Inequality rears its ugly head again.

What the hell -- I'm not trying to sell books anymore. Might as well stop pretending that I don't talk about politics here. 

This week's Supreme Court decisions -- particularly the one that invalidated President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan -- are what got me going this time. I have a personal stake in this: I still owe the government for one of the PLUS loans that I took out for my daughters to go to college. I made a decision before I retired to take about $30,000 out of my savings to pay off most of them, leaving a balance of just under $10,000 -- which would have gone away, if the Supreme Court hadn't decided this week to screw over 40 million Americans.

I paid off my own graduate school loan. I've paid off three-quarters of what I owed on the PLUS loans. Now I'm retired, living on a reduced income. And still there are people out there who would call me a deadbeat because I hoped for a little relief. 

But that's just one instance of how the Supremes screwed over regular Americans this week. There was also the decision that ended affirmative action in college admissions and the one about how people can refuse service to gay couples who want to get married (even if the situation is completely hypothetical, no one has been harmed, and the business isn't even set up yet!).

There's a lot to unpack with these end-of-term rulings, and I don't have the bandwidth to give it the space it deserves. (My apartment's in an uproar due to a plumbing leak in the unit above me, and I have a crazy week ahead that has now been complicated with insurance adjusters and whatnot.) But my brain has been doing its random association thing ever since the student loan order came down Friday, and the result was a rant that I posted to Facebook yesterday:

Everybody in my age cohort, by which I mean Generation Jones (mid '50s to 1963 or so), got fucked. 

We entered the work force in the mid to late '70s, just about the time when trickle-down economics took over -- when conservatives launched their long game to make money, and keep it, by gutting the middle class. We literally never had a chance. 

But at least we still had the opportunity to get an undergrad degree before college tuition went through the roof. My kids really got hosed -- they had to take out loans to afford college and graduated into the Great Recession, when there weren't jobs easily available to them so they could pay them off.

The American Dream worked for the Boomers because they had years of earnings before this shit started. That's why they think we're whiners. They never had to live through what we're living through financially.

Am I pissed? You bet I am.

I wrote about Generation Jones last year. Basically, it recognizes that those of us born between, oh, 1955 and 1963, give or take, have very little in common with the Baby Boomers we're lumped with demographically. We grew up watching the Boomers go through the Vietnam War and their reactions -- Woodstock and the Summer of Love as well as antiwar protests -- and internalized their values. Then the Boomers grew up and enjoyed, at least for a while, the postwar economy that supported the middle class the way it had their parents. Jonesers, meanwhile, came into the workforce right about when the gravy train ended thanks to Reaganomics. 

There are links supporting all this in the GenJones post I've already linked to. It looks like the link to the graphics from Inequality for All is dead, but here's the graphic that really got me when I watched the documentary (which I have stolen from a review of the doc at Zero Anthropology -- apologies for the quality of their screen grab): 

After 1977, Reaganomics and its trickle-down bullshit kicked in, and the hill to prosperity became harder and harder to climb -- hitting Jonesers and GenXers especially hard, because we feel cheated out of the American Dream that many of us lived as kids.

But see how the graph begins to fall off on the right side of the graphic? It assumed that the 2010 figure was the high point of inequality and that it would start coming down, but that was wishful thinking; income inequality continued to grow through the pandemic. However, awareness of inequality has also continued to grow. And while the Supreme Court's decisions this week seem to be aimed at cementing the disparities, by keeping down the people that should, y'know, be kept down (like Blacks and LGBTQ+ folks and basically everybody who ought not to have been granted access to an education that allowed them to think for themselves and question the oligarchy) -- and particularly when it's paired with last year's Roe v. Wade decision and its gleeful (on the part of evangelicals) aftermath --  it also feels to me like the final gasp of a dying worldview. 

It seems like we ought to be at a tipping point when the Supreme Court starts issuing decisions on bogus cases to enforce a draconian worldview that most Americans don't subscribe to. I hope we're at that tipping point. 

I've been disappointed on that score before. And yet, my hope for a turnaround abides.

It sucks to be living through this timeline. We may not begin making progress toward equality again for many years. But at some point, the pendulum has to swing back. It always does.

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The Biden administration is already working on a Plan B for student loan relief, although it won't be immediate or as far-reaching. And it may not help me, so I'm not going to wait for it. Guess it's a good thing that I went back to work...

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These moments of ranty blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Jonesing for a better future.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the last one to know everything.

