Short Shots

The Big Dick was right!

2010-10-13T12:14:00.000-07:00

The justification for the Eternal War of the Empty Policy’s erosion of our civil liberties, for its gutting of habeas corpus, for its policy assassinating anyone designated as a terrorist without the benefit of a trial, for its Patriot Act and its Military Commissions Act, for its trashing of Iraq and Afghanistan is pure simplicity: Since 9/11 there has not been a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Ergo, all of the above have been as successful as they were necessary.

And they are right. I know because I’ve used a similar approach in dealing with a threat to my personal wellbeing and security.

My home in suburban New Jersey is surrounded by a quarter acre of yard, and for years I lived in constant dread of the damage a herd of cattle could wreak if they wondered onto my property. My God! What grass they didn’t trash with their hooves they would be gobbled up by the greedy creatures. No shrub would be safe, flowers and perennials would be a thing of the past. By the time they were done, my yard would e reduced to a desert

The anxiety became unbearable. Many a night I would sit on the front stoop, flashlight in hand, waiting for the clatter of bovine hooves approaching my property. I lost weight and I lost sleep and regretted that my property wasn’t zoned for land minds.

Now some may ask what the chances of a herd of cattle descending on a lawn in suburban New Jersey are. And to those I say, “You fools! Aren’t you acquainted with the Big Dick’s one-percent doctrine that sates that if there is a one-percent chance an event will happen, then it must be treated as a certainty, and the facts be damned!

Salvation came when I visited my brother in Arizona. In a souvenir shop in Tombstone, among cowboy hats, Western costumes, leather goods, and Native American jewelry I found a solution to the threat I had been living under for so many years--a steer’s skull complete with horns and teeth. I snapped it up and had it shipped east. When it arrived, I placed in it a prominent spot in the garden that runs along the front of our house.

In doing so I was sending a powerful and credible message to the cattle of the world: If you step one hoof on my property, you get eaten, no exceptions and you can kiss your civil liberties goodbye.

And it has worked like a charm. Since setting the skull out not one damn steer has crossed my property line. Was the Big Dick right or was the Big Dick right?

Another Buzzword; Another Dust-Up

2010-10-06T07:35:00.000-07:00

How’s this for an epiphany? There is no progressive party; there are no progressives; there is no progressive movement or structure of any type. There are neither progressive politicians nor progressive platforms. There are only fragmented websites viewed by atomized individuals glued to their computer screens that have reduced “progressives” to a shriveled label that rattles around cyberspace like a dead pea pod signifying nothing. And in this vast wasteland that is cyberspace a disparate gaggle of individuals hang this label round their necks, festoon their bumpers with the appropriate stickers and call for a “progressive position” on this, that and the other thing.

How else do we explain how the right is able to frame issues in the most absurd manner imaginable and get ways with it time after time? Repeatedly, the right spits out a buzz word, then bends over and spreads its cheeks before chuckling when it becomes apparent that nobody on the left is going to pick up this buzz word and shove it up the right’s collective ass.

The latest example of this is the dust-up over “The Mosque at Ground Zero,” a beautiful little catch phrase that displays the Goebbelian compression that makes these phrases so effective.

Sounds scary, doesn’t it? What a slap in our face! A mosque on the very spot where Islamofascist terrorists reduced the twin towers to rubble. (Yes, Islamofascist still works because the left lacks the moxie to drive home the truth that the word is little more than a meaningless puff of bulldust. That’s dried bullshit for those of you who are interested. This is what happens when a buzzword ages and bullshit becomes dust. This is bullshit in its most dangerous form because the stench has dissipated and people have become so accustom to its presence that it seems a natural part of the environment.)

The problem with the phrase “The Mosque at Ground Zero” is that it’s neither a mosque nor is it at Ground Zero. What is being built is a community center on New York City’s Park Row, across from City Hall, a long two and one-half blocks from Ground Zero. According to Stephan Salisbury, the center will include “an auditorium, spa, basketball court, swimming pool, classrooms, exhibition space, a community meeting space, a 9/11 memorial and, yes, a prayer space for Muslims.”

A prayer space or room is not a mosque. It is simply a place where Muslims can go to spread their prayer rugs and pray to Mecca. A similar prayer room is found is the Pentagon, in the same building in which 184 people died on 9/11.

But, in spite of its absurdity, “The Mosque at Ground Zero” continues to stir passions and fears. This is largely because the Left, once again, has allowed the right to frame the issue and seems unwilling to challenge its premises. You see, the left believes that reason is useless against passion and bigotry. This may be true, but truth fired by passion is very effective, as the Civil Rights movement discovered when it broke down the barriers erected by Jim Crow legislation. But then, the left is as ignorant of history as is the right. So, gosh, if you can’t reason with bigots you might as well fold your tents and crawl home with your tail between your legs. You don’t want to do anything that might make the right angry.

Bigotry is a paranoid’s playground. It is the one place where unreasonable fears gain traction and are taken seriously. In a sane society, a proposal such as the one put forth by Rep. Louis Gohmer (R.-Tex.) would have been laughed off the floor of the House of Representatives. The good congressman is worried that terrorists are gaming our open democratic society. According to Gohmer, terrorists plan to flood our shores with pregnant Muslim women who will stay long enough to give birth to their children on American soil thus insuring their U.S. citizenship before taken them back home where they would be trained as terrorists to return twenty to thirty years later with U.S. passports to “help destroy our way of life ‘cause they figured out how stupid we are being in this country to allow our enemies to game our system, hurt our economy, get set up in a position to destroy our way of life.” (In Gohmer’s world stupidity is defined as failure to buy into the fantasies of a paranoid mind.

His solution? Change the 14th Amendment that grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States. So just being born here would not be enough to guarantee an individual citizenship. The newborn must be of the right descent, the right heritage and the right culture in order to qualify for citizenship. Otherwise, the newborn’s incubator would be set afloat in the Atlantic or Pacific to ob its way back to its country of origin. ‘Tis a vision to warm the cockles of a patriot’s heart. Thus is America kept pure and safe as flotillas of incubators catch homeward bound currents where, of course, the young ‘urns would be much happier than in the land of the bigoted and the prejudiced.

You see, Rep. Gohmer simply wants to protect “our way of life,” which these militant neonates are out to destroy. “Our way of life” is another buzzword that draws its effectiveness from its total lack of meaning. The image it evokes from the TV set of “Father Knows Best” or “Ozzie and Harriet.” It is a life built around images of Mom and Apple Pie that conveniently overlook the fact that mom is working two or three jobs just to keep food on the table so the apple pie, if there is any, is purchased frozen from the local supermarket. For the lucky few, our way of life is an exercise in materialistic hedonism in which well being is judged by the number of useless toys one is able to amass.

Bigotry and fear are boons for those who seek power for power’s sake. Bile is excellent filler for an empty soul whose life is without vision or meaning. To stoke fear and to pump it into the corridors of power like an odorless but deadly gas gives a thin veneer of meaning to lives that are otherwise meaningless.

But, what the hell! Anti-Muslim and anti-brown skin bigotry is breaking out all over the northern hemisphere. France wants to ban full-face veils; anti-immigrant political parties are gaining popularity in Europe; and the U.S. is fencing off Mexico but not Canada (the right sort of people live up there).

Could this be the last hurrah of the white folks as they watch their oil-driven way of life sink beneath the surface of the water for the third time?

Fastidiousness has always been the midwife of oppression. Keep the corpse scrubbed and clean and people might think it is still alive. Wear facemasks and latex gloves and you create a bulwark against misfortune. If you surround yourself with people just like you, on a summer evening on your condo patio with the Tiki torches blazing, you can maintain the illusion that God is in his little heaven and all is well with the world. Ramp up the volume on the stereo and the sound of a crumbling lifestyle is soon drowned out.

It doesn’t get much better than that!

Back Again

2010-10-04T09:06:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to say that I am adapting well to life with one lung. I've started weening off the oxygen, which is a relief since I am spending less time with a plastic tube hanging out of my nose. I plan to start posting tomorrow. However, I will no longer be posting daily, a decision I made before surgery, but hope to do one or two pieces a week.

Thanks to all of you for your support and encouragement.

cw.

A Little Hiatus

2010-08-08T18:00:00.000-07:00

I've been taking a little break while dealing with a nasty tumor on my left lung. Four courses of chemo have shrunk it from 4 cm to 1 cm, and I'm slated for surgery on Thursday, 8/12, to remove part or all of the lung. The prognosis is excellent and I hope to be posting again by the end of the month.

Many thanks to those of you who have offered words of encouragement and support.

cw

A Further Discussion

2010-07-24T11:14:00.000-07:00

In my last post one of my readers. Ivan Hentschel, objected to my conflation of empathy and Christian love when I wrote:

The word empathy has the same problem as does “Christian love.” Both words have touchy feely quality that evoke images of a maiden clad in a diaphanous white gown skipping through La-La Land with a beatific smile on her face. In truth both require a decent into the deepest pit of Hell coupled with a willingness to love every low-life son-of-a-bitch one finds down there even though one’s knee-jerk reaction is to tear their freaking throats out. Both empathy and Christian love are mindsets, which is why people rarely understand their meaning, and that is what makes them problematic as rallying cries.

To which Ivan replied:

Empathy is a useful capacity of human beings. “Christian love” is not.

To which I responded:

Actually, they’re one in the same, which is why neither is rarely found in organized religion.

To which Ivan said:

I must disagree. To be in empathy (to “feel with”) demonstrates some human compassion and energy sharing. “Christian (or any other brand of religious) love” is self-serving [My God is better than your God] and gratuitous. And it usually requires monetary contributions, whereas empathy does not.

And “organized religion” is probably no longer religion, but probably a financial, real estate and political movement. Just like corporations and political organizations, they have no capacity for empathy.

In short, empathizers, unlike sympathizers, do not manipulate for personal gain. Or at least they shouldn’t. If they do, they are merely charlatans.

I found Ivan’s comments so interesting I decided to kick them out of the comments section and devote a separate post to them.

In his last comment, Ivan has sunk his teeth into a half-truth…well, maybe a five/eighths truth or more. Yes, it is true that Christianity, like too many other organized religions “is probably no longer a religion, but rather a “financial and political movement.” He forgot to mention that Christianity’s overemphasis on “personal salvation” contributes much to its loss of empathy because all too often this” personal salvation becomes something to be fearfully protected by shutting out the outside world less it corrupt the purity of one’s faith. This is where you find too many Christians who only read Christian newspapers or listen only to Christian radio stations. Though, in truth, the majority of Christians pop into church at most once-a –week and doze through the sermon before rushing out for a week’s worth of secular activities.

However, there are a handful of us--a slim majority, a splinter group—for whom the emphasis of our faith in on the Tao of Jesus. In other words, we could care less about Jesus’ divinity, or whether he really rose from the dead on the third day, or whether God sent him forth to be a sacrificial lamb to atone for Adam’s original sin, or any of the other theological claptrap that surrounds his being.

The message he gave us was to develop a love (a mindset, not an emotion) for all of God’s creation, regardless of how it relates to us. This, and this alone, must be the essence of our faith. Anything less than that reduces the faith to a “corporate and political organization.”

For those who want to return America to her Christian roots, I am tempted to say let us do so. As Kurt Vonnegut has suggested, instead of posting the Ten Commandments in our public buildings, let us post the Beatitudes form the Sermon on the Mount. In his teachings Jesus reduced the Ten Commandments to two: Love God and love you neighbor. Then he proceeded to expand the definition of neighbor to include our enemies and those who hate us. This included the injunction to turn the other cheek, though the Religious Right is convinced that passage was translated incorrectly and that it should read, “Turn the other’s cheek with a fistful of knuckles.”

Were we truly a Christian nation, the first thing we would do is sell the Pentagon to a private developer who would turn it into the world’s greatest indoor shopping mall. (It has everything—name recognition, parking…) Because for a Christian, all acts of violence against another are evil. True, there are times, in rare circumstances, when this evil becomes a necessity as in the case of self-defense. These are exceptions that should neither be glorified nor honored. There is no such thing as a just war or a good war. Both are oxymorons that serve as thin rationalizations to justify our occasional and collective need to slaughter large number of our fellow beings in an orgy of self destruction.

Admittedly, Christian love is a tricky and difficult proposition fraught with potential danger. In the wrong hands it can become downright toxic as in, “Such is my love for your soul that I am burning you at the stake so your soul may rise heavenward on a column of greasy smoke to be embraced by our Heavenly Father.”

Practicing Christian love is a lot like pissing into a hurricane. Most of our output ends up in our laps. But occasionally a drop hits ground, and that makes is all worthwhile.

Numbing Narratives

2010-07-19T03:05:00.000-07:00

“Narrative” is one of those buzz words that bounces around the Progressive blogosphere. It is usually uttered wishfully as in, “Progressives need to develop a coherent narrative on (fill in the blank).” Tragically, the wish for a narrative rarely produces one as Progressives continue to play fallback in the face of a strong and powerful narrative from the Right, which is why you rarely hear the Right speaking of the need for a narrative.

“Narrative” is word that signifies nothing. Rather, it is the product of a causal fallacy, i.e. the assumption that a “narrative” can shape or change reality. Ira Chernus in a thought-provoking article on Progressive Patriotism argues that, “[I]t is entirely possible to transform the meaning of patriotism in just about any way we like.” Here, Chernus bumps into the flaw that has hobbled Progressives since they turned their backs on the working class in the sixties: that all we need do to change a narrative is to change its language and the world will fall into step behind it. This line of thought assumes that culture is a machine, a static noun, and all we need do is change a battery or tighten a screw and it will dance to our tune. The truth is that culture is an ever changing verb that is constantly shifting beneath our feet even as we dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s” in our carefully crafted narratives. It is this very fetish with top-down narratives that gave rise to the politically correct language that is anathema to the working class.

Chernus argues for a patriotic Progressive narrative grounded in empathy. Empathy is an empty abstraction whose soft vowels and consonants dull the senses while its meaning remains vague. What we should be striving for is a “decent” society. Here is a word that has a bite to it. The word implies not only the building of a decent society, but the treating of all segments of society with decency, regardless of our feelings towards them. Don’t forget that five simple words, “Have you no decency, sir?” brought down Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The word empathy has the same problem as does “Christian love.” Both words have a touchy-feely quality that evokes images of a maiden clad in a diaphanous white gown skipping through La-Lad Land with a beatific smile on her face. In truth, both require a descent into the deepest pit of Hell coupled with a willingness to love every low-life son of a bitch one finds down there even though one’s knee-jerk reaction is to tear their freaking throats out. Both empathy and Christian love are mindsets, which is why people rarely understand their meaning, and that is what makes them problematic as rallying cries.

Also, to create this Progressive patriotic narrative would be to impose another top-down ideology that would be likely to fall on deaf ears. The success of the Left in Latin America is due to their ability to tap into an indigenous populism. Progressives could learn much from the Tea Party when it comes to welding an indigenous populism to an ideology instead of attacking it, which only increases its appeal. The success of the Right is that instead of obsessing on top-down narratives, it has tapped into the fears and frustrations of the working class to create a bottom-up narrative that is highly effective. Speaking of the Left, Jean Baudrillard argues that, “[B]y investing in the moral order, it [the Left] can only watch the repressed political energy crystallize elsewhere and against it. And the Left can only feed evil by embodying the reign of virtue, which is also the greatest hypocrisy.”

What is repressed in Progressive narratives is political passion, and the bottom line is that politics demands passion. Without this passion politics becomes so much political pablum that induces apathy instead of action. Progressives will never mount a successful movement until their every utterance sends the Rightwing noise machine into spasms of apoplectic rage.

There is a rallying cry that would resonate with the electorate, and that would be a loud and passionate argument that three running sores are befouling Liberty’s face—Wall Street, the Beltway and the Pentagon, and that by the Pentagon we don’t mean the troops who are doing the heavy lifting, but the policy wonks and generals who have put them in harm’s way by sending them out to fight unnecessary wars. And we must fight to staunch those sores and to return to the one value all Americans both share and strive for, an unblemished liberty.

The Right has been able to conflate liberty and security in the mistaken belief that liberty is only possible in an atmosphere completely devoid of danger and risk. The truth is that security is only achieved when liberty is sacrificed on security’s altar. Liberty requires courage, the willingness to accept that life involves an element of risk and that security is only possible within the precincts of a police state that would turn America into a gated community. Anyone willing to surrender their liberty to be protected from the “terrorists” would do well to don a flame retardant suit and a crash helmet before getting behind the wheel because the probability of being wacked in an automobile accident is far greater than being wacked in a terrorist attack.

A decent society is grounded on four moral absolutes; do not kill; do not steal; do not lie and do not exploit. Obviously, corporatism and decency are mutually exclusive. For what is fouling democracy’s waters in the twenty-first century is not capitalism but corporatism. Capitalism was a product of owners who exploited their workers. Capitalism has morphed into a corporatism in which employees who think they are owners exploit the workers. Capitalist owners walked the factory floor; corporatist employees are sequestered in glass towers which makes it easier for them to ramp up their exploitation of their workers.

Our wars are corporate wars, waged to expand markets and secure natural resources. Corporatism’s attempt to equate itself with freedom is bogus. It offers freedom only to those at the apex of the pyramid, a freedom that is bought at the expense of the pyramid’s base. This is the peg upon which Progressives could hang liberty’s lantern. We must be willing to demonize corporatism , especially the finance corporatism that has raped pension funds, turned people out of their homes and shipped jobs overseas.

Such demonizing requires passion. We’ve got to be pissed off and we’ve got to be willing to piss the public off. We must be willing to listen to the impassioned member of the Tea Party and to respond to their fears and frustrations and to construct not a platform out of them but a raging bond fire. This does not mean we join forces with the Tea Party. Rather, this means we steal their thunder with an even louder rallying cry that would tap into the indigenous populism that is part of the American tradition. And we won’t do this by trying to create bland, reasonable narrative. It’s time to start handing out pitchforks and torches.

Keynes and Consumption

2010-07-17T03:46:00.000-07:00

All of a sudden, John Maynard Keynes has returned to the A-list. Exiled at the beginning of the Reagan administration, he is once again in vogue as the policies of Reagan and his successors have ended in an economic meltdown.

Keynes made his name during the Great Depression when he knocked Says law off its pedestal. Says law stated that supply and demand would always balance out in the long run. 1929 put the lie to that.

Instead, Keynes put forth a theory of aggregate demand in which he argued that demand evolves from the interaction of consumption, investment and government spending. In short, he believed that if consumption drops because of an economic downturn, then it was necessary to increase government spending, which would put money in the consumer’s pocket, which, in turn, would be used to buy goods, and this would stimulate the economy. (Of course, this implied that government spending be reduced in good times, something out leaders ignored during the Cold War.)

The only problem I have with Keynes theory is that it was developed when mass consumption was in its adolescence.

It is difficult to date exactly when the age of mass consumption began since several factors contributed to it. There was the sudden flooding of the consumer market with large quantities of mass produced goods that were affordable. Some argue that mass consumption really took off in the 1890s with the growth of corporate bureaucracies and the increased pay for white collar workers.

If we accept 1890 as an arbitrary start date, then Keynes formulated his theory when mass consumption was a little over forty years old. At this time, there was still room for growth in the consumer market. Many homes were without indoor plumbing or electricity. Coal or wood still heated houses and cooked the food. Clothes were washed by hand; fields were plowed by a team of mules; hot water had to be heated on the stove.

Now we fast forward to today when consumption is seventy percent of our GDP, and one could argue that much of this consumption has been superfluous since most of our basic needs were met in the go-go days of the fifties and sixties. In addition to that, this superfluous consumption has been floated on a sea of consumer debt.

How do you stimulate spending in a saturated consumer market? Whatever money is funneled into the consumer’s pocket will most likely go to pay down consumer debt. We have been floating on a consumer bubble, and it has popped. It is unlikely it will be re-inflated.

Like Icarus, our economy flew too close to the sun and has come crashing back to earth. There are no more wings to be had.

Nihilism

2010-07-08T03:02:00.000-07:00

What a wonderful age we live in. Never have the fields been so fertile for nurturing the forces of folly. Madness is the norm, idiocy is genius. And the reason can be summed up in two words: global nihilism.

In a world where life is no longer worth living, only the 30-second spot has meaning. Beauty, truth and justice no longer reside with the Gods, but with the roll-on deodorant. In a world without norms, deviance rules. Policy becomes a homicidal maniac turned loose to terrorize the village. Life is reduced to a cipher, numbers in the debit column crossed out to enhance the bottom line. Meaning is reduced to a shallow theological formula leaving only the grand farce of power for power’s sake.

So the policy wonks sing their songs, shrill motets broken and off-key, toxic notes like a heavy fog blinding and choking. And within the crippled cadence of the melody runs the grim denial that the first sign of a civilization’s decay appears when it touches the apogee. It is as it slides over the apogee and begins its descent that it becomes dangerously murderous.

Nihilism and decay are the twin goddesses that are lifting our leaders on high. The dankness of nihilism and the stridency of decay feed their power, for both tolerate all idiocy. They bath our leaders in a holy light whose glare blinds the masses and turn their danse macabre into a gay gavotte. They dance and duck and turn, twist and evade to the smooth song of press releases and denial. They dump a turd here and a turd there, slowly building a bulwark that hides and protects them from the forces of meaning.

They are the Zen masters of bullshit and the gods salute them. .

History Repeats

2010-07-07T02:51:00.000-07:00

They say Gen. David Petraeus is a consummate politician, which is another way of saying he knows what to kiss and what not to kiss. There is nothing new in this. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace gives us an early prototype of Petraeus in the character of Prince Boris Drubetskoy, the son of an impoverished noblewoman, Princess Anna Mihalovna Drubetskoy who schemes to wangle her son an appointment to the Guards of Smenovsky. There, as a sub-lieutenant, he makes a discovery and one wonders if Petraeus, as a green second-lieutenant didn’t make the same one:

He {Boris} had completely assimilated that unwritten code which had so pleased him at Olmutz, that code in virtue of which a lieutenant may stand infinitely higher than a general, and all that is needed for success in the service is not effort, not work, not gallantry, not perseverance, but simply the art of getting on with those who have the bestowal of promotion, and he often marveled at the rapidity of his own progress, and that others failed to grasp the secret of it. His whole manner of life, all his relations with his old friends, all his plans for the future were completely transformed in consequence of this discovery.

As Marx once said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce.

The Dead Cow Policy

2010-07-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama has lifted to the highest aesthetic level a tradition that has made our country what it is today: Our talent for mistaking a contingent and transitory reality for an eternal truth. We’re like the farmer who keeps milking the cow long after its dead. When a decayed teat slimes off in his hand, he calls it progress.

Take, for example, the Cold War. When World War II ended, the Soviet Union and we were the only two military powers still standing. Our military and industrial leaders looked across the ocean and instead of seeing Josef Stalin they saw a cash cow. I mean, why waste all that military equipment, why send all those scientists back to academia where they would only make trouble, why force prosperous defense industries to cut back? Let the good times roll!

During the war, we had made an exciting discovery. Paranoia is great for crowd control. That great statesman, Arthur Vandenberg nailed it when he told Truman the key to governance in the new world order was to, “scare the hell out of the American people.” Thus, paranoia became part and parcel of the American character. If we weren’t scared of Commies, we were scared of germs and body odor. It was great: everybody conformed; everybody kept their mouths shut.

Obama is clinging to that Cold War mentality even though it’s as irrelevant as a dead cow’s teat. He continues to make it sing; only now the song is in Pashtun instead of Russian. He’s outdoing the Cold Warriors of old. Every time they tried to mess with our civil liberties, the public raised hell. Look at how he continues to trample on them with nary a peep out of the people. The reason is simple: The people who raised the most hell back then were the people who remembered what life was like in a democratic republic. They are dying out. The only thing the Boomers have ever known is the presence of a constant threat. Their greatest fear is a freedom that tolerates diversity. This is the source of their silence.

Blobular Momentum

2010-07-01T03:08:00.000-07:00

With the passage of time, the dynamic of a newly ascendant power congeals into a bureaucratic blob that is as opaque as it is impersonal, with a momentum unrelated to either reality or the world outside its viscous mass. Within this mass, leaders morph into supervisors sucked along by its unstoppable momentum. In the blind eyes of the blob, the citizen is dead, replaced by the disinterested bystander.

Cut off one part of the blob and it reappears elsewhere on the blob. Cancel one program, and another slides in to replace it. The blob neither thinks nor feels, but moves with a nihilistic impetus powered by ego, greed and stupidity. The complexity of its rules and regulations increase in direct portion to the number of people available for their implementation and the speed with which printing presses can spit out pages for its multiple manuals.

Its growth has been exponential since the firewall separating private and public bureaucracies fell. There is no longer any distinction between a private bureaucrat and a public one because the blob has absorbed both.

Those who would reform ithe blob are helpless before it, for it responds only to infusions of liquidity. What was once corruptions is now funding; what was once freedom is now policies of control and stability; what was once democracy is now statutes; debate became marketing; the stimulations of reading is replced by the numbing down of dancing images on multiple screens.

Those who rise to the top of this blob are the socially maladjusted who mistake their crippled egos for the public will, or, even worst, the blob’s destiny.

Brutality and oppression come easily to the blob. In its eyes, nothing is living because numbers and labels have sucked the life out of existence. If nothing lives, nothing can die, and the corpses that pile up become so much clutter to dispose of so the land their blood soaked can be developed. They are names to be crossed off a register or a list, numbers to be placed in a dead file.

Those who stand atop the blob cling to the delusive belief that they control it. Ahead of them, they see a lighthouse firmly grounded on an immovable rock, guiding them towards the utopian world that is their birthright. What they fail to understand is that the lighthouse is a chimera that moves as the blob shifts directions under its own momentum giving them the illusion that utopia is still within their reach.

Life in the land of the blob is one of ennui and diversion, feeble attempts to find passing stimuli is the grey twilight that is neither darkness nor light. Bright lights, toys and noise divert and direct attention away from the world that is dying around them.

The blob makes possible our leaders’ madness because it does not car how insane they are, for they are but a passing speck on its surface, a mild irritant that will soon shrivel and fall off, only to be replaced by another irritant.

But while our leaders ride the blob, they are convinced of their exceptionalism as they keep their eyes firmly fixed on the lighthouse before them and continue to believe that it is fixed and unmovable.

Beckett the Prophet

2010-06-29T03:15:00.000-07:00

In 1946, Samuel Beckett began work on his novel, Malloy, the first in a trilogy that was to include Malone Dies, and the Unnamable. All three were ground-breaking works that redefined the novel. Interpretations of the works fill volumes. One interpretation is that the works represent an extended critique of a Cartesian rationalism that is crippled because it can only express itself in language, and language, as Beckett is quick to remind us, is limited in its ability to capture define reality, let alone express it.

But there is one passage in Malloy that gives us an insight into another side of Beckett that is never mentioned: that of prophet. In an age of Patriot Acts, surveillance camera on every corner, Military Commissions, legalized torture, drone attacks on civilians and the targeting of American citizens for assassination, see if this passage, written in 1946, doesn’t sound frighteningly familiar:

Morning is the time to hide. They wake up, hale and hearty, their tongues hanging out for order, beauty and justice, baying for their due. Yes, from eight or nine till noon is the dangerous time. But towards noon things quiet down, the most implacable are sated, they go home, it might have been better but they’ve done a good job, there have been a few survivors but they’ll give no more trouble, each man counts his rats. It may begin again in the early afternoon, after the banquet, the celebrations, the congratulations, the orations, but it’s nothing compared to the morning, mere fun. Coming up to four or five of course there is the night-shift, the watchmen beginning to bestir themselves. But already the day is over, the shadows lengthen, the walls multiply, you hug the walls, bowed down like a good old boy, oozing with obsequiousness, having nothing to hide, hiding from mere terror, looking neither right nor left, hiding but not provocatively, ready to come out, to smile, to listen, to crawl, nauseating but not pestilent, less rat than toad. Then the true night, perilous too but sweet to him who knows it, who can open to it like the flower to the sun, who himself is night, day and night. No there is not much to be said for the night either, but compared to the day there is much to be said for it, and notably compared to the morning there is everything to be said for it. For the night purge is in the hands of technicians, for the most part. They do nothing else, the bulk of the population have no part in it, preferring their warm beds, all things considered. Day is the time for lynching, for sleep is sacred, and especially the morning between breakfast and lunch.

Does it remind you of anything?

The Good, The Bad and The Wimpy

2010-06-27T11:55:00.000-07:00

We are slowly learning that all deficits are not created equal. There are good deficits and there are bad deficits; there are deficits that wear white hats and those that wear black hats.

Last week Senate Republicans shot down a bill that surely would have fed ammo to a black-hatted deficit when they killed legislation that would have extended unemployment benefits for the estimated 1.2 million Americans whose jobless benefits will be exhausted by the end of the month, according to The New York Times.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada did what Senate Democrats do best—he wimped out and announced he would move on to new business since he didn’t have the votes to stop a Republican filibuster against the bill.

