tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-258523912024-03-07T12:16:29.221-08:00Belaboring the ObviousSometimes, the answers are right in front of you....Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.comBlogger333125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-26931598963789159892011-08-12T21:59:00.000-07:002011-08-12T23:46:39.943-07:00Oh, yeah, and speaking of God-botherers...... the eminent Ms. Jennifer Bryson at the equally eminent <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/37668/?page=entire">Witherspoon Institute</a>, wishes to make a <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/08/3651">causal relationship between porn and terrorism</a> where none existed before, and may yet not exist at all.
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<br />Now, apart from needing a remedial lesson in correlation not necessarily indicating causation, Ms. Bryson also seems to assume that the rest of us are as pissing-in-our-pants-scared of Islamic terrorism as she is, and would, as she does, describe it as a dire threat to our species' survival. Umm, sorry, sadly, no.
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<br />Ms. Bryson, moving out of the slow lane of intellectual befuddlement into the fast lane of religious frenzy, makes the improbable assertion that if a connection between porn and terrorism could be made, well, it <span class="js-singleCommentText jsk-ItemBodyText"><span> "would pose a more widespread threat to human existence than nuclear proliferation." This woman seems to have forgotten that pornography comes from the ancient Greek, meaning "pictures of prostitutes," which strongly suggests that pornography has been around for at least 2500 years before nuclear weapons, and in all that time has managed to coexist quite nicely with human existence, whereas world war, genocide and nuclear weapons </span></span>have in the 20th century alone taken a toll wholly more, uh, dramatic and real than her imagined terrorism resulting from pornography.
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<br />But, hell, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt, and give her a choice. She can have a copy of <span style="font-style: italic;">Hustler</span> dropped in her lap, or she can have a two-megaton warhead dropped on her head.
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<br />At the very least, if she chooses the former, she'll still be around to rant about pornography's imminent destruction of civilization, even if no one pays any attention to her.
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<br />Let's get utterly real for a moment. The real threat to civilization is state-sponsored terrorism, of which the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder">very moral</a> and<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay"> upstanding policy elite</a> of<a href="http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/"> this country of ours</a>--<a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/firebombing-of-dresden">and our friends</a>--<a href="http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/12">are</a> <a href="http://www.garalperovitz.com/2011/08/on-the-sixty-sixth-anniversary-of-the-bombing-of-hiroshima/">past</a> <a href="http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm">masters</a>.
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<br />The real pornography of terrorism is wanton death and destruction, regardless who's doing it, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with what Jennifer Bryson, in her willful ignorance and her desire to shift the public's gaze from the obvious, claims is of existential importance.
<br />Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-49959836163708784432011-08-12T21:39:00.000-07:002011-08-12T21:41:47.155-07:00Just one thought on the panoply of...... Repug presidential candidates.
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<br />Including the soon-to-declare Gov. Goodhair, more than one has said, in so many words, that "God told me to run."
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<br />Now, applying just a tiny bit of logic here, either one or more of them is lying, or God is fucking with them, or us, or both.
<br />Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-36231814020838425882011-06-28T00:43:00.000-07:002011-06-28T01:53:03.610-07:00It's been a remarkable few weeks...... on the rocket-powered handbasket ride to hell. <br /><br />Haven't been posting all that much because there's just been so much to be completely gobsmacked about that it's getting near-impossible to sort it all out and put it all into perspective.<br /><br />But, top of the list, of course, is that the looniest politician currently drawing a paycheck on the people's dollar is now one of the Repug front-runners after a thorazine-assisted debate performance in New Hampshire. If Michele Bachmann were sedated any more than she appeared to be, Scary Sarah could have pretended Bachmann was the caribou on her reality show and gotten off at least five or six shots before Bachmann noticed she was under fire....<br /><br />The more I see and<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michele-bachmanns-holy-war-20110622"> read of Bachmann</a>, the more I'm convinced that there's a weird parallel-universe Pat Paulsen effect going on with her and the press. Paulsen ran for President as a joke. The press knew it was joke, Paulsen knew it was a joke, and both knew that it was a great way to get people talking and thinking about not only issues, but the process of campaigning, as well. Now, Bachmann is goofier than Paulsen could ever imagine being, but, and here's where I start to lose it, the press is treating her seriously, as if she actually could, conceivably, make sense, and be electable.<br /><br />This woman is <a href="http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/151439/psycho_talk%3A_the_32_craziest_things_gop_presidential_contender_michele_bachmann_has_said/?page=entire">not normal</a>. In fact, if I were looking for the perfect actress to portray her in the inevitable biopic, it would be Sally Kellerman, because Kellerman already had Bachmann nailed down, in "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069282/">Slither</a>." Deep, deep down, Michele Bachmann <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> Kitty Kopetzky.<br /><br />The great mystery of the moment is why the press is treating her as if she's the reincarnation of Margaret Chase Smith.Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-54212139711317227462011-05-01T00:45:00.000-07:002011-05-01T21:31:33.288-07:00Ran across a curious little mockumentary...... the other day, thanks to Netflix streaming--"<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455906/">The American Ruling Class</a>," which features Lewis Lapham, editor <span style="font-style: italic;">emeritus</span> of <span style="font-style: italic;">Harper's</span> magazine, advising two fictional graduates of Yale on how to find out if there is an American ruling class, and how to join it if it exists. One graduate is headed for Goldman Sucks, while the other wants to write, and, hopefully, make a positive difference in society.<br /><br />We can sort of guess how this will turn out--the vaguely well-meaning but mostly apolitical Yalie finally decides that he's tired of poverty and menial work and goes to work at Goldman Sucks, too, because he's sure that he'll be able to retain his altruistic impulses after decades of soul-numbing number-crunching and devising skeevy plans to benefit his wealthy clients.<br /><br />We know he won't. He interviews dozens of the nation's movers and shakers, the <i>crème de la crème</i> of the American foreign policy/financial elite, and every single one of them lies to him about the existence of a ruling class, just bullshits him like a carnie barker ropes in a hayseed from the country (James Baker III turns out to be the lyingest, silliest manipulator of them all in that regard--he won't even entertain the question and simply dismisses it out of hand as specious, after trying mightily to make shit sound like Shinola). And the back story is filled in with extraordinarily ironic commentary from Mr. Lapham himself, including one telling aphorism, "Just so long as you understand that 'national interest' means 'self-interest.'" And, of course, Lapham means the self-interest of the elite themselves.<br /><br />I found it odd that I ran across this curious little documentary just days before all the mounting frenzy--particularly in the mainstream news media--over the<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-rather/and-in-other-news_b_855034.html"> impending royal wedding in the UK</a>. I realize it's a stretch, but, there's always been an impulse in this country toward monarchy, because the monarchy the Founders knew best contained an aristocracy (and there were probably as many monarchical loyalists during the American Revolution as there were rebels). Madison and Jefferson, particularly, warned about accumulated wealth approximating an "artificial aristocracy," and it sure looks as if wealth has created an American ruling class with the same inclinations toward anti-democratic behavior as any landed gentry in the United Kingdom. That those inclinations seem to be heavily weighted on the side of political conservatives in this country probably should come as no surprise, and even though that contemporary conservatism is fraught with all the signs and signals of an emergent proto-fascism, the roots are similar--one leader for life, ordering society for the benefit of those who would protect power at all costs, and for those who would benefit financially by doing so.<br /><br />At virtually the same time, Washington was preparing for its own version of a royal ball, with the press invited to rub elbows with the courtiers of power and notables of the entertainment world--the jesters of our society today--the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. The dinner itself is always just a warm-up for the parties afterward, sponsored by powerful corporations and media outlets hoping that a free drink and a few canapes and the opportunity to kiss a celebrity on the cheek will induce some hapless dodo of a social-climbing reporter to think favorably of some rapacious corporate raider when word reaches him or her that said raider has probably broken five thousand-odd laws in the pursuit of profit, or to view some moral midget of a politician as a "real" human being worthy of polite respect because they have a pulse and are ever so slightly warmer than room temperature. Case in point: the <span style="font-style: italic;">Washington Post</span> online "Lifestyle" section dutifully reports that "After the correspondents' dinner, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/2011-white-house-correspondents-association-dinner/2011/04/30/AFMimqOF_gallery.html#photo=11">Sarah Palin attends the Bloomberg & Vanity Fair cocktail reception at the residence of the French ambassador</a> in Washington," and, that not being quite enough coverage of La Palin, also headlines, "Former Alaska Gov. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/2011-white-house-correspondents-association-dinner/2011/04/30/AFMimqOF_gallery.html">Sarah Palin attends the MSNBC party</a> after the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington." And, lest the well-known Palin resentment be thwacked into bloom, the <span style="font-style: italic;">Post</span> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/2011-white-house-correspondents-association-dinner/2011/04/30/AFMimqOF_gallery.html#photo=2">makes sure to note that Palin's club-footed dancin' fool of a daughter is also in attendance</a>, "Bristol Palin, daughter of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, arrives at the MSNBC after-party." Well, we're not sure of the order of those events, but, no matter, it's still the elite's version of pub-crawling, except that there are enough limos to prevent skinned knees and to avoid opportunities of bumping into the <span style="font-style: italic;">hoi polloi</span>.<br /><br />And, let's not be remiss in reminding everyone that this exercise in mimicry of aristocracy is <span style="font-style: italic;">arranged by the Washington, D.C., press corps. </span>And, let's not be remiss in reminding everyone of who doesn't get invited to this soiree, or who has the good sense not to be associated with it even if invited: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh">Seymour</a> <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/seymour_m_hersh/search?contributorName=seymour%20m%20hersh">Hersh</a>. <a href="http://www.consortiumnews.com/">Robert Parry</a>. <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/">Amy Goodman</a>. <a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/5591">Ray</a> <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/further/2011/02/16-3">McGovern</a>. <a href="http://fora.tv/2009/12/08/Chris_Hedges_Empire_of_Illusion">Chris Hedges</a>. <a href="http://www.vandanashiva.org/">Vandana Shiva</a>. <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/04/28/petraeus/index.html">Glenn Greenwald</a>. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2bXpx1L0Ho">Mike Malloy</a>. <a href="http://www.thenation.com/video/158093/noam-chomsky-how-climate-change-became-liberal-hoax">Noam Chomsky</a>. <a href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/greg-mitchell">Greg Mitchell</a>. <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog">Matt Taibbi</a>. <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/another-runaway-general-army-deploys-psy-ops-on-u-s-senators-20110223">Michael Hastings</a>. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scheer">Robert Scheer</a>. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._McChesney">Bob McChesney</a>. <a href="http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/">Barbara Ehrenreich</a>. <a href="http://history.wisc.edu/people/faculty/mccoy.htm">Alfred McCoy</a>. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_%28scholar%29">Mike Davis</a>. <a href="http://motherjones.com/authors/mac-mcclelland">Mac McClelland</a>.<br /><br />There is a ruling class in this country, and the very largest measure of us have no say in it. If that seems to put the lie to this country as a true democracy, perhaps it's because we've been encouraged not to pay attention too carefully to the <a href="http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Book_Excerpts/PowerElite.html">inner workings of power in this country</a>.<br /><br />On edit, if there's any question that the ruling class is sensitive about what the rest of us know about their comings and goings and doings, this should answer that question:<br /><br /><br /><object style="height: 390px; width: 640px"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/TazSuzUADS8?version=3"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/TazSuzUADS8?version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="390" width="640"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />The response of the mainstream press to Wikileaks pulling back the curtain just a tiny bit is no different than that of the power elite. So much for an informed citizenry.Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-56758523231753335342011-04-27T01:35:00.000-07:002011-04-27T01:46:53.494-07:00Just a note about The...... Donald. C'mon, folks, he's not serious about the job. Here's why: If he were to win the Preznidency, he'd have to give up control of his "empire," and he's not about to do that, because the trustees might discover that he's been doing everything from check-kiting to bribing S&P ratings analysts, and, lordy, lordy, lordy, he doesn't want any of that coming out. <br /><br />He <span style="font-style: italic;">can't</span> let other people run his business while he's playing Prez, first, because that would be an ego-deflator, and second, because they might discover what he's been up to.<br /><br />Nope, the headlines will read, "Trump Dumps Jump," or, perhaps, "Chumps Dump Trump." Something will cause him to bail out. This guy is defined by his own definition of his self-worth--in dollars, real or imaginary.<br /><br />No job is worth giving that up--even the Presidency.Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-45139659696089188862011-04-26T21:54:00.000-07:002011-04-27T00:52:36.950-07:00Have been ruminating on various...<span style="font-family: verdana;">... opinions about what government is these days, I suppose because of the accumulated </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">dreck</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> emanating from the right wing these days and especially with regard to the Tea Partiers' whining about wanting to "take their government back" and "getting back to what the Founders intended in the Constitution," a document that few of them have read through to the end and even fewer understand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Some of this nonsense is, certainly, rooted in nostalgia for the `50s, which were wonderful if you were white, male, had credit and a good job, and were utterly conformist, but not very good for everyone else.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">But, even then, government was large and growing noticeably larger, so the arguments about smaller government deserve some examination. I think the first misapprehension of the "small government" types is that until the New Deal, government was some tiny entity that required little to no funding, and that just isn't true. WWI cost a lot of money--so much so that inflation was accelerating to the extent that, around its conclusion, Wilson had introduced wage and price controls, and there were additional debts to be paid for the Spanish-American War, some of which was to play the quit claim charges extracted by Spain for them to give up their Caribbean interests, about $20 million, along with the price of an occupation force and government in the Philippines, and then, on top of that, there was the price of Seward's deal to buy Alaska from the Russians, along with the cost of Teddy Roosevelt's dispatching of the "Great White Fleet" around the world as a show of American military might (not to mention the $10 million he paid to rebel groups in Panama for their interests in the Panama Canal). As the country's leaders were realizing, war and imperialism weren't cheap, which was most of the reason why the income tax was created. And, with imperial ambition, a central bank was necessary, prompting the creation of the Federal Reserve.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">All that occurred well before FDR came to power and realized that the banksters had put the country in a tub of shit, and decided to do something about it, without overly antagonizing the Wall Streeters and the industrialists, because he was going to need them for the next war, which was looming on the horizon. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">And the population at the time FDR was first elected in 1932 was roughly 40% of what it is now. Further contrasts: air travel was in its infancy--the idea of normalized air traffic control was almost non-existent. Commercial radio was less than twenty years old and commercial television, even in rudimentary form, was almost two decades away. The closest thing to a national sense of ecology was provided by John Muir's attempts to preserve some part of the wilderness, and talking moving pictures were about six years old. Weather prediction was guesswork, and there were no weather satellites to help provide accurate weather forecasts, let alone electronic computers to analyze the data. There was a peacetime military, complaining about being underfunded, but, perfectly in keeping with the actual threats to the country (nearly none). Small farmers were still the norm, rather than the exception, and huge parts of the country existed without electrical service (from 1936 until 1947, the only electricity on my grandfather's farm in Texas came from a 6-volt, 200-watt Wincharger windmill, which was enough to provide a lightbulb in my grandmother's chicken coop, a light or two in the house, and enough power to charge the batteries for the radio, which my grandfather saw as his window to the outside world--before 1936, they had no electrical power at all--until FDR's REA program brought reliable electrical power to him). </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">It's very important to understand that, at the time, big business had neither the money nor the inclination to expand the economy to dig the country out of a depression, but, the aggregate resources of the government did. Big business did not initiate at its own expense the enormous energy projects of the `30s--only government had the resources necessary to accomplish those tasks, some with labor funded by the government that big business would not or could not employ. Big business did not create over 600,000 miles of roads into the backwoods of America, because there was no profit in doing so. That same big business did not build swimming pools for inner-city children or day camps in the country for them, again because there was no profit in doing so.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Government did those things, not just to create make-work jobs, but because those things were necessary if the country was going to, first, escape the economic doldrums which big business had created, and second, acquire and create the infrastructure necessary to keep the economy going.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">So, the first lesson that the teabaggers have unlearned is that government is necessary. It's now, like it or not, an integral part of the economy. Even today, the teabaggers have no understanding of what the government does with regard to the economy. Every office in the government today uses computers, printers, network paraphenalia, desks, furniture, and the office buildings, too. From where do those items originate? Tens of thousands of suppliers around the country who employ millions of people. How about the paper the government uses? More thousands of people in the timber and paper industries. Beyond those limited economic effects, the couple of million federal employees get paychecks--supplied by the taxpayers, yes--that then spend that money for their sustenance and shelter, their diversions and the education of their children, mostly in their neighborhood businesses and banks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Along with all those hard economic advantages, there were other improvements in ordinary citizens' lives that began during the FDR years--a formal end to exploitive child labor, the right of labor to freely organize, to obtain contracts for their work in exactly the same way that CEOs today negotiate their contracts, the initiation of minimum wage laws (however badly administered by Congress in recent decades),the beginning of guaranteed old-age pensions through Social Security, and the result was the economic advantages that accrued to workers in those same `50s teabaggers now fondly remember.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">What most teabaggers have no conception of today is that government is a giant engine of the economy, and that it works principally for business, and especially for big businesses. Much of what the government does today is not giving money away to foreign countries as foreign aid, or welfare, or a dozen other activities the teabaggers have been told take away their freedoms and their tax revenues, but, rather, is work for business. The government produces thousands of reams of statistics--on unemployment, on business trends, on exports, imports, GDP, on where government spending goes, economic sector analysis, the debt, the deficit, you name it, the government provides a statistic for it, all of which is grist for the corporate economists, Wall Street, the general business sector, on publicly-held companies and their expenditures, on taxation, on everything of business interest in this country and around the world. The Bureau of Economic Analysis, among many other tasks, does a line-by-line audit of the government's budget every year, separating every minute expenditure into categories useful to business. The Import-Export Bank arranges loans to foreign countries to buy American goods and services, and most of the money in non-military foreign aid is arranged by the U.S. Agency for International Development to go to American companies doing international aid work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">When Calvin Coolidge said, very reductively and somewhat moronically, that the business of America was business, he meant that government was largely in the business of helping business, and that's just as true today as it was in the `20s.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">All that said, are there ways in which government has grown too large? Oh, you betcha, as Scary Sarah would say. Ever since the end of WWII, when the United States was virtually the only industrialized country in the world that had remained unscathed by war, the country's leaders have been obsessed with imperial hegemony, and our tax dollars have been used to support that aim, starting in 1947 with the formal codification of the national security state. Within a couple of years of that date, the country embarked upon a plethora of domestic and international campaigns to establish a kind of neocolonial domination of the world, using both military and economic power, which has not abated to this day. And yet, oddly, it is this humungous growth of government which the Tea Partiers and their fellow travellers find normal and acceptable--that government is "keeping us safe," when nothing is further than the truth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">At the beginning of the Korean War, military spending would quadruple from peacetime levels and would never come down again, and those levels, including war expenditures, are now six or seven times the amount necessary for real defense at a time of real peace. On top of those costs came the new demands for extreme secrecy, a CIA free of ethical, moral or practical constraints, and, even after the end of the Cold War (a "war" we furthered and amplified--there's plenty of documentation from the former Soviet Union that they were much more terrified of us than we of them), new enemies in the Middle East had to be found to justify continuing military expenditures. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Add in the debt on such expenditures, the new desires of government to surveil its citizens at will, new technology and the burgeoning roster of private security-surveillance-intelligence corporations eager to feed the paranoia of right-wingers, milquetoast Democrats and the public alike, and military spending is now through the roof, most of which constitutes the means by which the rights of ordinary Americans have been roughly violated, and yet, the "smaller government" proponents never mention these egregious infringements on their liberties, nor do they complain about the huge bite out of their wallets that pay for these excesses, because "big government," which they otherwise hate, is "keeping them safe."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">It's a conundrum, isn't it? In truth, many of the complaints about big government are deeply embedded in racist attitudes about foreign aid and welfare (which have always been small percentages of the national budget) and just general whining about taxation. If "big government" were a real problem for such people, they'd be up in arms about their loss of rights, loss of their own privacy, and the orders of magnitude increases in the secrecy of the government in its affairs, because those are the biggest encroachments of big government in the last sixty years, bar none. And yet, the right-wingers, for the most part, blissfully accept that reality as normal, out of partisan idiocy or fear or both.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">The very wealthy in the right wing are determined, in the false name of smaller government, to destroy the best parts of government and society, and to keep the worst, and the uninformed great middle are blithely cooperating in that effort. We've seen wholesale efforts at the state and federal levels to destroy public education, unions for public and private workers, end restrictions on child labor, defund programs that have lifted the elderly out of poverty, eviscerate environmental law and a host of other bad, bad, bad ideas in the name of lower taxes and smaller government, the advantages of which will almost exclusively accrue to the very wealthy, and still, people of modest means and opportunity have signed on to these abominations in the name of "shrinking the size government."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">What can we ascertain from this thoroughly strange set of circumstances? Perhaps, first and foremost, that we have greatly underestimated the power of propaganda, and second, that there is no underestimating the divergence from logic and reason that occurs during times of desperation. Our chosen leaders know these principles far better than their electorate, which is why they can bullshit their constituents to the degree they do.</span>Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-23917577216582613872011-04-05T14:09:00.000-07:002011-04-10T05:13:16.819-07:00Dorothy Parker's Lament....For months and months now, each new day has prompted me to ask, "what fresh hell is this?"<br /><br />The news has been so unremittingly depressing that it's been difficult to single out any one piece of it for the shredding and/or belittling it deserves, let alone to do it in writing. Nevertheless, out of the miasma has come the conclusion that I've been horribly wrong about one thing in particular. For years now, I've been saying that the Repugs want to take us back to the days of the the Gilded Age. Wrong. We're already there in some important ways.<br /><br />First, there's almost no doubt left that we have a government that is working almost exclusively for the very wealthy, both corporate and individual. Poll after poll shows that, regardless of how people self-identify politically or ideologically, when it comes to issues that are important to them and their families, they want the things that Congress and the Executive have absolutely no interest in pursuing, and yet, the Beltway crowd seems to get what it wants.<br /><br />Second, as the most recent flapdoodle over Paul Ryan's infantile exercise in budget-making has evinced, the punditry, the media and the fever swamp that is Washington, D.C., are mostly enthralled with servicing the rich.<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/06/media-paul-ryan-courage/"> "Courageous,"</a> my ass.<br /><br />Third, there's a weird obsession with the markets that wasn't a part of the zeitgeist forty or fifty years ago. Tune in to NPR in the early `70s and you'd be lucky to hear a stock market report but once a week, on a Friday evening newscast summing up the week, and, if one bothered, on Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street program on Friday nights. Now, the updates come almost hourly, even though 80% of the country has nothing invested in the markets, or, at best, a few bucks in a 401(k) mutual fund.<br /><br />Fourth, there's some perverse notion afoot in the nation that we all have to work for "the economy's best interest," even though the economy largely benefits the wealthy these days--as every estimate of income distribution makes very, very clear:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZahz0vfAXNTlij8XeRB1mPc7vpPdtaDI3sm_bsWHTE_KjrDT64KlvQOFy9XmcK5oVkIPU7WvLRdhvmmhfk380JzXXvh0f9hWl-DeY6_9gGam6OiKVXr9NOp5KmYARcaLSi_RwDw/s1600/inequality.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 312px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZahz0vfAXNTlij8XeRB1mPc7vpPdtaDI3sm_bsWHTE_KjrDT64KlvQOFy9XmcK5oVkIPU7WvLRdhvmmhfk380JzXXvh0f9hWl-DeY6_9gGam6OiKVXr9NOp5KmYARcaLSi_RwDw/s320/inequality.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5593912719556869314" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Fifth, the <a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/09/20/the-whining-rich/">very, very rich are whining, non-stop</a>, that they aren't sufficiently appreciated whilst they suck money out of the real economy and put it in their pockets. Lloyd Blankfein says he's "doing God's work," while millions of people can't find work, are being thrown out of their homes and are also being expected to foot the bill for keeping firms like his afloat after they've engineered global-scale fuck-ups. Temerity is too tame a word to describe what's going on in the banking world right now.<br /><br />Sixth, even when a pussy like Dick Durbin dares say of the Senate, "the banks run this place," no one takes him seriously but <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/jefferson-county-alabama-screwed-by-wall-street-still-paying-20110407">a reporter for a goddamned <span style="font-weight: bold;">music</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span> magazine</a>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Rolling Stone</span>. It's not Mark Hanna passing out thousand-dollar bills on the floor of the Senate as it was in 1898, it's even worse--it's lobbyists promising campaign cash and future-compensation nirvana to do the will of corporations.<br /><br />On top of that, we have a black President who thinks Ronald Reagan (who began his national political ambitions in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of some of the worst racial violence in the country's recent history)<a href="http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20110207,00.html"> is a pretty neat guy</a>, and that all that Laffer Curve bullshit and trickle-down economics is Shinola. Why else would he put a CEO that <span style="font-style: italic;">eliminated</span> twenty percent of his <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/04/EDAD1IPMPN.DTL">company's domestic jobs in ten years</a> on a Presidential commission on job creation?<br /><br />Seventh, there are yahoos at the state level that want to<a href="http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/02/14/missouri-senator-wants-to-eliminate-child-labor-laws-really/"> do away with child labor laws</a>.<br /><br />Everything gained by ordinary workers in the last eighty years is under attack by a bunch of meth-snorting vigilantes working for big business, and their rallying cry is "freedom." Freedom for whom, exactly? The very, very wealthy, that's who, to do the fuck as they please with the environment, the economy and the country, and the powers that be are completely complicit in the effort. That's not 2011. That's 1893.<br /><br />Our country is being run by a bunch of skeevy fucks with money, and the <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer">Repugs and the Tea Partiers</a>, while the worst of the bunch, are not the only skeevy fucks doing the fatcats' bidding. That honor is <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/04/08/two_parties/index.html">wholly bipartisan</a>.<br /><br />Might as well change the name of the country to Fuckwits United, because that's what we've become.Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-63115890700909491852011-03-23T23:41:00.000-07:002011-03-24T01:08:51.317-07:00For a long, long, long time...... I've had the nagging feeling that we are in the midst of some weird, unexplainable mass institutional insanity. <br /><br />Unfortunately, I keep getting proof for that suspicion. For example, we have Ms. Martha Roby, Congresswoman from Alabama, who was apparently so traumatized by irrational numbers in school that <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/22/957873/-Conservative-Pie;-Republicans-Introduce-Legislation-Redefining-%CF%80-as-Exactly-3">she wants to rid the country of them</a>.<br /><br />NASA might as well close up shop if this becomes law, along with who knows how many engineering firms, big and small. <br /><br />Still, it's symptomatic of something much larger and much more insidious at work in this country, the definition of knowledge as elitist. Okay, start off with the acknowledgment that scientific knowledge is mutable and subject to change as better evidence is revealed to us. After all, the natural philosophers of three or four hundred years ago thought that some aethereal substance known as <span style="font-style: italic;">phlogiston</span> was responsible for fire. When Joseph Priestley stumbled upon the element, oxygen, as the reason for fire, there was plenty of hawing and harrumphing, but, eventually, repeated experimentation and related study showed the rightness of his discovery.<br /><br />That's the way science works. And the sciences need mathematics. Undermining mathematics produces errors in science, which is the ultimate ambition of legislation such as Roby's. Once scientific method can be discredited, it can be discarded, to the great relief of fundamentalist crackpots everywhere.<br /><br />But, what's mystifying about this is the presumption for Roby's legislation. It's the notion that making children <span style="font-style: italic;">more</span> ignorant, <span style="font-style: italic;">more</span> sure of being right when they're horribly wrong, is going to increase their collective standing on international measures of educational effectiveness. Roby is trying to be <span style="font-style: italic;">helpful</span> to our struggling students:<br /><br /><blockquote>"It's no panacea, but this legislation will point us in the right direction. Looking at hard data, we know our children are struggling with a heck of a lot of the math, including the geometry incorporating pi.... I guarantee you American scores will go up once pi is 3. It will be so much easier."</blockquote><br />Calling this moronic offers it dignity it does not deserve.<br /><br /><br />I once had a math instructor in college who had spent thirty-five years teaching math in the public schools, and then another fifteen teaching at the college level, who, when encountering a student who could not resist the urge to argue from a false premise, would draw herself up to her full 5'5" and say, forthrightly, "the inability to let go of a bad idea is the sign of a weak mind."<br /><br />I think that's where we are today as a society. We cannot let go of the bad ideas with which we have been bombarded for several decades. We have ample proof, for example, that trickle-down economics and the aptly-named Laffer Curve were, at best, cruel jokes played on a public woefully uneducated in economics, and, at worst, devious and deceptive principles whose objects were to move money upwards into the hands of the already wealthy and powerful (these ideas, at their best and worst, were enormously successful--a substantial minority of the public believes in them as if they had been written on stone tablets and brought down the mountain by Moses himself).<br /><br />Even today, with the wreckage of financial speculation and wretched imperial excess all around us, a significant portion of the public buys into the rank propaganda that our problems are solely due to the federal deficit, and that they will be good citizens by supporting legislation which will impoverish them for decades to come, even when historical data contradict the lies they've been told.<br /><br />There are bad ideas seeping through this society, like toxic waste through subterranean streams of drinking water, promoted by weak minds with loud voices. Some of them, like Martha Roby's, will eventually encounter obstacles such as a Presidential veto or death in Senate committee, but others, such as the many bills currently in state legislatures around the country to legitimize <a href="http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/03/9-bills-creationism-classroom">creationism as science</a>, or to <a href="http://www.politicususa.com/en/ric-synder%E2%80%99s-michigan-recall">destroy representative government</a>, or to <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/158942/f-word-capital-or-community-wisconsin">transfer wealth to corporations from the public coffers</a>, may yet prevail. <br /><br />Eventually, we are going to have to come to terms with the reasons why we have allowed ourselves to be governed by a minority of the weakest minds among us who have been busily promoting those bad ideas. We can do that before or after the crash, it's our choice.Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-44969896164537771102011-02-12T13:28:00.000-08:002011-02-13T01:14:02.330-08:00The Zeroes...<span style="font-family: verdana;">... is my now-permanent moniker for the last decade. It's numerically accurate, mostly, and it's a reasonable approximation of the zeitgeist that decade induced.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">We were barely into it when the dot-com bubble popped, which zeroed out a lot of people's savings and not a few of their dreams. Then the Supreme Court zeroed out the 14th Amendment and put a whole lotta zeroes in the White House, including the </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/bushquotes/a/dumbbushquotes.htm">Zero-in-Chief</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then, in order to prove what Reagan had said, that government can't help people, the entire national security establishment sat on its collective thumbs as hijacked planes flew into buildings. Help? Nada. Zip. Zero.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then, in a panic, the Congress and the White House sliced and diced the Bill of Rights with the USA Patriot Act, pretty much zeroing out the 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then, Congress once again ceded authority to make war to the President, which kind of zeroed out that part of Art. 1, Sec. 8, of the Constitution. Then they went to work on zeroing out the contents of the Treasury. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then, the news media unquestioningly reported every lie the Zeroes' administration told them in order to start yet another war, which resulted in the First Amendment being divided by zero and causing the free press to crash. The error was then compounded by the press fixation on Paris Hilton, a vacuous young heiress with zero redeeming qualities, but whose last name suggested that she had a lot of zeroes in her bank accounts. This press obsession was only interrupted by news of Britney Spears, a pop culture creation of zero talent, </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Britney_Spears">who said</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> of President Zero, "Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens," which just might prove that, for both subject and object, lack of curiosity is not the impediment it is for us mere mortals.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Secretary of Defense Donald Zero told the soldiers to buck up and live without armor plating, President Zero's national security adviser, Kindasleezza Zero intimated more Ground Zeroes could come "in the form of a mushroom cloud," and Secretary of State Colin Zero put on the performance of his career at the United Nations, saying that there was zero chance that the propaganda he was slathering on with a trowel could be wrong, which caused the network zeroes to work themselves up into a flag-waving war frenzy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">And on and on the decade went--two more corporate crony zeroes on the Supreme Court, a hurricane that zeroed in on one of the country's oldest cities, a tragedy compounded by weak levees which failed and turned the 9th Ward of New Orleans into a killing zone. And Republicans, once again </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/05/09/03_nail.html">proving that government won't do a fuckin' thing for you</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, used the calamity to turn the state hard right and white by zeroing in on every poor black person they could find and shipping them off to hell and gone in a modern-day rerun of the Trail of Tears.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">And the wars dragged on, the money spigot to America's corporations turned full on, as every vulture capitalist in the country zeroed in on every no-bid, cost-plus contract that President Zero could dream up, while Vice-President Zero's corporate benefactors were raking in big bucks for </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/world/middleeast/04electrocute.html">turning soldiers' showers into abattoirs</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> and soldiers' </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/news/contamination.html">drinking water supplies into germ warfare factories</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then the banks began to zero out the accounts of millions of home buyers, and then employers began to do the same with their jobs, so Congress, in its wisdom, gave the banks and the employers lots of taxpayer money with very, very few strings attached, which accomplished very, very little except to replenish the coffers of the moral zeroes on Wall Street.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then Presidential hopeful and whiner </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">par excellence, </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">John McCain, gave us one of the biggest zeroes of them all, Scary Sarah Palin, whose deficiencies have to measured in term less than zero, or maybe in imaginary numbers. and we can't seem to rid ourselves of her still.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Did things look up because a fresh face with a line of patter that sounded good won the Presidency? Well, so it seemed, until he took the oath of office and decided to take up golf with the fatcats that had crucified the economy and </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.openleft.com/diary/21072/business-roundtable-suggests-obama-is-a-disabled-infant-white-house-thrilled">kissed so many plump, white, rich asses</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> on the Business Roundtable that we had to check the Constitution twice to see if such behavior was required under Article II, and, guess what? </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/22/AR2010062205279.html">They still aren't happy</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">And the wars dragged on. Guantanamo lingered, like untreated impetigo on the ass of human rights, and so did all the assaults on civil rights that President Zero's legal zeroes had pulled out of their asses. </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/obama-doj-worse-than-bush">Warrantless spying</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, FBI </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/28/AR2010072806141.html">national security letters</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-goodman/obamas-military-is-spying_b_246655.html">infiltration of peace groups</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> and </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/25">misuse of the material assistance to terrorists statute</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> proceeded apace.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">The banksters began to</span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-courts-helping-banks-screw-over-homeowners-20101110?page=1"> defraud the courts in foreclosure proceedings</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, and used the government's HAMP program to </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/02/how-servicer-junk-fees-push-borrowers-into-foreclosure.html">force those foreclosures</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">. Real unemployment/underemployment continued to hover around 20%, while President Neo-Zero pressed for new "free trade" treaties that would ensure that the job-bloodletting would continue. President Neo-Zero sold out on </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://redantliberationarmy.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/ny-times-reporter-confirms-obama-made-deal-to-kill-public-option/">the health</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2224621/">care bill</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, and </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.alternet.org/story/145083/matt_taibbi_and_rfk_jr._on_obama%27s_sellout_to_wall_street">financial reform</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, and </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/11/10/david-axelrods-quaint-idea-of-middle-class-security/">raising taxes on the obscenely wealthy</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">By the end of the decade, it seemed as if the robber barons had finally won, the government that, </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9yoZHs6PsU">for a time</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, saw its role as keeping the barbarians outside the gates of civil society had finally thrown down its weapons and invited the invaders in and told them to help themselves. And still, the orcs on Wall Street whined that it wasn't enough... we were </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/06/big-firms-whine-about-news-coverage/">supposed to stroke their egos, too</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">It would be one thing to say that the Zeroes are finally over and done with, and good riddance, but, the Teens are fast shaping up to be not more of the same, but worse. Congress and the state houses, thanks to the biggest bunch of zeroes yet organized, the Tea Partiers, are now filled to the brim with </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/148303/how_fox_news_helps_its_own_employees_run_for_political_office?page=entire">corporate shills</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.freak-search.com/en/thread/4014506/the_embarrassing_republican_teabagger_governor_of_maine">crackpots</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.wusf.usf.edu/news/2010/06/18/whistleblowers_say_rick_scott_knew_about_medicare_fraud">outright thieves</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> and fourteen different varieties of </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert">madmen</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> and </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://minnesotaindependent.com/55510/bachmann-at-cpac-watch-out-for-obamas-thought-police">madwomen</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2009/06/_rep_dan_burton_r-ind.html">mental defectives</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/how-to-spot-a-flimflammer/">flim-flammers</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> and </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.mizozo.com/images/item_images/13000/12266_src.jpg">feebs</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">The country is in the grip of a kind of institutional insanity, overburdened by a national security apparatus and a fevered, flailing imperial ambition that is taking big swipes at both the Treasury and the Constitution, under the near-total control of an artificial aristocracy based on wealth, and the proper reaction is to be sick at heart about it, because the simple truth is that in a society that aspires (however much in vain) to wealth more than to democracy, the small-d democrat is an anachronism.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">It's not going to end well. </span><br /><br /><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrOE2s_ldlQ">And the wars drag on</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">. </span>Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-89351908483637733412011-01-18T02:44:00.000-08:002011-01-19T11:56:23.765-08:00Ever since the moment...... that Tommy Franks declared Dougie Feith to be the "dumbest fucking person on the planet," there have been right-wingers desperate to seize the title from Feith.<br /><br />Sean Hannity, in the midst of fierce right-wing competition, <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2011/01/14/hannity-invade-iraq/">makes a grab for the gold ring</a>:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>HANNITY: There’s two things I said. I say <strong>why isn’t Iraq paying us back with oil, and paying every American family and their soldiers that lost loved ones or have injured soldiers — and why didn’t they pay for their own liberation?</strong> For the Kuwait oil minister — how short his memory is. You know, <strong>we have every right to go in there and frankly take all their oil and make them pay for the liberation</strong>, as these sheiks, etcetera etcetera, you know were living in hotels in London and New York, as Trump pointed out, and <strong>now they’re gouging us</strong> and saying ‘oh of course we can withstand [these prices].’”</blockquote><br />There's so much stupidity and rampant imperial ambition in this that it's not worth discussing, except to say that it's an attitude that the corporate right in this country is determined to fix firmly in the public mind.<br /><br />For many decades, the object of such drivel has been to legitimize the notion that the United States <span style="font-style: italic;">deserves</span> to profit mightily from the resources of the world. The object of military intervention around the world is not to secure "access" to resources, as so many in government and on the right have asserted. No, hell, no. It's about controlling those resources--and their routes of transport--for maximum profit. The great believers in the "free market" were always able to buy those resources on the open market. That wasn't enough, however. That was, umm, too expensive, and limited profit.<br /><br />Thus has it been ever since the end of WWII. BP needed our help to take Iran's oil and for our help in arranging the coup there, we got a cut. When the Arbenz government of Guatemala sought to buy back United Fruit land for peasants (but used the extremely cheap tax values established under prior dictatorships as the basis for repurchase) and applied a tiny tax on the export of bananas (because the Guatemalan government was broke, thanks to United Fruit), United Fruit arranged for a coup carried out by the CIA. <br /><br />It should be noted that both Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala were described in the popular press as "communists," which was the ultimate justification for any intervention by the U.S., even though it simply wasn't true in either case. Mossadegh--and the parliament which approved his oil industry nationalization plan--was popularly elected and had broad national support for nationalization. The fig leaf used to paint the democratically-elected Arbenz as a sympathizer of the Soviet Union? He didn't ban the Communist Party of Guatemala and allowed them to demonstrate publicly, the same as any other political party. This presumed extreme threat to U.S. interests had, in 1954, all of two hundred members in Guatemala. Nevertheless, the threat of communism was a convenient cover for what were essentially economic takeovers in both Iran and Guatemala. Not long after the coup, Richard Nixon appeared at a staged photo-op with America's new hand-picked Guatemalan president, Carlos Castillo Armas, which showed behind them thousands of pieces of communist literature supposedly seized from the Presidential Palace--all dutifully recorded by the weekly news cameras for distribution in American theaters.<br /><br />It was an important fiction to impart to an American people already made fearful of "communism," along with the necessary fiction that the coups in Iran and Guatemala had been popular uprisings against communism, rather than carefully planned undemocratic plots orchestrated and carried out by the U.S. government. The coup in Iran set off a massive campaign of repression by the Shah to protect his place on the Peacock Throne, including the destruction of the nascent democracy movement there, and in Guatemala, initiated a series of brutal military takeovers of the government (America's choice for Guatemalan president, Carlos Castillo Armas, was himself assassinated just three years after the coup) and precipitated the death squads which, over forty years, killed an estimated 200,000 people, mostly indigenous <span style="font-style: italic;">mestizos</span> and pro-democracy advocates.<br /><br />One of the things least mentioned about the CIA--even within the CIA--is that it has been used as a tool of American big business. More to the point, it has <span style="font-style: italic;">always</span> been politicized to that end. It has always been there to protect the business interests of the U.S. We've been told for decades that the government, and its covert units, were "fighting" communism. Balderdash. We've been doing any and every despicable thing necessary to make money for companies unable to make a profit without the help of the government and its military, and communism had absolutely nothing to do with it.<br /><br />The 17th of this month is the anniversary of the assassination of another black man in the West's pursuit of power and profit--Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba was excoriated by the West for decrying colonialism, and for that crime, was executed by rebel forces in the Congo with the tacit approval and acquiescence of the CIA. When he asked the West for economic aid and was rebuffed, he turned to the Soviet Union. For that, predictably, he was branded a communist by the U.S., and the CIA enabled his capture by rebels who beat him, tortured him and murdered him. Among those rebels was Mobutu Sese Seko, who <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/opinion/17hochschild.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=patrice%20lumumba&st=cse">systematically destroyed the Congo</a> for personal gain, with the assistance and support of the United States.<br /><br />Contrary to the drivel being drooled by our evangelicals and right-wingers and teabaggers, this is not a nation determined to act on high moral purpose. Rather, it is a cartel, a syndicate, using the considerable military and economic power of a very powerful state to further enrich its already wealthy, corporate and individual.<br /><br />And for that, we are damned.<br /><br /><br /><br />[edited to add a couple of explanatory paragraphs]Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-58902608668298170612010-11-23T19:27:00.000-08:002010-11-23T19:36:35.770-08:00Why, exactly, is it...<span style="font-family: verdana;">... that the modern conservative pseudo-intellectual's solution to every small problem seems to </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2010/11/23/the-return-of-more-rubble-less-trouble/">involve genocide</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">?</span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">I guess some people see Generals Buck Turgidson and Jack D. Ripper as role models, not as the satirical allegorical figures they were intended to be....</span>Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-20862754395010366652010-10-08T02:25:00.000-07:002010-10-08T02:39:20.100-07:00Just an advisory....Greg Grandin's <span style="font-style: italic;">Fordlandia</span> is an exceptional work, for its history and its narrative.<br /><br />He's imminently fair toward Henry Ford, and ably charts the changes in Ford from a liberal (but, terribly patrician) policy wonk favoring industrialization as the answer to all things to an authoritarian autocrat perceived by most as losing his grip, and, facing the demands and trials of the Amazon, finds himself the lesser.<br /><br />It's a remarkable story, admirably told by Grandin, of a time and place long forgotten.Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-74374953062127031032010-08-18T07:43:00.000-07:002010-08-18T12:17:04.411-07:00Have been meaning to...... to write about Eric Alterman's recent article in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Nation</span>, "<a href="http://www.thenation.com/print/article/37165/kabuki-democracy">Kabuki Democracy</a>," not so much because I disagreed with it as because I wasn't sure it went far enough down into the roots of the problem.