Now that the decision has been publicly announced, we are left to ponder the ramifications for Afghanistan, the United States, and our tarnished, deeply confused, hero in the Oval Office, who will travel to Oslo, Norway in a few days to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.  If he maintains his current trajectory, he will end up giving peaceniks a bad name.

Such irony.

The president’s decision will inevitably produce a rise in the number of Afghans being killed as a result of the war in their star-crossed nation. Furthermore, events associated with the troop increase will motivate more young men and women in the region to join the fight against the foreign invaders. For reasons that should not be that difficult to comprehend, the troop increase will also have the counterproductive impact of undermining morale among Afghan police and military units, who will have to bear the stigma of helping foreigners kill their relatives. The net result is that the people of Afghanistan are headed for much harder times.

They deserve better.

The president’s decision provides a different, but no less momentous, set of problems for U.S. citizens.  More of us will experience dismemberment and violent death, more families will be destroyed, more money that we really don’t have will be spent, we will be less safe, and our tattered stature in the world will continue its precipitous decline.

As far as the president is concerned, it pains me to say it, but the raw, unavoidable truth is that last night Barack Obama threw his presidency under the proverbial bus. Several factors are responsible: hubris, insufficient understanding of history and culture, personal insecurities, insufficient common sense, and imperial fantasies of the sort that have run erstwhile great powers to ground on more occasions than need to be specifically addressed here.

However this unnecessary, violent travesty works out over the tortured years immediately ahead, from this point forward President Barack Obama will be a wounded duck; a gifted, talented man, who was swept into office before he was ready for the job by the buoyant, joyous dreams of a generation hungering for change. All is not lost. But we need acknowledge that last night our hero came up tragically short. My heart is heavy today.

We deserve better.

The gated communities, exclusive resorts, private airports, country clubs, limited entry neighborhoods, palatial, urban safe houses, rural estates, isolated islands, and other such that they use to avoid contact with the rest of us are important components of the phalanx.

Members of the ruling class also tended to be loyally protected by the mass media minions (their employees) who shape public perception and opinion via the press, advertising, public relations, motion pictures, art, and political dialogue.

Educators routinely participate in maintaining the phalanx of protection provided the nation’s ruling class via pedagogical paradigms that conspicuously ignore the definitive ways in which the ruling class use the rest of us to facilitate their best interests. As they have since the Middle Ages, the mainstream religious establishment tends to accept and condone the current social order in ways that provide invaluable aid, comfort and protection for the ruling class.

Maybe most important, the ruling class is protected at every level of government protected by those who exercise definitive political power. There is no better proof of this truth than the current smarmy debacle taking place in Washington over the Obama administration’s proposed plans for health care reform.

Even though public opinion polls consistently confirm that a definitive majority of the nation’s citizens want a comprehensive health care system that includes a public option, and even though Democrats control the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, there is a good chance that entrenched interests favorable to the ruling class will ensure that the public interest is inadequately served.

The fact that people without health insurance, or affordable medical options, routinely die on the streets of the nation’s cities in great numbers each year, has little impact on the overall situation as regards the best interests of the ruling class versus those of the rest of us.

Thus, president George W. Bush spent much of his time in office promulgating policies beneficial to those who rule. His ruinous tax cuts are but one of the many benefits awarded to the wealthy and powerful who dominate public and private power in this nation. Moreover, it was patently clear throughout his eight years in the White House that he had little or no interest in those aspects of public policy pertinent to the best interests of average citizens.

Barack Obama has a different resume. Nonetheless, much of his time these days is being spent touting policies virtually identical to those of his predecessor. I might note the Obama administration’s approach to the current financial crisis in order to elaborate the point. The Wall Street financiers have been taken care of by the administration’s following through on the bailout strategy initially formulated by the Bush administration. Banks, corporations, and other “too big to fail” segments of the financial system, are being protected by the Obama administration in ways that are even alarming many Conservative Republicans.

All the while, members of the working class, and those trapped in the poverty required by the structure and normal operations of the economic system, are largely being ignored by the Obama administration. It might not be entirely appropriate to accuse the Obama administration of practicing “trickle down” economics. But such accusations are not entirely inaccurate.

Most of those who supported Obama’s improbable candidacy for the presidency hoped for much more. But now that the candidate of change is in office, the mantra emanating from the White House tends to be composed of Reaganesque “stay the course” platitudes. As a result, president Obama is conspicuously avoiding his opportunity to make meaningful history where the best interests of average citizens are concerned. But our problems extend beyond the fragile ego, timid policies, and vague legislative aspirations of President Barack Obama.

Our key problem is that we are being led by a class of people who don’t have a clue about which policies to pursue in order to provide sounder, healthier, balanced, productive lives for the majority of the people who reside in this nation. Drunk with power, wallowing in wealth of the sort that could only be envied by ancient kings, they are largely out of touch with reality as experienced by average citizens.