Of course a fool might ask: Why not let the Republicans hold their filibuster. Let every Republican senator who stands up to speak against the bill be duly recorded by C-Span. Then when the 2012 elections roll around play clips of their dulcet rhetoric over and over again to let the nation see exactly what the GOP stands for.

According to the Times,”The Obama administration has not fought aggressively for the legislation.” But this is to be expected. Obama continues to float in Never-Never Land as the Pentagon leads him to and fro by his nose, and the Democrats wimp out.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said, “The only thing Republicans opposed in this debate are (sic) job-killing taxes and adding to the national debt.

Which brings us back to the distinction between good deficits and bad deficits: In Republican eyes, bad deficits are those that help alleviate domestic economic suffering. It all gets down to the Right’s doctrine of personal responsibility. The unemployed would not be unemployed had they not forced their manufacturing plants to relocate overseas because the once-employed demanded a living wage.

Good deficits, on the other hand, are those that help America maintain her military erection. Deficits are to the Pentagon as Viagra is to the fifty-something male. Here are a few examples of good deficits:

1. B-52 bombers consume 47,000 gallons of jet fuel per mission per plane, leaving a contrail of red ink in their wake.
2. When an F-16’s afterburner kicks in it burns through $300 worth of jet fuel per minute as red ink pours out of its exhaust.
3. The Afghan War is costing us $57,077.60 per minute to lose. I’d say we’re up to our keisters in red ink on that one.
4. A contributing factor to that cost is that the “fully-burdened cost” of pumping a gallon of gasoline in Afghanistan is $400. All those tanks, Humvees and other vehicles are blowing red ink out their exhaust pipes.

However, according to both Republicans and Democrats, these are good deficits because they are “feel-good” expenditures. Being a military superpower is such an ego trip that our leaders are loathe to give it up so the funds being burnt up on a useless war could be diverted to relieve the ever growing suffering on the home front.

Meanwhile, Obama continues to float in Never-Never Land while the Pentagon leads him around by the nose, and Sen. Reid comes up with even more creative ways to wimp out less he incur the wrath of America’s Rabid Right.

Our children may go hungry; more and more tent cities will spring up as more homes are lost, but, by God, both the Pentagon and its military contractors will continue to prosper. And nobody, but nobody seems willing to make the connection between domestic suffering and the money being wasted on an useless and unnecessary war.

Go figure.

Dress Rebellion

2010-06-17T08:17:00.000-07:00

One of the more thoughtful writers on the peak oil scene is John Michael Greer. His blog, The Archdruid Report is as perceptive and intelligent as it is well written. In one of his recent posts he made the following observation which concisely sums up one of the problems that plagues progressives in America:

Striking a rebellious pose and claiming originality is very fashionable these days; actually rejecting the conventional wisdom of our time, and thinking thoughts that conflict with those of one’s contemporaries, is less common now that it was in the supposedly conformist Fifties.

The truth is that when America's young people revolt they head for the mall where they are clothed, tattooed and pierced. Having established their bona fides as well-appointed revolutionaries, they return to their rooms or thier clubs to lose themselves in the ramped-up music of rebellion and despair.

Nothing insures social stability like a fashionable revolution. In a consumer society, revolution is all about style. Once properly costumed, the revolution goes mainstream and nothing changes. For the Corporatist State, revolution is not about liberte, egalite and fraternite, but about market share, retail shares and brand recognition.

But our corporatist should beware of the revolutionary who shows up in Dockers, penny loafers and a button-down shirt. That sonofabitch will hurt them. Where fashionable rebels hope to bring a pier down by slam dancing on its surface, the guy in Dockers is the one who puts on his scuba gear, drops beneath the surface of the water and starts chipping away at the pilings.

Unfortunately in an age when it is not only necessary to think outside the box, but to reduce the box to kindling, too many would-be rebels think that all the box needs is a fresh coat of paint or a new addition.

It's a Freaking Miracle!

2010-06-16T03:20:00.000-07:00

Talk about a miracle, out of nowhere over a trillion dollars worth of minerals and raw materials are popping up all over Afghanistan. And if we believe government spokesfolk, the Pentagon has just now stumbled onto them.

There’s iron, copper, niobium, cobalt, gold, molybdenum, silver, potash, lapis lazuli and rare earth elements such as lithium without which laptops and Blackberries would be so much scrap metal.

According to Tuesday’s New York Times, these deposits could “transform Afghanistan into one of the important mining centers in the world.” And most tellingly, “…it could alter the Afghan war itself.” Of course there is one caveat to these statements. Both express the earnest faith of Pentagon officials, who “believe” this could be so, somewhere, over the rainbow.

As with any article that appears in the Times, the real story is buried 20,000 paragraphs under the lead. The Soviets figured this out in the 1980s when they conducted their own geological surveys. The surveys were discarded when the Afghans drove them out of the country. A Pentagon team looking for some sort of economic justification for our eternal war of the empty policy came across the survey and put together a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists to expand on the study. This was in 2006.

The story does point out that, “American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan,” as in they need all the good news they can get no matter how chimerical it is.

James Joyner deconstructs the hype surrounding this “breakthrough discovery.” He quotes Foreign Policy managing editor Blake Hounshell who suggests that the $1 trillion estimate was pulled out of thin air. Let’s face it, the Pentagon has a vested interest in inflating the estimate in an effort to provide a commercial rationale for the Afghan enterprise.

One commentator calls it a “massive information operation,” though it might be more accurate to call it a “disinformation” operation.

Political scientists refer to the “Resource Curse” to describe the fate of third-world countries in which large deposits of minerals are discovered. The bottom line is that the poor remain poor while the corrupt and the connected prosper. Already, there’s talk of brining in multinational mining companies to exploit these mineral deposits at pennies on the dollar.

What we have here is a feeble attempt by the Pentagon to justify its existence. A trillion dollars, that’s the new buzz word that officials hope will garner support for a dying policy. How can we leave Afghanistan with all those minerals that will lift the Afghan people out of their stone-age poverty and bring them into the modern world? It won’t happen, but that makes little differences. Justifications for war rarely have any relationship to reality.

Then, of course, there’s the threat of China muscling in and exploiting the minerals for their own selfish commercial ends. God knows they’ve been inking contracts all over Africa and the Middle East. They’ve already tied up the copper franchise in Afghanistan.

However, the Chinese have one advantage over the United States—drones and hellfire missiles are not a component of their foreign policy.

But, hey! The Pentagon says all those minerals are just begging to be developed and when has our Pentagon ever lied to us? Nothing brings democracy to a country like raw materials waiting to be exploited. We can’t leave now and leave all those minerals to a bunch of foreigners. If we found them we own them. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference who they actually belong to.

A Gated State

2010-06-14T03:19:00.000-07:00

There are many who worry that as money and capital continue to flow upward towards the apex of the pyramid that passes for our democratic republic America could turn into an impoverished wasteland pocked by secure, thick-walled gated communities behind which the very wealthy would hide from the ravages of torch and pitchfork bearing mobs.

An article in this month’s Harper’s suggests that Arizona may be on the cutting edge of becoming America’s first gated state. In “Tea Party In The Sonora,” Ken Silverstein walks us through the madness that passes for politics in Arizona.

The state is facing a financial crisis that makes California look wealthy by comparison. Silverstein cites as an example of the political “wisdom” that is driving the state a decision by the legislature to slash the budget for the Department of Revenue, which is responsible for tax collection. Sure, they saved $25 million, but one official estimates that by doing so the state will lose out on $174 million in revenue.

Howver, there is one quote from an Arizona resident that jumps out at the reader because it underscores the gated-community mentality that seems to dominate Euromerican thinking on the far-right fringe of our political spectrum. To this individual’s credit, her statement was so perceptive that I doubt she shares its sentiment. Commenting on the right’s aversion to big government, she said:

People who have swimming pools don’t need state parks. If you buy your books at Borders you don’t need libraries. If your kids are in private school, you don’t need K-12. The people here, or at least those who vote, don’t see the need for government. Since a lot of the population are not citizens, the message is that government exists to help the undeserving, so we shouldn’t have it at all.

Now, there’s gate-building with a vengeance. It personifies the attitude of many Euromericans: I’ve got mine; screw you! Unfortunately, I’m not sure it’s an attitude that is strictly confined to our wingnuts. On sometimes wonders if the democratic liberals are cowed by the right or if they’re somewhat in agreement with them. It’s the old “Yes-they’re-fine-as-long-as-they’re-like-us,” syndrome.

One of the things that is sending the right into its spasms of bigotry is the sense that the age of Euromerican supremacy is drawing to a close. This could explain our collective obsession with military spending and wars. If your economy is hollowed out, if, instead of a community, peoples’ lives have been reduced to one of fragmented isolation, if the good life has been reduced to a question of how much junk you own, then the only feel-good experience left in to go to war and kill somebody. It’s a great high, especially if you’re not the one doing the killing.

America’s strength has been her ability to absorb wave after wave of immigrants. It has not been easy; it’s been traumatic and violent at times. Yet, as each wave was assimilated, America was re-energized. One of problems facing Europe has been its inability to absorb its immigrants.

Each wave of immigrants has arrived in this country poor and, over several generations, has prospered, and, in doing so, has made its contribution to our greatness. My grandfather arrived in America in 1892 with just the shirt on his back. The third generation of his offspring included doctors, nurses, teachers and business people, all of them on the make.

Then there’s the right’s lament that the latest wave of Hispanic immigrants are overburdening what’s left of our social welfare system. This is as it must be because the America into which the Hispanic immigrates differs from the world into which my Grandfather immigrated.

When my grandfather immigrated to America, it took a team of men armed with picks and shovels to dig a ditch. Now the same ditch is dug by a single back-hoe operator with a union card in his wallet, which he probably inherited from his father. The social services provided to new immigrants are not money down a rathole; they are an investment in the contributions their children and their children’s children will make to our country, if we allow them to.

Fear corrodes a people. A frightened people can never be a free people, and the great irony of the right is that the very fear that powers it is eating away at the freedoms they claim to value. Once fear takes over there is neither a wall thick enough nor a gate strong enough to make it go away. The point is reached when fear ceases to be an emotion and becomes a way of life. The right, particularly in Arizona, appears to be in the vanguard leading us into that putrid swamp of fear and paranoia where dreams die.

But then, if you can still afford to buy books at Borders…

A Nasty Little Sacrament

2010-06-13T03:05:00.000-07:00

What a nasty little sacrament the flag lapel pin has become. The church defines a sacrament as an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. The difference between sacrament and a sign is that a sacrament participates in the reality it represents.

Imperial sacraments take this one step further. As one sage pointed out, as imperial overlords we create a reality that is not real but appears to be real simply because we are imperial overlords and thus are able to create the reality of which any given sacrament is a part. One of the privileges of being an imperial overlord is the privilege of living in a fantasy world.

Nowhere is this demonic creation of reality more manifest than in the flag lapel pin. The pins our leaders wear is not the flag of social justice but of military prowess. It is not the flag of democracy but the flag of corporate management techniques. It is not the flag of freedom for the people but freedom of the few to exploit the many.

It is also rapidly becoming the flag of cultural purity as ICE agents continue to arrest and deport “illegal” aliens. Our leaders are determined to prove to the world that we are not a salsa culture and Arizona is in the front ranks of the war to keep it that way.

It is this obsession with cultural purity that is the real bond between the United States and Israel. Each of us, in our own way, represents the pinnacle of Western Civilization, and each of us is determined to prevent its corruption by brown-skinned aliens. The only difference is that Israel’s aliens shoot rockets while ours clean offices. Therefore, Israel needs a different methodology in dealing with its alien problem.

Call it what you may, but it’s not racism. Any alien willing to get with the program, internalize our Western values and claw his way to a CEO position is welcome with open arms. That’s why we have an alien in the White House. Those who won’t get with the program are deported, jailed or bombed out of existence. It’s a question of behavior and attitude, not race.

It’s only a matter of time before the values that gave us World Wars I and II are the norm and the world enters a golden age of carnage and fat defense contracts.

Thank you GM for doing something right for a change.

2010-06-11T03:14:00.000-07:00

Thank God General Motors has let me off the hook. Yesterday, one of their marketing mavens in a sudden attack of retartive genius issued a memo in which he directed employees and sales personnel that when referring the Chevrolet to stop calling them “Chevys.” The goal, he said, was “brand consistency.” Perhaps he thought Chevrolet had more of cachet to it than the more plebian Chevy.

I was crushed. This meant I could no longer drive my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry. Granted, I have neither Chevy nor levy, but that makes no difference. That damn memo deprived me of my freedom to someday have both a Chevy and a levy, whether wet or dry.

And let’s face it, singing:

Drove my Chevrolet
To the roundelay
But the dancers were dead…

doesn’t have the same punch to it.

This morning I learn redemption is mine! GM issued a “Boy-did-we-screw-that-one-up” memo in which they said, “Hell, yes. Go ahead and use Chevy ‘till your teeth fall out.

Could it be that the company is starting to realize that there’s a public out there it has to be responsive to? That could be a breakthrough.

In the meantime, does anyone know where I could pick up a used levy?

Lung Cancer and Life

2010-06-09T02:44:00.000-07:00

In April I was diagnosed with lung cancer when the doctors discovered a 4 cm adenocarcinoma on my left lung. The good news is that I caught it early and that it originated and is confined to the lung.

Monday, I completed the second of four courses of chemotherapy designed to shrink the tumor and keep it in its place. After the chemo is completed I will go into surgery. Because the tumor is located in the fissure that separates the upper and lower lobe of the lung it looks as if the entire lung will have to be removed.

Many patients talk of fighting cancer, of battling and struggling against it, and these are valid approaches that reflect the individual temperaments of these patients.

My approach is different. I embrace my cancer as an integral part of God’s creation, for all of creation is grounded in death and the truth we all face is that the leading cause of death is birth.

On this surface, this could easily be misconstrued as surrender. It is anything but.

Life is one big non-linear paradox. So my embrace, rather than being surrender, is a challenge to embrace my cancer and pass through it, and in passing through it to realize and accept that not only will it change me but it will always be with me. It will forever be in my soul, but by embracing and passing through I increase the probability that it will strengthen my soul instead of curdling it.

It will remain is my body, as well, in remission, but the truth is that cancer will probably be my ticket out of this world, hopefully some years from now. In one respect, we are all children playing in the sand, and with our plastic shovels and buckets we build sand castles, forts and other intricate structures. And, yet, the time comes for all of us when we must pick up our toys, take our father’s hand and go home. And after we have left the beach, the tide comes in and washes away all we have built. However, by the time that happens we are safely home and sound asleep.

This is actually my second bout of cancer. Ten years ago I was diagnosed with an indolent lymphoma. Happily, for the last six years, it’s been behaving itself. On that occasion I wrote the following poem:

requiem
Bury me, if you would, in a shroud
That my brothers and sisters
The worms and microbes may enfold me back into the earth,
That one day,
Years from now or generations from now,
A young girl may squat before a gaily-colored flower
And in leaning forward to inhale its scent
She will inhale my Spirit.

One of the upsides of cancer is that it gives you time to compose your epitaph. After much thought and meditation I wish the following to be carved into my tombstone below my name and the dates of my birth and my death:

SHIT!

After all, it does piss you off a bit.

It all goes back to the size of the crime.

2010-06-08T03:19:00.000-07:00

This happened in waters outside of Israeli territory, but we have the right to defend ourselves.
Avital Leibovich, Israeli Military Spokeswoman
Commenting on the Israeli attack
a Gaza-bound humanitarian ship that resulted
in nine deaths.

Of course they had to attack the ships because Israel’s definition of “’the right to defend ourselves” includes the right to attack a fleet of humanitarian relief ships in international waters as well as the right to turn Gaza into the world's largest concentration camp. And what concentration camp worth its salt is going to allow an incursion of humanitarian aid?

Ah! But wait! Things are not as they appear according to the Israeli government. These were ships manned by "terrorists" and “terrorist dupes” carrying a cargo that included weapons. Case closed, maybe...

I.F. Stone once said that all a journalist has to do is remember two words: governments lie. A corollary to Stone’s rule is that the bigger the crime, the bigger the lie. (Both rule and its corollary have been completely lost on the American media.)

According to Paul Craig Roberts, “America will never hear from the US media that Turkey’s prime minister Erdogan declared that the aid ships were carefully inspected before departure from Turkey and that there were no terrorists or arms aboard.

Roberts quoted Erdogan who declared, “I want to say to the world, to the heads of state and the governments, that these boats that left from Turkey and other countries were checked in a strict way under the framework of the rules of the rules of international navigation and were only loaded with humanitarian aid.”

Granted, Erdogan’s statement could fall under Stone’s rule, but then we must turn to the corollary and ask, whose crime was bigger? And why did Israel deport all the members of the ships’ crew if they included terrorists? Then of course, we’ve yet to see the Great Israeli Photo Op that displays all the weapons seized from the humanitarian flotilla, though if the Israeli’s did stage such a display one would have to wonder where, exactly, these weapons came from. It all gets back to the size of the crime.

Labels protect us from thinking.

2010-06-05T03:37:00.000-07:00

My loathing of labels is a product of the eighteen years I spent as a special ed. teacher in Brooklyn. It was in that setting that I saw how thoroughly labels dehumanize. I taught autistic children and was forced to spend hours listening to administrators drone on about strategies for teaching “the autistic child,” as opposed to teaching the human child. The children I taught were a diverse lot, yet the autistic label reduced them to a single, homogenous category.

In truth, the autistic label was a death warrant for a child. Reading evaluation reports for incoming students it was not at all uncommon to read about a pediatrician telling parents of a newly-diagnoses child that their child would have the mind of a two-year-old for the rest of its life, a gross misstatement of fact.

It’s easy to spin a label. If I told someone I taught autistic children, they would react as if I were a candidate for sainthood. If, on the other hand, I said I taught children with pervasive developmental delays (a more accurate description of what I did) the reaction was, “Oh! That’s nice.”

The advantage of the label is that it saves people the trouble of thinking, and in our age of collective brain rot this is a desirable quality to have. Labels also save us the pain-in-the-ass effort of trying to see others as human beings in all of their nuanced complexity. It is far better to hang a label on them so we can slip into our comfortable for-or-against-us mode of binary thinking.

Without labels power would be crippled. To thrive power needs both labels and numbers. What it can’t quantify it labels and in doing so it dehumanizes both its subjects and its enemies. Both numbers and labels are key ingredients in the firewall that protects power from the fecund maelstrom that is life.

Labels are so much easier to kill or oppress. It’s easier to bomb a terrorist than to bomb a human being, and the vaguer and more ill defined a label is, the easier it is to drop the bombs. Without labels there could be no Pentagon, no Israel, no military-industrial complex and no War on Terror. Without labels there could be no violence. Perhaps this is why the spinning of labels appears to be hardwired our collective brain.

The upside of labels is that they bankrupt empires since an empire can only conquer and oppress a label. One could argue that that is their sole contributions to a decent world.

An Exciting New Threat

2010-06-02T03:16:00.000-07:00

Happy News! We have a new threat to our wellbeing, something else to flame our anxiety and keep it at a simmer so we can await with baited breath the next words of wisdom that tinkle down from the “experts” who would sanitize and scrub clean our existences until nothing is left of us except compliant and obedient shells whose surfaces are brightly polished.

According to a front-page story in Saturday’s Times, this new threat is the very substance that kept our ancestors alive: salt. In the forefront of this new War against Something is none other than New York City Mayor Mike “The-People-Don’t-Know-What’s-Good-For-Them-But-I-Do” Bloomberg who wants to do what any politician wants to do when faced with an imaginary threat, and that is legislate.

Experts tell us that if we could cut down on our salt intake, we could “save” 150,000 American lives annually (That comes to .0005 of the population if I counted the zeroes correctly).

Now, the idea of saving lives by banning this or that substance raises a question. The simple fact of the matter is that the leading cause of death is birth. It’s true for all of us. So cutting down on salt doesn’t save anything. It simply puts off the inevitable. Granted this delay has its merits, but looking at it in this way robs the issue of its urgency. If I pull a drowning man from a river I’ve saved a life. If by taking away his salt and adding a couple of years to his life saves nothing.

But what the hell, a politician isn’t a politician unless he has a threat to hype, and for a politician a threat doesn’t have to be real as long as it plays well in Astoria.

Drill! Drill! Drill!

2010-05-22T04:04:00.001-07:00

Ah, the things we learn from a disaster. Estimates vary as to exactly how much oil BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig is pumping into the Gulf of Mexico. Initially, BP said none, then a thousand barrels a day, which the federal government then bumped up to 5,000 a day.

BP won’t allow any scientists to actually inspect the site, the Gulf having become BP’s proprietary body of water. However, scientists did get hold of a film clip of the spewing oil and estimated that at one time upwards of 70,000 barrels of oil a day was pouring into the Gulf.

Michael Klare has written extensively on oil, and he brings up a little noticed point about the Gulf disaster. The assumption has been that BP was sending its drill 13,500 feet beneath the surface of the Gulf in a frantic effort to decrease our dependence on foreign oil. After all, why be dependent on all those Mideast countries when we’ve got good old American crude just waiting for us below the Gulf. “Drill, drill, drill,” as Sarah is fond of saying and get that oil to the nearest gas station so America can keep driving as she always has.

This was not the case, according to Klare. He tells us, “There, is, however, some indication that the company was in an unseemly rush to complete the cementing of the Mississippi Canyon 252 well—a procedure that would cap it until the company was ready to undertake commercial extraction of the oil stored below. It could then have moved the rig rented from Transocean Ltd., at $500,000 per day, to another prospective drill site in search of yet more oil.” (Emphasis mine.)

As always, it gets down to the bottom line. Klare goes on to explain:

The major energy firms have their own compelling reasons for a growing involvement in the exploitation of extreme energy options. Each year, to prevent the value of their share from falling, these companies must replace the oil extracted from their existing reservoirs with new reserves.

The easy stuff is pretty much tied up by state-owned oil, which means that domestic companies like BP must go into for some high-risk drilling if they are to keep their balance sheet intact.

Though, speaking of a “domestic” oil company is a bit of a misnomer. The oil market is an international market, and any oil company, domestic or foreign, will sell oil to whoever offers the best price. So that oil pouring into the Gulf could have very well been used to power industrial plants in China or automobiles in India.

As it stands now, that oil’s not going anyplace except the Gulf Coast.

When is a lie a lie?

2010-05-21T03:10:00.001-07:00

One of my readers who tries to keep me on the straight and narrow, though not always with success, is Robert Becker, an excellent writer himself. Robert called me on yesterday’s post when I argued that four moral absolutes are necessary for a decent society: do not kill; do not steal; do not lie; do not exploit.

Robert jumped on lying when he wrote:

By the way, “lying,” in its nearly infinite dimensions is quite different from killing, stealing, and exploiting (thought that’s not a simple one either). Art, for example is a kind of lying, and something one must deceive to get to a higher truth. Now, giving false testimony, in a court where facts and life matter, that’s rather different than sweeping away all “lying.” We satirists lie all the time, and sometimes, to play the devil’s advocate, we must take on some of his attributes.

He makes a good point. Lying is a tough nut to crack. Not only are there times when it is necessary, but on the flip side brutal honesty can often be wielded as a weapon that is used to hurt and demean.

One possible solution would be to condemn lying when it is a vehicle for exploitation. This can be done on a personal level as in, “Of course I’ll still respect you if you sleep with me, baby,” to “Sadddam Hussein has stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.”

Such lies are born of a desire to wield power over another, and this is the source of the lie’s indecency. Otherwise, if there’s a boring party you’d rather duck, a slight touch of diplomatic flu is not a ticket to Hell.

What if we tried this?

2010-05-20T04:04:00.001-07:00

“Freedom” is one of those words that get tossed about like a pod full of dried peas, and often the only sound that emanates from it is a death rattle. The whole political spectrum wants to claim the word as its very own, and it is used as a rationale for everything from dropping Hellfire missiles on innocent civilians in the AfPak Theater to raucous West Coast orgies.

Frances Moore Lappe believes Progressives should make freedom their number one issue. She defines freedom as, “[O]ur power to make real choices, about not only our personal lives but about the forces determining the quality of life in our communities.” She then points out that, “In very real ways, basic economic security established through social rules we create together isn’t a threat to freedom; it’s essential to freedom.”

Then she skins her shins on the one rock Progressives seem to stumble into, no matter how high or bright the sun, when she says, “Progressives should challenge all Americans to a useful debate about what really restricts our choices and what actually does make us free.”

You can’t debate a sound bite. The problem is not to educate, it is to inspire. I once heard Drew Weston, author of The Political Brain speak, and he opened his talk by asking how many people in the audience remembered Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Plan” speech. King didn’t have a plan, he had a dream and he took the country with him.

One problem with those who talk about freedom is that they fail to take a good hard look at the type of soil freedom needs to sprout. Like Lappe, many writers put a great deal of emphasis on economic security. Yet, many of the marchers in the Civil Rights movement were dirt poor and hadn’t known economic security for generations.

What is freedom if not a demand for a decent society? As I have pointed out in previous posts, four moral imperatives are the foundation upon which such a society is built; do not kill; do not steal; do not lie; do not exploit. These, in turn, require courage. This explains why history has seen so few decent civilizations. Decency embraces and affirms all of God’s creation. When confronted with evil its response is measured and adequate to deal with the problem rather than one of fearful overreaction.

From the above, it is patently obvious that we will never achieve a decent society. And the results would be rather deadly if we tried to. Because to achieve a fully decent society, we would have to turn decency into an ideology, and ideologies have a nasty habit of turning to social engineering to achieve their goals. This raises a problem of what to do with those individuals who don’t want to buy into it. The traditional response has been prison camps and death squads. In the end decent people end up saying to the indecent, “You will either live a life of empathy and compassion or we will kill you.”

Rather, the push for a decent society should act as a counterweight to the unholy copulation between feral capitalism and a toxic beltway that are the twin albatrosses around Liberty’s neck.

The desire for decency is one that cuts across class and ethnic lines. Without this foundation of decency, freedom spins off and fragments into an atomized void of self centeredness and self interest. This is why so many individuals equate freedom with the freedom to buy. This is why the hedge fund manager defines freedom as the right to make obscene profits even if doing so threatens to bring the economy down.

Decency resonates with a public that is strung out, uncertain and frightened. The courage that the drive for decency would demand, along with its attendant empathy and compassion, would be an effective antidote to the fear-mongering that spews forth from the demagogues who dominate our airwaves.

What do you do with a low-life, mother-fucking son of a bitch?

2010-05-19T03:03:00.000-07:00

Most of us have had the experience, at one time or another in our lives, of hating someone with a passion that borders on the homicidal. This passion runs especially deep if the object or our hatred had hurt us or a person dear to us. The hatred comes in waves every time he or she is mentioned. Sometimes it washes over us in the wee hours of the morning and we find ourselves wide awake playing and replaying old grievances.

The problem is that while this passion consumes us and borders on the self-destructive, it doesn’t touch the object of our loathing. He or she continues along their merry way untouched by our hatred.

Here is a rather bizarre suggestion that might help neutralize this passion and allow us to move from day to day with a little more serenity.

When you wake up in the morning, conjure up the object of your hatred. Review in your mind every undesirable characteristic, every wrong he or she committed. Meditate on every mannerism you despise and every physical characteristic you find loathsome. And when your rage is all consuming drop to your knees, clasp your hands and pray the following prayer.

“God, please bless this low-life, mother-fucking son of a bitch!” Hell, don’t pray it scream it at the top of your lungs. Add a few more adjectives if it suits you.

The next morning, do the same thing. And keep doing it morning after morning.

In time, you will drop the “low-life” and the prayer will become, “God, please bless this mother-fucking son of a bitch!”

As more time passes, and if you are faithful, you will drop the “mother-fucking.”

Then, one day, you will drop the “son of a bitch.”

And on that day, you will be free.

It’s bizarre, but it works.

A Work in Progress

2010-05-17T03:29:00.000-07:00

In a recent article, Chris Hedges excruciated organized religion for its impotence in the face of a rising tide of anger and amorality. He opened his article by saying:

It is hard to muster much sympathy over the implosion of the Catholic Church, traditional Protestant denominations, and Jewish synagogues. These institutions were passive as the Christian right, which peddles magical thinking and a Jesus-as-warrior philosophy, hijacked the language and iconography of traditional Christianity…The obsession with personal piety and “How-is-it-with-me?” spirituality that permeates most congregations is undiluted narcissism.

With few exceptions, Christianity and organized religion are as oil is to water. Historically, organized religion has so much blood on its hands it is impossible to tell where the fingers end and the nails begin. All of this violence surfaces as soon as the church gains political power. When Church and State wed Hell pays for the reception for the child of the union is Death.

The message of early church missionaries to indigenous people was, “Jesus died for your sins, and so can you!”

The truth is that organized religion chokes on the teachings of Jesus. Early Christians referred to their faith as The Way. For them, the essence of this faith was internalizing Jesus’ teachings and actually living them. The Way included little annoyances like loving your enemies and turning the other cheek. (The Religious Right would have us believe that what Jesus actually said was turn the other’s cheek with a fistful of knuckles.) Living the Beatitudes is a pain in the ass, so it is easier for organized religion to get its knickers in a knot over evolution and same-sex marriage.

