Social Security: Beyond Red and Blue

(2 PM – promoted by TheMomCat)

George Carlin said it bluntly a few years ago, and it was dismissed as comedy by more than a few who saw that it wasn’t – who saw that he he was using the comedic stage as a platform to deliver a serious warning, to pass on the truth as he saw it clearly:

They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, they’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.

They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting f*cked by a system that threw them overboard 30 f*ckin’ years ago. They don’t want that.

You know what they want? They want obedient workers – obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paper work, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

And now they’re coming for your social security money.

They want your f*ckin’ retirement money. They want it back. So they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.

Carlin was a unique talent – he had a stage presence that was fun to listen to and he had a way with phrasing and delivery that made the depressing message he had to pass on a little easier to swallow than dry facts would have.

But the dry and cold hard facts of the situation Carlin so eloquently described, unpleasant as they may be, are as much if not more important to know if anything is to be done, if the American people are ever to rise up, exert the power they have, and take back control of their country and their own destiny.

In the past week or so we’ve learned of a few attempts by various people to address from various angles some specific aspects of the overall problem Carlin ranted about.

We’ve heard veteran war correspondent and journalist Chris Hedges note as recently as two days after Christmas 2010 that “We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse” and that over that past decade or so “Our manufacturing base has been dismantled” while “Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college.”

Chris does his best to warn that “Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit” but clearly points out what is obvious to many but to not nearly enough that “The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.”

The other day we heard Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri and author of “Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire” Michael Hudson talk with The Real News Networks’ Paul Jay about the 800+ empire of military bases the U.S. has established around the globe, about how all of the money that the military spends abroad is spent on foreign economies and is then “siphon[ed] up into the central banks. And the central banks would have nothing to do with these dollars but to keep their currency stable by recycling the dollars into US Treasury bills.” and about how “If it weren’t for the military deficit, America would have had to finance its own domestic budget deficit. It’s been foreigners that are financing the budget deficit.”

Hudson concluded with the observation that “Now that foreigners are essentially saying, we don’t want any more dollars, we’re not going to fund your deficit, all of a sudden they think: who’s going to fund the deficit if not foreign central banks? The answer is: American labor, the American middle class and working families are going to fund it, not the military.”

It appears the rest of the world has had enough of financing it’s own encirclement and subjugation by the U.S. military, and that from here on in it is you who is going to be paying that bill, along with a few other bills.

It also appears that Carlin’s “owners” seem to think that you will continue happily to be their personal ATM machine even if you have to go hungry – groceries being the luxury they are for many these days, while Jeannette Wicks-Lim at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) has concluded from her recent economic research that America has arrived at a point where most minimum wage earners can no longer afford the basic necessities of life in America, and while she tries valiantly to propose combining minimum wage and earned income tax credit policies to guarantee a decent living wage for all, few inside the beltway bubble, or anywhere else for that matter, listen if they even hear her.

William K. Black is professor of economics and law with the University of Missouri. Nearly two years ago, in an interview  with Bill Moyers in April 2009, Black did his best to get the message and warning out that the U.S. banking collapse was driven by massive fraud, that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was covering up systemic U.S. bank insolvency – that American banks and credit agencies had conspired to create a system in which so-called “liars loans” could receive AAA ratings and zero oversight, amounting to a massive fraud at the epicenter of US finance.

[Black] equated the entire US financial system to a giant “ponzi scheme” and charged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, like Secretary Henry Paulson before him, of “covering up” the truth.

“Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?” asked Moyers.

“Absolutely, because they are scared to death,” he said. “All right? They’re scared to death of a collapse. They’re afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we’ll run screaming to the exits.

Black teaches White-Collar Crime, Public Finance, Antitrust, Law & Economics. A former financial regulator, he held several senior regulatory positions during the Savings & Loan debacle, and is author of “The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One (2005)” in which he focuses on the role of “control fraud” in financial crises. Black developed the concept of control fraud as frauds in which a corporate CEO or a head of state uses uses the entity he or she controls as a “weapon” to commit fraud. Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined.

Black talks in this video interview released this morning with Paul Jay of The Real News Network, calls the current Republicans’ deficit ceiling bluff a direct attack on Social Security, and “an insane thing to do”, but goes on in his analysis to say that “it’s precisely the threat that the Republicans use, time after time, and they use it not because they’re insane but because it works, because it causes Obama and some other Democrats to suddenly give them things that they want“. In so many words, if the Democrats cave once again to Republican blackmail, it will be yet another example of the failure of Obama’s seemingly all or nothing drive for “bipartisanship” with forces decimating the U.S. economy, and it will be once again you who pays for the failure, on top of all the other bills being shoveled onto you by Carlin’s “owners” of America.