When they discuss major social problems such inadequate health care, endemic hunger, homelessness, criminally under funded educational systems, and the appalling lack of working-class jobs necessary for basic survival, it is obvious that the vast majority of them might as well be addressing unicorns and wizards. From the perspective of those who are more familiar with hunger and desperate prospects than are their privileged rulers , the casual, slovenly nature of their dialogue is startling, if not terribly frightening.

Desultory ruling class leadership is not new. As a matter of fact, weak, unfocused, self-centered leadership has been the group’s forte for generations. But in the past, the U.S. had more room for error, and the hard-working millions who compose the working classes generally proved sufficient productivity to nullify the inadequacies of those who consider themselves our betters.

The unified, global economy has changed the equation. Nation’s with weak, clueless leaders pay a steep price these days. And those that prove incapable of appropriately addressing their problems end up mired in massive, structural poverty of the sort commonly associated with Third World failed states.

Given this, president Obama’s recent trip to Asia should be seen as a bad omen regarding the immediate future of the United States. The loyal, see-no-evil mainstream press lauded the trip as just another instance of the U.S. president touching bases with adoring, subordinate nations situated on the periphery of the American Empire. But there was more serious business afoot than the neo-colonial fantasies of the obedient minions employed by the mainstream press.

From the Asian perspective, Obama’s trip was a form of official acknowledgement that the U.S. is in the process of losing control of its economic destiny. As a result, Obama’s most important efforts were focused on getting Asia’s expansively wealthy leaders to believe that the once highly admired, and soberly feared, economy has not run terminally aground.
In short, the U.S. president was on a begging mission.

If the Japanese, Chinese, and other wealthy Asians, decide that investing in the U.S. is not worth the trouble because of the nation’s faltering economic system, much of what we have come to know as the American-way-of-life will become as much a symbolic relic of monumentally incompetent leadership as is the former Soviet Union. President Obama was graciously received during the public segments of his Asian sojourn. But I am rather certain that he didn’t convince any of those who heard his deferential commentary that they need worry any time soon about the U.S. altering its surprisingly precipitous slide toward economic dependency.

Thus, it seems reasonable to me to conclude that it is just a matter of time until they pull the plug on the flow of funds that have helped keep the U.S. economy viable during recent decades. When and if this occurs, the consequences will be highly destructive for tens of millions of average Americans in ways that make the current recession appear mild in comparison.

Given this, it is clear that the time has come for the U.S. ruling-class to radically upgrade its overall performance pertinent to the nation’s social, economic and political destiny. Moreover, if its members are too busy perusing their stock options, trust accounts, tax breaks, foreign investments and expanding fortunes to radically upgrade their performance in ways which take the best interests of the rest of us into account, they need to step aside—because the rest of us can no afford the luxury of carrying them, while ignoring the massively inadequate nature of their destabilizing, clueless leadership.

Revolutionaries the world over compulsively study, and in minute detail, every significant movement dedicated to rapid change that has taken place over the past couple centuries. Particular attention is devoted to the struggles waged in Russia, India, China, Cuba, South Africa and Algeria. They also consistently examine smaller, less familiar struggles waged by organizations such as the Irish Republican Army, Shining Path, the Sandanistas, Tupamaros and Mau Mau.

This list is neither balanced, nor complete. But it doesn’t need to be. The key point to be understood is that the groups the U.S. and its allies are currently confronting in Afghanistan are prepared to do serious battle. As a matter of fact, it is probably true that many of the participants have been waiting and hoping for a battle such as this for a long time. Moreover, on the basis of lessons learned, I assume they are pretty much convinced that time and strategic circumstances are on their side.

Here are some of the reasons this is the case. Until now, two kinds of settings have been identified as essential for military parity, and possible success, when fighting armies of the sort currently deployed in Afghanistan by the United States and its allies. The first is a battle arena providing wide, dense remote swaths of triple deck jungle cover of the sort that exists in Viet Nam. The second is large cities with dense populations. Baghdad’s Sadr City comes to mind.

When used properly, triple deck jungle nullifies the strategic advantage of superior air power. The U.S. Government’s use of napalm, and other herbicides, during the Viet Nam conflict was not sufficient to the task of eliminating the advantages provided by such cover. Napalm notwithstanding, the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” remained intact, and functional, at least to the extent that those who depended on it were never left without viable opportunities to effectively conduct punishing military assaults unseen from the air.

The strategic military advantages that large cities with dense populations provide for irregular armies are relatively obvious. In order to defeat such armies, opponents must dismount their armored vehicles go forth into crowded neighborhood along paths and winding lanes too narrow for motorized vehicles larger than motorcycles.  This is necessary because attacking urban targets with carpet bombing is no longer acceptable, and any nation which might be foolish enough to pursue such a massively destructive approach to war will be universally condemned.  This was not the case where Hiroshima and Nagasaki were concerned.

But we are no longer living in the kind of lawless world that existed during World War II.  Wars must be fought in accordance with legally prescribed norms, and those who significantly violate them are subject to prosecution.  Thus, those who engage in war against irregular opponents of the sort in Afghanistan are forced to resort to chasing them through neighborhoods on foot.  This is a difficult task in and of itself.  But it is complicated in setting such as Afghanistan because the people  support local forces in ways that provide them incalculable advantages. This is what Mao Zedong was referring to when he asserted that “we (his soldiers) are fish, and the people are the sea.”

