The NSA Leak: A Lesson In Human Nature, Opportunistic Behavior, and Altruism's Levee

Almost overnight, Edward Snowden went from being a former NSA computer technician to civil libertarian demigod. Snowden, identified (with permission) by the UK newspaper The Guardian and The Washington Post as the informant that leaked information to the newspaper about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs of collecting records from phone and Internet companies, has been predominantly lauded for his actions. Snowden's actions are a prime lesson in human nature, the reality that we are all opportunists, and altruism's levees can and will always be subject to a breach.

The Guardian's Simon Jenkins in his praise of Snowden that "[t]he US and Britain today are as invulnerable to military conquest as ever in history" and writes that the Western counter-terrorism crusade has developed into a machine that undermines freedom by its relentless use of fear and paranoia. He's right, and this has been proven throughout history. When entities, countries rather, reach that proverbial zenith of power, they will attempt anything and everything to maintain the status quo that has entrenched itself with that assumed power. While we may be astonished at the means at which the United States is willing to do it, and by no means I am endorsing these tactics, it should really come as no surprise. The feeling of control is the antidote against paranoia, and this is true from government to our own personal lives. It's almost like a vicious cycle -- accumulate power and wealth, celebrate the success and benefits of it, become paranoid of it ending, then in response to that paranoia, attempt to alleviate it by trying to accumulate more power and wealth: all for it to repeat again. In a way, it's one seriously fucked up self-fulfilling prophecy.

My personal feelings on the War on Terror? This is not a conspiracy theory, this is just absolute, rock bottom truth: it's more than just a counter terrorism program, it's about doing anything and everything to maintain the United States' position in the scope of world politics. Campaigns to achieve and then maintain positioning is nothing new -- the European powers did it, ancient Asian empires did it, Hitler did it, Hirohito did it, and the United States is doing it as well. However, what has galvanized the public these days is the latest chapter of the information revolution -- leaks, or more specifically, how well we can acquire information that nobody would have really thought it would have been possible to acquire. In the end though, it is a testament to the fact that as human beings, we're opportunistic. As new discoveries are made in regards to how we can secure an advantage over one another, covert programs, whistleblowing leaks, and finding more ways to deepen how well we retain and hide information creates an even more complicated Rubik's cube. This isn't a battle of "good vs. evil", it has been, still is, and always will be a battle between who's more effective than who at achieving whatever desired goal is, whether it is emotional, mental, or ideological.

When it comes to supporting those in power, there's expectation among us that the clear majority of the decisions that are made by the powers that be would have a wide ranging affect would never breach the levee of altruism. Snowden too gambled on the same thing, noting in his interview with The Guardian that he  wanted to go public before, but held out hope that the then-incoming Obama administration would shift the NSA's aggressive tactics. However, the Obama administration has kept many of the Bush-era surveillance policies to his dismay, and now to the dismay of many. However, altruism's levees become subject to higher stakes -- it's either weakened or strengthened, and whatever way it leads, the response is to mobilize and establish control, through covert or public means.

In short, when I look at the NSA leak, I go beyond the relationship between the government and the governed. It's another exercise in the complexities of humanity, as we forge ahead in our epoch of existence, one new discovery at a time. So while I will continue spectate the the inane justification for this program by administration officials and the romanticized stand of solidarity and support of Snowden by many, I am ultimately going to wait to see the next great example of what lengths we're going to be willing to take as humanity to assume control of whatever we desire to frame into each of our worldviews.

The Buffett Rule and the reality of taxation

The Warren Edward Buffett rule or The Art of Illustrating The Unfair Tax System is legislation proposed by the Obama administration, named after the esteemed head of Berkshire Hathaway that would enact a 30% tax rate on all Americans bring in more than $1 million in income, inspired by the namesake's outrage that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.

In truth, I hope that Buffett would. With his wealth I would think he would have an army of accountants at his disposal to make sure he can secure every last advantage in the American tax system.

As for the Democratic Party, it's another folly (estimates put it at only a potential $50 billion in revenue that would be brought in) that is designed to score political points (by putting it voters mind that the Republican Party is still the party of the wealthy), in yet the latest example of how not to implement Keynesian economic strategies (no matter how much Paul Krugman favors legislation like this).


Candy Crowley's "spoiler" was humorous, yet true: this legislation has no chance in hell of passing. We're more likely to see Mitt Romney be consistent in his campaign banter that we would see tax-increasing legislation.


It's time to address the one thing that we long had to address: the reality of taxation. Before, I begin, there are two fundamental truths in regards to the current fiscal state of the United States government:

1. The government spends too much.
2. The government doesn't make enough money.

While the latter may seem preposterous, and there are some people accusing the government of actually being a corporation, in a way, as one of my friends put it who graduated with a degree in economics, the government is somewhat organized as a corporate firm.  The President is the chief executive, the Congress is the Board of Directors, and the constituents are stockholders. As with any company, spending is only one part of the problem: a company still needs adequate income to appropriately function. What your idea of "appropriate function" is in the eye of the beholder, in accordance to your political philosophical beliefs, of course.  For me, the function of really any government is to protect the civil liberties and civil rights of its citizens, to adequately defend the citizens of its country, and to soundly participate in a more interdependent world.

Cue the grumblings of debate. Let me stop before I digress any further.

Combine this with the expectations people have about what government should do, a distorted quandary is born. Cute pleas for tax cuts, tax credits, and the such.
So there are five fundamental facts that people should realize about "tax cuts":

1. They never pay for themselves (see the fiscal success of the Reagan and Bush tax cuts).
2. Most people do not make enough money in income to really see a benefit to tax cuts, beyond that, most people don't even pay enough in taxes to really see a benefit to tax cuts.
3. As long as private debt is high (the individual debt to income ratio stood at 112% last year), tax cuts will yield little to no economic benefit.
4. Tax cuts are a useless way to stimulate demand -- it stimulates the demand to have money to pay off debts, if you want to look at it in a smart ass, sarcastic way. Then again, in a way that is a legitimate argument.
5. Tax cuts create more fiscal issues than they resolve.

However, there are four fundamental facts about "taxing the rich":

1. Taxing the rich is of questionable economic benefit.
2. Marginal tax rates in the United States are at historical lows.
3. The wealthy actually pay more than their fair share in taxes, which may shock some people.
4. The wealthy (which for this statement, I'll consider the top 20% of income earners), for the most part still has substantial buying power after taxes over most Americans.
5. Because the wealthy take on so much of the tax burden, increased taxation on the wealthy yields little fiscal benefit, for that there are not enough Americans paying income taxes.

(Before I go any further, I wanted to elaborate on point #3. In 2009 the Congressional Budget Office released numbers that were interesting: the wealthiest 20% of Americans made nearly 56% of all pretax income in the United States, yet paid close to 70% of all federal taxes, a 14% discrepancy. The overall effective tax rate in the United States was 20.7%, which is not even top 50 in the world). Further more, the top 1% paid 28% of all federal taxes in 2007, and a 40% share of income taxes that same year. 

Now that I got "tax cuts" and "taxing the rich" out of the way, it's time to further illustrate the silliness of the American tax code:

1. 47% of American households did not pay income tax for the 2010 tax year. Of that 47%, nearly a third had incomes of $10,000 or less (which automatically puts them in the poverty threshold); of that 47%, nearly two thirds made less than $20,000; of that 47%, nearly 90% of them made less than $40,000. 
2. University of Michigan economists Joel Siemrod told NPR that while the top 10% of income earners pay 70% of the income taxes, they only make 40% of the income. It should be noted that entry into the the top 10% income club begins $110,000 for the 2011 tax year.
3.  Tax rates would have to increase by 50% on all levels to even possibly begin significant reduction of the federal deficit, Siemrod said in the same interview. However, I don't think it took into account spending cuts as it was not mentioned. 

