Thatcher's Poland

My mistake was not waiting to light my cigarette until after I'd passed the pawn shop. The lombard, as they call them here, opened only a few months ago but it's quickly become a favorite hangout for young and old alike. Bizarrely, you're just as likely to see a group of old fogies as a gang of kids ogling the phones in the window, dreaming of the day when they can afford to light up the screens with the slide of a fingertip to signal to the those around them they are worthy while sending and receiving signals from around the world.

As I hit the corner of the main drag, I suddenly remembered I needed cash. Lucky every other building is now a bank while the majority of those in between are oft-time ironically named cheque cashing joints like Happy Credit, mortgage brokers and aptly named kantors (foreign exchange) such as Joker Kantor, so cash was flowing free and easy. Well, apparently not for buddy who was on me like a fly on shit as I waited for the bank machine.

- "Daj mi papierosa" (Give me a cigarette) Came the predictable plea.
- "Jest moj ostatni" (It's my last) I tried to parry.
- "Give me cigarette"
Fuck. Something about my amazing (!?) accent had given me away making me both a prey and a mark.
- "Cigarette!" He barked.
My smoke was now the focus of both our attentions as I raised it to my lips and dropped it to my side. A couple of quick drags and I hand him the butt but he still doesn't budge.
- "One, two beer. How much?" Guess he's thirsty, too. After all it's almost noon.
- "I dunno, depends which" I answer, giving him a shoulder slap to his right shoulder while dodging to my right and slide into the bank machine as the previous customer walks out.

Cash in hand, smoke accoster nowhere in sight, I continued my walk towards first the train and then my work station beyond. As the flow of traffic peppered with the odd late model Porsche and communist era Polski Fiat 126p whizzed by I pass the Golden Arches just in time to see a herd of diabetic fat kids stream out the door, miraculously avoiding the two drunks splayed on the pavement leaning against each other for support as they dream of their next drink. Next up is the wheelchair beggar at his post just past the rail yard and in front of the trade center on the corner where I turn toward the university. Fortunately I'm shielded from his view as I pass by a gaggle of home decor/gardening/fashion enthusiasts clutching their conference bags filled with soon-to-be landfill waste and don't have to respond to his plea for the zloty (cash) he'd need to survive the next 24 hours.

Turning onto the bridge I walked past the newly completed portion of the train station, already covered in grime thanks to the pollution along with the road work and construction of the monstrous mall and even more ginormous parking garage that will be attached to the new Poznan train terminal. Wired gates control traffic at the end the bridge where the roadworks are most intense. Cars jockey for position from all sides as I emerged onto the zebra crossing with my usual contempt for motorized traffic. My second confrontation of the day comes when a car creeps up to my knee and we lock eyes, I point to the crossing and he starts yelling through his windscreen. Flipping him the bird I've already had two opportunities to fight and I haven't been out of the flat for 20 minutes.

That's when I found out Margaret Thatcher had died. I didn't have to wait to read about it in the obituaries or the newspaper, the words accompanied the beep that lit up my cellphone (fortunately I'm still holding onto my decade old Nokia brick and haven't yet needed to join the gawkers in front of the lombard).

"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"

Having come from a British friend that's all that was needed to convey the news. The fraction of a second it took for the impulse to smile to travel from my brain was long enough to allow the guilt for having such a feeling to arrest the curl of my lips before they'd even crinkled. I had to stop and look around. Here I was in Poland about to walk into university to teach a group of students whose parents most likely believe the Iron Lady was at least in part to thank for causing Communist USSR to crumble. The knowledge was more likely than not passed to their offspring subconsciously, like the information transmission of DNA, the kids probably don't even know what they, well, know. The terms Thatcher's Britain and Thatcher's child took no time to enter the lexicon and then the OED, and now standing on the corner with a Beyonce for H&M billboard to my left commanding women to buy her swimsuit or suffer social ostracism, if one's different, one's bound to be lonely, and a Szybcy i Wsciekli 6 (Fast & the Furious 6) billboard to my right reminding me of Thatcher's possibly apocryphal quote "[a] man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure", I couldn't help wonder how much this was Thatcher's Poland.

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past"
- Orwell, 1984

Upon noticing a book carried by one of my first Polish private students with Ronald Reagan on the cover, I was informed that Saint Ronnie along with John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher were his heroes: the holy trinity of freedom, a triptych of Maggie, Ronnie and JP2 on the mantelpiece of every good home. It's one of those things everyone here just knows just as I knew at that moment that Thatcher's passing wasn't going to go quietly; an information war every bit as deadly as the shooting kind she loved so much was already under way to remake her legacy, reframe the perspective and retard the rest of us.

Had she been a man, Margaret Thatcher could easily have been called Iron Balls as she had conviction in her beliefs if she had anything. Instead, thanks to her power to make most shrink around her, she was ironically given the nickname she came to love by the system she loathed. Accusing her of trying to revive the cold war, the Soviet Army newspaper Krasnaja Zvezda (Red Star) dubbed the then leader of the opposition železnaja dama (the Iron Lady) in January of 1976.

Seems as with everything else about Lady Thatcher, measuring the impact of her role in the fall of the Soviet Union is too subjective to measure, a hagiographic effort at best. Sure, after meeting Mikhail Gorbachev in 1984 she declared "We can do business together" and shortly thereafter the official party policy of glasnost was adopted in the USSR. However a near identical phrase "I think they can do business together" had been uttered in February of the same year by the American Senate Majority Leader Howard H Baker Jr. in reference to Reagan's potential meeting with the then Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko.

Her bold assertions that there was no alternative nor any such thing as society, delivered in a tone both boring and boring, made her seem so decisive and divisive but when examined in context become wishy-washy and banal. Should we celebrate the life or death of a lady who may have had a hand in bringing about a Brave New World order by bringing down the (iron) curtain on our 1984 future? How does one shed a tear for a woman who had no qualms about ordering the death of hundreds of 'Argies' sailing away from a fight, not only allowed the US to station nuclear tipped cruise missiles on British soil to up the Cold War ante but also to use British bases for bombing raids on Libya, and above all, taught us to be selfish and that the pain of others isn't our problem?

But did she help save the Poles and the rest from communism? Unanswerable and doubtful but Poland's neoliberal lackey foreign minister Radek Sikorski eulogized her as a "fearless champion of liberty". We can guess how the Argentinians feel about how she saved the Malvinas. Barack Obama trotted out the obligatory praise saying she was "one of the great champions of freedom and liberty". Why don't we ask a Chilean if she helped or hurt their struggle against her buddy Pinochet by thanking him for "bringing democracy to Chile" by murdering the people's elected representative. I'm sure the tens of thousands murdered, hundreds of thousands tortured and million plus forced to flee Chile under his dictatorship would disagree.

The Economist magazine, bringing the tru to Minitru and where 2+2=5, eulogized "[t]he essence of Thatcherism was to oppose the status quo and bet on freedom", thus doing their part to ensure her support of the South African apartheid regime is lost down the memory hole. Not only did she once refer to Nelson Mandela's ANC as a "typical terrorist organization" while her spokesman said it was "cloud-cuckoo land for anyone to believe" they could run the country, she somehow worked the doublethink trick of projecting opposition to the racist regime while befriending then Premier P.W. Botha. She celebrated her friendship with Indonesia's General Suharto calling hime "one of our very best and most valuable friends" for having killed 500,000 suspected Communists in Indonesia before moving on to invade East Timor in 1975 to massacre around 250,000 men, women and children on the island. Her government helped arm Saddam Hussein, lent a hand to Pol Pot and hailed General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq's work in Pakistan that laid the groundwork for the Islamic radicalization of a whole generation.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the woman was just that, she was a woman. In 1970, a week after becoming Secretary of State for Education and Science, she was asked if she would she like to become the first woman Prime Minister. "No," she answered emphatically, "there will not be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime—the male population is too prejudiced." Of the movement and activists which possibly did more to change the 20th century than any other and opened the door to 10 Downing to her, she reportedly told an adviser, "[t]he feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison." In 1982 she said "The battle for women's rights has largely been won" which explains why she never felt the need to speak out against domestic violence, rape, sexual abuse or harassment or how women earned about 60 cents to the dollar of men's wages. She gave the appearance of smashing the glass ceiling while in fact pulling up the ladder, famously promoting only a single woman to a cabinet position preferring instead to surround herself with vegetables. Is it sexist of me to wonder how a mother of two could also become Maggie Thatcher the milk-snatcher by taking away kids' milk? Despite her portrayal as a greengrocer's daughter who had to fight to the top, she seems to have been a daddy's girl who married well which allowed her the luxury to study and hire a nanny.

