Back to the root

BACK TO THE ROOT FINDS NEW LOCATION!

2011-12-20T10:11:00.002-05:00

Fed up with the ratrace, Mr. Andashes has packed up and moved his Back to the Root lemonade stand of bizarre commentary to a new location.

For those with a morbid or prurient interest in keeping up with the latest ravings or looking at what an old idea looks like all dressed up in a new costume, follow Back to the Root at its new supersecret location by clicking...

HERE!

The King Celebration is Postponed. Was it all only a dream?

2011-08-27T13:31:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow was to be the day the new memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr would be officially opened to the public. The long awaited dedication, finally set on a date that was to coincide with the 48th anniversary of King's delivery of best known speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, has been postponed due to the threat posed by Hurricane Irene. Dignitaries from the President to the surviving hero-footsoldiers of the Civil Rights movement were scheduled to address an audience estimated to exceed a quarter-million people.

As of this date, no new dedication date has been announced. I pray one is chosen soon. No event or symbolic ceremony is more needed at this moment than a recollection of the man who showed us how a revolution for social justice should be fought and why constant struggle for the progressive cause and the aspirations of a democratic society must be forever engaged.

Though the ceremony will not take place, maybe tomorrow we can take a moment to think about who King actually was. Not the gentle lamb of saintly martyrdom sacrificed for a dream shared by all—the otherworldy, transcendental, cuddly, safe King honored in the foggy softfocus style of postage stamps and middleschool textbooks.

Think instead of the fullblooded Martin Luther King, Jr., a direct action expert so dangerous that he was under constant wiretap by the FBI, continuously smeared and shunned by public officials of all stripes, routinely made the butt of vulgar racist jokes by nice middleclass white parents in front of their impressionable children. King who was jailed 29 times for his direct action campaigns. King who was assassinated while in Memphis to support a labor strike; assassinated by a known escaped felon under the very noses of the FBI who were busy doing 24/7 surveillance on King when they weren’t busy constructing COINTELPRO plots to extinguish King’s influence.¹

How would this real King—the man whose “I have a dream speech” was delivered during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice, was planning a massive Poor People’s March on Washington, who had broadened the focus of his actions from strictly racial justice to include social and economic justice, who had begun to speak of both class and race as the crucial concerns of justice and equality, who had fought his own allies in order to take a public stand against imperialist war in Vietnam—how would this King assess the state of American progressivism and the progress of American social justice? What would this King do in the face of the gathering forces of authoritarianism and totalitarian capitalism? How would this steeled revolutionary respond to the frustration of the left, the abandonment of progressivism by masses of working class families, by Obama’s drifting focus on matters of jobs, justice, and labor rights? What action would he take to address the current attack on workers and labor and the vulgar renascence of savage radical-capitalist theory mere months following its disrobing catastrophic failure?

Think of how he would re-weave the story of the struggle of the working class into the fabric of the American promise. Think of how he would look past the childish resentments and false populism of the ‘grassroots’ right to see into the heart of working class rage, humiliation, and hurt that gives rise to reactionary ideologies and find the means to call us all to our common and morally mandated struggle for justice.

How would he push authorities to jail him and in the name of what illustrating issue? What direct action would he take to draw attention and public shame to the palpable and manifold injustices of our own time?

And then this:

Beyond encomium, what real action do we owe in celebration of this hero’s life and in debt to his sacrifice? What posture toward injustice does his witness demand of us? What are we called to do?

Here’s a clue from King’s own writings:²

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. Without persistent effort, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social destruction.

¹Indeed, the King family has long pointed to abundant evidence that the FBI had maintained assassination plans of their own in case King should suddenly become a “'messiah' who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement."

² Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, 1958

Republican Lawmakers Label Irene, Quake 'Big Government Hoaxes'

2011-08-26T16:57:00.000-05:00

Satellite photo or clever Photoshop hoax?

Speaking to Fox News anchor Bret Baier, a group of Republican Tea Party Caucus members including Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) angrily denounced the main stream media for its uncritical coverage of the recent alleged earthquake whose effects were felt from Georgia to Maine and the supposed hurricane, Irene, now poised to descend on the Eastern seaboard.

"Could anyone show me one bit of evidence that the mild shaking we felt last week was caused by an earthquake?" challenged DeMint. "I mean someone besides one of those super-biased liberal seismologists," he added, making quotation motions with his fingers as he sneered the word "seismologist".

As DeMint elaborated upon his contention that the supposed earthquake could have been nothing more than a large sonic boom engineered by Washington, he was interrupted by Congressman Barton who insisted that the "quake hoax" was just part of a "much larger plan to use or manufacture a series of natural disasters to make people think public services are necessary."

"Just look at this Irene hullabaloo!" he said. "You got virtually twenty-four-seven coverage of this thing no one's actually seen yet, and not one so-called reporter bothers to ask 'Where's the wind?' No one asks if this couldn't be something cooked up by liberal eggheads at NOAA looking to secure some more federal lard. Why is the media playing softball with this stuff. I think we all know why!"

When Baier pointed out that many satellite photos had documented the presence of Irene off the Atlantic coast, Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC), also present for the Fox segment, shouted "LIES!"

"My twelve-year-old daughter could photoshop up a thing like that in about five minutes!" he added.

Marcus Bachmann in a Panic

2011-08-26T09:47:00.000-05:00

Hittin' that "s" kind of hard in "disciplined" and "sinful" Marcus? By the way, how many times a day do you "think it" or "feel it" and resist your fevered desire to "go down that road" of your "sinful nature"? I'm thinking you've got a different read on "when thou prayest enter into thy closet" than most folks...

Quit working out your own panic through dangerous phoney "reparative therapy" and homophobic hate-speech, Marcus.

Job Opening: GOP Presidential Candidate; Qualifications: Bright as a Wet Match

2011-08-16T13:07:00.002-05:00

Hi, I'm Rick! We met on line. Wanna vote for me for president?

Stipulated: A Texas countryclub-cowboy governor and former A&M “yeller” (read "male cheerleader" or "college jackass") who graduated with a 1.95 GPA in “animal science” is likely to talk like a drawling imbecile a lot of the time.

But Rick Perry has come out of the campaign gate spewing a degree of redneckofascist idiocy unheard of since…well, since the last time a former cheerleader-turned-Texas-governor ran for president. Indeed, Rick Perry—being a nat’ral born Texan unlike cowboy from Kennebunkport GW Bush—lacks the exposure to the academic environment of Phillips Academy and Yale that allowed Bush’s sense-memory of what intelligent discourse sounds like to keep him from swaggering off too far into the prairie-grass wilderness of redneck punkspeak that Perry instinctively inhabits.

While Bush’s encouragement of international terrorists to “bring it on” rang with the kind of mindless bravado typical of phallically-insecure men from Texas, even at his most pretentious mush-mouthed good-ol’-boy moments, Bush could not match the deliberately malinformed posturing that Perry indulged in on his first full day as the GOP’s newest presidential candidate.

A master of the phony snarling-around-the-lip-of-a-longneck commentary style favored by rightwing populist wannabes, Perry has gagged up enough raw and bloodened rhetoric to keep a warehousefull of teabaggers feeding for a month. Reviving the birther ethos—if not the specific accusations—Perry started his campaign by asserting (a) that President Obama does not love his country; (b) that “the greatest threat to our country right now is this president…”; and (c) that Commander-in-Chief Obama does not merit the respect of the nation’s military service members.

Not satisfied that he had sufficiently chummed the waters to draw all the Republican sharks to him, Perry then added an actual physical threat to public officials who defy the demented policy ‘theories’ of the right: Discussing the topic of the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing, Perry (who earned himself a “D” in economics while studying in the highly competitive academic environment at that well-known Harvard upon the Brazos, Texas A&M) offered his considered views on the Fed’s approach to staving off a threat of destructive deflation: “Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.” Emphasizing his point, Governor Perry added, “…if this guy prints more money between now and the election—I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.” Just to be clear for those who may be unfamiliar with Texas history, “pretty ugly down in Texas” involves a well-documented culture of lynching and vigilante law.*

But I do not want to be mistaken here for raising an alarm about how dangerous this Texas freak may really be. Quite the contrary; this guy is a clown. (After all, this is a presidential candidate who says out loud that he wants your vote so he can go to the White House and “work every day to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.” Hey, that’s great Rick; that sounds like a goal you could actually accomplish!)

Now sure, clowns with power—much like toddlers with firearms—can present a real danger to the neighborhood. But this is 2011. That the American right has become a danger to civilization is not news. The real news is not that the right has dangerous ideas; it is that the American media continues to have so much trouble making clear and specific statements about how laughably incompetent and confused the ‘thinking’ on the right has become. Thanks to the media's 'even-handed' treatment of the fucktards on the right, we run the real risk of anodizing their stupidity with a patina of legitimacy and a superabundance of genuine political power.

Stupidity is not dangerous; stupidity is wildly amusing. Incompetent intellectual functioning is not dangerous; treating it as if it stands on equal footing with competence is.

It is still not too long ago for even the notoriously amnesiac American electorate to recall the last time we handed a Texas fool the keys to the kingdom. This time, let’s not get our panties in a bind; let’s just be real sure to call a dope a dope.

I dunno what y’all on the right would do with some idiot who wants to make hisself president of these here Nyoonited States of 'Merrca, but me I’m fixin’ to laugh my ass off.

* Hey, keep it up, Rick! Another once long-awaited Republican presidential primary savior from the 2008 campaign is ready for you to join him in history's long shadow of obscurity: Former sage and statesman Fred Thompson can be found on TV pimping bad reverse-mortgage products to vulnerable senior citizens; he awaits your fate.

Former Presiential Candidate and Elder Statesman Fred Thompson

Ladies and Gentlemen: Your Republican Field…

2011-08-16T08:25:00.000-05:00

That's right...Get those hands up, you punks.

Turning Left on the Road Ahead

2011-08-01T11:23:00.002-05:00

We lost. Badly. Now what?

While the President’s craven cave-in to the right has been a nauseating embarrassment to behold, it is different only in degree from the triangulations of the Clinton era. Lest we forget, Dick Morris was actually advising Clinton on how to play progressives in Congress off the table so the president could maintain relevance in legislative sausage making.

The spectacle of the past month is depressing but it is not new. Many of us on the left have long complained that establishment Democrats always play slap-the-lefty whenever they need to prove to the media that they are ‘grownups.’

Tom Friedman wants you to grow up.

The corporate media always thinks it’s a good idea for politicians to ‘moderate’ their positions and compromise to a ‘middle’ that just happens to serve the status quo arrangements of power and privilege. Outliers are always depicted as ‘childish’ while establishment ‘centrists’ (who in America are actually rightwing hacks) are characterized as ‘mature’ and ‘adult; Democrats who exhibit a willingness to denounce or resist left-progressive elements among the party's base are always amply rewarded with media approval and praise. Nothing new here.

Pandering to this pressure, nationally elected Democrats have for 25 years consistently ignored the ‘base’ and allowed major erosions of cornerstone progressive policy institutions hard won during the Roosevelt and Johnson years. (Carter and Clinton did more harm to progressive programs, policy institutions and regulatory structure than Nixon, Reagan, Ford, Bush, and Bush could ever have done in their wildest imaginings.) So, nothing new here either.

But here’s the thing: The problem isn't any longer 'them'; it's us. This has been going on so long, blaming all the usual suspects for the systematic destruction of social justice is like blaming the fire for consuming your house.

The problem is we have allowed political power to accrue in the hands of the opponents of our values and interests. Assume you believe your interests and values align with the highest aspirations of the people of this nation. It is simply not enough to be right. This is not a contest of ideas to see who will get an A for being smart. It is smug, elitist, painfully privileged, and anti-democratic to believe that your ideas and views should prevail simply because they are better, smarter, more worthy, or whatever. Politics in a democracy requires that interests are organized and can deploy political power.

Once upon a time the left used to have the power to hold Democrats accountable for their votes. But we got used to allowing organized labor do the heavy lifting; in case you haven’t noticed, labor barely has enough power to bargain with employers anymore let alone sweat congress. That vacuum has not been filled and thus Democrats face no cost in ignoring the voice of progressives.

The problem is not the teaparty or their ‘maximlaist’ tactics. Nor is the problem this current president's manifest inability to negotiate. The real problem has two simple parts: (1) the policies and ideological preferences of the right are dangerous and contrary to the interests of workers and the people—but we all know this; the more significant problem is (2) THE LEFT IS GETTING OUT ORGANIZED. The right has proven itself to be a movement (my heart is breaking here); the left has proven itself to be nothing more than a discordant nagging drone of clever complaints.

We chose to give this president and the Democratic leadership room to sell us out. Where were our rallies to threaten mayhem if social programs were touched? Where was the summer of townhall confrontations following up on the initial outrage over the Ryan plan?

Bernie Sanders has been pleading for popular public mobilization to put fear into the hearts or iron into the spines of Democratic legislators. But Sanders wants Obama to call out the progressive ranks. I think Sanders actually knows this president is useless to the progressive cause having clearly now pinned his reelection hopes on convincing ‘independents’ (read ‘the media’) that he is a trustworthy and reasonable adult seeking to achieve compromise solutions despite the childish partisanship he faces from extremists on ‘both sides’. I think Bernie’s just frustrated.

The framework for left-organizing is not going to come from the Obama 2012 campaign. Not that the Obama 'groundgame' will not be a wonder to behold. Who cares? I'm not saying there's no difference between Obama and any of the likely contenders from the toxic Republican party. There are major and crucially important differences. But I am saying that no matter who wins the presidency in 2012, the progressive agenda is doomed anyway if the left cannot build the power to credibly threaten to primary any Democratic party defectors in 2014.

A renaissance of the progressive movement is the only hope left for saving the dream of a just and generous nation that manifests public provision, social justice, the dignity of workers, and the grace of democracy.

The questions we have to ask ourselves are these:

Are we willing to overlook small differences from contesting orthodoxies on the left?
How can we transform our current role from that of a clever criticariat to that of a movement?
Can left-progressive organizations lay aside turf battles, power struggles, and the personal ambitions of their leaders (I’m looking at you Andy Stern!) to patiently (re)build a progressive movement?
What structures already exist for organizing the interests of various left constituencies? How do we nurture them? How do we reform them if need be?
Will we confidently ignore inevitable media criticism? Will we refuse to apologize or moderate our message in the face of the usual media terror tactics?

There will be no quick fixes. Looking for one will only leave us vulnerable to the next message of ‘hope’.

I know have become lazy in my own commitment. I could say I’m demoralized (because it’s true) but this is precisely how democratic discourse works: you keep your agenda moving forward; you push your perspective into the public consciousness; you seek to make those whose views you believe are a genuine danger to your interests or to the aspirations you have for justice feel isolated and behind the curve of history. (If this is too much for you, fine. But don’t complain that Obama seems too weak—his weakness is yours.) To the degree I feel demoralized I have all the evidence I need that my side is getting outplayed. It may well be that America is beyond hope and it's time to move someplace else. I'm not prepared to do that now so I have to make myself useful here. I need to reengage, so I’m going to try to add some new (old) habits to my currently diminished repertoire of activism.

Here’s some stuff I think we all need to do (or do more of no matter how much we’re already doing)...

