Crib From This

"Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming..."

2011-11-16T18:02:00.002-06:00

A couple of items we thought you might like to know about:

From the Associated Press, by way of Yahoo News:

SEATTLE (AP) — A downtown march and rally in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement turned briefly chaotic as police scattered a crowd of rowdy protesters — including a pregnant 19-year-old and an 84-year-old activist — with blasts of pepper spray.
Protest organizers denounced the use of force, saying that police indiscriminately sprayed the chemical irritant at peaceful protesters.

The Occupy Seattle movement released a written statement late Tuesday expressing support for "a 4-foot 10-inch, 84-year-old woman, a priest and a pregnant woman who as of this writing is still in the hospital." ...

http://news.yahoo.com/pregnant-teen-elderly-woman-among-pepper-sprayed-113054448.html

From the Atlantic Wire, a blog associated with the Atlantic Monthly magazine:

There were reports that both Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Cal (on the Berkeley campus of the University of California) are being raided on Wednesday morning. The week of police crackdown comes amid reports that the federal government and is coordinating with multiple on legal strategies that can shut down the Occupy protests.

The woman in the picture is not just any elderly woman ... she is well known to Seattle residents. Dorli Rainey is a former school teacher who has been active in local politics since the 1960s. In 2009, she ran for mayor, but eventually dropped out by saying, "I am old and should learn to be old, stay home, watch TV and sit still." We guess she didn't learn.

Rainey emailed The Stranger, Seattle's alternative paper, to say she stopped by the march to see what was happening when her group got pinned in by police and nearly trampled in the chaos. ...

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/11/84-year-old-woman-becomes-pepper-sprayed-face-occupy-seattle/45035/

Uh...hi. And Orwell link.

2011-07-04T17:09:00.001-05:00

Well, it's certainly been a while, hasn't it? In between doing to millions of other things, I've been pondering over the last several months how to remake Crib From This, starting, as it were, from scratch. I've got a few cool ideas here and there, and I will let you know (if you or anyone else is actually reading this...) when it will be ready to put into practice. So anyway, stay tuned.

(My god, that was vague...)

So anyway, I just happened across one of my favorite George Orwell essays, Notes on Nationalism, and I'm once again impressed with how unbelievable prescient this plain-spoken anti-genius could be. I imagine that October 1945, when it originally ran in a journal called Polemic: A Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology & Aesthetics, this essay captured, in uncomfortably vivid detail, the deleterious effects of various kinds of nationalism upon the capacity of educated—supposedly 'civilized'—Englishmen and Europeans to think clearly.

What's even more astonishing, however, is to behold just how close Orwell's brilliant analysis comes to capturing the essence of the kinds of shortsighted allegiances that have captured the minds of our (the US's and the West's more generally) 'best and brightest', as we ordinary mortals observe powerlessly their arrogant, ham-fisted mishandling of our current geopolitical situation. Here's Orwell laying the groundwork for his argument, in Notes on Nationalism:

[T]here is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word 'nationalism', but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation — that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, AGAINST something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.

By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'.* But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, NOT for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
* Nations, and even vaguer entities such as Catholic Church or the proleteriat, are commonly thought of as individuals and often referred to as 'she'. Patently absurd remarks such as 'Germany is naturally treacherous' are to be found in any newspaper one opens and reckless generalization about national character ('The Spaniard is a natural aristocrat' or 'Every Englishman is a hypocrite') are uttered by almost everyone. Intermittently these generalizations are seen to be unfounded, but the habit of making them persists, and people of professedly international outlook, e.g., Tolstoy or Bernard Shaw, are often guilty of them. (Orwell's footnote)

So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough. Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside, nearly all of us would say much the same things about it. But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using the word 'nationalism' for lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to ONE'S OWN country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.

It is also worth emphasising once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the U.S.S.R. without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it IS the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.

Now that I have given this lengthy definition, I think it will be admitted that the habit of mind I am talking about is widespread among the English intelligentsia, and more widespread there than among the mass of the people. For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. Out of the hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies, the U.S.S.R., Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In theory, it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would therefore START by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America as the case might be, and only AFTER this would begin searching for arguments that seemed to support his case. And there are whole strings of kindred questions to which you can only get an honest answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of al the 'experts' of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939.* And when news of the Pact broke, the most wildly divergent explanations were of it were given, and predictions were made which were falsified almost immediately, being based in nearly every case not on a study of probabilities but on a desire to make the U.S.S.R. seem good or bad, strong or weak. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.** And aesthetic judgements, especially literary judgements, are often corrupted in the same way as political ones. It would be difficult for an Indian Nationalist to enjoy reading Kipling or for a Conservative to see merit in Mayakovsky, and there is always a temptation to claim that any book whose tendency one disagrees with must be a bad book from a LITERARY point of view. People of strongly nationalistic outlook often perform this sleight of hand without being conscious of dishonesty.
* A few writers of conservative tendency, such as Peter Drucker, foretold an agreement between Germany and Russia, but they expected an actual alliance or amalgamation which would be permanent. No Marxist or other left-wing writer, of whatever colour, came anywhere near foretelling the Pact. (Orwell's footnote)

** The military commentators of the popular press can mostly be classified as pro-Russian or anti-Russian, pro-blimp or anti-blimp. Such errors as believing the Mrginot Line impregnable, or predicting that Russia would conquer Germany in three months, have failed to shake their reputation, because they were always saying what their own particular audience wanted to hear. The two military critics most favoured by the intelligentsia are Captain Liddell Hart and Major-General Fuller, the first of whom teaches that the defence is stronger that the attack, and the second that the attack is stronger that the defence. This contradiction has not prevented both of them from being accepted as authorities by the same public. The secret reason for their vogue in left-wing circles is that both of them are at odds with the War Office. (Orwell's footnote)

Orwell goes on to say:

In England, if one simply considers the number of people involved, it is probable that the dominant form of nationalism is old-fashioned British jingoism. It is certain that this is still widespread, and much more so than most observers would have believed a dozen years ago. However, in this essay I am concerned chiefly with the reactions of the intelligentsia, among whom jingoism and even patriotism of the old kind are almost dead, though they now seem to be reviving among a minority. Among the intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism — using this word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members, but 'fellow travellers' and Russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose here, is one who looks upon the U.S.S.R. as his Fatherland and feels it his duty to justify Russian policy and advance Russian interests at all costs. Obviously such people abound in England today, and their direct and indirect influence is very great. But many other forms of nationalism also flourish, and it is by noticing the points of resemblance between different and even seemingly opposed currents of thought that one can best get the matter into perspective.

Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent — though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one — was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians.' Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it — as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the MARSEILLAISE over glasses of red wine — had about as much relation to reality as CHU CHIN CHOW has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous overestimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton's battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara, make The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.

Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political Catholicism, as exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism. So there are between either of these and for instance Scottish nationalism, Zionism, Antisemitism or Trotskyism. It would be an oversimplification to say that all forms of nationalism are the same, even in their mental atmosphere, but there are certain rules that hold good in all cases. The following are the principal characteristics of nationalist thought:

OBSESSION. As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can relieve only by making some sharp retort. If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority for it not only in military power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different countries are named.* Nomenclature plays a very important part in nationalist thought. Countries which have won their independence or gone through a nationalist revolution usually change their names, and any country or other unit round which strong feelings revolve is likely to have several names, each of them carrying a different implication. The two sides of the Spanish Civil War had between them nine or ten names expressing different degrees of love and hatred. Some of these names (e.g. 'Patriots' for Franco-supporters, or 'Loyalists' for Government-supporters) were frankly question-begging, and there was no single one of the which the two rival factions could have agreed to use. All nationalists consider it a duty to spread their own language to the detriment of rival languages, and among English-speakers this struggle reappears in subtler forms as a struggle between dialects. Anglophobe-Americans will refuse to use a slang phrase if they know it to be of British origin, and the conflict between Latinizers and Germanizers often has nationalists motives behind it. Scottish nationalists insist on the superiority of Lowland Scots, and socialists whose nationalism takes the form of class hatred tirade against the B.B.C. accent and even the often gives the impression of being tinged by belief in sympathetic magic — a belief which probably comes out in the widespread custom of burning political enemies in effigy, or using pictures of them as targets in shooting galleries.
* Certain Americans have expressed dissatisfaction because 'Anglo-American' is the form of combination for these two words. It has been proposed to substitute 'Americo-British'. (Orwell's footnote)

INSTABILITY. The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, as I have pointed out already, they can be and often are fastened up on some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincare, Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred years, transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among literary intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was to Japan, with Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and in our own age it is usually to Russia. But the peculiarly interesting fact is that re-transference is also possible. A country or other unit which has been worshipped for years may suddenly become detestable, and some other object of affection may take its place with almost no interval. In the first version of H. G. Wells's OUTLINE OF HISTORY, and others of his writings about that time, one finds the United States praised almost as extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within a few years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility. The bigoted Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even days, into an equally bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within the next few years. What remains constant in the nationalist is his state of mind: the object of his feelings is changeable, and may be imaginary.

But for an intellectual, transference has an important function which I have already mentioned shortly in connection with Chesterton. It makes it possible for him to be much MORE nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red Army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realises that this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack — all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one's conduct.

INDIFFERENCE TO REALITY. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side. The Liberal NEWS CHRONICLE published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians.* It is the same with historical events. History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell's soldiers slashing Irishwomen's faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the 'right' cause. If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities — in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna — believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.
* The NEWS CHRONICLE advised its readers to visit the news film at which the entire execution could be witnessed, with close-ups. The STAR published with seeming approval photographs of nearly naked female collaborationists being baited by the Paris mob. These photographs had a marked resemblance to the Nazi photographs of Jews being baited by the Berlin mob. (Orwell's footnote)
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English Russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.

Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should — in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 — and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.* In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists 'didn't count', or perhaps had not happened. The primary aim of propaganda is, of course, to influence contemporary opinion, but those who rewrite history do probably believe with part of their minds that they are actually thrusting facts into the past. When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly.
* An example is the Russo-German Pact, which is being effaced as quickly as possible from public memory. A Russian correspondent informs me that mention of the Pact is already being omitted from Russian year-books which table recent political events. (Orwell's note)

Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported — battles, massacres, famines, revolutions — tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to FEEL that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.

Orwell goes on to elaborate a typology of forms of nationalism. Laser-sharp thinking that—as with pretty much everything Orwell ever wrote—has a lot to say to us today.

Wisconsin's gubernatorial "Vanna White veto."

2011-03-03T11:01:00.001-06:00

Like many people, among the political developments I've been following as closely as I can (which isn't always very closely) is the widespread outrage among progressives and labor supporters to the scheme of Wisconsin's new Governor Scott Walker—along with his fellow Republicans in the legislative branch—to, in one fell swoop, strip the state's public unions of their collective bargaining rights. The standoff between Walker and his state's public employees has continued for weeks, with Wisconsin State Senate Democrats having decamped to undisclosed locations in Illinois—a tactic of last resort to prevent their Republican colleagues from ramming their draconian measure through without argument or objection.

A recent article appearing on the Web site of the Atlantic Monthly provides perhaps the most alarming in all of this story's peculiar twists:

Two weeks into the collective bargaining protests in Madison, the interior of the Wisconsin state Capitol feels like a high-traffic liberal website given physical form. It's a world of text. Sheets of paper are affixed to every reachable surface with little strips of blue non-staining painter's tape. Some pages have slogans markered on them, others have columns of dense printing. "Retired teacher from California supports Wisconsin Workers" "One day longer!" "You can't silence Wisconsin." "Why can't we be friends with benefits?" There's a printout of a George Lakoff article, notices of other protests around the state, a lost-kid board, and a flier for somebody's self-published apocalyptic novel. Ranging up and down both sides of a grand marble staircase are printouts of 10,000 e-mails from Wisconsin citizens to Gov. Scott Walker (R), opposing his proposal to strip collective bargaining rights from public sector workers.

But the boisterous messages hide a sobering reality as the stalemate over Walker's budget repair bill deepens. A deal floated by moderate Republican state Sen. Dale Schultz, under which collective bargaining rights would automatically reactivate in 2013, seems to have drawn no interest from either side. One possible reason: the Wisconsin veto makes such a compromise impossible to enforce.

What most people outside Wisconsin don't know is that our governor wields a veto power on appropriations bills so strong as to be frankly comic. It's not just a line-item veto; Walker has the power to veto individual phrases and words (PDF) -- like "not" -- from sentences. If the state Senate returns to session and passes a bill with time limits on Walker's favored provisions, he can strip out the new language and sign his own decompromised version into law. If that sounds crazy, keep in mind that until 2008 governors of Wisconsin could -- and did! -- veto multi-page sections of bills, leaving in place only eight or nine words spelling out a law the governor wanted to enact. And that, in turn, was a much-narrowed version of the so-called "Vanna White veto" power enjoyed by Wisconsin governors prior to 1990, when they could veto individual letters out of words and individual digits out of numbers.

Prank call reveals Wisconsin governor as stooge of corporations with nationwide anti-labor agenda.

2011-02-24T16:48:00.005-06:00

This is our time to change the course of history!
— Wisconsin's newly elected governor, Scott Walker

I'm not a huge fan of the idea of journalists pulling pranks like this, and I don't think that this conversation yielded any important new insights. The audio clip of a prank call that a journalist, posing as a rich businessman, made to Wisconsin's governor Scott Walker nevertheless makes for fascinating listening. It's especially important to keep in mind that Governor Walker believes himself to be talking on the phone to a 'conservative billionaire'. The Gov sure sounds more than a little chummy (specifically, the kind of chummy wherein one is also sycophantic). More explanation in this clip from the AP:

Who says this ain't a new Gilded Age?

On Wisconsin!!!

2011-02-17T08:45:00.001-06:00

I have no idea how you managed to elect this despotic thug named Scott Walker as your governer, but don't give up the fight against his unprecedented and draconian assault on workers' rights!

Snow Daze....A pictorial dispatch from Chicago.

2011-02-02T23:49:00.002-06:00

Or, anyway, from the portion of my neighborhood, beyond which I dared not travel. These photos were taken several hours after the onslaught of snow finally ceased. Some people were able to dig their cars out from underneath iced-over slabs of snow. Others weren't so lucky.

The thing about this snowstorm was not its magnitude per se, but rather its severity. Huge amounts of precipitation and wickedly strong wind gusts were concentrated within a disconcertingly brief span of time. As a result, the school day was canceled in both the private and public schools across the city. This might not seem so out of the ordinary, but apparently, today was Chicago Public Schools' first declared 'snow day' in 12 years(!).

It's said that this long streak of eschewing weather-induced school cancellations has been a point of pride among CPS officials, which is actually admirable considering the fact that so many poor children depend upon the schools for vital services that are frequently unavailable to them at home (including breakfast and lunch). But road conditions have continued to be so bad today that it would have been genuinely irresponsible for the administrators not to have called off school. They've also called off school for tomorrow, February 3rd, which is also more than merely the prudent option.

If you want to know how dangerous the roads still are in this city, consider that Lake Shore Drive—Chicago's bustling thoroughfare that races alongside the coast of Lake Michigan—had to be closed to traffic yesterday and, as I type, has not yet been reopened(!). Not only that, but apparently, there are still hundreds of abandoned cars stuck in the snow in the middle of this four-to-six-lane highway.

Nothing to do on a day like this except take photographs. And post them on one's normally horribly neglected blog. And tomorrow's going to be more of the same.

Mubarak's thugs remind us that neocons & repressive dictators speak the same language: violence.

2011-02-02T14:42:00.005-06:00

In the wake of Mubarak's announcement to the Egyptian people that he will resign from office at the end of his current presidential term (they have "terms"?!), we are reminded of Max Weber's famous observation in Economy and Society: "legal coercion by violence is the monopoly of the state."

We citizens of the modern bourgeois, cosmopolitan West ignore this relationship between violence and the state at our peril. A hundred years after the First World War, the fundamental premise of statehood remains unaltered: it is a form of social organization in whose name the use of violence is accorded legitimacy. It's through this lens that I've begun to view the recent eruptions of violence in Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere in Egypt.

Weeks of remarkably peaceful anti-Mubarak protests culminated yesterday in the collegial, civilized march of a million (or, anyway, a whole hell of a lot of) demonstrators. This was the moment Mubarak chose to make his LBJ-like announcement. And, within moments of his television address, he gave the signal to his police thugs, to paid-off petty criminals (the same criminals who'd previously been given free reign to loot stores, etc., all to increase the public's sense of chaos and instability), and to camel-riding mercenaries—apparently summoned from the tourism industry(!)—to confront the anti-Mubarak throng.

The result? Violence and chaos. But this time, instead of operating behind the scenes, to cultivate an atmosphere of unease—a strategy that had failed—the incitement happened right in front of the television cameras of the international press. Some of the supposed Mubarak-lovers riding camels onto the scene! As blatant a coordinated provocation as can be imagined.

My first reaction to this orchestrated provocation from the obviously phony "pro-Mubarak protesters" was: How could Mubarak be so ham-fisted? I quickly realized that, of course, there was nothing ham-fisted about it: Its obviousness is the whole point.

Paying off petty criminals and/or plainclothes policemen to loot stores was a genuine attempt to generate a sense of chaos, undifferentiated violence, economic uncertainty, and a yearning for the 'law and order' among the civilian population (this yearning being Mubarak's—or any repressive dictator's—political trump card).

By contrast, the coordinated "pro-Mubarak" incitement of violence represents a deliberate and ostentatious flexing of the state's muscle: an example of 'legitimate' state violence. The message to the protesting masses is simple: "Okay, you've extracted the best concession you're gonna get from us; now go home."

There is a separate message simultaneously being beamed to the heavy-weights in the Egyptian business community (and members of the middle class whose livelihood depends upon the smooth functioning of the latter), which is: "You still need us to keep the order." In this sense, the contrast between the ruling regime's highly uncharacteristic use of restraint over the past week and the volatility of recent developments is being used as an illustration of what happens when the state does not maintain the order with its iron fist.

The army plays an interesting role in this process. Its restraint, over the past week, has served as a way in which to preserve its popularity with the Egyptian public. Now, when Mubarak's thugs have been dispatched to the scene—by the busload, apparently—in order to spill some blood, the Egyptian army's restraint and 'impartiality' takes on a particularly sinister quality.

And so, when we witness the pro-Mubarak stance of some prominent neoconservatives, we should not see it as a sudden, surprising neoconservative embrace of Realpolitik—a posture that these same figures so often claim to despise (take their supposed belief in 'democracy-building' in Iraq, for example).

Instead, the neoconservatives are showing a tendency that has consistently been at the very heart of their system of values: the neocons, just like Mubarak, just like Ahmadinejad, believe in violence.

The neocons, like these repressive dictators, are suspicious of messy, unpredictable things like political and religious liberty, the rule of law, intellectualism, political discourse, and democratic deliberation. Although the neocons might occasionally speak the language of democracy, in fact they they understand only the language of violence.

See also: Slavoj Žižek on the cynicism and hypocrisy in the attitudes of many Westerners toward democratic revolutions in the Middle East.

The untimely passing of Broadcast's Trish Keenan.

2011-01-15T21:19:00.003-06:00

My god, what a tragedy! Trish Keenan, the creative and talented lead singer and lyricist of the British band Broadcast, has passed away at the shockingly young age of 42. Keenan, a resident of Birmingham, UK, died of "complications of pneumonia," according to the Web site of Broadcast's record label, Warp Records, which continues:

Our thoughts go out to James, Martin, her friends and her family and we request that the public respect their wishes for privacy at this time.

This is an untimely tragic loss and we will miss Trish dearly - a unique voice, an extraordinary talent and a beautiful human being. Rest in Peace.

The Toronto Sun provides additional details on this horrible horrible turn of events:

The Broadcast frontwoman picked up a strain of swine flu while touring Australia in December. She was hospitalized on her return to England and spent two weeks in intensive care after she was also diagnosed with pneumonia.

Keenan's sister told fans the rocker was "fighting for her life" on Thursday, and the following morning, the star passed away after suffering complications from the inflammatory lung condition.

I'm simply too shocked and sad about this to wax eloquent about the joy and comfort that Broadcast's music has brought me over the years—in particular, their 2005 album Tender Buttons, on which the band's line-up was stripped down to a duo, bringing into sharper focus Trish's beautiful voice/diction and evocative lyrics. That masterpiece's juxtaposition of Trish's voice—simultaneously mellow and icy—against frequently cacophonous musical accompaniments is showcased on Track 10, "Subject to the Ladder," which is possibly my favorite Broadcast song.

Subject to the Ladder (please feel free to ignore the visuals...I have no idea what they're supposed to be all about; it happens that this video represents the only posting of this song that appears on YouTube):

And here's the more tuneful and every bit as wonderful song Black Cat, also from Tender Buttons:

Why does it always seem to be the good people, who bring happiness into the world? Why not Tom Delay, or Henry Kissinger, or somebody like that?

Rest in Peace, Trish. We're really going to miss you.

Stephen Colbert applauds Bill O'Reilly's brilliant borderline-heresy.

2010-12-26T12:26:00.000-06:00

Hilarious Stephen Colbert monologue from earlier this month. Merry Christmas, y'all.

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March to Keep Fear Alive

Who (or what) the hell is that?

2010-12-21T18:53:00.003-06:00

OK, so I'm happy that Obama is going to get his treaty with Russia ratified and everything, but you'll forgive me if I'm distracted by this prominently placed photo of someone—or something—that is just begging to be put out of its misery.

Turns out it's Senator Jon Kyl, among the GOP Senators who were plotting to prevent the ratification of any treaty that might decrease the world's stockpile of nukes. Way to go, you Leering, Creepy Ogre-Faced Old Coot. You bang that table with your fist. "I DON'T WANNA LEAVE A SAFER, LESS INSANE/DANGEROUS WORLD FOR MY CHILDREN/CHILDREN'S CHILDREN." Does he even have opposable thumbs? (Maybe he's just waiting for someone to shove a big fat banana in that gruesomely shriveled ogre-mouth of his.)

