5/7/11 ...

Writing is both a tonic and hard work. Writing for the internet is harder yet. For one thing, I have chosen in my eight years online to forego the pleasures of providing for responders and cranks and catcalls and, at the same time to be fair, the occasional nudge toward some point that still eludes me. Writing into a vacuum is, therefore, less of a hassle, but less invigorating and less dynamic than engaging in debate over my point of view on things.

Last week I decided that unless you could demonstrate to me that I have a serious audience in sufficient numbers to justify the trouble I have been going to, then I would simply stop this crazy hobby of mine. I asked that you subscribe, one to get a handle on the total number of you that think it is worth your while to pay attention to my point of view on politics, culture, economy, and world affairs. The response was so far from gratifying that I seriously thought of just stopping cold turkey, saving myself countless hours of preparation and writing time, and about $125 a year for the website.

I have decided instead to call this a break, a sabbatical, because I know myself well enough that I will "need" to write to satisfy my own inner devils (and occasional angel).

You will not know when I return, because you did not subscribe. If you subscribe between now and whenever I decide to write on several-times-a-week basis, I will acknowledge your subscription, and I will let you know if and when I write again.

I will probably continue to write occasionally at The American Liberalism Project and may actually rejoin the folks at OpEdNews. I will not be notifying you subscribers about those activities. Sorry. I will probably make some noise at Twitter about what I think may be a better essay. I am "JimBrett" on Twitter.

Finally, I need to say once again that "things" are not good in our country. The socially responsible folks on the liberal and progressive side of things seem to be trapped by a stubborn decision to treat welfare fraud as an acceptable nuissance, inevitable and in the long run inconsequential. The conservatives are beating them to death with this. Five minutes in a local watering hole, listening, will tell you that a fundamental matter of fairness is being swept under the rug by progressives. The country also seems to be consumed by greed, a frantic (almost) feeling that the window of opportunity for making one's move is closing. We used to have an optimism that if you worked you would be rewarded, but I think it has succumbed to a lethargy which will eventually kill us off.

Best to you and yours.

JB

5/4/11

The Assad family rules Syria. Syria is, like most of the middle eastern countries a pastiche of various ethnicities and religious sects, dominated by Sunni Muslims, but ruled by Shiites. Syria has been the haven for literally ndreds of thousands of Iraqis who fled their own country over the past eight years. Syria abutts Turkey on the north, Iraq on the east, and Lebanon and Jordon and the Golan Heights now occupied by Israel on the south. Syria very well may be the keystone state in the region from the point of view of centrality, although Israel itself may claim that role politically, the proverbial burr under the Arab saddle.

It is widely assumed that the Shiite Assads are colluding with the Shiite Iranians to keep the Palestinian problem festering. Moreover, it assumed and probably documented that the arms arriving in Gaza and the Palestinian territories originate in or are transshipped through Syria. So, it is quite easy to understand that Israel and the United States have, on the face of it, no great love or respect for Syria, and quite the opposite. Funds for Fatah, Hamas and for Hezbollah come from Syria, presumed to have been "laundered" there from Iran. It is reported today by CNN that Fatah and Hamas have reached an accord that promises to put Israel into an unpleasant bargaining position, with Egypt now clearly leaning out of its former Mubarak-induced neutrality toward a unified stance on the key issues of Palestine.

To put it mildly, the expected disruption of the status quo by the so-called Arab Spring movements, including that in Syria, is a cat well out of the bag. Given that, this article from the Washington Post, a paper that usually represents the interests of the American military-industrial complex and the AIPAC, suggesting regional stability is at stake, is all the more perplexing. The Post cannot really want to continue this multiply duplicitous dance with the Assads, knows that the game being played by Israel is all but foreclosed, and that an opportunity has been given to the U.S. to correct its foreign policy all across the Arab world, so why this article?

Newspapers like the Post and the Times are not just for their subscribers. The editors collude with government officials to "leak" and to actually leak facts and points of view for foreign consumption. Could this Syria article be such a piece of that kind of stagecraft, designed to head-fake Assad? We are never sure, and that is why this role of viewpoint provider is so difficult to pin down. It is unlike this newspaper to run from an arms sale or a "police action." In today's edition the editors of the Post all but call for the assassination of Gaddafi in Libya, which may also be stagecraft, but clearly will find resonance across the planet. I think that the Post article is meant to be the weakest possible concession to the vivid fact that removal of Assad will cause some upheaval and destabilize the region for a while. But, consider the possibilities: defunding and no longer arming the three thorns in Israel's side would be a good outcome, if some other force moved Israel to understand the pivotal situation for what it is.

JB

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5/2/11

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JB

5/2/11

In posing a question about what the so-called birthers stand for the question of Constitutional precision is really not the point. The last person to be questioned so loudly about his birth credentials in the context of the presidency was Alexander Hamilton, born in England, and declared ineligible, although there were many who wanted that bright man to have a chance. The interrogation of Barack Hussein Obama, whose birth occurred in the State of Hawai'i in 1961, about the possibility that he might have been born in Kenya with a Muslim and Kenyan father and a formerly American mother, for whom there is no evidence that she had foresaken her U.S. citizenship, is a pile of speculation designed to erode and impeach the character of the president, rather than any question about provisions of the Consitution. The speculation is so wild and unsupported by facts that the adherents of birtherism must be in fact attempting something entirely different from their overt message. What, is the question, for why would citizens wish to weaken the foundations of the presidency on a spurious matter of character? The answer is that they found an issue that resonates with much more sinister and appallingly vicious race prejudice.

It is clear that Donald Trump understands the core issue in this matter and has deliberately used the contrived issue to get himself some attention in the press, as well as to demonstrate to the center of this band of birthers that he has both the "political courage" and "redneck moxie" to pursue any issue they like from the campaign podium. It is so transparent that one wonders how many of the birthers are actually fooled by it. And, having said that, it probably does not matter, for the birther credo is that they cannot tolerate Barack Hussein Obama under any conditions, so any form of calumny, libel, or deprecation is okay with them. The more the merrier!

It may well be that President Obama decided to produce the long form of his Hawai'ian birth certificate just because Donald Trump was the one demanding it. If it were, it is a wily chess move to give Trump "what he wants" to improve his visibility and thus show the entire nation what a literally incredible jackass the man really is ... as if most of us had not reached that conclusion years and years ago. If so, I think it will work, for in the Punch and Judy world of Donald Trump the subtext of power lusting becomes the story and Trump is revealed as nothing more nor less than the egomaniac he is. And good luck GOP dealing with the fall-out from this one!

But, there is, as I have said, a more sinister element to the birther situation, one that goes back into our past and wallows in the humiliation of the defeated Confederacy, the derrogation of white people into economic if not social parity with newly freed (and soon subverted) slaves. In today's Boston Globe there is an essay by James Carroll that brilliantly explains the roots of birtherism, and the roots are not a benign misprision of a fearful and dispossessed lower stratum of our society. It is root and branch of the cultural anti-semitism and anti-black fervor that has dominated the subconscious of western civilization since well before the events of 1492 on the Iberian peninsula. It goes back to Christian foundations built on racial hatred, cultured in honeyed terms, but nevertheless propagated in the same breath as the Faith itself.

The tribal impulse in humanity is very strong. We like to believe we can predict with some degree of accuracy and, more importantly, safety what our fellow man might do. It is part of the unspoken social compact that everyone respects at least a few common points of view about that compact. But, we are easily led to and of our own volition doubt the motives and goals of people from other cultures. We cannot predict them and so we fear for our safety among them. The birthers are just the most recent and distasteful group to succumb to this atavism. The birthers are not to be ignored or dismissed as cranks, however. They are fully capable of subscribing to more fiercesome doctrines than birtherism, all on the same subconscious, preconscious, and deliberate basis.

5/1/11

Today is May Day, the First of May, the day the communist parties around the world used to celebrate their imminent victory over the cruel forces of capitalism, which were, of course, fated anyway for inevitable destruction. For a generation born since the crumbling demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991 or any group of "China Watchers" aghast at the wanton destruction and upheaval of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolutions of Mao Tse-tung (now Mao Zedong after the revolution in transliteration) May Day is virtually unknown and, accordingly, widely unheralded. But if you were sitting in class in 1975 or even the spring of 1990, and you were asked to put $100 down on the country you thought would by 2011 be the stronger by virtually every measure, you proboulde not chosen China. You would have lost the $100, which would be worth about $72 or less.

Russia and China were both communist countries, and now neither is. Russia is a kleptocratic morass of corruption and self-loathing. It is the onion peeled back two or three layers to reveal that Russians are what you see from the outside, seemingly incapable of democratic values, strongly antipathetic to social stratification despite the evidence to the contrary in their neighborhoods. They are green with envy of neighbors, nations, and the world, complaining in privacy that no one gets ahead in Russia without cheating. Russias historical experience has been one in which democratic values were never inculcated, but rather despised as weak and frivolous. The iconic modern Russian is a drunk male or a very pretty, lusty, and deceptive female. The population is declining in Russia proper, even with in-migration of people from the former Union Republics in the south. To put it in tabloid terms, Russia is headed nowhere.

China is huge and in terms of population ungovernable in terms that most Americans understand. A while back the Chinese Communist Party determined that the lesson of the Soviet Union was that Marx's theory of socio-economic evolution stagewise from mercantilism, through industrialization, thru commercialism and consumer economies to a pre-communist and then fully communist utopia had to be realized stage by stage. The leaders set out to find China's natural capital—an easy pic ... the people themselves—and exploit it to realize the stages that must evolve. China is a political oligarchy running a state capitalist nation. Or, you could say that China is a committee dictatorship cynically wooing its population into submission by managing a consumerist economy. Certainly China understands that Chinese workers can produce a profit margin four or five times that of any capitalist country by playing the consumerist game through international trade. The Chinese population will probably level off at about 1.5 billions thanks (and no thanks) to very strict social programs designed to utterly change Chinese family-making traditions, a process that happens naturally, but perhaps too tardily to keep China's window of opportunity open long enough to accomplish a sustained take off as a modern economy. Mao did not understand the window, nor the means to pry it open. The current leadership group does. China is headed upward by virtually every measure we use in the U.S. to measure progress.

Two articles appeared today in national newspapers that are instructive and persuasive. Ann-Sylvaine Chassany and Jason Corcoran write in the Washington Post about the endless, self-defeating, corruption of modern Russia, which with its demographic problems and economic distortions cannot seem to rise above its past and show an honest face to investors so as to accomplish its transformation into a viable economy. As I read this article I could not help but think of the men and women I met in Russia whose aspirations are eroded from below by the endemic, paralytic envy complex and by the greed, distrust, and corruption of their leaders. There are good people in Russia, but they are weak and the system seems determined to keep them that way.

The China article is by New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, who writes about China and East Asia quite a bit. The surprise in his perspective is that he ignores the comparison of China with Russia, and instead stings us with a comparison to the United States, a comparison that suggests that Americans have been resting on their "laurels" for much too long.

I personally think, without proof, but with some experience of life in general and the politics of Russian and China particularly, that the Chinese Communist Party will evolve into a socialist organization no more ideologically toxic than the sort of socialism you saw in Sweden years ago. The prospects for democracy are dim, though, and if I am right at the national level a long way away. As for Russia, so much depends on Vladimir Putin and his ego that I cannot guess. I hope that he gets tired of being the biggest frog in a stagnant pond. If he does not, the pond will shrink, the oxygen in its waters will vanish and Russia will slowly become a place where almost anything can happen, mostly unpleasant for its inhabitants and the rest of the world as well.

JB

4/30/11

The title of this weekend essay is deliberately misleading. (That is not a statement equivalent to the bromide conundrum "This sentence is false.") No, my title is deliberately misleading because of two words: "Progressive" and "Process." The idea you have about "progressive" in the context of this website is that strain of political thought and action which holds that government can use its concentrated power to make things better for its citizens, such as by improving transportation by building roads or by setting a goal to reach the moon before the end of a decade or by sponsoring research into the causes and possible cures of cancer. Progressive in that sense is deliberately pitted against the idea that private enterprise is the source of all good developments in the country, including the infrastructure, such as private tollways, and private medical research institutes, and even privately owned space vehicle development. But, as I have already said, that is not the "progressive" I am interested in today (although you can and should keep the American political tradition of Progressivism in mind.)

The "progressive" I am thinking of is the more abstract idea that thoughts are linked to one another in a great chain of "thinking," and the metaphor chain is instructive in the sense that the thinking usually, but not always, follows proven and habituated pathways through the thickets of facts and emotions already learned by the brain. This is the bare bones of the thesis propounded recently by Dr. Stanley Fish in the New York Times with which I will take issue and optimistically declare there is a way of getting through to people stuck in their conservatively conditioned, pessimistic, and outrageously wrongheaded ideas about our country.

Here is the link to Dr. Fish's essay, which you should read now so what I have say about it makes some kind of sense.

Fish believes that we are caught up in a socially constructed matrix of possible thoughts that only remarkably freakish events can change, and then only by small bits and pieces. He writes

The obvious answer to this not entirely frivolous question is, “you can’t think of everything,” and that’s the right answer. Despite imperatives like “broaden your thinking” or “extend your horizons or “widen your sense of ‘us,’” thought is not an expandable muscle that can contain or comprehend an infinite number of things.

I wrote a doctoral dissertation on Russian intellectual history using terms like "metaphor, metonomy, synechdoche, and irony." My mentor on this took his lead from leading lights in the study of rhetoric and language and literature. None of us, including the professor of Psychology on my committee were truly well-versed in neuro-anatomy or neuro-physiology, but fortunately those disciplines were in their infancy and functional MRI scanning and some new ideas about brain function were just popping into view. We read this material avidly and the more we read the more the disparate fields of rhetoric and brain function physiology seemed to have a deep resemblance. To put it simply and to fulfill my promise to tell you how the term "process" is misleading in my essay's title, you should understand the word "process" a little bit better. Pro means "for" or "forward." The "cess" part is more complicated, but generally the root of it is the idea of "give or giving." In brain function the process is not a "procession" of links in a chain; it is a mass action wherein engrams—neural complexes of synapses which consciously evoke in our conscious brains "images," of things, sounds, smells, tastes, tactility, etc.—are strongly or weakly stimulated by their complex of associations through the physical medium of dendrites AND the "unloading" of synapses at sensitive frequencies nearby and in other parts and regions of the brain complex, all the while being continuously stimulated by consciously and unconconsciously received new outer stimuli. So, "process" is not a parade, it is a "fermenting" of connections between established and being-established engrams. The difference may seem precious to you, but it is as important as the notion of a spherical planet in a world that thinks of the land and sea as a scene ported around on the back of a huge turtle.

If you have the curiosity to click on the link (name and organization) to Silva Rhetoricae, which I strongly recommend for those of you who want to learn something new, yet very old, you will notice that the folks at BYU rhetorical studies have named this valuable website with a metaphor on "a forest." And that is especially important, given the homily about "not seeing the forest for the trees," which is exactly what Professor Fish has done.

Metaphor (broadly, including all its subcategories) is the method of our ability to move beyond the hardwired parts of our brains, evolved to provide us with instant responses in dangerous situations, and the soft-wired parts where we have become accustomed to thinking in sequences like "salt ... then pepper" or "GOP .. then business" or "Marilyn ... then Monroe," for three simple examples. Metaphor is the method by which we slip in a "ringer" term and let the brains of the audience consider the output on their own. When someone says the "cavernous mind of an Einstein" the imagery I get is of a "hitherto unsuspected vastness with stalactite ideas dripping droplets of inspiration onto growing stalagmites of new ideas." You might get a different image, but you will understand that "cavernous minds" are not just empty holes, but full of "micro-processes" and even "blind albino fish" of sterile notions, which swim in the imagination attracting attention, but proving almost nothing.

