Don't Look! Don't Touch! These are for You!

Not for nothing did cynical employees of the BLM give it the nickname,  "Bureau of Lousy Management."

Foremost among the not-so-wonderful agencies managing our federal public lands, the BLM tends to meet its multi-use mandate through addled non-logic.

It preserves antiquities for us by hiding them from us.  Now this bizarre policy has struck close to home.

For years, a dedicated group of conservationists, apolitical and indefatigable, have fought to protect a special place in the Robledo Mountains outside Las Cruces, NM.  It is a lovely place to hike and explore.  One day more than 20 years ago, a hiker and explorer named Jerry McDonald, a graduate student at New Mexico State University. made a discovery that he instinctively knew was important, even though he was not a geologist or archeologist.

Animal footprints, made hundreds of thousands of years before dinosaurs existed, had been preserved by an accident of nature in red sandstone layers of the rock that formed the Robledos next to what once was a primeval sea.  McDonald's instinctive appreciation of their value soon was at odds with the politics, petty jealousies and intense competition for funding among the esoteric sciences.

While museum curators, academics and politicians prattled, vandals and off-road terrorists savaged the initial site.  Flash floods added to the damage.  A nearby quarry scooped up some of the  priceless footprints and their fragments wound up  in tile floors, chimneys and garden walls of the Mesilla Valley.

McDonald persisted and so did the conservationists.  Finally the pols got the message and passed legislation creating the Prehistoric Trackways National Monument. The 5,280-acre monument was established, according to the BLM website, "to conserve, protect, and enhance the unique and nationally important paleontological, scientific, educational, scenic, and recreational resources and values."

And how, pray, does the BLM "protect" the area's most spectacular "paleontological, scientific, educational and scenic" resource, the paleozoic trackways themselves? By excavating them and carting them off to a museum 200 miles away in Albuquerque, where they are kept under lock and key, to be viewed only by those whose applications for a reservation are approved by the bureaucracy!

Many of us who rallied behind McDonald and the friends of the Paleozoic trackways assumed (wrongly) that national monument status would require the BLM to preserve these resources in situ.  They didn't pack up Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl (did they?) and truck it off to a locked warehouse in Denver, leaving Chaco Canyon to serve as a race track for ORV cowboys.

For years, it has been a ritual in our family that visitors would join us on the hike up a nearby arroyo to the "discovery site" where McDonald first found animal footprints.  We would scavenge the vandalized site for hours, shrieking  with delight when we found a single print, or an exotic marine fossil.  Without exception, our visitors experienced a special joy in making contact with creatures that had walked the very land under their feet millions of years ago.  However fine the samples hidden away in Albuquerque might be, viewing them there pales beside the adventure of finding them in situ.

Those of us who enjoy walking the beautiful canyons of the American southwest in search of the legacy of the Anasazi, Mogollan, Freemont and other early American builders and artisans have long become accustomed to the BLM's ethic of protecting antiquities  for us by hiding them from us. Cliff house ruins aren't on the maps.  There are no signs pointing to them. But at least the rock houses, potsherds, arrowheads, petroglyphs and climbing niches remain where their creators put them.  If you're lucky enough to find one, you can appreciate how those first inhabitants of the west lived and learned and manifested their knowledge of their world.  You don't have to request a reservation at some far away museum to see them.

Last time my son and I set out to walk up the arroyo to Jerry McDonald's "discovery site," the access was closed off.  No signs identified the national monument; it could just as well have been another piece of trash-littered southwestern desert. We decided to drive on out to Broad Canyon, to look for petroglyphs.  We didn't know that behind the locked gate they were taking away the very reasons for having a national monument in the first place, and stashing them in a crypt in Albuquerque, far from the eyes of those who battled to preserve them.

Who Has 'No Access' to What???

Why must there always be bad news with the good? 

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal headlined the good news: we're getting rid of Larry Summers, co-architect of the great recession and of the recovery efforts that rewarded rich and incompetent CEOs while failing to provide jobs for millions of unemployed working men and women.

Tucked within the article was the bad news: unnamed sources have told the Journal that Dr. Kidglove is going to appoint a CEO -- yes, a corporate CEO! -- to replace Summers.  Such an appointment, the article said, would assuage concerns that corporations don't have access to the White House.  The article gave no source of the "concerns" other than the author's own fantasies, or his Murdoch editor's, or the minds of the two remaining corporate CEOs who have not yet been given the opportunity to write economic or social legislation for the entire country.  Like the Journal's sources, the two CEOs asked not to be named because of the embarrassment of not having set foot in the White House except for social occasions in more than two years.

