Riley's Cold Feet and BofA's Cold Heart

“As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?” –Alexis de Tocqueville

I like to listen to "old time radio," partly for nostalgia, partly to marvel over differences between attitudes and styles presented in these programs and those we live with today. As a child, I loved The Creaking Door, Suspense, and The Whistler: "You know, don't you, Charles, that you're going to have to kill her."

I loved too Our Miss Brooks and Eve Arden's acerbic wit. Less favored were The Great Gildersleeve and The Life of Riley, but all these programs kept pre-television audiences riveted in the evening.

The Life of Riley, in particular, addressed itself to a sector of society now wholly neglected by our entertainment industry, at least in terms of honest representation of its membership. Before poverty was a dirty word, or working people bordering on extinct, working class families took up some airtime. Jackie Gleason, the bus driver lived in a dingy three-room apartment. Lucy took assembly line jobs to cover her extravagances so her husband Ricky wouldn't find out they were broke. And Gildersleeve, as town water commissioner, might be a high-ranking civil servant but he's perpetually out of money and struggling to come up with $5 here and $7 there.

In one typical episode of The Life of Riley, Riley is four months in arrears on his rent. The landlord offers him the job of rent collector in exchange for forgiving the debt. Today's audiences see nothing wrong with this arrangement, but Riley's wife and his friends are horrified. He becomes a pariah in his neighborhood. At one point, after the landlord pressures him to evict someone "as an example", Riley whines, "I can't throw people into the street just because they're broke." Wouldn't Bank of America love to hear about that?

When at last Riley can't bring himself to choose a back-rent owing family to evict, he evicts himself. In exchange, his neighbors take up a collection to pay his rent and they gather to haul his ousted furniture back into the house. In other words, he has rejoined the clan. A Marxist would say he renounced being a traitor to his class.

The Life of Riley aired from 1944 to 1951, an era of rampant anti-communism and flag-waving patriotism. But working people had watched the General Motors sit-down strike unfold (1936-1937). This was a strike that labor historians assert created the American middle class. (http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2009-01-13-flint-striker-autoworkers-union_N.htm) Riley's fans or their parents had experienced abject poverty and grueling working conditions. Without analyzing their convictions, they adhered to the principle that in unity there is strength and without it, an individual worker would be crushed.

This morning's New York Times carries an article about the "failed" government program to prevent foreclosures. Foreclosure is a euphemism for kicking families into the street, whether they have anywhere to go or not. More about the government's failure to help the burgeoning numbers of unemployed—unemployed, mind you, because of the collapse of the financial markets, which are a direct result of greedy bankers and investors scamming and bilking the uneducated and the poor.

The gains of the GM workers have been eroded and we see mounting evidence that the middle class is disappearing in the United States. Since Reagan’s presidency, de-regulation (and "off-shoring") of American industry and financial institutions has gouged everyone but the wealthy, as the following statistics show:

1. 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

2. 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

3. 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

4. 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.

5. A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.

6. 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

7. Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.

8. Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

9. For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

10. In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.

11. As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.

12. The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

13. Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.

14. In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.

15. The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.

16. In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.

17. More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.

18. For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.

19. This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.

20. Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.

21. Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.

22. The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.

When the public expressed outrage over the handouts to bankers (the very criminals who had plunged the country into depression), the Obama administration at last tried to paste together some sort of relief for working families who had been duped into bad loans or lost jobs and fallen behind on their mortgages. The program showcased offered one billion to help jobless workers keep paying their mortgages, but it wasn't scheduled to help anyone until the end of the year. According to the Times, even so, the program has "yet to accept any applications."

Meanwhile, Republican congressmen and women, who never met a rich man they didn't love, have deep-sixed the program and are awaiting further developments from the Senate, where Democrats don't much like the idea of giving money to the poor either.

Mortgage restructuring, which the Obama administration refused to make compulsory for banks under given conditions (such as the ability to pay the re-structured mortgage) has resulted in just under 61,000 permanent re-structurings, of which 10% have gone into default. Someone explained to me that re-structured mortgages arranged by small banks are defaulting at a much lower rate. The reason? The big banks heap on hefty fees for the process, fees that in some cases result in a "re-structured" monthly payment that exceeds the original.

