My Really Big Picture Populist Nightmare

[Tom Rinaldo]

I posted a version of this a few days back in GD, so I apoligize in advance if you've read it already.

Deficits aren't the problem staring Americans in the face now. An untenable economic future is the problem, and while ongoing massive deficits could lead us to that state someday they do not currently pose our gravest economic threat. That threat is a recovery from the Great Recession in which most Americans never really recover. That threat is an ever increasing pool of job applicants and an ever shrinking pool of good paying jobs to apply for. That threat is the collapse of the American Middle Class, that abiding source of hope and stability in a world where most people are less fortunate than us. For a decade or more Americans have watched this moment approaching us like a slow train rolling, but now the gate crossing lights are all flashing red.

It used to be that belonging to the middle class in America meant being economically comfortable in an upwardly mobile society, where the flat out poor struggled to enter the working class, and the working class aspired to join the middle class. There was always a strong element of myth to that picture, but at least some truth also, enough to keep the myth alive and most people believing in a real chance for a brighter future, no matter how dark the present tense.

We were taught to have faith in American ingenuity and the genius of our competitive free market system, which had bestowed greatness on America, and riches to our people. Americas leading brand name products were highly valued around the world, and typically made in America. For the most part Americas companies were American then, and their well being was linked in great part to the well being of a strong American middle class, who were ready and able to consume the products that they made in America. How long ago that all seems now.

When America suffered the Great Depression we were blanketed by a dark cloud that covered the globe, and Americans suffered along with the people of many other nations. But while America suffered that Great Depression the potential was always evident that better days could and even should lie before us. We were a still young and rising nation with abundant oil reserves and a technological lead over the rest of the planet, especially in the wake of World War II which was almost exclusively fought on other nation’s soil, leaving all of our natural competitors in shambles.

We don't live in a world that looks like that any longer. Asia is rising, India is rising, and parts of South America are starting to stir also. Europe as well has regained much of its lost traction. But most of all, America is not the same as it was a half century ago. Increasingly the great American companies of yesteryear are no longer owned and/or controlled by Americans, and their products are increasingly foreign made. Far more meaningful than that though is this; the American middle class is rapidly ceasing to be the consumer market of choice for the corporations that we once thought of as American. They don't need our skills to make their products, they don't need our land to base their operations in, and they increasingly don't need us to be their primary customers either. They no longer need for us to prosper.

Nor do they much longer need for their earnings to help maintain the health and social fabric of the society that they long called home. The ownership elite can live on any continent now, many nations are available for them to inhabit. They can go wherever they are made most welcome and there find shelter from the slow break down of the fabric of American society. They can always venture out in search of greener fields, but most Americans can not. They are global while we are local, increasingly just another market to invest in or not, depending on the relative rate of their return on those investments. The corporate class holds the cards and those cards are trumping the American middle class.

Big business used to say that a rising tide lifts all boats, but their ships are no longer anchored in American waters. The tide they speak of may not be our own. Government was in part a human invention to counter the avarice of organized gangs wielding enough power to overwhelm any individual standing alone. National governments however are now on a slow slide toward impotency in the face of the giant international economic networks that are today’s large corporations. Instead of being corporate regulators, governments instead are becoming corporate facilitators.

Deficits aren’t the problem in America today; they should better be viewed as a symptom of a national state of denial that has allowed the real threat to America to rapidly advance, virtually unimpeded.

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[grantcart]

2. First thing is that anyone who discusses deficits as an amount should be waterboarded

Deficits only have meaning if they are discussed as a percent of GNP anything else is gibberish.


Comparing the deficit of today with that of LBJ is as sensible as comparing the population of today with that of LBJ.

[Tom Rinaldo]

4. I might soften that to threatening them with being waterboarded

...I'm trying to keep my means and ends straight :) Other than that, yup. It's kinda like saying wages have gone up 5 fold (or whatever the correct figure is) since the 60s and not bothering to mention that prices have risen also.

[harkadog]

8. You should take your waterboard over to the White House

I don't know if you would make it past the SS however. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100130/india_nm/india458266

[grantcart]

10. At no point did the President use the device that I was critical of.

[harkadog]

12. Did he discuss the deficit as a percent of GNP?

That was your post.

