Emmett Till

I have vague memories of the news stories of Emmett Till's murder 60 years ago. I have more memories of the outrage at the acquittal some weeks later of the men who did it. But I also knew that at the time in Money, Mississippi, whatever white men did to black folks was considered right and just and proper by definition, and there wasn't a damn thing black folks could do about it.

It wasn't just in Money, Mississippi, either. Los Angeles (where I lived at the time) and many other parts of California had rules almost as broad regarding the impunity of white people to do to black and brown folks pretty much whatever they wanted. There was very little the victims could do about it in California, either.

That was the way it was.

The outrage over the murder of Emmett Till and the subsequent acquittal of his murderers was somewhat muted, therefore. It's not that people weren't upset and angry. Even plenty of white people were. It's that the conditions under which these things happened -- and they did happen with shocking regularity -- were time-honored, even integral to the national sense of itself.

In those days, blackness (and brownness, indeed, every skin-color but whiteness) was criminalized, and that criminalization justified oppression, exploitation, and occasional murder.

That was the way it was.

I've mentioned previously that in those days -- indeed, for all my life until moving to Northern California in 1959 -- I lived in an integrated neighborhood. So far as I was aware, there was no racial animosity. But as I think back about the people who lived there, I suspect there actually was a good deal of white animosity toward the "colored" in the neighborhood -- "colored" which included blacks, Latinos/Chicanos, and Japanese that I can recall, and may have included others I don't recall -- but it was not expressed openly or frequently. Now the neighborhood is almost entirely Latino as is most of the San Gabriel Valley, but from the pictures I've seen recently it appears to be little different than it was 60 and more years ago when I lived there.

Street where I lived facing east c. 2015

Street where I lived facing west c. 2015; our house was the yellow one on the right

While ethnically it has become an almost entirely Latino neighborhood, visually, it is almost the same as it was when I lived there. A few houses have been extensively remodeled, but most haven't been. Some still look like they did when I walked or bicycled through the neighborhood as a boy.

Living in an integrated neighborhood was somewhat exotic in California at the time, but I thought nothing of it because I had never known anything else. It seemed perfectly natural to me. And the story of Emmett Till -- what little we children knew of it at the time -- was frightening to us because it was easy for most of us and for me to identify with him. He was older than I was and so he must have been wiser to the ways of the world, and still he was killed -- they say for whistling at a white woman? That didn't make any sense at all. Boys did that. Nobody paid more than a minute's attention to it unless it got out of hand, annoying, and then some grown up would tell the boy to stop. That's it. So they killed Emmett Till for something most people would simply ignore? What madness was this?

All we children knew of these things was that some adults were just out of their minds crazy and brutal. We all knew it. We had our own mystery stories of kids being killed by grown ups, by their own parents sometimes. We knew it happened. But this case... no, something was bad-wrong, and what was wrong was that two white men killed this black youth, "Negro" was the word then used, out of... spite? Or just because they could? And somehow they knew they'd get away with it if they did.

About 20 years ago I was asked to write a play about Emmett Till's murder, his lynching as it was being referred to. So I did a lot of research on the story, and it was very ugly indeed, especially with regard to that part of Mississippi, to the two men who killed him, and with regard to the so-called "justice" system which acquitted them.

Everything about it reeked.

As I was doing my research, I found a story about a white boy who was kidnapped and murdered at about the same time. I don't remember his name, nor can I recall where the incident took place (it may have been Michigan), but I felt that these stories were parallel examples of something uniquely American, a social and cultural belief system that devalues and enables the extermination of certain lives while protecting the lives of certain others.

The white boy, ultimately, was no more protected and valued than Emmett Till was, you see, and his killer or killers remain unknown to this day. They weren't let off like Emmett Till's killers were. They were simply never found. That's because -- in my estimation -- that incident was swept under the rug. It wasn't investigated more than superficially, and if the authorities had a suspect or suspects in mind, they never pursued it. The boy was dead and it was just as well... or so it seemed.

So I wanted to parallel this case with the case of Emmett Till as an indictment of the broader American social environment in which these sorts of things went on all the time. Well, that didn't fly with the professor who'd asked me to write the play. He didn't want any "white boy" messing up the story of Emmett Till. While I understood his point of view about it, I told him that I thought it was important to broaden the picture by including the similar murder of a white boy and showing how his life in the end was worth no more than that of Emmett Till, but we could not reach an agreement on that aspect, so the script was never written.

