Ramble: The Puppet Show – Our American Dream Inverted

Originally published on December 5, 2012 on occupy.com

Shakespeare, Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde could not have asked for a better piece of irony than what has become of the American dream.

A dream that once encompassed the idea of entrepreneurism, individuality and hard work is currently devolving – or, some would argue, has already devolved, into its antithesis: a developing, collectivist, Big Brother society that does not respect privacy, press, speech or religion, that is not transparent or accountable, whose middle class is collapsing and whose State makes decisions without consulting the People, all the while operating under the guise of fealty to old ideals while secretly uprooting them.

Our country is now overrun with executive orders, immunity for telecommunication companies that spy on and wiretap innocent American citizens, data mining by the NSA, excessive and intrusive security at airports, legislation drafted outside of Congress, undeclared wars, billions invested on political theater instead of social programs and curbing poverty, taxpayer bailouts for corrupt financial institutions, severe crackdown on whistleblowing, unconstitutional and illegal drone strikes, torturing facilities, indifference to war crimes, a chain of hundreds of military bases around the world and a restrictive, controlled “free-market” that has given us a Walmart every 10 miles and a McDonald’s every two.

We are now a country wherein 1% of our nation controls about 43 percent of the wealth, more than the entire bottom half of the population; where six corporations control 90 percent of mass media; and where about one in four corporations pay nothing in taxes while getting millions of our dollars in refunds.

In our country today, most politicians are no more than spokesmen employed by wealthy special interests. Meanwhile, people are being foreclosed on by the banks their taxpayer dollars bailed out. They are having to choose between food and rent, as about 47 million Americans now need government help to feed themselves.

The deeper you look, the worse it gets. Our government has contracts with corrupt, private multinational corporations to purchase weapons and surveillance technology while not even receiving a slap on the wrist for blatant war crimes of past administrations. Our taxpayer dollars fund and supply weapons to oppressive oligarchic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen and Kuwait instead of areas at home such as Benton Harbor, Michigan; Gary, Indiana; and Pine Ridge, South Dakota, where the male life expectancy is 48 – the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. All the while, draconian bills to regulate and monitor Internet activity have seen a push in Congress (SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and most importantly, CISPA).

What may be most disturbing about our current state is that most Americans still accept emotionally-charged mantras like “We are land of the free, home of the brave” and ridiculously misguided and ignorant claims that we’re “spreading democracy and freeing nations around the world” (all the while expanding our number of military bases). We tell ourselves that soldiers overseas are dying to ensure our own freedoms at home (to be indefinitely detained without trial, conviction or due process). We are entering a near-psychotic state wherein we chronically see our country for what we want it to be – a constitutional republic – and not for what it really is: a corporatist, surveillance empire.

This illusion and psychosis is maintained in large part through control of the media, but also through the guise of humanitarianism: by bombing metropolitan areas such as Tripoli, and now-defunct award mechanisms such as the Nobel Peace Prize for a president who drops bombs, and a European Union that shoves millions into poverty with crippling, anti-democratic austerity measures.

Our psychosis has reached such a point that we ignore reality and continue indulging in our delusions. For many, it is much easier to believe the lie than to accept the truth because it is so distant from what is truly happening. Many simply reject the data and claim that these facts – surveillance, war crimes, political persecution and detainment without due process – are actions reserved for far-away developing nations and can’t happen here in America.

But they can, and they have, and they are. We as Americans must come to terms with what we have allowed to happen. We must accept what our country has become and quit sticking our heads in the sand and hoping that things will magically get better. They will not. If we look at the track record of our rigid economic-political dynasty governing from Wall Street and Washington, we do not have the leadership to extricate ourselves from this devolving socioeconomic crisis.

We must learn to hit the “Bullshit!” button more often and discredit the meaningless, mind-numbing ideology and doublespeak emanating from Washington if we are to understand what is really going on, because if the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the People’s Republic of China can teach us anything, it’s that terminology and ideals are a great way for governments to operate as legitimate governing bodies performing a puppet show while pulling the important strings behind the stage.

Ramble: It’s a Big Club and You Ain’t In It

Originally published on December 19, 2012 on occupy.com

In his 2006 HBO special “Life is Worth Losing,” George Carlin presciently noted: “They call it the American dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

With stunning tact and foresight, Carlin predicted much of what is happening today, including “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 your Social Security money, they want your (fucking) retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know what? They’ll get it from you, they’ll get it all from you sooner or later, because they own this (fucking) place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”

He’s right. So are the Occupy activists who point to the extreme economic polarization in this country. We are now faced with the reality that 1% percent of our nation controls about 43% of our wealth, our taxpayer dollars bailed out corrupt financial institutions that engaged in reckless behavior which resulted in millions of Americans losing their homes, and now, the reality that politicians are seriously considering cutting programs such as Social Security and Medicare as a solution to the budget problem.