According to the Times article:

Eleven Republicans joined every Democrat present to support the treaty, known as New Start, which now heads to a seemingly certain final vote of approval on Wednesday, as the Senate wraps up business before heading out of town. Voting against the treaty were 28 Republicans who argued that it could hurt national security. [...]

Republican opponents continued to hammer away at the treaty, arguing that its verification procedures were inadequate and that nonbinding language in its preamble could give Russia leverage to try to keep the United States from deploying missile defense installations in Eastern Europe. They said Russia got more out of the treaty than the United States.

“The administration did not negotiate a good treaty,” Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican, told reporters. “They went into negotiations, it seems to me, with the attitude with the Russians just like the guy that goes into the car dealership and says, ‘I’m not leaving here until I buy a car.’” [emphasis added....—cft]

Seriously, get a closer look at this sideshow spectacle!

Kafka couldn't have made this guy up! (OK, maybe Kafka could have, but few others.)

Journalist Dan Kennedy on Obama's "shameful" war on Wikileaks.

2010-12-18T13:49:00.000-06:00

Boston-based journalist and blogger Dan Kennedy contributed a characteristically lucid and well-reasoned commentary to his occasional column in the UK's The Guardian last Thursday. Kennedy is a left-leaning veteran of the all-but-extinct profession of journalism.

One of the hallmarks of Kennedy's work is that his analysis of facts is always dispassionate and informed by historical context. Of particular relevance here is his knowledge of the history of journalism and the first amendment, and their relation 'state secrets'. He does a great job of articulating what is at stake in the White House's participation in, or rather, coordination of, the hysterical effort to vilify and prosecute Assange:

President Obama has decided to pursue a dangerous strategy that could cause irreparable harm to freedom of the press as we know it. According to Charlie Savage of the New York Times, Attorney General Eric Holder is investigating the possibility of prosecuting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in connection with the 250,000 diplomatic cables stolen – according to the government – by army private Bradley Manning.

By longstanding first amendment tradition, third parties such as news organisations — even an unconventional one like WikiLeaks — are not prosecuted for publishing leaked material, even if the person who gave it to them broke the law. So, Holder is working on the theory that WikiLeaks "colluded" with Manning, acting not as a passive recipient, but as an active participant in persuading Manning to give up the goods.

The problem is that there is no meaningful distinction to be made. How did the Guardian, equally, not "collude" with WikiLeaks in obtaining the cables? How did the New York Times not "collude" with the Guardian when the Guardian gave the Times a copy following Assange's decision to cut the Times out of the latest document dump?

For that matter, I don't see how any news organisation can be said not to have colluded with a source when it receives leaked documents. Didn't the Times collude with Daniel Ellsberg when it received the Pentagon Papers from him?

[...]

Almost since his inauguration nearly two years ago, Barack Obama has been disappointing liberals, whether it's through his half-measures on the economy and healthcare, his continued pursuit of unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or his failure to close Guantánamo, the very symbol of Bush-era overreach. Some of those complaints are overwrought. Politics is the art of the possible, and Obama can justifiably claim to have done what's possible in the face of Republican intransigence and the sheer difficulties of what he has faced.

By contrast, the White House's legal war against WikiLeaks is a shameful assault on our guarantee of free speech and a free press. It's ironic that after two years of bogus claims from the right that Obama is dismantling the constitution, now that he really is, the only people who seem to care are on the left.

This is a rare sounding-of-the-alarm from an experienced and sober-minded journalist who really knows what he's talking about.

Julian Assange arrested and denied bail in UK, pens an editorial in Australian newspaper.

2010-12-07T17:44:00.002-06:00

Well, there it is. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested by English authorities and is being held without bail. From the UK's The Guardian:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was remanded in custody today after appearing in court on an extradition warrant.

The 39-year-old Australian, who is wanted in Sweden over allegations he sexually assaulted two women, was refused bail on the grounds there was a risk he would fail to surrender.

Before a packed court No 1 at Westminster magistrates court, District Judge Howard Riddle said Assange was to be remanded in custody until a further hearing on December 14.

The ruling came despite Jemima Khan, film director Ken Loach and veteran journalist John Pilger standing up in court to offer to act at surety for Assange.

But the judge concluded that because of the "serious" nature of the allegations against Assange, his "comparatively weak community ties" in the UK, and that it was believed he had the financial means and the ability to abscond, there was a substantial risk he would fail to surrender.

Assange, in an editorial piece published today in the newspaper The Australian, argues: "Don't shoot the messenger! for revealing uncomfortable truths":

WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.

IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win."

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain's The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be "taken out" by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be "hunted down like Osama bin Laden", a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a "transnational threat" and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister's office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Julia Gillard and her government. The powers of the Australian government appear to be fully at the disposal of the US as to whether to cancel my Australian passport, or to spy on or harass WikiLeaks supporters. The Australian Attorney-General is doing everything he can to help a US investigation clearly directed at framing Australian citizens and shipping them to the US.

Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.

We are the underdogs. [...]

Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.

Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: "You'll risk lives! National security! You'll endanger troops!" Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can't be both. Which is it?

It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. [...]US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn't find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:

► The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.

► King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US to attack Iran.

► Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran's nuclear program stopped by any means available.

► Britain's Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect "US interests".

► Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament.

► The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

For ongoing updates on the Wikileaks/Assange situation, consult this page on The Guardian's Web site. Another frequently updated page following the Wikileaks phenomenon is the blog of a certain Greg Mitchell on The Nation's Web site. Further ongoing coverage and detailed analysis regarding Wikileaks and related phenomena provided by Glenn Greenwald, of Salon.com.

Lastly, if governments can shut down Wikileaks with a few phone calls to credit card companies and Web hosting services (CS Monitor), here's an article in which a certain Paul Wallis asks: what's to stop them from doing the same to any and all other media?

Wikileaks pisses off Hillary Clinton...and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...and Sarah Palin.

2010-11-29T18:50:00.004-06:00

Now, let's say that I were an average American citizen, who—let's say—wants to hold democratically elected (directly or [usually very...] indirectly) figures in its government accountable for their habitual excesses and deceptions.

Let's say that I've noticed it's difficult to do this, as my government—like most governments—is a bloated, cynical, bureaucratic, militarist nightmare. So much so that it apparently has no center of gravity morally or even strategically.

Let's suppose that, furthermore, control over media—and, therefore, over public discourse—in the United States is monopolized by a handful of multinational corporations, all of whom in effect collude with governments in order to maximize the financial and political benefits that accrue to a fraction of 1 percent of the world's population—a tiny, wealthy elite with the greatest interest in maintaining the status quo, with all of its injustices and irrationalities.

Let's pretend for a moment that all of the preceding is true.

Wouldn't I be likely to conclude that a single piece of information that manages to piss off Hillary Clinton and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Sarah Palin...well, wouldn't I be likely to conclude that such a release of information is a good thing?

Wikileaks leaks more leaks!

2010-11-28T23:12:00.000-06:00

Some of the tidbits of information that have been leaked. And other stuff. (More and better-labeled links re this to come tomorrowish, as it is late as I type.)

A writer for The Guardian (UK) asks an appropriate question: "Why do editors committed to press freedom attack Wikileaks?" Possible answer: because they aren't actually committed to press freedom. Why not? Because they're nothing but the hired stooges of the multinational business interests that own the world's mainstream media...? Just a thought.

Of course, these Wikileaks-opposing editors would argue that, as our free-press-loving government claims, the release of these documents is dangerous, and not merely embarrassing.

But, as it turns out, there's no evidence that any Wikileaks releases have hurt anyone.

GOP Congressmen to America's 65,000 Unemployed: Stop eating food.

2010-11-20T14:35:00.001-06:00

(This item by way of the back-in-business PhuckPolitics.)

On Thursday, the newly emboldened, self-congratulatory, and Wall Street-subsidized House Republicans "torpedoed a bill to extend benefits for the long-term unemployed" (The Washington Post). Just get an eyeful of this Old Boy's (Hair) Club (For Men):

It seems that the $12 billion price tag of intervening on behalf of those teetering on the brink of total bankruptcy and ruin is too steep for these steely-eyed Protectors of ~~Industrial/Financial Interests~~ The American Way. Look at the determination in their, uh, gut. The sense of honor and profundity in their Latte-sipping gait.

They just saved America $12 billion. Phew! I'd be drinking me some coffee, too. It's a tough job, pulling our nation back from the brink of financial apocalypse, but somebody's gotta do it.

Of course, the Bush Tax Cuts for the ultra-wealthy cost the nation $3 trillion (Alexander Stille), and that's only over the first eight years of the cuts' existence! Were those cuts to expire on schedule, as the Dems are apparently going to be too weak-kneed to insist—which, by the way, is insane, depressing and humiliating...if ever there were an issue on which the Dems should refuse to compromise....—"the projected cost of the Bush tax cuts to the federal budget over the next ten years is $3.9 trillion, an average of 1.4 percent of the country’s total economic activity (GDP) per year" (CAP). If the Republicans and their conservative Democrat accomplices succeed in actually extending the the tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, the resulting drain on the US deficit would be an additional $4 million!

But, like I said, the Republicans should be proud of themselves that they've once again succeeded in cynically screwing over the struggling American families that are most vulnerable by sparing the US deficit that whopping $12 billion.

Progressives should oppose the intrustive pat-downs and sketchy scanners.

2010-11-19T15:41:00.001-06:00

You know what? I'm with those who are complaining about the intrusiveness of these these "security measures."

I disagree, however, with the neocon creeps who think that racial profiling is a better idea.

And I also disagree with advocates of phony "free markets," who are being paid off by industrial interests to make the implausible argument that "privatizing" airport security is somehow going to solve the problem. It's awfully difficult to see how. That's because it's opportunistic gibberish.

I oppose these intrusive pat-downs and radiation-emitting scanners for one reason: they—like the majority of "security measures" that have been put into practice in airports—are little more than a decoy, Orwellian in character, whose audience are not "the terrorists" to whom their purportedly "sending a signal," but, rather: the American "middle class."
The functions of these "security measures" with respect to middle-class travelers are twofold:

1) To provide people with the illusion that their safety is being guaranteed. In reality, the "safety" that these devices and "procedures" are said to provide exceeds could never honestly be guaranteed. It's impossible. Don't believe me? Read this detailed piece of reporting that exposes the "Security Theater" in our airports, published in the Atlantic Monthly back in 2008.

2) To remind people, as frequently and as concretely as possible, that they should be scared, that they should not think for themselves, and that they require the guiding hand of a benevolent, external authority.

Now, if my second point sounds like the classic right-wing/libertarian argument that "government intervention in our lives is paternalistic," that's because it's pretty much the same claim. With a couple of important differences:

First, I submit that it is obvious that it makes little difference whether the paternalistic authority is embodied in a government agency or a privately administered company, which will have inevitably owed its monopoly in a given market(s) to the congressmen to whom they have donated their millions of dollars.

The second element differentiating my argument from that of the phony free-market types is that, if anything, private industry stands to gain as much, if not more from disingenuous and arrogant administration of "security" policy than does a government agency. This is because the sole motive of private industry is to gain profits. How, then, can it be argued that they would somehow be more likely to refrain from molesting old grannies, or demanding that a cancer survivor remove her prosthetic breast?

The whole thing stinks. I think progressives should be speaking up in opposition to the intrusive and unhealthy "security procedures." Speak up, and don't let the privateering/profiteering brigade change the subject! Speak up in defense of our Constitutionally protected civil liberties.

Crib From This gets Hitched.

2010-10-23T14:09:00.016-05:00

I know—dumb title; but who cares.

Over the years, we here at Crib From This have characterized the writings, spoken remarks, and ideas of Christopher Hitchens variously as dumb, smart, funny, and irrelevant [this is not a typo—ed.]. Through the thick and thin of these reactions to his work, it remains that Hitch is among the few commentators to appear regularly in the 'mainstream media' (whose ranks Hitchens—previously a longtime columnist for The Nation magazine—joined when he emerged as an early and ardent propagandist for prosecuting the Iraq War) to reliably possess any kind of panache or even sense of humor. So when Hitch revealed, a number of months ago, that he had been diagnosed with a life-threatening form of esophageal cancer, we, of course, felt that this was some pretty crap news.

So, in any event, when we happened accidentally upon a couple of his recent contributions to his column in Slate, we were pleasantly surprised to find that both are pithy and of a high caliber. Neither of them is—as Hitch has sometimes been perceived to be—controversial or even provocative. Rather, they both communicate successfully more-or-less obvious truths that lots of other commentators and/or media lack the clearheadedness or intellectual distance from the daily news cycle to state. This is the kind of commentary that is so thoroughly lacking right now and why 'the news', as it were, has become so unworthy of anyone's serious attention over the past six months or year-or-so.

Anyway, we link, first, to Hitchens's lucid take on the recent, bizarre, Rick Sanchez episode. Rick Sanchez is, by the way, a person I had never previously heard of and someone whose career, etc., I fail to find at all interesting. And this is precisely why Hitchens nails it: he doesn't find Sanchez or his remarks to be particularly interesting either. Part of the reason for this, Hitchens argues, is that it simply isn't controversial to "note the effectiveness of the Jewish Lobby."

And we link, second, to an article in which Hitchens reflects upon the inanities and utter lack of substance detectable in the supposed political 'debates' preceding the upcoming mid-term elections occurring across the country. A taste:

Asking my hosts in Connecticut if there was anything worth noting about the upcoming elections in their great state, I received the reply, "Well, we have a guy who wants to be senator who lied about his record of service in Vietnam, and a woman who wants to be senator who has run World Wrestling Entertainment and seems like a tough lady." Though full enough of curiosity to occupy, say, one course of lunch, that still didn't seem to furnish enough material to keep the mind focused on politics for very long.

And this dearth—of genuine topics and of convincing or even plausible candidates—appears to extend from coast to coast. In New York, a rather shopworn son of one Democratic dynasty (and ex-member by marriage of another) is "facing off," as people like to say, against a provincial thug with a line in pseudo-tough talk. In California, where the urgent question of something suspiciously like state failure is staring the electorate in the face, the Brown-Whitman contest hasn't yet risen even to the level of the trivial.

Hitch then carries this discussion in the direction of a general, broadly applicable, and yet incisive and satisfying question:

Consider: What normal person would consider risking their career and their family life in order to undergo the incessant barrage of intrusive questioning about every aspect of their lives since well before college? To face the constant pettifogging and chatter of Facebook and Twitter and have to boast of how many false friends they had made in a weird cyberland? And if only that was the least of it. Then comes the treadmill of fundraising and the unending tyranny of the opinion polls, which many media systems now use as a substitute for news and as a means of creating stories rather than reporting them. And, even if it "works," most of your time in Washington would be spent raising the dough to hang on to your job. No wonder that the best lack all conviction.

This may seem to discount or ignore the apparent flood of new political volunteers who go to make up the Tea Party movement. But how fresh and original are these faces? They come from a long and frankly somewhat boring tradition of anti-incumbency and anti-Washington rhetoric, and they are rather an insult to anyone with anything of a political memory. Since when is it truly insurgent to rail against the state of affairs in the nation's capital? How long did it take Gingrich's "rebel" forces in the mid-1990s to become soft-bottomed incumbents in their turn? Many of the cynical veterans of that moment, from Dick Armey to John Boehner, are the effective managers and controllers of the allegedly spontaneous Tea Party wave we see today.

Populism imposes its own humiliations on anyone considering a run. How many times can you stand in front of an audience and state: "I will always put the people of X first"? (Quite a lot of times, to judge by recent campaigns.) This is to say no more than that you will be a megaphone for sectional interests and regional mood swings and resentment, a confession that, to you, all politics is yokel.

I think that pieces like these—more reflective, more genial, less polemical, and yet every bit as unwavering—suit Hitchens's authorial voice just fine. It's almost as though his longtime infatuation with Orwell has begun to rub off on his style in a more direct way. I like it. Let's hope that the new, 'mature Hitchens' is able to stick around for a good while longer, because we need people to be writing like this in the midst of our present political/cultural landscape.

So, for as long as he continues to turn out work of a high caliber, we say: we'll gladly Hitch our wagons.

"How completely isolated a world the German people live in..."

2010-10-09T00:06:00.007-05:00

I'd like to share with you an excerpt from William Shirer's famous book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer, a newspaper reporter who lived in Berlin throughout the 1930s and into the early years of World War II, recounts how startled he had been at the ease with which German propaganda managed to fool an ever-more gullible German public. What follows is Shirer's description of the headlines of German newspapers during August, 1939, during the final days leading up to Germany's wholly unprovoked invasion of Poland:

In Berlin [...] a foreign observer could watch the way the press, under Goebbels' expert direction, was swindling the gullible German people. For six years, since the Nazi "co-ordination" of the daily newspapers, which had meant the destruction of a free press, the citizens had been cut off from the truth of what was going on in the world. For a time the Swiss German-language newspapers from Zurich and Basel could be purchased at the leading newsstands in Germany and these presented objective news. But in recent years their sale in the Reich had been either prohibited or limited to a few copies. For Germans who could read English or French, there were occasionally a few copies of the London and Paris journals available, though not enough to reach more than a handful of persons.
"How completely isolated a world the German people live in," I noted in my diary on August 10, 1939. "A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today reminds you of it." I had returned to Germany from a brief leave in Washington, New York and Paris, and coming up in the train from my home in Switzerland ten days before I had bought a batch of Berlin and Rhineland newspapers. They quickly propelled one back to the cockeyed world of Nazism, which was as unlike the world I had just left as if it had been on another planet. I noted further on August 10, after I had arrived in Berlin:
Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland... here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is maintained ... What the Nazi papers are proclaiming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion...

"Poland, Look Out!" warns the B.Z. [cft note: Berliner Arbeiterzeitung] headline, adding: Answer to Poland, the Runner-Amok [Amokläuffer] against Peace and Right in Europe!"

Or the headline in Der Fuehrer, daily paper of Karlsruhe, which I bought on the train: "Warsaw Threatens Bombardment of Danzig—Unbelievable Agitation of the Polish Archmadness [Polnischen Groessenwahsn]!"

You ask: But the German people can't possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do.
By Saturday, August 26, the date originally set by Hitler for the attack on Poland, Goebbels' press campaign had reached its climax. I noted in my diary some of the headlines.
The B.Z.: "Complete Chaos in Poland—German Families Flee—Polish Soldiers Push to the Edge of the German Border!" The 12-Uhr Blatt: "This Playing With Fire Going Too Far—Three German Passenger Planes Shot At by Poles—In Corridor Many German Farmhouses in Flames!"

On my way to Broadcast House at midnight I picked up the Sunday edition (August 27) of the Voelkischer Beobachter. Across the whole top of the front page were inch-high headlines:
WHOLE OF POLAND IN WAR FEVER! 1,5000,000 MEN MOBILIZED! UNINTERRUPTED TROOP TRANSPORT TOWARD THE FRONTIER! CHAOS IN UPPER SILESIA!
There was no mention, of course, of any German mobilization, though, as we have seen, Germany had been mobilized for a fortnight.

The truth is a beautiful thing, even when it stings a bit. Do you suppose that the great William Shirer was spinning in his grave during the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction deception/embarrassment, which was aided and abetted by our American—putatively free, democratic—press?

I think it's fair to say that Shirer, like many in America's longstanding tradition of democratic patriots and truth-tellers, would be disappointed. He expected better of our elected leaders. We, unfortunately, have seen far too much arrogance and corruption among our leaders and their corporate handlers to reasonably hold the same expectation. But we can work hard to rebuild a genuine American republic in which future generations might reasonably expect it, just as Shirer did.

Wikileaks & Julian Assange: What to Make of Yesterday's Bizzarely Heavy–Handed Smear?

2010-08-21T12:54:00.008-05:00

Time to get current.

Wow. Okay, now I get it. We should be paying attention to this stuff.

Yesterday, I put together a page in this blog called What is 'Crib From This'?, in which I explained that Crib From This is intended to explore the complicated and changing relationship between information and knowledge.

Well, there is no question that Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, is giving us no choice but to confront this issue, and, particularly, its relation to nationalism, governmental claims of 'national security', propaganda, freedom of information, and the liberty of ordinary, everyday people to pursue and share knowledge. Without a doubt, these are questions that a lot of us—maybe all of us—would feel more comfortable not confronting, or would prefer to put off confronting until another day. But it seems as though it's too late for that, now. Particularly for we American observers.

So, this post is really just to say: it's time to, as it were, bone-up. Get current with this thing, if we're not already.

Yesterday's (absurdly heavy–handed & obviously fictitious) smear. And today's quick retraction.

Well, it's not news, of course, that Julian Assange has been pissing-off lots of people in high places. But up until yesterday, the most forceful attempts to criticize Wikileaks by way of character-assassination of Assange have come from the radical/loony Right-wing. And even these figures, like Liz Cheney, back on August 2, confined their accusations against Assange to aspects of the content of leaked data.

So, to get started, here are some links to articles about this bizarre episode:

First, an AP release from less than an hour ago (by way of Yahoo News):

STOCKHOLM – Swedish prosecutors withdrew an arrest warrant for the founder of WikiLeaks on Saturday, saying less than a day after the document was issued that it was based on an unfounded accusation of rape.

The accusation had been labeled a dirty trick by Julian Assange and his group, who are preparing to release a fresh batch of classified U.S. documents from the Afghan war.

Swedish prosecutors had urged Assange — a nomadic 39-year-old Australian whose whereabouts were unclear — to turn himself in to police to face questioning in one case involving suspicions of rape and another based on an accusation of molestation.

"I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape," chief prosecutor Eva Finne said, in announcing the withdrawal of the warrant.

...

Second, today, from Al Jazeera English:

'Dirty tricks'
After Swedish tabloid Expressen,first published reports that the arrest warrant had been issued for Assange, Wikileaks responded on Twittersaying: "We were warned to expect 'dirty tricks.' Now we have the first one."

"No one here has been contacted by Swedish police. Needless to say this will prove hugely distracting."

Assange's organisation has caused much controversy recently with the release of 75,000 classified US military documents containing information surrounding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The US government rejected the release of the documents, saying the website had "blood on its hands" for naming people who had helped its military in opposition to groups such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and ordered Wikileaks to return the files.

Wikileaks, meanwhile, has said that it is plans to reveal more of the remaining 15,000 classified documents it holds, possibly this month or next month.