A lot of economists are beginning to argue in favor of the value added tax system (you heard of it called "consumption tax", "luxury tax", or "FAIR tax"). While it would expand the tax base to force more people to contribute to it and end the income tax system, it comes at a cost -- it would have an adverse effect on consumption considering that a value added tax system punishes those with lower incomes. As such the cycle would begin once again in regards to loopholes, exemptions, and credits.
In truth, there are two reasons why the American tax code fails to work:

1) The tax code does not work as it was designed: For the most part, the tax code was designed to be fairly straightforward. The only issue is, the tax code got designed and redesigned for political points and pandering. The ones that benefited the most from these changes in the tax code are the wealthy and the married with children.

2) The tax code depends too much on one thing - income: As the tax code primarily depends on income for it to work properly, its vulnerable to changes in the economy and individual economic behaviors. 

So what's the solution?

A two-tier tax system that would combine two fairly brilliant ideas:

1. A value-added tax system that would equate to being roughly equal to one half of the average sales tax rate of all 50 states in the United States, with deductions placed only on food and medication.
2. A income tax system that reconciles each tax bracket to the poverty level income threshold. I wish I still had the link to where I read that idea (I do not take credit for it). The only difference would be that I suggest a multiplier system (i.e., 1.5 times over the threshold, 2.5x over the threshold, 3 times over the threshold, and so on.), with the poverty threshold formulated using the proposal by the U.S. Census Bureau put forth in 2011, which would be a vastly improved and more realistic alternative to the "thrift-basket model" that's been in use since the 1960s. 

At the same time, numerous tax credits, deductions, special case of income (i.e., a separate tax rate for capital gains taxes), and other loopholes would largely be eliminated. It forces more people to pay taxes, eases the evasion and regressive taxation issues of the value added tax system, and still maintains a progressive tax structure in regards to income.

Fareed Zakaria wrote that the best tax code would be one that can be written on two pages. Mine would take no more than five.

Close enough.

I'm well aware that I did not delve into federal spending. This post was not about federal spending -- it was about taxation, and taxation only.

Black America, White America, and Racial Sensitivity

The latest racial discussion and debate going on in the United States is stemming from the senseless death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a Florida high school student that was gunned down in a gated community in Sanford, a community northeast of Orlando, by 28 year old self-appointed Neighborhood Watch representative George Zimmerman, who is a white Hispanic. Martin, who was wearing a hoodie, roused apparent suspicion from Zimmerman, even though Martin was unarmed and only carrying candy and a can of iced tea that he got from a nearby convenience store and was only walking back to his father's girlfriend's house to watch the rest of an NBA game he was watching.

Black activists and social activist groups, along with a massive national viral campaign, are calling for Zimmerman's head arrest for murder, vehemently disagreeing with the Sanford Police Department's assertion that  Zimmerman claimed self defense and by way of a controversial Florida law passed in 2005, cannot press any charges or proceed further in an investigation. Martin's parents started a petition on Change.org which has sense collected over one million signatures calling for a federal investigation into the shooting because they lost confidence in local authorities to do so. According to a few stories I came across, this is not the first time Sanford has had issues in regards to race and police investigations.

I'm going to take this post to explain the current state of race relations in the United States that a lot of mainstream writers are either too scared or too polite to really write about: why blacks, and now whites, are so sensitive about race.

Social sensitivity is mostly an acquired trait, as in, you're taught reason to be sensitive. Often times, it begins at the home.

If you're black, like myself, and you're my age (24), you undoubtedly have parents and grandparents that grew up during the Civil Rights Movement. And while the movement resulted in landmark decisions such as Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka and legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- black resentment of whites, in truth, never completely wavered. So for a significant number of us, as we were growing up, we were taught the "don't trust white people" mantra, as they believed (and they justified this based upon their experiences growing up) that whites were only out to hold back and suppress the black man.

Couple that by the limited education we receive in today's public and private schools in elementary and secondary education (or intermediate and high school for those that don't know what the hell I meant) about the black American experience -- i.e., "blacks were brought over on ships to the 'New World' in the 'Atlantic Slave Trade' by 'Spaniards, Britons, and Portuguese'...then some blacks were given freedom for fighting against the colonists in the American Revolution...then blacks were considered 3/5th of a person the U.S. Constitution...then blacks spent the rest of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century trying to end slavery and achieve equality both socially and legally" -- it only adds to that sensitivity.  It's an additional reason why I can't stand Black History Month -- it aims for black empowerment but it only reinforces black sensitivity. It's the difficulty that most activists have in separating language of empowerment and language of sensitivity, that erects unnecessary boundaries within our culture and our community.

What further adds to it is that no matter where we go as blacks, we're often subjected to pandering -- which only adds fuel to that sensitivity fire. The Democratic Party, for example, openly courts blacks for the simple reason that they are black. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Quannel X (for those that are from Houston reading this) have made their careers out of pandering to black sensitivity with their numerous grandstanding antics and events. Affirmative action, while well meaning, is another example of pandering. In short, a lot of the time, we're not taught to look at ourselves as being human before anything -- we're taught to look at ourselves as being black before anything, and while there are positives and negatives to that, the overwhelming negative is limiting how we look at ourselves in the mirror.

Now, I'm not saying these things and trying to say that racism does not exist, because it does -- blatantly and passively -- and I'm not saying these things because I don't think that "because I'm black" is a legitimate reason to give, because there are many times out of a hundred when that is a legitimate reason as to why certain things occur. I'm saying these things because I hope that sooner or later, we have a major philosophical and cultural shift to where we adopt the ideal of "before you look at me as someone that's black, look at me at someone that's a human being" and that ideal is self-reflective and not used as a justification or defensive punch line towards someone else. However, I do realize that is a major generational shift. At the same time though, everything that I just said about black America can be said about Hispanic America, Native America, Asian America, and yes, even white America.

White America has generally always been sensitive about race, but largely it was out of a Western European egotistical attitude which further fueled a combination of fear and a distorted superiority complex over black America -- especially black men. Over time, that attitude has not changed and really, it has manifested itself into a different dimension.

Where white America still fears -- really with black men -- black masculinity (i.e.. "This black guy will whip my ass.") and still possess attitudes of cultural superiority (see, "All Pejorative Statements Made About Hip Hop Culture, Blacks and Welfare Programs, and African American Dialect, Otherwise Known As Ebonics, or to Harry Reid, The Negro Dialect"), it's not to the degree where white America will actively campaign to openly violate or restrict black civil rights to the degree that was seen in this country from end of Reconstruction to end of the Jim Crow South. In a way, it's less about white supremacy and more about "white pride" and "white separatism".

However, there's a new dimension to white racial sensitivity that has not been seen since really the Reconstruction Era. Whites, really Northern whites, during the 1870s began to resent blacks and the whole Civil Rights Movement of the 1870s, largely due to exasperation from the Civil War and the fact that Northern whites more or less stopped giving a damn whether or not Southern blacks were ensured of their civil rights. As you well know, Southern Democrats (yes, for those that don't know, the Democratic Party was black America's biggest enemy up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election in 1932) seized this opportunity, regained control of Southern state legislatures during the later half of the 1870s and the early 1880s and ushered in the Jim Crow era.

This attitude of white American resentment of blacks has regurgitated in the past few years as white Americans became increasingly irritated with what they feel as the federal government's pandering to black Americans at the expense of white Americans. An example of this is the current American conservative movement to more or less wind down and cripple social programs that the poor (and as a consequence a significant proportion of black Americans) depend on, even if the majority of the beneficiaries to social programs in the United States are white. A major example right now is the affirmative action case recently brought to the Supreme Court by a student (who is white) that applied to the University of Texas a few years back and was denied, feeling that it was UT's affirmative action policy more than anything that was at fault. This whole "angry, white America" has fueled the political commentaries of Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sean Hannity, Bill Kristol, and Bill O'Reilly and also bolstered the American Tea Party Movement when it was at its peak during 2010 and 2011.

