Letting Go...

I’ve been wanting to write this blog for a very long time, but I kept looking for evidence that perhaps there will be a reversal of recent trends. That search has proven very frustrating, and I am left with the conclusion that most Americans are either apathetic, misinformed or have given up caring about the survival of their country entirely… very much like a drowning man’s letting go of the last lifeline and weakly slipping into the water. We seem to be a nation of me first… me only… and damned be to anyone and everyone else. Leave me alone! The notion of facing and solving problems together seems to have vaporized. The willingness to accept compromise to move the nation forward appears to be slipping into a distant historical memory. Considering that we were once a great nation because we rallied together against difficulties and genuine enemies, proudly calling ourselves Americans along the way, we are letting go of that lifeline that defines us as Americans.

Polarization and immobility define America today. Archaic systems, etched in stone, are beginning to topple our dearest institutions. For example, generous pensions to government employees – according defined benefits on retirement, usually a function of the highest pay grade achieved, regardless of how much money rests in the pension account – are slowly taking down cities – Harrisburg, Stockton, San Bernardino, etc. – and even entire states (California and Michigan have unfunded and growing pension obligations that they can never afford). Municipal bankruptcy robs people of their retirements, and reflects that no one seems to be willing to deal with issues until the problems create utter disaster.

So it is with our educational system reporting ever-sinking math and science scores for our students that fall further every year… as we cut our school budgets at every level. In a world of hyper-accelerating opportunities in technology and sophisticated financial systems, clearly a nation with under-educated workers in these fields can only expect their relative global value – and hence their standard of living – to decline. We look at unemployment statistics as a measure of our “economic recovery,” but we aren’t asking if the jobs that do exist are comparable to what once was. With rare exception, average Americans do not expect their children to do better that they did in life… the first such moment in American history. We live in a polarized society where the vast majority of Americans are facing further-declining employment opportunities.

Our infrastructure has to collapse – levees must breach, dams must fail, and highways must crack into oblivion – before we pay attention, but the cost of dealing with the ensuing catastrophe is always multiple of what it would have cost to fix the problem before the failure. We’d rather spend money on the largest military in the world, one that has easily become embroiled in no-win conflicts, than invest in what needs to be done right here, right now.

For a nation built on immigration and a competitive spirit, we seem to hate immigrants and the fact that children of native born Americans dedicate themselves to significantly less study time than the children of immigrants just seems to piss us off even more. We just want to have our lives back without getting into that competitive spirit that made us great.

The 1% use their money and power – now amplified a thousand-fold by Citizens United – to push policies that allow them to operate with decreasing transparency, lower taxes and enhance their ability to increase their current holdings of 42% of this nation’s wealth to an even more staggeringly-untenable number. The losers are always the lower classes, but for the first time in our history, our middle class is falling backwards, declining in numbers, earning less, and about half our nation is now defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as either below the poverty line or within that vast swell of Americans defined as “low income.” Americans feel hopeless about changing this situation… and are letting go of their connective lifeline to America.

We watch as global banks are shown to have conspired for years to create false data that is used by the UK government to defined their interbank lending rates (Libor), and it does seem that the branches of US banks were heavily involved in that process. JP Morgan Chase, which screamed that they did not need regulations to protect the markets from bad practices and rogue traders, is slowly increasing their internal loss number – from $2 billion to at least $6 billion and perhaps more – from very recent bad practices and rogue traders.

Yet people are now terrified to challenge these institutions, and the amount of political spending seems directed at blowing away as many regulations against financial institutions as possible despite all the evidence of their continued malignant operations. We are killing ourselves. Our moral strength is no longer a value proposition where a big institution is involved. We will twist and turn to protect these behemoths from accepting the kind of accountability that honesty and fairness should demand.

A convicted pedophile – Jerry Sandusky – operated for years, abusing young boys using Penn State facilities, without risk or censure within one of the most prestigious academic sports programs on earth, despite ample evidence presented to legendary coach Joe Paterno and the Penn State higher-ups. Janitorial staff were too scared to reach outside the system for fear of job loss, and those at the top cared more about the institution than the horrific emotional destruction of young lives that would leave lifetime scars. They buried the criminal evidence and allowed the abuse to continue without action. The Penn State scandal is a terrifying metaphor for America.

We don’t seem to treasure honesty and justice. We don’t care to help level the playing field of opportunity. We don’t want to invest in ourselves. We don’t seem willing to compromise and work together. One of my very conservative friends, a 1%-ter, said something that really surprised me. He noted that in a land where opportunity is receding at an alarming rate, where increasing numbers of people are left with nothing to lose within declining quality employment opportunities, where wealth is increasingly concentrated… and in a land where the right to bear arms has left millions of guns in the hands of a lot of angry-and-getting-angrier people, violent disruption on a growing and perhaps even massive scale is inevitable. It is unless we put America first again.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I hope we right this ship before insurrection is no long what happens “elsewhere.”