The Ghetto Idea Is Enjoying A Renaissance

I came across a disturbing story on NPR today. It describes how the poor can be conveniently put in a box and forgotten.

By divvying people into rich (good people) and poor (bad people) conservatives can justify their greed and their habit of looking at people’s vulnerabilities as business opportunities.

But outside of nailing them to make their profits, the rich conservatives would rather pretend poor people don’t exist. They’ve been lucky and they seek to insulate themselves from the unlucky people.

Many of the less fortunate have gotten that way after encountering the sharp edge of rich people’s business schemes or political policies. But it’s hard to blame the rich. They can’t help themselves. Maximum profit and minimum responsibility is their religion.

The rich conservatives would like to avoid all responsibility for other people. Other people are there to profit from but never to be helped or looked out for. They’d rather put them on an ice floe and send them out to sea.

This selfishness has penetrated down into the working middle classes, whose margin of financial security has gotten thin. People in the striving middle classes are taught to emulate the rich in order to achieve financial security. Join the club by rejecting the poor.

We’ve become a selfish, uncaring society. Recent policies make poverty inevitable, inescapable and perpetual. These policies have mostly emerged from conservative and libertarian circles.

They put it more gently, but the philosophy is basically this: “I’ve got mine, fuck you.”

Oh, and "Praise Jesus."

Kiss Up, Kick Down––April 2016 Edition

This week John Oliver takes his always funny approach to an investigation of credit agencies, those large slipshod corporations that tell potential employers and landlords that you are actually a different person with a criminal record. Why do they do this? Because employers and landlords––groups of people who are always richer and more secure than you are–– are worried that someone lower down on the food chain is going to rip them off when the proper order if things reserves the right to rip people off to folks like them. Besides, if they make mistakes about your credit history (and 25% of the time they do) it’s only happening to people poorer than they are, so who gives a damn? (A: apparently no one.)

What if poverty is actually profitable to rich people. It is, and this happens. Predatory capitalism prefers to prey on people too poor or too weak to put up a fight.

If you dare to fight back, if you dare to criticize the powerful, this sort of thing might happen. Some courageous citizen annoyed Florida Governor Rick Scott and he did this. By the way, has Experian or any of the other credit rating agencies ascertained that Governor Scott is not actually Bat Boy?

Why do rich people have such contempt for the poor? Maybe they have a warped view of reality. Maybe they think money grows on trees and some people are just too dumb and lazy to pick the fruit. Because for rich people money does grow on trees. For the rest of us that is just an expression. Evonomics takes a look at the perpetual money machine rich people live off of.

Are Saints Bad For Us?

Are saints really good for humanity? Or are they just salespeople for an afterlife they cannot truthfully guarantee? In selling the afterlife are they, in more practical terms, supporting the ungodly selfishness of the powerful here on earth?

Here's a good article about the problem of saints, published in the Daily Beast. (Lest you think the Daily Beast is somehow connected with the satanic beast of Revelations, the paper's name is borrowed from the satire of Evelyn Waugh, who was a profoundly Catholic author.)

Philosopher Susan Wolf wrote a more profound and influential essay on this conundrum in 1982.

Christopher Hitchens (who had his own contradictions) subjected the next saint-in-waiting to this harsh accounting in 2003.

As unhelpful as she could be to the earthly human being, she was far from the worst thing that could have happened to the people she helped. She could have been better, or worse. This is where pure ideology parts company with practical good, with help that actually helps.

Catholic as she was, there is something dolefully Calvinist about the helping done by missionaries. Calvinists put the highest priority on an afterlife not on this one. Self denial is the holiest way to live. Meanwhile the whole idea of delayed gratification is so harmful to the world’s poor. The rich delay satisfying their appetites and are guaranteed immense gratification at a later date.The poor's delayed comfort accrues immediately to those who live in luckier places and circumstances, it bolsters their profit margin, it enhances their market advantage, and their piddling donations to the global mission absolve their far greater selfishness and the way they rig the global economy to keep billions conveniently in poverty. This is why Mother Teresa was the perfect saint for our capitalist world.

Plutocrats Explain What's Wrong With Working Americans

Jeb Bush’s unending cascade of clueless tactless and gormless remarks rubbishing working people has been unfairly ignored because of Donald Trump’s far more impressive and much louder tsunami of clueless tactless and gormless remarks about every group that doesn’t include billionaires.