You're now also seeing more social and Internet memes such as "Why isn't there a White History Week?" or "Why isn't there A White Entertainment Network?" -- direct examples of the new dimension of white sensitivity. If I had to sum it all up into a shorter way to express this it would be: for the first time white Americans are asking the same questions about themselves and their identity that black Americans have been asking for the past two centuries.

I'll wrap this up by saying this: we're going to keep discussing race for a long time. It's unfortunate that in the mainstream media that an honest assessment of racial sensitivity is not made. Hopefully, this post gets around the way it needs to get around and opens eyes. Post-racial America will not ever come to fruition until the color of one's skin becomes secondary and not primary. As long as it is primary, then we're going to keep having discussions and we're going to keep having responses and we're going to keep asking the same questions we've been asking every time an incident occurs where race may be a question.

Correction: This isn't a post racial society

The biggest lie that has ever been proliferated since Obama being elected to the office of the presidency is not anything that has to do with the budget or the economy.

The biggest lie that has ever been proliferated since Obama being elected to the office of the presidency is a "post-racial" America.

I've admittedly never really dealt with anybody that took open issue with my race to the point where it escalated into a confrontation. Never say never, of course, yet so far it has not been an issue. However, so far, I could say that I have not.

Racism, in itself, is a mutated form of tribalism, in that for all the years that human race has walked the face of this earth, has been institutionalized in some form whether it is through slavery, legalized apartheid, racial profiling, or race- and ethnic-based immigration policies. It is the dream of many to "eliminate" the disease that is racism, however, the reality is that as long as we tie skin color to any sort of system of risk or value, whether it is propensity to commit crimes, sexual prowess, ability to perform in a professional climate, and so on, there will still exist a bastion of racism. 


However, personal convictions, which fuel racism as it is, more often than not lead to disgusting consequences -- slavery in most of the Western Hemisphere well into the latter half of the 19th century, slave trade, apartheid systems in the United States and South Africa,  mass ethnic murders in holocausts in Armenia after World War I and Germany before and during World War II, rampant discrimination, white farmers being forced to leave from Mozambique, and it goes on and on. If you are a racist, and you don't like me for being a black man and you simply want to have nothing to do with me, then that's your problem. If you are a racist, and you're waging a campaign for the systematic violation of the human and civil rights of others through systematic containment and murder, then it becomes everybody's problem.

Quite few people here in the United States -- largely, white and conservative -- will claim that this is truly a post-racial society, that political correctness now seems demonize "whiteness", that the playing field is actually level, and now it is up to black and Latino Americans to make the most of the opportunities that have presented themselves since the Civil Rights Movement concluded with Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968.  Yet, while there may be truth that self-empowerment push of leaders such as King, Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cesar Chavez, and Dolores Huerta has transitioned to a "you [the white majority] owe us for the past four hundred years" mentality, it is honestly a representation of an endgame that was four centuries in the making -- blacks and Latinos having a general resentment of whites because of the past transgressions committed by the white majority and whites having a general resentment of blacks and Latinos for consistently feeling like they still have to pay for the "sins of their fathers". At the same time though, blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asians are more sensitive to racial issues than whites -- reaching to the point of hypersensitivity amongst Latinos and especially blacks.

However, racism does not have to be blatant -- it can be passive as well. Passive racism is most seen with racial profiling and racial bias. Generally, the latter (i.e., preferring to date someone of a certain race) is far more tolerated than the former (i.e., a police officer pulling someone over for no reason other than the color of their skin). In short, skin color and tone is always going to carry some weight of relevance. 


Unfortunately, that is the reality that we live in.

That reality was made apparent in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a black Florida teen, who was killed by 28-year-old George Zimmerman, a white Hispanic man, in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, which lies a few miles northeast of Orlando. Zimmerman had no real reason to call 911, except to further his belief than young black men are just criminals, and further had no reason to shoot someone unarmed. It was the same reality illustrated by James Byrd, Jr's death. The same reality illustrated by Emmett Till's death. It's the same reality faced by thousands of men, women, and children that were only assaulted and slayed for the color of their skin -- "black", "white", "red", or "yellow".

So, anyone that tells you that the United States has transitioned to a post-racial society is telling you a bold faced lie. As long as we're still using skin color to judge and decide how much value they have as a human being, even to the extent of violating their human and civil rights, then racism will remain a fabric that is deeply woven in the quilt of society. 

Emotional Politics and the Real Political Enemy of Everyday Americans

Once upon a time, when the United States was in its most nascent form, it was largely reason, not emotion, that dominated American politics. The greatest illustration of this political exercise was indeed the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which established the current U.S. Constitution, where delegates and leaders convened from across the country for one predominant reason, amongst others: the Articles of Confederation was simply not working and a grossly ineffective form of government for the United States.

I want to note something before I go any further -- when I say governing by reason, I mean this as governing with critical thinking and making decisions due a conclusion brought on by critical thought, as opposed to a pure emotional reactionary form of governing. "Emotional governing", as what I call it (though someone may have already beat me to the punch with that terminology) is needless to say, dangerous. More on this shortly.

It's actually galvanizing what governance based on reason, not emotion could actually accomplish. Another example -- which this time I am going to go outside of the United States -- would be Canada's debt crisis of the early 1990s, which was the ultimate result of government expenditure was disproportionate to not only what the Canadian government could afford, but what the national tax base and what the provinces could truly flip the bill for. Chretien's Liberal Party adopted what was then a revolutionary concept of Canada's stalwart left-leaning party: fiscal conservatism. This approach was based on reason, not emotion -- the ruling party was willing to put aside ideology for the greater good for an entire country. If the Democratic Party and the Republican Party did the exact same thing (oh, you know "compromise"), then I think there would be widespread wagers across the country on mutually assured, doomsday destruction.

Fine, fine, maybe that was a little bit too much of hyperbole. Yet, one thing that concerns me, and I'm seeing this on both sides of the ideological divide, that emotional gratification, with using political ideology as a front, has been the driving force of American politics for the past century plus. 

Now, some good has come out of emotional governance. Declared wars -- such as the First and Second World Wars (especially the latter with Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941) -- were emotional statements. Government moves during the Civil Rights Era was a product of an emotional crusade (amongst other things, notoriously), because the more antagonistic state governments were making their own emotional stand. Conversely, however, there are scores of other examples where bad has emerged from emotional governance -- Jim Crow laws, gay marriage bans, undeclared wars -- just to name a few.

However, don't get me wrong, this is not intended to be a history lesson. This is intended to be a contemporary lesson. Here we are, with another election being tagged "the most important election of our generation", with just about every single political faction in this country looking to make an emotional statement on things such as economic inequality, social inequality, nationalism, "American values", and other issues, real and purported.  So here we are, with tenured politicians from the left and right expressing themselves to voters as "saviors", "rescuers", and "enlightened individuals". This is disgusting and disturbing politics. Sure, there may be some good of it, such as pushing us to critically think about some issues, however, we're steered into an emotional response, instead of a response derived from reason. Let's look at it:

• There's the end of American unilateralism. We don't critically address it, but we panic over it -- all the while at the same time cry that other countries must strive for greater self-sufficiency and follow "America's example". Uh...
• There's the fact that financial system collapsed in 2008, and yet while I am in favor of Keynesian principles, it's fairly clear that both the Bush administration and the Obama administration acted on emotion and emotion alone.
• The health care bill might just be the biggest emotional statement of the past 25 years politically -- on both sides of the aisle.
• Leaders be damned if they would even critically look at the fact that the deficit is more of an issue with revenue than it is with spending, brought to us in part by clusterfuck tax code.
• There's no legitimate, secular reason from banning gay marriage. Gay marriage bans, and legalization, may be the greatest social emotional statements of the 21st century.
• The Republican presidential nomination race has degraded into a caricature of post-truth politics (Romney), outright demagoguery (Santorum), elitism (Paul), and hypocrisy (Gingrich).
• The Democratic Party, for the past four decades the alleged defenders of individual rights, stood by idly with NDAA.
• The Republican Party and Democratic Party do more to obstruct each other than to find solutions to alleged problems.

