Michelle Bachman relieves our anxiety regarding global warming on the House floor when she informed us that carbon dioxide gas is not harmful because it is natural and comprises 3% of the atmosphere.
Dick Cheney will defend torture as being something other than torture because it works.
Sean Hannity will undergo waterboarding voluntarily to prove its not torture.
Glenn Beck (and other assorted right wing nutjobs) think all our various pecadillos at Gitmo and elsewhere were not torture because he “doesn’t think it is” and “it’s a matter of perception.” I guess when Beck looks up the definition of truth in the dictionary he reads “Glenn Beck’s opinion.” The philosophical problem of relativism never bothered him.
Republicans call for the resignation of Janet Napolitano because of a Homeland Security Report that presumably targets right wing extremists. They fail to extend their criticism to the Bush Administration which started the program of tracking extremists, which, by the by, included left wing extremists.
The examples of patently absurd and embarrassingly transparent illogic are legion.
This might all be for 'shits and giggles' if it weren't for the fact that much of the right-wing lunatic fringe, Conservative and Republican rhetoric decays into the absurdities of dualistic oppositions that preclude the possiblility of discourse, inquiry, dialogue and self-reflection. For this ideologically fanatical mindset self-criticism of America by Americans is equivalent to treason.
Voltaire is more relevant than ever: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
WHAT’S GOIN’ ON? Politics of Hyper-hyperbole, Demonization, Irrationality….
Given that there are enough people in this country who actually believe in Satan as evil incarnate, the Republican right wing can continue to try turning the most innocuous of Obama’s words and actions into demonic signs of impending tyranny, fascism, socialism and finally the arrival of the anti-Christ in the form of Obama himself.
Or is it because the Republican/conservative/lunatic-fringe actually have no remotely clear cut philosophy, platform or project which really serves America as a viable polity that they huff and puff with theatrically unconvincing feigned indignation and conviction? I simply can’t believe that anyone is convinced, for example, that Sean Hannity, who is far from stupid, really believes that Michelle Bachman is anything but a flake at best or literally delusional at worst, especially Hannity.
It is sad if not frightening however if in fact the real motive in all this fake-hysterical non-sense is to mobilize an irrational if not violent reaction by the pseudo-political hysterical fanatics who swallow the Limbaugh/O’Reilly/Beck demagoguery as objective truth. Maybe recent right-wing militant media is only life-support for the core loyalists, i.e., the fundamentalist Christian culturalists, but I do sometimes wonder if this could be more insidious than meets the eye. What exactly are the Republicans thinking if the best they can do is try to manufacture a mass ‘mob-mentality?’ And is this mostly media crowd of proto-authoritarians really anything remotely what we might authentically call “conservative” or “republican?”
Well, the “Republicans” who will in 2012 represent the real opposition to Obama have only one real interest to defend: the wealth and power of mega-capital which the recent 19 page Republican “budget” did its best to declare as its real interest. They did this by offering only one solution to the economic crisis: lower taxes on the rich.
Let’s get clear however, as Obama himself is proving, that there is no significant difference between the two major faux political parties in America. It’s not that Obama, unlike the Republicans, has a viable philosophy, platform or project that will transform America. He does not. He is proving to do nothing regarding the economic crisis except recycle the ‘bubble and bust’ boys but now with taxpayer money. Obama is the black Bush with a helping of Rooseveltian stop-gap measures. Obama is continuing the Iraq war and gearing up his own in Afghanistan. He apparently will continue to tap our phones and refuse to carry out the demands of justice by not prosecuting the Bush war crimes. Lastly, he seems to have little interest in restoring the integrity of the Constitution.
On the other hand, the opposition to Obama does not comprise a consensus let alone a coherent consensus. The vocal opposition to Obama that preponderates toward the lunatic fringe does not a party nor a “real opposition” make. Unfortunately the power of the centralist media and the force of mega–money will most likely again instumentalize, aggregate and mobilize the mass of Americans suffering the illusions propagated by the New Class. Again many will conceive of their situation as having to choose between the lesser of two evils. This mass authoritarian pseudo-consensus will continue to masquerade as the real opposition, the semblance of a political party and, unfortunately,as a meaningful, coherent, rational critique of our political situation as symbolized in Obama (which it is not).
But America is many blue moons away from any sober discourse and rational self-reflection on this time in our history. If rationality means anything amidst the irrationality of our time, it may well be an acknowledgement that we do belong to the same society and must all seek together to realize its universality as the maximization of social freedom. In doing so we must walk the narrow path between the Scylla of massification at the hands of the authoritarians and the Charybdis of atomization at the hands of the assorted cultural relativists and marketers of rugged, possessive individualism.
Or is it because the Republican/conservative/lunatic-fringe actually have no remotely clear cut philosophy, platform or project which really serves America as a viable polity that they huff and puff with theatrically unconvincing feigned indignation and conviction? I simply can’t believe that anyone is convinced, for example, that Sean Hannity, who is far from stupid, really believes that Michelle Bachman is anything but a flake at best or literally delusional at worst, especially Hannity.
It is sad if not frightening however if in fact the real motive in all this fake-hysterical non-sense is to mobilize an irrational if not violent reaction by the pseudo-political hysterical fanatics who swallow the Limbaugh/O’Reilly/Beck demagoguery as objective truth. Maybe recent right-wing militant media is only life-support for the core loyalists, i.e., the fundamentalist Christian culturalists, but I do sometimes wonder if this could be more insidious than meets the eye. What exactly are the Republicans thinking if the best they can do is try to manufacture a mass ‘mob-mentality?’ And is this mostly media crowd of proto-authoritarians really anything remotely what we might authentically call “conservative” or “republican?”
Well, the “Republicans” who will in 2012 represent the real opposition to Obama have only one real interest to defend: the wealth and power of mega-capital which the recent 19 page Republican “budget” did its best to declare as its real interest. They did this by offering only one solution to the economic crisis: lower taxes on the rich.
Let’s get clear however, as Obama himself is proving, that there is no significant difference between the two major faux political parties in America. It’s not that Obama, unlike the Republicans, has a viable philosophy, platform or project that will transform America. He does not. He is proving to do nothing regarding the economic crisis except recycle the ‘bubble and bust’ boys but now with taxpayer money. Obama is the black Bush with a helping of Rooseveltian stop-gap measures. Obama is continuing the Iraq war and gearing up his own in Afghanistan. He apparently will continue to tap our phones and refuse to carry out the demands of justice by not prosecuting the Bush war crimes. Lastly, he seems to have little interest in restoring the integrity of the Constitution.
On the other hand, the opposition to Obama does not comprise a consensus let alone a coherent consensus. The vocal opposition to Obama that preponderates toward the lunatic fringe does not a party nor a “real opposition” make. Unfortunately the power of the centralist media and the force of mega–money will most likely again instumentalize, aggregate and mobilize the mass of Americans suffering the illusions propagated by the New Class. Again many will conceive of their situation as having to choose between the lesser of two evils. This mass authoritarian pseudo-consensus will continue to masquerade as the real opposition, the semblance of a political party and, unfortunately,as a meaningful, coherent, rational critique of our political situation as symbolized in Obama (which it is not).
But America is many blue moons away from any sober discourse and rational self-reflection on this time in our history. If rationality means anything amidst the irrationality of our time, it may well be an acknowledgement that we do belong to the same society and must all seek together to realize its universality as the maximization of social freedom. In doing so we must walk the narrow path between the Scylla of massification at the hands of the authoritarians and the Charybdis of atomization at the hands of the assorted cultural relativists and marketers of rugged, possessive individualism.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
I'm a Father!!!!
Two beautiful baby boys born April 7 and doing great!!! Mother is doing well and father is a basket case. But what a blessing!
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Bill O' Reilly and the Likes Thereof...
Bill O’Reilly is the “professional wrestling” of American political punditry.
Substitute Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Colter and a number of other right wing lunatic info-tainment wannabees and you have the same thing.
It’s a waste of time, of course, to try to analyze, debate, refute or deconstruct these parasites on journalism. The ‘pro wrestling’ analogy is sufficient explanation of it all. Just like ‘pro wrestling' they have and probably always will have their audience of uneducated and badly misled if not deluded myopic groupees who need to live in an overly simplified pseudo-reality.
For such sub-humans attempting to critically encounter the real is much too terrifying.
God bless and take pity upon them.
Substitute Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Colter and a number of other right wing lunatic info-tainment wannabees and you have the same thing.
It’s a waste of time, of course, to try to analyze, debate, refute or deconstruct these parasites on journalism. The ‘pro wrestling’ analogy is sufficient explanation of it all. Just like ‘pro wrestling' they have and probably always will have their audience of uneducated and badly misled if not deluded myopic groupees who need to live in an overly simplified pseudo-reality.
For such sub-humans attempting to critically encounter the real is much too terrifying.
God bless and take pity upon them.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
TURNABOUTS OF TIME: Why Godot Never Comes
We the people shouldn’t take much stock in the prophets of time. Especially Niagara Countians after the recent visit of Dennis Mullen, upstate chairman of Empire State Development Corporation. The Niagara Falls Reporter colorfully captured the essence of that “visit” as “Irish blarney.” According to the NFR, Chairman Blarney, oops I mean Mullen, prophesied that “it” would take “5 or 10 years before beleaguered residents of Niagara Falls could expect to see any sort of an economic turnaround.”
Let me say that surely it takes an insurmountable arrogance, or possibly, a smug certainty with respect to the ignorance of local residents, to make such a preposterous statement. What enables such agents of apodicticity to make these infuriating claims is a kind of mythology of time. Time cures everything or causes everything, of course, in enough time.
The duration of a decade seems to assure the locus of a meaningful epoch. 100 days is a just measure of the successful “beginning” of an American presidency. A few more or less days of school seems to some to make all the difference in academic achievement. And if it doesn’t, add or subtract another day, week, month or year. What exactly is this magic of abstract time? Well, there isn’t any magic though it seems to be a useful delusion, an acceptable form of justifiable delay, expectation, anticipation or even relief from frustration.
But back to Chairman Blarney. Note that he sucks us into the universal psychology of the perennial program of postponement. If we don’t know how to do or explain something just postpone its expectation from whenever to later to sometime. Christianity, or as I prefer to call it, Christianism, postpones heaven and salvation until after death. Troop postponements in Iraq for 2-3 more years. Success in Afghanistan….God knows. But Mullen naturally uses the appropriate procrastinating grammar when he says “it” would take 5 or 10 years to see economic progress. But what is the “it” that it would take. Does he tell us? No, because it will take time, just time and seemingly only time. And of course this blathering latter-day bureaucratic idiot doesn’t know and undoubtedly doesn’t care. He’s simply a delivery boy of bad news from the big bureaucrats in Albany. He is another layer of alienation separating the people from real and effective political self-representation in Western New York.
So time is progress. And progress? “It” takes time. But what we need to know is the content of that “it” and the content of all the “its” that didn’t happen when these same promises were made several times before in the criminally disappointing history of governmental pseudo-concern for and feigned interest in the well-being of Western New York.