Apologists rose to Thatcher's defense to claim her actions were a product of the times, the ends justified the means and of course, war is peace. Her sales pitch to a roomful of Saudis, "I'll have one of those!" while stroking a gleaming missile, to seal the $80 billion Al Yamamah arms deal wasn't meant for public consumption as 'batting for Britain' really involved billions in black money to bribe Saudi princes and add to the bottom line of BAE. Poles have learned Thatcher's buddy system well, er, well, the politicians at least, lining up to sacrifice lives and zloty to the alter of American military hegemony. Polish may have recently become England's second language but Polish politicians speak Anglo-Saxon ass-kissing as good as any lapdog. Most Poles are oblivious to the fact they ranked number four on the 'coalition of the willing' casualty countdown and just last month saw their 39th soldier killed in Afghanistan, while four more stand trial for war crimes committed there. Meanwhile the billions to be spent on a useless missile shield that the majority of the people don't want will piss off the Russians and definitely won't end up in the pockets of the locals.

"Non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature...are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation."
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Thanks to doublethink, the lady wasn't for turning and probably believed in what she was doing but the real trick was to convince not just the people but her own party of the myth that Thatcherism was good for 'ordinary' people and would emancipate the working classes. Attila the Hen found an ally in Rupert Murdoch; she helped him consolidate his media power while he helped her spread the gospel and get reelected twice. The two protestant 'outsiders' who attended Oxford railed against the establishment which they became a part of by helping each other; he by having his tabloid the Sun shift its traditional support for Labour to Thatcher's Tories with a front page editorial arguing Thatcher’s election would be better for the working classes, she by allowing his acquisition of The Times and Sunday Times to avoid scrutiny by the competition authorities thanks to a deal struck during lunch at Chequers. While Thatcherism was tearing the heart out of the industrial heartland and looting the commons to hand it over to a tiny elite of 'wealth creators' who would free up the market and rain wealth on the land, Murdoch helped make sure there would be astonishingly little protest or consciousness by blaming the poor, promoting war and of course giving the people want they really wanted, more football.

The strength of ignorance is both easily built and desperately needed here in Poland. Caught so often on the wrong side of history and geography, convincing the Poles that there is no alternative to the current course has been an easy sell. Football, vodka and the Catholic Church allow the people to imagine they'll get to a better place as long as they keep their head down and work hard. Sure, they have the right complain and the array of choices seems as diverse as anywhere but the media landscape ensures the discourse never strays far off course. German companies like Axel Springer AG spew IngSoc, er, tabloid trash and EU propaganda with their version of the Sun, Fakt, alongside Dziennik and Newsweek Polska, American movies continually revise the past while TV portrays seemingly  possible present from the west or a poor simulation thereof and Radio Maryja spews xenophobic hate cloaked in the hope of redemption. The closest Poland comes to Murdoch is Adam Michnik, editor of the ofttimes leading national daily Gazeta Wyborca who somehow managed the trick of undergoing a conversion from a fearless dissident into a hack propagandist heralding the evils of Islamofascism and convincing women to go shopping on cobblestone streets wearing high heels (er, a forced reference to his paper's women's magazine Wysokie Obcasy - High Heels)

Maggie may or may not have been instrumental in delivering Poland and Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union but it was her amazing electoral success along with that of fellow cold war warrior Rotten Ronnie on the other side of the pond that sped the demise of democracy as we knew it. Yes, the unions they broke had too much influence on Labour and Democrat policy and no, it wasn't her or Raygun's fault those parties ran into the arms of Big Finance but there you are. Poland et al had the misfortune of gaining freedom just as the end of history arrived and democracy became nothing but a choice between  more or less measures of neocon and neoliberal, a lesser of two evil song and dance, a recipe repeated around the world from Ottawa to Warsaw. When asked about her greatest achievement, Thatcher simply replied, "New Labour" and Tony Blair. In Poland the answer would be the ruling Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform) and the likes of Oxford educated, husband of Washington Post hack Anne Applebaum, current foreign minister Radek Sikorski (not only did he write this drivel after Thather's death he called for a statue to be erected here in her honour, maybe right next to Reagan's in Warsaw!). Politics have become subordinate to markets and labour to capital, society now serves the economy instead of the other way around.

"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."
- Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

It's this last point which is probably the most important connection between Thatcher and life here in Poland, freedom is slavery. Sparked by the Powell Memo in 1971 and lent an aura of intellectual legitimacy by the Chicago Boys, a new economic ideology was propagated through institutional sponsorship: America has the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute while the UK's versions include the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies founded in 1974 by Thatcher's mentor, Keith Joseph. Despite their benign sounding names, these are radical think tanks with almost nothing to do with the likes of Adam Smith who understood something about Moral Sentiments and the dangers of private monopolies and everything to do with Hayek, Friedman and Rand and their belief in extreme individualism or social Darwinism. Nigel Lawsen, Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer from '83 to '89 summarized their economic philosophy, "Economic planning was both impossible and unnecessary. . . . The price mechanism . . . was a much more efficient means of transmitting consumer wants and needs than the vast bureaucracies of Whitehall and the nationalized industries." Selfishness along with ostentation of power and status was in. Culture was ruled over by money, and the idea that those who win by making more of it do so because they are better was not just permitted but ordained.

Profit and capitalism were good while planning, government and taxes were bad. Conveniently this all worked together as in order to lower taxes, public spending had to be lowered which scaled back government by reducing public services, privatizing whatever was possible and deregulating the rest. Inconveniently most voters viewed the government as subsidizing essential public services, ensuring economic security and helping families in need. The trick therefore was to create a backlash against government waste, resentment against public subsidies to those who were less hard working than themselves and place the blame for inflation on greedy unions. Notice the success as the issue of benefit fraud, which costs the UK about £1.2 billion yearly is a far more emotive topic than tax avoidance, which costs about £70 billion a year. Voters also needed to be convinced that what was taken from the state was being given to them thus enhancing individual economic freedom and unshackling the wealth creators, allowing the wealth to trickle down on everyone. The only valid idealism was to destroy the state by, as Lawson continued, "elevating private actions above public direction and dismissing ‘social justice’ as both vague and arbitrary." Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

Thatcher was swept into power on a perfect storm of global inflation emanating from the US pushing up world prices, IMF imposed austerity in exchange for loans to support the value of sterling after Britain's 1976 foreign exchange crisis which made it impossible to finance the modernization of public industries as it would increase the PSBR (Public Sector Borrowing Requirement), and finally, well, strikes and weather, otherwise known as Britain's Winter of Discontent. Yes, a public sector strike during an unusually cold winter ground the country to a halt, literally, as roads went unsalted, hospital patients were denied treatment and garbage piled up in the streets. Labour, who had tied themselves to those striking unions, found themselves with their hands also tied behind their back. Thatcher picked and chose her battles with labour wisely and pursued a step-by-step program of trade union reform before ultimately crushing them in the '84-'85 coal miners' strike. There was indeed no alternative to the monetarist Thatcherism which created an employers' market by imposing chronic under-employment and shifting enterprise out of the unionized public sector to newly privatized, non-unionized enterprises; Marks and Spencer had triumphed over Marx and Engels.

Ironically, or perhaps just calculatingly mercenary, while destroying unions and solidarity at home she was lionized by Solidarność (Solidarity) in Poland, actually being mobbed by dockworkers in Gdynia when she visited in 1988. If you've gotten this far in reading it hopefully means you realize I understand there was a difference between unions in the UK and Poland, after all, in Poland the military used to shoot striking miners dead. Given the trade unions' role in the democratization of Poland it is curious that Poland today has among the lowest unionization rates in Europe as from 1982 until 2005 membership fell from 80% to below 14% (only  2.4% for employees under the age of 25). There are myriad of factors at play here, from the many mistakes made by the unions themselves, a massive shift of the workforce from traditional industries and sectors such as mining and steel, and the privatization of many formerly public, union dominated industries, but it was the pernicious effects of Thatcherism on human psychology that seem the greatest factors. The transformation of the full-employment ideals of post-WWII society to an economic system based on chronic un- and underemployment has made many afraid of forming or joining a union along with the societal appeal to the narrowest self-interest of individuals having gained the upper hand over the feeling of brotherhood and the desire to work for the collective good.

