The Hologram Lynches Casey Anthony

As I stated in a previous post, I didn’t follow the Casey Anthony trial. In fact, because I rarely watch television I only became aware of the whole sad, sorry spectacle a few weeks ago. Now the verdict is in, and much as I may have wanted to I couldn’t avoid hearing the results. It seems that everyone in America except the people sitting on that jury think she's guilty of murder.

Okay, maybe she did kill her daughter. Maybe she really is a sociopathic, inhuman monster. Like I said I didn’t follow the case, so I can’t speak authoritatively regarding the evidence against her. There are many things to deplore about this case and how it came to be a sick national obsession, most of which are already being pored over ad nauseum in many other quarters.

Instead, let me pose a question I don’t think is being asked but seems entirely relevant: what if Casey Anthony really is innocent of murder? What if the only thing she is guilty of is what she was convicted for, lying to the police and not reporting her daughter's death? If so, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time there was a rush to judgment that turned out to be entirely wrong.

I ask that question not to defend her, but to point out that if she did happen to be innocent of the crime of murdering her daughter, the shameful way the whole situation has been exploited by our corporate owned and utterly corrupted mainstream media has effectively ensured that when she gets out of jail she will not be safe walking the streets anywhere in the country. Far too many people who've been whipped into a rabid frenzy by the media would be willing to form a lynch mob and string her up from the nearest tree.

America has a long, sad, sorry record when it comes to lynching people, especially blacks, that we finally overcame just a couple of generations ago. Seeing any mob braying for retribution even after the accused has faced a jury of her peers ought to make our collective blood run cold, however despicable the defendant might appear to be. In this case that mob is literally tens of millions in number, which ought to frighten the living hell out of anyone who believes that the justice system, however flawed it may be, is all that stands between civilization and barbarism.

If I had my way, every mainstream media figure who participated in whipping up this terrible holographic lynching along with the management and owners of the networks that presented it as the latest high rated reality show, would themselves be confined in Casey Anthony's cell block. Nancy Grace, in fact, would warrant a life sentence. Without their their hideous manipulations, this would have been just another routine murder case, and maybe, just maybe, true justice would have been served.

Those among the general public who obsessed over this unfortunate woman’s fate really ought to be ashamed of themselves. Let it be enough that Casey Anthony is going to remain a virtual prisoner of her own infamy for the rest of her life. Your country is being stolen right out from under you by the same assholes that own the networks that turned her travails into a voyeuristic spectacle. Wake the fuck UP, already, and direct your anger instead towards those who so richly deserve it--the ones who are screwing you every day of your lives.

Batten Down the Hatches, an Economic Hurricane is Brewing

Reality returned with a vengeance on Friday as the June Monthly Jobs Report was issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The report showed that only 18,000 jobs were added to an economy that needs to add around 150,000 jobs per month just to keep pace with population growth. Making matters worse, the reports from the previous two months were downgraded by a total of 44,000, thus removing more jobs than were reported to have been gained in June. Additionally, 131,000 unverifiable jobs were added by the BLS’s “Birth Death Model,” meaning that in reality the nation most likely lost jobs in June, though because of the way the formula works you cannot just subtract the Birth Death Model number from the total to get an accurate count.

Plenty of other financial pundits have been covering this story exhaustively since these disastrous numbers were released yesterday, so rather than add more windy cyberspace verbiage to their attempts to explain what they mean, I will instead say that Joe and Leslie, the two unemployed folks that I’ve recently written about on this blog, could have clued in anyone who was surprised by this bad report well before it was released. Both are eager and willing to work at any job that will pay them a living wage, and each has spent months fruitlessly searching for such a job.

Looking at the chart above (courtesy of Calculated Risk), dramatically shows just how bad the employment situation is now in America. As you can see, this is the deepest jobs downturn since World War Two and in just a few more months it will become the longest as well. The reckless fiscal policies of the Bush and Obama administrations in borrowing over $4 trillion since the 2008 market crash temporarily arrested the sharp drop in the economy and jobs market, but all it took for the decline to resume was oil and gasoline prices shooting back up for a few months to where they’d been during the summer before the crash. Nothing was structurally fixed by the insanely expensive bailouts and stimulus package—except to transfer huge amounts of money from the taxpayers to the corporate elites and Wall Street.

We are now rapidly reaching the point where the next major peak oil-induced economic shock wave is about to hit. So many negative factors are lining up it is difficult to keep track of them all, but leading the list are the continued financial crises in numerous European countries; the likelihood that the upcoming debt limit agreement in Washington is going to remove hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending from the economy (Obama’s proposal this past week would shave roughly 2.8% from the total GDP); and, lastly and most importantly, a real oil supply crunch is now shaping up around the world. The recently announced release from the Western nations’ Strategic Petroleum Reserves is an indicator of an imminent crisis in the oil markets, as is Goldman Sachs’ announcement on Friday that it believes swing producer Saudi Arabia has reached peak oil production and can no longer flood the world with additional supply to keep prices down.

Add this all up and the dreaded “double dip” recession is not only a virtual certainty, but the second dip is likely to make the first one look like a walk in the park. In America it comes just in time to have a hugely destabilizing effect on the next presidential election. If this economic shock wave is as bad as I fear it might be, President Obama will be resoundingly defeated next year, which he richly deserves for his complete mishandling of the economy since taking office. It is only when you look at who from the other side might be his likely replacement that you realize it is time to be very afraid. Batten down the hatches, everybody. The outer bands of a Category 5 economic and political hurricane are now approaching.

