Hard Truth/Sally Herrin

Out of Time

Tell me brave captain
why are the wicked so strong?
How do the angels get to sleep
when the devil leaves the porchlight on?

This observation by Tom Waits illustrates the first and most critical hard truth, the one fact we can never ever ever ever ever ignore. The wicked are so strong because they enjoy a moral advantage over the rest of us.

24/7, year in and year out, the wicked enjoy far greater moral latitude, because so long as they come out on top, the wicked just don’t care what harm they do.

Apparently driven by an insatiable hunger for power and resources, the wealthiest 1% of earth’s people controls a greater percent of all earth’s resources than at any time in the history of the planet. Many voices have long warned of the consequences of unfettered winner-take-all capitalism, wherein the bottom line is always the highest priority, while the best interests of the bottom 90%, not to mention the best interests of our ecosystem, always come last.

I don’t know many billionaires up close and personal, nor the 9% who carry the 1%’s water—the legal, technical, financial and political elite class which helps keep the 1% in power in return for cars and vacations and other crumbs from the tables of their betters. I won’t even speculate as to if, or how, these people justify themselves to the god of their understanding or even to themselves, or whether they understand the consequences for the mass of people today and for the future.

Oligarchy and the authoritarian regimes which make the world safe for oligarchs are rising steadily around the world. I have written elsewhere that the same impulse that elected Obama (an increasingly desperate feeling of the need for change) served also, by means of the long-past-its-sell-by-date electoral college, to put Trump in the White House.

Many of us underestimated the depth of horror with which the right wing 30% regarded the Obama years—when a black man rescued the world economy AND the banking industry (though not as many homeowners as should have been done), when the spectrum of gender, human sexuality and new family patterns burst open every closet (somehow “ruining” marriage for straight white people), when the US was moving forward on climate change, and the Renewable Fuels Standard returned a profit in the marketplace to rural America. Sadly, we failed to understand that Obama was not the dawn of a golden age, but the sunset on any immediate hope that might have been. Consider me disabused.

The Dow Jones Industrial average, which every school child is taught is the number by which we score the health of the economy, hit a historic high just before the autumn equinox, but the household incomes of the highest brackets are the ONLY households where family income is rising. For the aggregate 90% of the rest of us, working people, seniors and children, family income is only just recovering from the Recession now.

There is not an institution of federal government that the 1% has not worked to weaponize against the 90%—the Electoral College (built by the way on the bones of slavery, as a way to give extra power to rural Southern states, another gift that has kept on giving down the years) and gerrymandering, the Supreme Court and the Citizens United decision that makes corporations persons and turns money into speech, the gridlock in Congress wrought through the Obama years by the GOP, in order to PROVE to people that government cannot be made to work on behalf of the common good. Even charitable giving, by which billions of dollars are diverted into foundations, just a third of which goes to help the actual poor while the rest helps to shape the country’s agenda inside and outside government, divert millions and millions of dollars of tax revenue away from federal coffers which by rights the wealtiest OUGHT to contribute as their fair share.

OF COURSE the angels can’t get to sleep. The devil is doing business all night long.

In fact, the wicked have grown so strong that they no longer find it necessary to pretend to moral high ground. The meme of the week just past is “All politicians lie.” And the right wing 30%, the “some of the people” whom the 1% can fool all the time, thinks that’s just fine.

To be clear, WE the decent Americans, the truly patriot citizens, are all we have, though we are many—between 40 and 60 percent by my entirely non-scientific lifelong observations — and we are on the right side of history. We are citizens, I repeat, not just tax-payers. Citizens build great institutions like public power and libraries, thriving towns and sustainable economies. Citizens understand the value of the arts and of wild places, of bridges and health care and schools. Citizens are proud to provide and protect these blessings in our communities.

The 1% meanwhile have spent fortunes convincing Americans that we are merely tax-payers, whiners who grudge every penny and fail completely to understand the principle of common well being. Our best and only chance to avert the kind of dystopia the comix have been warning us about for the past half century at least, is to climb back on the only horse we have to ride—our somewhat damaged but still functioning democracy.

In July 2018, Invisible posted, If we treat voting as an expression of virtue or personal principle, we will lose. If we demand perfection from our candidates, we will lose. If we impose single-issue purity tests on our candidates, we will lose. And if we stay home, surely we will lose.

This is the most important election in this country in my lifetime. We need to elect people of honesty and integrity, people of compassion and common sense, to positions of responsibility in every federal, state and local race on Nov. 6. We are out of time, Gentle Readers. We cannot afford to wait until “They” give us “better candidates.” The planet is burning, a new dark age is already here, and we don’t have the luxury of messing around.

Sally Jane Herrin, Ph.D., is a Lincoln, Neb., writer, educator and advocate for progressive agriculture, trade and energy policies. This originally appeared in the Nebraska Report.

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2018

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