Belaboring the Obvious

Oh, yeah, and speaking of God-botherers...

2011-08-12T21:59:00.000-07:00

... the eminent Ms. Jennifer Bryson at the equally eminent Witherspoon Institute, wishes to make a causal relationship between porn and terrorism where none existed before, and may yet not exist at all.

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.

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 "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 have in the 20th century alone taken a toll wholly more, uh, dramatic and real than her imagined terrorism resulting from pornography.

But, hell, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt, and give her a choice. She can have a copy of Hustler dropped in her lap, or she can have a two-megaton warhead dropped on her head.

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.

Let's get utterly real for a moment. The real threat to civilization is state-sponsored terrorism, of which the very moral and upstanding policy elite of this country of ours--and our friends--are past masters.

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.

Just one thought on the panoply of...

2011-08-12T21:39:00.000-07:00

... Repug presidential candidates.

Including the soon-to-declare Gov. Goodhair, more than one has said, in so many words, that "God told me to run."

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.

It's been a remarkable few weeks...

2011-06-28T00:43:00.000-07:00

... on the rocket-powered handbasket ride to hell.

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.

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....

The more I see and read of Bachmann, 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.

This woman is not normal. 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 "Slither." Deep, deep down, Michele Bachmann is Kitty Kopetzky.

The great mystery of the moment is why the press is treating her as if she's the reincarnation of Margaret Chase Smith.

Ran across a curious little mockumentary...

2011-05-01T00:45:00.000-07:00

... the other day, thanks to Netflix streaming--"The American Ruling Class," which features Lewis Lapham, editor emeritus of Harper's 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.

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.

We know he won't. He interviews dozens of the nation's movers and shakers, the crème de la crème 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.

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 impending royal wedding in the UK. 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.

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 Washington Post online "Lifestyle" section dutifully reports that "After the correspondents' dinner, Sarah Palin attends the Bloomberg & Vanity Fair cocktail reception at the residence of the French ambassador in Washington," and, that not being quite enough coverage of La Palin, also headlines, "Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin attends the MSNBC party after the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington." And, lest the well-known Palin resentment be thwacked into bloom, the Post makes sure to note that Palin's club-footed dancin' fool of a daughter is also in attendance, "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 hoi polloi.

And, let's not be remiss in reminding everyone that this exercise in mimicry of aristocracy is arranged by the Washington, D.C., press corps. 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: Seymour Hersh. Robert Parry. Amy Goodman. Ray McGovern. Chris Hedges. Vandana Shiva. Glenn Greenwald. Mike Malloy. Noam Chomsky. Greg Mitchell. Matt Taibbi. Michael Hastings. Robert Scheer. Bob McChesney. Barbara Ehrenreich. Alfred McCoy. Mike Davis. Mac McClelland.

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 inner workings of power in this country.

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:

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.

Just a note about The...

2011-04-27T01:35:00.000-07:00

... 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.

He can't 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.

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.

No job is worth giving that up--even the Presidency.

Have been ruminating on various...

2011-04-26T21:54:00.000-07:00

... opinions about what government is these days, I suppose because of the accumulated dreck 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

Dorothy Parker's Lament....

2011-04-05T14:09:00.000-07:00

For months and months now, each new day has prompted me to ask, "what fresh hell is this?"

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.

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.

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. "Courageous," my ass.

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.

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:

Fifth, the very, very rich are whining, non-stop, 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.

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 reporter for a goddamned music magazine, Rolling Stone. 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.

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) is a pretty neat guy, and that all that Laffer Curve bullshit and trickle-down economics is Shinola. Why else would he put a CEO that eliminated twenty percent of his company's domestic jobs in ten years on a Presidential commission on job creation?

Seventh, there are yahoos at the state level that want to do away with child labor laws.

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.

Our country is being run by a bunch of skeevy fucks with money, and the Repugs and the Tea Partiers, while the worst of the bunch, are not the only skeevy fucks doing the fatcats' bidding. That honor is wholly bipartisan.

Might as well change the name of the country to Fuckwits United, because that's what we've become.

For a long, long, long time...

2011-03-23T23:41:00.000-07:00

... I've had the nagging feeling that we are in the midst of some weird, unexplainable mass institutional insanity.

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 she wants to rid the country of them.

NASA might as well close up shop if this becomes law, along with who knows how many engineering firms, big and small.

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 phlogiston 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.

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.

But, what's mystifying about this is the presumption for Roby's legislation. It's the notion that making children more ignorant, more 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 helpful to our struggling students:

"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."

Calling this moronic offers it dignity it does not deserve.

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."

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).

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.

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 creationism as science, or to destroy representative government, or to transfer wealth to corporations from the public coffers, may yet prevail.

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.

The Zeroes...

2011-02-12T13:28:00.000-08:00

... 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.

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 Zero-in-Chief.

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.

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.

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.

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, who said 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.

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.

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 proving that government won't do a fuckin' thing for you, 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.

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 turning soldiers' showers into abattoirs and soldiers' drinking water supplies into germ warfare factories.

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.

Then Presidential hopeful and whiner par excellence, 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.

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 kissed so many plump, white, rich asses 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? They still aren't happy.

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. Warrantless spying, FBI national security letters, infiltration of peace groups and misuse of the material assistance to terrorists statute proceeded apace.

The banksters began to defraud the courts in foreclosure proceedings, and used the government's HAMP program to force those foreclosures. 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 the health care bill, and financial reform, and raising taxes on the obscenely wealthy.

By the end of the decade, it seemed as if the robber barons had finally won, the government that, for a time, 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 supposed to stroke their egos, too.

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 corporate shills, crackpots, outright thieves and fourteen different varieties of madmen and madwomen, mental defectives, flim-flammers and feebs.

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.

It's not going to end well.

And the wars drag on.

Ever since the moment...

2011-01-18T02:44:00.000-08:00

... 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.

Sean Hannity, in the midst of fierce right-wing competition, makes a grab for the gold ring:

HANNITY: There’s two things I said. I say 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? For the Kuwait oil minister — how short his memory is. You know, we have every right to go in there and frankly take all their oil and make them pay for the liberation, as these sheiks, etcetera etcetera, you know were living in hotels in London and New York, as Trump pointed out, and now they’re gouging us and saying ‘oh of course we can withstand [these prices].’”

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.

For many decades, the object of such drivel has been to legitimize the notion that the United States deserves 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.

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.

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.

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 mestizos and pro-democracy advocates.

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 always 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.

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 systematically destroyed the Congo for personal gain, with the assistance and support of the United States.

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.

And for that, we are damned.

[edited to add a couple of explanatory paragraphs]

Why, exactly, is it...

2010-11-23T19:27:00.000-08:00

... that the modern conservative pseudo-intellectual's solution to every small problem seems to involve genocide?

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....

Just an advisory....

2010-10-08T02:25:00.000-07:00

Greg Grandin's Fordlandia is an exceptional work, for its history and its narrative.

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.

It's a remarkable story, admirably told by Grandin, of a time and place long forgotten.

Have been meaning to...

2010-08-18T07:43:00.000-07:00

... to write about Eric Alterman's recent article in The Nation, "Kabuki Democracy," 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.

Babara Ehrenreich has apparently gotten the same feeling as have I, as she explains here.

But, to explain a bit, we've likely (as Charles Pierce put it in his excellent recent book, Idiot America) 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 a leveling of political power among individuals to preserve democracy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She really, really, really, really is...

2010-08-17T08:33:00.000-07:00

... just the rankest of opportunists, isn't she?

It's a nice twist on the dolchstoßlegende, though, even if her delivery of it might just rival Bush's tortured syntax in his more abstracted moments:

... 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.

I give her a month or so before she's out hunting for car crashes to blame on Muslims....

Maybe a bit difficult to reconcile...

2010-08-15T05:12:00.000-07:00

... given the current state of affairs between Israel and the U.S., but, shit, guys, give us a break here.

Let's just lay out some facts, just to keep things from getting far off-kilter.

First, Israel is the fourth or fifth largest nuclear power in the world. If we have any worries about a nuclear Middle East, it's because of Israel, not Iran.

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.

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.

The U.S. knows this. The Israelis know this. The rest of the Middle East, including Iran, knows this.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ah, I see Robert Gibbs is expressing...

2010-08-10T17:37:00.000-07:00

... his frustration by punching hippies again.

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.

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.

And, oh, yeah, if Gibbs/Obama think the Pentagon/militarists/right wing are their pals, and the great unwashed masses are the problem, it's time to sit down, shut up and think about which of those two entities has more to do with getting the country into the fiscal and foreign policy troubles in which it now finds itself, and which is more responsible for the intractable nature of those problems.

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. Back-room deals with sleazy assholes like Billy Tauzin are exactly like Bush's and Cheney's secret energy task force deals with the oil companies. Expanding unchecked state surveillance powers is fundamentally authoritarian, and in keeping with Bush's policies. Creating legal loopholes to further Executive power and sidestep the courts and the Constitution is what Bush and his fellow right-wing authoritarians did. Treating Wall Street banksters like aristocrats is what Bush and his Treasury secretary did.

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.

Are we even capable of recognizing...

2010-08-09T14:40:00.000-07:00

... that we are an empire in the midst of collapse?

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.

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.

We're dummies. We're funding our own destruction.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And we fell for it. Because we're dummies.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 and 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We're probably not going to notice until the first invasion by this century's equivalent of the Mongol hordes.

Positing the possibility...

2010-08-04T03:28:00.000-07:00

... that the entirety of the country's leadership went insane after 9/11:

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?
RT. HON. THE LORD PRESCOTT: Well, I think the first awareness was when I visited the United States --
BARONESS PRASHAR: That was when?
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.
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".

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 internationally belligerent in the world.

Some people on the right side of...

2010-08-02T18:39:00.000-07:00

... the political aisle are having some serious hallucinations.

I guess there are a lot more small, fat men in search of a balcony in this country than I figured.

The conundrum of which few are willing to speak...

2010-08-02T00:58:00.000-07:00

... is still with us, and will not be resolved until we make some fundamental reassessments of our obsession with so-called "free market" economics.

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.

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.

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.

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 laissez faire 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.

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.

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 retained by the very few in society, 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.

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.

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."

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%.

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.

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.

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 to transfer the clean-up costs to the taxpayers and/or slow down clean-up efforts, 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.

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 "the oil is gone," prompted by both government and corporate sources, are examples of this determined effort to evade the external costs of maintaining a rotting status quo.

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.

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, living out Thomas Jefferson's worst nightmare:

“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.”

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 wholly dependent on taxpayer money for its survival.

We spend trillions on war, 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 in large part to support the profits of companies 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 tolerate the wholesale destruction of our livelihoods to protect the wealth of the few. Our legislators subsidize corporations which offshore jobs with taxpayer dollars.

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.

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.

Just following up...

2010-07-29T17:24:00.000-07:00

... on the previous post, trying to fill in a blank or two.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 a now-predictable pattern. 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 habeas corpus 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 retroactive immunity (as with the telecom corporations). Congress even attempted to restrict rights to habeas corpus in the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The greatest bulk of the enabling legislation is renewed 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) had been horrendously abused for years, the current administration signals to Congress that it wants the scope of NSLs drastically increased.

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 has created new mechanisms--in conjunction with existing laws on secrecy--to actively prevent any intervention in Executive Branch activities by the courts.

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 "black site," Guantanamo remains open 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 courts determine to be innocent of any crime, and has taken the further step of targeting U.S. citizens for state assassination.

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 campisenos, 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.

The Washington Post has just completed a long investigation of the growth of the surveillance state in the last nine years, and the results ought to be scaring the pants off of the ordinary citizen. While Tim Shorrock delved into the matter of the privatization of intelligence in his 2007 book, Spies for Hire, 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.

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 Operation Ill Wind prosecutions 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.

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 fusion centers, 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 Los Angeles, Denver, New York, and Baltimore.

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.

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?

Maybe the only thing that continues to encourage us to categorize such talk as hyperbole is our own proclivity to self-deception.

Just a few random thoughts...

2010-07-27T16:36:00.000-07:00

... on Wikileaks, and its recent document dump.

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.

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.

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/NYT 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 LA Times. (The LA Times 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 did contact the White House.)

All of which ignores the truism that the first casualty of war is the truth, 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.

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).

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.

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, in rather unequivocal terms, 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, U.S v. Reynolds, in which the evidence provided by the government was itself an outright lie. (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 U.S. v. Reynolds 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.)

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 Doolittle Report 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.

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 contras, 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.

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 only 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 all 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.

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.

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 national security state 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.

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.

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 partisan political purposes. Using taxpayer-funded information which the national security state has hidden behind a cloak of secrecy to paint a truer picture of a war's prosecution should not, especially if that war has been both promoted and continued out of extreme self-interest.

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).

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 a drift toward authoritarianism 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.

Which entity is pro-democracy? The government which seeks to hide from its own citizens what it is doing and what is happening in the country and the world because of its actions, or the group that exposes what the government seeks to suppress?

In the midst of confusion...

2010-07-19T00:20:00.000-07:00

... one begs--often in vain--for clarity.

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.

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.

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?

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.

That's an easy emotion to politically manipulate, and we've seen plenty of such manipulation in recent years. The subtle (and, sometimes, not so subtle) 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.

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 1984, described this as doublethink--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.

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.

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, often specious or slanted information gains legitimacy by press exposure and repetition.

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 after the important decisions are made.

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 disinformation continues to be held in high esteem even after its refutation 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).

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 "Politics and the English Language"), 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.

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.

(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 two articles 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.)

Gobsmacked....

2010-07-16T18:33:00.000-07:00

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

We've been spending absurd amounts of money on what now totals sixteen years' worth of illegal and pointless war, 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 food stamps?

We. Are. Just. Plain. Screwed.

The government today is making the Politburo look like public service wizards....

Quite apart from the obvious implications...

2010-07-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

... of the WaPoo doing free publicity work to promote Newticles' books, haven't these bozos figured out that Newticles' mumblings about running for President are about as newsworthy as Lyndon LaRouche announcing his candidacy?

That ol' Newtie is in the news at all 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.

(Via Atrios )

Hmm. I'm a little confused by...

2010-07-05T14:09:00.000-07:00

... this article by Mel Goodman at Consortium News.

Many people today have concentrated on Eisenhower largely because of two speeches that bookended his term in office--his "Cross of Iron" speech in 1953 and his Farewell Address in 1961--as the person who best understood how to handle military minds, both in the Pentagon and in the nether world of intelligence operations, and Goodman makes this same point, for the purposes of illustrating how lack of experience with the military undermined Kennedy, Johnson and now, Obama.

In doing so, Goodman (whose general perceptions of the CIA's operations and leadership have been extremely helpful in understanding the increasing politicization--and militarization--of the country's intelligence services) buys into a bit of the hagiography surrounding Eisenhower. While he notes that Eisenhower signed off on operations such as Ajax and PBSUCCESS, which overthrew the governments of Iran and Guatemala, he nevertheless implies that the disasters of Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs had their origins in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and were the result of a naïveté about how the military operates, something of which, by definition, Eisenhower could never be accused.

The matter is much more complicated by the history of those times than Goodman suggests. While it is conventional wisdom to blame the origins of the Vietnam war and the Bay of Pigs on Kennedy, the facts suggest otherwise. Taking Vietnam first, it was, in fact, Eisenhower who began the covert war in Vietnam, using the CIA, almost immediately after French withdrawal after Dien Bien Phu, to destabilize both North and South and make U.N.-ordered unification elections impossible (because, even then, it was known by the CIA that 80% of the country would support Ho Chi Minh and his national liberation party). It was Eisenhower's CIA which plucked Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic with French sympathies (to run an overwhelmingly Buddhist country!), out of obscurity in exile and installed him in the newly-formed government of South Vietnam. It was Eisenhower's CIA which spent considerable amounts of money for the clandestine services of academics (particularly from Michigan State) to build a government around Diem. Finally, it was Eisenhower who first authorized the deployment of the U.S. military to Vietnam, in 1958. Though they were described as "advisors," that term fooled very few (it's a matter of record that some of the very earliest American deaths in that war were of NSA personnel doing signals interception in areas of combat).

It was that situation which Kennedy inherited. The same was true of the Bay of Pigs. That operation was begun with Eisenhower's approval, and training in Guatemala commenced in earnest in May, 1960, months before the election that would put Kennedy in the White House. As importantly, it was known in some circles in Eisenhower's administration and in the CIA that the Bay of Pigs operation could not succeed without the intervention and support of the U.S. military. From the start, it was seen by some as a means of precipitating a full-scale military invasion of Cuba.

And yet, that was not the way it was sold to Kennedy when he reauthorized the operation. To my knowledge, no one in the CIA or in Eisenhower's administration warned him of the operation's almost certain failure. There's almost no question, either, that Nixon, had he won, would have used the military as the back end of the plan required, despite the knowledge that the Soviet response was entirely unpredictable. Kennedy might have been able to smell the political trap being set for him were he less invested in his own anti-communist sentiments, but, that he'd been suckered by the CIA and the prior administration at the time of his reauthorization is not in question.

Then there's the matter of Eisenhower, because of his Farewell Address, knowing how to handle the military. The simple truth is that what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex had its birth and adolescence in Eisenhower's two terms, and much of the midwifery and nursing was accomplished by Eisenhower's first Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson. It was through programs such as those to have the taxpayers pay for not only military equipment, but for the production facilities themselves, as well (under the delusion that this would greatly speed up the conversion of commercial industry to war materiel production at the outbreak of war), that cemented the relationships between the Pentagon, the manufacturers and Congress that continue to bedevil the nation today.

The second considerable problem with this benign view of Eisenhower is that, by and large, Eisenhower left the Pentagon to its own devices, in part because much of its leadership had served under him during WWII. The general view of the Pentagon brass at the time was that the only President deserving of the title would be a former general, and it was that attitude which was at the core of the disdain for civilian control of the military. When Kennedy entered office, he also inherited Eisenhower's military leadership, and the Joint Chiefs' office, along with its high command, was at the time a rat's nest of Birchers and right-wing extremists.

It's at this point that using Kennedy as an example to explain Obama falls well short. Kennedy could figure out what was going on and did. After a sufficient number of warnings, Kennedy relieved Gen. Edwin Walker of his European command, and transferred Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer (who was on Eisenhower's staff in WWII and to whom Eisenhower entrusted the Joint Chiefs chairmanship) to NATO, to get him out of the Joint Chiefs' office. In what may be the best account yet of the Cuban missile crisis, Michael Dobbs makes clear in his One Minute to Midnight that it was Kennedy alone--against the advice of his staff and even, initially, that of his brother, Robert--who resisted the continuing demands of the military to escalate the situation to all-out war.

Kennedy also knew that he had to win the public's approval on his handling of the military without getting into the gory details (such as proposals from the Pentagon like Operation Northwoods), and to that end, he convinced Eisenhower that the situation inside the Pentagon was, indeed, serious, and enlisted Eisenhower to appear on television--as much in his capacity as the old general as ex_President--to affirm the need for civilian control of the military, and Kennedy himself embarked upon a series of speeches across the country on the dangers of extremism of all stripes (something Obama has been loathe to do for fear of being charged with incivility toward the batshit right wing). Finally, it was Kennedy, in Oct., 1963, who signed an executive order establishing the orderly withdrawal of the military he had sent to Vietnam.

Johnson's relationship to the military was more complicated. It was not that he mistrusted the military from the start but was insufficiently knowledgeable to stop them, as Goodman implies. Johnson, first of all, mistrusted the Kennedys, so he was inclined to discount decisions made by them. It might have been for that reason that he rescinded Kennedy's withdrawal order just a few days after Kennedy was assassinated. Johnson was also, in private, frequently heard to say that he was not going to be the first President to lose a war--most of those around Johnson in the early months of his Presidency understood that Johnson and his notably large ego were heavily invested in war success. And then, even though Johnson was said to be fully cognizant that the circumstances in the Gulf of Tonkin were not as advertised, he put a lot of political weight behind the war resolution that was the basis for a dramatic escalation of the war. Early on, it seems, Johnson wanted that war just as much as did the military. In that time period, Johnson and the military were acting cooperatively, rather than adversarily. It was not until the tremendous influx of soldiers and increased bombing failed to diminish the determination of the North Vietnamese that Johnson began to question the motives of the military and the information it and the CIA were providing him, and began to realize that he had been politically undone not only by the military, but by his own ambitions, as well.