The separation of church and state was not the creation of eighteenth century secular humanists, but of a clergy man, Roger Smith. The Puritans booted Smith out of Massachusetts because of his heretical beliefs, so Smith founded Rhode Island. Based on his experience in the Bay State and England, Smith realized that nothing corrupted a religion faster than being made a state’s sanctioned religion. So in Smith’s view the separation of the two was necessary to keep religion healthy and uncorrupted by the quest for political power. (The corrupted faith of the Religious Right becomes understandable when we remember that from the 1820s to the 1960s a White, male-dominated Protestantism was the de facto state religion of America. The poor boys want their power back.)

The Way, once it frees itself from the corrupting influences of the state is grounded in one of the world’s most misunderstood concepts: Christian love. At the mention of Christian love many people envision a white-robed maiden skipping through La-La Land with a beatific smile on her face.

It is anything but!

Christian love demands a descent into the deepest pit of Hell and a willingness to love every low-life son of a bitch one finds there even though one’s knee-jerk reaction is to tear their freaking throats out. In Greek, Christian love is called agape and is defined as an attitude and not an emotion.

I am always amused by the Christian right’s efforts to place the Ten Commandments in public buildings. Progressives missed a golden opportunity when Judge Roy Moore wanted to place blocks of granite, engraved with the Commandments, in the country’s courthouses.

What Progressives should have done was help him move the goddamn blocks. And when they were in place, a good Progressive would have mopped his brow, stepped back and said, “Damn Judge! Have you read these things? They’re little more than anti-capitalists tripe. Look at what they’re telling us: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie and don’t exploit. How in the hell can you run a multinational with an albatross like this around your neck.

As for myself, I am a renegade Christian. Being one means living the Tao of Christ. For the renegade, dogma is an irritant that is either shaken off or ignored. It means understanding the Bible as a repository of spiritual, not literal, truth. As one contemporary theologian has put it, “Everything in the Bible is true. Some of it actually happened.”

Such an approach is difficult for Americans because most of us were raised to be technicians. (I define “technician” to include everything from neurosurgeons to the front-end specialist and your local Ford dealer.) The mantras we were brought up with were: say what you mean; get to the point; don’t beat around the bush. It was a world in which every word had but one meaning with little room for metaphor. Consequently, we bark our shins every time we stumble into one. So when confronted with the Bible, we treat it as an either/or proposition. Either it is all literally true or it is all hokum. For technicians who believe, the Bible is a technical manual that must be followed to the letter. But, as Hedges puts it, “The Bible works only as metaphor,” which is why most Americans don’t get it.

To the renegade Christian, God is the Ground of Being whose qualities we will never know. Metaphorically, we might speak of Her as a person, but we run into trouble when we literalize this metaphor.

And, no! I am not one of those Christians who believe God is going to bail us out of the mess we’ve created simply because She gave us dominion over nature. According to the Bible, humanity’s dominion was brief. It lasted until Eve went apple picking. If you read God’s curse on Adam and Eve (Genesis, 3:14-19) it is obvious that humanity is stripped of its dominion and becomes just another derivative species.

God promised Noah no more floods because the flood punished the Earth and the Earth was innocent (Genesis, 8:21). She said nothing as protecting us from self annihilation. Hell, the next Messiah could well be a cockroach. Nor was dominion restored to humanity after the flood. All God said was, “The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal on the earth…” (Genesis, 9:2)

Hedges is correct when he says:

We are not going to be saved by faith in reason, science and technology, which the dead zone of oil forming in the Gulf of Mexico and our production of costly and redundant weapons systems illustrate….The essential teachings of the monotheistic traditions are now lost in the muck of church dogma, hollow creeds and the banal bureaucracy of institutional religion.

The sad truth is we are probably screwed.

Granted, God has entered into numerous covenants with humanity. But the covenants were in force only as long as humanity loved God and didn’t kill, steal, lie or exploit. The average lifespan of a covenant was measured in nanoseconds.

So here we are, knee deep in a sea of bile, which the Religious Right equates with Christianity. There is anger, uncertainty and hard times. Our leaders, aided and abetted by a subservient media, would have us project our anger on those with skins darker than ours, be they immigrants of Muslims.

For the past sixty-plus years, fear and paranoia have driven America’s politics, both here and abroad. According to our leaders, danger lurks everywhere: in the food we eat, the air we breathe and the second-hand smoke we inhale, not to mention a multitude of germs, bacteria and exotic diseases. America, they tell us, is constantly under siege, first by Commies and now by Islamofascist terrorist.

The first order of business for the still sane is to challenge this atmosphere of fear and trembling. Some of us who dissent from our national paranoia will find the spiritual strength to stand up and proclaim that there is nothing to fear. For myself, I draw this strength from the Tao of Christ and from the Liberation Theology of Latin America. This is not for everybody, nor should it be. But, it could well be that at some future date it may be missionaries from Latin America who will teach us how to live life in harmony with creation.

Tragically, there is no guarantee we will listen.

But as Hedges reminds us, “Those who championed this radical individualism, from Confucius to Socrates to Jesus, fostered not obedience and conformity, but dissent and self-criticism…Freedom and indeed the religious and moral life required us to oppose and challenge those in authority.”

A state does not a nation make.

2010-05-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

Any given country is made up of two components: the nation and the state, state meaning the center of governance and power.

“Nation” is an umbrella term that refers to the groups and subgroups that make up a country’s culture. The diverse values of its citizens are embedded in the nation. The nation is chaotic, disorderly and lacks efficiency, for it requires constant bickering to achieve the compromise and conciliation that are needed for effective action. All too often, the outcome of this bickering is an obsession with the common welfare.

The “state,” on the other hand, seeks power and authority so it may bring order and stability to the nation and impose upon it its own values of conquest and exploitation. Its power tends to puddle in one or more centers. In the case of America, it has puddled in the Beltway, Wall Street and the Pentagon, America’s own feral trifecta.

Traditionally, constitutions and common law are in place to protect the nation from the state.

The state achieves power by co-opting the nation’s values, corrupting them, and using them not as instruments of welfare and peace but as justifications for repression and home and conquest abroad. It recasts these values as absolutes that are propagandized to produce compliance and obedience.

The nation thrives on diversity; the state thrives on conformity.

If the nation represents the chaos of a life force that maintains itself in a constant state of tense equilibrium, then the state ultimately expresses itself as death, through incarceration, execution, and the sacrificing of the flower of its youth to advance its interests. The end is always the same: the enhancement of the state’s power. There is no other rational for its existence.

To thrive, the state must twist Christianity, with its message of love and universal brotherhood, into a message of God’s wrath and retribution, making of the state a wagon train drawn into a circle and surrounded by a dark, alien force. Church and state work hand in hand to undercut freedom so they might protect “people of faith” from the “evil” forces that would destroy its civilization by strapping a nuke to a camel and sending it for a stroll down Wall Street.

The state achieves its ends with a rhetorical arsenal that includes “inversion of language, verbal inflation, libel, rumor, euphemism and coded phrases, rhetorical wantonness, redundancy, hyperbole, such profusion in speech and sound that comprehension is impaired, nonsense, sophistry, jargon, noise, incoherence, a chaos of voices and tongues, falsehood, blasphemy.”[1]

To succeed, there must be a disconnect between the state and its citizens. These citizens must be reduced to a passive horde so wrapped up in themselves that they could care less about the antics of the state.

A good citizen is one who mistakes the fiery sword of conquest for the shepherds crook.

[1] William Stringfellow

Manufactured Identity

2010-05-15T03:17:00.000-07:00

Look at all we have accomplished the last sixty years. Our finest achievement has been the fragmentation of the community though a succession of electronic gadgets that encourage isolation. Technology is the jack hammer that has turned the foundation of rock upon which democracy once rested into a bed of sand. This same gadgetry has fragmented the family as well. With computers and televisions in every room, a home becomes an empty house with atomized individuals drifting from room to room.

Where people once identified politically through community and family, they now find themselves without any sort of grounded identity. So they pursue an identity through brand association, defining themselves to the world with the logos sewn on shirts, jackets and pants. They search for a manufactured identity grounded in a manufactured reality, which they try to pass off as authenticity.

A Japanese philosopher has pointed out that if a society deconstructs everything except the ego it is left with a crypto nihilism that can only be filled with noise and toys. It is this crypto nihilism that sucks the life out of a democracy and spurs our economic growth.

Destiny's Song

2010-05-13T03:07:00.001-07:00

Destiny is an old crone whose cackle sings a descant over and above the screams of those slaughtered in her name. She howls hysterically as we beat our Scriptures into the shrapnel with which we shred flesh in the name of an unseen deity. She fills her barren womb with the Blood of the Lamb and gives birth to lunatics who cut bloody swaths through the living in pursuit of her love. To her lovers, she is youth, beauty and eternal life; to her victims, she wears death’s black cloak, and swing her scythe with abandon as her lovers nurse at her shriveled teats.

Geekspeak

2010-05-10T07:36:00.000-07:00

If the attempted car bombing in Times Square is any indication of al Qaeda’s competence and expertise, then we can cancel the War on Terror, dissolve the Department of Homeland Defense and issue visas to every member of al Qaeda we can lay our hands on. Between shoe bombs , exploding underwear and plastic bottle of exploding shampoo, it looks like your garden variety terrorist couldn’t even put a Chinese firecracker in a mail box without screwing up the operation.

Unless…

It could be that what we are witnessing is planned incompetence. Think about it: al Qaeda knows full well that were it to kill scores of people in Times Square the full wrath of the United States military establishment would come crashing down on the Middle East. If, however, they staged a series of botched attempt with the sole goal of getting the Pentagon’s knickers in a knot, then they would get what they wanted, an increase in military activity that would lead to more civilian deaths that would give al Qaeda and the Taliban a increased pool of potential recruits.

Already we can hear the sound of knotting knickers emanating from the Beltway. The New York Times tells us there is a move within the administration to use the Times Square bombing as an excuse to ramp up our military activity in Pakistan. This means more contracts to be let and an additional justification for the Pentagon’s existence.

As Iraq winds down the Pentagon is badly in need of another war to replace it. According to Jack A. Smith, “Evidently the Pentagon is planning to engage in numerous future wars interrupted by brief period of peace while preparing for the next war.”

And Pakistan appears to be Act III in our Eternal War of the Empty Policy.

The article quotes an official whospeaks of the need for “boots on the ground.” That phrase is an example of what I call Geekspeak. Geekspeak is a word or phrase that inflates itself into a linguistic bubble that breaks free of reality and floats into space like a sterile dust mote. Geekspeak’s forte is covering the stench and gore of war with soothing euphemisms that give a false impression of linear sanity and intellectual rigor. Geekspeak is the bastard child of the value-free language so worshiped by the social sciences.

Other examples of Geekspeak are “full-spectrum dominance,” which is the doctrine of the playground bully. Then there’s “power projection capabilities” that include digging bullets out of civilian corpses so their murder can be blamed on the “enemy.” “Dominant global hegemon” is another way of saying, “Mine is bigger than yours!” Then there’s the ever popular “metrics,” which is a polite way of saying we can now quantify why we’re getting our asses kicked.

However, my favorite is “robust.” Robust is bureaucratese for machismo. It’s used by men who want to touch their feminine side, but not too much. People are ambivalent about aggression, but everyone loves robustness. It reeks of glowing health and evokes images of Tom Terrific manning the battlements against hordes of attacking brownskins intent on raping our daughters and marrying our sisters. It’s patriotic to be robust. Aggressiveness is what our enemies are.

This is only a partial list. Readers are invited to submit their own entries. Geekspeak rolls out of the Beltway like a fetor wafting across the Potomac River. But then what can we expect from a Beltway that is world’s largest sheltered workshop for arrested adolescents.

When is a conspiracy not?

2010-05-07T07:40:00.000-07:00

Where does a policy end and a conspiracy begin? Mike Whitney raises this question in a perceptive analysis of the run up to the 2008 financial meltdown. His thesis is that there was no conspiracy, per se, but a consistent policy of maximizing profits in the financial sector of the economy through the deliberate creation of asset bubbles, be they dot.com or housing.

Whitney sees this as a sign of decay in a mature capitalist system. He argues that “it’s far more damaging than any conspiracy, because it insures that the economy will continue to stagnate, that inequality will continue to grow, and that the gigantic upward transfer of wealth will continue without a pause.”

Now, if a policy produces negative consequences for the many while benefiting a few, is it still a policy or does it fall into the sphere of the illegal? A conspiracy is defined as “a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.” By that criterion, both the Iraq and Afghanistan enterprises could be considered conspiracies because both are eminently harmful and both, under international law, are illegal.

Of course, when dealing with the American empire we must remember that the benchmark for action is not legality but “reality creation.” As Karl Rove is reputed to have said, “We’re an empire, now, and when we act we create our own reality.” The problem is that an empire doesn’t create reality, it creates a fantasy world that it mistakes for reality because, being powerful, an empire believes its fantasies to be real when they rarely are.

The bigger question is when you move beyond the execution of a bank robbery or any other specific crime, is a conspiracy possible? When it comes to grand conspiracies, I confess to being a skeptic. I simply don’t believe Homo sapiens has the intellectual capacity to carry one out on a large scale. Human nature doesn’t lend itself to mega plots. Somewhere, someone would have one drink too many or would want to impress his mistress and the cat would be out of the bag.

Rather than conspiracies I see passing convergences of interest grounded in life’s contingencies, contingencies that are constantly in motion. These convergences are reactions to events and not their creators. This is why terrorist activity tends to be made up of isolated incidents rather than parts of some sort of overall strategy. Experts tell us that al-Qaeda isn’t so much a formal organization as an ideology.

A good analogy for these convergences can be found in chaos theory. If you sit by a fountain for a period of time, a pattern emerges. Most of the time the droplets of water fall in a random and chaotic pattern, but occasionally the drops fall in unison, a unity that is quickly dispersed as the droplets resume their random pattern. It’s the same with convergences. A disparate group of individuals come together to take advantage of a specific situation and then disperse.

Was 9/11 an inside job plotted and executed by the Bush administration? Absolutely not! Was the administration aware that such a plot was in the works and choose to let it happen? Possibly. Did every neocon and wingnut rejoice when the planes slammed into the twin towers because this breathed new life into our militarized security state? Absolutely! It was a passing convergence of interests.

Grand conspiracies have their appeal because of our need to impose some sort of order event that are, by nature, chaotic and unpredictable. We want to believe a single mastermind is behind them and that once this mastermind is neutralized the threat will vanish. Such a belief is the mindset of a technician who believes that there isn’t a problem that can’t be solved by changing a battery or tightening a bolt. The trouble is that life isn’t a machine and it rarely behaves like one.

The real problem arises when a criminal activity morphs into a hardened policy because of an ongoing convergence of interests between government and the private sector that takes on a life of its own. Then the problem is not one of conspiracy but one of a nocent policy supported by a de jure government, and the only solution to that is revolution.

Bush-League Sins

2010-05-03T06:51:00.001-07:00

Since being diagnosed with lung cancer I’ve stumbled across an interesting anomaly. Lung cancer is the most common form of cancer in America, yet we rarely hear about it and certainly not to the extent we are made aware of breast cancer. (This is not to disparage the publicity breast cancer receives. Research on one type of cancer benefits all types.)

I suspect that the reason for this anomaly is that in the public’s mind lung cancer is associated with a “sin:” smoking. There is still a corner of our psyche that associates smoking with “loose” women and men who hang around pool halls and saloons. Therefore, there is a subconscious tendency to see lung cancer as God’s punishment for a sinful life. (Up until seventeen years ago I burned between two and three packs of cigarettes a day. However, we just had a member of our church die from lung cancer and he’d never smoked a single cigarette. The simple fact is that if you live long enough the chances are that you are going to come down with some form of cancer.)

Along the same lines, there was an article in today’s Times about a new “problem” of women who are addicted to porn. The religious right has been carrying on about men addicted to porn for some time. (“Have you lost your husband to porn?” reads one banner on a religious website.) Of course, no mention is ever made of men who are addicted to televised sports, especially profession football whose violence produces injuries that could well last a lifetime. But then, our prudish psyches still look askance at “s-e-x” as if it’s still as sinful as it was during the Victorian Era.

The point is that by focusing the public’s attention on bush-league sins that probably aren’t even sins, attention is diverted from the big sins such as wars of aggression, torture, the felons running Wall Street, a totally corrupted Congress, poverty and unemployment, the healthcare reform scam and the three running sores on liberty’s face: the Beltway, Wall Street and the Pentagon.

There are four moral absolutes that are necessary for a decent society: do not kill; do not steal; do not lie; do not exploit.

By those criteria, we are indeed an indecent society, and it’s not because some chick flashes her pussy.

Making Things Up

2010-05-01T07:26:00.000-07:00

I confess, I am repeating myself because what I am repeating bears repeating. A major factor in our two wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, in our war on terror, in our peppering the world with military bases, in our actions towards Iran and our droning of Pakistan has nothing to do with oil or the spreading of democracy or the advancing of our global corporate interests.

True, all of these do play a part in our actions, but the overriding factor is the attempt to create an ongoing justification for a bloated and unnecessary military establishment that lost its raison d’être with the fall of the Soviet Union.

As Tom Hayden explains, “It is no accident that the Pentagon is shaping the ‘information battlespace’ by welcoming friendly reporters and think tank hacks to beam back commentaries…to the American people.” It is doing so through the use of “message force multipliers,” which often involves the floating of false or inflated information.

It all boils down to this: because the Military-Industrial Complex no longer has any justification for its existence it must create one by manipulating the public’s “perception.” If no real threat exists, then it creates one. Terrorism is a crime best handled by police and intelligence agencies, unless you are a military complex looking for a reason to live by elevating terrorism into a war, which has the advantage of creating even more terrorists thus increasing the need not only for the existence of the military but for its expansion.

Part of the perception management is the Pentagon belief that “America’s wars best be fought ‘off camera, so to speak.’” Democracy depends upon transparence for its survival. In such a democracy, wars cannot be fought “off camera.” The only rationale for doing so is that our military leaders know damn well that if they were fought on camera, if the public saw real people being murdered and maimed, its support for the wars would dry up.

It is normal for big countries to want to dominate and control smaller countries. The stupid ones try to do it militarily. The smart ones, like China, do so by inking contracts, something China is doing in the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. Countries that attempt military domination end up bankrupting themselves. Countries that don’t, prosper.

According to Shamus Cooke, China is building up its military to protect its economic expansion. However, the Chinese have one advantage our oligarchs don’t have. They are starting from scratch so they will expand only as much as they need to. They are fortunate that they are not burdened with a gargantuan military establishment.

But thank God, China’s buildup presents another potential threat that will be used to justify our military’s existence. Cook quotes a New York Times article that admits, “…there are few indications that China has aggressive intentions towards the United States or other countries.”

That simply won’t do. So the article goes on to quote a Navy admiral who says, “Of particular concern is that elements of China’s military modernization appear designed to challenge our [U.S. Navy’s] freedom of action in the region.”

Cue Congress to increase the Pentagon’s budget to meet this new “threat.”

Isn’t it wonderful how, when you are packing a gun how threats just keep on multiplying and multiplying? Gotta keep that baby loaded and ready. It’s only a matter of time before our leaders manufacture another one.

Paradigms and Prophets

2010-04-30T09:48:00.000-07:00

Limits suck! We still want to believe that progress is an eternal upward sweep of human endeavor that is stretching towards a celestial utopia made possible by science and technology. The idea of technology being limited remains a non-issue. But now the prospect of resource depletion has began to impose itself on our utopian vision.

This is why peak oil and global warming are anathema to us. They violate our theology and raise the specter that there might be limits to how far we can take our technology. Our tragic flaw is our inability to frame an issue outside of our theology of science because our all of our thinking proceeds from the unproven premise of eternal growth. This is what Damien Perrotin calls the “culture of progress.” He goes on to say:

The problem of Peak Oil is that the narrative which underlies it runs contrary to everything Enlightenment and the ideology of progress stand for. Where progress is about conquest and the mastery of nature, peak oil tells us of the absolute, unmovable limits this very nature assigns to our development and prosperity.

There is much talk of a need for a paradigm change. Implicit in much of this talk is the unspoken assumption that simply because we understand there is such a thing as paradigm changes it is possible to execute one simply because we understand it. What this assumption fails to appreciate is that there is a world of difference between saying and doing. Just because we can say it doesn’t mean we can do it. For an example of this, let us take a look at how long it took the Enlightenment to be diffused into our everyday life.

One of the earliest expressions of Enlightenment thinking was the French Encyclopedie, edited by Denis Diderot and first published in 1752. Many traditional publications included an illustration showing “The Tree of Knowledge.” Up until Diderot, these illustrations had placed Theology at the base of the tree. Diderot, in his Encyclopedie, showed the base of the tree as Philosophy. Theology was relegated to a twig on the branch of “Fancy and Fairy Tales.”

Fast forward to Westchester County, New York in 1835, where Robert Mathews, who called himself the Prophet Mathias and who claimed to be a messenger from Jesus Christ, was indicted on charges of attempted murder, child abuse and being a false prophet of God. Upon reviewing the indictment, the Westchester County district attorney dropped the false prophet charge because he believed there was no way to prove that Mathews wasn’t a false prophet. In other words, seventy-three years into the Enlightenment educated people still believed in the possibility of an individual being a prophet of God.

Fast forward, again, to 1895 and in Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip there are numerous accounts of individuals being institutionalized for “religious insanity.” It looks as if it took 140 years for Enlightenment ideas to percolate down to everyday life.

With time, the paradigm will change, as it always does. But we cannot will it; we cannot throw a switch and make it happen. Nor do we have any knowledge what it will look like. All we can be sure of is that it is now happening and that the upward sweep of progress is grinding to a halt.

Upddate v.1b`

2010-04-29T06:25:00.000-07:00

So much for the best laid plans, etc. The doctors have decided that I need a couple of weeks of pulmonary rehab before they operate. I am going in to day so they can feed a camera in and take a picture of the tumor. While they're at it, they are going to yank a suspicious looking lymph node. So I should be back home late this afternoon.

Hopefully, I'll post something tomorrow.

Hiatus

2010-04-27T09:51:00.000-07:00

The sins of my youth have caught up with me. The doctors discovered a malignant growth on the lower lobe of my left lung. Fortunately, they caught it early. Thursday, I go into the hospital to have the offending lobe removed. I expect to be back here in the first or second week of May.

So, who needs corporations, anyhow?

2010-04-26T07:10:00.000-07:00

This is an old chestnut I drag out from time to time whenever our oligarchs and kleptocrats out do themselves, which is quite often. But with the SE C’s civil suit (Note: Not an indictment) against Goldman Sachs, I thought I’d drag it out again. It’s a modest suggestion that may increase the probability that, someday, we might clean up a Beltway that is little more than a Wall Street subsidiary.

Recently, the United States Supreme Court gave Congress back to its corporate handlers when it ruled that Congress could not place restrictions on corporate contributions to political campaigns. The argument was the same fallacious argument that has allowed our corporate oligarchs to befoul our democracy—corporations are people and have the same rights under the Constitution and Bill of Rights as human people.

So, it is time to reprise an idea I put forth about a year ago. Then it fell into a sea of silence, but perhaps the court’s decision has made the ground more fertile for its growth.

What we need is a 28th Amendment to the Constitution that strips our corporations of their personhood. The net effect would be that our corporations would have no rights; they would only have responsibilities enumerated by the terms and conditions of their charters.

Today, such an amendment stands a snowball’s chance in Hell of passing. However, as our economy continues to tank, and as Wall Street bankers continue to get trillions in bailouts while the disempowered class in America, which increasingly includes the Middle Class, continues to slip down the economic ladder, the temperature in Hell is starting to fall.

Besides, think of the fun we could have with such a movement! We could demonize the hell out of the bastards.

Look at where we are now. In an age when it is not only necessary to think outside the box but to reduce the box to kindling, a paralysis has gripped the Obama administration, which spends all of its time trying to figure out if we’re in a box to begin with, and, if so, how big it is, what color it is and is it really necessary to think outside the box when we could easily build an addition to it, provided they could get the financing.

Meanwhile, the Left loudly proclaims that, “Something must be done! Systemic change is needed; reform is called for!” And, there it ends as the Left fragments into a spray of mini issues--gay rights, women’s rights, peace, the environment, animal liberation, universal health care—each droplet suspended in space independent of the others. Each of these issues is important, but each is made all the more difficult because we are confronting a system that is decayed and corrupt, and until this tottering superstructure is addressed, the above issues will simply limp along without any satisfactory resolutions.

The drive for a 28th Amendment would serve two immediate purposes.
Dissatisfaction in America is badly fragmented. We are too isolated in our discontent, which is why we seek escape in celebrity infidelities and reality television.. The drive for a 28th Amendment could well be the lightening rod that would unify this discontent into a viable movement.

At the same time, the radical left has a millstone hanging around its, neck: a vocabulary straight out of the nineteenth century that, in today’s world, is devoid of both meaning and relevance.
The struggle is no longer between capital and labor.

Capitalism is dead; it’s been dead for decades. A CEO is not a capitalist; he is an employee. A capitalist grew capital by the sweat of his brow and the blackness of his soul. A CEO plays with other people’s capital while absorbing as much of it as he can through executive salaries, bonuses and stock options. The soul of a CEO is a bland beige.

We no longer have a working class; we have a dispossessed class that grows larger every day. It is an inclusive class claiming as it members not only workers but the poor, the working poor, undocumented immigrants, the unemployed, the employed who are squeezed for three hours of productivity for one hour’s pay and, increasingly, the middle class. It is a class just waiting to be mobilized by the right issue.

If there is to be any systemic change in the country, the corporation must be demonized, and the movement for a 28th Amendment would present the perfect platform from which to do just that. Let’s face it, the corporation is an anachronism, a dinosaur that has outlived its usefulness and is in the process of devouring itself as it takes the country down with it. That is the box that must be reduced to kindling! The corporation served its purpose; it gave us all sorts of nice toys and technological advances (many of which are destroying the earth, but isn’t your iPhone worth it?) but it’s time it was put out to pasture before it ruins us completely.

The amendment would raise the possibility of doing something about our corrupt Congress. Cynics tell us Washington D.C. is an open septic tank overflowing with the raw sewage of corruption. In truth, it is a bit more sophisticated than that.

Granted, raw sewage is pumped into the beltway via open trenches that run from the nation’s power centers. But, instead of pouring into the Capitol, it is first pumped into the K Street Sewage Treatment Plant. There it is sanitized and deodorized before being piped into the Halls of Congress disguised as campaign contributions. It is still sewage, but, it smells sweeter.

The short answer to this mess is public funding of election campaigns. On the surface it seems to offer much. By freeing the congress from the multiple snares of corporate purse strings, Congress might start representing the public interest. As it stands now, every time an elected official speaks of our national interests or national security, “national” is simply a code word for “corporate”. The system is gamed to minimize public influence on policy.

Congress tried to reign in corporate power with the McCain-Feingold Bill. Before the ink was even dry on the bill, our corporatist oligarchy went weeping to the nearest federal court and claimed that the bill violated its First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Money talks, and if our corporate patrons aren’t allowed to speak through their wallets, they are being unconstitutionally silenced. And, the Supreme Court agreed with the poor darlings one-hundred percent.

The argument won the day, because under our current system, a corporation is a person.
People assume that corporate personhood was the result of a Supreme Court decision. In truth, the court made no such decision. The question of personhood arose when the court considered an appeal[1] of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. The focus of the case was the taxation of railroad properties. As the case worked its way through the lower courts, the question of whether corporations were persons protected by the 14th Amendment was argued.

However, before oral arguments began before the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite stated, “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question of whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are of the opinion that it does.”

Because formal arguments had not begun, Waite’s remark was a non-binding obiter dictum that had no bearing on the outcome of the case. The question of corporate personhood was never mentioned in the court’s written decision. The court limited its decision to the question of taxing corporate property.

However, the court clerk, when writing the header, or summary, of the case stated that, “defendant corporations are persons…”

Thus, was corporate personhood born.

The principle is so engrained in legal precedence that a judicial reversal is virtually impossible. That is why only a constitutional amendment could solve the problem.

That our amendment would raise some corporate hackles is an understatement. Already, I hear lamentations about the sanctity of private property, etc. However, a very compelling argument could be made that the ownership of corporate property is so diffused amongst shareholders that it is a misnomer to call it private property. Since corporate property exists at the pleasure of the State through the granting of a corporate charter, it is more akin to quasi-public property than private property.

I admit this is heresy, but given rate at which corporations are eating us alive, I think some healthy heresy is called for.

This brings us back, in a full circle, to our corrupted Congress. If corporations were stripped of their personhood, a campaign finance reform bill that eliminated corporate money from the electoral process would be protected from a court challenge. There is no guarantee this would clean up the system. All it would do is increase the probability that it would be cleaner than it currently is.