Here, then, we have another round in the stultifying edification process in which Western New Yorkers have not yet learned to no longer trust our local professional politicians, state bureaucrats and political party strategists and ideologues.
Change for the Falls and the region requires a radically autochthonous effort of a new order of thinking. Just don’t let anyone tell you it will probably take time. Time can’t do it. Only we can.
Let me say that surely it takes an insurmountable arrogance, or possibly, a smug certainty with respect to the ignorance of local residents, to make such a preposterous statement. What enables such agents of apodicticity to make these infuriating claims is a kind of mythology of time. Time cures everything or causes everything, of course, in enough time.
The duration of a decade seems to assure the locus of a meaningful epoch. 100 days is a just measure of the successful “beginning” of an American presidency. A few more or less days of school seems to some to make all the difference in academic achievement. And if it doesn’t, add or subtract another day, week, month or year. What exactly is this magic of abstract time? Well, there isn’t any magic though it seems to be a useful delusion, an acceptable form of justifiable delay, expectation, anticipation or even relief from frustration.
But back to Chairman Blarney. Note that he sucks us into the universal psychology of the perennial program of postponement. If we don’t know how to do or explain something just postpone its expectation from whenever to later to sometime. Christianity, or as I prefer to call it, Christianism, postpones heaven and salvation until after death. Troop postponements in Iraq for 2-3 more years. Success in Afghanistan….God knows. But Mullen naturally uses the appropriate procrastinating grammar when he says “it” would take 5 or 10 years to see economic progress. But what is the “it” that it would take. Does he tell us? No, because it will take time, just time and seemingly only time. And of course this blathering latter-day bureaucratic idiot doesn’t know and undoubtedly doesn’t care. He’s simply a delivery boy of bad news from the big bureaucrats in Albany. He is another layer of alienation separating the people from real and effective political self-representation in Western New York.
So time is progress. And progress? “It” takes time. But what we need to know is the content of that “it” and the content of all the “its” that didn’t happen when these same promises were made several times before in the criminally disappointing history of governmental pseudo-concern for and feigned interest in the well-being of Western New York.
Here, then, we have another round in the stultifying edification process in which Western New Yorkers have not yet learned to no longer trust our local professional politicians, state bureaucrats and political party strategists and ideologues.
Change for the Falls and the region requires a radically autochthonous effort of a new order of thinking. Just don’t let anyone tell you it will probably take time. Time can’t do it. Only we can.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
ROBERT MOSES REMOVAL ON THE TABLE: Toward a Politics of the People
Tonight the Niagara County Legislature should vote on Renae Kimbles proposal to support removal of 6.2 miles of the Robert Moses Parkway. Niagara Gazette reports that Fall Mayor, Paul Dyster, seems also to have reached his limit with the State Parks crowd, historically oblivious to the interests of our communities, and intends to move forward with parkway removal with or without the ‘blessings’ of the State.
These actions represent an authentic peoples democratic politic. Although Dyster and Kimble may reject the label populist or neo-populist, such actions are clearly in the spirit of Neo-populism. This is not merely a label or an ideological flag to be waved. The notion of neo-populism is descriptive of political actions on the part of and in the interests of the people disenfranchised by over 100 years of progressive centralization and bureaucratization of government. Since just after the Civil War at state and federal levels, progressive centralization of governmental functions has continued in the interests of corporations, partisan party politics and a cancerous obsession with empire via military intervention around the world. Only a peoples’ politics can stop this loss of local control and real self-representation.
Such actions by Kimble and Dyster begin to return power home to the people. Since local representatives such as Thompson, Maziarz and DelMonte, along with the former Clinton and present Schumer regime, are obviously not to be counted on for anything but useless talk when it comes to such significant issues as the loss of benefit of Niagara power, toxic pollution all over the county and removal of an obsolute and obstructive parkway, the people need to move on. These officials do not represent our interests, plain and simple.
It may begin tonight whether the resolution is passed or not. If the people come to consciousness as to what is possible when the reappropriate their own power, it has begun, i.e., a real peoples democracy, participatory, self-determining and just.
These actions represent an authentic peoples democratic politic. Although Dyster and Kimble may reject the label populist or neo-populist, such actions are clearly in the spirit of Neo-populism. This is not merely a label or an ideological flag to be waved. The notion of neo-populism is descriptive of political actions on the part of and in the interests of the people disenfranchised by over 100 years of progressive centralization and bureaucratization of government. Since just after the Civil War at state and federal levels, progressive centralization of governmental functions has continued in the interests of corporations, partisan party politics and a cancerous obsession with empire via military intervention around the world. Only a peoples’ politics can stop this loss of local control and real self-representation.
Such actions by Kimble and Dyster begin to return power home to the people. Since local representatives such as Thompson, Maziarz and DelMonte, along with the former Clinton and present Schumer regime, are obviously not to be counted on for anything but useless talk when it comes to such significant issues as the loss of benefit of Niagara power, toxic pollution all over the county and removal of an obsolute and obstructive parkway, the people need to move on. These officials do not represent our interests, plain and simple.
It may begin tonight whether the resolution is passed or not. If the people come to consciousness as to what is possible when the reappropriate their own power, it has begun, i.e., a real peoples democracy, participatory, self-determining and just.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
POLITICS AND TRUTH
Isn’t much of the three-ring circus of main stream national partisan politics today simply explainable as a function of ignorance? Such ignorance is undoubtedly a matter not only of not knowing much that we need to know historically and economically but as much a matter of deceit and/or distortion of facts and events. Of course such ignorance is also lubricated by greed, racism, elitism, arrogance, opportunism, power-grabbing and sophistry. Yet there is nothing to be gained by moralizing and vilifying. We don’t need any more witch hunts for “evildoers” whether domestically or internationally. But what is it that we are really ignorant of or deceived about?
The initial layer of ignorance that helps generate the circus atmosphere of American ‘politics’ at present, using the present situation of the so-called Republican Party as the best case in point, is a function of the parties not knowing what they really stand for nor even really what they are commited to. This is not just a matter of disagreement between party factions. That kind of disagreement presupposes the factions have some real, effective identity. It is a matter of the factions in contention really knowing who they are and what the party “should” be politically. But such self-knowledge must be more than manipulatively proffering an ad hoc platform in order to wrangle a coalition into the Republican corral.
Surely also, the self-definition of a party politic requires more than falling back on inflammatory cultural conflicts whose solution should be left to individual morality, religious decision or a community consensus with respect to cultural values. The one-issue moralistic or religious solution to party identity confuses the question of the cultural constitution of society with the question of the appropriate regulatory actions of governments. Government is not about using political institutional power to re-constitute how people live their lives culturally, religiously and morally. Government regulates the structure of the public sphere and should keep hands off the private cultural sphere.
So who are the “Republicans” and what are they up to?
Keith Olberman recently reported that John McCain floated an idea to have a 10-point party agenda to unite the party. The first point was: Cut taxes. That’s no big surprise. But it was also no real surprise when they were stumped on what the other 9 points would be.
Bobby Jindall made his play for party unity in his famous 3 minute speech counterpointing Obama’s address to the nation a few weeks ago. He contraposed “the American people” to “government,” BIG GOVERNMENT. That distinction was most likely intended to clear things up and let us all know that the Repubs don’t stand for big government even though they are arguably the worst offenders. And presumably the Republicans are those who really represent “the people,” of course conservative Republicans. Nice try Bobby.
Roger Simon of Politico.com said today he wasn’t certain whether the Republican Party should replace present Chairman, Michael Steele, or whether Steele should find a new party. Steele has blundered again and again in trying to define and mobilize the party. Yesterday he quite clearly stated in an interview he believed in “choice” when it came to abortion. Today he backed off that statement like a hyena realizing it couldn’t drag the carcass away from a flock of vultures. Then Steele appeared on TV confessing the faith that he was an unrepentant pro-lifer, always was, always will be (no matter what he says to the contrary). How much more confused can one leader be. Apparently a lot. Just a week ago Steele also compared homosexuality to race saying that one could no more choose their sexual preference than they could their race. Good job Mr. Conservative Chairman!
Let’s not forget, as most Republicans would prefer to do, that the Bush administration, most recent, proved the poverty of Republican ideas. Possibly the neo-Con aspiration and failure at militaristic world hegemony is the Republican Party come to fruition. The fruit ripened but proved too sour to digest. And why bother fertilizing a tree that yields bad fruit. More accurately the Republicans under Bush had no ideas, except of course those which would assure the absolute sovereignty of the Presidency, the military hegemony of “America,” the disempowerment of the average American and the evisceration of the American justice system.
Continuing with the parade of ignorance if not deceit and disinformation: Rush Limbaugh, who some would like to say is now the only coherent voice of Republicanism, is in the final analysis a blathering fanatical apologist of a self-contradictory conservatism who has no clue what America stands for. His is a ‘least-common-denominator’ demagoguery deluding many people that he actually has a solution to the crisis of late Liberal Democracy. Ann Coulter, in like manner, is simply a lunatic, not to mention being quite the explicit hate mongerer. Sarah Palin flunked Basic Knowledge 101. Joe the Plumber….well, you can finish that sentence any way you want.
And, most recently, Meaghan McCain, John’s daughter! She appeared on MSNBC seemingly doing nothing but taking a short ride on her father’s coattails, floating her semi-celebrity out there to see if she can get a nibble of party attention. She writes for The Daily Beast dot com. Her latest essay on Ann Coulter rates about a very generous D or D-. McCain’s criterion for party success seems to be “hipness” or at least ‘hipness’ as instrumentally necessary in attracting young voters. For Meghan’s taste (I hesitate to call it judgement) Coulter is too “radical…extreme…confusing … not ‘for real.’” Yet she thinks Coulter could be the “poster woman for the extreme side of the Republican party.” Oh yeh, by the way, Meaghan says she herself could be the poster for “the opposite.” So if Coulter is extreme conservative, that would make Miss Meghan extreme liberal. Would that make her a democrat?
In short, Meghan McCain represents more non-sensical blather from the Repub’s attempting to reinvent themselves.
Like the “reasoning” of Meghan McCain, the Republican discourse vascillates between the sadly silly and the tragically absurd.
Moreover, wishing for Obama’s failure, as did Rush Limbaugh and former Texas Congressman Tom Delay, also does not make a party, establish a platform, qualify as American or move the conversation forward. In the spirit of such wishing, several Repub governors and Congressional legislators recently attacked the supposedly exorbitant spending by Obama. But in the 8 years of Bush we didn’t hear much about his exorbitant spending even though he wasted @ 3.2 trillion on an ill-advised war, to say the absolute very least. Even the 15 or 20 Conservative Repub representatives who originally held out against the exorbitant spending of the TARP themselves caved in when the ear mark pie was sweetened and fattened a bit.