As for Reagan and Bush I being in the thrall of the military, as Goodman suggests, I wonder about that, too. Bush I saw considerable utility in using the military for domestic political purposes (at any rate, there's nothing at all to suggest that he had been helplessly pulled along by events precipitated by the military), and Reagan did, as well, to the extent that he saw anything clearly. Grenada was simply an ass-covering exercise, hastily implemented, to divert attention from the disaster in Lebanon, using a few Cuban workers as the anti-communist bugbear to whip up public support (anyone remember the silly, transparent use of intelligence photos of the Grenadan airport runway to hearken back to the days of the Cuban missile crisis?).

What does all this--or Goodman's analogies--have to do with Obama's performance to date, or with his dismissal of Gen. McChrystal from his Afghanistan command? Obama's a unique individual who came to office with his own set of preconceptions. Saying though, that Obama suffers from the same ignorance of the military as Kennedy or Johnson doesn't quite fit, though. Kennedy and Johnson both did have prior experience with the military, as both served during WWII (and Kennedy, in combat), although that experience was not on the same order as Eisenhower's. The implication is that more military experience enables a President to successfully resist the imprecations of the military, and, as the above certainly suggests, that's not entirely true, if only by one pertinent example which Mel Goodman doesn't mention: Jimmy Carter. Carter, absent Eisenhower, had more time in the military than any 20th century President, and yet, the military and the intelligence services not only bridled against the changes he tried to impose, some of them actively worked to successfully undermine his chances for a second term, even though Carter had called for a notable increase in defense spending toward the end of his term. (And, as Consortium News has recently written, there may even have been members of his own National Security Council spying on him and reporting to the Reagan campaign.)

Is Obama at a distinct disadvantage by having no military experience whatsoever? I think not. Much more depends upon the values and ideals one brings to the office, along with the ability to discern foul political motive from national necessity. Obama's great flaw was to believe Bush II's bullshit about the war in Afghanistan. The drama of 9/11 blinded him--as it did so many others--to the simple fact that a crime had been committed, one which did not require military intervention anywhere, and which Bush the Younger used to accomplish a vast increase in Executive power, power which Obama is now extremely reluctant to relinquish. It's misleading, I think, to suggest that the military is the prime mover in the events since 9/11, simply because the military's power has been expanded in direct proportion to that of the Executive. The younger Bush had military experience, too (of course, his experience was mostly in figuring out how to shirk responsibility, experience he used to advantage all his life), but, his intent was to use the military for political purposes even more than the military might have been inclined to use him to its own ends. Thus, it's reasonable to say, I think, that the younger Bush and his cohort used the circumstances and the military to further their own political ends. (Perhaps, in this context, one ought to remember that those in the military with warnings or misgivings about the Bushies' military misadventures were summarily cashiered.)

Obama has willingly walked into a situation where the Executive and its military and its intelligence services have cooperated, in symbiotic fashion, to further the power of each other, all of which translates into an enormous increase in the raw power of the President. No President willingly gives up power (the lesson of Watergate and Nixon's certain impeachment is precisely that), and Obama's no exception to that rule. It might be unsettling to admit such, but that might be a more powerful influence on Obama's behavior in office than is his ignorance of how the military operates.

Just a little musing on the economy and...

2010-07-03T14:34:00.000-07:00

... the problem of sustainability.

Even though we try not to act as if energy is a severe long-term problem, it is. The math is there, and it's not pretty. Even with the exploitation of fields that promise to be environmental nightmares (as offshore drilling above the Arctic Circle is certain to be, and as deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has proven to be), demand only has to increase slightly over current levels to make oil scarcer and scarcer, and, for practical purposes, effectively gone in three or four decades.

A very large part of the problem, of course, is the ostrich syndrome--stick yer head in the sand if the threat won't go away, but, the other part of it is a complete dependency on the so-called "free market."

First off, the "free market" isn't free. Where markets go is highly dependent upon how government seeds and feeds which markets--through outright grants and subsidies--but also in how it treats different industries with regard to tax policy (which encompasses everything from equipment depreciation to outright tax reductions not available to all industries and businesses, such as the oil depletion allowance), and much of that is tied to a macroeconomic philosophy that demands steady and predictable growth of the economy as measured by gross domestic product.

At this point, we don't even know how to measure economic activity that's genuinely productive. The classic conundrum between common sense and economic theory can be seen by the example of a guy getting drunk, smashing his car into a bridge abutment and spending a year either in the hospital or convalescing, and out of work. He consumed large quantities of beer beforehand, so, that's a GDP plus. He's totaled his car, so, eventually, he'll need another one, and that's a GDP plus. The bridge abutment is damaged, so, for the sake of public safety, it will have to be repaired. That's an economic plus, too. Maybe some economist will come along and calculate that the cost of protecting the bridge abutment is less than its repair, and might save lives, as well, so legislation is introduced to protect all bridge abutments with some gizmo, and that will stimulate gizmo production, which is also an economic plus. In the meanwhile, a tow truck and driver were needed to cart off the mechanical remains, a junk yard gets the pieces really cheap and gets to resell what's salvageable, the guy is hauled off to the hospital in an ambulance, where he spends considerable time being put back together, which uses hospital supplies, helps amortize some very expensive equipment, and employs dozens of people in a rather high-rent sector of the economy, as well as justifying the jobs of insurance clerks and actuaries. All those things are seen as adding to the GDP, but, looking at it from the lens of actual productivity, it's a complete waste of time and resources. The only thing that gets subtracted from the GDP is his loss of productivity--the time he spends out of work, and the loss of profit from the insurance company (which isn't entirely a GDP loss, because the insurance company raises everyone's rates to make up for what's paid out for his care). Overall, it's a net gain to the economy that he gets drunk one night and nearly pile-drivers himself. If he had died, much of that GDP gain would still be there, and, as well, the florists would see a dividend, as would the funeral home operator, and, if he has family and friends at a distance, the airlines benefit, too, and so would the aggregate GDP.

Most people would think that's a pretty crazy system, but, still, each and every one of those activities does move money around, does keep people employed, etc. By traditional standards, it's all economic activity. And yet, it's all based on the general destruction or depletion of resources, which, in our system, requires extracting more resources to replace those destroyed--and that's the problem with GDP growth vs. sustainability.

Even if one could somehow magically eliminate this sort of economic waste from society, growth is still necessary to maintain employment as long as the population continues to rise. More people means more cars (in the absence of some radically-transformed transportation system), more housing, literally, more of everything, from food to diapers to clothes to medicine to water to steel and aluminum and plastic, to even energy.

Leaving that up to the markets to provide ensures that resource depletion will continue at a rapid rate, because under our current system, extraction of natural resources is much cheaper than recycling, mostly because the external costs of doing so are absorbed by society and government--either in destruction of the commons or in taxpayer-funding of environmental damage (the polluter no longer pays the full cost of pollution, if it ever has), or in reduced life span and quality of life, or in taxes to pay for the military to effectively seize and control global resources for the benefit of our multinational corporations which depend upon our consumption for their profits, and even then, most of that damage associated with resource depletion is added to the GDP as economic activity.

This doesn't even address another fundamental problem--that, traditionally, 70% of all economic activity in the U.S. is consumer-driven--without maintaining that level of consumption of all available goods, the economy would promptly collapse, and very likely, the global economy with it. Where we once could make sensible economic predictions based upon the percentage of excess manufacturing capacity in this country, we no longer can--supply lines have grown so long now that U.S. firms are dependent in very big ways on manufacturing capacity outside our borders, and that must be factored into the equation. I suspect that even small drops in consumption in this country can result in big changes in global excess capacity, given the way businesses operate today. That a substantial quantity of that 70% was fueled by debt necessitated by the increasingly unequal distribution of income only makes the problem worse.

Anyone making the case today for a sustainable economy runs up against a huge wall made up of the following three big bricks--the system as it is now, the government's perceptions of the problems it faces, and public perceptions. Everything the government is now doing is directed toward achieving a status quo that was and is unsustainable for dozens of reasons, but which is definable and known and quantifiable--and politically safe. Anyone looking at the government's actions over the last two years can see that most of its resources have been directed at insulating the financial sector from its own bad behavior entirely for the sake of returning that sector to stability, because the dominant economic wisdom is that Wall Street and its wealthy patrons drive the country's economic engine. There are myriad ways in which this is no longer true, but, the conventional wisdom prevails.

Second, the status quo of the present system is unsustainable, both in terms of the level of consumption, the means to satisfy that consumption, and the ways in which that consumption is financed.

Last, and probably most profound in its effects, the public perceives any attempt at sustainability as detrimental to its welfare and its status. Every aspect of sustainability is perceived by the public as diminishing its standard of living. Telling anyone that they will have to do with less is political poison--the Carter Effect writ large. Of course, this resistance to change is cultivated by the very system itself, through a modern and psychologically powerful advertising system that plays upon everyone's subconscious desires, along with an equally powerful commercial media which reinforces the advertising upon which it depends for revenues. One can see how dramatic those influences are by how much of consumer consumption has been financed through debt, rather than savings.

If we are a culture demanding instant gratification, sophisticated, psychologically manipulative advertising and easily available credit have made us that way--we weren't of that mind always. As importantly, at precisely the time when a generation suddenly began to question the wisdom of an economic system which depended upon planned obsolescence, manufacturing which encouraged disposal rather than repair, a spendthrift energy policy and fighting wars around the world to secure natural resources at the highest possible profit margin, that's when the right-wing industrialists and financiers began to fight back--funding reactionary think tanks, consolidating news media and entertainment outlets, cultivating public opinion and spending ever more heavily on political campaigns and lobbying. One can see that accumulated power in operation today--even though oil is getting scarcer and prices are going up, even though burning oil and coal are intimately linked to anthropogenic global warming (which will have effects on the food chain, the costs of recovering from natural disaster, availability of fresh water and societal costs due to vast human migrations in relatively short periods of time)--and that power is directed primarily toward convincing the public that maintaining the status quo is of primary importance.

Damned difficult to overcome that. If society collapses because of that determination to maintain the status quo (which is intimately linked with the continuing disproportionate distribution of income and wealth), yes, then the public will demand that the status quo be abandoned. How that happens is anyone's guess. The economic turmoil of Germany in the `20s led to the ascension of the Nazis, who promised to create order out of chaos. To think that the United States, because of some ill-defended principles of democracy, is immune to fascism is to deny what's happening at this moment. More to the point, if we are unable or unwilling to make the changes in the status quo now which will enable a different, more sustainable society and economy, we may well not have the energy resources to make new energy sources. It seems almost silly to have to say that, but, if we expend our dominant energy sources before we have new ones in place, we will have no energy to enable that transition, no matter our level of desperation.

So much of this problem is a distinctive characteristic of our political system. We're more or less unable to consistently maintain necessary policies over many political administrations, and yet, we require exactly that ability to sustain research and development and re-industrialization over generations. There's a tremendous hatred on the part of the right toward anything that smacks of central planning, in part because it is perceived as antithetical to free enterprise and inhibitory of profit, and in part because of the horrible examples set by the Soviet Union, even though the Second World War could not have been won in anything like the time it actually took without some rather widespread central planning to coordinate the utilization of both resources and industrial capacity.

And yet, the multinationals that have a stranglehold on energy production and distribution in this country aren't about to give up an ounce of their current power or profitability for the greater good--especially if that entails some long-term effort. They are doing everything they can to preserve their hegemony over energy, even though that's completely antithetical to sustainability. If they can't own it and the distribution system for it, they don't want it and will fight it (because, as the early railroads demonstrated, if one controls distribution, one effectively controls all pricing).

All this points to a need for some serious changes in how we allocate resources and how we function as a society. I don't have any firm answers on how to do these things, if only because I recognize just how much resistance to change exists in our society, regardless of the reasons for that resistance. However, if we simply strive for a return--in the midst of economic calamity--to the status quo as a means of relieving that economic calamity, we're deluding ourselves. We're simply postponing the inevitable, and as a consequence, will make the inevitable come more suddenly and more dramatically, most likely at the expense of our general welfare and of democracy itself.

Maybe we have gone...

2010-07-01T15:32:00.000-07:00

... through the looking glass. The establishment press is, well, happily willing to tie themselves up in order to make it easier for unscrupulous administrations to have their way with the Fourth Estate.

However, it's not just about the press repeating what the government says. It's also about the way that the government--from the President on down--abuses our common language, which only then is repeated ad nauseum by our wholesome folks in the news media connected to satellite dishes and the country's printing presses.

George Orwell wrote in his "Politics and the English Language" that flowery, obfuscatory phrases were always used by politicians to, as Orwell put it simply and succinctly, "defend the indefensible." It is this intentional retreat from plain language that Orwell saw as a deliberate means of obscuring truth, and now, over sixty years after his essay was published, the practice in the United States government is both a high art and an arcane science.

Indeed, Orwell's absolutely right, and especially so in these days of Pentagon-micromanaged press coverage. It is the very fact that the press has enabled the government's introduction of these terms into the lexicon and has made continuing and unchallenged use of them that has perverted our understanding of reality. To that end, I offer a review of a few of the government's recent favorite phrases, along with translations into understandable English:

a) Collateral damage. Translation: Civilians killed because we didn't prepare carefully enough to prevent killing them, and, besides, randomly killing a few of them will scare the bejesus out of them and they'll do what we want. See: Roman Empire, better to be feared than loved.

b) Targeted killing. Translation: State-sponsored non-judicially sanctioned assassination, particularly from the air, of anyone, including American citizens, whom the President or his staff determines, without any review by the Judiciary, to be not wholly supportive of or antithetical to U.S. aims, using equipment designed to obscure personal and/or professional responsibility for those extra-judicial assassinations, especially in the many countries of the world where we have not officially declared war.

c) Enhanced interrogation techniques. Translation: torture by our own personnel of others for political purposes, in contravention of international human rights treaties. Principally used to obtain false confessions for use in military tribunals.

d) Extraordinary rendition: Translation: state-sponsored kidnapping.

e) Low-level terrorism. Translation: peaceful protest.

f) Torture: Translation: Egregious violations of international human rights treaties by countries other than ourselves.

g) Terrorism. Translation: any act, violent or non-violent, which can be utilized by us or our allies to place someone in indefinite detention and/or justify military action against other nations for economic and political purposes.

h) Defending our freedoms: Translation: Pursuing or abetting aggressive wars against countries unwilling to become our political and economic puppets.

i) Surge. Translation: the addition of more of our armed soldiers into a war of aggression and/or into a military occupation of ours to win the hearts and minds of the unwillingly occupied. See: Hopeless delusion.

j) Hearts and minds, winning: Translation: Failed Vietnam war strategy.

k) Mushroom cloud. Translation: Nuclear weapons scare tactic promulgated by us to inflate the potential threat to us of a non-nuclear country halfway around the world which does not have nuclear weapons or the means to deliver its non-existent nuclear weapons to our territory.

l) Axis of evil. Translation: A figment of the U.S. political imagination.

m) Ally. Translation: An imaginary friend whom we bribe with low- or no-cost military weapons, or any country's dictatorial leader whom we bribe with either arms or money to increase the trade revenues of our multinational corporations and/or to create an illusion of political solidarity with a people.

n) Intelligence community. Translation: Those paid by U.S. taxpayers to spy on other countries or to spy on us, or to torture both foreign and U.S. citizens, without fear of either prosecution or oversight.

o) State secrets privilege. Translation: The completely arbitrary and autocratic prevention of the exposure in open court of embarrassing and/or illegal activity on the part of our government.

p) Indefinite detention. Translation: The jailing of individuals through intemperate abrogation of human rights, civil rights and Constitutional rights to due process by Executive fiat, even if the individual has committed no crime.

q) Unlawful combatant. Translation: Any person, including American citizens, designated as such by the Executive as a means of denying that person prisoner of war status under the Geneva Conventions or rights to due process under criminal law. See: indefinite detention.

r) Black site. Translation: A torture chamber hidden from public scrutiny by secrecy classification.

s) Exporting democracy. Translation: The process of using military force or threat of military force to induce smaller nations to accept a commodified version of our political system as a means of creating new economic markets for U.S. multinational corporations and/or enabling neocolonial control of another nation's resources and/or the installation of puppet regimes suitable to the U.S. political and economic elite.

t) Insurgent. Translation: Any citizen of a foreign country killed by us in the process of exporting democracy.

I could go on and on, I suppose, but, that's enough for now. If one is able to strip away the euphemistic shroud concealing what is actually being done in our name, perhaps we have some hope of understanding current and recent events in a way that actually makes sense, absent the obscurantism, jingoism, nationalism and militarism which are always necessary to hide impure motives.

Easily the dumbest damned remark...

2010-06-19T17:42:00.000-07:00

... of the week. From Fareed Zakaria of CNN, on the bashing of oil execs: "'Not so fast,' says Fareed. In this week's Fareed's Take, he says we shouldn't vilify oil...because it isn't going anywhere."

Uh, pardon me? We shouldn't excoriate the executives of BP for their obvious gross negligence and their attempts to paste a smiley face over their fuck-ups just because we live in a society that the oil companies consciously shaped to create a dependency on their product?

If I need oil (and I'm doing what I can to require less), that need won't change whether I love the oil fatcats or not, and the oil companies know that, and they frankly don't give a fuck as long as their profits continue to rise.

More to the point, healthy anger over the extraordinary negligence of BP (as well as its continuing attempts to hide the truth about the damage it's caused) will help further the education of the public in the need to make a transition from oil to more sustainable sources of energy, which is probably what really bothers Zakaria.

What Zakaria is saying, in effect, is: "It's not nice to make fun of giant multinational corporations because we depend upon them," and that's just another way of saying that these frigging monsters deserve our respect.

It's a very, very good thing that Zakaria isn't counseling battered women.

Imperial ennui....

2010-06-19T06:50:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it was inevitable that this country, once founded, endowed with all the natural resources necessary for sustaining itself and building an agricultural and industrial base, would, despite the occasional warnings of its founders, end up with an empire jones.

In order to do that in a system which seemed, on paper, to discourage imperial ambition, the country's elite had to ignore history, common sense and, often, the Constitution itself. The movers and shakers also had to fundamentally change the attitudes of the people of the country, which I think they've done very successfully through the course of the Cold War.

We've always had leaders who saw, often through rose-colored glasses, imperial ambition, constant expansion and military might as entirely beneficial. Teddy Roosevelt was one, Monroe was another. Wilson, despite his protestations of peaceful intentions, was one, too. But, only after the end of WWII was there a presumption on the part of the country's foreign policy and economic elite that the first and singular duty of any President, by definition, was to further their ambitions.

This change is one of the bad lessons of the "Good War." Henry Stimson is an example. Before the war, in his capacity as Secretary of State, Stimson withdrew funding for the country's first peacetime cryptologic agency, the so-called "Black Chamber," saying that "gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail," (in a way, this was a conscious decision to resist the militarization of diplomacy) and yet, at the war's end, he retired from government service, not just to write his memoirs, but to visit elite Yale's young elite, giving monthly dinners at the Skull & Bones society, and at each of these events exhorting the secret society's members to use their future positions and the skills learned at Yale to force American exceptionalism on the rest of the world.

The second bad lesson learned was a consequence of the United States surviving the war virtually intact. This was frequently seen as a sign of the country's virtuousness, sometimes of God's favoritism, when it was mostly accidental--a function of geography. Nevertheless, that fact was used to promote both the pragmatic and the pompous. It generated the Marshall Plan and the quickly emerging belief that the United States was "the leader of the free world," a heady concoction of imperial desire, if there ever was one, and the moniker was almost as quickly attached to the President himself (the phrase persists today almost out of habit--the French, for example, find it an utterly ridiculous posture for any country's leader to take). It was also a way of reminding every Presidential hopeful afterwards of the elite's expectations.

