An official daily newspaper quoted a high-ranking official thus: "[College] students should view their degrees as an honor but not necessarily as a ticket to a professional career." While this could be a rare, honest lament of a US cabinet member it was Fidel Castro.
Why haven't our rulers made such frank assessments? Why have our public schools continued to channel the young through poor education and into the "honor" of a debt for which there are no jobs?
The answer? In Warren Beatty's monumental film, "Reds," Jack Reed answers a similar question cryptically: "Profit."
The answer is also in Pres. Barack Obama's strange television escalation. The US - true to the words of the president - is still in denial that it is a terrorist nation and will dress its foreign policy up in the sheep's clothing of "Values." I am discouraged that it will ever admit that it is a warring nation.
Not only is profit the easy answer but also that momentum - I would call it a hex - that propels this country to a contradiction of creating unemployable college educated men and women, while becoming a police state, which demands only obedience and fear.
Extraordinary renditions. Secret prisons. Show trials. Laws curbing free expression. The dismantle of public education and the construction of penal institutions.
President Obama, as CEO of the decaying empire rather than a revolutionary community organizer, is as forced and complicit as any fortune 500 company leader to send 30,000 military troops, trained to kill and destroy rather than 30,000 teachers, technicians, social workers.
Cuba, by the way, has more doctors per capita than any other developing country and exceeds the US. It also exports school teachers and technicians to poor countries to aid in social and economic development.
Compare and contrast. The well indoctrinated and disciplined will retort: "We are free," which the Western experiment has devalued exponentially.
12 November 2009
06 November 2009
1989 Twenty years of triumphalism and nothing to celebrate
Twenty years ago in November 1989 I had been six months a new graduate from Washington University, moved to San Francisco (on a coin toss, New York City being tails), and landed my first professional job at an international publishing company as a production editor.
Then the Wall came tumbling down and much shifted under my feet, but George Herbert Walker Bush was president, a stammering act one of the Reagan Administration. So while air flowed between the two sides of Berlin and the Bolshevik dream came to a sad end, the US was burdened not only with more of the same, but also a wretched triumphalism as if our sheer will and some green God's grace, we had crushed the red menace.
I owned a TV in 1989, which I watched if I wasn't listening to npr or Pacifica radio. I vividly remember watching one of those sober round table chat shows on public television where one of the white-haired economist cautioned US declaring victory over a Cold War we didn't see ending. He warned that the same things that brought down the USSR and the Warsaw Pact would bring down the US.
Then came the great sucking sounds: Bye bye Peace Dividend! Bye bye union jobs and military bases! Bye bye industrial base and the rationale for subsidizing the middle class as a bulwark against communist ideology. The middle class was never sustainable anyway, something many of them did not know - so they prattle about the poor having children they can not afford as if the state weren't subsidizing theirs - public hospitals, public schools, social services.
The middle class could only be sustained with socialism in policy but never in name.
Then: Bye bye international publishing company!
My graduating class of 1989 was the last that could earn a degree in anything [that publishing company didn't care] and get a decent, white-collar job. While there is still a momentum for the young to go to college or be damned, nothing awaits them except disappointment and debt. Our rulers do nothing about this scandal, and since we are the Masters of the World - the mafia crime-boss of the planet - with no USSR to compete against the poor have been left to their own devices.
Our walls are still firmly up, and Sen. Joe Lieberman one of its most prominent, ruthless, unsavory masons.
I lamented in a previous column how my present employer, the US Dept of Homeland Security, is a growth industry of managers and deputies with high salaries to police - I mean "protect"- us, while teachers are being fired and class sizes are increasing while student services are going the way of Cuba's ethical ration system: history!
That white-haired economist only said more soberly what Fidel Castro was to say in the same months of those earth-moving times, when another eminent historian informed us that history had ended. The leader of Cuba's socialist revolution asked what the US was being so triumphant about, given the sorry state of capitalism not only within the US but every place it had stepped its bloody footprint. Name one place, Fidel challenged, where capitalism had done well.
Twenty years later to the day, we must remember Fidel's admonishment as the US not only exceeds 10% unemployment nationally but also whole regions double that. What have we to celebrate about?
We must also remember that economist, whose words and tone I shall never forget.
The Godfathers of neoliberalism have sufficiently tamed and frightened the poor who are very worried. So our masters give us slogans and give the wealthy billions.
There is no option but a public option and that means a worker's party and socialism.