Friday Rant: Why Do So Many Americans Put Their Faith in Prayer but Not in Science?

I’ve become a Weather Channel junkie lately. Not so much the teevee version, which has become contaminated with the same devotion to slickness and celebrity as have all other no longer watchable American media outlets, from CNN to ESPN to the History Channel. The MTV-ification of mainstream television, with its minuscule attention span, worship of consumerism and fast cutting images (seriously, if you are someone who still watches television, try counting the number of times the camera angle changes in a minute’s time on almost any show. I’ll bet 15-20 is the average these days) was completed in the decade after 9/11. TWC was one of the last networks I stopped watching altogether, right about the time they announced they were hiring the utterly vacuous celebritard Al Roker as on-air “talent.”

No, what’s riveted my attention lately is the Weather Channel’s website as a series of natural disasters, from floods, to fires to epic tornadoes, have spread across the landscape. Hardly a day has passed since March when somebody, somewhere hasn’t been getting their butts kicked by Mother Nature. From Joplin, to Tuscaloosa, to Cairo, to Minot to New Mexico, it has been quite an unfolding spectacle.

As with any mainstream media website it is almost as fascinating to peruse the reader’s comments as it is to read the articles, as they truly give one insight into the infantile mindset of so many of our fellow citizens. People these days have no hesitation about sharing their ignorant opinions in a medium where they can be read by anyone. What’s worse, we must remember, the ones doing the commenting are likely a bit better educated and more affluent than the average person if they have the means and know how to access a computer. It would be really funny if it wasn’t so damn depressing.

Every website has its own unique brand of lunkhead commenter. On the sports sites it's the morons who have divided up into rabid tribes on the basis of their worship of one group of overpaid millionaire athletes versus all of the others. Economic sites seem to be dominated by Cro-magnon, selfish Randians and teabagger types who would prefer if any “parasite” other than themselves receiving government largess wither and die already. And probably worst are the news sites, where you can always count on some boob to go on and on about Obama’s birth certificate, or his being a socialist, or a Nazi, or a communist, or any dumb thing other than the very legitimate criticisms that could be levelled at his actual policies.

Being devoted to a relatively uncontroversial subject like the weather, you’d think the Weather Channel would be immune from such idiocy. Well, you’d be wrong about that. Just last Friday, in fact, there was a routine story about some powerful thunderstorms that swept through Chicago. Here was the very first comment left on The Weather Channel’s website: “Maybe we should start allowing God back into our country.” Two hours after it was posted it had already drawn 45 “Likes.” And from what I’ve seen in my regular reading of the site, this is pretty typical. Disaster happens and the Weather Channel commenters start falling all over themselves to send out their prayers and make other comments like the one above.

Before anyone gets upset with me for being a religious hater, I’ll state right up front that I have no automatic quarrel with religious people. Joe, my best friend from high school who I’ve written about, is a born-again Christian, and he’s one of the most decent people I know. Some people use religion as a personal force for good to help them cope with life’s madness and I have no problem with that. Sometimes I envy them, in fact. If the Weather Channel commenters want to send their prayers to total strangers in cyberspace, that’s really their business.

The problem is that whenever a comment then gets posted about Climate Change, it will immediately be followed by a bunch of denialist nonsense, often by those very same religious commenters. Pray for the tornado victims, is the mantra, but don’t EVER consider changing the habits that may have helped create the conditions that made the tornado more powerful. That's GOD'S will.

If it were the Fox News website, you might expect this type of stuff. Devotees of Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda machine often loudly proclaim their religious beliefs while denying science and promoting the corporatist party line. But this is the freaking WEATHER CHANNEL, for fuck’s sake. If its programming were any blander and less threatening, they’d have to change the name to The Tapioca Channel.

Sadly, this is just another example how impossible it would be to try to turn things around in this country. As long as people have no shame about loudly proclaiming lack of belief in science as if science and religion have equal merit in explaining phenomena the physical world, and as long as our craven politicians are willing to pander to them in order to win their votes, we are are going to continue to speed towards the abyss at 120 MPH.

The real Bill Hicks, after hearing a fundamentalist Christian assert that God had put dinosaur fossils on the Earth “to test our faith,” replied: “I think God put YOU here to test MY faith, dude.” As usual, Bill captured exactly how I feel better than I ever could.

Obama’s Stimulus Payoff Buys an Endorsement from the National Education Association

It was reported by Reuters on Tuesday that the delegates to a convention of the National Education Association voted overwhelmingly to endorse President Obama for re-election:

"President Barack Obama shares our vision for a stronger America," said Dennis Van Roekel, president of NEA. "He has never wavered from talking about the importance of education or his dedication to a vibrant middle class."

"The last two years of state legislatures and the mid-term elections were eye-opening, demonstrating what can happen when education legislation and decisions are left in the hands of politicians who do not support public schools," Van Roekel said.

