I recently did a round table discussion on the American Dream.  Here’s a part of the conversation I offered:

The American Dream is freedom to be left alone, to succeed or fail on your own.  It’s the promise that with effort, or luck, or both, you can find an unmolested happiness.  And when I say unmolested, I mean in the sense you aren’t bogged down with limitless barbed wires of mindless regulation and compulsion to participate in programs a government deems beneficial for everyone.  That you can make a living on your own terms, responsible for yourself.  It’s as much the freedom to fail, and perhaps die early as a result of your bad choices, as it is freedom to prosper.

But it’s not just liberation from a heavy-handed state.  It’s liberation from the tyranny of uncontrollable, stifling forces that would subjugate society to their small-minded  ends.  And by that I mean, it’s freedom from the chains of this silly corporate McWorld we’ve created.  Many of us – hell, most us – have no choice but to work for mega-corporations, organizations, or firms.  These companies enjoy relationships with the government that give them marketplace power far exceeding what they’d have in a true free market.  And with that power, they suck in everything around them like black holes, commoditizing and monetizing all interactions in our lives.  Chopping every transaction into a form of tradable economic units. Placing the majority of the country on a treadmill to nowhere, and rendering enormous numbers of us debt serfs from cradle to grave.

Consider the average upper middle class neighborhood.  Most everybody works for some monster corporation, hospital network, law firm, or financial company.  Their urine is tested once a year, their comments in the workplace are constrained by zero tolerance policy handbooks, their social media’s monitored by some creep in HR doing a monthly sweep to ensure against “brand damage,” and their retirements are tied up in some company pension or 401k. They shop at big boxes like Wal Mart, Target, and Coach, buy what they’ve been told is desirable in endless marketing messages they’re bombarded with every day, and watch news created by a handful of networks all owned by the same five or six multi-billion dollar conglomerates.  Once a month they walk to the mailbox and make a mortgage payment to a bank so enormous it doesn’t even know where their note is located.

Is this the American Dream?  No.  This is a society squeezed between corporate and government taskmasters.  If the Founding Fathers the Tea Partiers so often laud were alive, they’d choke back vomit viewing the mass of  blissfully incurious, told-what-to-do robots we’ve  become.

So no, you won’t find the American Dream on Main Street.  Main Street’s brain dead, a fenced-in pen where the herd sleeps.  And it’s been that way for years.  The American Dream is elsewhere, probably with the entrepreneurs.  With the kids starting the new businesses and hoping to never have to take orders in a hierarchy of bureaucrats or functionaries.  With the guy leaving his corporate or government job to do something he has a passion for because he realizes money alone is never going to be enough, and that the accrual of “stuff” – the rapidly depreciating status purchases and gadgets Main Street’s been manipulated into viewing as trophies of success – is but a temporary junkie’s fix, a fill-in for the fact that we’re not doing what fulfills, or even interests us.

And that right there is the American Dream: The promise you can forge your own way, carve your own road.  That you can be your own man or woman.  You might not  make a fortune in it.  You might not even succeed.  But You Can Try, and though the forces all around you are working overtime to corral you into robotry, to put you “back in line,” You Have a Choice.*  You can still say, “No.  Fuck that.  I’m going to strike out on my own and see where it goes.”

__________

* See also, this delightful little song.

You can, and should, read the whole thing here.

You do not become a ”dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. – Vaclav Havel

2011 will go down as the “Year of the Protester.”  For all the obvious reasons, the name fits.  And for what should be similarly obvious reasons, that’s a tragedy.

The world needs protesters now like a doomed airliner needs more stewardesses. The thing it really, desperately requires are dissidents.

Yes, there’s a difference between the two, a crucial one.  The dissident doesn’t scream in the streets.  He doesn’t sit in drum circles.  He doesn’t dress like in a fashion contrived solely to alienate others.  He isn’t incoherent by design.  Or a lost soul simply looking for some angry movement to belong to.

