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.

This Month in Wingnuttery

As events spin ever faster out of control it's getting harder and harder to tell if the tail is wagging the dog or if the mongrel is simply chasing his hind end in a circle. WMD's (weapons of mass distraction) flash from son of Hollywood royalty 80's pretty boy-shoot a fiance-beat a hooker or two-ex-wife restraining order champion but pay him a couple million an episode to appear in a sitcom meltdown to Chernobyl flashback, the end is nigh-radioactive cloud of death nuclear Godzilla-creating kind. Few are able to pay much attention, so it's like shooting fish in a barrel from religiosity to larceny through hypocrisy to find gems of downright wingnuttery.

Besides killing us all, the Japanese tragedy (what do you call an earthquake/tsunami/nuclear chain reaction) could have been worse according to the preachings of the gospel of capitalism on CNBC. After last Friday's earthquake in Japan, Larry Kudlow summed up the wingnut view on the value of life versus profit succinctly, "The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that."



Ok. The real upside for the wingnuts here is that with the Nikkei and other markets gyrating out of control, maybe we won't notice that no one besides Bernie Madoff is in jail for the construction and self-destruction of the pyramid scheme that is the financial world. Do watch Inside Job. If you don't understand how credit default swaps are like buying insurance on someone else's car so you hope they crash to collect, the WMD's will be able to go to work earthquake style so the next financial meltdown can be blamed on Atheists instead of teachers. More likely, it'll all be blamed on the Muslims like in California where they protest families trying to go to a fundraising dinner:




Freedom of speech means all this and more in America with the Supreme Court recently affirming the right to air your grievances at funerals in an 8-1 decision. The members of the Westboro Baptist Church (read: extended family of Fred Phelps) believe the ails of America are being brought upon her because she has accepted homosexuality. God's wrath for making everyone more equal was unleashed on 9/11, kicked the hell out of the Gulf Coast a couple times with Katrina and the BP blowout/unleashing (and possibly still leaking and definitely not cleaned up) hell on Earth, and is to blame for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Therefore, this cult travels around the States protesting the funerals of soldiers coming back in boxes of course. Counter-protester signs are bit more creative which isn't hard when your dealing with complete waiting to drink the Kool-Aid brainwashing that leads you to protest the burial of dead soldiers returning from the graveyard of empires for supposedly being God's retribution for society's acceptance of homosexuality.



If only they could make gay Muslims the ultimate evil when the evidence seems to run contrary to that idea. Enter the wingnuttery of Peter King, congressman from New York and his Faux News henchmen. Tag-teaming with Sean Hannity (who actually got angry at Phelps' daughter, god bless that freaky chick) who said to King in a hard hitting (?!) interview "from everything I've been reading, you're not going after the Muslim community". Forgot, like most of the world, he doesn't read the Washington Post or any source that doesn't confirm his bias. King's on a mission to show that Muslims aren't patriotic enough and not reporting their brethren to the authorities if suspecting them of terrorism. He could've just asked Michael Rolince, head of the counter-terrorism division in the FBI’s Washington field office from 2002 to 2005 who said, "I will tell you in no uncertain terms that the community has on multiple occasions come forward and assisted law enforcement". Or maybe read this PDF. The McArthyism of the new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee's first hearings being on Muslim radicalization aside, how do people not wonder why Peter King thought the IRA was a-ok? Brown Muslim terrorists equals bad while white Irish terrorists are good in his world. In fact, he once said that "the moral standing of the IRA is equal to that of the British army". Huh? Well, here, watch on Jon Stewart - he's funnier at least:

The Daily Show - How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sharia?
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Or maybe a Brit has a different view of King supported terrorism...

The Daily Show - Radical Muslim Hearings - IRA Terrorism
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Lucky we've got wingnuts to distract Americans from the real threat of domestic terrorism, otherwise the MSM would have to pay attention to those who are actually threatening and killing people.