The third bad lesson learned from that war was that it was, indeed, possible to extend military power across the globe in a very short space of time, maintain communications with those far-flung forces (something which had plagued the Romans) and establish more or less reliable lines of supply across vast distances, and as the immediate post-war occupations showed, extraordinarily easy to induce conquered enemies and allies alike to accept garrisons of foreign troops on their soil in exchange for money and other aid. Where 19th century attempts at co-opting Japan as a refueling point for military ships intent on controlling the greater market of China had largely failed, 20th century total war had succeeded.

Which brings up the fourth bad lesson--that the military could be made invincible through continuous technological improvement and the use of that technology on civilian populations. Certainly, the first atomic bombs were a dramatic datum in that calculation, but, mass night bombing in Europe and the fire-bombing of Japanese cities were also very convincing to war planners.

All of these "successes" merged into the worst lesson of all--that the country could conceivably control most, and possibly all, of the planet through combined military and economic power, and that possibility has dominated elite thinking ever since. As a consequence, we've had sixty years of military expansion and all-too-frequent war, the careful and increasing manipulation of public opinion to support that military spending and those wars, and via the increasing power of the military, the rapid ascension of government secrecy (while at the same time loudly proclaiming ourselves to be an "open society"), along with the progressive, inexorable diminishment of Constitutional rights principally by the courts' obeisance to the Executive in the use of military technology domestically.

Reductively, the military (with its auxiliary intelligence and contractor functions) has become a government unto itself. No significant bloc in Congress is capable of reining in the beast, and no President has been willing to seriously and significantly buck the Pentagon, if only because the Pentagon is the principal source of the President's power, ever since the creation of the national security state in 1947. While we've had plenty of indications of this sorry state of affairs over the years (COINTELPRO, the Vietnam war and Iran-Contra come immediately to mind), the last decade has been rife with dead canaries in the coal mine of which we've taken little to no notice. A few canaries:

1) Despite obvious and egregious violations of law by the country's top executives, the country's elite--in media, in the foreign policy arena and the economic world--have effectively neutered the ability of Congress to rationally exercise its authority to impeach. If anything, Republicans--very calculatingly and effectively--sought in the impeachment of Bill Clinton to convince the public that impeachment was a purely partisan political exercise, thus inoculating themselves in the future from the possibility of such censure, since they could then use that charge against Democrats if the Democrats chose to impeach for substantial cause. With Obama's refusal to engage Congress in setting limits on Executive power, impeachment for high crimes, let alone misdemeanors, is now impossible except for purely partisan reasons. In the future, impeachment will only be used by Republicans as a means of entrenching that party's power. (Anyone doubting that should review the ways in which Clinton's impeachment affected the media discourse during the 2000 election.)

While it's almost too predictable for words, the notable current example is Rep. Darrell Issa's promise to expand the staff and subpoena powers of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee if the Republicans regain the House in November, using the committee to politically harass the Executive branch in exactly the same way as Dan Burton used it during the Clinton years, and is certainly intended as a means of inclining public opinion toward Obama's impeachment.

Complicating this matter further is the Democrats' decided abhorrence of impeachment for violations related to perceived national security issues. Anything bordering on national security has simply been off-limits. In this way, the elites in Washington have been immunized from both impeachment and prosecution, regardless of the severity of their crimes. This may be the single most damaging effect of the militarization of society today, since it effectively has created a criminogenic environment at the top of government.

2) Government, and particularly the Pentagon, has increasingly sought to limit the ability of the press to report, and has constructed artificial limitations on the press that, in very fundamental ways, shape the content and tone of reporting. Most recently, of course, there is the issue of "embedded" reporters, but, this effort has been going on in earnest at least since the invasion of Grenada, when the Pentagon created a press blackout during those operations and even fired on reporters attempting to reach that island by boat. The elder Bush ordered the same during the invasion of Panama, and in the build-up to the first Gulf War, the Pentagon and the White House used public relations firms to manage information and the Pentagon effectively controlled the press by denying access except to media outlets that had signed prewar agreements to put themselves under military control (see, particularly, Rick MacArthur's excellent Second Front for details on the latter).

Similar arrangements were operative in Serbia and Kosovo, but this insanity has increased exponentially since 9/11. Much of reporting today is based on Pentagon press releases or officially authorized anonymous Pentagon and White House leaks, a process at which the Bush White House became highly adept, and which has not changed much in Obama's administration (note, for example, the recent article by James Risen at the NYT which announced, with high drama, that there was at least $1 trillion dollars' worth of untapped mineral resources in Afghanistan, a pronouncement which came at precisely the time when every independent report on that war was suggesting an ever-bleaker outcome there, as if the prospect of the stealing the country's resources would breathe new life into support for the war).

More ominously, of course, is the attitude in the Pentagon and the White House about using black propaganda on the U.S. public. Despite the existence of a 1946 law (the Smith-Mundt Act) forbidding the government to propagandize the public, the practice goes on with impunity. In recent years, the most egregious practice of the art came with the Pentagon's calculated and coordinated use of retired senior military who were also military advisers to the television networks to promote the Pentagon's line on the wars, on military spending, and on pretty much every issue of interest to the Pentagon. Worse yet, the television networks--even after the practice was exposed, and after it became known that many of the participants were also in paid positions with defense contractors and stood to gain personally by promoting the Pentagon's line--failed to acknowledge their own complicity, and almost all cases, continued to use those military advisers in news shows without disclosing either their conflicts of interest or their participation in the Pentagon propaganda effort. Worse still, the Pentagon's IG absolved the Pentagon offices involved of all wrongdoing.

3) As the government's talent for deceit has increased, along with the news media's tolerance of and willingness to participate in that deceit, the government's--and the courts'--intolerance of exposing the truth has only grown. Consider for a moment the press, public and Congressional reactions to the publication of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971. The import of those documents cannot be underestimated--their release prompted illegal retaliations by Nixon's White House, furthering Nixon's inexorable slide toward impeachment, the NY Times went to court to preserve their right to publish, they were read into the Congressional Record by then-Senator Mike Gravel, and their general effect on the public was dramatic, showing for the first time the obstinate pursuit by the military and successive administrations of a goal that was doomed from the start and in no way could be construed as advancing the security of the nation.

Contrast the mood over the leak of the Pentagon Papers with recent leaks. The press, Congress and public alike just wanted the Abu Ghraib mess to go away. There were a few low-level prosecutions of the "just following orders" variety, but the Pentagon and White House leadership were left virtually untouched, and the principal investigator for the Pentagon, Maj. Gen Antonio Taguba, effectively ended his military career by issuing the report--he was seen by the Pentagon's military and civilian leadership as disloyal for doing so. When the NY Times produced a story in 2004 showing conclusively that Bush had violated law in sweeping ways with his domestic surveillance and wiretapping practices, not only did the NY Times withhold the story at Presidential request for nearly a year, until Bush was safely reelected, but, as well, Congress rushed to both immunize the giant telecommunications corporations which profited from assisting the government in illegal operations and to codify the President's illegality in law. The public remained largely uninformed about the ways in which the changes in law affected their Constitutional rights and bewildered by the technicalities. The outrage was confined to a few civil libertarians and progressives who took the time to understood the implications.

Most recently, the Pentagon has sought to openly fight back against unauthorized leaks which threaten its control over the news. The government is actively pursuing the prosecution of Thomas Drake, a former NSA official who leaked information on the NSA's waste of money and resources on its Trailblazer program to a Baltimore reporter. It has formulated what are, in effect, battle plans against WikiLeaks, the independent forum for disclosure of government wrongdoing, and has detained the intelligence analyst who purportedly supplied to WikiLeaks the video of an Apache helicopter attack on two Reuters photographers which killed them and several others, and seriously wounded two children. The press has not pursued the issue of the Pentagon's iron grip on information beyond describing the Pentagon's search for WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, as a "manhunt," as if Assange, an Australian citizen and a journalist, were an internationally dangerous criminal. Maher Arar, the Canadian engineer abducted by the United States and sent to Syria for torture was denied his writ of certiorari by the Supreme Court on Monday last, apparently acting on the Obama's administration's request that the Court not hear his case. Even the Coast Guard, despite protestations otherwise, has apparently attempted to control news of the continuing oil damage in the Gulf on behalf of both BP and the administration, and new restricted flight zones are being created to prevent overflights at altitudes where oil damage can be observed and photographed (the FAA claims safety, while some reporters say the altitude restrictions put them in haze or cloud cover where the damage can't be accurately recorded, and point to lower altitude limits in force before the spill as proof).

4) The war's coming home, in unexpected ways. In societies where militarism and military expansion are a way of life, there's often little consideration of the ways in which the military is used domestically, or the ways in which a system of for-profit military procurement promotes the use of warmaking technology at home. The traditional cautionary note has been that anything the military uses in war can be turned on its own citizens, and the desire for profit can only make that temptation worse. Not only have defense contractors seen law enforcement as a new market for military weapons (think the rapid increase in the use of paramilitary SWAT teams around the country operating with military equipment and tactics), but they are already contemplating the domestic use of equipment designed for the military which the military hasn't even deployed, such as the Active Denial System, the "pain ray" microwave system which has been billed as the ultimate crowd control system. The LRAD sound cannon has already been used in the U.S., recently against both innocent bystanders and protesters of the G20 conference in Pittsburgh. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of the military's attitudes toward dissent. And, if you couldn't see it coming, the push is now on to employ surveillance drones in a variety of capacities inside the U.S. And, quite apart from the paramilitary law enforcement applications, there are the consequences implicit in turning U.S. territory into just another military zone of operations with the creation of Northern Command. Consider, too, the bill created by the Senate's resident neoliberal authoritarian idiot, Joe Lieberman, to give the President the tools and the authority to preside over an internet "kill switch."

5) More and more, we're trying to do all these things--and much more--on the credit card. We have an entrenched wealthy corporate class whose entire existence is devoted to tax avoidance and to getting the government to subsidize them, even in time of war. Unemployment remains doggedly high, and military spending combined with tax cuts for the wealthy is the chief impediment to alleviating that condition. Especially in the last decade or so, we've protected the wealthy and the military at the expense of the vast remainder of the population, coddled corporations and looked the other way at illegal activities, and the result has been financial and societal and environmental chaos. We have instituted, behind closed doors, the sort of corporatism that would have made Mussolini envious.

* * *

All these things are indications of an empire already in decline. Where we are now on that arc of imperial rise and fall, I couldn't begin to say, but, I would hazard a guess that a process which in antiquity took hundreds of years to resolve may now happen, due to near instantaneous communications and lightning-fast transfers of capital, in decades or less.

We cannot say, with any honesty at all, that we are still an open society. We resemble one superficially, but, in fact, the growing national security state and increasing Executive power have subsumed every principled attempt at openness. We continue to say we have a free press, but, in large part, that press acts not as a skeptical adversary of government, but, rather, as a partner (there are exceptions, of course, but they are becoming increasingly rare). We continue to claim the spread of democracy as our inherent right, and yet, in rather stark terms, our civil and Constitutional rights are seen by the government as an impediment to the protection of the national security state, our voting rights, that essential building block of democracy, are compromised--either in theory or in practice--by unauditable electronic systems and our candidates are too often chosen for us by political machines and by a corrupt system of campaign financing (if there's any indication of just how debased the system of voting has become, it's in the huge number of people who don't vote). The government may arbitrarily deny us justice to evade the public disclosure of its own wrongdoing or of embarrassing information.

Increasingly, countries around the world have been stung badly and have rejected our corporatist brand of democracy, which too often comes out of the barrel of a gun, and which too often demands the impoverishment of entire nations in exchange for our "protection." Many of those countries learned, from bitter experience, what happens when the United States trains the foreign leaders it favors, in "democratic" principles.

The ongoing project of the right wing in the United States has been to transform citizens into frightened consumers, and the effort has, thus far, been remarkably successful. The propaganda effort by the right continues to promote economic policies which are intended solely to move wealth upwards, and have apart from that purpose been abject failures.

If there is one single measurement of our decline, however, it is in the sense of futility so many of us feel. With dissent relegated to "free-speech zones," far from the eyes and ears of our representatives, and access to the wheels of government determined by the level of one's campaign contributions, by the seeming abandonment of the middle class and the working poor in favor of the wealthy and the powerful, we have come to believe, grudgingly and against our will, that the government finally has been captured by the post-war elites who will drive the country into the ground in pursuit of money and power, and principally because the distribution of power will become increasingly lopsided over time, our dissolution as a people is inevitable and inexorable.

Mistah Kurtz, he dead...

2010-06-02T13:56:00.000-07:00

... brain-dead.

There's plenty to fault Obama on these past sixteen months, but "optics" is not a "substantive" accounting of those faults.

Obama, whatever else he may be, is not yet in Calvin Coolidge's class of emotionless catatonia. When Dorothy Parker asked, upon hearing of Coolidge's death, "how could they tell?," she wasn't joking, or at least wasn't stretching the truth much to make it conform to wit.

Obama can be faulted for indecision, or not doing what he is capable of doing, etc., but not for failing to be the out-of-control frat boy idiot that his predecessor excelled at being, which I suspect is the unspoken intent of Kurtz's disquisition. Obama is distinctly averse to the "if you're not with us, you're against us," "we're gonna git `em, dead or alive," brand of public speaking, and, Howie, that's a good thing after years of Bush doing the political equivalent of, "hey, hold my beer... now watch this!"

Via Atrios.

Blanche Lincoln calls out her enemy on its...

2010-05-15T21:17:00.000-07:00

... attempt to throw her sorry ass out:

"Just like the far right, I think the far left also believes that you've got to be with them 100 percent of the time or you don't meet the test," Lincoln told the paper. "I don't think there's anybody that you're going to be with 100 percent of the time -- not and be true to your constituency. My first commitment here is to Arkansas." (h/t TPM)

Blanche, fer chrissakes, get a clue. There is no "far left" in this country. You and your conservative friends have been marginalizing anything resembling the left for at least sixty years, and the above is one sorry fuckin' excuse for doing the bidding of the big corporations.

The last sentence I would tend to characterize as a gigantic lie, repeated endlessly, except that Blanche obviously does have Arkansans' interests at heart, because to her mind, Arkansas = MallWart.

Thanks to "Democrats" like Blanche, Arkansas is about a half-step up the economic ladder from Mississippi. Halter certainly will be only marginally better than Lincoln. There should be no illusions about that, but, any improvement is welcome over the corporate shill that is Blanche Lincoln.

But, shit, lady, just cease and desist with this "far left" idiocy. It's no more truthful than saying that politicians are never influenced by the money they get from big contributors. There's never been a far left coalition in this country's national politics. It's a figment of the John Birch Society's imagination (and yours, too, apparently). Hanging around Searcy ain't good for yer sanity.

We're going to need the disclaimer...

2010-05-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

... "I swear, this is not from the Onion" a lot more frequently in the days ahead.

Of course, we were assured that backscatter x-ray wasn't very revealing, and that the operators at TSA would be absolutely professional in its use.

Yeah, right.

Heh...

2010-05-07T07:12:00.001-07:00

... it seems that Eric Cantor's "idea factory" is a bust. He claims Democrats killed it.

I thought that's the way the free market worked--if a factory can't produce a product, let alone one the public will buy, it closes down....

A long time ago...

2010-04-20T08:32:00.000-07:00

... I was wandering around in a nice suburb of Honolulu, looking for things to photograph. I ran across a Lincoln Continental parked in the driveway of a fairly nice house, and on the rear bumper, there was a small, orange square bumper sticker that read, "Hire the Morally Handicapped."

Y'know, I think that bumper sticker came from Wall Street....

Well, yeah, if being a duplicitous, lying asshole...

2010-04-18T10:02:00.000-07:00

... and a whore for votes while in an electoral death match with an insane person is the same as being a "great American," then, I guess you are, John.

Some of us might differ about that equivalency of yours.

If at first you don't succeed in destroying...

2010-04-17T00:46:00.000-07:00

... the country, just change a preposition and try, try again....

That's right! We now have a "Contract From America," a sorta spiffed-up, but trimmed-down version of Newticles' last major debacle, recently introduced by those concerned citizens, the Teabaggers.

Now, if they'd been honest, and called it "Contract Written By Multinational Fatcat Industry For Multinational Fatcat Industry," I might have been a little less inclined to pee on their parade, but, they keep insisting, in so many words, that this is the honest-to-goodness real thing that comes straight from the minds, mouths and asses of the great unwashed masses, reeling though they are from noxious gases.

Let's have a quick perusal of the document that has left us itchy and anxious for its long-overdue arrival:

1. Protect the Constitution: Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does.

Uh, what? "... gives Congress the power to do what the bill does?" How long, exactly, did the great, incisive minds of the Tea Party movement work on that odd bit of doggerel? First of all, nothing in the Constitution allows the Congress to do what's in the bills it passes. Its job is to legislate, and it is the job (done increasingly poorly, I might add) of the Executive to carry out the laws enacted by Congress.

Umm, but, lessee, if we can find something in the Constitution which says something about whether or not Congress can make laws. How about Article 1, Section 1: "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives?" That one's pretty good. And, our Constitutionally-minded friends might stroll through the language of Article 1, Section 8, just to sort of reacquaint themselves with it after many decades of thinking that "Constitution = latter half of the 2nd Amendment + what very little we think we know about the 10th Amendment."

2. Reject Cap & Trade: Stop costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation’s global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures.

This one sounds like it's gonna cause a war between the dirtiest energy producers and the Wall Street traders who are just licking their chops at the prospect of all those carbon credits to be sliced and diced into ever more incomprehensible tranches and converted into derivatives that even extraterrestrial investors can't figure out. But, hey, I give the Koch brothers an A for effort getting that one in. Of course, their motive in doing so is to be the only people on the planet in twenty years with heavy-duty air conditioning.

3. Demand a Balanced Budget: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax hike.

And, of course, we've all seen how wonderfully well California is doing with precisely the same system, controlled from the minority by people equally batshit insane as the people who wrote this manifesto. There's an odd little group of billionaires in this country who think that reducing the budget to just military expenditures and interest on the debt, and then getting the poor and middle class to pay for it would be just peachy for them. There's a name for what they want: feudalism.

Now, I'm all for sensible spending, so, to balance that budget, let's stop the multiple wars, close hundreds of our nearly 1000 bases around the world, tell the military to concentrate on our territorial defense (at which they failed miserably on a certain day in September nearly a decade ago) instead of trying to run the world, end the privatization of government functions and trim that military budget back to true peacetime levels, say, $140 billion a year. That'll get that budget looking smart again. Then let's put taxation levels back to where they were in the 1950s, adjusted for inflation and start paying off some of that accumulated national debt, building a rainy day fund to carry us through difficult economic times and enjoy life a little. Maybe then we'll talk about your silly amendment. If you get what you want right now, you've just locked in decades of continuing misery.

4. Enact Fundamental Tax Reform: Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the internal revenue code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words—the length of the original Constitution.

Of course, this appeals to the knuckleheads on the far right whose math skills barely reach 2nd grade level, and then only if they're on tiptoes. It's a giveaway to the already filthy rich, and it won't pay for nearly the amount of government handouts that all those Red States have been getting since the `30s. There's a damned good reason why somebody like Steve Forbes is pushing this. He's rich, and you're not, and he wants himself richer, and you poorer. It's not hard to figure out. If you bozos really want to simplify the tax code, tell your representatives to eliminate all the subsidies to mature industries and all the tax breaks of which only the rich and prosperous corporations can take advantage.

5. Restore Fiscal Responsibility & Constitutionally Limited Government in Washington: Create a Blue Ribbon taskforce that engages in a complete audit of federal agencies and programs, assessing their Constitutionality, and identifying duplication, waste, ineffectiveness, and agencies and programs better left for the states or local authorities, or ripe for wholesale reform or elimination due to our efforts to restore limited government consistent with the US Constitution’s meaning.