The dissident thinks. He’s formulated an idea, a plan, that challenges consensus, conventional wisdom, and the power structures in industry, government, and society that support the status quo.  He has an argument in favor of an alternative.  He can debate.  He offers a workable option that can rally millions of similarly thoughtful supporters – that silent majority we need to join the debate. Unlike the protester, who can spark what appears to be revolution, but is usually nothing more than replacement of his current oppressor with another, the dissident, by offering a formula for change, can radically upend the systems around him.

The dissident recognizes that screaming will always be cheap, and quickly forgotten.  But that a well constructed idea is sticky.*

If the difference I’m highlighting is opaque, allow me to offer a few concrete examples of dissidents.  It’s a good time for it, as we lost three huge ones last year: Steve Jobs, Christopher Hitchens, and Vaclav Havel. Each of these men, through the power of well reasoned, well crafted affronts to the accepted narratives, caused more change in their spheres of influence than ten years of Occupy Wall Street, or any other similar protest movement, would have in its.

Read the rest here.

1.

You may have heard of an economist named Tyler Cowen. If not, look him up, and read his book, The Great Stagnation. It argues, correctly, irrefutably, something the main stream media will never discuss: That the cause of the United States’ financial problems (and the world’s, for that matter) derive less from bad policy decisions, entitlement spending run amuck, or Wall Street malfeasance, than they do from simple lack of Big Innovations.  That we’ve run out of game-changing advances like electricity, television, automobiles, easily-tapped oil, the Internet, etc. That all of the “low hanging fruit” has been exhausted, and that all innovation going forward will occur in small increments.

He says this like it’s an entirely bad thing.

2.

I bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Double Black a couple weeks ago.  I had to get it as soon as it became available stateside because it’s a new product from one of my favorite distillers.  When I say “new” product, however, that’s mostly in name (and even there, it’s limited).  In substance, JWDB isn’t really new at all.  It’s a lot like Johnnie Walker Black, the almost already perfect gold standard of blended scotches.*

Around the same time, I stumbled onto Dr. Pepper Ten, a new quasi-diet soda that’s essentially nothing more than Diet Dr. Pepper with just enough enough sugar to add ten calories to the mix.

And about a week or so after that, cruising Itunes half-drunk, I ran across the Stones’ new deluxe version of the classic Some Girlsalbum.  Same old singles you recall – “Miss You,” “Shattered,” “Beast of Burden” – only with a second disc of new material added.

I bought all three, the two physically consumable ones several times since, and I couldn’t be happier with them.

3.

What do these products share?  What makes them such immediately likable innovations?  None are gimmicks.  None are non-inventions sold as inventions.  None are needless, useless, modifications of existing lines, like the “dry,” “ice,” or “low carb” beer fads of the past.**  None are Blu-Ray versions of movies packed with extra director’s commentary no one would ever watch, designed solely to compel people to buy new media players.  Quite unlike that obvious garbage, these products satisfy.

Read the rest here.

Labels are devices for saving talkative persons the trouble of thinking. – John Morley (1838-1923)

Call them unwashed, naive, incoherent… Misfits, miscreants, and malcontents. The damaged goods of society… oblong pegs in a world of square and circle holes.

Call the Occupy Wall Street crowds, and their organized labor supporters, whatever you like.

Just don’t call them Socialists.  They’re not, and should you do so– Should you offer that knee-jerk characterization - one favored by so many middle class wish-they-were-rich Republicans, and Archie Bunkers - all you’re effectively saying is:

1. “I am a tribal thinker;” and
2. “I do not understand, practically, how Capitalism works.”

Because if you understand how Capitalism really works (a thing hardly difficult to apprehend), and if you’re able to think beyond the “Labor organizers and protesters are necessarily Socialists” narrative fed you by the Right Wing, you already see Occupy Wall Street, and any strike by organized labor, for what they are: Capitalists using their capital, as good Capitalists do, to get more capital for themselves.

