ROB HARRIS

I’m not the only one who has seen Mad Max and thought “worst possible scenario for civilization.” 
Mad Max is as bad as it could possibly get:

No social contract to rein in excess.
The 99% fighting for survival.
Perpetual war over fuel oil.
Women being tyrannized by men.
The earth scorched, barren and toxic.
Law serving only the powerful.
Mel Gibson being the lone voice of reason.
Alright, I don’t have to hit you over the head with it: welcome to 2012 (except for the Mel part).

The Conservative agenda is upon us.
Which brings us to the Progressive agenda. 

… which is what again?

In the last decade we’ve lost Paul Wellstone & Ted Kennedy to death, John Edwards and Anthony Weiner to scandal, Russ Feingold and Alan Grayson to electoral insanity.  And we’ve wound up with the most conservative Congress since the era of the Robber Barons of the late 1800s.

For those unfamiliar with the Robber Barons, Wikipedia defines them as “big businessmen (who) amassed huge fortunes immorally, unethically, and unjustly” during the “Gilded Age.”  Very few of today’s rich would define themselves like that.  They made their money the new-fashioned way – they invested it… then took their profit just in time to leave others holding the bag when the investment turned sour.  At least some of the old time Robber Barons built railroads.

Conservatives are right about this: America was founded on the freedom to profit.  Adam Smith’s 1776 publication The Wealth of Nations, in which he espoused the inspired guidance of the “Invisible Hand,” was as key to America’s fundamental philosophy as The Constitution. 

The Constitution, however, threw Adam Smith one little curve in the clause that assigned the U.S. Congress the right to “regulate” interstate commerce.  The Robber Barons solved that problem by bribing politicians; today’s Robber Barons do it by bribing wanna-be politicians.  

Still, that Constitutional clause is what today’s Republicans and Tea-Baggers think they’re fighting.   That and the bit in the preamble about “promote the general welfare.”  Problem is, the “regulating” clause pertains to the government’s right to dole out tax money (or tax favors) and after a couple Centuries of bellowing about how government has no business tampering with business, the Conservative wealthy have only proved their willingness to bite the Invisible Hand that feeds them.  Or feed from the Invisible Hand that should be biting them.

The Invisible Hand first started getting mixed up with The Invisible Handout early in U.S. history in the form of tax relief and subsidies.  It kicked into high gear with the building of the railroads in the 1860s.  It continued through the discovery of oil.  It continues to this day.

Government subsidies for businesses are as old as commerce itself.  Subsidies for the poor are a relatively recent phenomenon.  The rail subsidies resulted in over-expansion that helped cause the Panic of 1873 – the greatest depression in the U.S. until the Great Depression.  The implementation of the Social Security Act of 1935 helped get us out of the Great Depression.  For 150 years, the wealthy have held their hands out with no shame.  Yet shame is how the Conservative wealthy have manipulated the poor into feeling undeserving of support at even the most basic level. 

Today’s Barons – Foster Friess, Sheldon Adelson, Philip Anschutz, the Koch brothers – are “amassing huge fortunes immorally, unethically, and unjustly” and perfectly legally because they control the lawmakers.  That would be bad but what makes it worse is they are doing it by trying to force a male-dominated social agenda on women, destroying the planet, shaming the poor and putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the 99% of the rest of us.  Their vision of a future includes no social contract to rein in excess.  Excess is their goal, law that restrains that goal is their enemy and law that subsidizes this goal is their power.

So let’s review: breakdown of the social contract, fuel wars, growing disparity between ultra rich and the rest of us, attempt to subjugate women, law serving only the powerful…

The Mad Max apocalypse may not be around the corner but you don’t have to see the movie to see the road we’re on.

Liberals and progressives had better get their act together pretty damn quick.

Before Mel Gibson becomes the lone voice of reason.

                                                     

In the summer of my 18th year I registered for the military draft, as required.  I registered as a Conscientious Objector.  Vietnam was the only war I’d known and I’d already spent two years on the front lines of protests against it.

Then in June of 1967, I began reading news reports about the United Arab Republic massing troops for an invasion of Israel. 
A petition began circulating around my school: Volunteer to Fight for Israel.  I didn’t sign it.  But I went home and thought about it.

