Candida Pugh's Blog

The trouble started before we left Oakland, California. I bought a OneSimCard for my iPhone and another for Charles’s economy phone, purchased a few years ago, when we were in Holland. Two days before takeoff, we tried them out. Neither phone would ring when we followed the dialing instructions on the Web site.
A call to OneSimCard service lasted over forty-five minutes. She could not understand why our phones wouldn’t ring. But toward the end of the call, she finally elicited a ring on my iPhone and declared the problem fixed.
One major glitch resulted from my conversation with her. The home base of OneSimCard is Estonia. She told me that to dial my husband’s phone, I needed to use the Estonian area code. I asked if this would change when he was in Poland and I was in Madrid. She said, “No. Wherever you are, use the Estonian area code.” I inferred that she meant I was always to dial with that code, not that I was only to dial that code if I called my husband. This led to my phone not working, my sending several inquiries and finally complaints to OneSimCard, and eventually finding out that I needed to dial the country code to get through to restaurants, etc. (OneSimCard insisted I watch their hours of videos, showing how to use their cards, but I had only my iPad and their videos wouldn't play on it. One video on YouTube did play but it wasn't much help.)
The problem of our phones not ringing, in spite of her confidence, was not fixed. When we reached the Madrid-Barajas Airport, I tried calling Charles, who stood ten feet away from me. His phone didn’t ring. He tried calling me. My phone didn’t ring. Okay. We had paid through the nose and were reduced to email and Skype. I hoped there would be no emergencies requiring instant contact. Charles, being more sanguine by nature, was sure there wouldn't be.
Charles went with me to the apartment, on the sixth floor near the city center. The apartment turned out to be gorgeous but very odd. Fully half of the limited square footage was inaccessible except on hands and knees because of the sloped ceiling. But it had a terrace and was on the top floor so that noise was a problem only occasionally.
Next Charles walked me to the school where I was going to take Spanish. He did this because I cannot turn around without losing my orientation. Here’s an example: I was in North Carolina, a teenaged volunteer in the 60’s Civil Rights Movement, driving a VW Bug from Durham to Greensboro. I stopped for gas at the intersection of two wide streets. In those days, an attendant filled your gas tank. After I paid him, I faced an significant problem. I exited the station, made a left, made another left, and then another left, which landed me back at the pump. The attendant looked at me blankly. I tried my sweetest voice: “When I came in here, did you happen to notice which way I was going?”
Luckily for me, he had noticed, or I might still be wandering through North Carolina.
As it was, even though the school was a seven-minute walk from my apartment and Charles had carefully gotten me to note all the landmarks, the first five times I went there, I got lost.
After that, we had lunch at a restaurant highly recommended on the Internet. It was not the first time a highly recommended restaurant turned out to be less than mediocre. Once, in Prague, we visited a place that had more than one hundred “Five Star” reviews on tripadvisor. Probably one of the top ten worst restaurant experiences of my life. My review begins “What restaurant did these people eat at?”
Charles left around six, headed for the airport to take a flight to Poland where he was attending a math conference for two weeks. I started unpacking and pretty quickly realized something terrible. The charger for my iPad, my iPhone, and my Kindle were all in his suitcase.
Panic set in. In mere hours, given the short battery life of most devices, I would have no way to get in touch with him and he’d have no way to reach me. While the loss of contact would be hard to bear on the level of missing each other, it also meant that we’d not be able to communicate when he returned to Madrid. As it was, two weeks later the failure of OneSimCard resulted in him wandering around the city center for an hour, unable to phone me for directions to the apartment, which he'd forgotten. (And by the way, his little inoperative Dutch phone had worked beautifully when we visited Holland and Belgium--for a fraction of the cost.)
No Apple store nearby. No idea what to do. At the school, I inquired as to whether anyone had the necessary chargers. No dice. At the end of the first day, I trudged off to Corte Inglesa, Spain's humongous super-store. There I located chargers for all three items.
Back at the apartment, I installed the voltage converter I’d purchased on Amazon for a small fortune. Sat down to eat a minimalist dinner and read a book. But my nose kept twitching. What was that smell? I got up and searched through the apartment, getting nervous about the possibility of fire because it did smell like something burning and I was up very high with no fire escape.
Couldn’t find the source so sat back down to read. An hour later I jumped from the couch, having been pummeled by a loud CRACK! The converter had exploded. I checked to see if it had damaged the iPad but no, the iPad was fine. My new problem was finding another converter using my less than perfect (ah, what a euphemistic way to get around the word “terrible”) Spanish.
After several mis-communications—and by the way, very few people spoke English in Corte Inglesa and indeed elsewhere in Madrid, something I could hardly hold against them, given they were in their own country and I too was in their own country—I arrived in the correct department. A very kind man spent several minutes trying to understand what I wanted and then explaining to me that the item he could sell me—weighing in at roughly five pounds—would not charge anything that drew too much current, such as a hair dryer or an iron.  I smiled and got out some euros. My hair could air dry and I had no intention of ironing anything.
After that, my only problem in Madrid was chronicallly getting lost. I’d take off, happily breathing in the city, only to find myself in some isolated location without any clue how to get back to the apartment. That this might happen to me had worried me in advance, but I thought the OneSimCard data package I purchased would enable me to access my GPS. Not so. I kept getting the message: No data plan.
Only during the final week of our vacation did I discover from OneSimCard (when I complained) that I had ordered a data package, paid for it, and immediately canceled it (without their issuing a refund). Since I ihad no intention of using the OneSimCard or their data plan after I left Spain, I wouldn't have ordered it and knowingly canceled it. Therefore, it must be incredibly easy to mistakenly cancel the data order on their site. And why was canceling but still paying for something an option? When all this became murkily clear, I found the “activate” button on my data plan and for the last few days of our trip enjoyed the benefits of GPS, something that would have saved us so much grief, had it not been canceled. (Needless to add, I will never ever buy their SIM card again. In fact, I urge anyone planning to travel NOT to buy any card here but to get one at the local airport abroad. In spite of the hype, it will be cheaper and, if like me you're not a geek, you can still get a working data plan without the risk of canceling it without realizing you’ve done so.)
But all’s well that ends well. Oddly enough, the idea of being lost concerned me far more before I got to Madrid than when I was actually lost in it.
MORE NEXT WEEK, INCLUDING OUR HARROWING EXPERIENCE GETTING TO OUR APARTMENT IN BARCELONA

From the NY Times of April  1, 2013:


Painful Payment for Afghan Debt: A Daughter, 6By ALISSA J. RUBINEDITORS’ NOTE — After the publication of this article on Monday, Taj Mohammad called The New York Times to say that a group led by an American lawyer had paid the debt he owed to another family in the refugee camp, and that his 6-year-old daughter would not have to leave. The Times’s Kabul bureau is following up on the case, and will write a new article about it on Monday.KABUL, Afghanistan — As the shadows lengthened around her family’s hut here in one of Kabul’s sprawling refugee camps, a slight 6-year-old girl ran in to where her father huddled with a group of elders near a rusty wood stove. Her father, Taj Mohammad, looked away, his face glum.“She does not know what is going to happen,” he said softly.If, as seems likely, Mr. Mohammad cannot repay his debt to a fellow camp resident a year from now, his daughter Naghma, a smiling, slender child with a tiny gold stud in her nose, will be forced to leave her family’s home forever to be married to the lender’s 17-year-old son.The arrangement effectively values her life at $2,500. That is the amount Mr. Mohammad borrowed over the course of a year to pay for hospital treatment for his wife and medical care for some of his nine children — including Janan, 3, who later froze to death in bitter winter weather because the family could not afford enough firewood to stay warm.“They said, ‘Pay back our money,’ and I didn’t have any money, so I had to give my girl,” Mr. Mohammad said. “I was thankful to them at the time, so it was my decision, but the elders also demanded that I do this.”The story of how Mr. Mohammad, a refugee from the fighting in Helmand Province who in better days made a living as a singer and a musician, came to trade his daughter is in part a saga of terrible choices faced by some of the poorest Afghan families. But it is also a story of the way the war has eroded the social bonds and community safety nets that underpinned hundreds of thousands of rural Afghans’ lives.Women and girls have been among the chief victims — not least because the Afghan government makes little attempt in the camps to enforce laws protecting women and children, said advocates for the camp residents.Aid groups have been able to provide a few programs for women and children in the ever-growing camps, including schooling that for many girls here is a first. But those programs are being cut as international aid has dwindled here ahead of the Western military withdrawal. And the Afghan government has not offered much support, in part because most officials hope the refugees will leave Kabul and return home.Most of the refugees in this camp are from rural southern Afghanistan, and they remain bound by the tribal codes and elder councils, known as jirgas, that resolved disputes in their home villages.Few, however, still have the support of a broader network of kinsmen to fall back on in hard times as they would have at home. Out of context, the already rigid Pashtun codes have become something even harsher.“This kind of thing never happened at home in Helmand,” said Mr. Mohammad’s mother as she sat in the back of the smoky room. Watching her granddaughter, as she laughed and smiled with her teacher, Najibullah, who also acts as a camp social worker and was visiting the family, she added, “I never remember a girl being given away to pay for a loan.”From the point of view of those who participated in the jirga, the resolution was a good one, said Tawous Khan, an elder who led it and is one of the two main camp representatives. “You see, Taj Mohammad had to give his daughter. There was no other way,” he said. “And, it solved the problem.”Some Afghan women’s advocates who heard about the little girl’s plight from news media reports were outraged and said they had asked the Interior Ministry to intervene, since child marriage is a violation of Afghan law and it is also unlawful to sell a woman. But nothing happened, said Wazhma Frogh, the executive director of the Research Institute for Women, Peace and Security.“There has to be some sort of intervention,” Ms. Frogh said, “otherwise others will think this behavior is all right and it will increase.”The CampsThe dark, cramped room where Mr. Mohammad lives with his wife and his eight children is typical of the shelters in the Charahi Qambar camp, which houses 900 refugee families from war-torn areas, mostly in southern Afghanistan.The camp is the largest in the capital area, but just one of 52 such “informal settlements” in the province, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.Abjectly poor, the people in the camps came with little more than a handful of household belongings. Seeking safety and aid, they instead found themselves unwelcome in a city already overcrowded with returning refugees from Pakistan and Iran.For years Charahi Qambar did not even have wells for water because the government was reluctant to let aid groups dig them, said Mohammad Yousef, an engineer and the director of Aschiana, an Afghan aid group that works in nine camps around the country as well as with street children.The refugees’ skills as farmers and small village workmen were of little use here since they had neither land nor houses. Penniless, they gravitated to others from the same area, and the camps grew up.Mr. Mohammad, like most men in the camps, looks for work almost every morning as an unskilled laborer, which pays about $6 a day — not even enough to buy the staples that his family subsists on: green tea, bread and, when they can afford them, potatoes. Meat and sugar are the rarest of luxuries.Many days, no one hires the camp men at all, put off by their tattered clothes, blanketlike wraps and full beards. “People know where we are from and think we are Taliban,” Mr. Mohammad said.After four years in the camp, he is thinking now of going back to Helmand as a migrant laborer for the opium poppy harvest so that he can earn enough to feed his family and save a little for next winter’s firewood.“It is too cold, and we wish we had more to eat,” said Rahmatullah, one of 18 deputy camp representatives and one of the few who spoke against the jirga’s decision to have Mr. Mohammad give his daughter to pay off the debt.Rahmatullah, who uses just one name, did note a positive difference in camp life, however, adding, “We do have one thing here — we have education.”Education was unheard-of for most camp residents at home in Helmand, and Rahmatullah, like many camp residents, said that at first he was suspicious of it. Shortly after arriving in the camp four years ago, he was shocked to see young girls walking on the street.He was even more amazed when another camp resident explained that the girls were going to school.“I did not know that girls could go to school, because in my village only a very few girls were taught anything and it was always at home,” he said. “I thought, ‘Maybe these are the daughters of a general,’ because where I come from women do not leave their homes, not even to bring water.”“I talked to my wife, and we allowed our girls to go to the camp school, and now they are in the regular Kabul school,” he said.His daughters were lucky. The schools in the camp were run by Aschiana, which gives a healthful lunch to every child enrolled — 800 in the Charahi Qambar camp alone. They try to bring the children up to a level where they can keep up in the regular Kabul schools.However, that program has just ended because the European Union, amid financial woes, is not renewing its programs for social protection. Instead, it is focusing its aid spending on the Afghan government’s priorities, ratified at last year’s international aid meeting in Tokyo, which do not include child protection, Alfred Grannas, the European Union’s chargé d’affaires in Afghanistan, said in an e-mail.The World of WomenLike most dwellings in the camp, Mr. Mohammad’s hut has a tarpaulin roof, lightly reinforced with wood, an unheated entry room, and an inner room with a stove. A small, grimy window lets in a faint patch of light, and piled around the room’s edges are the family’s few possessions: blankets, old clothes, a few battered pots and pans, and 10 bird cages for the quails he trains to sing in hopes of selling them for extra money.For his wife, a beautiful young woman who sat huddled in the shadows, a black veil drawn across her face as her husband discussed their daughter’s fate, there is little to look forward to day to day. Back in their village in Helmand, even poor families have walled compounds and sometimes land where a woman can go outdoors.In the camps, though, the huts are crammed together, with narrow mud pathways barely more than foot wide between them.“There’s no privacy in the camps, and for women it is like they are in a prison,” said Mr. Yousef, the Aschiana director. “They are constantly under emotional stress.”Like many Afghan women, Mr. Mohammad’s wife, Guldasta, let her husband speak for her — at first. He explained that she was too upset about what was happening to her daughter to talk about the situation.But then in a quiet moment, she turned, lifting her veil to reveal part of her face and said clearly: “I am not happy with this decision; it was not what I wanted for her.”“I would have been happy to let her grow up with us,” she said.The family’s case is a kind of dark distortion of the Afghan tradition of the groom’s family paying a “bride price” to the family of the wife-to-be. The practice is common particularly in Pashtun areas, but it exists among other ethnic groups as well and can involve thousands of dollars. In this case, the boy who is receiving Naghma as a wife, instead of paying for her, will get her in exchange for the debt’s forgiveness.Because Naghma, whose name means melody, was not chosen by the groom, she will most likely be treated more like a family servant than a spouse — and at worst as a captive slave. Her presence may help the groom attract a more desirable second wife because the family, although poor, will have someone working for it, insulating the chosen wife from some of the hardest tasks.Anthropologists say this kind of use of women as property intensified after the fall of the Taliban, said Deniz Kandiyoti, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.The most recent anthropological studies of the phenomenon were of indebted drug traffickers who sold their daughters or sisters to settle debts, she said. These are essentially distress sales. And unlike the norm for marriage exchanges before the past three decades of war, the women in some cases have become salable property — stripped of the traditional forms of status and respect, she said.RegretsAlmost from the moment he agreed to the deal, Mr. Mohammad began to regret it and think about all that could go wrong. “If, God forbid, they mistreat my daughter, then I would have to kill someone in their family,” he said as he stood at the edge of the camp in a muddy lot in the cold winter dusk.“You know she is very little, we call her ‘Peshaka,’ ” he said, using the Pashto word for kitten. “She is a very lovely girl. Everybody in our family loves her, and even if she fights with her older brothers, we don’t say anything, we give her all possible happiness.”He added: “I believe that when she goes to that house, she will die soon. She will not receive all the love she receives from us, and I am afraid she will lose her life. A 6-year-old girl doesn’t know about having a mother-in-law, a father-in-law, or having a husband or being a wife,” he said.Adding to their fears, the mother of the boy that Naghma will marry came to Mr. Mohammad’s home to ask his wife to stop sending the girl to school, he said.“You know, my daughter loves going to school, and she wants to study more and more. But the boy she is marrying, he sent his mother yesterday to tell my wife, ‘Look, this is dishonoring us to have my son’s future wife go to school,’ ” he said.“I cannot tell them what to do,” he added, looking down at his boots. “This is their wife, their property.”

