Read the piece that Time Magazine published and see if he doesn’t intrigue you also. If you are, click on the link to Big Think and watch or read that interview, too. Interesting ideas, indeed. A friend of mine said, upon reading the The Dropout Economy, that the homeschool movement has been predicting this for over 30 years. News to me, but then, the older I get, the less I know….

Here is Reihan Salam’s essay, as published in Time Magazine on March 11, 2010:

The Dropout Economy

Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college. Many economists attribute the sluggish wage growth in the U.S. to educational stagnation, which is one reason politicians of every stripe call for doubling or tripling the number of college graduates.

But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won’t exist, we’re on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live.

It’s important to keep in mind that behavior that seems irrational from a middle-class perspective is perfectly rational in the face of straitened circumstances. People who feel obsolete in today’s information economy will be joined by millions more in the emerging post-information economy, in which routine professional work and even some high-end services will be more cheaply performed overseas or by machines. This doesn’t mean that work will vanish. It does mean, however, that it will take a new and unfamiliar form.

Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones.

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.

This transformation will be not so much political as antipolitical. The decision to turn away from broken and brittle institutions, like conventional schools and conventional jobs, will represent a turn toward what military theorist John Robb calls “resilient communities,” which aspire to self-sufficiency and independence. The left will return to its roots as the champion of mutual aid, cooperative living and what you might call “broadband socialism,” in which local governments take on the task of building high-tech infrastructure owned by the entire community. Assuming today’s libertarian revival endures, it’s easy to imagine the right defending the prerogatives of state and local governments and also of private citizens — including the weird ones. This new individualism on the left and the right will begin in the spirit of cynicism and distrust that we see now, the sense that we as a society are incapable of solving pressing problems. It will evolve into a new confidence that citizens working in common can change their lives and in doing so can change the world around them.

We see this individualism in the rise of “freeganism” and in the small but growing handful of “cage-free families” who’ve abandoned their suburban idylls for life on the open road. We also see it in the rising number of high school seniors who take a gap year before college. While the higher-education industry continues to agitate for college for all, many young adults are stubbornly resistant, perhaps because they recognize that for a lot of them, college is an overpriced status marker and little else. In the wake of the downturn, household formation has slowed down. More than one-third of workers under 35 live with their parents.

The hope is that these young people will eventually leave the house when the economy perks up, and doubtless many will. Others, however, will choose to root themselves in their neighborhoods and use social media to create relationships that sustain them as they craft alternatives to the rat race. Somewhere in the suburbs there is an unemployed 23-year-old who is plotting a cultural insurrection, one that will resonate with existing demographic, cultural and economic trends so powerfully that it will knock American society off its axis.

Salam is a policy adviser at the nonpartisan think tank e21, a blogger for the National Review and a columnist for Forbes.com

Elizabeth Warren and Goliath

By Jim Wallis

I had a most instructive conversation this week with Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard economist who is also the Chair of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel. Warren has a way of cutting through the jargon and confusion of many economists and of this economic crisis — right to the moral core of the issues at stake. I knew her for her keen insights, but I didn’t know she was from, as she puts it, a “mixed marriage from Oklahoma” — Baptist and Methodist — and that she is a former Methodist Sunday school teacher. In the interview I did with her for Sojourners, her moral and even theological comments were as impressive as her economic analysis of our present crisis. She said the battle for financial regulatory reform is like the battle between David and Goliath.
Warren’s narrative of the U.S. economy, and the banking industry in particular, was very clarifying. For most of U.S. history, our country went through repeated periods of boom and bust, with all the consequences of those cycles. But after the Great Depression, a number of new financial regulations — rules for the road — were put into place that were designed to protect average Americans in particular from the continued abuses of the big banks and the often terrible results in bad times for ordinary people. Two important examples were the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) to protect people’s savings and the Glass Steagall Act of 1933 to prevent banks from speculating with depositors’ money. And the new rules worked for several decades, creating both prosperity and security for many American families and an emerging middle class. But starting in 1980, the rules were first watered down and gradually removed, and banks were free again to engage in both the abusive and very risky speculative behavior that helped to bring on the Great Depression, and resulted again in the current Great Recession.

