Nightingale at Large

A hero is an infrequent, episodic thing at best.  Often, like Shane (Alan Ladd in the movie), a hero does not even turn and wave to you as he rides off into the sunset.  Best case, the hero might leave behind some good advice.  Shane told young Joey (played by Brandon DeWilde) to "grow up strong."  The implication was: be like your father, one who fights steadily, modestly for the rights of homesteaders against the cattle barons.  We, too, should grow up strong.  Watching President Obama with a child’s hope in your eyes is indeed childish. The only thing Obama is giving us is a bit of opening to be ourselves, remembering that imagined heroes often turn their back on "the little people," that they do not even look back and wave.  They are an episode.  We are the full story.

Any socialist, any good leftist, voted for Obama because his story and what we might guess were his private inclinations gave encouragement to our own efforts toward social justice.  Certainly he was a lesser evil; but more than that there was his social justice inclination expressed alongside his ambition.  Now he is giving us the opportunity to make our own movements in the direction of that inclination. He himself will ride away.  Heroes are men of exotic personal skills and great personal ambition.  They use studied flairs of anger and determination but very often they maintain themselves with compromise and vast indifference.

At least that is my take on Shane and all the cowboy heroes.

Here are Paul Street’s reflections on Obama thus far.  You might well have skipped Street’s new book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics and can hardly be faulted for that.  "Obama" is like the word "Cooking"’ in book title land these days.  Street is also the author of Empire and Equality (2004).  He is not cocky and leaves a trail of good names behind him, which are his reading.  He is a habitual teacher.  I clip here from his website (http://www.zmag.org.znet/viewArticle/20932) where Street describes the Obama violin model of politics, ‘you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.’  "You campaign and gain office with populace-pleasing  progressive-sounding rhetoric but you make policy in standard service to existing dominant corporate and military institutions."

Obama’s violin performance is being expertly marketed by dominant media. We are told by the Times that Obama is making "a radical departure from the past" even as he proposes to increase the so-called defense budget, even as he makes it clear that he will be leaving 50,000 so-called "residual" troops in Iraq well past August of 2010, even as he increases the level of violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and even as he cannot pay elementary honest attention to the legitimate grievances and claims of the Palestinian people.

Obama is a "radically progressive departure from the past," we are told from on high even as he says he will cut the federal deficit in half but cannot bring himself to embrace the elementary bank nationalizations that are obviously required in the current economic crisis. Even as he refuses to advance the obvious cost-cutting social democratic health care solution: single payer national health insurance. Even he can only set up a middle class task force but not a poverty and inequality task force. Even as he promises to spend untold billions and trillions on further bankers’ bailouts executed with zero citizen oversight and direction.

Obama is a radical progressive break, we are told, even as he does not utter one word about the overdue labor law reform he campaigned on, the Employee Free Choice Act. Even as he fails to advance such basic elementarily progressive measures as a moratorium on foreclosures, a capping of credit card interest rates and finance charges, and the rollback of capital income tax rates to 1981 levels, Even as his tepid and inadequate stimulus plan is over-loaded with business-friendly tax cuts and woefully short on labor-intensive projects that will put people to work right away. And even as he asks for twice the amount of money to sustain the criminal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as he proposes to set aside per year as part of a reserve fund that might pay for just more than half the amount required to give the uninsured health coverage… in 10 years. [Even as he pays a presidential visit to Caterpillar, the company that sells occupation and apartheid bulldozers to Israel and the first major U.S. manufacturer in decades to break a major strike with scabs.]

Looking back, Street sees Obama an the ideal establishment candidate for a ruling class at peril:  he is Black, from African parentage, with a Muslim name, a "community organizing" resume, a solid family, and a degree from Harvard Law.  These are hardly the normal establishment credentials but enormously useful for a corporate/military spokesman right at the present moment.  Thus Obama passed the corporate vetting.  It gained him 37.5 million in campaign funds, 75% of it from donations over $200, and $900,000 from Goldman Sachs whose gold watches adorn so many wrists in the Obama Administration.  It gains him an outstanding corporate media approval that was probably even more costly (from the same sources). 

And Obama does not lack the familiar Clintonian corporate-friendly moderation.  Today Larry Summers is fronting for another give-away (hedge fund moguls will buy toxic assets, he suggests).  Timothy Geithner, a deregulator, announces a vast new program of regulation that he will administer.  And the hundreds in DC who specialize in promising bogus "defense" against bogus "threats" for their armament manufacturing and oil interests, go to work each day with enthuasism and smiles.  Nobody is actually worried.  Flexible capitalism (which by essence and definition cares nothing for equality or justice) is at stake.  Now it has a leader, Obama, thought by many to be a hero.  All the essential ruling class interests are intact.  A few cripples may fall from atop the carriage but the basic mode of transportation with the masses pulling rolls on.  Well more than 70% of Congress are stake-holders in the corporate cause.  They are still riding in comfort. 

We "little people" would not have given Hillary Clinton or Joe Bidden an inch but will give Obama a mile.  And when he delivers only reassurance, smiles, and that fleeting sense of pride we will have lost a great opportunity if we have not used this Obama Moment for social action.  That action no way depends on him; nor should.  Clearly, he is another centrist.  If we do not use the opportunity, then in 2012 every thing goes back to the fascists and their backers.  Who can we blame for the missed opportunity.  Not Shane.