There have been many steps that have led us to this current predicament – and our elected officials are hugely to blame for expediting the process. Because politicians have become no more than actors employed by special interests, the “big club” has had the political assistance required to deregulate the economy and pave the way for their pseudo-monopolies and tax-dodging cartels.

A few key repeals include the Glass-Steagall Act, which contained provisions that segregated commercial banks and investment banks; relaxing the Sherman Antitrust Act, which outlawed trusts; the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, which augmented the Sherman Antitrust Act and made room for unions; and the Robinson-Patman Act, which outlawed price discrimination (but exempted cooperative associations).

To point to a significant example, the Glass-Steagall Act is what would have prohibited Citicorp, a commercial bank, from merging with Traveler’s Group, an insurance company, to form Citigroup in 1998, a conglomerate vastly involved in the current mortgage crisis. The Federal Reserve gave Citigroup a temporary waiver that year, while their political stooges were working on the next piece of legislation: the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, which allowed security firms, investment banks and commercial banks to merge. The bill was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

This was the same President that signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which deregulated OTC derivatives and credit default swaps, paving the way for the investment banks, now consolidated with commercial/consumer banks, to tie their sub-prime mortgages into the derivatives without government oversight or regulation and sell them on our casino-capitalist market.

Let us not forget who the Treasury Secretary was under the Clinton administration: Robert Rubin, an employee of Goldman Sachs for 26 years, and who served as a member of the board as well as the co-chairman from 1990 to 1992.

After he left the Clinton administration, Rubin continued to serve on the board of directors of many entities such as the New York Stock Exchange, the Harvard Corporation, the Ford Motor Company, the Council on Foreign Relations and, most importantly, his own brainchild: Citigroup. During his tenure at Citigroup, Rubin made an estimated $126 million in stock options and cash. It was also under his watch that the federal government injected about $45 billion into the company.

Speaking of TARP, who was leading the rallying cry for the bailouts? Then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs. The TARP bailout was a perfect illustration of how our tax dollars don’t go towards improving infrastructure and eradicating poverty, but to propping up corrupt financial institutions, formed through deregulation, to continue their criminal activity.

Deregulation has led to a strip mall in every rural town, a Walgreen’s on every corner, a McDonald’s at every stoplight, a Starbucks on every block, a Wal-Mart on every three-acre plot, and a Home Depot on an area that used to include many family hardware stores.

You name the industry – retail, telecommunication, Internet, food, home repair, goods and services – and increasingly only a few companies are controlling and dominating them. There used to be family-owned stores, flower shops, pharmacies and hardware stores. Now the road is paved only for those on the inside: the big club.

To be part of the “big club” is also to be absolved of any criminal activity. When faced with a conviction or accusation that would warrant a criminal prosecution for the everyday citizen, those in the “big club” get off with a fine amounting to a few weeks or months of profit, paid to a government that in exchange lets the criminals go free.

This is illustrated with the recent finding that HSBC Bank laundered and processed about a billion dollars of drug money of some of the most notorious and dangerous drug cartels in Mexico. They paid a good amount as retribution, $1.9 billion, but not a single individual was criminally indicted or convicted for their activity.

With alarming boldness, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer declared that “despite HSBC’s ‘blatant failure’ to implement anti-money laundering controls and its willful flouting of U.S. sanctions, the consequences of a criminal prosecution would have been dire. Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges, HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.”

The federal investigation even revealed that “senior bank officials were complicit in the illegal activity.” You know you’re in the big club when the sanctity and ubiquity of your institution will never be sacrificed by thorough, blatant and disgraceful criminal activity.

Goldman Sachs, when faced with trial, paid a petty $550 million fine for misleading investors with sub-prime mortgage products, and thus avoided criminal prosecution. MF Global, an institution that lost about $1.6 billion of consumer money, got off with no criminal prosecution or indictment. JP Morgan, which lost billions of dollars in trading, was let off with no criminal indictment or prosecution. British Petroleum was charged with manslaughter for their negligence regarding the Deepwater Horizon explosion, but no one was sent to jail for the incident. The list goes on: no time for the white-shoe boys – even if you’re found, like HSBC, having violated the Trading with the Enemy Act.

The situation has become so neurotic that a group of CEOs, posing as rational and well-intended people, have formed a political campaign known as Fix the Debt comprised of the wealthiest and most powerful CEOs on the planet. On their list of solutions, you’d expect to find perhaps a mirror or a magnifying glass to more closely examine their tax returns. No such luck: the only thing on their list is our retirement money and our future health care money that we pay into.

So, at a time in history when these institutions have gotten away with so much already, we as citizens must decide if we are going to accept the lie that “entitlement programs,” as they’re referred to, are actually posing the gravest threat to our massive $16 trillion debt. With middle-class incomes collapsing and jobs coming with less and less decent wages and benefits, we must not let our politicians sacrifice the programs that were built to help us.