Fish ignored metaphor. He used it, as we have seen, and we can see how in using it he actually undercut his own thesis. Perhaps understanding that our daily verities can be overturned by metaphor will enable us to take control of our thinking processes in such a way as to make more likely that we will understand why 47% of Republicans think that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Does it go back to their beliefs about family and their rudimentary ideas about the genetics of personality? Do they understand that Obama's family in Kenya were Seventh Day Adventists and that his father converted to Islam in a fit of embarrassed rage? What do these facts and processes do to our own thinking?

Fish is dealing with trees, even groves sometimes. He misses the grandeur of the forest in so doing, but his lesson is one that should be learned. We all too easily fall into habits of mind that lead nowhere, provide few solutions, and answer no questions. But, Fish is wrong that we must wait for a tree to talk to us. We have!

JB

4/28/11

You just knew that in a matter of time we would find out that the Japanese earthquake and the tsunami were only the efficient and proximate causes of the catastrophic meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi power generations station northeast of Tokyo-Yokohama. One of the first signs that the Japanese were living in a dream world of imaginary safety and magical thinking was the news that the dangerous work was being done by the Japanese equivalent of braceros (crop-pickers), unskilled and uneducated laborers, who were deliberately put in harm's way so as to avoid putting educated Japanese there. You can see how having subscribed to this expediency, part of the burden of eternal vigilance was shaken off and the attitude, we see in a later news story, deteriorated further, exacerbated by unique, quaint, and utterly counter-productive Japanese traditions.

The news item, in case you missed it preparing for the royal wedding and rehearsing your newly acquired knowledge of the Windsor family tree and prospects, was in the New York Times a couple days ago, reporting the complicity of the Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency with the feckless, profit-hoarding upper management of the Toyko Electric Power Company. The news article is damning and reason enough to call for international action against the Japanese government for their part in this disaster. When you have major structural problems within a nuclear power plant your obligation to the planet as a whole is unescapable, yet these morons in Japan decided that their luck would hold. There is a very vivid lesson in all of this for France and the rest of us who have significant parts of our power grids dependent on nuclear reactors.

The most vivid case in point is the not in the least honorable machinations of the owners of Vermont Yankee nuclear power facility on the Connecticut River in southern Vermont. Apparently the owners believe that if they cannot bribe the locals, they can manage special treatment from the U.S. federal authorities charged with regulation of nuclear power. If there is any industry in the United States that needs vigilant and honest and thorough-going regulation, it is the nuclear power industry, but the Vermont Yankee posturing suggests that they know otherwise. Vermont Yankee melting down would destroy a huge swath of New England, rendering it uninhabitable for what amounts to forever.

No one wants clean energy more than we do. The problem is that fusion is at least a century away, by some accounts, or never happening by others. Fission of uranic elements to produce heat to make steam to turn electrical turbines is not clean. There are too many moving parts to trust it. And the least trustable parts are the human beings charged with maintenance and operation of the plants. As the Fukushima Daiichi story tells you, the natural course of social evolution surrounding nuclear power is for management to cut its losses, improve its profits, and maintain as close a relationship as possible with the regulators. That, friends, is a recipe for disaster. Not just a three news cycles disaster, but a virtually infinite catastrophe.

JB

4/26/11

David Brooks, of the New York Times op-ed staff, is a conservative, intelligent and vocal. He has been rooting around in psychology and worldview analysis for the past year or more, looking for the reasons we are in American what we have become. So have I, and so probably have you.

We know things are not right. We know that both political parties are at fault. We know that there are oxen to be gored and that some of them are ours. We bridle at the mention of social welfare as "the welfare state." But, we also know that the essential problem with welfare is not the redistribution of American resources, even the taking of resources from the very rich or the merely comfortable. We know it is the abuse of the system that has been decried as "systemic" that makes us angry. We know there is abuse in every human endeavor, criminality, lying, cheating, fraud, and with a system like social welfare, the words "entitlements" goes exactly in the wrong direction. People are not "entitled" to cheating and fraud!

Today in the Times David Brooks gives it up—a thoroughgoing Jackson Pollock portrait of American society and polity. We are, to use a different argot, "messed up." And, the worst part of it is that virtually no one seems to emerge to lead us off into a series of solutions. It is as if we were born this way and that the only cure is, well, you know, demise.

The truth of America is that there is immense hope out there. There is energy, and there is willingness to sacrifice, but we know there are those who will profit from the dislocations of sacrifice, and that seems like more of the same stuff to us. What we want ... and need ... is a Marshall Plan for ourselves, a big package that sets out certain goals based in empathy for those less fortunate, and vigilance about those who would offer their leadership.

I agree with Brooks that the situation is pregnant with disaster, and I struggle to bring myself to be optimistic about our chances. There is not a scintilla of evidence that politics as we now know it will work. So, folks, we have to do something else.

JB

4/24/11

Yes. Today is the day when we celebrate the onrush of spring, rejuvenation, birth, rebirth, growth, and all that the natural world has evolved to deal with a planet that because of a tilt in the axis of rotation has seasons. We call it "Easter" to bring forth the idea of eggs—vessels of future life—the potential for life, the intermediate form life takes on the way. It was not for nothing that the early Christians settled on this celebration to infuse the story with the metaphor of salvation by sacrifice.

Indeed, there is a sacrifice made in the burgeoning of spring for every living thing evolved to produce a next generation. It is a prolific sacrifice, seemingly a waste of seed that so few will grow from so many potential. This is not the sacrifice celebrated by the Christians, of course, but as we know from classical and modern rhetoric the human brain is naturally syncretic. We process huge amounts of incoming sensory information and boil it down to an ever evolving SitRep, an environmental scan, eventually a personal world view, something that could become a Weltanschauung. The brain learns by pondering metaphors and it does mix metaphors and harbor ineffable thoughts, all the more so as the ineffable produces wonderment and a sense of eternal mystery.

But back on Earth in a small corner of the Universe we have tribes, clans, ethnicities, and nations established from the output of the vernal explosions of life. As we understood primitive agriculture, we understood by a metaphor on husbandry the role of the keeper, the one who sows and reaps, and we understood the vagaries of that process, weather. Whether to plant or not was the eternal question. We needed to know whether the winter was over, and we needed to understand why some areas flood and others do not. We invented primitive astronomy and then, because we are at best unruly when not put to our necessary tasks, we need order. And astronomy morphed into something like an astrological religion, gradually incorporating stories of floods and lightning and signs and portents, and a priesthood arose to interpret to larger groups the best guesses of those who measured and timed and pleaded to Nature for good plantings and rich harvests. Life depended on it.

Today, many, many years later we have agribusiness and national governments that have moved beyond pure tribal leadership and the cults of priests. But, the reality of humankind is that we are not perfect. We are, in fact, bits and pieces of every stage of our development, shards of animism animate our children as they try to understand the rules about consequences. Tribal lore inhabits the imaginations of people who wonder what it would have been like to be born as a bird or a member of the neighboring tribe. Priests have a natural inclination to perpetuate their trade, and in the news today we see how utterly imperfect and atavistic—how chained to the relics of the past—they are.

Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times expresses her feelings about the imperfection of the priesthood and the absolute necessity to remain vigilant against notions they are otherwise.

Meanwhile the Associated Press reports that the current high priest of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI, has ventured out into the distant recesses of the past to stake the old claim for special creation of our species on this dim blue planet in a unremarkable corner of a universe that neither he nor I nor you can fully understand.

...[I]n his Easter Vigil homily Saturday, [the Pope said] it was wrong to think at some point "in some tiny corner of the cosmos there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it."

JB

4/23/11

"Politics is the art of the possible." This is the trite version and G-rated version. Notice that it does not say politics is a science. Only in universities do you get that shine. The erstwhile status of science comes from the more prosaic of political analyses using statistics, as if that were sufficient to be labeled a science. It is not. Framing hypotheses and finding evidence to support them might be half of the battle, too, but without predictability political analyses are still way short of science. The reason of course is that we human beings are right in the middle of the experiment and cannot help but create self-fulfilling prophesies and untold trouble.

The American political conservative movement these days is not a movement, but an attitude, actually a set of attitudes. On the more radical side are a bunch of people who have publicly thrown up their hands in disgust at the dishonesty and outright corruption that has become the hallmark of service in the United States Congress. Conservatives have often used the homily that democracy will fail when the poor decide to vote themselves a free lunch. Conservatives then noticed that it was not the poor that voted, but the rich for programs that served their interests, but they had to invent a story to cover that activity while still leaving open the keyhole to the activities that benefit the poor. These self-same "business conservatives" have a decidedly different view of Congressional corruption. They need it to get their programs into the process. So, yes, they buy the services of scores and scores of Senators and Representatives. In other words part of the conservative attitude is to preserve the corrupt status quo and part of it is to sharply curtail government to at least limit the corruption. It is a nightmare.

Yes, the philosophy of the conservatives is self-contradictory and naive and fundamentally dishonest. You can see this in the remarks of Jon Ward at Huffington Post where he clearly describes the ironies and contradictions that abound in the conservative program. Given a reality check the TeaParty faction of the Republican Party is seen to be so far off the mark as to be a sincere threat to the Corporatist backbone of the Party.

It would be easy to sit back and enjoy the show until the actors all self-destruct, but (as I noted at the beginning) politics is infested with people, and they are fully capable of misreading the situation and acting out of lemming-like principle. Robert Reich, also in HuffPo, describes the general situation for the liberals and how they can misread the political balance while being battered with highly charged rhetoric from all directions. Democratic politicians simply do not have the wherewithal to mount an educational program in their home districts to explain government to the angered TeaParty members in their constituencies (or the CoffeeParty members, for that matter), an educational programs that would enable them to see that Reich's analysis puts them in the center already—now—without having to give away the store needlessly.

Politics is a wonderfully absurd sport—exasperating and really far more important that anyone can imagine in the heat of the moment. But, we will survive it ... in most cases ... and live on to fight battles of will and even battles of principle from time to time.

JB

4/22/11

I like this recent essay about immoral and amoral corporate policy. It provides the basic rationale for refusing to put government into the hands of corporations ... as the Republicans want to do ... based on their notion that corporate leaders are better at organizational behavior than anyone else. It isn't true, and this essay shows why.

I like this recent article about the perfidiousness of political leaders whose imaginations are shorter than their attention spans. I like particularly the exposure the governors of Florida and New Jersey get in this piece. Both are blowhard demagogues and will be replaced soon enough so their states can begin to prosper. Lazy thinking and no-think politics are not exclusively Republican, but they seem to have twice or three-times as much as any other group.

This article about the sneaky work of Steve Jobs' Apple Corporation, deliberately tracking purchasers of their toys, is exactly the kind of thing that corporations do, regardless of the implications for personal freedom and privacy. Big Brother does not originate in government, but in corporate immorality ... and thankfully we caught this and will rub Steve's nose in it until he whimpers.

Paul Krugman's piece today on the perverse framing of the medical costs issue is good. Krugman is exasperated by the GOP metaphor of consumer, and rightly so. This is a rhetorical battle that will not be so much "won" as "countered continuously." It is not only a GOP foible that creates this metaphor; it is intrinsic to the whole MBA-ishness of social analysis.

This news item about Congress intervening in national diplomacy has me wondering whether the White House and State Department are "in on" this, "oblivious," or have been sucker-punched by the GOP. The law of the land is that the Executive runs diplomacy, but as we all know, Congress has the right and duty to investigate and accumulate knowledge about anything it may be called to legislate about. Still, this article has me watching for more clues.

Finally, this piece also from the New York Times about the shallow waters of Republican presidential hopefuls has me smiling about the underlying problem ... GOP ideology. You see, the GOP is a front organization that must pay at least convincing lip-service to the idea that they represent interest beyond those of corporations. They do this by framing issues ... like the medical costs issue ... in terms that please corporate leaders and resonate with other themes in the lives of normal Americans, but are false analogies and thin camouflage for the basic position that corporate power is good for American workers. Their philosophy of life is manifest in the hypocrisy of their erstwhile leaders, none of whom have the corporate/chamber of commerce framing engine on their side yet. Pathetic!

JB

4/20/11

George Lakoff is a linguistics professor at Berkeley. He is very much involved in the analysis of political rhetoric, by which I mean that he parses where others merely read or listen. His framing theory is well-known, and for reasons that defy explanation, continues to be ignored by the political left. Well, if not ignored, then not very well implemented. The reason may be that the left is a herd of cats doing their own things.

This suggests that framing is not the only matter involved. I would suggest that "democratic centralism" as practiced by the right is equally the key. This does not detract from Lakoff's insights, by the way, but it does suggest that the left must work extra hard to agree on frames and then use them. The GOP is very much more disciplined (and, therefore, hidebound) about it.

The other day George wrote a piece in Huffington Post that you will find interesting. He is pretty sure that the old Obama who won our votes in 2008 is back.

This article retraces some of the steps Professor Lakoff has taken to arrive at his theory and his conclusions, and is therefore a seminal piece of political analysis. Enjoy!

JB

4/18/11

You should read these two pieces from the New York Times. They need no introduction or interpretation or correction.

Paul Krugman: "Let's Not Be Civil"

NYT Editors: "The New Republican Landscape"

JB

4/18/11

You probably have heard something about "cloud computing" by now. As James Carroll writes this morning, "cloud computing" is a more undefined, more metaphoric concept than you might want, given the future shock tremors that rumble through your life with ever increasing frequency, creating that disconcerting sense of alienation and diminished illusion of control. But, what Carroll picks up in his description of the concentration of expertise and loss of local initiative and technical understanding as the cloud gathers, I think he misses in a fairytale of global intelligence.

There are huge efficiencies to be had in cloud computing. The effort companies have gone to to provide updates and patches and improvements to the software they produce will be concentrated in their own computers where they have a fairly good idea what the environment is. You, on the other hand, keep downloading registry cleaners, games, the occasional worm or virus, making life in Redmond, Washington a hellish nightmare trying to outguess your restless local innovations. But this is not just about software.

Amazon and Google and others have massive data bases on distributed computing systems, absorbing enormous amounts of electricity to run and to cool their computers. The cloud will attempt to link some of these systems together, more or less like producing an encyclopedia, and rather less like building a brain. Sorry Mr. Carroll. And, I think you can see the limits of this for the next five or ten years. There are fewer and fewer reasons to link raw information into systems where bottlenecks will form and diminish rather than improve access. Still, though there will be active links.

What James Carroll is supposing is that information "values" such as today's high temperature will become significant indices that affect other computer systems in the cloud. If PG&E's temperature index stays within certain limits then PG&E will make a certain amount of electricity and pump a certain amount of natural gas. They have been doing this sort of thing manually, semi-manually, and recently automatically by computer for decades. What has not been happening is that Google sites inside PG&E's bailiwick and service area have had to guess their energy consumption, but now can link to PG&E's data in the cloud. Consider other such automatics linkages, for example: traffic, markets, stocks, decision support systems of many kinds, and onward toward "Hal."

Moore's Law is frequently thrown into a discussion like this: the idea that computing power doubles every so often ... eighteen months or twelve, depending on the enthusiasm of the Law quoter. There is a tendency in computing to believe that Moore's Law applies to the whole universe of computing, but it does not. Look how long it has taken MS to develop a version of Windows ... I am speaking about Windows 7 ... that is reasonably adequate. I began with the first Windows and fought against it zealously. Windows 3.1 was a marvel, and captured the imaginations of millions, and tried their patience endlessly. Computing grows and evolves, but as the MicroSoft examples show, there are human roadblocks and accounting roadblocks and profit process roadblocks and exogenous factors that inhibit, delay, warp, and condition what happens in computing, even with upstarts like FaceBook emerging and putting generations into a thrall.