Principle for the Repub’s is an instrumentality of leverage to milk the budget for local benefit. Prior to the economic bubble bursting, the same Repub governors who we didn’t hear a peep from during the Bush administration regarding ear marks now want to refuse the stimulus plan’s allotted state monies because it has too many Dem ear marks. So even though the unemployment rate soars in places like Louisiana, Texas and S. Carolina, the governors there feel it’s all right to deny the poor and unemployed help because of the “principle” involved. What principle? Is it the one they didn’t mention and wouldn’t promote during the Bush Administration, whatever it might be?
As we see there is little truth in the Repub party, be it as it may, let alone honesty, integrity, compassion, intelligence or even authentic American loyalty. But what is really at stake with respect to any truth to be had here is the truth hidden behind the “debate” within the Repub party and between the Repubs and Dems. The only real reason this debate or discourse can become so ridiculously meaningless and unproductive is that what is at stake ultimately is preserving the illusion of a real difference between the two parties. They must preserve the illusion because there is no real difference between the two parties politically. Apparently the illusion of difference may best be conjured up by stirring up the lunatic fringe, keeping them sufficiently ignorant and irrational and assuring their readiness for mobilization in the next pseudo-election to make it appear as if there are real differences in this virtual mob to be represented by the pseudo-parties of the hegemonous duopoly.
The Republi-crat duopoly of which Obama is now the leader exists to control the mechanisms of power and domination of the New Class, i.e., the new political/financial class, that rules international capital and related policy. The real conflict and tension, as of yet insufficiently thematized theoretically, is between the Republi-crats and the Client Class, i.e., the rest of us who are not in contention to get our hands on the reins of power and domination. The real political conflict is not that within the so-called Republican party nor that between the so-called Democrats and Republicans. It is between the capitalist interests of the New Class and the Client Class consumers who have fallen victim to the philosophical confusion, the confusion as to the role of government in a democracy and the nature of a Federalism which would return us to the kind of regional autonomy that would permit sending representatives to Congress who actually represent the people as opposed to corporations and transnational capital.
Moreover the possible neo-populist identity and cultural autonomy which remains hidden and unarticulated (or at best irrationally and hysterically articulated) within the margins of communities, religion and the “lunatic fringe” is best understandable as a symptomatic cry for proper expression of a real politic representing their interests and needs. Unfortunately what they get is the Neanderthal ranting of Limbaugh, Coulter, the clowns at Fox News and the professional politicians who seem to know little and care less about our history, philosophy and possiblities as America. The professional politicians are confused, ignorant and tending toward authoritarian solutions to an obviously pronounced Liberal Democracy in crisis. Sarah Palin, identical twin sister of Michelle Bachman (Republican representative from Minnesota) case in point. How in God’s name could such persons be taken seriously by anyone with a college education or even an IQ above, let’s say, 30. She is, at best, laughable as Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey demonstrated quite nicely and easily.
By all accounts it seems we ought to take Voltaire’s warning a little more seriously: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
And lastly allow me to add a little from political theorist Hannah Arendt: “Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politicians but also of the demagogue’s and the statesman’s trade. Why is that so? And what does it mean for the nature and dignity of the political realm, on the one side, and for the nature and the dignity of truth and truthfulness, on the other? Is it of the very essence of truth to be impotent and of the very essence of power to be deceitful? And what kind of reality does truth possess if it is powerless in the public realm, which more than any other sphere of human life guarantees the reality of existence to mortal men?”
The initial layer of ignorance that helps generate the circus atmosphere of American ‘politics’ at present, using the present situation of the so-called Republican Party as the best case in point, is a function of the parties not knowing what they really stand for nor even really what they are commited to. This is not just a matter of disagreement between party factions. That kind of disagreement presupposes the factions have some real, effective identity. It is a matter of the factions in contention really knowing who they are and what the party “should” be politically. But such self-knowledge must be more than manipulatively proffering an ad hoc platform in order to wrangle a coalition into the Republican corral.
Surely also, the self-definition of a party politic requires more than falling back on inflammatory cultural conflicts whose solution should be left to individual morality, religious decision or a community consensus with respect to cultural values. The one-issue moralistic or religious solution to party identity confuses the question of the cultural constitution of society with the question of the appropriate regulatory actions of governments. Government is not about using political institutional power to re-constitute how people live their lives culturally, religiously and morally. Government regulates the structure of the public sphere and should keep hands off the private cultural sphere.
So who are the “Republicans” and what are they up to?
Keith Olberman recently reported that John McCain floated an idea to have a 10-point party agenda to unite the party. The first point was: Cut taxes. That’s no big surprise. But it was also no real surprise when they were stumped on what the other 9 points would be.
Bobby Jindall made his play for party unity in his famous 3 minute speech counterpointing Obama’s address to the nation a few weeks ago. He contraposed “the American people” to “government,” BIG GOVERNMENT. That distinction was most likely intended to clear things up and let us all know that the Repubs don’t stand for big government even though they are arguably the worst offenders. And presumably the Republicans are those who really represent “the people,” of course conservative Republicans. Nice try Bobby.
Roger Simon of Politico.com said today he wasn’t certain whether the Republican Party should replace present Chairman, Michael Steele, or whether Steele should find a new party. Steele has blundered again and again in trying to define and mobilize the party. Yesterday he quite clearly stated in an interview he believed in “choice” when it came to abortion. Today he backed off that statement like a hyena realizing it couldn’t drag the carcass away from a flock of vultures. Then Steele appeared on TV confessing the faith that he was an unrepentant pro-lifer, always was, always will be (no matter what he says to the contrary). How much more confused can one leader be. Apparently a lot. Just a week ago Steele also compared homosexuality to race saying that one could no more choose their sexual preference than they could their race. Good job Mr. Conservative Chairman!
Let’s not forget, as most Republicans would prefer to do, that the Bush administration, most recent, proved the poverty of Republican ideas. Possibly the neo-Con aspiration and failure at militaristic world hegemony is the Republican Party come to fruition. The fruit ripened but proved too sour to digest. And why bother fertilizing a tree that yields bad fruit. More accurately the Republicans under Bush had no ideas, except of course those which would assure the absolute sovereignty of the Presidency, the military hegemony of “America,” the disempowerment of the average American and the evisceration of the American justice system.
Continuing with the parade of ignorance if not deceit and disinformation: Rush Limbaugh, who some would like to say is now the only coherent voice of Republicanism, is in the final analysis a blathering fanatical apologist of a self-contradictory conservatism who has no clue what America stands for. His is a ‘least-common-denominator’ demagoguery deluding many people that he actually has a solution to the crisis of late Liberal Democracy. Ann Coulter, in like manner, is simply a lunatic, not to mention being quite the explicit hate mongerer. Sarah Palin flunked Basic Knowledge 101. Joe the Plumber….well, you can finish that sentence any way you want.
And, most recently, Meaghan McCain, John’s daughter! She appeared on MSNBC seemingly doing nothing but taking a short ride on her father’s coattails, floating her semi-celebrity out there to see if she can get a nibble of party attention. She writes for The Daily Beast dot com. Her latest essay on Ann Coulter rates about a very generous D or D-. McCain’s criterion for party success seems to be “hipness” or at least ‘hipness’ as instrumentally necessary in attracting young voters. For Meghan’s taste (I hesitate to call it judgement) Coulter is too “radical…extreme…confusing … not ‘for real.’” Yet she thinks Coulter could be the “poster woman for the extreme side of the Republican party.” Oh yeh, by the way, Meaghan says she herself could be the poster for “the opposite.” So if Coulter is extreme conservative, that would make Miss Meghan extreme liberal. Would that make her a democrat?
In short, Meghan McCain represents more non-sensical blather from the Repub’s attempting to reinvent themselves.
Like the “reasoning” of Meghan McCain, the Republican discourse vascillates between the sadly silly and the tragically absurd.
Moreover, wishing for Obama’s failure, as did Rush Limbaugh and former Texas Congressman Tom Delay, also does not make a party, establish a platform, qualify as American or move the conversation forward. In the spirit of such wishing, several Repub governors and Congressional legislators recently attacked the supposedly exorbitant spending by Obama. But in the 8 years of Bush we didn’t hear much about his exorbitant spending even though he wasted @ 3.2 trillion on an ill-advised war, to say the absolute very least. Even the 15 or 20 Conservative Repub representatives who originally held out against the exorbitant spending of the TARP themselves caved in when the ear mark pie was sweetened and fattened a bit.
Principle for the Repub’s is an instrumentality of leverage to milk the budget for local benefit. Prior to the economic bubble bursting, the same Repub governors who we didn’t hear a peep from during the Bush administration regarding ear marks now want to refuse the stimulus plan’s allotted state monies because it has too many Dem ear marks. So even though the unemployment rate soars in places like Louisiana, Texas and S. Carolina, the governors there feel it’s all right to deny the poor and unemployed help because of the “principle” involved. What principle? Is it the one they didn’t mention and wouldn’t promote during the Bush Administration, whatever it might be?
As we see there is little truth in the Repub party, be it as it may, let alone honesty, integrity, compassion, intelligence or even authentic American loyalty. But what is really at stake with respect to any truth to be had here is the truth hidden behind the “debate” within the Repub party and between the Repubs and Dems. The only real reason this debate or discourse can become so ridiculously meaningless and unproductive is that what is at stake ultimately is preserving the illusion of a real difference between the two parties. They must preserve the illusion because there is no real difference between the two parties politically. Apparently the illusion of difference may best be conjured up by stirring up the lunatic fringe, keeping them sufficiently ignorant and irrational and assuring their readiness for mobilization in the next pseudo-election to make it appear as if there are real differences in this virtual mob to be represented by the pseudo-parties of the hegemonous duopoly.
The Republi-crat duopoly of which Obama is now the leader exists to control the mechanisms of power and domination of the New Class, i.e., the new political/financial class, that rules international capital and related policy. The real conflict and tension, as of yet insufficiently thematized theoretically, is between the Republi-crats and the Client Class, i.e., the rest of us who are not in contention to get our hands on the reins of power and domination. The real political conflict is not that within the so-called Republican party nor that between the so-called Democrats and Republicans. It is between the capitalist interests of the New Class and the Client Class consumers who have fallen victim to the philosophical confusion, the confusion as to the role of government in a democracy and the nature of a Federalism which would return us to the kind of regional autonomy that would permit sending representatives to Congress who actually represent the people as opposed to corporations and transnational capital.
Moreover the possible neo-populist identity and cultural autonomy which remains hidden and unarticulated (or at best irrationally and hysterically articulated) within the margins of communities, religion and the “lunatic fringe” is best understandable as a symptomatic cry for proper expression of a real politic representing their interests and needs. Unfortunately what they get is the Neanderthal ranting of Limbaugh, Coulter, the clowns at Fox News and the professional politicians who seem to know little and care less about our history, philosophy and possiblities as America. The professional politicians are confused, ignorant and tending toward authoritarian solutions to an obviously pronounced Liberal Democracy in crisis. Sarah Palin, identical twin sister of Michelle Bachman (Republican representative from Minnesota) case in point. How in God’s name could such persons be taken seriously by anyone with a college education or even an IQ above, let’s say, 30. She is, at best, laughable as Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey demonstrated quite nicely and easily.