Thatcherism also slowly shifted the balance of power from labour to capital through tax and monetary policy, privatization and deregulation. She managed to destroy more than 2 million jobs in two years, an astonishing figure considering unemployment only breached 1 million in 1978 before reaching 3.5 million by 1983. Her monetarism lowered everyone's taxes a bit and 'simplified' the fiscal system by regressively shifting taxes away from wealth onto consumers via sales taxes, excise taxes and the value-added tax. With public institutions being starved by austerity, privatization was the only way to modernize. "Popular capitalism", spreading ownership as widely as possible, would serve the double purpose of making it difficult to re-nationalize in the future plus giving the public skin in the game, giving workers a stake in preserving the value of the shares they held in these enterprises. The discipline of the market would make British industry more competitive but its effect along with deregulation of the financial industry, the 'Right to Buy' scheme of 1980 and the 'Big Bang' of 1986 simply handed over complete control of the British economy to the square mile in the heart of London, the City.

Privatization, which started tentatively in her first term with British Aerospace and Cable & Wireless, had reached fever pitch by her second reelection: Jaguar, British Telecom, Britoil, British Gas, British Steel, British Petroleum, Rolls Royce, British Airways. Her fourth term (well, John Major's first) saw British Rail hit the auction block. By the time the Conservatives were voted out of office in 1997 by one of the largest margins in history it had become clear to the public that there were some side-effects to the medicine they were being forced to take. Prices hadn't declined along with productivity gains in some areas while they had jumped for essential services like water whose systems were breaking down or shifted against residential consumers in favor of large industrial users in the case of electricity. Services had been cut back, privatized companies were engaging in monopoly practices and to add insult to injury economic inequality had widened with the shrinkage in the industrial labor force and stagnating real wages while profits soared for the privatized companies and the City fleeced the government for underwriting fees and began gambling in earnest thanks to the newfound market freedom. Thatchers reply? "Let us glory in our inequality."

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
- H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

Pity the Poles for having gained their freedom at the height of Thatcherism, imagine how different the future would look had it been in, say, 1968? As it was, having been tried and tested by Thatcher's buddy Pinochet in Chile, the Chicago Boys idea of "Shock Therapy" came to Poland in the person of Leszek Balcerowicz in 1989 under the guidance of Harvard's Jeffery Sachs backed by the muscle of the IMF. Doubtless, drastic measures were called for to make the huge transition that was complicated by the fact Poland was an economic basket case, with debt of $40 billion and inflation running at 600%. Also doubtless, the Balcerowicz plan was a success when compared to the results achieved in some other Eastern bloc nations. Forgotten though is the doublethink trick achieved of forcing a now 'free' democratic nation to trade off part of the debts incurred by a totalitarian regime it had never voted for in return for selling off state assets at discount prices for the benefit of foreigners and those highly place communists who were quick enough to convert to the new religion. Who cares if it was completely undemocratic, Balcerowicz termed it "extraordinary politics" while Michnik warned that the common people or "rank and file...irrational hotheads [were] incapable of recognizing the limits and realities of the real world". Those in position to do so stripped all the assets they could, a $1 billion stabilization loan (aren't numbers from the olden days quaint?) was arranged, large blocks of shares of privatized assets were placed in the hands of banks and Poland was absorbed into the global slavery debt trap.

The only goal of the IMF/Sachs/Balcerowicz policies was to ensure payments continued to flow west on the $40 billion in illegitimate foreign hard currency debt (what would be called odious debt today). Much of that debt had been incurred in 1979 when rates in London and New York increased 300% under the policies of, you guessed it, Margaret Thatcher and US Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. By the end of '91, Polish unemployment had reached 2 million, industrial production was 66% of the '89 level at the end of '92 and as 1993 closed 2.8 million were unemployed and 50% of families with 3 or more children were living below the poverty line. Little wonder that elections held in September of 1993 saw the the pro-IMF government of Hanna Suchocka replaced by a raft of coalition parties with direct ties to the communist regime. Predictably, as inequality elsewhere surpasses levels unseen since the roaring '20s, the new grand bourgeoisie that has emerged here has combined old bureaucrats, new managers and a burgeoning entrepreneurial class; a situation reminiscent of Poland in the 1920s. Perhaps the best symbols of what Poland got in return for the misery, organized crime, and debt-based slavery brought by the 'reforms' are Galeria Mokotów (Mokotów Mall) in Warsaw and Stary Browar (Old Brewery). The former, a shopping center built in place of a demolished semiconductor factory, cuz, you know, who needs those in a modern economy when you can create another black hole to suck wealth out of the local economy, and the latter a mall built on bribery (Polish link) and murder involving the richest man in Poland.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
- Anatole France, Le Lys Rouge (The Red Lilly)

Ah yes, the riches and glory promised to Poland are coming but as in the rest of the world more and more disproportionately to those at the top of the income scale. It would take a figure  stronger than Thatcher to convince Poles they are on the wrong course though as they are pumped through the indoctrination centers that are the education system. They emerge believing they have free will and as unquestioning of the free-market god as their forefathers were in the Catholic one unaware that one believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them; soma is simply Christianity without tears. The trains are slow, late and chaotic not because they're being sold off piecemeal on EU orders which is creating the disarray, but because it's not fully privatized like the UK's, who cares about their disastrous experience. The long waits at NFZ have nothing to do with it being underfunded, the public health care system isn't a blessing but a curse as promoting preventative medicine instead of the Americanized version of health for profit resulting in worse health outcomes and higher costs must be better as it's the path the Cameron government is choosing as they privatize the NHS by stealth. Oh, and don't worry Polish kids, it's only a matter of time until the course laid in leads to a completely privatized American-style college system of trillion dollar debt slavery before you've even entered the workforce. Just ask any 20-year-old Brit what it's like. 

Would the UK and Poland be much different if Thatcher had never been? Maybe not seeing as even the EU, the institution that most separates Maggie and Poland, has become nothing more than a glorified debt collector/pusher a fact not lost on most Poles as they become more disenchanted with the concept as their democracy ages just as Thatcher did. Even the Iron Lady, as she mentions in her autobiography, was caught off guard at how much she came to rely on the financial manipulators, how little she was able to control them and the scale of those bankers' greed; she convinced us to sell the family silver for the benefit of the rentiers who perceived the Thatchers and Friedmans as pawns, well-meaning promoters wrapping austerity economics in populist garb. Unfortunately, the deleterious social effects of the inequality caused by growing GDP through financialization of the economy, empowering those banks and other corporations to pursue profit without paying the price for wrongdoing and turning people into consumer zombies takes years to measure and decades to be felt. Trillions in wealth will continue to by siphoned out of the productive economy while we are forced to run faster and faster just to keep up and are convinced that our phone has somehow made us smarter. Yet while there is always time to get off the tracks before the train hits there's not much chance of heeding the warning the more we come to rely on those who profit from us being run over.

XLVII - Brothers in Arms

After falling one game short last year, the Harbaugh brothers will become the first brothers to coach against each other in the Super Bowl. Jim's San Francisco 49ers will take on John's Baltimore Ravens in the Superdome in New Orleans February 3rd, 2013 so the game has been given various monickers on the theme: the Har Bowl, Harbaugh Bowl and the Super Baugh. Having grown up in Canada I was inundated with American culture of which the NFL is as integral a part as McDonald's, Coca-Cola and peanut butter. Despite being thousands of miles away I still get a monthly hankering for a Big Mac and Coke, make sure there's a jar of peanut butter in the cupboard and find a way to watch American football most every Sunday from September to February. I've watched games from the Hilton in Sana'a, playoff games at a TGIF in Quito and Super Bowls on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, in smoky bars from Madrid to Cracow and even from poolside in Varadero, Cuba. The game is larger than life much like America itself yet it's hard not to notice the dark clouds forming. Disease is causing worrying cracks to appear on the surface and in the infrastructure of players' brains and America itself which are seen as behavioral problems but are indicative of a deeper psychological illness threatening to bring both the game and the nation crashing down.

First Quarter - Season Review

While my team predictions for the year proved once again that I'm a much better annotator/commentator than prognosticator, I was quite prescient in choosing the rookie quarterback theme for my preseason post. Along with the Broncos riding the right arm of Peyton Manning and Adrian Peterson's stunning return to form for the Vikings leading both teams to the playoffs, the rookie quintet were the story of the year as they might be the best QB draft class since 1983. If Brandon Weeden weren't a rookie QB about to turn 30, his year would have held more promise, but as usual, the Browns are probably stuck with something shy of mediocrity. Ryan Tannehill may not have had the impact of the big three, but he still provided hope that #17, the 17th QB to start since Dan Marino retired from the Dolphins in 1999, will be around awhile and lead the team to the playoffs someday.