The Black Lives Matter movement is trying to hammer into American consciousness and conscience the fact that to a horrifying degree, black lives don't matter, especially to police and the interests whom the police serve. They are instead killable, disposable, pretty much at will. Until recently, it was almost impossible to get a police officer indicted for the clearly outrageous uses of force employed wildly disproportionately against black and brown people. While indictments are now being issued periodically, provided the case is outrageous enough, we aren't seeing convictions, and still, too often,  police are getting away with murder.

The current situation is remarkably similar to the situation in Money, Mississippi, in 1955, where a black youth could be murdered pretty much at will, and hardly anybody cared a whit. Except for his immediate family, of course.

We aren't seeing so many civilian lynchings -- though they still happen from time to time. Instead, we are seeing a daily body count, four to five a day, of men and women and sometimes children, killed by police who, in effect, have become the delegated lynching squad. Police encounter a black person mouthing off, getting uppity, not being submissive enough or obedient fast enough, or being belligerent, or even doing something wrong, and police feel perfectly justified in killing them, summary execution style, or taking them in and torturing them, or whatever they want to do, because... they think it's their job.

When lynchings by civilian mobs were commonplace in this country, the powers that be thought little or nothing of it. That was the way it was, and nothing could be done about it. Until something was done about it. What was done was mostly social shaming. That took decades to bring the number of lynchings down from hundreds a year to a few to -- officially -- none. Shaming works, but it takes a long time.

President Franklin Roosevelt twice refused to sign anti-lynching legislation proposed and (I believe) passed by Congress in the 1930s. They say he refused to sign so as not to piss off his Southern Democratic base which was filled with crackers, rednecks and lynchers, too. But it wasn't just the white trash he was concerned about. It was the white elites in the Southern Democratic Party, old line Confederates in many cases, those who suffered from Reconstruction or at least white folks claimed to have been its victims. Memories were long. The Lost Cause lived and breathed through these survivors and their descendants. To an extent, it still does.

By the 1930s, the number of lynchings per year had been on the decline, thanks in part to some brave Southern women who were fed up with the mob violence that characterized their part of the country more than any other -- violence which brought shame upon the South. You feel many echoes of it in the story of Tom Robinson as told by Harper Lee in "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Life was froughtful for black folks in the South -- it was froughtful everywhere, truth to tell -- and death came often in the night and hideously. Black folks lived in mortal peril every minute.

Emmett Till was from Chicago. He'd been sent South to stay with relatives in Money, Mississippi for the summer before he returned to school in Chicago in the fall. That day was coming soon when he went to the shop in Money to buy some chewing gum (I believe it was) and as he was leaving, they say he whistled at the proprietor's wife who was helming the store in her husband's absence. They say. Accounts vary regarding what Emmett Till actually did -- or didn't do -- that day. The point was that in no way was what he did or didn't do a threat or indecent or what have you.

He had, apparently, "broken code" though. He (apparently) did what black folks in Money, Mississippi, were not allowed to do -- under summary penalty which any white man was allowed to administer by common custom.

That summary penalty could include fiendish tortures and death. A mob may no longer be openly involved, but the result was the same, and the point of it was also the same: to perpetuate white dominance by terrorizing the various "Others" into submission and compliance.

Whatever Emmett Till did that day, his companions knew he was in trouble for breaking code. The assumption is he didn't know that there were certain things he must not do while he was in Mississippi if he valued his life. Yet I suspect he did know most of what he couldn't do, and whatever happened at the store was either a deliberate act of mischief or of defiance. I suspect he did know because he'd been there long enough, he seemed to be extremely social and bright, and it appeared he could pick up social cues well beyond what he was told he could or couldn't do. He was known in the town, too, as were the relatives he was staying with.

He was no stranger.

And he was going back to school in Chicago soon enough.

Whatever he did at that store was no doubt innocent of bad intent, I would say, but it must have rankled Carolyn Bryant to the point that she felt something had to be done or this uppity nigra boy would give the rest of the nigras in the area the wrong idea.

So she told her husband when he got back to the store that something had happened with that nigra boy from Chicago and she didn't like it a bit. Time to teach that boy a lesson, don't you think?

There were certain things in rural Mississippi that simply couldn't be allowed.

Carolyn Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went out to the house of Emmett's great uncle with whom he was staying and they demanded that the boy be turned over to them for... discipline, I suppose you would call it. The white folks as a rule never saw what they did to black folks as wrong in any way, any more than police today see what they do as wrong when they kill or brutalize to terrorize the way they do.

When you believe that black folks -- or any designated "Other" -- is nothing more than a savage animal, rabid by nature, and should be put down at a moment (the legendary "split-second decision," no?)  and it's your job to do that, to put down the savage, rabid animal, that's what you do, and you do not let conscience or any other form of empathy enter into it.