The fear card is all that's been left in the deck since WMD's weren't found in Iraq. How could all of the wingnuts, from Faux to the NY Times have been so wrong? Again. The situation in Libya seems like the ultimate damned if we don't, damned if we do situation, and it is - but of our own making. It's not the possible combinations of Gaddafi's name or the hallucinogenic drugs he claimed protesters were on that ensures we keep the area in turmoil. The west has cuddled and raised their dictators in an advanced version of Risk which keeps ending with someone knocking over the board. It's deja-vu all over again, this time with Super Sarkozy and his European arms makers' fear of doing nothing and losing a chance to make some cash by blowing Russian Migs and their own Mirages out of the air in the skies around Tripoli convincing us to intervene. It's always been this way from the Shaw, Sadam and Saud to Ben Ali, Mubarek and Gaddafi, prop them up, build them up, wind them up and let them go. Transparency gets ugly as yes, there's always the oil, we couldn't afford to sit around and do nothing, after all, we couldn't in good conscience continue to buy oil from an autocrat who slaughters his people, could we? UNSC Resolution 1973 seems to have included more bombs than the Arab League expected but probably not enough for these guys, who knew two weeks ago what was going to hit Libya. Watch how General Petraeus greeted his boss Defense Secretary Gates in Afghanistan back in February -



A sideshow of evil is provided by Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF thugs in Zimbabwe who claim that "vigilance has become the order of the day all around. Only God knows why these hopeless copycats, whose death wish is to be arrested at the Harare Gardens and be charged with treason in accordance with the rule of law they love preaching about, honestly think they can do an Egypt or Libya in Zimbabwe". Mugabe chum Ahmadinejad and Iran were the only one's complaining when at least a thousand Saudi Arabian troops marched across the causeway to join those from the UAE to help try to quell the rebellion in Bahrain. And quell they did - the burning and shooting kind. The home of the US Fifth Fleet features a Shi'a majority tired of living in an apartheid Sunni-dominated state and have been protesting for a month with many violent confrontations. With unrest spilling over to the Shiite minority in northeast Saudi towns where they've managed to stage a couple of protests the past couple of weeks despite heavy military deterrents including shots fired, the scale of the potential disaster for American policy was unacceptable and the WMD in Japan provided the perfect cover to violently crack down on protesters nearly unnoticed. A state of emergency was declared, the protesters were cleared out of Pearl Square and the hospitals taken over. Nothing to see here though, move along.



The most important love story of the past generation took place on the US Navy cruiser Quincy fittingly enough on Valentine's Day 1945. On his way back from the conference in Yalta with Stalin and Churchill to plan out the world's configuration as World War II wound down, Roosevelt was first through the Suez Canal to a meeting with the king of Saudi Arabia, beating out the other leading suitor Winston Churchill by a few days.



The ink had yet to dry on the lines drawn on the map and those in the sand still weren't all that cemented until the US gave its full support to the fledgling kingdom and reassured its aged monarch that they would champion the Palestinian cause. King Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud's naivety was possibly the result of never having been outside his country before but in return he gave America a stranglehold on the lifeblood of the economic system to power the post-war growth. This system powered by US petrodollars is so threatened today that King Abdullah had to hurry home to try to appease his people by sprinkling a bit of the cash around. While money may be debt in practice (damn you Nixon!), in theory it's just been a proxy for oil since that meeting aboard the cruiser Quincy on Great Bitter Lake. The love story has continued with each president and successive king, working on the 12th and 5th respectively, each partnership able to dance the complicated steps of the Palestine/Israel/Iran blame boogie.

The silence coming out of Bahrain and to a lesser extent, Yemen, is deafening yet anything but surprising, look at a damn map. No wonder American and the oil consumers sit back and accept Saudi and UAE troops under the auspices of the Gulf Cooperation Council being brought in to help crush a pro-democracy movement in Bahrain to protect the flow of oil. The love for black gold is so strong that America has even forgiven the Saudis for supplying most of the 9/11 terrorists and in fact wants to train more Saudi pilots, this time to fly F-15Es in Idaho as part of a $60 billion arms deal. From Yemen, we hear even less of an autocratic ruler perhaps using poison gas on his people, because, well, Americans provide the instruments of death to this or that autocratic rule but not as much to the other.