The big three rookies QBs were, simply put, amazing. No, electrifying. Wait, not quite. Prodigious, spectacular and wondrous. No one was too surprised by Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III (RG3), the numbers one and two picks in the draft for the Colts and Redskins respectively, but the Seahawks' Russell Wilson came out of nowhere. Seattle coach Pete Carroll's decision to go with the 5'10" Wilson, picked five spots after a punter in the 3rd round, over Matt Flynn, a guy they paid millions for in the off-season, turned out to be the coaching decision of the year. A 26/10 TD-to-Int ratio (+16, a rookie record and TD tally tying Peyton Manning's rookie record), four more TDs on the ground and a 100 QB rating helped lift his team to the playoffs where they won the wildcard game and lost a heartbreaking comeback thriller to the Falcons. Having grown up in the west, I was forced to watch Seattle games more afternoons than I care to remember which is why they became known to me as the Shithawks. Watching Wilson this year has me rethinking that name.

The losing side in Wilson's wildcard win was RG3's Washington Redskins. I got to see a few of his games last year including a week 17 playoff-clinching victory over the Cowboys in which he humiliated Dallas on one leg. Over the course of the year he threw for 3,200 yards and 20 touchdowns while rushing for 815 yards and seven more scores. He just looked so in control of every situation, always seeming to know he had an extra gear to outrun a pass rusher or the arm strength to get the ball past a defender. Well, he did. We'll have to wait until after surgery to find out if Mike Shanahan's decision to allow him to play hurt, and then blaming a doctor, has any long term effects. Meanwhile, Andrew Luck's Colts seemed to be out of it when their head coach Chuck Pagano was diagnosed with leukemia at the start of the year. Well, that went into remission and by the time he got back for the last game of the year, his rookie QB had guided his team to the playoffs. He completely turned around a 2-14 team as his rookie record 4,375 passing yards helped the Colts to an 11-5 finish. Clearly, it's a tough year to pick the offensive rookie of the year.

Elsewhere in the league, JJ Watt was dominant on D for the Texans, helping Houston deep into the playoffs and will win the defensive player of the year award. As mentioned, the Broncos and Vikings exceeded expectations meaning Peyton will be league  MVP and AP or All-Day, AKA the Purple Jesus will be offensive player of the year. Or vice-versa. Manning's Broncos won 11 straight at one point on the strength of his 4,659/37/11 (yards/TD/int) season after sitting out an entire year and having four neck surgeries while Peterson fell 9 yards shy of breaking Eric Dickerson's single season rushing record, tackled just short on the one year anniversary of surgery for his torn ACL in the second final play of the final game to finish with 2,097 yards. The over-priced and hyped Detroit Lions crashed and burned  but Megatron, WR Calvin Johnson, soared, breaking the single season reception yardage mark with 1,964 but won't get MVP consideration as much of it is seen as having been in garbage time.

The Eagles did the opposite of soaring in Philadelphia leading to coach Andy Reid being fired and then hired by the Kansas City Chiefs almost immediately. As my buddy texted, I wish I could screw up so bad and still get a job so fast. The Falcons once again dominated in the regular season while the Saints couldn't without Sean Payton. The Bengals looked less like the Bungles in making the playoffs while their AFC North rival Steelers fell to mediocrity. Both the Giants and Bears seemed headed for the playoffs only for the wheels to come off late while the Packers went the other way, starting slow and finishing strong. And my Cowboys? Well, at least they're not as bad as the Jaguars or Chiefs but once again couldn't finish the season and didn't make the playoff.

Second Quarter - "It's war. They're out there to kill you, so I'm out there to kill them. ... I'm a soldier."
      - Then 20-year-old Kellen Winslow, former 1st round pick, current free agent TE

Of course none of the previously mentioned QBs will take the field in this year's Super Bowl. Nor will there be a Brees, Brady, Rogers or another Manning, names conventional wisdom held you needed on your roster for success in today's pass-happy NFL, but Flacco and Kaepernick instead. The former, Joe, who may have the strongest arm in the league and is the only quarterback to bring his team to the playoffs in his first five seasons, winning at least a game in each, will lead the Ravens against the later, Colin, a second year dual threat monster thrust into starting duty midway through the season after starter Alex Smith went down to injury. Even though Niners' coach Harbaugh's decision to stick with Kaepernick after Smith's recovery despite having led his team to a 6-2 record was the key decision to get his team to the big game and the fact the league is now ruled by the QB position, it will be the defenses that will most likely determine the winner come Sunday.

The Niners have arguably the best defense in football while it seems the Ravens have been a perennial defensive powerhouse. San Francisco was the number two defense in points allowed this year and are led by pass rushing DE Aldon Smith (league leading and most by any player since the NFL started tracking in 1982 35.5 sacks over the last two years), run stopping DE Justin Smith, a strong secondary which includes Carlos Rogers and two first team All-Pro inside linebackers, Patrick Willis and NaVorro Bowman. Meanwhile, the Ravens defense disappointed most of the year. After being a top ten defense for more than a decade they fell to 17th in yards allowed but much of the blame for that stat was how long they were kept on the field this year - 1,342 plays so far this season, including the playoffs, the most for any team dating back to 2001, with the Super Bowl winning 2011 Giants being the only other team with more than 1,300. The aging group is still anchored by run-stuffing DE Haloti Ngata, S Ed Reed whose eight career post-season interceptions is one short of the record, LB Terrell Suggs with a couple of playoff sacks showing he's recovered from injury, and of course MLB Ray Lewis.

Deservedly, Lewis will be one of the big stories this Super Bowl as he tries to follow up his 2000 Super Bowl win and go out in style by winning his second as he retires after the game. After recovering from the awful sounding torn triceps suffered October 14th (perhaps using the banned substance IGF-1, a compound found in deer antlers that reportedly stimulates muscle growth), he's been his dominant self registering the most tackles in the playoffs, 44. Like it or not, he's the face of the Ravens and maybe even the game regardless of how much eye black he applies. His introduction dance may annoy most, his "no weapons" post-Bronco victory interview may have confused everyone, and his god's plan speeches and constant prayer antics may make Tim Tebow look like an atheist, but there's no denying his talent as his 13 Pro Bowls and two defensive player of the year awards attest. He's never fully explained his role in the murder that occurred during Super Bowl week in Atlanta before their victory 13 years ago. We'll probably never know why the victim's blood was found in his limo or why he fled the scene but all is forgiven as he's born again. He epitomizes the confused Christian, mixing metaphors of sports, religion and war. Not only did he once describe himself as a warrior he was given a real purple heart from a soldier wounded in Operation Enduring Freedom, aka Operation Perpetual War and will be sure to be praying before, during and after the game with the cameras following his every move.

"In football, the object is for the quarterback, otherwise known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack which punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line."

While these words were spoken by George Carlin less than a quarter century ago, war metaphors in sports have been around as long as sport itself as throughout history sport and militarism have been inseparable. Achilles held funeral games in honor of his friend Patroclus; the ancient Olympics featured races in full armor to build up speed and stamina for military purposes, the marathon is named for the 42.195 km run from Marathon to Athens made by a messenger to warn of Persian attack; Waterloo was won, the Duke of Wellington famously remarked, on the rugby fields of Eton; Walter Camp, the father of American football, spoke of football teams as "armies," of the kicking game as "artillery work," and of coaching as "generalship." While American football's rounder, more foot friendly cousin, football, may have led to an actual war, no other sport is as entwined with the military as what Europeans would call handegg. The Army and Navy college football teams were traditional powers for much of the 20th century while the "flying wedge", a formation in which large numbers of offensive players charged as a unit against a similarly arranged defense (resulting in quite a few on field deaths), was devised by Lorin Deland in 1892 after studying Napoleon's military campaigns.

The biggest contribution of today's NFL to war is the power of propaganda. One would have to excuse an outsider looking in on the game for mixing up the game with a military recruitment video. From the presentation of the flag to the air force fly over to the singing of the national anthem (Alicia Keys tries to avoid the Christina Aguilera disaster), the players, crowd and viewers are whipped into a jingoistic frenzy before the game has even begun. At some point the audience will be reminded that the game is being beamed by satellite to their brave troops protecting American freedom at home by occupying abroad in 175 countries and aboard Navy ships at sea. Don't forget about the barrage of commercials throughout the game promoting the US Navy as a "Global Force for Good", the Marine Corp "defending the American way of life or the US Army's ad inviting the unwitting to try on "the jersey of the greatest team on Earth".

