I, Robot

An interesting, brief article written by Sam Smith appeared on the Counterpunch web site this past weekend. "America Under the Management Cult" tells us what we already know -- though I was unaware that Obama in his student days was employed by a CIA front company -- but prefer not to dwell on because of its depressing nature. Here is a sample:

And now the Democrats appear headed towards nominating Hillary Clinton despite her seedy past, her several criminal associates and her less than progressive politics. If she wins and survives two terms, for over 50% of the previous half century America will have been run by two of the most corrupt families to reach the top of our country’s politics. For nearly three quarters of the previous half century our country will have been run by those with direct or familial connections to the CIA. And, for a topping, for two thirds of the half century the country will have been run by graduates of Harvard Business School or the Harvard or Yale law schools. 

This is not the America we were taught to love and assist in its noble purposes. But then, these days most of our children are nor even introduced to such thoughts in any meaningful way, except, say, as Answer C in a multiple choice exam. 

You can’t have a working democratic republic without an education that supports it, but with No Child Left Behind and Common Core, corporate interests and their political serfs are reducing education to robotic exercises in preparation for students’ similarly robotic experiences in adult life. 

But then this is the goal of the multinational corporations that have grasped control of our land and its leaders. Not since the pre-revolutionary colonial days of the British East India Company has America been so much a hostage to such alien institutions. Thanks to such expediencies as Citizens United and international trade agreements, if one follows the money, it leads inexorably away from the natural interests of the United States to huge corporations that are challenging whole countries, including ours, as major possessors of power.

Yes, that's right. That's what it feels like to me. I am becoming a robot. With the ascension of IT and the large corporations that control IT, time, the fundamental way that we experience time, has begun a metamorphosis. Time is being constricted and digitized and the large multinational corporations and the governments that serve them are overseeing this process.

To go along with this insight, Annie Lowrey had a story in the Sunday New York Times about the persistence of poverty in the United States 50 years after the State of the Union address where LBJ announced a war on poverty:

[H]igh rates of poverty — measured by both the official government yardstick and the alternatives that many economists prefer — have remained a remarkably persistent feature of American society. About four in 10 black children live in poverty; for Hispanic children, that figure is about three in 10. According to one recent study, as of mid-2011, in any given month, 1.7 million households were living on cash income of less than $2 a person a day, with the prevalence of the kind of deep poverty commonly associated with developing nations increasing since the mid-1990s. 

Both economic and sociological trends help explain why so many children and adults remain poor, even putting the effects of the recession aside. More parents are raising a child alone, with more infants born out of wedlock. High incarceration rates, especially among black men, keep many families apart. About 30 percent of single mothers live in poverty. 

In some cases, government programs have helped fewer families because of program changes and budget cuts, researchers said. For instance, the 1996 Clinton-era welfare overhaul drastically cut the cash assistance available to needy families, often ones headed by single mothers. 

“As of 1996, we expected single mothers to go to work,” Professor Ziliak said. “But if they’re shelling out most of their weekly pay in the form of child care, they can’t make sense of doing it.” 

The more important driver of the still-high poverty rate, researchers said, is the poor state of the labor market for low-wage workers and spiraling inequality. Over the last 30 years, growth has generally failed to translate into income gains for workers — even as the American labor force has become better educated and more skilled. About 40 percent of low-wage workers have attended or completed college, and 80 percent have completed high school. 

Economists remain sharply divided on the reasons, with technological change, globalization, the decline of labor unions and the falling value of the minimum wage often cited as major factors. But with real incomes for a vast number of middle-class and low-wage workers in decline, safety-net programs have become more instrumental in keeping families’ heads above water.

For decades elites have been telling us that wage gains only go to those who have invested in education. So if we want to be prosperous we better get a college degree. At least now that canard is being exploded. If 40 percent of low-wage workers have some form of college education, being better educated is no guarantee of a higher income.

Back in the days of Occupy I thought that this -- the immiseration of our college-educated youth and their reduction to student-loan low-wage peonage -- would be the catalyst to overhaul our behemoth banana republic. But force works. The encampments were razed. Take the military coup in Egypt last July as an example. The Arab Spring was in essence repealed. Elites took note. Force, at least for the time being, works. That's what we have playing out now in the Middle East. A rosy future for war. Force is being used in an attempt to keep the masses satisfied with their miserable lot.