By all accounts it seems we ought to take Voltaire’s warning a little more seriously: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
And lastly allow me to add a little from political theorist Hannah Arendt: “Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politicians but also of the demagogue’s and the statesman’s trade. Why is that so? And what does it mean for the nature and dignity of the political realm, on the one side, and for the nature and the dignity of truth and truthfulness, on the other? Is it of the very essence of truth to be impotent and of the very essence of power to be deceitful? And what kind of reality does truth possess if it is powerless in the public realm, which more than any other sphere of human life guarantees the reality of existence to mortal men?”
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
GETTING IT FREE AT THE "FREE MARKET"
The ‘free market’ seems to be taking on new meaning. The sub-prime suckers who took the mortgages they would never be able to afford are the patsys who enabled a swarm of inexorably unscrupulous mortgage brokers to make a profit ultimately at taxpayers expense. These brokers, for all practical purposes, did get it free. The mortgage loan profits were in fact free once they unloaded the packaged mortgages as securities on the banks. Then the mortgage brokers wouldn’t have to cover any losses when the interest on the bad mortgages went up, consequently became unaffordable and stopped being paid. The brokers no longer owned the mortgages. The banks did. What unscrupulous business sociopath wouldn’t sell worthless mortgages to effectively clueless and hapless members of the lower middle and middle class, knowing they would never have to suffer the losses. The banks would suffer the loss. And they did.
Now the banks who greedily and voraciously ate up the securitized mortgages got AIG to insure their investments. AIG, being the apparently crack institution it is, just knew such investments were beyond reproach. So they sold the coverage to the banks and pocketed the premiums as profit, dividends, bonuses and other loans. When the bottom fell out of the mortgage market and the banks ran to the insurance giant to collect, no one was home, so to speak. Apparently there is no law requiring the insurer to have the capital available to cover such losses.
So it seems various players on the market got theirs free at the free market, free for everyone but the taxpayers. The naïve and/or ignorant buyers got to live in their defaulted homes for free at least for a while until the Sheriff showed up; the brokers, who knew they couldn’t lose, (and therefore didn’t bother qualifying homebuyers) got theirs “free” once they dumped the mortgages on the banks; the megabanks who now know they are too big to lose are continuing to get theirs free (there’s just fewer of them, though they are even bigger); and the insurance giant, felled by carelessness and/or ignorance, or possibly ‘business as usual,’ also got theirs free on the “free market,” the same insurance giant who now has an insurer of its own called the American government, courtesy of the American taxpayer.
So it seems a lot of people are “getting it free” at the “free market.” They are getting it “free” on the backs of the “mortgaged” future of the children of the poor and middle class. The once charming and promising American Camelot is unraveling, if not intentionally being dismantled, on the ruins of the mythic “free market.” Apparently there are few crumbs left to fall off the table of the rich and superrich. Only the debt trickles down and settles on the disempowered and disenfranchised backs of the Client Class who can no longer pay the bill. The new international capitalist political class (call it the New Class) has sucked the blood and marrow out of the carcass and bones of the cadaver.
Alan Greenspan has since rode off into the sunset where rich capitalists go, returning to the scene of the ‘free market’ crime recently only to declare mea culpa, mea culpa. Ayn Rand giggles in her grave. Bill Clinton denies he had anything to do with unleashing the pitbulls of profit. And the neo-Reaganites inexplicably keep the faith, relying upon the short memory and myopia of the infinitely manipulable American electorate.
The government, capital, media and, of course, power become more and more centralized. The polity becomes more bureaucratized as the technocrats rule over all. The American people become essentially more ignorant of the fact and indifferent to the reality of the death throes of a participatory peoples’ democracy, a viable public sphere and a productive economy that makes self-determination possible.
Long live the once and great American dream.
Now the banks who greedily and voraciously ate up the securitized mortgages got AIG to insure their investments. AIG, being the apparently crack institution it is, just knew such investments were beyond reproach. So they sold the coverage to the banks and pocketed the premiums as profit, dividends, bonuses and other loans. When the bottom fell out of the mortgage market and the banks ran to the insurance giant to collect, no one was home, so to speak. Apparently there is no law requiring the insurer to have the capital available to cover such losses.
So it seems various players on the market got theirs free at the free market, free for everyone but the taxpayers. The naïve and/or ignorant buyers got to live in their defaulted homes for free at least for a while until the Sheriff showed up; the brokers, who knew they couldn’t lose, (and therefore didn’t bother qualifying homebuyers) got theirs “free” once they dumped the mortgages on the banks; the megabanks who now know they are too big to lose are continuing to get theirs free (there’s just fewer of them, though they are even bigger); and the insurance giant, felled by carelessness and/or ignorance, or possibly ‘business as usual,’ also got theirs free on the “free market,” the same insurance giant who now has an insurer of its own called the American government, courtesy of the American taxpayer.
So it seems a lot of people are “getting it free” at the “free market.” They are getting it “free” on the backs of the “mortgaged” future of the children of the poor and middle class. The once charming and promising American Camelot is unraveling, if not intentionally being dismantled, on the ruins of the mythic “free market.” Apparently there are few crumbs left to fall off the table of the rich and superrich. Only the debt trickles down and settles on the disempowered and disenfranchised backs of the Client Class who can no longer pay the bill. The new international capitalist political class (call it the New Class) has sucked the blood and marrow out of the carcass and bones of the cadaver.
Alan Greenspan has since rode off into the sunset where rich capitalists go, returning to the scene of the ‘free market’ crime recently only to declare mea culpa, mea culpa. Ayn Rand giggles in her grave. Bill Clinton denies he had anything to do with unleashing the pitbulls of profit. And the neo-Reaganites inexplicably keep the faith, relying upon the short memory and myopia of the infinitely manipulable American electorate.
The government, capital, media and, of course, power become more and more centralized. The polity becomes more bureaucratized as the technocrats rule over all. The American people become essentially more ignorant of the fact and indifferent to the reality of the death throes of a participatory peoples’ democracy, a viable public sphere and a productive economy that makes self-determination possible.
Long live the once and great American dream.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
REGULATION--SCHMEGULATION!
Damn those Liberal big-government regulators! Or so say our latter day Reaganites who never saw a regulation they didn’t hate. Regulation, schmegulation!
Is it possible to restore any reasonable discourse about the role of government regulation—regulation in the interest of the public sphere? For those who would consider that the public sphere and the common interests of the people in general is merely a lovely fable, the answer is no. For such Conservatives, Republicans and Free Marketers, there is no need for a public sphere of common interests and concerted action. Regulation of business, industry and finance is unfreedom to the neo-Reaganites. Regulation is repression, a suffocating restriction on initiative, productivity and efficiency.
On the contrary,freedom(from regulation)so loosely conceived is really license, license to do anything to maximize profit by cutting costs—at any cost. What the elimination of regulation means to such profiteers is this: what the public doesn’t know won’t hurt them. No regulators, then no transparency in production. Then anything goes! Contaminated foods, unqualified mortgage loans, unsafe automobiles, etc.! An unregulated financial sector has given us Bernie Madoff, financial instruments that few understand and that have nothing to do wtih real productive economy. If there are no watchdogs doing the relevant inspections, and thus no regulation of standards of production and processing, for example: of credit and insurance; of pharmaceutical claims for drugs; of manufacturers claims for toy safety for children, then no one is the wiser. The public is exposed to unhealthy food, unsafe products, misrepresentation of quality and quantity of goods and services, etc., etc. In the fanancial sector socially irresponsible money uses money only to make money. Sacrificing the quality of life and social conscience becomes the cost of doing business and finally becomes normalized.
Everyday mythologies would then rationalize the disastrous consequences with excuses such as “nothing is perfect.” “Sometimes it (food contamination, etc.) just happens.” These and innumerable other variations on the “this is the best of all possible worlds” logic would prevail. Scientific and ethical standards of health and hygiene, public interest and the common good would be scoffed at and laughed out of town.
Private interests in business and industry unabashedly suggests we privatize the inspectors and regulators. Such audacity is nothing but the continuing attempt to wipe out the necessity and reality of the public sphere. Even more so this is an attempt to wipe out memory of the public sphere.
But in the interest of public welfare and the good of the whole, regulation in general is an attempt to bring a moral order to society. Regulation is the effort to restore an ethical standard to the production of social goods which the perversion of the profit motive has destroyed. Business, industry and finance have proven historically that they cannot police and regulate themselves. The public—unfortunately more and more synonymous with the poor—pays the price of and for the ‘free marketers’ unlimited profit and accumulation thereof. Unfortunately the public most be protected from the irresponsibility of all too many privatized concerns who do not care how their carelessness affects consumers and the country
Regulation and inspection of the “free marketers” is the social conscience enforcing the public good. There is no such thing as self-regulating markets. That is a euphemism for unregulated selfish self-interest. De-regulation has unleashed an anarchy of self-defeating economic chaos. The ‘free-marketer’ wishes to distort the meaning of regulation insisting that it implies virtual constitutive activity on the part of government in relation to business. But regulation is not constitutive control of productive activity. It simply insures the self-reflective dimension in which narrow self-interests are forced to take responsibility for how their actions affect the integrity of the whole.
The cost of doing business should not be paid for by compromising the quality of life in America. Regulation from without would not be required if we could trust private enterprise to practice self-control from within. Unfortunately business, industry and finance have proven over and over again that essentially and as a whole they cannot be trusted to do so from the standpoint of the general interest in the public good.
So, for example, Barney Frank’s recent suggestion that the mortgage brokers be required by law to retain some responsibility for the quality of the loans they make is inevitable and good in our world. Without such external regulatory motivation the brokers, as a case in point, have proven they have no internal motivation to regulate the qualifying of customers as a matter of conscience and common business sense.
Short of a radical reconstitution of ethical community and the ability to act also as well in the interest of others while we help ourselves, regulation of social goods privately produced is here to stay.
Is it possible to restore any reasonable discourse about the role of government regulation—regulation in the interest of the public sphere? For those who would consider that the public sphere and the common interests of the people in general is merely a lovely fable, the answer is no. For such Conservatives, Republicans and Free Marketers, there is no need for a public sphere of common interests and concerted action. Regulation of business, industry and finance is unfreedom to the neo-Reaganites. Regulation is repression, a suffocating restriction on initiative, productivity and efficiency.
On the contrary,freedom(from regulation)so loosely conceived is really license, license to do anything to maximize profit by cutting costs—at any cost. What the elimination of regulation means to such profiteers is this: what the public doesn’t know won’t hurt them. No regulators, then no transparency in production. Then anything goes! Contaminated foods, unqualified mortgage loans, unsafe automobiles, etc.! An unregulated financial sector has given us Bernie Madoff, financial instruments that few understand and that have nothing to do wtih real productive economy. If there are no watchdogs doing the relevant inspections, and thus no regulation of standards of production and processing, for example: of credit and insurance; of pharmaceutical claims for drugs; of manufacturers claims for toy safety for children, then no one is the wiser. The public is exposed to unhealthy food, unsafe products, misrepresentation of quality and quantity of goods and services, etc., etc. In the fanancial sector socially irresponsible money uses money only to make money. Sacrificing the quality of life and social conscience becomes the cost of doing business and finally becomes normalized.