The article goes on to say that one of the key factors in the NEA’s endorsement was the passage of the Education Jobs Bill in the summer of 2010 as part of Obama’s stimulus package. The bill provided $26 billion to state and local governments to prevent layoffs of employees, including teachers. Obama delivered the goodies, and bought himself the NEA’s endorsement in the process. Sounds like typical political wheeling and dealing, doesn’t it? In reality, however, the NEA received some pretty thin gruel in exchange for this endorsement.

Van Roekel’s puffed up rhetoric should be the first clue that this is a bad deal for the rank and file. Let’s start with the first paragraph. Other than plunging the nation even deeper into debt by recklessly throwing around a bunch of borrowed money, Obama has done exactly NOTHING to help education during his tenure. The sheer folly of Van Roekel’s words can be seen in the tens of thousands of layoff notices now being sent to teachers all across the country. The Detroit Public Schools, for example, recently sent such notices to EVERY employee on the payroll. Obama’s education money bomb merely amounted to a one year stay of execution for those teachers who were facing layoffs at this time last year. It did NOT fix the longer term problem of state government revenue shortfalls in any way.

As for Obama supposedly being dedicated to a vibrant middle class, here again his actual record is dismal. Most of the money from the larger stimulus package was used on “shovel ready” projects that did provide some jobs for a limited time (at a cost of over $200,000 per job if recent reports are to be believed), but primarily enriched government contractors. While still a Senator during the 2008 Presidential campaign, Obama voted for the $700 billion dollar bailout of the big banks and Wall Street that was in effect a massive transfer of wealth from working and middle classes taxpayers to the rich. He also doubled down on President Bush’s bad bet in Afghanistan, spending countless additional billions waging a pointless and utterly futile war.

On the home front, there are several million fewer jobs in America today than there was when Obama was inaugurated (see above chart). The average time unemployed workers stay jobless has during his term nearly doubled from the previous all time high set amid the early-1980s recession of Ronald Reagan and is now an astounding 40 weeks. Additionally, those fortunate enough to actually find work are taking jobs that pay 40% less on average than what they were making before. Claiming this dreary record is supportive of a vibrant middle class just demonstrates that Van Roekel is completely out of touch with the very real suffering being experienced by millions of his countrymen.

In the second paragraph of his statement, Van Roekel falls into the same old tired two-party system trap of asserting that just because one side is against you the other side must be with you. Earth to Van Roekel: the Democratic Party stopped being on the side of the unions a long, long time ago, in part because they know they can always count of the support of useful idiots like you no matter how many times they sell your membership down the river to please their corporate masters. I guess you’ve been too busy schmoozing to notice that the days of unbridled stimulus spending are over and “austerity” is now all the rage in Washington. There isn’t going to be another federal bailout of the state and local governments to save teacher jobs, and your membership is going to suffer greatly no matter WHO gets elected next time around. By endorsing Obama so freely and so easily, you have effectively ensured that he doesn’t have to lift a finger for teachers ever again. And rest assured he won’t.

The Center for Public Integrity reported in May that Van Roekel earned nearly $400,000 in total compensation during 2009. Thirty other officers and employees of the union made more than $200,000 that year. Public school teachers, by comparison, were paid a national average of $54,319. So what does it matter to Van Roekel how many of his union’s members get laid off over the next four years, just so long as he can keep the perquisites he receives from being the president of the teacher’s union—perquisites that will no doubt include a chance to mingle with Mr. Hopey-Changey himself at the Democratic convention?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about how the American Association of Retired Persons had thrown its membership under the bus by announcing it would be open to discussing the possibility of cuts in Social Security benefits. In that piece, I asserted that too many average people misguidedly place their trust in ossified and self-interested large institutions that they believe are still working on their behalf. Here is yet another example of that dynamic in action.

Sadly, we really ought to be well past the point where any union should be placing its faith in the Democratic Party. That they still do reflects just how corrupted by power the leadership has become, and just how distracted and bamboozled their membership is to keep voting for the same sell out “leaders” to represent them even as all of their historically hard fought gains in wages in benefits are being gradually taken back by the predatory capitalist elites.

What NBA Players and Public School Teachers Have in Common

Last week it was announced that the National Basketball Association was following the lead of the National Football League and locking out its players in an attempt by the team owners to force the players to make salary concessions. This is yet another dispute between millionaires and billionaires, and I’ll be right up front and assert that the country would be far better off if EVERYONE stopped caring whether the NBA and NFL play their seasons or not. They contribute nothing of any value other than to serve as a massive distraction for the masses, making them even less likely to notice how the billionaire owners and their friends are stealing their country right out from under them.

That said, there is one aspect of this story that I think everyone is overlooking. The first question that should immediately come to mind is: why are the owners engaging in an action that could potentially cost them countless millions of dollars in lost revenue from ticket sales, merchandising and broadcasting rights? Seems pretty self-defeating, doesn't it?

The only possible explanation is that the owners have closely examined their books and realize what no one in a position of authority in this country will officially admit: that they are facing a dramatic long term drop in revenues and the only way they can keep making a profit is to cut player salaries. Already we see evidence of this in the recent bankruptcy of the Los Angeles Dodgers—long one of the most profitable franchises in Major League Baseball—and the fiasco that has befallen the ownership of the New York Mets, who lost a bundle investing with Bernie Madoff. The Great Recession has reduced attendance for all the major sports leagues and declining advertising revenue has squeezed the networks that broadcast the games.