Consider this question: What is Capital? Capital is an asset. Could be paper currency, commodities, debt, or equity. It could be anything. It’s whatever you’re able to use to create more wealth for yourself. Hence, Capitalism’s essential definition: The use of capital to create more capital.

Labor is just another form of capital. The unions, the protesters… these people don’t have access to large pools of currency, or commodities, or stock, or anything else they can leverage to create gains for themselves.  They have only their toil, and the power that comes with being able to shut down another capitalist’s business, or cause enough social upheaval through protests in the street to compel the government to give them more money.

Sound like some of our country’s most successful industries?  Of course it does. Defense Contractors, Wall Street, Telecommunications Companies, Big Pharma… Every one of these sectors does exactly what Occupy Wall Street is doing every day of the week – petition the government for stuff.  In the case of those industries, for rules and contracts that give them more money, more competitive advantage.  The only real difference between corporations requesting Government beneficence and Occupy Wall Street is the former does its bidding on K Street, hiring lobbyists to ply Uncle Sam for favors.*

Read the rest here.

Are you gonna bark all day, little doggy, or are you gonna bite? – Mr. Blonde, Reservoir Dogs

“This is beginning of a revolution!” “The oligarchs can’t stop us!” “The 99% are taking back the country!”

Nonsense. Occupy Wall Street is a dead end movement – a carnival of confused, frustrated misfits heading for the mother of all heartbreaks.

Not because they’re soft-headed hippies, Socialists, or touting a hopelessly un-American message.  Because their energy’s misspent, misdirected, and they haven’t a stitch of the commitment, or the appetite for risk, needed to succeed in flipping the status quo.*  No, the fatal flaw in Occupy Wall Street’s strategy, if that term can be applied to their efforts, is the fatal flaw in every other protest movement we see in America: All bark, no bite.

The One Percent these Ninety-Nine Percenters attack work in finance, government, and the bare knuckle intersection of industry and politics known as Crony Capitalism.  These people are nihilists, predators. People who view life as combat, every interaction a zero sum game. These sorts don’t bow to the government, and they sure as hell don’t bow to public opinion.  They long ago bought off all the regulators, all the Congressmen, and they own the mainstream media.  You can scream at them from the sidewalks until your vocal cords are sandpaper and They Won’t Hear a Thing. They will, rightly, snicker at you.  Because you are weak.  Because you are naive.  Because you believe you can petition some magical referee for fouls and handicap a rigged game with free throws.

Here’s a fact, my placard holding friends: The only time the One Percent listen – to anything – is when it impacts their bottom line.  Unless you’re costing them money, directly imperiling the system on which they’re dependent for their wealth, in the most immediate and painful sense, your rallies might as well be mime theater in Central Park.

The only hope Occupy Wall Street has of achieving its goals is to rob the banking system of some of the capital it needs to live…

Read the rest here.

Teachers unions, Wall Street Fat Cats, Bought and Paid For Politicians, Lobbyists, Entitlement junkies… The list is endless.  Depending on your political persuasion – right or left, as it seems the malleable masses are neatly divided - everybody has a personal boogieman to blame for the McDepression.

And each of these groups shares some blame, to a small degree.  But the real dividing line between the villains and the victims, if we must pit one sector of society against another, isn’t based on tax bracket, or government versus private employment, or any other of the other peripheral differences the media stokes to create wars of ideology.  The real dividing line is age.

Bernanke hasn’t propped up Wall Street with profligate easing because he’s an incorrigible Keynesian, or because lobbyists have pressured him on behalf of “The Goldman Sachs.” Congress hasn’t ignored unemployment among the young, instead focusing on diversions like the deficit, or wealth disparity, solely because its isolated from Main Street.  The real reason our government’s, and the Fed’s, policy reactions to the downturn have focused on propping up assets, rather than fixing unemployment, is:

Perhaps this was all apparent to you long ago, and if that’s the case, I apologize for travelling well trodden ground.  But for those of you who’ve not already reached this conclusion, here’s seventy-five percent of the reason the Fed, and Washington, are ignoring employment and focusing exclusively on asset inflation:

If asset values were to fall as they should have in a true free market collapse, an enormous percentage of the old and elderly would be rendered insolvent.  We would have a societal disaster on our hands.