Find a real, ACTIVIST left organization and join it and give it money. (I already have and do, but I’m going to add another one).
Let every sitting Democrat from the oval office to dog catcher know that you will not be taken for granted and will happily oppose any incumbent or challenger who does not demonstrate actual active support for left-progressive policies and values. (In my case I’m sooooo tired of Virginia Democrats, they will all know I am willing to sit at home as long as it takes.)
Go to one event whose cause you support, even though your schedule (or crankiness) makes it difficult to attend. (I’m sorry to say how long it’s been…)
Do everything you can to make the left perspective publicly heard and a routine part of social discourse. Speak your views and values anywhere you can any time you can. (I’m not going to let up!)
Bear witness to the truth you know. Make sure every member of your family, friends, and associates know exactly where you stand. Figure out where the point of diminishing returns lies and stop just short of it. Await your next opportunity. (I’m going to have to get better at identifying the point of diminishing returns and waiting for better opportunities)
NEVER give up trying to persuade everyone you know to move even one tiny step to the left but NEVER concede to a falsehood or benighted idea of the right in the name of courtesy or ‘reasonableness’. Words and ideas matter; change the subject if you must, but stop capitulating. (Okay, I’ll try to change the subject from time to time…)
Read more. Write more.
Follow the mandate of Frederick Douglass: Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!

The Teaparty: A Revolution as Plotted by the Keystone Cops

2011-07-29T14:49:00.000-05:00

Congressional Tea Party Caucus members enroute to yesterday's meeting

Look. I get what tea party supporters are feeling. They think the United States has fallen away from its founding commitments and has become a tyrannical threat to the liberty they believe is the essential content of the American creed (and so on and so forth).

While I find these fears and assumptions about the nation’s core commitments to be comically off target (as I’m sure teapartiers would find my own bill of particulars against the current regime), I do understand the spirit and desires of a revolutionary impulse. I really do. And I am ever sympathetic to those who feel an upwelling of revolutionary spirit when they see the rather obvious signs that their nation is failing to even remotely approximate any version of its creed (more about which in some other diatribe). And such a spirit is, for me anyway, far more befitting a democratic polity than apathy or, worse, that smug post-modern sneer of amused indifference I seen on so many faces these days.

But the tea party’s mouth-breather stupidity is manifest in its thoroughly incompetent, comic book understanding of the revolutionary spirit.

The most important of the multitude of realities lost on the teaparty bumpkinati right is this: no one elects a revolution.

Meeting of the House Tea Party Caucus last Wednesday

The behavior of the inept “Tea Party Caucus” in Congress (led, lest we forget, by the esteemed constitutional scholar, Michele Bachmann) is beyond regrettable; it is fundamentally deranged.

They speak of revolution and have trademarked their ‘movement’ with the brand of the Revolution of 1776, and yet they are as befuddled on the means and modes of revolution as they are on economics, American history, basic earth science, constitutional framework of American government, and virtually everything else they cluck and caw about. So here’s a little Revolution 101 for the grassroots members (hapless stooges) of the tea party.

If you look back into the near or distant past, you can easily discern two models for the would-be revolutionary. Gandhi and King were genuine revolutionaries. So too were and Thomas Paine and Gracchus Babeuf.[1] I admire all four and understand them all to be patriots. These two pairs of revolutionaries illustrate two distinct models of revolutionary spirit—the distinction having less to do with means (violence versus non-violence) than it does with aspirations for making change.

Revolution as transformation. King and Gandhi saw revolution as a transformational healing process. In this model, revolution proceeds by using direct action to fearlessly and relentlessly call to undeniable awareness the conditions of intolerable injustice and thus bury the regime’s will to suppress resistance under the weight of witness, opprobrium from its friends, and shame from within its own conscience. Thus, the regime (or the government that illegitimately sustains unjust or intolerable conditions) and those on whose behalf it wields power will ultimately withdraw from the use of force to sustain the status quo configurations of power and will more or less allow transformation to take place. Society, then, is healed by replacing illegitimate rule with legitimate government and a more just social order.

Revolution as overthrow. Babeuf and Paine (along with rest of the gang of 1776), on the other hand, saw revolution as a purgative process of overthrow. In this more familiar model, the resources of the regime are seen to be too powerful, or too its ideology too deeply ingrained within the minds of those whose tacit support maintain it, or simply too inherently evil to justify anything less than immediate extermination, or all three. Thus any idea of transformation is seen as delusional, self-defeating capitulation. If the regime is too strong for direct overthrow (as in a coup), the revolution must proceed by fearlessly and relentlessly pushing the regime to continuously worsen conditions and inflict ever greater injustices on the people. As the regime becomes increasingly poisonous to the system, the forces of anarchic rage and chaos will be released and purge the regime from the social body in reaction. Only after the expulsive overthrow of the old regime can the new, just order be established.[2]

Now, the issue here isn’t which mode or model of revolution is better; each has its own claim to efficacy. Nor is the issue about which model is appropriate to today’s state of affairs; typically it is only through historical perspective and the flow of post-revolutionary events that judgments can be made about the legitimacy of a revolution’s approach, otherwise on what basis other than dumb parochialism could we find the founder’s violent revolution just and the Bolshevik revolution a sham?

No, the point here is simpler. Revolutions don’t happen through Congress.

Pay attention, Cletus: Radical legislation is the accomplishment of a revolution not its means.

Neither King nor Gandhi, neither Paine nor Babeuf sought office within the institutions of the government they sought to raise a revolution against. Real revolutions—violent or non-violent, transformational or purgative—are staged by outsiders to the system (else they are coups--another matter entirely).

This is especially true when the agent of status quo injustice is not truly a regime but is rather an election-based government which simply fails to serve as a legitimate tool of the people’s interest. Depending on how dire the circumstances, genuine revolutionaries may call upon the government to take actions that would transform it from a mere mask worn by a tacit and unrecognized regime to a legitimate agent of the people, or they may take a more disruptive path, but they do not get themselves elected to office. When not simply an act of drooling incompetence, such an approach is an affront to history: Hitler and the German National-Socialists are history’s best example of elected revolution.

Any process involving electing revolutionaries to govern is inherently corrupt because it starts from a fundamental deceit: people expect their elected officials to provide competent government; no legitimate citizen goes to the poles and pulls the lever for someone committed to making matters worse—to making the nation ungovernable; nor does any intelligent voter vote for a representative thinking that this will place someone inside the legislature who will, through pure unprofaned witness, transform the status quo: such representatives (and there are a few) are either immediately ‘compromised’ (from the point of view of the deluded voters for transformational pure witness) as they seek to actually pass legislation, or they remain wholly symbolic representatives of a point of view which has no legislative impact.

Thus, the elected revolutionary must start by fooling his or her own constituents, which, of course, can lead nowhere good—either ineffectiveness or thuggery in the halls of government. In the case of the House teaparty gang we have both. They didn’t know what the debt ceiling actually was, they don’t have any idea how to get anything accomplished, their only capacity is to stop anything from being legislated, and in the end they won’t even be able to succeed in using their gangland hostage-taking efforts to achieve their narrow purpose to obstruct the raising of the debt ceiling.

But they will harm the nation. They will force the government to continuously worsen conditions and will probably succeed in pushing the government to inflict ever greater injustices on the people in the form of continued largesse for the wealthy amid draconian cuts for everyone else. That indeed is one model of revolution (see “Revolution as Overthrow” above), so good practice for a revolutionary; not so much for an elected member of the United States Congress (again, unless they intend a coup; maybe someone should ask them...).

So, to make things as simple as possible for the befuddled rightwing, Grover Norquist is a revolutionary: he works from outside the system of government and you will never see him run for office. The buffoons who sign Norquist’s pledge as they seek and hold elective office are not revolutionaries, they are tools. They are either delusional incompetents or cynical hacks or craven lapdogs, for example:

Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois and Sen. Rand Paul: delusional incompetents
Rep. John Mica of Florida and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: cynical hacks
Senators Orrin Hatch and John McCain: craven lapdogs

Oh, and then there’s…

Speaker John Boehner: cynically delusional craven incompetent hack-lapdog

[1] Babeuf was a revolutionary agitator and the editor of The Tribune of the People during the early French Revolution; after the fall of Robespierre’s dictatorship, when the Revolutionary Republic was under the more conservative (and corrupt) rule of the French Directory, Bebeuf fell afoul of the Directory for his role in the so-called “conspiracy of equals” which denounced the decline of the Revolution and called for the establishment of a true egalitarian society as outlined in the 1796 Manifesto of the Equals to which he was a party. Babuef was executed by the Directory in 1797.

[2] Often, as in the case of the South African revolution, the two models play a complementary role. Our own civil rights movement shows signs of this mode of revolutionary process: King and SNCC on the one hand, Malcolm and the Panthers on the other; one offering a peaceful way out for the regime, the other standing ready to unleash the wolves if more peaceful means proved ineffective.

Has Your Representative or Senator Signed Grover Norquist’s Pledge to Surrender Legislative Judgment to an Unelected Moron?

2011-07-29T13:19:00.002-05:00

List of Senators and Representatives Who’ve Signed Grover Norquit’s No-Tax Pledge: 112th Congress

>CLICK HERE<

Brilliant Song! Great Video!

2011-07-27T12:20:00.001-05:00

Many compliments to Louie Ludwig for the excellent work here.

Go to LouLost.com for more of Ludwig’s work.

Rapture Now! Hostage Politics and the American Right

2011-07-24T15:48:00.012-05:00

Republican Lawmakers Announce Unwillingness to Take “Worldwide-Destruction Option” Off the Table

WASHINGTON,January 24, 2012—In a joint appearance today, Republican leaders of the House and Senate surprised the Washington press corps when they announced their continued commitment to the so-called “worldwide destruction option” in eleventh hour negotiations over Phase 2 of the debt ceiling increase.

Last July when Republicans succeeded in forcing President Obama and the Democrats to accept a six-month, two-stage increase in the debt ceiling to avoid defaulting on the national debt, then-Speaker of the House, John Boehner, denied rumors circulating at the time that the Republicans had a secret strategy to place even greater pressure on the Democrats in the “Phase 2” negotiations.

Cantor at today's press conference

“Rumors that there is some plan up our sleeves to threaten worldwide destruction are simply ridiculous and highly irresponsible,” said then-Speaker Boehner during an appearance on Fox News Sunday immediately following the president's reluctant signature to the July stop-gap measure.

But within weeks, following a shakeup in House Republican leadership which saw Boehner demoted to the position of Assistant to the Lieutenant Whip of the Republican Milquetoast Sub-caucus (a face-saving post created just for the former Speaker) and the elevation of Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor to the Speaker position, House Republicans put forward a set of proposals plainly unacceptable to Democrats in the House and Senate; The GOP's "Slash, Screw, and Bury"plan would abolish Social Security, pass the Appropriate Rewards for Success and Enterprise Act (a $9 billion program to provide direct federal funding to the nations top 5% of jobcreators), and delete all references to Franklin Roosevelt from public records. After announcing the plan in late September, Republicans began openly suggesting that failure to pass Slash, Screw, and Bury would result in a House refusal to provide any further funds devoted to securing or maintaining the safety of the nation’s nuclear stockpile.

Initially, Speaker Cantor angrily rejected the media’s labeling of the threat as the “worldwide destruction option,” insisting that the Republicans were simply pointing out that without “commonsense increases in incentives to jobcreators necessary to spur economic growth, many important functions of government might have to be curtailed,” as the Speaker put it in a October press conference.“Preserving the safety and security of the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons is an example of the sort of programs that would have to be looked at under conditions of extreme austerity that would inevitably result from failure to pass Appropriate Rewards for Success and Enterprise,” he said at the time.

Today, however, standing alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Cantor not only confirmed Republican refusal to vote for the Phase 2 debt ceiling increase, he also clearly stated his intention to move forward on cutting off funding for nuclear safety next week unless Democrats accepted the Republican legislative package.

Though not present at today’s press conference, Assistant Milquetoast Whip Boehner’s office released a statement saying, “Speaker Cantor’s stance today is a dazzling display of his usual wisdom and sound judgment.”

Though many had expected a more conciliatory tone from the Speaker following reports of a highly positive meeting at the White House last night, the Speaker and Majority leader surprised everyone present at the press conference called this afternoon. An audible gasp could be heard from the usually jaded press corps assembled in the Senate press room when the Speaker for the first time referred to his own plan as the Worldwide Destruction Option.

“As things stand,” said Cantor, “we believe the worldwide destruction option is clearly the sanest option we Republicans can come up with to fix what’s wrong with America.”

In Other News…

In case it missed your attention, as of midnight Friday, July 24, the United States is on course to no longer have an agency to regulate air safety; the FAA is in ‘partial shutdown' with full shutdown imminent.¹

That’s right; because congressional Democrats were unwilling to accept anti-union provisions in the FAA funding bill, the crucifixion caucus on the right—led in this case by House Transportation Committee Chairman (and the Republican caucus’ Assistant Nabob of Witchburning), John Mica—let the funding for FAA lapse, immediately putting 4000 air industry workers on the street with more layoffs to come.

Meanwhile, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau² is without a leader and will remain so unless and until Democrats first agree to gut the CFPB’s authority. Republicans, to their credit, have been unapologetically unambiguous about their hostage-taking strategy on this issue: they never agreed that real consumer protection reforms were desirable in the financial services industry, they hated the creation of the CFPB, and they now intend to make sure that it has no independent enforcement authority. They have insisted on a set of ‘reforms’ that would give the CFPB exactly the same level of power to protect consumers from fraud in the financial markets that the Federal Election Commission exercises in protecting the American election campaign system from abuse. (If you think the FEC is doing an effective job, you’ll love the Republican version of consumer protection.) Their position is, we couldn’t get our way in the passage of Dodd-Frank, but now we’ll take a hostage to force the President to do our bidding. Hey Obama, you want to appoint a Director for the CFPB? First get the Democrats to make it toothless.

And of course, the burn-the-Reichstag gang is hard at work driving the nation to make catastrophic budget cuts or face the abyss of a default and consequent collapse of US creditworthiness.

Be clear. What we are witnessing from the right is not just ‘my way or the highway’ politics; nor is it the simple ‘politics of no.’ Indeed, by comparison mere obstructionism would be a wholesome development . Rather, the American right is demonstrating the nihilistic philosophy of the hostage taker: We will have our way or we will plunge us all into chaos.

On every issue, at every turn, the frothing eyespinners on the right (now known as the Republican base) have indicated a willingness to take the whole society over whatever cliff presents itself in order to get exactly what their ideology dictates.

Not happy with immigration law and unsatisfied with the limitations on your preferred xenophobic solutions imposed by provisions of the Constitution? No problem; propose a bill that circumvents the fundamental protections of the 14th Amendment. Can’t convince people to accept your alternate reality in which global climate change is conspiracy-hoax masterminded by Al Gore and that greenhouse gasses are just wholesome good ol’ CO₂? Don’t fret, just put up legislation to amend the Clean Air act to redefine the word “pollutant” so as to exclude “carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, or sulfur hexafluoride” from its meaning. Tired of five decades spent unsuccessfully trying to eviscerate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and enshrine a permanent preference for the rich? Easy! Wait for an opportune abyss into which to threaten to toss the American economy and hold out for ‘Cut, Cap, and Balance’!

How to explain this new romance on the right with the politics of hostage-taking? Oh c’mon! Does the goonsquad have to actually haul off a relative or two from your front door before you get the picture?

Our liberal friends have taken to calling recent Republican antics ‘maximalist.’ Well… sure…‘Maximalist’ in this context does refer to the practice of using radical means to secure a social or political goal in its entirety.

