Bob Lord

So, does Thanksgiving in White America include being thankful you’re not Black?

Seems that way.

Let’s face it. Too many aspects of Ferguson are flat-out disgusting. It wasn’t just a White cop using excessive force against a Black teenager. Every step along the way after that the authorities in Ferguson, St. Louis County, and the State of Missouri consistently behaved as if Black lives matter less than White ones. There was the failure to recover Michael Brown’s body for over four hours after the shooting. There was what we’re now learning was a sloppy investigation by the police department. There was Jay Nixon’s woeful decision not to appoint a special prosecutor. There was the pathetic, racist failure of the prosecutor even to try to get an indictment. There was the roll-out of the grand jury decision in a manner seemingly calculated to provoke maximum anger in the Black community. And there was the decision of too many in the mainstream media to focus on the unrest and property damage in Ferguson, rather than on the insane injustice that had occurred.

Charles Blow of the NY Times, sums it up well in today’s op-ed, Fury After Ferguson:

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Perhaps the best thing to come out of Bill Maher’s insipid critique of Islam is this piece by Rula Jebreal: Why America is losing the war on terror — and the Islam debate is so flawed. Jebreal’s takedown of American foreign / military policy in the Middle East is stinging and spot on. She starts with the stark reality:

An enemy that had comprised a couple of hundred desperate men hiding in caves in eastern Afghanistan when the “war on terror” got underway following the 9/11 attacks is incarnated today as 20,000 fighting men in the Islamic State movement. And far from hiding in caves, ISIS has brazenly raised its black flag over vast swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq – countries that, in 2001, had been two of the most secular societies in the Middle East.

It’s hard to summarize Jebreal’s analysis, but here are a few of her salient points:

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I’ve often wondered how much income we could cram into the top 1 percent before the bottom 90 percent erupts.

I never focused on the 9 percent in between. The folks in this 9 percent, I figured, are too affluent to rock any boats, so I left them out of my calculations.

But I’ve reconsidered. This “affluent 9 percent” may be inequality’s final victims. They may play a pivotal role in determining when our unequal society gets too unequal.

The affluent 9 percent are those households with annual incomes roughly between $100,000 and $400,000, the 30 million Americans both affluent enough and numerous enough to maintain our facade of prosperity.

They fill our restaurants, populate our shopping malls, and fill the coach sections of commercial airplanes. They trade in their cars before running them into the ground, simultaneously propping up our auto industry and creating a used-car market for those unable to buy new.

The question may not be how much income we can cram into the top 1 percent, but how long we can sustain the affluent 9 percent while the income share of the top 1 percent soars. If the affluent 9 percent feel pinched and cut back, our consumption-based economy could implode.

Indeed, data compiled by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty indicate that may be the case, and that another implosion awaits us.

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I guess it’s a good thing that the 60th vote for Mary Landrieu’s pipeline didn’t materialize, but what does the whole spectacle say about the desperation of the Democratic Party?

The news on climate change is beyond alarming. Today’s NY Times has this op-ed specifically about the Keystone XL pipeline: A Forest Threatened by Keystone XL.

The shallow deposits are scooped up by huge electric shovels and then hauled away in 400-ton-capacity trucks to mills that separate the bitumen from the sand. The waste is then dumped into lakes of polluted sludge. But most of the bitumen lies so deep in the frozen ground that it must be melted with steam and then pumped to the surface for processing. This requires steam injection plants that blast scalding steam into the ground through wells.

Basic mathematics underscores the absurdity of this brute-force enterprise. A study last year found that one unit of energy was required to produce the equivalent of five units of energy from the open-pit mines. For steam-extracted deposits, the ratio was roughly 1 to 3. As the Canadian economist Jeff Rubin put it several years ago, “when you’re schlepping oil from sand, you’re probably in the bottom of the ninth inning in the hydrocarbon economy.”

Where bitumen is near the surface, the landscape is reduced to a treeless wasteland. For the harder-to-extract bitumen, the steam plants require a supporting network of roads, pipelines, power lines, seismic lines and well pads that do their own damage. The natural gas that powers these plants is generated by the hydraulic fracturing of shale-gas formations in British Columbia. One battlefield leads to another.

The majority of Senate Democrats understand this, and understand that the big picture on climate is worse, as Dahr Jamail at Truthout explains at length in Climate Disruption Depression and 2013 Emissions Set New Records.

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A century or so ago, the workweek was 60 hours long, or longer.

Through advances in productivity, we reduced that to 40 hours.

The great majority of us consider that progress. Freedom from work allows for self-fulfillment. Most find that a 40-hour work week makes for a better life.

Somehow, though, the workweek length stopped declining when it reached 40 hours or so.

Funny thing is, we never stopped becoming more productive. Productivity increases march on. But, for whatever reason, we made a collective decision that further reduction in workweek length would not be a good thing.

Until 35 or so years ago, productivity increases also gave us two other huge accomplishments: Dramatic increases in wages for the many (the bottom 90% or so) and dramatic decreases in poverty.

As in the case of the length of the workweek, progress on those two fronts stopped and, arguably, went into reverse, even though productivity gains continued apace.

What happened? Put bluntly, we, as a society, allowed the wealthy to hijack productivity gains. The engine that for decades drove the betterment of the many now drives the betterment only of the few. There was a mindset we had in the 1960s, which we lost somewhere along the way.

Think that’s bad? Here’s what’s worse: If we don’t act, future productivity gains could drive a reversal of the fortunes of the many. We may be seeing the beginning of that process today.

Robert F. Kennedy embodied our 1960s mindset when he famously said: There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not? If ever there were a time for Americans to channel RFK and return to their 1960s mindset, this is it.

So, in the spirit of RFK, where would be today if productivity gains had not been hijacked?

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