Granted, the idea of a 28th Amendment sits way out there in the foggy fringe, but if our Neocon colleagues taught us anything, it is that today’s fringe is tomorrow’s mainstream.

This is a movement that could cut across class, gender and ethnic divisions because if there is one thing unifying America, it is our economic misery. And if nothing else, the drive for a 28th Amendment would make our oligarchs and plutocrats sweat. That, alone, would make the effort worthwhile.

Sure, it looks hopeless, but I.F. Stone wrote:

The only fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing—for the sheer fun of it—to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.

It’s time to bring back the Merry Pranksters, but instead of promoting psychedelic drugs, they will promote the decorporatization of America.

Peace.

[1] http://www.ratical.org/corporations/SCvSPR1886.html#118US394
[2] http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/hinkley213.htm

Buzz Words

2010-04-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

Buzz words rattle around the Beltway like dead seeds; they roll through the corridors of the Pentagon and traverse the potholes that dot Wall Street. They distract us from the intellectual vacuity that permeates much of our economic and foreign policy by the false sense of comfort their familiarity brings. They ring hollow and we mistake them for anthems.

They are all toxic, but the most toxic of all is that old chestnut, “credibility.”

Basically, what credibility means is that when you step in shit, you stand in shit as if you intended to step in it in the first place, as if the step was the result of careful planning, countless meetings, reams of reports and policy studies; that it was subject to congressional oversight and peer review.

Our leaders must remain standing in that pile of shit because to step out of it and scrape their shoes clean would be an admission that they had stepped into it by mistake, and that would undercut our credibility. So, they stand and stand and tell the world that the stench is really perfume and that the world will be a better place because of their dedication and determination.

This explains why our leaders are standing in two piles of shit at the same time—Iraq and Afghanistan. And why they will remain standing in them for some time to come.

After all, shit is sweet once you get use to the stench.

Whoops!

2010-04-23T07:10:00.000-07:00

What an oversight! Last month I posted a piece in which I argued that if, as the religious right insists, we are a Christian nation it would be nice if we started acting like one by feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, caring for the sick and (Gasp!) loving our enemies.

I just realized that I left out the most important characteristic of a Christian nation, and that is to follow Christ’s example by driving the moneychangers out of the temple of democracy.

Then I remembered—we worship Calvin, not Christ. And to Calvin wealth is a sign of God’s favor and grace. Maybe Golden Sachs’ Lloyd Blankenfeld is right when he says he’s doing God’s work.

Deconstructing "Reality"

2010-04-19T06:28:00.001-07:00

Superstition still lives. We like to think we’re “enlightened” because we no longer believe in ghosts, goblins or things that go bump in the night. But, the truth is we’re just as superstitious as our ancestors. The only difference is that instead of sporting fangs, our monsters wear wingtips.

Alexia Eastwood does a wonderful job of deconstructing one of our more prevalent superstitions, our belief in Economic Man, or Homo Economicus. Economic man was an outgrowth of Adam Smith’s contention that “the self-interested actions of individual agents guided by the ‘invisible hand of the market’ would lead to the greater good of all society.” This, of course, assumed that people were “hyper-rational.” Right away, that concept runs into trouble when you consider the millions who have plunked down over a hundred dollars to buy a pair of Nike sneakers that might have cost five bucks to manufacture.

Eastwood contends that studies in behavioral psychology and anthropology show “that our inclination to share and cooperate is hardwired into our genetic code and may have acted as an evolutionary advantage in human societies throughout the ages.”

Of course, the myth of Homo Economicus fits capitalism like a tee. It provides a rationale for the Social Darwinism that made the late nineteenth century such a hell -hole for the working class and which has made comeback in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Under this doctrine, the poor are poor because they aren’t fit. It’s all a matter of personal choice. A person is poor just because a sperm chose to fertilize an impoverished egg. It should have known better.

Another fallout from our economic friend is that belief that numbers represent reality, that if the numbers say it’s so, it is. Eastwood quotes Karl Polanyi who stated that, “[N]o other society outside of our own has ever raised the pursuit of economic gain to the guiding principle of society or understood it as definitive of the human condition.”

In other words, Economic Man is a socially construct that has no basis in reality. It’s pure make believe, a fantasy encouraged by our oligarchs to justify their manifold predations. We are now living with the dreadful consequences of this superstition

As for the invisible hand of the market, as I’ve explained in previous posts, there is an easy way to make it visible. Place you elbow on a table with your forearm perpendicular to the table’s surface. Make a fist. Now extend you middle finger heavenward and there you have it: the invisible hand of the market.

Pushing the Gurney

2010-04-18T04:07:00.000-07:00

Every since the fall of the Soviet Union, Capitalism has been taking its victory lap so thrilled with itself that it doesn’t realize that it’s strapped to a gurney being pushed by Beltway and media denizens. It’s like the dying man who believes that the harder he parties the more death will be kept at bay.

Things aren’t much better at the other end of the political spectrum. The left’s gurney ran off the track decades ago and is lying on its side slowly rusting as it is ignored by passer-bys.

One wonders if the dialectic of history isn’t getting ready to make another turn with capitalism as the thesis and socialism as the antithesis. At this point in time, we have no way of knowing what the emerging synthesis will look like. For that matter, most of us are unaware of this dialectic even being in motion. No doubt a thirteenth-century lord of the manor believed feudalism would last forever.

As Tony Judt puts it, “We have entered an age of insecurity—economic insecurity, physical insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity. The fact that we are largely unaware of this is small comfort: few in 1914 predicted the utter collapse of their world and the economic and political catastrophes that followed.”

“Not so!” cry those pushing the gurney. “Capitalism is the end point of history; it will rise from its own ashes like the Phoenix bird of mythology.” It’s a poor analogy. The Phoenix bird was consumed by an external fire; capitalism is dying from the internal rot of its own contradictions. Advanced capitalist countries have reached the limits of economic growth and are now turning inward and devouring themselves in a doomed effort to preserve the appearance of prosperity and health.

Capitalism rode to power on the wings of a geological fluke, abundant fossil fuel. At $2 a barrel, anything is possible. At $85 a barrel our options become limited. Economic growth has reached a tipping point where every increase in our GDP is another step closer to the destruction of the natural world that supports us.

Don’t bother telling that to the man on the gurney. He suffers from a terminal case of dementia in which he believes he is still an energetic young man who will never age or decay.

That’s the way it is with the dying.

A Culture of the Unreal

2010-04-16T02:31:00.000-07:00

One of the tenets of America’s Secular Christianism—in addition to our inflated exceptionalism and our belief that we are a City on a Hill sending forth the light of Liberty’s torch to the world-- is a belief in ongoing and eternal progress dictated by the Eternal Providence that has guided our destiny.

Those of us who grew up in the fifties grew up with a utopian view of the future, a future where everything would be automated, where labor and drudgery would be a thing of the past and where they was no limit to our economic growth. It was a time when nobody could understand why children “who had everything” were so unhappy and why the youth of the fifties were drawn to the strident discordance of rock ‘n roll.

A side effect of our belief in progress is the mistaken assumption that technical progress is the same as social progress. It isn’t. According to German philosopher Theodor Adorno, social progress is that which insures the “happiness of unborn generations.” There is no correlation between adding apps to our smart phones and world we will leave behind for our children and grandchildren. It is likely that the children of my grandchildren will live into the twenty-second century. I’d like to leave them more that smart phones, video games and a crushing deficit.

One could argue that social progress will begin when our obsession with technological progress ends, which it may well do as it runs head-long into resource depletion. It is becoming increasingly clear that technological progress is a parasite that has been slowly sucking the life out of Mother Earth. Technology does not necessarily make us better human beings, and given technology’s contribution modern warfare it could well be the instrument of our social regression.

Granted, technology has increased our efficiency, but the sad truth is that efficiency and freedom are mutually exclusive, and, no, being freed from the labor machines now perform for us is not freedom, its convenience. And convenience can make slaves of us all as we cling to our labor-saving devices and are quite comfortable with our militarized surveillance society as long as it keeps providing is with newer and cleverer toys.

There is a difference between hard and soft technology. Hard technology deals with needs; soft technology is pure fluff whose absence would be inconvenient but would be no great loss. Just before Christmas, our microwave went belly up. Panic set in and we rushed out a bought a new one. However, in the week between purchase and delivery, we discovered we really didn’t need one. Hell, bacon tastes better fried in a frying pan then it does when it’s nuked. It takes a little longer, but it’s worth the wait.

Without social progress there can be no ethical progress, which is why we have become so inured to torture, the crushing of our civil liberties, wars of aggression and the “collateral damage” that goes with them. And if we start feeling the stirrings of conscience, there’s always a screen nearby to divert our attention, or another happy pill we can pop that will make everything just fine.

Helena Norberg-Hodge argues that ours is a “synthetic culture” that is more media event than an organic product of people living in community together. Rather than being a product of community, synthetic culture can thrive only when the social bonds that hold together a community or a country have been destroyed and its people fragmented and isolated. She goes on to say, “In this sense, what is often seen as American ‘culture’ is not a product of the American people. It is, in fact, an artificial consumer culture being foisted on people through advertising and the media. This consumer culture is fundamentally different from all those cultures which for millennia were shaped by climate and topography—by a dialogue between humans and the natural world.”

Every once in a while I catch “Modern Marvels” on the History Channel. From time to time a voice-over intones, “Welcome to the twenty-first century. Things are going to be different.” It’s a pity how pop culture remains ignorant of its irony.

Thinking Circular Thoughts

2010-04-14T03:39:00.000-07:00

So the Pentagon believes “surplus oil capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.”

This little gem was found in a Joint Operating Environment Report issued by the US Joint Forces Command. And of course, we all know what this is. It is “an intellectual foundation upon which we will construct the concept to guide our future force developments.”

In other words, the Pentagon is prepared to burn more oil so it can use oil up so it will have a justification to invade even more countries to replace the oil they’ve burned up getting the oil they need to invade other countries. Or something like that. Of course, with the fully burdened cost of pumping a gallon of gas in Afghanistan averaging $400 a gallon, this could do wonders for our deficit.

While the Pentagon sends billions pouring out of its military tailpipes, the Chinese have discovered the pen is mightier than the sword, especially if the pen is signing contracts for future oil deliveries and joint ventures to develop future oil fields.

“Future fuel supplies are of acute importance to the US army because it is believed to be the biggest single user of petrol in the world.” Gosh, could it be that if we put down the sword and picked up the pen our army just might burn less fuel? It would be a hell of a lot cheaper and burn less fuel if we flew a trade delegation overseas to cut the best deal it could.

Perish the thought! The Pentagon doesn’t want oil, it doesn’t want victory and it sure as hell doesn’t want to spread democracy to the world. All it wants in a justification for its existence. And burning oil to justify fighting for more oil is all the justification it needs.

The report warns of the political upheaval that could accompany the economic a shortage of oil could bring. “One should not forget that the Great Depression spawned a number of totalitarian regimes that sought economic prosperity for their nations by ruthless conquest.”

Gosh! Does that sound like somebody we know?

Learning to Listen

2010-04-13T06:30:00.000-07:00

So, where’s the left? As Obama continues to morph into Bush Lite the left is off somewhere on life support. Sure, there are plenty of words flying round damning, condemning and suggesting. But there is no unified movement, no unified organization and no funding.

Part of this problem is that the bulk of the activity in on the net with the remainder being confined to progressive publications. Both are consumed in isolation, and the simple fact of the matter is that you’ve got to leave the house to start a revolution.

But there are other issues at work as well. The left sits by while the Tea Party rallies the working class that was once the left’s base. The reason is quite simple: the left turned its back on the working class in the sixties and continues to do so. Many on the left see the working class as beer-swilling Neanderthals and homophobes who care more about their guns then they do about the state of the country and who are constantly voting against their economic interests by returning one Republican after another to office. The left easily forgets that these are human beings groaning under the crushing weight of an oligarchy that continues to oppress them.

This split happened in the sixties when the left turned its back on the working class as the “new” left sought liberation in drugs and sex while damning all those who did not support its ideological goals. The Republicans, of course, capitalized on this split. What commentators call their Southern Strategy was really the GOP’s Blue Collar Strategy. The first thing they did after they locked in the working class was to screw them to the wall while distracting them with cultural warfare against gun control, abortion and gay rights.

At the same time, the left fragmented into a series of ideological encampments, each secure behind its own wall and so certain of the rightness of its fragmented cause that it was unwilling to enter into meaningful dialog. Consequently, the left today remains crippled by its own ideological prissiness.

There will be no viable left until it reestablishes solidarity with the working class. However, in doing so it must remember that the most important component of solidarity is listening! At the same time, the left must take a careful look at some of its ideological chestnuts and see if there is sufficient wiggle room to make its reunification with the working class a reality.

The irony is that one of the stickiest disagreements between the working class and the left is the one that could be easily resolved—gun control. This probably stirs a greater degree of working class anger than any of the other “culture” issues. Sure, the anti-abortion forces make a lot of noise, but it is gun control that can really get the working class enflamed.

Were it up to me, I would say to the working class, Keep your guns. But I ask one favor in return: teach your sons how to hunt. Hell! Teach your daughters how to hunt as well. Because hunting is environmentally sound. It takes 16 pounds of grain to raise one pound of beef. That works out to eight tons per steer, eight tons the hungry of the world will never see. The average male deer, when dressed, yields about 72 pounds of edible meat. That is 72 pounds of ecologically sound meat that has had a minimum impact on the environment. This venison displaces 72 pounds of beef raised on factory farms, which are environmental disaster areas.

Nor does any hunter want to see his wood leveled to make room for upscale condos or a coven of McMansions. This puts hunters in bed with the environmentalists.

Many will claim hunting is cruel because a lot of hunters can’t shoot straight. However, in nature animals rarely die peacefully in their sleep. Death comes slowly after weeks or months of suffering. Coyotes have been known to eviscerate a sheep while it still lives. And we must never forget that all of creation is grounded in death. (The most sacred thing we do is die. It’s so goddamn sacred we want nothing to do with it.)

It’s true, guns kill people and there have been some horrific acts of violence, but so do trains, planes and automobiles and there’s been no talk of banning them. They are, however, regulated, something the NRA would have to accept, and something it might be more willing to consider once it is convinced the left doesn’t care a whit about taking its guns away.

Gun control is only one example of an area where compromise could be achieved. And no, I am not talking about Obamaesque pragmatism or centrist triangulation. What I am talking about is the left’s core ideal of building a decent society in which all are cared for and in which our corporate oligarchy is brought under control. It is a decent society that would benefit the working class because it would guarantee that its children would have enough to eat, competent and free medical care and America would begin to rebuild its manufacturing base. It would be a country in which our hubric dream of global conquest would be recognized for the pipe dream it is and the Pentagon would be turned into the world’s largest indoor shopping mall.

Yet, none of this will happen until we win back the working class. Either we get them or the Tea Party does. This means our days of ideological prissiness must end.

Even more change we can believe in.

2010-04-11T03:39:00.000-07:00

It seems the Army is in a bit of a snit over WikiLeaks.org’s release of the tape showing an Apache helicopter gunning down a group of Iraqi men and the van that came to pick up the wounded.

Huffed an Army spokesperson, WikiLeaks “represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the U.S. Army.”

There was a time this would have been called journalism.

Making "All the News That's Fit to Print" fit.

2010-04-09T14:46:00.000-07:00

When The New York Times says, “fit,” it means all the news that’s fit to print if its reporters want to continue to have “access,” that door that opens and ushers a reporter into the multiple seats of power, both public and private, that control America. And the door stays open as long as the reporter behaves himself and doesn’t embarrass his handlers with tough questions or voice opinions that do not have official approval.

So it was, in the wake of the WikiLeaks.org video showing the gunning down of Iraqi citizens by U.S. Apache helicopters, that the Times ran a soothing “There, there” story in effect explaining that “boys will be boys.”

“Experts Cite Conditioning and Heat of Combat to Explain Iraq Airstrike Video,” read the headline. You see, the article explains, in order to kill somebody, you’ve got to make a game out of it, you have to dehumanize your victim because that makes it so much easier to kill him. As one officer explains, “Military training is fundamentally an exercise in overcoming a fear of killing another human being.”

This is another way of saying that war is a perversion in that it forces people to perform acts that in any other context they would find morally repulsive, unless they were confirmed sociopaths. This is why a country shouldn’t go to war unless it absolutely has to because in the process it emotionally cripples the young men and women who serve.

There may be times when a war is a necessary perversion, but neither Iraq nor Afghanistan is a necessity. Both are wars instituted by policy wonks who really think it’s all a game and have no concept of the crippled mindset necessary to kill another human being. Both wars muddle along like slithering blobs driven by their own momentum and continued simply because they are already in motion and to withdraw might injure our credibility, which is being shredded anyway because of our inability to bring either war to a satisfactory conclusion.

However, the above is part of a larger debate that is studiously avoided by our mainstream media. Corporate media never questions policy because said policy is set into motion by the Beltway’s corporate masters.

Getting back to the article in question, what is noticeable is the question the reporter failed to ask. Granted, in this day in age it is considered impolite for a reporter to ask tough questions and doing so might end up getting him stripped of his “access.” This would mean he’d have to revert to the old-fashioned journalistic techniques of digging and wearing out shoe leather.

Let us allow that the pilots were on edge and easily spooked. This brings us to the single, most important question the Times reporter failed to ask the experts: Why was the Fire Discipline so lax? One of the components of Fire Discipline is that a soldier fires when commanded to and ceases when commanded to. The assumption is that the individual in command has enough presence of mind to cease firing when a threat no longer exists.

Now, bending over backwards until the back is ready to break, one might say the initial encounter with the group of civilians milling in the street was a tragic action brought on by confirmation bias, which security analyst Christopher Albon defines as “the tendency of the human mind to unconsciously prefer information reinforcing existing beliefs. In this case, the fact the pilots were looking for armed insurgents made them predisposed to believe that any item carried by the persons were weapons.”

Firing on the van that came to assist the wounded was a gratuitous act of violence. If you listen to the dialog between pilots and the individual on the ground responsible for Fire Discipline, it is obvious that the pilots’ blood is up. They’ve killed and they want to kill some more, an unfortunate side effect of combat. This is why Fire Discipline is so important. It is the responsibility of the commander to recognize this and to order his men to cease fire when a threat is no longer present.

When the van showed up, it is obvious it only wanted to collect the wounded. Yet, the pilots begged their controller for permission to fire. They begged and pressured and in the end they controlled their controller and he folded and gave permission to fire on a van that represented no threat whatsoever. Fire Discipline broke down completely. And, of course, the Times never questioned this because it would have been impolite to do so.

After all, boys will be boys, so why sweat it? Once again, the Times made the news fit to print.

A Christian Nation?

2010-03-06T03:42:00.001-08:00

The fundies are carrying on about how the United States is a “Christian” nation, which is their way of saying that we should be a theocracy ruled over by a gaggle of televangelists. Instead of taxes we’d simply send a dollar bill to the address on our television screen. Not only would that fund our public services, it would also get us prayed for.

But let’s say, just for the fun of it, that we were a Christian nation. What exactly would that entail? Well, in Matthew 25:35 Jesus says, “For I hungered and you gave me meat; I was thirsty and you gave me drink.”

I suppose that means that a Christian nation would feed its hungry, clothe its naked and shelter its homeless. That sort of plays havoc with the religious right’s belief that poverty is a sign of God’s displeasure. It also means a Christian nation would have one hell of a strong safety net. In a Christian nation no child would go to be hungry; no family would be homeless; no individual would be denied adequate health care; its prisons would focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment; it would honor humility instead of celebrity; and it would value love over strength.

But it gets tougher. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus enjoins us to “turn the other cheek.” In other words, a Christian nation would only resort to violence as a last resort when all other means had been exhausted. It would also mean that a Christian nation would not maintain an obscenely bloated defense establishment. It would mean that the nation would play nice in its conduct of foreign affairs instead of starting wars of aggression and exploiting Third World countries for their resources.

A Christian nation would see all persons as children of God; there would be no illegal immigrants or racially inferior “others;” it would value people over money or property. A Christian nation would embrace all of creation as a gift from God for which they were expected to be responsible stewards instead of rapacious exploiters.

Instead of the Ten Commandments, a Christian nation would hand the Beatitudes in its public buildings, as Kurt Vonnegut suggested.

Is the United States a Christian nation?

I don’t think so.

A Sordid Tale

2010-03-05T03:55:00.001-08:00

The sordid story of the Ford Pinto is an instructive study of the corporate mindset. In the late 60s, small foreign cars such as the VW Beetle were giving American automakers a run for their money.

Lee Iacocca, a Ford vice president, told Henry Ford II he could produce a car that would weigh less than 2,000 pounds and cost less than $2,000. And he promised Ford to have the car in dealer showrooms by 1971.

In the auto industry the normal time it takes to go from planning to production is 43 months. Iacocca had the Pinto in production in 25 months.

During the initial design stage, engineers had become concerned over the fact that the gas tank was jammed hard against the back seat. They feared it might rupture in the event of a rear-end collision. In such a scenario, the smallest of sparks could set off a raging inferno.

Iacocca blew off the objections. As one engineer commented, “The company is run by salesmen, not engineers.”

Once the car was in production, actual crash tests proved that matters were even worse than engineers had originally feared. The gas tank would ruptured in rear-end collisions as slow as 25 mph. At 40 mph, the doors became jammed shut and occupants were trapped in a burning car.

What to do.

Hell! That was easy! Ford commissioned a cost-benefit analysis.

They estimated that the Pinto, as designed, would cause 180 burn deaths and 180 burn injuries. At $200,000 a death, $67,000 per injury and $700 per vehicle, the total cost to the company would be $49.5.

Redesigning the car to make it safe would cost the company $137 million.

It was a no brainer. The Pinto hit the market unmodified.

One wonders, in amazement, at the mindset that would let people burn just to save a few bucks. However, that’s the rub. In the corporate world, there are no people, only numbers.

What we have here is an example of corporate sociopaths at work. To the corporate sociopath, quantification is all. In this sterile world, there is no death, no blood, no gore, no charred bodies, no suffering, no cries of pain, no broken lives and no motherless children.

There are only numbers, and if the numbers justify an act, no matter how horrendous, then everything is fine because the corporate sociopaths are meeting their fiduciary obligations to their stockholders.

Life’s easier than way. There are no sticky ethical questions to deal with. All the sociopath has to do is lean back and let the numbers do the thinking for him.

Incidentally, there is a coda to this tale. Ford could have made the Pinto safer for less than the cost o the deaths and injuries. Goodyear had developed a rubber bladder that could be placed inside the gas tank , thus preventing the tank from rupturing. They didn’t consider it because Iacocca wanted the cars in Ford showrooms by 1971, and modifying the car would have delayed its introduction and possibly cost Ford some market share.

It was those pesky numbers again.

The Return of Belacqua Jones

2010-03-04T04:08:00.000-08:00

Belacqua Jones is returning. Yes, America’s lovable Machiavelli on meth is coming back after destroying the country’s rehab network in a vain attempt to get him clean. His new blog, “Confessions of a Right Wing Stoner” will debut on Monday (unless he’s too stoned to reach the keyboard.)

For those of you new to this site, Belacqua first appeared some years ago when this blog was titled, “Open Letters to George W. Bush” in which Belacqua acted as George’s shadow advisor. When George left the White House, Belacqua went to pieces. His binge made the Guinness Book of Records and has yet to be equaled.

It was only when he realized that Bush had not died but had risen from the dead in the body of Barack Obama that Belacqua sobered up enough to return to the keyboard with his trippy view of world affairs.

Belacqua is a visionary who sees the world through a set of lenses cracked by a neocon ideology run amok and too many controlled substances. So tune in on Monday for the first of his incoherent rants and discover the wisdom that is to be found in madness.

Consumptive Freedom

2010-03-02T03:44:00.001-08:00

The commodities economy long ago enslaved Americans and other “developed” capitalist societies. But Americans in particular. The most profound slavery must be that in which the slaves can perceive of no other possible or better world than their bondage. Inescapable, global, all permeating, the commodities economy rules so thoroughly most cannot imagine any other possible kind of economy.
Joe Bageant

It appears to be forever even though it may be coming to an end. Fevers peak just before they break, and the same is true of the orgy of consumerism that that had gripped the American psyche since the Industrial Revolution, which became a frenzied Bacchanal in the decades following World War II.

Delusion always accompanies the end of an era. Any twelfth century noble man would have been aghast had someone suggested that feudalism was coming to an end.

Consumerism won't end with a revolution.. When America revolts, it heads for the nearest mall. We don’t have revolutions, we have fashion statements.

And on those rare occasions when the public becomes so fed up that it begins murmuring about systemic change, our one-party system swings the door opens and invites them in, promising it to fight for the changes it wants. Then it tells the public to take a chair in the corner and keep quiet while the experts and professionals fight for the change it is demanding, which will involve only the most superficial of window dressing. (Before you cite the New Deal, remember that when the Great Depression hit, America had a viable labor and socialist movement, which are no more.)

It’s awfully hard to revolt when you’re glued to a screen or fascinated by the latest celebrity scandal. But then, why revolt when we’re the land of the free? After all, is not our freedom of choice complete? I see a shining example of our freedom every time I visit my supermarket. There I find a seventy-five foot shelf devoted solely to condiments. I can choose from an infinite selection of ketchups, mustards, hot sauces, vinegars, olive oils and marinades. Hell, how much freer can I be?

Yes, we are a consumptive democracy in which slaves are free to choose any commodity they want as long as their plastic isn’t maxed out. It is such a dazzling display of flashing, blinking, beeping toys, gourmet foods, engineered running shoes, T-shirts fashioned out of organic cotton and designer boxer shorts that we never even notice the erosion of our civil liberties. We are comforted by the fact that when the surveillance cameras catch our image we are dressed to the nines. In a consumptive society appearance is all. If you look good, you are good. This is especially true of politicians.

Who needs freedom when there’s UPS at the front door delivering another package?

Life is simpler that way. Why worry about an identity based on character when we can have one defined by the logos we display? Who needs freedom as long as we are free to go shopping?

It will end not because we revolt or because we experience a collective epiphany and return to a life of simplicity. It will end when the oil runs out, when the last credit card is maxed out and when the country is totally bankrupt. In retrospect, future generations will look back on our Age of Consumption and see it for what it was—a slow and gradual suicide in which we mistook decline for ascent.

Puck nailed it when he said, “What fools these mortals be!”

Here we go again!

2010-02-28T03:35:00.000-08:00

I refuse to subscribe to conspiracy theories, but, goddamn, it’s hard sometimes, especially when the Beltway is trying to pull a fast one on the public, such as Iraq’s WMDs or Iran’s nuclear weapons. Such a scam is dribbled out bit by bit in little dollops of media coverage that infer, suggest, imply, hint, allude, insinuate, all of which are peppered with sound bites that say much by saying nothing, such as, “We can’t wait until the smoking gun becomes a mushroom cloud,” that was so instrumental in justifying our Iraq invasion.

Now we find the same pattern with our oligarchs’ ongoing campaign to privatize Social Security. The latest song and dance took place last week when Ben “Swamp-em-with-Wampum” Bernanke appeared before a congressional committee and rent his garments as he bewailed our out-of-control budget.

Naturally, the first thing that came tripping off his tongue was to emphasize the need for a “plan that eases market worries by laying out how Congress will address the long-term insolvency of Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs…”

You said it, Ben! Let’s start cutting those deficits by privatizing Social Security, ramping up the war in Afghanistan and invading Iran, because the important thing isn’t deficit reduction. If it we’re we would have been out of Iraq and Afghanistan a long time ago. No Sir! All we need do is lose Social Security and all will be well in the land of the free. Hell, how can we afford all those wars with all those old farts draining us dry by cashing their Social Security checks?

Thank God Ben had a new red herring to wave, Greece. If we’re not careful, Ben warned, we’ll end up just like Greece. (Not really, Ben. The American sheep would never consider rioting in the streets like the citizens of Greece are. That would be irresponsible.)

Ben condensed the problem into a simple either/or dilemma---either we raise taxes or we cut spending, not that we raise taxes and cut spending. Since raising taxes would constitute socialism, we know which way that one will go.

The subtext of this entire deficit song and dance is all about the total disassembly of the New Deal and the final snipping away of the remnants that are all that remain of our social safety net.

It is feral corporatism’s swan song as it tries to fill its final balloon with the lead shot that will drag us down to the depths.

In Praise of Rahm Emanuel

2010-02-26T04:18:00.000-08:00

It’s no surprise that The Washington Post thinks Rahm Emanuel is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Here is a paper so fixated on access that it would praise Jack the Ripper for his feminism if it gained it greater access.

In a fluff piece by Dana Milbank we are told that Emanuel is a realist who mission is to bring the “cult of Obama” down to earth and to introduce them to the realities of Beltway politics, which is to do little other than an occasional exercise in meaningless window dressing. The problem is that the Beltway is a closed system with its own warped view of reality driven by an amorality that cares only about the checks its corporate handlers write.

This is why Emanuel was bitterly opposed to closing the Guantanamo Bay prison because “it wasn’t politically feasible.” He also opposed including a public option in the healthcare reform bill because it was “a needless distraction.”

