We Were Where We Have Always Been
(This, originally posted in August, 2010.)
Glenn Greenwald posted an article at
Salon (
"What Collapsing Empire Looks Like"), illuminating the slow-motion of deterioration wrought by the Crash.
>> Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further -- it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation.
[Where we are in 2018: Hawaii's schools were famous for 'furlough Fridays' with their teachers placed on unpaid leave. The state almost immediately returned to a full, 5-day weekly schedule -- but the costs of public education and the effective freezing of already small teacher's salaries have forced teacher's unions in a number of states to organize and push back.]
>> Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.
[Where we are in 2018: Clayton Co.'s public bus system did not return until spring, 2015, when it was absorbed into the Greater Atlanta transit system.]
>> Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, Co., the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.
[Where we are in 2018: Colorado Springs' municipal government took a hard-right turn in response to the Crash, and originally slashed it's police force and turned off streetlights in 2010 rather than raise property taxes to pay for public services. Thieves stole the copper wiring in the abandoned streetlights, and there weren't enough police to stop them. It later cost over $5 million to fix the lights, which are back on. It's municipal government is still conservative, but not insane.]
>> It's probably also worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month -- with a subheadline warning: "Back to Stone Age" -- which describes how
"paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue."
[Where we are in 2018: Plowing paved roads back to gravel, instead of paying maintenance costs to keep them, has only accelerated since 2010. In an era of dismal infrastructure spending, transportation agencies in at least 27 states now have unpaved roads, or are considering gravel roads as options.]
>> Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional.
[Where we are in 2018: While Utah's school board didn't follow through on this idea, a proposal was successfully floated in 2016 to make Middle School classes in art, health, Phys Ed, and careers 'optional'.]
>> And it was announced this week that "Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free."
[Where we are in 2018: The city of Camden's municipal libraries were nearly shut down -- but in 2011, they were absorbed by the Camden county library system.]
The nation didn't stop falling after the Crash of 2008. Only the pace has slowed, enough to make us believe that, somehow, we avoided
real trouble. And as we continue to fall, the descent is accompanied by commercials and television, iPads and SmartPhones; anything to keep people from realizing what's happening to the society they've lived in all their lives, and to the promises that society has held out to them as the American Dream.
It's human to not want to see the water rising, to focus on the familiar and the comforting, not to hear the sound of the steady drummer, "drumming like a noise in dreams".
... It's different to live through times which -- with the added crisis of climate change -- we're just on the cusp of. The fun hasn't even started in earnest yet...
Natley (Art Garfunkle) And The Old Man: Catch-22 (1970)
OLD MAN: ...Italy is a poor, weak country. And that is why we will survive, long after your country has been destroyed.
NATLEY: What are you talking about? America's not going to be destroyed.
OLD MAN: Never?
NATLEY: Well...
OLD MAN: Egypt was destroyed; Greece was destroyed; Rome was destroyed; Persia was destroyed -- Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours?
NATLEY: ...What you don't understand is that it's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
OLD MAN: You have it backwards. It's better to live on your feet than to die on your knees. I know.
NATLEY: How do you know?
OLD MAN: Because I am a hundred and seven years old. How old are you?
NATLEY: I'll be twenty in January.
OLD MAN: If you live.
-- Buck Henry / Screenplay to Mike Nichols' Film of Catch-22 (1970)
Will America dissolve into a State run by 'Pastors', conservative Oligarchs? Will most of us queue up for water, clothing; living space? Will we become like Britain, with CCTVs on every light pole and an electronic dossier on every citizen's email, personal buying and travel habits? Will someone in the Nuclear Club finally decide to uncork the Genie again?
People don't believe these things are possible; not here, in America. This is a land of opportunity, almost a meritocracy -- we don't have a class structure here based on family lineage or money; and we are the guardians of truth, justice, and the Rule Of Law™. You can rise as high as you can reach through hard work and the Free Enterprise system.
We say that we don't murder our leaders. We don't single out people for imprisonment or harassment because they espouse unpopular opinions. We are free to speak or write or create as we like. We are the strongest military and economic power on the face of the earth. We're not dictators. We don't quit, we don't surrender; we treat our enemies fairly and with compassion because that's the American Way.
Right.
As I've mentioned before, a Romanian acquaintance once said, while Ceausescu was still in power, "In the Eastern Bloc, if you are enough of a problem for the authorities, they take you out into the woods and shoot you in the back of the head. In America, if you are enough of a problem,
they restrict your ability to make money."
And, today, what passes for common wisdom among the political elite, pundits and media is that in order to prevent higher deficits and more National Debt, the government should enact policies that reduce it -- to privatize Social Security, reduce Medicare to a voucher system, freeze the pay of the military... and slash every Federal program possible. To cut, and not stimulate.
At the same time, these same Austerians say that raising income taxes is regrettable, but must be done. Only -- they mean raising taxes for everyone
except the top two per cent or so, who will receive a tax
cut. Because the wealthy are the ones who,through their purchases of Bulgari jewelry, Bentleys and designer clothing, will raise the rest of us up from poverty... a millimeter at a time.
This isn't a joke. It's
policy.
As Paul Krugman notes, "We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade."
(The wealthy, in America particularly, remind me now of the 'Owners' in Paul Theroux's 1986 novel,
O-Zone, which I strongly recommend.)
So official policy is to protect the wealthy, and allow the country to pass slowly into history. Greenwald concluded his column with a quote from International Monetary Fund Chief Economist Simon Johnson,
from his article last year in The Atlantic Monthly, "about what happens in under-developed and developing countries when an elite-caused financial crises ensues" -- and not targeting the rich is just par for the course:
Squeezing oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the Oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or -- here's a classic Kremlin bailout technique -- the assumption of private debt obligations by the government.
Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk -- at least until the riots grow too large...
But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests —- financiers, in the case of the U.S. -— played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.
I don't know why, but I keep thinking of a poem written just before the beginning of the Great War; Barbara Tuchman used it as a section title ("The Steady Drummer") in her 1966 book,
The Proud Tower -- another book I recommend; not many are being written like them any longer.
On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.
Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.
East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.
Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.
A.E. Housman, "A Shropshire Lad" (1896)
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