A cut of more than twenty percent from the minimum wage.  The layoff of fifteen thousand public sector employees (one in every five).  Immediate ends to collective bargaining and rent subsidization.  Mass privatization of public interests.

When over 100,000 Greek citizens took to the streets yesterday, launching Molotov cocktails at police and engulfing buildings in flames, many Americans (and indeed, the whole of the American media empire) portrayed the event as out-of-control citizens destroying their country.  They did, in fact, set ablaze some quite historic buildings, so a case could be made that they were doing just that.

However, let’s take a step back and remove the emotion from the argument.  These battles consisted of the people versus the police in the streets and the people versus the government in matters of policy.  When you think about who the police and the government are and what they’re intended to do, you may realize that the police are there to protect the people and the government is there to represent the people.  (While many Americans think that only the United States has a representative government, this is typically the furthest from the truth due to our “first past the pole” and Electoral College systems, but I digress.)  The point is it’s the people, not the police or the government, that are really supposed to run society.

When the people are in the streets battling the police and fighting against government policy decisions, the police and the government have two choices.  They can stand down and do the will of the people or they can become an enemy combatant, abandoning the will of the people and attempting to flip the power structure so that the people work for them instead of the other way around.  When the government of Greece passed austerity measures yesterday, people were already in the streets making their voices heard, so the government did indeed turn on the people.  As the police beat, detained and arrested protesters, they became an enemy of the people, requiring the people to defend their power.  It’s unfortunate that officers were injured, but each one had the ability to stand down and join the people as is part of their duty.

Today, in response, the president of Greece has announced elections in less than two months, despite the mandate he has for keeping the current administration in power for two more years.  This is a step in the right direction.  It is unfortunate that the administration signed these awful papers prior to leaving office, but it is now up to the people to elect a government that will maintain their will, including a fair living wage and nationalized public services.  The people know that, as Communist Party spokesman Thanassis Pafilis said, “You are not trying to save Greece, but a handful of industrialists.”

Pafilis went on to say, “You disgracefully blame the struggling people who created the wealth we have. You are trying to send them back to the Middle Ages. We will not allow it.”

With elections mere weeks away and the Greek people clearly ready to stand up for their rights, we’ll soon know who the workers trust.  The small but growing handful of Americans who see the same neoliberal pro-austerity slant in the Republican-heavy Congress will have to wait a bit longer.

Texas’ State Board of Education approved a landmark resolution nearly two years ago forcing textbooks to distort the truth of our nation’s history.  Among the many conservative-inspired pieces of propaganda were minimizing slavery as part of our history, watering down the civil rights struggle and suggesting that Christianity (and not religious freedom) played a larger role in our country’s founding.  The conservatives have since bragged about being “proud” to challenge the “left-leaning” textbooks that were currently in use; you know, the ones that were correct.

As angry as I was, I was somewhat pacified by the fact that this wasn’t a trend.  Most Republican legislators seemed to be more focused on declaring pizza a vegetable or disenfranchising college students, leaving the miseducation of our youth for another day.  Sadly, another day has come and another state wants to legislate lies in their students’ textbooks.

Tennessee tea party activists have outlined and presented five goals to their state legislature, one of which would require the state to remove from textbooks any passages which cite minority experiences which “obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers.”  In other words, the residents are trying to get our history of slave ownership and Native American displacement, two of early America’s most well-researched and agreed upon topics, completely removed from the state education curriculum.

(There has been textbook-related legislation on the west coast as well, with California requiring that educators not exclude LGBT figures from their lessons.  Of course, in this case, there is not a requirement to rewrite history; this passage merely reinforces that we’re all equals in this country and the civil rights struggle applies to all minorities.  Not surprisingly, Republicans are trying to get it overturned.)  

It’s no secret that the nation is divided along political lines moreso than at nearly any time in our 230+ year history.  The vitriol has been consistent and damaging to freedom and to civil discourse.  One of the staples of the right has been anti-intellectualism, a belief that smart is bad and idiots should rule the world.  I wish I was kidding.  Indeed, a recent study shows that being right-wing is a sign of lower intelligence and higher incidence of racism.  We heard often of the “elitist” problem during the 2008 presidential elections wherein it was determined that Barack Obama used big boy words and spoke in complete thoughts, so he was clearly a bad choice for president compared to dimwitted predecessor George W. Bush.