However…

While this is fine as far as it goes, it does not account for the current ideological absolutism of the right. Theirs is an interconnected set of political and social beliefs beyond the reach of critical thought, principled relativization, or even empirical tests.

So, see it for what it is and stop being surprised by their imperviousness to facts and their detachment from reality: Their rapture has already come. They are no longer among us; they have left our plane of existence to inhabit a new and exalted time and space apart from the mere world.

There is no uncertainty among the Bachmannesque rightwing, no room for profaning the pure with pragmatic doubt. Thus there can be no negotiation with holders of heterodox perspectives from the pure ideal, no quarter to be given to traitors on their own side who would compromise their absolute truth in order to make the concessions needed in the political processes of democracy.

Political maximalism wed to ideological absolutism is called totalitarianism. Rightwing totalitarianism has long been known as fascism. Remember the deranged and gun-toting thugs who terrorized townhall meetings during healthcare ‘death-panel’ summer. We should not have been surprised to find that the right has taken every opportunity to render the nation ungovernable when majority control is in the hands of the center-left.

Do not be surprised by the degree of rage on the right after the 2012 elections weaken Republican control of the House and would seem to strengthen the hand of the reelected president. We were warned in 2010 about “second amendment remedies” that could follow frustration at the polls.

If history is any guide, uniform-clad civilian groups bearing nationalist insignia are likely to follow.

1. Don’t worry though, certainly the same market forces and self-interested restraints that provided self-regulation of the financial markets in the 2008 will keep your next airplane trip safe and secure.

2. Unquestionably he best measure to come out of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation (maybe the only truly effective reform made in the wake of the devastating collapse of America’s plutocapitalist economy of the Bush era). The CFPB could, if it survives the Republican onslaught be the best financial services refrom since FDIC.

Trump the Can-Do Tycoon

2011-04-27T13:41:00.001-05:00

Trump Takes Credit for Release of Obama Birth Certificate

By JEFF ZELENY

Speaking in New Hampshire, Donald Trump takes credit for the release of President Obama's long-form birth certificate.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/trump-takes-credit-for-release-of-obamas-long-form-birth-certificate/?hp

In other news...

Trump Claims Credit for Settling Longstanding Controversy Over Earth's Shape

Today, TV super-tycoon and National Buffoon-Laureate Donald Trump lavished congratulations upon himself for bringing "a satisfactory resolution" to the increasingly controversial question of the actual shape of planet Earth.

With today's release of research papers from the National Academy of Sciences conclusively confirming the Earth's spherical nature, growing public concern about a suspected conspiracy to keep the Earth's true shape a secret can now, according to Trump "properly be put to rest--as it frankly should have been months ago."

"These clowns really screwed up their communications and credibility, in my humble opinion as a TV-show business professional," Trump said.

Over the last month Trump, in a number of nationally televised interviews, successfully elevated to national media prominence brewing concerns among so-called "flatters," a growing segment of conservatives who believe that a conspiracy among elites was perpetrated to cover up the truth that the round-Earth theory is a giant hoax perpetrated on an unwitting American public. Though the controversy had been largely relegated to the backwaters of public discourse, Trump's incessant public challenges to the Obama administration and the scientific community to "come clean about the shape thing" transformed the issue into a central story on nightly news broadcasts for the past two weeks.

"I'm proud to say that my unique gifts allowed me to gin up this shape thing into something that could not be ignored. No one else was able to force the bureaucrats in Washington to devote time to confirming a scientific fact. A fact, I want to stress, that was being withheld from the public by a tiny set of elite eggheads who thought we should all just take their word for it that they were telling the truth with their arrogant claims that the issue was already settled. Like I kept saying, if its not an issue, then you shouldn't have any trouble showing the proof. They should've just done this the first time I challenged their so-called facts. Well, I got them to finally show their stuff and the American people can thank me for getting this issue I helped make up finally behind us."

Trump went on to say that the kind of leadership he showed in both instigating an artificial controversy and then sweeping in to claim credit for its resolution "is just the kind of thing that Obama can't do--he just doesn't have the horsepower, and that's exactly why we are the laughing stock of the world and why I will win the presidency in 2011."

Reporters were quick to point out that the presidential elections will be held in 2012.

"Whatever," responded the vindicated TV-show mogul.

The Current Derangement of Catholic Teaching

2011-02-24T14:18:00.001-05:00

I wish I could fire off yet another sarcasm- and irony-filled rant...

but I just can’t.

As it turns out, umbrage (which is my general default posture) is a hill too high for a spirit weighted down by witness. Outrage, it seems, turns watery when diluted by plain sadness.

So, here it is plainly…

Not long ago I had the opportunity to work with a few hundred students from a number of highly acclaimed (and very expensive) Catholic schools from a few exceedingly prosperous regions of the country (schools which will go without further identification here for obvious reasons). These amazingly articulate and generally intensely aware students were able to formulate highly sophisticated and nuanced positions over a wide variety of public issues (for those keeping score, this would not be the sad part). Whether articulating defenses of teaching both Darwin and Genesis in public schools (arguing well for Darwin in science class, Genesis in social studies, and for the commensurability of Church teachings on Biblical creation with scientific accounts of the origins of universe and man), or offering incredibly well-reasoned arguments regarding the necessity of laws banning abortion (on both religious and secular-moral grounds), or making the case for protecting in law the exclusive status of traditional heterosexual marriage (again on both religious and secular-moral grounds), these students demonstrated solid understanding and tolerant respect for the logic and concerns of opposing views even as they held firmly to their own.

However (and here’s where all that ‘weight of witness’ and such comes in), when matters of economic justice arose, these same gifted students suddenly became entirely unable (not just unwilling—unable) to credit any reasonableness to positions advocating public responsibility and government intervention, shallowly dismissing such positions as ‘socialist’with no further ado. Note here that they were not simply opposed to such government policies; on these issues, unlike their ability to give a fair account of opposing arguments regarding cultural issues, they were fixedly unable to reconcile socially guaranteed health care, public assistance for low income families, or the provision of public services for undocumented workers with either Church teachings on social justice or with more general principles of secular morality.

Regarding all such issues, the positions taken and reasoning generally demonstrated by these highly educated students of prestigious Catholic schools were indistinguishable from those of the most ardent libertarian ideologues. More importantly, on these issues the students' otherwise highly complex critical thinking skills completely abandoned them as they became rigid bullhorns blaring neoliberal economic slogans.

Moreover, these students seemed unable to see any contradiction between their firm moral insistence that the vulnerability of the unborn demands public protection through law, and their fierce advocacy of the most merciless policies regarding the poor and the powerless. On long-term unemployment benefits, for instance, they showed near unanimous approval of one student’s challenge: "Why should my parents who have worked hard and acted responsibly have their tax dollars go to support people who've made bad decisions?" One otherwise brilliant student's comment on Social Security reform was astonishing: "I hate to sound utilitarian, but I just don't think we can afford to have our very limited public resources go to support people who have become economically unproductive." (So much, I guess, for the antique idea of imitating the example of Christ who, when offered an easy way out, chose the Cross...)

The unpleasant truth is that statements like the ones made by this group of students are not dramatically unlike those that can be routinely heard coming from among any significantly diverse body of students. But for me, to hear it so nakedly, simplistically, and unanimously expressed from this particular group of students was heartbreaking: All of these students acknowledged having taken high school level courses on the Church’s teachings regarding social justice, but nearly all claim to have understood these teachings to apply to the responsibility of Catholics to undertake acts of personal, private, individual charity. As they understood their lessons, social justice doctrine need not involve supporting public provision for the poor and the powerless.

Indeed, these students made clear their nearly unanimously held view that government cannot be trusted to act morally and that tax-supported public care stands in conflict with private acts of charity, which they deemed to be morally superior. Students signaled strong agreement with one otherwise well-informed young woman’s proclamation regarding the basis of her hostility to public assistance programs: Giving the federal government tax dollars to fund social programs would, in her view, ‘just give them more money they can use to pay to abort the babies of the poor.’

(!)

Has any bible-waving, snake-handling christian conservative ever shown signs of being more misinformed (or disinfomred) about the use of government revenues? Could any child raised in a fundamentalist Protestant community or taught in a rightwing Christian factory-school have mouthed that formulation more precisely than this child raised in the 2000 year old Church of the poor?

My reactions while working with these students took rollercoaster swings from tremendous affection (like all teenagers, these were sweet, funny, ironic, anarchic people whose energy and sideways look at the actions of adults is an endless source of cheer and optimism), to open-mouthed awe (as I said, these kids were brilliant), to anger and resentment (their assumptions of privilege and entitlement were unbridled and enormous), and finally to a deep sadness—a sadness I cannot shake; a sadness so profound it squashes my capacity to even mount a rant of outrage.

So, again plainly…

For me what I witnessed was the product of either systematic indoctrination in an incompetent version of Christian morality, or the product of careless—even reckless—negligence in Catholic social teaching. But here it is crucial to note that this miseducation is not being carried out in some isolated, poorly staffed parochial school whose faculty doesn't know any better. All these schools are highly regarded for their uncompromising academic rigor; at least three are Jesuit prep schools blessed with worldclass academics serving on faculty.

Nor are these the unfortunate children of some unsophisticated rustbelt Catholic community. These are the children of doctors, lawyers, academicians, and so forth. All-in-all, the Church's best and brightest children being taught by the Church's best and brightest educators.

And here we come to the crux of my concern, for it is just this that keeps me alienated from the Church of my childhood: These students have been subjected to an education that reflects—and reflects precisely—the Vatican’s cold hypocrisies and bloodless retreat from the central message of Christ's Gospel—a near abandonment of action on Christianity's core values and the Church’s core mission in the world; a retreat from action coupled with a realignment of the Church’s focus that together are rotting the heart of contemporary Catholicism. The 'thinking' of the Church, exactly like that of these the best of Catholic educated students in the nation, has become literally deranged over issues of sex and gender. By the evidence of their students' learning (by their fruits you shall know them), these elite schools have allowed themselves to become to the Gospels eerily parallel to what Wahabist madrasah schools are to Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, and the teachings of the Qur'an.

Like fundamentalist Islam, the Official Church has long since lost its way in its long and noble struggle to respond to the considerable challenges of modernity and materialism and to lead the resistance to their corrosive influence.

Oh, for a certainty Catholic teaching and learning has done a spectacular job of reconciling itself with the findings of modern science (and here I mean no irony whatsoever) and has recently (in Church-time terms) played a crucial role in creating much needed space in modernity for thought like that of Teilhard de Chardin (whom it once condemned but now seems to have re-embraced).

But on matters of private morality and secular law the Church has become entirely unhinged. It now seems bent on addressing its power intolerantly to what it perceives as the decadent behavior of persons while only muttering inaudible whining complaints regarding the patent amoralism of modernity’s economic institutions, the systematic immorality of their practices, and the barbarous indignity of the conditions that modern economic arrangements perpetrate and perpetuate upon persons and communities.

Like Her students’ well-reasoned moral arguments supporting the use of law to protect the innocent and powerless unborn, at the very moment the Church loses its will and its voice concerning protecting and empowering the poor and powerless born, its moral reasoning on abortion (and contraception) is revealed as perhaps nothing more than hypocritical posturing: The Vatican’s concern for babies takes on a distinctly false note and one can only wonder if the real concerns—like those of the grotesque Islamic clerics who want women to cover so men won’t be tempted to sin—aren't really more about controlling the sexual behavior of women.

(Of course, both the Church’s and radical-Islam's retarded vocalizations on LGBT issues speak for themselves.)

To be sure, there is a gaping chasm of difference between the metaphorical stones that the Church would have the law throw at those it deems to have fallen victim to the moral degeneracy of modernity and the very real stones that the Taliban and their ilk would throw at violators of their dark and paranoiac version of Islamic law; yet in the savageness of its intolerance, the Church seems now to be drifting into the same wide lane bound for the same lost off-ramp as those fringe radical clerics (of both Shia and Sunni sects) who advocate a 'return' to a twisted version of Sharia Law, sharing with them the same particular and peculiar focus on matters of sexuality and women.

Note here the many convergences among those who allow themselves to become deranged by fear and hatred of transgressions against traditional sexual morality--convergences which make strange ideological (if wholly unconscious) bedfellows of otherwise hostile camps: Sunni and Shia; Catholic, Baptist and Pentecostal. While unable to get over differences on crucial questions regarding the precise meaning of holy symbols, the name of the supreme being, the status and identity of the prophet-savior, the exact nature of salvation, and whatnot, everyone from all stripes and flavors of fundamentalist faith seem to agree on their intransigent moral intolerance for people who do unsanctioned stuff with their body parts.

Like political Islam, the Vatican now chooses to use its moral authority to focus the attention of the faithful on the Gospels' scant concerns regarding who sleeps with whom (and on what women do to deal with unwanted pregnancies). And while political Islam works to use what power it can to force governments in the Muslim world to bend to its vision, the Vatican now flexes its considerable political clout to bring governments in the Christian world to heel on matters of sexuality and women—in the name of reestablishing a culture of life, you see—while expending not one lira of political capital for public responsibility for social justice (or what some folks would call the preferential option and basic Catholic Social Teaching).

I want to be clear here, I am not making a religious argument on behalf of particular public policies of care and provision: as those close to me know, I do not believe that anyone's religious beliefs merit consideration as evidence for useful and just public policy--it seems obvious to me thatin any culturally plural democracy all such disputes can and must be addressed through deliberation over empirical claims and through secular-moral discourse.

I know, however, that my personal internal moral basis of my secular claims--everything I believe about policies of justice and the social responsibility of democratic government--arose out of simple catechism lessons I learned long before I was old enough to know anything about such things as 'the workers' struggle', capital's inevitable exploitation of labor, the inherent wisdom of the notion of 'public utility', and so on and so forth. (And here I must confess that even at the age of ten I was much less interested or attentive in lessons about the Mysteries than when we studied the examples of Christ's condemnation of hypocrisy and of his mercy; his warning that he would judge harshly based on how we had treated the 'these my least brethren'; the Church's warning that when we come to judgment, if we have put nothing in the hands of the poor, Christ will say "therefore you have found nothing in my presence"; the litany of mercy for our brothers and sisters by which we are judged, "..you gave me to eat, ...you gave me to drink, ...you took me in, ...you covered me, ...you visited me, ...you came to me"...)

Later, even during my most sincere periods of atheism, I was inspired and reaffirmed throughout the horrible 1980s by reading my father's copies of Maryknoll magazine where I found surprising stories of the courageous work against oppression undertaken by Fathers and Sisters and Catholic missionaries in the killing grounds of Central American.

Over the years, while my rejection of my faith has moderated, my outrage at the Vatican has grown apace. I have always been secretly proud of the moral stance for economic justice taken by many of the Catholic faithful in spite of the Official Church's abandonment or even obstruction of their work. I have never stopped feeling admiration for the faithful who saw their religious instruction as a command to social action. I have never stopped hoping that I would wake up one day and a new Pope would turn the attention of the Christian faithful worlwide to Christ's demonstration of a lavish and abundant mercy and task us to do likewise--not just as a matter of personal sacrifice, but also with a determination to use those tools equal both to the challenge and to the opponents of justice.

Ironically, over the years (since growing out of a reactionary impulse to atheism), the more I have beome aware of the genesis of my adult commitments from my childhood understandings of the Church's teachings, the more alienated I have become from the Church. That has been the trajectory that has given momentum to my increasing anger at the long series of reactionary Popes and at the ongoing moral incompetence of the Official Church.