The goal, at the beginning, was to help as many of 4,000,000 homeowners. The reality is that bankers and financial market profiteers are riding high, while the families Riley couldn't have evicted are living in cars and trailers.

Good Old Boys Torture a Whistling Child

In 1955 a fourteen-year-old boy, spending the summer with an uncle in Money, Mississippi, was murdered. The child grew up in Chicago and an older cousin foresaw the possibility of such a tragedy when Emmett Till insisted on going to the racist South with him. Emmett was known as a cut-up and he lacked the deference that might have gotten him through Mississippi unscathed. At the local grocery store, he decided to show off for his cousins and whistled at the storekeeper's wife. His mother insisted he hadn't, but recently, at a conference, his cousin, who had been present in that store at the time, said Emmett had in fact whistled: "A mother doesn't like to believe something like that about her son." What Emmett's mother liked to believe was that her child did nothing to bring down the horror that ended his life. Nearly sixty years later most reasonable people would say Emmett had done nothing to bring down that horror.

But this was an era in which a black man accused of raping a white woman would be legally lynched by the state if local rednecks didn't get to him first. On the other hand, black sharecroppers, often the descendents of slaves raped by masters, frequently endured sexual assaults by landowners, the wives forced to submit and the husbands excruciatingly conscious of the fate awaiting any black man who defended his spouse. The Great Migration that severed families and stranded people, often in frigid cities without adequate clothing, was a flight toward the possibility of living with dignity and of raising children who could whistle, perhaps rudely, but without paying the ultimate price. Anyone currently aware of the youth murder and incarceration rates plaguing America's ghettos will flinch from the painful irony of what is happening to those children today.

Emmett Till may not have been the first member of his immediate family to be lynched. It appears his father may have been strung up by the Army, laboring under the same racist assumptions that prompted Emmett's murder:

“…Mrs. Till’s husband's story is another whole story all by itself. Pvt. Louis Till was part of the 177th Port Company, 397th Battalion — an all-"negro" battalion — which left from a NY port and arrived in France during 1944. He was hanged by execution by the U.S. Army on July 2, 1945. by orders of General Eisenhower[, a]llegedly for the murder of Anna Zanchi, and the rape of Benni Lucretzia and Frieda Muri who lived in Civitavecchia, Italy. [T]hese crimes supposedly occurred on June 27, 1944, shortly after he arrived, mind you!

“According to records found at The American Battle Monuments Commission, Pvt. Louis Till is buried in an unmarked, prohibited, isolated area of Oise-Aisne Cemetery in Fere-en-Tardenois, France. The military marked his personnel file and the courts-martial records "secret," hushed it up, sent Mrs. Till a telegram, stating that her husband had died because of "misconduct," and she never knew what happened to him until her son's trial, when the Senators pulled some strings and contacted the military and some Staff Judge Advocate General, crossed out the word "secret" and released the information to them.

“Even after the trial of Emmett, she could never get any answers to what happened to her husband and why he was killed, this is clearly a military "railroad job," and has been hushed up all these years for a reason, but if you would check military history during this period you will see that a lot of black men were mysteriously hung for rape of French women. "They" took racism right on with them and convinced the French that "Negroes" had a problem, too.” http://neshobanews.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html

By releasing information about the father's execution for rape and murder, the United States government hoped to get across the message that Emmett was a bad seed, progeny of a rapist, and his fate was probably deserved. The ploy didn't fly, perhaps because not enough people read about the father or felt any real interest in the father, perhaps because decent people don't confuse a wolf whistle with a rape.

Emmett Till's torture and lynching laid the groundwork for the 1960s civil rights movement. The individual who deserves credit for this is his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, a woman of phenomenal courage and determination. Having fought Mississippi to get her little boy's corpse shipped back to her in Chicago, she arranged with a funeral director there to contrive a coffin with a glass cover that would put on display what the good old boys in the Magnolia State had done. Contrary to the usual practice of prettifying death for the weak-kneed, Ms. Till-Mobley insisted Emmett's wounds be preserved. The press came from all over the globe to document the boy's interment, a funeral thronged by tens of thousands of outraged mourners. Without the stoicism that enabled Ms. Mobley to turn her son's death into a pulpit for justice, her boy would have gone into the ground unnoticed, as had far too many before him.