I never knocked on anyone's door and asked them to come away from Jesus. Similarly, I never gave a dinner table dissertation on the virtues of eating pork or shellfish. When I was asked to bow my head and pray, I didn't stand instead and proclaim my allegiance to science and logic.
At sporting events, I confess, I do not rise for the bloody "Oh say can you see," and no doubt this has caused some consternation among the multitude who feel I am displaying a lack of fealty to "the land of the free and the home of the brave." That is perhaps the sole impertinent flouting of deeply held convictions I allow myself--passive resistance to mindless self-congratulation.
But, you know, I don't even paste stickers on my bumper declaring my indifference to god. I've never picketed a church, a synagogue, or a mosque, even though quite frankly I believe the institutions represented by those edifices are responsible for possibly one-third of the misery and violent death endured by humankind. (Yes, I realize they do "good works" too.)
Evangelical atheists annoy me as much as Jehovah's Witnesses at my door in their bandbox Sunday-Go-To-Meeting outfits and Mormons in their funereal black, descending uninvited in their eagerness to drag me into the arms of THEIR Lord. I don't speak to them about their hubris, their self-righteousness, or the absence of humility that drives them to imagine they know something I haven't given enough thought to.
If only religious practice would take a cue from sexual liaisons, most of which are happily conducted in private. If only True Believers would entertain the possibility that one size does not fit all.
Those of us who choose to live in peace, without Faith, could be a lot happier.

Children slaughtered by a maniac in Connecticut is a tragedy. Children slaughtered by the good old USA in Yemen, Pakistan, or anywhere else in the Middle East—well, that’s just the cost of doing business.

During my recent trip to Pakistan as part of our upcoming documentary film, Drones Exposed, I was struck most by the stories told to me by children who had experienced a U.S. drone strike firsthand. The impact of America’s drone war in the likes of Pakistan and Yemen will linger on, especially for the loved ones of the 178 children killed in those countries by U.S. drone strikes [emphasis added]. Drone Strikes

What lack of a moral compass enables us to wring our hands over the loss of 20 innocent American children but not over the massacre of 178 innocent Pakistani and Yemeni children? Are we so terrified by the Islamic bogeyman that politicians and our President have placed under our beds?
I favor absolute gun control, even of the military, actually. Our reliance on weaponry to make our way in the world probably dates back to the pioneers wiping out aboriginal Americans in the nineteenth century. We didn’t care who died to keep us safe as we pillaged then and we don’t seem to care very much now.
But decent citizens stand between a rock and a hard place: between “leaders” who do nothing the majority wants them to do (for example, no single-payer healthcare and no protection of Social Security even though SS has no bearing whatsoever on the deficit or the debt) and the American Taliban.
Our President and our legislators have steadily chipped away at constitutional rights. Now we can even be legally murdered if the baseball card bearing our name lands in Obama’s hand during one of his sub-rosa meetings with those who can send assassins after us. We can be interned indefinitely, without charges or access to a lawyer if we happen to donate to the wrong cause. If we are tried, we can face “justice” in a military court if the President deems kangaroo justice advisable.  We can be convicted on the basis of evidence we never see because it has been deemed secret. We can be subject to undisclosed surveillance and unauthorized searches. Extraordinary rendition remains a possibility for any citizen who stirs up the government’s paranoia sufficiently.
To keep all these things going, the TeaPugs have gerrymandered enough districts to maintain control of the House.

