America's Zen koan: What is "freedom"?

Koan:
noun, plural koans, koan. Zen.
1. a nonsensical or paradoxical question to a student for which an answer is demanded, the stress of meditation on the question often being illuminating. Dictionary.com

America is in many ways the freest country in the world and then again it isn't.

For example: America is a country where a wealthy and famous father of six children and grandfather of five, can, at the ripe age of 65, dominate the national conversation by freely deciding to become a woman and simultaneously, America can be a country where a single mother who works full time at minimum wage, and her children, can live in poverty.

A typical, traditional Zen Koan would be, "what is the sound of one hand clapping?"

Today our Zen koan to meditate upon would be: Is there a connection between these two realities, these two experiences of the reality of freedom, these two Americas... is there any "cause and effect"?

Since our celebrity culture doesn't devote many magazine covers to them, what, exactly does the term "working poor" mean?

While poverty is often associated with joblessness, a significant proportion of the poor are actually employed.The working poor are adversely affected in terms of many organizational outcomes such as job attachment, career attainment, and job attainment because of mediating factors that are cognitive, affective, and relational. Largely because they are earning such low wages, the working poor face numerous obstacles that make it difficult for many of them to find and keep a job, save up money, and maintain a sense of self-worth. The official working poverty rate in the US has remained somewhat stable over the past four decades, but many social scientists argue that the official rate is set too low, and that the proportion of workers facing significant financial hardship has instead increased over the years. Changes in the economy, especially the shift from a manufacturing-based to a service-based economy, have resulted in the polarization of the labor market. This means that there are more jobs at the top and the bottom of the income spectrum, but fewer jobs in the middle. Wikipedia

In this the United States is rather unique among developed nations, again from Wikipedia:

Credit Wikipedia

The closest I can come to answering the Zen koan I first proposed would be the following "counter-koan"

Perhaps a single, American, working mother, over the age of 65, would like to transition to being a man:

Credit Wikipedia

The media’s group embrace of Jenner’s transition should be seen for what it is — not a revolutionary step toward minority rights but a money grab for ads, ratings, sales and buzz in a culture of provocation and greed without ethics or conscience. Kathleen Parker - Washington Post 

The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
Jeremy Bentham

 "The rest is commentary — [and now] go study." 

Rabbi Hillel the Elder

DS

Inequality: a tale of two pyramids

David Seaton's News Links

This pyramid appeared in the Washington Post.

Looking at it I was reminded of another pyramid in a classic poster from the 19th century, which could be a "poetic" rendering of the graph from the Post.

The signs are all around us, if you want to take a peek at the near future, have a look at the scheme Jeff Bezos has dreamed up over at Amazon. It is called "Mechanical Turk" and its goal is to turn clerical tasks that require education and specialized training into sweatshop piece work like making T-shirts in Bangladesh. I urge my readers take a very close look at it to see where their training and skills might be used and what pay they would receive for performing these tasks.

That is the story: in developed countries we are in the process of recreating the class differences and the ensuing class struggle of the 19th century, but this time in a world where consciousness, class or otherwise, with the new social networks, quickly becomes universal. The 1% are sitting on a powder keg. These graphs explain the Tea Party and the Koch brother's spending millions bankrolling it. The idea is to keep a person from thinking clearly and like the fellow said, avoid an individual being "at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

If the problem of controlling the "powder keg" is one of consciousness, the system seems to be working rather well. It would appear that converting human beings into mental cripples is an enormous industry and they have to catch them rather young. The following is a sample of what a school teacher wrote Thomas Friedman, quoted in the New York Times.

We are dumbing down our classes.  It is an inexorable downward progression in which one day all a kid will need to pass is to have a blood pressure. The kids today are not different in ‘nature.’ ... The difference is that back then, although they didn’t want to, they would do the work. Today, they won’t. ... This is a real conversation I had with a failing student who was being quite sincere in her comments: ‘I know you’re a really good teacher, but you don’t seem to realize I have two hours a night of Facebook and over 4,000 text messages a month to deal with. How do you expect me to do all this work?’

Maybe Americans are finally waking up, but for the moment, from my perch on the other side of the Atlantic, the only one really talking any sense is Naquasia LeGrand. DS

Globalization: King and country

David Seaton's News Links

We are white mice participating in a great historical experiment.