But now...

Now after witnessing how the Church's dementia has twisted what is typically the idealism of its brightest youth, its most vibrant flowers, into a sophisticated but coldly hypocritical and ill-informed cynicism about commonweal and social good, about public provision and public utility, about human care manifested in human institutions and social arrangements, about social justice itself, I feel a simple, wearying grief.

And so I wonder: Is it finally time for me to stop fretting and hand-ringing about the direction of the Catholic Church, to grow up and stop flinging feces at the indifferent edifice of the Official Church and simply accept that it will not change course; it will not become the towering force for justice that it could be; it will not give its fullest cry to the state's fundamental responsibilities for care and provision; it will not moderate and bring balance to its now obsessive concerns with human sex and sexuality; it will never engage in a real, soul-searching and cleaning investigation of the terms and conditions of surrender to Truth and Reconciliation regarding its culpability in sins and crimes of its past?

Is it time now to just move on?

American Spectator Declares War on Wisconsin's Workers

2011-02-19T13:37:00.001-05:00

Words I never expected to utter: Thank you American Spectator!

The American Spectator continues to be an ardent and unrepentant enemy of working people and the mouthpiece of American fascism, but at least in their most recent issue they got the nature of the events in Wisconsin right in the title of their piece covering the Wisconsin workers' uprising: "The War in Wisconsin".

As the Spectator points out, there IS a war going on against workers, not only in Wisconsin but all across America, as the totalitarians of capitalism close in on the last element of democratic resistance to unbridled corporate power: organized labor. (Please don't say you thought that this was the role of the Democratic Party or Barack Obama; if that is your thinking you are far too innocent to be let outside without a chaperone...)

The right's plan is not new: The Pinkertons started busting unions (and the skulls of workers and their families) for the corporate trusts in the first decade of the 20th century. In the contemporary era, Ronald Regan fired the first shot with the decertfication of PATCO after goading air traffic controllers into a strike for the explicit purpose of firing them, busting their union, and beginning the battle to bring organized labor to heel.

Uncle Ron's program of fanning populist flames of hatred for organized labor was taken up by the odious Grover Norquist and "movement conservatives" in the 1990s and has since become the operational core of US rightwing politics around which every other "issue" and political agenda item actually revolves. Policywise, undoing the Constitution's democratic protections for the free association of individuals while simultaneously extending just such protections to the thoroughly fictive "persons" of corporate entities has become the holy grail of the American right.

And in the last two years, the American right has come within striking distance of their final two goals: Unlimited corporate influence over the political system by way of a fraudulent extension of civil liberties protections to corporations (see the radically activist an anti-American "Citizens United" SCOTUS ruling); the stripping of workers of any remaining civil, political, legal, or social protection form rapacious exploitation at the hands of liberated capitalists (see "National Right to Work" and Governor Walker's plan for Wisconsin's public sector workers).

While democracy burns in the hearts of the heroes of Tahrir Square and threatens to spark a prairie fire of uprisings all across the Middle East, here in the US it struggles yet for its survival, barley breathing now on life support.

CODE BLUE:

Here in America the people's tool of government is being systemically ripped from their hands by the coordinated and syndicalized power of corporate capitalism and their salaried lackeys in Congress. The intended outcome--government power and political dominance wed to the social and economic interests of sprawling corporations for the mutual and unassailable benefit of a narrow class of superwealthy superelites--has a known history, a coherent if diabolical ideology, and a pair of perfectly suitable names: fascism and nationalist-socialism. Look them up and don't be afraid to use them to name the enemy in the war that The American Spectator has so helpfully now publicly declared.

Stand up and voice your support for the heroes of Wisconsin now!

Back to the root

Beck Got the Date Wrong for His 'Restoring Honor' Rally: Missed it by 8 days

2010-08-27T16:32:00.002-05:00

Eerily reminiscent themes of Beck's planned 'Restoring Honor' Rally

Glenn Beck missed the best date for his "Restoring Honor" rally.

Best date: August 20.

August 20, 2010 was the 83rd anniversary of the "Day of Awakening" rally held by some self-appointed super-patriots in Central Europe. Their 1927 rally (the fourth in an annual series) was designed to inspire a restoration of national self-respect at a time when the super-patriots believed their nation had "renounced the protection of its values." The 1927 rally's other great purpose—like Beck's rally this weekend—was to restore lost pride in the nation’s military and those who served and fought: "Suddenly an ordinary military band begins to play, then the sleeper awakes from his dreams and begins to feel himself a member of a people that is on the march, and he marches along."

The great rally was organized by people in a movement (which had turned into a party) who believed that their "entire struggle is a battle for the soul of our people." They knew to the core of their beings that they were fighting against the same sort of dishonoring influences as Beck and his allies on the right believe they are fighting today in America: The forces of an elitist, power-grabbing socialist left which had (has) taken control of the federal government; a confused public that had (has) been lied to and tricked into electing a government inimical to their interests, hostile to their values, and indifferent to their voices; and an increasingly dangerous internal "enemy among us” (among them) that did (does) not share the values of the true citizenry and was (is) encroaching on the hallowed ground of the true nation, desecrating its soil, robbing the homeland of its former honor and glory.

The keynote speaker of the day told the crowd that the nation "wants a leadership in which it can believe, nothing more."

Listen for these themes on August 28th at Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally.

The 1927 rally was titled “The Day of Awakening” – five years later, in 1936, the ninth annual rally of a series begun in 1923 was held; it was called “Rally for Honor.” That rally, like the others before it starting in 1927, was held in Nuremberg.

The notion of restoration is an old and recurrent theme for the ultra right. It always plays on fears that the “real people” are being squeezed out, that “we” are losing “our” nation, that “our” values are being disparaged, that “we just want our nation back.” The ‘others’ who threaten ‘our’ way of life are…well, they’re ever-changing: The “International Jew”, the socialists, the intellectual elite, the feminists, the Blacks who don’t realize that Martin Luther King was really all about color-blindness, the Muslims who want to desecrate ground we suddenly and arbitrarily decided was (selectively) sacred. Often the contaminating other is simply conjured out of fevered imagination: Do we know who it is that Beck thinks need to be reminded to honor our veterans and rebuked for not valuing their sacrifice? Who is it that he believes soiled our honor; when exactly was it lost?

Well…

It is this very impulse to look back to a “lost honor” that is the hallmark of revanchist rightwingers everywhere and throughout history. And for present day America, it is an ironic perversion of a core American value: to instead look forward to a fulfillment of our highest aspirations, to recognize the defects of democracy, to listen to the voices of dissent naming the promise not kept, to follow those who would lead us toward a shared overcoming of ourselves and the realization of what we may be.

Thomas Jefferson articulated this core American outlook:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As
that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of
circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as
civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Think about that phrase “barbarous ancestors” next time you here some self-appointed guardian of the pure soliloquize the Founding Fathers, the next time you see Beck weeping over an image of George Washington. The new cult of veneration of the Founders contradicts—and contradicts precisely—the spirit of the revolution in which we were born.

Which is to say, the posture of the teaparty is antithetical to the values of the revolution it seeks to mimic. Which is to say, the spirit of Beck’s rally—beyond being a desecration of the memory of King—is patently un-American.

Yep. Two taboos in 750 words: I’ve called Beck and his followers unamerican and I’ve associated Beck and his rally with the thugs of 1927 Germany. And I meant it.

And…Oh, yeah…Of course they have a right to free speech and everything, it’s just that…and so forth.

Guam Military Buildup: Resistance Grows

2010-08-21T14:26:00.000-05:00

Chamorro protestors in Guam (Guahan) recently made clear their intention to resist some of the more egregiously destructive military buildup plans of the US DOD.

Protesters confront authorities at Pagat action.

Behind the protest is a long running story of US arrogance in its attempt to force the people of Guam into unconditional acceptance of sloppy, ill-conceived, and potentially destructive plans for a huge military buildup on the island.

Brig. Gen. Douglas H. Owens, a former commanding officer of Guam’s gigantic Andersen Air Force Base once referred to Guam as "an unsinkable aircraft carrier" for the projection of US military power in the Pacific. People who live in US territories kind of get used to being an afterthought in the minds of US policy makers--just ask the folks in Puerto Rico about Vieques or the folks who live unrepresented in DC about...well anything. (This, after all, is the reason other former US territories in the Pacific Island--Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Republic of Palau--became independent nations. But rarely is the exploitatively utilitarian truth expressed by Owens spoken with such brutal honesty and clarity; we should be thankful to Owens for his statements sheds light on why the US has been so seemingly indifferent to the chorus of objections of the people of Guam about the planned military buildup on their island Territory.

The US military is facing two primary problems in the Pacific. The Marines are getting chased out of Okinawa as the Japanese have had quite enough of a foreign presence they find unnecessary, obnoxious, and often given to bad (criminal) behavior toward Okinawan civilians. At the same time, China is flexing some new military power and has reportedly armed up a large number of missiles capable of reaching aircraft carriers at very long distances in the Pacific. Their aim is to counter the military power of the US should there ever come a showdown over the status of Taiwan.

So the Pentagon had a few issues to deal with in the Pacific and needed someplace to put the Marines, since the Okinawans were seemed to have become a bit touchy. Hawaii said ‘sorry"’, California said ‘nope’. Solution: Guam. Why Guam? Why not? It's a territory and so you don't have the pesky problem with a foreign government getting all up on its hind legs about 'sovereignty' and such. And its not like there's a state governor with Constitutionally reserved rights and powers to contend with.

So, the Department of Defense came up with a plan not only to relocate 8,600 Marines from Okinawa to Guam, but also to beef up the military presence on the island to offset strategic moves by the Chinese which had tipped the balance of power slightly away from the unchallenged dominance in the Pacific which the US believes is its right. So in addition to the Marine invasion, DOD plans to provide additional live-fire training sites, expand the already ginormous Andersen Air Force Base, create berthing for a nuclear aircraft carrier, and erect a missile defense system on the island.

Great plan. What's the beef?

Well, first off, you may note the part about nuclear aircraft carriers and missile defense systems. If you are a citizen of Guam,enjoying the bountiful natural beauty everywhere around the island (or at least enjoying that part of the island not owned by the US Department of Defense,sitting behind military security fences), why would you ever agree to be made a greater target of Chinese military attention due to a buildup of manpower and hardware that has nothing to do with protecting you from anyone?

Secondly, if there has to be a buildup, why does the Department of Defense and the US Government indicate that it may have to condemn significant amounts of privately owned land belonging to Guamanians? The US DOD already owns 1/3 of the total land on the island. This is the far and away the greatest percentage of land under the control of the US Military in any US state or territory where there are military bases. And yet DOD says it has no choice but to increase its footprint on Guam, even though it cannot say by exactly how much.

Worse yet, much of the land and ocean resources DOD says it must have is are environmentally important or culturally crucial. For example, the firing range (actually a firing range complex) the military says it must build are to be built in Pagat, on of the most culturally significant sites in Guam for the Chamorro people. Here is what GuamPedia has to say about the significance of Pagat:

Pågat (which means to counsel or advise in the Chamorro language) is an important cultural resource for the Chamorro people; the indigenous people of the Mariana Islands. The archaeological site contains the remnants of a large latte village that is believed to have been a part of a larger exchange network.

The area has been included on Guam Register of Historic Places as well as the National Register of Historic Places, since 1974. These designations by the Guam Department of Parks and Recreation and the US National Park Service attest to the historic significance of the site. In 2010, the National Trust for Historic Preservation included Pågat on America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

So, why Pagat? Why does the US Military need this particular piece of real estate? No one seems to have a good answer. But Leevin Camacho, a member of the We Are Guahan coalition, may be on to a lead:

Best wishes and GOOD LUCK to the Pagat Protesters.

TERRORIST ANCHOR BABIES! We must repeal the 14th Amendment NOW!

2010-08-13T20:10:00.001-05:00

Not kidding. Really an issue raised on the floor of Congress. Nope, not a joke. If we don’t change the 14th Amendment we are leaving the national vulnerable to the attack of ALIEN TERROR BABIES!

See it for yourself here:

I have no further comment.

iGoogle

Oops! We Butchered Someone’s Reputation…Again: The Right Wing Echo Chamber, Mainstream Media, Shirley Sherrod, and ACORN

2010-08-12T18:30:00.001-05:00

Sometimes it’s best to let the dust settle on a “story” before entering the fray.

From a little distance, the story of the forced resignation of USDA employee Shirley Sherrod begins to resonate with eerie familiarity with another recent story about the mishandling of “news” from dubious sources. The pattern is worth taking serious note of, but first some background.

Last month, the mediaverse was all awhirl over the story of Shirley Sherrod who was forced to resign from her position as Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the USDA after conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a heavily edited video excerpt of Ms. Sherrod’s speech at an NAACP event.

To briefly recap highlights of the sad series of events, Breitbart took a 43 minute video and edited it to about 2 minutes, retaining just enough clips to make it appear that Ms. Sherrod was confessing/boasting to the NAACP audience that she had once used her authority as a USDA official to discriminate against a white farmer who’d come to her seeking help for his failing family farm.

Breitbart's edited version

The video went viral, FOX went apeshit, the chatterati went all ‘let’s get serious about this outrageous case of reverse discrimination’, the NAACP said it was outraged by Ms. Sherrod’s speech and actions and called for her resignation, and the Obama administration made a big public show of shoving her out the door, and then…

Well, even if you don’t know the details of this particular episode, you can easily guess what happens next…The video was revealed to be essentially phony.

Mr. Breitbart, sympathetic to the cause of teabaggers everywhere, had been angered by the NAACP’s call for the Teaparty to renounce racist elements within the “movement” (really, must we dignify this mess by calling it a movement? Unless we have in mind something scatological…), so he decided to “prove” that the NAACP is a racist organization with his video.

AND IT WORKED.

The same day Breitbart posted his carefully edited video, FoxNews.com news gave it the full rightwing echo chamber treatment; they breathlessly reported that "days after the NAACP clashed with Tea Party members over allegations of racism, a video has surfaced showing an Agriculture Department official regaling an NAACP audience with a story about how she withheld help to a white farmer facing bankruptcy." (The use of the word “regaling” is a nice touch, see, because it not only points out--falsely as it turns out…oops!--Ms. Sherrod’s bigotry, but also cleverly imputes to the whole NAACP audience her alleged anti-white discrimination--since they were apparently “regaled” by her account of stiff-arming some poor struggling farmer just because of his hated white skin.) Rightwing pundit and frequent contributor to the Catholic journal First Things, Jim Hoft, weighed in on his blog with this even-toned and temperate observation: “The former civil rights group known as the NAACP does not just invite anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan and radical America-hating Marxist Jeremiah Wright to speak at their event, they also invite government officials who hate whitey, too.” (Nice job, Jim; you managed to get all the race-baiting stories of the last 3 years into one sentence!) Of course, the ever-professional Drudge Report couldn’t resist piling on with its own headline highlighting the alleged racism “evident” at the NAACP: “SHOCK: Video Suggests Racism At NAACP Event.”

By the time the full video was released, it was all over but the phony mea culpas from the media for not fact-checking the story before running with it, and the hollow apologies from the Obama Administration, the NAACP (who had condemned her alleged acts of discrimation before seeing the full video), and from the vast array of media outlets and pundits to Ms. Sherrod for unwarrantedly smearing her reputation.