But since the GOP . . . totally controlled 21 state governments, including Pennsylvania's, it allowed the party to master post-census congressional redistricting around the country. On Nov. 6, Democrats won the popular vote by 500,000 votes nationally but took just 201 of the 435 U.S. House seats. In Pennsylvania, Republicans took hold of 13 of 18 congressional seats while being outpaced by 75,000 total votes. Mr. Obama won 53 percent of the state's vote, but Democratic candidates won 28 percent of the seats. GOP Rig-Districting

This is the current state of our democracy.
For some, the erosion of security from government-sponsored abuses coupled with the Obama Administration's overt favoritism of wealth—such as granting HSBC and Bank of America the rights of an individual citizen with none of the responsibilities, including the responsibility to obey the law—ought to call for revolutionary action. The trouble is all talk of revolution comes from those who would oppress us even more.
Liberals remain convinced that, if they just hold tight, all these horrors will go away. Children in Yemen and Pakistan aside, we can return to imagining we are the home of the free and the land of the brave.
Liberal intellectuals in pre-World War II Germany thought the same thing. Yeah, I know. Invoking the Nazi bogeyman is even less popular among progressives than invoking the Islamic version. But we each need to ask ourselves where we draw the line.
Apparently we don’t draw it at mass murder on a scale that would shame a psychotic killer. Apparently we don’t draw it at the torture of American citizens such as Jose Padilla and Bradley Manning.
Right now, it seems we draw it nowhere.

I know I planned to do re-runs into January but today's article about anti-union legislation passing in Michigan enraged me. So here's my response, hopefully not garbled--still packing up!


1:57 A.M., January 29, 1936, Akron, Ohio

The foreman paced slowly past his workmen, his eyes darting in and out of the machines, eager for any betraying gesture. He heard no word, and he saw no gesture. The hands flashed, the backs bent, the arms reached out in monotonous perfection. The foreman went back to his little desk and sat squirming on the smooth-seated swivel chair. He felt profoundly disturbed. Something, he knew, was coming off. But what? For God’s sake, what?  

The tirebuilders worked in smooth frenzy, sweat around their necks, under their arms. the belt clattered, the insufferable racket and din and monotonous clash and uproar went on in steady rhythm. The clock on the south wall, a big plain clock, hesitated; its minute hand jumped to two. A tirebuilder at the end of the line looked up, saw the hand jump. The foreman was sifting quietly staring at the lines of men working under the vast pools of light. Outside, in the winter night, the streets were empty, and the whir of the factory sounded faintly on the snow-swept yard. 

The tirebuilder at the end of the line gulped. His hands stopped their quick weaving motions. Every man on the line stiffened. All over the vast room, hands hesitated. The foreman saw the falter, felt it instantly. He jumped up, but he stood beside his desk, his eyes darting quickly from one line to another. 

This was it, then. But what was happening? Where was It starting? He stood perfectly still, his heart beating furiously, his throat feeling dry, watching the hesitating hands, watching the broken rhythm. 

Then the tirebuilder at the end of the line walked three steps to the master safety switch and, drawing a deep breath, he pulled up the heavy wooden handle. With this signal, in perfect synchronization, with the rhythm they had learned in a great mass-production industry, the tirebuilders stepped back from their machines. 

Instantly, the noise stopped. The whole room lay in perfect silence. The tirebuilders stood in long lines, touching each other, perfectly motionless, deafened by the silence. A moment ago there had been the weaving hands, the revolving wheels, the clanking belt, the moving hooks, the flashing tire tools. Now there was absolute stillness, no motion anywhere, no sound. 

Out of the terrifying quiet came the wondering voice of a big tirebuilder near the windows: "Jesus Christ, it’s like the end of the world." 

He broke the spell, the magic moment of stillness. For now his awed words said the same thing to every man, "We done it!’ We stopped the belt! By God, we done it!"’ And men began to cheer hysterically, to shout and howl in the fresh silence. Men wrapped long sinewy arms around their neighbors’ shoulders, screaming, "We done it! We done it!" 

For the first time in history, American mass-production workers had stopped a conveyor belt and halted the inexorable movement of factory machinery. Rohan SDSU

That was the rubber workers in Akron.

One of the first sit-down strikes occurred in 1906 at General Electric’s Schenectady, New York plant. In 1910, women garment workers in New York City sat down in, a shop to prevent their bosses from farming out work to contractors not on strike. Variations occurred in Poland, Yugoslavia and France from the end of the First World War to the early Thirties. In 1933, 2,500 workers stayed inside the Hormel Packing Company plant in Austin, Minnesota, during a three-day strike.  Rohan SDSU

Two hundred and forty five miles away from Toledo, GM workers toiled in an unceasing din, shifts running twenty-four hours a day, making $20 a week and risking life and limb in dangerous conditions. One wife described her husband returning from the plant and crawling up the stairs at night, too exhausted to eat his dinner.
On December 30, 1936 in Flint, Michigan, autoworkers at the GM plant repeated the rebellion in Akron, pulling the lever to stop the assembly line and plunging the enormous factory into silence for the first time in its history. Those workers too shouted for joy as their ears at last stopped throbbing and their unity became obvious. Eventually, they would have to fight off 4,000 National Guardsmen as the state mobilized its police forces to crush the rebellion. But the workers, wounded and cold, held out for 44 days. During the 1950s, autoworkers enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. Of course, the titans of industry finally realized they could crush the worker movement more easily by moving jobs to countries where workers were docile and could be underpaid and shoved into dangerous conditions without the State complaining.
I just saw “Lincoln” and it started me thinking about how myths grow, specifically, the myth that Lincoln “freed the slaves.” Henry Ford occupies a similarly distorted persona in our history. Because he saw the importance of retaining workers you’d trained, he raised their pay in 1914 to an unheard of $5 per day ($120 per day in today’s dollars). His patronage paid off in a stable workforce, which led to his increased profits. But before we swoon over his generosity (as the media frequently does), let’s consider a salary of $120 per day, $600 per week, a grand total of $2598 per month. There are few places in the United States, if any, where $2598 a month will keep a family of four free from the wolf at the door.
The average mortgage payment is $1,061 monthly, leaving $1537. The USDA estimates the weekly cost of food on a low-cost model at $161 per week, or $644 monthly, leaving $893. Unless the family lives in Hawaii, they are likely paying $300-$400 monthly for utilities, leaving $493. Credit card debt racked up to furnish their home, clothe their children if not themselves, and pay for repairs to their house likely take most of that. Then there is transportation to and from work. Forget a car. Gasoline prices put that out of reach. And we haven’t even considered state and national income taxes.
If you think I’m splitting hairs and Ford’s boosting wages without suffering labor strife marks him as a compassionate man, read on:

