Week of July 26, 2009 - August 1, 2009
July 31, 2009, 1:34AM
Image by Eleonore Weil
Some of my readers may not be aware that southern Europe shuts down in the month of August.
Great cities like Paris, Rome, or Madrid, where I live and work, are deserted in August except for the tourists.
Many
years ago, in my painter days, I spent two Augusts in Madrid painting
exhibitions scheduled for October. It was a perfect way to get a lot of
creative work done.
I was totally alone: no one I knew was in town, there was nobody to call, nobody to see, nothing to do, except work...
No
distractions, most bars and restaurants closed, the streets deserted,
no traffic.
A city of nearly five million people: a ghost town
shimmering in the Castillian heat.
Almost everyone is on vacation.
Employees
here get one full month vacation a year, with a vacation bonus of an
extra month's pay (there is another bonus at Christmas too, they call
this the "catorce pagas", 14 paydays) and almost everyone takes (or is forced to take) their month off in August.
Those,
who like me, are free lancers, self-employed, with many irons in the
fire, are simply unemployed in August and must make provisions
throughout the year for this unpaid vacation.
This year, as I usually do, I am going up to spend August in a cabin I have in the Guadarrama mountains.
We have solar electricity, running water (if I choose to run up the
hill from the well with it) and the high mountain valley where it is
situated blocks cellphone reception.
Internet? LOL.
Peace, Shanti, Wa Salaam, Shalom.
Deer,
wild boar and assorted reptiles abound in the surrounding forest and,
since it is common grazing land, there are free range cattle wandering though it and even
wild horses that roam free in the woods until the spare stallions are
caught and sold for their meat.Eagles, hawks and giant vultures circle, glide and swoop through the cloudless, blue skies.
There, during the month of August, I will -- si Díos quiere, Inshallah, God willing -- lie, sit, sprall, under a tree and read and read and read and also block out some ideas for a book I'm going to write -- si Díos quiere, Inshallah, God willing.
So, this will probably be my last post till September.
I always feel bad about this because every time I take a month off, some faithful readers drift away and don't come back.But for those who like what I write, I promise -- si Díos quiere, Inshallah, God willing -- to be back full of piss and vinegar and fresh ideas in a month's time. PS.
To decorate my home page for people who stumble upon it during this month
of abstinence, I am hanging some of the work of my lady wife, Eleonore
Weil, inlined from her webpage. Enjoy!
July 29, 2009, 4:29AM
We
are in the midst of a great national debate about how to make health
care affordable; almost nothing is more important to working-class
Americans. "For the health of the nation, both physically and
economically, we need a system with a public option," Leo Gerard,
president of the United Steelworkers, wrote recently in the Huffington
Post. "And we need it now."
But whether working families get it now
depends to a large degree on Mr. Obama's personal popularity. And now
comes Gates-gate, this latest burst of fake populism from the right.
Waving the banner of the long-suffering working class, the tax-cutting
friends of the top 2% have managed to dent the president's credibility,
to momentarily halt his forward movement on the health-care issue. Thomas Frank - Wall Street Journal
In most situations there is one thing the whole business depends on or revolves around. I call that thing the "hinge".In analysis, finding the hinge is the shortcut to the center of a mass of inchoate information.In
action, identifying the hinge is often finding the "fulcrum" with which
to move the world and finding it can bring huge rewards with little
input of effort.The
world's latest economic crisis, for example, was brought upon us by
very clever people who had discovered that the "hinge" of our financial
system was that there was really no meaningful relation between the
actual value of assets and what you could charge for them if you
transformed them to a gaseous state.Despite
the near collapse of the system they had gamed, many of these clever
people are still laughing... because they had also discovered another
hinge... the "too big to fail, if you have enough friends in Washington" hinge.I
have been meditating on the plight of America's left as universal
health care, entangled in the pantomime of our checks and balances, is
once again circling the drain.
I have been searching for the "hinge" of the absurd impotence of American progressives.I think that I may have found said hinge in a simple technical phrase that keeps bouncing off my neural walls: "working poor".
The contradiction between working and simultaneously being poor in the world's richest country.
Here is how Wikipedia defines the term "working poor": Working
poor is a term used to describe individuals and families who maintain
regular employment but remain in relative poverty due to low levels of
pay and dependent expenses.
Barbara Ehrenreich, the writer who has probably done more than anyone to put a face on working poverty, has this to say in her book, "Nickel and Dimed": When
someone works for less pay than she can live on ... she has made a
great sacrifice for you ... The "working poor" ... are in fact the
major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children
so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in
substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they
endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high.
To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a
nameless benefactor, to everyone.