Don't forget the "Salute to Service" campaign conceived to "strengthen the relationship between NFL teams and the military community" in which teams wear decals on their helmets with the insignia of the U.S. Armed Forces. You couldn't miss the not-so-subtle switch from the pink to camo as the NFL went from breast cancer awareness month to celebrating Veterans Day by branding goal post wraps and pylons with camouflage ribbon decals, wall banners and the words Salute to Service written in the back of the end zone (Except for Washington and Kansas City that is, you know the whole cultural sensitivity thing, the US military having massacred many a Redskin and Chief). Well, at least you can get cool gloves to play war games while playing football! Now that "valor knows no gender" and women will be allowed in combat roles instead of just victims of rape maybe next year they'll go with pink camo.

The commentary of military and football analysts and the methods deployed to illustrate football and war became indistinguishable during Super Bowl XXV, played January 27th, 1991, just days after the beginning of the coalition bombing in Gulf War I. Whitney Houston's rendition of the the Star Spangled Banner that year, which hit the pop charts and turned her into a hero, was interspersed with several shots of flag-and-sign-waving fans, many of them homemade red, white, and blue posters announcing "America's Best Citizens Support our G.I.s," "God Bless America," and "Go USA," literally signs of support for the war. There were also dissolves to soldiers on the field, including a close-up of an African-American marine and tracking shots of several rows of enlisted men and women on the field holding the flags of various coalition countries. The Disney-themed New Kids on the Block half time show was preceded and followed by Peter Jennings news segments reassuring the public the Patriot missiles were intercepting SCUDS, the untested troops were ready for the still vaunted Republican Guard and that "Yes, men and women in the war zone have been able to see the first half" followed by a cut to a shot of Whitney overlayed with "The Gulf War: Super Bowl".

Is it "hopelessly Chomskian" to think the timing of the initial air strikes on Afghanistan after 9/11, about a half-hour before kickoff of Sunday's early games October 7th, was more than a coincidence? The New York Times wrote that news of the strikes "came on a pristine fall Sunday, 'a perfect day for football,' as the announcers like to say, just as many people were sitting down in front of their television sets for their weekly dose of gridiron glory." New York Senator Chuck Schumer had just suggested moving the Super Bowl to Giants Stadium stating "I can think of no better way to send a message to the terrorists". The games weren't preempted by war coverage, why would they be? Millions of red-blooded Americans parked in front of their propaganda screens with testosterone pumping could prove they supported the troops by watching Dubya's speech, a little network anchor commentary, and have the coverage get back to the Colts and Patriots on CBS or the Vikings and Saints on Fox, missing only a minute and 26 seconds of the latter game.

Imagine the power this drumbeat has, so powerful it convinced former Cardinal Pro Bowl linebacker Pat Tillman to walk away from the millions and glory of the NFL to enlist to defend his country first in the occupation of Iraq then be redeployed to get murdered by his own side in Afghanistan. Only America could turn his death into a recruitment moment. In life he opined to a friend "I don't want them to parade me through the streets" but in death, despite his opposition to Dubya and the Iraq war which he called "illegal as hell" and an act of "imperial whim", that's exactly what they've done. Following the Jessica Lynch script, a GI Joe story was concocted for the original report of Tillman's death as the puppet masters realize the initial bogus story carries vastly more weight in public opinion than the eventual corrective.

Halftime - Of Instant Replay and Beyonce (hey, it's better than a souffle baked by Timothy McVeigh)

Though a primitive version was used by the CBC during a hockey game in 1955, true instant replay didn't come to sport and the world until December 7th, 1963 when CBS Sports Director Tony Verna rigged up a 1200 pound machine to perform the Instantaneous Time Travel to the Past via Videotape magic for what else, an Army-Navy college football game. Try to imagine watching a game today without it. You can only fill the voids in play with so many cheerleader shots and endless chatter. Additionally, it has become a fundamental part of the rules of the game as replay reviews popped up over 26 years ago, coaches challenges began in 1999 and have spread to other sports from the NBA to the NHL and tennis. Ironically, or not, live TV in the US also died with football thanks to the wardrobe malfunction during the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII when Justin Timberlake whipped out Janet Jackson's right tit sparking nipplegate. Sure, 111 million people tuned in to watch the Super Bowl last year, but 3 million more were watching when Madonna performed at halftime.

The shows the thing with which to eat that wing. The game is in fact secondary for the majority of the 110+ million viewers. Many are watching hoping to see Beyonce's breast. The halftime show has come a long way from the days of  marching bands, Up With People and Andy Williams when it wasn't a laser-targeted, sponsored ray gun of corporate synergy. Michael, that other ever-slightly-more-famous Jackson's 1993 performance is held to be the greatest of all time; weird to think just a few months later the thought of Michael surrounded by so many children would take on such a different meaning. It could be the Super Bowl party they came for; at an average of 17 people, they're usually pretty lively. It's only fitting that while being fed a steady diet of commercials for junk food Americans will consume 1,200 calories each on Sunday scarfing down 1.23 billion chicken wing, 11.2 million pounds of potato chips, 8.2 million pounds of tortilla chips, 4.3 million pounds of pretzels, 3.8 million pounds of popcorn, 2.5 million pounds of nuts and 69.6 million pounds of avocados. To wash it down they'll drink 50 million cases of beer, unfortunately 94% of it will be Bud Light, Budweiser, Coors Light, Miller Lite or Natural Light which demonstrates more than anything how culturally closed and corporate controlled America remains.

Oh, and we best not forget the commercials. While the world ridicules America for its obsession with a game no one else cares about, they can't help fixate on the other evil they always complain about; the consumerism as reflected in the importance of the ads. The world won't notice who won the game, but they'll all remember the next spot featuring a mini Darth Vader using the force. At a new record average cost of $3.8 million per 30 seconds of air time, companies better make sure they're good. In 1967, that same amount of money would've bought 101 ads as they went for only $37,500 a pop for Super Bowl I. While the basics of sex, celebrity and satiety haven't changed since Edward Bernays invented modern public relations, the media used to propagate the propaganda has. I'll be watching the game from my laptop while millions will be watching on a tablet, a 'smart' phone or some such mobile device. More importantly to the marketers, many actually think they'll get more enjoyment out of the game by paying less attention to it, falling prey to the multi-tasking illusion by tweeting and texting and liking and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. What's that? You say there's a game on? Oh yeah...

3rd Quarter - Offensively speaking

I don't think the San Francisco 49ers are playing in the Super Bowl if their starting quarterback hadn't been injured. QB Alex Smith was leading the league in completion percentage and had his team at 6-2, not to mention having taken the team to the NFC final the year before, when he suffered a concussion during a tie with the St. Louis Rams. While his replacement Colin Kaepernick didn't look great finishing off the game, he blew away the Chicago Bears on Monday Night Football the next week and when Smith was ready to return the following week he was out of a starting job. The unwritten rule is that you don't lose your job to injury but just ask Drew Bledsoe and Tom Brady how that worked out for them. Kaepernick isn't Tom Brady, in fact, he might be better. While it's too early to say, the divisional win over the Packers where he set a record for rushing yards by any player, QB, RB, whatever, with 181 and scored four TDs, two through the air and two on the ground, all part of 579 yards of offense and 45 points was enough to prove the possibility. A physical freak with a cannon for an arm and the foot speed to run past defensive backs he gives the Niners a chance to blow away the Ravens.

If Colin Kaepernick is flash, Baltimore Raven QB Joe Flacco is, well, whatever the opposite of flash is. Joe Cool just seems to do the job as evidenced by his record six road playoff wins in his five year career. Year in, year out you know what you'll get, 3,600-3,800 yards, 20-25 TDs and only 10-12 ints. Until this year it also meant always coming up a bit short. After losing to the Patriots in the AFC Championship last year thanks to a dropped TD then a missed chip shot field goal, it looked like the Ravens were set to fall this year to the 9 1/2 point favorite Denver Broncos in the divisional round. Yet somehow, inexplicably, with the Ravens down by a touchdown with 31 seconds left in regulation and no timeouts left and the ball on their own 30-yard line, WR Jacoby Jones was allowed to run past two defenders as cornerback Tony Carter failed to jam him and safety Rahim Moore didn't play deep enough. Flacco flung a pass beyond the awkwardly falling and flailing Moore, who had taken a poor angle, dropping it into Jones' arms who scored untouched. The Ravens went on to win in double OT after having beaten Luck's Colts the week before and then beating Tom Brady's Patriots two weeks ago in the AFC Championship avenging the previous year's defeat. Suddenly, the Ravens appear to be a team of destiny.