To forestall union activity, Ford promoted Harry Bennett, a former Navy boxer, to head [his] Service Department. Bennett employed various intimidation tactics to squash union organizing. The most famous incident, on May 26, 1937, involved Bennett's security men beating with clubs UAW representatives, including Walter Reuther. While the Bennett's men were beating the UAW representatives, the supervising police chief on the scene was Carl Brooks, an alumnus of Bennett’s Service Department, and [Brooks] "did not give orders to intervene.". . . . For several years, [Ford] kept Bennett in charge of talking to the unions that were trying to organize the Ford Motor Company. Sorensen's memoir makes clear that Henry's purpose . . . was to make sure no agreements were ever reached.
The Ford Motor Company was the last Detroit automaker to recognize the United Auto Workers union (UAW).  Henry Ford

This morning’s NY Times features a front-page article on Michigan’s adoption of a union-busting law, pushed through by those Franklin Delano Roosevelt dubbed “economic royalists”.  Detroit News
The irony of Americans punishing and regulating unions, admittedly much in need of reforms, instead of the corrupt and greedy bankers on Wall Street who destroyed our economy defies reason. The very crooks who whine about over-regulation nevertheless seek to regulate the union movement out of existence. Their fealty to the American middle class doesn’t exist. They are not citizens of this country; they are multinational corporate robber barons.
The union movement has been eroded by the capitalist greed that infects all of us. Even so, as with Castro’s Cuba, you can trace their fault lines to an external attack calculated to smash anyone who seeks justice. Divide and conquer remains strategically viable.
Sad to see so much success and relatively little informed opposition.

First rerun from oldies but goodies--covering the holidays and my move back to California. Meanwhile, check out the drawing for a free book at my Web site, candidapugh.com. See info at right.

After baseball, scapegoating appears to be our favorite national pastime. Christianity, which far too many Americans imagine is our official national religion, celebrates the image of the scapegoat as martyr ("He died for our sins"). Our literature explores the process of cathartic blaming, as in Shirley Jackson's classic short story, "The Lottery", in which the citizens of one town each year ritually gather around the holder of the winning ticket and stone him or her to death. As a people, we have not infrequently experienced bullying as an ecstatic event. In Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident, a lynch mob grows increasingly jubilant as they prepare to hang three putative cattle rustlers.
Henry Fonda plays the good guy in the film version of The Ox-Bow Incident. The role suited him, not merely because Fonda seemed like a good guy in general, but because as a young man, from a window in his father's lithography shop, he had been devastated by witnessing a horrific lynching and the gleeful sadism of the mob. Nebraska Studies
Horrific lynchings litter American history, right up to the present when Muslims and Mexicans find themselves increasingly victimized by the outraged.

According to FBI statistics, the number of anti-Latino hate crimes increased by 35 percent since 2003. In California, the state with the largest Mexican and Mexican-American population, the number of hate crimes against Latinos has almost doubled. This statistic has been challenged by the anti-immigration Federation for American Immigration Reform for selecting a base year (2003) in which anti-Latino hate crimes were reported at an unusually low level and for not indexing the increase with the corresponding increase in the Hispanic population.Anti-Mexican Sentiment
Why Are Hate Crimes on the RiseHate Crimes Aganst Latinos Steadily RisingHate Crime StatsHate Crimes Against Muslims
In the 1950s, Communists filled the role currently occupied by Islamic terrorists. America then loved to hate the Reds. The face of the scapegoat, however, can be pasted on any convenient target. In 2005 Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian shot seven times while lying face down on a London tube platform, died because his dark skin identified him as a terrorist to the plainclothes cop he thought was trying to mug him. You can still hear the roar of profound British indifference to his murder.
On June 23, 1982, Vincent Chin found it was a fatal mistake to be Asian in a land where, to some, all Asians look alike:
Vincent Chin was a 27-year-old Chinese-American raised in Metro Detroit. A week before his wedding, June 19, 1982, he went to the Fancy Pants strip club in Highland Park with a few buddies for his bachelor’s party. There, they encountered two autoworkers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, who, like many at the time, blamed the Japanese for the U.S. auto industry’s troubles. Even though Chin was not Japanese and worked in the auto industry himself as a draftsman, Ebens was heard saying, “It’s because of you little m—f—s that we’re out of work,” as well as other anti-Asian racial epithets.The men were thrown out of the bar, and the fight continued in the parking lot and into the night. Ebens and Nitz searched for Chin and his friends, and upon finding them, Nitz held Chin in a bear hug while Ebens struck Chin’s head four times with a baseball bat, cracking his skull. Vincent Chin died four days later. His wedding guests attended his funeral instead.Vincent Chin

Few among us are immune to the seductiveness of self-righteous rage. Witness the pleasure (and the success) of television judges, in particular, Judge Judy, who—unlike the folksy black judges and the other white female judge, mommy-figure Marilyn Milian—slashes and burns her way through the complexities of reality to get at "The Truth." The best paid and arguably the most popular television magistrate, Judge Judy establishes the groundwork by declaring, "I don't give a rat's behind" for any information she deems irrelevant. She claims to be a mobile lie detector, at the same time asserting you can tell when a teenager is lying because "his mouth is moving."
She doesn't shy away from telling a boy, for instance, "You're a scumbag," or a man being sued by his mother, "The [wife] standing next to you won't be there in ten years, I guarantee it." Her crystal ball never clouds up. Yet, because the litigants are so frequently breathtakingly stupid or greedy or, at the very least, disgustingly irresponsible, we cheer her for nailing them to any convenient cross. The joy of Judge Judy is the joy of, yes, feeling superior, but, more importantly, it's the joy of the lynch mob, the joy of punishing somebody for all the frustration, disappointment, and pain that goes with being human.
The popularity of radio ranter, Dr. Laura, mirrors that of Judge Judy and for the same reasons. Her misogyny and racism aside, she takes on the "whiners" (usually female) and the "losers." It's hardly a surprise, in a winner-take-all economic system, that the winners justify their success by demonizing the losers. Dr. Laura and Judge Judy are the stones we fling at our demons.
This sort of entertainment gets turned on its head when Judge Judy shouts, "Take responsibility! Stop blaming everyone else for your mistakes!" Do we, her audience, delude ourselves, in the process of shifting out of self-pity and into self-righteousness, that we "take responsibility" for our own pain?
Or is simply that old saw: "We hate most in others what we despise in ourselves"?

Because I'm in the process of moving across country, I will have to suspend this blog until mid-January. After this blog, I will rerun some of my past favorites. When I resume, I think I will abandon political critiques and turn to cultural critiques--but I'll still be on the warpath against dreck.

 If “Black Friday” is ironic, “Black Thanksgiving” is an oxymoron. Americans supposedly celebrate the richness of our country on Thursday, but on Friday we express the greed capitalism has instilled in us by flocking to Walmart to buy cheap goods.

