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<

Brilliant Song! Great Video!

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

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

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

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

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!

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