Need I really say more?

However, the biggest political enemy that everyday Americans have is not the politicians...it's everyday Americans. How, you ask?

By playing right along with emotional driven politics too many times of the time.

Don't Call Me Nigger or Nigga, Whitey...wait, what?

To start off, I will have to apologize to Sly & The Family Stone fans for thinking that this would be a post about one of the greatest bands to ever take the stage in rock music. This post is about words and society. I came across a story that was posted on MSNBC about a Chicago Public Schools teacher that filed a federal lawsuit against the district for the right to use the word "nigger" in his classroom as part of teaching Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

As Chicago Public Schools' Lincoln Brown, the teacher in question, was teaching his 6th grade class at Murray Language Academy back in October, school principal George Mason walked in as he uttered the word "nigger" during his lecture and all hell seemingly broke loose. Brown took to the media after filing his lawsuit with his attorney and claimed that he is a victim of character assassination, denied he is a racist, and reiterated that he was only using the word in historical context as part of the lesson. Mason, on the other hand, contended that Brown used it in an abusive and inappropriate manner which is a violation of Chicago Public Schools policy. For the incident, Brown was suspended for 5 days by Chicago Public Schools and Child Protective Services for Illinois upheld the suspension when Brown tried to appeal.

I think the vast swath of us can remember The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from back in middle school. Set in the antebellum South, the titular character forms a friendship with Jim, a slave, who Finn helps escape to freedom. Twain used Southern Vernacular English in the text, which gave way to frequent use of the word "nigger". At the time, "nigger" was often used as Southern vernacular for the word "negro", and was not only used by whites, but by a vast amount of blacks as well. What is often noted, and at times ignored, is that Huckleberry Finn is indeed a satire, and one of the most scathing attacks on antebellum Southern life and attitudes, especially racism; not to mention, at the time that the novel was published in 1884, "nigger" was actually not seen as a pejorative racist term -- the word would not take on that meaning until the late 1890s to the early 1900s.

In the irony of all ironies, the word "nigger" became "nigga" with African American Vernacular English (which I think is a massive misnomer, because blacks, whites, Latinos, and even Asians all use this form of English) during the 1970s, after which it grew in use in various comics by black artists. "Nigga" is a vernacular corruption of "nigger". Just like "ain't" is a vernacular corruption of "isn't". Just like "chink" is a vernacular corruption of "China" and more specifically "Chinese". For the record, when I say "corruption" I merely mean it as "progressive distortion". Connotation is what makes something acceptable or not acceptable, but even then the clarity of what is "acceptable" is now becoming expanded and some what clouded. In fact, its increasingly being seen that "nigga" is not even used to just refer to blacks; Latinos picked up on the word referring to other Latinos that may not even be of black African descent. 


"Nigga" has taken on the same movement that "bitch" has taken on since the feminist movement: a word of self-identifying empowerment. This is mainly in conjunction with the hip hop movement, in which the word started to explode in acceptance and usage throughout the 1980s, and today you will have to look high and low for a hip hop album that doesn't even have the word uttered once. While connotation still carries a lot of weight, as it should considering use of certain words will illustrate what attitudes someone holds, it actually foolish that we should insist that the word "nigger" should never be uttered in public and stricken from public conscience. To do that, we would have to do the same for "nigga", "bitch", "queer", and any other word that is now a term of empowerment and loose endearment and had previous use as a pejorative exercise of a superiority complex.

So what's the point of this post? I personally take no real issue with the word. As unpleasant as the word may be, for one, it is a part of the development of the English language and secondly it is an artifact, if you will, in the evolution of race relations. Because it is really a historical linguistic artifact, I would not be opposed to the word being used in a classroom for teaching purposes. Realistically, it cannot be expected that sixth graders, like the ones at Murray Language Academy, would be able to fully comprehend the development of a word that by that time in their educational and personal lives, has largely been ingrained in their minds that ever since the word was developed in the 16th century, it has always been a "bad word" even though for nearly the first 3 centuries of the word's existence in the English language, it wasn't seen as one.  It is indeed the reason why that it takes significant care when using that word for teaching purposes as part of a lesson on historical race relations, which is often what books like Huckleberry Finn is used for at the middle school level in conjunction with teaching the historical development of the Great American Novel.


As for the lawsuit in question that spurred this post, it is coming to a fight of "he said, he said". We'll probably never know what truly happened until the case goes to trial and ostensibly students that were present in the class will get called to testify. Yet at the same time though, political correctness has to give way to an unabashed critical look at our history. We'll never have a good understanding of how this society functions unless we take a look at the historical construction of our society, no matter how plush or painful it may be. 

Why I don't celebrate Black History Month -- Even Though I'm Black

We're getting in the middle of Black History Month, and once again we are treated to different visages of cultural ass-kissing -- yes, ass-kissing -- from various sources of the mainstream media. Of course, there's going to be some white conservatives out there that's going to circulate the infamous quotations of Morgan Freeman in his 60 Minutes interview from a few years back when he dispelled his support for Black History Month.

There's two reasons why I don't really like Black History Month: for one, I resent that it fosters the belief that we should only give a damn about black history only one month or a few weeks out of the entire year. In fact, I resent that same idea for all various demographic divisions that humanity has concocted for I am a strong believer that historical awareness should have no boundaries in length of time. History is a beautiful thing and it necessary to be consistently and constantly aware of it so that we have a greater understanding of the present and enhanced perspective as to what we think or hope for in the future.

The second part is the ass-kissing and I'm going to limit this part to this diatribe to only Black History Month even though it could be universally applied to any "Insert Demographic Here" History/Awareness/Only-Give-A-Damn-About-It-Right-Now Month. We're going to see numerous specials, numerous commercials, and schools are going to make numerous announcements in commemoration of black history, and then it's mostly quiet for an entire year afterward. What makes me more of upset that it is largely regurgitation only exploring household names with a little bit of a curtly nod to the less celebrated. We often talk of tirelessly of the work that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X during Civil Rights Movement, but even during this month, we don't hear much of the work and sacrifice that W.E.B. du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Ralph Abernathy, James Baldwin, Clyde Kennard, James Meredith, Medgar Evers, Claudette Colvin, and others did during those turbulent years. You'll hear of Langston Hughes, a fine author in his own right, but why wait until college to hear about Ralph Ellison and August Wilson?

I understand the awareness which is mainly the purpose that Black History Month serves, and while that is a fair assessment, I still believe that the history of our people, both here in the United States and abroad, is worth way more than just 28 days (or 29 days in a leap year) of conscious groveling that will all but cease on the first of March.

How Antipathy Has Fueled - and Will Doom - the Republican Party

I attended a political lecture given by William Galston tonight here at the University of Houston.  Dr. Galston is a former public policy advisor to former President Bill Clinton and a noted progressive.

In one of his responses in the question-and-answering session after the lecture, he mentioned about the feelings of public antipathy, especially amongst the blue collar sector, that now harbor a resentment towards government and social programs. Moreover, he also noted that in the past half century, Americans have went from "trusting government too much" to "not trusting government at all".  He later answered another question after the question-and-answering session about the Tea Party, noting that the Tea Party movement was largely fueled by antipathy and antipathy can go a long way in carrying a political message.

Throughout history it has been proven that antipathy fueled movements may last as long as desired but don't really yield the results desired. The two most recent antipathy movements -- the Tea Party Movement and Occupy Wall Street -- are largely still ongoing in spirit, yet neither movement had a concrete agenda that could lead to significant, implemented change. Considering this post is about the Republican Party, I'll make a comment on the Tea Party: yes, I'm well aware that they talked about being anti-tax, anti-social programs, robust fiscal restraint, and anti-government -- but the Tea Party has yet to accomplish anything relatively significant, except to become the most vocal sect of a political party since the Dixiecrats of the mid 20th century.