To even things out, here’s Jeb in his own words...

"Americans need to work longer hours” ~Jeb Bush (And some feedback from Americans, via the Guardian)

“The American economy needs more immigrants because they’re more fertile.” ~Jeb Bush (There’s been less feedback on this one, possibly because people are laughing...via the Washington Post)

That’s enough Bushism for one meal. There are commentators who are less gormless than Bush. Here are a few:

Robert Reich writes about the biggest myths about poverty.

Paul Krugman writes about the myth that Americans are “living on welfare”. You know, moochers.

Interesting fact: most of those lazy selfish folks living off food stamps are white and living in Republican districts. (Via a recent report in TIME magazine)

The whole Trickle Down Philosophy that has shaped post Reagan America has created enormous prosperity among a tiny percentage of very rich people ––you know, the people who own for a living––and an epidemic of anxiety among the rest of us who work for a living. (Courtesy of the Atlantic)

Even in the Magic Kingdom life is getting very mean. Before they fire you they ask you to please train the imported worker who will be replacing you. (From the New York Times)

In case you’ve bought the propaganda about Climate Change being a “good thing,” consider this (and it’s fairly big): Scientists are now predicting mass malnutrition because of the warming climate. (Via the Washington Post)

Tricking The Poor Makes Surefire Television Entertainment

CBS has come up with a surefire ratings winner. Every American enjoys watching poor people squirm! Everybody finds tricking the poor very amusing! Fun for the whole family!

(Read the story in New York Magazine)

The BBC has something similar going in in David Cameron’s UK, where mocking the poor is a popular sport. This "reality program" is being compared to the Hunger Games. I guess fiction is reality.

(You can read this story in The Independent)

(The BBC defends its programming decision, but the Guardian doesn't buy it.)

Desperate people will never disappoint! They’ll do anything, degrade themselves in all kinds of unexpected ways, and all for our entertainment!

It’s like junior high, where there were always a few creeps who enjoyed teasing the special needs students. Those same creeps seem to have found a home in network programming.

Kiss Up. Kick Down. The Series Continues.

The richest man in Congress explains that poor Americans are the envy of the world. (From CNN Money)

Being Rich is a Game. (From Gawker) (Several years ago I considered turning The Rule of Accumulated Advantage into a board game. I realized only rich attractive people whose parents have powerful connections would want to play it, and decided to price it at $5 million dollars per game.)

This pundit at Jacobin Magazine seems to be looking at the inequality problem with his head turned sideways. Interesting though.)

The Republican Congress wants to tell poor people what they can and cannot eat. (from Wonkette)

Billionaires are advising poor working people to learn to live like the poor people they are. (BlueNationReview) (The rich are so tactful.)

Does this surprise anyone? (CommonDreams reports how the rich don't care about jobs.)

At a certain point, the rules that favor the rich enable them to levitate, tax-free, obligation-free, no strings attached. (from FirstLook)

The rich meanwhile get us to pay their costs of doing business. (From The Guardian)

Really bad ideas that favor a small fraction of Americans (if any) can gain traction if there is a lot of money behind them.

For Profit Prisons are a huge growth sector. (from Alternet)

The rich don't experience failure like the rest of us. (The New Republic) Again, they're immune.

Is it all of our own making? (Robert Reich thinks maybe it is.)

One thing that makes the rich eligible for all the breaks and the perks is this Republican mythology that tells us they're simply better at everything, more competent, more hardworking, more careful, wiser, more honest. And when their party rules the economy it does better. Well, it ain't true. (from Salon)

The Rule of Accumulated Disadvantage

The rule of accumulated disadvantage causes one disadvantage to kick other disadvantages into play, compounding them and leveraging them against you.

Voting is one advantage all Americans are supposed to be born with. They get the vote at adulthood and surrender it at death. All equal. But as Orwell’s pig observed, all may be equal but some are more equal than others. It’s the mission of one of our political parties to suppress the vote, because a full electorate would not vote for them. Imprisoning the poor is one method. Discouraging the poor is another. Misleading them, threatening them, miscounting them, gerrymandering them. Lots of ways of cutting the poor voter out of things. Killing them is seldom spoken about, but deliberate policies can ensure that the poor will die young.