So what does all of this have to do with teachers? Quite simple, really. State and local government employees are receiving layoff notices all around the country for the same reason the NBA and NFL players are being locked out—declining revenue as the economy slowly implodes.

Because the stock market has risen dramatically with the bailouts that followed the 2008 crash and good times at least outwardly seem to have returned to Wall Street, it has masked the fact that any billionaire whose business is based upon selling actual goods or services in the real economy is seeing his or her profit margins shrink dramatically. Shifting focus overseas to still-booming markets like China has helped offset some of the losses here in America, but long term trends everywhere have to be troubling for those whose portfolios depend on the health of the global economy.

If there was any solidarity among the laboring classes in America these days, the NBA and NFL players would be walking a unified picket line along with the teachers, police officers, factory workers and retail managers who are all suffering as the Great Recession grinds on. They would unify in their demand that the necessary sacrifices be shared equally by labor AND capital.

The fact that such an idea sounds patently absurd when you say it out loud just shows why it will never, ever happen. Instead, the plebes will fight each other to the death over an ever-shrinking number of crumbs while the elites steal away with the cake like a thief in the night.

Twenty-Six Weeks and Counting, A Friend’s Unemployment Ordeal

Awhile back, I wrote a post that included an anecdote from my high school days when my best friend and I waited in a long line in the middle of winter to apply for part time jobs at a new hotel opening in our hometown. It was kind of a lark for us…we were just looking for some extra spending money, and working in a hotel seemed like it would be kind of fun. We didn’t get offered a job—it was smack in the middle of the early-1980s recession and a couple of thousand applicants turned up to apply for a few dozen openings. It was the first time I had ever seen a large group of desperate adults queued up for what I now realize were menial, low paying jobs. As such, it was quite an eye opener.

Flash forward to the first week of this year, and in a tragic irony that same friend of mine, who I will call Joe, was laid off from his retail manager’s job without even so much as two weeks’ notice after 14 years with the company. Though we were best buddies back then, and are fairly close today, Joe and I took much different career paths. I spent six years scraping together enough money to get through college—taking a detour into the Illinois Army National Guard along the way—graduated with high honors and moved easily into the white collar ranks. Joe wasn’t really university material. He attended classes at the local community college for a couple of years before quitting to begin his retail career.

Always a hard worker, up until this year he had never had any problem finding a job. He worked at several other stores before obtaining his most recent gig upon relocating to not far from where I live in Virginia. It was a complete coincidence that the two of us, small town boys from Illinois, both ended up a short distance from each other in the Old Dominion, especially since we had largely lost contact in the meantime. Joe moved here after divorcing his first wife so he could be with a woman he met on the Internet. They were married not long after, and he eventually adopted her quadriplegic son as his own. It was just the kind of selfless act I would expect from my deeply religious and good-natured friend. He’s always been a better man than I am.

That’s why it pains me even more to see what he has been going through. Joe is about to exhaust his traditional 26-weeks of unemployment insurance and will be transferring over to start receiving federally provided extended benefits. The same benefits, as it was reported last week, that Congress is getting ready to eliminate as part of their budget cutting zeal. The chart at the top of this article really sets the insanity of that plan into stark relief. What it shows is that it is now taking unemployed people an average of 40 weeks to find a new job, assuming they ever do. That's nearly double the previous all time record of just 21 weeks set during that same Reagan recession all those years ago when Joe and I stood in line to apply for those hotel jobs.

During his six months of enforced idleness, Joe has sent out hundreds of resumes but has had exactly four job interviews. Just last week, he was optimistic that he might be hired to be the manager of a local thrift shop, but even that fell through. Had he gotten the job, the pay would have been $16-an-hour--$32,000 per year--or about half of what he was making previously. It’s okay, he said to me when I expressed my condolences, something’s gotta turn up eventually.

Fortunately for Joe, his wife still has her job, and more importantly her health insurance as their son requires constant medical care even now as an adult. They’ve had to tighten their belts, but they’re getting by. And given his normally optimistic outlook, I am actually much more fearful for Joe’s future than he seems to be himself, at least right now.

When talking to Joe, I am almost at as much of a loss as to what to say as I was to Leslie, the young college graduate with $100,000 in student loan debt who stayed at my house a couple of weeks ago while on her job search. I am very fortunate in that not only is my job currently secure, I am actually planning to retire in just three years.

I am also not so arrogant as to think that just because I completed my university studies I made better life choices than Joe did. Heck, but for the grace of having been born when I was, I could be in Leslie’s position today, saddled with huge debts and unable to find a job after college. Joe has always worked hard and done right by his family. His bad luck was to be working in a profession far more vulnerable than my own to the effects of the Great Recession.

This is also the reason why I’m not rooting for a peak oil-induced fast crash. The effects of these early stages of what author Jim Kunstler calls The Long Emergency have already made Joe and Leslie quite vulnerable. Additionally, I know a number of other friends and family members whose jobs will likely be in peril when the next economic shock wave hits. I do not relish the idea of watching helplessly as they get pulled beneath the waves. Extend and pretend, kick the can down the road, sustaining the unsustainable; whatever you want to call it, I’m not looking forward to the day when it finally proves to be no longer possible.

Independence Day Poll Shows a Shocking Collapse of America's Educational System

Inexplicable:

According to a new Marist Poll one in four Americans don't even know what country America declared its independence from. And only 58 percent of residents know that the U.S. broke off in 1776.

