Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.

On his blog at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum compares Obama’s requirement that everyone buy health care to the law that requires car owners to buy airbags and insurance. He writes:

When I bought my last car, for example, I was forced by federal law to also buy seat belts and air bags — and as far as I know, no court has ever suggested the federal government lacks this power. Why?
Technically, of course, the government isn’t forcing me to buy these things. I could, if I wanted, forego the purchase of a car. This isn’t very practical where I live, serviced as I am by a single bus line that comes by once an hour, but I could do it. I could also move someplace with better transit. I’m not absolutely mandated to own seat belts and airbags.
But in real life, the fact is that most of us need a car. It’s only an option in the most hyperlegalistic sense, which means that for all practical purposes the federal government has mandated that I buy seat belts and airbags. And they’ve done that on the theory that even if I don’t care about my own safety, other people might ride in my car and they deserve protection. What’s more, taxpayers could end up on the hook for medical care if I injure myself and my passengers. So seat belts and airbags are the law.
Practically speaking, then, what’s the difference between this and an insurance mandate? In both cases the federal government is forcing me to buy something I might not want. The cost of complying with both mandates is substantial. You can be fined for disabling airbags or removing seat belts, just as Obamacare fines you for not buying health insurance. They’re pretty damn similar.

I suggest that Drum’s argument comes from the same unthinking assumption of privilege that Obama’s health care law does. Drum doesn’t mention the many people in the U.S. who don’t have cars because they can’t afford to buy one. Would requiring them by law to buy cars work? Similarly, if a person doesn’t have the money to buy health insurance, where will they find the money to pay a fine?

Obama’s law makes about as much sense as it would make to legally require homeless people to rent apartments, and to try to fine them if they don’t.

Americans have a love-hate relationship with excess.  We are fascinated by it – just look at all the television commercials extolling Las Vegas revelry.  Yet our Puritan tendencies tend to pull us back from the abyss.  “The Pleasure Police” usually wins out in the end.

Thus we are intimately familiar with the concept of “too much” –  Don’t eat too much.  Don’t drink too much.  Don’t use too much salt.  Don’t spend too much.  Don’t watch too much television.

Curiously absent from our list of the over-indulgences we fear is perhaps the most dangerous intemperance of all:  money.

We talk about a maximum body mass index, a maximum level of alcohol on the bloodstream.  In other words, limits.  Guards against gluttony.

Yet we don’t talk about a maximum wage, a cap on wealth.  We should.  And, not long ago, we have.  We don’t have to look to those faraway places, like Sweden – even though Sweden, by the way, is doing very well, and not just because their society is more homogeneous than ours.

Instead we can study the highest growth era in American history, the 1950s and the 1960s.  We can best guard against gluttony – and return a measure of social justice to American society – by returning to the tax policies captained by Presidents, both Republican and Democrat alike – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.

Today’s top income tax rate is 35%.  In 1960, it was 91%.  Let’s go back to that rate.  Or, for my more “conservative” friends, we can try 70% — the rate in 1980.

Worse still, the capital gains rate now stands at 15%, the lowest rate since 1950.

No wonder we are broke.  Starbucks does not charge the lowest price possible for a cup of coffee; rather they charge the highest price the market will bear.  What’s good for business is good for America, indeed.

We don’t have complex domestic problems today.  I am not being simplistic.  We can pay for roads and schools, hospitals and national parks.  We can support and protect the most vulnerable members of our society – the elderly, the sick, the poor, our war veterans.

We simply need to tax the wealthy the way we did in the 1950s and 1960s.  If history is any indicator, not only will we have a fairer nation and one with more equal opportunity, but the economy will improve, too.

Let us not be fooled by Right Wing Rhetoric:  taxing the rich will hurt no one – not even the rich, who are too short-sighted themselves to see that inequality jeopardizes their long-term interests, too.  (Numerous historical studies show the eventual instability of societies and empires who tolerate too wide a gap between rich and poor, but I digress…)

Finally, the argument for taxing the rich at higher rates does not merely rest on altruism, fairness and principles of social justice.  Though I deeply hope and pray that these values still matter in 21st Century America, there is no need to rely on such ideals.