This recent study shows how earlier deaths among black voters decreased black turnout by a million in 2004. A million more living voters of color would have changed the outcome in several recent elections. In a good way. And poverty doesn't kill without careful instructions in terms of public policy. Industrial poisons seldom rain on Bel Air or Boca Raton. The Republican Party is damn sure the medical profession will never look at gun deaths as a public health problem. All these poisonous policies flow from the election of politicians who don’t care about the poor because they are employed by the rich.

There are maps of life expectancy in Chicago and Los Angeles and elsewhere that have a strong race and poverty correlation. Experts are not ignorant about this but the public is.

Republicans, of course, prefer to look on the bright side: if poor people die earlier they cost less. In their philosophy if you ignore a problem it doesn’t cost any money. And if it doesn’t cost any money it doesn’t exist.

Race does put you in a safe box or an unsafe one. Race can mark you as less equal than others. Even if you are a law enforcement professional, if you are black you are the enemy, you are the suspect.

Meanwhile, Republicans, acting on the beliefs of their billionaire clients, do whatever they can to limit government spending, especially that spending not directed toward large corporate contractors but directed at alleviating poverty and its associated ills. Fixable problems like poisonous environment, poor health, poor education, poor food, prejudiced policing and justice. Republicans would like “Charity” to handle all that “stuff.” They love charity, but hate government spending, which requires taxes.

Speaking of taxes and charity.

Billionaires get enormous tax deductions for “giving to charity.” What exactly is a charity? It’s whatever the billionaire wants to give to. Like an exclusive club for their Princetonian children to eat and entertain in.

College Dystopia

How do you define "dystopia"? OK, it's the opposite of utopia. What if some of the people living in it think it is utopia, perfect as far as they're concerned.

What would American colleges look like in a dystopian model? Like this:

Elite students are jetted around the country by colleges and given luxury living while enrolled…

(The Guardian posted an article about that very thing. All students are equal, but some students are more equal than others, as Orwell would have put it.)

Meanwhile professors work at adjunct level and live on public assistance...

(SLATE posted a story today describing how many working professors and instructors at college level, college graduates in other words, with degrees and abilities, are actually living in poverty.)

A few decades ago such a picture would have made us sick. But we just file it with all of the other stories about the dystopia America has become.

There are many ironies here. The most profound irony is that the party that hates elites has dedicated itself to creating them and insulating them. That would be the Republican Party. Irony evolved into hypocrisy some time ago.

Killer Business Model

Excellent article in the Washington Post about how furniture rental companies gouge three times the value of the furniture from people who can't afford to buy. This is called the Genius of Capitalism.

Faced with a need or a shortage, do you set about filling that need, that shortage, or is your first question how to exploit the shortage to the fullest advantage?

Is human vulnerability something to take advantage of?

Is poverty a profit opportunity for your company, the deeper the poverty the greater the profit?

Is someone else's helplessness part of your business model? When you see helplessness do you feel sympathy or greed?

Is helpfulness a naïve and foolish custom? Is it unbusinesslike to include generosity or humane consideration in your business plan?

Let’s imagine you manufacture flotation devices, lifesavers they’re called. It costs money to make them, so you sell them for a price. Naturally.

But here’s a business model: you provide flotation devices to lifeguards. Call these lifeguards sales agents and pay them a small commission. Then when someone is drowning don’t have your agent throw them a buoy free of charge, let the market set a price. Dicker with the floundering. Or rent the device to the person fighting for his life, loan the use of the buoy at so much per second. They’re really eager to rent, so set that rate as high as you can. Plus interest, compounding every second.

This is what’s known as a killer business model.

Outrage Over the VA

Reading about the spreading outrage over the VA systems failures and the coverup of said failures ought to make us think.

It sounds a lot like the school systems where test cheating was going on. Wrong, yes. But might it also be a logical response to impossible standards, huge demands and reduced budgets? The VA and our vets have both been victimized by the budget cutting mania. So have all parts of the public sphere, schools, roads, regulatory bodies like the IRS and FDA and SEC and EPA, all have been put on a crash diet. But their jobs have gotten bigger.