Ignorance is the refuge of the Republican party.  Don’t study evolution, just blindly believe in the creationism.  Don’t regulate the environment, just let everything work itself out.  College?  College is for liberals.  We’re just fine doing our learning in church, thank you very much.

But when is it too much?  When do we need to step back, take a deep breath, and decide that we need to stop the madness?  We let them write their letters to the editor about how they incorrectly wish the past really happened, but letting them put it in textbooks and lying to our kids, trashing our history, deleting the mistakes we’ve learned so much from?

Ted Kaczynski opined that leftists fight for “all the causes” because they’re filled with guilt and low self-esteem. Ted, much like other conservatives, confuses guilt with empathy.  I don’t feel any personal guilt for the black man in New York that keeps getting frisked by the cops for no reason, but I do feel a great deal of pain for how his rights are so consistently being violated.  Anyone who doesn’t feel compassion for what this man has endured is a textbook sociopath (until the word is redefined in next year’s Texas edition).  These are not the people we want teaching our children.

It boils down to this:  There’s a segment of the population that likes to pretend global climate change is some hoax perpetrated upon us by the “liberal” scientists.  Their proof, of course, is that… well, they have none, but they’re the people of God, so they’re right, dammit.  Not only do they lack any proof, but they reject consistent and unquestionable proof from actual scientists, relying instead on ignorant personal opinions based in nothing but political bias.  And now they’re attacking our textbooks.

We can’t let this stand.  The history of this nation cannot be rewritten.  Do you want to know why?  I’ll let Zach de la Rocha play us out…

Who controls the past now controls the future
Who controls the present now controls the past
Who controls the past now controls the future
Who controls the present now? 

When I share the graphs in this post with some of my neoliberal friends, they’re quick to bring up General Motors.  The graphs demonstrate the rise and fall of union membership versus middle class share of total income in the United States and, very similarly, the rise and fall of union membership versus CEO pay in the United Kingdom.  The simple lesson, of course, is that the working class achieves the best results for themselves as a collective and when they allow the capital class to destroy that power, they lose out.

Union membership vs. middle class share of income, US, courtesy of ThinkProgress.org

First, allow me to agree with the neoliberals that it’s absolutely true… it costs more to build things in America due to minor labor laws, minimum wage laws, environmental and workplace safety regulations and so on.  Most of these improvements were the result of union struggles to help provide a better life for the working class.  The conservatives, inexplicably even those who are firmly entrenched in the working class, conclude that factory workers for the automakers priced themselves right out of a job.  Reality, however, paints a different picture.

Union membership vs. CEO pay – UK (Courtesy of the Guardian)

One thing was responsible for the collapse of Motor City and that one thing is greed.  No, not greed on behalf of lifelong factory workers making sixty thousand dollars per year; the greedy folks were the stockholders and the executives who focused on “maximizing stockholder value.”  You see, there are three groups of shareholders in any given company an each has its own special needs and wants:

• Executives – This includes the CEO, board members, various VP’s and such.  These are the folks taking home the seven and eight figure salaries and bonuses based on key performance indicators focused on raising stock prices for stockholders.
• Stockholders – These folks are part-owners of the company, investors looking for a positive return.  The stock market is a fast-paced game and these folks are not looking for long-term safe growth; they are looking for instant gratification and they hold the executives accountable.
• Employees – The workforce doesn’t have a lot of money to invest.  In a display of textbook capitalism, the laborers only have their physical labor to sell in return for capital.  Therefore, their interest is in long-term stability with one employer so as to continue exchanging their labor for the income needed to provide the necessities.  Without long-term stability, the laborer must re-learn, re-train and start back over at the bottom of the ladder after every move (which benefits the capital class by keeping wages low).