Like snowballs, gobs of bovine excrement roll downhill.  By today, the media consensus is that the administration must assuage "concerns" about corporate access to the White House by appointing a CEO to succeed Summers.

As Art Buchwald used to say, you couldn't make this stuff up.

No corporate access?

Who in the hell crammed into the Oval office to accept Dr. Kidglove's sellout of the public option in the health care bill?  If those weren't the top people from pharmaceutical manufacturing corporations, then Labron James isn't in Heat.

Who the hell wrote the loopholes in the health care act that the insurers have already begun using to raise rates to intolerable levels, refuse coverage to children with prior illnesses and put unrealistically low limits on lifetime coverage for major health problems?  It wasn't any of the now 50 million Americans with no health care plans.  It wasn't any of the young cancer victims I know through my work in cancer survivors' organizations.  It wasn't Dennis Kucinich.  It was insurance c--o-r-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n-s.

Who the hell fueled the bizarre thought process that persuaded the Gang of Five on the Supreme Court to give corporations a license for unlimited spending to buy candidates for every elected office in the land?  Mother Theresa?

Who the hell bamboozled the Oval Office into botching the BP oil spill!  Who the hell bulldozed Dr. Kidglove into backing away from a really tough climate and energy bill?  Hint: look up the richest billionaires in the energy industry.  They run c-o-r-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n-s.

Who the hell do you think has intimidated Dr. Kidglove to endorse the mindless but oh, so profitable policy of endless war?  It couldn't possibly have been the defense industry c-o-r-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n-s and the Pentagon, also known as the military-industrial complex, could it? Nah.  Had to be Islam.

Once upon a time a president with gonads fired a big-ego general who defied him, reminding Dugout Doug that the Constitution made the president the commander-in-chief.  Today, Gen. Petraeus defies Dr. Kidglove and says he'll keep troops in Afghanistan as long as he damned well pleases.  No contrary word has been heard fro you-know-who.

He is, after all, Corporate Amnerica's general.  Ain't no power on earth stronger than that.

An Accurate Portrait of Rightward America

Even a casual reading of the local daily is enlightening.  Not because it manifests any of the traditional journalistic virtues -- it doesn't -- but because its picture of this corner of the American southwest lays naked the truths that underlie the country's drift rightward.

A recent edition displayed on Page One a photograph of a billboard that read: "More Mosques.  Less Jobs.  Vote Democratic?"

The grammatical barbarism, "less" where "fewer" is required, represents the mass ignorance of an American electorate that was downright proud to have twice voted into the Oval Office a man who got through college on unearned C's bestowed because of his family's political and financial clout.

The first phrase, "More Mosques," depicts the overt hatred and implicit fear that motivates our voting class.  Fear and hatred of "them" drives the engine of American politics: American citizens of German extraction in World War I, of Japanese extraction in World War II, of Asian extraction during the Korean and Vietnam wars,  of Arab extraction and Muslim beliefs today.   Do you believe that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion applies to American citizens who worship in mosques?  You're a traitor who supports terrorism.

The second phrase, about jobs, implies that Democrats caused the record unemployment that actually resulted from eight years of Bush economic insanity.  This is representative of another factor in America's drift rightward: voters' willingness to believe any lie, deception, innuendo, rumor or misleading statement that is repeated often enough on TV.

You can't pick up a copy of the local daily without being assailed with reasons to fear.  Our proximity to the Mexican border makes us particularly vulnerable.  "They" sneak across from Mexico and trash our beautiful desert and sell drugs to our innocent youth and take guns back in the other direction that are used to kill our ranchers and travelers and rape our women.

Recently the paper reported on a radio debate between our two candidates for Congress.  The incumbent, a Democrat who has been right on most of the important issues, wavered when asked if he supported much-needed legislation to protect our public lands from development, vehicular degradation and other misuse.  He said he feared that having wilderness on the border would give haven to drug smugglers, human traffickers and deadly assassins.  In fact, the legislation would enhance border security by providing a broader zone for law enforcement patrols than exists now. Never mind.  The fear frenzy has been whipped up by the Tea Party crowd, and not even a good man is strong enough to stand up against it.