It's illogical to raise standards and reduce budgets at the same time, but this kind of magical thinking is far too common these days. It's part of our national love affair with businessthink. It's always about getting more for less, an impractical idea to begin with. Running engines without oil isn’t good for those engines, but it saves money in the short run. There are consequences. We shouldn’t be surprised when it ends in catastrophe..

We had an unfunded, off-budget, poorly audited, unnecessary war, waged with insufficient manpower and poor planning. It sent men and women with insufficient body armor and inadequate equipment into a catastrophe that should have been foreseen and might have been avoided. (The pre-planning was more about the oil than about the people.) The whole disaster was then covered up, the consequences ignored and denied, the human damage hidden and the liabilities passed on to the taxpayer or onto the veterans who were permanently harmed, and onto the next president. The costs were not fully disclosed until Bush had left office, and then the payment of those costs was blocked by the Republican side of Congress who had helped him launch the war.

This is a fiasco but we shouldn’t be surprised by it any more than we ought to be surprised by an unrepaired bridge falling down or an unprepared student failing an unreasonably rigorous examination.

The VA is as full of flaws and insufficiencies as our infrastructure. Of course we blame the infrastructure. We should blame the jerks who shifted the necessary dollars into tax cuts to billionaires for the past fifteen years.

It is a religious dogma among Republicans that no problem exists unless it costs money. So if you ignore a problem it doesn’t exist. Ignore the VA’s need for funding and there’s no problem. Road repair spending is the problem, not the holes in the roads or the fallen bridges. Healthcare spending is the problem, not the poor health of Americans. Poverty programs are the problem, not poverty. Paying people a living wage is a problem, so cut their pay and there’s no problem. If poor people could just hide themselves we would have no poverty at all. If maimed veterans could suffer quietly in a dark room the consequences of this stupid war would stop embarrassing all of us, but more importantly it would stop costing taxpayers money, especially the wealthy taxpayers who complain to their Republican proxies. They are the ones we most need to take care of, aren't they?

After a war we should expect a rising cost in veterans’ care, but damned if Republicans will agree to pay for that care. Costs are the problem, not the lack of a leg or the serious unending repercussions of brain injuries caused when a soldier was blown up in an insufficiently armored vehicle. So they cut the costs; problem solved. That is the contradiction faced by many government departments. It’s not wasteful to give enormous tax cuts to billionaires so they can own a dozen luxury homes, but it is apparently wasteful to fund the VA sufficiently.

It’s false economy to calculate efficiencies with a bias against the people who do the work, but that is the new religion in this country. Whatever saves billionaires a dime is efficient. Whatever supplies necessary care or service or pay to someone at the other end of the income scale is automatically inefficient because it subtracts from the billionaire’s tax savings. Hell, most of those billionaires evade taxes already. We pay for them.

Americans are angry at the wrong people. It isn’t the first time.

The West Virginia mining country is our ugly past and our ugly future

Poverty hasn’t come back in West Virginia because the War on Poverty failed. It’s back because the Republican Party worked for the past 30 years to repeal everything FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and yes even Nixon put in place to make lives better for working people in America. The Republican Party decided their sole clients were the very rich. Oh they paid lip service to the white racist vote, but most of the Republican policies were directed at depriving and disempowering all working people, white, black, Hispanic, everyone who worked for a paycheck. The Republican Party has diminished the lives and reduced the power of everyone who works for a living and enhanced and protected the wealth and the power of people who own for a living.

Here's an article from today's New York Times that discusses how hopeless lives are in West Virginia.

This is what the bad old days looked like before the progressives (Republicans and Democrats both) wrote workers’ rights into law. An ugly violent world of private corporate armies that prevented workers from organizing or demanding their rights. Few Americans have ever heard of the Ludlow massacre.

Why? Mostly because textbook companies don't dare offend the wealthy who perpetrated this horrible crime. Life was awful for working people a hundred years ago.

The mining companies owned not only the jobs but the houses miners lived in and the stores they were forced to shop in. When miners in Colorado tried to unionize the mining billionaire John D. Rockefeller Jr. sent in hired thugs who burned the miners out of their camp and then mowed them down with machine guns when they tried to escape the flames. It changed how Americans saw the working poor.

This is the future the 1% want. This is the future that the Republican Party is determined to give us. Rich and poor divided, with very few living a middle class life.