[grantcart]

13. No it wasn't

It was against people who decry the deficit by stating an amount, like this year's $ 1.3 trillion is 10 times more than 130 billion in 1985.

The deficit is a problem. Payments on interest rob money that we could be putting into health care for example.

The President is not allowing the right to dominate the issue and make it their own. In doing so he is cleverly containing the issue and not allowing it to become the Republicans bang the drum issue this year when more stimulus and job growth is needed.

[boppers]

3. Interesting perspective, it seems very foreign to me.

"They are global while we are local", for example, seems very odd to me, having grown up in a mindset where an "American" perspective would be characterized as almost xenophobic, isolated, ignorant. On a daily basis I work with people all over the globe, and travel at will, so for me, there is no "America" left, other than antiquated ideas about borders and slogans... perhaps I never saw it because of my youth. Perhaps the post-national age is upon us, and we have traded what made nations great, in order to eliminate what made nations awful.... interesting to think about, though, and try to wrap my head around.


edit: punctuation

[Tom Rinaldo]

5. Thanks for a thoughtful reply

Clearly the flow of ideas, culture, and people around the world has increased dramatically in the last 50 years, and I think that is a good thing. America was too parochial when we weren't being imperialistic. You clearly have the means, either personally or through work, to travel at will, but most Americans don't for economic reasons. I am not addressing xenophobia here, rather the international flow of capital freed from any sense of social responsibility to those who did most of the work to create that capital initially, or to the tax payers who funded an educated work force that created products that now are produced overseas. Most workers ARE local. Most Americans still live within a 100 miles of where they were born even though we are one of the most mobile cultures in the world.

Henry Ford established a template for American mass manufacturing industrialization. He felt he needed to pay his workers enough for them to be able to afford the products they were manufacturing. For decades American companies needed a healthy middle class because America was the surest and safest consumer market in the world. Increasingly corporations are looking elsewhere for consumers for their products outside of the U.S. When that happens the unemployment rate here becomes of less consequence to them. A case can be made that it isn't any corporations problem how the American middle class fares. Our corporate legal structure enshrines that concept. Corporations must produce profits for their shareholders, that is their responsibility. Those shareholders might include their own workers, or they may be Saudi princes, it makes no difference. If a plant makes a profit in Ohio but can make a bigger profit situated in Thailand, a strong case can be made that the corporation has an obligation to make that move.

When America's large employers were mostly still family owned businesses, many of those businesses felt a bond of loyalty to the communities in which they were located, and that in turn influenced some of their business decisions and practices. Those bonds have severely eroded in the corporate era. If we had a strong Federal government that clearly represented the interests of American citizens while regulating corporations, the system might be workable. But our government is increasingly "owned" by those corporations now,and guided by their lobbyists, with the interests of average Americans seldom adequately protected. Fundamentally, it's not a question of borders. With or without borders tens of millions of people can't just pull up stakes and move every time that jobs do, due to the increased international flow of capital toward wherever their expenses will be least.

[boppers]

6. "capital freed from any sense of social responsibility" is certainly a problem.

From my frame of reference, as I understand it (and again, this is a 30-something perspective, so I'm limited by my personal education and experiences):

Part of how the US became such a powerhouse is *because* we were willing to exploit slave labor (literally), "appropriate" a continent's resources by force, and amass capital via violence and labor exploitation for the first 240 years of the country, and continue to do so.

While the Ford story is compelling, I can't help but wonder how much of it is a romanticized perspective, where some segments of US society have always been exploited, marginalized, and what we are seeing now is merely a continuation of that trend. We can look back on the 50's and marvel at the American standard of living then... if we're measuring by the white, male, middle class standard, in industrial areas. Loggers still lived on subsistence wages in pacific coast company towns, miners were still dying at young ages in the south and east, and farmers were scratching out a living on the backs of migrant farmhands all over the country... to say nothing of the exploitation of minorities that was (and still is, though to a lesser extent) rampant.