A blogger for CNN asks Is Assange the target of a U.S. smear campaign? Uh...sure looks like it, doesn't it.

Finally, this article from BBC News says

The Swedish Prosecution Authority website said chief prosecutor Eva Finne had come to the decision that Julian Assange was not subject to arrest.

In a brief statement Eva Finne said: "I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape."

The website said there would be no further immediate comment.

Earlier, Karin Rosander, communications head at Sweden's prosecutors' office, said there were two separate allegations against Mr Assange, one of rape and the other of molestation. She gave no details of the accusations. She said that as far as she knew they related to alleged incidents that took place in Sweden.

Media reports say Mr Assange was in Sweden last week to talk about his work and defend the decision by Wikileaks to publish the Afghan war logs.

Last month, Wikileaks published more than 75,000 secret US military documents on the war in Afghanistan.

US authorities criticised the leak, saying it could put the lives of coalition soldiers and Afghans, especially informers, at risk.

Mr Assange has said that Wikileaks is intending to release a further 15,000 documents in the coming weeks.

Some idle speculation.

As my title suggests, here's the thing I don't get: why so obviously spurious a charge as rape? I mean, rape? Really? And why would Swedish prosecutors withdraw the charge after less than 24-hours? Was it because the case was really just so obviously without any merit that withdrawing it was the only way to regain some semblance of credibility? If that's the case, then how did it come to pass that the warrant was issued in the first place? Pressure from the USA?

If the latter scenario is the case, then perhaps the whole episode was little more than a (in all likelihood, successful) attempt to scare the hell out of Assange—a show of muscle, if you will.

Also, there's likely to be significance to the fact that the 'news' about Sweden's warrant for Assange broke on a Friday. People who follow things like how the 'news cycle' works always point out that, if you want to release a story but simultaneously bury it, release it on a Friday, because very few people will pay attention, and this low level of immediate interest insures that media will have forgotten all about it by the time the following Monday comes around.

The Friday release would appear to suggest that the false accusation and resulting Swedish warrant really were meant either as an attempt to scare Assange or to 'send him a message', like what evil governments do in cheesy conspiracy movies—i.e., look at how easy it would be for us to crush you like a bug if you piss us off—or as what is sometimes called a 'test balloon', as a de facto public opinion poll, whose research sample consists of the segment of the population that's paying attention to the news on Friday and Saturday?

A brief moment of moralizing.

Not to state the obvious, but shouldn't the US Government and its vast intelligence apparatus have more important things to do than picking on whistle-blowers and advocates for the freedom of information?

Remember, as I point out in What is 'Crib From This'?, the United States Constitution is among the most forceful, elegant and powerful forces for the freedoms of speech, thought, action and information. It's truly a sad day when its leaders decide—not clandestinely, but out in the open, with an obvious smear like this—to attack the world's most dedicated advocates of the very same freedoms that it is constitutionally mandated to protect.

Hyperlink: David David Petraeus Petraeus

2010-08-20T11:44:00.001-05:00

The blog PhuckPolitics.com makes an elegant observation: at present, General David Petraeus is serving a public relations function on behalf of the Obama Administration's Afghanistan strategy that bears an uncanny resemblance to the public relations function he once served on behalf of the Bush Administration's Iraq strategy.

Read Obama’s Afghanistan full court press.

The GOP wants to repeal the 14th Ammendment?

2010-08-05T18:57:00.011-05:00

Stop paying attention to the news for a couple of days (or months), and this is the kind of great stuff that you miss out on. Get a load of the Grand Old Party's latest coordinated, demagogic/gestural exercise in—wink, wink—double-speak: in an effort to ratchet-up the appearance of being 'tough on illegal immigrants' (and, one surmises, in order to make damn certain that the Republicans lose the Hispanic vote once and for all [The Atlantic]), Senate Republicans are embracing the idea of holding hearings to determine whether or not to repeal the 14th Amendment to our nation's Constitution (NPR report).

We turn to the commentary of the frequently hilarious Democralypse Now, who reminds us of how excruciatingly embarrassing it is to pay attention to anything John McCain gets up to these days, as he begs for the support of the Republican far-Right:

"You know, look, I know it's babies we're talking about and it's hard to be tough on babies but let's remember we're talking about illegal aliens coming to this country for the purpose of birthing a child, not because they love the kid, cause they want that child to provide them the benefits of U.S. citizenship."—Attorney Wendy Murphy arguing to repeal the 14th amendment on Fox News (where else?)

When you have to start your sentence with the words "You know, look, I know it's babies we're talking about and it's hard to be tough on babies," perhaps that's a point you shouldn't be making.

I don't know, call me old fashioned, but any way you slice it, hating on babies just doesn't seem to be a very tasteful, not to mention, winning strategy.

Oooooh, sounds like Republicans just found themselves the perfect new rallying cry to fire up the base and boot that no good Barry fellow out of the White House and back into the harsh Kenyan wilderness where he belongs. This time, in the form of wretched diaper-wearing ne'r-do-wells looking for a free lunch, bottle of formula, lactating nipple, or whatever the case may be, by committing the unforgivable crime of being born within the nation's beautiful borders (Alaska included!), or at the very least, one of its lesser "territories" like Guam or "American" Samoa. The sweetly, conservative-named "anchor babies."

No, no, we're not talking about the adorable new cartoon infants to join Dora the Explorer on her maritime adventures, but something far far more sinister: pregnant women desperately climbing barbed-wire border fences (and dodging armed gangs of trigger-happy white supremacists) all for the chance to drop a tiny brown automatic U.S. citizen out of their gross foreigner wombs onto once-pure, now-sullied American soil.

[...]

Almost as amazing as watching Republicans try to out-crazy each other with terrible, untenable ideas, aimed at those most disadvantaged and unable to defend themselves, is the comical lengths some Republicans, such as certain former Prisoners of War turned current Prisoners of Wingnuts, are willing to go to try not to have to support this crazy idea, during an otherwise ho-hum morning press conference.
“We’re talking about the stimulus right now,” John McCain said, before darting off to the elevators down the hall from the Senate studio, where he again declined to take a question. Reporters eventually caught up with McCain in the basement of the Capitol, where he was walking toward to the man-operated train connecting the Senate with the Russell office building.

TPMDC asked, “Do you support the Minority Leader’s push for hearings into the repeal of birthright citizenship?”

“Sure, why not?” McCain said briefly.

“Do you support the idea itself?”

“I support the idea of having hearings,” McCain said.

“Do you have a problem with the 14th amendment?” another reporter asked.

“You’re changing the constitution of the United States,” McCain said. “I support the concept of holding hearings.”

“I support the concept of holding hearings,” McCain repeated, turning to the rail car conductor.

“Let’s go!” he snapped. "I don't have anything to add to that."
Now, typically there is something both hilariously funny and tragically sad about witnessing a withered old man shed every last fiber of his integrity en route to becoming a soulless, brain-dead puppet of the right, dancing (err, at least attempting) slowly around an issue as clear-cut and obvious as taking away the constitutional rights of the toothless, under-1 crowd who use pacifiers and diapers, need constant 24-hour care and coddling, and can't even do anything for themselves.

Read the full article.

Magnificent speechification: Grayson does it with style.

2010-07-23T19:53:00.004-05:00

The bill calling for the much-needed extension of unemployment benefits has finally been passed by both houses of the federal legislature—the Senate passed it on Wednesday and the House got around to doing so yesterday. So I realize that, with respect to the political issue, this post is not exactly timely.

I wish, nevertheless, to share with my enlightened readers this absolute triumph of rhetoric/oratory that was delivered by Rep. Alan Grayson, Democrat of Orlando, Florida during the House 'debate' that preceded the bill's passage. Now, we've seen previous examples of Grayson's deadpan wit, his knack for using invective to tasteful and brilliant effect, and his panache and cogency as a debater on substantive issues.

And herewith, the House doth Grayson rock.

But so rousing is the perfect little specimen of succinct speechifying that Grayson brought to the floor last Wednesday that I went and transcribed the whole damn two-minute speech for you. Now you, my readers, can never credibly question my love and devotion to you. Enjoy:

My grandfather, in the 1930s, spent several years of his life, every single day, at the dump, looking for things there that he could sell. Looking for things that he could take to the market and sell, because there was no other way for him to survive the 1930s and the Great Depression.

There was no unemployment insurance back then. There was no state benefits back then. There was no help for the people who had [no] jobs. All they could do, like my grandfather—supporting a family of seven—was to go to the dump and desperately try to find something he could sell.

And that, my friends, is the America that the Republicans are trying to revive. The America of desperate straits and, for them, cheap labor. The America where people have nothing, hope for nothing and are desperate to live for the next day. That is what the Republicans are trying to resurrect—day after day, week after week, and now month after month.

I've got news for my Republican friends: every single person who's going to receive unemployment insurance under this bill is unemployed. Every single one of them doesn't have a job. And that's why they need this money.

Now, I know what the Republicans are thinking:

"Why don't they just sell some stock? If they're in really dire straits, maybe they could take some of their art collection and send it off to the auctioneer. And if they're in deep, deep trouble, maybe these unemployed could sell one of their yachts."

That's what the Republicans are thinking right now.

But that's not the life of ordinary people—the 99 percent of America that actually has to work for a living, that doesn't just clip coupons and live off of interest and dividends, like my Republican friends do.

That's why we need this bill to pass: because of the 99 percent of America that deals with reality everyday. The people who will lose their homes if this doesn't pass. The people who will be living in their cars if this doesn't pass. That's why we need this to pass.

And I will say this to Republicans who have blocked this bill now for months and kept food out of the mouths of children. I say to them now:

May God have mercy on your souls.

I yield back.

Thanks to PhuckPolitics.com for bringing this to my attention. That blog contains a link to a video of the speech, along with its blogger's exuberant commentary.

Lookin' for a hero...

2010-07-22T13:09:00.005-05:00

Tom "The Fourth Doctor" Baker

Maybe if the United States of America had cooler superheroes, we'd lose our appetite for demagogues in media and politics.

Consider the following remarks of Tom Baker, who was—to my mind—the greatest Doctor Who of all time, in an interview broadcast on Australian television in the mid-1970s:

ABC Television Australia: Now, with the advent of Superman coming back to the big screen, do you think there’s ever a chance that Doctor Who and Superman may run into each other?

Tom Baker: Well that’s a nice idea, but what would be the point? I mean, Superman wouldn’t be any opposition, would he, because… well…

ABC Television Australia: You both have a sort of similarity with phone boxes, though, don’t you?

Tom Baker: Ah, yes, but that’s the only way. I suppose Superman only uses a phone box because, you know, he’s rather prudish and modest, isn't he, and doesn’t want to take his knickers off in public. But I think compared to the character of Doctor Who, he’s a bit of a bonehead, Superman? I mean, he punches things out, doesn't he?

ABC Television Australia: He certainly does.

Tom Baker: Whereas the character I’m involved with tries to think it out.

Music to my ears. It's high time that someone came up with an American superhero of the caliber of Doctor Who. We ain't got nuthin'.

Let's stop acting surprised.

2010-07-19T18:20:00.010-05:00

We're not really shocked, are we?, by instances of deceit, incompetence, greed and arrogance in the corridors of power?

Those of us who are convinced that civil liberties, free expression, free inquiry and democratic deliberation are the cornerstones of American society know quite well that lots of things are not as they should be. We know that, somehow, these essential principles and practices must be preserved, repaired and/or improved. We realize that we must continue to take these things seriously, remind one another of their importance and significance, and teach subsequent generations to preserve all that is best about the American project in republican self-governance.

We were, all of us, horrified by the self-righteous barbarity and callous disregard for the rule of law promoted, clandestinely (and then not-so-clandestinely), by former Vice President Cheney. We were dismayed to learn that various United States agencies had spied on American citizens, tortured prisoners of war (using methods borrowed from 1950s Communist China) and fabricated intelligence as a pretext for waging war. We thought the eleventh-hour first Bank Bailout, under Bush, was a bald-faced exercise in theft—that it revealed, to our dismay, the extent to which the American political system has become a fully owned subsidiary of powerful financial interests and an elite stratum of wealthy investors. And we thought that the second Bank Bailout, under Obama's watch, confirmed our suspicions about the current impotence of American democracy. To be sure, I'm not referring to its impotence in practice: we already knew all about that. No, what was confirmed was the impotence of American democracy as an idea.

So why do we act shocked when we encounter leaked footage of American soldiers in Afghanistan firing missiles at unarmed civilians? Why so surprised when Obama sells off—faster than Bush would even have dared—the American education system to a bunch of glorified loan sharks? Why are we taken off-guard when the Supreme Court overturns hundreds of centuries-old laws regulating the political spending of multinational corporations, on the basis of the notion—so argues the Court—that such laws restrict the (previously non-existent) Constitutional right of corporations to free speech?

I don't think that we are surprised by these things. I think that we are pretending to be surprised. I'm guessing that there are two (2) ways in which we pretend to be surprised, which coexist in varying degrees in any particular instance:

i. The first way in which we act surprised.
We want to be surprised by these things. Therefore, we either convince ourselves that we are surprised, or we act surprised in a semi-conscious attempt to simulate, for our own comfort, the feeling of being surprised. Or we act surprised out of sheer habit. In any of these cases—whatever our level of consciousness of our actions—we are motivated by a desire for comfort.

Why is the feeling of surprise comforting to us? Because surprise registers the phenomenon to which we are responding as something that is—as it were—beyond the pale. It's a psychological defense mechanism. We want so desperately to believe that everyone else values our Constitutional protections and civil liberties as much as we do. To us, this stuff is basic common sense, and it shatters our faith in humanity to recognize the truth: there are a substantial numbers of American citizens who would gladly give away their liberties in exchange for an illusory feeling of safety or security.

This brings us to:

ii. The second way in which we act surprised.
We hope that by expressing our outrage and shock in the face of the erosion of American civil liberties, we might be able to shock the aforementioned cadre of American citizens—a cadre that is in most other respects as heterogeneous as can be—out of its complacency and docility.

In other words, we like to believe that we are walking, talking George Orwells. That, if we talk frequently and loudly enough about how disgusted we are with our country's seemingly inexorable drift toward fear-mongering, surveillance state, that we will manage eventually to make them see the light!

The mistake we're making in this second instance is about as obvious as can be: do we really think that we can out-fear-monger the professional political-corporate-media fear-mongers?? I think this is a difficulty that faces those of us in the post-Baby Boom generations who believe that the only way in which our democracy can be repaired is through a reinvigorated civil discourse. At present, American political rhetoric is—like American political thought—beyond its moment of crisis. It is in a state of extreme fragmentation.

All I'm saying is, let's start admitting that we all know this. Let's stop acting surprised.

How does Google mean?...or: "Everything and More"

2010-06-12T02:20:00.017-05:00

No, I'm not going to weigh in on Google's (lack of) aesthetic sense, as demonstrated by the search engine's widely panned and short-lived experiment on Thursday during which a large photograph took the place of the usual plain, white background. Because who cares, really.

No, I'm much more interested in pointing out something that I've noticed over the past month or so that appears to the left of the results of an ordinary Google search. Here's a photo I snapped of it:

Anyone?

What immediately comes to my mind, whenever I glance at this side-bar (which I've done many times) is the title of the only published piece of writing by the late David Foster Wallace that I was never able to make it all the way to the end of. I refer to 2003's Everything and More, subtitled: A Compact History of Infinity. This book-length essay, intended (naively) for the general reading public, was Wallace's audacious, gimmicky and controversial attempt to explain set theory ("multiple infinities")—created (or maybe 'discovered'?) by the 19th century German mathematician Georg Cantor—without really using any actual math.

But, more than Wallace's book, it just strikes me that the words and hyperlinks featured in the above snapshot amount to a kind of smart-ass collage or accidental poem. In other words, with your initial search, Google is providing you with "everything." Should "everything" fail to sate your appetite for page upon page of relevant* material, follow the hyperlink, for Google offers you still "more" than mere infinity.

I guess I'm really just thinking about a constellation of things. First, the fact that we don't often talk about Web pages in ways that take account of how arrangements of words, images and—for example—navigational functions impact conveyed meaning. This can encompass both "intentional" and "unintentional" meanings; it can refer to the ways in which words, images and hyperlinks function as collages of juxtapositions, oppositions and organizational schemes. Furthermore, meaning is impacted not only by what exists on the Web page but by what is left out. Finally, meaning is shaped by the sets of expectations that users bring to bear when using a Web page. This is particularly interesting in reference to search engines, in the case of which the user's attention is almost always focused upon the expectation that he or she will encounter immediately thereafter a spectrum of (categories of?) content.

And, of course, there's the Marshall McLuhan-esque question: what, after all, do I mean when I refer to the "content" with which we expect a search engine to "connect" us?

All right. Hope that makes some kind of sense. Time for bed.

ADDENDUM:
It occurs to me that there's significance as regards user-expectations to be attached to the basic function of a search engine: (i) the sheer act of typing words into Google's interface signifies the expectation/intention of obtaining information, data or some other kind of non-tangible artifact, whose 'form' and to some extent, 'content', must be fixed or predictable to you—otherwise (i.e., were results to provide inscrutable artifacts or incomprehensible information), how could you anticipate that the results might have any value to you?; and (ii) usually, the object or objects of a search are characterized simultaneously and to an equal degree by a basic lack of familiarity—otherwise, why would you need to "search" for it in the first place?

In both i and ii are to be found the complicated interplay of contradictions between 'form' and 'content', as well as between anticipated familiarity and anticipated unfamiliarity. In an Internet search, one's capacity to comprehend and derive use from unfamiliar content is conditioned by one's reasonable expectation of familiarity of form.

(Here are some more quotations and aphorisms from the late, great Marshall McLuhan, some of which deal with the form/content dyad.)

_________________
* In the sense of popular and of containing such keywords as are to be found on a given Web location, irrespective of things like context and other 'meaning'-derived metrics.

A lion in lion's clothing: Why Rand Paul's primary victory is a good thing.

2010-06-08T23:58:00.007-05:00

I shall attempt to elucidate my view of the results of the recent Republican primary in Kentucky. It's a view that apparently is deemed to be heterodox—if not heretical—among chatterers in progressive-left circles. Specifically, I think that—despite increasingly ugly, politically motivated deviations—Rand Paul is as close to a principled libertarian as we're likely to see as a contender for national office, and that his victory in Kentucky’s May 19 Republican primary for the US Senate is a good thing.

I don't hold this view for political/strategic/operational reasons—i.e.: because Paul's ascendancy might make it easier for some Democratic Party hack to win in the general, or something like that (partly because, in fact, I'm sick of all the DP hacks)—but, rather, because Rand Paul seems for the most part to be an actual libertarian in the mold of his father, Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas. I mean the dude's named after Ayn Rand, for god's sake.

Rand Paul is a lion in lion's clothing, and that's a good thing. What do I mean by this? Well, let me explain. Remember George W. Bush's pre-2000 promises to the effect that he embodied something called "compassionate conservatism"? That's an example of being a lion in lamb's clothing.

See the difference? (And here's an interesting bit of reporting on the unrelated question of where the phrase "compassionate conservatism" comes from.)

Now, before we get into all sorts of metaphysical stuff about lions lying down with lambs, let me just admit up front that my metaphor/comparison doesn't really make sense, once you start thinking about it. So heed this warning and...well, don't. But, anyway.

Give me the Pauls any day. For one thing, it will make for a much better debate. I believe that the US could only benefit from an increased focus upon the tenets of libertarianism. Beyond even its potential impact upon the framing of political discussion, there is a side to libertarianism that should by no means seem to liberals to be entirely unpalatable. For example: what’s wrong with cutting back on the functions of government that exist in practice exclusively to serve the interests of big corporations? While Paul's textbook libertarianism generally causes him to oppose the placing of limitations upon the expenditures of private corporations, his consistent and clearly voiced opposition to our country's reigning, incestuous public-private oligarchy is right on.

From yesterday's Huffington Post:

For all the blaring headlines that Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has attracted for his remarks on the Civil Rights Act and his views on government interference in private enterprise, there is a strand of his libertarianism that -- on occasion -- can be alluring to progressives.

Mainly this is when the discussion turns to foreign policy matters and the Kentucky GOP candidate's skepticism with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and his opposition to the Patriot Act.

Occasionally, however, Paul's domestic politics have a bit of post-ideological resonance. And during a Monday appearance on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, that element of his candidacy was briefly on display. Asked a question about campaign finance reform, Paul offered the traditionally conservative denouncement of laws that curb the amount of money spent during an election. But from there he offered a proposal that would be of similar (if not greater) scope and reach.

"What I would do is that for every federal contract, if you sign a federal contract and we pay you, the taxpayer pays you a million dollars, I would put a clause in the contract that you voluntarily accept that you won't lobby or give contributions," he said, "because I think it galls the American people that taxpayer money is paid to contractors who take that taxpayer money and immediately lobby for more money."

This type of proposal would seemingly leave good government officials smiling. That it came from the belle of the Tea Party ball makes it all the more powerful -- not because of its unexpectedness (the Tea Party movement is quite clearly wary of the influence of lobbyists), but because Paul is symbolic for many of the future of the GOP.

Now, the question of whether and to whom Paul symbolizes the future of the GOP is open to debate, to say the least. But, isn't his stance on lobbying and government contracts absolutely correct?

Certainly it would be better if such a challenge came from populist progressives of the left, in the Bernie Sanders mold, but this is Kentucky we’re talking about. And I believe that the anti-oligarchic, anti-Fed, pro-personal privacy, anti-torture/surveillance and pro-transparency aspects of the philosophies of Father and Son Paul should be commended by left-progressives. We can still criticize the Pauls for their stances on many other subjects about which we disagree.

I feel the need to point all of this out because of the somewhat hysterical responses of some purportedly left-progressive-types to the Rand Paul phenomenon. I mean, sure, his performance on the Rachel Maddow show was ham-fisted, but, the idea that his take on the Civil Rights Act makes him a racist is really just too much. Those of us who are serious about wanting to improve political discourse should not be demonizing someone for showing intellectual honesty, however impolitic it might be for him to do so. In fact, the more straightforward and lacking in spin his stance, the greater the duty of the left opposition to express its disagreement straightforwardly.

