The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

It is time
to connect the dots. Growing up in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s or 80’s, there was a
sense of structure and basic decency. Add the fact that working hard
would lead to a better life most of the time. Dad (and sometimes Mom) went to
work, earned a livable wage and supported a family. Junior and sis went to
college got an affordable education and a job relevant to that education. It
was what was expected and it was what happened for the vast majority of the
middle class.

Today that
livable wage comes from two jobs if it comes at all. Maybe three or four jobs if
Mom works too. The structure of a decent wage for a decent living is gone.

What used
to be the common decency of looking out for your fellow man is becoming a
rarity today. Now, austerity is the word. Cut back on food stamps, don’t give the
unemployed so much money. The rich shouldn’t pay high taxes. Pay fees for extracurricular activities in school. All of these
schemes were on the political fringe 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Now they are
mainstream. In many states, they are a political necessity in order to win
elections.

The idea
that a corrupt politician or a corrupt business person who is caught cheating
or stealing would be brought to justice is no longer a given today. How many banksters have gone to prison?

Everybody
has their own thoughts and dreams about what things would be like if…

• What
  would it be like if Marshall law was declared on a major US city? Pretty much
  what Boston was like after the marathon bombing.

• What
  would it be like if an American political party ran roughshod over their
  opponents and did what they pleased? Look at several of our state legislatures
  where one party controls the state house and legislature.

• What
  would it be like if politicians were not held accountable for their actions and
  could do what they pleased with little accountability? Check out the 113th
  Congress’s dismal record on passing legislation.

Back up a
few years and it would be difficult to imagine any of these scenarios happening
in America, unless you were a novelist.

It isn’t just
that the economic rights of ordinary workers and the social safety nets of the
New Deal and the labor movements are being demolished. Major elements of the
broad social and political contract that has served as the foundation for this
country are being torn apart: the fraud statutes (essential to give people of
every level of society decent protection of property rights) and access to
legal remedies; basic protection of personal rights (habeas corpus, due
process, protection against unlawful search and seizure); militarized local policing. Decent quality public
education and the freedom of the press are both under assault.

If you haven’t
read it yet, check out the New York Times’ Sunday
magazine cover story on Laura Poitras. It discusses in detail how routine
communications on the web are simply not secure and depicted the considerable
measures Snowden, Greenwald, and Poitras took (and by implication, ordinary
people ought to be taking) to keep their discussion secret.

And we
have the drip, drip, drip of ongoing revelations such as “mistaken”
surveillance of thousands of ordinary Americans (and you can bet a lot more are
dressed up as legit).

Is Mr.
Obama losing some of his famous cool?  It
may simply be a coincidence of timing but he’s been visibly heavy handed of
late. Consider the following:  

• Delaying
  Rep. Grayson’s (D-FL) hearing with Glen Greenwald (Snowden’s reporter) which
  will happen in September. (What sort of victory was it to push it into a
  busier news period?)

• Getting
  snippy in the Democratic caucus meeting when asked about Larry Summers (Candidate for Fed. Reserve Board Chair) and
  later calling senators who opposed Summers to his office to tell them to lay
  off

• Launching
  a speaking tour on how he’s creating middle class jobs (which seems to be
  landing like a lead balloon)

• Launching
  a faux independent surveillance investigation (having Clapper on the committee
  is tantamount to saying, “So what are you going to do? Impeach me?”)

• Being
  wrong-footed on Morsi and the Egyptian military

• Ending
  the Summit with Putin on a whim

Shorter: Mr.
Obama looks slightly off balance.

Add to
that, we have municipal bankruptcies and restructurings,
which returns to the headlines the war against municipal workers and unions, while
creating another looting opportunity for Wall Street. See today’s NYT editorial,
“No Banker Left Behind”.

Back to
the Wrongologist’s post of yesterday,
there has been a full court press in the MSM to talk up/trumpet any financial
indicators (housing/retail etc) no matter how weak to show that there is a
recovery. They are frantically trying to paper over the cracks that are getting
wider every day.

As the
Wrongologist’s Georgetown Professor said:

Connect the dots…We are not drawing a
line through a random set of data points. It feels different this time. There
are too many bad things going on at once:

 

1. The banks have not
been reformed and never will be

2. The National
Security State will not be reformed absent a revolution

3. Our civil liberties
are eroding at an exponentially-increasing rate (Habeas Corpus, NSA, police
militarization, due process, Section 4 of the Voting Rights act)

4. The government is
now not even trying to hide that they will lie about everything and hold the
people in contempt, e.g., appointing proven liar (Clapper) to “review” the
Security State’s practice

5. The worst
environmental disaster in history (Fukushima core meltdown) awaits the next 9.0 earthquake.

 

This is not going to be fun. Isn’t it
ironic that the generation that fought “The Man” is worse, in some ways, than The
Man was?

Boomers: What’s
important is how one ends – a good beginning is not sufficient.

“As nightfall does not come at once,
neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything
remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be
most aware of change in the air–however slight–lest we become unwitting victims
of the darkness.” – William O. Douglas