Finally, I should add that government is the place where we need to drain the b.s. out of the system and replace it with rational processes. But that will not happen if (and this is a 100% certainty) political leaders cannot see a political advantage to themselves and their party. Moreover, the question of security is important and the national security people already know how fragile and vulnerable interlinked systems can be. Where we need it most is where the cloud will gather last.

JB

4/17/11

Rogen Cohen is not my favorite columnist by any means, but he is intelligent (and more than slightly self-indulgently) middle-rightwing. This piece on Sarkozy is really about France, and it looks like we have a new France to befriend.

I use Maureen Dowd frequently, on the other hand. Her brand of Liberalism was built in from her family and circumstances and represents a strain of legitimate progressivism that we need to keep in mind. But today's meow-ish piece on the arrival of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" in your movie theaters Friday, has neither deterred me from or lured me to that film. I was going anyway to see if my youthful indiscretions have been cleansed.

William H. Freehling is new to me although he seems to be deeply committed to a fair analysis of the state I grew up in—Virginia. Freehling disects the Old Dominion in a way that explains very well my discomfort with the place and the reason I will not return, yet it is intended to be, I think, modestly exculpatory. The fact is that Virginia 85 years after the Revolution was no longer the Mother of Presidents, but the sanctuary of jackasses like Wise, whose rhetoric reminds me of the jackasses on Fox.

Yes, I know these are all from the New York Times! It is simply the best place for sampling the flavor of our times. Notwithstanding that, the annoyingly jingoist Washington Post has an editorial today that I think clearly refreshes the image of Barack Obama as a man with too little understanding of the necessity to act decisively and let the devil and the historians take the hindmost!

JB

4/16/11

Susan (of The American Liberalism Project now off for some r&r for a couple of days) and I have been flogging some ideas about how a progressive nation should behave for quite a few years now—not quite a decade yet, but soon. Both of us have misgivings about the goal and the process. Both of us know that at some point one affixes a stiff upper lip and soldiers onward ... but now with more ideals lying corpse-like in the amber waves of grain.

The truth is that "the world's great experiment" in popular democracy began poorly. It accepted human slavery as a fact of life in what has been trivialized as the "crack in our Liberty Bell." The burden of the failure of our founding statesmen to eradicate human slavery on principle from the beginning still weighs heavily on our narrow shoulders. We have an original sin and our failure to deal with what a wreck of ourselves it has caused simply perpetuates and exacerbates the effects. To put it mildly, we are a very sick society, and unfortunately not all of the disease comes from our horrible guilt and lack of guilt over slavery. Some of it comes from abroad. Some comes from the dark places in the human soul when left to its own devices in the isolation of the wilderness, be it Appalachia or The Bronx.

Susan and I know that we cannot dwell on these things or you will stop reading. We cannot dwell of these things because we are so poorly equipped to deal with them. We raise the issue, allude, echo, and even rant from time to time, but dragging the wretched truth around like a beggar's grocery cart just isn't enough. We know it, and you know it. You have the brains to see that goodness and empathy are in short supply, that people in their own misery are nearly deaf and blind to the raw facts and truth.

So, as Nicholas Chernyshevsky wrote in the 1860s in Tsarist Russia "What is to be Done?" (You historians know that Vladimir Lenin copied this aching title for his own purposes fifty years later.) But, what indeed, is to be done for a society that began so poorly and then horribly derailed less than a century along its path?

Phil Rockstroh doesn't have the answer either, but he does have some insight into the nature of our problem, and although his prose is florid sometimes, it is also designed to give some texture and relief to what all too often is a bland academic and formulaic response. Phil knows the American South and knows that the plantation class is just about annihilated by now, replaced quickly during Reconstruction and the 20th century by the predators of corporate America, whose ingenius morality was behind slavery in the first place and whose interests now differ only in the quaint legalisms that declare us free men and women, bound and gagged by what Phil rightly calls shame and our magical thinking he calls an addiction to optimism.

You should read Rockstroh as though everything he says is just part of the truth, but nevertheless true in spades! You should know that your own journey is both like his and not, but the likenesses are fundamental. Someone wrote recently, and I think I commented on it here that the chains that bind us to the perpetuation of a nation that exploits people as if they were trash, that enriches the rich beyond any sense of reason, that tranquilizes us like animals to be tagged and then monitored for our interesting habits, that squelches the brilliance of children in maddeningly ill-conceived schools ... these are chains of our own making, locked in place by ourselves in our delusions of grandeur, self-sufficiency, rugged individualism, and malignant pride.

Yes, reader, we have to soldier on. We have no choice, but we might look around from time to time so to see who is actually calling the shots. It is not Jesus, believe me, for that edifice is now so vile and corrupt as to be he apotheosis of sin in our age. It is not us. We read our way into apathy and weld our chains all the more tightly around ourselves ... and our families. It is a pathetic thing to observe and to see the frosting overtake the cake, the shallowness of our society, the empty calories that we now call "the good life."

JB

4/14/11

David Brooks, columnist in the New York Times has a talk at TED, for those of you who subscribe to TED's "ideas worth spreading." It is not a particularly world-shattering talk David gives, but it is a lot more humorous than I thought he was capable, having read years' worth of his op-ed pieces that try to define the political center-right in America. Brooks is a good student, well educated, not quite intellectual, but certainly the next best thing. He is a columnist, after all, and his forte is to see in the world things that would be of interest to others and things with a didactic purpose that he can mold further or try to deflect.

In the course of David Brooks's recent meanderings through the thickets of political theory he chanced upon the topic of metaphor, presented to him as the modus operandi of the typical human imagination. I am glad Brooks has brought this subject out into "the open," as it were, for it is a very important concern of philosophers of epistemology as well as practical people in Linguistics, like George Lakoff whose work on political issue frames is part of the total picture of American politics today.

Brooks makes the stunning error in his report about metaphor of putting a disparaging valence on the use of metaphor, stemming from its all too apparent poetic character. He has not gotten into the study far enough to understand that the differences between prose and poetry are minor, when it comes to understanding where they come from in the human brain and imagination. For instance, an honest study of semantics reveals that words, indeed the entire vocabulary of a language is a cemetery of dead metaphors, words the poetry of which has dissipated into nothingness leaving us with a sense of security that the name of the thing or process or quality is appropriate and real.

Brooks did not have the time or the inclination to go further into a study of Rhetoric to understand that metaphor is but one of several forms of linguistic analogizing, there being (depending on the theorist) at least four major types, categories that develop analogies in specific ways, such as metonymy which is the figure of speech in which a closely associated thing is substituted for the subject thing: "The British Crown spoke in no uncertain terms about the responsibility of every Englishman to his native land." Clearly the physical crown atop George's head did not speak, but suggesting so gives more authority to the utterance, as it conveys associations with history and power.

Synecdoche is another figure of speech that is one of the members of the metaphor family. Synecdoche substitutes a part for the whole or whole for the part, as in the familiar expression "a hundred head of cattle," of course not meaning detached heads, but the whole animal reduced to a crucial part.

Of the four figures of speech the one that is perhaps the most confusing is Irony. Irony depends on the negative associations of the substituted word or idea, and Irony can emerge from an otherwise straightforward metaphor, such as "my love, a rose" certainly beautiful, fragrant, but sometimes too thorny.

Brooks may later get into the intricacies of metaphoric analysis, and I wish him well in this, for the subject lies at the heart of human cognition. We extend our knowledge of the world by way of metaphors and explicit analogies, such as the idea of "planetary electrons" surrounding an atomic nucleus. We eventually lose the "surprise" of the metaphor and take for granted that electrons orbit the nucleus in fact. This idea extended our vision of physics immeasurably, and with quantum physics may have met its ironic association.

Read Brook's column of April 11th and enjoy the extension of your own imagination. You will never be the same, believe me!

JB

4/12/11

The word "audience" begins with the root "to hear." Think of words like audio, audition, audit, and so forth. The "-ence" ending gives us the idea of process and doing. So an audience is an opportunity to speak and be heard, as in the expression "The king granted the knight an audience to plight his troth for the king's youngest daughter." But, audience is also the group of people who witness (process with their wits) an event or content such as a theatrical play, a concert, or a website. You are my audience.

In a brief discussion with my mentor and friend in New York City yesterday about the current state of affairs in the Democratic Party and the probably outcomes for the 2012 election, I said something that caught me by surprise. While I am a Progressive Liberal person committed to the use of the the commons for things that the commons does better and more honestly and efficaciously than do private individuals or companies, I have to notice that my president, an erstwhile Progressive Liberal is not acting like one, and I wrote to my friend my guess as to the reason why.

The president sees his audience as the entire nation, and that is probably appropriate in one sense, and it is an inexorable truth in the plain common sense that when the president speaks the whole country listens, not just the Progressive Liberals like us. In fact, the president is trapped by his own position into a role that has him constantly herding all of us cats into a place where we are likely to make individual decisions that improve the president's chances for getting a program of Progressive Liberalism accomplished.

But right now the problem is that we have been knocked off our feet and are trying to regain an upright posture and politicians are anxious about which way we will face when we do finally regain our feet. President Obama has to act pragmatically in this situation, even at the risk of not addressing the concerns of a significant part of his audience—you and me. Politics is the art of the possible, and everyone disagrees about what is possible until they get the gavel and realize that they cannot just pound on the desk incessantly.

So, the question of audience, though, goes beyond the president and what he says and what we see him doing. You are my audience for the moment, and I have a responsibility that forks in two directions depending on my intentions when I write to you here or at The American Liberalism Project. It is important for me to keep in mind that my audience is not President Obama and that I am not offering him advice about what to do and when. Nor, really, am I writing to his coterie of advisors, or my representatives in Congress, or any power elite group. I am writing to you, and so my purpose is different from what it would otherwise have been. I need to ask you to think about your audiences.

The 2012 election promises to be a rowdy affair in some sectors. President Obama is running, and so many Democrats who think they might be good at the job are not running. The Republicans are having a helluva time finding a candidate that will not be laughed or booed off the stage. They are a riven party that has exploited the fears (see SueZ's article preceding this one) so stridently that many are turning down the volume and looking for better answers than destroying government. Obama well may pick Hillary as a running mate, especially if the Republicans seem likely to pick a woman candidate for the Vice Presidency, and maybe regardless of what they do.

The point is that those of us who speak our minds to audiences, whether is is family, friends, or larger groups, need to direct the energies of our audiences to positions and actions that assure that President Obama will have a Congress with which he can work. We need to reverse the Recession backlash emotions of 2010, and we can. We just need to focus on us, not on Washington. They will notice and listen. There is proof aplenty of that recently.

JB

4/10/11

With Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy reactors continuing to melt down and their spent fuel holding tanks catching fire periodically, all spewing harmful radiation into the planet's atmosphere and into the same Pacific Ocean we have in California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawai'i, not to omit mention of the many other nations like China, the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and seven of the eight Central American countries, the industrial, financial, and governmental gamblers of the United States of Corporatist America continue their schemes to proliferate these insanely dangerous power plants.

What is insane about them is that they are fatally dangerous not just to individuals, but to whole populations, perhaps even our species. That is the operational risk, the danger from producing electricity using the raw heat produced by a reactor to produce steam to make an electrical generator turn. The second risk is in the aftermath of using dangerous materials, the remaining radioactive "spent" nuclear fuel remains an outrageously deadly contaminant for at least ten THOUSAND years after use, so much for the euphemism "spent." Fifty years later we still have not found a place to put it for that time, roughly twice the age of the Egyptian and Chinese civilizations.

Disposing of nuclear waste is well beyond an annoying question in 2011; it is a moral disaster building inexorably every year. The editors of the Boston Globe (a newspaper owned by the New York Times) write to this unfolding disaster today, decrying the feckless political maneuvering and selling our safety short by President Obama and the long line back to Dwight Eisenhower. Read this editorial and tell yourself if they mention the "other" problems with the Yucca Mountain repository issue.

Ten thousand years is about half or one third of the time human beings have been civilized enough to commit their energies to agriculture. It is a long time! But it is not a geological long time. It is, however, a span during which tectonic activities will threaten virtually every place on the the planet, some more often than others, but you get the point. It only takes one large earthquake to ruin a nuclear waste repository and everything around it. Repositories are not "kitchen middens" that will rot away or that will cushion the fall of out-of-favor courtiers being defenestrated for insulting the king. Repositories are hell-holes for virtually evermore.

The other main thing about Yucca Mountain is that it is remote from places where people live, except the million plus people of Las Vegas. But, and the editors of the Globe miss this point, no one wants to be on the route from a nuclear energy plant to any "Yucca Mountain repository," particularly with terrorists possible at every milepost along the way. In fact, this problem is also the undoing of the "refabricating" solution alluded to in the editorial, for how do you get "refabricated" nuclear waste somewhere where it can be used?

The insanity is endless. And perhaps the worst of it was revealed in an article in the New York Times Sunday about the Japanese workers that are doing the heavy lifting at Fukushima Daiichi. This is perhaps one of the most morally repugnant things I have read since the election last year. The Japanese nuclear energy corporation is using casual, uneducated, work-starved men to do the dangerous work around the nuclear sites, knowing full well that the majority will develop ghastly and usually fatal cancers! In other words, nuclear power, when you strip away the aura of science and high tech shininess is just another exploitation of people who are apparently morally worthless to the mainstream civilization. You have to wonder what the decision-makers actually think of mainstream folks, too.

I wish there were a way to harness nuclear energy safely on our planet's surface to supply needed electricity. Fusion of hydrogen atoms for virtually limitless energy "too cheap to meter," is an illusion of words. No real progress is being made to contain the energy, and believe me without containment we are back in the same stew, only worse. No real progress is being made on "refabricating" and, in any case, the logic of that quickly runs afoul of the social impacts of dangerous materials cruising our highways and rail lines.

Obama needs to see that the strategy of putting off the decision to get out of nuclear energy production has to be changed. It is already too late in the sense we have megatons of the waste material to deal with. But, it is not too late to stop planning for more.

JB

4/8/11

One of the rewards that universities like Harvard and Yale get when they strive to produce leaders and captains of industry is a closer look. If we are going to accept the cachet of Yale, for today's instance, as the proving ground for the intellectuals who will be making the thousands of decisions needed to move a society and its government forward, then we are going to look closely at what goes on at Yale. Is the place actually producing smart people, or is it a petri dish for the sons and daughters of the existing elites across the country, no better able to straighten out the spoiled brats among them than State U might have been.

There is a lot going on today, and concentrating on Yale to the exclusion of the impending close-down of government because Republicans who control one half of the Legislature and no part of the Executive, believe themselves to have a mandate, or writing on the continuing saga of Japan, her earthquakes, and her melting nuclear reactors, or guessing about the Arab Spring the blossoms of which are no longer occluding a view of the deep societal problems, ... is a little cheeky of me, but my view has always been that you readers do the headlines pretty well on your own.

You might easily miss the point that the male undergraduates at Yale seem to have a misogynist problem with social maturity. Not that you would have missed this point years ago when Skull & Bones lurched into the headlines when one the other of the Bush presidents careened into focus. There seems to be an annual rising of sap in New Haven that the administration of Yale University cannot deal with effectively. It is not funny to chant "No Means Yes" to Yale women. It deliberately erodes what little confidence Yale women have in the progress of human rights in their immediate environment. It is not funny to rate the incoming female students by the number of drinks it would take the average male Yalie to accept a Yale woman as a sexual target. The whole scene at Yale seems to be so far off kilter that you have to wonder what in hell the administration might be trying to do ... besides emulating the Roman Catholic Church strategy of covering up.

Here is the solution. If they cannot bring themselves to eject the leaders of these puerile demonstrations of misogyny from their midst then the trustees should eject them. No dean of students or vice president for student affairs would long survive elsewhere with this kind of crap going on year after year. Why should the moron that is at Yale continue year after year. Off with his or her head!