The chances that Afghanistan’s common people are going to withdraw support from the “fish” among them, and support the U.S. and its allies, are slim to none. Moreover, Afghanistan’s terrain provides another strategic military advantage to the “fish.”  This is due to the fact that much of the fighting must take place in remote areas at extremely high altitudes. There are few roads in many of the areas where the most intense fighting is taking place, and those that exist are commonly mined with explosive devices.  This is due in part to the fact that the remotely detonated roadside bombs that have proven effective against the U.S. and its allies in Iraq are now being used with devastating effectiveness in Afghanistan.

Given the situation, the U.S. and its allies are being forced to rely—to a great, and probably crippling extent–on helicopters to transport troops and supplies to critically important battle stations. But helicopters are particularly unsuited to fly at high altitudes because of the thin air. Those who have been closely watching the evolving battle in Afghanistan during recent weeks are aware of the growing number of allied helicopter crashes. Official assurances that the helicopters are not being shot down by hostile forces are obviously meant to convey confidence and resolve.

That’s understandable. But the brutal truth of the matter is that however confident and determined the U.S, and its allies prove to be, Afghanistan’s high altitude battle sites will remain critically dangerous for helicopters. I am certain that the leaders of Russia’s military forces understand this. But there is little evidence that the people in Washington, D.C. who are mulling over the possibility of sending another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan possess such understanding. This is highly unfortunate. Before he makes an enormous error that will severely cripple his presidency through its conclusion, President Barack Obama needs to understand what those who he seeks to defeat already know: more troops equal more targets.

It is time for the U.S. and its allies to begin the process of radically reducing their military presence in Afghanistan. New strategies, tactics and objectives are in order. Without them, failure is pretty much certain.

Obama is apparently a good egg. He has high hopes, and he is off to a relatively good start. He is a gifted speaker, and positively eloquent when he takes off on an inspired riff about some positively wonderful ideal. But we are still getting used to him as president. We are still, as it were, taking his measure, watching, questioning, comparing, critiquing. That’s what we do with new presidents.

But Barack Hussein Obama is vastly different from each of his predecessors in the oval office. As a result, it is taking us longer to adjust to his being in office than is normally the case. However much we seek to evade, deny, and move beyond, our unavoidable reality is that his race is largely responsible for the unusual complexity of the process of getting everyone comfortable with him as the nation’s preeminent leader. This is largely due to the fact that Obama’s election means that from this time forward everything involving race in the United States will be different. Thus, we are engaged in major social and psychological transformations. The Nobel Peace Price Committee has vastly complicated the process.

The key point to be understood is that Barack Obama is a new experience every day of the week for every one of us. Given that, if we had our druthers, we would have preferred to have had more time to get used to him before having to make the adjustment to seeing, and relating to, him as one of the world’s most highly regarded leaders. Up until now, this nation’s citizens have largely concentrated on what his election means to us. But his selection for the Nobel Peace Prize redefines our paradigm.

If nothing else, President Obama’s being honored in such an undeniably auspicious manner by prestigious foreigners is forcing us to acknowledge that he is as important to the rest of the world as he is to us. Moreover, we are also being forced to acknowledge that he is more honored, and more widely respected and accepted in much of the rest of the world, than he is here in the United States by his own countrymen and women.

Maybe most important, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has essentially called out the people of this nation regarding the matter of war. Needless to say, it is unseemly indeed for a recipient of the “peace prize” to be vigorously pursuing two wars. One might also reasonably argue that it is equally unseemly for the people led by a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize to be clamoring, as far too many of us are, for more military spending, more troops for combat, and more interminable killing on foreign battlefields.

Having been called out in a marvelously diplomatic manner regarding our outsized propensity to engage in bloody imperial episodes of the sort currently underway in Iraq and Afghanistan, my hope is that we will respond by forging peace in each setting as soon as possible. Only by doing so, will we justify the honor recently bestowed on the gentleman we elected to lead our government, and thereby ratify our long deferred dreams and aspirations for peaceful coexistence. In any event, however the situation develops, I should like to note that we are already deeply indebted to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for btilliantly nudging us in the proper direction.

The article also addressed her skill at crafting coalitions composed of disparate groups of legislators in order to get legislation passed. Her extraordinary skill at performing this aspect of her highly complex job is one of the primary reasons why members of the conservative establishment are perpetrating a massive smear campaign designed to beat her up, and tear her down.

I am pleased she is standing her ground, and proving more than equal to the task of inexorably transforming the nation’s domestic and international agenda, and thereby moving the nation ever so slightly, month after month. in a progressive direction.

As a San Francisco resident, I want to note that she is a local hero. More than any of her political peers, she represents the finest aspirations and traditions of San Francisco liberalism. Given that, the people of this city will return her to Washington to take care of business as long as she wants to go there and represent us in such an extraordinarily distinguished manner. That said; this post is about her smile.