Those cheap goods, however, come from underpaid workers and gutted towns that gave Walmart tax breaks to locate downtown. After Walmart  lured towns into giving them tax breaks in exchange for bringing jobs, after they destroyed the center of a town by wiping out small businesses, they invariably moved their operation to the outskirts of town when the time came to start paying taxes.
They buy cheaply from offshore suppliers who treat their workers even worse than Walmart treats its own workers here in the US, as the recent deadly garment factory fire in Bangladesh shows.
Long ago, people made most of what they used, which engendered a natural relationship between each person and the work they did. “Value” did not mean price. The farmer’s wife spent several days putting up canned goods to feed her family for a year. Value was that year of sustenance.
People didn’t sever objects from their intrinsic value, which could be either utilitarian or sentimental. Only after the capitalists convinced us that wearing a particular watch or driving a particular car elevated our own worth did alienation from real value occur. They also convinced us that their profits were worth sending our sons overseas to die for.
Desire is the engine of capitalism. To create desire, capitalists hire professional manipulators. Through image and language, no matter how distorted, these specialists produce mass desire, which leads to profits. Profits are the real worth of a worker’s efforts now. We imagine that we labor for an hourly or a monthly wage, that our skills stand on one side of an equal sign with salary on the other. This delusion enables the capitalist to perform his sleight of hand, hiding the lion’s share of what each worker produces: profit.
But profits are tricky. In the normal course of events, they shrink.

“We saw this when IBM and Apple started making a lot of money with home computers around 1990. Before you could blink, there were dozens of companies making home computers and they became cheaper every year.” CPSUA 

In other words, if one producer meets with great success, others move in on his territory. There’s a reason drug lords fight over territory and there’s a reason capitalists seek to destroy their competitors. But they can never rest comfortably because they know a successful enterprise will attract steady competition.
All of which means that expanding markets are vital to sustain any business. In order to expand, the industrialist creates greater and greater desire. As breastfeeding gained traction in the United States, manufacturers of baby formula moved overseas, into third world markets, convincing new mothers that breastfeeding was not the healthiest way to nourish their children.  In many cases, clean water was unavailable and infants thus developed dysentery. In some instances, impoverished mothers diluted the formula to stretch it and their infants died of malnutrition. These practices continue today, and all because American mothers have turned away from formula while manufacturers must continue to expand their sales. Business Insider
Is capitalism itself sustainable? Many Americans have begun to resent the degradation of social values that seems integral to a capitalist system. Money itself becomes an object, not a means of trading for goods. Stockpiling money, which should be regarded as fetishistic, instead marks an individual as disciplined and sensible. Accumulating more money than one can spend in a lifetime draws praise and admiration, not contempt for a hoarder.
When I was about nine, my brother loaned me a quarter, telling me I had to pay him fifty cents in return. My mother found out and denounced the transaction as “usury,” a word never heard anymore. Charging twice what is loaned, once considered disgustingly greedy, has become instead a low point in loaning. Think of the home mortgage. For the first several years, the home “owner” pays nothing but interest to the bank.
We talk about the materialism of Christmas as if materialism itself were acceptable, just not on that particular holiday. Of course, we could go into the creation of Santa Claus and Christmas itself as an alternative to a pagan holiday, suggesting nothing particularly holy about the day and everything calculating about it, an attitude perfectly in line with capitalism’s modus operandi.
In fact, we have grown blind to the displacement of value. We have people swearing allegiance to a showy “simplicity” movement, putatively attempting to restore our idealized past. But does it make sense to reject objects as a way of instilling real value in our lives? Doesn’t that somehow extend the elevation of their significance?
Returning to a time when labor consumed all daylight hours doesn’t resist the exploitation our culture endorses. Developing critical thinking skills in our young people would make a good start toward unraveling the tangled web of deception under which we currently (and truly) labor. Take Rolex, for example. They advertise that it takes a year to build a Rolex. Here are the facts:

A group of watch experts got together and did some math based on some publicly available information in order to either validate or invalidate Rolex's claim that it takes a year to make a Rolex that Rolex uses in their advertising. This group determined that Rolex produces nearly 1,000,000 watches per year.  800,000 of those watches are recorded by the COSC.   Rolex also produces pieces that are not certified by the COSC.

Rolex publicly claims to have approximately 5,000 employees. Watch experts know from figures released by other mass producers of watches that approximately 2/3 of employees of watch companies work in the production of the watches. This means that approximately 3,000 employees are producing nearly 1,000,000 Rolex watches per year.

Each of these employees  is not a watchmaker.  Many are involved in running machines that produce massive quantities of components and watch cases, etc. Take into account that people typically only work 5 days a week and also have a couple of weeks of vacation time and also have sick time and holidays off of work and you come up with 1,000,000 watches per  approximately 240 days.   So that means that Rolex is churning out  something like 4100 watches per day.  Every day of the work week.

Rolex watches are not rare.  They are mass produced and very overpriced for what they are.  And here is a news flash.  The stainless steel that they use is no better than the steel that anybody else uses.  And the brass that is used in making the movements is very inexpensive.  Rolex mass produces probably more watches than those who make the replicas of the Submariners that sell for $50.00.  And the materials cost probably very, very similar amounts.  What do you think the markup is on a $5,000.00 Rolex with a stainless steel case from pure manufacturing cost?  It is enormous!

Many other high end Swiss brands follow similar business models. Rolex Review

But having one on your wrist marks you as special, no?

The NY Times of November 13, 2012, reports that Democrats show “increasing interest” in Romney's proposal to cap federal income tax deductions at $35,000.

The cap — never fully detailed by Mr. Romney — is similar to a longstanding proposal by Mr. Obama to limit income tax deductions to 28 percent, even for affluent households that pay a 35 percent rate. But a firm cap of around $35,000 would hit the affluent even harder than Mr. Obama’s proposal, which has previously gotten nowhere in Congress. NY Times

Post-election, two years prior to the next election, the Democrats aren’t shy about ripping off their “Committed to the 99%” super-hero costumes to reveal themselves as less-than-mild-mannered—drum roll, please—Republicans.A $35,000 cap on deductions that’s supposed to hit the wealthy harder than the middle class? Let’s take a look, starting with mortgage interest deductions.Nearly one-third of all homeowners entered into refinancing contracts from 2009 to the present, or 16,000,000. Yahoo News This means, of course, that at a minimum one-third of monthly mortgage payments apply to interest in their entirety. What percentage of the remaining (non-refinanced) homes owed pay 100% to interest, I can’t say, but it seems safe to assume with refinancing pushed by the banks preceding the recession, a huge percentage of homeowners each plunk thousands of dollars annually into mortgage interest.For now, interest on a mortgage is deductible. But a cap of $35,000 would ensure that many taxpayers would exhaust their deduction maximum by declaring their mortgage interest. True, wealthy homeowners who held bank loans (why would the top .01% need to borrow in the first place?) certainly would hit the $35,000 max, perhaps with their first mortgage payment. But let’s face it:  Conventional deductions don’t interest the truly wealthy very much. Their accountants work overtime to ensure tax payments remain low through a variety of schemes. One key tax boondoggle on which they rely is capital gains.Today, the top income tax rate for capital gains is 15 percent. If you make money through actual labor, that’s taxable at a top rate of 35%. But, if you buy an asset, hold it for a year or more, and sell it for more than you paid, your profit constitutes a capital gain.Those who slash their tax rate through capital gains acquisitions argue that even the middle class invests and thus benefits equally from the low tax rate. But what are the facts?