One of the first books I remember as a child was a small paperback with a cover illustration of a young boy planting a tree.  It was first published in 1949, announcing the glories of the new state of Israel.  I still have that book.

I grew up believing that the sun shone out of Israel’s ass.  It’s existence made me proud: Jews could renew a desert, Jews could fight, Jews could help each other recover from the horrors of the Holocaust. 

And there was Sandy Koufax – the athlete who gave every Jewish American in the 1960s a reason to be proud of being one of The Chosen.  I had no idea if he was a Zionist – Judaism and Zionism were synonymous to me back then – but he was the most dominating pitcher in baseball and he wouldn’t pitch on the High Holy Days.  He was my identity.  How I prayed Yom Kippur wouldn’t fall on the deciding day of the World Series. 

So, I went home and thought about the impending destruction of Israel – the motherland for an oppressed, dispossessed people; the nurturing matriarch of a new generation of sabra Jews – who were about to be driven into the sea!

I was a pacifist.  Committed to non-violence.

The next day, Israel made a pre-emptive attack on Egyptian forces in the Sinai and a day later, I signed up to fight, relinquishing my right to Conscientious Objector status – consenting to a suicide pact: I would volunteer to risk my life for Israel and if I survived I would become a potential victim of Vietnam.  I was giving up my claim to pacifism because I’d found a war worth fighting.  My father – a World War 2 veteran with whom I had bitterly argued over my “duty” to serve my country in Vietnam – put his hand on my shoulder when I told him of my decision and said simply, “I hope you don’t have to go.”

I didn’t.  It was over in Six Days.  Like Koufax blowing through the lineup of the powerful San Francisco Giants, we had not only won, we had dominated.  There was Black Power, there was Chicano Power and there was Jewish Power.  Felt good to be a powerful minority.  All the way Israel-ays!

It no longer feels good.
I don’t know when it happened.  Could it have started as early as 1973?

If you recall the Yom Kippur War (known in the Arab World as the Ramadan War), you might remember that Egypt and Syria struck first.  Dastardly bastards.  You might not remember that after six years, Israel still had control of sovereign Egyptian & Syrian land.  Surely the Egyptians and Syrians remembered how Israel had never gotten around to giving back the Palestinian land they took in their war of independence.  Maybe – along with their vicious desire to drive Jews into the sea – they also thought they deserved to get back what had been taken from them in a war where they hadn’t made the first strike.

But I was still a proud Zionist then.  And Israel was again under siege.  We all remembered the 1972 massacre at Munich.  Now this unprovoked assault on a tiny nation, minding its own business, trying to turn deserts into fertile farmland!  Might I have volunteered again had that war been prolonged?  I don’t know; the war ended in 19 days, with Israel dominating once again.  Push ‘em back, push ‘em back, waaaay back!  My team was doing an end-zone dance.  I didn’t feel bad about it.

Still, the enemy kept coming (“When has there never been an enemy of the Jews?”).  In 1976, a plane with 100 Israeli citizens was hijacked at Entebbe, Uganda.  I cheered along with everyone else when a heroic raid got them back.  Jewish Power. Rah!  In 1979, Jimmy Carter negotiated the Camp David Accords and Israel gave back the Sinai, proving they wanted peace.  There were still a few loose ends about the Palestinians but, hey, nobody wanted to get into too much unpleasantness and the important thing was we were here to make friends with Egypt.  Mazel tov!

It was probably the First Intifada that started my questioning of Israel right or wrong. 
Palestine was a powder keg.  I was still an ignorant American Jew.  Why did they (Arabs) hate us (Jews)?  It was a rhetorical question. 

The First Intifada, in 1987, allegedly started when an Israeli man was stabbed to death shopping in Gaza.  Then an Israeli truck driver ran over four Palestinians in an apparent retaliation.  Then a teenage boy was killed by an Israeli soldier during a protest.  Provocation was argued by the Israelis.  The protests grew and the response of the Israeli Defense Force was short of enlightened: more than 1,000 Palestinian protesters were killed – some armed with rocks or Molotovs but most (the mainstream media failed to report) unarmed.