Then the Wall came tumbling down and much shifted under my feet, but George Herbert Walker Bush was president, a stammering act one of the Reagan Administration. So while air flowed between the two sides of Berlin and the Bolshevik dream came to a sad end, the US was burdened not only with more of the same, but also a wretched triumphalism as if our sheer will and some green God's grace, we had crushed the red menace.
I owned a TV in 1989, which I watched if I wasn't listening to npr or Pacifica radio. I vividly remember watching one of those sober round table chat shows on public television where one of the white-haired economist cautioned US declaring victory over a Cold War we didn't see ending. He warned that the same things that brought down the USSR and the Warsaw Pact would bring down the US.
Then came the great sucking sounds: Bye bye Peace Dividend! Bye bye union jobs and military bases! Bye bye industrial base and the rationale for subsidizing the middle class as a bulwark against communist ideology. The middle class was never sustainable anyway, something many of them did not know - so they prattle about the poor having children they can not afford as if the state weren't subsidizing theirs - public hospitals, public schools, social services.
The middle class could only be sustained with socialism in policy but never in name.
Then: Bye bye international publishing company!
My graduating class of 1989 was the last that could earn a degree in anything [that publishing company didn't care] and get a decent, white-collar job. While there is still a momentum for the young to go to college or be damned, nothing awaits them except disappointment and debt. Our rulers do nothing about this scandal, and since we are the Masters of the World - the mafia crime-boss of the planet - with no USSR to compete against the poor have been left to their own devices.
Our walls are still firmly up, and Sen. Joe Lieberman one of its most prominent, ruthless, unsavory masons.
I lamented in a previous column how my present employer, the US Dept of Homeland Security, is a growth industry of managers and deputies with high salaries to police - I mean "protect"- us, while teachers are being fired and class sizes are increasing while student services are going the way of Cuba's ethical ration system: history!
That white-haired economist only said more soberly what Fidel Castro was to say in the same months of those earth-moving times, when another eminent historian informed us that history had ended. The leader of Cuba's socialist revolution asked what the US was being so triumphant about, given the sorry state of capitalism not only within the US but every place it had stepped its bloody footprint. Name one place, Fidel challenged, where capitalism had done well.
Twenty years later to the day, we must remember Fidel's admonishment as the US not only exceeds 10% unemployment nationally but also whole regions double that. What have we to celebrate about?
We must also remember that economist, whose words and tone I shall never forget.
The Godfathers of neoliberalism have sufficiently tamed and frightened the poor who are very worried. So our masters give us slogans and give the wealthy billions.
There is no option but a public option and that means a worker's party and socialism.
04 November 2009
Reflections on a year of living with Obama's change has been a police state
I have been away for awhile, feeling as many Barack Obama supporters must: a bit disappointed to say the least. While I was admittedly not an Obama supporter but voted rather for Ralph Nader, I am equally grim about where this newest Augustus has driven this sorry, dilapidated empire.
Some promises are fulfilled, some broken, some just hot air.
When the Russian Revolution triumphed against the Czarist regime, against feudal power structures against the poor and worker, the Revolution was true to its word in re-organizing the economy and taking the new state firmly out of World War I. The USSR was the most industrializing country in the world while the West was mired in an economic 1930's Depression.
It was punished for keeping this promise to the people. Western countries invaded to re-establish not so much the quaint Czarism but feudalism and its profits. Thankfully, the West's decline had already begun and it couldn't bring down the first socialist revolt.
When the Cuban Revolution triumphed against the US-backed puppet regime, against a similarly feudal power where the best lands and wealth were taken out of the country to prop up the Metropolis, the US sustained a brutal war against it.
Cuba has been punished for 50 years for this insolence in keeping its promise to address the people's needs.
Keeping promises or showing it is a dangerous game.
Of course, many revolutions and dramatic elections passed the 20th century, and many of them deteriorated for myriad reasons into brutalizing the people on behalf of the Western Accountant, the behemoth, the Great Satan (what else would a rational person call such a parasite?). This deterioration was not unassisted by Western machinations - a sanitized way of saying assassinations, upheavals, sowing discord and watching the blood of brothers flow like rivers.
Obama, in as much as his election and Promise might be called Revolutionary, is such a traitor. History does not nuance these things. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was called a traitor ... to his class. Obama is a traitor to his - that is, the working class of his mother and father.
It's a rather dispiriting thing to see a pathetic country that can't produce anything, including decent graduates further lower the bar by saving the banks and screwing the people. It is very dispiriting to peruse job listings and forecast the state of the country.