But then, it seems every president needs a handler who acts as ballast to keep the status quo on an even keel. Cheney was Bush’s handler, Emanuel is Obama’s. And Milbank argues that Obama isn’t in trouble because of Emanuel; he’s in trouble because he ignored Emanuel’s advice.

One of the most hysterically funny statements in the Milbank article tells us that, “Emanuel, schooled by Bill Clinton, knew what the true believers [members of the cult of Obama] didn’t: that bite size proposals add up to big things.”

Such as?

Let’s get real! Bite size proposals add up to diddly-squat! One of Congress’s favorite scams when it passes a watered-down bill is to promise the public that “We’ll revisit the legislation later,” which it never does. So, if Emanuel had had his way, Congress would have passed a bland healthcare reform bill that did little other than increase coverage for children, and that would have been it.

Now some might argue that Emanuel’s approach was necessary given the lunacy that permeates the Beltway, and, all things being equal, that might make sense. But things aren’t equal. The country is in deep shit. We’ve got a crumbling economy, our states are in financial distress and we’re up to our necks in two-plus wars that are bankrupting us. Public money is bailing out the financial retards that tanked the economy and all our leaders can talk about is a “jobless recovery,” surely one of the foulest oxymorons ever uttered by a public official.

This is not a time for “small bites.” Rather it’s the time to tear a big chunk out of the corporate ass.

Good lord, if Emanuel had been FDR’s chief of staff, there never would have been a New Deal. That could be why conservatives love him so; he is keeping the ship of state on an even keel while it is sinking.

Huxley's Ultimate Revolution

2010-02-23T06:53:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in the process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarch who have always existed and presumably always will always exist to get people to love their servitude.
Aldous Huxley

There’s someone in my head but it’s not me.
“Brain Damage”
Pink Floyd

George Orwell was a wonderful writer, deeply in love with the English language and always quick to call attention to its abuse. Yet it has always puzzled me why dystopian views of the future always cite his 1984 as a benchmark by which we measure this future dystopia, when our dystopia bears a closer resemblance to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

The unfortunate thing about the emphasis on 1984 is that is a misleading diversion. We look at our little worlds and conclude that they are nothing like Orwell’s world so everything must be okay. (Of course, if you’re an inner-city Afromerican male, your world is probably closer to Orwell than Huxley.)

In a 1962 speech at the Berkeley Language Center Huxley pointed out that Orwell wrote his book between 1945 and 1948 at a time that saw the downfall of Hitler’s totalitarianism and the rise of Stalin’s.

Huxley wrote his in 1932, at a time when the influence of Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, was beginning to peak. It was Bernays who argued that, “The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.”

Huxley said:

I’m inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world, will probably be a good deal nearer to the brave new world pattern than the 1984 picture, they will [be] a good deal nearer not because of any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the BNW pattern is a good deal more efficient.” (Huxley’s point that there will always be oligarchs is a good argument for changing them from time to time. This is called a revolution. Of course, it’s a given that no matter how democratic a revolution is, the formation of an oligarchy is inevitable, and any oligarch will sour over time. This is why they must be changed freaquently, much as you change the oil in your car every 5,000 miles.)

Huxley’s point was that a dictatorship was much more stable if the people consented to their servitude than if the servitude was enforced by guns and clubs, though even the most scientific of dictatorships will resort to the latter if the mob gets testy.

In Brave New World, people love their servitude because they are given an unlimited supply of SOMA, a drug that soothes. Instead of SOMA, we have a full medicine chest of psychotropic drugs comfort and caress our minds.

Our houses are filled with screens that divert our attention from the real world even as they paint a distorted view of that world. The problem with this ubiquity of screens is not mind control ala 1984, it is mind apathy.

In his talk, Huxley also spoke of suggestibility, which is the degree to which a mind can be manipulated. He suggested that in any given population, twenty percent of the people are highly suggestible while twenty percent can totally resist it. The remaining sixty percent could go either way depending on the circumstances, though he did point out that a heightened state of anxiety makes an individual more prone to suggestibility, as in the War on Terror.

What this means is that in the United States, 60 million people hang on Rush’s every word while 60 million think he’s a complete asshole. The remaining 180 million watch “American Idol.”

We are entering an era of increasing unrest as economic and environmental problems continue to mount. How this plays out depends to a large extent on how well the 60 million skeptics in America are mobilized. This is especially important because Fox News, the Tea Party and the radical right are mobilizing the 60 million sheep. And lies, if they are repeated enough, can sway the remaining 180 million, and that would be enough to silence the skeptics.

Herding Cats

2010-02-21T03:43:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot written about the “War on the Middle Class, an unfortunate choice of words. Granted, the middle class is certainly under siege, but to call it a “war” is misleading. War needs a central command and a central strategy. What we have, instead, is an ooligarchical lynch mob, an example of monkey-see-monkey-do, all in the name of maximizing profits.

And the maximization of profits is the sole measure by which our oligarchs measure the economic health of America. They crow over the fact that productivity increased by 9.5 percent in the third quarter of 2009 and that 78 percent of the companies in the S&P 500 exceeded earning expectations.

All of these glowing reports of “better than expected earnings” are meaningless in light of the fact that a contributing factor to these increased earning has been a 5.2 percent reduction in unit labor costs thanks to the off-shoring jobs and the use of foreign workers. So, the increase in productivity has not seen a corresponding increase in wages. Had wages kept pace with productivity, the minimum wage would now be somewhere in the neighborhood of $18 per hour.

However, it must be remembered that our oligarchs would shed no tears over the demise of the middle class with its periodic outbreaks of reform mania that brought us an end to child labor laws, the civil rights movement, reforms in the treatment of the mentally ill, a regulated food and drug industry and scores of antismoking legislation, all of which have cut into to corporate profits.

It is true that the modern day reforms have become trivialized with the contemporary emphasis on such nonissues as second-hand smoke, childhood obesity and the elimination of transfats from restaurant menus. Of course, our oligarchs are four-square behind these reforms since they divert the middle class’s attention away from core issues such as the erosion of our civil liberties and the militarization of America.

The media loves to market the lie that we are the “richest nation in the world.” How can a nation be rich when its total corporate, private and public indebtedness equals 350% of it s GDP? Sorry fellows, but debt isn’t wealth as millions are discovering as their homes go underwater. Now American is suffering from “new-age” poverty in which one is poor because one does not have access to credit.

Some call the elimination of the middle class economic terrorism. I call it economic stupidity. The middle class has long been the backbone of the consumer spending that made up 70 percent of our GDP. The only thing that could possibly replace it is total war, which might give us a clue as to the direction in which we’re heading.

Our oligarchs have one unifying factor working for them that progressives don’t, and that is greed. Just as a lynch mob is an undisciplined collection of individuals focused on a single victim, so is our oligarchy an undisciplined collection of individuals focused on a single objective, the bottom line. The more labor costs are slashed, the better the bottom line looks. And if the middle class is destroyed in the process, it’s all the better. That means an end to pesky reform movements.

History isn’t planned; it just happens that way. And if we don’t like the way it’s happening then the solution is to make it happen another way. It’s kind of like herding cats. You never know where it's gong to end up.

Money isn't money when it's spent on defense

2010-02-19T04:01:00.000-08:00

It’s not a conspiracy, nor is it a case of bias. Rather it's a holistic condition so comprehensive that the mind, both personal and collective, is unable to wrap itself around any sort alternative. Recently, the lead story in The New York Times brought this home.

The ominous head line warned, “Party Gridlock Feeds New Fear Of A Debt Crisis: A Rising Fiscal Alarm.” (No Shit, Dick Tracy.) The second paragraph of the story cast a spotlight on our oligarchs’ mindset. The paragraph read:

After decades of warnings that budgetary profligacy, escalating healthcare costs and an aging population would lead to a day of reckoning, economists and the nation’s foreign creditors say that moment is approaching faster than expected, hastened by a deep recession that cost trillions of dollars in lost tax revenues and higher spending for safety net programs.

Notice what isn’t mentioned as a major contributor to our deficit, such as a war in Afghanistan that is costing taxpayers a cool $57,000 per minute, or a trillion-dollar-a-year defense budget.

I guess these don’t exist. They are phantom wisps floating around somewhere overseas, well out of the public’s view.

If Napoleon’s army ran on its stomach, ours runs on its tires. Now the Pentagon is telling Congress that gasoline in Afghanistan costs our military $400 a gallon. That is what the Pentagon calls the “fully burdened cost of fuel” once all the expenses of moving fuel in and around a country that is without either infrastructures or gas stations.

Of course there are some locations so isolated that fuel has to be airlifted in giant bladders carried by helicopter. In that case, the fully burdened cost of gasoline jumps to $1000 per gallon. Factor in the fact that the large trucks used to haul tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles get seven miles to the gallon and you’re looking at one hell gasoline bill.

All of this assumes that the trucks carrying fuel escape roadside bombs and make it to their destinations. In June of 2008, 44 trucks carrying 220,000 of gasoline were lost to attacks while trying to deliver fuel to Bagram Air Field. That’s $88 million of gasoline up in flames. You could bail out a lot of underwater home owners with that kind of money.

Military sources call Afghanistan a “logistical nightmare.” It is said that in discussions of military affairs, amateurs focus on tactics while professions sweat logistics. I guess the amateurs planned Obama’s surge.

Obama plans to form a panel to “find answers” to our nation’s looming fiscal crisis. And I fear that this panel will reek of a prejudice for a neoliberal Washington Consensus as a solution that would include slashing social programs and privatizing as many government programs as possible.

Just when you thought Social Security “reform” was dead…

We may rest assured that no politician will have the courage to even suggest that a good place for some vigorous deficit reductions would be the endless corridors of the Pentagon. This simply wouldn’t do.

Besides, reducing defense spending does nothing for Wall Street while privatizing Social Security does much. And we all know whose going to be wielding the scalpel when it comes time to slash expenses.

"Cue the Angry Mob!"

2010-02-17T03:41:00.000-08:00

One of the challenges facing 24/7 cable news saturation is that twenty-four hours is a hell of a lot of time to kill, especially if the emphasis is on image and not substance. Image is so much fluff and it’s difficult to make it sound weighty. The same is true of spin. Calling black white is easy; making it entertaining is not. One way to hype it up is through dazzling graphics and giant touch computer screens. The quick cut from scene to scene is necessary when what is being shown reveals little. Dazzle ‘em and they might not notice how vacuous it all is.

Another way of filling empty time with empty content is a parade of corporate shills and lobbyists, dragging their gravitas behind them, who are presented as impartial “experts.” Ex-politicians make excellent filler since the emphasis is on their past service and not their current service to a corporation or trade group.

As they say, “Out of the mouths of babes,” and the shills are no exception. Often what they say is revealing by what is not said. It’s called political analysis, though the analysis is as selective as it is slanted.

During the 2008 economic meltdown, “expert” Bernard Whitman appeared on Fox News to “analyze” the collapse of AIG. What wasn’t mentioned was that Whitman has worked for AIG to “develop, test, launch, and enhance their consumer brand.”

During the show, Whitman made a comment that is typical of our oligarchy’s response to public anger when he said, “The American people were understandably outraged about AIG. Having said that, we need to move beyond anger, frustration and hysteria to deal with the brass tacks of solving this economy (emphasis mine).”

Umm, Bernie, aren’t anger, frustration and hysteria the solution to solving our economy, along with torches and pitchforks? There are times when an angry mob can really stimulate systemic reform.

Some may find such a statement irresponsible, to which we reply, “So, what has responsible behavior done for us lately, besides tank an economy and mired us in two-plus unnecessary wars.” Face it, responsible behavior is an enabler for preserving the status quo.

Those who hold power never yield it willingly. Power only changes in the face of anger, frustration and hysteria. There is much about the Tea Party that disgusts me, especially their bigotry and xenophobia. But at least they’re pissed, which is more than I can say for progressives.

As frustration over the corruption flooding the Beltway increases, any fringe group that seeks to shake things up looks appealing. The danger is, of course, that one’s frustration becomes so intense that one compromises one’s principle just to join the mob.

“Stay cool!”

“Don’t be irrational!”

These are the mantras our oligarchs preach to the unruly mob. Reason has been degraded until it is little more than a tool for the protection of the status quo.

Progressives are “reasonable” and in being so they lend their tacit support tour oligarchy even as they criticize it. This “reasonableness” is why the Right has high jacked the Main Streeters that should be in the progressive camp.

The corporate state is an open wound leaking blood and pus; it’s going to take some strong medicine to staunch the flow.

Another Spittle Spray of Christian Love

2010-02-16T03:25:00.000-08:00

They call it the “Manhattan Declaration.” The document is an attempt by conservative Christians to reignite the culture wars that so consumed the nation in the early years of the last decade. The Declaration compares pro-choice advocates to eugenicists and Nazis and argue that same-sex marriage will be the road to polygamy and incest.

That, in a nutshell, is pretty much it. It contains the usual hype and bluster about creeping totalitarianism in the United States, even though its issuers would like nothing better than to turn America into a theocracy that would replace the Constitution with Leviticus. (Granted, stoning is a cost-effective means of execution, but really, now…)

The first thing to understand is that this is not a Christian documents because the individuals who drafted it and those who signed it are not Christians; they are Christianists. Christianism is an ideology that does its damndest to steer Christianity around the teachings of Jesus and resurrect the wrathful Jehovah of the Old Testament.

The whole concept of Christian love and forgiveness is anathema to them. They prefer their deity pissed off and ready to kick some ass. This is what makes organized religion so dangerous. As theologian William Stringfellow puts it, “The American churches more often than not have been among the most menial, manipulated and degraded vassals of the power of death.

Christianists hide behind the ramparts of dogma and express their piety in a spittle-spray of rage. Slaughter rocks when done in the name of God, and mendacity tastes sweeter when flavored with scripture.

As far as abortion goes, I refuse to entertain any pro-lifers unless they are active as hell in the peace movement. If they were serious about the “sanctity of life,” they would be storming the Pentagon, and Roman Catholic bishops would be demanding that our military budget be cut to the bones. But, that would mean an end to the patriotic violence they find so stimulating.

One of the best defenses of abortion was told me by a devout Roman Catholic who attended mass daily. He quoted Genesis 2.7, which reads: “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being (emphasis mine). In other words, the Bible tells us that life begins when an infant draws its first breath, or when is can survive outside the womb. Prior to that, it is simply a mass of cells.

But then, how could you have a culture war with thinking like that.

As far as homosexuality goes, Leviticus does have some nasty things to say about it. But the same book also prohibits the eating of shell fish. Now, the ban on shell fish had a practical basis since eating them in the days before refrigeration could be deadly.

When you stop and think about it, the ban on homosexuality also had a practical basis. In biblical times, the average life expectancy was somewhere around 21 years. The average was dragged down by an inordinately high rate of infant mortality. Back then, a woman had to go through six pregnancies just to keep the population stable.

Couple that with the fact that the main source of labor for the labor-intensive endeavors necessary to keep the village or farm going was children and we can understand why homosexual unions were banned since such a union would deprive the village or farm of twelve pregnancies.

However, fast forward to the modern area when Homo sapiens cover the earth like vermin, a homosexual unions start to make a lot of sense.

To date, 419,000 people have signed the declaration. (That’s .002 percent of the population for those who keep track.)

The religious right wants a utopian society that would consist of well-behaved Christians living lives of piety and obedience who would behave with propriety while attending a public stoning. I have no doubt they would oozed Christian love while the victim died a slow and painful death.

The problem with any utopian society is that you have to wade through so much blood to establish it. All you can do with the legions who don’t buy into your particular brand of ideology is herd them into a stadium and kill them.

But then, Christian love has always been a great rationale for murderous mayhem. Hell, if someone won’t convert the best thing to do is send them upstairs to have a heart-to-heart with the old man.

Hot Air and Power

2010-02-15T04:06:00.000-08:00

As children we were raised with masturbatory fantasies of power. We saw films of steel mills spewing there red-hot sprays of molten steel, scores of brand new automobiles marching along their assembly lines, muscular workers turning giant bolts on giant machines with giant wrenches, tons of concrete being poured to create Hoover Dam, and, most thrilling of all, warships plunging through stormy seas as wave after wave broke over their bows and formations of fighter jets cutting across a clear blue sky.

We grew up believing we were entitled to both power and progress, to industrial and military might. Progress, we believed, was a straight-line ascent that would go on forever and ever.

That was then; this is now. Now we are beginning to see that rather than a straight line, technological progress, like all other cultural movement, inscribes a parabolic curve with it ascent, apogee and descent, and at this point in time it appears that we are on the descent segment of the curve. The advances in technology are becoming increasingly trivial (do I really have to stream videos on my cell phone?). One could even argue that the technological advances that profoundly changed society surfaced between 1820 (the emergence of the railroads) and 1930 (the splitting of the atom) and that these major advances, while they seemed fantastic at the time, are now producing some very negative feedbacks.

It could well be, in the far, far future, that our Age of Oil will barely register as a cosmic fart on the timeline of geological history, assuming anyone is still around to make this observation.

Empires also inscribe parabolic curves, and ours is definitely on the decent segment. John Michael Greer points out that “[E]mpire is the methamphetamine of nations; in the short term, the effects feel great, but in the long term they’re very often lethal.”

Power once seized must be defended, and this is how empires end up bankrupt Empire is an ego trip, and ego trips are essentially fragile balloons filled with hot air. With the passage of time this hot air leaks out and all that is left in a flaccid membrane.

Power doesn’t just corrupt, it rots the brain because those who achieve power live with the fear that they could easily lose this power. Therefore everything outside of the corridors of power is seen as a potential threat. Clear thinking and power don’t mix well. In an effort to hold on to it the powerful end up hollowing out the very institutions that gave rise to their power.

Power only feels safe when it is growing. Unfortunately, growth is a parasitic vampire that sucks the life blood out of its host. As the host weakens, power weakens until it withers and dies. If there is one rule that governs power it’s that it’s never forever. Yet, those who hold power believe it is. That is their tragic flaw and why the gods spend so much time laughing.

The feudal lord of the thirteenth century was convinced that feudalism was not only ordained by God that it would last forever. The powerful always think they are the endpoint of history while behind their backs history continues to move at its slow, steady pace. And nobody, but nobody, knows where it’s going.

-

Streamlining the Constitution

2010-02-13T03:37:00.000-08:00

The Constitution has always been a pain in the ass. It’s hard to know what our founding fathers were thinking when they started hand out rights as if they were candy. If the goddamn document had never been written there never would have been a 9/11 because we would have snuffed the bastards before they even planned it.

This certainly seems to be the premise behind the multiple policies designed to keep us safe from terrorists by seeing how many terrorists we can create by blowing up their families.

If nothing else, many of these policies reflect the corporate state’s belief that efficiency is more important than civil liberty. Trials are expensive and involve too much effort on the part of the government to prove that in accused is guilty as charged. Prosecutors actually have to dig up evidence and then contest with a troublesome defense attorney to win a conviction. How much nicer it would be to do away with the whole process.

And the Obama administration is aiding this effort by continuing the Bush policy of targeting American citizens for assassination if the administration deems them “terrorists.”

Glen Greenwald quotes Dahlia Lithwick who calls the policy part of the administration’s “own special brand of terrorism-derangement syndrome.” Pogo Possum summed it up nicely when he said, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.” (He made the comment back in the 1950s when Albert the Alligator was being investigated for speaking English instead of Americanize.)

It’s for certain we are in more danger from our government than from any terrorists who might be floating around.

“Terrorist” is such a delicious label that makes the corporate state’s job so much easier. It’s a much more sophisticated label than “Communist.” “Communist” was too damn abstract to have any sort of real punch. It had to be propped up with an array of sub-labels such as, “pinko,” “fellow traveler,” “subversive,” the esoteric “comsymp,” and the ever popular “commie.”

Terrorist requires no such help. Its legs are strong enough to stand on its own and justify all sorts of derangement. Of course it helps that “terrorist” immediately brings to mind brown skin and a heathen religion. This gives the label a little extra oomph.

There is a toxic irony to all this. The only difference between the ’93 bombing of the World Trade Center and 9/11 is that 9/11 succeeded in bringing down the towers where the ’93 bombing failed to do so, even though that was its intent. However, all the perpetrators of the ’93 bombing were apprehended, tried in a court of law with all of its pesky constitutional safeguards in place and convicted. All of this was accomplished without a Patriot Act, military commissions, rendition, torture or wars of aggression. Meanwhile Obama bin Laden continues to make tapes.

And now the president wants to execute American citizens without the benefit of a trial by their peers.

Greenwald pointedly asks, “[I]f the Fifth amendment’s explicit guarantee—that one shall not be deprived of life without due process—does not prohibit the U.S. government from assassinating your without any process, what exactly does it prohibit?

I guess this is the change we can believe in.

Keeping Reality at Bay

2010-02-11T04:35:00.000-08:00

Power can only exist in a sterile bubble from which reality is excluded. The most efficient method of keeping this reality at bay is to build a dike out of quantified data and believe that it represents reality.

Data is so sanitary. It never cries out or moans or bleeds or stinks. It is the foundation stone upon which the fantasy world of theory is built that serves as the justification for power’s actions.

And according to Paul Krugman, Barack Obama’s bubble is in fine shape. He quotes an interview Obama had with Business Week in which Obama justified the bloated bonuses Wall Street bankers have awarded themselves.

After reading it one wonders if he occupies the White House or Never-Never Land. He praises them as “savvy businessmen” even though their actions as financial fools damn near tanked the economy. If a lowly store clerk behaved with the same recklessness this bunch did he’d be out on his ass. But that’s the difference between the rich and the rest of us. When the rich screw up they’re bailed out and use the bail-out money to award themselves healthy bonuses. (Of course there’s always Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein in sack cloth and ashes who is doing penance by reducing his bonus to a paltry $9 million.)

Obama then goes on to illustrate how he’s the “people’s” president by saying that, “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth.” Of course we have to understand that Obama’s definition of people differs from Lincoln’s use of the word in his Gettysburg Address. By “people” Obama means the one-percent harboring most of the nation’s wealth.

But the high point of the interview came when he praised the Wall Street bankers for their influence on his economic policies. And there is no doubt they have had their influence. Hell, they wrote the bailout legislation. Nor can one deny their influence on our economy, just as one can’t deny Typhoid Mary’s influence on New York City’s public health policy.

Krugman has his finger more firmly on the public pulse when he says, “There is good reason to feel outraged at the growing appearance that we’re running a system of lemon socialism, in which losses are public but gains are private.” After all, he points out; the Wall Street banks are wards of the state. Though in this case, the ward are ordering the adults around.

But then, has there ever been any doubt that Obama is primarily a shill for the corporate interests that put him in office. No politician worth his salt is going to bite the hand that feeds him. Nor is the fault Obama’s alone. He is simply carrying forward a long and established presidential tradition.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

2010-02-09T04:50:00.001-08:00

When he was in office, Ronnie’s guiding principle was that the poor were poor because they lacked get-up-and-go and that if they’d just get off their asses and stop freeloading off the country they would prosper. Of course, the factory jobs that for decades had been the economic ladder by which the poor climbed out of poverty were being shipped overseas, and it’s kind of hard pulling yourself up by your bootstraps while drawing a minimum wage. But then, Ronnie was a product of the Hollywood Dream Factory, so it figures.

Ronnie’s appeal was that he was the ultimate expression of the angry white male. This is the demographic that was falling all over itself to dump decency in an attempt to ape an ethos defined by the Hollywood western, which bore little or no resemblance to the historical west. Rugged individualism is the ethos of the sociopath, and Ronnie and his gaggle of angry white males made it socially acceptable. Now this sociopathology is gaining an even greater cachet with the rise of the Tea Party.

And, of course, part of this ethos was to destroy the labor unions since they enabled workers to freeload by earning a living wage. It was a milk run for Ronnie because the American labor movement was never anti-capitalist. As Harriet Fraad points out:

Americans accepted the capitalist system in which each generation had relatively prospered. American labor fought for an increasing amount of income that would permit workers to consume more goods and services, a system in which each generation could move to jobs considered more prestigious and lucrative within the capitalists hierarchy.

Since Americans believe that there is no class but the middleclass, the working class came to believe that an above-ground pool and two cars in the garage made it middleclass. So it flocked to a Republican Party that proceeded to screw it. (It never occurred to the labor movement to call a general strike when Ronnie fired the air controllers for striking. That sent a message to our oligarchs that the union movement was on life support and that all they had to do was pull the plug, which they did.)

The death of the labor movement coincided with the death of social mobility. The ability of a man, born in a humble log cabin, to rise to a position of wealth and power also fed into Ronnie’s vision of poverty. The heroes of the Horatio Alger’s novels of young boys achieving middleclass prosperity through hard work, courage, spunk (something Alger was quite fond of) and determination were largely myth. The system was gamed from the get-go, and Ronnie could never understand why a poor person who wasn’t born into the right family, didn’t attend the right school and didn’t know whose ass to kiss couldn’t climb the economic ladder.

So, he came up with the idea to build a fire under the poor by destroying the social safety net that had kept them out of total impoverishment. At the same time, the economic ladder they were suppose to climb kept getting taller and taller as money started to rise towards the top of the pyramid.

But, this is America, where all a poor man need do is strap on his six-shooter, gun down the bad guys and ride into the sunset all the richer for his effort. And if he’s too poor to own a gun, it’s his fault and not the system’s. All he has to do work three minimum-wage jobs to keep food on the table and a roof over his head and in time, prosperity will be his, somewhere over the rainbow where “troubles melt like lemon drops.”

Somewhere.

Changing Batteries and Tilling Fields

2010-02-07T04:15:00.000-08:00

There is much talk in progressive circles about restoring democracy to America. All too often this is the closing sentence of a screed that lists the multiple sins afflicting the country. It is a clarion call for a movement, a call that is totally devoid of the nuts and bolts of how we are going to achieve this.

It is the thinking of a technician and reflects the belief that life is basically a machine and that in order to restore democracy all we need do is change a battery, throw a switch or tighten a screw. Unfortunately, life ain’t like that. Life a swarmy mess of currents and counter currents, of contradictions and paradoxes. It moves at its own pace and is painfully slow to change courses. Albert Camus defined the absurd as the interface between our desire for order and predictability and the unpredictable chaos that is life.

Too many progressives, having been raised in a society that values instant gratification above all, become too easily discouraged when they discover that simply advocating for democracy fails to produce it, as if the word were an incantation that could create change as soon as it is uttered.

Christopher Hayes relates a story told by Robert Michaels of a German peasant on his deathbed who tells his sons that there is a great treasure buried in his fields. Upon his death, the sons run out and began madly digging up the fields. The treasure, it turns out, is the bumper crops the fields yield because they have been properly tilled.

Michaels went on to say, “Democracy is a treasure that no one will ever discover by deliberate search.” The implication is that democracy is a byproduct, perhaps a byproduct of the effort to build a decent and free society. It is a process that is never finished, the force of which ebbs and flows. It is a process that may go dormant for decades until life becomes so wretched that it springs back to life.

It is a process that is hobbled by a paradox Michaels called The Iron Law of Oligarchy. As Hayes explains it, “In order for any kind of party or, indeed, any institution with a democratic base to exist, it must have an organization that delegates tasks. As this bureaucratic structure develops, it invests a small group of people with enough power that they can then subvert the very mechanisms by which they can be held to account: the party press, party conventions and delegate votes.

Michaels says, “Who says organization, says oligarchy.”

All of this is done in the name of efficiency, and this is the greatest paradox of all: efficiency and freedom are mutually exclusive, which explains why the fields must be constantly tilled and why we will never be free by simply throwing a switch. It’s an unending grind.

Imagine

2010-02-05T06:19:00.000-08:00

Progressives have no imagination; the right has plenty. This is why, on every issue, the right constantly out frames the left. The left remains mired in statistics and dry facts while the right soars on imagery, and the fact that the right’s imagery is grounded in distortions and falsehoods in no way diminishes its effectiveness.

George Lakoff argues that “freedom” is the buzzword the right most frequently employs. Of course, their crippled definition of freedom is anything that advances their interests, and they have deftly equated capitalism with freedom even though capitalism thrives best in an authoritarian society, as we are seeing with China.

Lakoff observes that, “The conservatives are wining the framing wars again—by sticking to moral principles as conservatives see them and communicating their view of morality effectively. …We progressives are long on factual analysis, critique, suggestions—and ridicule.” Part of the reason for this could be that the left is crawling with individuals trained in the value-free world of the social sciences and not enough with individuals versed in literature and the humanities.

Because of this, Martin Luther King’s, “I have a dream.” has been reduced to Obama’s “I have a plan.” It doesn’t inspire.

Lakoff suggests making democracy the moral principle around which progressives can rally the troops. However, this is problematic because the word “democracy” has been reduced to a hackneyed expression through over use and the sometimes futile attempts to use it to justify a multitude of sins as in “bringing democracy to the Middle East.”