The survey of 1,003 adults was taken earlier this month and found that younger Americans were the least likely to know when America broke away from Great Britain. Only 31 percent of adults younger than 30 said 1776 when asked while 59 percent of residents between 30 and 44 got the question right. Americans 45 to 59 were most likely to know the year, with 75 percent getting it right. 65 percent of men got the answer right while only 52 percent of women did.

Did you catch that? It's bad enough that 42% of all Americans do not know what year we declared our independence, but the percentage of those under 30 who do not know is LESS THAN HALF of those in middle age. Even worse, those under 30 would have been in school much more recently and less likely to have forgotten. This is a stunning indictment of America's educational system.

That 1776 was the year of the Declaration of Independence is a fact that was burned into my memory at such a young age that I can't ever remember NOT knowing it. The idea that seven out of every ten members of the youngest generation of American adults are ignorant of it is not only depressing, but downright scary. If these are the people voting in elections, no wonder our system of government is so thoroughly broken.

June Blogging Statistics: Over 10,000 Page Views!

Since we are heading into the Independence Day weekend and lots of people are hopefully off relaxing outdoors somewhere instead of cruising the Internet, my posting is going to be very light through the holiday.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank my readers for making this blog such an overwhelming success in such a short period of time. The month of June was my first full month as a blogger, and just during that period The Downward Spiral received over 10,000 page views--averaging over 300 per day. When I started this project, I never expected to be doing nearly daily posts as I have been, and I can't promise that I will always be so prolific. After all, I usually have to edit each one about eight to ten times before I hit publish, and even then the occasional typo still manages to sneak through.

Nevertheless, the enthusiasm of my audience and all of the positive and thoughtful comments you have made both here and on the various discussion forums where I have linked these pieces has very much inspired me to work harder at it than I might have otherwise.

If you're in America, enjoy your holiday and if you are north of the border, Happy (belated) Canada Day! As for my friends in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere: cheers to you as well.

Now then, I hear a cold one in the refrigerator calling to me. Where's my bottle opener?

Friday Rant: Ten Minutes Stuck With the Fox News Propaganda Machine

I swear I must be cursed. Just a few days ago I posted on this very blog my thoughts and feelings about the coarsening effects television is having on American society. So sure enough, the very next day the gods were laughing as I found myself stuck in a waiting area where there was the omnipresent television screen. Making matters worse, this one was not only tuned to Fox News but actually had the sound turned up. There were about a half-dozen guys there with me, all of whom were more or less paying attention to the broadcast—so I steeled myself and started counting the minutes until I could get out of there.

Initially, the coverage was of the just completed Greek austerity vote and the subsequent rioting in Athens. The guest talking head intoned gravely that approval of the pact had been necessary to prevent a financial crisis in Europe that could spill over and negatively affect the United States. The fate of the Greeks themselves was completely irrelevant to his analysis. So what the hell ever happened to Fair and Balanced? Never mind, silly me.

Mercifully, after a couple of minutes they went to commercial break (you know it's bad when you are ROOTING to be bombarded by advertisements) and I was hoping I could get out of there before the broadcast resumed.

Cut to a Goldline commercial loudly proclaiming that with all of the government deficits you can buy Eagles, gold bars and Krugerrands for “just 1% over dealer invoice.” Got it, plebes? That horrible Muslim, Socialist, Nazi black guy in the White House is just a-fixing to crash the economy. Better buy your overpriced gold now before it's too late.

Don't these idiots know that if they get Raptured they can't take it with them?

To my chagrin, I was not able to leave before the bubble-headed, bleach-blond anchor came back on the air. “This next story will SHOCK and upset you,” she intoned gravely. Oh boy, this ought be good. So much for We Report, You Decide.

Cut to a segment about a letter of complaint (horrors!) made by some so-called religious groups against the director of a Veterans Affairs cemetery (evil bureaucrat!) in Houston (Heaven, Hell or…) for allegedly banning the word “God” (heathens!) and requiring that prayers be submitted for prior government approval (Godless Commies!).

The president of one of the groups was shown making an angry statement and then some old hag was interviewed and got in exactly one line: "How did I feel? I probably shouldn't say how I felt because it was absolutely appalling that this woman would come aboard and tell us we can not say 'God bless you’.” (editors note: in writing this post, I obtained the exact quote used in the story from the website of the Fox affiliate in Houston, and I shit you not, the word “appalling” was spelled with only one “p”).

After that whole mess, the “reporter,” then started adding his slant. That was it. No one from the VA was interviewed (presumably they must be smart enough to know better), no evidence was presented in support of the allegations and, bizarrely, not one specific instance of what these groups were asserting was described for the viewer.

And yet, about half way through the story one of the guys in the waiting room with me—the only black guy present, incidentally—got all indignant. “That’s just unbelievable,” he said. “What is this damn country coming to, anyway?” So much for redneck stereotypes.

I’m normally smart enough to keep my yap shut in such situations, but this time I felt like my head was going to explode. "Oh come on," I said. "That doesn’t even make good NON-sense. They didn’t provide one lick of proof to support their claims."

This failed to placate him. "But they couldn’t report it unless there was SOME truth to it," he insisted.