Everyday mythologies would then rationalize the disastrous consequences with excuses such as “nothing is perfect.” “Sometimes it (food contamination, etc.) just happens.” These and innumerable other variations on the “this is the best of all possible worlds” logic would prevail. Scientific and ethical standards of health and hygiene, public interest and the common good would be scoffed at and laughed out of town.
Private interests in business and industry unabashedly suggests we privatize the inspectors and regulators. Such audacity is nothing but the continuing attempt to wipe out the necessity and reality of the public sphere. Even more so this is an attempt to wipe out memory of the public sphere.
But in the interest of public welfare and the good of the whole, regulation in general is an attempt to bring a moral order to society. Regulation is the effort to restore an ethical standard to the production of social goods which the perversion of the profit motive has destroyed. Business, industry and finance have proven historically that they cannot police and regulate themselves. The public—unfortunately more and more synonymous with the poor—pays the price of and for the ‘free marketers’ unlimited profit and accumulation thereof. Unfortunately the public most be protected from the irresponsibility of all too many privatized concerns who do not care how their carelessness affects consumers and the country
Regulation and inspection of the “free marketers” is the social conscience enforcing the public good. There is no such thing as self-regulating markets. That is a euphemism for unregulated selfish self-interest. De-regulation has unleashed an anarchy of self-defeating economic chaos. The ‘free-marketer’ wishes to distort the meaning of regulation insisting that it implies virtual constitutive activity on the part of government in relation to business. But regulation is not constitutive control of productive activity. It simply insures the self-reflective dimension in which narrow self-interests are forced to take responsibility for how their actions affect the integrity of the whole.
The cost of doing business should not be paid for by compromising the quality of life in America. Regulation from without would not be required if we could trust private enterprise to practice self-control from within. Unfortunately business, industry and finance have proven over and over again that essentially and as a whole they cannot be trusted to do so from the standpoint of the general interest in the public good.
So, for example, Barney Frank’s recent suggestion that the mortgage brokers be required by law to retain some responsibility for the quality of the loans they make is inevitable and good in our world. Without such external regulatory motivation the brokers, as a case in point, have proven they have no internal motivation to regulate the qualifying of customers as a matter of conscience and common business sense.
Short of a radical reconstitution of ethical community and the ability to act also as well in the interest of others while we help ourselves, regulation of social goods privately produced is here to stay.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
ANALYZE THIS!
We’ve heard much talk recently—I wouldn’t call it discussion—regarding the virtues and effectivity of the “free market.” I’m curious to know if this so-called free market concept has historically referred only to the ‘real productive economy,’ i,e., the industrial and concomitant business sector. Or has it also referred simultaneously to the financialized economy, at least as we now know it? It seems to me that we might fairly discuss the virtues of the free market if we could factor out the financialized sector which seems to have turned part of the credit and investment system into a casino at best. But is the seemingly cancerous financial sector a legitimate let alone trustworthy partner in the market? Surely we have evidence now that it is not.
This splitting off of finance as a parasitic result of the over-extension of ‘free market logic’ seems to vulgarize the concept and value of the free market. Furthermore, it confuses a possibly meaningful and productive political discussion. That is, carrying out the political discussion on the basis of the political economy as, on the one hand, homogeneous, "free market capitalism" versus, on the other hand,"proto-socialist big government interventionists" seems to not quite represent what is happening nor what is possible in attempting to bring about a more auspicious reform in America today.
This splitting off of finance as a parasitic result of the over-extension of ‘free market logic’ seems to vulgarize the concept and value of the free market. Furthermore, it confuses a possibly meaningful and productive political discussion. That is, carrying out the political discussion on the basis of the political economy as, on the one hand, homogeneous, "free market capitalism" versus, on the other hand,"proto-socialist big government interventionists" seems to not quite represent what is happening nor what is possible in attempting to bring about a more auspicious reform in America today.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
NONE DARE CRY TREASON: Political Corruption or Social Class Power, Profit and Privilege
What is at issue today is treason against the American political idea, democracy, republicanism and the primacy and integrity of the Constitution. Recent history demonstrates that the very existence of a social class, the new American Political Class, is, in its very way of being, a betrayal of the intent and achievements of the Founding Fathers. Conceivably such treason manifests and may in fact be prosecuted in the case of persons such as Governor Blagojevich. Possibly most of such treason however is the betrayal of the people, We the People, and all that implies in subverting the ideal and promise of America. The latter is not a matter of litigation but of a reform which requires revolutionary restructuring of the sociology of the political.
Meanwhile this New Class functions undetected behind the invisible wall of the daily systematic dynamics of social and political exclusion of the Client Class of workers, welfare dependents, the mass of unemployed students and military recruits . In the New Class's world of fuel-injected normalization nothing could ever really be seriously wrong with their worldview despite the aberrant dysfunction and degradation of the way of American life of a mass majority of the People. While their worldview automatically re-legitimates through the Orwellian language and thought of the corporatized mass media, now nihilistically reduced to virtual if not actual entertainment, our world crumbles. Our suffering, that of the atomized, mass Client Class, goes unthematized and improperly politicized, yet always and only in the ultimate interest of the New Class. Since the Civil War this new class of bureaucratic-technocratic managerial, power-mongering, militarist empire builders, has preponderated toward the crystallization of hegemony over the will of the people and the interests of global economy.
Is recent history, then, comfortably dismissable as inevitably political and democratic “business as usual?” Or is it the startling symptomatolgy of social class structure, if not class warfare, manifesting as (1)scandal, (2)corruption, (3)graft, (4)business “mistakes,” (5)partisan self-contradictions of politicians supposedly courageously “reaching across the isle,” (6)“pay to play” disguised as lobbying and compromise, (7)‘pork’ as payoff to swing votes, (8)“donations” to influence policy and interest-orientation, (9)“bailouts,” (10)golden parachutes, and finally (11)mathematically rationalized “acceptable risk” formulas for the “monetizing” scavengers of Wall Street who need pseudo-scientific cover for their gambling and theft.
Is such corruption not treason against the very foundations of political democracy and a nation governed under the rule of Law? Surely when considerations of “size” surpass any meaningful and convincing considerations of principle and quality, this is corruption of all values that flow from the constituting principle of “We the People.” When the (a)size of a business,(b)the prevalence of practices of financialization and (c)the exigencies of predictable socio-economic “crisis” occlude from consciousness the (1)inherent social ineffectiveness and incompetence of super-centralization of power and (2)the entrenched bureaucratization of government, education, business and defense, then surely the political and social interests of the people are no longer in play as a determining force in government and political process. Any pretense to an essential equality of all the people on a putative, yet obviously illusory, mass democratic basis is pure unadulterated ideology, doublespeak and effectively treasonous political violence.
In short we are a thoroughly class divided political culture, where institutionalized access and advantage is structurally pre-determined by predictable educational failure, financial “corruption” of political process and the mass moronization of the people by a mindless, spiritually debilitating culture. Covering this scherade is a giant,hapless, effete media that turns to journalistic comedy, voyeurism and gossip while sustained analysis, relevant information acquisition and critical historical reflection fail to materialize.
Normality, that is normative acceptableness and tolerance of corruption, is in fact systematic brainwashing and lulling the People into dull indifference to the loss of values, insensibility to meaning and blindness to the exploitable automatism of character and attitude. Corruption is traditionalized, turned into romanticized legends of what is a history of heinous political infamy. Corruption is the personalized and moralized cover and excuse for a class co-opted government’s unwillingness to represent the people and to strive to realize the potential abundance of culture and community that the American way promises.
As Gov. Blagojevich said: “I did nothing wrong.” And according to the values and tacitly accepted conditions of power, profit maximization and privilege assurances, he didn’t do anything wrong. It actually was business as usual essentially and for the most part. It’s just that it wasn’t in any way in conformity with the Spirit of the Law and probably with the Letter of the Law. But when Law is instrumentalized to promote and legitimate the interests of New Class dominated big business interests and motorized by ‘bought and paid for’ congressional legislation, then the Law has no meaning nor regulative let alone constitutive force. What is materially and effectively “right” is not a matter of Law but what can be assured by the political monitoring and regulatory participation of the people who live and suffer the decisions of insular professional politicos virtually hermetically sealed from the voice and will of the People.
In the present financial market crisis it has become clear that American industry has also been betrayed by a vitiating history of class policy that has opted for financialization at the expense of material industrial autonomy. Untold billions are shoveled into, at best, questionable “bailouts” with vague mechanisms of execution, unclarifed planning and unmeasureable outcomes. Yet when such conceivably related “bailing out” involves benefit directly to workers as in the Auto industry or to homeowners, suddenly Congress finds its “conscience,” its prudence, its concern about whether such money is even available, not to mention thereby wisely spent. Obviously, the right wing Republicans would love to destroy the UAW. No, they don’t hate workers. They hate organized and self-determining workers. They hate empowered workers. They hate informed and educated citizens who bring to light bald-faced contradictions, double standards and the stacked deck of the political process. They hate transparency of government and accountability to the people. While some $800 Billion has been funneled to failing banks through the US Treasury, another as yet publicly undisclosed $2 Trillion is surreptitiously shuffled off to other “players” in the finance game by the Federal Reserve Bank courtesy of the American taxpayer. We may never know to whom and why that money has been dispensed, what the collateral is and why the bailout should have been made. Courageously the Bloomberg news group has sued the Fed to force them to disclose to whom and how this bundle of billions will be disbursed.
Apparently at least part of the right wing crowd is still deluded by the belief that the “invisible hand” of free market forces will magically take care of all socio-economic problems, thus obviating reasonable regulation, oversight, historical self-reflection and social planning. The government, presumably having lost faith in the invisible hand, has taken the bull by the horns and expects a return on at least some of this bailout money but for fear of being called ‘socialist’ or caught in the act of ‘nationalization’ they refuse taking board positions and having a vote in what happens to these favored enterprises. Again we see government defending the interests of the CEO’s who got us into this mess but, in refusing to assume some executive power in the name of the peoples’ tax money, continue to provide evidence that there are no limits to which they see the Client Class as exploitable and expendable as an organized self-conscious socio-political class with needs and rights, especially the right to have their needs and interests defended. So socialistically tinged actions are permissible to support and further the interests of the New Class but taboo in protecting the interests of the Client Class.
Such preferential and prejudicial treatment highlights the fact that two quite opposed social worlds are being secured, the one nurtured the other denatured. All too predictable policy preferences of profit-determined privilege and special treatment further determine and are determined by class consitituting values, attitudes and assumptions. Financialization of the domestic product does not make for real industry even though the elites refer to it as the “financial industry.” Even though supposedly credible arguments are made for the new financial instruments creating value beyond skimming profit as a parasite on real industry, on the real economy, it seems that the evidence indicates otherwise. Although all big finance is too big to be LET to fail, it is not to big to in fact not succeed.