So Roy and J. W. -- good ol' boys in the time honored Southern tradition -- only did what they had to do. They took Emmett out to the river, beat him senseless and bloody, then shot him in the head and threw his corpse into the Tallahatchie River weighted down with a cotton-gin fan, and then went home and had a beer while they told of their bravery and cunning.

That nigra boy from up North wouldn't cause any more trouble, oh no. And I don't doubt they laughed about it, laughed out loud. They felt proud of what they had done. Remorse wasn't an option.

No more remorse than they would have had killing a stray, rabid dog or a thieving raccoon or a stink-spewing skunk or a skittering palmetto bug. They did no more than any upstanding white person would have done. They got rid of a pest.

The fact that they had to go on trial for their action was an inconvenience but there was essentially no chance whatever that they would be convicted of anything, let alone murder most foul, any more than police officers today -- even if indicted and handed over for trial -- are likely to be convicted of anything at all, no matter what they do to suspects or "subjects" as they are known in the trade.

A white man protecting his white woman from the predation of a rabid, savage black is only doing his proper and necessary duty. Right?

This is exactly the same attitude that informs so many police today. They are told and they are trained to believe that killing is their highest and most honorable duty to those they serve. They are told and they are trained to believe that the greatest threat to themselves and their women are black males. They are told and they are trained to believe that their first duty is to protect themselves, and that black males are the biggest threat to their personal safety and security; they must be on constant guard in any encounter with a black person, particularly with black males. And they must be ready to kill instantly if they perceive anything that might be a threat from the subject.

That's what they are told and are trained to believe.

They act as if they must make periodic examples of blacks and browns and designated Others -- by maiming and killing them -- or the rest of the "savages" would get the wrong idea and get out of line. So they kill. And kill and kill some more. Just doing their jobs.

Roy and J. W. were doing the same thing in the backwater of Money, Mississippi back in 1955. I guess the big bellied sheriff wouldn't have done it for them. Well, no. He actually was the one who arrested them. No, if the good ol' boys had gone to the sheriff about Emmett Till's offense, the sheriff would have laughed in their faces. Emmett broke code but he did not break a law, no matter how the good ol' boys tried to exaggerate what happened. The sheriff likely would have told the good ol' boys that they would have to take care of it theirownselves. And they might get into a bit of trouble if they did. "Good luck, boys."

Police are left to use their own judgement in their encounters with the public, especially using their own judgement with regard to use of lethal force against... "subjects."  They may have to account for their actions, but they will most likely never face serious consequences -- such as conviction in a court of law. That's reserved almost entirely for gross corruption and sexual impropriety. Not for killing and brutality while on the job.

White men had to act on their own in rural Mississippi back in 1955 because the law would not do it for them.

In 2015, however, police take care of these problems so white men don't have to do it on their own.

Progress, right?

The murder of Emmett Till and the acquittal of their murderers in 1955 caused such a strong reaction among so many people because it was so outrageous -- and ultimately so frightening -- that it couldn't be allowed to pass without notice. The murder victim was a child. The murderers were a couple of no-account white bucks, tobacco spitting, arrogant creeps, the infestation and ruin of the South. Something had to be done.

But nothing was.

Roy and J. W. went to their graves free men.

That's the way it was in America and that's the way it still is in much of America today.

L to R: Roy Bryant, Caroline Bryant, Juanita Milam, J. W. Milam. Acquittal. America.

The confession that appeared in Look Magazine in 1956:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeature/sf_look_confession.html

Impunity Marches On

Bob McCulloch is turning into quite the little sideshow these days. He's the so-called St. Louis County prosecutor who rigged and manipulated the grand jury to return a no-bill on Darren Wilson for the execution of Mike Brown. [Note: I use the term "execution" in preference to "murder" because his actions and his excuses are in line with someone who summarily executes (under color of authority) rather than someone who premeditates and kills.]

McCulloch went public with the fact that he knew Witness 40 -- Sandra McElroy -- was bullshitting, lying, fabricating, etc, when she was called before the GJ to testify to what she had "witnessed" that day on Canfield Drive. Her testimony was almost word-for-word corroboration of Darren Wilson's story as reported in the St. Louis Post Dispatch the previous day. McElroy's testimony has been quoted numerous times in the media -- particularly on FOX -- to "prove" that Brown was charging the officer and did not have his hands up, yadda, yadda.

Except the "proof" is a fabrication.

McCulloch claims he knew it was fabrication and lies when his staff put her on the stand. So? The chest-out brazenness of it is pretty shocking. But then he's also said that plenty of witnesses lied to the grand jury, some on behalf of Brown and some on behalf of Wilson, and all he did was give the grand jury as much evidence and testimony as he could and let them decide whether there was evidence sufficient to charge Wilson with a crime.