Three antipathy movements are fueling Republican discourse at the moment: the relationship between government and the economy, which runs Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich's engines; the relationship between government and society, which powers Rick Santorum's campaign; and an overall disgust with the government, which pushes Ron Paul along. What these movements are causing is deep rifts within the GOP.  Granted, I'm well aware that all four candidates have somewhat put out plans to "get America back on track". The only issue is that while all four candidates have plans that undoubtedly address what is pissing people off at the moment, none of them are adequately sustainable.

Because of these antipathy movements, all four candidates are guilty of fostering unrealistic viewpoints of how the current issues facing the United States can be and should be resolved. In addition, all four candidates are dangerously guilty of promoting what they can and their policies can actually do about it.

Here's the reality: technological advancement, coupled with globalization, has increased competition for labor. Wages have stagnated because there's more people competing for jobs -- this time on a global scale. Wealth, increasingly, is transitioning from property to financial capital. Health care is expensive because of how medicine is practiced. The fiscal woes facing various states and governments is less about spending and more about inadequate revenue. The tax system has issues not because people are paying too much in taxes but because the current tax code keeps getting structured to shrink the paying tax base. American values are not on the decline; Americans are becoming more aware that if someone's personal choice does not affect them directly, then their rights shouldn't be infringed on. There's no such thing as a war against religion, but a realization that government is to be religiously neutral.

However, all four candidates are playing on antipathy felt by their constituencies. That should be expected and that is indeed part of -- for a lack of a better word -- "good" campaigning. As a consequence, especially with Ron Paul appealing to younger voters and voters that generally lean to the center-left, the Republican Party has diversified and within that diversification, each bloc of voters is pissed about something different and the aims of every bloc of voters are not universal.

Of course, the idea is that the unifying goal should be to vote President Obama out of office -- the underbelly of that is whatever candidate that wins the nomination will be clueless as to how to properly address and properly accept this new Republican diversity. If you need evidence: there's a reason why the Republican Party didn't accept Romney's moderate position and forced the former Massachusetts governor to project himself as a conservative; there's a reason why the Republican Party rejected the Internet-based and youth movement fueled by Paul's candidacy; and there's a reason why the GOP is still desperate to find the next Reagan, even entertaining candidates that have had ethics issues (Gingrich) and was embarrassed in their last election (Santorum in 2006).  As much as the Republican Party and their supporters do not want to admit it -- there's actually more to getting the incumbent out of office. You should have seen that lesson learned with George Bush in 2004 for the Democrats.

So of course, the antipathy streak will continue on in the Republican Party, considering that the schism is inevitable and that schism will end up giving Obama a second term. It will eventually doom the Republican Party. In truth, it dooms any aspiration that the political party has -- either sooner or later.

The End of American Unilateralism

There's two emerging forces taking shape in the United States today -- one is a force that recognizes that American unilateralism can lead to disastrous consequences; that recognizes government and policy should aim for realism, not idealism; and that there is a definitive line between sound patriotism and irrational, idealistic, and illogical nationalism. The other force is rooted in a deep insecurity held by the current generation of this country, with visions of the United States being on the decline with elevated unemployment, stagnating wages, a dysfunctional government, and countries such as China, India, and Brazil emerging as influential world economies along with being even bigger players on the foreign policy scene.

I read Fareed Zakaria's (who is emerging as my favorite political writer of all time) Washington Post column, which is in the form of an open letter to Mitt Romney, in response to his quip that Barack Obama believes that "...this century is the post-American century". Zakaria appropriately derided the GOP front runner's sentiments, criticizing it as narrow-minded fodder and stressing that the reality is that the "age of American unipolarity -- which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union -- is over." This is true. Zakaria's book takes the position that the United States should not necessarily feel threatened, but more or less should embrace the emerging success of the aforementioned countries.

The irony of the nationalist-fueled campaigns that the Republican Party candidates have waged is that they constantly invoke the historical foundations of American values, yet at the same time will deny that not even the United States is immune to what history has proven time and time again -- that unilateralism and unipolarity is not perpetual. It's a lesson that Spain learned in the 17th and 18th centuries, that France learned after Waterloo, and what Britain learned after the two World Wars.  Not to mention the American system, which for years upon years was touted as the socioeconomic model that everyone should follow, was soon embraced by China (slightly), India (somewhat), and Brazil, amongst others, and its no surprise why those countries are where they are now.

Yet, at the same time, there's something else at play when it comes to the decline of American unilateralism and unipolarity -- the perpetual case of insecurity that, in truth, is displayed but not often discussed in the way that it actually needs to be discussed. Ideally, a nation's foreign policy would to be coordinate the interests of their own country into mutually beneficial and peaceful international relationships. I stress ideally. With unilateralism and unipolarity, this is not the case. The European imperialist drive from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century is a perfect example of this. Britain built an empire over two centuries that proved to be unsustainable in just a short decade plus after the conclusion of World War II. Napoleon's unipolar drive for France only lasted a little more than a decade. We all know what happened to Spain. In short, having a foreign policy that aims to do more or less anything and everything to make sure that the pendulum perpetually swings into your nation's favor is almost always going to do more long term harm than good. The insecurity that fuels the idea that a country needs to do anything and everything to maintain their position at the top of the mountain is driven by nationalist pride. Throughout the course of history that course of action has proven to eventually catch up with the country sooner or later.

Despite not being their biggest fan, I recognize that President Obama, along with Representative Paul, have somewhat a grip on this new reality. In my mind, there is nothing wrong with bringing an end to the "you're either with us or against us" mentality that is a stalwart for neoconservative thinking. It did not do any favors for the United States before and it certainly won't do any favors for the United States now or in the future.

Me, Myself, and the Austrians, and the Keynesians.

If you ever read anything by Austrivangelist Ron Paul and Keynepologist Paul Krugman (I refer to both of them in humor because of Ron Paul's preaching of the Austrian school and Krugman's tireless defense of Keynes theories), it's obvious that one economic school resents the other. However, I give credit to both -- Paul is well versed and educated in Austrian theory and Krugman has won a Nobel Prize on Economics.

Most of you probably don't really know about the Austrian theory or the Keynesian theory, at least by name. However, nearly all of you know some form of it colloquially.

Austrian theory champions free markets, tying the money supply to the gold standard, believe credit cycles fuel business cycles, believe that inflation only comes in the form of monetary supply growth, and a rejection of math as a form of economic analysis. In Layman's terms, respectively: its that lassiez-faire concept you learned in U.S. history, its exchanging money for gold, it's securing loans and credit cards to buy more shit, it's things costing too much because there's too much money, and it's math being unable to predict what humans can do. Give credit where credit is due to the Austrians -- Hayek was screaming bloody murder about the prospects of a financial collapse early in 1929. You probably have read about what happened in October of that year. Paul raised red flags about the housing bubble as early as 2002.

On the other hand, Keynesian theory (even if it somewhat deviated from Keynes original theories as time went on), is the advocacy of government involvement in the economy, in the form of fiscal policy from the central bank, a large public sector to complement the private sector, and through government investment (spending) in the economy. A better way to put it is government stimuli, government banks, government stimulus programs, and government bailouts. The reasoning behind government intervention, according to Keynesians, that pretty much the free market can't do everything by itself. A cornerstone to Keynesian thought is the belief that aggregate demand is the preeminent driver of the economy. In the course of U.S. history, Keynesian economics seen its effect in the New Deal programs of the Great Depression, the post-World War II era, and the omnibus stimulus programs of the Bush and Obama administrations.

I believe that aggregate demand drives the economy, that the public sector is actually a valuable asset to the economy, that government can be good to promote economic stability, and the free market has the propensity to fuck up. I guess I can put on my Keynesian hat.