Looking at a larger trend in the story of the United States, we have Standard Oil, Railroad barons, Steel Magnates, Fruit kings, and even (in terms of car companies) the eventual "Big Three" destroying jobs and businesses around the country in pursuit of their own power. Depending on the time frame, different entities were exploiting different groups (to the benefit of other groups), but I can't think of a time when there weren't significant examples of large scale corporations or businesses exploiting workforces to benefit others. Perhaps one thing that has changed, and possibly accelerated this trend, is more readily available transportation and communication. Perhaps another thing that has changed is that legal structures were enacted that required less exploitation of domestic minorities for the benefit of the middle class, leading to companies seeking out other venues where it was still legal to exploit women, children, and minority ethnic groups.

A bigger change in manufacturing, as well (occurring with greater complexity over the last 130 years) is the displacement of workers with machinery. Initially (referring back to automotive manufacturing), craftsmen were replaced with assembly lines. This made assembly line workers happy, but it destroyed the wages of craftsmen. Later, as assembly lines improved in efficiency, less and less skill was required, and the more skilled workers were phased out. This made the workers (who still had jobs) happy, but like the craftsmen before them, many were displaced in the name of efficiency. This cycle continued, until eventually a great number of jobs were automated to a degree where robotics would displace human labor, or marginalized "slave labor" (which is available globally) was more profitable for the company.

Looking inward, in terms of my own career, I've been in software development for 20 years, which has been something of a global workforce for a while now, simply because the workplace is often so virtualized that geography is more of an inconvenience than an impediment. I don't have a nice TV, I live in a smallish residence, I can't really afford "vacations", I've never purchased an item of furniture worth more than $100, I haven't had healthcare for years, and travel for work is simply part of the job... but I'm thankful to have gotten lucky (?) enough to have landed in an industry which constantly displaces itself *with* itself, rather than displacing itself geographically or mechanically. In terms of social responsibility, I generally prefer to work for smaller companies, simply because those are the corporations that do still worry about their community, about their workers... even if the community is a virtual one.

Sorry about the rambling, and thanks for the brain food!

[eridani]

7. Tom's one of DU's most thoughtful posters

That's why the substantive exchange.

[Tom Rinaldo]

19. I want to thank you for this complement

It meant a lot to me.

[Tom Rinaldo]

16. What a great ramble, if a ramble it was

I think you were rather cogent, but you covered a lot of ground. In America, dreams and myths blend in unique and unusual ways. The American dream was always mythic, but that is part of where it derives enough power to have always actually contributed to shaping our actual future, going all the way back. A lot of what you described in telling detail about our history I attempted to short cut my way through with this sentence:

"There was always a strong element of myth to that picture, but at least some truth also, enough to keep the myth alive and most people believing in a real chance for a brighter future, no matter how dark the present tense."

American reality has always been more complex, and darker, than the American dream; but the American dream has always helped shape American reality since it fueled optimism that helped people persevere in attempting to achieve their own American dreams, with mixed results. That continues to this day as evidenced by our electing Barack Obama President in 2008 with hope and change as central themes of his campaign.

There has always been massive exploitation in America, and there have always been strong liberation movements here also. A descendant of slaves, Martin Luther King drew upon the strength of the American Dream when he articulated his own dream for America. So America has been an inspiration to much of the world even while we helped plunder much of the world. Ho Chi Minh was inspired by our Declaration of Independence...

But I digress, lol. Staying inside our borders for a moment, American history is a mixed bag, and not totally separate from the history of western civilization and African influences, and later other world influences, by any means. But it is different from that of most nations in profound ways also. You mention the exploitation of the Big Three Auto Makers rightfully so, but there was also the rise of the United Auto Workers, who negotiated and won a solid middle class income with strong benefits for workers who were not necessarily well educated nor well situated in a traditional classist society. The Union movement accomplished great things for tens of millions of Americans, overcoming powerful entrenched forces, seemingly against great odds. The Civil Rights movement ultimately did the same.

The situation you describe yourself in does not easily fit the concept of inter generational upward mobility. In many ways the middle class in your parents generation, including the educated and the unionized, grew up and lived in more economically secure times, with access to good health insurance, and regular vacations etc.

You mention how groups of people exploited different groups of people over time, and even that was woven into the American Dream. At one point Irish immigrants were treated like total dirt, same with Chinese etc. I am from mixed Italian and Irish working class American heritage. New immigrants groups coming to America took a certain amount of exploitation in stride, in the hopes that their children would grow up as "full Americans" and escape from those ghettos. And to an extent, in brutally imperfect ways, that has happened in America. The chance for upward social mobility is part of the fabric of the American dream.

