Hillary's White House will be a Mausoleum for Neoliberalism

While it might be a stretch to label Hillary's "Get Out of Jail Free" card issued yesterday by FBI director James Comey a "Nixonian" moment, that is what it feels like to me. Certainly the powerless public is used to seeing the powerful skate. After all, how many times have we reminded ourselves that none of the "Masters of the Universe" behind the 2008 global economic meltdown spent time behind bars?

The difference here is that we were never asked to vote for Dick Fuld or Angelo Mozilo, at least not directly, as we are now being asked to vote for Hillary.

Nixon resigned in disgrace and was spared criminal prosecution, in what was almost assuredly a quid pro quo, thanks to a presidential pardon handed down by a successor Nixon himself selected. The public was enraged for a while, and it no doubt cost Gerald Ford a close election against Jimmy Carter in 1976, but it turned out that the whole Watergate Nixon resignation was a handy Judas goat scenario which allowed voters to think that the "good guys won" and the body politic had been healed.

Clinton is not going to bow out, and voters no longer believe that "good guys" serve in government. There is no wiggle room left, not anywhere near the space available to present-day elites as was nearby for those present at the creation of neoliberalism in the Carter years.

I say it feels like a Nixonian moment because we are at the threshold of the mausoleum. The mausoleum is the Hillary White House. Once we pass through it we will be in a different world.

Hippies vs. Punks: Ravi Shankar

It has been a strange week. The sizable crew of painters who have been working on the exterior of the apartment building for weeks finally arrived to the north side where my studio is located. They use diesel telescopic booms. From Monday on my windows have been masked with milky polyethylene plastic sheeting and brown paper. So when I arrive home after work it has been like stepping into a spider's cocoon, dark and stuffy.

At the same time I have been preparing for a job interview, actually interviewing, and then waiting to hear if I would receive a job offer. I did, which then created another cycle of adrenaline as I submitted two-week's notice to the office manager at the local.

Waking up every morning in the midst of this I needed something sonically different, something calming but nutritious. By happenstance I lighted on my collection of Ravi Shankar records.

Listening to Hindustani classical Indian music turned out to be just the thing I needed.

Of course Ravi Shankar played an enormous role in the definition of Hippie culture. He was present at the creation when the Summer of Love kicked off at the Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967.

And he and George Harrison pioneered the superstar blow-out benefit rock concert with The Concert for Bangladesh the summer of 1971.

But critical for Hippies vs. Punks is his role in the Dark Horse Tour with Harrison in November and December of 1974. The concerts were savaged in the music press. Shankar suffered a heart attack and Harrison lost his voice. To me it is a critical moment in the expiration of the Hippie. If the Manson Family and Altamont hadn't killed off the Hippie at the end of 1969, since the massification of bohemia along Hippie lines proceeded apace all during the early 1970s, by the beginning of 1975, given the stillbirth of the first tour of the U.S. by a Beatle since 1966, it was clear the Hippie had run out of juice.

This photo from the Dark Horse Tour of Harrison and Shankar in the White House with Gerald Ford (Billy Preston to the left of Harrison) sums it all up. The president who pardoned Nixon (thereby preventing a necessary airing of a dangerously corrupt system) and who presided over the fall of Saigon yuks it up with the coked out peddler of "Krishna Consciousness." Is there a more fitting bon voyage to the Hippie?

Nonetheless Ravi Shankar's recordings are a goldmine. The ragas are particularly rejuvenating:

Hippies vs. Punks: Fly Like an Eagle 1976

The sunshine patriots of 1976 celebrated the United States Bicentennial by slathering themselves in light California rock. One of These Nights (1975) by the Eagles, Frampton Comes Alive! (1976), Fleetwood Mac (1975), Steve Miller Band's Fly Like an Eagle (1976) all were recorded in California and all charted on the Billboard's Year-End Hot 100 singles for 1976.

Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future

I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I'm free
Oh, Lord, through the revolution

Feed the babies
Who don't have enough to eat
Shoe the children
With no shoes on their feet
House the people
Livin' in the street
Oh, oh, there's a solution

I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I'm free
Fly through the revolution

Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future

I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I'm free
Fly through the revolution

Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future

The image of a bird flying to the sea is likely lifted from the powerful ending to Visions of Cody, Kerouac's source book for On the Road (1957). If there is a Book of Genesis for the counter culture it is On the Road. And if there is a film version of this Hippie Book of Genesis it is Easy Rider (1969).

And what is the philosophical underpinning of both On the Road and Easy Rider? Man understands -- Man has the ability to know -- time. As the Neal Cassady character Dean Moriarty says in On the Road, "Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!"

What's On the Road about? It's about becoming free, pursuing one's path aimlessly -- time unmarked and unbound from work and family and study and all expectations other than the adventure at hand. In other words, a trip to Mexico. What's Easy Rider about? Making one big cocaine score in Mexico, selling it to Phil Spector, and then heading out on the road to Mardi Gras.