Emmett Till's generation (and mine) grew up coloring human skin with a light tan crayon labeled "flesh colored". Black Americans were erased in every conceivable way, so it was all the more impressive that Ms. Mobley never stopped demanding that the villains who pulverized her son be identified and prosecuted by the federal government. Her demands, however, fell on deaf ears. Citizens were horrified but our leaders were not moved.

Two of the killers of Emmett Till, having been perfunctorily acquitted of the crime in the face of overwhelming evidence, immediately gave an interview to the now-defunct Look Magazine, boasting of their derring-do in slaughtering a child. In 2006 the FBI established a unit to investigate over 100 cases of lynching in the South, Emmett Till's death among them. The AG declined to prosecute anyone when all the evidence was presented, although it had long been clear that the men tried did not act alone.

In 1963 four little girls, wearing their best clothes and no doubt black patent leather shoes, died in Sunday school, victims of the bombing of their Birmingham church. In 1977, 2001, and 2003, three men were respectively convicted of these murders, one of them laughing throughout his trial and later claiming "political prisoner" status.

Credit for the civil rights movement has usually focused on individual heroes, primarily Martin Luther King. Myths abound, such as the myth that Rosa Parks was a simple cleaning woman, too tired to give up the seat she'd paid for. In fact, Rosa Parks, a savvy woman involved with a group seeking to desegregate the buses in Montgomery, Alabama, was chosen, specifically for her un-besmirched character, to refuse to give up her seat when the opportunity arose. Ms. Parks, legendary as she deserves to be, had an organization behind her. In 1944 a young woman named Irene Morgan, acting and reacting as an individual, similarly refused to yield her seat on an interstate bus and took her case (with the deft assistance of Thurgood Marshall) to our highest court--eventually Marshall became an illustrious Supreme Court justice in an era in which Supreme Court justices had impressive intellectual ability as well as dignity, and weren't openly taking corporate bribes as they do now.

Back in 1961 when Freedom Riders challenged the federal government to at last enforce the Irene Morgan decision--which held it unconstitutional to segregate buses engaged in inter-state travel--Bobby Kennedy ordered the demonstrators to stop and "be patient." Today, Barack Obama urges his supporters to exercise the same patience. History shows patience results in many more years of oppression. It also shows that nonviolence overthrows only the appearance of power. As in Egypt, one tyrant departs, a corrupt Army remains.

In the area around notorious Money, Mississippi, the good old boys haven't given up and the law down there continues to protect murderers pursuing white supremacy. Mysterious deaths have been declared "self-inflicted." http://www.opednews.com/articles/Mississippi-2010-Lynching-by-clare-hanrahan-101218-140.html, http://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/naacp-says-alleged-suicide-may-be-mississippi-lynching/

Meanwhile the FBI parades an interest in pursuing murderers, most of whom are long dead.

What Constitution?

A few days ago the government explained they were stripping Pvt. Bradley Manning each night to keep him from committing suicide. The fact that Manning has expressed no suicidal "ideation", according to Bradley himself, his lawyers, and his family, is irrelevant, as is the fact that the government seems not to have offered the soldier psychiatric counsel or antidepressive medication. Being forcibly stripped and obliged to stand outside his cell in his birthday suit each morning could inspire suicidal ideation in many people, a no-brainer that seems not to have occurred to Uncle Sam.

Except that it has. Manning, kept in isolation since his arrest, is a victim of state terror—today with the Good Government Seal of Approval bestowed by Mr. Obama. The state seeks to undermine Manning's free will as it did Jose Padilla's. Padilla, another "terrorist sans trial" for too many years--as if, in a free society, there might be an acceptable number of years to be denied a trial--was reduced to living totally inside his own head, everything outside his head having been removed. Held in solitary confinement for two years without access even to legal counsel, Padilla was transported, eyes blinded by blackout goggles, ears swathed in sound-blocking earphones, body bound up in chains—to the dentist. All this despite the fact that his jailers declared him consistently meek and cooperative. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/us/04detain.html This is sensory deprivation, a well-recognized method of torture.