A local columnist commented the other day on a commission, appointed by the governor, tasked with a broad range of responsibilities on energy policy.  This is an area where the lie-mongers have succeeded in planting a desperate fear of "Cap 'n' Trade" among voters, most of whom haven't the foggiest notion what's really at stake in the effort to control carbon emissions that are killing the planet.  He took no sides on the core issue, but lamented that it would be decided by an appointed commission.  Such things should be decided, he wrote, by elected officials who are "accountable to the voters."

As long as reasonable people continue to delude themselves that elected officials are accountable to anyone other than corporations and a handful of obscenely wealthy Americans, social justice, civil liberties, public health and welfare and the noblest ideals of the Founding Fathers will continue to wither and die.

When we finally realize who's running things -- if we ever figure it out -- it will require one hell of a revolution to restore democracy.

Think the Glass is Half Empty? You Got a Attytood Problem!

I remember when real Democrats walked the land, and when their candidates threw their hats into the ring on Labor  Day, in Cadillac Square, in sweat-stained Detroit.

Today,  most Democrats are really Republicans  in cheap suits. The other night a "Democratic" president preened before $30,000 a plate fat cats in plutocratic Greenwich, Conn. "back country," and derided  Democrats who "just congenitally see the glass as half empty."

Honest Injun.  That's what Barack Obama said. The fat cats thought it was hilarious.

While Dr. Kidglove was entertaining the super-rich with his disdain for the poor folks, the number of Americans without health insurance rose by 4.3 million to a record 50.7 million people.  Silly fools probably think their glasses are half empty.  Ha ha.

For forty per cent of American families, the 30 grand Kidglove's fat cats paid per plate to hear him gabble would represent an increase in annual income.  Yep, two out of every five Americans take home less than the cost of one plate of food at the Democratic fund raiser.  Damn idiots probably think their glasses are less than half full. Ha ha.

Official Labor Department statistics place the unemployment rate in this country at 9.6 per cent, representing almost 15 million people.  A nationwide unemployment study by a non-profit, independent academic group estimated that the government statistics dramatically understate the real amount of joblessness in this country.  They put the probable unemployment rate above 12 per cent, representing nearly 22 million unemployed working-age Americans.  Those demented asses probably think their glasses are half empty. Ha ha.

As Dr. Kidglove regaled his rich supporters, 3.8 million more Americans joined the official poverty pool as determined by government income standards.  One in seven Americans now lives in "official" poverty.  These misguided souls probably consider their glasses to be more than half empty. Hidey ha hee haw.

Thirty-thousand dollars to eat peas and chicken with the First Fabricator.

I know a small-businessman who couldn't get a $30,000 loan to save his business, at the same time that Dr. Kidglove was committing trillions to save the Wall Street crowd that caused the worst recession in the U.S. since the 1930s.  It put his 27 employees out of jobs and his family into the poverty-income bracket.

I know a young man who worked two jobs, stayed up all night studying, and still found time to work to elect Barack Obama president while he was taking on heavy debt to get a college degree. He got his degree, but is still without a job.  The Wall Street crowd is collecting record bonuses.  The top paid CEOs in the United States are the ones who have laid off the most workers.

None of this seems right to me.  But then, I just congenitally see the glass as half empty. Ain't that hilarious?

Sorry. We Can't Get There from Here

"Change," John Steinbeck wrote, "comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass."

The stealthy change that has transformed our country into a corporate kakistocracy has been more akin to a snake in the grass than wildflowers.  Chris Hedges, the distinguished former journalist and scholar, referred to it recently as "a coup d'etat in slow motion by corporations."

"Barack Obama is a brand," Hedges told the blogger Rob Kall. "Barack Obama serves the interest of the corporate state and the permanent war economy as assiduously as George W. Bush.

"I think we have to begin to understand that corporations have won and we've lost. And then we have to begin to build resistance movements based on that knowledge. And we're not there yet."

The great question is, will we ever "get there?"

Recently I reconnected with an old friend, a quasi-retired college professor who has always shared many of my political views.  Somewhat to my surprise, he opened our conversation by defending the Obama record: "Considering what he inherited," my friend said, "Obama has done about all that could be expected.  I grade him 95 per cent positive."

Yet as our conversation was ending, my friend sighed and said, "the country we knew as younger men no longer exists.  And we may never get it back."

Naomi Klein, Nation columnist and  author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, says,"We have to build that independent left. It has to be so strong and so radical and so militant and so powerful that it becomes irresistible."

I agree, and have written often that if we do not or cannot form a strong Progressive third party in this country, democracy is doomed.

Now, I fear, it's too late for Hedges's resistance movements or Klein's vigorous new left.  The battle is lost.