Well, shit, you guys can start on the fiscal responsibility thing by not reelecting the creeps you've been sending to Washington, D.C., who've caused the major part of the problem. They scream about gay marriage and you elect `em, and then they spend 95% of their time trying to figure out ways to give your tax money away to the wealthiest people in the country, so the fatcats will give an infinitesimally small percentage back to those same legislators in the form of election donations. Three Republican Presidents, Reagan and Bushes I & II, are responsible for $9 trillion of that national debt you're worried about. It was that lame psychopathic idiot, Dick Cheney, who said--and all you pinheads believed it as long as Republicans ran things--that "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." Where were your outraged shouts about the deficit then?

Oh, and by the way, if you had actually read that Constitution you're always gleefully waving around, you'd understand that the Constitution already defines the limits on government.

6. End Runaway Government Spending: Impose a statutory cap limiting the annual growth in total federal spending to the sum of the inflation rate plus the percentage of population growth.

Isn't this pretty much the same intent as Items 3, 4 & 5? Oh, and y'all are going to hate this--how do you find out the population growth percentage without doing a census every year? You guys hate the census. Michele Bachmann told me so.

Now, let's imagine that a giant sinkhole opens up and swallows your particular Red State (don't laugh--it's happening all over Florida right now) and you need some help from the federal government. But, oh so sad, the spending cap prevents the rest of us from giving you any help. Or, that climate change that none of you believe is happening spawns a series of giant hurricanes that run right up your cracker asses on the Gulf Coast? Oops, too bad. You'll just have to bail yourselves out, and good luck finding government-backed flood insurance.

7. Defund, Repeal, & Replace Government-run Health Care: Defund, repeal and replace the recently passed government-run health care with a system that actually makes health care and insurance more affordable by enabling a competitive, open, and transparent free-market health care and health insurance system that isn’t restricted by state boundaries.

Oh, yeah, that wonderful "free-market" health care system. You mean the one that's caused the mess we're in? Lessee, those same insurers don't want to lose their exemption from anti-trust law (which is supposed to make for more competition), so you guys don't mention that. But, you do want any insurer to take advantage of the least restrictive and most profitable laws in any state they choose, no matter where they actually do business, which is really a backhanded slap at those states' rights you're always nattering on about, eh? Guess we know who wrote this one for you....

8. Pass an ‘All-of-the-Above” Energy Policy Authorize the exploration of proven energy reserves to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources from unstable countries and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation, lowering prices and creating competition and jobs.

To really address this one, I'd certainly have to go into some of the details of foreign policy and geopolitics that there's just not enough space to do. But, geniuses, here's a clue. Virtually all of our imported energy is coming from countries you rocket scientists think are unstable. Hell, you don't even like Canada because they have a health care system that you think is communist.

Second, "proven reserves" have already been explored--that's how we know they're "proven." And all of those--offshore, in ANWR, the oil shale in Colorado--won't change the ratio of imported oil to domestic oil by more than a few percent. The oil companies aren't interested in reducing the amount of imports (not when they have our military to go into places like Iraq for them, where the extraction costs are next to nothing once there's no one left to kill). They're interested in their stock prices (which go up if their reserves under control go up) and in getting the government subsidies and tax breaks that come from drilling (let's put it this way--without those breaks, no one in his right mind would say, "I'd really like to spend my company's money extracting oil from above the Arctic Circle in winter--I love doing business in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet").

As for those regulatory barriers, I guess you would mean, oh, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act, and not drilling in national parks, and having the freedom to dump drilling and toxic wastes wherever a company pleases, right? Gee, I know who wrote this clause for you, because even you're not that stupid and greedy.

9. Stop the Pork Place a moratorium on all earmarks until the budget is balanced, and then require a 2/3 majority to pass any earmark.

Pork Place? That's right next to Boardwalk, isn't it? This is fine, actually. Except that the people you've been electing are the power pork producers to beat `em all. The Democrats certainly have been trying in this regard, but remember this one name: Jack Abramoff. He dealt exclusively with Republicans, and that was his job--to get pork and beneficial legislation for his clients. And he's in jail. And so are some of his legislator friends.

Moreover, what is your legislator going to say about not being able to bring home any government projects and dollars to your district. Are you then going to complain that the government isn't being fair to you? Or are you going suffer silently, or, more likely, blame it on the Democrats? As I say, I'm fine with no earmarks--they're a way of directing money around normal oversight procedures and open bidding rules, and that's wrong. But, keep in mind, it was your friends in government who turned the process into an art form.

10. Stop the Tax Hikes: Permanently repeal all tax hikes, including those to the income, capital gains, and death taxes, currently scheduled to begin in 2011.

All you want to talk about is taxes. Sheesh. Metaphorically, 99 and 44/100ths of a percent of you aren't affected by any of these rate changes. And they're not "tax hikes." Those are changes that expire from previous rates. The only people affected by these are very well-to-do, maybe the top one percent of earners. In the case of income tax changes, if you're of average income, your income taxes have already gone down further than with the Bush-era tax cuts, and aren't going to go up.

Most people don't own stock that's affected by capital gains. You may indirectly have some stock in an IRA or a mutual fund, but, because that's mostly deferred income, you pay income taxes on it as it's withdrawn during retirement. If you're like most people, you have a primary home, and if you sell it, there's an exemption from capital gains if you buy another house in a given period of time.

And they're not "death taxes." Boy, what a fuckin' sucker you are to believe that one. It's inheritance tax, and, IIRC, it was first employed by Lincoln to pay the costs of war (which, by the way, is one of the huge current reasons for that deficit that you're always goin' on about). And, unless you're very lucky and hit the lottery, it's highly unlikely to affect you, especially if you're married, because it doesn't apply to estates under $2 million for married couples. And, hey, what do you care anyway? You're dead (and contrary to popular belief, you just can't take it with you).

Your 2.1 kids get it. And even if you're not obscenely wealthy, they'll get plenty enough to behave badly with your money, if that's what you're looking forward to in life.

Each and every one of these demands are those of very wealthy, greedy people, because they'll have no effect whatsoever on you, except, no matter what you put in your little manifesto, if the rich get tax breaks, you or your descendants will have to pick up the slack, one way or another.

The very, very rich want you, very, very determinedly, to think you'll benefit from such a demand. They tell you that the mean, ol' nasty government will get smaller if you insist on it. It won't. It got bigger during Reagan's term, bigger still during Bush I's years, somewhat bigger under Clinton, and hugely bigger during Bush II's eight years. You should know by now that every time a rich jerk like Pete Peterson tells you to be scared of something, or that you've got to do something for your own good, he's lying to you. He wants you to do something for his good.

So, let's sum it all up, teabaggers. Your manifesto is a collection of buzz words and slogans, which have been fed to you by right-wing news and opinion outlets controlled by very, very wealthy people, who need you to do their bidding, and it's very apparent that you've given virtually no thought to the ramifications of any of this. Second, you're being hustled by experts. They've convinced you that these are your ideas, when, in fact, they are theirs. How can I be sure of that? Because all of these things will screw you and further enrich them.

You've not done the policy work to sustain any of this. How big is the government now, and how much smaller do you think it should be? How big should the government be to handle international affairs in a complex world and live up to its Constitutional requirements to more than 300 million people? Have you considered that a flat tax might harm you, rather than help you, or your relatives? Cui bono? Who really benefits? If you live in a state where the federal dollars coming in are greater than those being paid out (most of the so-called Red States), eliminating earmarks, for example, will cause your local economy to suffer. You and your neighbors will be worse off, not better.

Most importantly, let's say you get everything you want. Will you be happier? I doubt it. In fact, I think you'll be fuckin' miserable, if only because you'll be living in a country measurably worse off than it is even now. And, you'll blame it on someone else, because that's what you've been trained to do by the same people that put you up to this nonsense. You're trying to live in an imaginary time and an imaginary place that sort of looks like what you remember the idyllic 1950s to be, as seen through a gauzy, nostalgic lens (which, by the way, was when the top nominal income tax rate was 91%, the capital gains tax was almost double what it is now and union membership was fully a third of the workforce).

If the last thirty years are any indication, the deficit will grow ever larger, regardless of your grand demand to balance the budget, the country will become progressively under greater control of the very same banks that caused the recent meltdown, the trade deficit will mushroom, your children will fight more wars, and the amount of money that will go to richest 1/10th of a percent of the people will skyrocket. And you'll be out of fuel in thirty years and shivering in the winter and sweating your ass off in the summer and wondering why the government didn't do something about that. And you'll have a lot of time to think about it, because you'll have to walk everywhere you want to go.

And, if you get what you want, it will be entirely your own fault.

Well, maybe, we're all just fucked...

2010-04-06T23:48:00.000-07:00

... beyond repair.

The latest horrors released by WikiLeaks are just beyond description. And yet, both left and right are trying, desperately, to say that our soldiers are good, noble, and perennially the good guys.

Lies. Abject, horrible lies.

Finally, finally, finally, I've come to the conclusion that this country is a criminal enterprise, and that even my military service in the Vietnam era was in furtherance of criminal activity.

Our nation--by many different measures--is consumed by corruption, and I do not know how to fix that problem, have no means of effecting any positive change.

Frankly, I wish I could escape to some neutral country and make some honorable life for myself and forget the United States forever, and yet, I don't even have the money to do that after a lifetime of living in this rigged game.

It's crummy to say it, but, it's true. The poor--no matter how honest and sensible they may be--cannot win in a nation in which the rich are able to use their much greater money to their own advantage.

The Founders could never have anticipated what has happened to their dream. It's just plain fuckin' dead, and the Tea Partiers don't have a clue as to why. They're stooges.

I feel stupid and used and used up. Like a whole helluva lot of other people.

No, I'm not surprised by...

2010-03-18T12:09:00.000-07:00

... the sudden "rally around the President" tone in the rather pathetic attempts to get Dem skeptics to sign on to a very bad health "reform" bill.

Ah, well, the Dems were destined to shoot themselves in the foot. That's their nature.

We wanted a brand-new shiny 60 mpg hybrid, and we got a smoking, wheezing 1961 Nash Rambler with bad ball joints and rusted rocker panels and a busted exhaust.

And it's gonna cost us more than that spiffy new hybrid, because the salesmen were all in cahoots with each other.

I don't see much to be happy about, and I have a lot of company. And, sorry, but I don't buy a lot of the rhetoric coming out of Congress at the moment, especially the "OMG, if we don't do it now, we won't do anything on health care for another forty years" argument. They could, if they wanted, admit that they've created a monster, pitch it in the wastebasket, and start over with the best possible plan tomorrow.

But, that would also mean that young Mr. Obama would have to admit to himself that the Repugs don't want to play nice and don't want to be his friends, and Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi would have to do their jobs and kick out the lobbyists and get their troops in line.

As it is, persistent reminders of the elections coming up are supposed to rally the troops and cut the internecine warfare, which--at this stage of the game--is pretty much pointless. The Dems fucked themselves the moment they embarked on this corrupted process, the moment they started letting the Repugs and the for-profit system own them, the moment that Obama started making back-room deals with the very people who created the health care crisis in this country. The public understands this, even if Rahm Emanuel doesn't, and the public will make the Dems pay for it, even if the alternative is worse. This is, after all, a nation of people who have consistently voted against their own best interests time and time again, often out of ignorance and prejudice, but just as frequently out of hot-headed revenge.

When polls were saying, two years ago, that a nominal 65% of the country was in favor of a single-payer system, the Dems could have said to themselves, "hey, we might get more votes than we can buy with corporate advertising dollars if we give the people what they want!" They didn't. Through their leadership, they said, "sorry, citizens, no single-payer for you. It's off the table." Then, there was the "robust public option," which was quickly watered down to the weak public option, and then, thanks to the collusion between the White House and the for-profits, there was no public option at all, but, the individual mandate language remained. At each one of these steps, the Repugs gained power. At each one of these steps, public polling indicated that fewer and fewer people were in favor of the reform plan as written.

And the worse the plan got, the more that was revealed of Obama's dirty dealings, the more that progressives tried to hold firm against a very bad bill, the more that the Dem leadership engaged in "rally around the President" cheerleading, the more that this has come to be seen as a do-or-die moment for Obama's presidency.

As if getting this piece of ripe shit passed and signed is a real accomplishment.... Nevertheless, we'll be able to count on much flag-waving and back-slapping and press releases describing the passage as "historic," when the only thing historic about it will be the money made off of it by people with entirely too much money already.

Enjoy that Rambler, y'hear, America? And, no, we don't warrant that it will get you to the polls in November....

Well, why not be more than just a little bit peeved...

2010-03-16T21:23:00.000-07:00

... at this horseshit from the White House?

This is just more of the same, is it not?

Now, just to refresh one's memory, there's this from Scott Armstrong, on the 20th anniversary of the founding of the National Security Archive, which I paraphrase as follows: the greatest amount of effort the Executive Branch expends on national security issues is keeping the American people and the press from knowing what it's doing, the next largest effort is in keeping Congress from knowing, the next largest effort is in keeping other agencies from knowing what it is doing, the next largest effort is in keeping our allies from knowing what it is doing, and the least amount of effort is devoted to keeping our adversaries from knowing what it is doing.

C'mon--if Scott Armstrong is right (and I think he is), it means that the ultimate goal of any President is to keep the American people completely in the fuckin' dark about what's being done on behalf of the elite in this country.

There's something totally upside-down about that.

And yet, Obama is preaching that he's fostered openness in government?

That's fraudulent. That's just the worst kind of spin.

At the same time that Obama is touting his openness initiatives, he's allowing his DoJ to use the state secrets privilege to prevent the advancement of all manner of cases before federal courts that could embarrass the government, and has resisted all efforts which might, in some ways, limit his power as the Executive.

Beyond that, the largest proportion of government agencies bound by his directive haven't done a damned thing to improve the situation.

Obama, additionally, has not made any effort to promote a whistleblower protection act for national security employees.

It's pretty much all window-dressing and bullshit unless there's a determined effort to undo the unnecessary secrecy that has enveloped the country since the end of WWII.

Like the battered and cheated-upon wife, the public is the last to know of its government's indiscretions. It's about time that it stopped, but, Obama, captured as he has been by his advisors, is unable to do it.

By definition, if one does not open government to criticism where it deserves same, one does not have an open government. We, the public, are being punked, over and over again, and we take it because we believe the horseshit we're fed, about "terrorism," about "sources and methods," about the need for the President to have "executive privilege" to obtain "frank advice."

It's all lies. It's all about keeping us as uninformed and as stupid as is humanly possible, and, honestly, I don't know how to fix it. I think it's beyond fixing. Yeah, Obama's right. He's got a gift.

But, it isn't for any semblance of the truth.

We've been living with lies for the last sixty years, ever since the creation of the national security state, and we should not have any expectation that the situation will improve any time soon. When we elect a supposed Constitutional scholar who thinks it's okay to assassinate U.S. citizens on speculation, well, we're all just plain fucked is what we are....

Ah, Kremlinology....

2010-03-11T02:36:00.000-08:00

Back in the bad old days of the Soviet Union, everyone wanted to know (even those in the Soviet Union) what was up inside the Kremlin, despite the opaque nature of Moscow's doings.

Over time, people would try to divine what they believed to be the truth from who stood next to Brezhnev as he reviewed the May Day parade, which attaché attended the U.S. embassy's latest soiree, how many days in a row the General Secretary hid out in his dacha during a particular August.

It was a little like reading tea leaves, and about as accurate, even though there were times when there seemed to be a sense of urgency about such prognostications, particularly in those frenetic days and weeks and months after Brezhnev's death, when the Soviet Union seemed to change leaders faster than most people changed their shoes--Brezhnev followed by Andropov, Andropov by Chernenko, Chernenko by Gorbachev, all in the space of a very few years.

No such divinations were perceived as necessary in the United States, mostly because its political establishment and its press were firmly entrenched in the myth that the U.S. was an open society and its political dealings were for all to see, despite the fact that anyone and everyone who'd ever had a conversation with the President could invoke Executive privilege to remain silent, even under oath, about any matter discussed, even if it was what to have for lunch.

Over the decades, though, the press increasingly has come to engage in the White House version of Kremlinology, wherein White House sources dispense little pellets of innuendo or PR spin to reporters who, in turn, guarantee those sources anonymity. The latest of these bits of intrigue is Rahm Emanuel's apparent preening on the Washington stage, in which anonymity of sources figures prominently.

Of course, it's the first reaction and wholly appropriate to place the blame on those reporters who trade anonymity for access, in order to stay in the good graces of the ruling elite, but, that strikes me as little different than what Pravda did back in the day, and the White House's actions are certainly no different than the way the Politburo behaved. Any time a White House source will not go on the record, a good reporter should assume he or she is being spun for political effect, usually to benefit the individual or, as frequently, the occupant of the Oval Office, and yet, the practice continues with dreary regularity, even though the good reporter also should know that the ultimate beneficiary is not the public record, and, as well, the good reporter should know that he or she is being used to promote an interest that is entirely suspect and that the occupants of the White House cannot accomplish such ends without the complicity of the reporter.

Still, it goes on and on and on, and serves little purpose but to create some churn in the news cycle. How is this any different from Kremlinology, and what does this process say about the United States as an open society?

I've been watching...

2010-03-05T04:48:00.000-08:00

... tonight, the 1967 film version of Joyce's Ulysses, which could be nothing more than flawed, given the impossibility of compressing the many hundreds of pages of Joyce's dense and intricately layered text into two hours of film.

But, still, I remember going to a viewing of the film while in graduate school, decades ago, and at its conclusion, encountering a bitter, unhappy Irishman who happened to teach the criticism course in which I was enrolled, and who, as we all were leaving, remarked, "it's like a bad home movie of one's home town."

I suspect that the Irish academic, many years ago, found Bloom's existence a bit too close to his own life, and had to reject it out of hand in self-defense. The film is hardly a bad home movie of Dublin, whatever else it might not be.

Well, that's an interesting take...

2010-02-24T18:33:00.000-08:00

... on "peace." The New York Times reports yesterday that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates thinks that the "demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st...."

Most countries in NATO, apart from the U.S., have militaries suitable to their territorial defense, and probably in excess of any threat they might encounter (near zero, these days). The U.S., on the other hand, has been overspending for so long that it thinks overspending is normal.

Aside from that, how to deconstruct the notion that not buying huge new weapons systems is "an impediment to... lasting peace?" Gates is not only being positively Orwellian here, he's also being highly disingenuous. What he means, of course, is that the well-to-do NATO countries aren't spending enough on U.S. weapons. They're cheating U.S. arms manufacturers out of profits!

Some of this has to do with the government of the Netherlands falling due to its continuing participation in the Afghanistan debacle. Some of it, undoubtedly, is also due to recent calls for the U.S. to remove its nuclear weapons from EU countries. However, just step back and wonder in amazement at the insanity of suggesting that not doing what the U.S. wants is an "impediment to peace." The United States has not only been at war for going on nine years in Afghanistan (as have a number of NATO allies) and nearly seven years in Iraq, but has broadened those wars into Pakistan and Yemen. In those areas, there is no peace.

Where has there been peace for more than sixty years? Yup, that region which had been previously the focal point of wars for more than ten centuries--Western Europe. Precisely the place that Gates now wants to start overarming itself, presumably so it can go on supporting U.S. aims far afield from NATO's core territorial interests.

Consider the possibilities, though. If Western EU countries start spending on defense at the horribly excessive rates which the U.S. has come to view as ordinary, the money will have to come from somewhere, very likely encouraging a diminution of the European social safety net, which may bring on both internal civil strife (along with a corresponding lopsided distribution of wealth as in the U.S.) and cross-border economic conflicts. If those appear and intensify, the gross expansion of various militaries in Europe might result in use of the military inside those newly militaristic countries, or for the use of one's military against neighboring countries. Ultimately, a breakdown of cooperation inside the EU would probably bring an end to the EU.

