Middle class opposition to income redistribution

I wrote this for the Health Care Oregon email list, responding to a post:

I think the increased opposition to income redistribution has a lot to do  with the self-interest of the middle class.

Starting in the early 1970s, for a variety of reasons, it became more  difficult to maintain a middle-class income. The middle class tried to  preserve its standard of living by: 
1. Putting their wives to work. 
2. Running up credit card, mortgage and student loan debt. 
3. Reducing savings. 
4. Rebelling against taxes.

The tax revolt required them to turn against any government program that  did not seem to directly benefit them. Thus poor people because a target.  Middle-class people cooked up an entire ideology to justify this. They are  focused tightly on their jobs. Being middle-class is a full time job, and  they're highly specialized. Most of them, regardless of how theoretically  well-educated they are, know almost nothing about public policy issues.  They like the way they are living in their consumer paradise, and they see  no compelling reason to change anything. They're also a majority of the  voters. They feel threatened by the rest of us, don't want us to be even  visible, thus the vicious prejudice against and suppression of the homeless.

Converting them is not an option. We need a militant pushy Poor Power  movement that uses disruption to force them to give us what we want. Our  demands should include: 
1. A guaranteed annual income. 
2. A livable minimum wage. 
3. A lot more affordable housing. 
4. Single-payer health care.

We need to stop voting for any politician, regardless of party, that  doesn't advance our interests. Exert pressure.

"The Peripheral" by William Gibson

I thought The Peripheral had some interesting ideas but was a somewhat difficult read. It gets better later in the book after all the main concepts are explained. The dust jacket description helped. I have problems with books that go back and forth in time. This one alternates between a time later this century and one 80 years later.

Too much made up language. Would have helped if there was a glossary at the beginning of the book.

Jackpot -- A world-wide collapse sometime after the first period that killed off 80 percent of the world's population. Not spelled out but apparently a combination of climate change and other things. Mass social breakdown. Very sparse population remaining, supplemented by artificial human bodies, barely animated by AI (artificial intelligence) for show. The survivors are rich, and some of them are very old.

Kleptocracy -- A government or state in which those in power exploit national resources and steal; rule by a thief or thieves. How the far future world is run. Corrupt.

Stub -- People in the future can't physically time travel but they can exchange information with the past, which also allows people to go from the past to the future, as information, and inhabit an artificial body. When the future communicates with the past it alters the past so that it goes off on a time branch they call a stub. It is no longer the past of the future that communicated. The book never explains how this information transfer between future and past works, it uses a program on a mysterious Chinese server (fancy computer) that they don't understand.

Besides creating artificial human bodies, which they can inhabit if they wish, far future people can also create other life forms they can inhabit.

At the beginning of the book the main female character takes a job where she thinks she's providing security in an online virtual game. She's actually operating a flying machine in the future.

Hope that helps.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Peripheral-William-Gibson/dp/0399158448/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427411168&sr=1-1&keywords=the+peripheral

Nixon wanted to nuke North Vietnam

"If the president had his way," Kissinger growled to aids more than once, "There would be a nuclear war each week!" This may not have been an idle jest. The CIA's top Vietnam specialist, George Carver, reportedly said that in 1969, when the North Koreans shot down a U.S. spy plane, "Nixon became incensed and ordered a tactical nuclear strike.... The Joint Chiefs were alerted and asked to recommend targets, but Kissinger got on the phone to them. They agreed not do anything until Nixon sobered up in the morning."

This particular allegation of flirting with nuclear weaponry is not an isolated one. Nixon had been open to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam as early as 1954 and as president-elect considered striking "a blow that would both end the war and win it." A Kissinger aide who moved over to the White House, David Young, told a colleague "of the time he was on the phone [listening] when Nixon and Kissinger were talking. Nixon was drunk, and he said, 'Henry, we've got to nuke them.'" -- Anthony Summers, "The Arrogance of Power" p. 372, 2000

Summers quotes Kissinger as saying that it may have been a good thing that Watergate happened because if it hadn't, getting Nixon out of the White House, it might have been something far worse.

Someone wrote that the main accomplishment of the 1960s antiwar movement may have been to keep Nixon from nuking North Vietnam.

http://www.amazon.com/Arrogance-Power-Nixon-Watergate/dp/1842124315/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1426815514&sr=8-2&keywords=the+arrogance+of+power+summers

Time and Again

"I was, and I knew it, an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better informed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decisions of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than, and who are not more intelligent than, most of the rest of us. That it was even possible that my own opinions and judgment could be as good as and maybe better than a politician's who made a decision of profound consequence." -- Jack Finney, "Time and Again"

By the late 1960s I had reached the same conclusion. I remember Kurt Vonnegut writing, during the Nixon administration, that the people now running the country were the ones he went to high school with.

Finney's book, first published in 1970, is the best time travel story I've ever read. He lets us experience New York City in 1882.

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Again-Jack-Finney/dp/0684801051/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425177886&sr=8-1&keywords=time+and+again+by+jack+finney

Letter to Register-Guard re homeless shelter movement

Poor is the new black. Just as whites once fought to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods, now the middle class tries to exclude the poor. We see this in neighborhood opposition to any form of organized homeless shelter – while they complain about the mess created by uncontrolled homeless camping. 