She explained how credit card and mortgage application forms used to be only a page or two and were both clear and understandable to the average person — even allowing people to easily compare and contrast the deals offered. But now, as all of us know, these forms have expanded to 30 pages or more with lots of complications, hard to comprehend provisions, and “fine print” that cleverly hides a long list or traps, tricks, and a myriad of both exploitive arrangements and outright abuses that greatly benefit banks at the expense of borrowers and card holders. In clear moral terms, Warren described the current behavior of our biggest banks as deliberately deceiving, entrapping, and cheating unsuspecting customers into very precarious and ultimately disastrous financial positions. And with no more rules of the road, the banks were leading their customers into the financial ditch. An economic crisis has been the result with massive suffering and pain for millions of Americans.

We are now living in a “lawless” economic environment, according to Warren, where our biggest banks have become our most dangerous predators — and with no protections for the rest of us against the “law of the jungle,” as she puts it. The consequences for our economy, our culture, our families, and even our souls have been disastrous. This is not the way we should want to live, Warren says, and it is creating a world which we should not want our children to grow up in. She makes the urgent case for reform with the compelling analysis of a top economist, the family values of a grandmother, and the moral arguments of a person of faith. The sins of the financial world have become both a moral, and even religious, issue from the perspective of the Methodist tradition “which still shapes me.”

Warren is the “mother” of the idea for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA),which is in the current financial reform bill recently passed by the House of Representatives, and is now slowly making its way through the U.S. Senate. But the big banks are aggressively fighting back, trying to prevent their own regulation only one year after the financial meltdown for which they were in large part responsible. There seems to be no remorse, let alone repentance, from the big banks — only record new profits enabled by their taxpayer-funded bailouts, and enormous bonuses to the executives who made the very decisions that brought the economic system down on the heads and hearts of so many Americans. The biggest banks in America are giving shame a bad name.

Why are new rules, regulations, and protections necessary? Because of the human condition, the realities of human nature, and a biblically orthodox understanding of human sinfulness. Yes, the reasons we need the protections offered by a Consumer Financial Protection Agency are as theological as economic. And it is amazing to me how many of those who oppose any regulation of Wall Street also claim to be religious conservatives. They subscribe to what I label in my new book, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street — A Moral Compass for the New Economy, “the myth of the sinless market.” I am a conservative Christian too, conservative enough to have a healthy appreciation for human sins, human failings, and fallen-ness, and after witnessing the behavior of America’s biggest banks during this economic crisis, an old theological term called human depravity. It is simply bad theology to trust large corporations not to pollute our waters, poison our air, or cheat their unsuspecting customers. They have to be prevented from doing so for the sake of the common good. Good financial and economic rules reflect, not only good economics, but also good theology. And the free market fundamentalism of Wall Street’s defenders is, among other things, bad theology.

But as Elizabeth Warren, a good Methodist, warns, the banks are trying everything they can think of to kill financial reform. And we must not let them do that. In the name of a fairer economy, of family values, of moral values, and of sound biblical theology, the faith community must now make itself heard on the urgent issue of financial regulatory reform. We must hold our biggest banks accountable to the common good. So let our Senators not just hear from the bankers, but now also from pastors who see what such abusive banking behavior has done to their families and parishioners, to devastated communities with shuttered houses, to the prison of debt that more Americans find themselves in. People of faith across the land must now tell their elected representatives that we will be “watching and praying” to see what they will do about necessary financial reform. We don’t have the money in our financial coffers that the banks do to finance their political campaigns, but we do have our voice and our votes which will be turned against them if they vote against the best interests of our people and for the greed of the bankers. Jesus said it well — choose this day who you will serve, God or Mammon (Money). Let’s now put that choice to our Senators, who need to hear from us this next week while they are in their district offices during the Presidents’ Day recess. Critical decisions are being made for or against critical financial reform right now.

Economic Recovery 1 and 2

For many people, economic recovery means “getting back to where we were a few months or years ago.” That means recovering our consumptive, greedy, unrestrained, undisciplined, irresponsible, and ecologically and socially unsustainable way of life.