At that point I was already regretting speaking up, so I just said I didn’t believe a word of it and let it go at that. A couple of minutes later it was time for me to leave and I got out of there as fast as I could. Though the situation didn’t escalate into an argument, I felt drained as I was driving home that afternoon, as I do every time some little incident happens that proves to me yet again why we have no hope of turning things around in this country.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that a mere ten minutes’ exposure to Fox News would leave my head hurting. That’s just a given. And it is not their political slant that is the worst of it, appalling as it is, but just how badly they are dumbing down the discourse in this country under the guise of “journalism,” and just how easily their viewers are led astray. Pandering to the prejudices of elderly shut-ins is one thing, but this guy was about thirty-five and prosperous looking.

How is this allowed to happen, anyway? Where the hell is the FCC, too busy surfing porn on their office computers? If I were to go on the air and say the word “fuck,” they’d be all over my ass. But they’ll let this hideous abomination pollute the body politic with its anti-intellectual toxic waste, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Sadly, I know all too well the answer to the question of where the FCC is: totally corrupted and de-fanged as a regulatory institution. Somewhere, the ghost of little Joey “Clubfoot” Goebbles is raising his glass in honor of Roger Ails and Rupert Murdoch while making a toast to a job well done.

Why Formal Education Often Doesn't Help the Underclass, and Why It Won't Matter in the Future

Readers of this blog will remember Leslie, the young recent college graduate carrying $100,000 in student loans who stayed with my wife and I for a few days during her job search. Despite her situation, Leslie reminds me a lot of myself at her age: eager and energetic, full of ideas about how she can help change the world. While we were discussing her future the subject of social inequality came up—as it often does with progressive minded, well educated young people—and she repeated the standard mantra that I’ve heard many times before that education is vital if poor people are ever going to be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Access to better quality schooling, the argument goes, is the key to combating unemployment, teen pregnancy, crime and the cycle of poverty in general.

Before I go on, I should emphasize that I have not in middle age become some wild eyed follower of Ayn Rand who blames the federal government for illegally seizing my hard earned tax dollars only to redistribute it to “parasites” who contribute nothing to society. I am fully cognizant that the real parasites are the corporations, big banks and Wall Street who—if you count the trillion dollars plus in annual American war spending, the primary purpose of which is to make the world a safe place to make a buck—are the biggest welfare queens of all.

Nevertheless, unlike most people in the middle to upper middle classes, I grew up around kids who didn't have much and in my career have actually worked fairly closely with members of the underclass. For several years after I graduated college my job was to conduct housing benefit investigations involving people who were committing fraud in order to receive rental assistance. Not the most glamorous occupation in the world, obviously, and one that I moved on from as soon as I was able. But it was an invaluable experience, and one that first made me question the conventional liberal values I had carried as a college student.

For this is what I found in my experiences with the working (and some not working) poor: formal education appears to do little to help a lot of them. Many modern liberals make the mistake of thinking that most poor people are just like them but have merely not been given the opportunity to succeed. Now, I won’t argue that on occasion some gifted individual doesn’t break the bonds of the housing project and have great accomplishments in life. There are plenty of examples where that has happened. But they are the exceptions who are hardly reflective of the norm. Indeed, Leslie herself achieved a Masters’ Degree despite a rough upbringing, which included both of her parents dying when she was a child.

This is also not to argue that there are not plenty of complete idiots running around who are middle class or above. The difference for the latter, of course, is that the higher up the food chain you go, the stronger safety net. If you are George W. Bush, for example, you can spend half of your life as the alcoholic family fuck up and still get to be President.

As I gently explained to Leslie, the problem with formal education as a supposed cure-all for our societal ills is that many people simply lack the intellectual capacity for it to be of any real benefit. Statistically, half of the population has IQs below 100, and I think it is difficult for those of us blessed by having been born on the high side of the number to contemplate just how bewildering our complex modern society must be to someone who is on the lower end of the scale.

We also tend to forget that the idea that everyone, down to the lowliest member of society, should be a fully functioning citizen who participates in all aspects of our representative democracy is an historical anomaly enabled by the economic abundance brought on during the all-too-brief cheap oil era. For most of human history, members of the underclass were the serfs, disposable labor to be exploited by kings and nobility who rarely lived beyond their 40th year. No education was necessary for those folks, just get the men working in the fields and the women producing as many babies as possible to overcome the high rate of infant mortality and maintain a steady supply of labor. When you think about it that way, the whole teen pregnancy issue, for example, can be seen in a whole different light. No matter how well intentioned, those working to prevent it are actually fighting thousands of years of human evolution.

There was a kid who lived down the block from me when I was growing up who dropped out of school at age 16 having mentally checked out several years before that. Predictably, that same kid could never hold a steady job and ended up in prison by age 19 despite the fact that his father was a cop. When it comes to education you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink, especially if the horse lacks a basic understanding as to what purpose the water serves.

The tasks that many of us take for granted—balancing a checkbook, reading and understanding the terms of a mortgage document, differentiating between two political candidates’ positions and heck, even completing a job application—must be pretty daunting to someone whose mind has difficulty grasping basic mathematical concepts or the meaning of complex words and phrases. The rise of the personal computer and the Internet these past 20 years has just made matters worse.