The Rich Live Larger And Longer Than You And Me

I read an interesting article at the Atlantic and it got me thinking...

The core philosophy of the Republican Party these days is that a problem only exists if you spend money on it, meaning tax dollars, meaning THEIR tax dollars.

If you stop spending money trying to solve poverty (or the healthcare crisis) the problem ceases to exist.

In the mind of the Republican Party, poverty is only a problem because solving it costs rich people money they’d rather spend on another home in another tropical tax haven or on another corporate takeover.

If you stop spending money to alleviate poverty or the ill health of poor people the poor will go away and die and solve the problem more cheaply and therefore more efficiently.

As Scrooge said “Let them die then and decrease the surplus population.”

Why the American public doesn’t find this repugnant is a mystery until you realize that vast wealth also buys a lot of PR, a lot of network time, or, in the case of FoxNews, a whole network. (The Koch Brothers now hold a partial veto power over programming on PBS because they help fund it.) The .1% own most of the media.

The rich are not necessarily fascists, but they benefit from fascist policies so they often aren’t inclined to oppose them. It takes time out of their leisurely existence. Those who donate to liberal and progressive causes are to be applauded. They are acting against their own financial interests, just as the rural poor are voting against theirs, but what use are so few in the face of so many?

There is a meme going around that suggests that poverty is caused by the poor. You hear this on right wing talk radio.

Oddly enough, it’s true. In a way not quite captured by the right wing meme.

The poor who listen to right wing radio and watch FoxNews and nod obediently are helping deepen their own poverty and ignorance and ill health, by cooperating with the rejection of ObamaCare and by disbelieving science, by obeying their masters, by voting for Republican candidates who perpetuate their powerlessness. They are not stupid people, even though they are behaving stupidly. They are ignorant, not stupid. They may not even be ignorant, just ignorant of their predicament. They have been conned and are now invested in that con game, too embarrassed to admit it, because admitting you were tricked is harder than losing what was stolen from you in the process.

You have to reach a very low point before you admit you did something dumb, and, luckily for the Republican Party, most of the poor people who vote for them would rather die first.

Rich Vs. Poor

Keep the poor busy trying to stay alive and they don’t have time to keep you from robbing them.

Here's an interesting NPR story about this syndrome. It's real and has become the dominant living model in the U.S. Poverty makes us easier to impoverish.

This is why people who need help to stay alive are asked to jump through hoops and pee into cups. Workers who see the many who are worse off are far too busy keeping their bosses happy to consider asking for more. It’s too risky and who has the time?

And what do the rich get out of it? Unhappiness they can’t buy a cure for. Scientists have been studying this. All these unhappy rich folks have is the satisfaction of knowing they’ve made thousands or millions of others more miserable than they are.

Silly, isn’t it? It’s worrisome that the most powerful individuals in our society are irrational. Perhaps insane. Maybe even dangerous.

There is a rhetorical device called reductio ad absurdum. Taking the idea to its absurd limits. Just for the sake of argument. Or for shutting argument off.

One person making more in five minutes than his average worker makes in a year? That is absurd, but it’s become commonplace. And it isn’t enough for the person who’s making more in a day than his secretary will earn in a lifetime. He wants more. He earns a decent annual income on one visit to the bathroom. His workers have to punch out to use the bathroom. His retirement package will probably include free dry cleaning for life and lifetime use of an office boy for whatever he likes office boys to be used for. Firewood perhaps.

When money or power or validity is reduced to absurd levels in the large masses of people and increased to absurd levels in a handful of lucky ones at the top, absurd things happen. Things are bad now, but they could get worse. Most of us are worthless, in the current valuation, and a few people who own sweatshop factories and are able to get the taxpayer to feed their workers for them are gods. Absurd.

Then anything becomes possible. When your lords and masters can do what they wish with you, you need to worry about what they are wishing for. Especially because power and wealth makes people insane. Consider what people tell us about the supreme ruler of North Korea. This story may not be true, but, as the Daily Telegraph says, impossible things are happening all the time.

Why Do We Criminalize Poverty?

There's been an ugly development in Portland, Oregon. But we live in an age of ugly developments. Our worst instincts are being worked on every day. There's a major network devoted to exploiting our fears and hatreds. So we shouldn't be surprised to read that a masked avenger in Portland, calling himself "Artemis of the Wildland", is urging his neighbors to target the poor and the sick. One of the targets responded in the pages of The Guardian.