Israel had laid the groundwork for the Intifada five years earlier, surrounding the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, then sending in their proxies to murder hundreds of men, women and children in their sleep.  Israel first denied, then shifted blame, then ultimately tried to rationalize the part they played.

At least Catholics might give a mea culpa.  Frankly, world, Israel didn’t give a flying donut.  Shame on you, my grandmother would’ve said.  The Israeli government expressed no shame.

A second Intifada shouldn’t have been a big surprise.

Over the next decade, the Israelis did a fine job defending themselves from those dedicated to “driving the Jews into the sea.”  But by the 1990s, you were finding that phrase used mostly as an excuse for violent overreaction to a threat that history had already downgraded - and as rationalization for the landgrab we’ve come to know as The Settlements.

“Never again!” Jews shouted throughout the Israel’s first 50 years.

“Enough, already!” Palestinians shouted as first the Labor governments of Yitzak Rabin and Simon Peres, then the rightwing governments of Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon confiscated land in the occupied Westbank, Golan Heights, Gaza and East Jerusalem to build permanent, subsidized Jewish housing.  The 1993 Oslo Peace Accords was supposed to put an end to this.  Since then, the Jewish population of those territories has tripled.  The Israeli government put lipstick on a pig (no kosher slur intended) by calling the new settlements “Outposts.”   

The Second Intifada, depending on whom you believe, was either planned by Yasser Arafat or provoked by Ariel Sharon’s in-your-face election campaign visit to the most holy Muslim site in Jerusalem.

“They want to kill us all.  They want to drive us into the sea.” 
And Arafat was still the sleezeball he’d always been.
Then he died in 2004.

In that same year, Palestinian children were killed at 22 times the rate of Israeli children – yet the deaths of Israeli children were reported on American networks 10 times more frequently (http://www.ifamericaknew.org/media/net-report.html). 

They want to drive us into the sea. 
I started to question my unquestioned loyalty to the motherland.

Then came the Gaza Strip invasion of December, 2008: 1300-13 – not the score of a lopsided cricket match but the number of Palestinians vs. the number of Israelis killed in that conflict.  1300-13.  Go team.

The final step in my Zionist deconstruction came when some Jew on television said “Jewish lives are precious” in defending yet another draconian response to a rocket attack or a sniper attack or some other incident of isolated violence by some Islamic extremist Israel had helped create.

Isn’t all human life precious?
“Enough,” I said, “enough already.”

That was when I finally burned my Zionist draft card.

It’s fine with me if Israel exists.  What’s done is done; I don’t want another war to change the Middle East map.  But I won’t be signing up for the next volunteer army to save Israel.  Smothering them with American love has not led to a nation of mensches.  They’ve gotta learn to play nice with others.

Israel to American Jews: “I cook for you, I clean for you, and this is the way you treat your mother?” 
Let go of the guilt.  Mom isn’t perfect.  And if you’re a big boy or girl, you’ll admit it.

The English riots will be over by the time you read this.  Some looters will have been arrested and imprisoned; others will be enjoying their new TVs.   
Riots and anarchy had to be stopped.  Social order had to be restored.  Whatever your politics, better to have rule by the Tories than Mad Max.
Prime Minister David Cameron returned early from his vacation to take control of the blaming.  He pinned the problem squarely on “a sick society” full of irresponsible parents.   His opposition blamed it, at least in part, on Cameron’s own “austerity measures” – cutbacks in police funding and on social programs like youth centers.   Cameron’s response was to blame the police for not being “robust” enough.

But it’s more complicated than any of that. 
You can’t explain theft that ran from petty to grand, equal numbers of black and white arrests and frightening levels of random violence by blaming it on bad parenting or coddling cops.  You can’t explain it by blaming it on any single thing.  Or any single group. 

