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What collapsing empire looks like
Glenn Greenwald, Salon
As we enter our ninth year of the War in Afghanistan with an escalated force, and continue to occupy Iraq indefinitely, and feed an endlessly growing Surveillance State, reports are emerging of the Deficit Commission hard at work planning how to cut Social Security, Medicare, and now even to freeze military pay. But a new New York Times article today illustrates as vividly as anything else what a collapsing empire looks like, as it profiles just a few of the budget cuts which cities around the country are being forced to make. This is a sampling of what one finds:
Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further — it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation. …
UPDATE: It’s probably also worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month — with a subheadline warning: “Back to Stone Age” — which describes how “paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue.” Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional. And it was announced this week that “Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free.”
Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights — or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State — that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability? Anyway, I just wanted to leave everyone with some light and cheerful thoughts as we head into the weekend.
(6 August 2010)
Recommended by Asher Miller.
Will Our Kids Be Better Off Than Us?
Kevin Drum, Mother Jones
… It’s not high taxes (which are lower than any time in recent history) or social changes (which have been overwhelmingly positive) that bother me, it’s the fact that we increasingly seem to be led by a social elite that’s simply lost interest in the good of the country. They were wealthy 30 years ago, they’ve gotten incomparably more wealthy since then, and yet they seem to care about little except amassing ever more wealth and endlessly scheming to reduce their tax burdens further. Shipping off our kids on a growing succession of costly foreign adventures is OK, but funding healthcare or unemployment benefits or economic stimulus in the midst of a world-historical recession is beyond the pale.
So yeah: when Noonan says of our political leaders, “I think their detachment from how normal people think is more dangerous and disturbing than it has been in the past,” I agree. But where she sees social breakdown and anomie, I see something more like the patrician thugocracy of Rome, dedicated to ever more sybaritic pleasures and blithely willing to suck the marrow out of the vast middle class in order to get it.
Apocalyptic? Yes! What’s more, Scott Winship says our entire premise is wrong: polling suggests that parents still think their kids will have it better than they do.
(6 August 2010)
How BP Harnesses Music to Its Message
David Yearsley, CounterPunch
There is nothing more sincere than a guitar. A few simple chords, plucked or picked one note after the other at a gently swaying tempo summon reflexive feelings of trust, comfort, love, and hope. This elemental musical style works for the lullaby and the love song, the meditation and the memorial. Few musical tasks are easier to learn than grabbing a chord with the left hand on the frets while the right hand moves across the strings. Still fewer musical techniques give you more bang for your buck.
This mode of gentle guitaring provides the new soundtrack to the oil catastrophe as staged by BP on its “Gulf of Mexico response” website, which posts new videos every day of how swimmingly the clean-up is going, how satisfied the residents of the Gulf are with BP’s claim system, and how committed the scofflaw corporation is to “making things right.”
… With its logical, almost ineluctable succession of major chords the music conveys not only optimism but progress as well. Has BP recognized the seriousness of the catastrophe, and its minions are moving forward with a series of positive and successful measures.
The filmmakers time things with great precision. The first pass through the four-chord guitar’s cycle, each of which lasts about ten seconds, coincides perfectly with Seihan’s litany of his bona fides. As Seihan stresses his “personal investment,” the harmony is poised on an F-Major chord ready to resolve to B-flat major from where it has just come. But instead the music moves unexpectedly up to the original G minor, closing the circle of the progression, allowing it to beginning again where it started.
In music theory this is called a deceptive cadence, because from the so-called Dominant chord, which in the vast major of Western pieces precedes the final sonority (the Tonic), the ear expects the bass to move down the interval of a fifth (or up a fourth) to come to a close. For a tutorial in this venerable musical convention listen to the close of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where the composer alternates between Dominant and Tonic chords at epic length. The BP catastrophe soundtrack would seem to want to send us from the F Major back to B-flat Major. But BP knows it is too early for even a dash of the triumphant heroism of Beethoven’s Fifth. Instead of the full cadence, the bass moves upward by a step, thwarting our expectation, and bringing us to back to the minor. Never was there a deceptive cadence in which message and musical means were more perfectly aligned. It’s precisely at this point that the screen is filled with the ad’s first tag-line: “Making this Right. Beaches.” This exercise in corporate deception should answer any doubts that even the simplest of instrumental music can project meaning. …
David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. He is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia.
(6 August 2010)
Governments Go to Extremes as the Downturn Wears On
Michael Cooper, New York Times
… Faced with the steepest and longest decline in tax collections on record, state, county and city governments have resorted to major life-changing cuts in core services like education, transportation and public safety that, not too long ago, would have been unthinkable. And services in many areas could get worse before they get better.
The length of the downturn means that many places have used up all their budget gimmicks, cut services, raised taxes, spent their stimulus money — and remained in the hole. Even with Congress set to approve extra stimulus aid, some analysts say states are still facing huge shortfalls.
Cities and states are notorious for crying wolf around budget time, and for issuing dire warnings about draconian cuts that never seem to materialize. But the Great Recession has been different. Around the country, there have already been drastic cuts in core services like education, transportation and public safety, and there are likely to be more before the downturn ends. The cuts that have disrupted lives in Hawaii, Georgia and Colorado may be extreme, but they reflect the kinds of cuts being made nationwide, disrupting the lives of millions of people in ways large and small.
(6 August 2010)
Round-up of cuts around the country. -BA.
Battle Looms Over Huge Costs of Public Pensions
Ron Lieber, New York times
There’s a class war coming to the world of government pensions.
The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers. Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide.
The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions. Their 401(k)s or individual retirement accounts have taken a real beating in recent years and are not guaranteed. And soon, many of those people will be paying higher taxes or getting fewer state services as their states put more money aside to cover those pension checks.
At stake is at least $1 trillion. That’s trillion, with a “t,” as in titanic and terrifying.
The figure comes from a study by the Pew Center on the States that came out in February.
(6 August 2010)
The underlying story, which is hardly touched upon, is that there are big problems with pensions of all sorts, in almost all industrialized countries.
Sadly this article is an egregious example of framing. Author Lieber gratuitously pits government workers agains non-government workers. As sources of the financial shortfall, he conspicuously omits the trend in recent years to eliminate taxes on corporations and the very wealthy, to increase military spending during a time of relative peace, and government bailout of big financial institutions. Other causes peculiar to pensions are an aging workforce and the low returns on investments (upon which pensions depend)
-BA