And, moreover, let it be said now that Yale has a moral duty to make amends if we are to accept their graduates as leaders of American enterprise and government. Until they make a strong statement that they REALLY will not tolerate this stuff, Yale is off the list of acceptable institutions.

JB

4/7/11

One of the things that you learn first about the history of the Russian people, the Great Russians, the South Russians, the White Russians, and even the Kalmyks and other strains of Asian influence on these people is that it is all probably not quite true. You learn that much of the early history of the Kievan state comes from the Ancient or Primary Chronicle dating from about the end of the first millennium of the Common Era. This is an enormous revelation for neophyte historians, because rarely do you find such historiographical honesty at the beginning of an inquiry. You learn with the learning of Russian history to get confirmation from disparate sources. You learn that legend often bears the burden of victors' ego, while it tantalizes with information that you would otherwise have never suspected. Those ancient chronicles were written by the winners of history and gave short shrift to those peoples whose fates were not so kind.

There is an excellent article in the April 4th issue of New Yorker Magazine about the pandemic corruption of the Russian government, and indeed, Russian society as well. I could help but think that Russian have a very unstable and unreliable base for their beliefs about themselves, especially since their own history has been written to excuse all manner of travesty and misfortune, not excluding a quarter millennium under the "Tatar Yoke," a humiliation that still begs for rewriting by the survivors.

And so what is in stark relief in Russia is in America scarcely understood, that our histories are didactic, designed to tell a specific story about ourselves, a story designed to provide sustenance in hard times and courage and blinders to certain strayings from the path of ... well ... national righteousness.

Students of the academic discipline of history will recognize our contemporary civilizations as heavily influenced by tendentious estimates of our current history, none perhaps more strident than the TeaParty version of what we are, born of a rangy discontent with the role of government when government is attempting to solve social problems like human rights and economic justice, in other words, problems for which the underlying belief systems are poorly enunciated and sometimes still hotly contested.

In the United States now and since the Civil war a hundred and fifty years ago a theory of civilization arose based on an elastic and deliberate misreading of Darwin's description of "natural selection" as the principle process defining the human species. It concludes, despite announcements to the contrary in our founding documents and principles, that human beings are unequal in every respect, that the principle of equality before the law is irrational nonsense and must be tempered or counteracted by alternatives that recognize the greater good created by those whose inborn deficits are inconsequential, but whose willingness to achieve within the laws and principles of commercial enterprise provides both work and livelihood for many—today's corporate elites.

The underlying key or premise to this view of modern man is that the creation and interpretation of laws of commerce and enterprise must be left to the judgment of those same people who seek to achieve by them. Of course, these people are not only oblivious to the inherent conflict of interests they create in society, but are willfully negligent of the hardships they cause, as they dismiss the very consciousness of people who actually chose not or could not play this game of enterprise by narrow laws and specious legalisms.

People like the TeaParty feel the gnawing truth that government has gone over to the dark side of commerce simply to create jobs regardless of the total cost to environment and the human condition. They are rathful, but they seem not to realize that they are dealing with destructive forces that play to the hand of those who would substitute themselves for the will of the majority. In their self-righteous anger TeaParty misses the essential point of it all—unearthing motives and underlying assumptions.

And so you wonder how we get into pickles like this? How can we be so stupid and self-destructive? How can millions of Arabs allow themselves to be ruled by ruthless dictators and tribal chieftains/kings and the like. How can people give up their Enlightenment heritage of natural rights so easily to falseness and self-serving leaders, whose main interest is personal aggrandizement, riches, and survival of the elite?

It begins with ignorance, I think, a certain kind of mental laziness as a habit of mind. It is about the unwillingness or inability of ancient Russians to point out that the Kievan princes did not call the Varangians (Vikings) down from Scandanavia to assist in governing, but rather that the princes of Kiev were a feckless lot that succumbed to the more aggressive Varangians and were overtaken. The old Church chronicles gave the story enough to disbelieve that the story falls apart on its own, of course, but contemporary stories about national purposes do not drill down into the presumptions that guide the policies of Teaparty people. They "take the words at face value" without a thought to what agenda lies beneath.

And so, there is an instructive example of this deliberate ignorance in Thursday's New York Times by author Caroline Alexander, a short introduction to a bad habit of mind that seems to be all too prevalent in our times. It is a story about an an inscription to be placed in the 9/11 memorial at "ground zero" in New York City, a quotation from Virgil's The Aeneid, but so wildly out of context and so ignorant of its original meaning as to completely misrepresent the destruction of the World Trade Towers and three thousand people within them. Thanks to Ms. Alexander, we may have caught this error in the writing of our history. Perhaps the press will see the point and drill down a bit more often for underlying assumptions.

JB

4/4/11

Two essays by noted columnists arrived today, and rather than embroider an introduction, response, or retort, I thought you might just take the opportunity to read them without any coaching from me. Here they are:

The Truth, Still Inconvenient by Paul Krugman in the New York Times

The Roots of Anti-Muslim Bigotry by James Carroll in the Boston Globe

JB

4/3/11

Most Americans are too young to remember the movie "Elmer Gantry" starring Burt Lancaster and Jean Simmons. The movie probably could not be made today with the same message, the tolerance meter being red-lined well below what most of us understand as objective truth. But, Elmer lives on, you know. People like the self-certain-ness of the hardsell, rangy, charismatic, and if the message answers more of their earthly problems, then they almost brainwash themselves.

This is the point, though, brought into stark relief recently in a suburban Washington, D.C., Presbyterian church in Vienna, Virginia, not very far from where I was once an Episcopalian. It seems that the congregation entrusted its teenage girls to the lay leadership of an "Elmer" avatar. He was in business at this place among these girls for about five years, taking advantage of the basic fact that people, especially immature people or others with poorly or inadequately formed habits of mind are easy prey, particularly when you associate predatory behaviors with religious orthodoxy and zeal. This should tell us something, again, about the nature of organized religion.

The pederasts of the Roman Catholic Church are different from the man who preyed on Presbyterian teenage girls. The Catholic evil is clearly within the Church and systemic, as if one cohort of pederasts had recruited the next for lord knows how long. The Presbyterian experience in Vienna is not actually within the Church clergy, but clearly (from the Washington Post article today the pastor understands that his unit of the Church chose not to recognize what was happening and did precious little about it, preferring (like Cardinal Ratzinger—now Pope Benedict) to move on smartly and put it all behind them.

Church is where we take our human problems for an answer that does not seem forthcoming from secular sources. As I noted in my last essay, our human condition is replete with sufferings of many kinds, including socially-induced and systemic abuses, largely ignored by the fundamental Republican ethos and attributed by them to "bad choices" made by more or less inferior human beings. Church provides an orthodox answer by administering a palliative, a mythos carefully constructed to answer all questions with essentially the same answer, sufficient for many human beings, not so much for others. Church is a place where we are led to believe we can let down our guard, our natural mental defenses, our alertness to danger and misrepresentation.

It turns out that Church is a human enterprise where predators occasionally lurk and where they are given safe harbor to do their thing. But, moreover, it is a place of deception, for even casual understanding of the powers of man should tell you that no pastor, bishop, presbyter, or guru, has all the truth, or even any. It is a place, despite the over-dependence on the righteousness of orthodoxies, is really pragmatic and more like a M.A.S.H. unit than a hospital. Mistakes are made and people are maimed or die.

JB

4/1/11

Yes, April First, spring struggling through the impermafrost of another long winter. Here in Tucson the temps will hit mid-nineties already, soon to relapse, though, into balmy high seventies and early eighties. Golf weather, although we play year 'round here. And, nothing to do with Santa Claus today at all, except that I have a vision of an eight-year old tip-toeing through the month of December deliberately not listening to the talk around his peer group, not wanting to know.

There is something about homo sapiens that is not very sapient, not very wise, not very reflective, although out of self-image preservation, most of us retain a strong dose of the illusion of wisdom and ability to self-appraise. That "something" in us may stem from defects of workmanship in our physical bodies, mental deficiencies like dyslexia or ADHD syndromes. Or, it may stem from abuse or malnutrition in our infancy or youth. Or, it may come from disabilities acquired by accident, disease, or random misfortune. Taken all together the chances of being handicapped in some way are pretty good, and so we begin to think of ourselves as participating in the "human condition." We see that we are imperfect, but misjudge all too often where that "fate" of being human molds us and when we are just being uncritical and unwise.

In the politics of every civilization there is an open question about what do to about the negative side of our human condition. With respect to criminals—those who transgress society's rules for their own selfish reasons—civil authority takes the cautious way toward a solution, namely, incarcertion, separation from the general society, but sometimes extinguishment when the crime is egregious. With respect to disability societies tend to be blind. They turn away from the misfortune and, if the person shows signs of heroic effort to overcome disability, societies pride themselves (literally) on being of assistance, but it is one of those things that is not well managed and basically is part of the deliberate blindness we see in people and groups. The other negative side of humanity that gets short shrift is in work and labor.

Long ago we discovered that providing for ourselves and our families requires work. You just cannot sit around and expect the world to provide food, shelter, and sex. You have to go out and get it, build it, or pursue it. The history of the division of labor is abundant, but the consequences of the division are usually glossed over for the same reasons that others of our negatives are. We are averse to dealing with the negative differences among us, and moreover, we are extremely reticent to deal with the causes of negative differences.

Part of the problem is us. We just do not like the notion that Johnny cannot read and yet we know what the consequences will be. John will be consigned to work that is menial and low-paid, unless he becomes a rock star, which is literally a one in 10 million chance. We know that some people are better workers than others, and we know that many people are in the wrong kind of work for their native talents, and we know that leaders among workers are not necessarily good people, yet we turn a blind eye to the frictions, trouble, and perpetuation of invidious distinctions among workers of all kinds. We particularly turn a blind eye to the completely expectable excesses of those who choose themselves to be leaders.

Karl Marx wrote about political economy joining well known (from observation) notions about governance with equally well-known ideas about labor and synthesized a theory of human history from it. Marx's "labor theory of value" lies at the heart of his philosophy, but it is probably a mistake to think that Marx had solved the problem of human misery and malfeasance and bad government from that almost simplistic theory. It is a huge step forward, however, and most capitalists and socialists understand it in their bones.

Well, the rest of Marx is about discontent. Sigmund Freud was not the only person interested in Civilization and Its Discontents in the 19th century. People know deep down below their threshold for open eyes that "things" are amiss. They just do not know what to do about it, because they feel isolated and powerless. If anything the internet has done well, it is to make possible the spread of discontent by example. The ability to show others like you or even less well off in their own private discontents has been hugely powerful throughout the Mohammedan nations. (I have learned this week that there is a difference between Muslim and Mohammedan, that being the former is about militancy and the latter about Belief.)

The other problem about coming to Consciousness about one's place in the "class struggle" is the ego problem we have when evidence points to the fact that we are in a lesser category of humanity than we think we are .. or deserve. So it is all important that essays like that published in Common Dreams, Thursday, be read widely. "A Primer on Class Struggle" is exactly the sort of thinking that disabuses us of our private psychology of willful blindness.

Class Struggle may have been popularized by Karl Marx, but the concept ante-dates him by centuries. The history of social uprisings in "western civilization" goes back millennia. In African civilizations the organization has remained tribal, so that class distinctions are hidden by the trappings of patriarchy. In India and the Far East the situations are equally replete with insurrections and the long arduous struggle of menial labor against feckless leadership.

The Arab Spring of 2011 is a trumpet to all people, not just those trapped in tribalist dictatorships. The time has come for some peoples of our planet to assert the best notions of themselves to define what it will be like for their children. Will we continue to ignore the weak and oppress them for our personal benefit, or will we understand ourselves as imperfect, but well-meant citizens, fully capable of abstract thought about law, reason, and economy? I think we can rise up and change it all. It is a study in temperate outrage.

JB

3/30/11

Mankind's pursuit of energy to heat his dwellings, to feed his livestock and propel his drayage has denuded vast areas of the planet. We did not learn from our European ancestors what the real cost of fuel was in the big picture. The pressure that population put on energy resources moved us to coal and then to petroleum. And here we are again in a pickle.

The Dutch are famous for harnessing the wind for their mills and pumps and their experience is a lesson not very well learned either, although it is a bit more subtle. When you pump out the sea and reclaim land you extend your weal out beyond the capacity of normal means to protect it. When pumps fail floods ensue ... or as we now see, the reactors begin to melt down into a puddle of impossibly intractable radioactivity, which would be just fine if the China Syndrome actually removed the mess from the surface to the core of our planet. Technology has its own ecology, both physical and social, and it is often very, very difficult to see the big picture.

The Washington Post today ran a piece about the mythologies about gasoline prices that will be sure to upset many of us, since they remove more or less tangible causes of our current (but perennial) distress. The answer, of course, is to stop using gasoline so much ... or at all. It is poisoning our atmosphere. The denuding of Europe (and elsewhere) for its fuel timber will be a pale horror next to the climate change we are already beginning to experience.

As a thought experiment I have been toying with the notion that people who live within, say, 50 miles of where they were born tend to drive around more than people who leave the home territory and live elsewhere. There is, I am theorizing, a travel budget in the human psyche that must be appeased. But, if I am correct, then cruising the neighborhood or someone else's neighborhood might be drastically curtailed in times when cruising fuel is rapidly approaching $5 a gallon. Would this curtailment also have a ripple effect on the stability of our society? Sure.

My example is more than just slightly facetious. But, it is meant to deal with the human willingness to find simple answers to extremely complex situations, thus ignoring the possibility, if not the outright probability, of chaotic effects downstream. Today's gas prices will change the shape of automobiles and the mix of cars you will encounter on the roads, that is for sure. How long it will last is up to us .. unless we are actually devoid of freewill and programmed to wander around aimlessly squandering the riches of our planet.

JB

3/28/11

As the United States begins to recede into the background of the world intervention in the Libyan civil war, as Cheney's "war for oil and Saddam's scalp" recedes from the headlines and morphs into the on-going civil discord endemic to that ancient place, as the "war against harboring terrorists" continues without success or clear objectives in Afghanistan, as the TeaParty Republicans carry out their war against "the Beast", their notion of big government as the worst enemy of unfettered individual freedom ... except the military, which is the flywheel of the American economy, the everyday American citizen is becoming increasingly aware that the fundamental problems of our country are so deep-seated that almost nothing in the normal political cycle can be brought to bear to mend our national ways.

James Carroll, of the Boston Globe writes today an essay of almost unimaginable importance, a column about the very essence of the American way—the military solution to every problem foreign or domestic. Carroll's essay is balanced on a comparison of diplomatic versus brute strength military solutions, and he shows nicely that had we put as much effort into strong diplomacy we might have easily diverted some situations into peaceful evolutions.

I think Carroll mistakes the level of effort by the U.S. Department of State as inferior to the similar efforts of other nations. We put a corps of diplomats into the world at a level about the same, but much more richly endowed, than any other nation you can think of. Carroll's point, though, is that this sort of parity is ineffective, partly because the military solution is always available and we have invested so much in it, and partly because the level of diplomacy in inadequate to the tasks at hand.

When I was visiting Sydney, Australia years ago, I happened to be at the Consul General's home when he (the deputy Consul acting in the absence of the actual Consul General) was called out because some American movie star was threatening suicide at a downtown hotel. I mention this to give you an idea of the way diplomat's time is spent and to note that the organization of the Department of State is so archaic that the right tool for the job at hand is defined by a system that I would call ego-centric and patriarchal. State never gets things exactly right because most of what it deals with is human mistakes and disorderliness and obscure foreign politics. They just do not have the person or the brain power to deal with the historical situations on the ground. Carroll notes that the German recognition of Slovenian and Croatian independence set off a series of events that led to "ethnic cleansing" attempts by others of the Balkanized peoples of the region, the decaying invention we called Yugoslavia. Carroll thinks that if the U.S. State Department had had more and brighter people in Bonn or Berlin the Germans might have been persuaded to move more slowly.