I was having lunch at the French bistro Le Central a couple years ago with an artist friend from Beijing when I got the strong impression that someone was channeling my attention. I was engrossed in conversation at the time about the art of rapidly building a huge personal fortune in the Chinese art market, so I ignored the intrusive notion that I ought to relinquish my attention on the words flowing from the narcissistic lips of my vastly self-impressed companion.

But the urge to address the intrusive notion was so strong that I got my companion to pause for a moment by asking her to check her watch for the time. While she perused her watch, I looked up and began to scan the room from a point just behind my companion’s head. The first thing I noticed was an elegant woman, impeccably dressed, looking in my direction. I quickly scanned the room behind me in order to confirm the object of her attention. There was no one behind me.

She was looking directly at me, and the broad, friendly, smile on her face was meant for me. When it was clear to her that I knew she was smiling at me, she nodded warmly in my direction. I reciprocated with a smile, and a slight nod in her direction. She was Nancy Pelosi.

With that, she stepped forward, slid gracefully into a chair at a table, and began to address the gentleman accompanying her. My companion simultaneously announced the time, and then resumed her commentary regarding the alleged reasons why great artists get wealthy, and inferior ones don’t. Being a gentleman, I declined to note the possibility that, in her case, political patronage might be a more definitive source of artistic success than any of her alleged associations with genius.

In any event, for the remainder of the meal my mind floated back and forth between the excellent food, my companion’s comments, and that bedeviling smile flashed at me from the other side of the room.

I don’t even know Nancy Pelosi. But I have reason to believe she is a really nice lady.

My sense of obligation in this particular area has been heightened in recent weeks as a result of pondering the ramifications of some of the end or life issues raised by Conservative participants in the great health care reform debate currently mesmerizing large segments of the populace, elite and otherwise.   In response to their fervent remonstrations, I have been moved to think long and hard about the proper role of national health care systems.

The good things they should do are rather obvious, and all of them are more or less easy to achieve by a wealthy nation such as the United States.  Despite the protestations of Conservatives and ethically obtuse Blue Dogs, we can easily afford the kind of system we need. One of the most obvious indications that this is indeed the case is the fact that many nations endowed with far less wealth than the United States provide excellent health care for their citizens of the sort that would be appropriate in this nation.

Thus, the decision looming before us is not about the money, it is, instead, about morality and basic Human Rights.  As a result, we have wandered, almost aimlessly, into a confrontation with the necessity of making a major decision about what we are as a people, and what we might hope to become.  Moreover, the decision before us has ramifications just as important as those associated with the anti-slavery debate, or the one that resulted in women receiving the right to vote.

Health care for everyone, from cradle to grave, will fundamentally enhance the nature of human life in this society.  As a result,  it is imperative that those of us who support the cause, as the late Senator Edward Kennedy eloquently noted, need to be seriously engaged, and doing our level best to make honorable health care reform happen.

Having said that, I want to address some of the problems inherent in massive, nationalized health care systems that we need to anticipate, plan for appropriately, and hopefully avoid.  I should begin by noting that we in the United States who are alive today have experienced a golden era.  Despite widespread, endemic poverty, and all that the existence of such a problem implies, the nation as a whole has prospered for many decades in a relatively auspicious manner.

In addition, we have enjoyed a relatively stable political climate.  We have experienced assassinations, riots, and many kinds of violence associated with politics.  Nonetheless, the basic framework of government has remained stable, and the social fabric of that which has come to be known as “the American way of life” has evolved in many positive ways.  Most people probably agree that Barack Obama’s election to the highest political office in the land is proof that this is true.

As we move forward with noticeable, and uncharacteristic, uncertainty into this new century, we need understand that some better days are ahead.  But most certainly, and this is where the worst possible case thinking comes into play, we also need be aware that some unavoidable, troubled times lie dead ahead.

The key point to understand is that the health care system we need should be designed to withstand all the worst possible scenarios we can reasonably imagine.  For example, it needs to be designed such that it remains functional during times of massive economic dislocation.  It also needs to be designed such that it can withstand the inevitable pressures to do wrong, which will almost certainly accrue from any sort of extreme ideological swing to the right or left that may occur in the national political system.

During this relatively tranquil moment of domestic peace, and Liberal Democratic goodwill, it is proving relatively easy for most of us to focus almost entirely on all the good things associated with well-managed national health care programs.  Nonetheless, it is vitally important for us to understand during times of stress, turmoil and widespread paranoia such programs can be transformed into grotesque venues for exploitation, suffering and death.  Any cursory review of the ways in which such programs have been used to abuse citizens over time in countries around the world will reveal that there are good reasons for us to be cautious, and to insist on the establishment of strong protections for the rights of citizens.

We also need to devote much more attention at this particular moment in time to carefully examining all the ways in which the U.S. health delivery establishment has violated the rights of citizens in the past.  Such investigation will reveal that the infamous Tuskegee Experiment is/was the tip of an iceberg of abusive practices by health care personnel here in the U.S., who have perpetrated many oppressive, and probably illegal, abuses against U.S. citizen, including widespread, forced sterilization.