I’d like to suggest another kind of recovery … drawing from the world of addiction. When an addict gets into recovery, he doesn’t want to go back and recover the “high” he had before, or even to recover the conditions he had before he began using drugs and alcohol. Instead, he wants to move forward to a new way of life – a wiser way of life that takes into account his experience of addiction. He realizes that his addiction to drugs was a symptom of other deeper issues and diseases in his life … unresolved pain or anger, the need to anesthetize painful emotions, lack of creativity in finding ways to feel happy and alive, unaddressed relational and spiritual deficits, lack of self-awareness, and so on.

Similarly, I’d like to suggest whenever we hear the word “recovery,” we as a nation see it not as a call to get back our old addictive high, but rather as a call to face our corporate and personal addictions, including the following:

1. Our addiction to carbon. Fossil fuels are an addictive substance. They give us speed … quick energy … serving as a kind of cultural amphetamine. Meanwhile, they toxify our environment and throw the ecosystem in which we live into dangerous imbalance.

2. Our addiction to weapons. Weapons are one of the most addictive substances possible. They give us a feeling of well-being and security, removing our feeling of fear and anxiety, much like a barbiturate. But like a drug, they make us lazy and slow – lazy and slow in the much more important work of relationship-building, justice, and peace-making, lazy in seeking the common good. And they plunge us into an addictive cycle, because if everyone in the world is getting more and more weapons, we aren’t safer … especially when increasing numbers of those weapons are nuclear, biological, and chemical.

3. Our addiction to fear. Religious leaders, media leaders, and political leaders have all discovered that you can raise quick votes, dollars, and members through the hallucinogenic stimulant of fear. By making straights afraid of gays, conservatives afraid of progressives, Christians and Jews afraid of Muslims, citizens afraid of immigrants, and vice versa, these leaders get a quick organizational high – crack for their unity and morale. But the more fear you pump into your system, the more fear you have, and pretty soon, you go from being stimulated to paranoid, seeing things that aren’t there and missing things that are. And soon after that, you move from paranoia to paralysis, leaving you in greater danger than ever.

4. Our addiction to stuff. Jesus said that a person’s life doesn’t consist in the abundance of her possessions. An economy that measures growth by the number of durable goods (resources) extracted from the environment and turned into non-durable goods that are bought, used, and then thrown away into a landfill … that economy “succeeds” by turning goods into trash, and calling it success. That’s not success. We need to imagine moving beyond an extractive, consumptive economy to a sustainable economy, and beyond a sustainable economy to a regenerative economy. I believe that in God’s world, if billions can be made destroying the planet and exploiting people addictively, trillions can be made caring for the planet wisely and caring for people justly.

5. Our addiction to a single bottom line. During the President’s town hall meeting, a man from Indiana told how he started a solar-powered attic fan company, and how he chose not to ship manufacturing overseas, but instead, to provide good employment for his neighbors. That meant, he said, that he had a little less cash in his pocket … but wouldn’t you agree that being a good neighbor has a value that can’t be measured in dollars? The single bottom line of financial profit is addictive, and like an addiction, it destroys families and communities. We need to rediscover a triple bottom line – financial sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. So we need a recovery of family values, and we also need a recovery of community values, and neighborly values, and ethical business values.

6. Our addiction to easy answers. “Government is the problem.” “Just throw money at the problem.” We can’t afford our addiction to these kinds of easy ideological slogans and facile reactive fantasies in a complex, real world. Ideology is, in many ways, a drug that substitutes the quick high of unthinking reaction for the hard work of acquiring wisdom.

So … maybe we can sabotage our addictive tendencies by letting the word “recovery” have a meaning that wakes us up rather than drugs us into the comfortable, dreamy, half-awareness in which we have lived for too long. That’s my hope and prayer. (For more on this, see my book Everything Must Change.)

I don’t think I’ve ever read a more comprehensive and readable analysis of how we have arrived at our present dysfunctional state than this final section of a three-part piece by Sara Robinson on the approaching Fascist future of America. It appeared on the Campaign for Our Future blog on August 27, 2009.