The New Class is a cancerous class wholly parasitic on the real value produced by real industry. Like a cancerous tumor, it feeds on the body until the body dies and it itself begins to die. The advantage the New Class has over cancerous tumors is it can find new bodies to suck the blood out of, at least so far. A pundit on CNN one evening scoffed at Obama’s pronouncement that he would fight waste and policies that promote waste. The pundit laughed that better men than Obama have tried this but never end up saving much more than a few trivial billion. Unabashedly, he implied, what was a few trivial billion wasted on wealthy farmers often paid not to farm when trillions more are at play and at stake alongside which these several billion are nothing. So in other words New Class subsidy is so unfathomably out of control of any reform, why bother at all. Only a being firmly rooted in class privilege and the virtual immoveable momentum of self-serving “class corruption” could scoff at saving a few measly billion when billions more are spent unnecessarily except of course to preserve the power and privilege of an entrenched way of life for a very limited group of elites. And whatever ‘trickle down’ should result from the ‘good times’ should be enough to satisfy the dependent masses. Or so say the New Class elite.
But such corruption is merely the internecine warfare of the New Class players struggling for advantage and control. Despite its portrayal this is not about bad people. Of course neither is it about otherwise good people. It is about an intra-class war for which the People are the raw material and cannon fodder. It is not as if the government and economy would work well if there were not these several immoral people who end up making unwise political and business decisions. The Law as practiced is itself immoral and thus corrupt. It preserves and cloaks the immorality of law as practiced. It preserves entrenched interests while sacrificing justice, creativity and constitutive humanitarianism.
This soap opera of surface corruption is the smoke and mirrors that systematically dissolves real discourse, problem identification and universal social action. Corruption is entertainment for the masses that prevents most now from realizing that it’s not a matter of the banks, for instance, being nationalized but a matter of the whole of the Treasury being potentially privatized and the Fed investing in a shadow economy. This is not just the transfer of capital to industrious private citizens but a situationally legitimized expropriation of rights and capital by a social class to prop up the historically enervated ideology of that class. Failing to pass the test of democratic self-criticism by the People, it legislates false authority on the basis of the disproven expertise of the likes of such as Henry Paulson.
Possibly in the name of our own Constitution it is time to execute all the would-be Czars.
Meanwhile this New Class functions undetected behind the invisible wall of the daily systematic dynamics of social and political exclusion of the Client Class of workers, welfare dependents, the mass of unemployed students and military recruits . In the New Class's world of fuel-injected normalization nothing could ever really be seriously wrong with their worldview despite the aberrant dysfunction and degradation of the way of American life of a mass majority of the People. While their worldview automatically re-legitimates through the Orwellian language and thought of the corporatized mass media, now nihilistically reduced to virtual if not actual entertainment, our world crumbles. Our suffering, that of the atomized, mass Client Class, goes unthematized and improperly politicized, yet always and only in the ultimate interest of the New Class. Since the Civil War this new class of bureaucratic-technocratic managerial, power-mongering, militarist empire builders, has preponderated toward the crystallization of hegemony over the will of the people and the interests of global economy.
Is recent history, then, comfortably dismissable as inevitably political and democratic “business as usual?” Or is it the startling symptomatolgy of social class structure, if not class warfare, manifesting as (1)scandal, (2)corruption, (3)graft, (4)business “mistakes,” (5)partisan self-contradictions of politicians supposedly courageously “reaching across the isle,” (6)“pay to play” disguised as lobbying and compromise, (7)‘pork’ as payoff to swing votes, (8)“donations” to influence policy and interest-orientation, (9)“bailouts,” (10)golden parachutes, and finally (11)mathematically rationalized “acceptable risk” formulas for the “monetizing” scavengers of Wall Street who need pseudo-scientific cover for their gambling and theft.
Is such corruption not treason against the very foundations of political democracy and a nation governed under the rule of Law? Surely when considerations of “size” surpass any meaningful and convincing considerations of principle and quality, this is corruption of all values that flow from the constituting principle of “We the People.” When the (a)size of a business,(b)the prevalence of practices of financialization and (c)the exigencies of predictable socio-economic “crisis” occlude from consciousness the (1)inherent social ineffectiveness and incompetence of super-centralization of power and (2)the entrenched bureaucratization of government, education, business and defense, then surely the political and social interests of the people are no longer in play as a determining force in government and political process. Any pretense to an essential equality of all the people on a putative, yet obviously illusory, mass democratic basis is pure unadulterated ideology, doublespeak and effectively treasonous political violence.
In short we are a thoroughly class divided political culture, where institutionalized access and advantage is structurally pre-determined by predictable educational failure, financial “corruption” of political process and the mass moronization of the people by a mindless, spiritually debilitating culture. Covering this scherade is a giant,hapless, effete media that turns to journalistic comedy, voyeurism and gossip while sustained analysis, relevant information acquisition and critical historical reflection fail to materialize.
Normality, that is normative acceptableness and tolerance of corruption, is in fact systematic brainwashing and lulling the People into dull indifference to the loss of values, insensibility to meaning and blindness to the exploitable automatism of character and attitude. Corruption is traditionalized, turned into romanticized legends of what is a history of heinous political infamy. Corruption is the personalized and moralized cover and excuse for a class co-opted government’s unwillingness to represent the people and to strive to realize the potential abundance of culture and community that the American way promises.
As Gov. Blagojevich said: “I did nothing wrong.” And according to the values and tacitly accepted conditions of power, profit maximization and privilege assurances, he didn’t do anything wrong. It actually was business as usual essentially and for the most part. It’s just that it wasn’t in any way in conformity with the Spirit of the Law and probably with the Letter of the Law. But when Law is instrumentalized to promote and legitimate the interests of New Class dominated big business interests and motorized by ‘bought and paid for’ congressional legislation, then the Law has no meaning nor regulative let alone constitutive force. What is materially and effectively “right” is not a matter of Law but what can be assured by the political monitoring and regulatory participation of the people who live and suffer the decisions of insular professional politicos virtually hermetically sealed from the voice and will of the People.
In the present financial market crisis it has become clear that American industry has also been betrayed by a vitiating history of class policy that has opted for financialization at the expense of material industrial autonomy. Untold billions are shoveled into, at best, questionable “bailouts” with vague mechanisms of execution, unclarifed planning and unmeasureable outcomes. Yet when such conceivably related “bailing out” involves benefit directly to workers as in the Auto industry or to homeowners, suddenly Congress finds its “conscience,” its prudence, its concern about whether such money is even available, not to mention thereby wisely spent. Obviously, the right wing Republicans would love to destroy the UAW. No, they don’t hate workers. They hate organized and self-determining workers. They hate empowered workers. They hate informed and educated citizens who bring to light bald-faced contradictions, double standards and the stacked deck of the political process. They hate transparency of government and accountability to the people. While some $800 Billion has been funneled to failing banks through the US Treasury, another as yet publicly undisclosed $2 Trillion is surreptitiously shuffled off to other “players” in the finance game by the Federal Reserve Bank courtesy of the American taxpayer. We may never know to whom and why that money has been dispensed, what the collateral is and why the bailout should have been made. Courageously the Bloomberg news group has sued the Fed to force them to disclose to whom and how this bundle of billions will be disbursed.
Apparently at least part of the right wing crowd is still deluded by the belief that the “invisible hand” of free market forces will magically take care of all socio-economic problems, thus obviating reasonable regulation, oversight, historical self-reflection and social planning. The government, presumably having lost faith in the invisible hand, has taken the bull by the horns and expects a return on at least some of this bailout money but for fear of being called ‘socialist’ or caught in the act of ‘nationalization’ they refuse taking board positions and having a vote in what happens to these favored enterprises. Again we see government defending the interests of the CEO’s who got us into this mess but, in refusing to assume some executive power in the name of the peoples’ tax money, continue to provide evidence that there are no limits to which they see the Client Class as exploitable and expendable as an organized self-conscious socio-political class with needs and rights, especially the right to have their needs and interests defended. So socialistically tinged actions are permissible to support and further the interests of the New Class but taboo in protecting the interests of the Client Class.
Such preferential and prejudicial treatment highlights the fact that two quite opposed social worlds are being secured, the one nurtured the other denatured. All too predictable policy preferences of profit-determined privilege and special treatment further determine and are determined by class consitituting values, attitudes and assumptions. Financialization of the domestic product does not make for real industry even though the elites refer to it as the “financial industry.” Even though supposedly credible arguments are made for the new financial instruments creating value beyond skimming profit as a parasite on real industry, on the real economy, it seems that the evidence indicates otherwise. Although all big finance is too big to be LET to fail, it is not to big to in fact not succeed.
The New Class is a cancerous class wholly parasitic on the real value produced by real industry. Like a cancerous tumor, it feeds on the body until the body dies and it itself begins to die. The advantage the New Class has over cancerous tumors is it can find new bodies to suck the blood out of, at least so far. A pundit on CNN one evening scoffed at Obama’s pronouncement that he would fight waste and policies that promote waste. The pundit laughed that better men than Obama have tried this but never end up saving much more than a few trivial billion. Unabashedly, he implied, what was a few trivial billion wasted on wealthy farmers often paid not to farm when trillions more are at play and at stake alongside which these several billion are nothing. So in other words New Class subsidy is so unfathomably out of control of any reform, why bother at all. Only a being firmly rooted in class privilege and the virtual immoveable momentum of self-serving “class corruption” could scoff at saving a few measly billion when billions more are spent unnecessarily except of course to preserve the power and privilege of an entrenched way of life for a very limited group of elites. And whatever ‘trickle down’ should result from the ‘good times’ should be enough to satisfy the dependent masses. Or so say the New Class elite.
But such corruption is merely the internecine warfare of the New Class players struggling for advantage and control. Despite its portrayal this is not about bad people. Of course neither is it about otherwise good people. It is about an intra-class war for which the People are the raw material and cannon fodder. It is not as if the government and economy would work well if there were not these several immoral people who end up making unwise political and business decisions. The Law as practiced is itself immoral and thus corrupt. It preserves and cloaks the immorality of law as practiced. It preserves entrenched interests while sacrificing justice, creativity and constitutive humanitarianism.
This soap opera of surface corruption is the smoke and mirrors that systematically dissolves real discourse, problem identification and universal social action. Corruption is entertainment for the masses that prevents most now from realizing that it’s not a matter of the banks, for instance, being nationalized but a matter of the whole of the Treasury being potentially privatized and the Fed investing in a shadow economy. This is not just the transfer of capital to industrious private citizens but a situationally legitimized expropriation of rights and capital by a social class to prop up the historically enervated ideology of that class. Failing to pass the test of democratic self-criticism by the People, it legislates false authority on the basis of the disproven expertise of the likes of such as Henry Paulson.