The idea of completely untrammeled, frictionless capitalism has only been a theoretical construct till now, but we are almost there today.

There are basically two -- untried -- theories of how this would play out.

On one hand the free market liberals believe that, if not interfered with, the markets will bring mankind an endless cornucopia of good things that will lift all boats.

On the other hand Marx believed that left to its own devices, the system would tear itself apart.

Us white mice have front row seats at this experiment, rather like crab lice at the birth of Jesus.

All over the world and increasingly in developed countries like the USA, this metastasizing process of anarcho-capitalism that I call "stateless-imperialism" is producing a hardening mass of misery, which in America is known as the "working poor": an intractable class of unemployed, or underemployed human beings, or if they have work (often needing several jobs to get by) they are invariably overworked, over exploited, always underpaid, socially excluded and in general, politically inert. These are America's untermenschen, living in what is said to be the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world. A place which fills its mouth with phrases like, "all men are created equal" and washes it down with the greatest levels of inequality on the planet... even greater than in India.

Once again Indian metaphors arise, and this is because the Indians have been working on codifying this social stratification for thousands of years. So looking at their caste system will give us a clearer idea of where we are headed.

Everybody has heard of "untouchables", but many people that are unfamiliar with the workings of India's ancient caste system are probably unaware that there are categories way below the untouchables called the "unapproachables" and the "un-seeables". That is to say human beings you cannot share open space with and other human beings you cannot even lay eyes upon without being polluted.These last two categories are most applicable to today's gated-community, America.

"We've got the message. But my college kid, the babysitters, the nails ladies -- everybody who's got the right to vote -- they don't understand what's going on. I just feel like if you're lower income -- one, you're not as educated, two, they don't get how it works." guest at a Romney Hamptons fundraiser (hat doonesbury)

And paradoxically, America's affluent usually choose members of this underclass to take care of their children and cook their food.  However, except for that strange intimacy, the wealthy have put as much mental and physical space as they can between themselves and this mass of suffering humanity, denying them even a decent education and healthcare... This in the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world. No high caste Indian could be colder or crueler then then America's wealthy, not even get close. India is our future, nearly our present, not some exotic oddity.

Martin Luther King, America's most successful social activist's greatest influence was Mahatma Gandhi, so, not so indirectly, Gandhi may be one of America's most influential thinkers

King took as his model Gandhi's tactics and more importantly, perhaps, Gandhi's seamless infusion of political activism  with a spirituality that allowed King to connect on a deeply emotional plane with Americans of all colors and creeds just as Gandhi did with Indians.

Today, in great part thanks to Martin Luther King, America's "untouchables" are no longer so rigorously color coded, however these days, many who once sat comfortably at America's groaning table now have become familiar with the humiliation of un-aproachibility and invisibility, to add to their precarious hardscrabble existence without adequate healthcare or education.

In many ways Dr. King was more successful than Gandhi, that an African-American sits in the Oval Office today is the living proof of his success.

Today what is missing from the left is the emotional energy that came from MLK's Gandhian infusing of activism with spirituality.

In his 2008 campaign Barack Obama showed that Americans are still moved by the beauty of our English language when it invokes social justice... That there was little practical follow up to the "soaring rhetoric" in no way invalidates the revelation that many Americans are hungry for another social leader like Martin Luther King. For me that is the challenge that faces the American left in defending what should be its natural constituency, America's working poor. DS

What health care in America hinges on

We are in the midst of a great national debate about how to make health care affordable; almost nothing is more important to working-class Americans. “For the health of the nation, both physically and economically, we need a system with a public option,” Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, wrote recently in the Huffington Post. “And we need it now.”
But whether working families get it now depends to a large degree on Mr. Obama’s personal popularity. And now comes Gates-gate, this latest burst of fake populism from the right. Waving the banner of the long-suffering working class, the tax-cutting friends of the top 2% have managed to dent the president’s credibility, to momentarily halt his forward movement on the health-care issue. Thomas Frank - Wall Street Journal

David Seaton's News Links
In most situations there is one thing the whole business depends on or revolves around. I call that thing the "hinge".

In analysis, finding the hinge is the shortcut to the center of a mass of inchoate information.