Full 43-minute video of Sherrod's address

In one of this circus’s funnier moments, House Minority Robotman and Official Congressional Gasbag, John Boehner, criticized the sloppy journalism involved in the coverage: “It’s unfortunate that whoever laid this out there didn’t lay out the whole story, as opposed to a part of it…They only put a little piece of the story out there and people make judgments and they rush and they make bad decisions.” *

This would all be a comi-tragic story of the plight of a mistreated government employee…

HOWEVER…

Note that in all of this, although the story would eventually evolve into a tale of the “tragic mishandling” of the whole affair as it relates to the fate of Ms. Sherrod, the initial target of the smear is not Sherrod, but the NAACP. Breitbart wanted to publically slap the crap out of the NAACP for daring to call out the teaparty’s racist rhetoric and image mongering. For some, maybe the pattern here is beginning to sound familiar…

Here we have another rightwing blogger-hacktivist using heavily edited video excerpts to smear an “enemy” organization. Again, the target organization is one that represents the interests of minority folks. Again, the target organization is one that has been a successful opponent of rightwing policy and politics. Picture getting clear yet?

Remember ACORN? You would only be able to access ACORN in memory now, since it was dismantled in the aftermath of a fullbiltz media attack based on a set of videos so phony they screamed SCAM from the first time the Official State Inquisitors at FOX began thier 24/7 coverage of the bogus story of ACORN workers offering assistance to sleazy characters involved in apparent acts of crime. Let’s take a moment to recall the almost laughably obvious bogusness of the video-taped “sting” on ACORN upon which Fox “News” was basing its entire “gotcha” storyline about corruption at the “leftist” organization.

It’s almost as if part-time hactivists and fulltime (right)wingnuts,Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe were daring the rightwing media to call them out for the amateurishness of their attempt at a “sting”… But, no, the echo chamber just went into a feedback loop so profound you couldn’t watch TV for a week without seeing this white, capitol hill-intern-looking dork all dressed up in what he imagines to be “pimped out” urban drag (apparently after getting pointers from watching 70s era copdramas like Starsky and Hutch) strutting into ACORN with his streetbitch and appearing to get helpful advice from ACORN people on how to set up a successful child-prostitution ring.**

And, just as in the Sherrod/NAACP scandal, by the time anyone got around to putting out the real story and showing the exculpatory portions of the video that O’Keefe had carefully edited out (portions that demonstrated that ACORN workers had in fact worked to thwart O’Keefe’s fictional criminal plans), ACORN had spent a ton of money defending itself, lost its donor base, been stripped of its government contracts, and dissolved itself as an organization.***

To recap: progressive organization with long track record of success in fighting the man gets targeted by conservatives; “independent” rightwing pseudo-journalists produce phonied-up video evidence of evildoing by the target group; the rightwing media machine amps up the story, and after the damage has been done, all the rightwing vigilantics gets exposed as fakery.

A few important differences: (1) in the NAACP scandal, the original storyline—an attempt to “expose” the NAACP as a racist organization—got lost in the human-interest story of the fate of a government employee; (2) the mainstream media went out of its way to sing the mea culpa song about their irresponsible treatment of Ms. Sherrod, while in the ACORN story, the media's post-fuckup focus was on the bad deeds done by O’Keefe and the dubious legitimacy of "independent" bloggers as "real" journalists, with little acknowledgement of how the "real journalists" had bought the whole scam wholesale and whose "legitimacy" was deliberately leveraged by the rightwing machine to successfully destroy ACORN; (3) the NAACP still exists and its reputation as a social justice institution remains intact within the mainstream media; meanwhile the truth that ACORN was shamefully slandered and wrongfully—sinfully—driven out of business has only been grudgingly acknowledged;the general media zeitgeist surrounding the downfall of this once effective tool for poor folks fighting city hall and the predatory lending practices of financial institutions large and small has a disturbing ‘well they had it coming anyway’ vibe to it—as if it amounts to some sort of comeuppance.

While the NAACP episode was undoubtedly full of pain and humiliation for Ms. Sherrod, she probably does take some satisfaction from the fact that her reputation has been vindicated; just as CitiBank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, et.al. no doubt take satisfaction that ACORN’s has not.

* Note that Boehner’s spray tan makes his face appear to be the same color as the wood paneled wall behind him.

** Note that in O'Keefe's edits, ACORN workers, who would almost always be residents of the neighborhood, appear to buy these clown costumes with no comment or trace of suspicion...

*** While there are many reasons to have serious issues with ACORNs ethical practices, many of the chapters, especially Baltimore and Houston, were fighting the good fight and keenly attuned to needed reforms within the organization. Those reforms will now not take place, of course, and neither will the good work of the ACORN lay-staff.

Paul Burneko - Outlook Web Access

More Left-on-Left Crime, or How to Insure Low Turnout for Democrats in 2010, by Robert Gibbs

2010-08-10T16:08:00.003-05:00

In response to Whitehouse spokesweenie Robert Gibbs’ recent infantile diatribe against the “professional left” (?), David Frum observed, “Repub pols fear the GOP base; Dem pols hate the Dem base.” Frum has it right.* Indeed, this a longstanding pathology within the Democratic Party and among progressives/liberals more generally.

While conservatives generally keep a sharp weather-eye to their right in order to see which way they should set their rhetorical (if not policy) sails, mainstream liberals almost always look to THEIR right for the same purposes; seeing only dangerous reefs and seductive Sirens to be assiduously avoided to their left, liberals are always tacking to the right to stay near the "realistic" (i.e. not threatening to the status quo) center.

Consider the kidglove treatment the teapartiers receive from most mainstream conservatives and the establishment GOP. With a few notable exceptions, the conservative establishment is tying itself in knots trying to figure out how to harness the energy of this rightwing phenomenon. And this is a factional splinter group that routinely voices rhetorical outrage at the establishment GOP and mainstream conservatives for their lack of rigorous commitment to their (lunatic) version of core conservative principles. Moreover, the whole far-right teaparty phenomenon was cooked up by a number of conservative movement insiders and heavyweights themselves.

Compare this with how the liberal establishment has long treated critique from its left.

Bill Clinton administered a public pimp-slapping to the unions on his way to passing NAFTA with no protections for workers in NAFTA countries and no provisions for penalizing violators of international labor law or agreements. (And then he did it again with even greater malicious gusto in his recent support of the odious Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas.)
Ralph Nader (along with the now moribund Green Party) was thrown on the pariah heap of history by Dems and mainstream liberals who still claim Nader is to blame for the success of Bush II’s 2000 campaign. Apparently we are to ignore the laughable ineptitude of then-centrist Al Gore’s campaign in which he conceded so much policy argument to his opponent the Bushistas had to frame him as a pathological exaggerator as a means of differentiating their candidate. (Note that Nader is still considered a leftwing fringe crank despite the fact that in 2000 and ever since he has been the consistent, and often lone, voice sounding the alarm about the very regulatory vacuum that led to the economic meltdown; being proven right has never helped the left gain legitimacy with the mainstream liberal establishment.)
The Democrats in office treat MoveOn.Org like a downstate cousin who gropes the bridesmaids at the wedding reception—despite the consistent, effective support the group and its 3 million-plus members have provided candidates and progressive causes. Rather than the treatment given the teaparty’s deliberately provocative (and often hysterical) rhetoric by mainstream Republicans, Democrats seem to look for opportunities to outdo rightwingers in bashing the organization and publicizing their “outrage” at the organization’s media-determined “missteps” (remember the whole bogus outrage over the “General Betray-Us” ads?).
Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation is routinely invited on Sunday panel shows like ABC’s This Week to be set up as the silly and unrealistic leftist in contrast to more “reasonable” liberal voices at the table. Back when George Smugandunctuous was hosting This Week, you could see him and Will competing to see who could look more condescendingly annoyed when vanden Heuvel was speaking.
Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman and leftwing author Naomi Klein are treated like lepers in mainstream liberal circles despite having done great work in warning the world that the Bush Administration was lying about WMDs, connections to Al Qaeda, yellow cake and all the rest of the Iraq invasion propaganda. Again, being right is no help to those on the left.

And this is the short list of examples of how mainstream liberals and the Democratic party despise the left.

And now Gibbs thinks he’s doing Democrats some sort of good by suggesting that Obama critics from the left “ought to be drug tested”? Apparently Gibbs is annoyed that we on the left don’t show more gratitude for the victories. Bob should remember that we aren’t in this for Obama victories; we voted for this guy to get victories for the progressive cause and social justice and to reignite the movement to make government an effective tool to advance the interests and needs of working class Americans. On these fronts, the progressive left is justifiably disappointed; Gibbs sees this disappointment as “crazy.”

For example, Gibbs mocks the left for its foolish dissatisfaction with Obama’s health reform; he says we will only “be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare.” You're right...We’re sorry, Bob, we’ll all be satisfied that the Administration caved to the likes of Joe Lieberman and watered down the only major health legislation we’ll see for another generation in a craven and failed attempt to attract a few votes from the Gentlemen from Anthem, Aetna, and Pharma. That was riveting theater and a real motivational spectacle for progressives throughout the country.

We’ll also be satisfied by a complete failure to get decisive, unambiguous victories on unemployment, strong financial regulation, climate change, and energy policy. We know the Republicans and the Bush gang left you guys with a catastrophic economic situation; that must make it awfully difficult to CONTROL THE FRIGGIN’ TERMS OF DEBATE! That’s sort of your job, isn’t it BOB? Defining the terms of policy debates? How would you grade yourself and the Obama team on that so far?

So, maybe instead of sniping at the left, whining about the lack of gratitude for your (mixed at best) record of achievement, and sending out senior Democratic Party Parade Float, Bill Clinton, to rally support for Democrats, you could put on your big boy pants and fight for the goddam progressive agenda.

Or maybe you guys are kinda liking the idea of a Republican congress with a strong number of liberal democrats to "stand up to" so as to help you triangulate with the GOP for legislative “compromises.” Dick Morris, pick up your phone.

This whole ongoing drama of the left getting beat up by the mainstream liberals and establishment dems is a shame-filled experience. Its like being in an abusive relationship. What would you say to a friend who repeatedly helped the spouse get dressed up to go out only to find out they were being left home while spouse went out on a date with someone else…then got backhanded in the mouth for complaining? What would you advise a friend with so little self respect?

I still have my 2008 Obama bumper logo. It’s coming off my car today.

* This is the first, and hopefully only, time I have uttered such words regarding Frum.

Americans Found to be Too Stupid to Function on Minimal Level

2010-06-06T11:28:00.007-05:00

A recent investigation of several films and videos held in the vaults of various US agencies reveals that Americans have become increasingly unable to carry out basic functions of daily life.

The videos, obtained through numerous FOIA filings with several federal agencies, show ordinary citizens struggling to operate basic home utensils and appliance or to carry out simple tasks related to routine daily activities.

Apparently concerned not to alarm the American public with evidence of their own deteriorating intelligence, federal agencies have been holding the videos in secret, carefully encrypted electronic files the existence of which all federal agencies under several administrations have consistently denied. Long suspected to be held in secret, the files have now become public through a protracted court battle over contested FOIA requests in which shadowy public affairs crank, Hemlockandashes, finally prevailed.

An early film archived by the Department of Defense is the oldest of the uncovered documents. The 1963 film, documenting at least in part three case studies of Americans too incompetent to carryout such simple tasks as preparing a simple meal, features unsourced narration which at times sounds condescending, while at other times the tone is mocking.

DOD Film: 1963

Apparently the subject of government study for nearly fifty years, the alarming decline of intelligence among the American people is further demonstrated in a 1980s era video retrieved from the vaults of the Federal Trade Commission.

FTC: 1988

Though frightening, the collection of government documents contains evidence of incompetence so spellbindingly profound as to evoke laughter, such as in the case of one subject captured in the act of attempting to negotiate the technology of the modern loafer in a film (shown above)found in the files of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services).

But the material also documents tragedy. One woman is shown struggling and brought nearly to tears in two common household scenarios. The recently produced government video antiseptically informs us that the subject's inability to cope with simple tasks ultimately led to her early demise.

Department of Education: 2008

More recently, rumors are circulating that video documentary evidence has been hidden away (and may have been destroyed) which would connect the stunningly incompetent responses of public and private officials to emergencies threatening the financial sector and associated with the Gulf oil spill to the phenomenon of the widespread decay of coping skills and basic intelligence now running rampant among Americans in all walks of life.

Hemlockandashes has vowed to continue the struggle to unlock more videos from the multi-agency study thought to be held by the intelligence and national security sectors of the government.

Rand Paul Announces Support for Law of Gravity

2010-05-20T20:14:00.004-05:00

Just a day after his brilliant victory, newly nominated Kentucky Tea Party champion, Rand Paul, released a statement boldly announcing his position on a central issue in the upcoming elections: “I unequivocally state that I will not support any efforts to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Defending his position, Paul left no room for confusion about how he feels about the burning question of allowing a return of Jim Crow laws, saying, "I'm opposed to institutional racism…and I see no place in our society for institutional racism."

Paul also spoke passionately against a return to chattel slavery, and insisted that the nation should continue to observe the laws of gravity, Kepler’s Law of Planetary Motion, and the Four Laws of Thermodynamics—though on gravity he did say he was concerned that the law may need some slight reform to address complaints from “many Kentuckians and Americans [who] are frustrated with the way the current law impinges on some of their most basic aspirations.”

Rand Paul: Philosopher King or Doofus of Ideology?

No really…

Paul did lash out today at those whom he claims created the conditions in which it became necessary for him to reassure voters he was not a racist kook. "My opponent's statement on MSNBC Wednesday that I favor repeal of the Civil Rights Act was irresponsible and knowingly false…no serious people are seeking to revisit it except to score cheap political points.”

Well. This either means that Paul been taking cheap shots at himself of late, or it means he is not among the group he identifies as “serious people” who don’t seek to revisit the Civil Rights Act. After all, it was Dr. Paul himself who took us all on this trip to 1964 to revisit the virtues of the Civil Rights Act when he gave a long, gratuitous, and egregious response to a simple question posed by the editorial board of the Louisville Courier-Journal.*

The simple question was, “Would you have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?” I would have thought the answer here was easy. But it took Dr. Paul over two and a half minutes, including three follow up questions, to finally spit out that while he opposes racism and all, and favors ending all institutional racism, he…well, here is where Paul screwed the pooch: “I don’t like the idea of telling private business owners – I abhor racism; I think it’s a bad business decision to ever exclude anybody from a restaurant, but at the same time I do believe in private ownership…”

?

Well, he didn’t exactly say no did he? And he did point out that racial discrimination is bad—business-wise.

But he didn’t say yes, and that’s the gratuitous and egregious part. Dr. Paul is not running for the open seat of Kentucky Philosopher in Chief. His job, should the good people of Kentucky elect him, will be to craft legislation that addresses 21st century concerns. Mucking about with how an ideology applies to 1964 legislation is only of value in an undergraduate political science class; which is to say, nowhere. I believe Dr. Paul when he firmly asserts that he is not a racist and that he find racism abhorrent. But Paul does not seem to understand that the pure and beautiful logic of libertarianism that spellbinds him and his ilk does not trump history, justice, or dignity. His goofy intellectual commitments to abstract principles blinds and deafens him to the point of moral retardation.