They said "No," like nearly all grand juries and DAs do.

No matter what the cop does, what the testimony and evidence show, cops are almost never-ever charged with a crime when they kill someone. Sexual indiscretions, on the other hand, can get them into plenty of hot water.

McCulloch's brazenness in this case mirrors his brazenness in many others, wherein he not only refused to indict cops who committed "street justice", he used the opportunities to smear the victims and witnesses alike, just as he did in the Darren Wilson matter. It is his way, and it's the way of most DAs. Cops are perhaps imperfect, but the people they kill are monsters who need to be put down, at least in the culture and lore of the police/DA continuum. No matter the facts.

We're seeing this brazen impunity play out again and again, all over the country, in almost every case of police killing, while the People raging in the streets over it risk becoming part of the background noise of a society and globe in crisis.

I may have said it before, but it looks to me like Authority -- in the persons of Bob McCulloch and his counterparts in much of the country, and in the persons of chiefs of police and police union honchos, and in the persons of governors and various other political leaders -- are deliberately trying to incite rebellion, perhaps as a means to gauge the depth of resistance to the New Model American System.

In other words, there is at least a suggestion in McCulloch's behavior and that of the various PDs involved in the killing of Mike Brown and its aftermath of a deliberate intent to cause rebellion in order to study it, counter it and suppress it. A large-scale social experiment you might say.

There is a growing recognition that the American justice system -- from the cops on the beat to the Supreme Court -- is broken. Disparate justice is the rule, impunity for those with power vs harsh retribution for those without is the standard. There is no sign that Our Rulers will do anything to redress the legitimate grievances of the People and restore balance to a justice system out of whack.

Incidents keep piling up, but nothing substantive is done about it. Too many people like things just the way they are.

And people like Bob McCulloch and his counterparts are brazen as all get out about it, because they know that nothing can or will be done about it under the current system, and they are confident that the current system will endure, no matter the rebellion in the streets.

Impunity marches on.

Monsters Who Walk Among Us

This interview with so-called "Jobs Tsar" Jeffrey Immelt on "60 Minutes" last night still makes my skin crawl.

Why does unemployment stay so high? It's policy. And this man is a big part of the reason the policy is what it is.

Watch it:



Why is there a Revolution under way? This man is a big part of the reason.

What the New Year Holds

This is apparently what The Powers That Be want us to endure next year: the Pauls, Father and Son, holding forth endlessly, and bringing the operations of the Government to a grinding halt while they propound about the Constitution As It's Supposed to Be (cf: the Confederate Constitution) and the Universe twirls around them, first around the one and then around the other.

I put the Son before the Father (sacrilege, I know) for the simple reason that he will be seated as a Senator from Kentucky, and as a Senator, individually, he will have essentially unlimited power to bring the body to a screeching halt. This is a power all Senators have, but only Republicans are allowed to exercise it according to the rules and ancient traditions of the body. The Father cannot single-handedly bring the House to a halt, but he will no doubt do his best, and likely will achieve his objective by strategy -- a strategy of burying the House in investigatory fervor, everything being "wrong" and all. Since 1787. So it all has to be "reviewed."

Why The Powers That Be would want this is something of a Mystery, but clearly they do, and no doubt while the Government is completely paralyzed, they will set in motion their Final Solution. The outlines have been obvious for years. They don't believe in Constitutional Self-Government and they want to replace it with something more like a "Directed Democracy" in which the constitutional forms of the past are retained in large part, but they are non-functional. Instead, Rule is achieved through and from what amounts to the Throne, which is not so much an independent executive as it is the agent of the Ruling Faction of Private Interest. The People, essentially, have no say in the matter, nor are they even expected to know what's going on. The Government is to exist as the enforcement arm of the Ruling Faction of Private Interest, nothing more. The heady days of "self-government" will be well and truly over.

A dictatorship? Well, it could be, especially if the Pauls, Father and Son, are able to completely paralyze the functioning of Government. There will have to be a sharp -- and quite possibly final -- intervention from... somewhere... which will have the effect of irrelevating Congress altogether. If Obama can't engineer it and implement it appropriately, I have little doubt he will be replaced, and not with Joe Biden. The most likely replacement would be General St. David Petraeus who would step in as a kind of Interim Protector, the Presidency and Vice Presidency being temporarily vacant.

That role could easily become permanent.

It's already quite clear that internal factional disputes within the Ruling Class have reached critical mass. There will be a fierce and potentially violent struggle between factions for ultimate control, a struggle that will make the internal factional disputes of the Clintonian Interregnum seem almost quaint. How it will resolve is difficult to tell. But whatever the result, the New America that emerges will look little like what we once knew, its path will be set in a different direction, and just like today, many around the world will follow.