I believe that yes, access to credit can fuel demand, that loose credit is disastrous, that the free market side of the economy is what really puts our food on the table,  and unbridled confidence in the government to act as an insurance agency for an economy can prove extremely damaging to government fiscal policy. Well, I guess I can put on my Austrian hat as well.

At the same time, before the era of the Federal Reserve and the American mixed economy, there were still bubbles, recessions, and depressions. Railroad bubbles, fueled by unstable financing, set off economic depressions in 1873 (which, lasting until 1879, remains the longest period of economic contraction in U.S. history and was the first economic event to be called "The Great Depression") and again in 1893 (which was actually seen as worse than the event of 1873-79). The United States actually had three severe recessions in the 20th century before the Great Depression (in 1907, in 1918-1919 after World War I, and then the second part of that post-World War I recession in 1920-1921). In a demonstration of how bad things were -- it was J.P. Morgan himself that bailed out the U.S. Treasury in 1893 and Morgan inspired New York bankers to rally to reestablish confidence in the economy in 1907.

By the way, it was Panic of 1907, along with the numerous bank runs that had been taking places intermittently in the years previous, that gave birth to the Federal Reserve in 1913.

So taking history into consideration, it should be recognized economic booms and busts are standard, no matter what economic theory we subscribe to. There will still be economic bubbles that will plateau and then burst. There will still be credit bubbles because throughout the course of the past few centuries of human history, we've proven that no matter how hard we try, not everything can be paid up front and the acceptance of deferred payments will always be a cornerstone to an economy. There are winners and losers and capitalism; it can be argued its a mathematical outcome; but those that are "losers" in the capitalist economy can bring socioeconomic chaos.

There has to be a stabilizing check and balance on the free market -- of which government serves that role. I am not one to have total blind faith in the free market. Governments do make mistakes; we've seen plenty of them and thus I won't have total blind faith in the government, either. However, I'd rather have government involved in the economy than not be involved in it.

The Keynesian hat stays. I'll always err on the side of the mixed economy.

My apologies, Dr. Paul.

Could we learn something from the Canadian model?

I came across a highly interesting column concerning early 1990s Canada, who which saw their debt to GDP ratio skyrocket, slow growth stemming from high interest rates, and downgrades by the major credit rating agencies. Canada's welfare state grew under Prime Ministers William Lyon Mackenzie King, Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, and Brian Mulroney, but reached a point that by the 1980s, fiscal issues stemming from the expansive social programs along with the slowing growth were looming and would eventually explode heading into the 1990s. Further exacerbating this issue was the weakness of the Canadian dollar.

After a Liberal Party budget released in 1994 to widespread criticism for the fact that it still included spending increases despite the numerous reforms that were included in the budget package, Chretien, then Finance Minister Paul Martin, and the rest of the Liberal Party broke out the scissors, shears, axes, chainsaws -- whatever adjective that describes cutting that you want to use -- and took to reducing Canada's debt.

Canada's debt-to-GDP ratio reached its all time peak in 1995-96 in the midst of the implements of the cuts. Growth actually did stagnate, according to a CBIC study, whenever Martin called for widespread spending freezes in 1996. Chretien would push for departments to cut budgets -- which ranged from as little as 5% to as much as 65%. In addition, the ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases were 7 to 1, as Chretien would note in his interview with Reuters it was about "what was needed most." The spending cuts did have adverse effects as Canada's Medicare system suffered budget cuts that lengthened medical waiting lists (which is what you hear of constantly when United States conservatives deride the Canadian healthcare system) and put many provinces in a serious bind as they depended on the federal government for funding of some services.

The final component of the turnaround came when the Bank of Canada lowered interest rates in 1996, allowing Canada to finally reap the benefits of the fairly positive global economy, spurred by the United States and China's economic growth. Canada's budget returned to black ink in 1997 and remained so until the global financial crash and North American auto industry crash of 2008 and 2009. There's also the fundamental difference between the Canadian outcome from the recession as opposed to the outcome in the United States -- Canada emerged from it a year later as the most fiscally healthy country of all the G7 nations.

There are two key things about the success of Canada -- for one, the Canadian government scaled back to a more manageable proportion of size and role versus population it is supposed to serve. Let's not get confused here -- Canadian social programs are held to high regard and are fairly popular in Canada, even though some of the Canadians I spoke to complain about the Goods and Service Tax.  In addition, and probably the most important thing, is that the Canadian government was largely united in tackling the deficit.

However, here in the present-day United States, we're treated to ideological warfare between a left that is sick of concessions and a right that is exercising reactionary power play. Austrian economists such as presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX) argue for spending cuts, tax cuts, and reduced government while Keynesian economists such as Nobel laureate professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that argue against draconian cuts because of the harm they would do to the economy. I cite Paul as an example because Paul has demonstrated to be the only person on the Republican side that truly has an understanding of economic theory. I cite Krugman, not because of him being a Nobel Prize winner in economics, but because he is the largest trumpeter for the mixed economy.

The Canadian government's austerity push in the mid-1990s proved both of them to be right. As stated before, spending freeze mandates and tax cuts actually stagnated Canadian economic growth (proving Krugman right), while at the same time allowed the Canadian government to become leaner and more efficient (proving Paul right). However, the fundamental difference was how instrumental the central bank was in Canada's recovery -- something that would be to the chagrin of Paul, but not exactly -- the Bank of Canada decided to finally rectify years of poor monetary policy by reducing interest rates. The Federal Reserve's monetary policy is pointless -- low interest rates really only work when banks see credit extension as an asset and not a liability.

The true value of Canada's turnaround is not necessarily about luck; its about how political leaders put aside ideology for the greater good of a nation in recognition of what needed to be done. The Liberal Party cutting spending is similar to the Republican Party reversing Bush era tax cuts, but as much as the Liberal Party hated to do it (as then Finance Minister Paul Martin once disclosed), the Party had to set aside its ideological platform of social welfare expansion for the greater good of Canada. The Liberal Party actually demonstrated that neither political party has been able to demonstrate down here -- putting aside a staunch ideology stance to bring needed stability to the country instead of only having a narrow minded view through the eyeglasses of their beliefs as to how to achieve it. The greatest failure, in my opinion, of Washington these days is that a political party's need to triumph in political chess is outweighing getting anything done -- especially in the case of the Republican Party.

There was an additional footnote that Chretien and others noted that politicians can still win elections despite massive austerity measures. However, one thing that kept Chretien in power for 10 years as Prime Minister was the growth of the Canadian economy in the late 90s to the early 2000s. If people can see a beneficial payoff of a given administration, then people will keep that administration in power. People saw the payoff in keeping Ronald Reagan in power in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1996, and George W. Bush in 2004.

So what is the greatest lesson that can be learned from the Canadian austerity model of the 1990s? Its not the spending cuts and tax cuts and those said cuts exceeding, by proportion, increased taxation. The reason why the measures taken by the Liberal Party of the mid-1990s worked for Canada is because Canada provided a welfare state that was way too big for a population to be able to pay for and had an economical system that allowed for the federal government to carry too much weight in the mixed economy balance. The issue in the United States is less about the welfare state and more about entitlement spending and an eroding tax base augmented by a complicated tax code that actually does more bad than good to the fiscal health of the United States. The biggest lesson learned is that the controlling Liberal Party set aside ideology to solve a problem. The United States government needs to solve problems first and worry about how that problem solving abides to ideology second (preferably, not really worry about it at all). A continued failure to do that will only exacerbate problems and quite possibly lead the United States to that "decline" from the perch of secured supremacy in an insecure world.

More On Occupy Wall Street

If anybody has ever been in sales, then you'll know who Grant Cardone is because either somebody reference his training or forced you to watch it. In the car business, I was only referenced to it. His high-energy, positive motivational work has made him pretty much the prominent speaker for the sales profession, and his entrepreneurial work has been covered by the mass media. In fact, he has his own show, Turnaround King, on National Geographic.

If you're looking for a post for me bashing his contributions for the Church of Scientology, you won't find it in this post. Scientology is a joke and not really worth my time shitting on.