In action, identifying the hinge is often finding the "fulcrum" with which to move the world and finding it can bring huge rewards with little input of effort.

The world's latest economic crisis, for example, was brought upon us by very clever people who had discovered that the "hinge" of our financial system was that there was really no meaningful relation between the actual value of assets and what you could charge for them if you transformed them to a gaseous state.

Despite the near collapse of the system they had gamed, many of these clever people are still laughing... because they had also discovered another hinge... the "too big to fail, if you have enough friends in Washington" hinge.

I have been meditating on the plight of America's left as universal health care, entangled in the pantomime of our checks and balances, is once again circling the drain.

I have been searching for the "hinge" of the absurd impotence of American progressives.

I think that I may have found said hinge in a simple technical phrase that keeps bouncing off my neural walls: "working poor".

The contradiction between working and simultaneously being poor in the world's richest country.

Here is how Wikipedia defines the term "working poor":

Working poor is a term used to describe individuals and families who maintain regular employment but remain in relative poverty due to low levels of pay and dependent expenses.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the writer who has probably done more than anyone to put a face on working poverty, has this to say in her book, "Nickel and Dimed":

When someone works for less pay than she can live on ... she has made a great sacrifice for you ... The "working poor" ... are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone.

Here is what she wrote in the New York Times:

The human side of the recession, in the new media genre that’s been called “recession porn,” is the story of an incremental descent from excess to frugality, from ease to austerity. The super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee’s. In some accounts, the recession is even described as the “great leveler,” smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.

But the outlook is not so cozy when we look at the effects of the recession on a group generally omitted from all the vivid narratives of downward mobility — the already poor, the estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the population who struggle to get by in the best of times. This demographic, the working poor, have already been living in an economic depression of their own. From their point of view “the economy,” as a shared condition, is a fiction.

So, where is the hinge to the sheer uselessness of American progressives?

The hinge is that, at its most critical moment, the entire debate about universal health care in America has been diluted, if not derailed, for over a week by an unpleasant, though bloodless, encounter that a Harvard professor had with a police officer.

All this, while millions of working Americans, both black and white, are being treated like shit every day of their lives.

"Treated like shit": surely an exaggeration?

Check this from the Guardian:

It was July 2007 and Potter, a senior executive at giant US healthcare firm Cigna, was visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden mountain districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw an advert in a local paper for a touring free medical clinic at a fairground just across the state border in Wise County, Virginia.

Potter, who had worked at Cigna for 15 years, decided to check it out. What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements.

For Potter it was a dreadful realisation that healthcare in America had failed millions of poor, sick people and that he, and the industry he worked for, did not care about the human cost of their relentless search for profits. "It was over-powering. It was just more than I could possibly have imagined could be happening in America," he told the Observer.

Now, it appears that the policeman and the professor are going to the White House to have a beer with the President of the United States.

A nice chilled lager, a manly handshake, a photo opportunity, this, while, as the Canadian National Post newspaper writes:

The U. S. Congress, corrupted by a failure to impose campaign finance reform on special interests, from unions to wealthy entities, appears to be unable to pass laws to provide even a modicum of fair, universal health-care coverage for its populace.

So that is the "hinge" in American progressive politics: what passes for a left in the USA is obsessed with racial, gender, ecological and identity politics, while Americans, of all races and all possible sexual preferences, are mercilessly overworked and underpaid. They are being exploited and treated no better than excrement and left to the mercy of right wing demagogues, all while the President of the United States takes time off to soothe the ruffled feathers of a professor and a policeman.

Frivolity, corruption and decadence are the hinge. DS

Today's America is a class act

The United States ranks behind every industrial nation except France in the percentage of overall economic activity devoted to manufacturing (...) Manufacturing has long been viewed as an essential pillar of a powerful economy. It generates millions of well-paid jobs for those with only a high school education, a huge segment of the population. New York Times

“It wasn’t the US service sector that defeated Japan,” notes Robert Dujarric of Temple University in Tokyo. Well-paid blue-collar jobs, he adds, have been a pillar of Japan’s postwar social equality. Financial Times

(Meth is) “the only example of a widely consumed illegal narcotic that might be called vocational, as opposed to recreational.” It was given to starving Nazi soldiers to keep them in warrior mode on the Russian front. Now it’s a preferred stimulant for people working two jobs in low-wage purgatory. "Methland vs. Mythland" Timothy Egan - NYT

David Seaton's News Links
Everybody has their own way of thinking: some people think in facts and figures, I think in symbols and metaphors.