Well, it is an hypothetical that we will never be able to prove one way or the other, but his point is well taken that in the hurly-burly of asserting ethnic identities in the region, military power came into its own quickly and surely, as if it were a natural human response ... and it is.

Carroll is not arguing elimination of our military, and neither am I. What he is arguing, though, is that the reflexive response to trouble is military, and that the vaingloriousness of this response obscures the failures of a weak diplomatic corps, or it draws the conclusion that State cannot manage any situation, so why bother!

There is a lot going on here. We could talk endlessly about the vigilantist streak in American culture or the rough and ready gun-toting ethos so ballyhooed as the Cold War thawed and then disappeared. We could talk about human nature in general, or about the sorry state of human civil evolution on this planet. But, we should talk about the integration of militarism into the general society and the economy, and that is what Iron Mountain is all about. The fact is that Carroll is spitting against the wind until our civilization finds a different kind of flywheel for our national economy(ies). It seems that from the time of the Pharaohs, Babylonians, the Hittites, Greeks and Romans, the progress of national civilizations has been toward militarism and then demise.

It is fairly clear that the U.S. is already musclebound and unable to assert itself successfully with its military. The simplest IED, a pipe, a cell phone, and some explosives will throw our military into a dither, meanwhile maiming both our military personnel and obliterating our national purpose. Carroll is right: the military is fundamentally ineffective as an instrument of national policy, and just marginally effective at persuading other nations and groups to behave ... even if we do not.

I was an officer in the U.S. Navy. I know the military to be what it is: an imperfect, but hugely expensive, organization of might against anyone who might transgress against our national policy, if we have one. The TeaParty in its zeal to reduce the footprint of national government in our lives, needs to understand that their efforts will come to naught, until they see the Department of Defense as the number One target of their aspirations. They have to learn this now!

JB

3/25/11

Every morning when I read the economic news, the ranting about fiscal austerity from the right and the mime of perplexity from the left, I wonder. I wonder if anyone has ever heard of the definition of insanity. You know the one: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. In fact I try to apply that same logic to my own work, and I end with a sad admiration for the likes of Paul Krugman who writes again and again about the irrationality and illogic of austerity programs.

While reading that column today I was struck with the notion that Dr. Krugman knows that he is repeating himself with little hope of a different result, but I noticed that he does what few other writers do. He recalls the recent past and demonstrates that if A then B, if C then D. He shows us historical examples, and still the politicians remain committed to their campaigns for fiscal austerity, when it never works, not here in the United States and not anywhere, except in homes across the nations where economics is a sliver of pie and where, importantly, families cannot mint their own money. In other words, I think, the appeal of austerity programs is based on an analogy with family budgeting which is comparing apples to celery.

But, the appeal of austerity programs to those who promote them is not about family finance or even about curing an ailing economy. It is about curtailing government down to the level where the strong can extort, bribe, and finagle special dispensations with the authority of law from a government that increasingly becomes beholding to special interests and special interest groups. In the same issue of the New York Times as Krugman's column was this absolutely exasperating revelation about the policy of General Electric Corporation regarding taxes ... or in other words, the wherewithall of the federal government. You should read this slowly and savor the feeling that GE has for our country.

You will note in the process of metabolizing this news that corporations no longer pay roughly a third of the federal income, but now less than a fifteenth, yet they complain that they are at a disadvantage competing in world markets. Well of course they are when you subtract outrageous salaries and bonuses to the the dudes who run these outfits.

And there is the rub. Corporations have separate identities from the real people who run them. GE was run by a dictator for years, a man who was admired throughout the corporate world as Neutron Jack, the guy who detonated without damaging the structure of things, but decimating the personnel. N.Jack was ruthless and in corporate terms successful. GE is now our largest corporation. I stumbled writing that sentence because GE does 60% of its business abroad and leaves the profits there, too.

It is just a matter of time before corporations generally will not pay taxes. Their ability to deceive Congress, to bribe Congressmen and Congresswomen, to lie about their intentions under the guise of corporate competitiveness, and then stick it to the taxpaying human citizens of the country will only increase. America (and much of Europe and Japan) are corporatist states, with the veneer of citizen democracy wearing extremely thin.

JB

3/23/11

We have been there before. Things are not much improved over the two hundred years since we visited the Barbary Coast. Thomas Friedman in the New York Times today, thinks he has if not the answer, then the more accurate description of things in Libya and other countries now experiencing their own outrage at being lost in one of the slow eddies of civilization without progress. Friedman is probably mostly right about the "Tribes with Flags" and probably should be taken as partly right, since none of these countries is completely one way or the other. None completely "tribal" and none completely modern.

I remarked to my good friend in NYC who pointed this article out to me (since I do not often read Friedman's column in my daily foraging for "newstrition,") that Friedman does not use the word "Islam" in his article, not even once. I double checked this just now to make sure. The concept "Islam" may be there, but Friedman does not attribute to the religion any causal relationship to the "division" between these two types of countries. I think this is a mistake. I think that Islam is essentially a patriarchal religion and that it is easily used to bolster a patriarchal situation such as you might find in tribal organizations. We know that Turkey has been fairly clear on this issue from the moment Mustafa Kemal Ataturk burst on the scene in the post-WWI era.

I think the big lesson for Americans from Friedman's article is that we need to be a lot clearer about our own assumptions, but not afraid to act on the behalf of human beings subjugated by tyrants like Hosni Mubarak or Muammar Qaddhafi.

This brings up a second thought, expressed by Maureen Dowd on the same page of the Times as Friedman's article. Maureen is transfixed in her own special way by the role of women in our government in the development of the policy that finally got us onto the right side of this situation, albeit late and unconscionably disorganized. Maureen exaggerates the point to make it, and I agree that the men sure looked like sissies in this situation, clearly multi-tasking more ideas than their brains could actually deal with, and ending up in a political paralysis that "for safety sake" may have cost us the good-will and moral position that this whole event is about.

Notwithstanding the moral imperative that propelled me and the ladies toward intervention, there remains the question of why Barack Obama did not see the route on this when the Tunisians of Friedman's "real country" category rose up and threw off their old chains? The situation developed sufficiently slowly that any good national security team should have been all over it and with options prepared.

I need to suggest that options probably were prepared, but that at the point where the positive and negative institutional valences of the Intelligence, State, and Defense were most apparent, the White House and the President sitting there did not metabolize the intelligence or the options into broad-scale national policy alternatives and present them to Congress, as Senators Webb and Lugar have rightly pointed out. The outcome of asking Congress would have put the American people into the catbird seat, and I am confident that the moral issue and the Real Politik of the Libyan situation would have been the backbone of our new foreign policy. But it was not. Obama has expressed his moral indignation, but he has not controlled the press on this point, and the reports of his hestitancy are at least as vivid as his "outrage."

I criticized President Obama a few days ago about this, and I feel just a strongly today that he is dangerously inept. Whether the problem is his own unwillingness to commit to a course of action or that his close advisors are buffaloed by the welter of information that comes their ways is still something of a mystery to me. In the end, though, he is responsible for taking his own counsel or theirs.

JB

3/21/11

Once upon a time I held a very high security clearance. It was when I was in the Navy and billeted as Operations Officer on a large ship in the Vietnam combat zone. That was a long time ago, of course, and things have changed somewhat. Some things never change, and one of the verities of the U.S. classification system is that everyone in the chain of command has their ego out there when it comes to classified materiel. They get an ego boost for every level of secrecy they place on a document. Sometimes it is obvious that an enemy would gain an advantage if he knew what was in the document. Sometimes it is not so obvious. For instance, is it Secret classification for a naval message between admirals decided when they are going to meet to play golf? Clearly they think their hides are at stake and do not want to let everyone know that they are playing games while the rest of world works.

I cannot say that in my position I did much about the overclassification of Naval messages and Naval documents. I was brought up short once when a sailor told me he did not know what his duty station in case of collision was, and I discovered that he did not have the clearance to read the document that contained this information. And, I did change that malfunction of our system, but I had to extract the information and republish it, because someone said that the rest of the document contained information that could be useful to an enemy.

Clearly knowledge that an Admiral has horrible and painful hemorrhoids could be useful, but doesn't the lack of information about someone also point to something ... his importance, perhaps?

Well, as you know President Obama has issued an order to begin to clean up the secrecy side of our federal government. And guess what? The worst abusers are ignoring the order!" Treason? You know it is unlawful to simply ignore an order from competent authority, so what is going on?

The article by Steven Aftergood does not say so, but I think you will find that the secrecy system is so convoluted now that the people below those nominally in charge do not have permission to talk to the other people like themselves to begin the conversation to fix this mess! Eventually, you know, this becomes a real problem for democracy. You just cannot have a system that allows golf games to be classified Secret.

JB

3/19/11

I am sick of this President and his feckless indecision. While Muammar Qadaffi murders his own people this shade of a president sits and mulls over the politics of intervention. Are you nuts! The Libyan people have cried for help! If they were drowning would you ask the Germans if they wanted to get wet? What! You would?! Don't you have a thought of your own? Is Hillary Clinton president or you? Your leadership is wanting, Barack! You are pathetic!

There comes a time in the course of human events when a sea of troubles boils and the people boil. There is nothing pretty about it. You have a megalomanic monster in a place of power, a kleptocrat, a dictator, a person whose wilingness to do harm frightens most men and women and they shy away. This is not a person who was elected. This is a person without human feelings whose will to power exceeds by a thousandfold any remote chance of his understanding the meaning of his actions. He is human only in shape. He is a pathological criminal, and he must be removed ... ... obliterated!

You, Barack Obama, are unworthy of your office. Yes, the decision to intervene is difficult and there are points on either side about the consequences of American action against Qadaffi and his mercenary troops whose loyalty is to their blood money, and who will run at the site of American arms plowing through their evil ranks. Yes, Barack Obama, you failed this test, like so many before. You had months to figure this out before the Libyans had built up their courage. You failed to direct and preside.

It doesn't matter that Angela Merkel has a smart answer for the question. The question is a moral one, not a German one! The question is whether when asked for help by a vox populi, we will. You did not, and now we have to face Gadhafi over the graves of his people. You sicken me, Obama! You are useless and you too will be replaced!

JB

3/16/11

Writing about the multi-layered and indescribably horrible disasters in Japan is what I was going to do, until I read Maureen Dowd's column today in the New York Times. Maureen has written about the Roman Catholic clergy and their unbelievable crimes against humanity before, and so have I. It is one of those rocks under which there seems to be endless stories of depravity and wanton disregard for human beings, a decisive indictment of that Church and everything that distinguishes it from the rest of our world's religions.

Today Maureen concentrates on the Philadelphia story, a thread in this skein of pederasty and lies and institutional rot that has not gotten the attention it needs because of the revolutions in north Africa and the Arabian peninsula and more importantly the devastation and continuing horror in Japan. But, in fact, the Roman Catholic clergy problem is the longest running disaster of them all, an assault on the defenseless young here and abroad that has been going on for no one knows how long, but certainly centuries, perhaps millennia!

The most atrocious part of the Roman Catholic Church story is the deliberate suppression of the crimes against children AS IF the victims were of little value in the ethos of the Church, AS IF the survival of this wretched congeries of pederasts outweighed the justice and truth that the victims deserved. I have written it before and I will repeat it now: The Roman Catholic Church has relinquished all moral authority on this planet. They are beyond the Pale and deserving of the Hell on Earth they have created. If only we could deal with these priests and Papal enablers like they dealt with the young. There would be justice!

JB

3/14/11

If you want to begin to understand the destruction that the tsunami wreaked, look at these before and after satellite pictures from the New York Times. Be sure to use the blue slider in the middle of the photographs to see what has been lost.

The latest word on nuclear power plants is very dire, with three reactors in the process of melting down their fuel rods. Pay particular attention to the reports on these reactors, because the Japanese and the U.S. governments will begin attempts to avert panic. This situation is out of control and ... well ... devil take the hindmost. Here is how the panic-stemming reportage begins:

So far, Japanese officials have said the melting of the nuclear cores in the two plants is assumed to be “partial,” and the amount of radioactivity measured outside the plants, though twice the level Japan considers safe, has been relatively modest. [WTF does "modest" mean?]

But Pentagon officials reported Sunday that helicopters flying 60 miles from the plant picked up small amounts of radioactive particulates — still being analyzed, but presumed to include cesium-137 and iodine-121 — suggesting widening environmental contamination.

JB

3/13/11

If you were around in 1944 you might remember the sales pitch of the Ford Motor Company: "There's a Ford in Your Future!" Personal automobiles were not produced for three years during WWII. Doubtless there were cars produced for official purposes, of course. So, Ford thought it would be good to stimulate the market that was looming over the horizon of the war and that was their slogan. Today, of course, Ford is struggling along and seems to have been better managed and engineered than its old domestic competitors, which may not be saying much.

But there is another Ford word in the lexicon, the thirty-eighth president of the United States, the guy who took over when Richard M. Nixon resigned in disgrace, the Ford guy who pardoned Nixon before he was formally charged with anything, the Ford guy who is being remembered by the Department of Defense with a new aircraft carrier class. Yes, the Ford class of super-carriers, and man-oh-man are they expensive!

The Ford-Class aircraft carrier is not the only boondoggle in progress over at the Pentagon. John Arquilla and a design firm named Fogelson-Lubliner have put together an interesting map of the military-industrial complex, or at least a peek into the maw of that voracious beast that pulls the modern American economy along its destructive path. You have to wonder what kind of mentality and accounting system permits a 20% cost over-run let alone one exceeding 300%! You have to wonder about Congress and the Executive that bald-facedly present these things to the public as if there were the slightest shred of evidence that the costs can be contained.

And, you have to wonder what we could accomplish with our national infrastructure if we were not utterly wasting such huge sums of taxpayers' money on these toys for the generals and admirals. As Bob Herbert, in the New York Times put it a couple days ago, we have not much time left to get our national infrastructure revitalized, or ... we end up permanently behind the eightball, dealing with expensive and debilitating consequences of our inattention and lack of resolve to maintain what we have created.

You know, a bullet train from Tampa to Orlando is not high on my priority list, while a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles makes everything but seismic sense. But new, sexy infrastructure is not what we are talking about. We are dealing with 310 million citizens with an infrastructure budget for 200 million and an imagination for fewer still. The electricity grid must be improved. Roads and bridges are, as we well know, pot-holed and falling down. We invent ways around the unsexy process of renewing infrastructure and convince ourselves we have done something good. Even the extremely far-sighted New York City water project is beginning to crumble with precious little attention given to it.

Living in a military-industrial complex means that we are addicted to wasting the best productive efforts of our society on propelling a flywheel that is supposed to even out the peaks and valleys of the "business cycle." The book The Report from Iron Mountain, which forms the ironic centerpiece of this website, explains this focus on waste as a necessary flywheel for our pretended free-market capitalist economy. We know we cannot long endure the effects of a really free-market economy as the Great Depressions of the 1930s and the decade beginning with the debacle of 2007 are proving. So, we have devised through the chicanes of national and local politics, earmarks, and massive public boondoggles, a "mixed economy" where the public is fed a continuous skein of lies about the righteous freedom of free-markets while massive corporations milk the public treasury endlessly ... for the ostensible purpose of "national defense" (the number one "motherhood" issue in America).

We see in Libya that the Commander-in-Chief feels the impinging reality that force of arms is not easy, brings consequences, and has a politics all its own. Yet, we persist on feeding the illusion that force of arms is the ultimate solution to world problems (like Moammar Qaddafi). I think we need to test that hypothesis, by the way.