Rand Paul's views on the Civil Rights Act can be—and are—wrong without being racist. This is the kind of debate we should be taking seriously. It's the mainstream Republicans who aren't worth the time and effort, who will misrepresent themselves to get elected and hold onto power. The notion that Rand Paul is somehow worse than the average "machine"-Republican candidate is absolute balderdash.

To the extent to which the likes of middle-aged pseudo-leftists like The Nation's obnoxious Katha Pollitt (May 22) continue to set the terms of what counts as political debate in progressive circles, we'll never get beyond the intellectual bankruptcy and gridlock of the Culture Wars and the 1960s. I'm sorry, but Baby Boomers like Pollitt just get fatter and more full of shit with each passing day.

By contrast, Robert Scheer's May 19 take on the Pauls and libertarianism I find to be coherent and useful. It is, in fact, the article to which—in the wake of Paul's stumble on the Maddow show—Pollitt's shrill statement is apparently aiming to respond. Still better is Scheer's May 26 follow-up, in which he gets down to what should be the business at hand for those of us on the progressive/left:

Where I agree with [Rand Paul] is that with freedom comes responsibility, and when the financial conglomerates abused their freedom, they, and not the victims they swindled, should have borne the consequences. Instead, they were saved by the taxpayers from their near-death experience, reaping enormous profits and bonuses while the fundamentals of the world economy they almost destroyed remain rotten, as attested by the high rates of housing foreclosures and unemployment and the tens of millions of newly poor dependent on government food handouts.

But the poor will not find much more than food crumbs from a federal government that, thanks to another one of [President Bill] Clinton’s “reforms,” ended the federal obligation to deal with the welfare of the impoverished. Yes, Clinton, not either Paul, father Ron or son. It was Clinton who campaigned to “end welfare as we know it,” and as a result the federal obligation to end poverty, once fervently embraced by even Richard Nixon, was abandoned.

Concern for the poor was devolved to the state governments, and they in turn are in no mood to honor the injunction of all of the world’s great religions that we be judged by how we treat the least among us. That would be poor children, and it is unconscionable that state governments across the nation are cutting programs as elemental as the child care required when you force single mothers to work.

“Cuts to Child Care Subsidy Thwart More Job Seekers” ran the headline in the New York Times on Sunday over a story detailing how in a dozen states there are now sharp cuts in child care for the poor who find jobs, and how there are now long lists of kids needing child care while their mothers work at low-paying jobs at places like Wal-Mart. In Arizona, there is a waiting list of 11,000 kids eligible for child care. That is what passes for success in the welfare reform saga, with mothers forced off the rolls into a workplace bereft of promised child care that the cash-strapped states no longer wish to supply.

Hear, hear. For those of us who believe that what this country desperately needs is a genuine left-populism, shouldn't we be asking: Why don't we hear Democrats articulating a similarly robust critique of ongoing—and grotesquely antidemocratic—lobbying practices?

And, more to the point: instead of playing the politics of personality (and...even ickier..."character"), let's respond to Paul's views on the evils of the welfare state with real arguments. All around us, on the local, national and international levels, we can point to massive, moral, social and practical crises directly attributable to laissez faire economics and neoliberal governance. As Scheer argues, the hullabaloo about Rand Paul is nothing but a cheap distraction from the real questions:

How in the hell can humankind be expected to survive and prosper without a social safety net to protect them against the vicissitudes of a globalized and unregulated market economy? Without such a safety net, how can Western societies ever hope to fulfill their constitutional (little c and big) aspirations of freedom, justice and equality?

And, finally: If the Democratic Party can't be counted upon to take these questions at all seriously, who can?

Poetic truth in political advertising.

2010-05-15T11:34:00.003-05:00

Thanks to a longtime friend, a certain GSR, for sharing the link to this video. Very funny stuff from the 1990s—in many respects, a halcyon period for comedy in our beloved United States.

News fatigue?

2010-05-09T23:28:00.002-05:00

Your humble blogger has been asked if he's suffering from "news fatigue" as an explanation for the infrequent posting that's been occurring lately on Crib From This.

The answer is: no. We've simply been attending to other things and have had limited access to our computer.

Fear not! We'll be back soon, and better.

The Charter-Schooling Racket.

2010-04-27T22:58:00.002-05:00

There are some charter schools that are doing good work, but these are the exception, not the rule. The fact of the matter is that the charter schools movement serves first and foremost as a front for the privitization of education—the placement of educational infrastructure into the hands of profiteers, industrialists, finance capitalists and loan sharks.

This article, which appeared recently in the New York Times, describes a case in point:

When the energy executive Dennis Bakke retired with a fortune from the AES Corporation, [get a load of the AES Corporation's Web site!—cft] the company he co-founded, he and his wife, Eileen, decided to direct their attention and money to education. [E]ager to experiment with applying business strategies and discipline to public schools[, t]he Bakkes became part of the nation’s new crop of education entrepreneurs, founding a commercial charter school company called Imagine Schools[,] now the largest commercial manager of charter schools in the country.

Here's a(n ineffective) public relationsy photograph of the Bakkes 'interacting' with the low-income students in one of the schools 'managed' by Imagine Schools:

As education expert Patricia Burch states in an article on the dark and clandestine market forces that are unleashing the worldwide privatization of education and that are misleadingly portraying this widespread, government-coordinated profiteering racket in terms of the benefits of parental "consumer choice" or of the putative benefits of "market competition" upon educational quality, among the reasons that this cynical ploy works is because

we tend to equate the public sector with large bureaucracy and the private sector with more efficient, flexible and network-oriented forms of organization. In fact, the providers now “trading” in the new education market place are situated squarely in the same institutional environment as schools. In broad strokes, this institutional frame reflects embedded routines and rituals for the organization of schooling.

This institutional template for schooling can have a conservative influence on schools and keep reform ideas from becoming or achieving anything new. In this context, rather than breaking the mold, private firms in the education market can end up reproducing the worst practices of public schooling, offering low-income students “more of the same” and at significant cost. [Access article here.]

Returning to the Times article, we see that the Bakkes epitomize the ways in which the puppet-masters of the charter-schooling racket uses this notion of 'marketization' as a means by which to justify enriching themselves—tax free—to the detriment and even ruin of the urban children they are supposed to be helping:

Because public money is used, most states grant charters to run such schools only to nonprofit groups with the expectation that they will exercise the same independent oversight that public school boards do. Some are run locally. Some bring in nonprofit management chains. And a number use commercial management companies like Imagine.

But regulators in some states have found that Imagine has elbowed the charter holders out of virtually all school decision making — hiring and firing principals and staff members, controlling and profiting from school real estate, and retaining fees under contracts that often guarantee Imagine’s management in perpetuity.

The arrangements, they say, allow Imagine to use public money with little oversight. “Under either charter law or traditional nonprofit law, there really is no way an entity should end up on both sides of business transactions,” said Marc Dean Millot, publisher of the report K-12 Leads and a former president of the National Charter Schools Alliance, a trade association, now defunct, for the charter school movement.

“Imagine works to dominate the board of the charter holder, and then it does a deal with the board it dominates — and that cannot be an arm’s length transaction,” he said.

Such concerns have thwarted efforts by Imagine to open a school in Florida, threaten to stall its push into Texas, and have ended its business with a school in Georgia and another in New York, as well as other states.

Imagine is not shy about the way it wields its power, which it calls essential to its governing philosophy. “Imagine Schools operates the entire school, and is not a consultant or management company,” its Web site says. “All principals, teachers, and staff are Imagine Schools people. The Imagine Schools culture is meant to permeate every aspect of the school’s life.”

Mrs. Bakke, who is paid $100,000 as vice president of education at Imagine, says it works in “close partnership” with the boards of the schools it manages. “The governing boards are definitely in charge, but they look to us, frankly, because as you know, nonprofit boards are well meaning but don’t always have the experience and expertise running the schools,” she said in an interview.

She said that she and her husband, who is paid $200,000 as the company’s chief executive, sank $155 million into Imagine and that they were able to run schools efficiently. “We offer a great deal for communities and for taxpayers,” Mrs. Bakke said, “because we’re providing education at less than what a traditional school is spending.”

She says the company should be judged by its educational results, not its business and financial arrangements.

And if that doesn't sound sketchy enough for you, read on:

Mrs. Bakke said her company “is operated as a not-for-profit.” But Imagine is not a nonprofit group, and it has so far failed to gain status as a charity from the I.R.S.

Imagine applied for federal tax exemption in 2005 and has repeatedly said approval is imminent. It typically takes four to six months for such approvals. “We’re not sure why it’s taking so long,” said Mrs. Bakke, who is 56. “We suspect it’s because we’re trailblazers in a sense, and they haven’t had an application quite like this.”

The I.R.S., as is its policy, declined to comment.

And how about the relationship of Imagine Schools to individual schools and their boards of directors? Read on:

In Texas, parents trying to open a charter school for elementary school students thought that Imagine was going too far.

“Imagine did a few things that indicated they thought the charter belonged to them, which was not our understanding at all,” said Karelei Munn, who is part of a group working to establish a charter school in Georgetown, Tex., near Austin. “We were looking to control our board, and they were looking to control our board.”

Ms. Munn and other members of the group holding the charter broke their ties with Imagine and are trying to form a school on their own.

Regulators in Texas have been slow to approve a second Imagine school, citing concerns that include an e-mail message from Mr. Bakke to the company’s senior staff members that was reported on by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch last fall. In the message, dated Sept. 4, 2008, Mr. Bakke cautioned his executives against giving boards of schools the “misconception” that they “are responsible for making big decisions about budget matters, school policies, hiring of the principal and dozens of other matters.”

Instead, he wrote, “It is our school, our money and our risk, not theirs.”

Mr. Bakke, who is 64, suggested requiring board members to sign undated letters of resignation or limiting board terms to a single year.

In a statement after the e-mail message was disclosed, Mr. Bakke apologized to board members “who felt offended or maligned,” saying he had “overstated my personal frustration in ensuring that the dedicated, caring people who hold the seats of charter governing boards at Imagine Schools understand and support our mission and operating philosophy.”

As Texas continues its consideration, the e-mail message helped upend Imagine’s plans to open a school in the Hillsborough County School District in Florida, which encompasses Tampa.

“That e-mail was very, very bad for them,” said Jenna Hodgens, the local supervisor of charter schools. “All the things we had been questioning, things about control of the school, he answered in his own words.”

The Hillsborough school board rejected the application in December. “Charter schools are not private schools, they are public schools and are governed as such,” said Susan Valdes, who heads the board. “Some, though, are starting to forget that — and they’re getting away with it. But not here.”

And that's only the beginning. I highly recommend reading the entire article, in order to learn about the nature of the Bakkes' company and its shady investment and governance practices. Imagine Schools is basically a giant loan shark.

Let's get these sleaze-balls and hucksters away from our schools already.

Harper's piece on "The Vanishing Liberal."

2010-04-15T23:26:00.006-05:00

Frequent Harper's contributor Kevin Baker—who, according to his byline, is actually a novelist—has a couple of great things to say in an essay in the magazine's April issue (which non-subscribers like Your Humble Blogger will simply have to go out and buy in order to read). The essay's subtitle—"How the left learned to be helpless."—is somewhat misleading, or in any event insufficiently specific. Let's face it, the contention that the left is helpless can in and of itself be said to be controversial only in the sense that it assumes that the left exists.

What's important about Baker's argument as regards this helplessness is the comparison he posits between today's thoroughgoingly lost and disillusioned left—a group among which I suppose most normal (or even semi-normal) people under the age of 40 must by definition count ourselves—and its intellectual and spiritual forbears in American history: the Populist and and the Progressive movements. Those movements, for all of their flaws, had gravitas. Vitality. Rocks. You get the picture.

It should not be surprising that contemporary left/liberalism/whatever pales in comparison to those often quite radical historical movements. But what's nice is that Baker's piece offers more than the usual woe-is-us routine.

(Not that it's bad to say "woe is us." It's actually necessary for us to say it. However, the usual plodding, overlong and doom-and-gloom-laden fare does tend to get annoying. For example, see the final rant that now-former Harper's Editor-in-Chief Roger Hodge contributed to the magazine before he was—shockingly, and in an ominous sign for the mag's future, as Hodge was an intelligent and ballsy editor—sacked.)

Instead of simply throwing up his hands in despair (although he does do that), Baker threads together a political-historical narrative that serves as a call for genuine grassroots action of an order that we've not seen in this country in generations. He sets the scene by lamenting the fact that President Barack Obama,

[o]ne of the most charismatic politicians of his time, a man who was able to raise the most money and draw the biggest crowds in American political history has apparently decided that his new job is to fluff up the generals and bankers and politicians who not very long ago were in panicked disarray. Armchair psychologists from the Maureen Dowd school of political commentary like to analyze this conversion in terms of the elusive personality of Obama himself. Others prefer to dwell on the surprising ineptitude of his administration. And some simply accept his about-face in terms of the political exigencies of an essentially conservative nation, concluding wistfully that Obama is confronted by so many barriers to change—Republican obstructionism, the treachery of this or that Democratic senator, the nature of the Constitution itself—that the country is now ungovernable.

All of which may be true. But it only skims the surface of a greater tidal shift, one that has little to do with Obama himself and in fact has inundated the whole of our democratic process. This shift, which is subtle and has been many years in the making, might best be understood by considering a design underlying many of the interrogation techniques we employ at the (still-unclosed) prison at Guantánamo or at the black sites we still maintain, wherever they are. That is, bringing about the state known as learned helplessness.

The expression dates from a famous set of experiments by Martin Seligman some forty years ago, in which he found that dogs exposed to repeated and seemingly random electric shocks eventually stopped trying to escape those shocks, even when they could very easily do so. This insight gave rise to “no touch” torture, pioneered in large part by the CIA, whose efforts to “break” prisoners involved all manner of techniques, from the unsavory to the absurd, such as depriving prisoners of sleep for weeks on end, bombarding them with ear-splitting noises, exposing them to extreme heat and cold, shackling them in “stress positions,” tying bras to their heads, making them bark like dogs, and waterboarding them. There is no evidence that such practices enhance the odds that prisoners will provide more useful information to interrogators. It is well established, though, that they will make prisoners docile, and so the techniques remain popular.

For decades now, as our public discourse in general has become more scattered, random, and irrational, Republicans—funded by corporate and other elites in the private sector—have stunned Democrats with absurdist attacks that have proved to be effective at garnering votes and, more important in the long term, at hampering Democrats even when they hold the majority. Democrats have been reduced to a state of psychological helplessness, one in which any political obstacles—ranging from the prevarications of stalking horses like Senators Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, to the plaintive cries of the tea-baggers out in the streets, to the sterner demands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Big Pharma—are transformed into insurmountable organic obstacles.

We have learned to be helpless. And in this state of political depression, it no longer matters how many elections liberals win for the Democrats, or how badly Republican, right-wing policies fail or how much damage they do to the country or the world. There is simply no way to do anything differently.

Such hapless fatalism is, of course, in direct opposition to every tenet of American liberalism, which is rooted in the idea that human agency is still possible in the modern world—that democratic action can make a difference when ranged against vast, impersonal forces and supposedly immutable “laws” of human society. Liberalism’s antecedents lie in one nineteenth-century rebellion after another—against laissez-faire capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, Social Darwinism, and other efforts to transmute political dispositions into irrefutable “social science.” American voters of the time were regularly assured by authoritative voices that “hard money” was an indispensable economic principle; that women, people of color, and many varieties of European immigrant were inherently inferior; that any attempts to regulate the “natural” workings of the economy, even private charity, would thwart human progress because they interfered with the culling of those who, in Herbert Spencer’s description, were not “sufficiently complete to live.

[...]

And so we arrive at the present moment, in which the people are not asked to do anything. The fine words and able presentation of Obama, whether delivered at West Point or on Wall Street or in the well of the House of Representatives, obscure the fact that they are subtle parodies of a century of liberal argument. Whereas the Populists’ soapbox lecturers or the Progressives’ magazine exposés or FDR in his radio “fireside chats” explained the way of the world to the people and argued for why and how that way must change, Obama—like most Democratic leaders—concedes that the way of the world is wrong but tells us why it must stay that way because, some time in the past, powerful interests decreed it so.

[...]

Now, to be sure, there are problems with Baker's narrative—especially as regards sympathies within some manifestations of historical Progressivism itself toward Social Darwinism and other 'social scientistic' gobbledygook that he ignores completely—but no matter. It's worth a read. And one of its themes—the notion that human beings can and/or should always work to improve the world in which we live, to make it more fair and just, etc.—is a very interesting one about which I intend to say more in the near future. Specifically, I think there are some important details of this Enlightenment spirit that a rejuvenated left-populism needs to get right intellectually and rhetorically.

Welcome to the New Wedge Politics: A political calculus.

2010-03-30T19:50:00.011-05:00

Well, it's here. (Or, rather, it's back.) White, Christianist * Terrorism (yes, terrorism, since the Right has decided to use this term when it's convenient to its purposes). Charged with plotting to kill police officers and civilians and to set in motion a new American Civil War, the aims of these armed Christianist militiamen were entirely politico-religionist and ideological: they have committed treason against the United States government and its people and engaged in seditious activities. In yearning to start the next Civil War, these militiamen stand alongside the tea-bagger rank and file.

This is a moment in which the bogusness of the Fox News Right's sham claims to consistency, moral authority and—most deliciously ironic of all—patriotism is exposed for all to see. And I mean exposed in a way that forces the old-fashioned Republican base—the suburban, upper-middle class—to confront the chaos, ugliness and violence in which all supporters of the current Republican Party have been complicit.

The wealthier households of the American suburban bourgeoisie, who have long served as the real political base of the Republican Party—and whose defection to Obama in 2008 helped cost McCain the presidency—basically only care about two things:

physical security for themselves and their families at all costs, and
low taxes (i.e.: financial security for themselves and their families at all costs).

Whichever party can scare this still-very-powerful echelon of the American citizenry into perceiving** that either (1) or (2)—in that order—or both cannot be trusted in the hands of the other party, wins.

[***]

Consider, for example, Joe Briefcase. Joe is a medium-level Big Shot in the [whatever] business and is a case study in the mentality of this socioeconomic stratum of American society. He typically—before the Iraq War, anyway—falls for, I'd say, at least 75% of neoconservative scare-mongering lies (i.e.: 'An attack on the USA is imminent if we don't do a, b, and c to stop it...') and is also especially easily flattered by Republican laissez-faire & square charm tactics (i.e.: 'You've pulled yourself up by your bootstraps and deserve to hold onto every precious penny you've earned...')... and has voted Republican ever since he graduated from [whatever] school and entered what is known colloquially as "The Real World."

Joe Briefcase doesn't give two shits about the "restoration of American values" or the "maligned legacy of state's rights" that the brainless, fat, racist, uneducated, neo-secessionist, Fox News-watching hordes seem to care so much about. The fact is that Joe Briefcase doesn't want trouble, and trouble is exactly what he has begun to see that he will get if the Republican Party manages to regain control of the country.

Three additional factors shall flesh out my hypothesis of a new electoral alignment that I believe may be a component of the Democratic Party's (and especially Obama's) electoral strategy, which I shall call the New Wedge Politics:

All of the "tea party" shenanigans during the health care debate managed to poison the well of public discourse to such an extent that most Americans stopped caring about the content of the health care bill a long time ago and simply grew increasingly irritated by the shrill health care bill debate. And it was the Republicans who, after all, vowed over and over and over and over and over again to obstruct the passage of the bill. Thus—irrespective of most people's inclinations as regards the content of the bill (and irrespective of the likelihood that the Obama Administration shrewdly planned to allow the Republican demagogy to meander until it reached the pinnacle of outrageousness)—Obama gets all of the credit for putting the whole miserable display out of its misery with a stroke of his pen. Meet Obama, the restorer of 'law and order' from the clutches of tea-bagger-fueled chaos and anarchy.
The Civil War. Don't forget the Civil War. It's very much on the minds—or in the hearts—of many among the tea-bagger faithful, whether they realize it or not. From incumbent Governor Rick Perry's Texas Secession Rallies to the new revelations of Far-Right paramilitary activities to the ugly racism of so much of the redneck sloganeering, the ghost of the Civil War has returned to the national subconscious in a big way. And it just so happens that Joe Briefcase's great-great grandfather fought in the Civil War. And guess whose side Great Great Grandpa Briefcase fought for? That's right, it wasn't for the Confederacy. Joe Briefcase has always taken pride in the fact that he belongs to the Party of Abraham Lincoln. He has no sympathy for protesters of any kind. He wants the secessionist rednecks to get off his TV already. He most certainly does not recognize the current Dixiecrat Shambles as His Republican Party. This 'Party of No' is not the Republican Party as he has known it.
The Iraq War. Don't forget the impact of that war either. The minutia of the USA's continued presence in Iraq under the Obama Administration, of course, fail to capture anyone's interest. But the people of the United States have not forgotten the Iraq War, nor its costliness in lives and dollars, nor the sleazy lies that the Bush Administration told in order to sell it. This still stands as a significant betrayal of trust between the Republican Party and its erstwhile supporters.

To close, some caveats: my analysis here is intended to be hypothetical. Furthermore, it's a hypothesis about long-term political and/or electoral strategy—not a prediction of whether or not such a strategy would work. And when I say long-term, I mean that it's not about the vicissitudes of 'cable news' cycles, which Obama has made it his habit to ignore (or at least to appear to ignore)—a way of doing things that has worked well for him in the past and which furthers the impression of his being 'above the fray' of the bullshit.

Lastly, although I dislike the Republican Party something fierce, and although I'm not as critical of Obama as many others on the Left have been (not having expected him to act as a genuinely progressive president in the midst of our current political/economic conditions and ideological alignments), I'm not saying that it is necessarily a good thing that the Democratic Party might be preserving its spot at the Center by pushing the Republican Party ever-farther to the Right. I'd have much preferred it if the health care bill had been more aggressive and radical, etc., etc. And I'd certainly have preferred to see Obama actually take a firm legal position against torturers, liars and manipulators like Dick Cheney, et al.