My current employer, an aviation security arm of the federal government, is bloated with too many managers and hierarchies with inflated salaries. Meanwhile, public education has gone the way of a crackpot invention by your crazy uncle: teachers and staff are being laid off, class sizes increased, services downsized.
Like good Germans, all our managers are being obedient for a perceived, short-term benefit of a paycheck, while in the long term we send what hope we have on a night train headed for a death camp.
Could this be a civilization on the make, ready for a 21st century future or a police-slave state being solidified? Unbeknown the public at large, the federal government is growing the security field with managers and inspectors whose ultimate purpose is to tell us the sky is falling.
The state will need these teams of federal police when the only work available is part-time language tutors for autistic children, and the worker cannot pay rent.
I have heard some predictably discouraging comments from our "managers" - who are really overseers disciplining a plantation of workers, but it drives one to hopelessness to hear how deeply or wage-slaves have internalized these lessons.
And why not? They have had no teachers. They have had no history. They are secured in their foreclosed homes and unemployment with growing lists of jobs in the federal security sector, while the teachers of our young and young-adult can't get a teacher, counselor, school psychologist.
President Obama has done absolutely nothing to turn this ship away from the precipice. Not only has history shown a tough road for promise keepers, but also Obama is the Lehman Brothers Man. This would make him more a scoundrel than a coward. The failing mid-term score I gave him must be a demotion now. Send this man back to the Illinois legislature where he can do no harm.
For more info: My Socialism: Our present poverty crisis (2006) * Examiner Homepage
Some promises are fulfilled, some broken, some just hot air.
When the Russian Revolution triumphed against the Czarist regime, against feudal power structures against the poor and worker, the Revolution was true to its word in re-organizing the economy and taking the new state firmly out of World War I. The USSR was the most industrializing country in the world while the West was mired in an economic 1930's Depression.
It was punished for keeping this promise to the people. Western countries invaded to re-establish not so much the quaint Czarism but feudalism and its profits. Thankfully, the West's decline had already begun and it couldn't bring down the first socialist revolt.
When the Cuban Revolution triumphed against the US-backed puppet regime, against a similarly feudal power where the best lands and wealth were taken out of the country to prop up the Metropolis, the US sustained a brutal war against it.
Cuba has been punished for 50 years for this insolence in keeping its promise to address the people's needs.
Keeping promises or showing it is a dangerous game.
Of course, many revolutions and dramatic elections passed the 20th century, and many of them deteriorated for myriad reasons into brutalizing the people on behalf of the Western Accountant, the behemoth, the Great Satan (what else would a rational person call such a parasite?). This deterioration was not unassisted by Western machinations - a sanitized way of saying assassinations, upheavals, sowing discord and watching the blood of brothers flow like rivers.
Obama, in as much as his election and Promise might be called Revolutionary, is such a traitor. History does not nuance these things. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was called a traitor ... to his class. Obama is a traitor to his - that is, the working class of his mother and father.
It's a rather dispiriting thing to see a pathetic country that can't produce anything, including decent graduates further lower the bar by saving the banks and screwing the people. It is very dispiriting to peruse job listings and forecast the state of the country.
My current employer, an aviation security arm of the federal government, is bloated with too many managers and hierarchies with inflated salaries. Meanwhile, public education has gone the way of a crackpot invention by your crazy uncle: teachers and staff are being laid off, class sizes increased, services downsized.
Like good Germans, all our managers are being obedient for a perceived, short-term benefit of a paycheck, while in the long term we send what hope we have on a night train headed for a death camp.
Could this be a civilization on the make, ready for a 21st century future or a police-slave state being solidified? Unbeknown the public at large, the federal government is growing the security field with managers and inspectors whose ultimate purpose is to tell us the sky is falling.
The state will need these teams of federal police when the only work available is part-time language tutors for autistic children, and the worker cannot pay rent.
I have heard some predictably discouraging comments from our "managers" - who are really overseers disciplining a plantation of workers, but it drives one to hopelessness to hear how deeply or wage-slaves have internalized these lessons.
And why not? They have had no teachers. They have had no history. They are secured in their foreclosed homes and unemployment with growing lists of jobs in the federal security sector, while the teachers of our young and young-adult can't get a teacher, counselor, school psychologist.
President Obama has done absolutely nothing to turn this ship away from the precipice. Not only has history shown a tough road for promise keepers, but also Obama is the Lehman Brothers Man. This would make him more a scoundrel than a coward. The failing mid-term score I gave him must be a demotion now. Send this man back to the Illinois legislature where he can do no harm.
For more info: My Socialism: Our present poverty crisis (2006) * Examiner Homepage
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