Such personnel also have a long history of conducting unconscionable, and sometimes deadly, experiments on unsuspecting, uninformed citizens.  In addition, the health care system has historically accommodated prevailing systems of endemic oppression involving caste, class and race in ways that continue to have devastating consequences on the lives of those who hail from targeted groups.   Given this, I am particularly concerned about the manner in which the death penalty is used here in the United States.  Separate and apart from that issue, I recommend that  increased critical attention be devoted to the role of health care personnel in the capital punishment industry.

Anyone doubting the validity of this assertion should take the time to read Medical Apartheid, by Harriet A. Washington.  Furthermore, I hope I am not the only one deeply concerned about the role that some U.S. medical personnel have played during the past few years in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other black sites around the world, in connection with the so-called War on Terror.

It seems reasonable to ask whether the U.S. medical personnel who are, or have been, engaged in such activities are disqualified from participation in the national health care program currently being constructed in Washington?  Under what set of circumstances might they be disqualified?  Before any new programs are established under the heading of health care reform, we need to know whether the civilian and military spheres of health care will ever be permitted to merge, and if so, in what ways?

Do medical personnel who move back and forth between the two systems experience ethical conflicts?  If so, what are they, and how might they be precluded from occurring in the first place?  This is the time to address such e issues, and we need to thank Conservatives for forcefully bringing them to our attention.  And in direct response to t valid concerns they have raised about potential abuse, I recommend that the program currently being developed in Washington include a provision that specifically prohibits government participation in end of life decision-making at any time, for any reason.

Finally, I want to reiterated my strong conviction that the best way for the nation’s political leaders to show their good faith regarding the high standards that should be associated with every aspect of the emergent national health care program is for them enroll the rest of us in the system that protects their health and well-being.

That’s what equal opportunity is all about.  Either they believe in it, or they don’t.

For better or worse, we, the people of the United States, are currently doing democracy as well as we possibly can. It is not perfect, but it seems to be working. The stakes are high, and the political maneuvers muscular. Some kind of bill will likely be passed in the name of health care reform, but the contents have not been codified.

The situation is fluid, and no particular coalition of partisans, including the one containing the President and all his supporters, can assume victory is theirs. As I watch the historic drama unfold, I can’t shake the escalating feeling that the dialogue is being conducted at too high a pitch.

People need to calm down. We also need to moderate our tone and behavior. Everyone needs to be more courteous. This can be accomplished without any faction losing face or advantage.

Having said that, I want to put my words into action by being more courteous myself. For example, I don’t intend from this point forward to be accusing anyone else of being an “avatar” of any sort. Moreover, from this point forward, I intend to devote more time and attention to understanding the opinions being expressed by those with whom I disagree.

In keeping with that practice, I take this opportunity to publicly acknowledge that Conservative participants in the health care reform debate are exercising a vitally important function. Given their ferocious opposition, they are forcing the Obama administration, and its supporters, to produce better ideas, more coherent proposals and better budget strategies.

Most important, Conservatives have raised several points that need to be taken more seriously by proponents of reform. This is particularly the case regarding a question repeatedly raised by Conservatives: what is the proper role of government regarding individual end of life decision-making. Like many of the Liberals and Progressives who have publicly commented on the matter since Conservatives began getting into everyone’s face with the question, I initially rejected this line of opposition as ridiculous, and somehow or another, intellectually underhanded. But after devoting close attention to the point Conservatives have been making, in sometimes clumsy and crude ways, I have come to believe that this issue needs to be addressed.

Decisions passed into law in the name of health care reform are going to fundamentally influence the character of life in this society. Moreover, any significant mistakes made now will almost certainly become institutionalized in ways that could end up harming us for decades. Given this, it does not take genius to understand why it makes sense for us to calm down and carefully articulate the proper role of government in regard to this aspect of life.

I suspect we will eventually come to understand that the establishment of a quasi-nationalized system of health care will also require the establishment of strong safeguards which ensure that citizens rights are protected as scrupulously as possible, separate and apart from budgetary considerations.

For now, I want to salute the august Conservatives who have done all or us a favor by forcing us to look more closely as this critically important issue.

In my next blog entry, I will address some of the most important negative ramifications of mishandling this matter.

In the interim, and in passing, I should like to note that this democracy stuff really is a lot like making sausage…

The scene shifts from troubled to disastrous as one rides into town along any of the major corridors leading into the downtown area where the big, gleaming gambling casinos sit in isolated splendor hard on the shores of the muscular Detroit River. The first signs of the massive decay underway in the heart of the city are the abandoned, boarded up businesses. Soon after one crosses the city’s perimeter, they appear on both sides of the street in growing numbers. For block after block, they are interspersed with greasy spoon restaurants, junk dealers, second hand stores and down market pawnshops. Garbage and trash line the streets in heaps that are frequently shoulder high. Weed-filled lots are so common, and so grossly overgrown, that it is difficult to reject the notion that much of the city is returning to bush of the sort associated with the African outback. Excepting stores whose primary product is “beer and wine,” there is no commercial presence in many neighborhoods.