<br /><br />Babara Ehrenreich has apparently gotten the same feeling as have I, as <a href="http://www.alternet.org/world/147882/progressives_need_to_fight_the_corpo-obama-geithner-petraeus_state/">she explains here</a>.<br /><br />But, to explain a bit, we've likely (as Charles Pierce put it in his excellent recent book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Idiot America</span>) become a bit too dependent upon what the Founders thought as a way of defending our points of view, as if they were oracles that could see much farther into the future than mere mortals, which is a fatal assumption. Some of this impulse comes from a solid decade of the Bush and Cheney and Obama administrations making a frontal assault on civil rights. In such times, it's a natural inclination to return to the founding documents and their authors for rebuttal.<br /><br />Unfortunately, those rebuttals, however well-founded in plain language, have been about as effective, practically, as a popcorn fart stopping a windstorm. There are probably two major reasons why, and both of them might well go back to the structure the Founders created for us.<br /><br />The first and most obvious is that the Founders chose not to address the issue of money in politics, and collaterally (although some had tremendous misgivings about them) never addressed the issue of political parties. The latter was certainly inevitable--even if the writers of the Constitution has specifically barred the formation of political parties, legislators still would have coalesced along informal ideological boundaries into groups that would have functioned much the same as political parties do today.<br /><br />The issue of money, however, is one that they could have addressed and did not. The originators of the Constitution held private property in high esteem. That much is apparent in the language of the document--the regulation of commerce among the states, the limitation of voting to men of property--so there was little inclination on their part to limit the use of personal wealth in the political world. I would guess this was a reactionary position on the part of merchants to a feudal system in which wealth and political power were concentrated in a royal aristocracy. They likely felt--by extending political power to all with property--they were greatly expanding the power of the people when compared with the system they were opposing.<br /><br />Even so, a few of them, such as Jefferson, thought that the accumulation of wealth could in time create what he termed "artificial aristocracies," which might function in governance in ways very similar to the royal aristocracy which was the bane of their collective existence, and that the surest way of preventing the rise of such an aristocracy was through a system of taxation of income designed to prevent the formation of such an artificial power base, which Jefferson saw as needing to be "geometric" in nature. Jefferson was describing the progressive income tax system, as it existed in this country from the 1930s through roughly 1963.<br /><br />So, was Jefferson the first socialist? Hardly. Jefferson's conception of democracy was, generally, that any well-informed citizen could make the decisions necessary for his own governance through his representatives, and that unnatural concentrations of power (via large amounts of money) in the hands of the few mooted such a democracy. Jefferson was describing not the necessity for redistribution of income, but, rather, the need for <span style="font-style: italic;">a leveling of political power among individuals to preserve democracy</span><span>.<br /><br />In one sense, the system of government was set up with roughly equal powers to limit any one branch from dominating government, or, in theory, government from exercising tyrannical state power against the individual. The premise of government, then, was a leveling of political power within government and within the society which chose the governors.<br /><br />For a lot of reasons, including the ceding of Congressional power to the Executive with the creation of the national security state in 1947, the balance of power has become increasingly lopsided, which calls into question whether or not we effectively operate as a democracy any longer. Much of that lopsidedness has to do with the concentration of wealth in a few individuals which Jefferson feared. Since the courts have increasingly chosen to see corporations as having the rights of citizens, they, too, must be considered as individuals with concentrations of wealth unhealthy to democratic rule, as Jefferson envisioned it.<br /><br />Yes, here I am depending upon one of the Founders again, but, only to demonstrate that Jefferson may well have been the most far-sighted of the bunch, given how we've turned out, two hundred and twenty-odd years after the ratification of the Constitution, and to illustrate the great paradox of our time. Even if we recognize that the country's laws are shaped to ensure the continuing accumulation of wealth by the wealthy, even if we recognize that the political power of the wealthy increases commensurate with their economic power, even if we recognize that our own power has been diminished by this system, we're powerless to interrupt or rectify that process, simply because the people we elect are the very people most dependent upon that system for their reelection. Their self-interest is at odds with our own. <br /><br />Which is why we've been completely unable to either derail or thwart the artificial aristocracy that now controls the system. There are fixes that would be rather simple and egalitarian and enforceable, such as a number of public election finance schemes (which, thanks to the stacking of the Supreme Court with functionaries of that artificial aristocracy, now will require a Constitutional amendment), but, none have been implemented, and the why of that is obvious.<br /><br />More recently, the problem of the revolving door between government and corporation has become acute--and blatant--and is perhaps the worst of all indicators that the artificial aristocracy and government work hand in hand. Again, the fix is simple. Bar members of government, including Congress and Congressional staffers, from working as lobbyists to government or working for firms that do business with the government for twenty years after public service. Bar the military from working for firms that do business with the government for twenty years after leaving the military. Bar Executive branch agency officials for twenty years from working for the firms those agencies regulate. Simple legislation. It, too, will never happen, because even the most democracy-minded of elected representatives are compromised by the very system which has over time evolved in this country to benefit that artificial aristocracy.<br /><br />Needless to say, even those in government who recognize the visionary perception of Jefferson in this regard are unable or unwilling to implement the means he suggested to prevent or ameliorate the problem, and are, instead, lost in the midst of quibbles about whether or not the expiration of a tax cut on the wealthy constitutes a tax increase; meanwhile, any resolution of that problem still leaves the wealthy with an extraordinarily undemocratic level of power in government, which is precisely why those quibbles were fostered, promoted and chewed on interminably in the media--to serve as a distraction from the underlying problem.<br /><br />Today, the idea that democracy works best when in the hands of people with equal political power is a radical one. Even the Founders would not go so far in Jefferson's direction as to put that level of power in the hands of ordinary people. Even after enumerating a Bill of Rights protecting basic freedoms for all, when virtually all of which were intended to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority and the individual from the tyranny of the state, the Founders did not give the people the opportunity to control their national destiny by referendum, even with the counterbalancing force of a court system charged with the protection of civil and human rights.<br /><br />We live now with what has evolved from the system left us by the Founders, one that to a considerable degree did not anticipate that the disproportionate accumulation of power through wealth would one day corrupt the very system of lawmaking and law enforcement upon which their society governed by rule of law would depend, and that would also shape and shift public knowledge and public opinion, as well as institutionalize governmental and corporate secrecy, in ways that would undermine the ability of the citizen to be truly well-informed, as the Founders said would be fundamentally necessary for effective citizenship in the democracy they launched.<br /><br />So, for now, yes, finding candidates that somehow can prevail against the tremendously powerful (and, perforce, somehow resist the institutionalized corruption of the system as it is now, once elected) is the only avenue to change currently available. Still, over time, the imbalance of power has become so disproportionately large that we simply and finally must accept that our government is controlled by an artificial aristocracy, which to a considerable extent also determines the candidates for whom we may vote, thus further diluting the little political power we retain.<br /><br />As with all other societies based on aristocratic control of government, ours will eventually succumb to the corruption that attends such aristocracies, and will lapse into a modern form of feudalism, signs of which are already apparent. It is important to note that if this happens, as looks likely, the fault is not in the concept of democracy itself, but in the inherent flaws of the system we inherited, that, like loose stitches in a sweater that, once pulled, unravel into an unrecognizable heap. <br /><br />Therefore, we will need, eventually, to correct those flaws, perhaps through some national movement to write a new Constitution--outside of the traditional Constitutional Convention system which, because it is managed by that same aristocratic government, is sure to be corrupted itself--retaining the best ideas in the founding documents, but also adding those ideas that better undergird democracy in modern times, and then command the government to accept that document, through sheer force of numbers, or through mechanisms such as national non-violent sit-down strikes. <br /><br />The inevitable alternative is revolution, and as I've mentioned here many times, that alternative is fraught with uncertainty. One never knows who prevails in such chaos, one can never minimize the human destruction or the damage to the national psyche, and the odds are at least even that what rises out of the ashes of violent revolution may be even worse than the previous status quo, however undemocratic that status quo may be.<br /><br />Nevertheless, we are a nation in decline, and that decline is not measured by GDP, but, rather, by the degree of apathy and helplessness and powerlessness we feel, and increasingly, that we are being conditioned by the aristocracy to accept that state of affairs as normal, which it is not.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /><br /></span>Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-88337306234283814942010-08-17T08:33:00.000-07:002010-08-17T08:44:33.798-07:00She really, really, really, really is...... just the <a href="http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/sarah-palin-why-are-the-muslims-choosing-a-location-just-a-block-or-two-away-from-911.php?ref=fpblg">rankest of opportunists</a>, isn't she?<br /><br /><br />It's a nice twist on the <span style="visibility: visible;" id="main"><span style="visibility: visible;" id="search"><em>dolchstoßlegende</em></span></span>, though, even if her delivery of it might just rival Bush's tortured syntax in his more abstracted moments:<br /><br /><blockquote>... however there are a 100 mosques already in New York to chose and be so adamant about this exact location just a block or two away from 9/11 is just that knife it feels like.<br /><span style="visibility: visible;" id="main"><span style="visibility: visible;" id="search"><em></em></span></span></blockquote><br />I give her a month or so before she's out hunting for car crashes to blame on Muslims....Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-80083622971324326552010-08-15T05:12:00.000-07:002010-08-15T08:23:19.977-07:00Maybe a bit difficult to reconcile...... given the current state of affairs between Israel and the U.S., but, shit, guys, give us a break here.<br /><br />Let's just lay out some facts, just to keep things from getting far off-kilter.<br /><br />First, Israel is the fourth or fifth largest nuclear power <span style="font-style: italic;">in the world.</span> If we have any worries about a nuclear Middle East, it's because of Israel, not Iran.<br /><br />The reason why Israel so desperately wants U.S. help in bombing Iran is because Israel doesn't want to be seen as an aggressor in the matter, and hopes that the U.S. won't be accused of aggression because it's reputedly defending the NNPT (or, simply doesn't care if the flak is directed at the U.S.<br /><br />This is rank bullshit, first, because Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons, isn't a member of the NPT, won't admit to inspections and, most importantly, wants to maintain--at all costs--its nuclear hegemony in the region.<br /><br />The U.S. knows this. The Israelis know this. The rest of the Middle East, including Iran, knows this.<br /><br />Iran is a particular problem for Israel, because it supports, either through small arms or money, the two groups most determined to prevent Israel from achieving its "Greater Israel" program, which is to expand Israel's borders far beyond its 1948, or, even, its 1967 borders. If one looks at Israel's actions related to war, it's all about fulfilling David Ben-Gurion's pre-1948 mandate--that Israel's borders must be "natural." By that, Ben-Gurion meant north to the Litani River, east to the Jordan River, west to the Mediterranean, and as far south into the Sinai along the Red Sea as would be possible.<br /><br />Every military action of Israel since 1948 can be seen as furthering that mandate. Jimmy Carter's peace agreement between Israel and Egypt interfered with that edict, but, it didn't stop the Israel government occupying southern Lebanon all the way up to the Litani, did it?<br /><br />This mandate is now known as the "Greater Israel" project, and the governments of Israel have continued to use military force to achieve that end.<br /><br />Under ordinary conditions, it would make no U.S. foreign policy difference that Israel did these things, lied about their intentions, and went on behaving exactly like the very enemy that decimated their numbers in Europe in WWII. But, these are not ordinary conditions. For more than forty years, Israel's successive governments have been lying about their intentions, have carried out a systematic program of ethnic cleansing over the last sixty or more years, and have used both its military and its status with U.S. politicians to do whatever the hell it liked, regardless of how badly it has behaved toward Palestinians.<br /><br />The truth is that most of the so-called pro-Israel groups--with extraordinary lobbying power in Congress--are not American groups. They're, more specifically, lobbyists for a foreign power, i.e., Israel. Even more specifically, these groups are the interface between the right wing in Israel and the right wing in this country. Most of these groups maintain political positions that don't reflect the views of most Jews in this country. A poll done years ago by The Forward pretty much nailed down the facts--2.2% of voters in this country are Jewish. Of those, fully 70% are liberal, ostensibly Democrats, or small-d democrats in general, while only 0.7% of respondents are right-wing Israel-first-and-always fanatics. <br /><br />So, it's not a stretch to say that our foreign policy with regard to the Middle East is dominated by a very vocal 0.7% of the entire electorate of the United States. What's wrong with this picture? Well, maybe nothing, except that 0.7% represents an extreme minority of the country, and there's absolutely no good reason why that tiniest part of the electorate should determine how Congress votes, and what our foreign policy should be.<br /><br />Every time one tries to make sense of this, the slightest suggestion that the government of Israel might be massively fucked up and is imitating its worst enemies in order to achieve its arbitrary ends invites a torrent of abuse in the form of complaints about anti-Semitism, and that if one doesn't reflexively defend Israel, no matter how badly the country behaves, one is for Hitler and against freedom.<br /><br />Horseshit. Ever since the 1967 war, Israel's governments and its military have been pursuing the same aims with Arabs as the Germans did with Jews in Europe in the years encompassing WWII. Sorry, guys, but, you've been behaving like a bunch of right-wing, fascist assholes.<br /><br />Never again? Hell, you've been repeating history since 1946. The only difference is that you're the oppressors, not the Germans, and the Arabs under your administration are treated just like the Jews were in Berlin, Romania, France, Poland and throughout Europe and Eastern Europe.<br /><br />What's worse than that? You don't care what the international community thinks. You don't respect international law. You don't give a shit. How is that different from Hitler's Germany? No difference at all. Hitler said he was defending Germany. You say you're defending Israel. Neither of you have one whit of respect for the rule of law.<br /><br />Yes, a lot of this is the fault of the United States. We gave you too much money, money which you used to further the arms trade and your own military. And we keep on giving you money and arms, even when you behave very, very badly. Some of that is the result of the lobbying groups you maintain to influence Congress, and some of it is the result of Jewish Senators and Congressmen and women who cannot admit--because of the Holocaust--that you're now controlled by a bunch of right-wing assholes who will not give up until "Greater Israel" is a reality, even if making that goal a reality destroys your national character, your people's ambitions, your lives and your livelihoods.<br /><br />That's what this missive is about--your destruction. No matter how much you fuck with our Congress, no matter how much money you devote to our electoral process, you will fail, and you will destroy yourselves in the process. You were off on the wrong foot in 1947, and you're still on the wrong foot. Nationally, you no longer represent the Zionism that Albert Einstein envisioned in 1920. You're no longer representative of the pensive, contemplative, complicated Jews that tried to explain the complexities of life and human affairs to those of us in this country that never endured similar suffering and ostracism, and learned from such grand and great human beings as Isaac Bashevis Singer, or Sholem Aleichem. Or E.L. Doctorow, or Allen Ginsburg, or Eugene Ionesco, Joseph Heller, Franz Kafka, Clifford Odets, Grace Paley, Nathanael West, or Morris Rosenfeld, the best of the "sweatshop" poets.<br /><br />With so much to teach, why have you learned so little in the last sixty years? Why have you become a nation of loud-mouthed, arrogant, half-assed warmongering liars that, behaving too stupidly for just an afternoon, could create events that would wipe you out in moments? Why is it that you revere petty tyrants such as Bibi Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman? Because they make you feel strong? Truly, I can't guess. You will have to tell me why these tin-pot dictators make you feel better about yourselves after you've stolen so much from others, and, in return, given the world so little since 1948, except more arms and more strife.