And so we decided to screw the more resilient generation – the young – to protect the old.

Read the rest of this piece here.

Editor’s Note: You’re going to hear a lot of people talking about the possibility of social unrest in the United States if the economy craters into a double dip recession, as many economists predict it will. Here’s an intro to a piece I recently did on the subject over at ConstitutionalDaily.com which, for reasons I can’t fathom, I forgot to link here.*

Short the Revolution

‘Cause I’m hung up, on dreams I’ll never see. – G. Allman (1970)

I don’t believe in movements, at least not those started in this country.  Personally, the only I’ve known of any value are those dispatched into a toilet bowl.  Americans don’t do revolution well.  Hell, we don’t even really do it at all.  At least not anymore.

“What?” you might be thinking.

The Civil War?
Suffrage?
Civil Rights?

These weren’t revolutions.  They were decent people forced to drag Neanderthals among us into the Modern Age – to compel those with indefensible positions to treat their fellow humans with a modicum of dignity and respect that should existed from the first… that should been obviously, innately due. And so no, you can’t call these revolutions. These were national embarrassments.  Reminders that, as much as the country might progress, as much as it’ll flog the notion it’s a free and open society, there’s always some degenerate element with a hand on at least one of the big levers of power, seeking to re-impose medieval ideals on the masses.

But then, perhaps the masses need it.  Perhaps they’ve earned the screwing they’re getting.  Because really, if you look around – if you examine the reality TV with which we entertain ourselves, the narrow, self-obsessed nature of much of our youth, and the incurious oafishness that is Joe Sixpack, what can one conclude except “Yes, This is Old Rome”?

Bread and circuses for our entitlement addicted, seventy percent diabetic, gadget junkie underclasses.  Stuff their mouths with government cheese… pillage the public coffers while they finger their iPhones and surf pay per view.

But our common fools, the hopeless jelly-headed cattle of the Republic, aren’t the real problem.  They’re not the agents of change, and they’re not even the most deluded.  The loss of their effort in any push to fix what ails this country is
immaterial.  All they can do is follow.

No, the loss lies with those who think “I Can Win the Rigged Game.  I’ll be a Player”… The young and silly who don’t grasp, “This is broken and it needs to change,” but instead live by the creed, “I can manipulate this system to my advantage, and Win.”

Read the rest here.

_____

*As I was writing this note, the stories about Gadhaffi’s collapse started rolling across the cable news networks.  All the more reason, along with the possibility of Assad’s regime toppling, the media will be discussing “revolution” frequently in coming weeks. (These Arab revolutions will ultimately effect nothing more than the installation of new strongmen, of course, but that’s a point for another piece, and probably another website.)

Stockholm Syndrome (n.) – Feelings of trust or affection felt in many cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim toward a captor.

Perhaps you’ve heard about “Social Intelligence.”  Perhaps not.  Perhaps it sounds like a harmless geek concept like “The Singularity.” Or some scam sold by a marketer with a Twitter profile that reads “Web 2.0 Enthusiast! Online Marketing Consultant Specializing in ‘Social Intelligence.’”

Sorry, Percival, you’re qualified, and it appears quite talented. But our gumshoes at Social Intelligence have found this Facebook shot of you standing next to a man smoking a joint at a Furthur show during your sophomore year at Colgate.  This disqualifies you.  Zero tolerance.  I’m sure you understand.