Anyway, there you have it. If anyone's actually read this far down, I'd love for you to prove it to me by leaving a comment. Heh.

[N.B.: I updated this post (mostly grammar and formatting edits) on the morning of 3/31/10).]

* Note the distinction here, between Christians and Christianists, Christianity and Christianism, religion and Religionism. Each of these dyads comprises:
first, a phenomenon that is so heterogeneous and multifarious, and rooted so deeply in our history and society as to resist evaluation in one direction or another, in and of itself, and

second, an extreme politics that enshrouds itself in a rhetoric that has been appropriated from the first, and then manhandled and distorted to accord with tactical or strategic ends.
I am an atheist, but I consider the notion of the 'inherent evil of religion' to be both inherently childish and itself always a cloaked political gesture, every bit as much as Religionism. I suppose I could distinguish my brand of atheism from that of Sam Harris by calling him an 'atheismist,' but I won't. You get my point. (Up.)
** This is a not-insignificant component of the process to bear in mind. Perception, that is. Kind of a slippery concept, I know, but sometimes we forget that we're not talking about the unmediated, abstract truth of these things, but rather, the truth of people's perceptions, which—in addition to being very difficult to determine—is frequently unconscious (that is, people don't always perceive the content of their own perceptions). That's one of the reasons why polls are frequently pure garbage. (Up.)
*** Notice that the trick that the Republicans have pulled off over the decades—in concert with the enormous interest group it serves, namely the military-industrial complex—is to eliminate any and all cognitive dissonance between (1) and (2), despite the fact that the 'bloated government' and 'proliferating, unaccountable government bureaucracy' that the GOP claims to so oppose are nowhere more strongly in evidence than in unfunded military spending. Remember that the Bush Administration deliberately left the deficit-spending on the Iraq War off of the books! (Up.)

Knowledge is authoritarian, even in a democracy.

2010-03-28T22:27:00.009-05:00

No one, not even the opportunist hacks of the Texas State Board of Education, can fiat this fact away.

Previously, here at Crib From This, I argued that the so-called "Believers" sitting on the Texas State Board of Education are actually nihilists. This time, I wish to demonstrate that the Texas State Board of Education curriculum overhaul reveals the inherent limits to the habitual over-inflated conservative indictment of 'big government'.

A friend of mine, whose politics are a good deal more conservative than mine, nevertheless is in complete agreement with me that the decision recently handed down by the Texas State Board of Education is embarrassing, wrong, bad for education, bad for the study of history, and bad for the students in Texas—and potentially elsewhere—who are finding themselves shat upon by a gang of anti-intellectual, self-centered and neo-secessionist spoiled brats.

Forget the Gospel of Low Taxes. The conservatives of the Texas Board subscribe to a hyper-culturally conservative brand of Dixiecrat Republicanism that has been forcing increasing numbers of middle class Republicans to look askance at the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln that they thought they had known so well.

Interestingly, as one of those old-fashioned Libertarian-types—whose critique of federal government-overreach has to do with fairly subtle questions of commerce and jurisprudence, and not so much with a plot to take away his guns (especially because he doesn't have any guns)—my friend chalks the Texas folly up to of the the perils of centralized, majoritarian decree. In other words, he sees the disaster as issuing not so much from the fanaticism and ignorance of a gang of inbred would-be messiahs, but, rather, from the fact that Texas operates under a system in which a single school board has the power to make a mockery of an entire state's social studies curriculum with a snap of its Born-Again Christianist, Ayn Rand-praising fingers.* The old-fashioned GOP anti-'big government' critique.

I do have to give him credit for creativity. It is interesting to examine the connections between what Libertarians and old-fashioned economic conservatives of his type call 'Federalism' and what Alexis de Tocqueville described as the "tyranny of the majority." Tocqueville argued that, in order for the great American experiment of republican governance to be successful, the right of the minority to dissent must be protected at all costs:

Several particular circumstances combine to render the power of the majority in America not only preponderant, but irresistible. The moral authority of the majority is partly based upon the notion that there is more intelligence and wisdom in a number of men united than in a single individual, and that the number of the legislators is more important than their quality. The theory of equality is thus applied to the intellects of men; and human pride is thus assailed in its last retreat by a doctrine which the minority hesitate to admit, and to which they will but slowly assent. [...]

In my opinion, the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny. an individual or a party is wronged in the United States, to whom can he apply for redress? If to public opinion, public opinion constitutes the majority; if to the legislature, it represents the majority and implicitly obeys it; if to the executive power, it is appointed by the majority and serves as a passive tool in its hands. The public force consists of the majority under arms; the jury is the majority invested with the right of hearing judicial cases; and in certain states even the judges are elected by the majority. However iniquitous or absurd the measure of which you complain, you must submit to it as well as you can. [...]

I do not say that there is a frequent use of tyranny in America at the present day; but I maintain that there is no sure barrier against it, and that the causes which mitigate the government there are to be found in the circumstances and the manners of the country more than in its laws. (Democracy In America, Book I, Chapter 15)

And, come to think of it, has it not been along this general line of thinking that the premise of "state's rights" has been defended?—from John Calhoun's championing of "nullification," to the South's moral justifications for Secession, to present-day slogans about the "tyranny of big government" among the Republican rank-and-file?

It would seem that the actions of the Texas Board would support this sort of critique of centralized authority, albeit viewing Texas as a microcosm of the federal government. In a way, it does. However, in another sense, it serves to undermine this very critique—or at least it points to spheres of human activity to which this critique cannot be said to apply.

The problem, as I have found myself saying recently, is that knowledge is not democratically constituted. Knowledge is, in a sense (and shall ever be), authoritarian. And, whatever it is that the Texas School Board might want the world to be, there's simply not much that can be done about that.

We cannot approach knowledge itself, for example, in the same way in which we approach law. For example, even Justice Antonin Scalia knows that you can't be a "strict interpretationist" of history. (It's ephemeral enough as a legal philosophy...)

This is not to suggest that knowledge can be linked definitively, directly or uncritically to specific human beings or organizations, or even to any specific source. The academic disciplines, for instance, are not and don't pretend to be that kind of authority. Quite to the contrary, disciplines are themselves sites of contestation and debate.

When 'experts'—whether they work for an academic institution or for the WMD Committee of the Project For A New American Century—misrepresent themselves, or misrepresent the knowledge in their field, or provide insincere, incomplete or tendentious interpretations of this knowledge, they are—to precisely the extent to which they engage in this behavior—not experts, but merely posing as experts.

In effect, in having pushed the politicization of the curriculum this far, the majority of Texas Board of Education members have exposed themselves not as pie-in-the-sky Fundamentalist Christian-idealists, nor even as Fundamentalist Christian-ideologues. They are simply hacks—up to their earlobes in the toilsome wretchedness of aimless resentment.

We bemused onlookers witness the superficiality of their understanding not only of history but of the political or ideological battles in which they believe themselves to be mired (to say nothing of the empty opportunism of their feigned interest n these subjects). They have taken caricatures of their 'opposition' with total earnestness. Moreover—and even more embarrassing than their threadbare understanding of history—is the sheer self-centeredness and self-entitlement with which they have seen fit to (mis-)interpret any and all 'inconvenient' political and educational tendencies that differ from their own.

Consider the following metaphor. In war, all factions of your opposition are united in at least one significant respect: they are all out to kill you and your fellow soldiers. For purposes of political propaganda and mobilization—the domain in which GOP-hireling Svengalis like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove so excelled—this war-style-worldview can yield some limited successes by fostering solidarity among differing factions within an alliance: the 'enemy' represents a hybrid of characteristics. It's a lowest-common-denominator enemy.

The effectiveness of this approach no longer holds, however, when you are making education policy, nor policy in any domain that deals with disciplines of knowledge and expertise. In this context, undertaking to right all the wrongs of your caricature/hybrid foe leads to disastrous consequences.

Foremost among them is that this foe does not exist.

In my next post, I shall conclude my discussion of the Texas State Board of Education's curriculum guidelines by taking up the questions: (i) Why should we even consider the board's bizarre actions to be "conservative"?, and (ii) When we tacitly accept the self-categorizations of these confused, theocratic would-be secessionists, aren't we letting them frame the debate?

___________
* The utter incompatibility of the pimple-faced-high-schooler's-simpleminded-version-of-Nietzsche pseudo-philosophy of Ayn Rand (who had zero use for god, religion and the like and said so frequently) with the tenets of Fundamentalist Christianity is an example of a phenomenon to which this post turns shortly: the caricatured/hybridized opponents that so often become invented in the course of forging such unlikely political alliances as the GOP cobbled together in the '80s, '90s and '00s. That is, before the GOP emerged, with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, as the party of Southern Secession. Ye Olde Abe Lincoln is a-spinnin'-in-his grave. Probably Ye Olde John Brown is, too. (Return to the main text.)

Why the so-called "Believers" on the Texas State Board of Education are actually Nihilists.

2010-03-18T19:28:00.011-05:00

The neo-secessionist, racist and neo-McCarthyist antics of Texans have become so commonplace, that it's hard to muster up the energy to be outraged by anything them folk down there get up to. Nevertheless, I wish to argue that the recent actions of the Texas Board of Education, radically revising the state's prescribed curriculum for history and social studies textbooks, is a turn of events that we should find especially shocking.

Why is it such a big deal? First of all, there is the matter of the scale of the the decision's impact. Few of us know anything at all about the political economy of textbooks, and we are thus oblivious to the textbook publishing industry's vertical consolidation, which has ascended to heights that would have Gilded Age industrialists calling on the White House to 'Bust the damn trusts!', its systematic price-gouging of captive consumers, and its many other anti-competitive and crony-capitalistic practices.

The impact of the Board's action upon public school systems extends beyond the boarders of Texas itself, already containing a huge population, and into several other states. The reason for this is that Texas's particular system of centralized textbook-standardization (which in itself is more than a little reminiscent of Bolshevism) means that the state exercises tremendous influence over textbook content in many other states. The reason for this is that it's expedient economically for the textbook publishing oligopoly simply to produce a single, one-size-fits-all textbook for distribution to many states, as opposed to creating specific editions for specific localities. The only way in which publishers can accomplish this is by producing a single textbook that is written such that it happens to fulfill the guidelines of the Texas Board of Education. The state of California has a similar set-up and therefore exercises similar control.

So, that addresses the scale of the impact of this decision. Now, onto substantive reasons we should be shocked and outraged: for one, the shamelessness and hypocrisy of the alliance of Born-Again Christians, libertarians and "state's rights" types that assumed majority control of the Board. These right-wing ideologues got themselves elected to the Board with the explicit intention of appropriating the school history textbook as the terrain upon which they would declare 'cultural warfare'. The entire project was undertaken in nakedly ideological terms, and in a way that does not even pretend to comprehend the study of history and other social sciences. In fact, as Thomas Frank mentions in his excellent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, the members of the Board are openly resentful of historical expertise itself. (And any kind of expertise, for that matter!) As Frank points out, whatever the real or perceived 'ideological excesses' of past academic historians and textbook authors, nobody could reasonably doubt that those people were undertaking sincerely to produce curricula that did the best possible job of teaching social studies to public school students.

The Far-Right alliance's putative 'revision' has no rationale that has anything at all to do with history, education or students. The 'revision' reflects no coherent understanding of how textbooks work, how historical representations relate to historical facts. It takes textbooks to be nothing more than ideologically grounded statements and interpretations, strung together in a chronological sequence. Of course, its notions of what constitutes 'chronology' is skewed, in that its ideological preoccupations are entirely presentist, which is to say that even its political readings of what various narrative interpretations "mean" are based entirely in the politics of the present day, as opposed to the political frameworks as they were known and understood by historical agents at specific times.

It's funny that some of these Culture Warriors style themselves as "Believers", because their actions bespeak a worldview that is fundamentally nihilistic. The simple equation of curriculum with site of ideological struggle could not be less concerned with educating students -- the function that schools are supposed to perform. For members of the Board to act in the interest of carrying out their ideological struggle alone, means that the are literally not performing their prescribed duty in good faith: they are not fulfilling the only responsibilities that membership on the Board entails. Moreover, they can hardly be said to be acting in accord with their own ideological convictions, because their actions and rationale are motivated by a lack of belief, a lack of faith in public education.

How can you honestly claim to be acting honestly and in accord with your faith and convictions if you are sitting on a board overseeing an institution that you either

don't believe is equipped to serve its mission of educating children, but rather, is merely a platform for ideological struggle? or
-- as some members of the Board explicitly state -- wish to destroy the institution of public education?

Is this really a way of behaving that evinces faith in your beliefs and convictions? If you want to get rid of public education, is sitting on the Board of Education really the place in which to carry out this political mission with the honor and dignity that befits your cause and your supposed faith? Can you literally act in bad faith as a way of demonstrating your faith??

In response to the frequent, self-righteous accusations that the Fundamentalist Religionists are in the habit of flinging at we so-called "secularists," I ask:

Who the hyper-relativists now? Who are the nihilists now?

As our accidental poet used to say, make no mistake: the nihilists are on the Right.

To my #1 favorite political Web site: thanks for the (unrequited) love!

2010-03-17T19:01:00.000-05:00

The time has come for me to address the small matter of the unheralded hiatus of Crib From This from its former pattern of experiencing updates on a somewhat frequent basis. Which specifically was...uh... at-least-bi-weekly (and five times a day during the months leading up to the presidential election!).

I shall shortly unleash upon an unsuspecting world a statement, of sorts, expounding the new and -- I hope -- more narrowly focused mission (intellectually, rhetorically, aesthetically, whateverly) to be pursued in the future incarnation of this blog.

And speaking of how out of touch I have been with this blogging crap, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my all-time, number-one (#1) favorite political Web site and blog PhuckPolitics.com -- formerly the one significant connection between this blog and the outside (cyber-) world -- for dropping Crib From This -- without ceremony and without fanfare -- from its list of links to featured blogs.

Were I in PhP's position, I would surely have done the same thing, probably....***adopts 'wounded-dog' facial expression***...

Let's face it. Given the rocky road that the present blog has traversed -- its fickle, fluctuating and comment-averse readership; its restiveness as regards politics and the sordidness of saying things within political frameworks; its contempt for the concept of typing one's opinions on the Internet generally; its frequently overlong sentences, paragraphs and articles; its pretentious, plodding and sententious syntax, betraying all of the vanity and narrowness of a petit bourgeois sensibility; its tendency to discuss contemporary political questions using the metaphors and wisdom lifted carelessly and out of context from whatever book the blogger happens to be reading at the time, like William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or The Thrill of It All: The Story of Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music or some half-comprehended essay by Friedrich Schiller -- it's a minor miracle that Crib From This survived as long as it did in its coveted position in PhuckPolitics.com's Hall of Credibility.

So, anyway, umm. In sum, this blog has been silent for a few months principally because I have been:

re-conceptualizing this blog's mission, to be explained in the aforementioned soon-to-be posted ...uh..post,
helping a friend with the writing, editing and designing of his interesting new Web site,
doing lots of stuff unrelated to blogging.

Crib From This will be back soon. And how, might you ask? With a vengeance, Good Sir.

(And -- we can only dream tearfully as of yet -- with enough élan to merit the blog's eventual re-inclusion -- parable-of-the-Prodigal-Son-like -- in the PhuckPolitics.com universe.)

Stay tuned, Gentlemen and Ladies, for the new Crib From This mission statement.

The Baffler is Back!

2010-03-17T12:47:00.002-05:00

Being as completely distracted and off the ball as I have been lately as regards politics & journalism & news & culture & whatever, it has only just now come to my attention through a couple of different sources that The Baffler is back!!!

If you've never heard of this kick-ass, unpretentious political/cultural journal thingie and want to know why its revival is a really great thing, read here and especially here. In The Baffler's glory days, during the Clinton era, its editor Thomas Frank and his coterie of South Side Chicago smart-asses provided a sustained critique of a Democratic Party that had transformed itself into a fanatically pro-laissez faire force, a party that turned its back on economic populism, but nevertheless continued -- pathetically -- to compensate for completely selling out its base by signaling its supposed 'leftism' by adopting ludicrously 'tough' postures, which naturally fed right into the hysterical"Culture Wars"-style paranoia propagated by the A.M. radio demagogues and Think-Tank-Neo-McCarthyists of the Far Right. Furthermore, Frank and Company poked fun at the appropriation by multi-national marketeers of 'oppositional' pop culture tropes and 'attitudes', from the Nirvana-like guitar-crunch sounded by ads selling luxury cars, to Burger King's strategy of hawking burgers and fries with the apothegm: "Sometimes You've Gotta Break the Rules."

The list of contributors to the first issue of The Baffler's "Volume 2" appears to be a bit heavy on academicians. It was not uncommon for the 90s version of the journal to include the occasional professor or Ivory Tower-type -- after all, Frank himself earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago. But in those days, the the lion's share of spineless bimbos putatively positioned on the 'Left', inside and outside of academe, were united -- for either ideological or pragmatic reasons -- in their support for the new and improved neoliberal, "Third Way"-style Democratic Party. Some of the most forceful opposition to Frank's brand of left-populism -- and especially the way in which Frank framed the "Culture Wars" issue -- issued from politically engaged academic-types who really should have known better. Among them, and someone who in most respects I quite like, is the literature and cultural-studies professor Michael Bérubé.

But anyway, I gather that The Baffler has returned in part because the arguments to which it has given voice regarding market fundamentalism -- and the political toxicity of the Democratic Party's continuing institutional (read: $) and ideological allegiance with it -- are now impossible for an intellectually honest person to ignore. The impotence of the Democratic Party, despite enjoying an unprecedented congressional majority, the incoherence of the party's ideological stance as regards big business interests, health care, social justice, and any number of issues, and the Obama Administration's inability and unwillingness to pursue real reforms against an appallingly oligarchic financial sector are the inevitable consequences of thirty-or-more years of cynical market fundamentalism. A fundamentalism against which there is no bulwark in this country -- no checks, no balances. Pretty grim. But at least somebody's pointing it out now.

See also Thomas Frank's great new piece in The Wall Street Journal about the Right-wing Christian Fundamentalists who have hijacked -- with SERIOUSLY SHOCKING results (NY Times) -- the content of the social studies textbooks to be manufactured and distributed throughout Texas and probably throughout many other states.

Succinct, thorough explanation of economic crisis & why Obama can't & won't reform the system.

2010-03-06T19:15:00.006-06:00

If you want a succinct explanation of why the economy went south and why Obama's hands are tied to do anything about the outrageous unemployment levels in this country, I encourage you to watch this interview with Yves Smith, who is the brilliant, no-bullshit brains behind the blog Naked Capitalism.

The interview, which appeared on the Canada-based Business News Network, and which begins at about the 5:00 minute mark of the linked segment, also provides insight into the facilitating role performed by mainstream economists since as early as 1980, in inventing, espousing and legitimating the phony, casuistic, and rhetorically scientistic rationale for pursuing economic policies that precipitated the crisis.

She furthermore comes right out and says it: the Obama Administration can't and won't reform our broken financial system because it is beholden to Wall Street. According to Ms. Smith, Obama received more campaign funding from the financial services industry than any previous presidential candidate (adjusted for inflation, etc., presumably).

Obama's financial advisers are, as we all know, the same dudes who escalated the crisis in the first place. They also were among the 'experts' to give the guilty policies their gloss of scientism. But it doesn't really matter who they are, because no 'expert' -- no matter how glossy his gloss, no matter how dizzyingly rational-seeming and science-evoking his numbers and graphs -- can match the heft and gravitas of the thunderous basso profundo of the Almighty American Dollar.

Ms. Smith has written a book that looks interesting -- I mean, considering that it's economics and everything -- called, Econned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Damaged Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism. She's smart, and we like her here at Crib From This.

Politics = boring.

2010-01-19T18:21:00.003-06:00

That is, when it's not being depressing [PhuckPolitics.com].

Oh, and this picture of the Boredoms is in honor of politics being boring.

They (the Boredoms) are not boring, though; they're great (or at least they were last time I checked, which was not recently). Here's their myspace page.

Racist Tea Bagger issues domestic terrorist threat.

2010-01-08T02:37:00.003-06:00

Terrorism is unacceptable, whatever the color of the terrorist's skin.

It's an important point for those of us who oppose violent extremism to make. Stand up for education, freedom of expression, civil liberties and civil discourse and denounce violence, chauvinism, willful ignorance and hate.

Happy New Year's. Or: in the words of the late John Lennon, "Just give me some truth."

2010-01-01T17:23:00.002-06:00

We live in a time marked by corruption, double-speak, injustice, violence, superstition and the creeping specter of right-wing totalitarianism. None of this is anything that the human race hasn't faced or endured before. Still, several generations of middle- and working-class people in the United States have enjoyed comfortable existences. We have relied upon -- and participated wittingly or not in the production and reification of -- febrile illusions and convenient myths that blocked from our view various of the certitudes of human history, including: inequality, oppression, exploitation, and financial and militaristic power-jockeying.

But just because we've awoken to find the world around us -- internationally and domestically -- in tatters doesn't mean we have to stop enjoying life. Quite the opposite.

I see the project of political self-education as continuous with the project of being a human being. It's not easy, sometimes, to be a human being, and the very notion that it has ever been easy is a seductive (perhaps irresistibly so) fiction. Whatever our political orientations -- left or right -- each of us has an idealized notion of human life that necessarily draws its raw materials from the past. That this idealized picture never actually existed as such often gets lost somewhere in the course of our endless discussions about the meaning of life, liberty and property as the Founding Fathers meant it. We want to believe that their interpretations of these things were more-or-less like the ones we espouse today.

An obvious example of this phenomenon is Thomas Jefferson. Both the left and the right in this country are fond of claiming him as their own. After all, he was among the most eloquent architects of the United States as an Enlightenment project, poised precariously (if that's possible...) between the polarities of violent revolution and orderly, reasoned deliberation. To the far right, Jefferson was and remains the prophet of the Confederacy -- the defender of States' Rights and of Southern self-determination (read: slavery). To the far left, Jefferson is our founding Civil Libertarian, opponent of slavery (in theory...) and the instrumental force in banishing governmental intervention into our personal, intellectual, moral and religious lives.