All these years, I've believed that I was a Baby Boomer. I was born in 1957, which is comfortably inside the traditional span of Boomer birth years -- 1946 to 1964. But I always knew that the world I grew up in was different from the one my brother, who is ten years my senior, grew up in. The kids in his high school graduating class worried about being sent to Vietnam; by the time I was in high school, not only was the Vietnam War over, but the draft was, too. Young people his age went to San Francisco with flowers in their hair (although he never did); all that hippie stuff was over before I was old enough to drive.

But one of the biggest differences was economic. When my brother graduated from college, the economy was booming and there were jobs aplenty. By the time I got out of college, things weren't so rosy. Good-paying jobs were harder to find. I didn't understand at the time what caused the difference. Years later, though, I watched a documentary by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich called Inequality for All that went a long way toward explaining it. You can see a bunch of the graphics from the film at this link. When I watched the movie, the thing that really got my attention was a graphic showing "The Great Prosperity" -- the post-WWII boom years between 1947 and 1977, when the economy was going gangbusters. After that, though -- starting in, oh, 1978 or '79 -- we got stuff like trickle-down economics and Reagan's breaking of the air-traffic controllers' union. Wage growth stalled and financial inequality grew. And grew.

Guess when I graduated from college? 1979.

It turns out there's a label for us late Boomers and early Gen Xers -- those of us who weren't old enough to be part of the Summer of Love and who came of age when regular folks started to get the shaft. For a while, I guess, we were termed the Lost Generation -- cheerful, right? But then in 1999, a researcher named Jonathan Pontell coined the term:

We're the people who grew up jonesing for the better lives we were promised -- the lives our parents and older siblings had.

Although the name has been around since the turn of the millennium, I'd never heard it until a few weeks ago. (I'm the last to know everything, remember?) The label has gained traction in certain circles -- for instance, some folks blamed Jonesers for John Kerry's loss to George W. Bush in 2004. But it's nowhere near universally known. Pontell's book must have sunk into oblivion -- I can't find it anywhere online, even a used copy -- although the author still has a website. 

I guess in a way we're still the Lost Generation.

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By the way, Inequality for All is available to watch for free on YouTube at that link above. And if you're interested in this sort of thing, Reich is going to be presenting a free, on-demand lecture series called "Wealth and Poverty" on his Substack site. The class will run for eleven weeks; the first one will be available this coming Friday. I'm hoping to watch as many of the sessions as I can.

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These moments of bloggy jonesing have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

The Wheel keeps turning.

I'm feeling pretty good about our holiday preparations here at La Casa Cantwell. The tree is up and decorated, as I mentioned last week; the shopping is done; and most of the baking is done. I have one more batch of cookies to make tonight, and a gluten-free option or two later this week. And I still have to wrap all the gifts. But I feel confident I'll have everything done by Yule, which this year is Saturday the 21st in North America.

What a contrast to the current drama just up the road in DC. In case you've been living under a rock, the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on two articles of impeachment against President Trump this coming week. The vote is scheduled for Wednesday, and it's a foregone conclusion that the House will impeach Trump. Then the drama moves to the Senate, which is obliged to hold a trial on the impeachment articles. A couple of the folks in charge -- namely Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Lindsey Graham -- have already made it clear they expect to speed through a sort-of trial and vote to exonerate the president.

This is not a political blog, so I won't express my opinion on any of that here. (I already spend more than enough time posting about politics on Facebook.) But I expect you guys have gathered my opinion of President Trump anyway. And like a lot of other liberals and progressives, I find it hard, some days, to be upbeat about it all. Some of my friends are wondering why the House is bothering to impeach Trump when the Senate is going to clear him anyway, thereby giving him carte blanche to keep doing what he's doing. It's easy to fall into a pit of despair, especially since the House vote is coming just after Britain voted to keep their Conservative Party in power, which means Brexit will happen now for sure.

It's easy -- and profoundly depressing -- to agree with Medium blogger Umair Haque, whose post last week was titled, This is How a Society Dies. He compares the death spiral of the Soviet Union to what's happening today in the United States and Britain, and suggests that we may never recover.

When the Soviet Union fell apart, it did seem to happen overnight. One day the USSR was the Red Menace, the Communist global superpower that could take us down as soon as look at us; the next, they were a third-world country with nuclear weapons, and we, the United States, were the lone global superpower left standing.

But in the years since then, income inequality has hollowed out our middle class, and our poor never had a chance. About a year and a half ago, the United Nations Human Rights Council declared the United States has the highest income inequality in the Western world. Forty million Americans live in abject or extreme poverty, according to the UNHRC report, and 40% of us couldn't come up with $400 to cover an unexpected expense.