Overall, there wasn't much to separate the two offenses during the regular season with the Ravens ranking 10th with 398 points scored and the Niners a single point behind in 11th. Niners' starting running back Frank Gore is no slouch as he runs powerfully and is hard to take down while super speedy rookie LaMichael James can break a big run anytime, but I'd have to give the edge to the Ravens as Ray Rice may be the best all-round back in the league and Bernard Pierce has just gotten better all year and is averaging over 75 yards over his last five games. Wide receiver Michael Crabtree has finally fulfilled his first round draft pick promise for the Niners this year and can look across the field at future hall of famer Randy Moss. They've also got one of the best tight ends in the league in Vernon Davis and a decent #2 in Delanie Walker. Yet they don't quite add up to the balance the Ravens pass catchers possess. WR Torrey Smith is an outside burner who's always a threat to score a couple of long TDs while Anquin Boldin provides the sure hands and experience of one of the best possession receivers in the game. Surprisingly, TE Dennis Pitta actually had more receiving yards than Davis this year plus they've got #2 Ed Dickson.

Both offensive lines are among the best in the league but the Niners three first round draft picks give them a slight edge in the, ahem, battle of the trenches. While Flacco has ridden a wave to this point I think it's Kapernick's game to win or lose. He's a rookie for all intents and purposes with only nine career starts (including playoffs) under his belt. If Ed Reed or Ray Lewis get in his head or under his skin early he could get the jitters on the big stage. The flip side is his near-unlimited upside; if he gets hot, he'll be impossible to stop. Special teams could play a role as well as the Ravens boast what was by this measure the third best unit in the league but gave up a 104-yard kickoff and a 90-yard punt return against the Broncos. They also have Jacoby Jones, the hero of that same Bronco game, who brought back two kickoffs longer than 105-yards this year. Finally, the Ravens are more comfortable with it all coming down to a last second field goal as two of the past 11 Super Bowls have as they'll field undrafted rookie Justin Tucker who replaced last season's goat Billy Cundiff. Tucker only went 30-of-33 and nailed the 47-yard game winner against the Patriots. Meanwhile, David Akers inexplicably went from setting an NFL record for made field goals in 2011 to missing 10 of 19 from 40 yards or further this year and made only 11 of his final 18 tries of the regular season. What about cheerleaders? Who's got the edge? Judge for yourself.

4th Quarter - A Level Playing Field?

Having such a short span of attention, the population has all but forgotten how the season began with replacement refs, the real ones having been locked out by the owners. It was real enough at the time though as not only did the games lack rhythm, dragging on interminably with the bumbling replacement zebras, they actually managed to influence the outcome of games. Refs are those guys we love to hate until they're gone as without them the rules get forgotten, twisted or misinterpreted and without those rules the game loses meaning and there's no point in playing. Even with the refs back it's becoming clear that the rules have changed forever for the NFL no matter how much they try to change the rules in the NFL just as the rules of the world have been warped with time meaning there's no return to the idyllic 1950's.

A run of high profile NFL player suicides the past couple years have shaken most of the remaining few out of their ignorance of the dangers of the game. In May, former Charger Junior Seau, a retired sure-to-be-hall of famer, shot himself in the chest with a shotgun. Though he left no note, it eerily mimicked Duane Duerson's suicide but he left a note asking that his brain be studied for trauma. Seau's family donated his brain tissue for study and the results showed he was suffering from CTE, the most terrifying letters for any player, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy as did Duerson. Seau's family is suing, accusing the NFL of "deliberately ignoring and concealing evidence of the risks associated with traumatic brain injuries." They're not alone as 3,800 more players are involved in legal action as well. Even more frightening was the Jovan Belcher murder/suicide in which he shot his girlfriend and then drove to the Kansas City Chiefs stadium to kill himself in front of his coach and staff. At just 25 he was already showing signs of brain damage. The NFL's response a few years ago was to deny any link but they've been forced to come around and have made some rule changes regarding helmet-to-helmet hits and concussion protocols in a vain attempt to protect players' lives. All these rules do is confuse the players, who are trained to destroy the enemy and who know that admitting one can't play is weakness, weakness that may cost them their job.

Who else would the NFL partner up with to 'solve' this problem than the military? Makes perfect sense in that both institutions are suffering from a rash of suicides as military suicides now far exceed combat deaths, recording almost one a day for a total of 349 last year, up from 301 the previous year and compared to 295 deaths in Afghanistan in 2012. Military grade Kevlar has been added to the player padding in a sport that developed in an era before 300+ pound men could run sub 5 second 40-yard dashes and linebackers running in 4.4 smash full speed into returners moving at 4.3. Much as soldiers don't develop problems from one shock but the repetitive nature of the brutality they're exposed to, the danger to NFL players is being shown to not come from isolated concussions but the cumulative effect of thousands of sub-concussive hits. If we support our team while this massacre is occurring how are we any better than the hypocrites who claim to support the troops by waving flags. In both cases we are at best complicit, at worst, the cause. No fans, no game.

The standard line of defense at this point is to claim that players, just like soldiers, know what they're getting into and enter voluntarily with the bonus that NFL players get paid millions to do what they love. This is the standard American excuse for everything, it's 2013, the information is there, if they don't know they're putting their lives at risk it's their own fault. This is as absurd as war apologists who disregard the constant stream of patriotism inspiring propaganda and fear mongering from a never-ending carousel of menacing enemies: Communists, Terrorists, Latin American Tyrants, Saddam, Iranian Mullahs and Secretive Dictators oh my! It's worse than free-marketers arguing consumers make rational choices in a world designed to feed as much choice influencing advertizing into our brains as possible. The NFL may be ignoring a helmet solution offered by the Swedes yet ironically it hasn't ignored the Swedish economic model which would benefit America and much of the west. Yes, the NFL's revenue sharing and salary caps make it a socialist paradise.

One could say America itself is committing suicide. No, I'm not referring to the proliferation of guns, loose laws and lack of psychological support leading to all the mass murders. The root cause of nearly all her problems is the inequality, social and financial, that has exploded over the past 30 years. While the NFL has done everything it can to maintain a level playing field among the teams to ensure a competitive product, Sunday will see the fifth different winner over the last five years (compare that with the English Premiership or the Spanish Liga), and thus success, America has done the opposite. The now-accepted mythology of job creators and trickle down economics has seen the country become more unequal than much of Latin America and yes, even that empire whose decline that of  America's is always compared to, the Roman. "So what?" Ayn Rand would ask. Well, a little study, or just a reading of The Spirit Level: Why Equal Societies Almost Always do Better by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett would tell you that once a country has reached a certain economic level, the more unequal a society is in terms of wealth, the more problems it will have in nearly every part of society: child mortality, mental health, drug use, educational achievement, teenage births, imprisonment, obesity and most importantly for our purposes today, violence and lack of social mobility.

The simple reason more unequal societies suffer from higher rates of all sorts of violent crime from homicide to rape and child abuse is that increased inequality ups the stakes in the competition for status in the evolutionary game. In such societies one doesn't need to take numerous knocks to the noggin for their brains to suffer the ill effects of the hormone cortisol which floods the brain when we feel threatened, helpless and stressed while simultaneously not benefiting from the reward chemical, dopamine, which helps with memory, attention and problem solving that we get when we feel happy and confident. As inequality rises so does the rigidity of social structure, most easily measured by intra-generational income mobility; those with rich parents are more likely to become rich and of course the poor remain poor generation after generation. Paradoxically, children in more unequal societies report higher future aspirations while facing a world in which they have less opportunity probably due to the fact their career choices are dominated by star-struck ideas of financial success coming with images of instant wealth or the glamor of celebrity, images the NFL and the Super Bowl do their best to promote.

Of course most of these kids will never become Beyonce or Colin Kaepernick, thus the military may indeed be the only career option for those for whom there are few better opportunities. For such enlistees, military service can open opportunities that would not otherwise be available. Once they've signed up, those of low socioeconomic status are more likely to be assigned to combat roles within the military than those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, becoming in effect, cannon fodder. Oh, many will dream of football glory until their dreams die sometime in high school or maybe even college, by which time their brains will have taken such a beating they'll be much more likely to suffer from a variety of ailments from memory loss, aggression, confusion, depression, vertigo, disorientation, headaches, poor judgment, slowed muscular movements, staggered gait, impeded speech, tremors, deafness and finally dementia. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, has even recently been linked with ALS. As CTE can only be diagnosed after death, it's hard to tell how early it can set it. The earliest known football case to date was a 17-year-old.