Whatever the case, it is not our struggle.

[Note: I am recovering from pneumonia. I refused hospitalization -- for the simple reason that the last time I was hospitalized I was nearly killed (twice) through medical error and neglect. Recovery will be long and slow at home, but it wouldn't have been any faster in the hospital...]

Shopping

Ordinarily, I wouldn't have anything to say about La Palin; she's a huckster and a grifter, and her "policy" positions are laughable.

But recently there was an interesting outbreak of Anti-Palinism over her claims about... grocery prices.

She said that grocery prices were rising and that the recent move by the Fed to flood the markets with dollars ("QE2") would push grocery and other prices even higher.

She was immediately attacked by Anti-Palinists who insisted that "statistics show" that there is no food price inflation, and she is just wrong.

This was immediately countered by people who actually shop for groceries, who, for the most part, assert anecdotally, from their own experience, that indeed grocery prices have been going up, in some cases sharply, and all the national statistics are meaningless at the shopper's individual checkout stand.

In other words, on this issue, La Sarah was and is right.

What I found interesting about the controversy was how rigidly Anti-Palinists insisted Palin was wrong about the rise in grocery prices, regardless of any experiential evidence to the contrary. It absolutely did not matter whether shoppers were paying more for groceries, Palin was WRONG and that was that.

And this attitude intrigued me because it is a version of the Languid Indifference to the Plight of the Masses in this Endless Recession that I have repeatedly taken issue with. Languid Indifference, of course, is how the Dems and especially the White House have approached the indecencies of massive unemployment, bankruptcy and foreclosure among the Masses -- in stark contrast to their immediate (and generous) responses to the collapse of the financial sector and major industries.

Here we had a situation in which Sarah Palin was demagoguing the hell out of an issue that affects millions and millions of everyday people -- which is why she could demagogue it in the first place -- and her opponents simply denied the facts she was citing which in turn denied the experience of millions upon millions of Americans every day.

No wonder Dems lose. No wonder "Progressives" get nowhere.

You simply cannot deny experience this way because you don't like the politician making hay with the truth of that experience.

What you do is acknowledge the truth of that experience and offer a strategy to deal with it. A better strategy than the idiocies of Sarah and her TeaBaggers.

Is there no political education on the Left in this country at all?

It's More Than Just Languid Indifference

I've been fretting over the languid indifference of Our Rulers to the plight of the masses for years. Since the start of the Endless Recession, millions upon millions of Americans have been forced out of their jobs, out of their homes, and directly into poverty. The attitude of the Ruling Class to this nightmare situation for ever more millions of Americans has been, "Tough luck, suckers, it could be worse, you know." And that's when they're being charitable. Nothing else.

As the unemployment statistics continue month after month to be horrendous, as ordinary workers' incomes fall -- or cease altogether -- as opportunity vanishes, as cutback after cutback ripples through every level of government (except the Federal, but I'll get to that eventually), as home foreclosures cascade over and over again, and as top level fraud continues to be rewarded, Our Rulers have essentially followed the Hooverite dictum of Larry Summers: "There's nothing to be done about it."

I have pointed out that Barack Obama is the grandson of a bank vice president, who essentially raised him, and it is clear as crystal to me that he has a Banker's Heart. Like this one in front of the B of A building in San Francisco. It looks more like a liver.



Bankers and Hooverites believe sincerely -- and idiotically -- that in a recession, the preferred economic policy is to provide a "cushion" for those at the Top and let everyone else sink or swim. Suckers. That's how they are. Americans should know this from bitter (and repeated) experience, but for some reason they've forgotten.

Their unfocused anxiety and occasional outbursts of rage are being captured and utilized by the TeaBagger masterminds -- the Kochs, the Armeys, the Russos, the Palins, the Becks and the rest -- to foster a New Paradigm in which the Rulership by those at the Top is reinforced, accountability for those at the Top is eliminated (except if they are Democrats; Democrats and Liberals are to be scapegoated), and conditions for the masses are to be made increasingly harsh and untenable.

A couple of things have come up over the last few days that have helped to illuminate what's been going on. Chris Hedges has put together a talk and some literature that explores his theories of the Death of the Liberal Class, and David Cay Johnston brings out the statistics of income collapse for the masses, contrasted with the enormous increases of income for those at the very top of the pyramid throughout this Endless Recession.