What this post is about, however, is his comments made on a Phoenix television station that he uploaded on this account on YouTube describing the Occupy Wall Street movement as a distraction. Many people continue to dismiss that Occupy Wall Street is nothing more than a movement of lazy, anti-capitalist Americans that want a handout. He also noted that he has never seen anything that looks like the mighty 1% of Americans oppressing the other 99%.

Hmm...

Before I get into that, allow me to digress for a moment.  The "American Dream" has been always romanced into a quasi-rags-to-riches story, as hard work, persistence, and dedication will pay off into comfortable living. That's a reasonable statement, and why not? People, such as Grant Cardone can tell that story. It's his story of making his wealth from dirt by taking a sales job and his reinforcement of the entrepreneurial spirit is what sold him so many damn books in the first place. It's a good story.

Same thing can be said about the late Steve Jobs -- his love of technology, his demand for perfection, and his savvy marketing skills brought him great wealth and reverence as the greatest technology executive ever. He too has a rags-to-riches story, from founding Apple in his parents garage to taking Apple to vanguard status in computing and telecommunications.

However, let's not confine ourselves to idealism. You can give your effort to anything and then still come out with nothing. That happens. Especially in sales. There are more people who don't experience what they deem to be success than those that would consider themselves successful and the unsuccessful/successful discrepancy is massive. Capitalism is a crapshoot, but I didn't tell you that.

I recognize that capitalism is a crapshoot. I've been in sales. I'm still in sales, by way of transitioning into the insurance industry. However, I'm also attempting to get a degree in business so I can head to the energy sector. I'm just like a good chunk of the people down in Wall Street -- broke, balancing school and work, and hoping for a payoff with my degree. I also realize that I have a real chance to fall flat on my face, and there is also a chance that if I do fall on my face, it can be as much my fault as it isn't my fault.

I wrote before that there are winners and losers in capitalism. Someone argued with me that this was a result of a mathematical outcome. I'm inclined to agree with him; its just the result of that said mathematical outcome is what brought thousands of people to Wall Street and as such, it moves past being just a mathematical outcome.

I also came up with the concept of "corporate arielism". Some of you would consider it a far fetched idea -- that corporations and the extremely wealthy want the other 99% or so to accept the fact that they have the income, they run the show, and they're in the driver's seat.
 
What I mean by the driver's seat is that they have the financial means necessary to solve many issues that the vast amount of Americans can't. Those issues can be anything; the financial means could be exercised in anyway -- whether its just throwing money at liabilities, throwing money in to invest, or throwing money to lobby politicians.

What I mean by how they run the show is that for better or for worse, they get called on to spur the economy. That's either through increased consumption, increased investment, or paying more in taxes. The monetarists and the Keynesians and the well off and the dirt poor turn to the 1% for all three reasons (give or take what category you fall into, you either are calling on all three, two of, or one of those things listed above). It's the Gospel of Wealth versus Social Darwinism.

What I mean by having the income is self explanatory. Then again, it is not self explanatory. There's a wide range of topics from commerce to capital gains. I don't count on your attention span to be that wide. It's not me being unable to make a point here; its me basically saying that they have an ability to generate income through the means that they have that most people don't have.

In short, the top 1% represent the "winners" in the economic game of capitalism. That's where Grant Cardone is. Good for him. Makes for a hell of a story to tell. However, his story won't get repeated 310 million times over.

I will have to dispute his notion that government has never fixed an economy. The United States government has fixed an economy before. It's called entering into World War II.

I will dispute his assertion that the Occupy Wall Street movement is a distraction; it's a necessary movement to address the issue that is going to dominate this century -- the income disparity with a corollary addressing financial greed and the corporate state. That's the gripes. In their eyes, its financial greed that wrecked the market place, the corporate state that allowed for it, and now greater income disparity as a result of it. They're pretty much right -- a free market will never truly behave itself, no matter how many times libertarians and conservatives will argue otherwise; Washington will hear big business loudest; and the income disparity, no matter how much people will argue that it is just a mathematical outcome as a result of capitalism, will continue at an increasingly unsustainable pace.

However, its not a political movement. It's a movement to bring awareness and to push for action, for there are those that work hard and still struggle. For there are those that seek to better themselves with education and degrees that are supposed to provide for a better pay day and a better life and still struggle. For there are those that can't afford to take care of themselves or see what issues with their health they may have. For there are those that can't find full time work, not because they don't want to, but because they can't. For there are those that are upset that as they struggle to make ends meet in the wake of the financial system's collapse, those in the driver seats of the financial sector have never been held accountable for the damage done -- in their eyes an injustice.

There are others, like Grant Cardone -- mainly conservative pundits and bloggers who believe in the "American Dream" of work hard brings rewards -- that only want to open their mouths to discredit the whole movement. However, what these pundits and bloggers fail to realize, that every tried and true system has an end game to it. Yet, the end game doesn't have to be doom and gloom, if we just use our heads.

The Confederate Flag

Proposed license plate (Houston Chronicle/Texas Department of Transportation). FAIR USE: I am only using this image for educational purposes only as it has to do with the subject of this post.

I'm writing this in response to a story that I saw posted on the Houston Chronicle's website about local political critics ramping up their campaign against the proposed allowance of a Confederate insignia to be on Texas license plates, which will be voted on by the Texas Department of Transportation next month. The proposal is sponsored by Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson on behalf of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The group plans on using the proceeds from custom license plate purchases to mark Confederate graves and build monuments for Confederate heroes. In turn, they will share the proceeds with the Texas General Land Office.

I went to school with a guy that had a girlfriend who bought him a Texas Confederate belt. The belt did not really offend me because he was not really a racist (even though he tried to act like one) and he did it out of Southern pride and not out of white racial supremacy. Or so I think. I haven't spoke to him in years so I could never really quiz him on his intentions. To tell you the truth, I really could care less. When it comes to racial issues I see it like this -- you're entitled to your opinion, however, if you have an issue with the color of my skin do not allow it to get to a point where you're interfering with my right to my own life. That's when we have problems.

It is indeed understandable as to why the Confederate flag offends the majority of Americans and not just black Americans. The Confederacy's Constitution guaranteed slavery and Southern politicians justified it by invoking a twisted interpretation of the Biblical story of Ham in the Bible. There are indeed those that use the Confederate flag to not only show off their Southern pride, but also as a racial intimidation tactic in support of white supremacy. Yet, at the same time, even the Confederate flag has increasingly began to take an avant-garde meaning to it -- as just a mere display of Southern pride and heritage. It is the avant-garde meaning that the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Land Commissioner Patterson are sticking to in their campaign for the insignia.

It goes back to freedom of speech. You're guaranteed the freedom of speech so as long as you are not putting others lives in danger. If the TxDOT allowed for the Confederate flag to be put on license plates, it would not interfere with others quality of life, however it might affect those that choose to have the Confederate flag on the license plate because they're going to stick out and the judgment calls will roll in. However, the formation and the existence of Confederacy was one of the many markers that was a part of the unfortunate first three centuries of American society, where there was widespread, legalized disenfranchisement based on the color of one's skin. But the Confederate flag manifested itself from being a flag of a nation that institutionalized racism to being a flag of a distinct part of the country with its own culture and distinctive heritage. Now, how much you are willing to accept the latter is up to each and every one of you, but personally I have accepted the "heritage not hate" aspect of the Confederate flag.

On a personal note, I'm not bothered by the Confederate flag. I've seen it flown, I've seen it on window decals, I've seen it on bumper stickers, I've seen it on online profiles -- you get the point. There's no point in oppressing or trying to cover up history, no matter how unpleasant. If you wish to fly the Confederate flag or display it in the name of heritage, fine. If you do so out of racist means, that's fine too, so as long as you do not interfere with my life and my right to live.