Fascist America III: Resistance For The Long Haul

August, die she must. The town hall freak show is winding down, the media circus is packing the cameras and satellite dishes and hairspray back into the vans, and Congress is soon heading back to the relative safety of D.C. Yet, after all the fuss and bother, they’re probably no more or less resolved to pass health care reform than they were back in June, when those first delirious fevers rose like clouds of infectious mosquito nymphs hatched from a thick, overheated carpet of soggy astroturf.

Let’s hope they succeed at getting it done. But, win or lose, we’re crazy to think that the goon squads formed and trained to instigate this summer’s health care wars will pack it in just because the silly season is over. Those folks have tasted power, graduated from their introductory courses in Political Bullying 101, shared some camraderie and beer, and felt the heft of their own political muscle. That was fun. Now, what do we do next? Paralyze the school board over evolution in the textbooks? Intimidate the city council into shutting down the immigrants’ services center — or beat up some immigrants, so they’ll just stop using it? Vandalize the cars and houses of known liberals? Get one of our own elected sheriff, so he can deputize the rest of us and make our posse official?

Nothin’ but good times ahead. Now that they’re organized up and had a little practice, the possibilities for further mayhem are limited only by the boundless paranoia and unfettered fantasies of the right-wing mind. Out at our local county fair this past weekend, the GOP booth was festooned with a wide array of buttons, tees, and bumper stickers proclaiming the owner’s status as a “Proud Member of the Right-Wing Mob,” and other similarly, um, assertively empowered sentiments. Judging from the general belligerence of the collection on offer, that seems to be the GOP’s whole political identity now. They’re determined to move boldly into 2010 as the party of America’s union-, immigrant-, democracy-, and (if necessary) head-busting squadristi — and they’re damn proud of it all, you betcha.

* * *

How in the hell did we get here? And more to the point: how do we get back out?

The first question is depressingly easy. This is precisely where 40 years of wandering in the right-wing moral, cultural, and economic wilderness has left us — and, in fact, where it was always intended to lead us. A liberal democratic society is a complex system that’s designed to be very resilient and self-correcting in the face of all kinds of extremism. But the health of that system — especially its natural immunity to would-be attackers — ultimately depends on just one factor. It cannot survive without people’s ongoing confidence in a functioning political contract.

When it’s working right, this contract guarantees the upper classes predictable, reliable wealth in return for their investments. It promises the middle class mobility, comfort, and security. It ensures the working classes fair reward for fair work, chances to move ahead, and protection against very real risk that they’ll be forced into poverty if they can’t work any more. Generally, as long as everybody gets their piece of this constantly re-negotiated deal, everybody stays invested in keeping the system going — and a democratic society will remain upright, healthy, and moving mostly forward.

For the past four decades, conservatives have done everything in their power to dismantle that essential contract, and thus destroy our mutual confidence in the fundamental agreements that allow any democratic system to function. None dare call it treason — but a solid case could be made. This isn’t news: by now, most of us can recite the litany, chapter and verse, of the all the many ways they hacked away at America’s essential ability to function as the Constitution intended.

But the biggest loser, as always, has been the working class — the people whose only real power lies in their sweat and their numbers. Their faith in the promise of democratic self-government has been shattered through years of union-busting, farm foreclosures, factory exports, college grant cuts, subprime mortgage scams, and all manner of betrayal, treachery, neglect, and abuse. Over in the comments threads at Orcinus, we hear from these furious folks almost every day. The way they see it, representative democracy has repeatedly failed to deliver on anything it might have once promised them. At this point, the disgust runs so deep that anybody who’s got other ideas — theocracy, corporatocracy, anarchy, whaddaya got? — has a fair shot at getting their attention.

And their outrage is so total that any target they’re offered looks about as good as any other. Without that reason-strangling sense of betrayal and paralyzing fear of further loss already in place, it’s hard to see how Fox News’ windbags or Dick Armey’s checkbook would have been able to convince these people to turn on the best chance at real government help they’ve been offered in decades. But with it, they’re about ready to shoot at anything they’re told to aim at.