R.S., better known in the blogs as One Pissed Off Liberal, asked earlier today in Long live the rebels! that “As Americans, do we have an enormous tolerance for governmental lies wired into our psyches?  Do they somehow get a ‘we’re the government’ pass on any and all violations of the law or good conscience?  Are we, nevertheless, always and forever going to give them the benefit of the doubt?  No matter what outrageous lies they tell us?  No matter how much they steal?  No matter who they torture?  No matter who or how many they kill?” and pointed out that “It’s time to quit accepting, defending or even embracing what these bastards have done and are doing still.  It’s time to stand up against these monsters.  It’s time to do the right thing.”

Fortunately, there are some in academia and other places scattered few and far between who had internalized OPOL’s message before he wrote it. I’ve quoted from a few of them above. They write of their own warnings and of their own proposed solutions for some aspects of the overall problem, but can there be enough social pressure on the real owners of America and their employees (political appointees?) in Washington to force real changes without all of the population rising up to support and stand behind the lonely and too often thankless work they do?

These may be what seems to be overwhelming and insurmountable problems for a country and for you to face.

There are awesome forces arrayed against the population, it seems.

What can be done? What can you do?

Here is one suggestion from Rebecca Solnit, courtesy of the remorselessly upbeat Tom Engelhardt, shortly before Christmas 2010. You can be, as you’ve always been, part of the “Shadow Government” over which Carlin’s “owners” have no control and are most afraid of:

Who wouldn’t agree that our society is capitalistic, based on competition and selfishness? As it happens, however, huge areas of our lives are also based on gift economies, barter, mutual aid, and giving without hope of return (principles that have little or nothing to do with competition, selfishness, or scarcity economics). Think of the relations between friends, between family members, the activities of volunteers or those who have chosen their vocation on principle rather than for profit.

Think of the acts of those — from daycare worker to nursing home aide or the editor of TomDispatch.com — who do more, and do it more passionately, than they are paid to do; think of the armies of the unpaid who are at “work” counterbalancing and cleaning up after the invisible hand and making every effort to loosen its grip on our collective throat. Such acts represent the relations of the great majority of us some of the time and a minority of us all the time. They are, as the two feminist economists who published together as J. K. Gibson-Graham noted, the nine-tenths of the economic iceberg that is below the waterline.

Capitalism is only kept going by this army of anti-capitalists, who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially compensate for its destructiveness. Behind the system we all know, in other words, is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Much of its work now lies in simply undoing the depredations of the official system. Its achievements are often hard to see or grasp.

[snip}

The official economic arrangements and the laws that enforce them ensure that hungry and homeless people will be plentiful amid plenty.  The shadow system provides soup kitchens, food pantries, and giveaways, takes in the unemployed, evicted, and foreclosed upon, defends the indigent, tutors the poorly schooled, comforts the neglected, provides loans, gifts, donations, and a thousand other forms of practical solidarity, as well as emotional support. In the meantime, others seek to reform or transform the system from the inside and out, and in this way, inch by inch, inroads have been made on many fronts over the past half century.

The terrible things done, often in our name and thanks in part to the complicity of our silence or ignorance, matter. They are what wells up daily in the news and attracts our attention.  In estimating the true make-up of the world, however, gauging the depth and breadth of this other force is no less important. What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential, even if deeper in the shadows, than market forces and much more interesting than selfishness.

Most of the real work on this planet is not done for profit: it’s done at home, for each other, for affection, out of idealism, and it starts with the heroic effort to sustain each helpless human being for all those years before fending for yourself becomes feasible.  Years ago, when my friends started having babies I finally began to grasp just what kind of labor goes into sustaining one baby from birth just to toddlerhood.

If you do the math, with nearly seven billion of us on Earth right now, that means seven billion years of near-constant tending only to get children upright and walking, a labor of love that adds up to more than the age of this planet. That’s not a small force, even if it is only a force of maintenance. Still, the same fierce affection and determination pushes back everywhere at the forces of destruction.

[snip]

We tend to think revolution has to mean a big in-the-streets, winner-take-all battle that culminates with regime change, but in the past half century it has far more often involved a trillion tiny acts of resistance that sometimes cumulatively change a society so much that the laws have no choice but to follow after. Certainly, American society has changed profoundly over the past half century for those among us who are not male, or straight, or white, or Christian, becoming far less discriminatory and exclusionary.

Radicals often speak as though we live in a bleak landscape in which the good has yet to be born, the revolution yet to begin. […] both of them are here, right now, and they always have been. They are represented in countless acts of solidarity and resistance, and sometimes they even triumph. When they don’t — and that’s often enough — they still do a great deal to counterbalance the official organization of our country and economy. That organization ensures oil spills, while the revolutionaries, if you want to call them that, head for the birds and the beaches, and maybe, while they’re at it, change the official order a little, too.