Moreover, the distressing truth is that in virtually every section of town, burned out hulks of abandoned buildings dominate the setting. They come in all shapes and sizes, many of them old, and once distinguished. In a way, the burned out hulks that tens of thousands of people used to call home, have come to symbolize contemporary Detroit. Their smell of old, rotting, wood permeates the air in many neighborhoods. But it is not the most pervasive odor in Detroit’s neighborhoods. That dubious honor belongs to the sagging hulks of the abandoned, burned out homes that litter the city’s neighborhoods. The hulks of the abandoned homes have their own distinctive smell. It is a cloying, acrid, oily odor that clings to the insides of one’s nostrils in a nauseating manner, reminding one with every breadth of the terrible tragedy unfolding across the length and breadth of the once proud, confident city.

Detroit still contains streets that would be considered attractive in most major U.S. cities. But virtually all of them are located within two or three blocks from rat-infested neighborhoods that reek of human misery of the sort historically synonymous with abject Third World poverty. The two words most useful in describing the scene are abandonment and decay. Moreover, every indication is that the neighborhoods where most Detroiters subsist are experiencing an escalating rate of decline and deterioration, represented most dramatically in the form of collapsing homes, institutions and infrastructure. This thoroughly demoralizing process includes all of the social pillars that typically anchor communities, and channel their aspirations for personal and communal achievement.

People speak in slow, measured voices when they discuss the devastating forces of destruction that dominate their lives. This is particularly the case when they are reminded of the large number of schools, churches, businesses, and social service agencies that have been boarded up and abandoned during recent years. Their sense of abandonment is palpable, and it has come to dominate their troubled perspectives of the future. It is difficult to reject the strong impression that many Detroiters are victims of a municipal version of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder of the sort associated with warfare. Given the plethora of financial, social and political crises they are enduring with no hope of substantive relief any time in the immediate future, it is relatively easy to understand why this might be the case.

In addition, Detroiters are experiencing substantial stress due to the large, and growing number of alcoholics and drug addicts moving into the tens of thousands of abandoned buildings located throughout the city. Down and out, with little or nothing to lose, members of these particularly desperate cohorts are frequent sources of deadly violence. As a result, many of the city’s beleaguered residents have become wary and withdrawn.
They have good reasons to be wary. Detroit consistently ranks as one of the highest crime rate cities in the U.S. For example, in 2007 Detroit was ranked sixth in the nation for violent crime in cities with populations exceeding 500,000 residents. There were 368 homicides in Detroit in 2008, making it the nation’s murder capital for cities with more than 500,000 residents.

Over the past quarter a century, the city has averaged approximately one murder per day. The fact that 65-70 percent of the city’s murders are associated with illegal drugs provides a rough sense of the death grip that narcotics have on residents. When two teenagers recently shot and wounded seven junior high school students waiting for a bus to take them home from summer school, none of the scores of people who witnessed the violent assault dared to publicly identify the perpetrators. Talking to the police about such matters can easily produce a street-level death sentence.

Much time, attention and fiscal resources have been devoted to upgrading the Detroit Police Department during the past two years, but to little avail. Detroit is still one of the most dangerous cities in the nation. Moreover, there is little indication that the situation will improve any time soon. Rape, robbery and burglary continue to be major problems in most sections of the city. Extremely violent drug syndicates dominate the streets and commons areas in many neighborhoods. And given the police department’s inadequate efforts to cope with the situation, citizens protect themselves, as best they can, in their homes behind bolted doors and barred windows.

Crime is, of course, only one of the myriad reasons why Detroit’s population is collapsing. Fed up with the danger and uncertainty engendered by the omnipresent threat of crime, hundreds of thousands of Detroiters have packed their belongings and decamped. This is particularly true of the city’s white residents, who have left in such large numbers that few of them are left. Nonetheless, it should be noted that whites are not alone in the abandonment of the city. Middle-class people from every racial group are participating in an escalating wave of out migration. Few subjects upset Detroiters more than the rate in which the city is hemorrhaging residents. In 1950, Detroit was booming and the future looked as if it would be endlessly bright.

At the time, Detroit had 1.9 million residents, making it the fourth largest city in the United States. But the postwar optimism, and booming economic progress engendered by the expanding automobile industry, began heading south by the onset of the 1960s. With the passage of each succeeding decade, conditions in the city worsened. The net result is that Detroit has lost more than half of its population. Current estimates indicate that the population is approximately 920,000. Approximately 1,200 residents per month are leaving, and Detroit is now the eleventh most populous city in the United States. Moreover, experts are predicting that the city will eventually lose at least 400,000 additional residents.