But, the military-industrial complex is, in fact, really not about defense or force of arms, it is about private wealth concentrated in the hands of powerful and extremely greedy corporatists who see that sharing a small piece of the federal contract pie to workers is quite profitable for themselves, and well worth a century of lies and deceit.

Bob Herbert is right. If we are going to inch our way out of this military-industrial complex, we need to spend our money on infrastructure. A productive use of our budget spins more flywheels than a destructive one does. It is time we learned that.

JB

3/12/11

I don't know what to call today's little essay. I have just watched videos of the earthquake and tsunami and nuclear power plant disasters in Japan. This is a dire situation that will draw attention away from Libya and Wisconsin, both dire situations of their own. Wisconsin is more abstract than the civil war in Libya and the horrible destruction and peril in Japan. I imagine there are people in the United States who feel the NFL lockout and potential for no football in 2011-12 is pretty dire, too, but Wisconsin and NFL at their bases are both about how to be a democratic country, not just about greed!

In Wisconsin the GOP has declared war on democracy, Democrats, working people, all under the guise of their mistaken partisan view of how government and economy both work. The NFL situation is a study in exploitation of the work of others, of greed converging from all directions on a well-tended pot of gold, and also about the rule of law. I care that the law is followed, but the rest of it is pure rubbish.

Japan will survive this horror, and the world will pause to reconsider the efficacy of nuclear power generation on an unstable planet. We will add an iconic word to our vocabularies and place it next to Chernobyl in long list of epic horrors, but we do not know that word yet for there are five nuclear reactors in peril.

So, finally, I get to express my chagrin about President Obama and Libya. The Washington Post this winter Saturday says that Obama is not so sure we should get into the civil war in Libya. I can see that as Commander-in-Chief, already bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan with Pakistan threatening to topple given just the wrong combination of events, Obama would be reluctant to divert even more of our resources to "somebody else's" fight. The Post, channeling some archaic nostrum about bearing responsibility for a person whose life you save, includes this bit of editorial bulloney in their account

Neil Hicks, the international policy director for Human Rights First, said the Obama administration has been careful, as a result, not to directly encourage Libya's rebels.

"They've promised very little, so I think the rebels should count on very little from the United States," Hicks said.

But Hicks and others say it is important that Gaddafi be forced from power, although how to do so remains the challenge.

"If he stays, his potential to destabilize what has happened in Tunisia and Egypt is great, and he will continue to give support to rulers who are the worst of the worst," Hicks said. "But if the United States becomes deeply implicated in the process of overthrowing Gaddafi, then it also bears responsibility for what becomes of Libya in the aftermath." (emphasis added)

The decision to quote Mr. Hicks does not reflect the opinion of everyone I know, nor of the vast majority of Americans as I read the sentiment expressed in the rest of the media. Clearly, Obama holds this view, and has forgotten that the French aided the Americans in their fight against Britain for independence.

Where is that spirit these days! I do not recall the French interfering in the development of our new nation. Well, they did sell us the Louisiana Territory, I recall!

There is no excuse for expressing your indignation over the murderous activities of Moammar Qaddafi, Mr. Obama, and then retreating to the comfort of platitudes and cost-value analyses. We need to have a good record with all the peoples of north Africa and within Islam. Standing by while atrocities are committed by a megalomanic dictator is exactly the wrong posture. We need to get in an make sure that Qaddafi fulfills his recent statement .. to the last drop of his blood!

JB

3/10/11

The Libyans, I should say the New Libyans, are getting hit hard by the well-funded armed forces "loyal" to Moamar el-Qaddafi, the mafiose tribesman who has run this poor country into the ground over the past forty years. Some of the voices from Libya (and elsewhere) tell the United States to go to hell and stay away from the Libyan revolution. Other voices, also from Libya and elsewhere, tell us we have a moral responsibility to intervene, since we (and many others) supported Qaddafi at times in the past.

Personally, I think our moral position is very problematic. We have warped our foreign policy in the Islamic countries for their petroleum and for our client Israel. But, even above that, we have reflexively chosen the path of supporting stability over moral imperatives. We have stood by passively as thousands upon thousands of human beings were slaughtered in internecine fratricide. We have sold arms to everyone and, why the press is surprised by the result is no longer amusing. The press in the United States is dominated and fundamentally controlled by corporate interests and corporatist "ethos," which is to say that corporations of whatever stripe are considered to be a progressive evolutionary step beyond mere individual home sapiens sapiens. The press is silent as business operates beyond and against the moral fiber of the public from which they sprang.

It might be that the United States must heed the warnings of serious members of the New Libyan rebellion that the presence of American forces would be counter-productive. What exactly to do they mean by this, though? Is the American reputation so bad that Arabs and Berbers in Libya cannot forget the basic guilt of American toleration of Qaddafi? What about Libyan toleration of Qaddafi? Is there not a balance of guilt?

Are the New Libyans afraid America will come in and argue for cheap petroleum? Are New Libyans so weak as to succumb to these probable business pressures? Probably. Qaddafi has "hollowed out" most institutions and organizations in Libya that would have mounted a possible threat to his dictatorship. So, Libya now finds itself the inheritor of its own cowardice! All the more reason to assist and to get the fuck out of Libya as soon as they have a functioning government.

What we common Americans want is for Libyans to stop killing Libyans, by which we mean that we want Moamar Qaddafi to leave and never return. Killing him is against our law about assassination of foreign leaders, but ... we all want him gone!

I cannot think that having mobilized the West in support of New Libyans that the United States or France or the United Kingdom or Italy or Germany would countenance a Qaddafi victory in this struggle. Having said that as principle, how much killing are we going to passively watch before our principle becomes righteous? It is righteous now and dillydallying is immoral, since we already know what we must do. Let us do it ... now!

JB

3/8/11

Ever since Adam Smith pulled up that mossy old rock and looked beneath to see why the Dutch were so adept so early at the mercantile system and brought his Enlightenment experience into the "scientific" analysis of political economy, we have been trained to think about labor as a service-commodity in the broad workscape of the economic markets, as if ... a thousand years of ethics to the contrary were but a figment of our civilization's imagination. One thing that the Arab uprisings have taught the western nations that so long ago outstripped the sclerotic pace of civil progress in "arabia" is that the way people organize themselves for protection and food and shelter very much determines how good they are going to get at providing that protection from armed bands of desperados, huns, vandals, and motorcycle gangs and how good they are going to get a providing food for a growing population and housing and education. Apparently the easily mimicked tribal elder patriarchy model taken from family organization does not work very well, whether you call them Kings, Fuehrers, dictators, fearless-leader, or whatever. The whole history of civilizations is the history of a failure to organize appropriately. And you have to wonder why we as a species keep repeating the same mistakes over the millennia.

When you are young your parents either directly or indirectly give you ideas and models about what you are going to be or do in your life. Carpenters son's often become carpenters, sea captain's sons go to sea as well, actresses daughters become actresses, sheep shearers give rise to more sheep shearers, and so on. And, the method of family governance, typically a patriarchy with women bearing children and teaching the children about security and responsibility and then often and soberingly dying in childbirth, leads to expansion of the idea beyond the family to the clan and then to the broader community, tribe and nation.

You think you would like to be a fireman or astronaut or doctor or singer or novelist or any of a million things that people do in your environment. You begin to understand the difference between BEING a fireman and DOING the work of a fireman. Being is in your head and your children's heads, but Doing is something that happens among other people. You put yourself out there as a candidate for fireman and someone says that you seem to be healthy and strong enough for the work, so they accept you into the group as a volunteer. You do it for free because you are happy doing it. It fulfills some deep urge you have to protect your community. Meanwhile, your parents who have been growing food that you eat and providing your shelter and all the while getting old and want you to provide these things for yourself. So, you decided to become a professional fireman and offer your services to the community for food and shelter, which they do because you are good at firefighting, and they pay you in money rather than in food and shelter. The money gives you some additional flexibility about how much food you need as compared to how much shelter and what you also have within your shelter to make things more comfortable and interesting, like a computer and television and horseless carriage and crockery, clothing, furniture, golf cart, etc.

A bard comes to your town and tells stories about the way things are in other towns. The mere mention of other towns, of course, is exciting and you had not thought much about what it is that makes a town a town, but you learn that people are pretty much the same wherever you go, although there are interesting differences, too. You think about those differences and wonder why some people praise their god on Friday and some on Saturday and some on Sunday and some not at all. You get the idea that gods are different and that your need is to find the best god for you and your wife and children, one that will protect you from ravages of weather and marauding bands of uncivilized people. Eventually, you notice that all the world is made up of people doing and believing different things as if there were no real rhyme or reason other than some people are better at one thing than at another. You also notice that some activities are more highly prized and therefore more highly paid than others. You did not know about this before.

So you talk to the other firemen and women in your community and ask them what they think is a fair remuneration for putting their lives at risk in blazing infernos of warehouses and homes and restaurants. You are amazed that all the firepeople are thinking and feeling that they are underpaid. You all decide to form a firepersons guild and later you decide, after hearing about similar groups in other towns, you call it a union, because it is a union of people around a central idea, namely, the idea that they are not paid enough for the work they do, given that some people have decided not to work at all, and some people are focused on making money regardless of the pain they cause others.

Soon you learn that other professions have unions and that large numbers of people, millions and millions think they are not getting their fair share of the money in circulation. You approach the tribal elders with this revelation and they say, son, you we think of you and your group as essential, but there are many such groups, many essential, many interesting, many entertaining, some doing work that no one else wants to do, but there is only this one pie and we have to be very careful about how we serve it. The pie has to last all year!

Later you realize that your request was consigned to a person who, having been an auctioneer in another town, but married to a girl in this town you are glad is now married, thinks of your group as a customer and of groups of customers as buyer groups or "markets," on an analogy with customers for wheat, swine, and coal. You go home and talk to your wife about this, thoroughly depressed by the notion that your desire to better yourself and your family has been reduced to chattering and terminology about buying and selling swine and other goods. You wonder if the auctioneers have a union and if they get paid much for all their funny and not-so-funny talk.

Paul Krugman, a writer in the newspaper you buy on weekends and read daily online, says that unions, especially public employee unions, need to be made stronger. And you find yourself agreeing with him, but also wondering if there were not a point glossed over, namely, the idea that workers compete against one another for jobs meted out by employers in a free-for-all market governed only by the notion that profit is the highest good that can be realized by Homo sapiens sapiens.

Isn't there an ethic that says that everyone has the right to work, that the "market value" of a person's work is a marginal difference, not the essential difference, and certainly not the do or die difference among people. After all we believe that all people are equal before the law, so how can law be created that deliberately discriminates among them based on the "whims" of an impersonal construct of the 18th century imagination, the market? Wouldn't people work just as hard and productively if they knew that their society appreciates them by rewarding them with essentially the same wage, rather than virtually enslaving some so that the marginal market value of others is grossly overpaid?

What would it take to reach an accommodation like that? Would we have to rewrite laws about business and go back to a system where the dignity of labor is recognized above its remuneration? Would some jackass call it communism because he was trapped in a mercantilist mentality where labor is a commodity? Would you opt for a civilization where the productive efforts of all were given to the benefit of all?

JB

3/3/11

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

That is the heavyweight sentence of the the millennium just ended a few years ago. It is attached to a document we simply call The Constitution. It is self-referential in that you have to know what the word "Congress" means in both a literal and a metaliteral sense. You have to know what the Framers thought when they used the word "establishment"—was it a verbal or nominative sense, did they mean the process of establishing or the "edifice" of something already established? You have to know what intent failure to split the infinitive "to (peaceably) assemble" has. Isn't the grammatical licence meant to draw special attention, or was that common and unremarkable in the 1780's? Scholars make careers on such questions and with a variety of answers. In this way the Constitution and its Bill of Rights is a living document, one which because of the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court this week continues to live.

The people from that Church in Topeka, KS have the right to express their belief that the death of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is the result of our society's toleration and acceptance of homosexuality. Yes, I agree with the Court, too. These church people are fools, of course, and seemingly heedless of the mental anguish they cause, the "brutalization" as Justice Samuel Alito called it in his lone dissent, a dissent that did not raise new issues, but rather simply echoed the sense of the Framers that "free speech" has limits as do "peaceable assemblies."

Read The Washington Post or the The New York Times on this story. I think you will hear the muffled protests of those who agree (if rarely) with Alito. Notice that the Post headline and article spends a bit more time inserting the notion that this ruling was for a church, leaving open the question of whether it pertains to any assembly of persons exercising their free speech rights. It is a subtle inference on their part and very deliberate.

The answer to this noxious bit of Constitutional parsing is that what is good for the goose is also good for the gander. It makes clear, to me at least, that picketing of the church in Topeka and the activists among them wherever they assemble to peacefully demonstrate their bigotry is right and proper and fully defended in the Constitution. I believe that they should be drowned out by the chorus of intelligent, tolerant, compassionate, and understanding majority in our country, and were Topeka and her people anywhere nearby, I would be on the sidewalk in front of that miserable congregation and letting them know how utterly stupid, self-righteous, and destructive they are.

JB

2/28/11

What a title for an essay! The winners of Oscars should be happy with their achievements, but the Academy pendulum has swung too far in the "comfort" direction, away from controversy, and unfortunately away from blazing talent toward career achievement. "True Grit" was the best picture this past year by any standard or measure, and it is irrelevant that the Coen brothers won it hands down recently. They are at the top of their game. Let it be said out loud. And this too shall pass.

But this essay is about losers, the people of the Arab countries and of the "-stans." These are the losers of history and the measure of that is the kind of government and leadership they have. What they have is assertive and egotistical men with a paucity of imagination for realizing the humanity of their countrymen and countrywomen, for realizing their potential, for shedding the enormous burden of tradition, for seeing a way to bring their people out of humble circumstances into the modern world.

It should not be lost on Americans that Islam is different in different countries. In the Arab and "-stan" world Islam is abused as a religion and as a method of social control and personal redemption and solace. In other parts of the world Islam is not a hate and fear doctrine. This means that cultural dispositions in the Arab psyche are to blame. I will call it primitive tribalism. It is a method of social control, and mindlessly asserted to hold patriarchal leaders in power. It is antithetical to democracy. The cure for it is to prove the patriarchs, be they kings or dictators, to be wrong. Insane men like Qadhafi in Libya need no further explanation. They must be killed.

It should not be lost on Americans that our country has taken the low road with respect to the Arab countries and the -stans. Our foreign policy was formulated in an era when the Communist International run in Moscow was active among the wreckage nations of the old Ottoman Empire, destroyed along with Imperial Russia in the Great War. The low road has been to secure countries and entire regions against the horror of Soviet infiltration with Communistic ideas! It was obvious back in my youth that this policy would turn Americans away from their core values as democracy loving and nurturing people.

James Carroll tells the story, unfolding now across north Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, for Pakistan, the most dangerous country in the world, worse even than North Korea. Carroll notes the genesis of our ugly American policy toward these people, and we see a glimmer from his writing and our understanding of the Cold War, that fixing broken cultures is a lot of hard and frustrating work, so why not opt for the easier way, the stability way, the wrong way!

Carroll does not mention the subtext of the Cold War, the fight of capitalist business for hegemony in the world, nor therefore does he note the torque and bias of our "righteous cause" in the Cold War (after all Leninist/Stalinist Russia was a terrible place where millions died needlessly for a "bankrupt" ideology). The corporations made sure that Americans equated successful business with that anti-communist righteousness, and so how easily it became to see business interests as a goal of American foreign policy. All they wanted was stability. They did not care a whit about the progress of peoples left in the undertow of historical processes. And, so we come into the 21st century fully burdened ourselves with an impossibly ugly foreign policy that even a "heroic" figure like Barack Obama cannot undo in two years or six.

But, as Confucius say, "a journey of a thousand li begins with the first step." There is no better time than now to recognize that the Cold War is over and that Islam is not the enemy but rather the whip in malignant, dirty, self-serving hands of tribalist demagogues and dictators. We need to get on the side of people, not these tinpot governments!