Who needs Hollywood or Bollywood when the streets of Lahore provide CIA not-so-secret war movie scenes. The American public will never understand why the Other hates them so much when they watch their President demand the release of their embassy worker on the news interspersed with scenes of Americans being burned in effigy on Pakistani streets. All too many will never know their 'free' media was asked by their government to lie to the public and keep the identity of Raymond Davis, an American CIA operative working for Blackwater (now Xe) secret from the American public. All told four people were killed in the incident (a pedestrian run down by the SUV dispatched to pick up Davis and the wife of one of the shooting victims committed suicide) but it will have the effect of making "the Other" even more distrustful of America and weakening future claims of diplomatic immunity. The smugness of the American belief in their superior news service makes the situation even worse for the ignorant viewer as he pities the 'uninformed' Pakistanis, who ironically know so much more. To fix it, a little blood money is simply paid to the families and Davis is magically pardoned and whisked out of the country. To celebrate the deal, the US decided to take out a peaceful meeting of tribal elders with some predator drones. They rain down in Pakistan killing nine civilians for each terrorist target while Americans reading their Newsweek will smugly believe their president is efficiently killing the enemy and can therefore make jokes about them.

Abandoning another election promise, Obama "regrettably" vetoed an Arab-sponsored UN resolution branding Israeli settlements illegal this month, his administrations first veto. The resolution, sponsored by 130 countries, reaffirmed "that the Israeli settlements established in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, are illegal and constitute a major obstacle to the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace." The US veto in sole-support of Israel has been a tradition since March 17th, 1970. 14 of the 15 Security Council members voted in favor of the resolution, adding to the insane number of times the US has defied world opinion alone to prolong the Palestinian dispute. Then we're supposed to be surprised when the Israelis announce further illegal settlement construction the next day. Quietly every other day, the IDF kills a Palestinian civilian with impunity in the occupied territories. It's a terrorist attack when a wacko Palestinian knifes five Israelis in their home but a security operation when the Israeli army kills hundreds of Palestinian children.

Speaking of the US and the UN, you won't hear the Koch suckers on Faux News informing the public that the Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has signed legislation that puts his state in contravention to article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A news network that employees half, five of the ten, possible Republican candidates for president isn't there to inform so you can decide. Whatever, there's something about torture in there too, right? Instead, Republican presidential hopefuls like Mike Huckabee are employed by Fox to feed lies about his president, "his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British are a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather." WMD's providing a cover of ignorance allowing Walker to ram through an austerity bill that lost all its financial savings and only left in the budget busting bits to avoid quorum in service to the Koch Brothers. Funny the governor had time in a budget crisis to sort out strategy with his puppet master:





So, he's following in the steps of Ronald Reagan? Maybe it would be more instructive for Faux News viewers to learn their hero, Ronald Reagan was really a raging socialist!



In 1980, two out of three American workers were in defined benefit pension plans with guaranteed lifetime benefits. Now it’s one in five and falling. The end result is the emergence of the politics of resentment. Most workers don't have pensions, so why should union members? Pit the workers against each other. Keep the lower classes fighting each other, while the rich loot the country. It's all about what teachers make instead of what the corpocracy is stealing. Classic divide and conquer technique making jokes reality. A CEO, a public employee union member and Tea Partier were all sitting around a table with a plate with a dozen cookies. The CEO took eleven cookies for himself. He turned to the Tea Partier and said "watch out for that union guy, he wants part of your cookie."

Meanwhile, in Michigan it gets even crazier...



I suppose next we'll be hearing about the new Strength through Joy program. In case you didn't get that, governor Rick Snyder has made it so he can declare a financial emergency and appoint an administrator to take over towns, human or corporation. So, when the taxes run out, which inevitably will when you cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations by $1.8 billion and raise $1.7 billion from the poor and elderly, and the townships default on the loans they took out to buy a new sewer system or the like, the banks they can't pay will take over the running of the town. These administrators are empowered to do anything to return their version of economic stability (them getting paid) from voiding contracts and collective bargaining agreements to dissolving the town council and school board as well as firing anyone including elected officials, hiring private security, unincorporating the town, and of course selling off public property. Oh, and of course the citizens have no say in this. Go Democracy!