In Hedges' truly dark view, the "Liberal Class" has failed, utterly, and our future -- such as it may be -- is bleak if not entirely absent. Hedges refers in his recent column that expands on some of the ideas in his talk to the "collapse of liberalism," the "bankruptcy of liberal institutions," and the indifference of the liberal elite to the rage and plight of the masses, and I can't disagree with him. I've been saying many of the same things myself for years. All of our main institutions failed during the Bushevik Regime, and now, many of those same institutions are collapsing. Want to know what our future could look like? It could look like Haiti, and that is only slightly hyperbolic.

The current cholera epidemic in Haiti is symptomatic of the failure and collapse of what little remained of Haiti's institutional infrastructure after the earthquake, and it demonstrates how plethoras of "helping organizations," the infamous NGOs that infest Haiti like a plague of locusts, are incapable of handling even the most predictable crises. There was no anti-cholera medication in Haiti prior to the outbreak, and the infamous "helping organizations" had to "scramble" to find some once the epidemic took hold and thousands sickened and dozens or hundreds died. And then they had to organize clinics, provide inadequate medications, try to find ways to care for the increasing numbers of patients, collect and dispose of the dead, and on and on, while simultaneously organizing other efforts to provide some clean water for some areas so as to limit and if possible control the outbreak... the mind boggles. Cholera was a predictable consequence of the conditions the earthquake survivors for forced to live under because the NGOs (and the sorry excuse for what passes for a Haitian "government") couldn't and can't deal with the reconstruction, nor with the basic needs of the refugees. There are hundreds of NGOs all with their own territorial imperatives, and the upshot of all this "helping" is failure and paralysis -- and ultimately death.

That's where we are headed, as our institutional infrastructure collapses and to the extent it is replaced at all, it is replaced by ad hoc "helping organizations," each with a territorial imperative, and each primarily focused on its own survival and the incomes of its leaders -- in order that it may continue to "help."

Hedges, being the son of a preacher man and having attended seminary himself, prior to his journalist career, sees the collapse of liberal institutions in even starker terms than I do. Their failure is complete. And he has little sympathy for the liberal elites that engineered the collapse of their own institutions. Nor is he particularly sympathetic to the generally passive American People who have let this collapse occur. I have a little more sympathy, but I am just as frustrated as he is.

David Cay Johnston uses some interesting statistical information from the Social Security Administration to chart part of the collapse, that of the decreasing income of the working and middle classes, while the incomes of those at the very top... skyrockets.

While many of us have long been aware of the maldistribution of income in this country, and some of us are aware that incomes for many workers have been flat or falling for years, accurate statistics have been hard to come by. Though the data are collected by various government and private interests, little of it is reported in the major mass media, and what is reported tends to be couched in terms that make the situation seem not as bad as it is. David Cay Johnston points out it's actually MUCH worse.

Only 150.9 million Americans reported any wage income in 2009. That put us below 2005, when 151.6 million Americans reported wages, and only slightly ahead of 2004, when 149.4 million Americans held at least one paying job.

For those who did find work in 2009, the average wage slipped to $39,269, down $243 or 0.6 percent, compared with the previous year in 2009 dollars.

The median wage declined by the same ratio, down $159 to $26,261, meaning half of all workers made $505 a week or less. Significantly, the 2009 median wage was $37 less than in 2000.

To give this some perspective, from 1992 to 2000 the number of people earning any wages grew by 21 million, but nine years later just 2.8 million more people had any work.

These wage data, based on the Medicare flat tax on all compensation, tell us only about the number of people who earned wages and how much. They tell us nothing about whether these individuals were underemployed, had to work more than one job, earned fringe benefits, or were employed at a level commensurate with their abilities.

But they do give us a stunning picture of what’s happening at the very top of the compensation ladder in America.

The number of Americans making $50 million or more, the top income category in the data, fell from 131 in 2008 to 74 last year. But that’s only part of the story.

The average wage in this top category increased from $91.2 million in 2008 to an astonishing $518.8 million in 2009. That’s nearly $10 million in weekly pay!

You read that right. In the Great Recession year of 2009 (officially just the first half of the year), the average pay of the very highest-income Americans was more than five times their average wages and bonuses in 2008. And even though their numbers shrank by 43 percent, this group’s total compensation was 3.2 times larger in 2009 than in 2008, accounting for 0.6 percent of all pay. These 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers.

In other words, at best, workers are barely treading water in today's economy, and a lot of them are drowning without a life preserver.

On the other hand, a relative handful of multimillionaires/billionaires have seen their incomes increase during the Endless Recession fivefold. Is it any wonder the "recovery" is only at the Top?

Americans of course understand that things just aren't right with the economy, and they may even have some sense that their Betters are continuing to make out like bandits at the expense of everyone else. But with only 80% or less of the working and middle classes fully employed, there is a strong tendency for workers to keep their heads down and their noses to the grindstone in this economy. Make too much of a fuss (or in some cases any fuss at all) about economic conditions, and you can be the next one out on the street, facing foreclosure, bankruptcy and worse. And if you are of a certain age, you might have no chance of ever being gainfully employed again.