Possibly in the name of our own Constitution it is time to execute all the would-be Czars.
Saturday, December 06, 2008
Time for Niagara Politicos to Seek Federal "Bailout"
Niagara County is an ecological and economic disaster. The wheels of state government are turning much too slowly and don’t seem to be turning in Niagara’s direction when it comes to caring for the health of our people, restoring the integrity of our environment and maximizing the potential of our location and natural resources for economic success. The time for patience and trust in state bureaucracy, which includes the elected officials, and especially the DEC, is over. The time is now and the time is ripe for any politician who dare calls him- or herself a leader to look beyond the provincial indifference, likely incompetence and stifling inertia of established representation in Niagara County and turn to Washington for help. The help we need is in restoring and creating an “infrastructure” that makes us maximally competitive as a world class tourist destination
Barack Obama has made it clear that he wants to “rebuild” the “infrastructure” of America. The heart of Niagara’s infrastructure as a potentially world class tourist destination is the Falls and the surrounding water and land. Surely included in Obama’s project could be work on restoring such contaminated land and waterways and terminally dysfunctional and decrepit cities such as Niagara Falls to healthily habitable space, safely utilizable resources and possibly most importantly aesthetically attractive and thus economically productive destinations. If someone could lead the local politicos to assess our needs in doing such a comprehensive restoration and document the number of jobs that could be created in cleaning up Niagara County’s dump sites totally and permanently and reinventing our geography as such a destination, this would serve as the data needed to acquire funding from the Obama administration.
Surely the legislature with the aid, let’s say, of the recently hired Public Information Officer, the County Manager and whomever else they must hire who might be required to carry out such a task, could create such a “grant proposal” and execute such a study post haste and have it on Obama’s doorstep the evening just after the inaugural. Surely they could do this. It’s time to forget that the good will and creative concern of NY State career politicians will ever turn in our favor.
Surely a case can be made that as a potentially major tourist destination, Niagara’s infrastructure must have a pristine environment and a properly integrated geography which at present is lacking. Only such an environment can rightly consider itself a world class destination if in fact it is going to “work” to its own greatest advantage economically. It seems to me there is little good reason for us to not be at the top of the list of those needing and deserving help from the Federal infrastructural restoration project if some such case can be made.
Whoever here might lead such a project probably cannot count on the backing of a demoralized and depoliticized populace which has lost its sense of entitlement to self-respect, good health and equal treatment by State government. Hopefully not all of our poltical “leaders” have also not fallen into the groupthink of such second class non-citizenship, victimization and pathological civic passivity. Someone must step forward and take our case to Washington.
Niagara should be the jewel resort area of the Great Lakes region and not the dump site of first "resort" of the Eastern Seaboard.
Barack Obama has made it clear that he wants to “rebuild” the “infrastructure” of America. The heart of Niagara’s infrastructure as a potentially world class tourist destination is the Falls and the surrounding water and land. Surely included in Obama’s project could be work on restoring such contaminated land and waterways and terminally dysfunctional and decrepit cities such as Niagara Falls to healthily habitable space, safely utilizable resources and possibly most importantly aesthetically attractive and thus economically productive destinations. If someone could lead the local politicos to assess our needs in doing such a comprehensive restoration and document the number of jobs that could be created in cleaning up Niagara County’s dump sites totally and permanently and reinventing our geography as such a destination, this would serve as the data needed to acquire funding from the Obama administration.
Surely the legislature with the aid, let’s say, of the recently hired Public Information Officer, the County Manager and whomever else they must hire who might be required to carry out such a task, could create such a “grant proposal” and execute such a study post haste and have it on Obama’s doorstep the evening just after the inaugural. Surely they could do this. It’s time to forget that the good will and creative concern of NY State career politicians will ever turn in our favor.
Surely a case can be made that as a potentially major tourist destination, Niagara’s infrastructure must have a pristine environment and a properly integrated geography which at present is lacking. Only such an environment can rightly consider itself a world class destination if in fact it is going to “work” to its own greatest advantage economically. It seems to me there is little good reason for us to not be at the top of the list of those needing and deserving help from the Federal infrastructural restoration project if some such case can be made.
Whoever here might lead such a project probably cannot count on the backing of a demoralized and depoliticized populace which has lost its sense of entitlement to self-respect, good health and equal treatment by State government. Hopefully not all of our poltical “leaders” have also not fallen into the groupthink of such second class non-citizenship, victimization and pathological civic passivity. Someone must step forward and take our case to Washington.
Niagara should be the jewel resort area of the Great Lakes region and not the dump site of first "resort" of the Eastern Seaboard.
Monday, November 17, 2008
New Political Class Secures the Yachts While Client Class Drowns in the Storm
Is it becoming clear to anyone during this latest economic crisis, that there are two distinct classes of people in this country? There are those who are paid millions as serverance pay for nothing more than failure. Then there are those who are merely reserve labor, social statistics or potential problematic voters that the two wings of the party duopoly must compete for in order to secure power and guarantee their corporate supporters 4 more years of special treatment.
It is ironic that the likes of Thomas Friedman would say that “"The loop we're in now, if we don't find a way to get America to go back shopping, to get a catalyst there [for the economy]…”(in Politico.com columnist Victoria McGrane’s “G-20 Punts on Global Market”). It seems that when push comes to shove some would want the people to bail “the market” out of its mess, including Bush who also urged America to go shopping shortly after the Twin Towers came tumbling down.
Well, I guess we know our allotted role, don’t we? We’re consumers. That’s all. So shut the fuck up and go shopping (whether you can afford it or not).
While its permissible for several large banks to sock away several million of tax payers money for a rainy day and further shore up their solvency by buying up smaller banks also with taxpayer money, it’s not ok for the American consumer, formerly known as citizen, to save for that same rainy day. We OUGHT to go shopping. We ought to buy American. We ought to suck it up. It’s ok for the ruling political class, the New Class, to be safe, secure, covered for health problems and always having the American tax coffers to fall back on when capitalism fails again and again, but not ok for the people to have the same social guarantee. Who do we fall back on? As Senator Phil Gramm recently announced: ‘Americans are a bunch of whiners.’
If you don’t get that this is effectively the most egregiously heartless if not effectively violently vicious class structured society that has ever been, wake up and smell the crisis. It is the latest historical phenomenon to point to the permanent crisis of Liberal Democratic Capitalism. The people and the polity are in effect expendable when the well-being and interests of the New Class are in jeopardy. Their solution is further centralization and bureaucratization in order to lock down control on our future and the democratic process which may provide voice to alternative paths for progress.
The first clear sign that democratic influence in confronting the economic crisis was surely off the table was when the first Bailout Bill which was defeated was also opposed by over 90% if the American people. But this mandate to let the failures fail was not enough for the Conservatives who shot the bill down to hold their ground in the re-vote given the $150 million “incentive” in the form of strategically placed earmarks. Read bribery. What a difference several million dollars makes. Big business wins and democracy loses. The will of the people is unceremoniously ignored. While the people are willing to pay the price for the mistakes if not the greed of big business, big business is not. They refuse the corrective that might in fact return Capitalism to a principled course. The people are will to be Capitalists and the Capitalists are not. Go figure!
We the People are now good for cheap labor, an easy source of tax monies when capitalism as such fails again and again, cheap votes in managed and engineered elections and cheap cannon fodder in our latest neo-imperialist wars. Little else. So if you didn’t hear it the first time: Shut the fuck up and go shopping. After all, there’s a sale at Wal-Mart. What a country! Or maybe join the army. We have another big fiasco coming up in Afghanistan if Obama feels the need to prove he’s not effeminate. He’s got to keep up appearances for that upcoming election in 4 years.
It is ironic that the likes of Thomas Friedman would say that “"The loop we're in now, if we don't find a way to get America to go back shopping, to get a catalyst there [for the economy]…”(in Politico.com columnist Victoria McGrane’s “G-20 Punts on Global Market”). It seems that when push comes to shove some would want the people to bail “the market” out of its mess, including Bush who also urged America to go shopping shortly after the Twin Towers came tumbling down.
Well, I guess we know our allotted role, don’t we? We’re consumers. That’s all. So shut the fuck up and go shopping (whether you can afford it or not).
While its permissible for several large banks to sock away several million of tax payers money for a rainy day and further shore up their solvency by buying up smaller banks also with taxpayer money, it’s not ok for the American consumer, formerly known as citizen, to save for that same rainy day. We OUGHT to go shopping. We ought to buy American. We ought to suck it up. It’s ok for the ruling political class, the New Class, to be safe, secure, covered for health problems and always having the American tax coffers to fall back on when capitalism fails again and again, but not ok for the people to have the same social guarantee. Who do we fall back on? As Senator Phil Gramm recently announced: ‘Americans are a bunch of whiners.’
If you don’t get that this is effectively the most egregiously heartless if not effectively violently vicious class structured society that has ever been, wake up and smell the crisis. It is the latest historical phenomenon to point to the permanent crisis of Liberal Democratic Capitalism. The people and the polity are in effect expendable when the well-being and interests of the New Class are in jeopardy. Their solution is further centralization and bureaucratization in order to lock down control on our future and the democratic process which may provide voice to alternative paths for progress.
The first clear sign that democratic influence in confronting the economic crisis was surely off the table was when the first Bailout Bill which was defeated was also opposed by over 90% if the American people. But this mandate to let the failures fail was not enough for the Conservatives who shot the bill down to hold their ground in the re-vote given the $150 million “incentive” in the form of strategically placed earmarks. Read bribery. What a difference several million dollars makes. Big business wins and democracy loses. The will of the people is unceremoniously ignored. While the people are willing to pay the price for the mistakes if not the greed of big business, big business is not. They refuse the corrective that might in fact return Capitalism to a principled course. The people are will to be Capitalists and the Capitalists are not. Go figure!
We the People are now good for cheap labor, an easy source of tax monies when capitalism as such fails again and again, cheap votes in managed and engineered elections and cheap cannon fodder in our latest neo-imperialist wars. Little else. So if you didn’t hear it the first time: Shut the fuck up and go shopping. After all, there’s a sale at Wal-Mart. What a country! Or maybe join the army. We have another big fiasco coming up in Afghanistan if Obama feels the need to prove he’s not effeminate. He’s got to keep up appearances for that upcoming election in 4 years.
Saturday, November 08, 2008
AN OPEN LETTER: NADER TO OBAMA
November 3, 2008
Dear Senator Obama:
In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words "hope and change," "change and hope" have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not "hope and change" but the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo.
Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys. Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart. Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?
To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, courage, integrity-- not expediency, accommodation and short-range opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation, blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of the Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007 issue of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed by a majority of Jewish-Americans.
You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an "undivided Jerusalem," and opposed negotiations with Hamas-- the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored "direct negotiations with Hamas." Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote "Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society by the Israeli state."