Progressives would do better to fight for the building of a decent society without which freedom is difficult if not impossible to achieve. A decent society is characterized by four moral absolutes: Do not kill, do not steal, do not lie and do not exploit. This explains why decency is anathema to the corporate state because to survive and grow, the corporate state must kill, steal, lie and exploit.

Ironically, Obama defined the decent society during his campaign. In the following quote, I have substituted “decency” for “democracy:”

[Decency] is about empathy—caring about your fellow citizens, which leads to principles of freedom and fairness for all. Empathy requires both personal and social responsibility. The ethic of excellence means making the world better by making yourself better, your family better, your community better, and your nation better. Government has two moral missions: protection and empowerment for all. To carry them out, government must be by, for and of the people.”

Needless to say Obama left that thought on the podium, jammed between the pages of his inaugural address, and he hasn’t looked at it since. But it sits there beneath the soil, dormant and waiting for the right conditions to germinate, and it is the tears of the dispossessed and the impoverished that will nurture the seed even as the anger of betrayal fertilizes it. With time it will take root and grow in spite of Obama and not because of him.

One thing should be understood—decency has nothing to do with sex. The right tries its damndest to equate the two because in their eyes, cum is ickier than blood. Blood soars and waves the flag of patriotism. Blood is homeland, motherland, and fatherland. Blood sings its ownperverse poetry; it seeks its own purity and destroys all that might contaminate it. Cum, on the other hand, is a post-coital mess to be cleaned up. It’s quite alright to shed blood; just be careful where you dump your load. As the artist Madison Young puts it, “If you can’t fuck it, it’s not a revolution." Though I’m not sure how effective “More Cum; Less Blood” would be as a rallying cry.

In Lakoff’s opinion, a guiding moral principle is what makes the difference between a movement and a coalition. As he explains it, “Coalitions are based on interests. Movements are based on principles. We need a movement that transcends interests and goes beyond coalitions.”

Today, there are three cesspools of rank indecency that are smothering freedom: Wall Street, the Pentagon and the Beltway. And as long as progressives keep their faces buried in specific issues buried beneath dry prose and statistics, these cesspools will continue to stink. Only when there is a movement that cuts across class and ideological lines dedicated to the building of a decent society will the cesspools finally be flushed out and reduced to rubble.

In other words, progressives have to start writing some poetry and using the imaginations God gave them. The public has had enough of coalitions. They are ripe for a movement.

"Reforming" Criminal Prosecution

2010-02-04T03:57:00.000-08:00

The finance reform bill painfully working its way through the Senate will have as much of an effect on the financial community as spraying perfume on cockroaches. To the observer, it looks as if stern steps are being taken against the roaches as the spray is pumped into the cracks and crevasses where they hide. The roaches love it.

But now, it appears that the Obama administration is trying to jeopardize the bill by adding some toxins to the perfume, and Senator Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is upset.

According to Wednesday’s New York Times, the White House wants the bill to cap the future size of financial institutions so a bank going belly up won’t threaten to take the economy down with it.

Former fed chief Paul Volker summed it up nicely when he said, “The mandate is to arrange an orderly liquidation or merger—in other words, euthanasia, not a rescue.”

Dodd’s reaction to the administrations gambit speaks volumes about why the United States is saddled with an impotent Congress. “It’s adding to the problems of trying to get a bill done.” He charged that, “The Obama administration ran the risk of derailing months of delicate negotiations over overhauling financial regulations.”

Let me see if I have this straight. The FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) industry committed financial assault on the American public. Because of this assault, home values have plummeted, retirement and savings accounts have been hollowed out, and credit has dried up forcing many small businesses to shut their doors, and Congress is negotiating with the criminals over how they are going to be regulated?

There’s not a felon in the country that wouldn’t jump at an opportunity like that. Instead of jail time we’d have “months of delicate negotiations” over the sentence with the accused making a sizable contribution to the judge’s reelection campaign coffers.

Of course, this coddling of criminals in nothing new to the Beltway. Obama has informed us that he will not investigate possible war crimes committed by the Cheney administrations because it’s time to forget the past and look to the future.

This, also, is a concept the criminals of America would embrace. “Hell, your honor, I did it. But let’s not become mired in the past. It’s time to look forward.”

But I forget—bankers are rich; criminals are poor. Therein lies the difference.

Anybody seen a leader? Anybody?

2010-02-02T03:58:00.000-08:00

Frank Rich quotes historian Alan Brinkley who points out that Congress is entering its fourth decade in which it “has failed to deal with any major national problem from infrastructure to education.”

Rich, sometimes the master of understatement, goes on to observe that, “There is also a gaping leadership deficit. A closer look at either Pelosi or Reid shows that there is, not just a leadership vacuum; there is a gaping leadership hole down which meaningful legislation disappears to reemerge diluted to the point of nonexistence.

The Senate Majority Leader chair once occupied by Lyndon Johnson is now a child’s potty seat. Rich notes that Johnson was “able to transform a sleepy, seniority-hobbled, regionally polarized debating society into an often-progressive legislative factory.” And that was with a slim majority and a Republican in the White House.

Much as we may miss a Johnson at the Senate’s helm, the truth is we will never see the likes of him again until we wrest control of Congress away from its corporate masters. No member of Congress can hope to achieve a leadership role unless they have been vetted by the oligarchy.

The days of congressional leadership are over. Corporate managers of the Pelosi/Reid ilk have replaced them. These managers create nothing. Rather, they implement the assorted corporate policies mandated by their masters. And their masters are not going to allow a potentially strong leader near anything that resembles a position of power.

In his column, Rich implies that a repressed Congress is thwarting Obama’s raging, progressive hormones. The truth is that there ain’t none. Obama’s as repressed as Congress when it comes to bucking the country’s corporatacracy. His rhetoric is sound without fury. And that’s the best we can hope for until corporations are stripped of their personhood and constitutional rights.

Rats, Lice and Currency

2010-02-01T04:50:00.001-08:00

Rats desert a sinking ship; lice flee a cooling corpse. It is no different with currency. As soon as it begins to sink, value heads for the nearest exit. There is, however, one difference. Rats occupied the ship, the lice were at home on the body, but value hasn’t inhered to our currency for decades. The truth is that our worthless fiat currency was one of the greatest scams ever to be foisted on the world.

It all started in another decade mired in another war. The time was the 70s, and the war was Vietnam. For the first time in the twentieth century, the United States found itself saddled with a trade deficit.

At that time, we were a signatory to the Bretton Woods Agreements which obligated us to keep our currency pegged to gold, i.e., every dollar represented real value. The problem was that we’d printed so much money just to keep up with the cost of losing the war in Vietnam that we only had enough gold to cover twenty percent our the currency in issue.

The solution to that problem was simplicity itself. Nixon simply unpegged the dollar from the value of gold. The liberated paper now represented whatever we could scam the world into thinking it was worth.

Without the albatross of gold handing around its neck, both the dollar and the Dow Jones soared while assets bubbled.

One plus side of a worthless currency is that it is much easier to go into debt. And go into debt we did. Between 1987 and 2005, public and private debt went from $10 trillion to $43 trillion.

Of course there’s the danger that some damn fool will look at the Dow and realize that it’s being denominated in worthless dollars. Once upon a time, the Dow was sitting at 12,200. However, had it been denominated in Euros, it would have dropped to 7300. This simply wouldn’t do.

These days, Obama, Geithner and Bernanke are like tap dancers frantically tapping away in a burning theater, smiles frozen on their faces as they try to convince the audience that the smoke is really fresh air.

To them, reality is whatever they want it to be.

This allows our oligarchs to game the system, which they tout as the actions of a free market. The freedom so cherished by free market ideologues is the freedom to manipulate the free market so it favors their interests.

They find the roller coaster ride that is our economy stimulating. The slow climb up followed by the stomach-churning plunge downward invigorates them. And they expect us to enjoy the ride as much as they do. What they forget is that while they are safely strapped in their seats, we’re clinging to the outside of the car, and a lot of us fall off as the car speeds down towards the bottom.

Oligarchs never do.

The Wages of Prosperity

2010-01-30T02:45:00.000-08:00

Those who care wonder how the United States ended up as a militarized security state. Logic dictates that as soon as the Soviet Union fell, the rationale for our bloated defense establishment was no more and we should have seen a massive demobilization, especially in the wake of the Vietnam debacle. But instead, our military has spread like a cancerous growth across the face of the earth.

This growth has not caused much of a ripple because the Pentagon has, in effect, gone underground with its all-volunteer army and private contractors. Without mandatory military service funneling young men into the military, the military does not cause as much of a stir on Main Street as it once did, nor do unpopular and unnecessary wars generate the same level of passion and protest as Vietnam.

Many reasons have be put forth to explain this, and all of them contain an element of truth. However, there is one factor that has been overlooked.

A bloated military establishment is a product of prosperity. As long as I have a good paying job and the benefits I feel entitled to are not touched I will tolerate such an establishment, especially since our colonial wars carry all the impact of a video game.

But, what will happen with the money begins to dry up, when states face bankruptcy and services are cut?

What happens when jobs and homes are lost?

What happens when our military-industrial complex is finally recognized for what it is: an expensive bauble we can no longer afford?

What happens when the public finally realizes that the Pentagon is little more than the world’s largest pork barrel?

Is it possible that the public will finally ask why in the hell we are spending $57,000 a minute on Afghanistan when schools are being shuttered and the ranks of the unemployed swell?

Of course, it’s a sad commentary on our society that when the public finally turns against the military it will be for economic reasons. It never occurs to anyone that the bombing of women and children just to keep our military-industrial complex solvent is morally abhorrent.

But then, if you give a boy a toy he just has to play with it.

Again!

2010-01-28T06:31:00.000-08:00

The rhetoric soared, the air was thick with buzz words and all the right buttons were pressed. The Democrats stood and applauded, the Republicans sat on their hands. Promises were made; programs were announced; initiatives were launched.

Again.

From all appearances, action remains mired in partisanship, a partisanship that has nothing to do with ideological differences or political philosophies, and everything to do with power for power’s sake. Obama wants nothing other than to cling to it while Republicans care only about destroying his presidency.

At one point in his State of the Union speech, Obama noted that the American people have lost confidence in their government. This is to be expected when you have a Congress and a White House in which the mentality is that of a gaggle of arrested adolescents.

This goes beyond progressive and liberal carping. Quite frankly, any progressive who expected “change” from the Obama administration wasn’t paying attention during the campaign. The Democrats are doing what they’ve been doing since the end of the nineteenth century, defanging progressive and populist movements. What we have here, is a Democratic Party on the cusp of self destruction because of its deluded belief that it must rule from the center and that the primary duty of any Democratic politician is to keep his or her corporate handlers happy and the hell with what the public wants.

Peter Wallsten has written a piece about the Left’s displeasure with Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Corporate Centrist himself, in which Wallsten suggests that Obama is hiding behind Emanuel’s wingtips, which is probably closer to the truth than the progressive belief that Emanuel is sabotaging Obama’s progressive platform.

The idea is to let Emanuel take the fire while Obama spouts his populist rhetoric while both work the corporate center.

Bruce Lee, chief executive of the corporate Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) says, “Rahm’s approach, like the president’s, is not ideological. It’s practical.” In other words, the emphasis is on professionalism, another buzz word that hides a multitude of mischief. It tells us the professionalism is given more credence than principle. Unfortunately, professionalism is a synonym for dehumanization. It has its place, but like any double-edged sword, it must be used with care. (The Holocaust would have gone nowhere without the professionalism and practicality of its managers. Hate inspired it; professionalism made it possible. Not to suggest that there’s any comparison.)
In other words, both Obama and Emanuel are technocrats and technocrats make notoriously poor leaders because they lack the passion leadership requires if it is to be effective.

Wallsten describes one White House meeting with progressive leaders who were urging the Obama administration to reverse the onerous Bush-era antiterrorism policies. According to Wallsten, “Mr. Emanuel was often the loudest voice questioning the wisdom of such changes, according to a participant in the discussion. His concern wasn’t so much the substance of the policy, but the political consequences, this person says.”

Therein we see the priorities of the Beltway: holding on to power is more important than protecting our civil liberties. It’s okay to ignore them as long as the votes are there. Emanuel is reported to be open to any idea that could gain a majority vote. He forgets that a leader doesn’t try to gain a majority, he creates one.

Though how much of a majority Rahm’s approach is gaining is open to question. As Wallsten points out:

The unrest among liberals comes at a perilous political time. Party strategists worry that anger on the left could depress turnout in this year’s midterm elections and cost the party congressional seats and state governorships. The most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC survey found 55% of Republicans “very interested” in the November elections, compared to 38% of the Democrats.

When one stops to think about it, a liberal boycott of the midterms might have some long-term benefits, because only if the Democrats lose both the White House and Congress will there be a chance that they will finally realize just how bankrupt their centerism is. It has always been, a Democratic graveyard. Right now the party is in a casket, ready to be lowered into the hole. A good jolt of electro-defeat might bring it back to life.

Progressives and liberals have fallen into the habit of voting for the lesser evil. Surely eight years of a Clinton administration and one year with Obama must have taught them that there is no “lesser” and there never will be until the Democrats abandon the center.

Rhetoric notwithstanding, just how different would a McCain/Palin administration make other than a notable drop in the collective intelligence of the Beltway, which isn’t breaking any records as it is? The differences between the two have proven to be superficial, because the sad truth is that there is little difference between Republican and Democratic control.

And the idea that progressives could drive a Democratic administration to the left is a pipe dream. It ain’t going to happen as long as lobbyists write the checks.

Sanity is too much!

2010-01-27T03:50:00.001-08:00

In times like these, sanity is a pain in the ass because all that seems to be coming out of the Beltway these days is madness. Here we are, looking at an indebtedness in the neighborhood of $7 trillion, and Obama announces he is going to cut spending.

On the surface, this seems to be the sensible thing to do. But, as they say, the devil is in the details. According to Tuesday’s New York Times, “The estimated $250 billion in savings over ten years would be less than 3 percent of the roughly $9 trillion in additional deficits the government is expected to accumulate over that time.

(Billion/trillion, they rhyme nicely, but there’s a world of difference. Using seconds instead of dollars, a billion is the equivalent of 37 years while a trillion is 37,000 years.)

However, things really get crazy when we learn that none of these cuts will touch either the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security, the two running sores on Liberty’s face.

Hello!

Here we are pumping $57,000 a minute in to the war in Afghanistan, in what has to be the dumbest military campaign since the French fought tooth and nail to control that vast wasteland known as the Sahara Desert, and Obama won’t touch the Pentagon.

Were a multinational conglomerate to buy out the Pentagon and do a cost-benefit analysis of the Pentagon’s expenditures against its gains, said conglomerate would not hesitate to break the place up, sell the constituent pieces and close it down. We’re looking at a major loss leader that is bleeding the country dry.

Every time I look at the Pentagon I see what could easily be the world’s greatest indoor shopping mall. It has everything a successful mall needs—the square footage and the parking. Instead, it is a rat hole down which our national wealth is being dumped.

Obama’s deficit cutting efforts remind me of the fool who tries to fell a might oak by plucking off a handful of leaves.

Sanity really sucks!

How to boost your anxiety level and live in fear.

2010-01-25T03:27:00.000-08:00

I keep no weapon in my house. Never have; never will. Okay, so there’s the chef’s knife in the kitchen drawer, but that doesn’t’ count.

I didn’t even arm myself during the media-hyped “crime wave” of the early seventies when our Euromerican oligarchs decided to neutralize the gains made by the civil rights movement by siphoning as many Afromericans in to jail as they possibly could.

There was one time, though, when I saw an ad for a commando knife and wondered if it might not be a good idea to keep one in my nightstand “just in case.” As soon as that thought crossed my mind, a funny thing happened: my anxiety level rose. That was because just the thought of arming myself brought to mind all of the “possible” situations that might require its use.

And that’s the problem—sweating possibilities instead of probabilities. Anything is possible. Yes, it is “possible” some evil characters may break into my house in the dead of night and murder my wife and me. It’s possible, but not probable, which is why I don’t worry about it unless I start obsessing on the possible. (Probability means having some hard data to work with. It is probably I could be wacked in an automobile accident, but it is highly improbable I’ll ever be murdered in my sleep.)

That was the problem with the knife. As soon as I thought about getting a weapon for security, my anxiety level rose because just having the weapon on the premises shifted my focus from the probable to the possible.

It’s a closed feedback loop. I consider the possible, feel threatened by it and buy a weapon to alleviate the anxiety it creates. Yet, the very possession of the weapon increases my anxiety and prompts me to think about buying a deadlier weapon. Had I purchased the knife it would have been a matter of time before I became so anxious that the knife wouldn’t have been enough. In the end I would have ended up with an assault rifle tucked under the bed.

And this explains how America became a security state. The possibility of Communists, criminals, terrorists or (fill in the blank) worries us, so our leaders churn out weapons and start wars to make us feel secure. But they don’t because we began to obsess on the “possible.” This results in a gaggle of security bureaucrats sitting around table saying “What if…? What if….? What if…”

What if the terrorists develop an effective shoe bomb? (Have airline passengers take off their shoes.) What if an explosive can be poured into a shampoo bottle? (Limit the amount of shampoo that can be carried onto an airliner.) What if the terrorists develop a workable underwear bomb? (Use your imagination on that one.)

And, of course, the more secure we try to become, the more anxious we become, which suits are oligarchs because an anxious people are more willing to surrender their freedoms in exchange for a false sense of security and, as Ben Franklin noted, they end up with neither.

As for me, I think I will remain unarmed; it keeps the anxiety level down. And while I’m at it, I think I’ll hold on to my freedoms. Somewhere it is written that they are inalienable. So, no matter what the government does or what the courts decide, I remain a free citizen of a free country.

Lessons Never Learned

2010-01-23T03:17:00.000-08:00

Generals and politicians are notoriously slow in the head when it comes to adapting military tactics to a changing world. And when they do try to adjust, the result is usually disastrous.

Traditional European tactics evolved from the Roman practice of finding an open field with nary a tree for cover , amassing two large bodies of soldiers standing fact to face and marching them towards each other Or, if they were really dumb, they'd march them towards the other’s fortifications

This was all fine and dandy in the age of the sword, spear or musket. However, the Civil War changed all that. It was the world’s first industrial war in which victory was not decided by tactics, courage, valor, glory or es spirit de corp. Victory was determined by who had the biggest industrial plant. An army doesn’t win anymore; it simply out produces the enemy.

And what both sides in the Civil War discovered was that it was downright deadly to move masses of men across an open field in the face of modern weaponry. (Gen. George Pickett learned that painful lesson at the Battle of Gettysburg.)

So, one would think that military leaders across the world would look at the carnage the Civil War produced and rewrite their manuals.

Didn’t happen.

World War I broke out and the fools tried using the same tactics of moving masses of men across open fields. The result was even more disastrous. It wasn’t until World War II that the generals finally caught on, even though a variation of this archaic tactic continued in the form of assorted amphibious landings. A stretch of water offers even less cover than an open field.

It’s a hard and fast rule of military tactics that one never gives up a tactic simply because it doesn’t work. In the face of failure, the response is more of the same.

The atomic bomb pretty much put an end to the age of industrial warfare. There’s not much sense if fighting an industrial style war if you are going to annihilate civilization. But, that didn’t stop leaders from churning out tons of military hardware designed for a form of warfare that had outlived its usefulness. The result was failure in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fast forward to our Eternal War of the Empty policy in which the United States finds itself mired in two wars of aggression, a new record for America. If Vietnam should have taught our leaders one lesson, it’s that you can’t wage an industrial war against an insurgency. For one thing, most insurgents are bright enough to pass on amassing large bodies of men on an open field in order to march them towards the enemy. Nor does bombing the shit out of them work, as we painfully discovered in Viet Nam. Advanced technology much of an advantage in such a war.

This is a lesson we’re learning big time in Afghanistan. Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt point out that, counting both active duty and reserve forces, the United States enjoys a 1,286:1 ratio over al Qaeda. However, this doesn’t stop our leaders from repeating over and over that al Qaeda represents a threat to the homeland and to the stability of Afghanistan and the Middle East.

This ignores the hard truth that al Qaeda doesn’t really exist. If two pissed-off Muslims sit down at a table and try to dream up ways of zapping the invading American forces, they are, ipso facto, an al Qaeda cell. As Turse and Engelhardt point out:

The Pentagon with its giant bureaucracy and its miles of offices and corridors, is the headquarters of the U.S. war effort, but there is no central al-Qaeda headquarters, not in Afghanistan or Pakistan—not anywhere. There is probably no longer an “al-Qaeda central.” Osama bin Laden has vanished or, for all we know, may be dead. Think of it, at best, as an open-source organization that is remarkably capable of replicating by a process of self-franchising.

Of course, this assumes that the reason we’re fighting our wars of aggression is to defeat al Qaeda. Not so. al Qaeda is simply a marketing tool to justify the continued existence of America’s number uno White Elephant, the Pentagon. Where once we branded nationalistic guerilla movements “communist,” we now call them “terrorists” or, even better, al Qaeda in (fill in the blank).

Of course, the reverse is true—al Qaeda needs the United States military to justify what remains of its existence.

I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories, but I have to wonder… Look at how botched recent attempts to blow up airplanes have been. You had Richard Reid with his shoe bomb, the plot to blow up an airplane with a bottle of shampoo and, finally, the exploding underwear. In all three cases, scientist agreed that there was no way in hell the devices could have brought down an airplane.

Some call it stupidity, even though history has taught us that it’s not wise to think of your enemy as stupid. Could it be, instead, an example of tactical brilliance?

I’m sure al Qaeda, or any terrorists with a single cell of grey matter, realizes that to actually bring down an airplane would bring a firestorm of death and destruction down on their homes. One the other hand, al Qaeda wants to keep America’s knickers in a knot so we will continue to ramp up our military presence in the Middle East, thus making it easier to recruit more insurgents.

What better way is there to accomplish this than with botched up bombing attempts. The suicide bombers are thrilled with the idea because it means they avoid a premature death. Our leaders get to spaz out every time an attempt fails and we ramp up our military efforts up another notch. For both al Qaeda and the Pentagon it’s a win-win strategy.

Meanwhile, we are treated to the paradox that with every drone and bomb we explode the Taliban increases their control of the Afghan countryside. But hey! Industrial warfare worked in the past so there is no reason it won’t work in the future.

That’s what the military calls learning from experience.

It's Time!

2010-01-22T07:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court gave America back to her corporate handlers when it ruled that Congress could not place restrictions on corporate contributions to political campaigns. The argument was the same fallacious argument that has allowed our corporate oligarchs to befoul our democracy—corporations are people and have the same rights under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as human people.

So, it is time to reprise an idea I put forth about a year ago. Then it fell into a sea of silence, but perhaps the court’s decision has made the ground more fertile for its growth

What we need is a 28th Amendment to the Constitution that strips our corporations of their personhood. The net effect would be that our corporations would have no rights; they would only have privileges granted them by the state.

Today, such an amendment stands a snowball’s chance in Hell of passing. However, as our economy continues to tank, and as Wall Street bankers continue to get trillions in bailouts while the disempowered class in America, which increasingly includes the Middle Class, continues to slip down the economic ladder, the temperature in Hell is starting to fall.

Besides, think of the fun we could have with such a movement! We could demonize the hell out of the bastards.

Look at where we are now. In an age when it is not only necessary to think outside the box but to reduce the box to kindling, a paralysis has gripped the Obama administration, which spends all of its time trying to figure out if we’re in a box to begin with, and, if so, how big it is, what color it is and is it really necessary to think outside the box when we could easily build an addition to it, provided they could get the financing.

Meanwhile, the Left loudly proclaims that, “Something must be done! Systemic change is needed; reform is called for!” And, there it ends as the Left fragments into a spray of mini issues--gay rights, women’s rights, peace, the environment, animal liberation, universal health care—each droplet suspended in space independent of the others. Each of these issues is important, but each is made all the more difficult because we are confronting a system that is decayed and corrupt, and until this tottering superstructure is addressed, the above issues will simply limp along without any satisfactory resolutions.

The drive for a 28th Amendment would serve two immediate purposes.

Dissatisfaction in America is badly fragmented. We are too isolated in our discontent, which is why we seek escape in celebrity infidelities and reality television.. The drive for a 28th Amendment could well be the lightening rod that would unify this discontent into a viable movement.

At the same time, the radical left has a millstone hanging around its, neck: a vocabulary straight out of the nineteenth century that, in today’s world, is devoid of both meaning and relevance.
The struggle is no longer between capital and labor.

Capitalism is dead; it’s been dead for decades. A CEO is not a capitalist; he is an employee. A capitalist grew capital by the sweat of his brow and the blackness of his soul. A CEO plays without other people’s capital while absorbing as much of it as he can through executive salaries, bonuses and stock options. The soul of a CEO is a bland beige.

We no longer have a working class; we have a dispossessed class that grows larger every day. It is an inclusive class claiming as it members not only workers but the poor, the working poor, undocumented immigrants, the unemployed, the employed who are squeezed for three hours of productivity for one hour’s pay and, increasingly, the middle class. It is just waiting to be mobilized by the right issue.

If there is to be any systemic change in the country, the corporation must be demonized, and the movement for a 28th Amendment would present the perfect platform from which to do just that. Let’s face it, the corporation is an anachronism, a dinosaur that has outlived its usefulness and is in the process of devouring itself as it takes the country down with it. That is the box that must be reduced to kindling! The corporation served its purpose; it gave us all sorts of nice toys and technological advances (many of which are destroying the earth, but isn’t your iPhone worth it?) but it’s time it was put out to pasture before it ruins us completely.

The amendment would raise the possibility of doing something about our corrupt Congress. Cynics tell us Washington D.C. is an open septic tank overflowing with the raw sewage of corruption. In truth, it is a bit more sophisticated than that.

Granted, raw sewage is pumped into the beltway via open trenches that run from the nation’s power centers. But, instead of pouring into the Capitol, it is first pumped into the K Street Sewage Treatment Plant. There it is sanitized and deodorized before being piped into the Halls of Congress disguised as campaign contributions. It is still sewage, but, it smells sweeter.

The short answer to this mess is public funding of election campaigns. On the surface it seems to offer much. By freeing the congress from the multiple snares of corporate purse strings, Congress might start representing the public interest. As it stands now, every time an elected official speaks of our national interests or national security, “national” is simply a code word for “corporate”. The system is gamed to minimize public influence on policy.

Congress tried to reign in corporate power with the McCain-Feingold Bill. But, before the ink was even dry on the bill, our corporate overlords went weeping to the nearest federal court and claimed that the bill violated its First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Money talks, and if our corporate patrons aren’t allowed to speak through their wallets, they are being unconstitutionally silenced.

And, the Supreme Court agreed with the poor darlings one-hundred percent.

The argument won the day, because under our current system, a corporation is a person.
People assume that corporate personhood was the result of a Supreme Court decision. In truth, the court made no such decision. The question of personhood arose when the court considered an appeal of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. The focus of the case was the taxation of railroad properties.

As the case worked its way through the lower courts, the question of whether corporations were persons protected by the 14th Amendment was argued.

However, before oral arguments began before the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite stated, “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question of whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are of the opinion that it does.”

Because formal arguments had not begun, Waite’s remark was a non-binding obiter dictum that had no bearing on the outcome of the case. The question of corporate personhood was never mentioned in the court’s written decision. The court limited its decision to the question of taxing corporate property.

However, the court clerk, when writing the header, or summary, of the case stated that, “defendant corporations are persons…”

Thus, was corporate personhood born.

The principle is so engrained in legal precedence that a judicial reversal is virtually impossible. That is why only a constitutional amendment could solve the problem.

That our amendment would raise some corporate hackles is an understatement. Already, I hear lamentations about the sanctity of private property, etc. However, a very compelling argument could be made that the ownership of corporate property is so diffused amongst shareholders that it is a misnomer to call it private property. Since corporate property exists at the pleasure of the State through the granting of a corporate charter, it is more akin to quasi-public property than private property.

I admit this is heresy, but given rate at which corporations are eating us alive, I think some healthy heresy is called for.

This brings us back, in a full circle, to our corrupted Congress. If corporations were stripped of their personhood, a campaign finance reform bill that eliminated corporate money from the electoral process would be better protected from a court challenge. There is no guarantee this would clean up the system. All it would do is increase the probability that it would be cleaner than it currently is.

Granted, the idea of a 28th Amendment sits way out there in the foggy fringe, but if our Neocon colleagues taught us anything, it is that today’s fringe is tomorrow’s mainstream.
This is a movement that could cut across class, gender and ethnic divisions because if there is one thing unifying America, it is our economic misery.

And if nothing else, the drive for a 28th Amendment would make our oligarchs and plutocrats sweat. That, alone, would make the effort worthwhile.
Sure, it looks hopeless, but I.F. Stone wrote:

“The only fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing—for the sheer fun of it—to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.”

It’s time to bring back the Merry Pranksters, but instead of promoting psychedelic drugs, they will promote the decorporatization of America.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer party.

2010-01-20T03:45:00.002-08:00

So the Democrats lost what had been a safe Senate seat in Massachusetts. There’s really no surprise there. If anything it was a vote against the feckless Democratic leadership. The center has long been a graveyard for the Democrats. Those who occupy it show the public that they stand for nothing, and that doesn’t sit well with voters.