All is good though as the newest Forbes rich list celebrates the increase in the number of billionaires to 1,210 and their total wealth to $4.5 trillion. It's somehow good for the economy that the richest 400 Americans now hold more wealth than half of the population combined, 155 million people. When it's so easy to convince people that teacher's unions caused the financial crisis it's no wonder that at the top of Sunday's New York Times best-seller list for paperback nonfiction was "Heaven Is for Real". Yep, the near-death tale of the three year old son of an evangelical pastor in which he not only met his great-grandfather, the biblical figures Samson, John the Baptist and Jesus, who had eyes that "were just sort of a sea-blue and they seemed to sparkle", but also his younger sister who was never born due to a miscarriage is the most popular NONFICTION book in America. Wonder if he asked about the crucifixion or how bringing torture back from the history books is supposed to spread peace and love. Along with neo-fascist parties serving in western European governments such ideas would have been dismissed as ethical disasters which could never really happen just a decade ago. But there they are in Stockholm, Amsterdam and Budapest while torture has spread from Abu-Ghraib to the military brig in Quantico, Virginia in the blink of an eye.

State Department spokesman PJ Crowley was forced to resigned from his post just two days after calling the treatment of alleged Wikileaks source Private Bradley Manning "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid". Regardless of whether what Manning did was a crime, his treatment amounts to torture and is further proof that Obama is actually a more dangerous person to have as president than Dubya. With George you knew where you stood, with Nodrama it all depends on the optics and what the polls tell him, so you want to keep it quiet when you're torturing your own in America. Crowley was the author of a homeland security report that foreshadowed his demise as it read in part, "[W]e have policies, including harsh interrogation techniques, detention without charge, government surveillance, and immigration that are inconsistent with our values and our long-term interest. All this in the name of something called the “war on terror." The ultimate WMD, "the war on terror".

The same passage from impossibility to normalization is happening as reality melts into a new age. Literally in some cases like the ecological threat of global warming in the new Anthropocene Era where "humans - thanks to our numbers, the burning of fossil fuels and other related activities - have become a geological agent on this planet." Or not. Nuclear power plants, which are definitely anthropogenic, meltdown thanks to an earthquake/tsunami one two punch. Maybe the tremor wasn't caused by HAARP but the building of the Three Gorge Dam in China was most likely a factor in intensifying their last big Sichuan quake. And don't tell me you haven't noticed the increase in the number of big, devastating quakes from Chile to New Zealand, Haiti and now Japan. Yeah, I know, there have always been earthquakes in these places but we are living a time when we and they are all connected by the capitalist market amplifying the aftershocks felt around the world. The mode of our survival depends on the maturity of our collective reason which unfortunately seems to only have one button, MORE. This 30 year experiment in planned stupidity has reached a critical point as the fuel may be cut off that we need to burn up the planet. More disasters mean more money for those who seem to have it to burn, but we'll probably just keep blaming the teachers.

The Daily Show - Crisis in Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer - Teachers and Wall Street
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Fun and games. The cycle of death and violence continues alongside the cycle of poverty and larceny. A delicate balancing act of choosing among which autocrats to support and which ones to help bring down in a new era of regime alteration change. Shared sacrifice translates in the real world to making the poor, elderly, children, and now working-class families pay for the losses of the ultra-wealthy. WMDs like Sarah Palin are able to spread their fear and hate as far as India so we don't notice the next disaster being planned by Wall Street. I'd like to believe in Tony Blair's hell if only to know there's a special place reserved there for him just for the part he played in re-legitimizing Colonel Gaddafi not to mention his warmongering throughout the region. But like the corporate minions they are, the press will continue to feed us Charlie Sheen stories while sweeping the real evil under the rug. One can only hope the day is fast approaching when that rug gets pulled from under all of them.

Lessons on Killing the Golden Goose

Wake up, this is important I say!

If you were listening closely on Thursday you might have heard the collective yawn of 300 million Americans as the US Census Bureau released its 2009 report on poverty in America. Meh, so what if 1 in 7 people and 1 in 5 children in the world's richest country are destitute with ever diminishing chances of climbing out of the cesspool of want. 4 million more people than the year before failed to surpass the threshold of despair, there are now more poor people in the US than people in Argentina (look out Tanzania, your next). It kinda reminded me of standing in front of around fifteen 22-year-old Polish university students lecturing about inequality in those same United States. There I was going over chart after chart showing how the distribution of income in the US hasn't been so unequal since the beginning of the last century and trying to get them to come up with ideas about why it was happening and what repercussions it might have. I mean, what was I thinking? Better yet, what we're they thinking? A few possibilities:

"I can't wait to get home and stream last night's Desperate Housewives!"
"Did he just say 'annual stimulus'?"
"I wonder how my tomatoes are growing in Farmville?"