Exactly the sort of problems common to Europe prior to the end of WWII. Western Europe has avoided war in its region by not following the example of the U.S., and it's getting well-weary of the decision to follow the U.S. into Afghanistan, because of NATO commitments, after nearly a decade of stasis in Afghanistan. The dissolution of the coalition government in Holland over Afghanistan is evidence enough of that.

One could see the first indications of this U.S. pressure to suddenly increase arms budgets in U.S. relations with Canada after 9/11. Canada, with a population of only 35 million or so, couldn't possibly meet the demands of the Bush administration to greatly increase defense spending without sacrificing in other ways--the most obvious being virtual abandonment of its national health care system, which, at the time, seemed the most likely underlying reason for the Bushies' demands. Can't have a workable public health system so close to the U.S., as a desire for one might rub off on us....

Virtually all of the first-world nations today can afford social safety nets that minimize the sort of civil strife that tore apart Germany between the two world wars because they don't spend absurd amounts of money on war materiel, large standing armies, or war itself. As the U.S. continues to decline in power and influence, because of its military and war spending, the more it will try to spend on those items in a vain attempt to stem that decline, and the more stark the contrast will become between the relatively stable countries of Western Europe and the increasingly unstable United States.

This across-the-bow shot by Gates at Western Europe has nothing to do with actual military requirements, and much to do with that growing contrast.

Why is that, when reading this...

2010-02-22T22:14:00.000-08:00

... account of XPAC, the line, "How about a Fresca?," keeps running through my head?

Uh, Mr. Obama... about those two guys...

2010-02-19T15:12:00.000-08:00

... you picked to straighten out government spending (read: slashing Social Security and Medicare), you know--Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson?

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

You've got new polls out that suggest:

Sixty percent (60%) of voters think that neither Republican political leaders nor Democratic political leaders have a good understanding of what is needed today. Thirty-five percent (35%) say Republicans and Democrats are so much alike that an entirely new political party is needed to represent the American people.

Nearly half of all voters believe that people randomly selected from the phone book could do as good a job as the current Congress.

Recent BLS data show that lower-income, less-educated workers are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the unemployed (those with less than a high-school education are 51% of the unemployed/underemployed), and this same poll says these are exactly the same people who feel least-represented by government today.

And, here you are, appointing two fiscal jerks who want to create more poor people....

One would think that you and the Dems would be doing your best to clean up your act--to marginalize the DLC/New Democrat types that think emulating Republicans is a good thing. When you get this kind of polling--that says people think there's no discernible difference between the Repugs and Dems--it's about time the Dems woke up and smelled the coffee. Ladies and germs, you've got a problem, and that problem isn't that your Wall Street bankster contributors are fickle friends.

Bowles and Simpson say that you say "everything is on the table."

That's a lie, and you know it. No one will say one substantive word about the twenty-nine-ton gorilla in the living room--horribly inflated military/national security and war costs. Those are just the costs of doing big business (except that big business isn't paying their share of those costs--we are).

If they--and you--simply refuse to acknowledge the obvious, the only conclusion one can draw is that they--and you--are willfully stupid.

We are paying combined national security and war costs of approximately a trillion dollars a year and that's the huge, dominant share of discretionary spending, and the prime reason for deficits, and those costs have been inflated by a conscious program of privatizing and outsourcing national security tasks and by weapons programs that are, too often, make-work for military contractors and/or are wish-fulfillments for every wet dreamer in the Pentagon. We are, quite simply, breaking the budget to further enrich the corporate world.

So, what do you do? You appoint people who want to privatize Social Security and gut Medicare. How do I know that? Because that's the first thing they wanted to talk about upon appointment. They weren't talking about slashing military spending and ending idiotic, illegal wars.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

[And, on edit, I'll bet these two bozos are not about to say anything about bringing the top marginal rates back into line with the pre-Reagan days, or, heaven forfend, the 94% rate during the last declared war. These accumulating deficits have occurred because we spend, militarily, as if we are at war (and then add war costs on top of that), and yet, we do our absolute best not to tax the rich, who benefit from war, to pay for those wars. That's just plain dumb.]

Ah, I see that CPAC is in full swing...

2010-02-18T22:48:00.000-08:00

... and Shooter and Junior have been returned to the fold. There have been many stirring addresses by people held in the high opinion of the greedy and undemocratic, even as many of those orators have used teleprompters to make jokes about Obama using teleprompters.

It's difficult to sum up in a single sentence such a complex menagerie of political charlatans as is CPAC, but, H.L. Mencken comes close:

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

The great conundrum of CPAC, year upon year, is that its participants always seem to be so damned jolly about being fed shit sandwiches. Must be the size of the portions....

Might this be a more pervasive problem...

2010-02-13T11:43:00.000-08:00

... than even Greenwald surmises?

Glenn looks at this from the viewpoint of how Guantanamo has perverted the justice system, and he's, to my mind, quite right in his estimation.

However, I've been thinking about this at a more mundane level for some time. Where I live, jury duty is a protracted business. One must be on call and available for three months, every three years, so, more than people in other areas, I find myself called for a lot of trials.

Invariably, during those jury deliberations, there is a tendency on the part of jurors to dispose of cases quickly, and jury forepersons will often call for an initial vote without much deliberation. Often, those initial votes produce, roughly averaged, a two-thirds majority for conviction. Only when there are holdouts does the actual business of deliberation and examination of the evidence begin, and not always in earnest.

This general trend to unqualified belief in the government's position has bothered me, because it runs counter to the whole point of a "jury of one's peers." That principle, long-held in jurisprudence, assumes that ordinary people, in the face of the considerable accumulated power of the government, will be more inclined to defend the innocence of one of their own than to side with a powerful state that could just as easily, capriciously or mistakenly, put them in jeopardy, too.

And yet, in practice, exactly the opposite happens. Certainly, in some instances, the government's case affirms racial or ethnic prejudices in a given jury. I've seen that happen. But, for the largest part, the most powerful force in effect at the moment deliberations begin is the mere fact that the prosecution has brought a case to trial. For the largest percentage of jurors, that seems to lend more credence to the proceedings than the evidence presented. That's the near-religious faith in the government's infallibility of which Greenwald speaks.

That's a very worrisome trend, for a whole host of reasons. First, of course, is that the average juror is unaware of the circumstances leading to trial--the desperation to produce a suspect might lead an investigation to people who are innocent. Second, the average juror is likely not to understand the ways in which a prosecutor can lead a jury to conclusions that the evidence does not support (I've seen prosecutors use opening and closing remarks, for example, to assert a truth for which they presented no evidence whatsoever, and that works on some jurors). Nor do jurors see the increasingly bitter relationship between prosecutors and defense lawyers regarding the production of evidence (I've seen prosecutors hand previously-undisclosed evidence to the defense moments before a trial began, when there's no time to evaluate that evidence, in order to technically comply with rules of discovery and yet still leave the defense at a disadvantage), and the general trend of prosecutors to see winning cases as the highest priority, with truth and justice of considerably lesser importance.

I don't have any firm conclusions about the reasons for this phenomenon, just best guesses. Media and politicians focus on crime because it's a hot-button issue for most people. People, quite naturally, fear having their lives disrupted by criminals, and it's of little consolation to them that per capita crime rates have, in the very long term, been declining. To many people, that's just statistics, and doesn't have the emotional impact of the nightly news.

Civics education may play a role, too. I've encountered jurors who adamantly believe that the entire system is backwards--that the proper way to proceed is the assumption of guilt, not innocence (and, when asked if they themselves would prefer that sort of treatment, often answer that they're not criminals, and if brought to trial could easily prove they were not guilty--a self-delusion if ever there was one).

For most of the last century, the state has also enlisted science as its ally, even though the question of whether or not the science is properly applied or is rigorous enough to be conclusive is still an open question in most trials, and most jurors are ill-equipped to evaluate scientific findings, no matter how many episodes of CSI they may have watched. Perhaps the most egregious recent example is that of the use of fingerprint analysis to arrest Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer accused of complicity in the Madrid train bombings. The FBI specifically, and law enforcement generally, has promoted in the public mind the notion that fingerprint evidence is specific, unique and foolproof (in some absolute sense, this is true--even identical twins have different fingerprints), and yet, the Mayfield case showed that the manner in which fingerprint evidence is interpreted is perishingly far from conclusive and absolute. (Mayfield's case also shows fairly clearly that loose interpretation of the evidence may simply be the wedge by which the state manipulates the judicial system toward a desired end. Mayfield was a family law lawyer with connections to the Muslim community and was assumed by the government--without any evidence--to be a material witness in the aiding and abetting of terrorism, in part because he defended one of the so-called Portland Seven. His arrest on the fingerprint evidence enabled exceedingly broad search warrants of his home and office which the government hoped would yield incriminating evidence, or items which could be nuanced as material support for terrorism. Those search warrants would likely not have been approved by any court without the FBI affirmation of a positive fingerprint match--evidence which turned out to be completely erroneous and which was based on inadequate and superficial analysis. Why the government decided to look at Mayfield's fingerprint for a match--among the hundreds of millions of individual prints in its files--hasn't been properly explained.)

Paradoxically, prosecutors have been vigorous in protesting the introduction of new DNA evidence in settled cases for which there have been convictions. The state's belief in science apparently does not extend so far as its use in calling the state's infallibility into question. Of the many cases which the Innocence Project, for example, has successfully reopened, virtually all have depended upon scientific technologies such as DNA mapping, and a significant percentage of those overturned cases show prosecutorial or law enforcement misconduct in the extraction of false confessions for use at trial. (Here, one can find direct analogues in the use of torture at Guantanamo, to both extract false confessions from suspects and false testimony from witnesses.)

Fast fading, too, is the ancient prescription of Maimonides that "[i]t is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death." This is not the sort of thinking that dominates the mind of the average juror walking into a jury room, and yet, it should. Somehow, and for reasons I don't completely understand, many jurors are able to divorce what treatment they would wish for themselves from what the state intends for others. Perhaps, because they are generally law-abiding, they simply cannot imagine any circumstance in which their lives or liberty might be threatened by the state, and yet, examples abound of law-abiding citizens finding themselves in the position of defending themselves against a state system heavily weighted in favor of the state. Think, for a moment, about the thousands of teenagers wrongly sentenced to juvenile detention in the case of the two corrupt judges in Pennsylvania. The general presumption of most of those concerned was that the judges were acting in accordance with law, and even those in the legal system who were suspicious of their actions deferred to them because they were perceived as politically powerful. That case is a prime example of how the power of the state can be misused, and yet, there's little skepticism on the part of jurors, generally, about whether individuals with the power of the state behind them are behaving properly, dispassionately and without self-interest.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to a population increasingly deferential to authority, and tolerant of the use of force, both physical and prosecutorial, by the authorities, the root cause of which is likely fear. Fear of crime is often a more powerful motivator than actual personal experience of crime. Fear of terrorism clearly inclines one toward a dependence upon authority to a much greater degree than terrorism itself (Nate Silver estimates the odds of being a victim of airborne terrorism as about 1 in 10,000,000, while the odds of being struck by lightning are about 1 in 500,000, and yet, there's a helluva lot more fear of terrorism than of lightning, and much more expectation that government do something to allay one's fears of terrorism).

So, is there a chicken or egg feature to this fear? Is government, generally or specifically, encouraging this fear in order to advance its authority? It would certainly seem so if one looks at the last eight years' worth of governmental excesses in the name of fighting terror and the concomitant diminishment of civil rights which has been a result of those anti-terror programs. Even at the local level, ordinary people are remarkably tolerant of police use of tasers, even when it's apparent that their use is intended to enforce deference to authority, just so long as local politicians portray the taser as a law enforcement tool which enhances law and order.

Perhaps it's just human nature to think it's okay to cast off rights which one doesn't expect to have regular need of in daily life, if government promises increased security by doing so. It might also be simple human nature to think of suspected criminals as having lives different than one's own which incline them to suspicion (and presumed guilt). And, perhaps, it is these inclinations which prompt many people to find comfort in the government's depiction of some "other" as an existential enemy not worthy of rights, even when that presumed enemy is a fellow citizen.

The increasingly authoritarian character of our society today should rest uneasily on people's shoulders, and ought to prompt a rational skepticism of government, rather than blind trust. It was that unwarranted trust that Dietrich Bonhoeffer addressed when he said: "First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."

The first place that such skepticism ought to be in evidence is in the cloistered rooms of the nation's juries, but, in my experience, it often is not, for many of the same reasons that torture and indefinite detention by an increasingly powerful government are too often tolerated by people who have yet to find themselves in need of those human and civil rights they see as an impediment to the state's aims and intentions, which they credulously assume are the same as their own.

Move over, Dougie Feith...

2010-02-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

... there's a new dumbest guy on the planet.

[Usual mumblings about right-wing chickenhawk intellectuals getting other people killed and never having to bear any responsibility for their war cheerleading. At least Goebbels, the great propagandist for war and empire, had the decency to commit suicide when his empire came apart at the seams....]

If he were smart...

2010-02-01T10:08:00.000-08:00

... Punxsutawney Phil would just say, "fuck it," and stay inside tomorrow.

Because, when the fate of the world is in these hands, we're pretty much screwed:

Every so often at Davos you have a short, startling conversation which completely changes the way you think about a subject — and I just had one of those standing next to Dan Barber, the chef of Blue Hill Farm. He’s a very smart, very funny guy, who’s passionate about food on every level from preparing the ingredients of the dishes in his restaurants to the logistics of feeding the planet.

I bumped into Barber as we were milling around the Davos conference center, waiting for the panel on “rethinking how to feed the world” to begin. I asked him what he thought of the food in Switzerland; he compared in [sic] unfavorably to what he was fed by the airline on the way over here. “I haven’t seen a vegetable since Thursday,” he added, looking a bit overwhelmed by the number of things that the Swiss seem to be able to do with bread, cheese, and bit of veal.
When the panel started, I could almost see the steam coming out of Barber’s ears. It featured two heads of state; two agribusiness CEOs; a representative from the World Bank; and Bill Gates. [emphasis added]

Ah, Davos, where the rich and powerful come to save the world. I keep wondering if Gates suggested shutting down the world for a minute and restarting it.

Selling ice to Eskimos....

2010-01-26T01:42:00.000-08:00

After the Supreme Court decision last week, there's been no shortage of outrage about the Five Stooges on the bench handing over the country's elections to corporate control, and no small amount of it over the fact that recent appointees, during their nomination hearings, promised to be moderate and to respect precedent, when, in fact, they turned out to be the raging Federalist Society aristocratic bulls-in-the-judicial-china-shop everyone knew from their histories, pre-nomination, that they would be. C'mon, boys and girls, that's why they were nominated by Bush.

By now, maybe it's essential to understand that nomination hearings are mostly cynical exercises--dog-and-pony shows--that only hint at, rather than explicate, the underlying issues of ideology and competency that all the participants understand much more completely than does the citizen observer.

Nomination hearings, though, are just symptoms of a larger problem: we're the most propagandized people on the planet. Oh, yeah, I hear the wails of protest, that we're a democracy, we're free, we have more information available to us than any society in history.

Too bad that most of that information is pure, unadulterated horseshit. George Carlin probably said it best:

"The table has tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people: white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good, honest, hard-working people continue--these are people of modest means--continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all! At all! At all! And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day, because the owners of this country know the truth. It’s called the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it."

What's putting people to sleep is the most sophisticated propaganda effort ever mounted in world history. That propaganda is a combination of what the government says through the media, what corporate advertising says to the public through the media and how corporate astroturfed public relations spin spreads virally through society unimpeded.

Much of it depends upon the lessons learned from the father of modern advertising, Edward Bernays, who developed many of his ideas while advising the government on how to move public opinion to support for Woodrow Wilson's entry of the U.S. into WWI, a policy decision that was generally unpopular among the public. What was critically different about Bernays' approach to public relations was that he actively employed the ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, and the psychology of mass movements to, as he put it, the "engineering of consent."

Think about it. The government, beginning in WWI, began to employ techniques to mold public opinion that depended less and less on appeal to rational thought processes, and more and more on manipulation of the subconscious, and, at the same time, began to create law to enforce the government's policy positions, the Sedition Act and the Espionage Act.

By the end of WWI, Bernays was teaching courses in modern public relations at what is now New York University, and published the first comprehensive book on the subject of public relations, Crystallizing Public Opinion.

It's probably no accident that, not long afterward, American big business began its first major campaign to suck money out of the pockets of ordinary people by convincing them that debt equaled wealth. The result was a decade of bubbles culminating in the Great Depression.

At the end of WWII, the GI Bill helped train a new generation of technocrats, and among them, advertising and public relations professionals, many of whom found employment on both Madison Avenue and in government, a relationship explored in detail by Adam Curtis in his four-part BBC series, "The Century of the Self." From that time onward, both advertising and government propaganda became radically more sophisticated, orders of magnitude more subtle in terms of disguising the motives behind the messaging, and in recent years, has depended more and more upon the neurological research of the cognitive sciences.

The question today, given that history, is whether or not any of us have much free will left to exercise democratically. What portion of our opinions, if any, is independent of subconscious influence directed at us by the powerful in society? We know from bitter recent experience that psychologically damaging torture techniques such as sensory deprivation and sleep starvation can "rewire" the brain (Jose Padilla's lawyers, for example, said that he was resistant to cooperating in his own defense because he thought that might somehow injure George W. Bush). The core intent of such methods is to reduce the person to the state of an infant, without memory, without history, upon which new ideas can be "imprinted." Those shock (and morally shocking) methods, in the minds of the torturers, are the most efficient in terms of the time required to achieve that breakdown of brain function. What if, however, similar effects can be achieved less radically over longer periods of time?

One of the most puzzling aspects of modern American society is the persistence of a significant percentage of voters who, unaccountably, seem to vote consistently against their own economic interests. Many of those people are either single-issue voters, or are attracted to so-called "family values" candidates. They are against abortion law, for example, even though nothing in that law mandates that they themselves participate in abortion. The position is often described as a morally inflexible affirmation of life, but, paradoxically, many of its adherents also believe in the state's right to put criminals to death, as well as in the state's right to engage in wars of choice which inevitably have as a consequence the deaths of large numbers of innocents. Moreover, the candidates for whom they vote, while expressing sympathies against abortion, overwhelmingly seem disinclined to actually change the law, even when they are in control of government, and who are also ideologically inclined, once in government, to favor the interests of the rich and powerful.

Putting aside for a moment the question of the moral implications of abortion, since it is not germane to the current topic, what remains is a remarkably irrational hodgepodge of contradictions. I myself have tried at times to describe those contradictions as consistent with the personality profile of followers of right-wing authoritarianism, but, I sometimes wonder if those contradictions--precisely because the internal logic of them is so inconsistent--are the result of modern propaganda techniques, especially since they seem to result in political and economic advantage for the wealthy elite in this country.

It's difficult to pinpoint the germination of trends, so, it's probably not good scholarship to ascribe to a trend just one single source, but, for purposes of discussion, let's explore a trend and its possible place of birth. In many ways, 1970 was a watershed year in modern history. We saw a polarization of society only rivalled by that in effect today. Huge demonstrations against a futile war encouraged that polarization, as did a new trend of scientifically-based environmentalism. Underlying these many schisms was a generational clash of philosophies about the way society should be structured. In the main, one can label them as an older dominant culture and a younger counter-culture, but, to my mind, what mattered was the way the moneyed classes felt threatened by the ideas of that counter-culture, and there's no better place to see their fears than in what is now referred to as the Powell Manifesto.

In many ways, Powell's memo is an historical and literary document, worthy of serious study on its own, but, it's also worthwhile to think of it as the beginning of a major societal trend that persists today. First, Powell's language is that of war--he talks from the start about the counter-culture's "attack" on what he believes is the very heart of the country--big business. The nature of that attack? A rejection of materialism for its own sake, the repudiation of mindless consumerism, of keeping up with the Joneses, and an abhorrence of the principles of planned obsolescence and disposability. Powell gussies up his argument with what he thinks are persuasive examples of anarchic disrespect for law and order, but, like disingenuous autobiography, Powell knows that everything he cites are threats to the continuing accumulation of profit by his class (Powell himself was moderately well-to-do, but, as a lawyer, he was almost exclusively in the service of powerful corporations).