So, while politicians play the Blame Game – in which participants start out with an ideological rant, then collect data to support an entrenched position based on a previously held bias – why don’t we try a game of Clue.
Colonel Mustard, if you will please, tell us the way this works:

First pick a Looter:
1.     An 11-year-old boy arrested for stealing a trash bin worth 50 pounds.
2.     A black unemployed single mother caught on camera examining a purloined pair of sneakers.
3.     An 11-year-old foster-home girl who smashed the windows of a clothing shop with rocks.
4.    The mother of two who slept through the riots but accepted the gift of a pair of shorts from her roommate.
5.     A 16 year old who believed he could bring home a 46” TV on his skateboard without his parents disapproving.
6.     A 23-year-old engineering student who was walking back from his girlfriend’s house and took a six-pack of bottled water (worth 3.5 pounds) from a store that was being looted.
7.     A 45-year-old banker who drove up housing prices by making bad loans, then sold derivatives made up mostly of the bad loans he’d created.

 Next, pick a Thug:
1.     The driver of the car that ran down three Muslim men trying to protect their business.
2.     A guy who helped a mugging victim to his feet in order to give his partner better access to stealing items from the kid’s backpack.
3.     The men who beat to death a pensioner who was trying to stop them from setting fire to trash bins.
4.     A law student who joined a pack of rioters trying to set fire to a restaurant – with customers cowering inside.
5.     A 46-year-old drunk, bearing a resemblance to the star of the British TV series Shameless who tried to gouge out a policeman’s eye.
6.     Vigilantes from a rightwing political party who used the riots as an excuse to stir up racial hatred.
7.     Rupert Murdoch – whom we could suspect of conjuring all this just to keep himself off British front pages.

Next pick a weapon:
1)   bricks and rocks
2)   police stop and search
3)   gasoline and matches
4)   jobs and training programs
5)   a hard line against looters
6)   a sensation-hungry press
7)   a good tax attorney and accountant.

Next, pick a Villain:
1)   Unwed mothers & Absentee fathers
2)   “A sick society”
3)   The police
4)   Profiteering gangs
5)    Liberals
6)   “austerity measures”
7)   Rupert Murdoch (game note: you cannot pick him as both a Thug and a Villain)

Finally, match a crime to a punishment:
1.  A 14 yr. old girl who stole some clothes.
2.  Accepting a pair of shorts from a looter.
3.  The theft of billions of pounds.
4.  The murder of eight African children.
5.   Bribery of police officers and extortion of government officials.
6.   Destroying people’s livelihoods.
7.   Stealing a six-pack of water bottles.

A.  Pfizer Pharmaceutical pays $175,000 each to families of four of the eight dead children.  No payment to the dozens that were disabled.
B.  Punishment depends on whether its vandal youth burning businesses or UK corporations sending work to India and China.
C.   5 months prison.
D.  Rupert Murdoch may not get to buy Skye TV.  Or he still may.
E.  Remanded to custody of her parents who were “too busy” to show up at her trial.
F.  A bailout that enabled banks to make billions more.
G.  Six months prison.

(Answers: 1E, 2C, 3F, 4A, 5D, 6B, 7G)

The first player to find a Clue must share it with the Prime Minister - who doesn’t appear to have one.

Bonus points if you can predict when this classic game is going to make a comeback in the U.S.
destruction of private property.  The rich worship it; the poor barely know what it is.

The English riots have barely been reported on – let alone explored – by the U.S. press.  Don’t think it’s not coming there.  But with guns, not bricks.

Somebody please help me understand Republicans.

I had a favorite philosophy professor who told us “You can’t hate that which you understand.”  A kid in class asked, “What about (name your favorite dictator)?”  The professor just smiled and repeated, “You can’t hate what you understand,” then added, “understanding is not the same as approval.” 

I’ve been aided in my quest for Republican enlightenment by a recent study (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110407/ts_alt_afp/healthpoliticsusbritain) that indicates the brain structures of liberals and conservatives significantly differ.  Science has found liberals have more grey matter in the part of the brain that deals with complexities; conservatives have more grey matter in the part that deals with fear response.  That would make conservatives the ones you want to be with when your house is on fire.  The problem is they’re always thinking the house is on fire. 

America’s social programs need “fixing.”  A brilliant bit of Republican (the house is on fire!) phrasing.   But Republicans don’t want to fix Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid: they want to end them.  Been a thorn in their paw since the Roosevelt administration.  They’ve planted the killer seed by fomenting fear, using projected estimates of these programs running out of money in the next 20-40 years.