Given this, city and state official are preparing for the time in the not too distant future when Detroit is expected to collapse as a consolidated municipality. Some suggest that the city will shrink into a relatively small enclave centered on the downtown area. Others suggest that major portions of the city’s land will be returned to agriculture. As might be imagined, desperate future prospects of this sort are having a devastatingly depressive impact on property values. This past April, there were 6,259 foreclosures in the Detroit metropolitan area, one for every 303 housing units. Bank repossessed properties are being sold in bundles of 100 or more, with each house selling for less than $10,000. Seeking to profit from the city’s misery, buyers are flying in from afar to take advantage of perceived opportunities. They include newly wealthy entrepreneurs from and flush groups of buyers from locations as distant as California, Australia and China.

The city’s remaining residents know that they are enmeshed in the vortex of a collapsing financial system. More than one of every five municipal residents is unemployed. And tens of thousands more will lose their jobs in the immediate future due to the imploding automobile industry. Constrained by a precipitous downward trend in municipal revenues, largely due to the catastrophic exodus of tax paying residents, the municipal government is incapable of reversing the rate and scale of economic collapse. Although their finances are in somewhat better shape than Detroit’s, nearby county governments are incapable of providing appreciable financial assistance. And the state government is nearly bankrupt.

Although the Obama administration is providing financial assistance to the automobile industry, it has no plans to address the broad array of problems currently sucking life and vitality from Detroit, and the scores of nearby communities that depend on it for their own financial viability.
Most important, there are many good reasons to believe that Detroit’s decline will not prove to be unique. For example, two decades ago Michael Moore’s film “Roger and Me” focused attention on the desperate plight of residents in Flint, Michigan in the wake of the closure of local General Motor’s production plants. Flint has not recovered, and in the interim several other major Michigan cities have declined so precipitously that they are in danger of replicating Detroit’s tragic collapse.

Finally, there are many good reasons to believe that Detroit’s desperate plight will be replicated in other major industrial cities across the nation. While there is time to prepare, the nation’s leaders need to turn their attention to the endangered fate of urban, industrialized America. If nothing else, they need to understand that if they can’t save Detroit, and similarly situated American cities; there is little or no possibility that they will prove capable of saving far off targets of imperial hubris such as Baghdad and Kabul.

The homeless people on my block are being forced to compete with young professionals for midday squatting rites. The young professionals are attracted by a food service business that sells them gourmet coffee and lunch from a waist-high street-side window. Each working day, they pour onto the block and gather in front of the window from whence they acquire food.

After obtaining food, the young professionals spread out along the block in search of spots suitable for sitting in the sun to eat while talking with friends and associates.  Because there are so many of them, they dominate the scene all along the block. Preoccupied with themselves, they seldom interact with those who do not belong to their demographic. These days, there are thousands of them in the neighborhood during work hours.

They are drawn here by high tech jobs associated with the graphic design segments of the computer industries. Many of the firms they work for are relatively new startups. But the foundations of their emergent, critical mass in this South of market San Francisco neighborhood was provided by the printing, photography, engraving and advertising firms which proliferated in this area prior to the emergence of Silicon Valley.

Many of the old firms have gone out of business over the years. But a surprising number of them evolved with the technology such that during the dot com era this section of town was known as “Multimedia Gulch.”  Young professionals constitute the primary work force for the high tech firms that lease the large, red brick warehouses located throughout this neighborhood.

Most of the warehouses were built as storage facilities during the era when San Francisco was an important seaport. The sailing ships and steamers are long gone, including the longshoremen who worked on them. But the buildings they used remain, including the large warehouses formerly used to store cargo.

These days, the beautiful, old warehouses are being transformed into expensive lofts, chic offices, and conspicuously informal, work sites for young professionals with high tech skills. As indicated above, such employees dominate the neighborhood’s public spaces during working hours. I emphasize the fact that their dominance is largely restricted to working hours because few of them can afford to live here.

Nonetheless, they are clearly well paid. And the quiet confidence they uniformly exude confirms their hope–that they will eventually acquire sufficient financial assets to reside in neighborhoods much nicer than this one.  It is, of course, all a gamble. A similarly smart, hip, confident, demographic flowed in and out of the same restaurants, coffee shops, bars a decade or so or ago as members of the dot com phenomenon.

Within a quarter mile radius of this block, they earned and spent hundreds of millions of dollars. Many of those who cashed out smartly before the crash, have moved on to nicer neighborhoods. But many remain, and some of them are the employers of the current crop of young professionals. Those who completely missed the dot com gravy train, deserted this scene long ago.

At the end of the workday, and the young professionals have departed, homeless people reoccupy the few spots along the block where the sun is still shining. Some of them use the respite to organize their incredibly full shopping carts. They are much less chatty than the young professionals, and also less prone to congregate in groups.

Many of the homeless people who gather here use the hours after dark to collect cans and bottles from trash containers and dumpsters. Others cop squats in comfortable spots beside buildings to down a few beers, or smoke a bit of weed.

With the arrival of daylight, they crawl out of their ragged, sleeping bags, scramble from cardboard blankets, and move off in anticipation of the arrival of the young professionals. One wonders what will happen to them when the full force of the gentrification tsunami currently transforming neighborhoods such as this one makes it impossible for them to be here, day or night…

The current crises threatening stability in virtually every sector of U.S. society should be all the proof sane and balanced people need in order to understand that we are hovering on a precipice between extraordinary achievement, and dramatic, unalterable decline.  Given that, we all need to remain alert and aware regarding all the best things we can achieve, individually and together, as we move forward with great uncertainty, into a largely unknowable future.