Read any account of imprisonment in a totalitarian state and you will encounter similar stories. You will also discover that, for all but the strongest victims of it, this sort of treatment breaks down an individual's will, his resistance, and his perception of reality. Let me be clear: I do not fantasize that we as a society now live in a totalitarian state. But some individuals, citizens and non-citizens, have already experienced what may be coming: American totalitarianism. If the far right continues to make inroads, all of us will find out what it means to be at the mercy of people who have none.

So why is torturing Pvt. Manning important to our government? One sad reason is that little boys like to play war games. Think of Dick Cheney, Dubya, and Rumsfeld gathered around in the war room, plotting how many times they should waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? How about 183? Sounded about right to them. The magnitude of our country's horrific treatment of this man—monster though he may well be—belies any serious effort to extract information from him. Now as a country we're into S&M. Little boys who never grow into men often become sadists instead.

The torture of Manning has another potential benefit. Having failed to produce evidence of a link between the young man and Julian Assange, the Army now looks to break him into manufacturing that evidence for them. If you believe they care whether Manning's coerced confession will be true, you haven't been paying attention for many years.

The third reason for engaging in state terror is the effect it has on the rest of us. By not hiding what they're doing--and in fact by announcing a motive so patently absurd--the government seeks to intimidate those of us who might otherwise be tempted to work todo what Manning is accused of doing, namely exposing secret activities, many of which do not appear to involve "national security," but are more related to "administration embarrassment". The Army cynically explains they can't let Manning get dressed before roll call because that would require them to wake him up early. (As of this morning, they have provided him with a "tear-proof smock." One wonders why tear-proof pajamas aren't available.)

But those of us who have been paying attention don't wonder at all. The only citizens who would buy the argument that his clothing has been removed for any purpose other than to humiliate and degrade him are citizens who can be relied upon to behave themselves anyway. The treatment of young Manning is directed at anyone who comprehends its true purpose. Otherwise, the military might come up with a slightly more believable explanation for its outrageous treatment of Manning, who has been systematically denied the rights of citizenship, in particular the right to face his accusers in court in a timely manner. Obviously the military doesn't yet have the evidence they want so they can't hold a trial.

Yes, I realize that, because Manning is a private in the Army, he is subject to abrogation of his rights as a citizen. Yet did his crime, if crime he did commit, occur in the course of his duties as a soldier? If he hacked into secret government files (much as high school students did into the Pentagon's computers in 2008), did he do this in the employ of Uncle Sam or as an individual? Since the military and our government continue to withhold information about him and his putative crime, we may never know.

On another, related topic, our President has decided to cave on military tribunals for prisoners at Guantanamo. I think Padilla and Manning give us ample evidence of the military's capacity for fairness. Why bother with the hypocrisy of putative trials? Declare them all guilty and lock them up forever.

Is there any substantive promise Obama will NOT cave on? He's already spared Congress the need to gut the health care bill by telling governors they can opt out. Will State governments, lacking funds to furnish their collegiate football teams with a band, pass up such an offer?

My second question is in regard to the coming Presidential election: Unless Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck is his opponent, can Obama defeat anyone? He has systematically alienated those who voted for him, even chastising them for failing to carry out his campaign promises and/or failing to be patient about waiting for him to carry them out. (By the way, next week--the civil rights movement and Robert Kennedy's insistence that those struggling for equality hang back and "be patient.")

My third question is, does it matter whether Obama wins? He has spent his time in office courting his enemies and saving his criticisms for those who elected him, continuing the disastrous de-regulation begun under Ronald Reagan (http://atlantapost.com/2011/01/18/obama-courts-business-support/). Now he declares Americans can rent, they don't have to own their own homes. Nice. Without a crumb to toss to the elderly and infirm who will wind up in apartments where the rent escalates annually while their income remains static, our "savior president" dispenses with all security beyond that of the wealthy.

When will Americans get angry at the right people?

On to the Congressional Muslim witch hunts and the answer to that last question: Probably not in my lifetime.

