Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

BACK TO THE ROOT FINDS NEW LOCATION!

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?

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.

¹ Indeed, 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'



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

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

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…



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

Turning Left on the Road Ahead

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

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?

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

>CLICK HERE<