Monthly Archives: November 2011

American Redoubt

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As the European fiscal crisis continues and political instability worsens across the Middle East, it is perhaps time to rethink our country’s deep embrace of globalization. Instead, we should concentrate our economic and cultural energies on the Americas, the Western Hemisphere of land from Wainwright, Alaska , to Tierra Del Fuego, Argentina. Within this vast territory lies every natural and human resource we need. With vast new energy resources in Brazil, Venezuela and Canada, we would have no need to deal with Petrol autocrats in Saudi Arabia or Russia. The anti-colonial roots of both North and South America stem from both Thomas Jefferson and Simon Bolivar’s reading of Voltaire, Adam Smith and Montesquieu. And while these rooted democracies of the American hemisphere may be flawed, they are strong enough to deal even the toughest of caudillo’s like Chavez, electoral setbacks. From a human capital perspective, while much of Europe is entering a demographic death spiral, the America’s are full of young workers who pay taxes that can provide a healthy safety net for the old and infirmed.

And within the creative urban economies of our hemisphere are the young workers who are making the knowledge goods that the rest of the world consumes. From brilliant film directors working in Mexico City, to innovative software designers in Silicon Valley to wonderful musicians in Rio like Zelia Duncan—the next economy is firmly rooted in the Americas. Continue reading →

Republican Rope a Dope

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Barack Obama learned a political trick from Muhammad Ali called Rope a Dope. For you youngsters, this refers to the epic Rumble in the Jungle Heavyweight fight against George Foreman in 1974. Here is the Wikipedia explanation.

The rope-a-dope is performed by a boxer assuming a protected stance, in Ali’s classic pose, lying against the ropes, and allowing his opponent to hit him, toward the end that the opponent will tire and make mistakes which the boxer can exploit in a counter-attack. By leaning against the ropes, much of the punch’s force is absorbed by the ropes’ elasticity rather than the boxer’s body.

In competitive situations other than boxing, rope-a-dope is used to describe strategies in which one party purposely puts itself in what appears to be a losing position, attempting thereby to become the eventual victor.

Last summer during the debt ceiling hostage crisis, Obama appeared to be the loser, but yesterday Republicans woke up to the reality that they lost Big Time–that we were going to get $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions, with 50% of the cuts coming from the military and none of the cuts from Social Security and Medicare. The Congressional water carriers for the Military Industrial Complex are in a panic.

Republican lawmakers moved quickly Monday to protect the Pentagon from automatic budget cuts that will be triggered by the supercommittee’s failure, with the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee saying he’ll soon introduce legislation to repeal them.

President Obama immediately threatened to veto any attempt to undo the spending cuts. That means that Republicans would have to get a 2/3 rds majority to undo the first meaningful cutback in the Military budget in 60 years. In addition, if Obama also threatens to veto any attempt to restore the Bush Tax cuts in 2012 (they expire automatically on January 1, 2013), progressives will have totally changed the inequality dynamic, without having to pass a single piece of legislation.

So why aren’t progressives celebrating this morning? Got me. As long time readers know, it has been my contention that the key to revival of our democracy and our economy lies in radically reordering where we spend our collective resources. That more than 60% of our discretionary budget flows to the Military Industrial Complex is just the most egregious example of Crony Capitalism. If you had suggested to me last spring that a Republican House would pass a bill cutting $600 billion from the Pentagon budget over ten years, I would have called you crazy. But that is just what happened.

So there is only one election that matters a year from now. And that is that President Obama will be reelected and able to keep his veto threat. There is no possible 2012 electoral realignment of the Senate and House that would give the Republicans a 2/3 rds majority.

This is an amazing victory and all we have to do to hold on to it is reelect the President.

Wired’s Party Line

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I don’t have a publicist and so I rely on the kindness of friends to spread the word about my new book, Outlaw Blues; Adventures in the Counter-Culture Wars. Its been pretty well reviewed and has been in the number one spot on the I Bookstore Arts and Entertainment chart for a while. The book is a history of the role of artists from Mark Twain to Bob Dylan in shaping our culture and our politics. It has over 100 embedded videos that help guide you through the culture. The Wall Street Journal thought it was a technological breakthrough in the E book world.