So we’ve determined the three classes and it’s pretty obvious which two have the most power, especially when working in collusion.  If the executives focus on short-term goals that cannibalize the long-term viability of the company but drive dividends higher, the stockholders wouldn’t even consider turning down executive raises.  It’s a vicious circle:

• Executives cut labor, workforce loses compensation, business profits, stocks go up, stockholders reward executives
• Executives close underperforming (yet profitable) locations, part of workforce becomes unemployed, business profits, stocks go up, stockholders reward executives
• Executives outsource labor, cheapen quality of products, overlook safety issues, etc…

You get the picture.  The investors get their short term boost because the executives focus on “maximizing stockholder value” at the expense of running a solid company.  General Motors, for example, not only cut labor and refused to invest during boom times (neglecting long-term value for short-term payoff), they spent over twenty billion dollars in share buybacks between 1986 and 2002.

Share buybacks are a way to bribe investors by reducing the number of shares on the market, keeping share prices up artificially to keep the remaining investors happy (while helping the bought-out investors pick up some more lucrative capital gains).  These actions used to be equal to about 5% of US corporate profits and skyrocketed from the start of Reaganomics through the crash, accounting for nearly 300% in 2008.  Economists have said that GM would not have needed to declare bankruptcy in 2009 without the twenty billion in buybacks in previous years.

The fact is that autoworkers and their unions are not to blame for the bankruptcy at GM.  It was the collusion between the executives and the stockholders that sent them to bankruptcy court.  The workers were sacrificed in the neverending quest to “maximize stockholder value.”  Do you know of a company doing the same thing today?  I’m guessing you do.

AFTERTHOUGHT:

You know, I can’t let the union completely off the hook here.  There is a real issue that needs addressed related to AFL-CIO and UAW in particular.  The issue is that AFL-CIO and UAW leadership is no longer part of the collective.  Through one-sided “negotiations” and self-serving motions, the leadership of these once-great unions has joined the executives in their quest to exploit autoworkers.

Presidents Richard Trumka (AFL-CIO) and Bob King (UAW) hailed Barack Obama’s recent State of the Union address in which he noted that the Big Three were back.  They agreed that profits have returned to Detroit and the three American automakers were doing quite well for themselves.  What these two failed to mention was the reason for the recovery.  The cold, hard truth is wage scales have been cut in half and benefits have been destroyed for new autoworkers.  They also fail to mention that the unions worked directly with the executives to help push these damaging changes through, fully neglecting their duties to the workers.

Oh, they also failed to mention that, as presidents of the unions, they made $294,000 and $153,000 last year, respectively.  These two frauds make as much as fifteen of the autoworkers they pretend to represent.  Much like the executives themselves, the union leadership in this case is working in collusion with the stockholders.  Despite the short-term cuts, it’s still a long-term disaster in the making.  The workers need strong, effective and non-compromising representation if they ever expect fair pay and benefits again.  Right now, they’re paying union dues yet they’re still on their own.

I pay for my music.

I know… it’s a relic of the past.  Nobody pays for music anymore and, at least according to some of my friends who aren’t producing and selling music to pay the bills, nobody should pay for music.  They’ve told me that “charging for music is the old model, and the artists need to find a new model where they get paid but we don’t pay them.”  I’m not sure what that means, but OK.

I’ve had plenty of heated debates with buddies and strangers about the values of those who choose to not illegally download and share media.  I don’t do it because I’m on some trip to be righteous and holy.  If I had the ability, I’d send the RIAA and MPAA lawyers to the unemployment line tomorrow.  It’s not about the law, either.  While I do attempt to keep myself out of jail, pirating music isn’t exactly a risky proposition.  The odds of someone busting down the door and confiscating my computer are pretty slim.

So why don’t I do it?  Because I balance my demand for new music with my budget for purchasing it, then I reward the artists whose material I want by spending my hard-earned income on a copy of said material.  Do they get their fair cut?  No, but as I said… I’m not in support of the RIAA.  I’m in support of the artist, and my part of the bargain is buying the material.  By copying it, I’d be doing even less to support them than I am now, and until that changes, I will stay legit.

Tomorrow, websites across the country will black out in support of SOPA.  The concept is to demonstrate the potential effects of an internet that becomes censored by an overzealous entertainment industry.  SOPA aims to stop piracy the same way an F5 tornado aims to rearrange the throw pillows on your couch.  Wikipedia, Reddit, and even Google are getting in on the effort.  This is massive online demonstration of a caliber we have never seen in the United States and it has the bill creators and the industry lawyers issuing nasty press releases, clearly demonstrating their fear of the truth being revealed.