Some of the ugliest, bitterest, least qualified and most radically far right people ever to hold office in this country will be elected to Congress in November.  The corporate kakistocracy that did so much damage in the Bush years, and that Obama failed to stifle, will become a runaway freight train.

In their book 13 Bankers, the brilliant economist Simon Johnson and his associate, James Kwaak,argued that the key forces behind the transformation of the financial sector and the resulting financial crisis were political, not simply economic.

"Business interests in all sectors organized a takeover of political power," Kwaak explains. "(It) pushed organized labor and other groups protecting middle-class interests to the sidelines and made possible decades of policies that have enriched the super-rich at the expense of everyone else, including the merely affluent. Finance was simply the biggest and most profitable of these sectors–and, we would emphasize, the one best able to hold the government hostage in a financial and economic crisis."

Kwaak agrees with economists who have written that the turning point in the corporatization of the United States ocurred in the 1970s. 

"The Nixon presidency saw the high-water market of the regulatory state," Kwaak writes. "The demise of traditional liberalism occurred during the Carter administration, despite Democratic control of Washington, when highly organized business interests were able to torpedo the Democratic agenda and begin the era of cutting taxes for the rich that apparently has not yet ended today."

The Tea Party kooks and the blathering fools on the TV networks would have us believe that all of this was propelled by a profound shift in public opinion.  But in Winner-Take-All Politics, the authors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson demolish the myth.  Most of the public, they demonstrate, still resents economic inequality and believes in taxing the rich to help the less advantaged.  But in Congress, where money talks and the politicians obey, the concerns of men and women in the street back home don't matter.  “When well-off people strongly supported a policy change," they write, "it had almost three times the chance of becoming law as when they strongly opposed it. When median-income people strongly supported a policy change, it had hardly any greater chance of becoming law than when they strongly opposed it."

After November, things will only get worse.  The country we knew as young men has vanished.  We will never get it back.

To the Barricades! The Geezer Revolution is Coming!

When the new American revolution comes -- as inevitably it will -- it will probably be geezers who are first to the barricades.

While we slept, Dr. Kidglove's deficit reduction commission colluded with corporations and Congress to hack away at Social Security benefits. 

"Oh," we shrugged, re-checking the iffy status of our 401(k) and other dwindling savings, "they'll never touch Social Security."

They've done touched it, folks, and ain't a thang we can do about it now.  Get used to it: cheap dog food kind of tastes like, oh, Spam if you load it with ketchup.

While the lap dogs of the media kept us busy fretting over celebrity divorces, phonied-up videos of a black USDA official speaking to the NAACP, and  manufactured controversy about whether the First Amendment applies to Islamic American citizens, that deficit commission was meeting in absolute secrecy.

We still haven't figured out that the moment anything happens behind closed doors in Washington, John Q. Public is going to suffer for it.  When the something that's happening involves a whole gaggle of outspoken enemies of Social Security and all other aspects of the social safety net, the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

Now, these dudes who had made up their minds even before they began meeting in secret to agree with one another, will make their official report in December -- right after the Tea Party kooks, Republican extremists and other whores of corporate America have swept control of Congress.

So when Alan Simpson, Pete Peterson and the rest of the gang tell Congress that the geezers have sucked too long and too hard at the public teats, you can bet that Congress will rubber stamp it  tout de suite.

The vote is rigged anyway because the House has already passed a  resolution calling for an up-or-down/no-amendments vote on the Commission's recommendations, a procedure that assures the enactment of the commission's recommendations.

Every significant aspect of corporate government is rigged against We the People who formed this more perfect union. 

Once, ten per cent return on investment was considered a fair and decent profit for an American business.  Then Wall Street and the big investment banks -- yes, the outfits we had to bail out with our tax dollars a couple of years ago -- decided that ten per cent was peanuts, wouldn't pay the big bonuses CEOs were entitled to. 

So they bought a few more congressmen and began to work away at the American labor movement, which created the middle class.  In secrecy and shady deals, American labor was so neutered that American jobs, particularly in manufacturing, went "Poof" and reappeared overseas. And corporate profit margins soared -- 20 per cent, 25, 30. . . .Exxon Mobil!

It isn't coincidence that trillions went to save corporations and a few dimes went to create jobs for the millions of unemployed Americans.

Perhaps the jobless will join the geezers on the barricades when revolution comes.   Who do you imagaine discovered that dog food tastes like Spam if you load it with ketchup?

It wasn't the fat cats in corporate suites and boardrooms.