Over the last few years the tide had begun to turn in Eugene, with city and county governments providing unused land free to new nonprofits setting up well-run, low-cost homeless shelter – Opportunity Village Eugene, Community Supported Shelters, Nightingale Health Sanctuary. 

NHS is just getting their two legal “rest stop” camps started, but OVE, with Opportunity Village, and CSS with their three rest stop camps, have established a good track record. Their simple shelters, built with donations and volunteer labor, work. They’ve taken over 90 people off the streets, and still growing. 

People who oppose this movement need to understand that their choice is between well-managed shelter and messy unorganized camps. The homeless and their advocates, working together, are putting a lot of energy into creating shelter. We need neighborhood support.

In Defense of Food

“In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan is one of the best books I’ve read on diet. Written in a conversational tone, it’s an easy read and seems like quite sensible advice. 

His main message is summed up by a banner on the cover: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. 

By “food” he means stuff that our grandparents would recognize as food, as opposed to “food products” that have swamped our diet in the last half century, invented by corporations, with long lists of ingredients that we don’t know.  

Much of our diet, he writes, is between-meals snacking, a lot of it consumed in cars while driving, consisting of food products, driving up our calorie intake. These snacks are mainly based on cheap, government-subsidized grains. 

Pollan explains the serious limitations of diet research to date and doesn’t subscribe to any of the popular diet theories. But he says all of the nutrition experts he has talked to, regardless of their theories – low-fat, low-carb, whatever – agree on one thing: we need to eat more plants. Even meat, he says, would be better for us if the animals have been fed plants instead of grain. And they should not be given antibiotics, which is breeding resistant germs. 

He says we need to focus on the benefits of eating whole foods instead of individual nutrients in foods, and that culture – how and when we eat – may be as important as what we eat. We need to spend more time on it and eat with other people.

On not being a recording

It's critical at any age, but especially as we grow older, to expose ourselves to new information, ideas, influences, experiences. Otherwise we become recordings, thinking, saying and doing the same things over and over, living by habit.

I suggest reading nonfiction, preferably on subjects you don't already habitually think about.

"He who is not busy being born is busy dying." -- Bob Dylan

Old age

A book I recommend is "In the Company of Strangers" by Mary Meigs. It's a companion to the "semi-documentary" movie "Strangers in Good Company", which I also recommend. Seven old women, and one young one, played themselves in a fictional situation. Both the movie and the book are meditations on old age. I've been looking for something realistic on the subject, and the movie was the first thing I found. Amazon has both. Netflix has the movie.

Voting against the taxes

I'm voting against both the city & county taxes. The city tax has been discussed so much that I don't need to.

The county tax will fund more jail beds, and I'm against that. People who typically end up in jail are my people, working-class and poor. The city uses some of those jail beds to lock up homeless people who are camping. The Eugene Police Dept. refuses to stop harassing homeless people.

Jails are where we put the mentally ill, most of the time.

Jails are used for the so-called war on drugs, which I'm against. Legalize drugs and treat their use as a public health issue. If that isn't politically possible, stop enforcing the laws.

The U.S., I believe, is now second to China in the percentage of our population we lock up. I won't support this. When local governments find their policies enraging both the left and the right it's time to change, because the inert middle-class no longer has the votes.

From Wikipedia's article on Philip Wylie: "The Disappearance (1951) - An unexplained cosmic "blink" splits humanity along gender lines into two divergent timelines: from the men's perspective, all the women disappear and from the women's, all men vanish. The novel explores issues of gender role and sexual identity. It depicts an empowered condition for liberated women and a dystopia of an all male world."

For maybe half of us, that has happened. Unable to create or maintain marriages, men and women have gone their separate ways. In most cases, I've read, when couples split up it's the woman who leaves. Whatever women expected men to be, apparently we aren't. Millions of us are headed into old age alone, the leading edge of the post WWII baby boom. A quiet social tragedy, with no end in sight.

I think this trend has been greatly pushed by the growing inability of men, particularly working-class men, to make a living. We've lost the main function we had for women and children. Women are having children alone rather than depend on men who can't support them. We tend to look at the long-standing "war between the sexes" as being about gender roles, which we imagine are changeable, but economics are probably more important.

Men are wild creatures, designed by evolution to hunt, and are no more suited to domestication than a cougar. Women need domesticity to raise their children, which depends on getting men to fall in line. Women really, really want men to do what they want us to do, and will argue with us if we don’t. Women’s reproductive success depends on getting men to do things we don’t want to do.

Men don’t like women arguing with them. It’s an irritating waste of our energy, since we’re going to do whatever we can get away with, regardless. Women have the thankless job of persuading us that we can’t get away with it. Frankly, this only works if we’re getting something from the woman that makes it worth it.

Men are not suited to civilization and spend our lives, consciously or unconsciously, pining for the wild. It’s true that we live longer domesticated, but would you like to live in a zoo? We hate spending most of our lives doing what other people tell us to do. I think this is the source of much of the irreconcilable conflict between men and women: we have different needs. Men need adventure; women need routine.

I suggest to women, if they want to get along with us, to not argue with us unless it’s really important to their personal welfare, or that of their children. Often I think they argue simply to prove that they’re still in control, not the man. It seems to be the principle of the thing.