As I said to Leslie, I am very much a believer in a level playing field; that every child should, as much as society is able, be provided with a fair chance to succeed. That means access to the same quality of education whether you live in a tony suburb or an inner city housing project (it is in this area that America’s education system most dramatically fails many of its children). But no one should expect that even an impossible-to-achieve complete equality in formal educational opportunities would eliminate or even put much of a dent in the number of Americans who represent the permanent underclass.

The irony in all of this is that as peak oil and resource depletion accelerate the devolution of our modern industrial society, some of these folks will likely be much better prepared psychologically to handle it than most in the middle and upper middle classes. After all, when you’ve never had anything, nor have you ever expected to have anything, you won’t be wasting your mental energy lamenting what you’ve lost. Instead, you’ll be getting on with surviving as best you can, just like you always have.

High Gas Prices Are Changing People’s Behavior (Again)

I bought a new car this past weekend. Yeah, yeah, I know, shame on me for engaging in such “business as usual” behavior—but the oil age isn’t over yet and I still have to get around. After a bit of research, I settled on the Ford Escape, a smaller SUV that can haul a lot of stuff without sucking down a main battle tank’s worth of fuel. I was able to get a good deal, and I’m quite happy with it—which is especially important because I keep my cars for a long time and this could well be the last one I ever purchase before the day finally arrives when gasoline becomes prohibitively expensive.

Anyway, when I first started looking, I decided to check out the hybrid version of the Escape, not because I have any silly illusions about hybrids saving the Earth by being “green” or anything, but because I was hoping to maybe save a little gas money. Bad timing on my part as it turned out, for not only was the hybrid model a staggering $7,000 costlier, there were none available at my local dealership unless I wanted to buy the ugly lime green (for the “greenies,” I guess) showroom model. Of course, the salesman was happy to take me to the back lot where over a hundred regular Escapes were all lined up in rows, with just about every feature and color combination I could have possibly desired.

Business must be a little slow, I remarked. He laughed off the comment, but the truth was pretty obvious. He said I could have my pick of the lot that very afternoon, but if I wanted the hybrid version in anything other than a color that made me want to puke I’d have to wait at least six to eight weeks. I told him I would consider my options and went home to talk it over with the wife.

In the end, the decision was easy. We went with the regular version since it is not a commuter car and we will mostly use it for highway driving— the hybrid’s gas mileage on the open road was not nearly enough of an improvement to justify the huge additional cost. Even if gas prices soar to over $5 a gallon sooner rather than later it would still take years to make up the difference.

All of this got me thinking, as just about everything that happens in my life does these days. Clearly, the recent run-up in gasoline prices is once again having a major effect on the public’s car buying habits. It’s depressing to realize how quickly people forgot about the last gas price spike even though it was less than three years ago. For awhile hybrids and other gas sippers were all the rage, but not more than a year after oil prices subsequently crashed along with the stock market, I started seeing a large number of brand new behemoth SUVs and pick-up trucks on the roadways again.

A while back, I wrote a post about the 1980 presidential candidacy of Republican Representative John Anderson, who advocated as one of his central campaign planks a 50 cent a gallon federal gasoline tax (equivalent to about $1.50 today) as a response to the energy crisis of the late 1970s. Anderson instinctively realized that the only way you were going to get Americans to change their behavior, conserve energy and look for alternatives was to hit them in their pocketbooks. It should have been done then, and it most definitely should be done now…but instead you have the spectacle of President Obama and other world “leaders” releasing oil from various nations’ strategic petroleum reserves in a desperate effort to keep prices down.

So what will happen if they manage to succeed in their efforts for a year or two? People will drive more than they otherwise would have, will purchase bigger vehicles than they otherwise could have afforded to buy gas for, and in the near future, probably right after the next presidential election, we will be right back where we started, only with several hundred million less barrels of oil in those reserves that are supposed be there for dire emergencies.

Today it is likely way too late, even if it were politically possible, for America to change course before the onset of a peak oil-induced economic catastrophe. Indeed, we are already well into the early stages of it. The time to act was back when John Anderson was running his quixotic campaign for the presidency. Despite complete inaction on the part of the federal government back then, America did experience a significant decrease in gasoline consumption during the first half of the 1980s as people bought smaller cars and automakers were motivated to build more fuel efficient vehicles. During his college days in the late 1980s, for example, my brother owned a tiny little Geo Metro that got over 45 miles a gallon—more than many hybrid models do today.

Sure enough, however, once gas became cheap again as the last supergiant oil fields in the North Sea, Alaska and Mexico came online we reversed course and carmakers began trotting out the gas hogs, first the minivan and then the SUV. Today, by my casual observation vehicles larger than the ones Americans drove back in the 1970s constitute about half of the passenger vehicle fleet.

One last thing of note about the car I bought. I hadn’t purchased a new vehicle since the bad old days of 2002, which was just as the I-Craze was getting started; so I was astonished that my new car came with an IPod connection, a USB port and more electronic doohickeys than I will likely ever be able to figure out how to use. Add in hundreds of satellite radio channel options, and I seriously wonder how some people find the time to actually keep their eyes on the road. Anyone remember back when cars just had an AM radio dial? Then again, that’s very much the motto for America these days: Entertained at All Times and at All Costs.