If this product catches on, and it all but assuredly will, one of two things are going to happen. In the first instance, nobody’s ever going to be hirable again.  As in our political systems, corporations using social media background checks will be all but entirely staffed with milquetoast, vanilla robots. Armies of Mitt Romneys, corporate suites of congenital ciphers and bobble-headed Yes Men. All remnant fumes of creativity and innovation left in the stagnant McIndustries of this country will be snuffed out. Asia, probably a BRIC nation, or perhaps even Old Europe – any place adult enough to realize most of us (and usually the most talented of us) are closet libertines – will soak up all the talent.  We’ll be left with corporate hierarchies entirely composed of Men in Grey Flannel Suits.  And untold numbers of closeted freaks who were smart enough to stay off Facebook.

In the second instance, so much dirty laundry is going to be on display that screeners are going to have to set standards so low the only evidence disqualifying a prospective hire will be a Facebook post proclaiming his lifelong allegiance to NAMBLA or the American Nazi Party (“Interests: Crystal Meth (I don’t fuck around, yo),” “Favorite Book: The Satanic Bible“).  It’s entirely possible, if not likely, that when we merge the admissions of our real lives, where we’re honest in a fashion we’d never be at the office, with our career personas, we’ll be faced with having to admit aloud that Every Man is Two People.

Of course, everyone knows life is 50% acting – that we spend untold hours of every week behaving in an artificial way around people we’d never otherwise associate with, to accrue money.  But as much as we admit that to ourselves, as much as we all know it’s a baseline reality, we rarely talk about it.  And we never discuss it at work, for this obvious reason: To so breach that “fourth wall” admits a duplicity at the center of society’s operational mechanisms.*

And allowing the admission one acts through half of his waking hours raises the question, “Why do I put on the facade?” The response necessarily following that is, “I don’t know,” which then leads to this:

“I’m dropping the false front.  I’m going to speak my mind.  I’m going to question the next directive that doesn’t make sense.  I’m going to admit my politics.  I’m going to express myself, even if it’s at odds with my community, or my employer’s ‘brand.’”

Obviously, that result – having that discussion openly – is not the one the corporations swallowing our society want.  And that’s where the evil brilliance of something like Social Intelligence emerges. That type of monitoring service allows corporations, and the governmental authorities who feed them our money, to control not only who gets hired, but through fear cause the population at large to eschew criticisms of all economically and politically powerful structures.  The mere knowledge something like Social Intelligence exists will both cause people to think twice before writing something that doesn’t fit the Accepted Narratives, and keep people who’d question the Accepted Narratives away from the levers of power.  And away from audiences who’d hear them.

What are the Accepted Narratives?  We all know those very well.  That you should spend.  That you should extend yourself… That you should buy all the stuff the corporations sell.  Get yourself in debt to the banks.  Buy the American Dream… the expensive car, the expensive house, the granite kitchen you see on HGTV.  Get addicted to stuff, get larded up with debt you’ll pay the banks from cradle to grave.  Never sit back and think, even for a moment, “Isn’t life’s only real currency freedom?  Time?  Wouldn’t I be happier owing less?  Wouldn’t I be better off aiming to be free, rather than leveraged into a gilded prison?”

Author’s Note: And when you’re done reading that, read a rebuttal to it, “Orwell via Huxley (Counterpoint),” by ConstitutionalDaily’s Editor, BL1Y:

2. People Will Remain Lazy

Just as many of us are too lazy to adequately hide our dirty laundry from potential employers who go snooping on the internet, employers are also people, and will likewise be too lazy to make full use of all
the information out there.

Consider how few law firms bother to ask for an official transcript either when making summer hiring decisions, or when taking on new employees full time. What are the odds that if you made up a fake reference on a job application that anyone would ever notice? Would they even notice if you and your reference have the same phone number?

Some employers will be very thorough, but probably only in the same proportion as the employees who are thorough about keeping their Google footprint squeaky clean, which is to say not that many.  As the amount of information grows, the signal to noise ratio gets worse. Data mining becomes more time consuming and less productive.

The rest is here.