While it's true that many middle-class Americans own stocks or bonds, they tend to stash them in tax-sheltered retirement accounts, where the capital gains rate does not apply. By contrast, the richest Americans reap huge benefits. Over the past 20 years, more than 80 percent of the capital gains income realized in the United States has gone to 5 percent of the people; about half of all the capital gains have gone to the wealthiest 0.1 percent. Daily Kos

As the Republicrats deploy this scheme to render income tax more “equitable”, we should keep in mind that the top 1% hires savvy accountants to ferret out loopholes, exemptions, and strategies for legal tax evasion. Complex scenarios well beyond the usual taxpayer account for Mitt Romney’s 14% tax rate—mostly involving reaping profits abroad.So exactly how will a $35,000 cap on deductions result in the rich paying more tax? True, only 32% of taxpayers itemized, the rest having income or deductions too low to report—or not understanding the deductions to which they were entitled. This presumably means the higher income individuals would be penalized while the lowest income earners would not.
But consider this convoluted logic from the Wall Street Journal:

But details aside, the tax cap is a big idea, and potentially a very good one. The proposal makes economic sense to the extent that it helps to pay for lower marginal tax rates. Lower rates with fewer deductions improve the incentive for investing and taking risks based on the best return on capital rather than favoring one kind of investment (say, housing) over another. This would help economic growth.

 The idea may be even better politically. The historic challenge for tax reformers is defeating the most powerful lobbies in Washington that exist to preserve their special tax privileges. Among the biggest is the housing lobby that exists to preserve the mortgage-interest deduction—the Realtors, home builders, mortgage brokers and the whole Fannie Mae FNMA 0.00% gang.

 But don't forget the life insurance lobby (which benefits from the tax exclusion on the equity buildup in policies), the tax-free municipal bond interest lobby, the charitable deduction lobby and more. Each one will fight to the death to preserve its carve-out, which means that reformers have to engage in political trench warfare to succeed. Wall Street Journal 

Note what “special interests” the writer seeks to shut out. We’ve already dealt with mortgage interest deductions and the impact of limiting them on the middle class. Who invests in life insurance? You can bet the .01% do not bother with equity buildup on such a puny investment, nor do they put their ample dollars into municipal bonds. He shows no interest in increasing the rate of taxing passive income—that is, money received for doing nothing. In addition, the top 1% don't need lobbyers. A lot of them hold offices in Congress.
Commentators often claim that increased investment creates more jobs and that's good for everyone. Here’s a chart showing that job creation has a long way to go to match pre-Reagan levels:

2010 to 2012 Jobs Forecast
And here’s a chart showing where those jobs went (can you say “Red State”?):

Job Creation By State

Note the populous states where the number of jobs declined, including most notably California, which finds itself in one of its numerous economic crises. Cities have slashed public services to the bone and are hard pressed to find a way to stay afloat without cutting back on the slush funds.What’s really going on here? Americans have been brainwashed into seeing taxation as stealing. Taxes in and of themselves are a necessary commitment to ensure that our society functions. But our taxes are funding war, not public welfare, infrastructure, or peace. Those behind brainwashing Americans into hating taxes per se do so because they seek to eliminate government controls over their rampant profiteering. By starving government, they imagine it will shrink. Ironically, under Republican administrations from Ronald Reagan through George Bush, the government has swollen—but swollen with fat, not meat. Our schools, roads, libraries, museums, public hospitals, police and fire services, public transportation, and social services, to name a few, have shrunk. The effect has been that our nation slides into the ranks of the impoverished, with burgeoning death rates, declining literacy rates, etc. But government means simply one more trough for these pigs to feed at. Just as Bechtel soaked the Iraq for billions in profit without completing what they’d been hired to accomplish, the hog class collects without delivering. A prime example made the front page of the NY Times of November 14:

It was four days before Hurricane Sandy would arrive, and trustees of the Long Island Power Authority gathered as forecasters’ warnings grew dire. For more than two hours, the trustees talked about a range of issues, including a proposal to hire a branding consultant.
But discussion of the storm lasted just 39 seconds.

This is the America we are reaping, one of illusion (aka “branding consultants”), not substance. Either get used to it, or start organizing.