Before Wyatt (a.k.a., Captain America) and Billy take off on their motorcycles, Captain America pulls off his wristwatch and tosses it on the ground. Heroes don't do clocks. Then at the end, right before Captain America and Billy are shotgunned by the rednecks, Wyatt says, "We blew it!" What does Captain American mean? He's responding to Billy's gleeful prattle about being rich and retiring to Florida; Captain America realizes that their entire enterprise was merely a reaffirmation of the rat race and the equation of time and money. Make a pile of loot and retire to Florida. Easy Rider as a film version of the Hippie Book of Genesis is a refutation of Founding Father Ben Franklin's "Time is money."

Fly Like an Eagle had three top ten hits: "Take the Money and Run," "Rock'n Me" and "Fly Like an Eagle" (which though released as a single at the end of 1976, didn't chart until March of the following year). Go into any hardware store or walk onto any construction site in North America on any given day and chances are that you'll hear Tea Party politics and classic rock radio; and on that radio "Fly Like an Eagle" will be playing. Like the hackneyed insect trapped in prehistoric amber, Time keeps on slippin', slippin' slippin' into the past.

The past is 1976. Gerald Ford is on his way out, having successfully managed the aftermath of the Watergate crisis with his controversial presidential pardon of Richard Nixon as well as having shrewdly got out front of the Church Committee and Nedzi/Pike Committee with his Rockefeller Commission and thereby arguably lessening some of the public outrage over revelations of the nefarious aspects of American Empire.

This was a moment of structural weakness for the Leviathan, known in Iran as Great Satan. But the Hippies were no longer in any mood to confront "The Man." They elected an evangelizing peanut farmer from Plains, GA who promised them clean government but who ended up bequeathing us our current corrupt and exhausted neoliberal paradigm, hallmarks of which are rule by and for the 1%, government gridlock and permanent military occupation of the Persian Gulf (Carter Doctrine).

So much promise evaporated between 1975 and 1980. We went from Empire exposed and on the defensive to Empire reborn. The Hippies could have done something. But they didn't; they were tired. They were content listening to their sun-drenched California rock, safe in suburbs and exurbs with their good dope and coke. The horizon was clear. The mists of the Aquarian Age had finally, after more than a decade, burned off. In 1976 things seemed, for the moment at least, peaceful, hopeful, new. Almost perfect. It's no wonder that the Hippies decided to kick back, enjoy the clear weather and "fly like an eagle to the sea" (and it's no coincidence that this is also a critical year for the Punks).

Today, more than 35 years later, we have lost touch with the message of "Fly Like an Eagle," even as it is pooped anew endlessly out of countless speakers across our broad continent. It is a radical message. Homo sapiens sapiens is a creature capable of knowing time -- a ghost trapped in the present, ruled by force, but somehow forever slippin' into the future.

Hippies vs. Punks: "California Über Alles" 1979

By 1979 the Hippies are finished as a vehicle for cultural change. They have become part of the status quo; hence, the Dead Kennedys' "California Über Alles." Released as a single in June of 1979, the source of the song's ire is Jerry Brown. Jerry Brown is the current Governor of California, and he was Governor of California from 1975 to 1983 when Jello Biafra wrote "California Über Alles." Brown's nickname, coined by Mike Royko, was Governor Moonbeam. But that nickname, like the target of "California Über Alles," speaks not of a Hippie per se but what became of the Hippies when they returned to the rat race and accepted the yoke of corporate domination and with it their own niche in consumer society. This is New Age.

Jerry Brown is a great politician. Biafra's disdain was misplaced and his prediction not altogether accurate. "Carter Power" did "go away," but it was ushered out not by Brown but another California governor, Ronald Reagan. Maybe if like the Dead Kennedys you lived in the Bay Area it might seem as if New Ageism could sweep the nation in 1980; but the opposite was the case. The country was lurching rapidly to the Right and had been for several years. 

No, Jerry Brown's days in the national spotlight in the 1980's were numbered. His time had already come and gone. His time was 1976; but that year he ran a diffident, inscrutable presidential primary campaign and Carter cleaned his clock. If only Brown had run stronger -- he didn't have to win; he just had to bloody Carter more -- the outcome of the general election very well could have been different.

My idea, one I've entertained for a long time, is that if Gerald Ford would have beat Carter and won four more years in the White House, which Ford very nearly did anyway, we never would have elected Reagan in 1980 and suffered the decade-plus devastation his presidency wrought. What we needed was an additional four years of Ford. Four more years with Rumsfeld and Cheney at the controls, assuming we could have avoided a nuclear conflagration, would have certainly meant victory for the Democratic presidential candidate in 1980. The country by this time would have been absolutely exhausted with 12 years of Republican misrule. Either Jerry Brown or Teddy Kennedy could have won a general election race against anyone the GOP nominated. Reagan would have been blocked. And the working class -- meaning most of us, the 99% -- would be much better off today.

So when you listen to "California Über Alles" think back to that time when the Hippie was in the Punk's crosshairs and Jerry Brown was soon to be President of the United States.