America’s best (and perhaps only) chance to keep the shreds of its tattered democracy intact is to get serious about cutting working Americans back into the democratic contract — and repair their broken trust by making damn sure those promises are actually kept. Once they’re back on board, the system will begin to work again for everyone. Until then, the accelerating breakdown is just going to continue.

It’s not going to be easy. Right-wing populism is riding so high among the middle and working classes right now that there’s nothing progressives can say right now that they’re likely to believe. So we need to let our actions do the talking — and there are five solid places we can start that will get their attention.

First:

Ironically, passing health care reform would be a colossal trust-builder, as I’ve argued before. The right wing knows this, which is precisely why it’s recruited the very people most likely to benefit from reform to fight as their shock troops against it. Simply seeing the government working to provide such an essential common good for everyone would shift the entire American conversation about the purposes and capabilities of government. It would go a long way toward restoring our confidence in the very idea of democracy, and make it much harder for anti-democratic arguments to get traction.

Second:

We need to re-establish the rule of law. You cannot have a credible democracy as long as there’s so obviously one standard of economic and civil justice for the rich and well-connected, and a very different one that’s designed to make victims out of everybody else. Nobody seriously believes any more that rich or powerful people can ever be held accountable by an American court. Prosecuting the Bush Administration for their assorted crimes against America and the world would make an unforgettable, inarguable statement — both to our own citizens, and the rest of the planet — about our renewed commitment to justice.

That would be a great start. But we’d need to follow it up with a whole series of reforms; including holding corporations fully accountable for actions that destroy the commons, ending the catastrophic “war on drugs,” giving people back their access to the courts, and restoring some proportionality to our sentencing laws, which have put millions of lower-class families into the permanent thrall of the justice system.

Third:

We need to get serious about investing in education. It’s well understood now that our broken health care system is right at the bottom of the barrel among industrialized countries; but most of us don’t realize that our schools are in the same comparatively wretched shape. Thomas Jefferson understood that liberal democracy is impossible without a literate, well-informed populace; and the endless parade of teabagger loonitude is precisely the kind of know-nothing nightmare he most feared.

Conservative “tax revolt” politics have been undermining American education since California’s Proposition 13 passed in 1977 — and we should draw a clear, bright line between decades of systematic defunding and the monumental failures of reason we’re seeing all around us now. Don’t know much about history — so the Christian Right is busily rewriting it to argue that there’s no such thing as a wall between church and state. Don’t know much about biology — so fewer than half of all Americans think the theory of evolution explains our origins. Don’t know much about the science book — so we’re ready to believe whatever junk science the corporate PR folks can conjure up. Don’t know much about the French I took — which has left the country insular, parochial, and unable to work and play well with others in a world it purports to lead.

But the worst failure is that we went through a decades-long patch where we didn’t teach civics — and still don’t much, especially in states where it’s not part of the standardized tests. Which means that there are tens of millions among us who have absolutely no idea what’s in the Bill of Rights, or how a law gets made, or where the limits of state power lie. It’s quite possible that if the conservatives hadn’t undermined universal civics education, the right-wing talking heads would have never found an audience. Instead, what we have is a country where most people are getting their basic political education from Rush Limbaugh and FOX News.

If we want our democracy back, that has to change.

Fourth:

No democracy in history has ever survived with our current levels of inequality. There’s no reason for the middle and working classes to trust anything about a system that’s so clearly rigged to suck money straight out of their pockets into the tax-free offshore bank accounts of the wealthy — who, of course, turn right around and use that money to buy off our government, so they can suck up even more of our economy for themselves.

This has gone on so long that we’ve arrived at the endpoint where every single civic function you can name — health care, defense, law enforcement, prisons, infrastructure development, research, media, and (increasingly) education — makes decisions not on the basis of what will best serve the common good or give taxpayers or consumers the biggest bang for the buck, but whether and how much it will pay off some well-connected corporation. It doesn’t matter what the public wants, or what makes sense, or what will save money in the long run. The bottom line is: if Haliburton or Wackenhut or United Health isn’t getting their cut, it ain’t happening, period. And that’s pretty much the definition of a corporatized state — which, as we’ve seen, is one of the two necessary ingredients required for full-on fascism.