This is a big reason why people continue to vote against their own interests, and why Our Rulers continue to get away with the crap they do.

When it comes to stark matters of survival, people do what they have to do. Or what they think they have to do.

Correcting this situation -- if it can be corrected -- is going to take more than just getting hold of the information, though that helps (but unfortunately, the links to the charts in David Cay Johnston's piece don't work). Doing something about it is the hardest thing, and Americans are not yet ready to do what it takes.

In the meantime, Our Rulers will do what they do, continue on the path they've been on, implementing the reversionary Program, and we will continue to vote as if we had any say in the matter.

At some point, though...

On Languid Indifference (Now With Update! And More!)

This is a day to return to our friends at Despair.com -- "Increasing Success by Lowering Expectations" -- for some Demotivators™

Back to the Oil Gusher in the Gulf, it seems. Since the weekend, there's been a somewhat hysterical sideshow, especially among the doombloggers, but not exclusively so, on the "Explosions" which have "collapsed" and/or "opened up" the geological formation in which BP's Devil Riser was placed. The hypothesis seems to be that the pressure of the escaping oil and gas has ruptured the rock all around the well, collapsed it in some places, and there are now several new oil spouts, injecting many more millions of barrels into the Gulf than previously.

Oh and BP is running their LiveCam on a loop. The same eel keeps showing up again and again, and the same little fishy. Over and over. Monkeyfister (whom I recall from quite a few years ago at the Bartcop forum as a very intense young man determined to bloody the Busheviks and their running dogs) and others witnessed the Event and live blogged it, though their conclusions about what happened vary widely.

If you do Windows Media Player, this link goes to a live feed. Well. They say it's live. Who knows. The view currently available on my screen shows a plume of oil and some piping and gizmos down at the bottom of what looks like a pretty deep large-diameter, rough-sided hole. The camera position may be on the rim, I don't know. At any rate, it doesn't look like the views that have been widely distributed in the past. The plume is coming from what appears to be a very narrow orifice at the bottom. It spreads wide quickly, as all of the oil plumes we've seen to date do.

As we know, the oil has come ashore on a 150 mile arc along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, and it has contaminated beaches, marshes and brown pelican nesting areas. Clean up has been, shall we say, spotty.

Last night there was a revolting report on the NewsHour from Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, where oil has been coming ashore for days, and nothing whatever is being done about it by BP or the Federal Government. The Parish Homeland Security Rep points out that numerous local people were trained by BP to serve as workers to handle the spill, but BP never hired anybody to do it. All kinds of control and containment equipment is stored in the Parish, but none of it has been touched as it belongs to BP and there are no BP personnel anywhere near. Frantic calls to BP and the various Federal officials in charge of oversight aren't picked up or returned, and the locals have pretty much decided that both BP and the Feds are worthless and so they are taking matters into their own hands.

Following that report, Coast Guard Admiral In Charge Thad Allen was semi-grilled about the difficulties people onshore were facing, and he acknowledged that everybody involved had to do a better job, no doubt about that, and command and communications had to get better and they were working on it just as hard as they could.

What about Jefferson Parish?

"Working just as hard as we can to stand up better command and communications."

You just want to go Medieval on these people's asses. WTF?!

Thad Allen had a Long Talk with BP over the weekend, and he's sure that things will come together and get better within a short time.

What about Jefferson Parish?

BP has deployed tens of thousands of workers and scientists, the best in the world, to handle the consequences of the spill. And we're all working just as hard as we can to stand up better command and communications.

WHAT ABOUT JEFFERSON PARISH, YOU NIMROD NUMBSKULL?

Everyone is working as hard as they can.

And so it goes.

Much blather masks utterly languid indifference.

A topic I have raised on this blog numerous times with regard to the Washington view of the ongoing unemployment calamity. They couldn't be more indifferent to the crushing plight of the long-term unemployed, despite their recent blather of "concern." They simply don't do anything about it.

Much as we see happening in the Gulf.

Long ago, I decided that Our Rulers' indifference to unemployment was Policy in Action; the point being that maintaining high unemployment figures over an extended period has the "positive" effect of lowering wages and benefits for all workers, which in turn bulks up bottom lines for employers, financiers, and investors. Win-win, in other words, for the Masters of the Universe, not so much for the rest of us, and it is devastating for the overall economy. High unemployment over extended periods forces more and more people into penury and poverty, and cuts in income that ripple through the land reduce the ability of consumers to... well, consume. Which in turn puts the Real Economy (as opposed to the Digital Bytes Finance Economy) into reverse. Keep it up long enough -- and this has been going on for years now -- and there is no returning to "prosperity" for the masses. Which seems to be the intent of the Policy.