President Obama recently weighed in on the issue saying, "If I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football" but luckily for him, he probably wouldn't have to make that choice. Mary Ann Easterling, wife of Ray Easterling who committed suicide last year, said that her husband felt “used,” and that if he could go back, he wouldn’t have played. At the very least, Obama's son wouldn't have to rely on the scholarship that is the only ticket to college which could offer any chance of future success for students from low income families. Student loans you say? Yeah, right. The NFL and its guaranteed contracts is the lottery ticket out for the economically disadvantaged. It's no coincidence that blacks are disproportionately represented among the poor and the NFL (67%). Seeing as more income and wealth is concentrated at the top than any time since records have been available (1913 thanks to federal income tax), and the divide is widening as 93% of new income is flowing to the 1%, no wonder more and more people, players and non-players, are turning to god and Vegas.

Overtime - Wide right?

Any Super Bowl party worth its salt will feature some kind of square board where wagers on the score will be laid. For the serious gambler though, or the desperate indebted student hoping to pay next semester's tuition, there's no better place to be than Las Vegas for the Super Bowl. The prop bet has evolved from the benign, heads or tails for the coin flip, to the tedious, such as the length of the national anthem or Beyonce's hair style or outfit color to the ludicrous, Ray Lewis tackles in XLVII versus Ray Lewis in XXXV or Kaepernick versus Steve Young in XXIX. About the only one I'd want any action on is the over/under on how many times Ray Lewis will mention god/lord if he is interviewed after the game. It's set at a ridiculously low three when I'd be tempted to bet over at ten - take the free money and go all in on over. After all, we're talking about a country where 27% of the people believe god "plays a role in determining which team wins" sporting events. Just another anomaly that non-Americans will shake their heads at in disbelief, just like the rise in belief in creationism along with its teaching in schools and museums devoted to it or their refusal to accept scientific evidence no matter how hot it gets. Unfortunately, it's more than a bug in the system, it's a feature.

As America lurches from crisis to crisis, their responses, from war to bank bailouts and doubling down on the carbon economy, may seem irrational to an impartial observer as they aggravate instead of solve the problems but are simply part of a natural pattern. Civilizations tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. As collapse becomes palpable, societies in distress retreat into what anthropologists call "crisis cults." Witness the reaction of gun freaks to mass-murders as they clutch the Second Amendment tighter and demand more guns to stop the killing; the attempt to put an end to financial crisis by further enriching those institutions which created the problem while impoverishing the engine, the middle class, that could return economic health; dealing with having been led into war on false grounds by expanding conflicts and further empowering those same positions to determine who lives or dies without oversight; convincing people that torture is justified by glorifying such atrocity in Hollywood blockbusters. The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.

No Super Bowl has yet been decided in overtime. The closest finish was the famous "wide right" Giants victory over the Bills in XXV, 20-19. Baltimore (as in Colts) beat the Cowboys in Super Bowl V 16-13 on a field goal with 5 seconds to play, while the Patriots did the same to the Panthers with 4 seconds left to win 32-29 in XXXVIII. Adam Vinitieri also won it for the Patriots as time expired in XXXVI against the Rams making the final 20-17. In XXXIV Tennessee Titans' Kevin Dyson was memorably stopped a yard short from scoring a touchdown which would have tied the game with a conversion, the Rams won 23-16. Hoping for such an ending as exciting, I'll once again do my best to ignore the risks the players are subjecting themselves to but it'll be hard to ignore the flyovers (at a cost of half a million to the taxpayer), shots of genuflecting players, recruitment ads and shout outs to the troops who are risking the same degenerative brain disease as the players on the field as roadside explosions injure the brain the same way as explosive tackles. I doubt this year's match up will provide us with the first extra period as I've got a feeling Kaepernick and the Niners may blow the Ravens out. Yet, I've always been a fan of the black swan, the fat tail and maybe a little divine intervention, so I'm taking the Ravens, in OT, 26-23.

It's Not The End Of The World

Whether by rapture, nature, or computer there have been countless predictions of the end of the world over the past three millennia. These harbingers of doom have had many sources, from scripture to soothsayers, but all have been shown to be nothing but conjecture as the world has continued to revolve, the sun to shine and man to (de)evolve. Unless you've been living under a rock, don't get out to see movies nor have a Facebook wall to tell you, you probably heard something about the Maya calendar ending on December 21, 2012 augering the end of the world. Meanwhile, after a temporary break to obsess about the fact that they like to own a lot of guns so they can kill each other and anyone else they feel like, America's propaganda machine will go back to heralding the financial end of the world, the fiscal cliff. Like all good myths, both harbingers of doom freely mix fact and fiction to produce a potent brew believable enough to intoxicate the masses while ensuring the real moral of the story and a chunk of change will be lost in the panic to the propagandists.

Many Romans believed 634 BCE would bring the end based on a story in which twelve eagles, each representing ten years, revealed the lifespan of Rome to Romulus. Most religions have their own eschatological doctrines but it's the crazy Christians who have the longest list of false prophets. Harold Camping was simply the latest in a long line Christards to predict the end such as Paul the Apostle, Hilary of Poitiers and Martin of Tours. Perhaps tired of just killing infidel Muslims in the Crusades, even Pope Innocent III got into the act by adding 666 to the year Islam was founded to determine the world would end in 1284. Theology and astronomy have always been a toxic mix, but when Johannes Stoeffler used them to predict a worldwide flood he convinced many to move to higher ground and invest in boats before February 1, 1524. As many as 100,000 'Millerites' were moved enough by William Miller's preaching of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844 to sell all their belongings. Like Camping, when the world woke up the next day to normality, Miller just moved his date back; his followers were so fervent they went on to form the Seventh-day Adventist movement.

Sowing panic in the markets has always been an easy way to make a mint for some and to steer economic policy for others. Stories of the so-called fiscal cliff are another textbook example. Nathan Mayer Rothschild’s riders and messengers were able to get news of Wellington's defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo a full day in advance of the government’s own news carriers. As the story goes, Nathan convinced the rubes he had knowledge of Napoleon's victory by selling heavily on the English stock market. When panic ensued, Rothschild had his agents snap up stocks for pennies on the pound, entrenching the family banking dynasty. Many claim the Panic of 1907, the United States' first modern financial crisis, was engineered by JP Morgan to implement certain financial regulations and ultimately the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. Newspaper reports of the days ahead of the panic seem almost comical in their propagandizing prose describing the health of the financial market only to be proven completely wrong when the crash led to a drop of 21% in commodity prices, a 47% spike in bankruptcies and a rise in unemployment from 2.8 to 8%. Lucky these things could never happen today!

A simple connection can be made between today's supposed harbingers of apocalypse, the end of the Maya Calendar and the US fiscal cliff: both are completely made up and being used for gain by the mythology makers of our day. The Maya understand 17 different calendars, some of them accurately charting time over more than ten million years. The one causing all the hub-bub is the Long Count which is an astronomical calendar based on the cycle of Pleiades used to track longer periods of time. Just as with other calendars, the end of the old signals the start of the next. Americans on the other hand created the fictitious fiscal cliff just last summer when the federal debt level was about to hit the imaginary debt ceiling. Imaginary in that a limit that can be extended is not a limit but a gimick which in this case proved a useful opportunity for fearmongers. As a deal couldn't be struck, an agreement was reached for automatic spending cuts to kick in come the end of 2012 thus the name fiscal cliff was coined to scare the people into believing cuts need to be made to avert financial disaster in the new year. However, just as we can go out and buy a new calendar, the US government has the power to simply go out and 'buy' more dollars whenever they need to.

The reason it's so important for the elite to sow fear among the infotariat is that both imaginary apocalypse makers are in fact opportunities to reshape the world we live in. The current Long Count cycle finished December 21st when it reached the end of the 13th b'ak'tun which themselves are made up of 20 k'atun cycles composed of 20 tun each of which last for 18 winal cycles that are about a year long. The end of the Long Count has nothing to do with death but everything to do with rebirth. The true meaning is transformation not conflagration. According to the correlation between the Long Count and Western calendars accepted by the great majority of Maya researchers, the starting-point of the just ended Long Count cycle is equivalent to August 11, 3114 BCE. This date marks the creation of the world of human beings according to the Maya, the last great transition.