We also need to think long and hard about the serious financial, social, spiritual and political crises that plague our society.  Permit me, if you will, to cite our escalating chronic homelessness problem in order to elaborate the point.  It has been obvious since the late 1960s that homelessness is a serious, debilitating national problem.  And since that time, the number of people involved has grown exponentially such that chronic homelessness is common in U.S. cities.

That is why it is commonly referred to these days as a chronic problem, in much the same manner as are prison recidivism, violent crime, and constant warfare of the sort required to maintain the U.S. Empire.  Our use of the term “chronic” in relation to homelessness is important because when we use we are more or less acknowledging that the problem has become a standard component of normal life here in the United States. Therefore, the term may also be interpreted to mean that at this point we accept widespread homelessness as a problem that probably will not be eliminated.

Whether this admittedly bleak interpretation of the term “chronic” in relation to homelessness is accurate or not, we are still faced with the thoroughly depressing fact that our efforts to cope with the problem over the past 40-odd yeas have been totally inadequate.  Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars, and the implementation of numerous local, state and national plans and programs designed to eliminate homelessness, it is arguably a larger, more persistent, problem today than it has been at any time since the Great Depression.

Given this ignoble record of abject failure, we obviously need to adopt comprehensive, new strategies based on different thinking.  My best sense is that the search for new and better ways to deal with chronic homelessness needs to take place within context of a broad, national dialogue about the kind of society we consider normal and appropriate.  We are not engaged in such a dialogue at this moment, but we desperately need to begin the process.

Some may allege, and rightly so, that the recent presidential election, was a step in the recommended direction.  Unfortunately, it is already apparent that it wasn’t sufficient. Even though the new administration is more liberal than the one it replaced, it is already clear that homelessness, and other serious social problems are not at the top of the Obama administration’s agenda.

In any event, much of the failure associated with our efforts over the decades to eliminate homelessness, and other serious social problems, is due to the fact that we do not possess anything even remotely resembling a coherent consensus regarding the characteristics and priorities of a healthy, normal society.  Given the absence of such a consensus, we are depending on an uncoordinated, haphazard, collection of inadequate services to deal with homeless. None of it is expected to actually eliminate homelessness, or any other serious social problem.

Moreover, far too many of us have come to believe that overall societal health can be achieved in the midst of massive squalor, and largely unrelieved suffering, by millions of our fellow citizens.  It can’t. And far too many of those who currently dominate public discourse pertinent to the nation’s best interests are committed to policies, priorities and traditional systems of privilege which ignore this fact.  One way or another, we are all required to pay dearly due to their ignorance and biases.

In any event, the recommended dialogue should include participation by citizens from every sector of society, and the consensus achieved should be used as the blueprint for establishing priorities and policies designed to eliminate every one of the nation’s chronic social problems, including homelessness.

One of the most important issues that should be addressed via the recommended dialogue is the destabilizing amount of wealth that people at the top rungs of our society have amassed during the past two decades.  That wealth, and the national priorities which have assisted its accumulation, is inextricably linked to chronic homelessness, and other forms of endemic poverty experienced by millions of U.S. citizens.  Steps clearly need to be taken that facilitate a coherent, reasonable, and effective redistribution of wealth in ways that provide substantive economic enhancement of the lives of those at the bottom of our economic pyramid.

I am not advocating class warfare, nor am I interested in demonizing those who are “filthy rich.”  Wealthy people are not the problem; they are simply the beneficiaries of an economic system, which provides them more affirmative economic assistance than is good for the nation as a whole.

Healthy, appropriately balanced, societies provide employment options sufficient to make it possible for their citizens to live honorable lives via employment in meaningful jobs.   Healthy societies also provide comprehensive, social safety nets for citizens who are unable to work in order to ensure that they do not end up homeless and destitute. The fact that we will need to enact major reforms in order to meet these obviously minimal standards is indicative of the degraded nature of our social order.

In any event, in order to close the gap between the situation in which we currently find ourselves, and the one we must create in order to acquire a healthy, balanced social order, we will need to place more emphasis on human beings, and less on economic fixes designed to protect the wealth and privileges of the nation’s elites.

Unfortunately, there are few indications at this point that those who dominate the nation’s political and economic affairs are thinking in the ways necessary for us to implement appropriate reforms.

Moreover, there are even fewer indications that most of the nation’s political leaders are willing to acknowledge that absent the implementation of major social, political and economic reforms, a huge segment of the current middle class will become more personally familiar with chronic homelessness than most of them ever imagined.

As indicated above, we are in dire need of a massive makeover, and the sooner we get about the business of implementing one, the better off every single one of us will be.  Without such a fundamental reformation of the nation’s social, economic and political trajectory, we will almost certainly continue our precipitous slide toward the dark side of the abyss.