The logical question should be “where do we get the money?” – not whether it’s the government’s duty to provide for the public welfare.  But the latter is exactly the ideological point the GOP wants to make: it’s not the government’s duty to protect citizens from anything other than foreign invasion.  Not corporate polluters, not food industry health hazards, not derivative-trading bankers.

Republican reasoning, as best as I can understand it, is whatever sets the free market free (see Milton Friedman) to generate wealth is cool.  Cuz, ya see, those who generate wealth are gonna hire more American workers… except reducing the labor pool will drive up wages.  Uh oh, that won’t do.  Guess they’ll have to keep hiring cheap labor overseas.  While still collecting corporate welfare here.   Republican ideology has never been about giving everyone a fair share; it’s about giving the wealthy and aspiring wealthy an opportunity to get MORE than their share.  The rich will save us!  And you too can be one of them.  Am I over-simplifying?

Surely not all Republicans are wealthy.  So what are struggling middle-class and lower middle-class Republican voters thinking?  Are they thinking?

Maybe they’re thinking that lowering Social Security income and raising the cost of medical care will neutralize the impact of overpopulation on future generations – unless they succeed in shutting down Planned Parenthood, thus offsetting the premature loss of pensioners with an increased number of unwanted babies.

Or maybe they’re just so afraid the house is burning that they’re ready to follow anyone – and there are some lulus - with a large fear-response lobe? 

Will somebody – preferably a Republican – please explain Republicans to me?

Somebody.  Please.

   The last time I saw Cairo was April, 1999.  I was on a five-day Easter break from my publicity duties on Gladiator, which had been filming on Malta for about a month with two months left to shoot.
    My cab driver had dropped me in the heart of the city, outside the Museum of Egypt.  I avoided the hustlers and tour guides, walking fast in no particular direction into main business district.  I’d already hit the tourist spots, the Museum, the Citadel, the mosques, the tombs where living and dead shared residential space.  I wanted some time on the unruly streets of this urban labyrinth.  I wanted to go where tourists fear to tread.
    I started north along Shari Champollion, named after the Frenchman who broke the code of the Rosetta Stone, towards the Coptic section of El Azbakiya.  Cutting south again, I wandered sidestreets along the spine of Shari Muhammad Farid, who was either a famous physician or one of the heroes of the overthrow of King Farouk - depending on who you talked to.
   Who you talked to became a bigger problem the farther I ventured into the A’bdin district where few of the shopkeepers, clerks or people on the street spoke much, if any, English.  I sensed no hostility towards me as a Westerner.  Only the universal frustration of people unable to understand what I was asking or to make themselves understood.
    I found a bookstore that had only Arabic novels in the window but sold a few books in English.  I bought Naghib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk - a novel that had been banned in Egypt before he won the Nobel Prize in ’88.  I took it to a large, spartan café across the street where I ordered a coffee that tasted like sweetened hot tar and examined the glass cabinets which contained a half-dozen plain rolls and as many biscotti.
    The only other customers in the shop were a table of four young Egyptian men, one of whom had a spiral notebook, another a hard-covered text of some sort.  They might have been students, though I guessed they were in their early to mid-twenties.  It was just as likely they were among the growing number of educated unemployed in this country.
    Egypt underwent what globalization gurus call “economic modernization” during the 1990s, ticking off the checklist of requirements for full participation in the goldrush of integrated commerce and technologies: controlling inflation, reducing debt and building reserves. 
    The only thing they hadn’t been able to do was reduce unemployment.  In fact, the new Egyptian economic model - lean, mean and ready for competitive entry into the international marketplace - had brought about a significant increase in unemployment.
    Between 1988 and 1998, nearly a million people a year entered a labor force that had no labor for them to perform.  A large number of them were well educated – in a country where agriculture still accounted for 42% of the nation’s work force.
      Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman and other celebrants of global markets claim this kind of “correction” is to be expected.  As an economy changes from, say, largely agrarian to mostly technical or industrial, there is a predictable disruption to the lives and livelihoods of the untrained.  What wasn’t figured into the equation by most proponents of a headfirst dive into the capitalist mosh pit was an economy that educated its people faster than it could employ its educated people.
    This was happening throughout Egypt where levels of education had been improving at a rate independent of the economic expansion.  Increasing numbers of graduates were leaving high schools with high hopes, only to find that the dropouts already had all the jobs. 
    “Educational and training systems continue to churn out graduates, taking little or no account of the actual demand for labor,” professor Samir Radwan asserted in a study for the office of the Director General of the International Labor Organization. 
    Consider that 33% of the people who actually have jobs in Egypt are illiterate, while 55% of the unemployed have an “intermediate” education (above 8th grade).  One can only conclude that an applicant has a better chance of getting a job in Egypt today if he or she can’t fill out an application.
    The Globalism advocates suggest that these unemployed, educated youths will be part of the vanguard of social change.  But a repressive regime, like those throughout the Middle East, isn’t going to initiate reform just because its growing intellectual underclass is growing impatient. 
    The guy with the spiral notebook shook a cigarette from the pack lying at the center of his table and turned in my direction.  He had a thin moustache and goatee, dark eyes narrow and alert.  He lit up and peered through the smoke, catching me looking at him.  Our eyes locked for a brief moment.  Then he turned his gaze as one failing to identify anything of importance in his line of sight.
    I left Cairo the next day.  It has rarely left my consciousness.  After the events of this week, I know why.  Egypt has too many smart people to tolerate a repressive regime.  We can only hope that means they’re smart enough not to go the way of Iran.  Let’s also hope the West doesn’t pander to Israeli apprehensions and allows Egypt to find its own version of democracy.  So far, President Obama seems smart enough to recognize this.