No one cares about the finer points of his libertarian theory that robust private markets and common sense social decorum will ultimately correct all ills (and so forth, blah and woof…). The most useful answer to any such lame question that invites relitigation of socially settled issues is a simple affirmation that one agrees with the verdict of history; “yes” is all that is required. If asked if one would have supported the passage of the 13th Amendment, only the town crank who thinks that every nuance of his pristinely logical political ideology must be expressed in a tedious review of his concerns about state rights or the questionable ratification process. The right answer is “yes.” Move on, for godsake! (Unless one does not actually agree that the 13th Amendment or the Civil Rights Act were and are ultimately just; in which case, one is entitled to one’s opinion, but one is not fit to be dog catcher in Wasilla let alone a US senator.)

Dr. Paul couldn’t help himself; he has libertarian Tourette's and thus had to explain that freedom is “hard” and often requires us to accept the difficulties of “abhorrent behavior” from some groups and individuals. Which I guess means that a black family traveling for dozens if not hundreds of extra miles to seek hotel accommodations must simply accept this as the price they must pay for freedom—the freedom of the property owner being the self-evident paramount concern of libertarians and other slack-jawed penny philosophers before which all other values of democracy and notions of justice must bow.

Rand Paul: Whiner

Dr. Paul now whines that his opponent, who went on MSNBC to say that Rand Paul supports the repeal of the Civil Rights Act, is engaging in “irresponsible and knowingly false” cheap shots. And you do have to admit that the Democratic challenger, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, did not have to spend much (in opposition research anyway) to spin Paul’s actual words into an accusation that the good doctor “would repeal the Civil Rights Act.” It’s a stretch to get from whatever garbled thing Paul did say to a willingness to repeal the 1964 law, but not a long one.

At some point in his elaborate discourse, Dr. Paul said, “I do believe in private ownership, but I think there should be no discrimination in anything that gets public funding and that’s what mostly the Civil Rights Act was about to my mind.” I guess that means Dr. Paul is mostly in support of the law. But, see, here’s the thing: What the law was and is does not rely on what is in Paul’s mind; there’s an actual reality out regarding what the Civil Rights Act was about. Out of the 16,000 words that make up the Act, 10,000—about 63%--are specifically targeted at discrimination practiced by private actors: the bulk of the law outlaws racial discrimination by private owners of restaurants, bars, hotels, and other “public accommodations” against selected patrons, and racially discriminatory hiring practices by private employers.

That’s 63% of the Act; if Rand Paul wins the election with 63% of the vote, I’m betting he will think the vote was “mostly” in favor of him. So, I'm curious: If Paul would support the law under the assumption it was mostly about ending discrimination in anything publicly funded (which, by the way, as a libertarian, Paul would not have much of anyway) and not about “telling private business owners” what to do, since we can now demonstrate that the bill was, indeed mostly about what he is philosophically opposed to, is it really “knowingly false” to say that the brand of libertarian ideology that Dr. Paul espouses would, indeed, entail repealing most of the Civil Rights Act, or at least not supporting it?

Rand now pouts because (you guessed it!) the liberal media…

C'mon, does that sentence really need to be finished? Anyone paying even fleeting attention to the ongoing weeping of the Right in any public affairs discourse already knows the tune, the lyrics, the chorus, the bridge, and the beat: “These attacks prove one thing for certain: the liberal establishment is desperate to keep leaders like me out of office, and we are sure to hear more wild, dishonest smears during this campaign.” Y'know, like those wild, liberal-media, dishonest smears about death panels, secret plans to take away everyone's firearms, hidden birth cirtificates...

Hey, Doc! You keep spewing your laundry list of pet musings (stuff like reinstating the gold standard, teaching flat-earth theory in schools, and investigating what REALLY happened at Area 51 and whatnot) and you’ll probably get a lot more pushback from the liberal establishment (if not a call to return home from the overlords of your home planet).

Libertarian Crackpottery

The truth is, Rand Paul, like dear old dad, is not cut out to be a public servant—because he barely believes in a public. He is more consumed with the fever dreams of a pure ideology—a set of thought toys—consistently followed to their logical conclusions. I refer you to his interview with the Courier-Journal; along the journey Dr. Paul took us on in his guided tour of his fascinating mind, he mentioned his belief that we should do away with the Federal Reserve, eliminate the Department of Education, and let the marketplace work its blessed logical magic to satisfy the needs of the disabled thus disposing of the need for an intrusive, freedom impinging, big-government American’s with Disabilities Act.

Rand Paul gets a lot of reasonableness-points in the media for his acknowledgement that Barack Obama is “not really a socialist”; I hope to score the same kind of cred with the recognition that Rand Paul is not really a psychotic in need of hospitalization.

* You can watch the video of this Randy in Wonderland interview yourself. WARNING: It’s reaaaallllyyyy looooooong. The video is studded with wonderful nuggets of libertarian jaw-drool, but the relevant part comes at almost exactly the one-hour mark; fast forwarding is highly recommended.

Tortured Reasoning

2009-08-27T06:51:00.012-05:00

God bless the media coverage of Eric Holder’s decision to appoint federal prosecutor John H. Durham to investigate the CIA's interrogation program. Once again, American journalism wisely avoids boring the public with investigative fact-checking, substantive analysis, or penetrating review of the known background of the underlying issues entailed in the story; instead our savvy journalists thankfully focus public attention on the political posturing involved in the “debate”(over tactics not issues) and the campaign-like horserace questions of whose popularity will or will not be hurt by the emerging controversy (surrounding tactics not issues). The big important drama of Holder’s announcement, as relayed in the media, is the fate of Obama’s political capital and whether Durham’s investigation (which it now appears will be “limited to a dozen or so cases, most of which already have been the subject of several reviews”) will prove to be a distraction from the President’s policy agenda.

You know, there are some sentences that should be recognized as inherently absurd—even though they seem to need saying. Things like “Please don’t set your sister’s head on fire again,” or, “This grilled hyena pancreas tastes funny to me.” Into this category, I would place “The U.S, Attorney General should investigate credible evidence that high ranking officials of the previous administration may have authorized torture.”

For the slower of wit, let’s break down just two of the many parts of this statement that signal self-demonstrating absurdity:

1. “…the previous administration may have authorized torture.” Let’s start with the real basic stuff. What the hell world are we living in? WHAT CENTURY IS IT? Imagine if, instead of George Bush becoming president in 2000, Al Gore, or John McCain, or John Travolta, or that weird lady who sits vigil in Lafayette Park and wears a tin spaghetti strainer under her twelve-dollar wig had been elected to preside over the United States of America and the whole Bush crew had never come to town. Can you imagine ANY circumstances, any non-Cheneyized universe in which those words alone would not cause laughter, would not immediately mark whoever uttered them as a What’s-really-going-on-in-Area-51 mouthbreather. TORTURE. You know, the stuff they always show the evil guy doing to the hero of the movie to make you get really angry? Do we now need the movie-soundtrack, heavily minor-key music playing in the background to let us know when something…um…wrong is happening?

2. “The U.S, Attorney General should investigate credible evidence…” And the head of the Center for Disease Control should look into the latest outbreak of plague in Manhattan. IT”S THE AG’s FRIGGIN JOB TO INVESTIGATE CRIMES. (Any Cletus objecting that the interrogations weren’t necessarily crimes if the administration authorized them needs to go back and s-l-o-w-l-y read point 1 above.)

Notwithstanding the self-evident truth (and thus self evident absurdity) of pointing out that the AG should probably have started poking around into this matter about 20 minutes after his confirmation, it seems like one of those kinds of things that somehow need saying at this point. See, we’re now embroiled in controversy about how politically damaging this may or may not be for Obama’s agenda and whether or not Holder is making a big mistake and mucking things up for his “boss”. This is what we are going to worry about? This is the discussion lighting up the interweb? Well aren’t we sophisticated? I wonder if the guys in charge of the Nuremberg Tribunal stopped to think about what a big PR pickle they may have been putting Truman in?

Commenting on Holder’s tepid, half-a-pair decision to appoint an investigator, Dan Balz of the Washington Post writes, “No matter which way he turns, President Obama can't seem to shake the legacy of George W. Bush's presidency.” Is he kidding? This reads like bad 1970s promo copy for a sitcom: Watch as that loveable, hapless President Obama mixes love and laughter to deal with the zany antics of that meatheaded former President Bush! Obama just can’t shale that crummy ol’ Bush legacy.

Dan Balz: The Wink Martindale of journalism.

How about this from Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

“Attorney General Eric Holder doesn’t seem to have any enthusiasm for revisiting the torture controversies of the Bush era. Neither does his boss, President Obama…But Obama and Holder had no choice.”

Obama and Holder had no choice? His boss Obama doesn’t have any enthusiasm for revisiting the torture controversies? Ms. Tucker seems to have forgotten, if she ever knew, that the inclinations, choices, enthusiasms, passing fancies, or desperate political needs of the president aren’t really supposed to enter into an Attorney General’s considerations of the legal merits of an investigation of suspected crimes. Maybe it’s because I grew up with the Watergate hearings banging away on TV every time I skipped school (I saw A LOT of the hearings), but I recall a time when journalists would have eaten a grilled hyena pancreas* just to get a hold of the mere hint of a whiff of a rumor of a leak that a president was seeking to influence the direction, targets, or degree of a Justice Department investigation. John Mitchell must be feeling a touch perplexed at this point (about presidential influence over the AG, I mean, not about the extreme heat in hell…). Forget Obama, Holder has no choice. The crimes documented in the latest release of the CIA report (won by the ACLU not the diligent legal work of the Justice Department, or obtained through investigative journalists bothering to file a FOIA petition) along with the repeated public confessions of Dick Cheney indicate not just the possibility of impeachable-type high crimes and misdemeanors (beyond the reach of which Bush and Cheney are in any event), but first class war crimes – Trial at Nuremberg stuff. Trial at The Hague stuff. Whatever Obama’s political fate, Holder damn well better get some enthusiasm.

And just so we’re clear, Cynthia, this isn’t about enthusiasm for “torture controversies” for chrissake; this is fate-of-democracy-level decision time, not some cocktail party debate in a townhouse in Georgetown. Try the canapés, Cyn, I hear they have real beluga caviar!

Cynthia Tucker: The Brooke Astor of Journalism

Or how about this one from Tim Rutten in the LA Times:

“Let Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and spokesmen for the activist group Moveon.org keep demanding that Bush and Cheney be "held accountable" if they wish. But let's hope Obama and his attorney general understand that prosecuting a president and vice president for policies they believed were crucial to national security -- however wrongheaded, vicious and destructive -- would be a divisive political disaster.”

Someone at the LA Times gave Tim’s opinion piece the tile “CIA torture indictments? No thanks.” I think it needed a subhead: I’ll take the Health Care Debate with a side of Death Panel Rants instead!

Tim believes that no matter how – what did he say? – “wrongheaded, vicious and destructive” Bush policies may have been, it would be bad politics to prosecute. Wrongheaded? Vicious? Has he read any of the stuff in the just-released CIA report? Viscous is a word usually used to modify other words like “rumor” or “cat scratch” or “tongue lashing,” not “torture treatment.” That was a really vicious mock execution, Bruno. I think I’ll take my pedicure business elsewhere!

Hey, Tim! If you’re combing your thesaurus for adjectives, try CRIMINAL. That’s really the point, here. Either the activities and policies of the Bushistas were criminal or they were not. If they were, then, especially by the standards of conservative-style justice, crime must be punished lest it spread. It looks like a prima facie case has been made that the Bush administration may have committed crimes. The AG exists to investigate that sort of thing, Tim.

And what’s with the gratuitous smack at the progressive left? Tim seems to have some issues with folks like Russ Feingold (the only senator with enough courage to vote against the Orwellian PATRIOT act in 2001) and MoveOn (who, by the by, had the goods on Bush’s Weapons of Mass Destruction lies, Cheney’s enhanced-interrogation, and all the boys in Cheney’s “special” office with their extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and all the rest of the heinous, sickening, traitorous crimes of the Republican Party’s fascist-wing well before all the serious journalists started doing their whole “Did we go too lightly on the fact-checking?” shtick they do whenever they’d rather not have you notice that they have all long been in the bag for - or at least at the mercy of - their corporate overlords and, by extension, the Republican party that does their bidding.) Could it be that Tim is resentful of people who have a backbone and would rather risk popularity than ignore barbarity? Could it be that his cynicism is born of justified self-loathing for the man of character he is not?

Tim Rutten: The Tim Rutten of Journalism

So, one again, let’s hear it for the proud, brave members of America’s community of journalists, protected by a First Amendment won through the blood and treasure of a nation, trained at the finest J-schools in the world, and kept busy all day reading and transcribing the press releases of public officials.

American Journalists: The Stenographers to Power

* This, I am told by comedians of my acquaintance, is known as a callback. Bringing back a reference from earlier in a routine is supposed to be the mark of a refined comic. I am nothing if not refined. Ask anyone who knows me…

Legacies and Other Detritus

2009-08-01T11:39:00.004-05:00

Exactly when did the meaning of the word “legacy” switch from something to be valued to something to be suspicious about or starved into non-existence?* At a monument to Mary McLeod Bethune in Washington, Bethune is depicted in the act of handing off her legacy as an educator, civil rights activists, and proud, wise elderly woman to two children who stand waiting to receive it. The inspiring words of her Legacy are engraved around the base of the statue. The legacy, here, is used as a symbol of durable, perhaps even timeless values; an inheritance to be treasured, protected, nurtured and maybe even venerated.

But maybe we don’t live in a world than can any longer accommodate such an understanding of things left to us from time gone by.

You will note that US auto companies were not-too-long ago said to be suffering from “legacy costs” – which was intended to mean but not say, the cost of paying on the retirement plans of union auto workers. What well-managed American company would continue to honor these burdensomely generous retirement plans for factory workers (whose productivity had made billions of dollars of profits to pay dividends and raise asset values for shareholders and finance outlandish corporate management salaries)?

We were to understand that grown up people must accept that Detroit’s once-upon-a-time generosity and “Big Labor’s” once-upon-a-time power are now outdated and somehow quaint elements of a bygone, fuzzy-headed era of coddled middleclass expectations and bloated corporate laziness. This was to be seen as an unfortunate legacy left to us by a previous generation, somewhat like big, overstuffed, embarrassingly ornate Victorian furniture left to you in a will by an ancient addled great aunt who’d accumulated a bunch of once cherished pricey pieces now turned to just so much superfluous crap by changing social tastes and mores. You smile politely when the executor tells you where to pick it up, then you rent a u-haul to take it all to the salvation army or the dump, or perhaps stick it all in the “finished basement” that no one ever goes in and is the resting place for your bumper-pool table, exercise bike, and other extraneous junk you don’t want but cant get rid of (in other words, your growing “legacy” for some unsuspecting surviving distant relative).

More recently, we’ve come to understand that US auto manufacturing itself is a legacy industry. In fact, some want us to understand that industry, as we once understood it, is a legacy sector of the economy. Oh, sure it would be nice if we could keep the old thing running, but who has the time or the resources for it any more. I mean, it was great that our parents could expect that with a reasonable degree of publicly provided education, and a willingness to work hard and take some overtime, one could work at a respectable job making things and earning enough to live in small but comfortable home in a nice neighborhood with solid schools, have a nice family meal out every once in a while, take a vacation at a nearby lake for a week once a year, put away enough money to send the kids to a state university, and so forth…

But, c’mon, those rosy days are gone. People need to wake up and realize we live in a globalized economy where brown and off-white folks are willing to work in plants, mills, and factories for a fraction of what spoiled US workers expect to be paid. Lazy American workers expect to earn a living; those frisky, enterprising, realistically hardened folks in the developing world understand that work in a factory producing wealth and products for others’ benefit can only pay survival wages; who should expect more – it’s called labor for godsake, it’s not like working with your mind or something valuable like that!