Do I believe that piracy is an issue?  Yes, I do.  I believe that it’s important, serious, rampant, damaging to the artists and needs to be toned down.  I support stiff penalties for sharing, common sense smaller penalties for downloading, and protections put in place to help make piracy more difficult.  This puts me at odds with many out there and I understand and respect the differences of opinion.

That said, I oppose SOPA because it takes a legitimate problem and attempts to correct it by placing nukes on every corner and giving the big red button to the bastard stepchild of Kim Jong il and the crazy cat lady from the Simpsons.

(By the way… mentioning that copyrighted character in my blog could put me at risk of having my entire site shut down without recourse or trial under SOPA.  Now you’re beginning to get the picture.)

Regardless of any difference of opinion on piracy in general, it is clear that SOPA, PIPA, and the more recent OPEN are all threats to the structure and openness of the internet.  It is important we keep the government (and indeed, the lawyers for the music industry) from manipulating our democratized network of free speech and open information.  This is why I will be joining the major sites above and thousands of smaller sites around the country and the world in blacking out my site on January 18th, 2012.

It is up to us to keep our government in check.  Remember:  They work for us, not the other way around.

(Updated:  Added a missing “not” in an early paragraph that made me sound silly.)

If you’re a conservative and you support Ron Paul, we’re cool.  It’s not too often I see your side de-escalating wars and ending persecution of marijuana users, so I’ll allow it.

If you’re progressive and you support Ron Paul, we need to talk.

Like, really talk.

I make Facebook posts about the war, the economy, whatever political topic of the day and the response is “RON PAUL 2012.”  OK, I get it, you’re a supporter.  It’s good to show loyalty.  I post about my vacation or what I had for dinner and the response is “RON PAUL 2012.”  Maybe, I think, you’ve hit your head and developed some sort of amnesia where you immediately forget what the topic was and that’s your reboot phrase that automatically rolls off your fingers.  I post about some silly old lady at the grocery store who insists on paying in loose change… “RON PAUL 2012.”  WHY ARE YOU REPEATING YOURSELVES?

It never says anything else, either.  Just that.  In all caps, regardless of the topic, with no context.  Sometimes, if someone’s feeling especially frisky, there are exclamation points or boldface.  I see it on Newsvine, Twitter, Reddit, comments on every major discussion site.. I even saw it written on a whiteboard at work.

I get it.  Military intervention is expensive and undiplomatic.  Throwing pot smokers in prison is a waste of resources and a pretty ridiculous excuse to terminate someone’s right to freedom.  Some of the things the guy stands for are positives.  It’s not too often that anyone stands up for these things, so you want to shout from the rooftops how much you love this awesome “libertarian” that seems to share so many of your values.

How, though, do you justify his continued wet dream of deregulating Wall Street and allowing unchecked corruption to surpass even the vile criminal conduct of the ten years leading up to the crash?  How do you, as a progressive who cares about the people of this country, defend a man who wants to shut down the departments responsible for ensuring food safety and environmental responsibility when contamination and environmental disasters are at their worst point in our lifetimes?  How do you, as intellectuals in a country of anti-intellectual conservatives, explain your support for a man who thinks the entire educational system should be turned over to for-profit corporations?

This guy is the epitome of the anti-progressive.  He’s literally off-the-charts Sarah Palin nuts.  He has spoken against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (the one that allows blacks to eat in the same restaurant and drink from the same fountain as whites) because it “infringed on private property rights,” meaning it infringed on the right of business owners to kick out what I can only assume Mr. Paul refers to privately as the Negroes.  He stated the country “would be better off” without the government stepping in and stopping discrimination and that he would have voted against the CRA itself.  He was the only person in the entire Congress to vote against  nonbinding resolution commemorating the 40th anniversary of the act.

On Congressman Paul’s own website, he asks “Why should anyone be forced to subsidize the medical care of others?”  This progressive would like to answer with a question of my own: “In what self-righteous Ayn Rand-inspired dystopia would people need to be forced to help each other when they’re sick or injured?