Part of the rise of the American middle class is because there was never complete agreement in the ownership class that fostering a real middle class in America would not be in their own long term interest. Not only did a middle class fuel consumerism, it also allowed the United States to experience relative social stability, making this country an attractive place to base operations in as well as to invest in.

I am rambling also, lol. Your post touched on so many different areas of possible discussion...

[puebloknot]

9. We already need an American Marshall Plan to restore our country ...

... to economic wholeness. But the spirit that drove that enterprise no longer exists, and people are now just fodder for the machine of global capitalism. "American Exceptionalism" has had its day, and the world moves on.

Pretty depressing. On bad days, I think the only answer will be total breakdown of social/economic norms all over the globe, massive death, and some kind of new birth/new awakening. The Fundies say it's so, based on the Book of Revelations; the New Agers say it's so based on a lot of prophetic writings.

I recently saw the film "The Road," and I think it is going to inspire the sale of a lot of antidepressant medications. Hey, maybe that's it. Commerce rises again. But wait, it would be Big Pharma, not the little guy, that would make all the profits.

How do we break out of living in a stacked deck?

[Tom Rinaldo]

20. "How do we break out of living in a stacked deck?"

The only clue I have begins with increased populist rage, of the type people have against the bank bailouts, except more. For the record I am not saying that some type of bank bailout wasn't essential by the time Obama was elected. Had the banking system completely broken down common suffering would have increased ten fold. But the fact that it ever became necessary, and how it all played out, infuriated a lot of people across the political spectrum.

The most important victory of the Right in America over the last 30 has been their largely sucessful drive to make Big Government, not Big Business, the focus for populist attacks. And since NAFTA was a Democratic Party initiative, many of those fearing upheavals because of it drifted into Perot's sphere of influence, not ours. To gather the strength we need, some of the working and middle class voters who today scream against Big Government need to develop a healthier fear of the increasing power that trans national corporations wield over our lives. The pendulum has to swing back to wanting government to act as a check on corporate power.

[puebloknot]

26. So we need a new, catchy meme that doesn't require a lot of critical thought ...

... to bring people back to their senses.

I'd like to think intelligent articles like your OP would do it, but the Sound Byte rules.

Perhaps an appeal to past history, when trusts were busted, and social laws came into being which protected children from having to work long hours and forfeit an education. How soon we forget!

Maybe a little pointing out that we all feel impatience with government and its inefficiencies, but what we've got now is slick perfection from corporations who have the bucks to buy anything and anybody.

Maybe I'm dreaming.

(edited for typos)

[Armstead]

11. You really piss me off.

...for telling the depressing truth.

No YOU don't piss me off. :)

But the truth you tell does.

I will take this one step further. It is our own damn fault. If we as a nation had not been so greedy, ignorant and short sighted, we could have held these corporations accountable for their behavior much earlier. We could have kept them to a reasonable size at many points along the line. We could have required them -- while we still had some degree of control over them -- to act like better citizens.

AND (to put it into the political context) ALL OF THIS is why so many progressives are so angry at the "centrist" Democratic Party. We (collectively) tried to expose the Emperor's New Clothes for years. We tried to get the Democratic Party to at least listen....But Nooooooo. Instead, common sense was allowed to be labeled "fringe leftism" by the Democratic leadership of all people. It's to be expected from Republicans and the right wing. But not the Democrats.

Globalization is probably inevitable, and it is good for wealth to be more equally distributed around the world. Instead of the form of Corporate Colonialism we have encouraged through our "free trade" policies, we could have implemented fair trade in which all nations were able to grow and raise their standard of living by balancing their domestic and export economies.


However, we're doing it in a way that is not helping anyone except the elites. We screwed the pooch.

We allowed the Corporate Oligarchs and their CONservative allies to bamboozle us. We made a hero out of GE's Jack Welch -- who was one of the worst examples of the "Screw the US. We're a transnational corporation now." We allowed and encouraged through our buying habits companies like Wal Mart to pressure US firms to shift from domestic manufacturing to overseas sweatshops so we could get cheap goods.