The truth, of course, is that Jefferson -- especially taken over the course of his lifetime -- was a walking contradiction. For all of his brilliance, wisdom and passion, he was often inconsistent, self-contradictory, stubborn, tone deaf and even dumb.

I think I lost track of where I was going with all of this... Oh well. I guess I really just wanted to say that these ambiguities and contradictions are part of what make us human beings, and the better we become at understanding this about ourselves and one another, the more adept we will be at being and living amongst human beings. We live in a deeply conservative age in which power is horded by a very small number of people whose conceptions of political and economic justice, reason and freedom center upon one thing: the necessity of maintaining the status quo. In one sense, it has never been an easier time to articulate a critique of the status quo. The injustices perpetrated by crony-capitalist oligarchies -- and the degree to which our elected representatives are in the employ of these oligarchies -- has never been clearer for all to see. It's as though all one needs to do is point one's finger, like identifying a leak in one's bathroom plumbing.

Of course, the trouble is that pointing this out doesn't seem to accomplish all that much. Describing the problems fails to alert our fellow democratic citizens to the necessity of taking political action in order to redress these injustices. But we should take this not as a defeat but as a challenge. We're simply not articulating ourselves clearly enough. Or we're not talking to the right people. Or we're being arrogant, lazy and self-righteous (guilty as charged...). I guess what I'm trying to suggest here is not just that the pen is mightier than the sword, but also that the truth is more durable, valuable, penetrating and infectious than lies.

Sure, the far right (both the radical-laissez faire right and its cousin, the let's bomb everything all the time right) has got legions of oil-company-funded "think tanks" to come up with strategies and propaganda for various right-wing pet-projects, like wars, the privatization of public infrastructure and lowering taxes. They've got the guns, the money and the numbers.

The only thing that stands so much as a chance against so menacing a phalanx is the truth.

Eugene Robinson's case for passing the Senate bill.

2009-12-18T12:34:00.001-06:00

An excerpt from yesterday's Rachel Maddow Show (a show I've seldom seen since I don't have cable [and I probably wouldn't watch these kinds of shows much if I did] but I must say that last night's episode was good television), in which The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson argues that passing this massively flawed bill is better than not passing anything. I agree with nearly every aspect of his analysis:

Glenn Greenwald: Don't kid yourself; this is the bill Obama wanted all along.

2009-12-17T09:33:00.002-06:00

Although I have stated that, lousy as it is, I would prefer that the Senate bill pass -- and although I this is still my position -- I must confess that I have begun to feel increasingly icky about what the bill has lately become. So it goes.

It's an awfully difficult time not to be extremely frustrated by the seeming impotence of the Democratic Party as well as disappointed with Obama. I, for one, never lost sight of the fact that the president is a centrist and a pragmatist and that his attachment to various financial and corporate paymasters is inextricable. It's just that, somehow, I must not have remembered just how far right the putative "center" has become in our corporatist nation state. It's not pretty.

But, more than that, I think I had the feeling that Obama would be able to pull off his role -- precarious and self-contradictory though it may be by definition -- with a bit more...I don't know...panache? I mean, in moments at which he looks like a cynical, calculating servant of corporate interests, he really looks like a cynical, calculating servant of corporate interests. I'm led to wonder why that is. I think it's because of the kinds of posturing that Obama has to do in order to throw bones to the 'progressive' left wing base, while simultaneously keeping the insurance and pharmacological industries happy.

And, as regards this very posturing in application to the matter of a "public option," it looks as if Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald has got Obama's number:

[C]ontrary to Obama's occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it. From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House -- hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama's campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN). Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn't pass it. The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party -- rather than the GOP -- will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse. As was painfully predictable all along, the final bill will not have any form of public option, nor will it include the wildly popular expansion of Medicare coverage. Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this -- the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional "centrists." Right. The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start -- the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry.

Greenwald praises Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold for pointing this out:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

"This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth," said Feingold. "I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect."

Seems convincing to me, and if it's true, it isn't all that surprising. But it's still dismaying to see how hamfistedly the Obama administration seems to be in dealing with this stuff. What a mess.....

As matters stand, I still think the bill in its present decimated form is better than no bill and here's why: In almost all of the complaints from the so-called 'progressive' left about this bill, I have not heard a single serious reference to the impact of this law upon poor people. Where are the anti-poverty advocates, and why shouldn't a serious discussion of the problems with his bill include a discussion of poverty? Almost all of the criticism has to do with middle-class concerns and middle-class problems.

Doesn't this bill still help people who can't currently afford ANY health insurance, and shouldn't that be the main priority? Please, if anyone knows more about this angle, fill me in. Nobody seems to be talking about it.

Hyperlinks to items of interest.

2009-12-16T00:44:00.001-06:00

Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's "stonewalls and prevarications."
Down With Tyranny's Ken ponders signs that prominent members of the House of Representatives -- including "corporate stooge" Steny Hoyer -- might be contemplating reversing the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (1933).
Naked Capitalism's pseudonymous guest contributor George Washington on why the effort to "audit the Fed" (supported by 79% of the American population) is justified and why the Fed's protestations that this would constitute interference with its "independence" are "false."
FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver on "Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate [Health Care] Bill."
PhuckPolitics.com on why he opposes the Senate health care bill and why Joe Lieberman might be "doing the right thing for the wrong reasons."
Thomas Frank in a very intelligent piece addressing why "Newsrooms Don't Need More Conservatives" and also laying out a general argument against treating "ideological diversity" as though it were the same as racial or socioeconomic diversity.

Big man, pig man / Ha ha, charade you are!

2009-12-11T02:04:00.007-06:00

It's here, at long last. The Crib From This Photoshop Moment (although I didn't literally use Photoshop). I felt the need to present my critique of the US Chamber of Commerce in a manner that captures the rhetorical nuances and socio-critico-theoretical apparatus that are within my meager capabilities to bring to bear:

With grateful acknowledgments (...and apologies?) to George Orwell and Roger Waters.

Okay, this means war. Public Enemy #1: the elitist plutocrats of the US Chamber of Commerce.

2009-12-11T01:09:00.002-06:00

At least the Dems -- in contrast to the members of the GOP -- in Congress aren't readily and openly whoring themselves out to the US Chamber of Commerce.

From AP News, by way of Yahoo! News:

WASHINGTON – A bipartisan coalition in the House voted late Thursday to make it easier for corporations to engage in complex derivatives trades without government restrictions, eroding the reach of proposed regulations to govern Wall Street.

Democratic attempts to toughen the legislation failed.

Though not major setbacks, the votes illustrated the difficulties facing House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank and the Obama administration as they seek to pass legislation aimed at preventing a recurrence of last year's Wall Street crisis.

Key votes loomed ahead, with a final vote on the sweeping legislation scheduled Friday.

Democrats hoped to fend off an amendment Friday that would eliminate the creation of an independent Consumer Finance Protection Agency. The agency is a central element of the Democrats' legislation and the Obama administration's proposed regulatory changes.

The amendment was offered by Rep. Walt Minnick, a conservative Democrat from Idaho, and seven other centrist Democrats. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been running national television ads against the creation of a consumer agency, said it would base its support for lawmakers in next year's elections, in part, on how they voted on the amendment.

"I think we're going to beat the Minnick amendment, but it's a real test," Frank, D-Mass., said Thursday. Creating a consumer agency is a top priority for consumer groups and for labor organizations such as the AFL-CIO.

Democratic leaders also were pushing changes that would add further restrictions on banks and financial institutions. One, vigorously opposed by banks, would let bankruptcy judges rewrite mortgages to lower homeowners' monthly payments.

A coalition of banking organizations on Thursday sent lawmakers a letter urging them to vote against the amendment. The House previously passed bankruptcy-mortgage legislation, but it failed in the Senate.

The legislation imposes new regulations on derivatives, aiming to prevent manipulation in and bring transparency to a $600 trillion global market. But an amendment by New York Democrat Scott Murphy, adopted 304-124 Thursday night, exempted businesses that trade in derivatives, not as financial speculators, but to hedge against market fluctuations such as currency rates or gasoline prices. The amendment also provided an exception for businesses that are not considered too big to be a risk to the financial system.

A Democratic effort to make more companies subject to derivatives regulation failed 279-150.

The Chamber of Commerce circulated a letter Thursday urging lawmakers to vote for the Murphy amendment and against the broader regulation. [...]

If ever there was an entity that is contemptuous of the basic, day-to-day existence of the ordinary, middle class American citizen and family in 2009 (and there was/is!), it is the US Chamber of Commerce. It is a truly despicable assemblage of liars and crooks, an organization of cigar-chomping Mr. Spacely-type Captains of Oligarchy.

Of course the US Chamber of Commerce is against the regulation and oversight! I mean, weren't excessive market regulation/oversight and rampant consumer protections the things that plunged us into this economic crisis in the first place?? Oh, wait.....

Anyway, what do you expect from an organization that opposes the prosecution of private contractors in Iraq who gang-raped American and Iraqi women?.

The history books of the future shall surely look back on this moment as the finest hour of laissez faire capitalism and its apologists.....

House 'Audit the Fed' bill persists, teeth intact.

2009-11-24T11:35:00.000-06:00

From Politico:

The House Financial Services Committee has approved Rep. Ron Paul’s measure to drastically expand the government’s power to audit the Federal Reserve.

The measure, based on a Paul proposal that has attracted more than 300 co-sponsors, passed, 43-26, as an amendment to a financial reform bill. Florida Democrat and fellow Fed critic Alan Grayson co-sponsored the amendment with Paul and played a leading role drumming up support for it among committee members. The adoption of this amendment is an extraordinary victory for Paul, whose libertarian, anti-Fed leanings have often been dismissed by the political establishment.

[...]

The House Financial Services Committee will vote on approving the underlying bill after Thanksgiving recess.

This is precisely the kind of thing I'm talking about when I call for a tactical alliance of left and right in the interest of advancing populist measures.

True, I oppose the extreme laissez faire economic philosophy of Paul and the libertarian tendency. He favors a system with severe restrictions upon the regulation and oversight of markets. By contrast, I favor a social democratic model that protects ordinary people against the inescapable perils of market activity.

But so what? The fact is that left- and right-populism share the interest of instituting democratic checks against powerful, and currently insular and unaccountable, monetary policy-making agencies. As the poet said: in politics, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and it has always been this way. I don't have to want to play cribbage with someone in order to share some or many of his political interests.

Washington Times: Obama, "Sired by Kenyon father," lacks "blood impulse" for what America "is about."

2009-11-18T14:24:00.009-06:00

The Washington Times has never been a serious newspaper. It was conceived as little more than a mouthpiece for the extreme right-wing ideology favored by its founder and owner, the singular Rev. Sun Myung Moon. The Korean jet-setting businessman/evangelical-cult cleric Moon helms the Unification Church -- you know: the Moonies.

Still, despite its track record, I somehow wasn't quite prepared for overt and deep-seated racism on display in a Times editorial contributed yesterday by editor-in-chief emeritus Wesley Pruden (brought to my attention through Media Matters). Old Man Pruden begins by ranting hysterically -- you might say that he waxes impenetrable -- about Obama's current diplomatic visit to Asia. But just wait until you get to the final paragraph (if you can make it that far without becoming nauseous):

So far it's a memorable trip. He established a new precedent for how American presidents should pay obeisance to kings, emperors, monarchs, sovereigns and assorted other authentic man-made masters of the universe. He stopped just this side of the full grovel to the emperor of Japan, risking a painful genuflection if his forehead had hit the floor with a nasty bump, which it almost did. No president before him so abused custom, traditions, protocol (and the country he represents). Several Internet sites published a rogue's gallery showing how other national leaders - the prime ministers of Israel, India, Slovenia, South Korea, Russia and Dick Cheney among them - have greeted Emperor Akihito with a friendly handshake and an ever-so-slight but respectful nod (and sometimes not even that).

Now we know why Mr. Obama stunned everyone with an earlier similar bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, only the bow to the Japanese emperor was far more flamboyant, a sign of a really deep sense of inferiority. He was only practicing his bow in Riyadh. Sometimes rituals are learned with difficulty. It took Bill Clinton months to learn how to return a military salute worthy of a commander in chief; like any draft dodger, he kept poking a thumb in his eye until he finally got it. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, seems right at home now giving a wow of a bow. This is not the way an American president impresses evildoers that he's strong, tough and decisive, that America is not to be trifled with.

[...]

But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy '60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to "hope" for "change." It's no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of "the 57 states" is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream. [Emphasis added.]

What's truly disgusting about this Old Coot is that not only is he a racist, but there's something distinctly old-timey about his racism. Pruden is a species of racist from whom we haven't heard all of that much in this country since the days when a succession of United States Presidents had weird facial hair and wives were considered property and black people had only recently attained legal status of human beings and were frequently tarred and feathered. And shit: what fate do you suppose befell white women who were "attracted to men [of color]" in the Jim Crow South?

It would appear that I have just described the world to which the Cretinous Bigot Pruden pines for his everlasting return.* More accurately, it's the wold in which Pruden lives.**

***ADDENDUM***
A couple of things. First, sample other people's outrage over Pruden's editorial (it's never good to be outraged alone!) at the blog The Atlantic Wire, on the Web site of the Atlantic Monthly.

Second, having conducted some light spade-work, it appears that the editor-in-chief emeritus of The Washington Times and Arkansas native has been a longtime activist for neo-Confederate causes. Frankly, I'm somewhat stumped as to what those causes could be. But in the meantime, behold the following picture of Pruden saluting the Confederate Flag:

UPDATE: It's him all right. Will the South rise again? Not on Pruden's watch. Under his stewardship, the South probably can't even get a date.

(Although multiple credible-seeming sources cite it as such, I am still not 100% certain of the picture's legitimacy. I will remove it if I'm convinced that it's phony. Mind you, I'm not even saying I have cause to call its legitimacy into question. I'm just being careful 'cause I try always to be fair and accurate, even when it comes to bigoted dickheads...)

_________________________
* That's right. I said Cretinous Bigot.

** Oh, and Hawaii is a state, dick. Once upon a time, people like you spewed the same hot air about...uh...California.

Obama's memorial address at Fort Hood (& a brief excursus on how cable news isn't news).

2009-11-11T11:56:00.002-06:00

Since I don't have cable and wouldn't watch cable news even if I could, I'm not familiar with exactly what idiotic statements from the Washington DC political mercenaries led Time magazine's David von Drehle to decry the idiotic framing and commentary with which "television culture" obscured the immediacy and impact of Obama's Fort Hood address.

While I'm certain that von Drehle is telling the truth, maybe it's time someone suggested to him just not watching cable news. It isn't -- after all -- news, is it?

I'm not bragging, by the way, about the fact that I don't watch cable news. I'm just saying: Cable news is a perfectly valid form of entertainment, of distraction from the headaches of quotidian reality, and I just happen to prefer other forms of distraction. Like playing my antique zithers and fucking.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, Obama's address was a truly exceptional and praiseworthy bit of speechifying. And it appears that lots of others -- like Slate's John Dickerson -- agree with me:

[...]

These men and women came from all parts of the country. Some had long careers in the military. Some had signed up to serve in the shadow of 9/11. Some had known intense combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some cared for those did. Their lives speak to the strength, the dignity and the decency of those who serve, and that is how they will be remembered.

That same spirit is embodied in the community here at Fort Hood, and in the many wounded who are still recovering. In those terrible minutes during the attack, soldiers made makeshift tourniquets out of their clothes. They braved gunfire to reach the wounded, and ferried them to safety in the backs of cars and a pick-up truck.

One young soldier, Amber Bahr, was so intent on helping others that she did not realize for some time that she, herself, had been shot in the back. Two police officers - Mark Todd and Kim Munley - saved countless lives by risking their own. One medic - Francisco de la Serna - treated both Officer Munley and the gunman who shot her.

It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know - no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice - in this world, and the next.

These are trying times for our country. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same extremists who killed nearly 3,000 Americans continue to endanger America, our allies, and innocent Afghans and Pakistanis. In Iraq, we are working to bring a war to a successful end, as there are still those who would deny the Iraqi people the future that Americans and Iraqis have sacrificed so much for.

As we face these challenges, the stories of those at Fort Hood reaffirm the core values that we are fighting for, and the strength that we must draw upon. Theirs are tales of American men and women answering an extraordinary call - the call to serve their comrades, their communities, and their country. In an age of selfishness, they embody responsibility. In an era of division, they call upon us to come together. In a time of cynicism, they remind us of who we are as Americans.

We are a nation that endures because of the courage of those who defend it. We saw that valor in those who braved bullets here at Fort Hood, just as surely as we see it in those who signed up knowing that they would serve in harm's way.

We are a nation of laws whose commitment to justice is so enduring that we would treat a gunman and give him due process, just as surely as we will see that he pays for his crimes.

We are a nation that guarantees the freedom to worship as one chooses. And instead of claiming God for our side, we remember Lincoln's words, and always pray to be on the side of God.

We are a nation that is dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal. We live that truth within our military, and see it in the varied backgrounds of those we lay to rest today. We defend that truth at home and abroad, and we know that Americans will always be found on the side of liberty and equality. That is who we are as a people.

[...]

SURMISE: The illusion of comfort as commodity.

2009-11-07T00:30:00.011-06:00

The advent of the current global economic crisis has brought some things into sharper focus, don't you think? One example of this is that as regards the United States and probably also in much of Western Europe, it is difficult to dispute that

comfort is an illusion, that this illusion is a commodity, and that
any commodity is itself an illusion, the purchase of which confers comfort upon its purchaser.

People want to believe that they are comfortable. It's much easier to encourage people to believe that they're comfortable than it is to convince them that they're not.

Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United States, staunch opponent of labor strikes and noted exponent of laissez faire governance is famous for having said:

The chief business of the American people is business.

Now, the fact is that Coolidge has gotten a bit of a bum rap, because this remark is actually taken from a lengthier piece of speechifying that argued that the generating of wealth and profits is virtuous and useful only insofar as it is applied to the funding of measures that further the public good (like education), and that when wealth is not so applied, it bespeaks nothing more than the selfishness of those who accumulate it.

This caveat notwithstanding, the mythologies concerning the assumed virtuousness of hard work, productivity and profit have been ubiquitous in America since the aphorisms of Benjamin Franklin (as noted specifically by the German sociologist Max Weber, who was the first thinker to expound the Protestant Ethic).

Whatever the origin of this 'ethic', the functions it has served have been manifold. Among the most obvious ones are the legitimation of America's pervasive socioeconomic stratification -- think, everything from the oeuvre of Horatio Alger to the ascent of Social Darwinism. This function of legitimation applies, by the way, both to those at the top of the ladder -- for whom the myth of meritocracy (or a kind of biological determinism, beyond the purview of man) is a bulwark against pangs of guilt about the socioeconomic disparities -- and those at the bottom of the ladder -- for whom the myth of meritocracy encourages them to chalk up their lot in life to their own faults (or those of their families and loved ones) of laziness, stupidity, drunkenness, insufficient religiosity, or just plain old everyday lack of industriousness.

But, let us return to our consideration of the advent of the present global economic crisis, with its various peculiarities, such as the specter of the declining wealth, access to social and cultural capital and education and economic opportunity available to wide swathes of the nation's population, including large parts of the middle class. This is accompanied by the likelihood of a continued sharp decline in upward social mobility, a trend totally unheard of among Baby Boomers and the generation of their parents.

It seems to me that in the bleak geopolitical and global-economic era upon which we are likely embarking, the so-called 'Protestant Ethic' and the corresponding myth of meritocracy perform a function whose salience will supplant those associated with mere legitimation.

This new function is a much more basic one: rootedness within a seemingly fixed structure of social relations. American/Western-capitalist human self-perception will come increasingly to depend for its sustenance upon its ability to perceive itself as being somehow embedded in a framework that provides some semblance -- even if it's chimerical -- of predictability.

In other words, people will -- and have already begun to -- pay huge amounts of treasure (whether it's in the form of cash or in the form of the human soul) for the illusion of comfort. As Crib From This has surmised in the past, the ability to see the world as it is turns not upon your intelligence -- and certainly not in the vulgar/scientistic sense of this overused word/concept -- but upon your bravery.

Most of us -- particularly in the West -- aren't brave.

These Times: Nobody ever believes anything anybody ever has to say about anything...

2009-11-03T13:35:00.005-06:00

...and why should he (or she)?

As an illustration of the Samuel Beckett-esque times in which we live, take a look at this most recent post from the left-leaning economics blogger Yves Smith, in which she reveals that she -- in her capacity as one among a "small group of bloggers" -- was invited to participate in a pseudo-off-the-record discussion with "senior officials" of the Obama Treasury Department. Smith:

It wasn’t obvious what the objective of the meeting was (aside the obvious idea that if they were nice to us we might reciprocate. Unfortunately, some of us are not housebroken). I will give them credit for having the session be almost entirely a Q&A, not much in the way of presentation. One official made some remarks about the state of financial institutions; later another said a few things about regulatory reform. The funniest moment was when, right after the spiel on regulatory reform, Steve Waldman said, “I’ve read your bill and I think it’s terrible.” They did offer to go over it with him. It will be interesting to see if that happens.

Four of us [bloggers of various political orientations from the aforementioned "small group"] had a drink afterward and none of us felt that we learned anything (not that we expected to per se; if the ground rules are “not for attribution” in an official setting, we are certainly not going to be told anything new or juicy). But my feeling, and it seemed to be shared, was that we bloggers and the government officials kept talking past each other, in that one of us would ask a question, the reply would leave the questioner or someone in the audience unsatisfied, there might be a follow up question (either same person or someone interested), get another responsive-sounding but not really answer, and then another person would get the floor. The fact that the social convention of no individual hogging air time meant that no one could follow a particular line of inquiry very far.

My bottom line is that the people we met are very cognitively captured, assuming one can take their remarks at face value. Although they kept stressing all the things that had changed or they were planning to change, the polite pushback from pretty all [sic] the attendees was that what Treasury thought of as major progress was insufficient. It was instructive to observe that Tyler Cowen, who is on the other side of the ideological page from yours truly, had pretty much the same concerns as your humble blogger does.

[...]

Read the rest of this fascinating-if-frustrating post-meeting report at the blog Naked Capitalism.