<br /><br />Israel, since its statehood, has given so very little to the world, and taken so very much. Perhaps the Holocaust created in Israel's citizens a sense of disproportionate entitlement, a sense that nothing--no matter how violent or perverse--was, as was said in earlier times, beyond the pale.<br /><br />More likely, I think, is that the right wing in Israel has chosen, deliberately, to create a siege mentality in its citizens, to make them fearful of everything, and everyone not themselves, to despise an "other," exactly as their ancestors were described by the Nazis. Israel's right wing has done this to maintain power, to achieve ends that are meaningless in comparison to the blood shed, and to obtain goals that are just as inhumane as those historically inflicted on Jews by their various tormentors. <br /><br />I am ashamed that my government has largely acquiesced in this process over these last many decades. It has done so out of imperial ambitions of its own, believing that Israel is a client state of the U.S., and out of a peculiar kind of cowardice, a cowardice that comes from the unwillingness to risk a tenuous alliance which, for a long, long time, has been predicated on mutual exploitation, rather than true friendship. <br /><br />The proof of that, I think, is that the Israeli government--along with its elite business, intellectual and military classes--continues to use its disproportionate political influence in this country to obtain its own ends without suffering direct consequences itself, and this is no more apparent than in the current campaign to convince the American public to wage war on Iran, which is a stupidly aggressive intention. I think it obvious that America's foreign policy elite want to undo the revolution in Iran of 1979, but, hardly for altruistic purposes. Iran was once a reliable client state, just like Israel, until the Islamic revolution there. Since the time of that revolution, Iran has materially or symbolically aided the two groups, Hamas and Hizbollah, which have as their primary purpose resistance against Israeli territorial expansion via a disproportionate advantage in military force, backed up by a corrupt court system aiding an illegal occupation, in order to fulfill David Ben-Gurion's dictum. That is the "greater Israel project."<br /><br />That gives both the U.S. and the Israeli governments equivalent motives for attacking Iran. But, both motives are aggressive and wildly ill-advised. Such an attack would, if anything, spur Iran to precisely the nuclear programs it has consistently denied pursuing and which the IAEA has confirmed it is not now pursuing, and would push Iranians toward a virulently nationalistic response, simply because the Islamic government there would rightly perceive both Israel and the U.S. as existential threats to its existence. <br /><br />In other words, it's an exceedingly dumb move on multiple counts, and one in which the Israeli government should not attempt to engage the U.S. <br /><br />Israel is now like a spoiled child with an allowance so large that it guarantees it will get into trouble, trouble from which the parent may be hard-pressed to extricate himself, let alone the child. We sometimes forget that Israel is a nation of barely 7 million people, about 30% of which live in contested territories that require constant military support or intervention, surrounded by perhaps 4 million Palestinians who have been denied their rights, had their land stolen from them and have suffered for more than forty years the daily indignities and pains of military occupation.<br /><br />There are a good many people in Israel who are fervent and dedicated advocates for a just peace, and I salute those many people and I applaud and support their efforts. But, the majority in Israel has lost its collective mind, and has, after decades of brutalizing others, become what it has most hated in its history. Until Israel regains its sanity, I will mourn its moral decay and hope for the day when it comes to its senses. If it does not regain its sanity, it will destroy itself from within, or, others, either in desperation or frustration, will destroy it from without. <br /><br />I am the avowed enemy of anyone in this country who continues to advocate for Israel's current leadership and policies, because those advocates wish for, whether they realize it or not, the inevitable destruction of Israel's neighbors, and, in the process, Israel, as well.<br /><br />One day, and I hope sooner than later, Israelis will cast off the right wing's mantle of fear and xenophobia and violence, and finally fulfill the destiny set out for them by gentler, kinder, smarter Jews in earlier times.Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-33986469884356680332010-08-10T17:37:00.000-07:002010-08-10T19:51:31.819-07:00Ah, I see Robert Gibbs is expressing...... his frustration by <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/10/gibbs/index.html">punching hippies again</a>.<br /><br />We've been told, again and again, over the years, that the President's press secretary is his official spokesperson to the press and the public, that the press secretary's views channel those of the President.<br /><br />How closely, then, does Gibbs' tacky little tantrum track the views of the President himself? Because if that's the way Obama thinks about the people that worked very hard to get him into office, he's going to discover how little the fatcats' money helps when his base has abandoned him.<br /><br />And, oh, yeah, if Gibbs/Obama think the <a href="http://andysternberg.com/pentagon-lies-persist-unchecked/">Pentagon</a>/<a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10574">militarists</a>/<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/right-wing-organization-profiles-index">right wing</a> are their pals, and the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/feb/17/politics.uk">great unwashed masses</a> are the problem, it's time to sit down, shut up and <span style="font-style: italic;">think</span> about which of those two entities <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/05/the_ministry_of_oil_defense?page=full">has more to do with</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods">getting the country into</a> <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/173962-should-the-u-s-drastically-cut-its-bloated-defense-budget">the fiscal</a> and <a href="http://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/pentagon-taking-over-u-s-foreign-policy/">foreign policy troubles</a> <a href="http://armscontrolcenter.org/policy/securityspending/?gclid=CPrlooCosKMCFRScnAodDVJO5w">in which it now finds itself</a>, and which is <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Pentagon_military_analyst_program">more responsible</a> for the <a href="http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-05-21/books/17295707_1_carroll-points-carroll-s-father-pentagon">intractable nature</a> of <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16270">those problems</a>.<br /><br />If Obama doesn't like the comparisons of him with Bush, he can stop promoting and perpetuating Bush's policies and wars. RTTT is little more than embroidery on the foul cloth of Bush's NCLB. Leaving 30-50,000 troops in Iraq permanently as "non-combat trainers" and filling the combat gap with mercenaries is just more of the same, not a departure from Bush's war policies. <a href="http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2010/02/12/the-legacy-of-billy-tauzin-the-white-house-phrma-deal/">Back-room deals with sleazy assholes like Billy Tauzin</a> are <span style="font-style: italic;">exactly</span> like Bush's and Cheney's secret energy task force deals with the oil companies. <a href="http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/obama-doj-worse-than-bush">Expanding unchecked state surveillance powers</a> is fundamentally authoritarian, and <a href="http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/04/expert_consensus_obama_aping_bush_on_state_secrets.php?ref=fp1">in keeping with Bush's policies</a>. Creating legal loopholes <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/21/AR2009052104045.html">to further Executive power</a> and <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/07/assassinations">sidestep the courts and the Constitution</a> is what <a href="http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=christopher_blakesley">Bush and his fellow right-wing authoritarians did</a>. Treating <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/why-is-obama-championing_b_367540.html">Wall Street banksters like aristocrats is what Bush and his Treasury secretary did</a>.<br /><br />If Gibbs' remarks are a window into Mr. Obama's current state of mind, there's no question now why Obama chose to not prosecute Bush and Cheney and their cohort for their many crimes, large and small. He's behaving just as they did.Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-42491242842236178632010-08-09T14:40:00.000-07:002010-08-09T14:41:52.090-07:00Are we even capable of recognizing...... that we are <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/06/collapse/index.html">an empire in the midst of collapse</a>?<br /><br />We stagger from one war to the next, never making a full accounting of costs v. benefits (a fond obsession of every right-wing neocon idiot since Ronnie Raygun's tenure in the White House when it comes to social spending). The cautious advisories of "maybe we can't afford this expenditure of blood and treasure" are drowned out by the shouts of "USA! USA! USA!" from the nationalists and militarists from all strata of society.<br /><br />We see the degradation of everything from the availability of jobs to public services and, still, we support the expenditure, without the least bit of kitchen-table discussion in the nation's households, of monstrous sums on "defense" which not only keep insane wars going, but also support the destruction of our own civil rights in the process, in deference to the demands of the national security state.<br /><br />We're dummies. We're funding our own destruction.<br /><br />The national papers tell us that the government strongly disapproves of Wikileaks telling us unpleasant truths about how we conduct our wars (paid for with our tax dollars), and there's an immediate call from the right wing in the country to kill the "traitors."<br /><br />What happened to the dispassionate national debate about how to expend both the nation's blood and treasure? Lost in the ozone of propaganda. How about the inverse relationship between the secrecy of government and the defense of our civil rights? Forgotten in a firestorm of legalese prompted by the Federalist Society and the judges it installed on the bench with the help of right-wing administrations.<br /><br />It's one thing to sacrifice uniformly during times of unavoidable war, and it's quite another to demand sacrifices from the few to accommodate eternal war in order to justify a neverending state of national emergency which, in turn, is intended to justify a continuing attack on our civil rights, rights which, after all, are our political birthright.<br /><br />And, like dummies, we keep on electing the very people who enable the expenditure of our national blood and treasure on ideological insanity, and refuse, as well, to raise taxes on those who materially benefit from war, neither to pay for the costs of war nor to convince them of the futility of war profiteering.<br /><br />However, that's only part of what drives us on toward this insane pursuit of war. Economic conquest figures prominently in the equation. We have a business community that depends upon having the economic and military power of the United States government behind it. Just as the foreign policy elite of the country brooks no independent-mindedness from other nations, our multinational corporations tolerate no interference with their aims to exploit resources, natural and human, at home and abroad. The European impetus to conquer the Americas began with the Spaniards in the 15th century and has not yet abated; in the past two centuries, Americans have expanded that obsession from east coast to west coast to the remainder of the world. No one elected us cops of the world, so, there must be another reason to have created nearly a thousand places around the world in which to deposit our military.<br /><br />Maybe it's to intimidate other nations into doing what our multinationals want. We invaded Iraq to rid the world of weapons that did not exist (and that we knew did not exist), and, in 2002-3, our government tried its best to whip us into a frenzy of fear by claiming a third-rate nation--with a military effectively destroyed by nine years of a war of attrition with Iran, a failed invasion of Kuwait and twelve years of crippling international sanctions and under-the-radar bombings of its infrastructure by us--was an existential and imminent threat to the United States.<br /><br />And we fell for it. Because we're dummies.<br /><br />And now, because our forces have retreated to the dozens of bases we built in Iraq and are suffering smaller losses--even when Iraqis continue to die from the violence our invasion unleashed--and which will stay there for as long as the American public tolerates the costs, the right wing tells us we've "won." So, what have we won? Our multinational firms, along with those of a few other countries, will control 60% of the oil of Iraq, and will try to use that control to overproduce so much that OPEC is destroyed, which will return cartel monopoly control of oil production to the exclusive hands of the United States and a few of its favored allies, such as the UK (which would certainly give the Saudi royals good reason to look the other way when the money they supply their religious extremists is used to blow up pipelines and refineries in Iraq).<br /><br />One also need only to consider the nature of the seemingly arbitrary commands issued by the CPA to tilt trade and investment in favor of American multinationals. Why prohibit Iraqi farmers from saving their seeds except to benefit American firms such as Monsanto? Why allow foreign firms to expatriate 100% of their profits from Iraq? Why institute a 15% regressive flat tax that's been the darling policy of every rich right-winger in the USA? Why take $9 billion in Iraqi oil proceeds and use it as a slush fund for U.S. contractors, with virtually no accounting? Why pursue oil PSA contracts with Iraq when that type of contract traditionally is only used in areas where returns on exploration investment are destined to be minimal at best, while Iraq very likely may have the largest untapped reserves remaining in the world?<br /><br />And that's just a few of the reasons why our soldiers and our mercenaries will never leave Iraq voluntarily. They won't be leaving because they'll be needed to deter and defend against attacks on "American interests" in and out of the Iraqi oil fields, yes, but, they'll also be needed as a quick-reaction force to attack Iran. <br /><br />Iran is a particular thorn in the side of the United States--and Great Britain, our witting accomplice in our recent international war crimes. MI6 and the CIA cooperated jointly in 1953 in the destruction of democracy in Iran, because the country's democratically elected leader--with the assent of the nation's parliament--nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (which would later become, hey, surprise, surprise, British Petroleum, later to become just BP). MI6 and the CIA did this in order to preserve the profits of western oil companies, and in doing so, installed through a planned coup a reliably compliant puppet in the form of the former Shah, Reza Pahlavi, a man of near-galaxy-sized self-importance, whose first task was to employ the CIA to help him create Iran's internal police force, the SAVAK, the task of which was to destroy all groups which might threaten Pahlavi's position on the Peacock Throne, including pro-democracy groups. The Shah continued to be a good friend to the U.S. for twenty-five years, first by giving away profits that should have gone to the Iranian people, and second, by returning a goodly number of those remaining oil dollars to the U.S. via purchases of U.S. arms.<br /><br />Over the course of twenty-five years, the Shah lavished the meager remainder of oil revenues Iran received on himself, his family, various jetsetters and his corrupt friends (the Shah is reported to have spent $300 million on a party celebrating the 2500th anniversary of Persia, a party to which the Iranian public was not invited) while letting poverty in Iran reach crisis proportions (which is the real reason why the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution succeeded--Khomeini promised Iranians that a return to Islamic law would right the economic wrongs existing under the Shah). <br /><br />It is for those reasons that the United States has had Iran in its gunsights for the last thirty years, not that Iran might one day, at considerable cost, make a nuclear weapon or two. The foreign policy establishment in this country is still rankled that its coup overthrowing Mossadegh was itself overthrown by a popular movement and that its reliable puppet, the Shah, was deposed. The entrenched hardliners in the U.S. government are determined to return Iran to the preferred status quo. They could give a shit about democracy there. In fact, for twenty-five years, they did their best to undermine democracy in Iran. <br /><br />The Reagan administration even strengthened the power of the Ayatollah by selling arms and military spare parts to Iran (via arms dealers in that very same Israel that now claims Iran to be an existential threat, despite Israel's undeclared but very real existential nuclear threat to the greater Middle East--including Iran). Perhaps U.S. planners hoped that by giving both countries military assistance, Iran and Iraq would beat each other bloody, and the U.S. could then pick off the loser, thus gaining its desired military foothold in south central Asia (which we seem to have done in setting up Saddam Hussein in 1990 like a tin bear in a penny arcade shooting gallery). Now, it's Iran's turn, because that old slight of the Shah's removal is still stuck in the craw of this country's foreign policy elite. How dare those religious crazies send our favorite son into exile? And then demand that the money he stole from the Iranian people and deposited in the banks owned by some of our foreign policy elite be returned to Iran? The upstarts!<br /><br />Ah, well, you get the picture. Our foreign policy has little to nothing to do with our espoused values. It does very much have to do with, however, old grievances, imagined and inflated, which the amoral, exceedingly crusty types who hang around Washington pick at like scabs. And it has very much to do with money. Big money.<br /><br />Perhaps we forget our own history. The American Revolution was not just a rebellion against political tyranny. It was also an overthrow of an economic system which selectively benefitted relatively few people in England. The British East India Company operated by Royal Charter, giving it monopoly advantage in a number of trading areas. Both the King and members of the English Parliament received stock from the company in return for legislative favors. In India, it not only had a stranglehold on trade, it also used its own private army to suppress unrest which endangered its profits and its control over Indian regional governments. When its own army wasn't up to the task, the British Army was dispatched to assist (how many Americans know from high school history that Lord Cornwallis' next assignment after losing the war in the Americas was in India, propping up the private forces of the British East India Company?). It was a huge corporation, and precisely because of its links to British government and the advantages it gained from that link, was much feared by the Founders.