You see, I'd forgotten the golden rule of giving a lecture. Know your audience. These kids are the first generation born and raised from birth completely free of communism. Equality is the last thing they want, all they want is to be living in a country just like America. If they only knew that if we had been in America, most of them wouldn't have the opportunity of sitting in a classroom such as that one. Well, unfortunately what is happening in America isn't happening in isolation and it has repercussions for us all.

Just to be fair, I suppose I should do to my readers as I did to my poor students and put you all through a little inequality 101 primer:

The first decades of the 20th century were a time of crisis for capitalism in America. No one had tried to measure income inequality as measuring income was impossible before the introduction of federal income tax in 1913 but it was clearly a problem. It was the time of the robber barons and Standard Oil. Vanderbilt, Astor, Rockefeller, Carnegie and J.P Morgan showed the world how unrestrained markets led to accumulated wealth, monopolistic behaviour and distorted markets that retarded growth. The ideas of Marx were mixing in a potent cocktail of labour unrest. Something was wrong with capitalism. When in 1915 a statistician at the University of Wisconsin named Willford I. King published The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States he was astounded to find that the top 1% of the population accounted for about 15% of the income. That figure was to climb to a peak of 23.9% in 1928. Coincidentally, the next year saw Black Tuesday as the stock market crashed on October 29th kicking off the Great Depression.

The effects of the depression combined with progressive taxation, the New Deal and World War II to usher in an era of dwindling income disparity, referred to by some economists as the Great Compression. Provided you were a white, Christian male of non-drafting age, this period of time could be viewed by many as the golden age of American life. There was no better time to be a middle-class American and the numbers grew and grew in a virtuous cycle. America had won the war and they were tasked with powering the global economy. Foreign competition was minimal, resources were abundant, each decade added a year to average educational attainment and unions ensured workers earned a salary that allowed them to purchase their employers products. The gap between rich and poor reached it's historic low in the 1970s as the top 1% was taking in about 9% of total income, a little over a third of what it had been 45 years earlier.

Oh, this is the top 0.01%. Not bad!

Then, something happened causing what Paul Krugman has termed the Great Divergence. The trend completely reversed itself and we've seen a growing disparity between rich and poor, rich and richer along with poor and poorer ever since, to the point where the top percentile's income share reached 23.5% in 2008. Notice any similarity between that number and the one eighty years ago, you know, right before the Great Depression? Correlation isn't causation and all that, but do you think the fact that a smaller piece of the pie being available to the majority of the population could have something to do with a slowdown in economic activity? I'm no economist, but...

Ok, so what's my point? Well, that's my point. It's not just my classroom that was bored to tears with these numbers. Imagine Faux 'news' trying to go through these facts with its viewers. Ha! Just mention the word inequality and the next thing you know you'd probably be shouted down for being a socialist-communist-terrorist pedophile with an evil plot to turn the country into a government controlled death camp in preparation for an alien invasion. Or something like that. Americans truly believe that what has made their country great is the independent/innovative/entrepreneurial spirit of its population facilitated by having a small, unobtrusive government. They've been brainwashed into believing that the only economic prescription for tough times is to cut taxes and liberalize the market. Funny they don't seem to remember that it was government policies that created the conditions for growth (and a couple of little World Wars that knocked out the manufacturing capacity of much of the world) seen in the 20th century. Anti-trust legislation, the minimum wage, social security, the 16th and 17th amendments, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Glass-Steagall. Oops, see, we've gotta be vigilant or the next thing you know these things could be gone.