"California Über Alles"

I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles
And never frowns
Soon I will be president...

Carter Power will soon go away
I will be Fuhrer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will meditate in school
Your kids will meditate in school!

[Chorus:]
California Uber Alles
California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California
Uber Alles California

Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face

Close your eyes, can't happen here
Big Bro' on white horse is near
The hippies won't come back you say
Mellow out or you will pay
Mellow out or you will pay!

[Chorus]

Now it is 1984
Knock-knock at your front door
It's the suede/denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece

Come quietly to the camp
You'd look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don't you worry, it's only a shower
For your clothes here's a pretty flower.

DIE on organic poison gas
Serpent's egg's already hatched
You will croak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown
When you mess with President Brown

[Chorus]

The Hinge is 1975

If you missed Obama's State of the Union address last night, as I did, today's lede unsigned editorial in the New York Times provides a synopsis. One proposal, to increase the the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour from $7.25 and to index it to inflation, is the subject of Annie Lowrey's story today:

Many state and local government set their own minimum wages above the federal floor. Currently Washington is the only state that sets a minimum wage above $9 an hour, but several states exceed the current rate of $7.25.

The White House said that the $1.75 increase in the minimum wage would be enough to offset roughly 10 to 20 percent of the increase in income inequality since 1980. According to data compiled by the economists Thomas Piketty, at the Paris School of Economics, and Emmanuel Saez, at the University of California, Berkeley, inequality has worsened considerably during that time, and many metrics show that wages have stagnated or declined for millions of working families. The income share of the top 1 percent of earners has doubled, to 20 percent in 2011 from 10 percent in 1980. Between 1980 and 2008, according to analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the top 10 percent of earners captured 98 percent of all income gains. 

The proposal is one of several that the White House has put forward to tackle that inequality. In the speech, Mr. Obama also proposed expanding early childhood education programs — another path that experts say can tackle inequality by leveling the playing field and increasing mobility among children from low-income families. “Every dollar we invest in high-quality early education can save more than $7 later on by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime,” Mr. Obama said. “Let’s do what works, and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind. Let’s give our kids that chance.” 

In his 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama proposed lifting the minimum wage yet higher, to $9.50. Under the current proposal, the White House said that a family earning $20,000 to $30,000 would see an additional $3,500 of income a year. 

“This single step would raise the incomes of millions of working families,” said Mr. Obama on Tuesday night. “It could mean the difference between groceries or the food bank, rent or eviction, scraping by or finally getting ahead. For businesses across the country, it would mean customers with more money in their pockets. In fact, working folks shouldn’t have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up while C.E.O. pay has never been higher.”

Anytime the research of Piketty and Saez finds its way into the mainstream press it's a good day. Piketty and Saez have captured the Zeitgeist -- the "unprecedented surge in top wage incomes starting in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1990s." The 1%. I track it to 1975; that's the hinge. The critical presidential administration is Gerald Ford's, although Carter's has to be included in the mix. By the time Reagan assumes power the flight path of the Zeitgeist has already been established.

There are currently ten states that peg their minimum wage to cost-of-living increases. Washington State has the highest minimum wage because we established our inflation peg (by means of a ballot initiative for which I helped gather signatures) sooner than others. Seemingly each legislative session in Olympia the restaurant lobby tries to repeal it.

Scott Shane on the National Security State

Scott Shane has an important and readable story in the Sunday paper about Obama's national security state and the increased prosecution of leakers.  Shane chronicles the interesting narrative of how former CIA analyst and operative John Kiriakou ended up in DOJ crosshairs.

The plutocracy's renaissance in this country can be tracked to the administration of Gerald Ford.  Rumsfeld and Cheney traded off as White House Chief of Staff.  George H.W. Bush went from RNC Chairman during Watergate to Ford's Chief of the US Liaison Office in the People's Republic of China and then to Director of Central Intelligence, replacing William Colby.  The Agency was hemorrhaging from Seymour Hersh's "family jewels" revelation in the New York Times and the subsequent Church Committee investigations.  The goal was to get the genie back in the bottle.

Here is what Shane says about the Obama administration's attempt to rebottle the genie:

Mr. Obama has presided over twice as many such cases as all his predecessors combined, though at least two of the six prosecutions since 2009 resulted from investigations begun under President George W. Bush. An outcry over a series of revelations last year — about American cyberattacks on Iran, a double agent who infiltrated the Qaeda branch in Yemen and procedures for targeted killings — prompted Mr. Holder to begin new leak investigations that have not yet produced any charges.

The resulting chill on officials’ willingness to talk is deplored by journalists and advocates of open government; without leaks, they note, Americans might never have learned about the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods or the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping. But for supporters of greater secrecy, the chill is precisely the goal.

What does it portend?  Probably the maintenance and continued expansion of drone warfare (a judge ruled recently that even the administration's legal opinion justifying the drone killing -- a.k.a., assassination -- of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki could be kept secret); and in addition to that, continued terror strikes against Iran.