Restoring equality also means meaningful immigration reform. As long as there’s a two-tiered employment system that lets employers sidestep wage, discrimination, and safety laws by hiring undocumented workers without penalty, there’s going to be a permanent trap door under the feet of American workers. To close that door, we need to shore up the border, completely revamp our utterly dysfunctional immigration process, enforce existing workplace laws and prosecute employers who violate them, and get our current crop of undocumented immigrants on the books so the laws can be applied to them, too. Until we do this, nobody is going to get a fair shake in the job market — and there’s no reason for working-class Americans to have any trust at all in the system’s ability to deliver for them.

Finally:

We need to focus on restoring our basic liberal institutions. Back in 2005, Chris Bowers noted that progressive ideology has always been disseminated through four major cultural drivers: the universities (and related intellectual infrastructure); unions; the media; and liberal religious organizations. Knowing this, conservatives set out back in the 1970s to undermine all four of these institutions — and over time, they’ve largely succeeded in blunting their historic capacity to disseminate and perpetuate the progressive worldview.

But change is on the way. The new GI Bill, like the previous one, is likely to create an expansive renaissance in American university education, restoring vigor and diversity to our academic and intellectual community. The Employee Free Choice Act, if passed, will help unions regain their role as the voice and political muscle of the working and middle class. Bloggers have formed the core of a new progressive media that’s calling the corporate media to account, and slowly forcing it to change its one-sided ways.

On the other hand, there’s still considerable misunderstanding and confusion within our own camp about the essential role liberal religion should play in lending heart and spirit to the progressive resurgence. With a few notable exceptions (Tom Paine, Robert Ingersoll), American progressivism has always drawn its most compelling moral voices from the ranks of Catholics, Jews, Quakers, Unitarians and Universalists, and a wide collection of social gospel Evangelicals. And even now, the vast majority of Americans — on both ends of the spectrum — still draw their political ethics straight out of their personal religious beliefs. As Bowers points out: we need those voices if we’re going to succeed.

Fascism is so dangerous precisely because it speaks to its believers in the language of emotion, populism, purity, redemption, and enduring values. Nobody on the progressive side knows how to speak that language — and match that moral force and energy — better than our own native faith groups. Secular progressives may wish it weren’t true, but it is: there’s simply no way we can rebuild a strong democratic system without holding up our end of a broad new culture-wide discussion about morality, meaning, priorities, passion, and values. And those conversations begin most naturally in our houses of worship.

* * *

I’m well aware that this reads like a liberal wish list. And that’s really my entire point. Progressive democracy is a self-reinforcing system. Wherever you have educated citizens, thriving progressive institutions, a solid public infrastructure, fair courts, and a relatively level economic and social playing field, you’ve got prime growing conditions that lead to an expanding economy, increased rights and freedoms, and a strong collective sense of investment and confidence in the system. Progressivism fosters the conditions that make a nation secure, peaceful, stable, and virtually impervious to revolutions of all kinds. In particular, it creates a natural resistance that recognizes fascism as a mortal enemy, and never fails to raise effective immune antibodies against it.

Almost every conservative policy going back to Nixon has, in one way or another, undermined our ability to mount this kind of resistance. The emergence of corporate-backed brownshirts is a clear warning sign that the system that keeps America progressive and free is now hitting its point of fatal breakdown. And we don’t have much time: if their behavior succeeds and escalates in the coming months, we could be done for in a matter of months. By next August, this one may be remembered as the last moment of calm before the revolution.

Doing nothing is not an option. The only long-term antidote to our current wave of emergent fascism is a big, strong dose of trust-building progressive culture and politics, administered daily until the system’s basic democratic functions come back on line. If we want to build a fascist-proof America for the long haul, we must stand up now for everything we believe, and everything we are.