We recently saw Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job, a painful and painstakingly detailed account of the financial meltdown – or The Great Crash of 2008, as historians will refer to it.  Unless, of course, there’s a greater crash coming. 
​The Stock Market Crash of 1929 got all the attention but the economy wouldn’t hit bottom until three-and-a-half years later.   
Let’s see… 2008 + 3 ½ = mid-2011!  We’re almost there!! 
​Except we’re not.   
​My father bought his house for the equivalent of a year’s income.  Raise your hands if the income-to-price ratio on your house matches that.  Of course, house values could yet go back down to that level.  That’s the good news? 
​The difference between the 1950s and 2010s is that one was a period of growth, the other a period of… well, guess we’ll find out, won’t we?  Historically, the economy grows in inverse relation to the disparity between rich and poor, i.e., the less disparity, the greater the growth (et voila, an expanded “middle class”).  Raise your hands again if you think income disparity is shrinking.   
  
And now the rich will have their tax cut.  On what planet was that a high priority?  Trickledownutopia?  But I’m not sure it would’ve done any good for President Obama to hold out at this point.  The damage was done and the pattern set much longer ago. 
​ 
The thing for which angry liberals can legitimately fault the President was his neglect of debtors in the early bailouts.  The few consumer protections that came out of that were toothless.  The reform limiting exploitative credit card rates is a joke: you now have the option to reject their rate increase – which triggers a reduction on your card limit (usually down to what you owe – effectively cutting off your credit). The 2009 Home Affordable Mortgage Program (HAMP), funded with $72 billion, was designed to keep 3-5 million homeowners in their homes: to date less than half a million applicants have been approved for permanent loan modifications (more than half the temporary mods are cancelled after three months and many more linger in limbo with unpaid debt piling up). 
The financial institutions got all they wanted and more – giving only tokens to consumers.  Thank you Henry Paulson for blazing the bailout trail that Larry Summers and Tim Geitner followed.  Different parties, you say? Watch Ferguson’s documentary and you’ll see that Summers and Geitner have merely been holding the course until Republican reinforcements get there in January with more swell ideas for saving the wealthy from the clutches of the “undeserving poor.”

While Inside Job might want to make you slit your wrists – or some high roller’s throat – consider the possibility that the Right might be right: making the rich richer so they can produce more riches makes us all richer in the end. 
Sorta like Mexico. 
​Raise your hands if you want to move to Mexico.   
Hmm, there seem to be a few of you.