MICHAEL VENTURA – LETTERS AT 3AM
DID ABRAHAM LINCOLN DESERVE A SECOND TERM?
Austin Chronicle – December 14, 2012
Well, did he? Many men thought not. (Women had no say.)
Republican Abraham Lincoln carried 22 of the 25 states loyal to the Union, crushing Democrat George B. McClellan in the electoral count, but the popular vote wasn’t so lopsided: 55% to 45%.
Continue reading Ventura: Did Abraham Lincoln deserve a second term?
Political theater is so threadbare today that it shouldn’t be able to fool anyone, yet it contues to do so. Nice to see Michael Ventura’s analysis cut through the drama to show the reality. Intriguing final paragraph.
MICHAEL VENTURA
LETTERS AT 3AM –
THE SYSTEM AIN’T THE SYSTEM
Austin Chronicle – August 31, 2012
One political question cuts through all others: Who benefits?
Who, for instance, benefits from the following?
“Half the jobs in the nation pay less than $34,000 a year … A quarter pay below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually. … Wages for those who work on jobs in the bottom half have been stuck since 1973” (The New York Times online, July 28).
Let’s see. Since 1973, we’ve had eight presidents – five Republicans and three Democrats (one of those Democrats deregulated the finance industry). Democrats pretty much controlled Congress from 1973 to 1995 and it’s been pretty much a Republican show since. It’s hasn’t been in the interest of either party to address the stagnation of buying-power that traps the lower half of the American work force. One administration gives some benefits, another administration takes some away, but the basic situation of half the American workforce does not change.
So who benefits? Duh. A powerless workforce with no real representation in government is global capitalism’s wet dream.
For instance, in California’s Inland Empire, “where unemployment reaches above 15 percent in several cities,” a “local economist” named John Husing says, “You can have people [he means corporations] come in here and find a robust blue-color work force eager for employment” (The New York Times online, July 22).
“Robust” is a funny word for people desperate for any work at all, under any conditions.
Who benefits from the lawful bribery we call “elections”?
“The average member of the House of Representatives has to raise $367 for every hour they’re supposedly serving their constituents to pay for their re-election campaigns. The average senator needs to wrangle $819 an hour” (Mother Jones, quoted in The Week, June 29, p.20). Crunch those numbers. Unless you’ve got an awful lot of money, your representatives are not representing you. Which leads one to believe that these days Congress may be doing exactly what it’s paid to do: nothing.
A pretty cute set-up, when you think about it. Oligarchs finance both sides to fight and stymie each other so that the United States can keep up the appearance of a republic while, in function, it is nothing like a republic.
Say this for the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” that make up our oligarchy: They’re crafty.
Oligarchs finance both parties because it serves their interests when neither Republicans nor Democrats can dominate.
Unlike fascists and totalitarians, oligarchs don’t want a strong central government. Oligarchs want to reduce government to the role of an accomplice, and not a very organized accomplice. The more confused, hysterical, and contradictory the better. Make it damn near impossible to accomplish anything solid. You don’t want Republicans to win all out, because their drastic budgets will drive the workforce into frenzy and frenzy is dangerous. Bad for business. You don’t want Democrats to win all-out – not because you’re afraid of what the Democrats might do (there’s not much to fear in that regard) but because Democratic domination would demoralize a lot of dangerous people – frenzy again, bad for business.
Oligarchs want our pathetic political theater to continue so that they may remain backstage, unmolested.
Occupy Wall Street outed them last year — a big accomplishment, never to be underestimated. But outing is not nearly enough.
President Obama “staffed his White House with former Wall Street executives. During his term in office, the gap between rich and poor has widened to unprecedented levels” (NYMag.com, quoted in The Week, Aug. 3, p.6).
“Wall Street firms made $83 billion in profit during the first two years of the Obama administration – more than the $77 billion in profit these firms made over the entire eight years of the George W. Bush presidency” (The Washington Post, quoted in The Week, Nov. 18, 2011, p.16).
At the same time, “[t]he average American family’s net worth dropped almost 40 percent … between 2007 and 2010” (CNNMoney.com, quoted in The Week, June 22, p.34)
“The richest 1% of Americans gained 93% of the additional income created in 2010 (The Economist, June 23, p.84).”
“Since 2008, when the biggest banks caused a crisis that ‘decimated the middle class,’ these banks have actually gotten bigger, with just five banks controlling $8.5 trillion in assets – equal to 56 percent of the nation’s economy.” (TheAtlantic.com, quoted in The Week, May 25, p.2).
The goal of oligarchy is to utterly disempower the workforce. For that, the oligarchs’ best operatives are Republicans on the state level.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry and “[a]t least five other Republican governors … [have announced] that they will not expand their Medicaid aid program for the poor even though the federal government would pay for almost all of it. … [I]n Pennsylvania … 61,000 residents – almost all of whom are disabled and poor – were told they would abruptly lose their $200 monthly general assistance payments, all to save $150 million a year. Our hands are tied by a tightening budget, welfare officials told astonished recipients, though Gov. Tom Corbett’s hands didn’t seem restrained when he handed out $300 million in business tax cuts earlier this month (The New York Times online, July 17).”