First, of course, is the RealPolitik fact that poor and middle class Americans outnumber the rich, and should merely vote their own self-interest.  In order to so, pragmatic, ordinary Americans must bust the myths perpetrated by the Tea Party and their gurus of deception:  Big Government is not the big problem; Big Business is.

Lastly, there is an interest-based argument to tax the rich highly as well.  It is simple:  the rich consume more government resources than the rest of us do.

Military expenditures constitute a whopping 54% of the federal budget (approximately $1.5 trillion out of total expenditures of $2.6 trillion (2009)).  A homeless person sleeping on a park bench does not need a 1.5 million person army to protect her interests.  But the homeless pay no taxes, the conservative replies.  OK, stipulated.  What about the janitor, the dishwasher, the secretary (even Warren Buffett’s), the cook?  We all pay taxes, but most of us have no “interests abroad’ to protect. Granted we all require public safety and a reasonable measure of insurance against the threat of another 9/11…etc., etc.  Fine.  But multinational CEOs (most based in the U.S.) are “citizens of the world.”  They have interests abroad, not the rest of us.  And right now, they are more worried about Greece than about New Orleans.

The Cold War is over.  The Chinese cannot and will not stage a 2nd Pearl Harbor – for one, we owe them too much money.  Big Business is what we defend overseas.  Let the wealthy pay for what the wealthy want.

Meanwhile, let’s make the Right eat their specious arguments for an oligarchy, and pledge allegiance with the rest of us – yes, the 99% — to “ONE nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for ALL.”


Larry Fondation is an internationally-published fiction writer, journalist and community organizer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of Angry Nights, Common Criminals, Fish, Soap and Bonds and Unintended Consequences.

The Picnic by Vince Larue

On the last day of 2011, I offer warm thanks to my friends, my enemies, and everyone who reads this blog.

Here are the ten most-read blog posts this year:

Beavis and Butt-Head Should Study English Lit

Koan Commentary: The Book of Serenity, Case 20

Chris Hedges’ Hysterical Defense of Cornel West

We Must All Become Grandmothers

Any Man With a Microphone Can Tell You What He Loves the Most

Abortion: Choose Your Ideology and Defend It

Alone

Zen in the Street

There Is No Such Thing as Money

Writing Wipes the Dirt from the Window

Viewing the horrifying photographs and videos of U.C. Davis Police Lt. John Pike pepper-spraying passive, sitting students, two questions occur to me…

In this era of cell phone cameras/video recorders, blogs and Youtube, are cops unaware that their chances of engaging in this sort of thuggery without it being made public are remote?

Or do they do it with confidence that, even though the pictures and videos will go viral, they’ll get away with it anyway?

I’ve heard some people argue that Occupy Wall Street is based on the anger of privileged white people who find themselves forced into a poverty that many people have to endure without protest.

I can sympathize with this argument, but the actuality is that an oppressive system only collapses when it becomes unbearable for the majority of people. A capitalist system depends on the existence of an underclass for it to function. When that underclass becomes the majority, the game is over.

Capitalism has failed. It was always a matter of when, not if. There are now more peasants than ever to toil in the making of products, and fewer people than ever with the means to buy them. What we are seeing now, throughout the “developed” world, is a monster dying from its own poison.

Cops “protect and serve” at Occupy Phoenix   Photo: Mauro Whiteman

As the movement that began with Occupy Wall Street continues to spread nationwide, media commentators and political hacks show that they don’t understand what is happening. I don’t mean that they are confused, or not entirely getting it; I mean that they actually have no idea what is going on. It is so beyond their ken that they don’t have a political/philosophical language with which to discuss it.

Occupiers are criticized for having no unified ideology, no specific common demands or goals. Their critics are like dinosaurs trying to understand computers. They are unable to comprehend any approach other than the hierarchical one they have been conditioned to see as the only possibility, and so they cannot understand a movement that comes together to discuss and decide upon its goals, rather than gathering around a pre-set dogma.  They seek to label because they seek to control, but they can find no labels that will stick to this movement. Their reality is failing them, and so they are afraid.