JB

2/26/11

"From the halls of Montezuma ..." is the beginning of the Marine Corps hymn, but the interesting part (also unfinished business) is "to the shores of Tripoli." The spanking new American republic with its own merchant fleet building encountered the "Barbary Pirates" along the coast of Libya and carried out a little war against them. Like my colleague, I am more than a little annoyed that the American response to the Libyan cry for help does not receive the same response we gave to Israel in 1948—instant diplomatic recognition of the freedom-seeking rebels!

We are not alone. Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post yesterday wrote as good a call for intervention as yesterday seemed appropriate. Today, which was foreseeable, of course, the situation is resolving somewhat and become more desperate. Tripoli in the northwest is isolated, but seemingly more strongly defended by "loyalists" than the freedom-seeking Libyans can uproot and defeat.

There are now two Libyas and we should recognize the new one and give them the assistance they need to end the sway of the dictatorship they hate so much.

There is a code of conduct among nations that says outsiders should stay out of the internal fights within nations. That code is applied liberally to situations where the outsider is unprepared for intervention or is trying to persuade other nations that they have nothing to fear from the outsiders. On the other hand, when the outsider does not like the looks of the "rebels" the code allows the outsider to support the "dejure" government. Moreover, when the outside forces are truly vexed, they tend to invent reasons for intervention on one side or the other, as witnessed by our two wars against Iraq in this generation. So much for codes of conduct! They are bullshit and everyone knows it.

So, Obama, get out of the law library and into the cockpit! We have been looking for a time to remove Muammar Qaddhafi for decades. Do not blow this wonderful chance for America to get on the right side of history ... for a change!

JB

2/24/11

I am extremely interested in the deep structure of ideology. Not just Liberalism or Progressivism, per se, but all ideologies. My studies of and in Russia were basically about Marxism and Leninism and Stalinism, and my studies on China about the KuoMinTang and then the Maoist version of Communism. But I have also studied western European ideologies and have noticed that "world views" and Zeitgeists may be more important that ideologies in determining what a person actually will do in a given situation.

World views and Zeitgeists (literally "spirit of the times") are cultural, that is, they are trains of thought and thinking that are sufficiently widespread to "have a life of their own." With obvious variations and differing perspectives from one generation to the next, world views seem to be the most deeply rooted and extend out into religion and psychology. Zeitgeists, as the name implies, are more ephemeral, and even may be more hazy concepts than world views. The spirit of the times of the "Roaring Twenties" was not shared by all or even most of the people in the United States or western Europe, but it was a definite cast of mind that even included a political ideology such that people "swept up in" the Roaring Twenties were in some sense "on the make" economically, socially, or sexually, and so there was a background belief that aggressive commerce, social climbing, or dalliance was acceptable, legal, expectable, and welcome in some overarching way.

Well, these thoughts passed through my mind this morning as I read E.J. Dionne Jr.'s column in the Washington Post about who Rahm Emanuel, the new Mayor of Chicago as of Tuesday, is and might turn out to be. In the middle of his essay, Dionne says

... One of my favorite (printable) Rahm quotations is his observation that the talk in his home when he was growing up led him to believe that the Democratic Party "was one of the 10 lost tribes of the Jewish faith." This primordial feeling allows him to understand every kind of Democrat.

Many assume he is more New Democrat than liberal because of his advocacy during the Clinton years of welfare reform, NAFTA and a tough approach to crime. He was more ready to compromise on health care than Obama was. And, yes, his mayoral campaign was more like a venture capital fund, a juggernaut financed by big contributions from some of the country's richest people.

But there's nothing illiberal about being against crime, and Rahm has consistently emphasized the toll of street violence on the poor, a theme he struck again in his victory speech on Tuesday. He understands the value of a certain amount of populism....

Dionne says that Emanuel may be a "New Democrat" rather than a liberal. Then he goes on to chalk up pros and cons for what Democrats believe and inferring what "liberals" believe. Dionne's specific exclusion of welfare reform from the agenda of "liberals" really annoyed me. It is as if to say that "liberals" are oblivious to the various complaints about welfare and its debilitating and other unanticipated consequences. It is as if "liberal" to Dionne conjures up some notion of a bleeding heart so intent on his or her guilt for the tribulations of the poor and infirm that they cannot see. So, I question whether Dionne really knows what he is writing about, first, and then I question whether contemporary Democrats actually subscribe to the "liberal" ideology, or have they run away from the mudslung word "liberal" and the ideology that word embraces?

Food for thought. I will leave you with my assessment. Dionne is basically liberal, but has been battered about so badly that he is slightly confused or at least willing to abuse a few terms for a nod from a larger audience than he believes he actually represents. And, yes, Liberals do have hearts, but they no longer bleed all over the place. In some sense the Liberal heart is hardened to the realities of politics, especially the GOP politics of taking no prisoners and listening not at all to what the opposition has to say.

Liberalism is the fundamental engine of our Enlightenment-inspired democracy and republic. Liberalism is a path of understanding of human events and futures parallel to the scientific method, in other words, rigorous, fair, carried out with humility, and not dogmatic or fixed in its discoveries and lessons. The spirit of the times, with TeaParty populists ranting around every corner, is not parallel to rational discourse or science. It is aimless pragmatism directed to accumulation of quick and easily ballyhooed victories to build up confidence for facing what is for many a very bewildering future.

JB

2/21/11

Some people have asked me why I jumped into the fray in Madison, Wisconsin, since Wisconsin is something of a backwater state, aggie, beery, and politically polarized since the days of Bob Lafollette. One suspects in Wisconsin that politics is modulated by the passing of generations and the stark differences between Catholics centered in Milwaukee and the Calvinist and Lutheran remainder. But, the answer is that Wisconsin is just the contemporary stage for a battle that has been going on for 150 years or more, namely, the battle for political, social, and economic hegemony in the United States.

Paul Krugman, fearless Nobelist and economist, wrote in the Sunday New York Times about Wisconsin's role in the larger battle and the current score. Democracy is losing! And, having said that, one wonders why individuals, Americans, enlist in the armies of the enemy?

What reasons could an individual have for siding with the forces that want to corrupt and obviate our democracy? First, I think, is the egocentric assumption that they, themselves, will rise into the milieu of the rich and famous. They believe that their current interests are to make sure there is a place for them above where they find themselves today. They are blissfully unaware of the sobering statistics on social and economic climbing. Even "new money" has to look "in" through the keyhole, but they ignore this.

Second, I think that proto-oligarchs, if that is what we should call them, fundamentally dislike the idea of democracy, even representative democracy. They distrust the masses motives and believe reflexively that majoritarian rule is just a tyranny of the crowd. The believe that the crowd will vote itself a free lunch and sponge off the "hard work" of others endlessly. They don't just dislike democracy; they are afraid of it and hate it without words to say so.

Thirdly, I think that people who have strongly held principles about public behavior tend to not respect people with variant views. So, for instance, if the Democrats support the idea of Choice in planning parenthood and our proto-oligarch does not, or at least is against abortion, then he will tend to avoid that group and by default or by earnest intend fall into the group that wishes to impose its rules on the private lives of others. To put it mildly, proto-oligarchs, being successful by some measure in business or industry, are awfully self-certain and so their view of what is public and what is private blurs to their own benefit.

Finally, but by no means exhaustively, the person who is ready to give up democracy to curtail the rights of others as "presumptuous," "uneconomical," "immoral," or any other rubric of opinion you can think of have a poorly developed sense of the social nature of the human species. They are hell-bent to understand the world as their authoritarian parents understood it. They lack compassion, and indeed such a word sounds fatally weak to them. How they manage to "practice" Christianity is a miracle of hypocrisy worthy of research by all the synods and diocese of man.

When you sum them up and understand their basic motives you understand that they are an implacable enemy. Many, if not most, of them seem to be immovable in their views, and we should not wonder at this, since they were formed as children in what really amounts to an abusive relationship with people upon whom they depended for life itself. They are who they are and what we can do about it is the biggest question.

We can understand that they cannot be eliminated quickly. We choose as a principle of humane activity to reject violence against them, so what can we do? The answer is that we must have a long period in which they are shown that what the Progressive and Liberal and Humane person does actually works! We cannot allow them political power for they will, as Reaganistas did, sabotage the best intended programs for social and economic justice. We must dominate their imaginations with truth about our species and its "condition." We must teach them democracy and tolerance, because they do not know it.

JB

2/20/11

Sometimes it does not help to take the long, broad view of things. I can tell you that in the main humanity is so far from overcoming its own genetic and social legacies that a sane person would despair. So, in times like these, it is necessary to concentrate on things at more manageable levels, like calling out the Governor of Visconsen for the lying jerk he and his GOP family of fascists really are. Cut corporate taxes and then blame the deficit on state workers' trade unions! He should be impeached! ... or worse!

Why the Governor and the GOP conservatives are so ugly to behold is another story. George Lakoff's long-standing and basically incontrovertable thesis is that these self-absorbed moral midgets were brought up this way. Conservatism is a moral disease brought about by familial tyranny, as Lakoff clearly points out time and again in his writings. The ranting conservatism we see today in America is not just a disease of the soul, it is a clear and present danger to the weak and and unwary among us, about whom these conservatives care almost nothing, as shown in the next story.

Nick Stuban, 15 years old, committed suicide because of the tyranny at his high school in Fairfax, Virginia, where, incidentally, two of my relatives are matriculated. The Governor and the high school Principal are birds of a very dark feather, tyrants, conservative authoritarians whose interest is to see to it that nothing happens on their watch, rather than seeing to it that honest workers are treated fairly and young teenagers are educated in the best way, including educating them about the messiness and ambiguities of real life. The principal and the Fairfax Board of Education that hired this monster and his staff should all be fired! ... or worse!

But, the beat goes on. Maureen Dowd in what is probably a facetious diatribe about the inability of many to deal with information coming to them via the new social networks, absolutely nails the issue in a way that I wish Lakoff could incorporate into his thinking. Writing about the assault and rape of a CBS female reporter in Alexandria, Egypt, last week, Dowd does dig down into the bowels of the tweets and blogs to describe the very most sordid aspect of humanity, while the amorality of electronic media amplifies and broadcasts it to a pitch that begs for silence and reconsideration of our "progress." Dowd knows that the human condition is a mixed bag, and we all know that with electronic media or not, we have been a savage species for tens of thousands of years despite our attempts at civilization. The rapists and those Americans who have ranted their vile praise of them will not be brought to justice, but someone somewhere knows them and will do their best to bring them some clarity ... or worse.

Meanwhile in Libya Muhammar Gaddafi (or however one is to spell this monster's name these days) has ordered the killing of persons mourning their dead in cemeteries. Is this not a new low for dictators and their coercive forces? And, we wonder, pondering the rights and responsibilities of sane and honest citizens in Fairfax, why the Libyans put up with the tyranny their leader gives them each day. Obviously, in each case the people are afraid of being destroyed by tyrants, picked out of the crowd and made an example of, herded into corners and browbeaten until their heads ring with numb resignation ... and hatred ... or worse.

It is a bewildering and utterly depressing picture painted for us by the clear thoughts of seasoned writers this weekend in February. It is all the more so after reading Bob Herbert's account of how something as abstract and sterile as reducing a government program budget can destroy people. It is more of the estrangement we have from our moral center, our willingness to capitulate for moments of surcease and safety and quiet. It is, however, a capitulation and definitely a victory for that conservative disease that has us all forgetting or abandoning our social responsibilities. If we are not a social species, then what are we? Can people not see that morality is social and that it entails social responsibilities?

Perhaps yes! There is some evidence, as Frank Rich sees it today, that resistance is not futile. The majority of Americans know there is something wrong in America, and they often listen to the loudest and the most cunning voices, but not inevitably and not for long. The conservative disease bearers are now being scorned, isolated, made out for the cunning tyranny-bringers they really are. I think that Rich is correct. Americans are often foolish and poorly focused on the threats to their well-being, but they are not stupid. We must criticize conservatives who are (whether they know it or not) furthering the processes of tyranny. It requires us to speak up, to write, to act, to block the entrances, to join in common cause.

JB

2/19/11

There must be something in the water in Wisconsin that turns elected officials into assholes. The Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader thinks that sending state troopers after the truant Democrats will "send a signal" to them that the game is getting serious. Well, what does he think sending troopers will accomplish? Is Wisconsin now a police state? Are they going to coerce Democrats into violating the civil rights of state workers?

Yes, the budget situation in Madison is serious. No one doubts that, but union busting in Wisconsin is not the answer. Republicans should begin to understand that and soon. Meanwhile, state employees and everyone who understands the principles undergirding public employment should continue their civil disobedience. Shut down the legislature and bring the martinet, grandstanding, reactionaries back into a reasonable colloquy.

Oh, and by the way, denying the Wisconsin Senate a quorum is a perfectly good parliamentary ploy. It is in the tradition of Roberts Rules and the practices of most governmental systems, including the federal legislature. It is not different in cause or effect than the much discussed filibuster rule, another way for the minority to protect itself from ruthlessness in the majority.

Ruthlessness is the keyword here. The Wisconsin GOP is hoping to take advantage of the budget problem to roll back the twentieth century, just like their brethren elsewhere. Democrats in office and those of us out in the trenches are not going to let this happen. If the state imposes martial law, so be it! We know what kind of people they are.

JB

2/18/11

The states are in trouble. Some are in deeper dogpiles than others, but since states cannot regulate monetary policy like the feds can, they are in dire jeopardy of bankruptcy. No one really knows what a state or commonwealth bankruptcy would accomplish or what effect it would have on the laws of that state, but let's agree for the time being that chaos would engulf a state like New York or California or Texas. A state like Nevada, which is the worst off of all fifty states, might skinny through a bankruptcy as the butt of jokes for five years or so. Most people, I think, would just hold on to whatever bonds that Nevada has sold (or might sell to bail themselves out) on the presumption that there will always be people to spend personal money in a place like Las Vegas or Reno. Moreover, with the federal government owning most of Nevada, the idea that traffic laws or marriage laws or tax laws in Nevada would be null and void, just does not comport with an American sense of continuity and ultimate redemption. If the state were Pennsylvania or Ohio, however, the belt of rust hanging around the necks of the good people of that Commonwealth and that State might give us pause. My point is that Americans can see a variety of futures for our states, some of which are more problematic than others.

So, this week in Wisconsin the legislature is trying to come to grips with Wisconsin's budget woes. They are broke and some—the GOP, notably—see the public employees as having had their way with the taxpayers of Wisconsin, thus being the source of much that is wrong with the income and outgo in that state. I don't know whether the GOP understands that public employees trade off high salaries for solid pension and health care programs. That is "the deal" they get. They forgo living up-scale like their brothers and sisters in the private sector where pensions and health care benefits are iffy, but when the time comes for the state to pay for their part of the bargain, states tend to forget the underlying reasoning in the bargain. And, yes, it is dishonest of states to say that previous legislatures were spend-thrifts. It just isn't so.

Well there are lots of things that are no so, but get a lot of attention in the states' and nation's scrambles for solvency. Paul Krugman, in the New York Times addresses the wanton baloney that is being passed off as legislative zeal these days. The GOP freshmen in the House of Representatives know full well that they are not going to get their way, "killing the beast," but on they rant about cutting the federal government down to what they think are its essentials. It is pure bullcrap! Moreover, it is not about deficits; it is about rolling back a century of progressive legislation that has given millions of people deliberately placed behind the eight-ball by corporate greed and racial discrimination a fighting chance to succeed as human beings in this culture.