Coincidentally, we are told by textbooks that civilization began around 3,000 BCE in Mesopotamia as the Sumerians simultaneously developed all the traits of high civilization: the wheel, metallurgy, astrology, astronomy, calendars, taxation, bookkeeping, an organized priesthood and of course written texts. Ancient Egypt as we know it came into being with the union of Upper and Lower Egypt and the start of the First Dynasty under Menes somewhere around 3100 B.C. Should we go on about the significance of that time? Stonehenge has been dated to around 3000 B.C. It was also around 3100 B.C that stone circle building and other types of megalithic structures were being built throughout Britain, Scotland, and Ireland. Newgrange, the large passage-grave in Ireland, is generally dated to about 3200 B.C. More? Civilization is said to have begun in China around 3000 B.C. with the emergence of the Yang-Shao culture. All very important, but not as big as what it all brought about. Yep, the whole system of modern slavery. Debt.

Even before there was money, there was debt. The arrival of civilization, agriculture and all its benefits also brought the plague of credit. The ancients learned to control it through systems such as the Jubilee, but in modern times we have forgotten the lessons of the past and let it become the system for the powerful to control wealth and therefore society. Nowhere has done a better job than America where the debt figures boggle the mind. Credit card debt has lagged since the financial crisis and sits a bit under a trillion but student loan debt has more than made up for the slack, powering past the trillion mark last year helping push consumer debt to $2.7 trillion. Total household debt is over $13 trillion, just a couple of trillion shy of total yearly economic output. But we better be sure not to mix these figures with the 'real' problem facing America, the federal debt. 

Yes, like the rogue planet Nibiru predicted by the Mayans, serious people are warning us the federal debt will obliterate us all. Wait? What's that? The Mayans never said anything about Nibiru? It was just dreamed up in 1976 by Zecharia Sitchin in his book "The Twelfth Planet" using his own unique translation of Sumerian cuneiform to identify a planet, Nibiru, orbiting the sun every 3,600 years? Then several years later, Nancy Lieder, a self-described psychic, announced that the aliens she claimed to channel had warned her this planet would collide with Earth in 2003? After a collision-free year, the date was moved back to 2012, where it was linked to the close of the Mayan long-count period? So, it's just a mixture of science fiction and psychics? Wait. Science fiction and psychics sounds suspiciously close to the definition of economics to me. 

Even though they agree on about 99% of things, Democrats and Republicans still manage to come to loggerheads often enough to make for good kabuki theater. Last year's debt ceiling fiasco not only cost the US it's AAA credit rating but also set the cuts and tax increases to go off around the end of the year. The name 'fiscal cliff' is an inapt metaphor for many reasons, but the $500 billion in tax increases and $200 billion in spending cuts represent about 4% of the US economy and would probably push the US into recession. It's a hodgepodge of policy decisions that Congress has made, or better said, not made, over the past two years, piled onto a single deadline. It's not a cliff but self-induced austerity crisis, theater designed to pressure policy makers into a deal such as the grand bargain whose ultimate goal is to dismantle social security and medicare while continuing at least a portion of the tax cuts for the rich. Despite the many other problems that exist, the added bonus of this approaching apocalypse has been that it has completely paralyzed the lame duck Congress and the status quo usually benefits one group, the plutocrats.

The simplest option is to do nothing and go over the 'cliff' but this is unlikely to happen as not only does it harm everyone but it hits the rich, the military and corporations disproportionately. While it would cut defense spending and allow taxes on the rich to return to Clinton era levels, it also would see benefits cut and taxes for all others rise as well. Additionally, with the debt ceiling fast approaching again, some kind of deal will avert the next crisis. However, the tax hikes and spending cuts are spread over two years so there isn't really any urgency. Another possible scenario is to just kick the can further down the road by simply extending the deadline by a year or two. This is what policy makers usually do from climate change to war related troop draw-downs, so don't be surprised. Finally, some kind of deal may be reached, ranging from some kind of small deal in which some tax cuts are allowed to expire along with some spending cuts to the plutocrat preferred 'grand bargain'. The media is undoubtedly pushing this as their overlords will be better able to disguise the savage cuts to the social safety net among all the other hoopla of a deal within the framework of the Simpson-Bowles plan, or the Domenici-Rivlin plan.

A healthy democracy would use this moment to its advantage by diagnosing the disease and taking its medicine. A rotten one will use it to make things worse for most while benefiting the few. Sequestration will see a range of spending cuts across the board (ie. defense and non-defense) in discretionary spending as mandated by the debt ceiling compromise, the Budget Control Act of 2011. Cutting doctors pay and unemployment insurance at a time of record low employment don't sound too bright but slicing a portion of the $300 million a day to fight an unwinnable war in Afghanistan sounds pretty good, but unfortunately war costs are exempt. Speaking of the unemployed, maybe increasing taxes on the 'job-creators' isn't such a bad idea. The secret is the rich aren't creating jobs at all but stealing them. Only 3.6% of the top 0.1% income earners are entrepreneurs, the majority rely on extracting rents from the rest of us. Their tax rates have fallen while the working class are paying more via payroll taxes. The other supposed engine of job creation, corporations, have done a pretty good job of avoiding paying their fair share as well. Just as the top 1% of breathing people have taken 93% of income growth since 2008, corporate non-breathing people saw their profits quickly rebound following the downturn to the point where their profits are at a record level when compared to the whole economy. Charts? You want graphs? Well, here's a few:

The Real Cliff - Employment has fallen and can't get up!

Surprisingly, cutting top marginal tax rates increases the income share of the rich!

The slow shift in tax burden from non-breathing 'people' to working class people

You might say the crisis was pretty good for corporations

The term 'fiscal cliff' was coined by none other than Ben Bernanke. You may remember him from such heists as the 2008 bank bailouts (TARP) when he helped Hank Paulsen bully Congress into handing over $700 billion to the banksters. That $700 billion sure is a familiar sounding number, isn't it? Well it should be seeing as it the amount of 'forced' austerity being brought about by bailing out banks, something that research shows predictably happens. An IMF paper showed bailouts lead to austerity. That IMF paper examined 42 banking crises between 1970 and 2007 but there's evidence all around us today from the UK to Spain and Greece. It's all so sickeningly predictable. Whatever you want to call them, the elite, oligarchs, plutocrats, Bilderbergs, they behave just like the borg from Star Trek TNG, methodically extracting all the wealth they can before moving on to the next source. The last forty-odd years were spent laying the groundwork for the biggest transfer of wealth from the bottom up the world has ever seen; the tax burden has been shifted away from the rich and corporations onto the backs of the working class, 'think tanks', 'research centers' and Faux News were created to tell the people this is normal, unions were devastated, consumerism as self-actualization became the mantra, corporations were turned into people and rewarded for shipping jobs overseas to the lowest wage countries they could find. Uh, I could go on but I already have.

Sadly, much like the end of the Long Count Mayan cycle, the fiscal cliff is being sold as disaster instead of an opportunity. The cult leaders aren't named Jones, Hubbard, Koresh, or Jouret nor were they dressed in flowing robes but garbed instead in suits and named Rand, Greenspan, Friedman and Hayek. Worse, their preachings aren't responsible for the deaths of tens or hundreds but thousands, millions and possibly eventually billions. We get to see their converts every day in our classrooms, on the streets and most often, on the TV where a parade of hucksters trying to convince us the debt was caused by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and needs fixing before anything else. The propaganda becomes transparent when you consider a group such as Fix the Debt, which is the loudest of the fearmongers, is composed of CEOs with ties to 43 companies with over $43 billion in defense contracts. They're strangely silent about the fact that the debt is largely due to the recession, the two Bush tax cuts while paying for two wars which have caused defense spending to double since 2001 putting US military spending equivalent to the next 26 nations combined.

It's telling that as the 21st of December neared more effort was expended dispelling the Mayan apocalypse myths than extolling the possibilities that a new era of peace and unity could bring. Bolivian president Evo Morales marked the winter solstace and auspicious calendar date by extending an open invitation to the world to celebrate "the end of the Macha and the beginning of the Pacha, the end of selfishness and the beginning of brotherhood, it is the end of individualism and the beginning of collectivism." Similarly, as we near the so-called fiscal cliff, more energy is being expended to convince us the end is near if we don't make fixes which will exacerbate the problems rather than solve them. Every challenge we've faced this millennium has been made worse: 9/11 led us into a never ending global war on terror, climate change has brought an endless parade of broken promises and conferences, financial crisis a perpetual bailout for the perpetrators and sellout of the people. No, just as December 21st wasn't the end of the world, the fiscal cliff won't bring about the apocalypse but the majority of us would be better off if we turn off the current disastrous path.
Update Jan.22 -