I think, reading these times, all of you should join some costly cause, take the risk, put your back to the wheel of change.  Why not?  This is the time.  There will be no "Great Depression."  That much is clear.  Going forward the main interest of the powers-that-be is harvesting the government’s new money, our money.  In their last throes, if it gets to that, they will turn the fire hose of inflation on us; but that is not yet.  Presently it is just harvesting the give-aways.  As Shane advised, "grow up strong."

Jim

In the homes of the very wealthy, note the bookends as pictured here. The surprising fact is that very often the rich do not give much thought to the content of the books between them. Only bookends matter. Truths about our unequal, unfair society matters less to them than the legislation and policies that create the inequality and favor the very rich. Likewise, many commentators are careful to place their truthful content between editor-acceptable bookends. (more…)

A policy-enforced disparity between the health of the rich and the poor is evident in any major urban hospital. All the staff is aware of it. As you proceed from the worried well to the barely ambulatory, from brief physical examination to technologically sophisticated costly medical diagnostics, from scant to full staffing, from simple to thorough lab tests, from wards to the single rooms with adjoining kitchens and accommodations for family—nice views, hospital-supplied flowers, comfortable seats, etc. —so you proceed from health care for the rich to health care for the middle-class.

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Health policy in America is a nurses’ joke, the black humor that is part of carrying on, doing what you can in spite of whatever. Health policy aims directly at suppressing the demand for health care. Nurses in our hospitals see it most clearly. First, most cost cutting aims at suppressing demand. Understaffing is only the most obvious example. Why should health care always be a matter of hurry up and shortcuts? (“Be patient and I‘ll get to you as soon as I can.”) Then there are the all too obvious deferrals, denials, long delayed treatment, skipped appointments (“Maybe I’ll get better”). Hospital and HMO administrators urge doctors and nurses to a thousand daily decisions whose rationale is “cost containment.” The intent and effect is to reduce demand. What kind of a health god is cost containment? (“They talk of care as if it were some deadly sin?”) Why are there no local clinics? Why are all hospitals monstrosities? Is transport so primitive, so expensive? No.

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Frequent articles and ads promote while others oppose the widespread application of antipsychotic and other powerful drugs to children with mild behavior issues. You might think there is controversy here, that “medical/scientific opinion is divided.” A better explanation is the excesses to which the drug industry, seeking ever greater profits, has gone is pushing these drugs. That industry—ten or so unrestrained, unregulated capitalist corporations (with prescription revenue of something like $250 billion in 2007)—seeks ever larger populations, ever more “conditions” in which to promote their ever growing pharmacy of interventions. Using their grand revenue as weapon, the drug industry has captured the regulatory agencies, institutions, and “thought-leaders” that should have reduced such drugs to a necessary trickle but have brought them to a flood.

In a nutshell it is a war of drugs on children with the drug industry using the trust of parents in doctors, false analogy with developmental disorders such as autism, the helpless anxiety of parents over their children’s behavior, the billions in profits, and the background noise of our judgmental, over-medicated society to sell ever more, and ever more expensive, drugs.

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As we all notice the belated media attention now given to the Democratic Republic of Congo, our first response should be “Utt-Oh! This can’t be good.”

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During Barack Obama’s first inaugural address we will hear something on the model of Franklin Roosevelt speaking at his first inaugural in Depression 1933:

First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

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Why is it, I’ve often thought, that centrally involved smart men are able to pose such incisive questions, to phrase them effectively, and to place them before a large public; and yet provide such lame answers? Today Paul Krugman says, “Surely I’m not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?”

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The heroic pictures are appearing. You can see them everywhere.  Our new president-to-be, skating on the “fluid poetry” of his winning presidential campaign, is being given his visual space, his introductory media adulation, his hundred days of grace in advance of budget-cutting, defense-spending, and law and order backlash.

He does deserve some kind of adulation, if only for winning a ballgame where we were fans or participants. He is standing tall in the mind of the majority and I do not wish him ill-fortune or a Carteresque spill. Given the alternative, I cheer. In addition, he is an articulate man.  Sure he is.  Forgive his increasingly frequent use of phrases such as “on a daily basis,” “dire consequences,” and “bridge to nowhere,” He still rates Grade 11 over Bush’s Grade 5.

However, per the Obama appointments, we seem to be looking at yet another Clinton Administration. (more…)

The media has given this election its usual simplification: a race between two animal emblems with cheers and speeches. Tomorrow it goes down to the wire leaving us with less to look forward to than all the cheering warrants but more than the last baker’s dozen elections. True, both candidates supported the $700 billion Wall St. bail-out initiated by Bush’s Treasury Secretary, both are belligerent toward Iran and Russia, both are ready to surge in Afghanistan, both are pledged to rally round Israel’s racist and reactionary pedestal, both endorse “free trade,” neither endorse universal health care free of the insurance industry bite, both go to the wire without a promise of electoral reform, bankruptcy reform, or any immediate economic stimulus. And yet this election could not be more different from 2000 or 2004. An old slogan of mine, “Don’t Vote. They’re All the Same,” becomes a false slogan. Obama is not a lesser evil in the usual nasty implication of that phrase.

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