People who get aid have to take delivery through a crowd of hateful stares. Why do we do this? We are instructed to, certainly. Goaded into it by right wing media. (Watch "The Five" or "Fox N Friends" on FoxNews and you realize the nastiest bullies and mean girls of your childhood now earn six figure incomes on TV.)

But there must be something in us already. A lot of Americans are dominated by their "lizard brain", the autopilot deep in their heads that reacts to fear and loathing, the part of the primitive brain that caused ancient peoples to stone outsiders and abandon infants if they had red hair.

In difficult times that reptilian way of thinking re-emerges and there are powerful individuals that like to encourage that mindset because primitive, fearful, hateful people are easier to control. They are less likely to help their peers, less likely to organize into unions and more likely to follow corporate authority. They are the ones who wore brown shirts in 1930s Germany. We could call this lizard brain "the fascist brain".

Why don't we think differently in hard times? Some do. Many hardworking and luckless people are kind, generous, helpful, and nonjudgmental. Poor people, in fact, tend to be more selfless and generous than rich people. Which also means they tend not to judge the rich negatively for the enormous wealth shift these past few decades from working people to those who own for a living. Maybe that needs to be taught too...

Instead of stigmatizing poverty, criminalizing and punishing it, we ought to stigmatize unearned wealth. Why do we think badly of people who need food stamps even though they are working hard? Why not stigmatize the Walton family members who own 40% of the nation's wealth? They earn their billions off the labor of minimum wage employees, then they instruct them to apply for government assistance to feed their families. That kind of behavior takes more gall, more ugly nerve than applying for foodstamps after a long day's work in a warehouse.

Maybe we should stigmatize the corporate CEOs who accept large government subsidies and pay no taxes, who then give themselves billion dollar bonuses... Maybe we should stigmatize the Republican congressmen who vote against hurricane relief aid for the east coast but demand flood aid for their districts. Maybe we should stigmatize the Republicans who have voted 42 times to defund the Affordable Care Act (calling it socialist when it isn't), while accepting totally free socialist healthcare from the US government themselves.

Before we stigmatize the working poor or the sick and elderly who are unable to work, maybe we should cast a critical eye at the extremely rich who are subsidized by millions of average working taxpayers. These creeps spend their extra millions (freed up by our public subsidies) telling the rest of us who to hate and who to attack. They deserve that hate more. Want to know where our broad prosperity has gone since 1980? Look at their offshore bank balances. There are people we should be angry at and it isn't the poor.

The Poet of the Commons

George Monbiot wrote a clear, thoughtful essay in the Guardian about our common lands and common life and about the poet of those things, John Clare. Worth reading.

And Clare is worth finding and reading too. He was a poor man, and therefore worthless to middle class eyes. He was a simple man, so he was an easy mark, easily exploited, credulous, trusting, easily led, like a lot of ordinary people these days. We have a habit of trusting that "better people" know better, not smarter people but better as in richer, as if the easiest way to judge someone is trustworthy is to see how much they are worth.

I wouldn't vote for a John Clare for president or ask him to manage my pension fund, but it's worth listening to him, reading him. In a lot of ways, important ways, he is us. Us as we were. Us as we are becoming: vulnerable, homeless, herded, noting our precious world as we are losing it.

Here's a poem of John Clare's.