So I figured Wired Magazine might be interested in this new form. But when a friend inquired of an editor there, the word came back that “they were aware of the book, but it was not a good fit.” I should have known. The last chapter of the book takes on the question of the future of America as a knowledge society in a world where knowledge is being devalued. How can you build a society that’s great at making music, movies and video games if the rest of the world thinks these objects of desire should be free? And of course the main proponent of this view is none other than Wired’s Editor in Chief, Chris Anderson, whose most recent book is titled, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I was pretty hard on Anderson in the book, going so far as to quote Malcolm Gladwell’s famous query from the New Yorker.

“It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who ‘prefer to buy their music online’ carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference.”

So I guess Wired is run like the old Soviet Politburo. If you are not willing to spout the party line of Free Culture and Techno-utopianism, you don’t exist.

“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”

Next Steps for OWS

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The leaderless Occupy Movement should quietly thank Mayor Bloomberg for ending the encampment in Zuccotti Park. As Ad Busters, the culture jamming magazine which first proposed Occupy Wall Street, suggested yesterday that there are two routes forward.

STRATEGY #1: We summon our strength, grit our teeth and hang in there through winter … heroically we sleep in the snow … we impress the world with our determination and guts … and when the cops come, we put our bodies on the line and resist them nonviolently with everything we’ve got.

STRATEGY #2: We declare “victory” and throw a party … a festival … a potlatch … a jubilee … a grand gesture to celebrate, commemorate, rejoice in how far we’ve come, the comrades we’ve made, the glorious days ahead. Imagine, on a Saturday yet to be announced, perhaps our movement’s three month anniversary on December 17, in every #OCCUPY in the world, we reclaim the streets for a weekend of triumphant hilarity and joyous revelry.

We dance like we’ve never danced before and invite the world to join us.

Then we clean up, scale back and most of us go indoors while the die-hards hold the camps. We use the winter to brainstorm, network, build momentum so that we may emerge rejuvenated with fresh tactics, philosophies, and a myriad projects ready to rumble next Spring.

Strategy #2 is the way to go. I don’t even think you need the “die-hards” to hold geography, because the movement is not about territory, but about ideas. What is needed over the winter months is a series of Teach-Ins like the epic events that made the Anti-Vietnam War Movement coalesce in the winter and spring of 1965. Now is the time on college and high school campuses to educate the wider public on the issues of economic inequality. The movement has a powerful meme–”We are the 99%”–which was in danger of being diffused by the inevitable crime and sanitation problems that come from putting a small cities in public parks all over the country. Out of these teach-ins should come some specific proposals that OWS would push during the 2012 election. Here are four suggested pillars:

  1. A surtax on incomes over $1 million
  2. A Tobin Tax on Stock Trading
  3. End the corrupting influence of money in politics
  4. Bring the troops home

One last thought. In the last few weeks I have often thought “What would Martin Luther King do in this moment?” Ultimately the great social justice movements in America like women’s suffrage, ending child labor or the civil rights movement have come about out of a strict adhesion to the loving principles of non-violence. Dr. King, who I marched with in Boston in April of 1965, consistently held up a vision of a better world that we would make through non-violence. His most famous speech was “I have a dream” not “I have a nightmare”. I know that there is a small group of angry young anarchists trying to influence the OWS movement. Those of us with grey in our beards have been here before, watching the Weathermen subvert a non-violent peace movement. What we ended up with was Richard Nixon (running on a law and order platform) as our President.

We should not make that mistake again.

Pentagon Propaganda Machine

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The very best thing that could happen for America is for the Super Committee to fail. To understand why I say that you need a little history.

In my new book, Outlaw Blues;Adventures in the Counter-culture Wars, I write about Walter Lippman helping President Woodrow Wilson “manufacture public consent” for the U.S. to enter World War I, “to make the world safe for democracy.”

Eric Alterman wrote about Lippmann as the precursor of much of our media manipulation of today: “Lippmann likened the average American-or ‘outsider,’ as he tellingly named him-to a ‘deaf spectator in the back row’ at a sporting event: ‘He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen,’ and ‘he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.’ In a description that may strike a familiar chord with anyone who watches cable news or listens to talk radio today, Lippmann assumed a public that ‘is slow to be aroused and quickly diverted . . . and is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict’.” Thus began the culture war.