LATE-BREAKING ADDENDUM:
It occurs to me that I nowhere explained what's "Samuel Beckett-esque" about our "times." Not sure that's really the correct characterization. Well, anyway, you have a lot of men (and some women) in suits talking back-and-forth, everyone politely waiting his turn, statements being made that take the form of answers and questions without always actually necessarily being answers and questions (or even maybe statements), and in the end it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Or something. (As it were.)

"Pro-sex feminism" as a paradigm for a left-populist moral consensus.

2009-10-30T22:48:00.005-05:00

Girldrive
An article in the Chicago Reader discusses a new book that offers a fresh approach to understanding salient commonalities and contradictions in contemporary American feminism. Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism is a travelogue that compiles the testimony and experiences of feminists (not necessarily self-identified as such) across the 'lower 48' states of varying racial, cultural and socioeconomic profiles. Kind of an interesting idea in itself. But what interests me most about the project is the identity of one of its young co-authors and the overarching political project that is implicit in much of her work.

It should be said that the story of the book's creation -- at once inspiring and tragic -- is as complicated and worthy of attention as its content. I won't dwell on it here except to mention that what's tragic is that co-author Emma Bee Bernstein took her own life before the book was completed and that more can be learned about this by reading the article in the Reader.

Aronowitz: Nona Willis and father Stanley
The other co-author is Nona Willis Aronowitz, who is the daughter of two intellectuals, both of whom were prominent figures in the American Left in the 60s and 70s. For many years, I have admired the scholarship of her father, the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, particularly for his politically engaged work in the sociology of education and his pioneering inquiries into the sociology of the workplace.

Since, in my limited understanding, issues of economic disparities and social class have played so central a role in Aronowitz's scholarship (as opposed to stuff like identity politics), it was with some surprise that I discovered that he was married to the late Ellen Willis, the feminist writer and critic. Willis was opposed to the puritanical stances that sometimes emanate from feminist circles, and is associated with what has been called "pro-sex feminism."

Ellen Willis and "pro-sex feminism"
The meaning of "pro-sex feminism" can be discerned through the following quotation from an article that Willis contributed to the Village Voice in 1981 (titled "Lust Horizons: Is the Woman's Movement Pro-Sex?"):

While liberals appeared to be safely in power, feminists could perhaps afford the luxury of defining Larry Flynt or Roman Polanski as Enemy Number One. Now that we have to cope with Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms, a rethinking of priorities seems in order. [...]

My god, that observation was prescient. I bet feminists in 1981 could not in their wildest dreams have imagined the ascendancy of theocracy under Bush and Cheney; even today the courting of religionists is common practice among politicians of every political stripe. And despite the fact that "feminism" is no longer the salient assignation that it was in the early eighties, the din of anti-(hetero)sexuality/anti-sex rhetoric can still be detected in a percentage of feminism's present-day manifestations. Willis categorized the practitioners within the feminist tendency of what she called "sexual conservatism" into two groups: (1) the monogamists and (2) the separatists:

These apparently opposed perspectives meet on the common ground of sexual conservatism. The monogamists uphold the traditional wife's "official" values: emotional commitment is inseparable from a legal/moral obligation to permanence and fidelity; men are always trying to escape these duties; it's in our interest to make them shape up. The separatists tap into the underside of traditional femininity – the bitter, self-righteous fury that propels the indictment of men as lustful beasts ravaging their chaste victims. These are the two faces of feminine ideology in a patriarchal culture: they induce women to accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men's sexual freedom as a substitute for real power. [...]

I don't care who you are and what your attitude toward feminism is (if you're like me, you support feminism and might even be a feminist, but you basically almost never think about it and tend to devote more attention to certain sets of systemic injustices that are preventing human and political emancipation along lines of socioeconomic class, race and ethnicity), the above passage is really well written and thought-provoking and makes you wonder: why aren't people writing stuff like that these days? Is it partly because "alternative weeklies" like the Village Voice and the Chicago Reader are now owned by evil, corpora-financial interests?

A de facto feminism that is already out there, waiting to be described
Anyway, it's encouraging to see that Ellen Willis's corpus of feminist writings, including especially her "pro-sex" stance, have informed the work in the burgeoning career of her daughter. Nona Willis Aronowitz is still (very, for a journalist about whom I'm bothering so much as to blog) young, and the jury's still out on whether she'll become a writer of the talent and insight of her mother.

What's most encouraging is that she already understands the tidbit of wisdom that I believe to be indispensable to a future for the American Left: it must get the hell out of American's self-styled, middle class-bohemian echo chamber and start giving a voice to the people who are getting screwed worst of all in this country: poor people, both whites and minorities and both from the inner-city and the Great Plains. Nona Willis Aronowitz is spot-on when it comes to the necessity of this outreach. Behold the following quote from the Reader article:

[...] "Feminism, [says Aronowitz] for me, is women owning up to realities of sexism—but feminism as identity is less important than realizing those things and having gendered consciousness [sic].

[...] "Some of the most badass feminists we met were raised in conservative families or oppressive communities. I couldn't believe the urgency of women working in Fargo and Louisiana, the Bible Belt and Austin—they were way more passionate than a lot of women in big cities with big feminist communities."

These subjects—clinic defenders, Chicana activists, community organizers, and other women helping women on the ground—inspired Aronowitz and Bernstein to change their tack. The book's initial outline had been somewhat autobiographical, but as they put more miles between them and Chicago, they realized the stories that needed to be told weren't necessarily their own. "These women don't have a chance to be heard," says Aronowitz. "It started to feel urgent to let them speak for themselves."

Toward a Left-populism
What I find most compelling about Aronowitz's characterization of the project of her book is that it stands as a paradigm for precisely the program of left-populist thought and activism that stands the best chance preserving the foundations of civil liberties, self-governance and checks-and-balances enshrined in the Constitution.

To my mind, a Left that is premised upon a project of democratic emancipation cannot sustain itself -- and if not in the United States, with its vital republican constitution and traditions, then where? -- without being willing and able to take the form of a no-bullshit, intelligent Left-populism.

It is way too easy for the Left to fall into the same habits of the past thirty or forty (or more) years -- among them: defeatism, self-pity, pedantry, the fetishization of 'expertise', the fetishization of credentials, excessive intellectual and moral balkanization, regionalism, etc. --, but to pursue such a course would mean ceding all of our political autonomy (not just existing, but potential) to the reigning plutocracy (and a succession of future real- and potential-plutocratic [re-]configurations).

A Left-populist moral consensus cannot be prudish, because real people aren't prudish
We have to start, just as Aronowitz and Bernstein did, with the people who are already out there doing it. Furthermore, we need to bear in mind that a Left-populist moral consensus can only emerge around themes that that everyday people really do care about. Not an imagined version of morally upright, pious, unselfconscious 'everyday people': that's bullshit and pandering and a lie.

It's easy to know what people care about, because even if they don't always come out and say what it is, they do, inevitably and frequently, talk about it.

Here's a perfect example: sex. It's really easy to tell that human beings care about and think about sex because they talk about it all the time.

Karl Rove wanted everybody to think that there's this unimaginably enormous population of far-Right Christian religionists that constituted the largest and most monolithic voting block in the history of the universe. And for a long time, he succeeded. But, before long, everyone came to realize that it was actually a bunch of smoke-and-mirrors. And eventually, that becomes replaced with another bunch of smoke-and-mirrors -- the birther-movement, the tea-bagger movement, the neo-Nazi resurgence, etc., etc.

Maybe what I'm trying to say here is this: I'm as put-off by the smoke-and-mirrors shows as anyone else. But the response of the Left should not be to call for bans on smoke-and-mirrors shows, to denounce entire red-state populations on the basis of such spectacles, or to mount opposing smoke-and-mirrors production numbers!

It should be to call it what it is, to say: what a bunch of fucking loonies and point out how they are a playing perfectly into an ongoing succession of time-wasting distractions that muddy political discourses in our current landscape of consolidated media and micro-commerce. If a Left-populist movement puts real effort into doing precisely this, if it insists continually upon exploding mythologies rather than perpetuating them, it will make friends, not enemies out in the American countryside as well as deep in the American cityscape.

What say you?

Screw the Federal Reserve.

2009-10-27T22:47:00.002-05:00

Another reason to grind our teeth in the direction of the Federal Reserve, courtesy of a report appearing in Bloomberg, as discussed by Yves Smith in the blog Naked Capitalism [emphasis mine]:

It had generally been assumed that the AIG payouts of 100% on credit swaps (when the insurer was under water and bankrupt companies do not satisfy their obligations in full) was the result of some gap in oversight plus traders at AIG exercising discretion (they were unhappy about bonus rows and had reason to curry favor with dealers, who were potential employers).

The article [appearing in Bloomberg] makes clear that AIG had been negotiating to settle on the swaps prior to getting aid from the government, and was seeking a 40% discount. The Fed might not have gotten that much of a discount, but there was clearly no need to pay out at par.

This massive backdoor subsidy to the likes of Goldman, DeutscheBank was authorized by Geithner while he was at the New York Fed. [...]

[T]he fact that this was a backdoor rescue means the Fed is acting as an extra budgetary vehicle of the Treasury. This is a violation of the Constitution and shows how patently false the Fed’s claims of independence are. [...] The real issue is that the Fed BY DESIGN bailed out banks, including foreign banks, through a device not authorized by Congress.

Links: Is Obama finally getting his populist on?

2009-10-23T22:26:00.000-05:00

Obama, the Trust-Buster? Obama and congressional Democrats taking on the Insurance Industry? And insisting upon a 'public option'? [DownWithTyrrany]

All of this, plus Obama and the Democrats slashing executive pay for acceptors of TARP money? [The Washington Post]

Contrary to what Washington DC chattering-class idiots might contend, a Democratic, Obama-led Populist Turn is a good thing!!

The Populist Left / The Paranoid Right

2009-10-23T20:16:00.005-05:00

In recent posts, I've discussed the idea of authoritarian populism, an idea popularized by the sociologist Stuart Hall to describe the rise of Margaret Thatcher in early 1980s England. I argued that the resentment-fueled rhetoric of the current Republican Party could be seen as an updated species of authoritarian populism.

But forget about all that.

I think that a recent op-ed by Thomas Frank nails it. What the GOP has been up to, he observes, is not really populism at all but paranoia. It's the John Birch Society gone mainstream....

Next month will mark the 45th anniversary of the publication by Harper's Magazine of Richard Hofstadter's famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a work that seems to grow more relevant by the day.

I was not always a fan. [...] I thought, who really cared about the strange notions that occurred to members of marginal groups like the John Birch Society? Joe McCarthy's day was long over, and even in the age of high Reaganism, I thought, the type of person Hofstadter described was merely handing out flyers on street corners.

As the historian himself admitted, "in America it has been the preferred style only of minority movements." Why bother with it, then?

How times have changed! Hofstadter's beloved liberal consensus has been in the grave for decades now. Today it would appear that his mistake was underestimating the seductive power of the paranoid style.

The essential element of this mindset, Hofstadter explained, was its predilection for conspiracy theory—for understanding history as a theater in which sinister figures control the flow of events from behind the scenes, nudging us constantly and secretly in the direction of communism.

Back in Hofstadter's day this sort of thinking at least had something supremely rational going for it: The existence of the Soviet Union and its desire to bring the West to its knees.

But take that away and the theories become something far more remarkable. Consider, by contrast, the widespread belief that President Barack Obama's birth certificate was forged. What could have been his parents' motives for committing such a bizarre deed, or his home state's motive for colluding in it, or the courts' motives for overlooking it?

Or consider the widespread conservative conviction that we are being marched secretly into communism or fascism. Why would someone bother? It seems equally likely, given today's circumstances, that conspirators would trick us into becoming a colony of Belgium or the imperial seat of the Bonaparte family.

The paranoid pattern persists regardless. It is impervious to world events; a blurting of the American subconscious that has not changed since Hofstadter analyzed it 45 years ago. Consider the recent wave of fear that the hypnotic Mr. Obama was planning to indoctrinate schoolchildren. In "The Paranoid Style," Hofstadter wrote, "Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; . . . he has a new secret for influencing the mind; . . . he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system."

Conspiracy-mindedness isn't just for fringe political groups anymore; it makes for riveting entertainment. And it is all around us today, a disorder with an entire industry to act as its enabler. [...]

Frank goes on to cite recent examples of this phenomenon, from Glenn Beck's fake news show to a truly bizarre essay penned by Michelle Malkin. These examples always include (1) alarmingly hysterical conspiracy theories and (2) a self-persecution complex, accompanied by massive amounts of self-pity.

What the hell's going on, anyway?

Although Frank's piece isn't about progressive political strategy, I believe that Frank's formulation (or, rather, his appropriation of Hofstadter) might provide a rhetorical framework with which to strengthen the project of Left-populism.

The conundrum that I had been perceiving in all of the Angry Right-Teabagger stuff had not been limited to the damage that violent, racist innuendo and intellectual dishonesty threatens to inflict upon civil discourse. What had been worrying me most of all had been the fact that it appeared that the Deranged Right was -- albeit disingenuously -- threatening to dominate populist-inflected discourse in this country.

But why cede that ground to a bunch of hacks, liars and -- as Frank notes -- producers of mass entertainment?

Glenn Beck doesn't represent a twisted, authoritarian version of populism: He represents many vile, stupid and wrongheaded things. Not one of them has anything to do with populism.

GeoCities will be gone forever as of Monday, October 26.

2009-10-23T00:42:00.006-05:00

Sometimes my capacity for nostalgia surprises me. That's because I lie to myself, and the lie that I tell myself is that I'm not nostalgic. The impulse to tell that lie must be machismo, inscribed in my male DNA. Nostalgia seems soppy, feminine (or maybe too Irish?) and scatter-brained: A sign of physical and mental weakness.

See? I'm already babbling incoherently.

For people my age and possibly for other people the decade of the 1990s triggers our nostalgia reflex like no other. It seems like it was such an innocent and simple time. Only we Americans, who live in a condition of total culture industry-immersion, could possibly be self-indulgent enough to cast matters in that light.

Really, it wasn't a time of innocence at all, but rather, of myopia and wealth. If the myopia was the kind of myopia that accompanies great wealth, the wealth was the kind of wealth -- think "Dot-Com Bubble" -- that depended upon myopia for its sustenance: irrational exuberance, half-baked math and coke-addled entrepreneurs gaming venture capitalists for millions of dollars in order to get chihuahua-enthusiasts.com off the ground.

But then again, it was an innocent and simple time, and maybe its innocence was partly to do with its simplicity. To be sure, the Reagan 80s were an even simpler time that bombarded us to an unprecedented degree with big spectacles of consumer populism, products, images and myths that knew no class divisions, preferring to treat us all like idiots: the Magic Of Spielberg® ™, Family Ties, Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" shit, NASA, Eddie Murphy, when he got really really lame, New Coke, Sylvester Stallone, Flight of the Navigator, etc., etc.

No wonder everybody was in such a celebratory mood in the 1990s. By the end of the 80s, culture had basically gotten as bad as it could possibly get. So it was time for Big Capital to steal, to gut, to bastardize and to...erm...monetize* a fresh batch of attitudes, fashions and tropes. Remember My So-Called Life? And, uh, 120 Minutes (actually begun in the 80s, but whatever...). The "Seattle sound" stuff was kind of refreshing for a couple of seconds to those of us teenagers who hadn't previously been cool enough to know about Fugazi, The Minutemen and Big Black. And before long, we had amazing music to get into, like Stereolab (rest in peace, Mary Hansen), Lush, Gastr del Sol, Jim O'Rourke, Pavement and -- last but not least -- Oasis.

But I'll leave aside my sure-to-be-interminable observations about music for another day. the important thing to observe for now is that through the vast majority of that halcyon decade, that obnoxious "Pitchfork" bullshit had yet to rear its head and poison everything with its vile, vapid, retrograde shittiness.

No, in those days, the decade of Bill Clinton, we had GeoCities.

And the point of this post is to inform those of you who may not already know it that GeoCities -- the Yahoo corporation's once-ubiquitous, trusty, colorful, untrendy, gauche, un-ironic, un-self-reflexive, fun, free Web site-hosting service -- will be closing in just a couple of short days.

I'm going to miss GeoCities. Just having it around. It's been around for over 15 years! For some reason, it honestly just feels weird to contemplate a world without tons of decrepit old GeoCities Web pages that nobody ever looks at anymore. Isn't it in repositories such as this that is to be found proof of (the decline of) Western civilization?

Read Yahoo's lame non-reasons for euthanizing GeoCities. (I'll get over it. Some day....)

And click here or the image below to learn -- at this, the eleventh hour -- how to help the venerable Web site archive.org to save archives of your favorite GeoCities sites as a service to history and to humanity. In twenty years, when you write your two-volume History of the Internet, you'll thank yourself for having had the prescience to ensure the preservation of a deserving GeoCities site.

Am I the only one who's going to miss GeoCities?

_____________________
* I feel like I should say ten Hail Marys or something for having used that phrase, even in jest... You can take the Catholic out of the Church, but you can't etc., etc. Turns out this is true even when he takes himself out of the Church, crying tears of joy and toasting to his imminent liberation from his oppressors every step of the way.

Link: Frontline's "The Warning" will detail the roles of Rubin, Greenspan, Summers & Geithner in enabling financial crisis.

2009-10-20T19:46:00.003-05:00

More information and "sneak peak" video hyperlinks can be found at the blog DownWithTyranny,

whose author writes:

[...] Tonight at 9PM PBS is debuting The Warning by Mark Kirk. I heard him being interviewed on the radio this morning. It promises to be a blockbuster of a program and if you ever wonder how all these highly paid smart guys dragged the whole country-- if not much of the world-- into ruin, you really ought to try to watch. Kirk's goal is to open the black box and unearth "the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression." [...]

Propaganda Alert: Wall Street's grip on media. Or: Access journalism, the elimination of dissent & the recoveryless recovery.

2009-10-17T17:08:00.002-05:00

The re-ascendancy of Goldman Sachs, et al., was made possible by US taxpayers -- who weren't, by the way, consulted about it -- having forked-over billions and billions of dollars, in accordance with TARP and related measures, enacted in the moment of crisis (in 'extraordinary circumstances'!!!) as necessary for the very preservation of the United States economy.

And yet, despite the fact that the vast majority of US citizens are getting massively screwed by this state of affairs (and, let's face it, most of us are struggling right now just to make ends meet...it's not just the ultra-poor that are getting screwed, but the middle class), we hear nothing about this fact. It's reported or even so much as mentioned by no prominent media, including the declining 'traditional' press and the massive entertainment organizations that call themselves 'cable news'. And scarcer still is any piece of reporting that points out explicitly the fact that the small cadre of super-wealthy bankers are enriching themselves at the expense of the middle class. (And don't even get me started on the pitiful state of social services for poor people!)

So: why are the media nothing more than stenographers for the banking industry's public relations specialists?

To learn more, have a look at the spirited commentary of Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith: MSM Reporting as Propaganda (No One Minds Our New Financial Lords and Masters Edition).

In this piece, the author grapples with some of the sinister trends in financial news coverage (and in news coverage in general) and tries to sort out what accounts for the fact that the news reporting of the "mainstream" media are not just 'slanted', but -- and this is not hyperbole -- downright dysfunctional. In other words, propaganda. Here's a taste (I have emphasized certain passages using boldface):

Access journalism has created what is in many respects a controlled press. And that matters because people are far more suggestible than most of us wants to admit to ourselves.

Let us start with the cheerleading in the media over Wall Street, and in particular, Goldman earnings. Matt Taibbi, in “Good News on Wall Street Means… What Exactly?,” tells us why this is so distorted:
It’s literally amazing to me that our press corps hasn’t yet managed to draw a distinction between good news on Wall Street for companies like Goldman, and good news in reality.

I watched carefully the reporting of the Dow breaking 10,000 the other day and not anywhere did I see a major news organization include a paragraph of the “On the other hand, so fucking what?” sort, one that might point out that unemployment is still at a staggering high, foreclosures are racing along at a terrifying clip, and real people are struggling more than ever. In fact the dichotomy between the economic health of ordinary people and the traditional “market indicators” is not merely a non-story, it is a sort of taboo — unmentionable in major news coverage.
The press has been on a downslope for at least a decade, as a result of strained budgets and vastly more effective government and business spin control (and it was already pretty good at that, see the BBC series, The Century of the Self, via Google video, for a real eye-opener). I met a reporter who had been overseas for six years, opening an important foreign office for the Wall Street Journal. He was stunned when he came back in 1999 to see how much reporting had changed in his absence. He said it was impossible to get to the bottom of most stories in a normal news cycle because companies had become very sophisticated in controlling their message and access.

I couldn’t tell immediately, but one of my friends remarked in 2000 that the reporting was increasingly reminiscent of what she had grown up with in communist Poland. The state of the US media became evident to me when I lived in Australia during the run-up and the first two years of the Gulf War. I would regularly e-mail people in the States about stories I thought were important and I suspected might not be getting much play in the US. My correspondents were media junkies. 85% of the time, a story that had gotten widespread coverage in Australia appeared not to have been released in the US. And the other 15%, it didn’t get much attention (for instance, buried in the middle of the first section of the New York Times). And remember, Australia was an ally and sent troops to the Iraq. [...]

Please do read the rest.

Video link: "Stormtroopers' 9/11"

2009-10-16T21:21:00.001-05:00

I stumbled upon this. It's pretty damn funny and eats up a measly 2:31 of your day:

Crib From This Contra Glenn Beck

2009-10-14T17:37:00.008-05:00

The diatribe that follows was prompted by having heard an excerpt of a certain very dumb man's radio program, which I encountered courtesy of PhuckPolitics.com:

Now, the fact is that this dude ain't worth it, because unlike, say, Rush Limbaugh -- who, despite having a lot of dumb people in his audience, cannot himself truthfully be said to be dumb, on the basis of his considerable moneymaking acumen alone (and who also isn't worth it) -- Glenn Beck's dumb as a rock. And that's an understatement. I mean, the guy is really, really dumb. Not George-W.-Bush/good-ol'-boy/lacking-intellectual-curiosity dumb. We're talking glaring/conspicuous-cognitive-deficiencies-having dumb. That's how dumb Glenn The Dumb Guy Beck is dumb.