As ever-bigger monopolies were formed, average Americans sat back and swallowed Orwellian double-speak like "We have to eliminate competition to preserve competition." And "We have to lower your wages or eliminate your job to protect your standard of living."

AND (to put it into the political context) ALL OF THIS is why so many progressives are so angry at the "centrist" Democratic Party. We (collectively) tried to expose the Emperor's New Clothes for years. We tried to get the Democratic Party to at least listen....But Nooooooo. Instead, common sense was allowed to be labeled "fringe leftism" by the Democratic leadership of all people. It's to be expected from Republicans and the right wing. But not the Democrats.

The Democrats should have been giving the truth to counteract the Corporate CONservative lies that enabled all of this over the last three decades. They should have been enforcing anti-trust and otehr regulations to stop these mega-mergers. They should have been both helping to encourage better social values and economic justice.

Instead they went along and -- in the case of sellouts like Bill Clintion -- actually encouraged the very policies and ideology that allowed all of this to happen.

The nightmare scenerio you outline is not inevitable. Some of us foolishly cling to the hope that -- as Paul Wellstione famously said "We can do better."

But only if the Democratic Party stops ignoring this core issue, and stops misleading people and starts to be the party of fighting liberals and progressives.

[Tom Rinaldo]

18. Yeah, exactly...

I'm with you word for word, or damn near close to it anyway. Sometimes I think that there were those in our party, Bill Clinton comes to mind, who bought into a false vision of the future, who didn't/couldn't look around the corner to see what was actually coming. Remember in the short term, his terms, our economy had a significant surge and unemployment went down etc. I'm not sure how that type of seduction works to pull some who essentially are compassionate down that road, without seeing clearly where it will ultimately lead. Probably it had something to do with this point that you made:

"Globalization is probably inevitable, and it is good for wealth to be more equally distributed around the world. Instead of the form of Corporate Colonialism we have encouraged through our "free trade" policies, we could have implemented fair trade in which all nations were able to grow and raise their standard of living by balancing their domestic and export economies."

We failed in implementation. I have an atypical (for me) friendship with a moderate Republican corporate exec whose hobby made him a customer of mine which is the only way I ever would have met him. He is extremely well connected in the financial world and super wealthy, but fundementally fair at heart. He is furious at how most of the major players on Wall Street gamed the system with the bail out, and used it to consolidate their own vested interests. He believes the U.S. government is out gunned in dealing with those types.

But I too perhaps foolishly cling to some hope, though I am not quite sure why, that we still can alter the course we are on.

[Armstead]

24. We have been victims of Magical Thinking

There should be more discussions like this on DU and elsewhere.

Frankly, I think DU is typical of a basic problem in all of this. We yap back and forth at each otehr whether Obama is a great guy or not, or how awful republicans are or whether we need to be "pragmatic and moderate" or "go left" blah,blah.

All of that crap misses the larger points -- which is the need to totally change our thinking from the set of economic and political and social assumptions that have become embedded since Reagan. It's no longer a matter of "right and left" or liberal and conservative or even republican and democrat.

I don't mean we need some some kind of radical utopia socialist paradise. But we need ty0o get back to moderate common sense and common decency. Unfortunately, that has been so overshadowded by the "magical thinking" of the 80's and 90's that it seems radical today.

I think the US bought into a set of assumptions that were based on conservative fantasy. Do you remember all the nonsense that was being promulgated back then. "The end of history" and the notion that there would no longer be economic cycles because the economy would just continue to grow forever, and we would all benefit.

In that environment, there was a feeling that liberalism was dead because it was no longer relevant or necessary. After all, the economy would be generating wealth that would spread to everyone, and government was merely an impediment.

Oooops. Turned out we were wrong. Homes that we thought were money machines suddenly lost their value. We kept shipping jobs overseas and then -- ooops, now we're biothching that there are no more jobs.

Those benevolent corporations and financiers that we allowed to do whether they wanted. Ooops. Turns out they were immoral and greedy and, in many cases, stupid and reckless. And they gained far too much control over the economy. And they almost singlehandedly wrecked the economy. Ooops.


Your moderate republican friends sounds like the kind of person who actually may have more in common with a DU progressive than either would recognize or acknowledge....I don't mean they would necessarily agree on every issue -- But they might share a lot of similar basic values and ultimate goals.