It doesn’t matter that what Republican Scott Brown stands for—no healthcare reform and forget our legal traditions when dealing with “terrorists”—is onerous. The fact that he stood for something appealed to voters disgusted with vacillating Democratic leadership.

In truth, it’s no big deal that the Senate lost its veto-proof majority. The Senate leadership hadn’t done anything with it except wimp out and compromise on every issue.

If Senate Democratic leaders had any backbone, they’d force the Republicans to filibuster the healthcare reform bill and use the filibuster as a cudgel to beat the Republicans over their Neanderthal skulls when the midterm elections roll around.

That won’t happen, though. The rightwing noise machine kicked the spin out of them years ago, and the poor fools are still trying to find it.

Maybe this will be a wakeup call for Obama to get off his ass and start living up to his campaign promises. I doubt it thought.

A more viable alternative would be a third party because it looks as if the Democrats are ready to follow the Whigs into political oblivion.

Riffs on a Good Read

2010-01-18T07:23:00.000-08:00

A good article is one that ends up covered with margin notes after it’s been read. Gaither Stewart’s “Symbolism, Ideology and Revolution” is one such article. I’d highly recommend taking time to read the entire article. That being said, let me begin to quote and riff.

Stewart quotes Umberto Eco who argues that:

[S]ociety…has become a universe devoid of a center. Everything is periphery. There is no longer a heart of anything.

What we have, instead, are faux power centers that are more media creations than reality. It has become clear by now that neither Obama nor any other president has every run the country. What the media calls the most powerful leader in the world is little more than a shill for the dispersed special interests and lobbyists who are the real power, and, as Eco noted, there is no center, no heart through which a sword could be plunged. Rather there is only a toxic mist made up of many discrete particulates that drifts across the land, constantly changing shape as it moves.

Eco goes on to say:

Power is multiple and ubiquitous. It is a network of consensuses that depart from below. Power is plurality. Power is the multiplicity of relationships of strength.

The habituated momentum that makes a society and keeps power in its place also hollows society out as the ideals and ideology that set this momentum into motion gradually fades from memory and only a fragile ideological construct is left tht slowly becomes a parody of itself. We see this is the desperation with which our oligarchs cling to the belief in a self-regulating fee market, which is little more than an empty ideological shell staggering beneath the weight of the global economic meltdown brought about by a “free market” run amok.

Power is neither rational nor planned. It is a convergence of interests by those with the resources to implement them.

Stewart comments that one “notes little solidarity between middleclass and the poor.”

This points to the paradox of class in the United States. Because we cling to the belief that we are a classless society we find ourselves mired in class prejudice. The reason is simple: because we are classless we believe that everyone should be middleclass and those who isn’t well dressed, well behaved, orderly, polite, law abiding and Euromerican are marginalized.

The left castrated itself in the 60s when it turned its back on blue-collar America and, in doing so, lost its base. It has been impotent ever since. As a result, blue-collar America ended up voting for Regan who proceeded to screw them them to the wall.

Speaking of the European bourgeoisie, Stewart says:

Within that class emerge the thinking and movements for drastic social change.

This hints at a major difference between Europe and America. Europe has a history of vibrant social thought that reached down to all classes in a society. America has no such tradition. This is because we are a nation of technicians, not thinkers. For example, the mantras I grew up with were: “Say what you mean!” “Get to the point!” “Don’t beat around the bush!” In other words, we were conditioned to believe in “one word; one meaning.” Consequently, our language lacks depth, nuance and metaphor, without which there can be no poetry, and an ideology without poetry is a flattened balloon. (This explains why America is crawling with fundamentalists and why, when you scratch an atheist, you find a pissed off fundamentalist.)

Stewart argues that America is not bourgeois; it is middle class. And:

Lionel Trilling defined middle class in relations to the government. From the ruling or governing class one scales down to the lowest classes which are cut out totally from any relation with the government. The middle class, situated midway between the two, continues to believe—in its overwhelming false consciousness—that the government exists for it and for its interests.

However, now that the impoverishment of the middle class is underway, it will be interesting to see how it develops. Stewart contends that, “…the major target for proponents of radical change should be precisely those deaf and dumb, ignorant and obtuse, super patriotic middle classes.” We should take a hard look to see what we might have in common with the tea baggers. (Incidentally, an important component of “solidarity” is the willingness to listen.)

Unfortunately, the middle class has always wanted reform, but not too much reform. The reform is seeks is divorced from the structural and systemic changes that would be necessary to evolve into a truly decent society instead of the dog-eat-dog kennel we currently are. As Stewart notes about Liberals:

Liberals can take strong stands on minor community improvements; they can work themselves into a fury and campaign relentlessly and join sit-ins and carry placards concerning, let’s say, how the local school yard is to be used on weekends or about alternate days for trash pick-up, and still ignore the concept of social justice for all. Viewed from a distance, I therefore am dubious about so-called grassroots activities: naturally they are welcome, but I suspect in the long run harmless. No wonder Power as a rule lets them sit-in, sit-out, march and carry little placards. Liberals, at the most only potentially revolutionary, are Power’s ally and stand in the way of drastic social change.

Speaking of artists, Stewart argues that, “To write propaganda or paint conformist art is to succumb to the allures and/or the coercion of the reigning system. For that reason most artists are countercurrent. That is also why artists should stay away from the White House or the Elysees Palace.”

That is also why artists should avoid grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I disagree with Stewart over how “countercurrent” our artists are. Art seems to have been reduced to arcane installations viewed only by the “creative” clique that clusters round the trendy galleries in the country’s metropolitan centers and what passes for contemporary literature is little more than empty naval gazing.

Articles like Stewart’s are why I prefer reading to television. The tube deadens while the printed page stimulates. The tube produces consumers while the printed page produces citizens. This could explain why there are so few citizens in America.

The Serenity of Modern Warfare

2010-01-16T04:38:00.000-08:00

The successful execution of America’s Eternal War of the Empty Policy does not require toughness or resolve. All that is needed is for those in charge to achieve a sublime state of moral nihilism that transcends the division between good and evil.

In this elevated state of moral nihilism, consequences no longer exist. The dead are not dead; the maimed are not maimed. It is an ethical void scrubbed clean of the gore that is war’s traditional aftermath. In this netherworld dead children, who really aren’t dead, continue to play in the streets under the loving gazes of their mothers, whose limbs haven’t been blown off. Dead fathers returned from their destroyed factories and the family sits down to its evening meal even though its home has been reduced to rubble. Life goes on, no matter how brutal the bombing.

Slaughter is sanitized. A clean-cut young man sits at his laptop somewhere in Nevada and with his mouse directs the course of an unmanned drone until a collection of hovels is in his sights. He clicks the mouse and in a flash, the hovels are no more. He closes his laptop, goes home to his family and gets a good night’s sleep. He’s put in a good day, and as he sleeps he is blissfully unaware of the death and destruction he has wrought.

Moral nihilism works best in value-free individuals. This emptiness is achieved when the ties that bind an individual to family and community are severed. Into the void that remains pour the facile symbols of the state, symbols that are effective because they have been stripped of their original meaning until they are empty shells that resonate with meaning in individuals who are also empty shells. The best example of this is the flag lapel pin. This once proud symbol of freedom and democracy now signifies the moral void that has made us a hegemonic wonder to behold.

To reach its peak efficiency, moral nihilism requires an environment in which nobody is in charge. Instead of a single evil mastermind, there is a collective mass consensus that is more reminiscent of a pool of toxic sludge than a grand conspiracy. Its driving force is a blind momentum that drifts along more from habit than resolve. Any attempt to think outside the box is thwarted because the box is constantly growing and expanding so the mind is never able to step outside of its confines.

Language, stripped of passion, is the medium of this moral nihilism. The language of the nihilist doesn’t sing, it drones. Here is an example of its poetry:

A cluster bomb delivery will be examined to determine the optimum configuration of bomblets from a maximum probability of destroying the target.

The power of this passage rests in the absence of a child attracted to an unexploded bomblet. Nowhere is there a photograph of the child after the bomblet has exploded. The prose sits in a state of pure innocence which reduces war to little more than a pushing and shoving match.

But, do not think for a minute that our moral nihilists are totally lacking in compassion. Leo Tolstoy had them in mind when he wrote:

I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means except by getting off his back. Of course, if the man throws me off his back, I have no choice but to kill him so the contagion of his freedom doesn’t spread to other carriers.

A savage brutality once drove war. Now it is driven by the serene barbarity of the civilized.

Who needs freedom when we are eating right?

2010-01-15T03:47:00.000-08:00

Fastidiousness is the midwife of oppression. Authoritarian stats are neat freaks that want their ducks in a row and have a pathological fear of anything that has not been scrubbed clean of all that makes it human and unique. The sophisticated ones are oblique and subtle in their approach. Over time they put together rules and regulations, which, individually, seem so innocuous that people barely notice that the screws are being tightened, but in their totality are oppressive and highly restrictive.

Authoritarian states of old obsessed on what people thought and how they acted. Modern states obsess on what people eat. In this respect, Mike Bloomberg’s New York City is on the cutting edge of contemporary authoritarianism.

When speaking of New York City, a caveat is necessary. In the public’s mind, New York City covers an area roughly from the tip of Manhattan to the borough’s 96th Street, allowing for an margin of error of ten to fifteen blocks in either direction. Most outlanders are unaware that the city has its own flyover land in the form of its outer boroughs.

But getting back to Mike, the man is very concerned that his subjects eat right. First he pushed through legislation regulated the amount of transfats in food. Next, he made restaurants post calorie counts. Now he wants to regulate the salt content in food. I guess he figures the proles don’t know how to eat right so their big brother has to tell them to finish their veggies. All of this was over and above his smoking ban so his subjects’ nostril wouldn’t be violated by the rank odor of cigarette smoke, one tendril of which would be enough to send the victims lungs into a spasm of pulmonary disorder.

The rationale for these rules and regulations is that they saves money by reducing the medical expenses associated with the poster child disorder of the twenty-first century, “obesity.” Mike wants us all svelte, even if it costs us our freedom to eat as we please. It’s so damn sloppy that way. The idea of all that salt and grease ravaging our bodies is too much for Mike to bear.

Of course, the expenses associated with the treatment of obesity pale compared with the expenses associated with old age. It costs an arm and a leg to keep those senior citizens breathing. If Mike was serious about saving money he’d outlaw aging. The old farts are parasites draining assets from the system that would be better used to treat Manhattan’s beautiful people. By caring for the aging we are creating a moral hazard in which citizens are encouraged to age. But, by God, they’d think twice about doing so if they knew they wouldn’t be cared for in their dotage.

But, what can you expect from an administration that banned large demonstrations from Central Park’s Great Lawn because it might hurt the grass. That’s America for you, more concerned about its lawn than its liberty. If the grass is green and the air is fresh and women can slip into a size six, all is well. Fastidiousness rocks!

Bull Guts and Prosperity

2010-01-12T02:57:00.000-08:00

Fiat currency is to finance capitalism what lead was to alchemy. Both are base materials their possessors sought to transform into something of value through the muttering of incantations. Only finance capitalism succeeded. Fait currency obtains value when a well-armed bully shakes a dollar bill in a peons face and snarls, “This mother is worth what I say it’s worth!”

I wonder if the alchemist, as he stood over his bubbling cauldron, asked himself, “What if I succeed and turn this lead into gold? What will that do to the price of gold on the open market? Will we not reach the point where it would take a ton of gold to purchase what a pound of gold now purchases?”

One thing we can be certain of, the finance capitalist never asked this question about his fiat currency. Why bother when you can produce value as fast as you can print it.

Finance capitalism is the alchemy of today as it busily produces value out of a base material--paper. It is all fantasy. Fantasy is the hot air that has inflated the multiple bubbles that have maintained the illusion that we are a prosperous nation when, in truth, our economy has stagnated as we shipped our manufacturing base overseas.

Ours has been the prosperity of increased indebtedness as more and more consumers join the ranks of the poor. We need the poor because they debt they piled up during flush times is a major source of revenue for our financial capitalists. They are the vultures who profit every time funny money changes hands.

Their goal is the total economic meltdown that would give them the opportunity to wrap a neoliberal garrote around the neck of what remains of the New Deal and slowly strangle it.

All of this was made possible when the bean counters enticed the virtual economy to pack her bags and leave the real economy. There’s more profit in fanatasy than there is in actually making something or in providing a real service.

The priests of old assessed risk by studying the innards of a gutted bull. The priests of finance capitalism assess risk using “risk assessment models.” I suspect the priests of old had better luck with their bull guts.

Rational Spending

2010-01-10T03:34:00.000-08:00

The multiplier effect is an economic tool that measure how much additional economic activity a dollar spent will generate. For example, The New York Times tells us that, “Every dollar of additional infrastructure spending means $1.57 in economic activity.”

The article goes on to list the following multiplier effects for each dollar spent:
· General aid to states: $1.41
· Increases for food stamps: $1.74
· Unemployment checks: $1.61

It would appear that a viable social safety net—unlike the shredded remnant of the one now in place—pays economic dividends.

What is harder to pin down is the multiplier effect of the $57,000 per minute we are blowing in Afghanistan. Like all other concepts in the dismal science, multiplier effects are subject to a great deal of debate. So estimates of the multiplier effect of each dollar of defense spending range from eighty cents to $1.40. The high end figure is misleading because the expense involved in the care and rehabilitation of a young soldier suffering from a terminal brain injury (TBI) is listed as an asset since it adds money to the GDP. It doesn’t subtract the reduced input into the economy the young soldier will be incapable of providing. In light of this, the lower multiplier effect is probably more accurate.

One fact that is indisputable is that defense spending is a drain on the economy. The standard Keynesian approach of using government deficits to stimulate aggregate demand worked during the Great Depression because the country was not saddled with a DOD parasite that was draining its treasury.

As one writer points out:

Defense spending means that the government is pulling away resources from the uses determined by the market and instead using them to buy weapons and supplies and to pay for soldiers and other military personnel. In standard economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth and costing jobs.

He goes on to list the number jobs produced by $1 billion in spending in various economic fields:

As we see, defense spending creates 8,555 total jobs with $1 billion in spending. This is the fewest number of jobs of any of the alternative uses that we present. Thus, personal consumption generates 10,779 jobs, 26.2 percent more than defense, health care generates 12,883 jobs, education generates 17,687, mass transit is at 19,795, and construction for weatherization/infrastructure is 12,804. From this list we see that with two of the categories, education and mass transit, the total number of jobs created with $1 billion in spending is more than twice as many as with defense.

The bottom line is that defense spending is a fool’s game characterized by the law of diminishing returns. We are getting nothing in return for the $57,000 a minute we are wasting in Afghanistan.

How many homes could be saved with the money spent over there is an hour, a day or a month? How many struggling states could be bailed out with the money being spent just to satisfy the egos of fools who equate military prowess with potency even though this prowess is slowly rendering us impotent. After all, who got Iraq’s oil and Afghanistan’s copper? It wasn’t us.

The money isn’t making us any safer as it finances the production of even more terrorists.

But when a country’s institutions are corrupt, madness stalks the corridors of power. Lord Acton’s corrupting power does not result in greed or oppression. It’s corrupting influence is brain rot.

Providence Rules!

2010-01-09T04:39:00.000-08:00

Divine Providence is to the state what a chef’s knife was to Jack the Ripper, an instrument of policy. The beauty of Devine Providence is its long-term vision. No matter how disastrous the consequences of a given decision, providence promises that all will be well in the end as long as we equate the events with "God's will."

Divine Providence allows the leader who is up to his neck in shit to declare, “I did the right thing.” Alan Hart says of that statement, “In discourse analysis it’s known as the false dilemma. You can’t argue with somebody, particularly a leader who insists he was doing what was right because, implicitly, you invite yourself to be seen as arguing for what is morally wrong.”

The leader who believes that his nation is a manifestation of providence lobotomizes the brain’s feel for decency. As soon as he is convinced that God is behind him, the leader will not shrink from wading through a waist-high lake of blood and viscera because the slaughter his decision causes is justified by the noble end his policy is pursuing.

From whence does this Divine Providence come? It is really quite simple: The ego farts and the soul thinks the breath of the Spirit is upon it.

Buying Ourselves to Death

2010-01-08T03:58:00.000-08:00

[W]e no longer have movements; we have thousands of people each clamouring to have their own vision adopted. We might come to together for occasional rallies and marches, but as soon as we start discussing alternatives, solidarity is shattered by possessive individualism. Consumerism has changed all of us. Our challenge is to fight a system we have internalized.
George Monbiot

Monboit’s observation explains a lot. In a society of possessive individualism, the only unifying force is greed, which explains why the Right has maintain its unity and force while the Left is in total disarray with any semblance of solidarity relegated to a footnote in a history book that is never opened. Consumerism has, indeed, “changed all of us.” Yet, consumerism is a word that is bandied about without any sort of understanding of its sordid history.

There was a time when we were a frugal people. The ruling mantra of the day was, “Use it up; wear it out. Make do or do without.” It was a frugality born of necessity. In the absence of an industrial plant, there wasn’t much stuff to go around. If tools and utensils had to be hand crafted by the local blacksmith, people made them last. Clothing was a product of the spinning wheel and hand loom, so people patched rather than replace. (Is there anyone still living who could darn a sock?)

All of this changed towards the end of the nineteenth century as the country’s industrial plant swung into gear. Now goods could be manufactured quickly and cheaply. But capitalism had a problem. It had to cure the public of its frugality. Thus, we saw the birth of the advertising and public relations industry, and the concurrent creation of wants in place of needs. People were encouraged to buy because they wanted, not because they needed.

Our industrialists and marketers made another discovery. Community and family put a damper on consumption. If I “want” a $300 shaving set, complete with a chrome-plated razor, brush and elegant stand to hold both, I am not going to tell my wife because her scornful anger would discourage me from purchasing it. But, if I say nothing, it’s mine.

So it was that we saw the gradual erosion of the family as consumerism replaced community, a process that was speeded up with the introduction of television. Soon, this fragmentation will be carried to a new level as television programs are streamed over people’s smart phones. Now, a family no longer has to gather around a single screen. Each can wander their empty house immersed in the tiny screens they can hold in one hand.

Consumerism built a head of steam during the twenties, only to make a crash landing when the Great Depression hit. Yet, that event was preparing the ground for the advent of consumerism's resurrection in the fifties and its transformation into the feral consumerism that has plunged us into our present economic meltdown.

Poverty is stressful. Never knowing if you’ll have food on the table or a roof over your head is a strain. Worry is your constant companion, a worry goaded by anger and resentment.

With the advent of World War II and the full employment created by the war industries, people once again had money in their pockets and a terrible burden was lifted from their shoulders. People naturally began to assume that money brought happiness, when all it really brought was a release from the stress of poverty, which is not the same thing as happiness. From that assumption came the belief that the more money one had, the happier one would be.

It was this assumption that drove the fifties and sixties. At the end of World War II, America was in the catbird seat. We were the only country in the world whose industrial plant hadn’t been blasted into oblivion. Coupled with that was a public whose savings had been gorged by wartime rationing and in whom memories of the poverty of the Great Depression were fresh.

It was in the sixties that the country started to realize that money doesn’t buy happiness. This was a factor that played into the youth rebellion that sought an alternative to materialism and consumption. Ironically, their mantra of “Do your own thing” was a marketers dream. Consumerism was off to the races.

As our prosperity began to fade in the seventies, consumption became an emotional prop as people tried to conceal their slowly sinking standard of living by plunging into debt to buy the trappings of prosperity to fill the vacuum left by its absence. A series of asset bubbles coupled with low interest rates facilitated this plunge.

Now all we are left with is a hangover, one we suffer in isolation because there isn’t a social movement in sight that we could join to seek redress for our grievances.

History is never stagnant. Out of the rubble of a dying system a new one emerges. This makes the unity of the Right frightening. We saw what happened as Germany plunged into the Great Depression. They turned to Hitler as their savior and the rest is history. Now, instead of Brownshirts, we have tea bags and Bibles.

The left is going to have to lose its ideological fragmentation if it wishes to be any sort of a counterforce to the Right. Right now it is too fragmented as individuals occupy their private ideological castles and refuse to leave them. You can neither organize nor fund-raise from a computer.

We will only cure this fragmentation if we are willing to leave our castles and engage in a political process that has been described as a process of compromise and conciliation between conflicting groups in a pluralistic society. And I’m not talking about compromise and conciliation with the Right; I’m talking about it within the left. Without it, we shall remain fragmented and impotent.

The "Times" strikes another blow for our National Security!

2010-01-06T07:55:00.000-08:00

You can always count on The New York Times to fan the flames of war. They did it with Iraq’s WMDs and now they are doing the same with Iran’s nuclear program. The Wednesday edition carried a frightening headline that alerted us to the fact that “Iran Is Shielding Nuclear Efforts in Tunnel Mazes.”

Accompanying the story was an equally frightening photo of Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, surrounded by a group of tieless functionaries, all sporting red hardhats, in a tunnel reinforced by a Byzantine network of equally red I-beams. The tunnel had “threat” written all over it—until you read the caption. They were standing in a newly constructed highway tunnel!

Now, there’s a scare.

The story went on to refer to Iran’s “notoriously opaque nuclear effort,” without the quotation marks.

The article highlighted a problem that has been plaguing the Beltway ever since it started grousing about Iran’s nuclear program: The program is perfectly legal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to which Iran is a signatory.

This has forced the administration to obsess on the “possibility” that Iran is really trying to build a nuclear weapon. It’s Cheney’s old “one percent” doctrine. If there’s a one percent chance that a possibility is real we treat it as real.

In all the coverage the story has received, a few salient facts have been left out. Given the hostility the West has exhibited towards Iran and given an Israeli Air Force just chomping at the bit to bomb the hell out of the country, Iran would have to be brain dead not to bury its nuclear facilities beneath the deepest mountain it could find.

For that matter, Iran would have to be brain dead not to develop a nuclear bomb. Nothing changes a hostile nation’s attitude like a nuclear arsenal, as North Korea discovered.

However, such thinking would require commonsense, and that’s the last thing the Beltway can afford. There’s simply no profit in it.

A Dead Past Lives On.

2010-01-05T06:35:00.000-08:00

When a country’s past is fable, the present veers towards unreality. The past is not static. It changes as we change, as we become more perceptive with the passage of time. Often times, this change is painful as we are forced to confront the ghosts of the past we have kept hidden.

Fable becomes a refuge from the pain of self discovery. Once we have exchanged the dynamic of an ever-changing past for a static world of make believe, the past ceases to be a source of growth and becomes frozen in amber, thus dooming the present to repeat the sins of the past over and over again.

America’s past became frozen with our victory in World War II, a victory that has turned out to be democracy’s swan song.

America’s past wars saw the mobilization of the citizenry followed by its demobilization once victory was achieved. World War II was different. There was no demobilization as we slowly morphed from a republic to a militarized security state.

Victory in World War II gave rise to the fable that we were a military superpower. From this, it followed that we made the error of equating hardware with strength. (Hardware is okay in an industrial war between two nation states, but it’s meaningless when dealing with an insurgency.) In the process we are slowly spending ourselves in to penury just to keep this fable of the past alive.

In order to keep a dead past alive, the mind needs a constant stream of delusions that protect it from the truth. This is why we need al Qaeda and terrorism. They protect us from the harsh reality that we are a hollowed-out shell. This delusion is abetted by Wall Street with its constant stream of asset bubbles, which maintain the illusion that we are the richest nation on earth when, in fact, we are broke.

We are like the aged dowager, living a life of gentile poverty, who maintains the illusion of wealth by plunging further and further into debt in the belief that her children will deal with it after she is gone.

Now, as we sink even deeper into the quicksand of delusion, we are being told that there is now a link between Columbia’s rebels and al Qaeda to smuggle cocaine into Europe via West Africa.

How wonderful! Now we have more countries we can “intervene” in as we continue with our Eternal War of the Empty Policy. Nothing shores up a bully’s ego like beating up on a kid smaller than he is. Each blow hides his fear and his weakness. His redemption is found in the blood of his victim.

Like the bully, we seek our redemption in the blood of innocent women and children as we continue to beat up on the weak. It’s a feel good thing, especially for the bureaucrat bored to tears by endless meetings and reams of policy papers. What a thrill it is to order wholesale slaughter and destruction with a nod of the head knowing full well that no blood will splatter his wingtips.

This is what happens when our leaders try to drag the past, kicking and screaming, into the present, thus corrupting the future as they do so.

Stoking Anxiety for Fun and Profit

2010-01-04T03:54:00.000-08:00

Faced with the threat of exploding underwear, the administration has expanded our “Long War” to include the small country of Yemen. This is encouraging news for our corporate-military infrastructure as Iraq winds down and as we move closer to declaring victory in Afghanistan and splitting, thus threatening two of their revenue streams.

Couple this with increased saber rattling over Iran and it looks like its flush days for the Pentagon for several more decades.

It’s all part of the Beltway’s Terror Feedback policy in which we pick a small, impoverished Muslim country, start bombing it , thus creating another generation of terrorists who will provide the rationale for future military campaigns, though military campaign is a misnomer since you can mount a credible campaign against an elusive insurgency.

But campaign or no campaign, our Empty War provides one additional benefit: it stokes America’s anxiety level and turn flying into an even more wretched experience than it already is.

Even though recent attempts to blow up airplanes have been exercise in ineptitude, the Beltway’s response has been one of studied hysteria in which a remote probability is treated as an imminent threat. Personally, the benchmark I use is to ask if the probability of being blown up in an airplane is greater than the possibility of being wacked in an automobile accident. If the probability of death by airplane is less than death by car, I don’t sweat it.

Of course, Beltway couldn’t afford to take this attitude since it would endanger a very viable profit center.

It would also help if our leaders realized that the most effective way of fighting terrorism is to stop producing terrorists. But that would be too boring. It would mean our leaders would have to give up the adrenalin high that comes with bombing impoverished villages into oblivion.

Then there is the stimulation that comes with playing the Great Game, that nineteenth-century struggle between the White nations to control Central Asia and the Middle East. It’s a replay of an aged geopolitical chess game. What our leaders don’t realize is that the rules have changed. The lowly pawn now carries a Kalashnikov and can move with the same impunity as the queen. Not only that, the pawn can leave the board, hide behind the game box and blow away the queen as she passes.

But then, much of our thinking is mired in the nineteenth century, which was the acme of White male supremacy and we’re loathe to let go of it. So we will continue our march into bankruptcy and oblivion just to pump life into a dead past. It’s the only way to keep our credibility intact. Besides, our corporate-military infrastructure is the only one we have left. We’ve off-shored all the others.

Dubious Decades

2010-01-03T04:04:00.000-08:00

Here we are three days into a new “decade” as pundits struggle to hang a name on it. If I took decades seriously, I’d call it the Potty Decade because of all the shit that’s been dumped on us over that last ten years.

But, therein lays the problem. I don’t do decades for the simple reason that they distort the past. The very word implies a discrete unit of time totally unrelated to the decades that preceded it and the ones that will follow. The implication is that when the clock struck twelve on New Year’s Eve, all the evils of the last decade vanished and the new decade would mean a clean slate and a new beginning.

The sad truth is that the old decade is still with us because it is part of a continuum that stretches back into the past. Nothing really new happened in the last ten years. All we saw was the strengthening of trends that run like toxic threads through our history.

Obama is tanking because he stepped into a raging torrent of momentum that quickly swept him away despite his noble and lofty intentions (if they ever existed in the first place.) We made the mistaken assumption that he would represent a clean break with the Bush administration. What we failed to realize was that the Bush administration was simply a farcical extension of a mob paranoia that began with the Cold War mentality of the late forties. And that had its antecedents in the Palmer Raids that followed World War I in which innocent people were swept up in a dragnet driven by hysteria.

It is in the Palmer raids that we find an antecedent for the further degradation of the law that has aided and abetted the erosion of our Constitution. The law is a positive force only when it is kept balanced by an ethical gyroscope that makes of the law a firewall against our baser mob instincts. 9/11 shattered that gyroscope and since then the law has run amok as it tramples over rights that had their birth in English common law.

Nor is there anything new about our paranoia. We have a long history of it. Woodrow Wilson was so frightened of dissent during World War I that Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918 that made it a crime to protest against the war or to utter any statement that could be construed as a criticism of the United States government. As with the Patriot Act and the Military Commission Act, many an innocent person was jailed.

The law, once our protector, has become an enemy and a threat. But then as the scholar John B. Roche once pointed out, “The first precept of constitutional interpretation is whose ox was gored.” Our Supreme Court is as easily swept along by mob psychology as the Fox News fans.

Our knee-jerk military response to world problems is nothing new. It began with Wilson’s gunboat diplomacy and festered and grew with the birth of a military establishment to fight World War II. The irony is that we haven’t won a war since. (Sorry, Grenada and Panama don’t count,) But that hasn’t stopped us from trying. When you start thinking in decades, the past ceases to exist, so the same mistakes are repeated over and over.