It's worth noting here that at the turn of that decade, hippies weren't the only threat to profit. Japan was economically ascendant, as was Western Europe--particularly West Germany. Domestic oil production had peaked. The insiders knew that, but the public didn't. Even non-environmentalists could see that the air in America's major cities wasn't fit to breathe, and that rivers catching on fire was not exactly a good thing--especially if one eventually had to drink that petrochemical-laden water, and that post-WWII production and consumption were part of the problem. The only way for the rich to keep on making lots of money was to gradually convert to an economy that depended less on manufacturing and more on financial services, and the only way for financial services to make the profits to which the rich were accustomed was to create a lot of new debt to leverage, and that's where the hippies enter the picture. Any cultural class that discouraged wanton consumption was also discouraging debt accumulation.

Powell's memo, in keeping with his theme of war (and here I hope to finally make my point), also was a plan of battle. It laid out--in rather specific ways--a sophisticated long-term program to change public opinion, and, critically, the means to fund that change. Powell said that the wealthy, in order to protect and increase that wealth, would have to tithe a portion of their income to PR efforts, in the same way that they protected their spiritual wealth by tithing to their churches. The wealthy responded. They funded think tanks, public relations firms and speakers' bureaus. They funded the campaigns of politicians who would, first and foremost, shift public policy in directions helpful to the wealthy and who relished the thought of cultural warfare. The wealthy, quite literally, blitzed Washington, DC, and the nation with the gospel of "free" enterprise and the religion of wealth, and, at the same time, their corporations sought out advertising whiz-kids who would restore to American society the vague subliminal discomforts upon which excess consumption--and, therefore, debt--depends.

All the better that the production fueling that consumption depended less and less upon the American worker. Factories closed because labor was cheaper elsewhere and low-paying service jobs increased debt accumulation and discouraged unionization. The think tanks and PR firms could also use increasing impoverishment to inflame racial and religious differences, in part by enlisting the aid of radio- and television-based evangelists who increasingly preached the prosperity gospel as wages stagnated, and who encouraged--unlike previous times--their flocks to, as Texas-based evangelist James Robison put it, fight godless liberalism and secular humanism by leaving their churches for the streets and the ballot booths, inevitably inciting passions that had nothing to do with the well-being of common people and electing politicians--eventually of both parties--who saw their primary task as furthering wealth accumulation among the wealthy in exchange for incumbency. While the ordinary citizen was exhorted to accept personal responsibility and stand on his own two feet as an almost religious duty to society, the wealthy and the corporations that drive their wealth were increasingly being subsidized by the taxpayers.

Thus, what seems at first glance to be an organic religious movement to bring morality back to society might, in fact, be the result of a well-oiled and sophisticated political PR campaign to return American society to precisely the sort of consumption that benefitted the wealthy forty years ago and was endangered by some very old notions--newly wrapped up in tie-dye--about thrift and economy and the inadvisability of crapping in one's bed. Anecdotal evidence abounds for this view. First, there are the internal logical contradictions of popular Christian evangelicalism today, about life, war, poverty and the peculiar cross-branding of the evangelical right and the GOP and corporations (for example, Jeff Sharlet notes in The Family that members of the New Life Church he met in Colorado Springs almost uniformly disdained the old downtown family-owned restaurants in favor of the corporate chain restaurants of suburbia, which, coincidentally, are the ones that get advertised on television).

Second, there are the undeniable economic and political changes that occurred in society as the PR effort of the wealthy gained traction. Jimmy Carter's appeals to thrift and economy and to wear a sweater were roundly ridiculed, even though what he advised could be found in thousands of Biblical passages and manuals on personal economy. Reagan entered office on a wave of optimism generated in large part out of thin air and vague promises to return the country to the halcyon days of plenty, which was largely fueled by cheap-money debt and a wholesale attack on regulation (which, incidentally, caused the two big burst bubbles of the `80s, the stock market meltdown and the savings and loan disaster). Wages and manufacturing continued to decline, while debt and debt leverage grew, as did protection of the rich from loss by taxpayer bailout.

Wealth inequality grew rapidly as the public grew to embrace economic theory that it largely neither understood nor related to its own declining prosperity, and which had proven--in the real world--to be a failure for ordinary people. Governmental, corporate and private debt exploded. Even today, in the midst of one of worst economic collapses in nearly a century, trickle-down theory and its ugly siblings, "free trade," and "deregulation" are, in the popular mind, the antidotes for the local mom-and-pop store supposedly being suffocated by government taxation and oppression, when, in reality, mom and pop have been driven out of business by their own representatives in government and are now working for a big box store subsidized by property tax abatements and sales tax rebates, subsidies shouldered by the ordinary taxpayers for the benefit of the wealthy.

The mind reels at the contradictions in logic, and the only way to explain such irrationality is that some unseen force must be at work causing it to happen. M'self, I think that stealthy force began with Powell's suggestions on how to change public opinion, using the best propagandists money could buy. An essential of modern propaganda is the principle of the Big Lie. A huge lie, repeated over and over and over again, is more likely to be believed than a small, inconsequential lie, and the Big Lie that Powell sought to have branded in the mind of the public is--reduced to its essence--that the welfare of the rich and powerful is the same as the welfare of the country. That such can be believed with conviction by so many--even as we go careening through the wreckage--is in itself proof that the PR campaign worked.

After recent Supreme Court decisions...

2010-01-24T17:32:00.000-08:00

... and the hundreds of millions spent lobbying to water down health care reform, and the coterie of banksters in the White House, maybe it shouldn't come as any surprise that this song of Robert Burns has been rattling around in my head lately:

It took the Scots nearly three hundred years to get their parliament back. Truthfully, I wish we had that much time, but, I don't think we do.

Now that the wailing and gnashing of teeth...

2010-01-21T01:51:00.001-08:00

... has died down a bit, it's probably time to assess why Scott Brown ended up winning, and why Democrats are in a tizzy about it.

Scott Brown, who came off as a ruggedly handsome truck-drivin' troglodyte, didn't win so much as Coakley lost--anyone who hates the nuts and bolts of politics, pressing the flesh and smiling until one's face cracks, probably shouldn't be running for an office that requires that sort of campaigning, and a Senate seat for Massachusetts most assuredly does. It was held by world-class smilers for more than fifty years.

Coakley also lost because of her association with Democrats. On a host of issues that matter--health care, budget, housing, bank bailouts, jobs, wars--Democrats, and particularly that fellow in the White House, have had one PR strategy: give people shit, and tell them that it's pie.

Brown won not for his stance on those issues, because he avoided issue analysis. He won because he was able to tell people, in the clearest possible way, "hey, that ain't pie, that's shit," thereby confirming the people's suspicions, and thus giving him the superficial appearance of being honest. Not that Brown will be a raging success in the job--people will also figure out, in time, that he's got even more shit in store for them than any Democrat could manage. Massachusetts voters, for some unaccountable reason, have a history of voting for Strong Republican Daddies for governor, usually accompanied by buyer's remorse later, and that dynamic is at work here.

What's comical about all this have been the reactions of Democrats in Washington, which have ranged from "WTF?," to "we're doooooomed." Only in the hothouse that is DC could an election that shifted the arbitrary balance of power in the Senate from 60-40 to 59-41 be seen as a bigger calamity than the earthquake in Haiti. The reaction of the Washington insider press is even sillier, that "Democrats moved too far to the left," but is one that is already being picked up by Dems themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth, but, that won't stop them from behaving as if it's true.

If Republicans and big business have openly and brazenly had their hands in the pockets of each other for a long, long time, have been major-league, world-class hypocrites about their treasured "conservative values," the Dems have been trying, however inexpertly, to emulate them, at least from the time of emergence of the DLC two decades ago. The lesson here is that, after eight years of bumbling, lying, thuggishness and thievery by Bush Republicans, the public was champing at the bit for competency and actual solutions to problems. Instead, the Dems came to 2009 eager to cooperate with and, frankly, kiss the asses of the people who had caused the very problems that had angered the public--the banksters, the for-profit health-care industry, the Republicans. In many instances, Dems not only perpetuated Bush policies, they amplified them.

It's no wonder that the public reacted as they did. They blamed the Democrats for not solving those problems and for not, at the very least, making a game effort at undoing the damage of the Bush/Cheney years, and in a two-party system, and when the Dems behaved like their more corrupt political brethren, there was only one alternative. Voters were repelled by all the cash being thrown willy-nilly at the monster banks when they and their neighbors were watching their own prospects for the future circling the drain, and naturally expected the Dems--and particularly Obama--to show some real leadership, for once, by coming to the aid of the people and by prosecuting financial criminals by the bushel basket-full, but, the Dems fell on their ass on that one, making one excuse after another about the economic necessity of bringing the Wall Street pirate ships safely into port and giving their crews bonuses.

Those same voters then watched in horror as Dems handed the Republicans the Sledgehammer of Bipartisanship and let them bludgeon the bunny rabbit of health care reform to death, then recoiled as it was boiled down into an unrecognizable mass of shit and cartilage and fur and then hacked up by industry lobbyists and the Blue Dogs.

All the while, the Dems kept right on talking about how the economy was getting better (as people were swimming away from houses that had turned into leaky submarines, trying to evade the job-loss Great Whites) and that, boy howdy, we'd all love that bunny rabbit once Congress got through with it. The Dems kept right on talking shit right through Tuesday evening at 8 pm EST.

FDR is remembered for putting fear in its place and for his Four Freedoms. Obama and the current crop of Dems will be remembered for their rhetoric, too: "Have some pie."

Musings on wealth, entitlement and privilege....

2010-01-14T17:26:00.000-08:00

One common theme runs through most of the problems facing the country today, but is notable for its absence in the discussion of those problems, and that is the inclination in the U.S. to defend wealth and to refuse to tax wealth at rates necessary to address those problems.

This shows up in myriad ways, some of egregious proportions, some a lot more subtle. Republicans scream about government "stimulus" programs as wasteful (as if there were no truth in the Keynesian necessity of additional spending to get the country through bad economic times), and then take credit for stimulus spending in their districts, while at the same time noting (along with Democrats) the absolute necessity of providing equally large bailouts to selected large investment banks that gambled wildly with other people's money, and now want to expand their power to do so.

There's hypocrisy in this, surely, but, it's one that's uniformly tilted toward the one-percenters, the people who view wealth as an entitlement to be protected. At the same time, so-called government entitlements, Social Security and Medicare, which are largely not entitlements, but, rather, are insurance accounts into which the not-wealthy pay into throughout their working lives, are seen as an existential threat to the well-being of the country by the minions of the likes of billionaire Pete Peterson.

Why? Because there may be shortfalls in the decades ahead? No, quite frankly, the implicit threat is that an increase in taxes may be necessary to meet those shortfalls, and that those increases may slow the accumulation of wealth by Peterson and his peers in the privileged class.

The curious thing in recent decades is that ordinary working people seem to think that taxing the wealthy is a singularly bad thing, even though there's a mountain of evidence that many of the country's problems are intimately associated with the failure to do so. The wealthy have always been able to use the power of the government and the press to convince the working class that they share the same fears and concerns as the wealthy, a very large fiction on its face. It's not a new phenomenon--the Horatio Alger stories of the 19th century sent a powerful but largely untrue message to the economically downtrodden that hard work, pluck and determination were the means to wealth, and promoted the fiction of the "self-made man," the rugged individualist who by sweat and hard labor "pulls himself up by his bootstraps," and succeeds on his own terms. Today, that message has been amplified by the economic fictions of Milton Friedman to suggest that anyone can succeed if the so-called "free markets" could only prevail over the forces of government regulation and interference, and that the accumulation of wealth by the few ultimately benefits everyone (this latter view is even older, and is a conscious distortion of a few of Adam Smith's basic tenets of market capitalism).

The current economic meltdown--and the response to it by both government and Wall Street--should have prompted widespread reevaluation of the country's reverence of the rich, along with some serious contemplation of the means required to blunt the damaging effects of wealth concentration. And yet, even vague suggestions of increasing taxation on the rich--even very marginal and minor increases--are routinely ignored or are never considered as viable alternatives to the status quo.

Quite the opposite seems to be occurring. If one goes by the signs and slogans and speeches of the Tea Party protests, a central theme is that the Obama administration is raising taxes, where, in fact, the administration has marginally cut taxes on those making much less than ~ $250K a year, and has pretty much abandoned any determination to get legislation to raise taxes on those making more than that. The theme persists, though, because the Tea Party movement, to a considerable degree, is being guided and funded by wealthy corporate interests operating in the background in classic astroturf mode. This is one of the more sophisticated ways in which the wealthy induce the working class to adopt the fears and desires of the wealthy.

As mentioned, I think this general tendency on the part of the lower and middle classes to exalt the rich has been with us for a very long time, but, it really went into hyperdrive beginning with the Reagan adminstration, and the populace has been bombarded with messages to that end ever since, mostly through the press picking up the talking points of the major right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, AEI and the Cato Institute, all directed toward less and less regulation and much less oversight, thus setting the stage for the egregious risk-taking, speculation and outright fraud which characterized the major investment bank failures. The "invisible hand" of the unfettered financial services market, unrestrained by government regulation and oversight, started picking everyone's pockets.

The beneficiaries of that pickpocketing were the wealthy, and contrary to the conventional wisdom, they weren't putting the proceeds into useful investment. They were, in cooperation with hedge funds and similar entities, using that money to further corrupt normal market processes, and were very likely moving the excess gains into offshore secret accounts and reinvesting in speculative schemes, instead of into traditional investment opportunities. The results are obvious, if one only cares to look--there's a reason why manufacturing accounts for only 11% of GDP (and much of that defense-related), why the Fortune 500 now account for only 7% of U.S. jobs as compared to 22% in the 1950s, why the aftermath of recent recessions is uniformly described as "jobless recovery," why unionization--the demonstrated key to a solid middle-class--continues to be under attack by both the wealthy and government, why Democratic and Republican administrations alike paid no heed to the lessons of the savings & loan mess and proceeded to further enable massive economic bubbles and the rampant speculation that fueled them.

Beyond all that, there's been little discussion of the political effects of encouraging and accommodating a class of the super-wealthy, especially in the last few decades. It's pocket change (millions over a few years) for the Walton family's corporation to buy the services of their own dedicated lobbyist in Washington, DC, to push for their interests (such as favoring private over public education and the repeal of the estate tax), and yet, this is seen as normal--even though such opportunity is not available to all but perhaps the top 1/5th of one percent of the population. That is the virtual definition of the sort of "artificial aristocracy" of which Jefferson and others warned against. The corporate interests which predominately serve the wealthy, directly or indirectly, also have financial and legal resources to obtain favors from government that are wholly out of the reach of ordinary citizens, and those resources are used, relentlessly, toward one end--further increasing wealth concentration, even when that very wealth concentration undermines the health of the economy and the nation. Moreover, the massive increases in wealth of the top 1/10th of the population--effected by both hobbling government oversight and tax cuts for the rich--has enabled them to direct more money to the right-wing think tanks that influence the press and popular opinion, to undermine campaigns and politicians (through contributions from the very wealthy to operations such the Arkansas Project, the laughably-named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and more recently, the Tea Party movement), without any personal sacrifice whatsoever--in fact, the taxpayers at large, in effect, subsidize their efforts.

This means that the direction of government is being skewed even further in favor of the interests of the wealthy elite--an extraordinarily small and fundamentally antidemocratic slice of the total population. And while heavy taxation of the wealthy is the most direct means of curbing the influence of the rich and wealthy corporations on government and society, it's not even on the national radar today--which is, in itself, an indication that the situation is beyond critical.

Further, that influence shows in ways one wouldn't expect in an open society, the first of which is that the average person isn't aware that high taxation on top-heavy income was the norm in this country for the five decades between the onset of the Great Depression and the first Reagan term, nor are they aware that the age of enormous deficits, rapidly accumulating national, corporate and private debt, grossly excessive national security spending and the transformation of the country from net exporter/creditor to net importer/debtor coincides precisely with preferential tax treatment for wealthy corporations and individuals. The deficit hawks--after maintaining radio silence during the horrible excesses of the Reagan/Bush/Bush Jr. years--are predictably emerging during the Obama administration, just as they did during the early months of the Clinton administration, and are taking dead aim not on the root causes for the deficits--tax breaks for the rich and drunken-sailor national security spending--but, rather, on the warp and woof of the social safety net.

The reasons for this are simple, of course. The obvious and necessary fixes to the deficit problem--reining in war and defense spending (which, combined with related interest on the debt, account for ~ 80% of discretionary spending), and heavy taxation of excessive wealth accumulation--are direct threats to further concentration of wealth (and, therefore, political power), while social programs do not directly generate wealth. As well, the continued existence of social programs is seen as a drain on income through existing taxation (even though the wealthy pay phenomenally low percentages of their income for Social Security and Medicare due to income caps on payroll deductions and the diversion of income to capital gains which aren't subject to SSI/Medicare taxation), and as an ever-present threat of increased taxation in the future--even though maintenance of the social safety net has direct benefits, by stabilizing the real (rather than the speculative) economy, by expanding educational opportunities and by reducing the societal costs of poverty and the poor health engendered by poverty.

Now, all this is readily known and understandable to most progressives, but, if one goes by the general tone of popular protest today, and by the regular exclusion of such notions in the popular press, it's not difficult to understand just how effective the right-wing noise machine has been in the last three decades. The mere fact that any respect at all for Reaganomics persists in the popular mind--even though there's plenty of evidence that the theories it offered were thinly-disguised programs to raid the Treasury and impoverish the bottom 90%--is further evidence of the power of sophisticated, modern propaganda and the ability of the Big Lie, repeated endlessly, to crowd out both common sense and actual experience.

Which, I suppose, brings me to the question of entitlement and privilege. Much of the real wealth (and, therefore, the power to increase that wealth) in this country is inherited and/or enabled by inherited wealth. There are exceptions, of course, but, in general, it is that inherited wealth that has subtly or overtly shaped the domestic and foreign policy of the country. Much of that wealth was generated with the assistance of government, rather than in spite of it, and it depended, more often than not, on extracting wealth from the common weal, often through legislation beneficial to extractive industries (think here, for example, oil depletion allowances and the Mining Act of 1872), preferential takings by government (for example, extensive state, county and local takings benefitting the railroads during their early expansion phases), corporate subsidies, and, certainly, by exploiting the value of public education, and, when advantageous, the use of federal military forces to ensure the profits of U.S. investors overseas. Examples of the latter abound throughout the country's history.

Over time, with successive generations of a wealthy elite generally insulated by their wealth from the everyday concerns of the bulk of citizens, it's no wonder that all the trappings of aristocracy would accrete around the wealthy, including a sense of entitlement to their wealth, along with the errant beliefs that wealth bestowed on them exceptional status in society and, consequently, that government, first and foremost, was obliged to accommodate and further their exceptional status and to ignore their excesses. Aristocratic inclinations are at the heart of privilege, the root meaning of which is "private law." (If anyone is under the mistaken impression that our contemporary system of governance is antipathetic toward private law, David Cay Johnston's books, Perfectly Legal and Free Lunch, will quickly disabuse a person of that notion.)

Again, everything old is new again (it was the first Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Jay, who reportedly said that the people who owned the country should govern it--a profoundly antidemocratic principle if ever there was one). The wealthy on Wall Street and the wealthy enabled by Wall Street are adamant that not only should their wretched excesses be ignored, but that government should indemnify them from their excesses, as well, and the right-wing noise machine is busily reinforcing those views among the people who can never hope to rise beyond the status of wage slave, on the foolish expectation that, like Horatio Alger, their hard work and industriousness will one day place them in the company of the Masters of the Universe, even though history shows that the Masters of the Universe club has always been a small, select body, and that even the prosperity gospel cannot ensure admission (with the possible and occasional exception of its preachers).