Here is what she wrote in the New York Times: The
human side of the recession, in the new media genre that's been called
"recession porn," is the story of an incremental descent from excess to
frugality, from ease to austerity. The super-rich give up their
personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates
classes; the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at
Applebee's. In some accounts, the recession is even described as the
"great leveler," smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that
characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a
single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny
fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.
But the
outlook is not so cozy when we look at the effects of the recession on
a group generally omitted from all the vivid narratives of downward
mobility -- the already poor, the estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of
the population who struggle to get by in the best of times. This
demographic, the working poor, have already been living in an economic
depression of their own. From their point of view "the economy," as a
shared condition, is a fiction.
So, where is the hinge to the sheer uselessness of American progressives?
The
hinge is that, at its most critical moment, the entire debate about
universal health care in America has been diluted, if not derailed, for
over a week by an unpleasant, though bloodless, encounter that a
Harvard professor had with a police officer.
All this, while millions of working Americans, both black and white, are being treated like shit every day of their lives.
"Treated like shit": surely an exaggeration?
Check this from the Guardian: It
was July 2007 and Potter, a senior executive at giant US healthcare
firm Cigna, was visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden mountain
districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw an advert in a local paper for
a touring free medical clinic at a fairground just across the state
border in Wise County, Virginia.
Potter, who had worked at Cigna
for 15 years, decided to check it out. What he saw appalled him.
Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance,
descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long
lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of
charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were
treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on
trolleys on rain-soaked pavements.
For Potter it was a dreadful
realisation that healthcare in America had failed millions of poor,
sick people and that he, and the industry he worked for, did not care
about the human cost of their relentless search for profits. "It was
over-powering. It was just more than I could possibly have imagined
could be happening in America," he told the Observer.
Now, it appears that the policeman and the professor are going to the White House to have a beer with the President of the United States.
A nice chilled lager, a manly handshake, a photo opportunity, this while, as the Canadian National Post newspaper writes: The
U. S. Congress, corrupted by a failure to impose campaign finance
reform on special interests, from unions to wealthy entities, appears
to be unable to pass laws to provide even a modicum of fair, universal
health-care coverage for its populace.
So that is the
"hinge" in American progressive politics: what passes for a left in the
USA is obsessed with racial, gender, ecological and identity politics,
while Americans, of all races and all possible sexual preferences, are
mercilessly overworked and underpaid. They are being exploited
and treated no better than excrement and left to the mercy of right
wing demagogues, all while the President of the United States takes
time off to soothe the ruffled feathers of a professor and a policeman.
Frivolity, corruption and decadence are the hinge.
July 27, 2009, 1:37AM
A multiracial group of
police officers on Friday stood with the white officer who arrested a
prominent black Harvard scholar and asked President Barack Obama and
Gov. Deval Patrick to apologize for comments the union leaders called
insulting. Associated Press
It
has always been a truism of the classic left that the "class struggle"
in America is eternally short-circuited by racism: that the hostility
of working class whites toward blacks, and working class blacks
justifiable mistrust of their white "comrades", always meant that the
bourgeoisie could divide and rule them in comfort. In short, racial
hostility would always trump class loyalty in America.The
clearest example of this was Nixon's "Southern Strategy", whereby
tricky Dick pried loose the heretofore populist, "a chicken in every
pot", southern whites from their age old, "solid south" loyalty to the
Democrats and enfolded them into the Party of Abraham Lincoln,
something which violated not only their most precious traditions, but
also their every economic interest.Thus, in America, so the saying goes, politics are racial, not class, based.Perhaps this is changing.Commentators
from all over the world have affirmed that the election of America's
first African-American president heralded a post-racial America. In a rather perverse way, perhaps the professor Gates arrest hoo hah is this new America's first icon.Hey,
don't laugh! Look at it this way: as the quote above from AP shows, a
multiracial group of working class union members stood united with
their white "comrade" and faced down two members of the upper middle
class, a Harvard professor and a former professor of the University of
Chicago, (the second professor just happens to also be the President of
the United States of America). This
multiracial workers union solidarity has stopped these powerful and
prestigious men dead in their tracks and has the president --
supposedly the most powerful individual in the world -- back peddling
rather smartly.Is this a sign of the changing times?As
more men and women of color take their places in positions of power,
naturally defending their privileges and the system that provides them
with those privileges; as their color becomes increasingly incidental
to their power and the status that goes with that power; as the
oppression they, by the very nature of their position, exert on those
beneath them is less and less identified with a particular skin color,
will this -- in a deteriorating and stagnant economy -- bring the
oppressed of all colors together to fight oppression... no matter the
color of the oppressor?If
this is where post-racial America is taking us, then the
"establishment" is soon going to be heartily sorry that they ever took
this road and it will be interesting to see what tactics they may use
to get the races conveniently back at each others throats.