I am ever searching for the correct symbol or metaphor, and when I find the one that feels just right, everything else: thinking, talking and writing, comes easily to me, just like ringing a bell.

I love to put some quotes and pictures, like the ones above, together and hear how they resonate like a chord played on a well tuned instrument. For me, much of what we are facing today is resumed, almost like a poem in these snippets

The key visual metaphor is that of the meth addict's transformation from hillbilly beauty into death's head. The key phrase is the one from Robert Dujarric in Tokyo: well paid blue-collar jobs, are the pillar of social equality, followed by the NYT stating that those with only a high school education make up a huge percentage of the US population. That is the present situation in a nutshell.

I was struck by a line in president Barack Obama's much reported NAACP speech, where he, a supposed "lefty", addressed this advice to young African-Americans:

“They might think they’ve got a pretty jump shot or a pretty good flow,” Mr. Obama said, “but our kids can’t all aspire to be LeBron or Lil Wayne. I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers, not just ballers and rappers. I want them aspiring to be a Supreme Court justice. I want them aspiring to be president of the United States of America.”

My first reaction to that paragraph was that aspiring to be a rapper or a professional basketball player was just as realistic as aspiring to be a scientist or engineer and certainly more realistic than aspiring to be a Supreme Court Justice or president of the USA, as between the White House and the Supreme Court there are only ten jobs, whereas to begin with there are 1,696 basketball players in the NBA... (Sorry, but I can't find the number of openings for hip-hop artists).

I immediately thought on reading Obama's words, "what's wrong with aspiring to having a union card and working in a factory at union rates and getting married on that pay, buying a house and raising a family, seeing some of your kids go to college and then retiring on a decent pension and going fishing with your grandchildren?"

What is supposed to happen to people who don't have the natural aptitude or interests to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers? Or specialists in derivatives or other such useful types?

In today' America are they fated to end up like the woman in the photographs, fated to taking methamphetamine in order to be able to stand the strain of working 60 plus hour weeks at minimum wage without any unions or medical coverage?

Is there only to be a future in America for knowledge workers?

If so, we as a people are in deep, deep, shit.

Because that is not really in our DNA.

For thousands of years our species has mostly worked with its hands and as a simple matter of natural selection, not everyone who is an able bodied, willing and honest person is interested in reading and studying.

As Italian author Alberto Moravia once said, the number of illiterates is constant, but nowadays the illiterates know how to read.

And this is just as true for white people as for black people in today's America.

In many senses we really are living in a post-racial society.

Today the real question is class and poverty, not race.

Most of the white working poor of today's America would happily trade the pale complexion of their nether parts to be an African-American UAW worker in the 1950s and 60s Detroit.

Today, instead of a society where race inevitably determines status, we live is society of sharp class divisions, where class, except for those with inherited wealth, is based on educational attainment and that educational attainment itself is in great part based on the parent's social class and the income that comes with it.

Within living memory the sons and daughters of the line workers of unionized American manufacturers, who showed aptitude for study, could go to excellent state land grant universities and their brothers and sisters who didn't like school could look forward to the same decent life as their parents had enjoyed... That didn't last very long did it?

In today's America it is very difficult for an American from a poor family of any race, no matter how intelligent he or she might be, to get a first class education or, with parents (or single parent) working at two jobs, the supportive and stable family life to be able to concentrate on their studies and thus escape from poverty.

The heart of the matter is that America's once proud working class, both white and black, is being transformed, has been transformed, into a classic "lumpenproletariat" or "ragged proletariat". Here is how the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines that term:

(German: “rabble proletariat”), according to Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, the lowest stratum of the industrial working class, including also such undesirables as tramps and criminals. The members of the Lumpenproletariat—this “social scum,” said Marx—are not only disinclined to participate in revolutionary activities with their “rightful brethren,” the proletariat, but also tend to act as the “bribed tools of reactionary intrigue.”