The Deafening Roar of Muted

Beginning in the 1960s, with the Black Power Movement, and continuing into the 1970s and 1980s, women and minority-rights advocates lobbied for more control over language. Some African Americans, once called Negro out of politeness, demanded the right to define themselves. Some hammered away at the word “nigger,” and some gays embraced the word "queer," all in an attempt to neutralize the slurs. This was regarded as “subversive.”

I felt more in tune with efforts to re-name what had been offensive. Asian for Oriental, woman for lady, homosexual or gay or lesbian for queer. Disabled for crippled. Intellectually challenged for retarded. Yes, it’s cumbersome and might be compared to calling a janitor a “sanitary engineer,” but what’s wrong with that? If the word “janitor” conjures an image of a dull slacker with a broom, barring the word forces us to revise the image, or at least to consciously map it onto a new expression. Because, although writers know that clichés are words devoid of impact, we also know those words have no impact precisely because we’ve all agreed on what they mean. They evoke no self-consciousness, no self-critical thinking. You might say they are hot-wired directly to the center of meaning in the brain. We can’t examine our racist ideology if we are never inspired to consider it. This may be behind the shifts in naming of black Americans--African American, Afro-American, black, Black: We got too comfortable with each new moniker, easily packing it with our old stereotypes.

The right characterized all this as "political correctness." They derided efforts to appropriate naming conventions as intimidating and at the same time (oddly) ridiculous. The right said people (note the absence of a color designation) were no longer free to speak their minds. They couldn’t tell jokes because the political correctness police had no sense of humor. All the things that were in the employ of the right, from language to law enforcement, were attributed to the PC Movement.

The ploy worked. Liberals, for the most part, caved. They too began attacking objections to objectionable language as “PC.” On college campuses, students raising questions about language were silenced by accusations that they were trying to silence others. Admittedly, some self-styled “leftists” were naïve or arrogant or foolish—in some cases, all three. It wasn’t uncommon for jerks to latch onto the language wars with no clear understanding of what was at stake. But the cannons of the right were turned on the core battle. The clowns were mere collateral damage. And so began the demise of a left in the US, to the point that few people laugh whenever someone refers to the “extreme left-wing of the Democratic Party.”

Now we’re back to bowing to conservative authorities, those who can tell us what women want, what gays want, what black people want. Recently, in an interview with Mike Wallace (who, I'm sorry, looks like an apple left on the window sill for months), the actor Morgan Freeman made the assertion that the way to subvert racism was to ignore race.

"When is white history month?" he demanded in response to a question about his lack of support for Black History Month.

Well, Mr. Freeman, Mike Wallace may have been at a loss to respond but I am not. I can tell you when white history month takes place in the US: January through December, each and every year. Students at all levels study “white history” in every class not specifically relegated to “ethnic studies.”

We don't have to identify a given, because it's—a given. Although such practices are no longer uniform, until a few years ago you could presume any malefactor described as “the alleged burglar/rapist/holdup man” was white. If he were black or Latino or Asian, this would be reported. If you are white and you are speaking with another white person, describing a person of color, you will hesitate (if you’re sensitive to racial issues), making a decision as to whether to specify the individual’s race. Would it be prejudicial to tell? Is it really relevant to what you’re saying? You may or you may not decide to include an ethnic designation, but if you were describing another white person, no such “Moment of Truth” would come up. The race of a white person (among whites) is a given.

We frequently hear apologies for racism in film and literature of fifty or more years ago: "That's just the way people thought back then." Oh really? And what color are the "People" who thought that way back then? Recently, I heard an FBI agent, discussing the 1955 lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, claim that global censuring of Mississippi for acquitting the boy’s murderers caused “all Mississippians to become protective of Mississippi.” The excision of black Mississippians—no small segment of that state’s residents, then or now—comes naturally to whites because, unless otherwise specified, all populations are white.

The movement to take back language has been intimidated into silence, although some victories linger. Asian, black, etc.—they’re all pretty much melded into our vocabulary, although they may have taken on much of the coloration of the words they replaced. The ideas persist. Judge Judy says to a young woman, “There’s nothing more disgusting than a drunken woman.”

Some of us raise our eyebrows and maybe shake our heads. But really. We have nothing to say.