This is nothing less than a war of terror against the working class.
Who benefits from a terrorized working class? Any employer who wants to maximize profit no matter the human cost, making labor, and life, ever cheaper.
That works best if the workforce is not only frightened but ignorant. That’s why you read things like these:
“[T]he Texas GOP platform proudly declares: ‘We oppose the teaching of Higher Order thinking skills, critical-thinking skills, and similar programs’” (Newsweek, July 16, p. 18).
On a global level, the U.S. education system ranks 26th (Time, Nov. 14, 2011, p.44).
“Less than half of all Americans who start college ever graduate, putting the U.S. ‘dead last’ among industrialized countries” (TheAtlantic.com, quoted in The Week, June 29, p.42).
Who benefits from a mal-educated workforce? Oligarchs who can pump billions into propaganda that the mal-educated haven’t the means to question.
So here come two grandiose infomercials called “political conventions,” Republican and Democrat. But the political system they advertise ain’t the system that is.
Reporters will report, commentators will comment, and, across the political spectrum, they’ll mouth a vocabulary obsolete and inaccurate because they analyze as though the United States is a functioning republic. But the facts says that the system they speak of ain’t the system we got.
Power is always more fragile than it seems. We can get out of this mess, but it would help if our speech caught up to our reality.
Occupy Wall Street was a good beginning. The 1% has been identified. Next, the 1% must be confronted in many (nonviolent) ways and from all sides.
What will it take to make that happen?
Something. Something stirring out there somewhere.
Can you feel it? I can.
Something unexpected.
As usual, it is a case of “argue if you can.” I’d like to see you try!
MICHAEL VENTURA
LETTERS AT 3AM –
A JOG IN THE SMOG
Austin Chronicle – August 10, 2012
In Austin, you see them on West Cesar Chavez Street near the river, on Exposition Boulevard, on Windsor Road between Exposition and MoPac, and on the Congress Avenue Bridge. In fact, you see them in all directions, in all cities, pretty much anywhere where there’s traffic.
MICHAEL VENTURA
LETTERS AT 3AM – ACCIDENTS OF BIRTH AND REBIrTH
Austin Chronicle – July 13, 2012
Whenever I bitch about the evils of my era, I take a moment to remind myself that no other era would have me.
Had my birth occurred a few years earlier, my mother almost certainly would have died — me, too, probably. Fortunately for us, by 1945 the world had spent a decade tearing itself to pieces with war; that massive variety of wounds inspired myriad new medical techniques, and as a direct consequence, my mother and I lived.
Me, just barely. I kept on almost dying. Doctors said I’d not make it to 1950 and age five. But penicillin worked wonders. Now I read that penicillin’s mass production wasn’t effective until well into the Fifties. Gee. I’d lucked out again.
My existence has been, so to speak, a generational gift, but my generation is famously ungrateful for its advantages, and I’m no exception. My good fortune failed to restrain a recklessness that is, for better and worse, at the core of my nature. Drinking, smoking, pushing myself past sane limits of endurance – I like that sort of thing. (But I don’t do drugs, and never have, for fear they’d mess with what Mikey says is my favorite vice: writing.)
Life continued for an unexpectedly long time until, six or so years ago,
Continue reading Ventura column – Accidents of Birth and Rebirth
”Frank DeMarco is an adventurer of the intellect and of the spirit. He challenges our definitions of reality with compassionate, down-to-earth writing. If this is mysticism, it’s a singularly practical mysticism.”
— Michael Ventura, author of The Zoo Where You’re Fed to God
For other quotes, and to see the cover in full color, and to order from Amazon, go here:
What do the following authors (in alphabetical order) have in common, besides creativity, a passion for exploration, and a lifetime’s thoughtful observation of the world around them?
Robert Bruce (OBE pioneer)
Joseph Felser, Ph.D., (professor of philosophy)
Ervin Laszlo (systems theorist)
Carla Rueckert-McCarthy (channeler of the Ra material)
Charles Sides (businessman)
Michael Ventura (cultural explorer)
They have all provided advance cover quotes for my new book, The Cosmic Internet.
To see the cover in full color, and to order from Amazon, go here:
So there’s this book of essays by Michael Ventura, with photos by Butch Hancock, called If I Was a Highway, published by Texas Tech University Press (ttup@ttu.edu, or www.ttupress.org). It’s a hardcover, 7.5 x 9.5 inches, 236 pages, $30 but you can get it at Amazon for $22.
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Back in the 1980s, while reviewing books for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, I came across Shadow Dancing in the USA by this guy I’d never heard of. I read it enthralled, and gave it a good review which unfortunately didn’t see the light of day for nearly a year, thus doing the publisher no good at all) and from that moment added Michael Ventura to my look-for list. Of course, that was back before the days of internet searches, and Amazon and Alibris and Powell’s online and so forth.