Yes, media, Ron Paul is relevant

Official United States Congressional Photo of Ron Paul (2007)

"We furnish the Presidential race." - Somebody in some media organization that decided that the most compelling presidential race will be the one that is the most salacious.

Maybe there is a point to Ron Paul being somewhat ignored by the mainstream media -- he currently does not lead in any of the major polls for Republican candidates and there's only moderate awareness of him compared to Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry. However, the truth is that the mainstream media shoves Romney, Cain, and Perry down our throats, along with Michelle Bachmann and Chris Christie, despite the fact that Bachmann is not even a relevant candidate and Christie has no intentions in running. Aside from the fact that Paul is the most prominent American libertarian since Barry Goldwater, Paul has very little the media would want to salivate over: he doesn't utter comments in stupidity (Perry), has no controversy surrounding his religion (Romney), and he does not have a catchy tax plan (Cain).

I have to applaud Ron Paul despite the fact that I disagree vehemently with his economic views. He doesn't live for the political sideshow, his views have been largely consistent, and for the most part he practices what he preaches. He never maxes out his Congressional office budget and he has not enrolled in any Congressional pension plan. There's nothing really controversial about him (okay, there was the newsletter issue that he actually handled pretty damn well in my book). Not even his comments about the United States involvement in the Middle East. He doesn't even live for the soundbite. He doesn't have any political feuds. At least Andrew Napolitano gives him face time.

Paul doesn't get any attention in any of the presidential debates, which is something I really don't get. Rick Santorum is a pop conservative, Bachmann uses too much hyperbole, Perry aims for shock value, Jon Huntsman is a narcissist, Gary Johnson is way out in left field, and Romney is actually a moderate who is trying way too hard to appeal to conservatives. Paul offers solutions and political beliefs that can be subject to debate on an intellectual level, which is something that cannot be said about the rest of the Republican candidates (all right, I'll give Romney some credit). As a corollary to that, Paul professes far superior knowledge of the issues and offers said solutions that are far more coherent. Whether or not media outlets such as Fox, CNN, or even Bloomberg are intimidated by Paul or just trying to milk Romney versus ______ so much is up to all of you to decide, though I'll personally vote for the latter.

Overall, besides the media's infatuation with Romney versus ________, the media's real issue with Ron Paul is that he's not really a pop candidate -- as in, a candidate that the media can easily make a generalization about. He's not a party personality or a personality of a movement. Or, in other words, he's Ron Paul, a libertarian, instead of Ron Paul, the GOP superstar or Ron Paul, the darling of the Tea Party. He is truly his own man and his own candidate and he refrains from political grandstanding and pandering so that he can score constituency points through the media. That's what his followers adore about him. Consequently, that's why the media seems bored with him.

Notwithstanding, there's no guarantee that if Paul got even more media exposure that he would be a candidate that would be setting the world on fire. Considering that he is the most coherent Republican presidential candidate, he probably would set the world on fire, at least for the GOP. However, it is clear that if Ron Paul's candidacy is not successful, then it will be largely the fault of the mainstream media, who the American public will turn to be educated about the candidates, that consistently push him to being the candidate for libertarian political underground. When considering that, it is a damn shame that the media is doing a disservice to the American public with the debates: the debates should be more about a forum to get to know where all the candidates stand and not a political grandstanding and pandering showcase.

Yet, while most of the country remains ignorant to Ron Paul, he still continues to raise money at an aggressive pace with a series of successful Internet-based money bombs and donation drives. Paul still has a populist appeal that could resonate with more and more voters as the primary season begins to heat up at the beginning of the 2012 calendar year. Make no mistake about it: despite the fact that he is not a media darling, he is still a relevant candidate. It's my hope, personally in at least for the sake of healthy, sensible American political discourse, that Paul does not remain lost in the shadows of political mainstream media engineering.

Occupy Wall Street

Protestors at Occupy Wall Street in New York City on 17 September 2011. (David Shankbone, Wikipedia)

To satisfy my humanities requirement for my degree, I'm taking American Cultures this semester here at the University of Houston. I'm not necessarily going to publicly criticize or make a gratifying statement about the course. It's just a class, I take it online, and I just took the midterm earlier here on campus.

I have to credit this class to introducing me to something that most people are not even anywhere familiar with. Hell, I never even heard of arielism until I read about it a few weeks ago. However, the American interpretation of José Enrique Rodó's 1900 seminal work is rooted in elitism as, Frederick Pike wrote, the American elitist clique believed that the lower class needed to be "liberated" from materialism, which was fed to them by Corporate America. Indeed, Rodó's Ariel does criticize materialism, but also calls on the need for Latin American youth to aspire to not fall into the shadow of the United States. Keep in mind, this was written two years after the Spanish-American War which established the United States as a world power and the cemented the States as the national power of the Western Hemisphere. Whether American arielists misinterpreted that part of Ariel or deliberately ignored it, who knows.

I bring this up because the American elitist gripe of the early 20th century is has similarities with the Occupy Wall Street / We Are the 99 Percent social movement that has sprung up in the past three weeks.

Pike wrote that the American arielists aimed to expose the lower class to higher cultural tastes for they believed that culture should set the tone of society and not economic achievement. He further wrote that these arielists sought to reaffirm what they believed to be their place in the American social hierarchy (of course them being at the top) and basically leave the "lower class" to be happy with their lot in life and accepting of their subordinate position to the cultural elite. Needless to say that something of this sort happened, but not in the way the arielists would hope for it to happen.

A brief history lesson here: as the modern "corporate America" took shape in the late 1880s it gained a fairly shitty reputation, as evidenced by strike after strike by laborers that felt victimized by Corporate America and a federal government that felt that Corporate America represented an obstruction on the American economy. Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt based their presidencies around "trust-busting", which was basically the federal government's fight against cartels (or at the time widely known as "trusts"). However, Corporate America had the same aim as the American arielists albeit in a different way: people of the "lower class" in this class the actual economic lower class and middle class, should be happy with their lot and accept the fact that Corporate America runs the show in the United States. In addition, Corporate America believed (and advertised) that materialism should be where Americans find value.

It brings us to today.

A friend of mine wrote to me on Facebook in response to my post on what should be the size and role of government in the United States that the wealth and income disparity statistics is mainly a product of a mathematical outcome. I did concur that it was a mathematical outcome, however, when considering all points, it comes out to being more than just a mathematical outcome. It's a by product of what I call corporate arielism: that Americans should be accepting of the fact that corporate America provides the hands from which the United States feeds from, whether it is in the form of politics, society, or simple daily life. The value of life, at least in the eyes of Corporate America, should come in the form of how much you are able to participate in materialistic consumerism. It will be Corporate America that allows for opportunities to exist. It will be Corporate America that decides whether or not the opportunity that you think is yours is really yours. Corporate America will be responsible for what it wants to be responsible for. And I could go on and on.

Take that into consideration, and it is obvious to see what the Occupy Wall Street movement is actually about. Those that support movement believe that Corporate America arielism is screwing Americans in many forms from not hiring, to laying off, to not providing enough jobs, to health care, to hijacking the political process, and to securing their financial position at the expense of the American that wants to pursue their dream of living a comfortable, decent life. Whether the logic is flawed is in the eye of the beholder; however, their message shouldn't be ignored.

Like I said before, there are winners and losers in capitalism in the sense that someone gains wealth at the expense of someone else. Is that the reality of the free market? Sure. I'd be absolutely stupid to deny that. However, capitalism, corporate arielism, and Corporate America as we know it now have a bigger question on their hands as middle and lower class discontent begins to grow and spread: sustainability. So few people can control so few of the wealth for so long. Personally, I believe this: if the Occupy Wall Street gains the momentum that their inspiration, the Arab Spring, did, then just maybe we will see a new form of arielism to develop over the course of this century that the majority of Americans will be willing to accept -- the arielism of the middle class, where the middle class runs the show and the upper class will have to be the ones living with it, and the middle class would be free from having to abide by and depend on Corporate America.