THE NIGHTINGALE'S NEST

Up this green woodland-ride let’s softly rove,
And list the nightingale - she dwells just here.
Hush ! let the wood-gate softly clap, for fear
The noise might drive her from her home of love ;
For here I’ve heard her many a merry year -
At morn, at eve, nay, all the live-long day,
As though she lived on song. This very spot,
Just where that old-man’s-beard all wildly trails
Rude arbours o’er the road, and stops the way -
And where that child its blue-bell flowers hath got,
Laughing and creeping through the mossy rails -
There have I hunted like a very boy,
Creeping on hands and knees through matted thorn
To find her nest, and see her feed her young.
And vainly did I many hours employ :
All seemed as hidden as a thought unborn.
And where those crimping fern-leaves ramp among
The hazel’s under boughs, I’ve nestled down,
And watched her while she sung ; and her renown
Hath made me marvel that so famed a bird
Should have no better dress than russet brown.
Her wings would tremble in her ecstasy,
And feathers stand on end, as ’twere with joy,
And mouth wide open to release her heart
Of its out-sobbing songs. The happiest part
Of summer’s fame she shared, for so to me
Did happy fancies shapen her employ ;
But if I touched a bush, or scarcely stirred,
All in a moment stopt. I watched in vain :
The timid bird had left the hazel bush,
And at a distance hid to sing again.
Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves,
Rich Ecstasy would pour its luscious strain,
Till envy spurred the emulating thrush
To start less wild and scarce inferior songs ;
For while of half the year Care him bereaves,
To damp the ardour of his speckled breast ;
The nightingale to summer’s life belongs,
And naked trees, and winter’s nipping wrongs,
Are strangers to her music and her rest.
Her joys are evergreen, her world is wide -
Hark! there she is as usual - let’s be hush -
For in this black-thorn clump, if rightly guest,
Her curious house is hidden. Part aside
These hazel branches in a gentle way,
And stoop right cautious ’neath the rustling boughs,
For we will have another search to day,
And hunt this fern-strewn thorn-clump round and round ;
And where this reeded wood-grass idly bows,
We’ll wade right through, it is a likely nook :
In such like spots, and often on the ground,
They’ll build, where rude boys never think to look -
Aye, as I live ! her secret nest is here,
Upon this white-thorn stump ! I’ve searched about
For hours in vain. There! put that bramble by -
Nay, trample on its branches and get near.
How subtle is the bird ! she started out,
And raised a plaintive note of danger nigh,
Ere we were past the brambles ; and now, near
Her nest, she sudden stops - as choking fear,
That might betray her home. So even now
We’ll leave it as we found it : safety’s guard
Of pathless solitudes shall keep it still.
See there! she’s sitting on the old oak bough,
Mute in her fears ; our presence doth retard
Her joys, and doubt turns every rapture chill.
Sing on, sweet bird! may no worse hap befall
Thy visions, than the fear that now deceives.
We will not plunder music of its dower,
Nor turn this spot of happiness to thrall ;
For melody seems hid in every flower,
That blossoms near thy home. These harebells all
Seem bowing with the beautiful in song ;
And gaping cuckoo-flower, with spotted leaves,
Seems blushing of the singing it has heard.
How curious is the nest ; no other bird
Uses such loose materials, or weaves
Its dwelling in such spots : dead oaken leaves
Are placed without, and velvet moss within,
And little scraps of grass, and, scant and spare,
What scarcely seem materials, down and hair ;
For from men’s haunts she nothing seems to win.
Yet Nature is the builder, and contrives
Homes for her children’s comfort, even here ;
Where Solitude’s disciples spend their lives
Unseen, save when a wanderer passes near
That loves such pleasant places. Deep adown,
The nest is made a hermit’s mossy cell.
Snug lie her curious eggs in number five,
Of deadened green, or rather olive brown ;
And the old prickly thorn-bush guards them well.
So here we’ll leave them, still unknown to wrong,
As the old woodland’s legacy of song.
John Clare

Kicking the Poor: An American Pastime

Barbara Ehrenreich has a trenchant and disturbing piece in this morning's Guardian. It is a well-reported piece, thoroughly footnoted and linked to sources of further information. So why is it labelled "opinion" rather than published as fact? (And why did Ehrenreich have to cross the Atlantic to get it published?) Fact editors have to be extra careful not to lay blame. Fact reporting is one more thing under the thumb of the advantaged. Journalism, which once took appropriate pride in discomforting the comfortable, is now especially careful not to offend. It's one more advantage in the powerful system of Accumulated Advantage and Disadvantage.

This journalistic caution has increased as the comfortable class has narrowed and grown comfortable beyond the dreams of avarice. Their comfort must not be disturbed, and reining in these systems that prey on the poor might result in the comfortable having to pony up their rightful share of public costs. The rich might have their puny taxes increased if we stopped hitting up the poor for the costs of being poor.

The bizarre injustices Ms. Ehrenreich describes here are positively Dickensian, but in a time so rich with injustice, too many of our best writers devote themselves to chronicling the struggles and ennui of the moneyed, the leisure classes.