What could be a better description of the working poor followers of Sarah Palin's, or of any populist of the right that may arise in the near future's, than as "bribed tools of reactionary intrigue"?

Are any right wing populists, who go in mostly for creationism, abortion and guns, going to advocate strong labor unions, a higher minimum wage, universal health care and keeping the jobs in the USA? I doubt it very much, don't you?

Will anybody else advocate those things? DS

Harold Meyerson hits a home run

David Seaton's News Links

Harold Meyerson has exposed one of what Marxists like to call the "contradictions" of the right: talking up the sanctity of the family while simultaneously destroying it.

Certainly the stability of the family is at the center of any traditional conservative's value system... everything else radiates from it. And that family system is also the center of patriarchal repression and the model for all dictatorships and the obedience school for the citizens of such dictatorships.

Therefore a person of the left might be happy to see those bonds loosened. However the individual thus "freed" must find a replacement for the practical support that a traditional family or clan gives its members. That is where the welfare state comes in. Free child care, nurseries, subsidies, generous old age pensions etc. Anything else is social disintegration like we saw in Katrina.

American "conservatives" have created the worst of both worlds. They have destroyed the family and put nothing in its place. Katrina was only a color coded metaphor for America's working poor and how they are viewed by the de-cerebrated radicals that call themselves conservatives in the USA. DS

Meyerson: 'Family Values' Chutzpah - Washington Post
Abstract: As conservatives tell the tale, the decline of the American family, the rise in divorce rates, the number of children born out of wedlock all can be traced to the pernicious influence of one decade in American history: the '60s. The conservatives are right that one decade, at least in its metaphoric significance, can encapsulate the causes for the family's decline. But they've misidentified the decade. It's not the permissive '60s. It's the Reagan '80s. In Saturday's Post, reporter Blaine Harden took a hard look at the erosion of what we have long taken to be the model American family -- married couples with children -- and discovered that while this decline hasn't really afflicted college-educated professionals, it is the curse of the working class. The percentage of households that are married couples with children has hit an all-time low (at least, the lowest since the Census Bureau started measuring such things): 23.7 percent. That's about half the level that marrieds-with-children constituted at the end of the Ozzie-and-Harriet '50s.(...) the Ozzie and Harriet family -- modified by feminism, since Harriet now holds down a job, too -- still rolls along within the upper-middle class but has become much harder to find in working-class America, where cohabitation without marriage has increasingly become the norm. Taking into account all households, married couples with children are twice as likely to be in the top 20 percent of incomes, Harden reported. Their incomes have increased 59 percent over the past 30 years, while households overall have experienced just a 44 percent increase. To be sure, the '60s, with its assaults on traditional authority, played some role in weakening the traditional family. But its message was sounded loudest and clearest on elite college campuses, whose graduates were nonetheless the group most likely to have stable marriages. Then again, they were also the group most likely to have stable careers. They enjoyed financial stability; they could plan for the future. Such was not the case for working-class Americans. Over the past 35 years, the massive changes in the U.S. economy have largely condemned American workers to lives of economic insecurity. No longer can the worker count on a steady job for a single employer who provides a paycheck and health and retirement benefits, too. Over the past three decades, workers' individual annual income fluctuations have consistently increased, while their aggregate income has stagnated. In the brave new economy of outsourced jobs and short-term gigs and on-again, off-again health coverage, American workers cannot rationally plan their economic futures. And with each passing year, as their level of economic security declines, so does their entry into marriage. Yet the very conservatives who marvel at the efficiency of our new, more mobile economy and extol the "flexibility" of our workforce decry the flexibility of the personal lives of American workers. The right-wing ideologues who have championed outsourcing, offshoring and union-busting, who have celebrated the same changes that have condemned American workers to lives of financial instability, piously lament the decline of family stability that has followed these economic changes as the night the day. American conservatism is a house divided against itself. It applauds the radicalism of the economic changes of the past four decades -- the dismantling, say, of the American steel industry (and the job and income security that it once provided) in the cause of greater efficiency. It decries the decline of social and familial stability over that time -- the traditional, married working-class families, say, that once filled all those churches in the hills and hollows in what is now the smaller, post-working-class Pittsburgh. READ IT ALL