The same sort of Indifference, combined with more and more meaningless blather, seems to be going on with regard to the Gulf Gusher, but what in Hell is the Policy?

So far as can be determined, BP is in complete control of the situation, and they are doing whatever will accrue to their corporate benefit. And for whatever reason, have done nothing at all, NOTHING, to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf. NOTHING. Instead, they have done everything they can think of to capture as much of the oil as they can, apparently for distribution and sale. They have made much show of Environmental Concern, yadda yadda, but when push comes to shove, they do nothing. Cf, the story in Jefferson Parish above. Talk about Potemkin Environmentalism. Well, there you are.

They talk extensively about this, that, or the other thing they might-could do to stop the flow of oil, but they don't do it. And they and their flacks keep saying "No one wants to stop this oil flow more than BP, no one!" but there's no evidence of it.

It's all just blather, while the Gulf fills up with oil and scientific studies are conducted on the "effects" all this oil is having on the Environment.

Science! YAY!

This utter indifference to the People (and plants and animals) affected by the constant streams of oil into the Gulf (except in the abstract, as scientific research) is in some ways worse than Chernobyl. At least the Soviet authorities were actually doing something (as tragically misguided as some of it was) to control and contain the contamination and they kept at it until they had done everything they could.

With this Gulf Thing, the Authority is the Corporation, and the Corporation's interest is in recovering as much of the gushing oil as they can for distribution and sale. Nothing matters to them so much as that. And it is obvious from their behavior to date that they will be focused on that objective until the end of the crisis. For its part, the Government refuses to intervene.

Instead, there is blather. Endless blather, and more blather. No action at all.

Though I think it is despicable, at least the Company's motivations are understandable. But what are the Policy motivations for letting them have their way? This is uncharted territory, and I can't tell what Policy matters are being formulated and implemented, except to ignore the public interest to every extent possible.

But to what object?

Anyone?

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UPDATE begun at 4:05pm 05/25/2010

I dunno. Maybe the hysteria is justified. I just checked the live feed from the link above, and the plume has massively, grossly, hideously changed. The view is the same; but the plume when I first saw it just now was much larger, brown instead of black, and seemed to be spewing from a much wider orifice next to the equipment. Then all of a sudden, all hell broke loose, an explosion of some sort, and it looked like a rent in the seafloor opened, spewing massive amounts of brown gunk through a long channel into the ocean. The camera position changed somewhat, apparently trying to take in what had happened, but the plume of engulfed it in a brown haze, looked a lot like smoke from a forest fire.

Scary.

It's hard for me to stay connected to the feed for more than about 30 seconds at a time, but from what I can tell, the camera is surrounded by floating debris and the scene is essentially nothing more than this debris scattering around in a cloud of brown haze. I don't see the plume at all. The debris is moving chaotically and there is quite a bit of it.

The scene has cleared slightly. There appears to be a black plume behind the equipment and a much larger brown plume in front of it. These plumes appear to be issuing from different orifi, but it's impossible to tell for sure. Now it appears to be all one plume, huge, a blowout of a blowout maybe. The camera hasn't moved.

Now the feed has gone dead. I can't reconnect. It's 4:24pm PDT, 05/25/2010

Was just able to reconnect (4:27pm). It's a different view now. There is an elaborate piece of brassy equipment on the end of the arms of a remote operated vehicle. There is a relative small black plume behind this equipment. It looks like an earlier view that was live yesterday. The title of the view is "Deepwater Response", so this is not the view of whatever just blew out. There was a time and date stamp on the prior view, and it was today's date and time. There is no time/date stamp on the current view.

Something happened.

That's for double damned sure.

Something happened. And they cut the feed. There's no two ways about it. As for what we're seeing now? I bet it was live yesterday and it's being replayed now.

I will now don a tinfoil hat.

----------------

UPDATE AGAIN 5:15pm

The same sort of explosive event has been going on at the location of the current live view, assuming it is live. According to Monkeyfister, the device in the scene is used to control dispersant. According to posters over at the Oil Drum -- who have been watching the explosive events today (apparently there have been a number of them) -- what's going on are tests of the blowout preventer to determine whether it can withstand the "Top Kill" operation which has been repeatedly postponed. They are injecting mud to see what happens, and the explosive release of brown stuff is the mud being vomited back up.

Oddly, it seems perfectly rational. Of course whether it is true or not, who knows? If they hadn't a gone off lying about pretty much everything...