So, before figuring a way out, or even if we need to, the first question is, what happened? Economists have variously pointed fingers at race, gender, the breakdown of the nuclear family, immigration, technology, Republicans, the demise of organized labour, globalization, federal policy, and the decline of K-12 education. Well, I blame it on the 1970s. No, not disco (well, a little bit), nor the designated hitter rule, the Big Mac or the Bicentennial. Why were the seventies such a turning point? The oil crisis, Vietnam and Nixon closing the gold window to allow for an unchecked expansion of the money supply led to stagflation. At the same time American corporations were just figuring out that the rebellion against conformity of the previous decade wasn't a threat but in fact their greatest opportunity. Value and lifestyle marketing. It was in the corporations interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. America's (and the developed economies) were rescued by the self-actualizing individuals who became the motor of what became known as the new economy. Consumerism became the path to self-actualization. This was not only observed and practiced in the market for goods and services but politics too. New individualism was leading an attack on fifty years of government interference in people's lives. Well, we know where that led to now. Reagan/Thatcher ushered in an era of deregulation at the same time as the right-wingnut mantra chant became the only correct way to think: Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. Products and false idols allowed people to express what they felt was their individuality. "The generation that once rebelled against the conformity imposed by consumerism now embraced it because it helped them to be themselves." (Do watch the whole series, this is the 3rd of 4 parts)



Middle America's recent embrace of the Tea Party and their populist slogans really isn't that surprising. Anything that allows the mind to shift the burden of blame away from itself is much easier than looking within, finding the errors of one's ways and correcting them. No matter how much they yell and scream about the 'Obamanation' that they see as the cause of their ills, there's no escaping the fact that it is in fact us who are too blame. We allowed the mass marketing gurus to convince us that the road to happiness could be found in the modern day houses of prayer, the strip malls, that sprung up all around them and powered the new economy for 30 years. As the economy grew however, our wages didn't keep pace, the median male worker earns less today than he did in 1980, so we adapted in order to be able to continue to sate our unlimited desire to buy new things. How? Women continued to stream into the workforce making the two-income family the norm. In 1966 only 24% of mothers with young children worked outside the home; by the late nineties that figure had reached 60%. When this wasn't enough, we all worked longer hours, and not just in America - by the middle of the oh-ohs (2000s) the average male worker was working 100 more hours a year than two decades previously (almost 2 more hours a week! - the typical female was working 200 more hours!). Is it any wonder that no one was able to notice what was happening around us? With less and less time people came to rely more and more on opinion instead of news. Why bother to read and learn about a subject when it's much easier and quicker to simply digest what your told to believe as quickly as possible while scanning your iPad/Phone/Blackberry for news and updates on Facebook. Oh internet, you had so much promise! The worse was yet to come for Jack and Jill Average though as they found they still couldn't keep up with the Jones' next door (or at least what all those Lifestyle's of the Rich and Famous types the boob tube kept telling them were so much better than they were). When Jack and Jill found they had charged up their Visa cards over the limit, they discovered they could use their homes as credit cards. Oh, the joy they had in going up the hill, as housing prices always went up, right? So nothing could ever go wrong, could it? From 2002 to 2007, American households extracted $2.3 trillion from their homes leading to a tumble that has broken more than our crown.

Meanwhile their corporate masters took a growing slice of a stagnant pie (untasty!). They allowed the post-Reagan acolytes to dismantle their only defense against this onslaught, the unions, first smashing the air-traffic controllers union in a display of might and power, then slowly removing market stability legislation that had been in place since the New Deal. Today, organized labour is down to about 7% of the private workforce. While the workers were losing their voice, the plutocrats were just finding theirs. With all the hoopla surrounding bankers' pay last year it was somehow missed that this isn't an anomaly but a trend. In 1970 US CEOs were paid 28 times more than the average worker; by the oh-ohs this figure was hovering around 500 to 1, peaking at 548. Do you think their jobs got twenty times more difficult, twenty times more stressful, twenty times more demanding or they did a twenty times better job? Ha! Cough! Yike! The fact is the Friedmans of finance, those gurus of GDP, gods of globalization, have used every crisis over the past few decades to tighten the screws a little bit tighter on Joe Sixpack (yes, Jack and Jill's neighbour whose home is also under water), reducing benefits, outsourcing labour and increasing the profit margin. The rise of lobbyists and PACs has meant that those with the most money have the loudest voice in forming public policy, ensuring that every piece of legislation, from health care to financial reform, will have one intended winner, not the people but the Masters of the Universe. The Citizen United Supreme Court ruling making corporations people will only serve to make a bad situation worse as money becomes not only speech but also the only words those in power will bother to listen to. There's a reason politicians are vastly more responsive to the views of affluent constituents than those of modest means, they know who butters their bread. As Larry Bartels notes in his study on income inequality and political representation, what we are seeing is a "debilitating feedback cycle linking the economic and political realms: increasing economic inequality may produce increasing inequality in political responsiveness, which in turn produces public policies increasingly detrimental to the interests of poor citizens, which in turn produces even greater economic inequality, and so on".