It's a kind of insanity, in that it does not respond to either fact or actual experience, an insanity egged on by the truly rich to protect them from the backlash, real and imagined, that might ensue were the hoi polloi, suddenly resistant to the sophisticated psychological coercion of modern advertising and to the seductive lies of right-wing think-tankery, to see the fog around them lift, revealing the whole sordid process for what it actually is.

A little riff on the previous post....

2010-01-05T18:20:00.000-08:00

In thinking about the reasons why Bush and Cheney would be so inclined to subvert law, there's the always appropriate "accruing power to the Unitary Executive," but, I wonder if there's more to it than that. After all, Cheney's complaints about the supposed fettering of executive power always come back to his days in the Nixon administration, and it is from that time that Cheney marks his objections.

However, the power of the Executive has grown far beyond original Constitutional limits ever since the end of WWII, with the advent of the national security state and the ascendancy of imperial ambitions on the part of hawks in both parties.

The Founders understood that any government had the capacity to become tyrannical, and both the Constitution and the Federalist Papers reflect that understanding. But, the Founders had no way of seeing far enough into the future to predict the development of nuclear physics and the weapons derived from that development, nor could they have anticipated the changes precipitated by the turmoil in the hearts of the American wealthy at the prospect of the 1917 Russian revolution and the rise of communism there. There have been countless instances when the government viewed some citizens as the enemy for ostensibly ideological reasons (the Whiskey Rebellion, in microcosm, or the Southern secessionists, in macrocosm, for example), but, with respect to the accretion of lopsided Executive power, nuclear weapons and communism were genuine game-changers, I think--with the generous help of partisan politics.

At some point in the last sixty years, more likely earlier than later, the Executive Branch came to see the public, Congress and the press as adversaries, as enemies from which that branch had to protect itself, even if that meant inflicting on the public brainpan the blunt force trauma of secrecy and a shadow government composed of the intelligence agencies and the military as coordinated by the National Security Council, the excesses of which only became obvious and seemed blatant as a result of Nixon's political paranoia.

There's always good reason to be skeptical of one's government, and Izzy Stone's dictum that "all government's lie" should always apply. That said, the most recent seizures of power by the Executive Branch have greatly reinforced the impression that the government stands in opposition to its citizens, and that calls into question the efficacy of representative democracy in this country.

Unfortunately, Obama has done little of substance to dispel the nagging suspicion that government no longer works for the people. The corporate money behind the teabaggers is hoping to exploit that fear (that much is evident from the teabagger protests) for its own purposes, and yet, that imprecisely focused fear of government is precisely what the Executive Branch has fostered and furthered over the past several decades, and that puts the interests of the corporate elite in solid alignment with the Executive, thus compounding the problem.

The irony, of course, is that the people who best understand that the government ought to fear the people, rather than the other way around, are those who are most likely to seek out peaceful means of effecting change, and are the people most likely to be ignored by a government which views them as adversaries. The people most inclined to think they can resist the government by wandering around with handguns or by hitching up with a right-wing militia or by being useful idiots in the teabagger movement are those most likely to adopt an even more oppressive form of government, just as long as they get to be on the side of the oppressor.

Ultimately, a government that solipsistically sees its interests as separate and unique from those of the people (even if it claims to be protecting the public by doing so), combined with a public that fears the government, cannot come to any good end.

Well, probably, these differing standards...

2010-01-05T12:25:00.000-08:00

... can't be reconciled.

Greenwald is, of course, quite right in saying that partisanship has infected assessments of what the Obama administration is doing with regard to rule of law and in its conformation to Bush policies in that regard.

I do wish that he'd amplified on root causes, though. The myriad legal distinctions being made today derive from what can only be termed as imperial hubris, beginning with the desire to create a category of detainee separate and apart from those delineated in domestic and international law: the "unlawful combatant," thus placing all detainees outside the scope of law as defined, allowing both administrations to do an end-run around existing law.

In any conflict, those taking up arms in defense against a foreign invader can rightly be considered under existing law as POWs after being captured, whether they be regular soldiers or citizen-soldiers, formal or informal militia. Individuals detained because they were suspected of having plotted or assisted in the attacks of 9/11/2001 would under existing law be considered criminal suspects and, properly, would be placed in the criminal justice system.

That would be the normal state of affairs under law. But, the Bush/Cheney administration's desire was to create a military conflict in Afghanistan, and to therefore militarize the entire process. Having done so, even then, existing law should still have applied. POWs should have been afforded all rights under the Geneva Conventions, and criminals should have been transferred to the criminal justice system for trial. Those were the options, neither of which suited the increasingly out-of-control Bush administration. Instead, the administration chose to create special military commissions in which to try those who had been classified, arbitrarily, as outside of the protections of either domestic law or international treaty.

The military commissions created could have been used for actual war crimes as defined by law, but, instead, were designed to accommodate the administration's synthetic rules, the very first of which was that the President, by fiat and without due process, could assign anyone--including U.S. citizens--to a legally fictitious status which denied them all rights under existing law.

That is roughly the system Mr. Obama has inherited, and which Greenwald rightly assesses has been perpetuated in the current administration. If there were some respect for the Constitution in the Obama administration, there would be absolutely no talk of "indefinite detention." There would be absolutely no use of military commissions to prosecute ordinary combatants captured during military operations for resisting occupation as if that were a war crime. There would be no use of "secret evidence" and there would be, even in those military commission proceedings, consideration for the Geneva Conventions, and for due process. As of now, the reigning standard for the military commissions is that resisting foreign invasion and occupation is informally, and improperly, defined as a war crime, and that's imperial hubris at its extreme. Nevertheless, the root of that determination is in the arbitrary classification, unlawful combatant, created to evade rule of law.

The Bush administration did not simply make a mistake in creating this awful system. It was an intentional, planned and coordinated effort to subvert law by a group within that administration which has no respect for law. That much is evident from the DOJ torture memos alone. The Obama administration, in perpetuating that system, however, will be the ones making a mistake.

Despite Obama's repeated assertions that his administration is dedicated to transparency, the on-the-ground reality is very, very different. Obama has continued the multi-tiered system of justice--and detention--created by the Bush/Cheney cabal. Obama has continued the Bush/Cheney practice of using the state secrets privilege to prevent a host of civil cases from proceeding--cases which would both embarrass the government and expose government wrongdoing (notably, classification law does not allow security classification for those purposes, and yet, the Obama administration has been using "national security" precisely toward those ends).

Most importantly, the Obama administration has given perishingly little thought to the ways in which the Bush/Cheney administration set into motion a series of events which would actually ensure continued terrorism well into the future and which have encouraged a steady diminution of and disregard for the Bill of Rights, and, apparently, even less thought as to how to undo those adverse trends.

In ads during the campaign, Obama said, "As your commander-in-chief, my job will be to keep you safe." In saying that, he bought into two of the most odious memes fostered by George W. Bush--first, that the President is the commander-in-chief of us all, which is patently untrue, and second, that his job is to keep us safe, which is disingenuous and derivative. Nowhere in Obama's oath of office does it say that his solemn task is to keep us safe. That oath, however, does require that its taker affirm "to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Our protection will not be found in the increasing militarization of law and society, but, rather, is anchored in the spirited defense of our common rights as the Constitution provides.

Ah, well, Peter King won't be happy...

2009-12-30T21:04:00.000-08:00

... until Napolitano orders pre-boarding rectal exams.

When that happens, I hope they hand King a flashlight and a speculum and make him look up 4000 assholes a day for the rest of his life.

At least that would make him marginally more useful than he is in Congress.

And he'd be in familiar company.

Via digby.

Everyone's looking back...

2009-12-30T15:24:00.000-08:00

... at the very bad, quite terrible, just plain awful past decade, and the not-so-heartwarming past year, and, apart from the seriously propagandized and addled wingnutz, the consensus seems to be that we've been living through some really unpleasant shit.

Of course, not as unpleasant a pile of shit as that in which the victims of various U.S. wars have found themselves... so, disaster is relative.

But, one has to look back at the last couple of decades to get a more complete picture of why things seem so desperate today. We ended the `80s with a couple of object lessons in the dangers of deregulation--the bailout of Citibank and the savings and loan debacle--that went completely unheeded, and, in what is now seen as typical fashion, proceeded in these past two decades to heap greedy self-interest of the elites on top of imprudent disregard by politicians, and the result has been a succession of bursting bubbles that have severely damaged the "real" economy of the country.

We ended the `80s with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the accelerating crack-up of the Soviet Union, which held the promise of not only ending the Cold War, but also of ending four decades of wildly extravagant military spending which, in most of those years, was three to four times what would have been necessary in peacetime. In equally typical fashion, we instead resisted any significant demobilization of U.S. forces and proceeded to unleash that military in now at least nine different theaters. Military spending has, instead, skyrocketed from its already high Cold War levels, and the U.S. currently operates about 750 known bases outside our territorial limits, along with perhaps 150-200 more in classified locations.

We ended the `80s with the sober realization that the combination of excessive military spending and tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations had done extensive damage to the country's finances, that in just the two terms of one President, Reagan, the national debt had ballooned from less than one trillion dollars to three trillion dollars. Instead of reversing the policies that had allowed that to happen, governmental, corporate and personal debt headed for the ionosphere, while, at the same time, the maldistribution of real wealth continued to become even more lopsided. We gained billionaires, but, the national debt nearly tripled from its end-of-the-`80s level and the safety net below the middle class and the poor became progressively more tattered and careworn. Productivity nearly doubled in the successive two decades, but the wages of ordinary workers, corrected for inflation, were virtually stagnant.

At the end of the `80s, there was budding awareness that climate change was quickly gaining on us, that issues of sustainability were paramount, that changes in the ozone layer indicated that human activity could, indeed, affect the biosphere in relatively short periods of time, and that corporate profits and the consumer consumption driving those profits figured prominently in the problem. Over the intervening two decades, little to nothing has been done, climate agreements without teeth continue to be made, wars for resources continue to be fought, and the trade agreements created in the meantime have disproportionately benefitted the wealthy corporations of the wealthiest countries, to the detriment of the biosphere and ourselves.

Over the intervening two decades, we've seen a general diminishment of both human rights around the world and diminishment of our civil rights at home, with both of those trends greatly accelerating in the past decade due to a timid and feckless Congress and a President and Vice President steadfastly, ruthlessly, determined to expand the powers of the administrative branch of government. Over the same period, we've also seen the courts moved ever rightward, producing decisions that generally have favored the power of the state and corporations over those of the individual. Government has become, contrary to Constitutional mandate, decreasingly secular and more inclined to entertain the whims and demands of fundamentalist Christian groups (consider, for example, the tawdriness of the Terry Schiavo business and the damaging results of political and religious interference in stem cell research).

Congress and Reagan abandoned the Fairness Doctrine in the late `80s, while media power through consolidation and legislation became greater in the `90s. As a consequence, news media have become increasingly tendentious, less informative and more accustomed to pleasing corporate stockholders than meeting their obligations to the citizenry. News gathering and dissemination are steadily being drained of life, and two of the worst examples in this regard are publicly-funded radio and television, both of which no longer see their primary role as speaking truth to power.

There were high expectations for 2009, in very large part due to the election of Barack Obama and the prospect of his first term coinciding with strong Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. The country was hungry for a reversal of these trends adverse to both democracy and citizens' well-being, and yet, by and large, there's no firm reason to expect much. Health care reform has been transformed into business-friendly health insurance reform, and the process by which that has been done has been both ugly and indicative of the degree to which Democrats have been co-opted by big business. Congress has thus far failed to undo the damage to civil rights done in past years, and the Obama administration has adamantly refused to bring war criminals to justice. Moreover, it seems to have adopted many of the most offensive tactics employed by the Bush administration to evade government accountability with regard to domestic spying, torture and the prosecution of war. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq proceed apace, and Obama has expanded them into Pakistan, and, most recently, Yemen. The banking industry continues to be propped up and protected from both its own mistakes and prosecution for its crimes, in large part because Obama has surrounded himself with many of the Wall Street players who helped create the crisis, and a compromised Congress has avoided repealing the laws that permitted those finance industry excesses and encouraged the underlying fraud on Wall Street. Those hopes that Obama would emerge as the FDR of this current crisis have been effectively dashed by Obama himself, although there were indications well before his election that those expectations were unfounded.

All in all, we might be better off if the political process in the country were moribund, but, in fact, it's not--it's actively working against the general interests of the electorate, and that's a phenomenon that began with Reagan and has been gathering steam ever since, in part because Republicans are determined to prove, by their actions, that government can't solve problems, and in part because the Democrats have succumbed to the false belief, promoted by the so-called New Democrats (the old DLC), that kowtowing to big business is the key to electoral success.

If there's any lesson to be learned from the last few years, it's that representative democracy in the United States has been rendered impotent by the elite, and that concentrated power has created a level of corruption and hypocrisy in the nation that likely cannot be expunged by any of the systemic means still left to the ordinary citizen.

One of the principles of transcendentalism is that one must go through a "dark night of the soul" before one is receptive to enlightenment, and as bleak as the prospects for genuine democracy have seemed in the recent past, that dark night is still yet to come.

Hmm. Still wondering about this...

2009-12-27T00:19:00.000-08:00

... Twitter message: RT @NYCAviation "CNN passenger interview: Heard pop like champagne cork, moments later saw flames shooting out of suspect's crotch."

There was a teaser earlier today, suggesting that the supposed bomb was a mixture of "liquid and powder" contained in a condom.

Let's put it this way... if the TSA starts demanding rectal exams as part of pre-boarding security, train and automobile travel are going to get very popular again....

I guess the Dems' new motto is...

2009-12-17T06:45:00.000-08:00

... never let the barely adequate be the enemy of the plain flat fuckin' lousy.

I keep hearing from shills for the Administration that there are great things in the Senate health care bill, and I keep wondering, "for whom?" That's not an idle question today, given that the bill reported out of the Senate Finance Committee was heavily edited and influenced by a former VP in the health care industry, that all the so-called improvements have some very nasty and imprecise qualifiers attached to them, leaving lots of wiggle room for both regulators and the for-profit industry, and that the only real means of forcing competition on insurers is extremely likely not to be in the conformed bill.

Hell, the expansion of Medicare to the 55-64 age group was mostly a watered-down consolation prize for losing the public option, and that, if Lieberman continues to get his way, won't be in the final bill, either. Moreover, health care stocks are going up, and that says volumes about who benefits from this skanky piece of legislation.

I was about to say that the American people are like one giant nation with Stockholm syndrome, but, that's not quite right. It's the Congress that suffers from that particular malady, and its captors are the corporations. The American people just can't get through to their Congress critters, and the frustration of not being able to do so is gradually becoming debilitating, and that's showing up in polls, and in the Tea Party movement, which is composed, mostly, of the bottom 25% of voters who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore, but, can't quite figure out who to be angry at, or why, and can't see that they're being guided and underwritten by the real villains.

When historians look back on the 21st century, I think they're going to see this year and the next as the critical turning point in the dissolution of the American empire, even though the actual decline began decades earlier. Serious mistakes made by the Bush administration are now being institutionalized; even though the export-jobs-and-buy-cheap-Chinese-shit-with-borrowed-money model has completely collapsed, everything the administration and Congress have done in the last two years has been an attempt to prop up that same system; the wars are spreading out and getting longer and progressively more expensive (and justified by endless variations on the theme of "the white man's burden" or outright black propaganda). The maldistribution of wealth is getting worse, job growth is non-existent, the government's obsessive preoccupation with internal security is distorting or making moot a raft of Constitutional rights, and many of the avenues to a more stable export economy are being systematically cut off by a failure to invest in non-military R&D and that aforementioned business model.

If I didn't know better, I'd think that pod people are involved.

One of the country's great...

2009-12-15T15:47:00.000-08:00

... carnival pitch men has finally met his maker. At that meeting, popcorn, cotton candy and RC Cola were served, and God had a good laugh, on us.

For a Monday...

2009-12-14T20:27:00.000-08:00

... there's been more goatfucking going on than usual. To wit:

There's little Joe, strutting around like he won the Presidency in 2008. (Shorter Joe LIEberman: "I have the soul of the rat, the face of a basset hound, the brains of a flatworm, the tactics of a mafia don and the stature of a toadstool. Go fuck yourselves.")

Then there's the Judiciary colluding with the ~~Bush~~ Obama Department of Justice to kinda sorta, y'know, ignore the Constitution, international treaties and all common sense.

Then there's the tribe of brain-damaged goatfuckers over at Fox, who think that cutting the minimum wage and raising CEO pay is going to bring us back to economic health....

And, are we making progress at COP15 in Copenhagen? The goats bleat "oooh, fuck, noooo."

And, then there's Michael Steele, one of Washington, D.C.'s best-dressed goatfuckers (hey, this guy wipes his dick on the goat's pelt when he's through) saying that it will be all rainbows and roses if we get rid of the capital gains tax and cut the unemployment insurance tax.

Lotta stressed-out, morose goats out there for a Monday....

Changing the landscape...

2009-12-13T11:56:00.000-08:00

... more musing on Spocko's question....

The 1934 Communications Act firmly established the principle that the airwaves were a public commodity which could be regulated at the federal level--hence the creation of the Federal Communications Commission. Moreover, through a series of legislative battles during the debate on that legislation, it was established that broadcast licensing had to serve the public interest.

While much of that debate centered around the right to use public interest airwaves for commercial purposes--advertising--the need to regulate was obvious, since the technology was improving rapidly and the frequency bands were becoming increasingly crowded.

But, it was the coming of television that prompted the FCC to establish the Fairness Doctrine in 1949, as television was perceived as being even more powerfully influential than radio had been. The doctrine prevailed until 1987, when Reagan's appointee to the FCC, Mark Fowler, pushed through a radical ruling eliminating most of the provisions of Fairness Doctrine, with the remaining pieces--the right to use a licensee's frequency to respond to personal attacks and the so-called "political editorial" rule--being eliminated in 2000.

Every challenge to the Fairness Doctrine was rooted in the rather Orwellian principle that mandating broadcast of opposing views was a limitation on free speech, despite the fact that previous court cases, with Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC being the most prominent example, established that space on broadcasting bands was finite and could not be monopolized. In Red Lion, Byron White wrote for the majority:

A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a radio frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others.... It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.

And yet, it is precisely monopoly in broadcasting--particularly radio--which has been the goal of the conservative/reactionary right for decades. Pro-business groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute have lately been on a crusade to get the FCC to permanently sell off portions of the public airwaves instead of licensing specific frequencies or leasing blocks of frequencies, thus making them a trade commodity and not subject to licensing--effectively privatizing more of the commons.

Much of this can be traced back to Reaganomics, true, but, ultimately, it originates in the so-called Powell Manifesto of 1971, in which Lewis Powell exhorted the business community to find every possible way of promoting corporate views and of dominating the public information landscape--and to tithe to that effort as might an individual to a church. The big business community embraced his call to arms, and the result has been the most successful propaganda effort in history. In order to consolidate and homogenize that propaganda message, it was essential that dissenting voices be stifled, and how best to do that but by denying them access to the public airwaves? Rush Limbaugh could not have found the niche he has if Premiere Radio Networks was required to offer program time to someone who would come on after Limbaugh and skewer him and his rhetorical sleights-of-hand. Limbaugh was, in effect, created by the dissolution of the Fairness Doctrine. Once the opportunity for response to personal attacks was eliminated in 2000, it opened the door to outright hate speech, such as that regularly broadcast by Michael Savage and his ilk.

With the complete dissolution of the Fairness Doctrine, networks are free to provide 24-hour programming with a right-wing, corporatist slant, and, importantly, have increased hour-by-hour follow-on listenership, which makes them more attractive outlets for advertisers, and fulfill their public service requirements by offering the occasional 30-second PSA. Quite simply, it's a variation on the old principle of revolution--the first thing one does is seize the radio and tv stations.

