The Shift From Here To There

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

How many of you remember driving a stick shift? Recall how that feels, to disengage from forward motion, pause just the slightest moment in almost indiscernible nothingness and then click into the next gear, feel it grab? Our progress as a planet, a nation, a people has felt like that to me for a while now, as if we’ve tried to climb a long hill in fourth gear, slowing to a near standstill while we wait for some giant hand to reach for the gear shift.

Soon, quick as all that, a nearly imperceptible click will send us spinning forward, still too slow to manage the climb but free from the inertia that holds us, preparing for the next shift into gear to put some muscle in our drive. That’s where we are and where we’re going.

The news this week seemed to smack of that momentum, moving forward while unengaged. John Kerry, playing a very quiet game of statesmanship — yes, truly — has reinstated the process for direct peace talks between Israel and Palestine. This has taken six months of intense diplomacy, the agreement still being formalized as the first positive step toward peace talks in five years. Did you hear about it in the news? No? Then you probably also don’t know that Kerry recently suggested on Pakistani television that U.S. drone strikes in the region might soon end, signaling a restart of U.S./Pakistan security talks with potential to close a major breach in relations.

This has not gotten much media attention, given the meme that Pakistan is considered THE most dangerous hot spot on the globe, while the hard-won return to Mid-east peace talks has been overshadowed by everything from recent tweets on Weinergate to warnings not to Google information on pressure cookers. What does all this prove? Overwhelmed and spinning freely, we are not engaged.

Meanwhile, news that NSA informant Edward Snowden was granted temporary asylum by the Russians put Putin and Obama — and their scheduled meeting at the G20 summit in Moscow next month — in limbo (again.) The U.S. had been hovering like a hawk ready to pick off a sparrow should Snowden board a plane to South America that put him in U.S. air space. Indeed, the fact that Attorney General Holder felt it necessary to pen a note to the Ruskies explaining that the U.S. would neither kill nor torture their infamous guest if he was returned clearly defines the hill we’re climbing as we look for a push forward from the cosmos. This is not — repeat, NOT — yer Daddy’s United States of America. This is a nation still under the sway of George Bush’s “anything goes” War on Terror and Barack Obama’s disdain of whistleblowers.

Still, movement in the Snowden situation was welcome news. Sometimes you’ve got to make a move, even if its not optimum, in order to loosen the loggerhead of inaction, to grease the skids. It comes at a time when there’s already been slip and slide reported from other arenas, leaks in the dyke of obstructionism. And it’s domestic issues, rather than international, that have filled the blank spaces in what’s left of print, pointing to any number of interesting examples of the pairing of progressive interests with grass roots activism.

For instance, thanks to a blink from Pubs regarding the ‘nuclear option,’ and a wink from a handful of determined Dems with public support, the boycott in Obama’s appointments has eased. This has allowed a flow of unaccustomed forward motion in the halls of congress, assisted by some of the old timers — John McCain for one — who have had enough of the lockstep that has impeded the ability to make law; thus proving, given how closely the Senate divides, that it only takes a few people remembering what “maverick” feels like to make a difference.

The House, of course, is another cat entirely, one that boozy lion-tamer, John Boehner, has apparently stopped attempting to herd. Having failed to pass a farm bill that would cut food stamps by the millions, the House has now announced its refusal to pass a budget in the coming months unless it is granted even more dire cuts to social programs, along with an end to that pesky Obamacare. Having spent most of their attention on eliminating Obama’s health care reform (39 separate votes to repeal, with determination to end this session on a 40th) the Baggers have pushed Boehner into an untenable position: put a gun in the mouth of the party or lose your job. John has selected the former.

I suppose there are farmers and retirees, ideologues and Bagger groups along with oldsters across the nation who are waving their long johns in support of such a stonewall, but to the 90+ percent of us that find this stance ingenuous to the point of criminality, there is nothing about such a demand that speaks to an economy in crisis. In fact, recent reports indicate that some 80 percent of us — 4 out of 5 adults — will experience economic insecurity, including unemployment and food scarcity, by the time they turn 60. Somebody needs to say it: what have House Republicans done for any of us lately?

Remember the grump about how giving a hand-out just perpetuates the ability to take-take-take without contributing, how people who seize on unemployment insurance rather than find one, two or three jobs to keep the kids fed are just lowlifes, sucking off the public tit? Remember ‘us’ and ‘them?’ Well, citizen, 80 percent of the nation is now ‘them’ and that probably includes you. And while non-white numbers top the 90th percentile, some 76 percent of whites can look forward to periods of welfare and joblessness along with near-poverty. I doubt many of us are eager to support further cuts to either job creation or the safety net.

Riffing on his recent speech on economic inequality, Obama offered the Pubs a modest “grand bargain” that includes a cut in corporate tax rates in exchange for greater investment in jobs programs, public services and infrastructure. The Pubs turned up their nose, but as time gets shorter — and it’s already short — threats to shut down government again over what can only be called vastly unpopular legislation may prove a bridge too far from Americans already pushed to the brink of their patience and the edge of their pocketbook.

Any attack on public funding is too much, in my opinion. In fact, there is a clear movement to reverse the entire sequester/austerity meme wherever it rears its ugly head. There have been calls to increase Social Security, not trim it; increase Medicare, make it available for everyone, not cut it further. Cries for a living wage are outdistancing calls for an end to welfare services. We can be encouraged by fast food workers around the country who, alongside their brothers and sisters at various Wal-Mart outlets, have found the courage to strike against dismal wages and working conditions. And the good news is, the public sector increasingly has their back.