I love a challenge and set to work. I was astonished to find the number of sites from the right wing populists and Tea Party members who rant incoherently about unfair taxes and tout something called a Fair Tax (a regressive consumption tax) and call for the abolishment of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave Congress the power to levy an income tax. Color me ignorant. But not any longer. After some searching, I found the website of the National Priorities Project. They offer a pie chart calculator that informs you what portion of the income tax that you pay goes to what expenditure. To make it easy to calculate a percentage, I used the figure of $100 so that the portions paid are easily convertible to percentages.

As an example: 29% goes to the Military and 8% goes to Military debt. Only 3% goes to Education. Is that skewed or what?

Here is the link to the calculator. It provides interesting information about how the Federal Government spends our tax money. Warning: I’m one of those evil liberals and progressives and the National Priorities Project is supported by other evil liberals and progressives, among them ACORN, Code Pink, NAACP, labor unions, the League of Women Voters and assorted other socialists, communists, and pinko types. Just so you know ….

This video gives you an introduction to National Priorities:

Now, I know what the Boston Tea Party was (and it wasn’t what you think it was!) so this reference aroused my curiosity. I did a little research and found that the phenomenon of Tax Day Tea Parties was vastly bigger than I had ever imagined. I also thought back to my post on Glenn Beck’s 912 Project. When Mr. Beck states that “We Surround Them”, that sounds eerily similar to what Ma Joad said in The Grapes of Wrath: “[r]ich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good an’ they die out. But we keep a’comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.” And then I had a distant memory of a scene in the movie adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, in which the character Muley Graves is dispossessed of his land by an agent of the bank. A.O. Scott, of The New York Times, refreshed my memory:

“Early on in the film, a flashback shows Muley Graves, an Oklahoma dirt farmer, being dispossessed by a well-fed gentleman with a fine car and a big cigar who disavows any personal responsibility. He’s just doing the bidding of the land company, which is doing the bidding of the bank, and on the chain goes — all the way up to the fat cats back East. That no one is to blame puzzles poor Muley. “Well, who do we shoot?” he asks.”

The problem with the Tax Day Tea Parties that I have is not their grievances, but the object of their scorn. In their single-minded pursuit of freedom, liberty, small government, and low taxes, the protesters are signing on to the agenda of the corporations who run this country. Liberals and progressives are trying to rein in the corporations, not give them further powers to run roughshod over the citizenry. Low taxes, small government, and liberty is what the corporations want and have gotten, through their control of the Republican Party for the last 30 years.

Who do we shoot? Conservatives, not Liberals!

What I find interesting about people who repeat these talking points is that they almost never apply their philosophy, such as it is, to economic matters. Sure, there are a number of Libertarians (of various stripes) who extend these complaints to the economic arena, but the chance of libertarianism ever becoming mainstream is extraordinarily small. Libertarians, like Socialists and other Leftists, spend most of their time arguing over the number of angels on the head of the proverbial pin and never offer a constructive agenda of how to bring their visions of society to life.

Today, I discovered The Conservative Nanny State, by Dean Baker. It was published in 2006 and is a withering attack on those who vilify Liberals for their regulatory mind-set. He asks, in essence, why it is O.K. to attack the Liberal Nanny State for its suppression of personal freedoms but it is not O.K. to attack the Conservative Nanny State for the generous support it has given to corporations. In his book, Baker shows how corporations have taken control of government and passed legislation that has created a very unjust economic playing field for anyone but themselves. This lack of regulation has resulted in the financial crisis that we currently find ourselves in. The book is 133 pages long and starts with a preface and a short synopsis of each chapter, as a way of introducing the subject matter. Should you wish to delve further into the content, the full chapters start after the end of the short summaries of each chapter. This format is novel to me, but I found it useful, because we are all very busy and taking the time to read the entire book may be more than we have time for. The book is licensed under the Creative Commons and is not copyrighted. It is a free download, in either HTML or Adobe Acrobat format, from Baker’s website.

Right Wing Populism & the Economic Crisis: Watch Out for Scapegoats!

In the face of economic crises there is always a search for scapegoats. Particularly in the case of modern capitalism, there remains a certain level of disbelief that crises are built into the system, i.e., that capitalism generates crises (and always has!).