Yes, we have inherited the expectations of the once mighty American middleclass, but…well, it’s a legacy. We’ll have to figure out what to do to store those expectations somewhere where they won’t be an embarrassing eyesore or reminder…just until we can get rid of them, or they quietly die off from neglect.

Sticking the word “legacy” in front of something you probably ought to value and treat with respect but would rather ignore, neglect, or relegate to some status of invisibility is an uncannily creative and craftily convenient use of language. (Not surprising, since it came from the fun and clever world of IT.) I recently heard someone described as a “legacy catholic.” I found this pleasingly handy for describing my own relationship with the Church. No longer do I have to struggle with the ambiguity of “I was raised catholic…”, now I can say I am a legacy catholic: I don’t really use it, it was just left to me by my parents, bless their cute little souls.

It occurs to me now that that we may soon be encouraged to see our aging friends, relatives, and neighbors as a “legacy population.” Just like Social Security will soon be a legacy social program. Maybe instead of a burdensome Social Security system, we will have a new cost-efficient Legacy Interim Population Support program which will provide minimal survival upkeep and warehousing for us aging babyboomers somewhere out of the way until our demographic balloon of resource-sucking numbers tails off sometime in the 2040’s.

Not that this isn’t what we do now with about a third of the folks who live past 80, it’s just that it will be openly and unapologetically acknowledged as the only sensible way to deal with a legacy social contract and some very irresponsible post WWII procreating by our grandparents; plus it will have a cuddly new acronym: LIPS; just like what you kiss someone gently off to sleep with, kiss a beloved relative goodbye with; kiss off some former prized possession or loved one now turned burdensome and unlovable…

Legacy: It’s the new garbage.

* According to various sources: A gift of personal property by will. A tangible or intangible thing handed down by a predecessor; a long lasting effect of an event or process. c.1375, "body of persons sent on a mission," from O.Fr. legacie "legate's office," from M.L. legatia, from L. legatus "ambassador, envoy," noun use of pp. of legare "appoint by a last will, send as a legate". Sense of "property left by will" appeared in Scot. c.1460.

Video Games, the Suffering of the Real World, and Sam

2006-01-28T10:07:00.000-05:00

So this morning I was listening to some music in the living room and sam (more about whom in future posts) came in and hooked up to play Zelda and he asked if it would bother me and I said not with the sound off and he said ok and after a few minutes of listening to him grunt and whisper-curse in frustration over mistakes and his inability to figure out how to get the required prizes and find the necessary openings to reach the next level I asked him why he was playing the game on a saturday morning instead of just listening to the music (because thats the kind of annoying thing I say) and he said because the game was a nice escape from the regular grind and then for a while I just watched the game unfold and his moves on-screen.

A little time passed and sam said he thought that if I played the game with him I'd wind up liking it so much I might get back into enjoying video games (because I used to enjoy them -- in the same sense that an OCD sufferer enjoys his daily frantic rituals) and I said I didn't really want to get back into video games and he asked why not and I said because they seemed like a giant timesuck and then we were quiet awhile and he eventually asked me if I didnt think that an ideal video game that was artful and exciting and thoughtful and such would be as worth spending time playing as listening to music would be and (even tho I dont really like thinking about abstract idealizations -- as buncencia will attest -- because I dont think they illuminate much more than the structure and assumptions of the least interesting parts of our brains as currently enculturated) I thought about it for awhile and said no because a video game always imposes a structure on the play of your mind unlike listening to music when even as youre totally absorbed in it allows a real creative playfulness where your mind and music dance and play with each other and he said yeah but that a video game was still a good escape.

So I listened to him playing for awhile more making all those frustrated grunts and whisper-curses punctuated by occasional spasms of achievement vocalizations and I said if you think about it video games dont really give you an escape from the current reality as much as reproduce and amplify it (because thats the kind of annoying thing I say) and he asked what do you mean and I said think about when you start playing a new game youre dropped into a world where the rules are given and quite rigid yet unknown to you and the aims are also given and highly defined but only dimly perceived and you are there to struggle and stumble about encountering dangers and opportunities of artifice constructed before your arrival and as you stumble about you slowly begin uncovering the rules and learn to count as achievement the conformation of your mind and behavior to the pre-scribed rules and goals of the game and quantify frustration and failure in direct proportion to your inability or enduring resistance to conform to the games rules and goals whereas listening to music entails conceding to the musics given pattern while at the same time letting the pattern-play of your mind weave in and out and about the musics own pattern creating as you and it play about a new pattern of youit.

And then sam said yeah I see what you mean and then we laughed and joked for a few minutes about how we could design a buddhist game where the way to advance to the next level involved letting go of the desire to gain the next level and then we were quiet awhile while sam continued to play and then I said that I thought that reproducing and amplifying the madness of the ruling paradigm is probably unhealthy (because thats the kind of annoying thing I say) and sam played on for a bit and then smiled and said yeah,

but its fun.

Sams cool.*

*If the question arises, What is the point of this? I guess the answer is: the point that could be articulated and explicated would be beside the point.

Some more original graphic art

2005-12-10T08:49:00.000-05:00

Sadly, A Top Ten List

2005-11-12T18:48:00.000-05:00

Last week a coworker asked me why I’m always so cynical. (I had been making snide comments about the new expansion of Tysons Corner shopping mall – something like: nine more acres of the same twenty product brands…). The thing is, I don’t even begin to think of myself as cynical. Just disgusted. But it got me thinking, what am I so disgusted about? So I started listing the stuff that bothers me to see if I could find a pattern.

Here they are, in no particular order: Ten Things* that Indicate that We’ve Become a Nation of Flaccid, Water-Kneed, Cringing, Suburbanized Lambs Undeserving of the Rights and Radical Heritage of Which We Remain Unconscionably Unconscious, Who Would Eagerly Sell Our Mothers, Souls, Testicles (or Parallel Female Genital Metaphor), Children or Anything Else of Fundamental Consequence to Our Humanity for the Equivalent of a Discount Coupon for a Cafemoogabocharonichino** at Seattlebux.

• Incredibly bad and deteriorating service at every corporate chain and franchise. For instance, has anyone noticed that since Royal Ahold bought Giant Food, the staff has become incapable of answering such difficult customer inquiries as “Where can one find canned soup?” and “How much longer will I have to wait until you find out the price of this untagged bottle of olive oil?” Home Depot is another place where the staff seems either poorly trained, disgruntled, or both. The typical Home Depot “Associate” acts as if unable to understand why people keep asking questions about home improvement tools and products.

• Our cowardly bullying of fellow victims of #1 above who are unfortunate enough to be compelled to work at these corporate concerns. Ever thought of this? Next time you’re about to wet your pants because your latte is taking tooooo loooong to prepare, instead of bravely scolding the minimum wage “barista” how about you ask to speak to the manager – not to complain about said barista, but rather to advocate for pay, training, and sufficient staffing to give you the quality service you desire and thus justify the $4.00 price you paid for 31 cents worth of coffee and 9 cents of milk? How about you ask who the regional manager is and make your complaint there instead of giving yourself a sadistic little groin-tickle by beating up on someone whose position and economic need guarantee they’ll have to stand there and silently take your shit?

• That we elected not one but two members of the ultra-weenie Bush family to serve in the same office once held by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

• Our tolerance for police who wear terminator-type sunglasses. What the hell is this about? I’m completely out of patience for our uniformed public servants carrying on infantile intimidation tactics any time they have contact with the public. The whole power-posture, command-voice, theater of authority thing is getting way old and way over the top. The other day I was waved to a stop at a school crossing by a cop wearing a pair of sunglasses suitable for a WWF badguy-persona wrestler. Apparently, even while helping children safely cross a busy intersection on their way to the neighborhood middle school, this officer felt he needed to be prepared to intimidate some would-be criminal, traffic scofflaw, or sociopathic pre-teen unwilling to comply with public authority. Maybe the officer felt that wearing futuro-sadofascist eyewear would restore the testicles shrunken by getting crossing-guard duty while all his policeman pals were out doing real policeman work. Why can't our police do their routine work in a spirit of service to the community rather than as an occupation army? Take off those ridiculous roidrage nazigoggles you morons, you work for us

• John Stossel is on TV. Oh c'mon...

• Our daily acceptance of anti-human work environments for ourselves and our fellow human beings. Without even getting to the evil of how we support our bourgeois lifestyles on the backs of sweatshop (and worse) work done in "developing" countries, the stultifying nature of the daily working conditions most of us toil in at our workplaces is entirely unbefitting and unsupporting of fully-upright humanity. The wallpaper of the laboring existence of most of us is an unrelieved, monotonous repetition of indignities and humiliations so pervasive we don't even notice most of it most of the time. And even for those of us who are fortunate enough to have jobs that allow us to use our minds and judgment as part of our work, more and more we find ourselves putting our creativity and intelligence in service to questionable, dumb, or downright odious enterprises. And despite the corporate-speak of teamwork, workforce buy-in, human resource development, blah blah, most of this is just a scumfilm-thin 21st century gloss on what remains 19th century capitalist command and control and exploitation of workers. Workers of the US unite; you have nothing to lose but your quarterly performance evaluation!

• The continued presence of republicans among us let alone in positions of power and influence.

• Ditto christian conservatives. Although they and especially their leading public figures are an almost constant source of morbid amusement.

• Our acceptance of cellphone toting toddlers. Does anyone actually think that giving cellphones to children who should be spending their time twirling in circles of delight and pretending to be animals and comets is a good idea? Stop it! Just stop it now, I say! I'm going to punch the next parent I see whining "could you put that down and listen to me" to a prepubescent sneer-monster at the mall. Why'd you buy them the friggin thing in the first place, bub?

• Our mindless, orwellian parroting of the stupid claims and idea-slogans of neo-lib capitalists and conservative cranks:

creative destruction (With apologies to all the sweet, Shiva loving hippie types, real creation is never destructive -- disruptive maybe but destruction is never the outcome of anything we ought to call creativity. For the record, most of the corporate-capitalist apologist nitwits who throw this around in defense of what many would call breath-taking examples of profound market-failure and bottom-seeking competition are probably unaware that Joseph Schumpeter, who first coined the phrase, also predicted the ultimate triumph of socialism. For the record, Schumpeter was a half-crank who had lots of quaint ideas.)
tragedy of the commons (The only tragedy here is that people accept a fantasy version of phenomena from a pastoral 17th century anglo past that never actually existed to justify present-day corporate-privative exploitative uses of the commonweal of humanity under the banner of "privatization".)
privatization (Oh for the love of god. Click here if you want to get the most recent rant on this.)
war is a continuation of politics by other means (Yeah. Just as blather is the continuation of philosophical thought by other means. This is one of the most stupid quotations in history. Clausewitz may have been a brilliant guy, but this slogan is inane. And the funniest part is, wannabe intellectuals throw this around like it shows off their sophisticated thought. Every time I hear some talking chimp "thinker" spew this line I want to project my lunch into their slackjawed face. Look how easy this philosophical dogtrick is: Outsourcing is a continuation of workforce employment by other means. Pollution is a continuation of environmental control by other means. Exploitation is a continuation of stewardship by other means. Genocide is a continuation of humanitarian aid by other means. Stupidity is a continuation of erudition... Why has anyone ever been taken in by this nonsense? For the record, war is the failure of politics.)
capitalism is the real democracy because it allows people to vote with their dollars (OK, follow along carefully. Voting is democratic if and only if conducted under the conditions of one-person-one-vote. "Voting" with dollars is called purchasing. [Important Tip: When there are two different words or labels it's a good tip-off that they refer to different objects or concepts; that's why we have different names for them.] Now, in markets, because differnt persons possess differing amounts of dollars, different persons and entities have differing levels of purchasing power. In a democracy, different voters must have equal voting power. (Remember? One-person-one-vote.) If you argue that in our country it is not true that different persons have equal voting power, you've just stumbled across the fact the you do not live in a democracy. A system which distributes political power according to variations of purchasing power, giving the greatest political power to the most wealthy individuals and entities, is called a plutocracy not a democracy. Different words referring to different objects and concepts, Cletus.)
ours is the best health care system in the world (This is simply a lie. By the way, to call what we have in the US a health care system would be like calling the dumpster outside an office building an information management system.)
the liberal media (blah blah blah blah...)

Well, that's it.*** Some days I find myself hoping to wake up soon and it will still be 1971, I'll still be poised on the brink of adulthood and giddy with hope, and it will still be possible to avert the collapse of left politics into denialist apolitical lifestyle crafting, irrelevant micropolitical issue advocacy, and distracting and disintegrating identity politics. Ronald Reagan will still be a punch line about California politics and George W. Bush will still be the drunken dumbest fratboy son of a Republican hack scion of a family whose patriarch was a nazi sympathizing financier.

But most of the time I think about my children and how wide awake they are and especially my daughter and her husband and how they are raising their wise and dazzlingly alive daughter with grace, humanity and awareness and realize that 1971 isn't so far in the past after all.

*For those who sneer at the ongoing fad of Top Ten Lists either because you credit or blame their creation on David Letterman: Ever heard of the Decalogue? Or how about the Bill of Rights (that would be Amendments one through ten of the Constitution). Perhaps if these lists of ten had been named, respectively, Top Ten Things That Piss Off God and Top Ten Principles We Really Hope Our New Federal Government Will Not Violate, folks would know that Letterman has merely borrowed a deeply rooted Western form. Had Letterman been of Asian heritage he would no doubt have “originated’ the top eight list, as in: The Eightfold Path to Ironic Mockery.

** In a future rant I will list the infantile product names that corporate Nazis in control of all our goods and services force us to say, the worst of which being “rooty-tooty-fresh-and-fruity”…

*** Yeah, I know I cheated on the last one and added a bunch of other items going way beyond a list of ten. If this bothers you, you must be some sort of poorly toilet-trained crypto-fascist thug.

Some Original Graphic Art...

2005-10-15T16:27:00.000-05:00

Abort Bennett, Part 2: Let's Call a Cracker a Cracker

2005-10-09T09:25:00.000-05:00

OK. I'd stop beating this dead horse's ass except he just won't stay still. Cracker Bill was out on the stump last weekend demonstrating that he is not only a racist, but also cynical and stupid too!

Last Saturday, Bill "Trust Me I'm a Serious Thinker" Bennett decided that he would clear his reputation by carefully elucidating his intellectually complex position on genocidal approaches to crime control and the heavy burden borne by public intellectuals in modern America before a cheering crowd of conservative businessmen in Bakersfield California (a well known center of culture and learning).

According to an unapologetic Bennett, the media distorted his radio comments and turned his denunciation of a hypothetical atrocity into an endorsement. "I was putting forward a bad argument in order to put it down," Bennett argued. "They reported and emphasized only the abhorrent argument, not my shooting it down."

That would be an outrage... If it was true. Unfortunately for Bennett, this particular herring is way too red to mistake for the real target. Here's what Bennett said on his radio program:

"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could - if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."

Now, for the slower of uptake, let's set that out again, this time with emphasis added to the more troubling (slobberingly racist) part of this "thought experiment":

"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could - if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."

