Memorial Day

National holidays are occasions for floods of clichés uttered at ceremonies in every city and every village and dutifully recorded in the next day's newspaper. Speakers from the President on down thank our veterans for the sacrifices they made for us. Some of them gave their lives. Many others returned from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from Vietnam, from Korea changed forever. They may be missing limbs, they may no longer be able to function in civilian life. Their families may fall apart; significant numbers of veterans end up committing suicide.

Speakers at Memorial Day ceremonies repeat over and over again that veterans made these serious sacrifices so that we might continue to enjoy the freedoms we have. For their defense of our freedoms we thank the veterans.

But surely there is something seriously wrong here. Was Saddam Hussein a threat to American freedoms? Are the Taliban? Saddam Hussein oppressed the people of Iraq. They might thank our soldiers although, seeing the destruction we have wrought in their country since 1991, Iraqis may well be of two minds about that. But Saddam Hussein never was a threat to American institutions.

Even Osama bin Laden, though a threat to American lives, was not a threat to our institutions. We ourselves, our representatives in Congress, chose to limit American freedoms thought the Patriot Act after 9/11. But that was our choice. Bin Laden did not do that. We chose to restrict freedom for the sake of greater security.

Why are we telling lies to ourselves about American soldiers—men sand women—saving our freedom when they did nothing of the sort?

In recent weeks conservative candidates for president have let it be known that they now, by hindsight, consider the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to have been mistakes. We should never have invaded either country they now believe. Candidates for president do not hold opinions that are not shared by significant numbers of voters. These politicians simply echo beliefs widely held by the public.

Many of the people who thank our veterans for protecting our freedoms also believe that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be justified, that, on the whole, they accomplished nothing worthwhile.

It is obvious why they lie about that on the day dedicated to veterans. Many of those who returned alive are still suffering the after-effects of combat. Few of the patriots attending the Memorial Day festivities protested these wars. They were content to have soldiers be seriously injured or even killed, even after it appeared that there were no weapons of mass destruction and Osama bin Laden was not in Afghanistan. They laughed at those of us who protested these wars.

Now they have to admit that they did nothing to stop soldiers being injured in combat when that served no purpose.

Memorial Day is the day of truth. Many honorable men and women incurred life long suffering for no good reason at all. These wars were engineered by a group of men, all of whom had refused to go to war when they were at an age to do that. George Bush, Vice-president Cheney, Wolfowitz—the entire crew of war-mongers—had refused to face combat.

What can we, as a nation, say to the veterans who were sent off into combat for no good reason at all?

That is a terrifying thought that should make all of us feel very guilty. It is true, we owe a great debt to veterans not for what they did for us, but for what we did to them, namely to injure them seriously without good reasons.

On Memorial Day we lie about it. The rest of the year we pass city ordinances forbidding homeless veterans and others from panhandling and we refuse to provide adequate funds for the Veterans' Administration.

It is high time that we stop repeating pious patriotic clichés, taking pictures of parades, and start to tell the truth about these wars and its victims. It is time that we be honest and admit that we failed to end these wars a long time ago, that we failed to save the men and women whom we thank on Memorial Day and make serious efforts to repair the damages we allowed to be done to them.

Don't believe everything they tell you.

The Federal Reserve Bank held a conference recently in Boston on economic opportunity and inequality. Janet Yellen, Chair of the Federal Reserve Rank, addressed the meeting.

She frankly admitted that inequality has been increasing rapidly in recent years. Between 1989 and 2013 the income of the top 5% of households increased 38%. The incomes of the remaining 95% of households increased by 10% or less.

What to do? Yellen had all sorts of ideas to even out the increasing inequalities in our nation. Specifically she had three suggestions: "early childhood education, affordable higher education, and increased business ownership."

Most of these are all sensible suggestions. There exists a good deal of evidence that children's school trajectories are affected by their learning in the very first few years of life. More Head Start programs might produce a better educated workforce.

College education has become terribly expensive and is prohibitive for some people. Many other students need to work, some of them full-time, in order to afford college. If students have a full-time job and go to school full-time, the odds are that they are not going to learn a lot. There is not time or energy enough to assimilate what they read or hear in class.

I am less certain about the third suggestion that more people should go into business for themselves. That takes some money doesn't it?

But I was really struck by what chairman Yellen did not talk about. Her suggestions seem peripheral. She did not address the economic problems responsible for the growing inequality.

There is still a good deal of unemployment; many people are working part-time who would prefer to work full time.

Significant numbers of people work minimum wage jobs that do not bring in enough for people to live comfortably, let alone send their kids to college.

Since the early 1970s, working-class wages have been pretty stagnant. Employers have outsourced jobs to very low wage countries, thus setting up competition between American workers and those in different Asian countries with a much lower standard of living than ours. More and more people are not regarded as employees of the firms where they work; instead, they are 'independent contractors' or they work for subcontractors. Their employment is uncertain and intermittent. Their wages are held down by competition between subcontractors.

Continuing unemployment gives employers the upper hand when it comes to negotiating wages.

All of these assaults on working-class incomes were made possible by the concerted effort of business during the Reagan administration and thereafter to destroy the powers of labor unions. Fewer and fewer workers are represented by unions. Partly as a consequence of the unions' very precarious position, they can only offer limited protection to their members.

If we look at the society as it is, it is clear that there are some more central remedies for inequality than expanded Head Start programs: raise the minimum wage, abolish Right-to- work laws (anti-– union laws), encourage unionization, and put limits on temporary employment, subcontracting and other ways of increasing business profit and impoverishing working people.

All of this is well known. Janet Yellen, of course, knows all this a lot better than I do. Why did she not say so?

There are a number of possible reasons. If she were taking the side of the workers in the struggle between workers and employers, she would be in deep trouble with the people who have most of the power. People on the right of the political spectrum, rich corporate types, would make sure that she would soon be out of a job.

On the other hand, she does not want to agree with people on the left that so many working people are suffering because the economic system is skewed against them. As the head of an important federal agency, part of her job is to tell citizens that things are really alright and that the problems you have are open to easy fixes: combat inequality by expanding Head Start.

That is of course also what people on the right want her to do: tell everyone that it is not the fault of employers if workers's wages and incomes deteriorate every year. Our actually very serious economic problems are made to look benign if they can be fixed by expanding Head Start programs.

Here then is today's lesson: don't believe what high level bureaucrats tell you about the state of the economy and of our world. They are not to be trusted.

Don't let your employers exploit you and then tell you that it is all a problem of early childhood education.