Halt! Danger ahead.
No kidding. On one hand, we have the wacko’s encouraging the wackiers to do something violent—perfectly in tune with the Second Amendment as interpreted by one more group of wacko’s, the ones who imagine the framers of the Constitution were omniscient.
On the other, we have our President speaking out of both sides of his mouth, already, again. Today’s New York Times features Barack Obama declaring simultaneously that taxes on the rich must be increased but then offering to “compromise.” Well. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather.
Couldn’t he wait until he was inaugurated to demonstrate how little dedication to the 99% he intends to show in his second term?
Yeah, I know. The loony press has already started to beat up on him for not being “more conciliatory.” I heard Dan Rather criticize the President. Rather can be forgiven by virtue of his advanced age and the obvious impairment of his mental faculties. But for those who have no such excuse, what’s with these people? Are they living in an alternate universe? Even before Obama won his second term, Repugs in Congress announced they wouldn’t work with him.
Yet he isn’t being conciliatory enough.
We have a perfect storm of a weak president and a nutty intransigent House of Representatives. With the Blue Dog Dems giving these nutcases a helping vote, the middle class stands to lose even more of its population while the poor—well, forget the poor. They may always be with us but they are ignored--except to be disparaged.
Psychology teaches us about projection. We see in others what we most despise and/or fear in ourselves. Thus, the lazy rich whine about their long “work” days (sitting at desks and gabbing) and carp about the worthless poor who want handouts. The “worthless poor” come into that office with mops and brooms and dust cloths, and they clean up the garbage and slop and filth left behind by the fat cats. The poor tramp out to fields at daybreak and harvest food they can’t afford to buy. They stand on swollen feet behind counters at grocery stores and 7-11’s and MacDonald’s, while their “betters” push pencils around, figuring out how to maximize profits by paying no taxes and puny wages. But we’re supposed to believe that lowering taxes on the wealthy and corporations increases employment.
Hasn’t worked yet, but that hasn’t stopped the media from treating that cynical argument as worthy of consideration. Again.
The middle class, many of whom hold on with their fingertips, are lying awake nights trying to figure out how to pay the mortgage, stock the refrigerator, keep the lights on, and--oh yes--squirrel away enough cash to send their three kids through college. Maybe if they took a third job.
Nah. They can forget it. Our politicians have put college beyond the reach of anyone not in the 14% tax bracket by virtue of living off their capital gains. You know, that money that people work so damned hard to accumulate. It's hard work opening the mail and reading the stock quotes. Poor things.
Can you believe Mitt Romney? He talks about people who feel entitled to food and housing and healthcare. I’d laugh my ample rear end off if this stuff didn’t pass some kind of ludicrous muster to make it into the arena of sober discourse.
We have the whiniest group of white men bitching about how women and minorities can’t stop whining about their lot.
We have the most dangerous individuals clutching their guns and passing laws declaring open season on everyone else because—get this—everyone else is so dangerous.
And we have politicians declaring war on constitutional democracy while insisting the President is a man nobody can work with. And, by the way, the only reason these despicable people made it back to Congress in the numbers they did is they jury-rigged the districts in their states to make sure those lazy entitled poor couldn’t vote as a bloc.
If Mr. Obama ever needed to stiffen his spine, clench his jaw, and insist on charging these criminals with gorging on human flesh, this is the time. Instead of waffling about cutting back on Medicare and Social Security, the President needs to come back to Americans with a strong proposal for single payer--the ONLY way to eliminate the excesses of healthcare in this country. We pay far more for less because we pay the fat cats who push pencils.
Everyone else built it for them. Isn’t it time at last for the Mitt Romneys of this earth to pay what they owe?

In Amsterdam, I toured the Rijksmuseum. On the first floor, I saw a self-portrait of Rembrandt. At 22, a cloud of wild hair hovering over his face, he broods so romantically, I felt a stab of lust. On the third floor, an hour or so later, I came on a second self-portrait, this one painted when Rembrandt was in his sixties. That wild romantic hair replaced by a turban, his face had collapsed into the gorge of old age. The years had deeply scored his forehead and cheeks.I felt I'd witnessed something like Dorian Gray decaying in a matter of minutes, right there on the canvas. I came face to face with an ugly truth: I value beauty unblemished by experience and recoil from the signs of aging. I was reminded of dating sites where men in their fifties and sixties sought women with “no baggage, please.” Dictionary.com defines baggage as “previous knowledge and experience that a person may use or be influenced by in new circumstances.”In other words, these bozos wanted a woman who hadn’t learned a damned thing from all that had happened to them. Or, more probably, they longed for a girl to whom nothing had ever happened.As a child, I unconsciously assumed people came in two varieties: old and young. Of course, logically I knew that my grandmother had not always been wrinkled, that the ropy veins in her hands must have once, like those in my own, lain flat.But, as is true for too many of us, logic did not play an important role in my attitudes. I understood--looking at my Nana--that one of us counted for less than the other.In a couple of days, I will be officially old, not just the old that children define but the old of someone in the final decade or decades of her life. And I have watched the collapse of my own face, not only in the mirror but also in the cold indifference of young people, in the blindness that slides past me to some likelier view.All this started for me years ago in a parking lot at Costco on a stormy night. The battery in my truck died and--newly divorced--for the first time in my life, I was having to deal with an automotive crisis on my own. I'd managed to figure out which battery I needed, to remove the old battery and to purchase and install the new one in the dark, without a flashlight or umbrella. The final step, however, kept eluding me. In my early fifties, standing in the rain trying to strap in the new battery so it wouldn't bounce onto the highway on the way home, I watched with chagrin as dozens of men walked past me and drove away. I was thirty-five miles from home and the battery wouldn’t hold. My cell phone was dead and Costco was closing. After what seemed hours but was probably about forty-five minutes, a young couple approached me and the man took over, quickly strapping the new battery in.What does this mean? Well, I’ve never been a raving beauty but I was the kind of young woman whose distress normally brought a man to the rescue in fairly short order. What, I ask myself, does getting old in a market-based society mean? In other countries, I had observed a very different attitude. In Mexico, men from two to ninety flirt with women from two to ninety. In Brazil, young men stop to help quiet crying babies, even those in shopping carts pushed by grandmothers. In Canada, a teenaged boy stops at a spring garden to exclaim over its exploding colors, tended by a kneeling woman in her sixties.The attitudes displayed by contemporary Americans have been shaped by the confluence of capitalism, psychoanalysis, and hucksterism. Our cultural perfect storm began brewing in the early twentieth century, during World War I, when Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, went to work for Woodrow Wilson on persuading Americans that the War’s main objective was to democratize Europe. Bernays subsequently perfected and unleashed public relations as an art. It has metastasized out of the marketplace into our democratic processes. Because of this, the Supreme Court rules that corporations may freely buy elections, that workers may be threatened into giving over their vote, and that wealth is the only pure value.Nothing sucks up quite as much wealth, returning no hope of increased profitability, like old people. If we have money, we perhaps may be forgiven, although even then--without the advantages of a Mitt Romney--we can be depended upon to consume more than our fair share of taxes. Thus, the Paul Ryans see the elderly as wastrels to be dumped into the streets when our life savings have been exhausted.Our faces don’t sell cars or cigarettes. In skimpy bathing suits, we display the ravages of time and remind people of deeper values than profitability. The image of the Inuit shipping their old folks out on ice floes holds great attraction for people like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. And even though Fox News draws its audience from people wearing Depends and swallowing gallons of Lipitor, the worthlessness of those who do not make money underscores every commentary.

Older Americans account for over one third of all medical spending in this country -- approximately $300 billion a year for their share of the cost. It costs about four times the amount of dollars to treat a 65 year old for health care in a given year than it does to treat a 40 year old. Care for the Elderly

Rumor holds that the bulk of medical treatment dollars are spent caring for the elderly in the final weeks of their lives. This isn’t true. Rumor also has it that in the last weeks of life people spend several times what they have spent in all the years preceding. Also not true. Only ten percent of our medical dollars are spent in the last year of life. Health and Human Services
What accounts for the proliferation of this myth? The same ambition that covets slashes to Social Security and Medicare rather than taxing corporations and the wealthy.
We have admired the dewy bodies of nubile models, the flawless faces putatively resulting from $150 an ounce cold cream, and the slim agility of athletes. Who knew we ourselves would wind up old?