Did you spot the problem? In case a member of the Bennett family is reading this, I'll simplify the problem by taking out the confusing extra words. ""I do know that it's true that...abort...black...your crime rate would go down." See? In Bennett's big serious brain, the idea that high crime is caused by the existence of the black folks in America is a self-evident fact. Bennett says in effect: "If you get rid of blacks, crime goes down (but of course, that would be wrong!)." Then says the media is trying to make it seem like he was advocating genocide when he was saying exactly the opposite -- you know, the "that would be wrong" part. He doesn't get (or chooses to pretend he doesn't) that the assertion of what he "knows" about blacks and crime is both empirically false and rhetorically racist. On the Fox News Sunday program following Bennett's original broadcast, perpetually constipated commentator and national embarrassment Brit Hume defended Bennett's remarks as "factually unassailable." Brit Hume: racist.

Here's the thing (again for benefit of the ideologically impaired), the social correlation that counts is not race:crime, it is class:crime. In America, as everywhere else in the universe, poor people are more apt to both commit crimes and be victimized by crime as well as other social pathologies. That's one of those facts that make poverty unpleasant. One of the facts that make capitalism unpleasant is that it creates a poverty class. One of the unpleasant facts about America is that its history of racism (and racism's apparent continued existence) has placed a disproportionate number of black families in poverty. In any capitalist society, the spaces of poverty will be filled by the most vulnerable groups and individuals around -- typically racial and ethnic minorities, women, and children. The rate of crimes committed by middle class African Americans is no different than that of middle class whites, latinos, or asians. Same with the crime rates of wealthy whites, blacks, latinos, etc.: quite high, just not defined as crime. Big news: There is no racial tendency to commit crime. This would not need to be said except that conservative intellectuals need remedial training in the basics of modern knowledge. They've been busy studying 18th century economics and 19th century politcal theory, you see.

So to help the Bennetts and the Humes, it's not end blacks=end crime; it's end poverty=end crime. In the end, to follow out Bill's odious counterfantasy, if you rid America of its black population the crime rate would settle right back to where it is now, just with a different complexion as other vulnerable populations took up the spaces of poverty without relief or redress in post-reagan America. Moreover, if Bill wants to push this cheap thought gimmick further, if he aborted any sufficiently large category of people in America he'd be bound to kill off a number of potential criminals since any large population would likely include a significant number of people living without much hope in poverty; thus he would get his (temporary) decrease in the crime rate. And, by the way, this whole mode of discourse wherein one speaks about a whole race of people as if they were not actually part of the community is hideous on its face. Would Bill ever say something like, "if you were to abort every catholic male baby, your child molestation rate would go down (but that would be wrong!)"? I wonder why Bill's mind went immediately to black babies...

Bill Bennett: racist.

Bennett's supporters, however, have another card to play: White intellectual's burden. These folks want you to know that the real reason you misunderstand Bennett's comments is because you, untrained in the finer points of academic discourse, don't understand "thought experiments." According to fellow right-wing intellectual wannabe, Bill Kristol, Bennett's real mistake was "trying to conduct a thought experiment on the radio." Even softie liberals like Brad DeLong buy into this notion: "Never attempt a reductio ad absurdum argument on talk radio...somebody is bound to think you are endorsing the horrible absurdity that you are rejecting." OOOHHHH! A reductio ad absurdum! I see. Latin stuff. Must be all egghead like.

Says Bennett: "A thought experiment about public policy, on national radio, should not have received the condemnations it has." Oh. Sorry, Bill. Didn't mean to jump on you; didn't realize you were doing thought experiments on the radio. I'll just sit quietly in the corner over here and breathe through my mouth.

Are you kidding me? Thought experiment? You mean like Einstein and Bohr and Planck working out unobservable quantum phenomena through imagined subatomic scenarios? That kind of thougt experiment? I think I'll puke. Bennett's cracker ruminations are to thought experiments what farts are to Mozart's Oboe Concerto.

All right. I'm dropping the subject now.

Abort Bennett; Sterilize Everyone In His Family

2005-09-30T19:29:00.000-05:00

OK. Not only is this right-wing intellectual dumb enough to utter racist stupidity on the radio, he actually goes on to defend himself with further slackjawed commentary.

Here's a thought: If you aborted every white right-wing baby in America you'd raise the national IQ average at least 30 points.

Why isn't Bush more compassionate? WHO CARES?

2005-09-11T14:56:00.000-05:00

We’re hearing a lot these days about Bush’s compassion. Where is it? Why did it fail to show up for Katrina's victims as it did after September 11? Is it back? I for one find this line of Bush-bashing to be completely off base. I think demanding that public officials show compassion is just dumb. Who cares?

I’m sick of liberals who expect public officials to weep over people’s hardships. I’m tired of listening to whining complaints that conservatives don’t have compassion for the downtrodden of the world. The truth is I know a lot of conservatives who go around weeping buckets over the poor and underprivileged. They pity and they pray and they volunteer and they send charitable contributions to worthy causes. So this line of criticism is just not justified. But more importantly, who cares?

I don’t care about Bush’s tears or, for that matter, Bill Clinton biting his lower lip and feeling my pain. Hey Bill, did you feel the pain of the men, women, and children who were cutoff from the welfare system under your “reform” plan? Did you weep for the plight of the working families and blue collar communities displaced and ravaged by your corporate-giveaway NAFTA bill? Frankly, I don’t want politicians feeling anything of mine. How about this: Why don’t the Clintons and their ilk quit feeling people’s pain and start using government to share their burden and advance their interests?

So what's this concern for Bush's compassion all about? For those who woke up late and missed the news, we're back to the ideology of Andrew Carnegie and Herbert Hoover. Government power is used to assist corporations and their investors in their ceaseless endeavor to remove regulatory barriers and concentrate wealth and then government leaders are supposed to show compassion and encourage the private sector to "do its share" to meet the needs of the suffering underclass through charity -- the very suffering their corporate welfare and feed-the-rich policies helped to create in the first place. This is the heart of Bush's so-called "compassionate conservatism."

Compassion as a political attribute makes me want to vomit. Compassion is something you get in a get well card. People in trouble and people struggling to cope with life with limited resources need support from those with means, materials, and power, not compassion from onlookers. Compassion from public officials is just repackaged noblesse oblige. First the noblesse class use every available means to appropriate all the wealth and resources of the community, then they feel the oblige to “give something back” out of a sense of compassion. This typically involves a lot of showy fundraising and little actual impact. (And I'm sorry, pop-culture stars from Bono to Nelly donating concert performances to raise money for "relief" isn't any better.)

This is the sorry state of affairs in America after 35 years of the ascendancy of renascent 19th century socioeconomics: Workers whose daily toil and incredible productivity produce all the profits reaped by corporations and their stockholders now have the pathetic additional burden of begging for relief from conditions created by laws which allow all the returns of productivity to go to capital rather than labor. Public officials at best end up running government as a kind of super-charity. Walmart’s workforce on Medicaid is just the most obvious example of this humiliation. In the final humiliation, workers rely on public officials to beg charity from the "private sector" on their behalf. And the rest of us are supposed to miss the obvious cynicism of this slight-of-hand by which democratic government -- the greatest tool ever invented for the use of the people to realize their collective genuine interest -- is turned into a vehicle for the accelerated gilding of the special interests of the plutocracy.

Every once in a while, however, the noblesse class forgets itself and lets its real ideology slip out in public: Nearly equaling Marie Antoinette's "let them eat" cake gaffe was the slip made by Barbara Bush -- poster matron for noblesse oblige -- while visiting evacuees huddled on emergency cots in a sports stadium. But are you really surprised by the vulgarity of the First Matriarch? What do you think dinner table conversation sounds like when Babs, Poppy, and the rest of the imperial family get together?

Some have said the term "compassionate conservative" is oxymoronic. Not so. It is entirely consistent. Compassion has always been the show that the privileged and powerful put on to distract the servants from a recognition of the servants' own power and rights. So, when used by members of the plutocracy the term is not oxymoronic at all. When used by ordinary working people it’s just moronic.

Anyway, compassion is generally useless in real life. Note the passive nature of the words that typically accompany the word compassion: it's something one just has or shows. When it really matters, what we need is care. Mothers and fathers who are worth spit do not "have compassion" for their children. Family members do not "show compassion" to one another. The word is care. Care is something you do, or a tangible good you provide. Compassion is just something for show -- a tear in the eye or a quiver of the chin will do just fine for compassion. But, unless you're a sociopath running a con, you care for a loved one, you provide care to a fellow human being in need, you don't worry about showing them compassion.

More to the point, if you’re an elected official of a democracy your job is to use the power given you by the people to serve their interests, to pursue justice, to empower the powerless, to use the leverage of government power to win comfort and dignity for those who cannot win it for themselves.

Skip the compassion, go directly to democracy.

Lost in thought

2005-09-10T07:52:00.000-05:00

Iron straps of memory bind me now to the ferrous wheeling place I stood when first I beheld the future that awaited my futile attempts to resist its relentless pull toward an unknowing unseeing blank void of sodden folds of winding sheets impenetrable to the razorine shards of hot sulfurous light heliographing ambiguous messages furiously off the glazed and glistening surfaces of a dawn too fractured to bear the weight of further hermeneutic efforts to decode the meaning of texts overburdened by tropes inherited from dying cultures grown cold and moldy in the vapid context of social metastasis rebounding rapidly from remission amid the detritus of dreams careening madly toward ecstatic embrace and fulfillment of desperate desires inflated ballooning straining to rupture and release tensions carried high in the back yet low enough to know better than the last generation’s hopeless dance of hanging sentences of death do us part fantasies promulgated through the indifference of a lost people searching endlessly for the exit from which no human intention could emerge without scathing raging fury aimed at any and all who might dare to dare. As I recall, I walked home alone.

Leaving Tulsa

2005-09-09T09:31:00.000-05:00

I'm leaving Tulsa today to return to my home. What more does one need to say?

New Orleans: Beaten by Katrina, Mishandled by Bush, Killed by Ideology

2005-09-03T12:57:00.000-05:00

As the people of New Orleans watch their world revert to the conditions of barbarism while promises of such trappings of civil order as food, medicine, shelter, basic public provision, and basic human security are made and routinely broken, what we are seeing is less the incompetence of specific public officials, and more the final triumph of the discourse of privatism. While the drooling incompetence of the Bush “administration” is tragi-laughably on display, it is the now regnant Bush-Cheney-Reagan ideology that is killing people as they wait in vain for the agencies and stewards of modern government and public responsibility to arrive at last and perform their basic duties. The cavalry may be on its way, but unfortunately the cavalry no longer knows how to ride its horses or even what its basic functions are. The sheriff may ride in but can’t seem to do anything better than protect the property of businesses (most of which have been washed away with the rest of the antediluvian assumptions – but, oh well, we’ll just keep going through the same hollow motions of the same dead dance…), label struggling survivors “looters” and point guns at them as they try to drag sodden disposable diapers and canned goods out of the wreckage of doomed supermarkets. Remember, in the new conception, government power exists and may be legitimately exercised only to protect property rights of owners from the capering mobs of terrorists, extremists, populists, and lazy riffraff. In the new world order, to ask a public servant acting during a time of crisis (now known inanely as a “first-responder”), whose only known role is to protect stuff already privately possessed, to affirmatively care for human beings and provide for their human needs is as foolish as asking a pig to dance.

Oh, yes, everyone makes the right concessionary noises about meeting human needs, providing human service, and restoring public confidence, but pigs too can be dressed in tutus and trained to dance the Nutcracker on command. Watch the head of FEMA clumsily struggle to blame the media for “sensationalizing” the suffering of people who’ve been out of food and medicine and water for days on end, watch the president say words of concern that do not match his odd look of annoyance (at the bother of being forced to cut short his vacation?). The fact is, these folks really don’t understand what’s gone wrong, why things are falling apart. Why in the world is this happening, they wonder, why is everything falling apart just when we’ve finally completed all the hard work of pruning to the very verges the government that Ronald Reagan assured us was the problem at the heart of every public trouble? Why, they wonder, is everyone so angry at us when we’ve finally succeeded in convincing all the important thinkers and opinion leaders that what we need is an ownership society that relies on private efforts, private successes, private agency, and personal responsibility to meet individual or aggregated private needs? Why do they keep asking unintelligible (but vaguely embarrassing) questions about lapses of pubic responsibility and the incompetence of public efforts?

The chaos, panic, suffering, and humiliation of the poor, the fragile, and the marginalized we witness this week is the always-obvious and inevitable outcome of abandoning an ideology of public interest, public welfare, and shared responsibility. The corporate media struggles mightily but in futility to find any convincing stories of private provision; it’s not that there are not heroic stories of such acts of person-to-person kindness and basic human compassion carried out in the zone of private engagement, it’s just that it is painfully, achingly, glaringly apparent that the capacity of these private agents is vanishingly small compared to the scale of public human need. We see now, moment by moment, in sharp definition the irreplaceable value of public mobilization. And perhaps we faintly recall how, when they were -- once upon a time -- empowered and held accountable to carry out the people’s work, public agencies, public officials, and public servants using public spending, public utilities, and public programs, did, in fact, manifest actual public compassion. Can we recall now that public works can be the best manifestation of public values like kindness, care, and morality?

Can we now see that for a large, modern, plural, and populous people and nation it is by far wiser to put our collective reliance on law-and-democracy-based institutions rather than faith-based organizations and private corporations? The loss of public competence is the self-fulfilling prophecy of those who’ve barked at the moon for three decades and more in their fevered delirium of conservative ideology. In their ceaseless baying, drowning out rational discourse, they’ve succeeded in shaking our shared confidence in the capacity of public institutions, the potential competency of public agents and stewards to safeguard the public interest, protect the public weal, and provide for public needs. Their self-revealing ideology of self-interest and the alleged fallacy of altruism (tarted-up in the drag of pseudo-theories and shiny slogans having to do with nonsensical toy ideas like “tragedies of the commons” and “prisoner’s dilemma”, and blah and woof), broadcast night and day by a corporate lackey media, have so clouded the public mind that we can barely manage to think clear thoughts about public responsibility and collective action any longer. Thus benighted, our path back to sanity and a wholesome, hopeful, and human understanding of the public basis and nature of genuine democracy is only dimly perceptible, glimpsed fleetingly now in the flame of shared anger and frustration we feel at the images and realities coming to light in New Orleans.

Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 in the middle of, and in reaction to, a breakdown of our public competence. Our economy staggered under the combined bloat of crippling debt and deficit and the weight of rocketing gas prices, our national interest wandered about blindly , lost somewhere in the sands of middle-eastern hatred and reaction to American policy gone awry, and our sense of having failed ourselves and our shared history of the struggle for democracy. Government would not be the solution, Ronald Reagan scolded those of us who might be tempted to force it to reform and recommit to progress and justice; government, he sneered, was the problem. Isn’t thirty-five years of intimidated deference to this tired, cramped, and paranoia-fueled ideology enough? Isn’t it time to wake up and see who is empowered when government is turned to the protection of wealth already achieved, who is impoverished when public institutions are converted to private centers of profit, who is served when public service is turned over to the likes of Charles Colson and Pat Robertson, who is helped and who is harmed by an ideology of ownership and privatism as the basis of social life? Who is lifted up, who is left behind? What is cherished, who is protected, and who is neglected? Who is welcomed as a neighbor and who dismissed as a refugee, a vagrant, a beggar, a ravening terrorist, a clinging dependent? Who wins and who loses in the world according to Bush? The answers flicker now before us, the code becoming clarified. Just watch the images streaming out of the ravaged coastal South.