<br /><br />By comparison, in America today, the East India Company would be a flea among elephants. One of the unpleasant conundrums of political life today is that in a nation ruled by law, the way to complete corruption is through the law. Successive Congresses and Presidents have found ways to achieve their aims largely through legal collusion with the corporate world. Want to create the framework for endless war <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> get campaign contributions for it? Easy--just provide a no-bid earmark to a specific company for defense-related work. Maybe the company's not going to make enough money on doing the nation's bidding? Even easier, designate the no-bid contract as cost-plus, which guarantees a profit and inflates the profit through multiple layers of subcontractors where administrative costs are added on each subcontract, and all perfectly legal. Even if auditors find gross mismanagement, the fines, as compared to the profits to be made, are just a cost of doing business.<br /><br />The inability to change this system in any meaningful way isn't only frustrating and expensive--it's also a big-ass signpost on the road to complete decay. Fifty years ago, the casual and extensive use of corporate mercenary forces throughout the Department of Defense and the Executive Branch would have been unthinkable. Now, it's not only commonplace, but a commonly accepted practice, as well, almost unremarkable, even though the costs are staggering. That this goes on as a matter of course at the same time that there is sharp debate in Congress on whether or not to pay comparatively small amounts to save the jobs of tens of thousands of teachers, for example, isn't just gobsmacking, it's a big ringing alarm bell that somebody's priorities are wildly fucked up. <br /><br />We've been on this path since the turn of the last century, and dead earnestly for more than sixty years. It's only been in the last twenty or thirty years or so that the patterns of that neocolonial scheme have become more obvious to the ordinary citizen, and only in the last ten or so that the actions of the government to that end have become sufficiently blatant for a significant percentage of Americans to even notice (and even fewer seem to object). It's only been in this last decade that the phrase "American empire" even appears in print casually and without heavy qualification.<br /><br />In a way, we're prevented from seeing ourselves as we are now, as a significant part of the world sees us, not just because of the incessant domestic marketing of American exceptionalism, but also because we have what is, I think, a nostalgic view of ourselves. Whenever there's criticism of U.S. actions today, we retreat to what we view as an impregnable defense--the past. We saved the world from tyranny in WWII (even though we forget some allies in saying that). We rebuilt Germany and Japan (well, we actually loaned them the money to do it, and part of the deal was that we helped structure their governments in ways that were suitable to our foreign policy objectives). We once spent a lot of money on foreign aid (never a great deal, actually, especially compared to military aid to some very questionable governments, and a great deal of that foreign aid, even today, not only comes with many strings attached, but often goes into the pockets of American corporations doing work outside the country). We were first to the moon. First with the atomic bomb. We beat polio. Etc.<br /><br />This has become an almost reflexive defense. We were good world citizens, so we are good world citizens. And yet, a thirty-volume set in small type and quarto format couldn't contain and detail all the instances in which we have behaved with ruthless and exceedingly deceptive self-interest, to the detriment of billions.<br /><br />A clear sign of our unwillingness to confront our failures, our imperial ambitions and our limitations is to be found in the modern conservative response to internal criticism of the country--it's branded as "America-hating." The phrase is used because of some very mixed motives, certainly, but, it's also meant to shut off debate about the country's faults. It's the macrocosmic equivalent of what goes on every day in dysfunctional families. <br /><br />There's a huge divide between what we say and what we do, a divide that is growing wider with increased government secrecy and increased dependence upon communications which are increasingly propagandistic in tone and method, which likely explains the huge drop in support for Obama in Muslim countries--and the drop in approval of his performance in office in domestic opinion polls. A country which has invested much in its reputation as an egalitarian and open society doesn't easily admit that its aims are more about conquest and control by subterfuge than spreading democracy.<br /><br />Maybe we're just in denial, or perhaps we've finally been sucked down into a sticky grand ennui and can't get out of it. Maybe today's versions of bread and circuses have distracted enough of the population that the government is able to operate ever more independently of public opinion. Perhaps we're all just busy scrambling for a living and don't have time to notice the creeping decrepitude around us. Most likely it's a combination of all those things and more.<br /><br />We're probably not going to notice until the first invasion by this century's equivalent of the Mongol hordes.Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-37790806646851659492010-08-04T03:28:00.000-07:002010-08-04T03:38:07.055-07:00Positing the possibility...... that the entirety of the country's <a href="http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2010/08/bipartisanship-when-it-really-mattered.html">leadership went insane</a> after 9/11:<br /><br /><blockquote>BARONESS PRASHAR: Thank you. Lord Prescott, when did you personally first become aware of the discussions between the President and Prime Minister that might lead to the removal of Saddam Hussein? <p> RT. HON. THE LORD PRESCOTT: Well, I think the first awareness was when I visited the United States -- </p><p> BARONESS PRASHAR: That was when? </p><p> RT. HON. THE LORD PRESCOTT: Just a couple of days after 9/11... in going to America at that time I talked to a number of my senator friends, Democrat ones, and I was absolutely surprised to find them talking about an aggressive attitude, that Iraq was unfinished business. </p><p> One of my own friends for 25 years, Senator Chris Dodd, I said, "Chris, how can you be expressing this?" He said, "It is unfinished business. We have to sort it out".<br /></p><p></p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>One of these days--and likely too late for it to matter--we're going to figure out that our country, whose leaders incessantly protest that we are peace-loving, is the most <a href="http://www.alternet.org/books/147675/how_to_dismantle_the_american_empire_before_this_country_goes_under/">internationally belligerent in the world</a>. </p><p><br /></p>Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-64810870804055933472010-08-02T18:39:00.000-07:002010-08-02T18:47:28.928-07:00Some people on the right side of...... the political aisle are <a href="http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/542171/201007301830/Will-Washingtons-Failures-Lead-To-Second-American-Revolution-.aspx">having some serious hallucinations</a>.<br /><br /><br />I guess there are a lot more <a href="http://www.newt.org/welcome">small, fat men in search of a balcony</a> in this country than I figured.Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-57718807169633409832010-08-02T00:58:00.000-07:002010-08-08T03:32:37.426-07:00The conundrum of which few are willing to speak...... is still with us, and will not be resolved until we make some fundamental reassessments of our obsession with so-called "free market" economics.<br /><br />The conundrum of which I speak is the impossibility of creating a sustainable economy within the economic and political ground rules of today, in part because those operative ground rules are both justified by and are perversions of the nearly 250-year-old ideas of the two prominent philosophers of political economy of the United Kingdom, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Both believed that markets were self-correcting, and that government interference in markets inevitably led to economic stagnation.<br /><br />However, these views were informed by the position (held much more by Smith than Ricardo) that unlimited economic growth was both desirable and possible, and yet, we understand today that growth has built-in liabilities, which modern economists choose to call, in morally neutral fashion, "externalities," and that those liabilities are often unequally distributed in domestic society, as well as being unequally distributed among nations.<br /><br />This problem is most evident when examining a world economy driven largely by petroleum energy. Perhaps the first and most obvious liability is that nations will inevitably and invariably compete for disproportionate shares of that resource, seeking to fuel economic growth through control of that resource, rather than simply seeking access to it through the markets, often through the use of military and economic power and war. The object of that control is as much to deny other nations access to the resource as it is to ensure the continuing supply to the nation carrying out such wars. The second liability is one unimagined by Smith and Ricardo, that the use of an economically beneficial resource is itself a threat to civilized society and the entire world, as global warming research now suggests. A third liability is the unequal distribution of economic benefit and liability itself in the production, transportation and use of petroleum. The ordinary inhabitant of the Niger Delta of Nigeria or of the Ecuadoran Amazon disproportionately bears the brunt of the liabilities associated with petroleum production without sharing proportionally in its economic gains.<br /><br />For good and ill, governments inevitably intrude into markets and they do so due to competing interests within nations and among nations, and the great fallacy promoted by the right wing in this country (along with right-wingers in a few other nations) is that we would all be better off were government to leave business alone. As recent events have shown, nothing is further than the truth. First, much of the federal government exists to serve the business community, not the other way around. "The business of America is business," said that scion of <span style="font-style: italic;">laissez faire</span> economics, Calvin Coolidge. For example, the statistics compiled regularly by the federal government are not used primarily by ordinary citizens, but, rather, by business economists and analysts, the USDA to an increasingly large degree works as an interface between the farmer and big agribusiness, and much of the research funded by the CDC and the NIH ultimately benefits the large pharmaceutical firms headquartered both here and abroad. The Pentagon, ever since 1950, has served as a subsidizer of contractor defense aerospace firms, and now, more recently, to those firms' subsidiaries in the intelligence/surveillance and war logistic support fields. The economic power of the Treasury has most recently saved the butts of big Wall Street banks from a retribution they richly deserved because of their lack of restraint and gross speculation with the money of others.<br /><br />Second, what right-wingers mostly deride as government interference are those policies which marginally limit the corporate profits extracted by exploitation of the commonwealth and which in very meager ways put limits on the upward movement and concentration of wealth.<br /><br />Therein lies a notable part of the problem--this decades-long insistence on so-called "trickle-down" economics requires genuinely huge rates of growth to have a positive effect on the economic life of the ordinary worker, since so much of the value of that growth is <a href="http://lanekenworthy.net/2010/07/20/the-best-inequality-graph-updated/">retained by the very few in society</a>, and increasingly, as the graph shows, most of the last thirty years' productivity gains have been retained by the very wealthy in society. The wealthy will continue to demand greater growth in order to increase wealth, and the worker will, too, in the hope of even small increases in economic security, even if at the margins.<br /><br />As noted above, much of that growth is tied to the burning of oil and coal, since density of energy use is intimately associated with economic expansion, and is a major contributor to global warming, which is, in turn, a direct factor in the unsustainability of the current economic model.<br /><br />I don't think much of this is all that controversial, but, the notion that some huge structural change will be necessary to achieve sustainability remains at the ragged edge of economic and political thinking. Right now, the dominant model at work in U.S. government is an attempt to achieve stability by returning the economy to the status quo. Virtually every attempt to right the sinking ship of the economy has been directed at protecting the most politically and economically powerful entities in the country since, in traditional terms, they are the "engines of the economy."<br /><br />They continue to be seen as such, even though they've become much less so in the last sixty years or so. The big Wall Street investment firms are doing much less in the way of traditional investment and are engaging in much more short-term, high-risk speculative ventures--raking off money from the "real" economy on which to provide a foundation for more debt-based schemes which prompted the recent meltdown. The Fortune 500 were responsible for nearly 25% of the nations jobs in the 1950s, but now account for about 7%.<br /><br />Making the situation much, much worse is that these wealthy individuals and corporations are increasingly using their economic power to influence legislation to their advantage through campaign contributions and lobbying, mostly in the effort to reduce tax liability. That has to be the explanation for the results of the recent GAO study which indicated that in the years studied, 94% of the country's corporations paid an effective tax rate of 5% or less, and fully 60% of those corporations paid no taxes at all.<br /><br />All this flies in the face of Adam Smith's dictum that at least some of the wealth accrued must be used to sustain the infrastructure which enables the wealth of the nation. More importantly, when those external costs begin to overwhelm the nation, and the corporate and individually wealthy are unwilling to assume some of those costs, the infrastructure begins to decay. If the impulse of the "engines of the economy" is then to make the situation worse through exercise of political power, in the expectation of increasing wealth by the greater avoidance of those external costs, the rate of decay can only increase.<br /><br />We see that decay in ways that aren't always apparent as a diminution of economic strength or as a permanent loss of the commonwealth. For example, the country is littered with Superfund sites due principally to environmentally unsound manufacturing and mining practices, and rather than accepting those external obligations, the corporate community during the Bush administration successfully sought to upend the principle that the polluter pays and <a href="http://projects.publicintegrity.org/superfund/report.aspx?aid=853">to transfer the clean-up costs to the taxpayers and/or slow down clean-up efforts</a>, and in this age of demand for deficit reduction, Superfund clean-ups will become a back-burner item, so the external costs will probably increase over time due to adverse health and welfare issues.<br /><br />We see the same impulse in the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. BP has expended huge sums on lobbying and public relations to both shape public opinion and to limit its liability for its actions. The latest news reports that "<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6730IJ20100804">the oil is gone</a>," prompted by both government and corporate sources, are examples of this determined effort to evade the external costs of maintaining a rotting status quo.<br /><br />Which brings me to that sticky matter of sustainability. Sustainability, by definition, requires not only a complete accounting of those external costs, but, as well, their elimination. Eliminating those external costs will require changes that a system built upon protecting the wealthy from their own excesses cannot tolerate. The very entities that traditionally have been designated as "the engines of the economy" are the major dead weights in the climb toward sustainability and may well constitute threats to the survival of the nation and its people, not to mention the rest of the world, because their profitability may be compromised.<br /><br />We're going to have to rethink a great many things that we do without thinking much about them if we're going to last, as a nation and a species. We are, at this moment, <a href="http://thinkexist.com/quotation/there_is-an_artificial_aristocracy_founded_on/144577.html">living out Thomas Jefferson's worst nightmare</a>:<br /><br /><h1 style="margin: 0pt; font-weight: normal;font-family:verdana;font-size:12px;"><span style="font-size:100%;">“There is...an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy.”</span></h1><br /><br />That artificial aristocracy is now real, not ascendant so much as realized and supreme, and has much more political power than the rest of us, and its political power is directed toward protecting and increasing its wealth and power. Unless that power is blunted, there's no genuine hope for a sustainable, equitable and egalitarian society. Very possibly, we're on the cusp of a precipitous decline the effects of which the wealthy, for a few generations at best, may be able to use their wealth to personally stave off. Eventually, Monsanto's drive toward oil-derived chemically-dependent monocultures may well starve the rich as well as the poor. BP's evasion of its responsibilities to people and planet may well destroy more seas and marine life and livelihoods, leaving rich and poor alike destitute. Lockheed-Martin's lobbying for more weapons production will only increase its profits until the society funding its production collapses, since it's become <a href="http://www.wetfeet.com/Careers-and-Industries/Industries/Aerospace-and-Defense.aspx">wholly dependent on taxpayer money for its survival</a>.<br /><br />We spend <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/29/exclusive_the_three_trillion_dollar_war">trillions on war</a>, trillions more on arms and the standing army, and our government wages a continuing assault on the civil and human rights of its own citizens and others, all to protect a system that is destined to fail because of the flaws introduced into it by the moneyed aristocracy. We imprison more of our citizens than any other country in the world <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/17392/">in large part to support the profits of companies</a> which have taken over the state function of incarceration via the specious process of privatization. We create criminals to keep that part of the system going. We <a href="http://www.iatp.org/iatp/commentaries.cfm?refID=102007">tolerate the wholesale destruction of our livelihoods</a> to protect the wealth of the few. Our legislators <a href="http://www.exponentialimprovement.com/cms/offshoresubsidies.shtml">subsidize corporations which offshore jobs</a> with taxpayer dollars.<br /><br />The nation's governance has been completely captured by those with the most economic and political power and we, in turn, have been rendered virtually powerless to influence either current events or our futures, in very large part because wealth accumulation is now the country's dominant religion among the movers and shakers in society.