Because many of us would rather believe that capitalism is a rational system that should work on its own, sort of along the lines of a self-aware computer (think Terminator), when there is an economic downturn, whether a mild recession, financial collapse, severe recession or depression, mainstream commentators often attempt to define the problem in terms of errors (or greed) on the part of specific individuals. Thus, in the current crisis it should not surprise us that Senator McCain has focused on WHO, that is, which individuals, are responsible for the meltdown rather than acknowledging that it is the system.

McCain, however, is not the worst of the problem, though he actually assists those who are. The real danger rests with right-wing populism and its adherents. Right-wing populism, an ideological current that promotes the idea that the people (usually defined in racial terms, and in the case of the USA, white people) are being trampled on by nefarious individuals – usually from a minority group – who are seeking to derail the “American Dream.” Such evil people allegedly conspire, often against allegedly good, patriotic working people and business people.

Well, there are certainly evil people out there, and many of them are rich. And, they often conspire against the rest of us. But what right-wing populism ignores is that there is actually an economic system that promotes the greed and avarice, and reproduces itself generation after generation. This economic system – called capitalism – is not the extension of a particular racial or ethnic group. In addition, there is nothing that should make white people impervious to the perils of capitalism and, therefore, they are taken by surprise when the economy cracks and their dreams vaporize.

Yet the narrative developed by right-wing populism is very persuasive. When the focus can be on certain individuals or groups it is much easier to identify the problem-source. Rather than accepting that there is a system that needs to be changed, right-wing populism suggests eliminating certain groups and the current system will work just perfectly. “Eliminating” can mean anything from banning immigration, ending affirmative action, removing women from the formal workforce or, in more extreme cases, committing genocide.

When there are financial crises there is normally a particular spin that right-wing populism offers: blame the Jews. And, so it is that we are already beginning to hear little codes in the discussions coming out of the political Right. The fixation on naming the names, and other subtle and not so subtle hints of a particular group behind the financial meltdown should have our guard up. In the 1980s, the farm foreclosure crisis witnessed the rise of significant anti-Jewish sentiment in rural areas as Jews were identified with bankers and bankers with Jews. Extreme right-wing populists and fascists made use of this message in order to stir up the countryside, completely ignoring the way the banking system and credit actually works.

In addition, when there are any problems in the USA, one can be guaranteed that in addition to Jews and immigrants, Black America is not far behind in the list of those to be blamed. So it is that in the current situation the political Right seeks to blame the financial crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act and the alleged steps taken by banks – as a result of this act – to give loans to poor and undeserving people.

Once again, the political Right does not let the facts get in the way of their opinions. In the case of the Community Reinvestment Act, this was legislation passed in the 1970s. Therefore, logically, the impact of this Act should have been felt VERY long ago rather than in the first decade of the 21st century. Second, as the Washington Post noted (“Activists Angered by Blame for Crisis,” October 3, 2008), only a tiny fraction of subprime loans offered since 2000 were in connection with the Community Reinvestment Act. Nevertheless, much like Reagan’s portrayal of Black women as welfare queens, the image and impression can stick because of the deep-seated racism within US society.

The fact of the historic strength of right-wing populism in the USA (and, for that matter many other capitalist societies) means that progressive organizations must initiate or extend their agitational and educational efforts to address the myths generated by the political Right. Ignoring the threat from right-wing populism or living in denial is not a sound strategy. Even though right-wing populism is grounded in irrationalism, that does NOT mean it lacks persuasive abilities. Neither does it mean that right-wing populism will be inhibited from becoming a broader political movement due to (inconsistent) democratic traditions in the USA.

It is time for a preemptive strike against right-wing populism and its continual efforts to shift our eyes away from the prize, and instead focus on alleged racial or ethnic enemies. In 1992, the slogan of the moment was “…It’s the economy, stupid…” Perhaps for today we should modify that slogan a bit. The problems we face in the economy do not rest with Jews, immigrants or Blacks: “…it’s the system, dummy…” In other words, this is the way that capitalism operates, so one either has to get used to it, or one needs to commit to changing it.

Guess which course I advocate?