I think of my father, who could be labeled a republican moderate conservative, but who was also very decent and open minded. He died in the mid-1980's, but he was appalled by the excesses of Reaganism and Jack Welch Corporatism because it offended his sense of decency. He actually said at the time that he basically agreed with everything Jesse Jackson said.

What I believe we need at this point is to actually strip away the stupid labels that are used to divide the populace, and get back to looking at these things in terms of common sense and decent values.

I don't mean we cave in. Rather it means gettig back to what the an assumption that honest liberals and honest conservatives may disagree on strategies, but that we all need to reassert decent human values and realistic assumptions again.

Maybe that sounds too idealistic and politically naive. But I think that part of what is needed is to get back to a sense of shared basic values instead of this "my team versus your team" approach that politics has devolved into.

I think that politics would actually get MORE civil of D's and R's were actually contesting over real policies. O read someone who made a really good point. When the real differences in ideology becomes too blurred, the personal aspect of partisan politics becomes nastier, and compromise becomes LESS possible.

In that sense I agree with Obama. My major disagreement with him is that he is too "centrist" which actually perpetuates the nasty personal side of politics. I think politics might actually become more workable if he took the same desire for bipartisanship -- but actually stood for a clear liberal alternative.

This may sound muddled. It's hard to boil it all down, but I hope to see more discussions here and elsewhere that actually acknowledge that we all have to cast off the stale stereotypes on all sides.

[Armstead]

28. Kicking this

[ProSense]

14. "Deficits aren’t the problem in America today; they should better be viewed as a symptom" The only

person who said anything remotely honest about Obama's spending cuts is Bernie Sanders, who said that there are programs that can be cut substantially, and others that need to be increased.

The response to spending cuts, even after learning that they will be targeted, is bizarre. It's as if people like Krugman are more concerned that the President is ceding to a Republican talking point than they are about what he is actually trying to do. President Obama has already said that these cuts will have no impact on his agenda for jobs, health care reform and other programs. In fact, he has announced several spending programs since advocating the spending freeze.

If the deficit was being run up for nonsense, the critics would be outraged. The claim that this advances a RW talking point is also ridiculous because if we were to be honest, we'd admit that Republicans are hypocrites when it comes to the deficit.

One cannot support Bush's tax cuts for the rich while claiming to be against wasteful spending. The reality is that if the President can cut useless spending and it only saves $25 billion a year, that's $25 billion he can spend on something else. Most likely he's going to direct some of the funds saved to programs that will effect even bigger deficit reduction.

[Tom Rinaldo]

17. You know with this OP I wasn't really focusing on the Obama Administration

Obviously what if anything to do about deficits now is in the news currently, and that was a springboard for what I wrote, but I was looking at what I consider to be a much larger sweeping issue when I focused on the future of the American Middle Class. I wasn't either attacking nor defending Obama's proposals about what to do immediately about our economic condition. I agree that deficits can and do cause problems for America in the long run, and that we do need to consider the long run while we deal with the present. But my post is about something deeper and I feel graver than the threat of continued deficits.

[Drunken Irishman]

15. Deficits won't be an issue if unemployment drops.

[alcibiades_mystery]

21. I love how the "real threat" to America

is the end of colonialism.

The American progressive movement became a joke the day it abandoned global protest (say, The International) for the strictly speaking AMERICAN worker.

What's dead is the privilege of the American worker. But maybe that's a good thing.

[smitra]

22. This is really the core issue.

I am an American of foreign origin, I was born in India. Addressing the posts on this thread that seem to imply that emphasizing being American is somehow (even just a bit) jingoistic and exclusionary... that is what I would like to address. Despite the freer flow of information, which has made many of us all over the world aware, and to some extent respectful, of different cultures - and that is a good thing - we are not anywhere near being one global society, with one government that is accepted by people in every corner of the globe as being 'ours'. There is nothing negative about this -- it is just the way it is. As an example, the son of a fellow academic here in upstate NY - a liberal thinker - married a woman of Indian origin, and he and his whole family spent a week or two in the relatively small town of Meerut, India where the wedding took place. My colleague's wife set up an excellent web site describing their trip and their experiences. No 'Western superiority' here .. just a sincere attempt at describing their experience of a different culture and trying to make it understandable to the expected local audience here. She ends with the sentiment .. 'Could I live there? I realized no, I could not. For the simple reason that it is not my home'. Similarly, my parents who live in India visit - stay for 3 months or so - and have a positive experience here (we live in a 95% white neighborhood). They appreciate much of the American work ethic - the ease with which many things can get done here (esp. in dealing with the govt. agencies - say the DMV) in comparison to back home. Still, they would not like to live here permanently. Those of us who are immigrants, and have made the conscious decision to live here, try to integrate both cultures - esp. in our children - and that is not an easy task, and we do the best we can.