This man is not even in the ballpark of progressivism.  He is a dangerous, crazy, uninspired, Objectivist superconservative that would literally hand the keys over to the private sector at a time when we need a strong and effective public sector.  Ron Paul is absolutely not what this country needs.

To which I’m sure a least a few of you will respond with nothing more than “RON PAUL 2012.”

“When even one American — who has done nothing wrong — is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril.”

– President Harry S. Truman

Americans are known far and wide for their apathy toward government, employers, and everyone else that plays a role in deciding their fate.  One well-known example is the vacation gap which sees a country like Germany providing 30 vacation days per year to all their workers while Americans are often afraid to take the mere one or two weeks they’re provided for fear of not being seen as a team player, which led to a very interesting observation by a German blogger living in America: “Maybe that is the reason that many Americans never been out of the country and at times there isn’t much understanding for foreign cultures.”

There’s something to be said for the concept that Americans are apathetic because of the mistaken belief that all other countries are undemocratic, oppressed, impoverished and war-torn.  In a post I once read about the “ten reasons why America is the best country in the world,” the top two reasons were democracy and freedom.  The author opined that America has shined as the beacon of freedom for two centuries in an unfree world, that America by definition means “free.”

Notwithstanding that pop culture has taught us that drug and sex trade laws in the Netherlands are lax, most Americans don’t realize that country also allows gay marriage and free speech of individuals (but, unlike America, their free speech laws exempt commercial entities… corporations aren’t people across the ocean).

The dirty little secret is that most of Europe, Australia and a large part of Asia is indeed free and even democratic. In many cases, their freedom and democracy actually outdoes our own, and any threats to their liberties are handled swiftly, like last year when French riot police nearly went on strike after being told they couldn’t drink on the job.  In Europe, they know that if you give the government an inch of authority that they may take a mile.. so there is no compromise.  The people win or the people strike.  Such a change in America would..

.. Well, we can’t answer that because virtually every employer in the United States bans drinking on the job and drug tests everyone they hire regardless of relevance to the job.  Freedom!

So what would make Americans strike?

In 1995, eventual Vice President Joe Biden and others drafted what would eventually become the USA PATRIOT Act.  Put into effect in 2001 under the guise of protection from 9/11-style terror attacks, this well-prepared and far-reaching legislation gave the government powers that would have made Mussolini wet himself.  The president who said he would prefer the United States were a dictatorship suddenly ran an administration with the authority to snoop on all communications, medical and financial records, even library book records with no warrant, no probable cause, and no restrictions.

Nothing.

In 2008, the American economy collapsed as the outright fraud and criminal behavior of Wall Street came to light.  Millions were foreclosed upon by ruthless bankers who promised the world and, as they moved out, investors felt the second punch from the industry as their AAA-rated bonds were found to be loaded with mortgages that were likely to fail.  As mentioned in previous posts on this blog, banks were even foreclosing on houses they had never held papers on.  In the course of all these, the federal government determined that a financial infusion was needed to save people.. not the people being kicked out on the street but the bankers that had screwed everyone.  Homeowners, investors, retirees… millions had played by the rules and were screwed by the bankers… then had their tax money diverted to the same bankers.

Nothing.

A few Americans have been jarred from their comas.  The Occupy movement has shown promise at fighting back against the revolving door between the government and the private industry it is supposed to regulate.  In response, wide swaths of the underpaid, overworked middle class have come out swinging… in favor of their oppressors.  As police in military gear assaulted thousands around the country, the media portrayed the movement as college students looking for handouts instead of getting a job.

Not only nothing, but we are actively beating down the roots of our own revolution.

OK… we got this.  This one will result in an outright riot.

Last week the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act which literally allows the military to kidnap and imprison American citizens indefinitely.  With no due process.  For any reason or no reason at all.  With no recourse.

Nothing?  Seriously?  OK… how about this…

Three days ago, the House took control of this bill and voted by a margin of 406 to 17 to make the discussions surrounding this bill private, kept sealed from the American public which elected them.

And guess what, folks:  Still nothing.

So you tell me, what will it take?