When we view the past as a series of discrete decades, it is easy to convince ourselves that the Great Depression never happened, or that it was a unique phenomenon confined to a specific decade. This made it easier to set ourselves up for our current depression, which our leaders tell us isn’t since a depression is something that happened so far back in the past that it can never happen again because this is a different decade.

Karl Marx once said that history repeats itself—first as tragedy and second as farce. The last decade was the decade when farce came into its own.

We fight; China prospers

2009-12-30T05:03:00.000-08:00

Finally we know the real reason we’re in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our military’s mission is to prepare the way for China’s commercial interests. First, China and Russia squeezed us out of the oil concessions in southern Iraq. Now the Wednesday edition of The New York Times tells us that China has won the rights to mine one of the world’s richest copper deposits near the village of Aynak in Afghanistan. (The current price of copper is $6,600 a ton.)

The article points out that, “The world’s superpower is focused on security. It’s fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.”

Of course, the Chinese have one advantage we don’t—they aren’t saddled with a voracious corporate-military parasite that needs a steady diet of wars and threats to survive. We destroy; China builds. Our military drags us into bankruptcy; China prospers.

As one Afghani put it, “The Chinese are much wiser. When [they] went to talk to the local people they wore civilian clothing, and they were friendly. The Americans—not as good. When they come there, they have their uniforms, their rifles and such, and they are not as friendly.”

The article notes that the Chinese “flush with money and in control of both the government and major industries, meld strategy, business and statecraft into a seamless whole.”

The copper contract China has inked with Afghanistan underscores the difference between their approach and ours.

· They will build a 400-megawatt generating plant to power both the mine and Kabul. We bomb wedding parties.
· They will dig a new coal mine, with Afghani workers, to power the generating plant. We kill women and children.
· They will build a smelter to refine the copper. We torture.
· They will build a railroad to carry ore to the smelter and refined copper back to china. We support a corrupt regime.
· They will build schools, roads and mosques. We have reduced their country to rubble.

The article goes on to point out that, “[T]he conclusion is inescapable: American troops have helped make Afghanistan safe for Chinese investment.

China is proving that the pen is mightier than the sword, especially if the pen is used to ink contracts.

Bored Violence

2009-12-29T04:13:00.000-08:00

A life of bored prosperity is such a numbing existence that only violence can make it feel alive. The days of the prosperous are ordered before them like footsteps dried in concrete as they follow the same tread day in and day out, their life reduced to pure routine even down to the bead length of toothpaste they put on their brush.

Perfect order and perfect predictability yield the boredom that is a prerequisite for violence. Boredom gives a depth to violence that passion is incapable of giving. It is the grit that gives violence its purchase. So sublime is its stimulation that violence quickly becomes a habit.

To the children of a bored prosperity all violence is virtual like the choreographed fistfight in the Hollywood western. This suits the children of prosperity because they can remain unsplattered in their sanitary bubbles while setting into motion the policies that slaughter. Cries of agony and death never reach their ears; blood never splatters over their wingtips. And they revel in their toughness and see themselves realists though the world they occupy is one of pure fantasy: the fantasy of their immortality and the fantasy of their infinite power.

The violence born of boredom has stamina because it is violence filtered through the turgid language of policy, the pain it creates muffled by the nasal intonations of its spokesmen. Barbarity filtered through policy perpetuates itself because the justification for barbarity is constantly shifting and changing—old targets fade, new ones come into focus. The only constant is an enemy, a threat. Words are the sponges that wipe away barbarity’s gore and leave in their wake a shining monument to man’s triumph over tyranny—words sung, words spoken, words of glory; mundane words that sooth and uplift.

The proles sit with pods firmly in their ears, glazed and content to slowly die as boredom’s hand closes around them lowering them into a anesthetized indifference until the Blood of the Lamb dribbles over their foreheads and they are awake and alive, ready to cheer the slaughter, waving their colors proudly to the fetish boom of clusters spiting shards of steel through flesh and clothing. How it stimulates; how alive a man feels as the ground shakes beneath his feet and he glories in his master’s strength, his life now one of meaning and purpose.

Gentle Oppression

2009-12-28T06:38:00.000-08:00

The twentieth century saw the birth pangs of a dynamic movement that was to reach its maturity in the twenty-first, and that was ideological totality and its child, social engineering.

The totalizing methods set into motion by Stalin and Hitler were crude affairs whose lack of sophistication and marketing acumen guaranteed their eventual self destruction.

Despite their clumsiness, these early experiments shared one thing in common with the more sophisticated ideological totality of the twenty-first century, and that was the belief that ideological implementation was possible only through the complete destruction of a nation, a community or an individual. Out of the rubble of the old would emerge a new nation, a new community or a new “man.”

The earlier attempts failed because they equated destruction with actual physical destruction. You shot all the dissidents and beat the survivors into submission. Out of this, they believed, they could build an individual who internalize the official state ideology.

You don’t rebuild the human psyche, you corrupt it. Instead of active support, the sole goal of the state should be to induce passive apathy. Once it turns citizens into consumers, the state is free to do as it pleases as long as it continues to entertain the proles. Put a prole in front of images dancing on a screen and community is doomed. This is one of the reasons the twenty-first century is devoid of alternative social movements. You have to leave the house to start one.

Parades, rallies and mass gymnastics are all passé when it come to the modern totalistic state. As long as celebs get the lion’s share of airtime and political coverage is focuses on fund raising at the expense of content there is little chance of the masses rebelling.

Corporatism is scaling heights undreamed of by the totalistic states of old because it understands that effective marketing is more important than propaganda. Noise and toys have replaced chains as instruments of control.

A Classic Revisited

2009-12-26T03:45:00.000-08:00

The beauty of a classic is the ease with which it can be updated even as it is retold. Shakespeare’s Hamlet moves easily between the centuries with each new production. Classic literature is infinitely adaptable to time and place.

Take the French classic The Story of O, which tells the tale of the training of a female submissive. In the French version, O was a female fashion photographer who loved every indignity to which she was forced to submit. In the updated version, the submissive in training is a male politician so driven by ambition he submits willing to the demands of his handlers.

There are some differences between the two:

· In the original, the heroine admitted her submissiveness; in the updated version, the protagonist is in denial.
· The original was erotic; the revision isn’t.

Our hero is always willing to shill for his handlers. With the Senate passage of the healthcare reform bill, our hero has been trotted out to sing his masters’ song, touting the bill as a major breakthrough when all it does is force the poor to buy insurance from private insurers and fining them if they fail to do so.

His minions accompany him with their familiar descant-: It’s not perfect but it’s the best we could get. Don’t worry; we’ll revisit it latter; it’s only the first step in a long process.

Not.

It’s the same song and dance they did when the Medicare drug bill was passed.

Nothing will change; nothing will be revisited. Their masters have spoken and the bill is as it is and as it will remain.

Our contemporary Story of O could well be subtitled Much Ado About Nothing.

Soltice

2009-12-24T03:18:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve. The solstice, that night when the earth reaches the nadir of it plunge into darkness without which light would be impossible. It is part of the cycle that makes a mockery out of our feeble attempts to impose a linear narrative on the slowly turning sphere of birth, growth, descent, death and rebirth. It grinds our schemes and pipe dreams to dust as it turns, for the cycle knows what we refuse to acknowledge, that all of creation is grounded in death, that the rose blooms best when rooted in the decaying flesh of its brothers and sisters who have died and been enfolded back into the earth.

The cycle mocks our chirpy Christmas music because it knows that the manger sits in the shadow of the cross. The sixteenth century’s “Coventry Carol” captures this tension between birth and death. It is a lament sung by mothers whose infant sons have been slaughtered in Herod’s massacre of the innocents as described in Matthew 2:16-18.

All darkness contains a shard of light just as it is the shadows that give light its depth. Rather than a season of Hallmarkian joy, Christmas should be a time of sad reflection deepened by the sweet pain of memories of times long past and of innocence lost.

We put too much store in our doctrine of eternal happiness. The Spanish have a proverb that reminds us that there is no happiness, but only moments of happiness.

The paradox of darkness is that only by surrendering to it and plunging into its depths are we able to find the light that sustains.

So, may your holidays be a time of growth and of movement towards the light that is present even when the night is at its darkest.

Fairy Tales Do Come True

2009-12-23T03:05:00.001-08:00

The nation must have been pretty naughty last year because all it’s getting from the Obama administration for Christmas is one lump of coal after another, be it a healthcare reform bill that is gives the insurance industry a barrel of pork or a thirty-thousand troop “surge” in Afghanistan or the ever popular bailing out of a corrupt and ineffectual banking system.

With every passing day the Obama administration morphs into an extension of the GWB administration with the only change being an increase in the level of articulation. Somehow bullshit is easier to take when it’s articulate. There’s nothing worse than a mumbling liar.

Now, according to David Michael Green, another similarity is beginning to emerge. Where Bush had to clear his every move with Cheney, Obama has to clear his every move with that master of corporate ass kissing, Rahm Emanuel. And Emanuel insists that Obama sing the Populist Rag in such a way that it doesn’t upset his corporate handlers.

The mantra that guides this administration is, “Promise everything; deliver nothing.”

Emanuel’s philosophy is that it’s okay to hollow out the country as long as those corporate contributions keep pouring into the party’s coffers.

Green says he can’t figure Obama out. Then he proceeds to answer his question by pointing out that Obama is a corporate hack. He always has been and always will be until his non-policies create such a level of outrage that he is either forced to change course or is kicked out of office. With Emanuel at the helm, the preference would be to sink the administration as long as the coffers were full. Gold is heavier than idealism.

While shopping for Christmas gifts for my grandchildren, I noticed a lot of children books that have been written about the Obama presidency. This is fitting since it is turning out to be a regular fairy tale for adults.

In “Little Red Riding Hood,” the woodsman saved Hood from the wolf. In this fairy tale, the woodsman is feeding both grandma and Hood to the beast.

Green sagely points out that by refusing to make an enemy of anyone, Obama is making an enemy of everyone, except the wolf.

Closing the Carcass Gap

2009-12-22T03:04:00.000-08:00

Oppression rests on a bedrock of ideology, be it the divine right of kings, Christianism, Nazism or Communism. Without a dynamic ideology driving it, the best a leader could hope for was a tepid authoritarianism. A war driven by ideology takes on a nasty brutishness not found in wars fought for political or economic reasons. Slaughter rocks when ideology is giving the orders.

The question is how do you spin an ideology out of the raw material of life? What switch must a leader throw, what screw do must he tighten in order to create a jackbooted ideology that destroys all in its path.

We find a clue in the early days of sociology. The discipline arose in the nineteenth century with thinkers like Weber, Comte and Durkheim. These early thinkers were literate and well-red, and in many cases their writing approached poetry.

One of the tools these early thinkers used to understand the working of society was the “ideal type.” This was an abstract construct that represented a social phenomenon in its pure form. Examples of ideal types are democracy, capitalism, freedom and socialism.

It was understood by these thinkers that the ideal type was not reality. It was simply a tool with which one could analyze reality. Human beings are too contradictory, difficult, disorganized and undisciplined to ever achieve an ideal type—unless they are forced to.

Here now is the key to creating an ideology: Treat an ideal type as if it is real. Place this new “reality” on a mountain top, and drive the people up the slope with whips, cudgels and unmanned drones. Stalin did this with socialism and the end result was Communism, a mutant form of state-run capitalism.

The contemporary hotbed of ideology is the United States where every word is literalized and every ideal type is treated as a reality to be achieved. Saint Milton of Friedman is our patron saint of ideology. He took an ideal type, feral free enterprise, and treated it as a reality. The result has been a seething cauldron of poverty, misery, oppression and disenfranchisement. Just as Stalin gave us Communism, St. Milton has given us the Washington Consensus.

In the beginning, the Washington Consensus was rather wimpy as ideologies go. True, it caused its share of misery, but is simply couldn’t achiever the same body count as the traditional European ideologies.

That is until our Oligarchs decided to bring free enterprise and democracy to the Middle East. With that decision, the Washington Consensus started earning its chops as a grim reaper. We still have a ways to go before we catch up with the twentieth century ideologies, but this is America, home of the can-do spirit.

This is why Afghanistan is so important. We simply cannot allow this carcass gap to continue. We must show the Europeans that when it comes to body counts, we are number one.

Keeping the Golden Goose Hale and Hardy

2009-12-21T03:55:00.000-08:00

It’s not easy running an unnecessary war. Our leaders really have to be fast on their feet to pull it off. The more unnecessary a war is, the greater the chance that peace will try to break out, especially if the country waging it is bankrupt and a foreclosed public starts wondering why their enlightened leaders are dropping a cool trillion on two wars that won’t do squat.

Things are really looking grim in Afghanistan where peace is really trying to raise its ugly head now that the Taliban have offered a pledge that they will not allow the country to be used for an attack on another country if NATO (read the United States) agrees to a pull out and that they would renounce al Qaeda (not a big thing, really, since there are no more than 100 al Qaeda in Afghanistan).

What the Taliban fail to realize is that peace is anathema to our Corporate-Military Establishment. Hell, how would they reap all those profits if they didn’t have a war to fight? What would we do with all that military hardware?

There are two requirements for the execution of an unnecessary war. The first is a public whose memory can be measured in nanoseconds. The second is spokeshacks facile in the spinning of creative truths. Both of these have come into play in dealing with the Taliban offer.

Huffed one State Department spokeshack, “This is the same group that refused to give up bin Laden, even though they could have saved their country from war. They wouldn’t break with the terrorists then, so why would we take them seriously now?”

Now, that's creativity! The truth is that the Taliban offered three times to surrender bin Laden. The first two times they asked for evidence that he was involved in 9/11, a standard procedure in extradition proceedings. Twice, the U.S. refused, citing “state secrets.” The third time, after the invasion began, they waived the evidence requirement. We still said, “Thanks but no thanks.”

Then Bobby Gates chimed in by saying that we had to grind them into the ground before they would negotiate on our terms, our terms being our permanent presence there so we could protect the pipeline we want to build.

The first rule of unnecessary warfare is that you don’t serve the goose that lays the golden eggs for dinner. It is imperative that you keep it fat and healthy no matter what the cost. The priority in such a war is not a healthy army, it’s healthy defense contractors, and if you have to hollow out the army to keep the contractors hale and hardy, then you do so. After all, military prowess is simply a form of glorious self destruction.

More "Change" We Can Believe In

2009-12-19T03:59:00.000-08:00

It looks like Obama has joined the “Bash-the-Victims” movement that is one of the right’s talking points. However, he’s gone the right one better by giving it a populist spin.

This happened during his radio address last Saturday in which he praised the House passage of a Wall Street friendly banking bill, a bill that is high on spin and low on reform.

In his speech, Obama seemed to lash out at the banks when he condemned the “irresponsibility of large financial institutions on Wall Street that gambled on risky loans and complex financial products, seeking short-term profits and big bonuses with little regard for long-term consequences.” What he forgot to mention is that the “reform” bill will allow many of these practices to continue in all of their unregulated glory. But, when has spin ever spoken the truth?

Having given Wall Street a tiny tap on the wrist, he proceeded to stomp the shit out of Wall Street’s victims by decrying the millions of Americans who “borrowed beyond their means and bought homes they couldn’t afford, and assumed that housing prices would always rise and the day of reckoning would never come.”

Of course, he conveniently ignored that fact that the public did so because swarms of experts assured them that it was financially sound to do so because “housing prices would always rise.” This assertion came on the heels of decades of preaching to the public that consumption was the road to salvation. It was a nice little sleight of hand in which the decline in the public’s standard of living was concealed by forcing to maintain their old standard by plunging deeper into debt.

The only sin committed by the public was putting too much faith in “experts,” something they had been conditioned to do from birth. If there is a lesson to be had out of this entire debacle it is that experts are to be viewed with the most profound skepticism and their utterance are assumed to be incorrect until proven otherwise.

The irony of the bill is that it would not bar financial speculation; the speculators would just have to tell us what they were up to. It’s kind of like telling a criminal to reveal his crime, but promising him he won’t be prosecuted. It makes a break-in much easier to endure.

Once again we have another change we can believe in.

The Sweet Momentum of History

2009-12-18T03:43:00.000-08:00

History is chaos upon which an arbitrary narrative has been imposed. An African proverb tells us that until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.

In truth, the past is habit run amok until it hits a wall and a new habit is born. The narrative that is imposed on is a post hoc rationalizing of a toxic momentum that rolls over all in its path.

So when John Feffer tells us that, “Barack Obama demonstrated that he, too, cannot step outside history,” he is telling us that Obama has been swept up by the collective habit that drives the Beltway.

It is an ugly habit that leaves dead women and children in its wake. This is why leadership is so often an exercise is sociopathic behavior. A decent leader, seeing clearly the consequences of his actions would cringe in revulsion.

This is why historical narratives are always written on thick paper so the blood of the victims can’t soak through. History is a shroud in which the victims are buried. History sanitizes and sprinkles perfume on the stench left in habit’s wake. So it is that then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (the same Madeleine who said of the half million Iraqi children who were victims of our draconian sanctions, “It was worth it,”) can call the United States an “indispensable nation.”

Feffer cites Obama’s Oslo speech as an example of whitewashing a dung pile. Obama proudly proclaimed that, “Wars are morally justified…if they are conducted in self-defense or as a last resort, if the force employed is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared violence.”

Feffer then proceeds to make mincemeat of Obama’s statement by pointing out that:

The problem with the president’s interpretation of just-war theory is that the conflict in Afghanistan—the issue that most threatens to undercut the legitimacy of his prize—doesn’t fit the bill. It is difficult to claim the war is still in self defense, not when the Taliban pose no threat to the United States and al-Qaeda has been reduced to a few fragments that could relocate elsewhere. The force is far from proportional, given that the most powerful country in the world is bombing one of the poorest. And civilians have surely not been spared violence.

History turns deadly when momentum is treated as destiny. Momentum sails into destiny’s harbor on a ship built of lies. (One of the bigger lies is that we are a “military superpower.” If we’re such a superpower, why haven’t we won a war since World War II? Sure, we have more military hardware than anyone else, but most of it is useless in the counterinsurgency wars we have fought and are fighting.)

The truth is that Obama is a much of a prisoner of momentum as his predecessors. He has fallen into a raging torrent that will sweep both him and those who follow along until it is reduced to a trickle. Some call it history; others call it madness.

'Tis the Season of Hallmarkian Joy

2009-12-17T03:49:00.000-08:00

Christmas is problematic for our oligarchs. Talk of peace and love fill the air, and there is always the possibility that things will get out of hand and the public will begin to take it seriously. However, season does give our Beltway minions a chance to spend at least one day wallowing in decency before reverting back to the serene barbarity that is the wellspring of all progress and civilization.

Not to worry. The religious right will make sure this never happens. They worship the parochial god of the tribe and not the God of universal love. Universal love is doomed to failure because too many people associate it with a euphoric skipping through La-La Land with a beatific smile on their faces. They are unwilling to face the harsh reality that Christian Love requires a descent into the deepest pit of Hell and a willingness to love every low-life son of a bitch one finds there, even though one’s knee-jerk reaction is to tear their fucking throats out. This unwillingness to do so is what transforms Christian Love into the spittle spray of Christian bile.

The religious right also guarantees that its followers are kept away from Jesus. Nothing would ruin their faith faster than a public that actually bought into his teachings. Instead, their leaders encourage them to practice Christianism rather than Christianity. Christianism is simply Christianity without Jesus. Under Christianism’s guidance, a dynamic faith is reduced to a fossilized ideology.

Jesus broke bread with sinners and the poor; Christianism marginalizes them. Jesus taught love; Christianism teaches a hate born of fear. Jesus taught salvation; Christianism teaches destruction.

Christianism’s irony is its obsessive propagation of the Ten Commandments and its determination to see them displayed in public building. They don’t seem to understand that the Commandments are downright anticorporatist. They tell us don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie and don’t exploit. How in the hell do you run a multinationals with an albatross like that around your neck?

Christianism could be described as “a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, [that] abandons democratic liberties and pursues redemptive violence...without ethical or legal restraints [and pursues a policy] of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

That is part of Robert O. Paxton’s definition of fascism sung to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

I don’t what our oligarchs are worried about, though. You don’t see many crèches among the brilliantly flashing lights of Christmas lawn displays. I think we’ve kind of forgotten what the season is all about.

The Pentagon will be pleased.

Jumping Joe--Part II

2009-12-16T03:04:00.000-08:00

My goodness, the attempt to pass a healthcare reform bill is becoming more and more like a third-rate sequel to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Jumping Joe Lieberman is wielding his monkey wrench like a frat boy wields a keg while Senate progressives wring their hands and shed crocodile tears over their inability to do anything about it.

Of the many productions our Corporate Congress has staged for the public, this is one of the more elaborate. It’s a classic example of running in place even as you claim you’re running a marathon.

First, there is the false deadline. “We’ve simply got to get this bill passed by Christmas, no matter how vapid it is. The deadline is arbitrary, put there for dramatic effect.

Then there are the mournful statements from Democrats whining that while they're disappointed that Jumping Joe spiked the Medicare buy-in and the public options, the progressives must put on a happy face and be thankful for the few crumbs their corporate masters allowed to fall from their table, such as:

· The bill will extend coverage to an additional 30 million uninsured individuals, as in forcing them to buy coverage from private companies thus providing a super-sized barrel of pork to private insurers. Fifteen million would remain uninsured.
· Insurance companies can no longer deny coverage because of a prior condition or cancel coverage because an insured has maxed out his or her benefits. (Expect the private insurers to take that one straight to the Supreme Court—illegal seizure of property, you know. Not nice because the government can’t do that to a person and everyone knows a corporation is a person.)

What is interesting is that after Jumping Joe threw his hissy-fit, not one Democrat senator threw his and threatened to allow a filibuster. The reason is simple enough: regressives are ruthless; progressives aren’t. If progressives were ruthless, they would allow a filibuster to continue right through the Christmas recess and let Lieberman and his Republican cronies face the wrath of their constituents.

Of course, we forget that the last thing the Senate worries about is what their constituents think. This is because the Beltway has become a foreign occupying power, part of a troika that includes Wall Street and the Pentagon.

Jumping Joe Strikes Again!

2009-12-15T07:21:00.001-08:00

The corporate ownership of our United States senators is not a constant. There are degrees of ownership as evidenced by the extent to which our senators dance to their corporate pied pipers.

By this standard, one of the most subservient of senators has to be Jumping Joe Lieberman. This man is so tied into his corporate handlers that he not only eschews his constituents, but he eschews his party as well. It’s no wonder he left the democrats to become an independent (an ironic label if there was everyone.)

Well, Jumping Joe has done it again. The Senate, in a rare show of intelligence, crafted their health reform bill to provide a Medicare drop-down to age 55. This is sensible on several levels. Older workers are hit harder by unemployment than their younger peers, and they tend to have more health problems. In addition, it is commonly agreed, by those not beholden to corporate sponsors, that a government-run single payer system is far more efficient and equitable than the private system now in place.

Trust someone as corporately owned as Jumping Joe to stand up and say, “Wait one fucking minute. My handlers want no such a provision as that in the health bill.” So he has threatened to filibuster the bill unless the provision is removed.

And of course, the democratic leadership immediately flopped down on their bellies and crawled to Jumping Joe to find out what they had to do to placate him.

Kiss the Medicare drop-down goodbye.

Now if the Democrats had both a spine and brains, they’d see Jumping Joe’s threat as a golden opportunity. All they’d have to do is force the son of a bitch to stand up in the Senate and filibuster a program the majority of the country favors. Shine a media spotlight on his obstructionism. Get the wheeling and dealing out of the Senate cloakroom and on to the floor where the citizens of Connecticut can see what a mean-spirited bastard they elected.

At the same time, the Democrats could inform Joe that come the next election they were going to target all their resources on making sure he didn’t return to the Senate chambers. And the linchpin of their advertising would be film clips of Joe’s filibuster against meaningful health care.

Of course, all of the above assumes that the Democrats were serious about the Medicare drop-down in the first place.

And that ain’t necessarily so.

What we could be looking at here is a carefully choreographed song and dance. The Democrats propose the drop-down, and that nasty independent from the Nutmeg state kills it as the Democrats wring their hands in mock despair and claim that, golly gee, we really, really tried to get the measure passed but the political wind just wasn’t blowing in the right direction, though, in truth, the only wind blowing in the Senate chamber is a corporate fart.

In the end, it’s all theater scripted by the K Street Drama Club.

Moving Beyond Gay Marriage

2009-12-14T03:14:00.001-08:00

Opponents of gay marriage claim that if it is legalized it would only be a matter of time before marriage between humans and animals will become legal. Of course it would. Good heavens, if a person in in a stable relationship with their cat, why shouldn’t it be sanctified by the sacrament of marriage, though getting a cat to walk up the aisle could be problematic.

The sticky problem is what to do about marriages between humans and vegetables or mineral. If a man is in a deep relationship with his pet rock does it not follow that this too should be sanctified? Or if a man is suddenly smitten by the rutabaga on his plate, should it not follow that this is a union crying out for a deeper bond?

Though, I will admit that the rutabaga does raise some sticky theological questions. Rocks tend to be stable creatures. Their structure does not change, so a long-term union is possible.

The question is how to sustain a long-term relationship with a rotting vegetable. You could vacuum seal it and freeze it, but that would force man and rutabaga to live in a constant state of estrangement.

Another possible solution would be to encase it in amber. However, this brings up another thorny question. A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, but if the spirit is dead, is it still a sacrament? By the same token, a life is an outward and visible sign an inward and cellular vitality. Just as we may ask if a marriage still a sacrament if the celebrant and couple are simply going through the motions, so we may ask if a life is still a life when the outward physical attributes masks an inward cellular mortality.

If we affirm that the physical appearance is the sole determinant of life, then we are forced to consider the viability of a stable relationship between an individual and a corpse. Have we been treating necrophilia unfairly over the centuries? Can a man and his corpse sustain a lasting marriage over time. Is a marriage between man and urn possible?

And, what happens if a developer declares his love for a national park and asks for its hand in marriage. People marry for money, why shouldn’t they marry for undeveloped land. After marriage, the developer , being the good husband that he is, would shower her with condos and shopping malls.

This, in turn, leads to a possible solution to the Afghan war. Instead of raining Hellfire missiles down on wedding parties, the United States should simply propose marriage. As a pledge of our troth, we would drape our beloved country with a bejeweled oil pipeline. Why spend all that money conquering a country when you can marry it instead?
The possibilities are endless.

Framing the Rising Sun Controversy

2009-12-13T04:28:00.000-08:00

It is something of a miracle that the Republicans still manage to keep the Democrats on the defensive even though the Democrats control both the White House and Congress. Bombarded by a constant barrage of buzz words and faux issues, the Democrats have barely been able to keep their balance and go on the offensive. The rightwing noise machine has them so cowed they self-censor their every thought less it unleashes a barrage of polemic.

It all gets down to the right’s superb ability to frame any given issue in such a way that the Democrats can only react, and in their reaction come across as weak and uncertain.

The key to framing an issue to make a blatantly false statement with such confidence and certainty that the public believes it must be true. The statement is repeated and repeated until the public accepts it as fact. This entire process is abetted by a supine press that parrots every turd tossed out by the right without questioning it.

For example, a Wingnut could express moral outrage over the Democratic Party’s belief that the sun rises in the East. Such a belief is eating away at the country’s moral fiber because studies have shown that people who support gay marriage and abortion also believe in an East-rising sun. And there the right has its buzz word, the East-rising sun conspiracy, because we all know that in the corporatist state east is west, west is east, north is south and south is north.

Immediately, the rightwing noise machine screams its abhorrence of the East-rising sun conspiracy and demands that the Democratic Party repudiate this subversive heresy.

The Democrats are in disarray. The attack on the East-rising sun conspiracy is so virulent they are too scared to point out that the sun actually does rise in the East. To do so would leave them open to attack.

At first, they try to ignore the issue. But the right refuses to let them off the hook. Why, the right demands to know, are the Democrats silent? Is it possible that they believe the sun rises in the East. Finally, the Democrats issue a statement that calls for further study of the rising sun issue.

The media, of course, laps this all up as they repeat every charge and every futile attempt by the Democrats to defuse the issue. Editorials accuse the Democrats of being weak on the rising-sun controversy. Pundits expound that there are two sides to every issue and that the Democrats are hurting themselves by their failure to take a strong position on the issue.

Pressure builds at the local level for schools to teach both sides of the question. The whole concept of an easterly direction comes under attack. Democrats start losing elections because of it. The party is reeling from the onslaught of the anti East-rising sun movement. Cable news rating soar as the controversy grows. Evangelicals join the fray and condemn the East-rising sun doctrine as another attack on Christianity.

The whole issue is nearly as absurd as death panels. But then, political trivia is just another manifestation of the bread and circuses that keep the public distracted.

It is amazing that after all these years the Democratic Party still hasn’t figured out that it is being gamed. The party has spent so many years on the defensive that it has forgotten how to mount an effective attack.

America is truly a one-and-a-half party system.