If You Don’t Watch Television, You Live in a Whole Different World

Recently, I was making small talk with someone who asked me if I had seen a particular television show. I’m never quite sure how to respond to such an inquiry as more often than not I haven't even heard of the program in question, so I answered patiently that I rarely ever watch television. The other party, a middle aged woman who seemed nice enough, looked at me as if I had just told her that in my spare time I enjoy standing around bus stops in the nude.

Really, she asked, then how do you keep up with what’s going on in the world?

The Internet, mostly, I replied. I prefer to seek out stories I’m interested in and not have someone spoon feed to me what they think is important.

Hearing this, she immediately switched gears. So what do you think about the Casey Anthony trial?

She got me with that one. I asked, who is Casey Anthony? And no, I wasn’t being an ass; at the time I genuinely had no idea.

Not surprisingly, after what I subsequently discovered, the conversation quickly petered out. That night I Googled the name to see what the lady had been referring to and—ah yes, a little white girl murdered, this time by her own mother. Another overhyped media spectacle of absolutely zero importance to anyone beyond little Caylee Anthony’s family. Shame on me for not knowing. I’m such an uncaring bastard. A few days later, Jim Kunstler included a snide reference to the case on his blog, which caused me to laugh out loud at the coincidental timing of my having just become aware of it.

So the point was driven home yet again—because I do not participate in the vapid, celebrity-driven spectacle of our mainstream media, I live in a completely different world than do the vast majority of Americans. What’s funny is that it’s not like I’m a hermit or anything. I live in a prosperous suburb of the imperial capital and I keep a pretty close eye on the doings of the arrogant local denizens who think they create their own reality around the world. I can explain to you in great detail what’s happening in many different countries, most particularly my own, but because I am so sheltered as to not have any idea who Casey and Caylee Anthony are I’m at a disadvantage when making casual conversation at parties. It’s surreal, to say the least.

It wasn’t always like this, of course. Coming of age in the 1970s, I was raised on television like nearly every child of my generation and can probably recite all of the lines from various Bugs Bunny cartoons from memory. Being a curious youth who was interested in what was going on in the wider world beyond my parochial hometown, by my high school years I was an avid viewer of the nightly network news. MASH was then my favorite entertainment show--its strong antiwar message holding much appeal for me. Television was a huge part of my life.

Probably my first realization of the power the medium can have over people’s thoughts was during high school history when the teacher asserted that he could take over the country if he was given complete control of just three institutions: ABC, NBC and CBS (no cable or satellite channels back in those days, obviously). Shortly thereafter, cable television and CNN came to my hometown and I quickly became a junkie, often watching the half-hour Headline News broadcast two or three times in succession.

When I got to college, a political science professor proclaimed that it was important to watch the television news in addition to reading a daily newspaper if you wanted to fully understand what was going on in the world. Faithfully, I followed the tenants of my education, keeping a subscription first to the Chicago Tribune and then the Washington Post well into my thirties. CNN was a regular part of my day, and I still enjoyed numerous entertainment shows like Cheers and Seinfeld.

But somewhere along the way, it all started to go bad. The first time I remember being really disgusted by overhyped “news” coverage was during the O.J. Simpson trial. Naively hoping that the media would regain its senses once that spectacle was over, I was instead dismayed when such sensationalist coverage became the norm.

It was around that same time that Fox News appeared on the scene, and even worse than its right wing editorial slant was how it drew viewers by MTV-ifying its coverage—using quick edits, slick graphics, sensationalism and celebrity worship when not actively pushing its political agenda. Instead of resisting this coarsening of news broadcasts, the other networks instead fell all over themselves to imitate it. Meanwhile, I noticed that the number of entertainment shows I watched regularly was quickly dwindling as quality programs went off the air and were replaced by utterly vapid prime time game and reality shows.

After 9/11 came the now omnipresent running scroll at the bottom of the screen during news broadcasts, but I noticed that the more information the networks insisted on presenting, the less actual value it had. By the middle of this past decade I had become an Internet news junkie, rarely turning on the teevee for information at all. For entertainment programs, I eventually whittled my regular viewing all the way down to just The Daily Show, which I ultimately gave up this past year after Jon Stewart’s hugely dispiriting Rally to Encourage People to Do Nothing.

So now here I am, braying in the Internet wilderness, writing a blog so at odds with what most of my fellow citizens accept as reality that I fear their heads would explode if they ever read it. It’s a strange feeling, but sometimes it can be fairly exhilarating—such as the grim satisfaction I felt when the stock market crash I had been predicting to my friends and colleagues throughout the summer of 2008 came to pass and they then thought I was clairvoyant. The evidence was all there, I tried to tell them afterward, you just need to stop believing what you see on the news.

Occasionally, I’ll read a peak oil article where the writer will be very earnest in suggesting this or that big picture solution for the problem of our society transitioning to a powered down world. They always make sense, and I appreciate their efforts, but then I think about the above and realize the author is no doubt someone like me—thinking so far outside (the idiot) box that they will never be able to get through to the idiots.

That’s why I don’t offer such solutions here. Instead, I merely implore my readers to do what they can to prepare themselves and those they care about for what’s coming. It’s all you can do, really, until the day finally comes when what the late author Joe Bageant used to refer to as The American Hologram delivers its final broadcast, and is ultimately revealed to have been a mass hypnosis conjured by slick hucksters who have made the little man behind the Great and Powerful Oz look like a rank amateur.