How Wall Street wins whatever happens

If you ask anyone how the last two years have been, the answer would be “Terrible!” Unemployment rocketed up to nearly 10% officially and probably about 20% unofficially and shows no sign of coming down soon. Homes are being foreclosed left and right, throwing people onto the street. Food banks are reporting difficulties in meeting the increased demand for their services.

But not everyone has been hard hit. As Bloomberg news points out:

The last two years have been the best ever for combined investment-banking and trading revenue at Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, 56, and his top deputies are in line to collect more than $100 million in delayed 2007 bonuses — six months after paying $550 million to settle a fraud lawsuit related to the firm’s behavior that year. Citigroup, the bank that needed more taxpayer support than any other, has a balance sheet 14 percent bigger than it was four years ago.

The very institutions that created so much distress for so many people were able to get the government to not only bail them out but to gut many of the new regulations that would have prevented the kind of reckless actions that might cause a repeat of the crisis.

The U.S. government, promising to make the system safer, buckled under many of the financial industry’s protests. Lawmakers spurned changes that would wall off deposit-taking banks from riskier trading. They declined to limit the size of lenders or ban any form of derivatives. Higher capital and liquidity requirements agreed to by regulators worldwide have been delayed for years to aid economic recovery.

Can anyone doubt that we have an oligarchy?

In fact, corporate America has been amassing huge amounts of cash by firing workers and squeezing the remaining ones to take on the increased workload. This ‘business strategy’ goes under the euphemism of ‘increasing productivity’. As a result, they increased their profits that have been used to pay huge bonuses to their top executives and raise their stock prices. Look at the Dow Jones index over the past two years.

Does the index bear any resemblance to the conditions of actual people?

Ted Rall’s animation succinctly captures what is going on. (Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow taps into a similar vein.)

The sanitized Bible

I wrote recently about my email correspondence with ‘Henry’ (not his real name). In the course of my probing as to what he actually believed, I asked him whether he believed in Noah’s flood (the story begins at Genesis 6:9) as a historical event. Christians who believe this to be true tend to paint with a broad brush and gloss over the details. For them, it is a short story the moral of which is a just god punishing evil humankind and starting over with a clean slate, using just the righteous Noah and his family. The whole story is treated as if it were a road (or rather boat) trip for Noah and his family and all the other people are ignored. If they dwell on the details at all, they consist of quaint images of cute animals marching two by two into the ark.

I don’t let believers like Henry get away with this sanitized version of the story. I ask them, if they think the story is true, to imagine the details of what must have come before the supposedly happy ending of a new dawn for humankind with doves and rainbows and perhaps Celine Dion singing in the background. I ask them to think of the steady non-stop rain, the relentlessly rising water, people panicking as they realize that this is no ordinary flood, parents gathering up their infants and children to save them, climbing to the tops of buildings or trees or desperately seeking higher ground, hoping against hope that the rains will cease, and their increasing terror as it does not.

Once they get as high as they can, they will do what parents instinctively do which is try and save their children, holding them up above the water even as they themselves get covered and are unable to breathe, wishing for some miracle to save their babies at the last moment. But nothing happens. The rising waters swirl over the terrified infants and soon even their gurgles subside to a deadly silence as they suffer ghastly deaths by drowning. [Update: Commenter Jeff alerts me to this image by Gustave Dore that captures my words almost exactly.]

Meanwhile god is watching all this and does not lift a finger to help. At any moment he could have chosen to save at least the infants who have not done anything wrong, unless you believe in the truly idiotic doctrine of original sin. But god does not do what any ordinary person would feel compelled to do when seeing others in danger, and that is to try and save them.

I ask religious people how they can possibly believe in such a god. I do this because if you take the flood event to be historically true, surely it must rank as the worst act of genocide in history, revealing a truly despicable god, one who is a callous mass murderer. Anyone who takes the Noah story to be true has forfeited any right to speak of morality or the existence of a loving god.