And anyway, I tire of expressing pure outrage (because making normal, intelligent people angry is precisely what Glen Beck is designed to do…to what end is beyond the scope of my comprehension), but what the hell is this guy talking about?

All he does is tell bizarre lies and attack both individuals and large communities in a way that is at once deeply vicious and confoundingly non-specific.

The latter is especially troubling, because when he demonizes others by using insinuations and weird neo-McCarthyist rhetoric — be it cries of “communists” or “fascists” or whatever — he is himself by definition engaging in precisely the rhetorical strategies that are the hallmark of propaganda in radical totalitarian regimes. Surely, even someone as willfully ignorant as Beck realizes this, and that’s part of what makes it so outrageous and mendacious as a provocation.

But what offends me even more than his lies, his slander and even his vulgar and continual celebration of his own ignorance, is the fact that he clearly does not have anyone’s best interests at heart. There is no trace of passion for any human cause — however misguided or illusory — to be found in either his persona or rhetoric.

He does not wish to change the minds of his ill-defined ‘political enemies’: He merely wants to silence them or to destroy them. His attitude toward his own audience (and even, at its core, toward himself) consists of nothing more than contempt.

According to the Weltanschauung he espouses (if I may call it that) the world is a dark, dark place where communication, understanding, consensus and even compromise among people is not only impossible but undesirable, whatever the specific circumstances, period.

In short, he's anti-democratic.

If Thomas Jefferson came back today and saw the things that Glenn Beck says in the name of ‘American patriotism’, he’d never stop throwing up.

Politics & ideas? Economic self-interest & authoritarian populism.

2009-10-14T11:38:00.002-05:00

The relation of politics to ideas has always been complicated. But the conceit of this post will be that there's something to be learned by exploring it.

Politics and ideas: the Right
For example: Ideas are, in an important sense, anathema to the climate within which the current American conservatism prevails. Nevertheless, it's important to remember that during the decades prior to the election of Barack Obama, ideas had a twofold significance in em the Republicans to seize/maintain and use political power.

To be sure, at least half of this significance was ancillary to how, why and for whom the so-called 'conservative movement' of the 1980s, 90s and 00s was built. The GOP seized/maintained power through the application of brainpower to such tactical/operational processes as propaganda, demographic analysis and the procurement and allocation of material resources. Simultaneously, the ideas developed by various big brains/think tank types connected to the 'movement' as to how best to use this power were every bit as oriented toward strategic considerations -- how to maintain power -- as toward articulating philosophical/political 'principles'.

For the most part, this coterie of ideologically warped eggheads agreed that this political power could best be put to use by dismantling government itself (see: Messrs. Gingrich, Norquist, Rove, Ambramoff, et al.).

This GOP ambition to dismantle government did not extend, naturellement, to such elements of the public-sector as military and "intelligence" infrastructure. Although, of course, 'outsourcing' these functions -- to mercenaries to fight our wars and to 'specialists' to torture our 'enemy combatants' -- is by now established practice, thanks to Messrs. Rumsfeld & Cheney, et al.

Politics and ideas: the Left
By contrast, no left/progressive politics can exist or have any hope of success without ideas.

To be sure, ideas don't do the trick in and of themselves, and the Right knows this. That's why it has tried, and not without success, to milk every last drop of potential from the 'left-leaning, soulless egghead/expert' cliché. (Although, for some time now, its effectiveness is showing definite signs of strain.)

Allow me to illustrate. One of the biggest and looniest lies that extreme-neoconservative shills like the neo-McCarthyite former/longtime Communist and Black Panther David Horowitz have tried to propagate is that notion that the American professoriat -- as with, of course, 'the mainstream media, the arts, and the employees of public libraries(!) -- is overwhelmingly left-wing in its orientation and that its aim is to indoctrinate defenseless undergraduates, the progeny of unsuspecting, good, decent, law-abiding American families.

Would that that were the case!

For one thing, it's self-evident that this notion is a big, stinking lie (and a febrile one, at that), so ludicrous that it doesn't even merit refutation. However, setting aside the fact that it is categorically untrue -- self-evidently, and empirically -- I believe that there is a more important point to be made as regards the internal logic of what the lie intends to imply. Namely, we might ask: Could the professoriat -- irrespective of the direction in which its politics trend -- really wield the kind of seismic influence over the nation's populace that Horowitz wants to believe it does?

The answer: To the extent to which the academy (and the same applies to the arts, or the press, or what have you) has provided a safe refuge to progressive/left -- even 'liberal' -- ideas over the past decades, then surely this fact has diminished the capacity of these ideas to engage people rather than the other way around. Academia is not called 'the ivory tower' primary in order to evoke architecture. To the extent to which the Left has been hiding out there, it has hampered the flourishing of left-wing ideas. It has probably prevented many good ideas even from entering the public sphere, to say nothing of capturing the public's political imagination.

(Think of things that once existed in the public sphere that have by now retreated for safe harbor in the academic sphere: poetry, visual art, Lacrosse, etc. Do these things appear to be enjoying widespread influence? Can you name more living poets than you can count on one hand? Thus: Academia is the place where once-vital ideas, practices and traditions go to die long, painful deaths.)

Resentment is not an idea
Now, of course, the corollary I have just proposed doubles as a straightforward description of why right-wing political hacks like Horowitz bother proffering these self-evidently idiotic assertions in the first place. When it comes to the Horowitzes of the world: It's not what they're saying, it's what they're talking about.

In other words, since Horowitz and Company are not men of ideas, but rather, merely corporately-funded propagandists for far-Right interests (who previously had been well-funded propagandists for the most militant and radical causes of the far-Left), it is most appropriate to assess their utterances on the basis of how these utterances function and not on the basis of what or how these utterances might 'mean'. Their meaning is their function.

As Crib From This has noted on previous occasions, the vast majority of the intellectual energies among the hired brains of the Reagan Revolution, of the Gingrich Revolution, of the Bush/Cheney Reign Of Terror, of Sarah Palin's Wardrobe and beyond have been expended in pursuit of tactical positioning, not -- as had been at least partly the case in its early years -- in the service of real ideas.

Authoritarian populism
This brings us to the issue that has prompted my little excursus: that of authoritarian populism.

A coinage -- I think -- of the sociologist and Marxist Stuart Hall, authoritarian populism refers to the now-familiar methods by which conservative political forces forge, nurture and/or manufacture political support -- and often sizable majorities -- by, in part, slyly embedding Rightist/ultra-capitalist/neoliberal ideology into the "common sense" of everyday life.

Hall's formulation draws from the thought of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who theorized that, in industrialized nations in the twentieth century, the dominant class established and maintained political control over the working class not only through the use and threatened use of conventional force, but through hegemony: the systems of socialization, the ingrained assumptions, the modes of valuation, etc. that imbue a society and serve to legitimate status quo power relations. Hegemony refers to the processes by which ideology does its real work.

Of particular relevance to Hall's thesis is that Gramsci's concept of hegemony might go part of the way toward explaining how exploited populations can be manipulated into voting against their own economic interests. (Follow this hyperlink for a decent primer on Gramsci and hegemony [with particular emphasis upon Gramsci's significance to educational theory].)

The age of Reagan and Thatcher
Hall's discussion of authoritarian populism emerged from a series of frenzied conversations conducted among leftists and liberals in the United Kingdom wherein Hall and his comrades watched in stunned horror as Margaret Thatcher's Tory Party rose to power in a seeming popular groundswell. To make matters worse, the Labour Party was starting to get routed and the once-steadfast support of the working class seemed to be slipping.

Soon afterward, Ronald Reagan ascended to the White House, with significant assistance from the Democratic Party's disillusioned, blue-collar base ("Reagan Democrats.")

Despite the parallel developments between the United Kingdom and her former upstart-colonies, it is important to remember that England's working class, in contrast to that of the United States, actually had a fairly strong tradition of a political consciousness. Whereas the relationship that had developed between the Democratic Party and American workers, beginning with FDR, had resembled a longstanding yet typical political transaction based upon mutual benefit, English workers were organized and had secured many welfare state protections through collective demand.

So: along came this woman Thatcher, who promised to undermine all of the reforms and protections that this class had fought so hard to obtain. And she swept into power in the midst of what was ostensibly a populist groundswell! How could this be?

Enter: authoritarian populism. Here's Hall's assessment of Thatcherism's populist flair, against which he juxtaposed the ineptitude of the Left's tactics, attitude and rhetoric. It's striking how similar his characterization is to those that emerged fairly recently within the American Left, particularly in the wake of the disastrous candidacy of John Kerry [boldface added by the present blogger]:

Horrendously, the Right has been far more successful in recent years than the Left in connecting with some of these popular movements and trends in civil society. Of course, they have connected with them in their own populist way. The intention of the radical Right, which has been most penetrative, has not been the conversion of masses to the religion of the market and unemployment. Rather, it has been the subtle capacity to identify the positive aspirations of people with the market and the restoration of the capitalist ethic, and to present this as a natural alliance. Thatcherism has been remarkably successful at moving the counters around so as to forge a connection between the popular aspiration for greater freedom from constraining powers and the market definition of freedom. It has created a chain of equivalences between the reaction against state bureaucracy, so deeply inscribed in the Fabian version of social democracy, and the quite different passion for self-sufficiency, self-help and rampant individualism. But, like all ideological and political interventions — which is what Thatcherism is — these connections are neither 'natural' nor necessary. They represent an attempt to inflect and expropriate and absorb what are often democratic currents into free market channels. We have suggested already how and why in the earlier period the market came to be a popular mass experience. The Right, after all, has no hang-ups about making money and stimulating the instinct for money making as the driving force of society. In simple terms, that is what the capitalist system is. So to address itself to isolating and developing the competitive side of that contradictory experience was an obvious and natural way for the radical Right to align itself with popular aspirations or, to put it another way, make itself populist. This is one feature of the wider phenomenon we have seen in this decade of the Right showing itself once again capable of recuperating itself, renewing itself, taking on the challenge of the social democratic consensus and eroding its basis, and learning once again to address the people in accents which seem to groove more naturally with life as they live and experience it. This is the naturalisation of the Right which has proven the real changed ground on which the Left in the 1980s has been forced to operate. It is part of the Right project to turn the tide on every front — in civil society and moral life as much as in economic habits and expectations. Its project, in short, is to become hegemonic, to address the common experience, to speak to and for 'the nation'. [Stuart Hall, "The Culture Gap," originally published in Marxism Today, January 1984. Click here to access the entire article in .pdf format.]

Sound familiar?

Thomas Frank on American politics in the mid-00's
Although the parallel breaks down in some important respects, perhaps the most famous contemporary point of reference that comes to mind with respect to the relation between culture (and the "Culture Wars," a term that Hall at times used specifically in describing Thatcherism) and political "common sense" is Thomas Frank's influential What's the Matter with Kansas? (now also a film, directed by Laura Cohen and Joe Winston).

Here's an excerpt of Frank's book -- published in 2004 -- that recalls aspects of Hall's 1986 assessment of UK politics, but which then takes the conversation into new territory, elements of which I have rendered in boldface.

That our politics have been shifting rightward for more than thirty years is a generally acknowledged fact of American life. That this rightward movement has largely been accomplished by working-class voters whose lives have been materially worsened by the conservative policies they have supported is a less comfortable fact, one we have trouble talking about in a straightforward manner.

And yet the backlash is there, whenever we care to look, from the "hardhats" of the 1960s to the "Reagan Democrats" of the 1980s to today's mad-as-hell "red states." You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America – "going out of business" signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush.

I chose to observe the phenomenon by going back to my home state of Kansas, a place that has been particularly ill-served by the conservative policies of privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization, and that has reacted to its worsening situation by becoming more conservative still. Indeed, Kansas is today the site of a ferocious struggle within the Republican Party, a fight pitting affluent moderate Republicans against conservatives from the working-class districts and the downmarket churches. And it's hard not to feel some affection for the conservative faction, even as you deplore their political views. After all, these are the people that liberalism is supposed to speak to: the hard-luck farmers, the bitter factory workers, the outsiders, the disenfranchised, the disreputable.

Who is to blame for this landscape of distortion, of paranoia, and of good people led astray? Though Kansas voters have chosen self-destructive policies, it is just as clear to me that liberalism deserves a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon. Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Wichita and Shawnee, Kansas with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.

This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and – more important – the money of these coveted constituencies, "New Democrats" think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where's the soft money in that?

This is, in drastic miniature, the criminally stupid strategy that has dominated Democratic thinking off and on ever since the "New Politics" days of the early seventies. Over the years it has enjoyed a few successes, but, as political writer E. J. Dionne has pointed out, the larger result was that both parties have become "vehicles for upper-middle-class interests" and the old class-based language of the left quickly disappeared from the universe of the respectable. The Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters – their traditional base – the big brush-off, ousting their representatives from positions within the party and consigning their issues, with a laugh and a sneer, to the dustbin of history. A more ruinous strategy for Democrats would be difficult to invent. And the ruination just keeps on coming. However desperately they triangulate and accommodate, the losses keep mounting.

Curiously enough, though, Democrats of the DLC variety aren't worried. They seem to look forward to a day when their party really is what David Brooks and Ann Coulter claim it to be now: a coming-together of the rich and the self-righteous. While Republicans trick out their poisonous stereotype of the liberal elite, Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.

Now, here's the part with respect to which, in my opinion, Frank's prescience is being revealed before our eyes in the political events and Democratic electoral/political gains of Obama's 2009:

Such Democrats [Bill Clinton, the DLC, et al.] look at a situation like present-day Kansas where social conservatives war ferociously on moderate Republicans and they rub their hands with anticipation: Just look at how Ronald Reagan's "social issues" have come back to bite his party in the ass! If only the crazy Cons push a little bit more, these Democrats think, the Republican Party will alienate the wealthy suburban Mods for good, and we will be able to step in and carry places like super-affluent Mission Hills, Kansas, along with all the juicy boodle that its inhabitants are capable of throwing our way.

Has this very demographic shift not been cited as one of the chief components of Obama's victory? The Loony Right has stepped beyond the point of no return for many middle- to upper-middle-class suburbanites in the Northwest, the Midwest, the West and even in key portions of the South. So what's the problem, we might ask? Frank decries the long term prospects of and, to be sure, the very point of a Democratic Party that severs its ties with economic populism:

While I enjoy watching Republicans fight one another as much as the next guy, I don't think the Kansas story really gives true liberals any cause to cheer. Maybe someday the DLC dream will come to pass, with the Democrats having moved so far to the right that they are no different than old-fashioned moderate Republicans, and maybe then the affluent will finally come over to their side en masse. But along the way the things that liberalism once stood for – equality and economic security – will have been abandoned completely. Abandoned, let us remember, at the historical moment when we need them most.

Truer words have never been -- etc., etc. I mean, I'm with Frank on this: The lack of responsiveness on the part of either party to the needs of poor people -- from the victims of Katrina to the countless victims of predatory lending who are now being evicted from their homes -- is morally repellent. There is absolutely no doubt about the fact that Republican Party is chiefly to blame for this state of affairs. It is furthermore true that Obama has at least been addressing and acting to solve some of these problems -- far more so than it's possible to picture any Republican president doing.

Unfortunately, it's also true, as Frank has pointed out, that a sizable share of the blame for the dismantling of the few remaining traces of the welfare state, consumer protections, corporate/financial regulation in the wake of Reagan and Bush Sr. sits squarely on the shoulders of our former President William Jefferson Clinton.

The true lesson for liberals in the Kansas story is the utter and final repudiation of their historical decision to remake themselves as the other pro-business party. By all rights the people of Wichita and Shawnee should today be flocking to the party of Roosevelt, not deserting it. Culturally speaking, however, that option is simply not available to them anymore. Democrats no longer speak to the people on the losing end of a free-market system that is becoming more brutal and more arrogant by the day.

The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or anti-school-prayer; it's that by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the sneers of Hollywood whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns. We are in an environment where Republicans talk constantly about class – in a coded way, to be sure – but where Democrats are afraid to bring it up.

What Frank might have mentioned here -- and which he'd be sure to mention somehow were he revisiting these thoughts given the ratcheting-up of this species of GOP rhetoric in the hands such Fr. Coughlin-epigones as Glenn Beck -- is race, which can never be far removed from any serious discussion of socioeconomic class in America. From Nixon's "silent majority," to propagandists from Lee Atwater, to Karl Rove, the GOP has relied upon unspoken -- and, indeed, often subconscious -- racial animus in the cobbling together of its majorities, particularly with respect to its 'South Strategy'.

Of course, in a way, what Frank found so alarming about the radicalization of the Republican Party in Kansas was precisely that its activism began increasingly to resemble that of the fanatics of the Deep South. (Frank discusses this fascinating observation, with particular reference to the politics of abortion, in the film version of What's the Matter with Kansas?). Paradoxically, at precisely the moment at which the Southern Strategy stopped working -- i.e.: at the moment of Obama's resounding victory -- the Republicans are no longer even bothering to couch their race-baiting rhetoric in "coded" terminology. I wonder what Frank makes of that?

In the meantime, let's rejoin Frank for the conclusion of his lecture, in which he almost seems to have anticipated Obama, specifically with respect to his belief in the necessity of a political movement. Of course, the only kind of movement politics that he argues will work effectively in the long run is one that is focused upon economic populism:

Democratic political strategy simply assumes that people know where their economic interest lies and that they will act on it by instinct. There is no need for any business-bumming class-war rhetoric on the part of candidates or party spokesmen, and there is certainly no need for a liberal to actually get his hands dirty fraternizing with the disgruntled. Let them look at the record and see for themselves: Democrats are slightly more generous with Social Security benefits, slightly stricter on environmental regulations, and do less union-busting than Republicans.

The gigantic error in all this is that people don't spontaneously understand their situation in the great sweep of things. Liberalism isn't a force of karmic nature that pushes back when the corporate world goes too far; it is a man-made contrivance as subject to setbacks and defeats as any other. Consider our social welfare apparatus, the system of taxes, regulations, and social insurance that is under sustained attack these days. Social Security, the FDA, and all the rest of it didn't just spring out of the ground fully formed in response to the obvious excesses of a laissez-faire system; they were the result of decades of movement-building, of bloody fights between strikers and state militias, of agitating, educating, and thankless organizing. More than forty years passed between the first glimmerings of a left-wing reform movement in the 1890s and the actual enactment of its reforms in the 1930s. In the meantime scores of the most rapacious species of robber baron went to their reward untaxed, unregulated, and unquestioned.

An even more telling demonstration of the importance of movements in framing people's perspectives can be found in the voting practices of union members. Take your average white male voter: in the 2000 election they chose George W. Bush by a considerable margin. Find white males who were union members, however, and they voted for Al Gore by a similar margin. The same difference is repeated whatever the demographic category: women, gun owners, retirees, and so on – when they are union members, their politics shift to the left. This is true even when the union members in question had little contact with union leaders. Just being in a union evidently changes the way a person looks at politics, inoculates them against the derangement of the backlash. Here, values matter almost least of all, while the economy, health care, and education are of paramount concern. Union voters are, in other words, the reverse image of the Brown-back conservative who cares nothing for economics but torments himself night and day with vague fears about "cultural decline."

Labor unions are on the wane today, as everyone knows, down to 9% of the private-sector workforce from a high-water mark of 38% in the 1950s. Their decline goes largely unchecked by a Democratic Party anxious to demonstrate its fealty to corporate America, and unmourned by a therapeutic left that never liked those Archie Bunker types in the first place. Among the broader population, accustomed to thinking of organizations as though they were consumer products, it is simply assumed that unions are declining because nobody wants to join them anymore, the same way the public has lost its taste for the music of the Bay City Rollers. And in the offices of the union-busting specialists and the Wall Street brokers and the retail executives, the news is understood the same way aristocrats across Europe greeted the defeat of Napoleon in 1815: as a monumental victory in a war to the death.

While leftists sit around congratulating themselves on their personal virtue, the right understands the central significance of movement-building, and they have taken to the task with admirable diligence. Cast your eyes over the vast and complex structure of conservative "movement culture," a phenomenon that has little left-wing counterpart anymore. There are foundations like the one operated by the Kochs in Wichita, channeling their millions into the political battle at the highest levels, subsidizing free-market economics departments and magazines and thinkers. Then there are the think tanks, the Institutes Hoover and American Enterprise, that send the money sluicing on into the pockets of the right-wing pundit corps, Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, and the rest, furnishing them with what they need to keep their books coming and their minds in fighting trim between media bouts. A brigade of lobbyists. A flock of magazines and newspapers. A publishing house or two. And, at the bottom, the committed grassroots organizers going door-to-door, organizing their neighbors, mortgaging their houses even, to push the gospel of the backlash.

And this movement speaks to those at society's bottom, addresses them on a daily basis. From the left they hear nothing, but from the Cons they get an explanation for it all. Even better, they get a plan for action, a scheme for world conquest with a wedge issue. And why shouldn't they get to dream their lurid dreams of politics-as-manipulation? They've had it done to them enough in reality.

Like Hall, the indexes by which Frank traces the Republican Party's wholesale capture of the populist mantle are cultural and rhetorical. But, unlike Hall, Frank is not a Marxist. Not even a socialist. He dreams of a return to the left-populism that was -- throughout the vast majority of US history -- the norm for prairie states, Great Plains states and Midwestern states. It's true that even over the past thirty years, the Midwest never really became a GOP stronghold, and furthermore, it wasn't all that long ago that Kansas had a reasonably strong Democratic Party (it can still be strong, on the local level).

So...
I suppose my point is that I think that Frank -- and to some extent Hall -- are correct about the folly of any so-called Left that disregards economic populism and that disregards the economic needs of ordinary people, even (or perhaps especially) the ones who have been brainwashed by the Right through any of its innumerable channels of influence.

We have to (1) find a way to establish a greater, more cohesive and more sincere Left/populist presence that can put pressure on leaders in the Democratic Party or support Left third party candidates, and (2) stop letting cultural differences and even large differences of opinion on some cultural issues get in the way of establishing meaningful political solidarity. You don't have to be someone's bestest buddy in order to vote alongside him if and to the extent to which your and his economic interests coincide.