We're the only developed nation without universal healthcare, and yet any proposal from the left to rectify that insanity is met with criticism from the center and the right about how it's too expensive and anyway it doesn't work as well as those deluded lefties would have you believe. Never mind that it was the health insurance industry that wrote the arguments against universal healthcare.

So is the United States just a third-world nation with nuclear weapons? Some days I wonder. Some days it feels like the smartest thing to do would be to escape -- to emigrate to some other country, maybe somewhere sunny, with a stable government and decent healthcare, and hunker down 'til it's all over.

I brought up Yule for a reason. John Beckett wrote a lovely column this weekend about the solstice being the real reason for the season. People on Earth have been celebrating the turning of the seasons since the Earth itself began turning. In the Northern Hemisphere, the days have been getting shorter since June. In North America, this coming Saturday will be the culmination: the winter solstice. The longest night. In ancient times, people would sing, pray, and light bonfires and candles to beseech the sun to return.

And it always does. The Earth turns, and the days begin getting longer again. The singing and the candles don't have anything to do with it -- time turns, and the Earth turns, and the sun returns.

A lot of Pagans rely on the Wheel of the Year for their spiritual observances, but I think time is really more of a spiral. This coming spring will and won't be like last spring. Summer 2020 will be like all the other summers we've ever had, and yet it will be its own thing.

Maybe Trump will still be president then and maybe he won't. When President Nixon faced impeachment, the smart money was on his removal from office -- until he quit. Maybe Trump's impeachment will be like that: he won't leave office until he does, abruptly. And he'll probably let us all know by tweet.

Bernie Sanders tweeted this last week:

At this moment in our history despair is not an option. I've got four kids and seven grandchildren. I can't give up. You can't give up.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 9, 2019

It's far from the first time he's said it. But it rings especially true for me, in this season, when the Earth is turning and the sun will soon be returning. We can run, or we can stay and do what we can to make things better. I know which one feels right to me.

And now if you'll excuse me, I have one more batch of cookies to make tonight and they're not going to make themselves.

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These moments of Earth-turning blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Pity the poor billionaires.

SIphotography | DepositPhotos

Oh, woe is our poor billionaire class. Someone has suggested that they've amassed too much wealth and wants to take it from them -- and that someone has a shot at winning the presidency next year. Why, she has even come up with a plan to tax a portion of their wealth -- not their income, their wealth -- so the government can spend it however it sees fit.

The candidate is Elizabeth Warren, and since she announced her wealth tax plan, the country's billionaires, and those who serve them, have cranked up their P.R. efforts to discount her proposal. Now as you all know, this is not a political blog. So I'm not going to talk about the plan itself. Instead, I'd like to talk about the billionaires -- and this one billionaire in particular: Leon Cooperman, chairman of Omega Advisors, a hedge fund based in New York.

As you might imagine, Cooperman doesn't much like Warren's plan. He was quoted in Politico as saying her attacks on the wealthy are unfair. "What is wrong with billionaires?" he asked. And then he said, "I believe in a progressive income tax and the rich paying more. But this is the fucking American dream she is shitting on."

Warren fired back in a tweet: "Leon, you were able to succeed because of the opportunities this country gave you. Now why don’t you pitch in a bit more so everyone else has a chance at the American dream, too?"

In response, Cooperman sent her a five-page letter to say she had him all wrong. Billionaires have done great things for this country. Moreover, he's a signatory to a billionaires' Giving Pledge that promises they will give away half of their fortunes, and in fact he pledged to give away all of his.

In the wake of this letter, Cooperman was interviewed on a CNBC program this past Monday. And on the show, he teared up while talking about Warren's plan.

I'll be honest: I've read about Warren's plan, and I think I may have read the Politico story when it was published, but I didn't know about this spat between Warren and Cooperman until I saw the story about his CNBC appearance. And I didn't watch the interview until tonight.

Besides the part where he tears up, there's another section that I thought was key. You can watch it yourself at the link I posted above. Scroll down the page to the second video -- the 12-minute-long one. The quote that struck me starts at the 6:44 mark: "She's screwing with the wrong guy. I want to give it all away. Not 50-60% -- I want to give it all away. But I want to control the decision. I don't need the government giving away my money."

(By the bye, he's actually not giving it all away. He's giving away half in his lifetime, and putting the other half in a trust for his family to give away as they see fit after his death.)