<br /><br />The essential quality of tragedy is the inevitability of a fall from grace, that the qualities which bring the protagonist to the pinnacle of prominence are the same ones which ensure his downfall. Shakespeare would have understood well our dogged, perverse furtherance of a system which reveres the power and wealth of the few at the expense of the survival of all.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><img src="file:///C:/Users/mdporter/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot.png" alt="" /><img src="file:///C:/Users/mdporter/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.png" alt="" />Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-16426134362361661862010-07-29T17:24:00.000-07:002010-07-29T19:42:35.975-07:00Just following up...<span style="font-family: verdana;">... on the previous post, trying to fill in a blank or two.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Because we define ourselves as a "superpower" on the world stage, we tend to never question either the truth of that assertion, nor do we give much thought as to the definition of the term. It, rather, stands in place, static, a symbol of the monolithic gargantuan we believe we have become.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">By contrast, for decades we've used the term "banana republic" to describe the puny, occasionally troublesome but inconsequential countries hovering just inside or just outside our sphere of influence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">We have a mental image of the banana republic--hot and humid, poor, a president in military garb with gold lanyards and lots of medals, a place where small-scale corruption and penny ante bribes are a way of life and where occasional state brutality occurs, but which is otherwise unremarkable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">For some time, I've seen the banana republic as having somewhat different characteristics--for me, it's a state which tends to the authoritarian and/or the dictatorial, has an economy which depends all too greatly on outside forces in league with compliant figures in the government, which is over-armed for its size, heavily in debt and which is obsessed with internal security, often with the aid of the military.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Certainly not how we would describe ourselves, and yet, we exhibit most, if not all, of those tendencies. Yes, we have a supposedly coequal tripartite government, but, over time (and especially in the last two or three decades), those three branches have become less and less independent of one another and have grown much more intertwined in this last decade's irrational overreaction to the specter of terrorism.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">One might argue about our government being authoritarian, but, one can't argue that much more power has been invested in the Executive over the course of the last decade, and by a specific process which has steadily evolved in </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.aclu.org/national-security/establishing-new-normal">a now-predictable pattern</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">. At first, Congress is railroaded by events (9/11) into granting supposedly temporary emergency powers far in excess of what existed previously (the USA PATRIOT Act). The Executive, under Bush and Cheney, usurped further powers not delineated in the emergency laws, including widespread and often indiscriminate spying on U.S. citizens, torture, state-sponsored kidnapping and the establishment of secret prisons around the world. Moreover, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the major thrust of the Executive in all those actions was to render the courts and the due process system of </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">habeas corpus</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> and warrants inoperable. Over time, as those extrajudicial excesses are revealed, Congress cooperates in rendering them moot, instead of investigating and referring the people and agencies involved for prosecution, sometimes even giving those involved </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/05/bush-administration-proposes-retroactive-immunity-for-phone-companies.ars">retroactive immunity</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> (as with the telecom corporations). Congress even attempted to restrict rights to </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">habeas corpus</span><span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> in the </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2006/12/killing_habeas_corpus.html">Military Commissions Act of 2006</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">. The </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/10/obama-sides-republicans-patriot-act-renewal-bill-p">greatest bulk of the enabling legislation is renewed</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> when earlier sunset clauses require retirement, and even when evidence surfaces that extrajudicial tools such as National Security Letters (NSLs, the use of which was greatly expanded by the Patriot Act) </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/nsl-abuse/">had been horrendously abused for years</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, the current administration signals to Congress that it wants the </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/adam_serwer_archive?month=07&year=2010&base_name=administration_wants_to_expand">scope of NSLs drastically increased</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Now, most Congresses have been reticent to completely undo the actions of their predecessors, and have preferred to tinker around the edges of previous legislation, but what has been happening over the last few years goes well beyond that. National security legislation in the last few years has not only constituted a general attack on civil rights of U.S. citizens which increasingly conservative courts have refrained from challenging, but has also transferred power to the Executive and </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/02/01-7">has created new mechanisms</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">--in conjunction with existing laws on secrecy--to actively prevent any intervention in Executive Branch activities by the courts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">To say this has emboldened the Executive is an understatement. After years of thinking that such actions were aberrations resulting from the peculiar disrespect shown for the Constitution by Messrs. Bush and Cheney and their hired thugs, in concert with increasingly authoritarian Republicans in Congress, it's clear today that the trend continues unabated. Bagram is the new consolidated "</span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/who-runs-secret-black-jail-bagram">black site</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">," </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/politics/26gitmo.html">Guantanamo remains open</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> and most of its activities are still well outside the civil courts system. The current administration continues to entertain the belief that it has the right to arbitrarily impose "indefinite detention" even upon those whom military or civilian </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/22/detention">courts determine to be innocent of any crime</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, and has taken the further step of </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/07/assassinations">targeting U.S. citizens for state assassination</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">How greatly different is that from banana republic justice? No matter how elegantly written the legal policy reviews may be, it's no different at all from what has gone on in some of the worst U.S. client states in Latin America, and the excuse is always the same--threats from within. Today in the United States, it's terrorism. In El Salvador, or Honduras, or Guatemala, it's organized </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">campisenos</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">, or trade unionists, or human rights activists. Inevitably, it's a result of the Executive acting with impunity without court intervention, and often with the assistance of the military, excused by national emergency.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">The </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">Washington Post </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">has just completed </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/">a long investigation of the growth of the surveillance state</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> in the last nine years, and the results ought to be scaring the pants off of the ordinary citizen. While Tim Shorrock </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://timshorrock.com/?p=710">delved into the matter of the privatization of intelligence</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> in his 2007 book, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">Spies for Hire</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">, this latest series of articles gives some statistical heft to Shorrock's conclusions, and, reading carefully, it's apparent that the lines between public and private, military and civilian, legal and illegal, are already hopelessly blurred, and that the Executive Branch prefers it that way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Congress has been all too willing to throw great wads of tax money at the intelligence agencies in the name of fighting terrorism, and the result is predictable. Just as with the extraordinary excesses documented in the </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporate_Welfare/Military_Fraud.html">Operation Ill Wind prosecutions</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> of more than twenty years ago (after Reagan demanded and Congress provided huge budget increases to the Department of Defense), so, too, the intelligence agencies of the Executive Branch and the Pentagon have received so much money that there is no way to account for it all, and that systemic growth is now, for practical purposes, cancerous and out of control.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ultimately, much of this hugely increased capacity for spying and surveillance will be turned inward on the American people, if only because the federal government has done so much to cultivate local police forces and state National Guard offices through mechanisms such as </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_center">fusion centers</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, and, let's face it, the police forces of the nation's major cities, when it comes to surveillance of citizens, have as little respect for the Constitution as the Executive Branch. Witness, for example, the activities of police intelligence units in </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.laobserved.com/visiting/2010/04/daryl_gates_secret_legacy.php">Los Angeles</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.aclu-co.org/spyfiles/chronology.htm">Denver</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/nyregion/25infiltrate.html">New York</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, and </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.alternet.org/news/147420/7_outrageous_examples_of_police_spying_and_harrassment_toward_peaceful_activists?page=entire">Baltimore</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">As dire as the situation is now, it's almost inevitable that it will get a lot worse before it gets better--if it ever does. This pernicious tendency to not undo mistakes has a way of not only creating new mistakes, but also of creating a long series of self-fulfilling prophecies in order to justify the continuing funding and expansion of these highly undemocratic activities--which have the additional and undesirable effect of further concentrating power in the Executive.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">So, how is that like a banana republic? Growing dictatorial powers in the Executive? The blurring of military and police functions inside the country? Over-armed to the point of absurdity? Unaccountability of the Executive? Much of the spending on such police powers done on the nation's credit card? Obsession with internal security? Wholesale indifference to civil and human rights? Virtual disregard for an independent court system?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Maybe the only thing that continues to encourage us to categorize such talk as hyperbole is our own proclivity to self-deception.</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></span>Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-13690170526128337342010-07-27T16:36:00.000-07:002010-07-27T23:56:47.289-07:00Just a few random thoughts...<span style="font-family: verdana;">... on Wikileaks, and its recent document dump.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ostensibly, the leaked documents simply confirm in some detail what many people have either known, or suspected, for some time: that the war in Afghanistan was militarily unwise and has been going downhill almost from the start.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">In that way, they do resemble the Pentagon Papers. Unlike the Pentagon Papers, they weren't written as a history of an ongoing war, but, nevertheless, they constitute a history of sorts--and that makes them substantial.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">The responses to the leaks are utterly predictable. They aren't substantial, because what's been leaked has been known in general (which sort of ignores that the power and impact of the leaks are in the details). The people leaking the material to Wikileaks are traitorous and vile. Wikileaks can't be thought of as journalists because they're anti-war, and are, therefore, activists. Jim Jones, Obama's national security advisor, even invoked Bush-era White House/</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">NYT</span> cooperation: "WikiLeaks made no effort to contact the U.S. government about the documents, said Jones, who added that the administration learned from news organizations that the documents would be posted," wrote the <a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/26/world/la-fg-pakistan-papers-20100726"><span style="font-style: italic;">LA Times</span></a><span style="font-family: verdana;">. (The </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">LA Times</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> did not mention, in context or otherwise, that the U.S. government is spearheading a manhunt for Julian Assange in an attempt to shut down Wikileaks. One would think that would be a good reason for not contacting the White House. The paper did mention that all the newspapers receiving the documents </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">did</span> contact the White House.)<br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">All of which ignores the truism that the </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Aeschylus/">first casualty of war is the truth</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, and that's the great problem with secrecy. As the process of starting and prosecuting war becomes ever more bureaucratic and political, the veil of secrecy becomes progressively more opaque, and the need to enlist the press in the propaganda effort becomes ever more urgent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">For the ordinary citizen, maybe it boils down to trusting the government, or not trusting it. If one trusts the government, one's inclination is to assume that secrecy is not only necessary, but that the government's application of security measures and classification are wholly benign, i.e., that the government has nothing to hide that wouldn't directly harm the American people or the soldiers fighting the war. If one doesn't trust the government, one can find plenty of reasons to doubt the honesty of the government and its system of security (and to doubt the motives of the government in vigorously prosecuting unauthorized leaks).</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Unfortunately, there's little reason to trust the government in matters which have been labeled as important to national security, if only because the history of the government and its elected officials is replete with substantive examples of the government using that rubric to hide wrongdoing, send embarrassing fuck-ups down the memory hole and to generally bamboozle the public into thinking its government is behaving honorably when it is doing quite the opposite.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">In this context, it's instructive to remember a few of those examples. During the 20th anniversary proceedings of the National Security Archive, co-founder Scott Armstrong said, </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/podcast/panel2.mp3">in rather unequivocal terms</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, that the government expended its greatest amount of effort in preventing the American people from knowing what it was doing. This might be why every administration pays lip service to transparency and then uses every tool available to prevent that transparency. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have made extensive use of the so-called state secrets privilege to prevent exposure in court of government wrongdoing, including state-sponsored kidnapping, denial of due process and torture. That privilege was established in a 1953 Supreme Court case, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">U.S v. Reynolds</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">, in which the evidence provided by the government was itself </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a030953statesecrets">an outright lie</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">. (The government claimed that accident reports involving the deaths of several scientists in a B-29 crash could not be revealed in court because of national security concerns, and further claimed that the government had the special privilege of denying its own citizens information during discovery that would effectively deny them the Constitutional right to redress in court, if the government itself determined that national security might be endangered by disclosure. Nearly fifty years later, the documents withheld in </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">U.S. v. Reynolds</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> were declassified, and it was found that the accident reports not only did not contain national security information, but also contained details of negligent engine maintenance that directly contributed to multiple engine failures and the crash which killed the scientists. Despite the truth in the matter, the state secrets privilege continues to be an essential item in the government's toolbox in preventing redress in open court.