During your visit to Israel this summer, you scheduled a mere 45 minutes of your time for Palestinians with no news conference, and no visit to Palestinian refugee camps that would have focused the media on the brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported the illegal, cruel blockade of Gaza in defiance of international law and the United Nations charter. You focused on southern Israeli casualties which during the past year have totaled one civilian casualty to every 400 Palestinian casualties on the Gaza side. Instead of a statesmanship that decried all violence and its replacement with acceptance of the Arab League's 2002 proposal to permit a viable Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full economic and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you played the role of a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians with the feeling of much shock and little awe.
David Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip succinctly: "There was almost a willful display of indifference to the fact that there are two narratives here. This could serve him well as a candidate, but not as a President."
Palestinian American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did not utter a single criticism of Israel, "of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians. ...Even the Bush administration recently criticized Israeli's use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians [see www.atfl.org for elaboration]. But Obama defended Israeli's assault on Lebanon as an exercise of its 'legitimate right to defend itself.'"
In numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly criticized the Israeli government's assault on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on "the heart of a crowded refugee camp... with horrible bloodshed" in early 2008.
Israeli writer and peace advocate-- Uri Avnery-- described Obama's appearance before AIPAC as one that "broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning, adding that Obama "is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future-- if and when he is elected president.," he said, adding, "Of one thing I am certain: Obama's declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people."
A further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you turned your back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused to send surrogates to speak to voters at their events. Having visited numerous churches and synagogues, you refused to visit a single Mosque in America. Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington D.C. after 9/11 to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a frightened major religious group of innocents.
Although the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008 titled "Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama" (by Andrea Elliott), citing examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all walks of life, who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the American dream. Three days earlier the International Herald Tribune published an article by Roger Cohen titled "Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque." None of these comments and reports change your political bigotry against Muslim-Americans-- even though your father was a Muslim from Kenya.
Perhaps nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or even the mildest version of this trait than your surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention. This is a tradition for former presidents and one accorded in prime time to Bill Clinton this year.
Here was a President who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt, but his recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid Apartheid of the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to sideline him. Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy Carter on this critical international problem, he was relegated to a stroll across the stage to "tumultuous applause," following a showing of a film about the Carter Center's post-Katrina work. Shame on you, Barack Obama!
But then your shameful behavior has extended to many other areas of American life. (See the factual analysis by my running mate, Matt Gonzalez, on www.votenader.org). You have turned your back on the 100-million poor Americans composed of poor whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. You always mention helping the "middle class" but you omit, repeatedly, mention of the "poor" in America.
Should you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented upward career move following a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that spoke "change" yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration power of the "corporate supremacists." It must be about shifting the power from the few to the many. It must be a White House presided over by a black man who does not turn his back on the downtrodden here and abroad but challenges the forces of greed, dictatorial control of labor, consumers and taxpayers, and the militarization of foreign policy. It must be a White House that is transforming of American politics-- opening it up to the public funding of elections (through voluntary approaches)-- and allowing smaller candidates to have a chance to be heard on debates and in the fullness of their now restricted civil liberties. Call it a competitive democracy.
Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly stands. "Hope" some say springs eternal." But not when "reality" consumes it daily.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
Dear Senator Obama:
In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words "hope and change," "change and hope" have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not "hope and change" but the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo.
Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys. Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart. Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?
To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, courage, integrity-- not expediency, accommodation and short-range opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation, blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of the Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007 issue of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed by a majority of Jewish-Americans.
You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an "undivided Jerusalem," and opposed negotiations with Hamas-- the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored "direct negotiations with Hamas." Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote "Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society by the Israeli state."
During your visit to Israel this summer, you scheduled a mere 45 minutes of your time for Palestinians with no news conference, and no visit to Palestinian refugee camps that would have focused the media on the brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported the illegal, cruel blockade of Gaza in defiance of international law and the United Nations charter. You focused on southern Israeli casualties which during the past year have totaled one civilian casualty to every 400 Palestinian casualties on the Gaza side. Instead of a statesmanship that decried all violence and its replacement with acceptance of the Arab League's 2002 proposal to permit a viable Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full economic and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you played the role of a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians with the feeling of much shock and little awe.
David Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip succinctly: "There was almost a willful display of indifference to the fact that there are two narratives here. This could serve him well as a candidate, but not as a President."
Palestinian American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did not utter a single criticism of Israel, "of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians. ...Even the Bush administration recently criticized Israeli's use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians [see www.atfl.org for elaboration]. But Obama defended Israeli's assault on Lebanon as an exercise of its 'legitimate right to defend itself.'"
In numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly criticized the Israeli government's assault on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on "the heart of a crowded refugee camp... with horrible bloodshed" in early 2008.
Israeli writer and peace advocate-- Uri Avnery-- described Obama's appearance before AIPAC as one that "broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning, adding that Obama "is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future-- if and when he is elected president.," he said, adding, "Of one thing I am certain: Obama's declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people."
A further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you turned your back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused to send surrogates to speak to voters at their events. Having visited numerous churches and synagogues, you refused to visit a single Mosque in America. Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington D.C. after 9/11 to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a frightened major religious group of innocents.
Although the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008 titled "Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama" (by Andrea Elliott), citing examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all walks of life, who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the American dream. Three days earlier the International Herald Tribune published an article by Roger Cohen titled "Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque." None of these comments and reports change your political bigotry against Muslim-Americans-- even though your father was a Muslim from Kenya.
Perhaps nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or even the mildest version of this trait than your surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention. This is a tradition for former presidents and one accorded in prime time to Bill Clinton this year.
Here was a President who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt, but his recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid Apartheid of the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to sideline him. Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy Carter on this critical international problem, he was relegated to a stroll across the stage to "tumultuous applause," following a showing of a film about the Carter Center's post-Katrina work. Shame on you, Barack Obama!
But then your shameful behavior has extended to many other areas of American life. (See the factual analysis by my running mate, Matt Gonzalez, on www.votenader.org). You have turned your back on the 100-million poor Americans composed of poor whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. You always mention helping the "middle class" but you omit, repeatedly, mention of the "poor" in America.
Should you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented upward career move following a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that spoke "change" yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration power of the "corporate supremacists." It must be about shifting the power from the few to the many. It must be a White House presided over by a black man who does not turn his back on the downtrodden here and abroad but challenges the forces of greed, dictatorial control of labor, consumers and taxpayers, and the militarization of foreign policy. It must be a White House that is transforming of American politics-- opening it up to the public funding of elections (through voluntary approaches)-- and allowing smaller candidates to have a chance to be heard on debates and in the fullness of their now restricted civil liberties. Call it a competitive democracy.
Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly stands. "Hope" some say springs eternal." But not when "reality" consumes it daily.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
Thursday, October 16, 2008
BONFIRE OF THE BANALITIES: Toward the Democratization of Political Economy
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything. I’m feeling kind of sucker punched by the economic and political situation. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the economic crisis. Yet I really can’t get a handle on how to begin to grasp what needs to be said to move the political discourse forward, at least in my mind. Not that I’ve moved it forward or could move it forward in anyone else's mind. I really don’t harbor such grandiose kinds of illusions. But as Jodi Dean at the icite blog said, are we “in a situation of such global volatility that there isn’t a cohesive locus for thinking about it.” That is, how do we “frame,” contextualize and locate the vantage point of an illuminating perspective.
It certainly doesn’t do me any good to worry about my retirement account. I’ve decided to just ride out the storm and hope there’s something left standing when it’s over. I can’t even dream that I would have anything to contribute to resolve or solve the international economic crisis. Even if I had the economics background enabling me to analyze the situation, I’m sure I wouldn’t be any more confident or convincing than the beating around the bush I’ve heard over the past few weeks from the “experts.”
I’ve never heard so many experts with such sterling credentials say so little to throw new light on the situation. Undoubtedly the debates that Bernanke, Paulson and the likes have in the room behind the Boardroom, I probably couldn’t even begin to understand. I just can’t help believe and have faith in the possibility that in a democracy there should be some better attempt to educate regarding and to communicate about what’s happening to us economically.
Economics Professor Cristian Ioan Tiu of SUNY, Buffalo said, “Why can’t we take all we know about risk aversion and translate it into prudence? … This crisis is built on the foundation of financial illiteracy.” [Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/10/08] I’m not sure if he meant the illiteracy of the majority of the populace or actually the illiteracy of even the experts, or, of course, both.
If the business model of Wall Street itself is bankrupt, as some have suggested, then someone needs to shake up Wall Street undoubtedly way beyond the controls now being imposed which don’t seem to be much more than kind of giving the fox limited times and conditions under which he gets to continue to ravage the hen house.
Possibly however it’s not just the business model but the very idea that the international economy can be “managed” that has been exhausted. If in fact globablization has made us inextricably inter-dependent, then the fulcrum for carrying out management mandates may not exist. Haven’t we reached the point where the international economy itself must be democratized given that the theoretical leverage and/or the practical wisdom doesn’t seem to exist that can unify the global players for the good of the international communities. And shouldn’t we begin the renovation of the educational system which until now leaves most of us unable to fathom the language and practices of a financial system that leaves us helpless and hopeless to participate politically even if we were sufficiently democratized to do so.
It certainly doesn’t do me any good to worry about my retirement account. I’ve decided to just ride out the storm and hope there’s something left standing when it’s over. I can’t even dream that I would have anything to contribute to resolve or solve the international economic crisis. Even if I had the economics background enabling me to analyze the situation, I’m sure I wouldn’t be any more confident or convincing than the beating around the bush I’ve heard over the past few weeks from the “experts.”
I’ve never heard so many experts with such sterling credentials say so little to throw new light on the situation. Undoubtedly the debates that Bernanke, Paulson and the likes have in the room behind the Boardroom, I probably couldn’t even begin to understand. I just can’t help believe and have faith in the possibility that in a democracy there should be some better attempt to educate regarding and to communicate about what’s happening to us economically.
Economics Professor Cristian Ioan Tiu of SUNY, Buffalo said, “Why can’t we take all we know about risk aversion and translate it into prudence? … This crisis is built on the foundation of financial illiteracy.” [Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/10/08] I’m not sure if he meant the illiteracy of the majority of the populace or actually the illiteracy of even the experts, or, of course, both.
If the business model of Wall Street itself is bankrupt, as some have suggested, then someone needs to shake up Wall Street undoubtedly way beyond the controls now being imposed which don’t seem to be much more than kind of giving the fox limited times and conditions under which he gets to continue to ravage the hen house.
Possibly however it’s not just the business model but the very idea that the international economy can be “managed” that has been exhausted. If in fact globablization has made us inextricably inter-dependent, then the fulcrum for carrying out management mandates may not exist. Haven’t we reached the point where the international economy itself must be democratized given that the theoretical leverage and/or the practical wisdom doesn’t seem to exist that can unify the global players for the good of the international communities. And shouldn’t we begin the renovation of the educational system which until now leaves most of us unable to fathom the language and practices of a financial system that leaves us helpless and hopeless to participate politically even if we were sufficiently democratized to do so.
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