So my point is that we are not going to be one 'global society' anytime soon. While being tolerant, respectful and compassionate to others, we are still going to care more about those closer to us. We are going to care more about a devastating earthquake in California than Haiti - and I mean this only in a relative sense. Being a country does mean something more than just borders or patriotic expressions a few times a year - there is a sense of a shared culture, values, etc. that are in some sense at least different from some others.

So if we are a country, then we must be able to sustain it. And we cannot be sustainable if we have all the clothes in our closets come from the Honduras, China, Vietnam, etc., the drywall used to build our homes be from China, the cars in the garage from Japan, the toys our kids play with be from China, and so on. The food we eat has to be largely what can be supplied locally, for example. Quoting something I had heard before: we have to have our own feet firmly planted on our ground before we can open the doors and windows of our home to let the breezes from all sides come in. And this is what we should strive to.

Therefore, protectionism cannot be a dirty word. It does NOT imply exclusivity.

[Tom Rinaldo]

23. Thank you for an extremely interesting post.

I hope you will excuse me if I wait to comment on it further until later today, or perhaps tomorrow. I have an extremely busy day today and most run out of the house in a few moments.

[Odin2005]

25. Excellent post!

:yourock:

[PurityOfEssence]

27. Worse still: the very model of American success is predicated on having a large middle class

67% of the GNP is consumer spending; the serfs need to make money.

The mean-spirited need to crush others into a lower-wage world betrays one of the harsher truths of conservatism: for many, it's not enough to be at the groaning and overloaded banquet table of delicacies, one has to have a scrawny, toothless beggar to throw one's bones at. It's not enough to do well, one has to do BETTER than others, and one needs their demonstrative privation to prove one's own worth.

Admittedly, the human is a decidedly mixed bag, and amid this endemic nastiness is much goodness and altruism, but the dangerous truth is that the American economic model simply doesn't work unless there's a broad middle. That is effectively gone, and much as the American habit to deny failure can keep up the proverbial appearances, it can't continue forever. People are falling farther and farther behind.

The mythic American character of the lone cowboy on the prairie who's taking care of himself and not asking anything from anyone belies the true nature of life: interdependence. While the Shane-like myth endures and manifests itself through idiocies like Libertarianism, the dark side has always been there: selfishness. This was the whispered and tolerated downside of this great self-reliance, but it was viewed as a moral fault and a failure that was the unfortunate by-product of the otherwise sterling trait of individualism. What destroyed this country was the 1980 election and the atavistic, systematic destruction of the social safety net that has cynically whipped us back to a kind of neo-feudalism.

Beaten down by the glowing rhetoric of being the land of opportunity, it is anathema for most to admit that they're not making it, not here, where the only people who can't make it are the lazy and the generally worthless. Finely-honed since the early splitting of the working- and middle-classes along racial lines over affirmative action, the reactionaries know all too well how set the have-littles against the have-nots and sucker the ever-sinking middling' classes into siding with their overlords against each other, and thus themselves.

Now, with the bursting dam of corporate moneyspeak, things look really grim. What's impressive, though, is how they'll pin all of these setbacks on the evil liberals, even though there is nary one to find in national office.

They will not play fair; they're angry that their hopes of bloated, gilded-age mega-riches aren't as founded as they were a few years ago, and they NEED to play every unfair advantage to the nth degree, regardless of the viability of the model. It's selfishness writ large, and only immediate gratification truly counts. Truly, global climate change is a poetic fate for us: to protect ourselves, our culture and our offspring, we need to come together and make some sacrifices. Fat fucking chance.