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">So, early on in the post-WWII years, we have solid evidence that the government consciously chose to give itself powers to protect itself from its own citizens. Through the `50s and `60s, in part because of the influence of the </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://cryptome.org/cia-doolittle/cia-doolittle.htm">Doolittle Report</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> on the clandestine agencies, "national security" became an all-purpose excuse to engage in illegal and inadvisable behavior and to consciously construct the circumstances necessary to position American forces all around the world, to engage in discretionary war and, perniciously, to see substantial segments of the American public as the enemy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">This attitude is a root cause (but, by no means, the only cause) of the intelligence and military excesses behind Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Watergate, the assaults on civil rights common to several administrations (including Operation CHAOS and COINTELPRO), Nicaragua and the </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">contras</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">, the invasion of Panama and the circumstances leading to the first and successive wars in the Gulf, the second Bush administration's concentrated legislative attacks on the Constitution, and, yes, Afghanistan, too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Apropos of the above, but lost in most discussions of government secrecy, is that when the government is in complete control of so-called national security information, the government decides what it wants the public to know, and that the government itself is the biggest leaker of all--in furtherance of promoting its own views. The leadership of government, in both its official and unofficial capacities, becomes the arbiter of public information. If the government wants to take us to war because of decidedly mixed motives, it is not only likely, but virtually certain, that the government will provide the public and the press </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">only</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> the information which the leadership deems necessary to justify that war, or which will incite the public toward support for war. It's rare to never that the government provides </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">all</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> the information it has on a given national security issue in an effort to further a genuinely democratic debate on matters which affect both national blood and treasure, and, as events of the last few decades have shown conclusively, that leadership uses the national security apparatus to actively deceive the public, along with the press which is purportedly tasked with informing the public.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Which brings me to Wikileaks. In a society in which information of national importance is both limited and selected by those in power, all protestations of transparency and openness by those in power are ludicrous and without substance. In days long past, the press understood that, when it comes to the self-interest of government leadership, it had to be somewhat adversarial. For a host of reasons unrelated to national security matters, the press has become much less adversarial over the years. Congress has become fractured along ideological lines and, as a result, is now virtually ineffectual in its oversight role. As a consequence of these changes, there's no force left which consistently challenges the government's version of the facts. Without all the facts, democracy becomes a pretense, while the opportunity to choose only between candidates who will further the pretense just adds insult to injury.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Someone or something has to fill that void in democracy for democracy to survive. Over several decades, the country's government has been transformed from a republic (in which representative democracy depends upon a fully-informed public) into a </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Security_State">national security state</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> in which its leadership determines what we can know about what our government does and does not do, almost always making those determinations on the basis of some degree of self-interest, either political or personal or corporate or institutional, or some combination of all those motives. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">It's a sign of the degree of decay of democracy under the national security state that a small group of individuals decided, on their own, to seek out and publish the information the government refuses to provide, to create a secure conduit for national security whistleblowers which previously did not exist and to make that information widely available without exclusively depending upon the press for dissemination of the information. Congress has refused to include national security whistleblowers in protections it has mandated for other government workers (as marginal as those protections are), so a secure means of maintaining anonymity for such people is their only protection, and without that protection, we might otherwise not know what is common knowledge in the bowels of the national security apparatus. It's a very rare person who chooses to be incarcerated or have his life destroyed for doing the right thing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">And, that's the crux of the biscuit: doing the right thing. If we are, indeed, a democracy, we are able to make distinctions about what is right and what is not in the national security arena. Spying for money grates on our sensibilities. So does burning a spy for </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.thenation.com/article/what-valerie-plame-really-did-cia">partisan political purposes</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">. Using taxpayer-funded information which the national security state has hidden behind a cloak of secrecy to </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010">paint a truer picture of a war's prosecution</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> should not, especially if that war has been both promoted and continued out of extreme self-interest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">It may well turn out that, even with that information, the public would choose to continue that war, for any number of reasons, but, at least the public gets a better sense of what it's actually supporting. On the other hand, if the release of the information shatters the aura of respectability and altruism which the government has carefully constructed around the war by its selective and propagandistic use of information, leading to a strong reversal of opinion about the war and much wider demands for its cessation, then democracy has been well-served, even though the institutional integrity of the national security state has been harmed (which is quite a different matter than actual harm to the people of the country).</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">One of the great myths of the post-WWII years has been that we remain a country which adheres to strong democratic principles and maintains strong democratic institutions when, in fact, those principles and institutions have been steadily eroded by government secrecy and appeals to fear in the name of national security, which are intended to make </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://w2.eff.org/patriot/">a drift toward authoritarianism</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> seem less dangerous and more palatable. The simple truth is altogether different: the national security state and democracy are antithetical to each other. As the former becomes ascendant in power and priority, the latter is descendant and diminished. The core value of the national security state is its own survival and the survival of the elites who nurture it. The core value of democracy is governance through citizen participation, which ultimately depends upon the quality of the information available to all citizens and the breadth and timeliness of its dissemination among them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">Which entity is pro-democracy? The government which </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.usa.gov/">seeks to hide from its own citizens</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> what it is doing and what is happening in the country and the world because of its actions, or the group that </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.wikileaks.org">exposes what the government seeks to suppress</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">?</span>Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-30721354569860358382010-07-19T00:20:00.000-07:002010-07-19T05:54:35.965-07:00In the midst of confusion...... one begs--often in vain--for clarity.<br /><br />It's funny, in a perverse sort of way, that the Information Age has, more often than not, created even more confusion in our lives. We're bombarded with information, much of it useless or counter-productive or untruthful, and we have a declining ability to winnow the wheat--the truth--from the chaff without expending copious amounts of time that we often don't have.<br /><br />If the Nielsen and Arbitron ratings are any indication, a lot of us simply go mindless, seek escape in mediocre movies and reality television, let the giant one-eyed beast provide the fantasies and phony controversies on which our minds feed, let the commercials and the uncritical stenography of the news media wash over us, creating a state of mental suspended animation, providing a space where we don't have to think too much, or in ways that society--whatever the hell that is--doesn't prescribe.<br /><br />I don't mean this to be some elitist screed on anti-intellectualism, but, rather, to ask a simple question: what if we have lapsed into a state of confusion created by the Information Age, and if so, what are the implications?<br /><br />There are rather strong anecdotal indications that a significant response to that confusion is to retreat into ideology that seems to provide order, even if that order is little more than the comfort of the familiar, bumpersticker slogans that make us feel as if there is a path back to some more rational time (this, I think, is a prime motivator for the teabaggers, the genuine need to believe in the myth of a better time). The greater the confusion and disorientation we feel in daily life, the greater the need to simplify, the larger the desire to turn back the clock to some idyllic other life that might never have been.<br /><br />That's an easy emotion to politically manipulate, and we've seen plenty of such manipulation in recent years. The subtle (and, sometimes, <a href="http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/tea-party-leader-mark-williams-says-naacp-p">not so subtle</a>) racism inherent in the Tea Party movement is rooted in this myth of a better, simpler time, namely, the `50s, when racism was much more institutional, and therefore accepted as the norm. One never needed to apologize for or feel any guilt for what was accepted as normal.<br /><br />The level of confusion is also apparent in the teabaggers' embrace of contradictory messages. They are acrimonious over the bailouts of the big banks, of Wall Street, generally, but also think the answer to the problem (guided as they have been by astroturf groups such as Dick Armey's Freedom Works) is less government interference and less regulation and oversight (precisely the policies that created the problem with the banks in the first place). Orwell, in <span style="font-style: italic;">1984</span>, described this as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink"><span style="font-style: italic;">doublethink</span></a>--the ability to hold two diametrically opposed ideas in mind and be certain of the absolute truth of both at once. The only way that can work is if the mind is in a state of perpetual and ongoing confusion, and when such confusion is perceived as normal.<br /><br />If one accepts the old aphorism as true that in chaos, there is opportunity, one might also be inclined to think that there is some nebulous conspiracy to generate that chaos, but, in a society such as ours, that's not really necessary--the desire for the profits which opportunity provides is enough to ensure that profit- and power-minded individuals will act in their own interests. Such might well result in conscious policies of chaos creation as individuals perceive the connection between confusion and profit, but, no grand conspiracy is necessary--the motivations are built into the system. There's money to be made in the technology and money to be made in the provision of "content," so the means of delivery of information and the information itself are mutually reinforcing--at least when it comes to making money--even though the net effects on society may ultimately be destructive, especially when that chaos alters the public discourse and becomes the norm in governance.<br /><br />Here's, perhaps, the crux of this particular biscuit. Increasingly, because of the flood of information, it's getting more and more difficult to discern duplicitous, mendacious and/or self-serving behavior. All the traditional intellectual tools for coming to some assessment of fact and truth become less effective--and even more time-consuming--when presented with multiple and reinforcing streams of information. It is in such an environment that propaganda--of all sorts--flourishes. Even more problematic is the fact that the press no longer presumes skepticism--especially toward government and business sources demanding anonymity in exchange for information which may be propaganda in part or in whole--so, <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/03/06/anonymity">often specious or slanted information gains legitimacy</a> by press exposure and repetition.<br /><br />Perhaps the best example is the most recent and most well-known: the carefully-constructed disinformation campaign designed by the Bush White House to sell the Iraq war to the public. Almost no part of that campaign contained any solid truth that endured after the initial invasion, and yet, so pervasive was the propaganda that the usual method of comparing multiple sources and evaluating the veracity of sources on the basis of their proximity to the facts was effectively useless. Nor did most ordinary people perceive that sources with strong backgrounds on the issues were being marginalized. Most importantly, it was only long after the fact, after the damage had been done, that the evidence was found to be either absent, exaggerated and/or manufactured, which is exactly the wrong time to find out. If democracy depends upon the public having accurate information in order to advise their representatives of their wishes, democracy is subverted when that information is only available <span style="font-style: italic;">after</span> the important decisions are made.<br /><br />Of course, the general atmosphere of secrecy that has increasingly infected government does not make the task easier, nor does the increasing tendency of government to threaten and marginalize whistleblowers, especially those in the national security state apparatus. Nevertheless, when disinformation is coming from multiple sources which in detail or in general agree with each other, the usual means of establishing fact available to the ordinary citizen are less useful, and there is more likelihood that the <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1022-01.htm">disinformation continues to be held in high esteem even after its refutation</a> by later information (which might explain why so many people continued to believe Bush administration claims regarding Iraqi nuclear weapons programs, chemical weapons, drone aircraft and associations with al-Qaeda, long after those claims had not only been definitely disproved, but were shown to be fabrications based on unreliable intelligence, as well).<br /><br />Perhaps the more general question should be: is there a general confusion in society to which information overload has contributed, and is that confusion being exploited, incidentally or systematically, by professional propagandists inside and outside government? Broadly, I would say, yes, this is so, and because I think this true, the implications for democratic participation in governance are not good. One cannot in a Constitutional society restrict speech to filter out the noise of propaganda, so, perhaps, the answer lies in better preparing people through the education system to recognize when they're being deceived or misled (I doubt that many school systems are, for example, teaching Orwell's "<a href="http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm">Politics and the English Language</a>"), and in pushing back against a corporate system that demands more and more of our time, and in finding ways to make more time available to evaluate all the information with which we are being bombarded.<br /><br />Again, it's not a problem that's amenable to easy or quick answers, but, without addressing it, we can be certain that the cacophany around us will eventually overwhelm our ability to define the truth, let alone understand what it is.<br /><br />(On edit, I suppose I should offer some explanation for why this very general look at too much information popped out. Unlike many Americans today, I have a lot of time to read about what's going on, I'm not distracted by television, and have enough education in language to give me a small advantage in recognizing when we're being conned. And yet, even I feel overwhelmed. In part, I've been feeling that way ever since the stories on the bombings in Zahedan, Iran and in Uganda, and the return of the Iranian scientist to Iran appeared, which were reported without much background, or historical context, or how these events may have been influenced by U.S. actions. Then, quite by accident, I ran across <a href="http://www.chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/1991-another-day-another-atrocity-in-the-world-of-dirty-war.html">two</a> <a href="http://www.chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/1989-leading-by-example-elites-apt-pupils-launch-surge-in-uganda.html">articles</a> by Chris Floyd that offered some of that context of which I was unaware, and, together, suggest a degree of double-dealing on the part of the U.S. government that's troubling. I got the sinking feeling that even I'm walking around pretty much clueless and confused at least some of the time.)Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-75574754739909132882010-07-16T18:33:00.000-07:002010-07-16T18:45:01.369-07:00Gobsmacked....<span style="font-family: verdana;">What the fuck is </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://washingtonindependent.com/91851/obey-white-house-suggested-cutting-food-stamps-to-pay-for-edujobs-funding">wrong with these people</a><span style="font-family: verdana;">?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">We've been spending absurd amounts of money on what now totals </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">sixteen years' worth of illegal and pointless war</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">, in two theaters, wasting enough money on so-called defense to keep several African countries in deep clover, and the wealthy, thanks to some egregiously large--embarrassingly large--tax cuts, are out buying his and hers private jets, but, the first suggestion of this White House is to offset some public education spending with cuts in </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">food stamps</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">We. Are. Just. Plain. Screwed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">The government today is making the Politburo look like public service wizards....</span>Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25852391.post-66907473293026337862010-07-13T16:08:00.000-07:002010-07-13T16:21:32.899-07:00Quite apart from the obvious implications...... of the WaPoo doing <a href="http://instaputz.blogspot.com/2010/07/fine-line-between-reporter-and.html">free publicity work to promote Newticles' books</a>, haven't these bozos figured out that Newticles' mumblings about running for President are about as newsworthy as Lyndon LaRouche announcing his candidacy?<br /><br />That ol' Newtie is in the news <span style="font-style: italic;">at all</span> is much more an example of the Village's enduring fetishes with fat, corrupt, windbag Republicans than it is one of necessary reporting in the public interest.<br /><br />(Via <a href="http://www.eschatonblog.com/2010/07/enablers.html">Atrios</a> )Montaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03531503205815503135noreply@blogger.com0