The overworked argument that increasing the minimum wage from an economically-crippling $7.25 an hour would mean passing devastating additional cost along to the buyer has been batted back like the buzzy little propaganda bee it is. David Sirota recently collected data from three credible sources to swat the nasty little sucker:

The first analysis comes from 100 economists who, in a letter to policymakers, estimated that raising the minimum wage to $10.50 an hour would result in just a nickel increase in the price of a Big Mac. That was followed up by a report in Newsweek based on the calculations of University of Massachusetts economists. They found that raising McDonald’s workers’ wages to $15 an hour would likely add just 22 cents to the retail price of the Big Mac.

It is much the same for Wal-Mart. According to a study by researchers at the City University of New York and the University of California, raising the wages of all of the retailers’ employees to at least $12 an hour would cost the average customer just 46 cents more during their typical trip to the store. Over an entire year, that’s just $12.50.

Given the recent analysis that each Wal-Mart shopping center costs its community approximately $900,000 in social services to underpaid workers, I’d say we would do our country a service if we boycott Wal-Mart altogether if we can. If we can’t, then let’s force them to behave as responsible employers. Wal-Mart is on record with higher revenue than the GDP of 169 countries but pleads that it cannot afford to pay its employees a living wage or provide them with health care.

We are subsidizing Wal-Mart with our tax bucks, allowing them to mistreat their workers and put the profit in their pocket while we pay the tab. Let’s turn up the heat. Pick up this graphic for your Facebook page. It says:

If every Wal-Mart nationwide had a minimum wage of $12 an hour and passed that entire cost on to the consumer, it would increase the price of an average Wal-Mart shopper’s trip by just 1.1%

I’m not trying to pick on Wally World, per se, when others are just as bad if not as big. I’m an equal opportunity basher, particularly disturbed, I might add, by a midwestern outfit called Menards, whose attractive pricing and glossy advertisements I simply can’t subject myself to now that I know they “school” their associates politically — or else. But the very inequity we’re talking about — broken down into graphs by Business Insider — is the direct result of policies promoted by the business class of this nation and tolerated by a seemingly lobotomized public. The graphs illustrate that:

— Corporate profits and profit margins are at an all-time high.

— Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low.

— Fewer Americans are employed than at any time in the past three decades.

— The share of our national income that is going to the people who do the work (“labor”) is at an all-time low.

How many times do we have to face those same facts, have our noses rubbed in them, before we understand that employers aren’t going to change that dynamic — that employees have to, if it’s to be done. We voted away our rights to unionize, allowed existing unions to fail, and now we reap the whirlwind of no worker protections even as those dreaded fatcat union workers like teachers and cops and mail carriers sweat out each day until retirement, watching those around them struggle.

We cannot shift the gear that awaits, climb the hill we face or make any actual progress in the nation while our neighbors remain unaware that they have no chance to change their circumstances — find a job, raise their kids, pay for an education, live sustainably and retire with dignity — unless they wake up and smell the corporate coffee being force-fed down their gullet. We stand witness until they awaken.

Greed is NOT good when it collects at the top. That’s what has brought us here — and this is where we must deal with it or stay stalled. Very little ever does “trickle down.”

The good news is, there is awareness everywhere you look. Just about everybody and their dog cocks their heads at mention of the Koch brothers these days, while nobody knew who they were before the Supremes decided in 2010 that corporations were ‘people’ free to spend lavish amounts to get their insiders elected. And no, awareness is NOT engagement, but it is just one small shift away from taking action against what thwarts us, boycotting what we find offensive, withholding votes from those who are not about the people’s business and rejecting that which — simply — does not work for the betterment of us all.

We’re in that unengaged spot where we’ve shifted out of fourth, unable to summon the power to climb, still cruising on momentum. The cosmic prod to push us into shifting back to first gear is close at hand, not recreating what was in order to get up the hill so much as creating anew that which we believe ourselves to be on this journey. We can afford some changes, don’t you think? Some oversight, for instance, clamping handcuffs on those who fly in the face of the ethical laws of the universe? And that Second Amendment of the Constitution could use a little clarifying, seems like, while there are others that need updating as well.

We’ve grown into America, version 2.0, during these last contentious years. Our blueprint needs some revision if it’s to find a place in a 21st century designed to survive, even to thrive. And that cannot come unless — until — we put an end to predatory capitalism and conscience-less plutocracy, to government manipulation and class warfare.

What if we listened to our higher angels, as did Bradley Manning when he wrote, a few days before his arrest, “I can’t separate myself from others… I feel connected to everybody … like they were distant family.” Like Manning and Edward Snowden, what if we responded to our circumstances from our soul level? What if we decided that it was better to do without than to play into a dark and deadening consumer consciousness. What if we found the workaround, the creative juice to do it differently. What if we just said no?

We’re not quite there yet, collectively, but we’ve got our hand on the gear shift. The lies we’ve been told ring hollow, the diversions we’ve been offered to keep us quiet have failed. The energy is gathering for a way forward; where we’ve been for a decade or so seems like a dead end, and where we came from before that? Outgrown, like old definitions of success that no longer even sound attractive.

No, this ain’t yer Daddy’s America. It’s ours. Ours to remake, to refine, to rebuild. It’s time to take it back with a new design in mind, a new way forward. Just ahead there’s a shift of gears and a steady climb up the hill, and if you aren’t just a little excited, just a little jazzed, you’ve missed the point.

We already know what’s wrong, we’ve spent years fearing and fighting it. A decade of adrenal exhaustion has left us little energy for further outrage so let’s rethink what comes next. If we’re ready to let go of that grudge, outgrow that expression, then we can overlay it with right action, experiment with what’s ethical, inclusive, creative. We can experience this differently.

This is the part that can engage our heart as well as our brain, fill us instead of use us up. We’re closing in on writing a new definition of success, and we’re almost ready to throw it in gear so if you’re ready for the fun, lay down that baggage and climb aboard!