Money poured into "think tanks" and "research centres" in an effort to mold a new and unchallenged economic model. Industrial dynasties have spent not insignificant parts of their fortunes on the conservative agenda. In the1980s , the Olin family, which owns a chemicals-and-manufacturing conglomerate, became known for funding right-leaning thinking in academia, particularly in law schools. And during the nineties Richard Mellon Scaife, a descendant of Andrew Mellon, spent millions attempting to discredit President Bill Clinton. But the real wizards behind the curtain are the Kochs. Only the brothers know precisely how much they have spent on politics. Public tax records show that between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than 48 million dollars. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch and his wife, spent more than 28 million. The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than a 120 million. Meanwhile, since 1998 Koch Industries has spent more than fifty million dollars on lobbying. Separately, the company’s political-action committee, Koch has donated some eight million dollars to political campaigns, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. So far in 2010, Koch Industries leads all other energy companies in political contributions, as it has since 2006. In addition, during the past dozen years the Kochs and other family members have personally spent more than two million dollars on political contributions. In the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation. Other gifts by the Kochs may be untraceable; federal tax law permits anonymous personal donations to politically active nonprofit groups.

Have you heard of the Cato Institute? Heritage Foundation? The Hudson Institute? The Independent Women’s Forum (seriously!)? The Mercatus Center (yeah, part of George Mason Univerity, publicly funded but fighting to end public funding)? Citizens For a Sound Economy? Citizens For the Environment (with no citizen membership)? Economic Education Trust or Triad Management? Remember the climategate kerfuffle over the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia. Wonder why formaldehyde isn't listed as a "known carcinogen to humans" substance by the EPA? Confused as to why “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community”? All are Koch created or funded, their main purpose helping ensure the maintenance of the status quo, the one that enriches them while raping the planet. Their activities and goals dovetail menacingly with the secret 1971 memo that then Virginia attorney Lewis Powell wrote two months before being nominated to the Supreme Court. The antiwar movement had turned its anger on defense contractors such as Dow Chemical and Ralph Nader was leading a public-interest crusade against corporations. Powell, writing a report for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged American companies to fight back. The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society" - intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion.

Convincing people to oppose action to save the world!

Um, did I mention so what? Why should we care that equality is not only increasing, but set to get worse even faster. Simple. Inequality is/was the major cause of the Great Recession. No, I'm not only pointing to the fact that income inequality was at similar levels just prior to the Great Depression and it's less powerfully named sibling, the Great Recession. After all, then I'd have commentators screaming that correlation is not causality. There's too much else going on here. Bank failures tend to coincide (notice the influence of financial deregulation) with times of growing income inequality. The growth of household debt has followed a pattern strikingly similar to the growth in income inequality. Finally, inequality has a substantial negative impact on overall consumption by creating a drag on effective demand. This is intuitive as well as scientific as it is obvious that the rich spend a lower percentage of their income than the rest of us thus robbing the economy of the demand it needs to keep growing and creating jobs. Worse yet, the rich don't necessarily spend their earnings and savings on and in their own country, being far more likely to spend it where they will get the highest returns, whether in a tax haven such as the Caymans or a holiday on the French Riviera. Remember that top 1% of earners? Well from 1980 to 2005 they took in more than 80% of the total increase in Americans' income. 80%! Leaving 20% to add to the spending power of the rest of us. Is there any wonder WalMart is so big?

You like graphs? We've got 'em!