That seizure can happen quite literally, as happened in Caracas, Venezuela, in 2002. Every commercial broadcasting operation in Venezuela is owned and operated by Chavez's political opposition, and yet, during the April, 2002, coup it was considered essential that the rogue military units capture and shut down the public television station, as it was the only news outlet for the deposed government. Similar tactics were used in this summer's coup in Honduras. The lesson, of course, is that no opposing views can be tolerated whatsoever.

In the U.S., the revolution was accomplished through the legal and regulatory processes, despite the earlier determinations that the airwaves were part of the public commons and had to serve the public interest. So complete is the takeover that public service requirements are almost non-existent. One of the best examples was the 2002 train derailment in Minot, ND, which went unannounced by any radio station in the area for over ninety minutes as a toxic cloud of anhydrous ammonia drifted from the wrecked train, largely because the designated emergency announcement station in town was a Clear Channel station running on automatic pilot and had no one on duty to break into the programming and give emergency instructions.

It's a sign of Democratic fecklessness that talk of reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine actually subsided after Democrats gained the Senate, the House and the White House. Any time there is talk of it, the right wing propaganda outlets go into full Wurlitzer mode, and the Dems quietly drop the issue for fear of provoking a right-wing populist backlash against them (failing to understand, of course, that such a backlash occurs anytime they propose something that threatens the power of the corporatist state). So, it doesn't seem likely that any relief is going to come from the Democrats at the national level.

The other alternatives seem bleak, as well. Spocko's long been known for his campaigns to inform advertisers of the programming they sponsor, and while he's had some successes, it's, to my mind, a Sisyphusean task. If the wingnutz still control the airwaves, they still control the direction of the debate--and control of the minds of a significant minority population.

Then, there's the problem of money. The right wing seems to have most of it (and their media efforts are singularly directed at protecting what they have and increasing both wealth and power). Lefty interests are badly marginalized for lack of money--and because of a splintering of effort into hundreds of smaller special interests. That's part of the reason why, every so often, someone laments the absence of Dem players such as George Soros in broadcasting. True, Soros could bankroll a CNN-level operation from his own wallet and have plenty to spare, but, he's consistently said he's not interested, nor are any other of the Dem-leaning well-heeled. The system as it is works quite well for them.

However, there have not been many attempts to bring left-leaning operations together to make media changes on a large scale--such as that specifically prescribed by Lewis Powell in 1971. The idea of tithing to a media/think tank/PR operation on the scale of what the reactionary right has accomplished over thirty-odd years may be the only way to change the media landscape in the long run, in the absence of legislation to bring back some semblance of the Fairness Doctrine.

The network of think-tanks that sprang up from Powell's prescription now dominate the news and opinion sector of Washington, D.C., while older so-called liberal institutions (Brookings comes immediately to mind) are now more properly neoliberal, with aims and outlooks not very much different than those of the neoconservatives. The rolodexes of the Washington press are full of the names and phone numbers of ideologues at the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute and their ilk. When clueless reporters, editors and producers need someone for background, the sheer volume of such sources virtually ensures that they're going to be heard, and, more often than not, heard in the majority.

A second change that will have to made by left-leaning organizations is the way they fund their operations. Because money is scarce on the left, they've tended to micromanage budgets. If they don't get relatively quick results, the funding gets yanked. That's got to change. The right wing in this country funded their flagship think-tanks year after year after year without expectation of immediate results. Even underground efforts such as Richard Mellon Scaife's Arkansas Project were funded for nearly a decade, and managed to harass and preoccupy Democrats for most of Clinton's presidency and culminated in his impeachment. It's fine to be results-oriented, but only with the understanding that the results come by steady application of money and effort. After all, it is precisely that strategy that has provided the reactionary right a constant voice on the airwaves.

Left-leaning organizations will also have to learn to network in more effective ways--not at occasional conferences, or annual events, but all the time, and separate and apart from official or quasi-official Democratic Party operations, with much of that networking time devoted to how to regain access to the media and/or developing new broadcasting outlets, and working on funding those outlets for the long term. Being able to fund solid investigative reporting is the key to breaking back into the media, but, so far, efforts to that end, such as The Real News, simply haven't been funded to a level adequate to make them a 24-hour broadcasting reality, nor ones with staying power.

In the meantime, maybe the occasional guerrilla effort is appropriate. Offshore pirate radio might be useful in the short term, but, everyone buying into such an effort ought to understand from the outset that the power of the state eventually ends those operations, and there needs to be something more enduring to replace such ephemeral efforts.

More on this subject later.

Sketch artists?

2009-12-10T12:09:00.000-08:00

Watercolors of mass destruction?

From TPM:

Standing in front of the Supreme Court this morning, a group of Republican lawmakers railed against the court system run out of the building behind them. A sign affixed to the plexiglas podium each spoke at in turn spelled out the reasons for their fears. "Protect our homeland," it read. "Keep terrorists out of America."

The justice system laid out in the Constitution, they said, is just too weak to protect American citizens from wiley terror suspects. From "activist judges" to courtroom sketch artists, the group reeled off a list of reasons the Obama administration decision to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to the U.S. for trial could quite possibly end in, as Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) suggested, a nuclear attack on the United States.

Well, to quote Maj. "King" Kong: "I've been to one world's fair, a picnic and a rodeo, and that's the stupidest thing I ever heard...."

I wonder if these fear-mongering GOP morons are fond of Stephen Sondheim: "Send in the clowns... don't bother, they're here."

A couple of thoughts on "The People Speak"...

2009-12-09T15:09:00.000-08:00

... coming up this Sunday on the History Channel. Zirin is right that the wingnutz are coming unglued at the thought of the series being aired. The usual suspects (BigHollywood, Newsbusters, Drudge, Andrew Breitbart, and, no, I'm not gonna link to them) are having a bad case of the vapors over this, with Breitbart, apparently, even suggesting that showing the program in a public school might be illegal, and is generally stamping his little feet about this being proof of the tendentiousness of the "liberal media."

Nice try, guys, but, I doubt it's gonna work. It's not going to get pulled just because you're all whining more loudly than usual, or because it makes your reactionary icons look like greedy racist fuckheads.

That said, the program is going to be an abbreviated version of Zinn's work, at best, isn't going to change the political dynamics of the country overnight, and there's the chance that the personalities might unintentionally outshine the words of the historical characters they portray.

It's the curse of television these days, but, it's better than nothing. One of the great lies told--mostly post-WWII--is that we have the highest standard of living in the world because of our brand of democracy wedded to the so-called "free market." Michael Parenti, in virtually every lecture of his on the political economics of the United States, reminds us that at the turn of the last century, the country was, for practical purposes, a third-world country, and that we have the efforts of countless ordinary citizens to thank for that standard of living, such as it is, because all the things which made middle-class existence possible in the U.S.--bans on child labor, women's suffrage, unionization, civil rights, old-age pensions, public education, the 40-hour work week, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage--were fought tooth-and-nail by the capitalist class, and that elite has been doing its damnedest ever since to undo those gains. In many instances, ordinary people made extraordinary sacrifices--bled and died--to gain those rights for which the capitalist class now takes credit.

Hopefully, that will be the message that comes through in this upcoming series--that democracy can't be defined for us solely by the financial and political elite, and that common purpose and the actual exercise of democracy, first and foremost, are what have given us our advantages.

That's what's got Breitbart and his ilk wetting their knickers. They don't like that sort of democracy.

Spocko asks...

2009-12-09T10:01:00.000-08:00

... of the previous post, what can be done to fix the problem (which, I suppose, can be reduced to one of reversing the anti-intellectualism which seems to dominate politics in the U.S.).

If I had a sure-fire answer to that, I'd be making the big bucks advising political campaigns, certainly. But, maybe, drilling down into the problem itself offers some avenues to explore.

As a rule, we don't do a lot of sociological investigation into how large, complex societies evolve, which is how the U.S. ought, properly, to be defined today. We tend, more often, to look at subsets of society and then evaluate their influence on society in general. For example, there are an awful lot of trees killed in the examination of particular laws and how they will affect society, but, on the subject of the effects of the entire accumulated body of law on society, not so much. That's not a trivial concern in a society founded on the rule of law. If the body of law becomes so tangled that it is little more than a gigantic warehouse full of funhouse mirrors in which the cleverest navigator finds the reflected image desired, that the very complexity inherent in the system of law can therefore be manipulated and politicized for the advantage of the few, then the average person in society is, literally and figuratively, going to feel alienated from the foundational principle of the society. The inability to fathom that complexity, to understand it, to address it, can lead to the general perception that the presumed object of law--equal justice for all--is either out of reach or irrelevant.

So it is with politics, from which all that law ultimately derives. We lull ourselves into believing that the ideological and practical divisions between the two parties are clear and distinct (and, when campaigning, politicians attempt to capitalize on that tendency of ours to label and categorize), and into believing that those two parties encompass the political spectrum, when, in fact, the opposite is true. The greater truth is that the society is incredibly diverse and chaotic, politically, and that, even in those elections where turnout is described as "high," roughly forty percent of those of voting age don't vote. In a society where our only absolute ability to participate is voting for representatives every two or four years, the process in which republicanism is rooted, almost half opt out, in large part because they no longer see or sense any connection between their own interests and the greater process. For that reason, winning a political campaign is often solely a matter of (temporarily) motivating a greater number of the disenfranchised and disaffected.

As Richard Feynman said of the cold inflexibility of the shuttle booster o-rings in the Challenger accident hearings, "I think this has some bearing on our problem."

We ignore the complexity in society at our peril, but, it's understandable that we do. Most of us aren't wired to take in the enormous number of permutations of interactions in a society of three hundred-odd million people. Our tendency is to arbitrarily reduce complexity to a simpler set of rules that we can understand. That's what the two major political parties do, and yet, that's precisely the reason why so many people are effectively excluded from the political process. Over time, those two parties have learned how to manipulate the arbitrary limitations they've created, out of self-interest. For example, the two parties, about twenty years ago, successfully wrenched the campaign debates from the League of Women Voters, thus ending any opportunity for third-party candidates to obtain national exposure, name recognition and presentation of issues. Likewise, the two parties at the state level have created primary election rules that have successfully marginalized candidates not beholden to the two parties. In a sense, machine politics is an outgrowth of the human inability to understand and respond to complexity, and the human tendency to take advantage of it.

So, perhaps, a better understanding of societal complexity is a good starting point. How that is done is beyond my ken, but, maybe some of the principles of chaos theory and the theory of complex natural systems can be adapted and applied to understand similarly complex interactions in society.

More practically, maybe the process of representation has been over-simplified and is now manipulated to concentrate power. For example, the number of representatives has remained static since the turn of the last century. This may have been done to avoid running out of work space in the main assembly of the national legislature, the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., but, the actual net effect has been to further distance legislators from their constituents, making them less likely to be responsive to constituents' demands, more likely to restrict access to campaign contributors, more likely to endorse campaign finance law which facilitates meeting the huge costs of television and radio advertising (which are now virtually the only ways of reaching voters in very large districts), and more inclined to engage in the sort of gerrymandering that distorts representation to protect individual and party power.

Most importantly, it increases the complexity with which each legislator must deal in what is a finite and fixed period of time, while at the same time requiring the legislator to spend more and more time on fundraising. In the context of the ills that decision has spawned, the notion of maintaining the Capitol Building for iconic, symbolic purposes, or simply for the sake of not overcrowding available floor space, seems arbitrary indeed and antithetical to the spirit of representative democracy, the core tenet of republicanism. Around the time that the country was founded, the House of Representatives had one member for, roughly, each 40,000 people. Today, in a vastly more complex society, each representative serves, on average, about 700,000 citizens.

The response to this feature of complexity, therefore, ought to be more representation, not less. The only likely way to achieve that is through a Constitutional Convention, the invocation of which is quite another political problem.

More on Spocko's question later....

Just more musings about the political divide...

2009-12-06T16:02:00.000-08:00

... and our inability to bridge it. When a concern troll, for perhaps the millionth time, chided someone in a blog's comment thread for calling the American people "stupid," it prompted me to make a distinction between politicians saying such a thing (not at all likely to win many votes) and the value of the statement as social commentary (probably true to a more considerable degree than even most pessimists imagine).

I tried to couch the problem in terms of marketing psychology and its great effectiveness, but, I'm not sure that's the entirety of the problem (although mass marketing techniques have made the problem of adversarial politics much worse). After all, even the most piercing keystrokes of H.L. Mencken's typewriter were not sufficiently powerful to prevent the election of the dunderheaded Warren G. Harding, and that 1920 campaign essentially predated the age of modern advertising, which was only at that moment beginning to spring forth from the fever dreams of Edward L. Bernays.

Americans have always been suckers for clever sloganeering. "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!" "54-40 or Fight!" "A Chicken in Every Pot!" "I Like Ike." "Morning in America." Most slogans are unreconstructed bullshit with, at best, minimal inherent meaning. They are signifiers of preference, placeholders in the political spectrum. The problem today is that, particularly on the right, they've come to be statements of principle in and of themselves, which makes any debate pretty much impossible. "We can't allow the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud!" was, as far as the underlying substance goes, a baldfaced lie, but, it was never meant to be examined for its truth. Rather, it was a rallying cry for war, and an effective one, no less potent (nor less mendacious) than "Remember the Maine!"

So, when Scary Sarah emits the word "freedom," or the phrase, "free markets," some notable, but not large, percentage of the population--in part, because of some rather sophisticated psychological conditioning--gets all warm and runny, not because any great knowledge has been imparted, but, rather, because their limbic systems give them a jolt. Those jolts are the subterranean reason why such people will consistently vote against their own interests.

And that, in a presumptive democracy, is really stupid behavior. So, I think that the tendency has always been with us to ignore the details and give in to what thrills us emotionally. Modern marketing and branding techniques have simply built upon and manipulated that tendency.

Uh, maybe I'm just confused...

2009-12-04T07:33:00.000-08:00

... but, if there was a net job loss in November (even though much less than expected), how does the unemployment rate go down?

And by two-tenths of a percent?

Now, a lot of unemployed people could have suddenly died, thus removing themselves from the rolls the hard way. As unpleasant as things have been, that's not statistically likely.

Or, a lot of people could have been shoved off of the rolls of the actively unemployed because they didn't find work in the period when they were receiving benefits and their benefits have run out. But, then, there'd be a similar increase in the U6, and I don't see mention of that.

Or, a lot of people formerly counted in the U3 could be getting a few hours of temp work during the month. That, also, should raise the U6.

So, statistically, what's left? That the BLS has been diddling their birth-death models again.

For a country that measures, in considerable detail, damned near everything related to business, for the sake of business, we can't get statistics--even weekly or monthly--from, say, W-2 withholding data, that gives us an accurate picture of actual employment and unemployment (however noisy that data might be)? Sure, the self-employed don't report on that schedule, but, they're defined in other ways, and are a known quantity, even if their economic activity while self-employed is uncertain over a longer period, so, I'm not sure self-employment is the reason for the statistical inconsistencies.

Much more likely is that unemployment is always a political hot potato, and every administration diddles with the way it's calculated to make it seem like they are doing more than they are, as folks such as Kevin Phillips and William Greider have detailed over the years. When Reagan was faced with truly ugly numbers, he simply included the military in the ranks of the employed when they never had been before. Other Presidents have done similar things. The mere fact that the BLS continues to advertise the U3 rate as the unemployment rate, when the much higher and more realistic U6 doesn't get top billing is evidence that the numbers are spun for political purposes.

Now that the deficit hawks are in full-throated screaming mode, even small changes up or down are going to be seen as more dramatic than they actually are, and we're going to see politicians and economists alike stirring the goat entrails of these numbers for signs and portents. So, it would be kinda nice to think that they were really accurate.

Umm, I note that Mr. Bernanke...

2009-12-03T13:38:00.000-08:00

... assiduously avoids any mention of this country's obscenely bloated national security state budget in his assessment, "that's where the money is."

Given that when all the defense-related spending (and its share of interest on the debt) is added up, it's about 80% of the discretionary budget, I would say to Mr. Bernanke that he doesn't know fuck-all about where the real money is.

These fuckers do want to go after old people's security, contrary to Mr. Bernanke's protestations. Business has hated to make its contribution to those funds ever since their inception.

We're in a rocket-powered handbasket to hell, and these sonsofbitches now want to spoil the ride, too.

The President's Escalation Speech....

2009-12-02T01:24:00.000-08:00

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

That is all.

For people distressed over the Constitutional abuses...

2009-11-25T08:44:00.000-08:00

... created by having a black President in the White House, I suppose this interpretation of the Constitution is in character.

If one were to go by Blech and crew, one might think America's only product is assholes.

Everyone is waiting for the change...

2009-11-23T23:38:00.001-08:00

... having expended most of the hope. Well, now, is this an indication of the sort of change we can expect?

The Secretary of the Treasury's office metaphorically moves down Wall Street from Goldman Sucks to Robber Barons `R Us?

Ooooh, that's change we can believe in, yessir.

Yeah, right.

Word to the wise Dems in Congress....

2009-11-22T22:12:00.000-08:00

If you keep trying to play into the narrative of the whacked-out doofuses in the extreme minority, if you worry about what they might think about you say or do, you're:

DOOMED!

And, so are the rest of us. Submit to the tyranny of the batshit-insane minority, and we're all fucked.

Yet one more instance of...

2009-11-21T13:38:00.002-08:00

... legislators running helter-skelter away from anything that resembles central planning and into the arms of the free-marketeers....

Ultimately, even the large U.S. firms are creating more jobs overseas, since they're assembling from components manufactured in Asia. But, the government's happy if the big multinationals are making money, even if means that every part built in China represents an inadvertent or intentional technology transfer of either process or design.

We're already well behind other parts of the world in green technologies, and given the paltry amount of money we spend on non-military basic and applied research, we've probably already fucked ourselves in this market.

But, yeah, that "free" market is sumthin', ain't it?

About this woman, Palin....

2009-11-18T00:12:00.001-08:00

I've pretty much stayed away from Palin the phenomenon, but, now that she's back in the media's eye because she has a heavily ghost-written book released, I suppose it's now time to weigh in on Scary Sarah, the Alaskan mooseketeer.

We have the sorry-assed Senator McCain to thank for making her a media phenom, first of all. Had not Johnny Crash-and-Burn picked this dweeb as a running mate, she would have dissolved in a hail of ethics complaints while the erstwhile governor of the least-populated state in the country.

We also have the mainstream media, always desperate to emulate The National Enquirer, for elevating her well beyond her station.

And, we have Scarah herself, anxious to make of herself much more than she actually is. If this paltry excuse for a human being were my mother, it would have been a toss-up whether I left home forever or murdered her with an axe. I guess her children have more tolerance than do I.

She's a fake, a phony, a hypocrite, a liar and a consummate self-promoter.

Should I care? Only to the extent that she might, one day, have some influence on my life as an elected politician. She's stupid, vain, and thoroughly unqualified for any office superior to that of director of garbage collection in her tiny, insignificant home town of Wasilla, Alaska. Even then, grifter that she is, Wasilla better keep an eye on her, in the event she might use that office for personal gain.

So, why should I be concerned? Because the idiots in the Washington, DC, media see her as "news." They'll keep this moronic halfwit in the public eye as long as they can, will spin her ground-level ignorance and her stratospheric stupidity as "relevant," will make her the political equivalent of Michael Jackson's long-overhyped death. She's the Aimee Semple McPherson of the new century, except with Christian witch doctors.

The longer the media strokes this whining excuse for a human being, the more dangerous she becomes, the more the Christian right sees her as their defender in the vicitimization sweepstakes, the more the populace accepts her drivel as truth, because it's easier and simpler to digest.

So, let's be plain. This horrible woman is a cancer on the body politic, and everyone other than right-wing wackos (because they're helpless and hopeless) needs to have their heads examined if they think, for a moment, that this brain-dead religious fascist, this minor-league beauty-queen runner-up, has the slightest interest their welfare. What she really wants to be is Anita Bryant with clout someone else gave her.

She's a chancre on the ass of democracy.

And, that's all there is. Oh, yeah, except that she hates to hear people complaining. I mean she really hates it.

Thus endeth the lesson.