We are about to endure a Pentagon inspired propaganda campaign in the next month that will be an echo of Lippmann’s campaign of 1916. It will be triggered by the brilliant position, negotiated by Democrats during the debt ceiling crisis, that if the “Super Committee” was unable to reach a compromise by Thanksgiving, then an automatic “Sequester” would take place, cutting the Defense Budget by $600 Billion in the next ten years. Leon Panetta will be leading the charge against the Sequester for the Military Industrial Complex that views it as Armageddon for the gravy train they have been on since the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb in 1949. Here is Panetta with the first big lie of this campaign.

“After every major conflict — World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union — what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep, across-the-board cuts that impacted on equipment, impacted on training, impacted on capability,” he said. “Whatever we do in confronting the challenges we face now on the fiscal side, we must not make that mistake.”

Here is the reality of defense spending.

The only time defense spending ever declined in real dollars (blue Line) was during the Clinton Administration, after the Soviet Union had dissolved. So as the economy got less “security oriented”in the 1990′s, a huge amount of innovation blossomed, seeded by government spending (the Internet, the microprocessor) from the 1970′s. This meant that as a percentage of GDP (red line) defense spending fell even more as the digital consumer economy boomed. Although the fall of military spending helped Clinton balance the budget for the first time in years, as soon as 9-11 happened, spending went through the roof

So here is the deal I want to make with all my Libertarian friends. Let’s make sure the Sequester goes through. If  the latest polls are right 27% of Americans have a positive view of the Tea Party and 32% have a positive view of Occupy Wall Street. Since I doubt there is much overlap in these two cohorts, that would mean that almost 60% of the people are against the “establishment”–military, financial or political. Here is a place to man the barricades. Let Ron Paul and Barney Frank join forces to defeat any efforts by the Military Industrial puppets in the Congress to weasel out of the Sequester.

Inequality Smackdown

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I always love it when David Brooks and Paul Krugman tussle on the pages of the New York Times. On Monday, Brooks wrote a column called The Wrong Inequality, arguing that the Occupy Movement was wrong to target the 1% and that the real inequality problem was between the people who didn’t have a college degree and those who did. This is what I call the feeble attempt on the right to change the subject.

So this morning Krugman weighs in with Oligarchy, American Style and without ever mentioning Brooks by name, performs an epic smackdown.

Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

He then goes on to point out that the biggest gains are really going to the top .01%, whose incomes have risen more than 400% since Ronald Reagan first started cutting taxes for the wealthy. Of course the rationale for Republican supply side economics from 1980 on has been that cutting taxes on the wealthy encourages investment in the productive industries which in turn fuels employment for all, leading to higher consumption of products in a virtuous circle. But that obviously is not working out to be true and so the Republicans now contend that the investment of all this surplus wealth from both corporate and billionaire balance sheets is not happening because they are “uncertain about the future” under the Obama administration.

This is nonsense. What has happened in the last 30 years is very clear. Because all of the income gains have gone to a very small number of people, the purchasing power of the average household has fallen dramatically. For a while (1989-2006) this was masked by the explosion of consumer credit as people used their home equity like an ATM to keep up with the aspirational lifestyles of the rich and famous. As for the rich and famous, they were not investing in new productive enterprises, they were speculating in the casino we call Wall Street. Investment bankers worked long hours to invent new instruments of speculation as the explosion of derivatives masked the sad truth that the traditional role of finance as the engine of new enterprise faded into the background noise on the trading floor.

As for the one real area of Innovation in our society, the Internet Industries, it has become increasingly obvious that the capital needs of these businesses are relatively low compared to the last boom of industrialization that fueled the post war growth of steel, autos, chemicals and oil. Why else would Microsoft, Apple, Google and IBM each have over $50 Billion in cash sitting in the bank?

We are not going to get out of this stagnation until the gains of our economy are spread a little bit more evenly. The Koch Brothers and their mouthpiece Herman Cain (with Rick Perry in the Green Room) are trying to cut their taxes even further by floating flat tax proposals. I think an election fought on the lines of “Whose side are you on?”–forcing the Republicans to defend their “Oligarchy, America Style”–will be good for our fading democracy.