A rising tide lifts all boats? What was once true is simply no longer the case. If you're born in rags, you're more likely to die in those same rags than those born in previous generations. Let's take a look at the most obviously method of perpetuating a plutocratic society. Estate taxes had been used for much of the century to help distribute wealth from top to bottom. There's no question that it should be everyone's right to pass on what they have created in their lifetime to their children. The question is how much is enough while trying to encourage a society in which members can move up and down the social ladder based on their knowledge, contribution and a little bit of luck. Once upon a time, this movement, let's call it social mobility, was fluid in the United States. Over the past 30 years however (why does that number keep coming up?) we have seen a dramatic calcification of this process. No matter, if you have a lot of money, you're happy with the new reality and therefore want your children to carry the mantle, after all meritocracy is so overrated. We need to eliminate the estate tax. Enter the right-wingnut spin doctor. Abracadabra, alakazam, poof - the estate tax becomes a 'death tax'. Fun with words! "No one likes a death tax! Let's get rid of it". And it was so, a one year moratorium that Republicans now want to make permanent, give to the rich and pass the costs on to the rest. Never mind that the estate tax was the most progressive and meritocratic tax in the country with the first $3.5 million being tax free impacting only the richest 0.3% of estates. We can always continue to misquote Alexis de Toqueville: "America is the best country in the world to be poor". That way we can delude ourselves into believing that Horatio Alger still exists. Sorry folks, "It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Finally, income inequality is one of the worst diseases a society can have. People in more equal societies simply live longer, healthier, and happier lives than people in more unequal societies. And not just poor people in these societies - all people. In a project intended to solve the reason why health within a population gets progressively worse the further one moves down the social scale, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett accidentally made a discovery big enough to change political thinking. It is no wonder rightwingnuts have been so vehement in their condemnation and more fantastical than usual in their attempts to discredit Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. What they found was that in states and countries where there is a big gap between the incomes of rich and poor, mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, obesity and teenage pregnancy are more common, the homicide rate is higher, life expectancy is shorter, and children's educational performance and literacy scores are worse. Unsurprisingly, the Scandinavian countries and Japan consistently come at the positive end of this spectrum having the smallest differences between higher and lower incomes and the resultant best record of psycho-social health. Those nations with the widest gulf between rich and poor come out worse and have the most health and social problems - Portugal, Great Britain and of course the United States of America. Oh, it's not only the poor who suffer from the negative effects, everyone does. For example, rates of mental illness are five times higher across the whole population in the most unequal societies.

Instead of facing reality and looking in the mirror, the rich will attempt to keep the the status quo while trying to maintain the belief of the plebs in the false gods of market liberalization and tax cuts by stoking the populist anger at the heart of groups such as the Tea Party. Their success has been breathtaking, twisting the truth to suit their purposes. From climate change to death panels and tax policy, misinformation has been the key to their success in controlling the media's agenda. Take the economic stimulus package, instead of acknowledging its limited success, limited by the fact it was too small, the right-wingnuts have managed to turn it into a dirty word. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it reduced unemployment by somewhere between 0.8 and 1.7 per cent in recent months. Economists at various Wall Street houses suggest that it boosted GDP by more than two per cent. And a recent study by Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder, economists from, respectively, Moody’s and Princeton, argues that, in the absence of the stimulus, unemployment would have risen above eleven per cent and that GDP. would have been almost half a trillion dollars lower. Yet polls show that a sizable majority of voters think that the stimulus either did nothing to help or actively hurt the economy, and most people say that they’re opposed to a new stimulus plan. The hostility has numerous sources. Many voters conflate the stimulus bill with the highly unpopular bailouts of the banking sector and the auto industry; Republicans have done a good job of encouraging such misconceptions, as when Representative Mike Pence, of Indiana, referred to the “bailout stimulus.”

Oops!

No, it is much easier to attack and criticize than reflect and offer solutions. The battle over the upcoming expiry of the Bush tax cuts will be instructive as to the direction America chooses to go. Does it want to continue to perpetuate a broken system, one in which California has built only one new college since 1984, but 21 new prisons, or will she decide to heal herself by implementing policies to guide us back to sanity. Things don't look good with money not only pouring in from special interest groups but ever more staggering amounts are also being spent by candidates themselves. At times I find myself wanting to see the Tea Party lead the Republicans to victory in the mid-term elections and ride the wave of misinformation through 2012 to usher in the era of Palin just to see how bad it gets but I know we'd all be swept away by the ensuing tsunami. Instead of letting ourselves be tricked into chasing bogeymen who are figments of our imagination we need to go about fixing the problems that we're faced with. The economic progress made over the past couple of centuries since the days of Adam Smith are undeniable, truly a goose laying golden eggs. Greed leads us to want to slice it open and grab all the gold today. A tool is only as good as its user, and capitalism, no matter how superior an economic system, is just that, a tool. We have to remember the users here are little different than monkeys and we all know what happens when monkeys are given tools.