Religious people get increasingly uncomfortable as I describe the above sequence of events because I don’t think they have ever actually thought these things through and their religious leaders never go into detail either, for obvious reasons. And this is just one story. The Bible is full of such ghastly stories of a cruel and vengeful and merciless and vain god. This is why any thinking and compassionate person who actually reads the Bible has a good chance of becoming an atheist.

Most religious people are not really taught the Bible except in the highly sanitized form they learn in Sunday school as children. I have in our house something called a Children’s Bible and it omits all the horrendous elements of the stories, like Abraham’s willingness to murder his son, god’s commands to stone to death rebellious children and women who are not virgins on their wedding night and people who merely gather wood on the Sabbath, not to mention all the rape and incest and genocide. It reads more like an epic adventure story. This is reasonable for something written for children but the problem is that many religious people never grow out of it. Their knowledge of the Bible progresses little beyond their childhood indoctrination. For them, ignorance is truly bliss.

Next: Some actual conversations with believers on this topic.

What to expect in 2011

Here are my predictions.

On the political front, things are not going to be good.

We can expect an assault on Social Security, the dismantling of which is a long-held dream of the oligarchy. This will be facilitated by Obama, the faithful servant of the oligarchy, who has already signaled that the fix is in by (a) reducing the employee contribution to 4.2%, thus creating a resource problem where there wasn’t one before; (b) saying that he wants to ‘reform’ it so that others don’t do a worse job; and (c) encouraging his ‘Catfood Commission’ to use Social Security as part of their budget deficit plans.
We can also expect Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan to continue their assault on public education by diverting resources to charter schools and continue the practice of bribing school districts to fire teachers.
We will see Obama go along with the attack on public sector employees (he has already frozen their salaries) by cutting their numbers and undermining their unions.
We will continue to see further encroachments on our civil liberties and a further tend towards an imperial presidency, all in the name of fighting terrorism.
We will see a further attempt to siphon wealth towards the oligarchy by means of ‘tax reform’.
Providing adequate health care to people and controlling its costs will loom as the biggest problem facing the US because of its refusal to adopt a single-payer system.
There is going to some political theater in February when the debt ceiling will need to be raised in order to continue funding the government. The oligarchy needs this to happen so the ceiling will be raised but there will be some Kabuki theater before it happens in which Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress will pretend that they are being held hostage by the mean old Republicans in Congress and that they are forced to concede to some of their demands in order to keep the government running. I don’t know what specifically the Democrats will ‘reluctantly concede’ but you can be sure that it will be something that harms the less well-off.
There will be no end to the military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and only token reductions in forces in those two countries. Furthermore, the wars in Pakistan and Yemen will escalate.

As I have said repeatedly, the oligarchy is most successful in their assault on the poor and middle class when a Democrat is in the White House because then the base of the Democratic Party is lulled into inaction, thinking that the president is looking after their interests when all the evidence points to the opposite. Measures that would have had them howling in protest if a Republican president proposes them are meekly acquiesced to when a Democrat advocates them.

On the bright side, the longer-term prospects are better. All oligarchies contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction and from the ashes of the wrecked US economy, there might emerge a better society. But the interim is going to be brutal.

There is also every indication that religion will continue its slide into oblivion. I know that this does not seem obvious, but the signs are pretty good, actually.

I will elaborate on these issues in the coming year.

O Lucky Man

Here is Alan Price singing the title track from Lindsay Anderson’s great 1973 film.

I particularly like the line: “If you can’t be tempted with heaven or hell, you are a lucky man.”

So true.

The future of humankind

British director Lindsay Anderson produced a trilogy that began with If… (1968), continued with O Lucky Man (1973), and ended with Britannia Hospital (1982). Anderson’s films were surreal and took swipes at all the stupidity and hypocrisy of society. No one was spared: politicians, clergy, business, trade unions, scientists, education, all were targeted with biting class-based satire.

That great British character actor Graham Crowden plays a mad scientist Professor Millar who was introduced in O Lucky Man, a wonderful, sprawling, surreal film with the best sound track ever (by rocker Alan Price). The role was expanded in the final film from which this scene is taken.