Warren responded to all this in another tweet, pointing out that Cooperman is on the board of Navient, a student loan company that, she says, "has cheated borrowers and used abusive, misleading tactics. He even went so far as to ask how I might impact his investment in the last earnings call with Navient." And while he's worried about protecting his billions, young people can't pursue their dreams due to crushing student loan debt. The American dream worked great for him, Warren says, but on the backs of American students who now can't get ahead.

There are a lot of things we could do in this country if billionaires weren't sucking up nearly all of the country's wealth. CEOs at firms in the S&P 500 Index earned 361 times more than their average workers in 2017; back in the '50s, the ratio was 20-to-1. Taxes were a lot higher on the rich back then, too. PolitiFact says in 1952 and 1953, the top marginal tax rate was over 90%.

Back then, it didn't pay to be too rich; instead, company owners invested in their employees by paying them more. Now the rich want to pick who gets their money, instead of paying their employees more -- and instead of doing something to help the whole country. I'm just guessing here, but I'm pretty sure Cooperman isn't going to donate his fortune to people struggling to pay off their student loans.

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These moments of non-political blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

The love of money.

New cars today have a lot more bling than they did when I bought my last car in 2008. Remote door locks were just becoming a thing, and you had to pay extra for high-end stuff like cruise control. Now, it seems, electronic keys and cruise control are pretty much standard.

Another thing that was brand new in 2008 was satellite radio. Back then, I thought it was a crazy idea -- why would anybody pay for radio when they could get it over the air for free? But then the radio business changed and stations seemed to switch formats all the time, and I couldn't find an oldies station that played more than the Beatles and a few other hits I'd heard a million times before. (This phenomenon is worse for people who worked in top-40 radio. Each radio station used to have its own music director -- an actual human who decided what songs to play. Now stations are programmed by consultants who use committees called focus groups. Members of focus groups always give high ratings to songs they recognize, and in the case of oldies, they recognize songs because they got a lot of airplay. But even now, the guy who gave them all that airplay is heartily sick and tired of them. Like retail-workers-at-Christmas-carol-season tired of them.)

Anyway, I had pretty much quit listening to the radio in the car, except for my own CDs. And then I got Eli, who came with a trial subscription to Sirius XM. Once I found the '60s and '70s channels, it was all over. I'm hearing songs I haven't heard in decades -- including this one by the O'Jays from 1974.

For a moment, let's leave aside the irony of hearing a song about the evils of money on a radio station I'm paying to listen to, when I first heard it over the air for free.

It did, however, get me thinking about morality and how things have changed. Wikipedia says what spawned the song was a Bible verse, specifically 1 Timothy 6:10. It's the one about how the love of money is the root of all evil. I've seen a few truncated versions of the verse -- most often, "Money is the root of all evil" (the Monkees had a sampler on the wall of their pad), but also the snarky "Money is the root of all."

But the original text is about the love of money, a.k.a. greed. I'm no biblical scholar, and maybe a Pagan shouldn't be sticking her nose into this at all -- but my understanding has always been that simply having money isn't the problem. Money is neutral -- neither good nor bad. What's problematic is grabbing and hoarding as much money as you can.

I find it interesting that back in the mid-'70s, this song got a lot of airplay. Not long after, though, we started to see wealth, and the pursuit of wealth, put on a pedestal -- and some of the biggest pushers of the idea were megachurch pastors who told their faithful to send money to fund their big church buildings in order to glorify of God. I guess their mansions and fat bank accounts were meant to glorify God, too.

This idea that wealth is okay as long as you're not a miser seems to have fallen by the wayside, though, in this new Gilded Age, where the top 1% of earners in the US make, on average, 26.3% more than the bottom 99% combined. That's higher than the income disparity in the last Gilded Age. In 1928, just before the Great Depression, top earners made 23.9% more than the rest of the work force. What's more, income inequality has risen in every state since 1975. That's right about the time the O'Jays were singing about the dangers of the love of money. What a coincidence, huh?

A certain faction of the American public talks about making America great again. I think going back to those mid-'70s values, when the top 1% of earners made just 8% of total US income (compared to 22% in 2015), would go a long way toward that goal. I'm not saying America was perfect in the '70s. It wasn't -- not by a long shot. But at least the middle class had a decent standard of living back then.

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I'm moving right along with the first draft of Treacherous Ground. April has been a busy month, but I'm happy to say that I'm at 40,000 words as of tonight, so I should have no problem making it to 50,000 words by the end of the month. That puts the book on track for publication in mid to late June. As always, I'll let you know how it goes.

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These moments of cautionary blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.