There is nothing to the TeaPartyish GOP threats to shut down the government but their self-induced rage over someone else getting money earned in their state. Krugman misses the point that these people are nothing more nor less than emotional children spoiled by a toxic brew of false ideas about how nations actually operate. They are going to very surprised when in two years their attempts to pull the rugs out from under millions of their constituents is going to put them themselves into unemployment lines!

The GOP in Wisconsin has a sordid history anyway, something they inherited from the old world and something they ginned up to heat up the melting pot in their state. Wisconsin is not the only state to have fielded a Joe McCarthy, but the upper midwest seems to be full of itself these days and headed for real trouble. If they succeed in trimming the trade union rights of Wisconsin's public employees, they are going to reap the whirlwind, for no one is going to keep a company or an educational system going in that kind of environment. It is just bad business planning and insanely stupid educational policy. Not to mention the opportunities for police and fire protection to decay and lapse.

I am not sure President Obama is being heard in the legislative chambers in Madison, but they would do well to listen to the rationale Obama has enunciated. All of them would do well to listen to Krugman's despair over budget slashing when so many people are still out of work.

JB

2/17/11

People I talk with about American politics generally doubt my (and many others') assertion that America has become a corporatist state. It is strong testimony to Bill Moyers's point that belief is stronger than curiosity in most people. It directs the conscious and the subconscious in the selection of facts, choosing those that corroborate a belief system. Americans just do not like the idea that their democracy is effectively bought and paid for by the corporations. Moreover, the rude facts that Congressmen and Congresswomen are "on the take," representing interests antithetical to democracy and to local economic and cultural interests is ignored under the rubric ... "well you just cannot trust politicians" or "politics is a dirty business." This as if there were no reason other than human frailty for the deceit and dishonesty that politicians daily exhibit.

The most insidious form of corporatism, perhaps, is the undermining of the information economy, the free press, the very freedom of speech that is the sine qua non of democracy. Without a free and unfettered system of information distribution, what we call a free press, democracy cannot possibly survive. Yet, time and again we see the major corporations in apparent collusion to suppress certain kinds of news or to impose on an event a point of view that may be at odds with the facts on the ground. This article from The Guardian in the United Kingdom and reprinted in the website Common Dreams tells such a story. The piece leaves no doubt in your mind about the power that corporate leaders have over the information you accept passively as "news."

JB

2/16/11

There is usually something for everyone in a keynote speech, and Bill Moyers's keynote address at the 2011 History-Makers Convention in New York City late last month was no exception. Bill has a wealth of experience and connections to people who are about to make news or are still doing it. The speech was a rouser, as expected, and if you had to boil it down to the glue of its theme, you would be talking about Freedom of the Press.

Often, though, Moyers's thoughts lean heavily on the role of the rich in our information economy. It is amazing to me that more of our plutocrats do not understand that their own rampant and egregious violations of freedom of information will come back to destroy them sooner or later. Such is the arrogance of money and the Olympian view from the corporate boardrooms.

Bill chose a title for his speech that reminds us of an old joke he used to tell. "Is This a Private Fight or Can Anyone Get In It?" But, as you will soon see his topic is no joke and his point is clear. Yep! You are in this fight!

JB

2/14/11

Today's celebration of love is good. It is about romantic love, which is for the great majority of us a relatively modern luxury ... probably not much more than 500 years old, the exceptions taking place among the wealthy and well-born. I could write quite a long disquisition on this subject, injecting liberal and progressive comments from time to time, but ... the truth is that I sprained my left hand on Saturday scrambling around on a mountain hillside, and it is therefore excruciating to type the letters "q,a,z" and to use the left Shift key. So, ... I will be back writing soon, I hope.

JB

2/10/11

It never ceases to amaze and annoy me that so many people have such egocentric attention spans and world views. They think the latest snow storm is evidence that Al Gore is an idiot and the 97% of the worlds climate and weather scientists are deliberately trying to attach a socialist agenda to every part of the world's economies. Myopia is not the problem. These people are ignorant and unable to think beyond their own noses. Worse, they are vocal and creating a din about their misgivings and misunderstandings that begins to drown out the possibilities for the necessary steps we must take as a species (let alone nations or communities) to save our own asses.

The fact is that the severe melt during the summer months has permitted the various "seas" along the north slope of Alaska and Canada and Siberia to warm up significantly. These are uncontestable facts. The next step in the meteorological process is that the air above the seas is affected. In the current time period a significant new low pressure area has formed over the Barents Sea (off Siberia) which is pumping extremely cold polar air down into Europe. This affects the conditions over northern North America and promotes a similar flow of winter arctic air down the plains and into our imaginations. These are not necessarily permanent effects. We just do not know what will take place five years from now.

One of the more important components of human civilization is the ability to predict the time and place to plant crops. The ancients were interested in the apparent movement of celestial objects like the sun and the moon and the precession of equinoxes mainly for the reason that it gave them a heads up on when to organize their fellow man toward cultivation and planting. That need has not changed in the succeeding millennia. We are extremel dependent on stable climates for our various crops and animal husbandry. What we are now seeing and feeling in our winter bones is the break down of that kind of certainty that our civilization has been predicated upon for upwards of 20,000 years!

Paul Krugman, in the New York Times wrote a few days ago about the effect that bad weather and bad decisions, both based on climate change or denial of it, have already had on world food production. We are already at crisis in many parts of the world. You should not be surprised to learn that the Tunisian, Egyptian, and other uprisings over the past year are directly related to the cost of food, which is determined as you "free market enthusiasts" know by supply and demand. The supply is down and the demand is up. The elasticity of demand is limited, and the elasticity of supply is being challenged by climate change ... and bad decision-making.

JB

2/8/11

First, let's be clear. "Gipper" is nonsense. There is nothing and no one in the world named "gipper". Ron Reagan's appropriation of the term from a movie in which he once was a supporting actor tells you nothing about Reagan or America. It is about nostalgia and friendship—a darned good frame for a presidential hopeful. It is, though, a ruse and part of the fantasyland that has been created about Reagan.

The mythology of Reagan is revealed quite nicely today by the Washington Post's columnist Eugene Robinson. The mythos certainly is built from selective memory most of which is outright false. Read Robinson now and tell me the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth is not a fairyland of forgetting the facts and building an image of something the conservatives are in fact unable to do or be in real life!

JB

2/7/11

Euro-centric culture and the many similar cultures within Islam we have largely ignore them or misunderstood them. In an OpEd piece today in the New York Times I learned something on the fly that, as an historian, gives me pause. I say, "on the fly" because the very, very interesting piece by Reuel Mark Gerecht, a former CIA employee concentrating on the Middle East, is not at all about classical feudalism as experienced in Europe, but rather a different kind of evolutionary path, a cul de sac it turns out, that the Arab world, particularly, among all the other worlds of Islam, has gotten itself into and is trying to get out of now. Gerecht wonders aloud about why "Arabia" (taken broadly to include all places where Arabs have settled) turned out the way it did.

His title is "How Democracy Became Halal," the decisive idea in his article that gives motion and hope to the unique historical processes that are unfolding in Arab lands. It is exceedingly difficult to gauge the culture from the standpoint of our own because of the divergent paths we have taken, not only in terms of formal religion, but as Gerecht notes, in terms of how the social compact is seen differently between us. In the west the tradition of feudal liege and subject was underpinned by a sense of overarching responsibility and order, giving way in good time to the idea of a social contract and then to miniature contracts, soon abundant and ubiquitous and forming an idea of a rule of law.

In the Arab lands and not completely apart from the notions embedded in Islam the feudal idea of two way responsibility (and eventually the idea of contract and orderly rule) was taken up by and submerged by the idea of what is allowed by God as righteous. So in Arab lands, heir to tribal authorianism by virtue of the hard life they led in the deserts of north Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, Arabs developed a lesser sense of their individuality as civic entities, and their relations with other human beings were mediated by Sharia and other forms of Islamic law first, rather than independently of overarching orthodoxy.

It is an interesting and probably fertile ground for commentators on the Arab uprisings of 2011, because it illuminates one of the blind spots we in western civilization have about the Arab culture ... (and vice versa). The idea that "democracy" is now "halal" (permitted and to be prized) is huge because it is the path out of the cul de sac, and yet as Gerecht writes, it is not pretty, and I would add, it might not get pretty soon.

JB

2/6/11

Someone wrote this morning that this day's Super Bowl was irrelevant and no one cared. It was a good game, though, and the Pack led the whole way, yet it was exciting. Best commercial for me was about Chevy trucks. The Black Eyed Peas were raucous and well staged. Good show overall; I'd give it a B+.

Meanwhile most of the world could care less, and in fact are a little annoyed that the U.S. is so preoccupied with itself. Frank Rich, in the New York Times does a good job with this. He shows pretty well that Americans know almost nothing about the Muslim world and are unlikely to learn much from the U.S. media, who for reasons that related to our corporatist oligarchy see opportunity in the idea of trashing Islam at every turn. He damns our culture for thinking that anything positive that is going on is about us. It definitely isn't.

Then, David Brooks, also in the Times, writes to inform in his semi-academic way. He pegs Egypt as a 40% nation, a middling nation among the nearly two hundred on this planet, middling in all the political and cultural dimensions one might look for in a search for hope in this revolution. Forty percent is not bad as third world countries go. Mubarak can hardly be credited with that much success, but the people of Egypt need to see themselves as optimistically as Brooks does. It is going to take huge work to bring Egypt up out of poverty and corruption, but maybe it can be done. The sixth seeded Packers did it from the middle!

JB

2/3/11

We beings of planet Earth, arisen from the murky depths and spread out like some strangely patterned fungus on the surface, our spores sailing in the low clouds, our imaginations constrained by the insecurities of daily need for food and shelter and many other things we really need and many more we don't, marvel at the pet dog who believes himself to be a member of the family, the pig raised by dogs and seems to think himself a dog, but we do not marvel at ourselves sufficiently.

Shakespeare wrote in "As You Like It" that

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Sans everything at the end, of course, but are we as Shakespeare wrote confined to the stages of ordinary life, or ... or are we as he first asserts actors capable of reading a different part, players, possessed of something more than just free will, perhaps something more in keeping with our inevitable vanishing, something from inside the conscious brain that notes injustice and turns to fix it?

The exercise is not futile, I think and having read playwrite Wallace Shawn today from TomDispatch in Tom Englehardt's absence, I am restored from yesterday's glum pessimism, and I hope you will be as well. Shawn has written an elegant essay about our possibilities to be our better selves, and Thomas Jefferson take heed.

JB

2/2/11

The world watches as Arabs, discontent with the lack of progress in their countries, discontent with tribal rule and patriarchal dictators, discontent with what seems to be their assigned part of the future, go to the streets to demand change. At home in America both liberals and conservatives cheer them on, hoping well beyond all hope that the Arabs will see real Americans as friends, despite years of American governments choosing stability in the Arab lands and chessboard posturing for the sake of Israeli security.

The rest of the world cheers on the Arabs because what Arabs do in the streets is done because playing their dictators' games achieves nothing. Dictators promise reform, stage transparently corrupted and meaningless "democratic" elections, and live high on the hog as millions live in poverty and see their lives wasted by these arrogant men. For the ends they see as important American governments support these regimes, and so America's government's policy seems to have tacitly bought the idea spoken many years ago by New Republic's Peretz that "Muslim life is cheap."

But, in fact, life in general is cheap and treated at face value you see the outcomes as seething anger and blind rage. You do not have to go to Cairo or Mogadishu or Tunis or Baghdad to see it. When human beings are treated like trash in America they end up looking like and acting like trash. Liberals quickly see the cause and effect and work for a change in the causal factors. Sometimes even they work to help the affected human beings, but often they do not succeed. Conservatives see the causes as personal bad decisions and turn away from these daily tragedies as if there were nothing in them worth saving.

There is a motion picture now playing called "Blue Valentine." It is about two young Americans whose lives are a mess. Their lives have always been a mess because as children their families were disfunctional and violent and unconcerned with what the children saw and learned and modeled. The boy has no ambition but to create a family that is functional, but he does not know how. He has never seen one. The girl (the actress is up for an Academy Award for best actress in a leading role) comes from a family where her life is meaningless and threatened daily by her father's virulent hatred of the mother, who is too busy nursing her own psychological wounds to be of much good to her child.

Both know there is a better way, but they do not know how to get there, and no one can break through the walls they have erected to defend themselves as children and offer them guidance. The young man works hard, but drinks hard, partly to anesthetize himself and partly to prove he is really a man. The young woman engages in careless sex and eventually has a baby, though the paternity is misplaced the young man undertakes the responsibility for it. They fail.

The movie has been testing my circuits for a week now. My sense of optimism was shattered by it. My liberalism brought into question because it appears that this couple are not only typical of the perpetuating devaluation of human life in our society, but that they are already in their early twenties too far gone! There is no religion to help these people, no agency, no law, no moral imperative in our society to help these fellow human beings. They (and eventually we) just think of them as pitiful trash, refuse by the side of the road, blown around by the vagaries of the economy and the decisions they make with their meager tools of life.

The notion popped into my head when the Tunisian immolated himself that the desperation of real people is also real and the invisibility of solutions absolutely real and stark. The characters in "Blue Valentine" are also "hopeless" as long as there is no one interested in taking a lot of time helping them out of what the prisons of their childhood terrors have made for them as adults. While Americans and Europeans hope that Tunisia and Egypt and Jordan do not become religious dictatorships like Iran, there will be in those places a search for some sort of hope, some agency, some law, some moral imperative in those cultures directed to saving millions of lives. Islam will be the beacon, and we must understand that.

JB

1/31/11

The United States is a military-industrial complex. Since the announcement by Secretary Gates about "drastic" cuts in the Department of Defense budget, there has been a lot written about where cuts could be make that do not hurt. The answer is that virtually every part of our society has for about three generations been addicted to what is euphemistically called "defense spending." News media hop onto stories about defense contracts and defense cuts as if there were no countervailing arguments about whether any of it is worth while for our national aspirations.

What are our national aspirations, anyway? We speak in almost any context about helping other societies discover the benefits of democracy, as if we were all that good at it ourselves. The plain ugly facts about our democracy are that it is thoroughly corrupted by special interest money—money that has bought legislation and executive rule-making and judicial injustice on any subject you can mention. The corruption is so prevalent in politics as to rival what we see in other countries as despicable cultures of endemic corruption, such as in Egypt where baksheesh and bribery are "a way of life."

Well, folks, the way of life in America is that we turn away from the ugly sight of our elected "representatives" when they blatantly seek out campaign funding from corporations and PACs that we know are inimical to our own private interests. We are as guilty of corruption of the spirit of our democracy as the man on the street in Cairo who pays off the police to protect his cart of goods for sale. But, we do precious little to demand honesty and clear and critical thinking among our representatives.

We call politics a dirty business, but we rarely wash up ourselves. And, when it comes to the defense establishment, we are exactly what Pogo said some fifty or sixty years ago. We are the enemy! We tolerate extravagant waste by understanding it as "our share" of the national pork eating contest. We build useless machines that kill and wonder why the part of the world where we test them out on real people hates our guts.

Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University writes in TomDispatch a couple days ago about the M-I complex and the outrageous cant and lying that sustains it. You should read this before you go down to the store to by your federal tax preparation software.

JB

1/29/11

Most of us Liberal Progressives have a decent appreciation for a good argument, an argument that marshals facts and perspectives, performs something like a syllogism, and concludes with striking assessment of a knotty problem. We recognize such arguments as being a few notches up the stick from the reality they pretend to represent, but that is the nature of human thinking and communication. It is symbolic and a little abstract no matter what we do to give it a sense of messy realism. It is, therefore, more than an idle complaint that some people pretend to argue, but are actually constructing a false picture of a nonexistent situation, using fabricated facts, and exploiting the well-known abuses of the syllogism. Why do they do this? Is their reality so bankrupt and threadbare that they must invent from whole cloth each time they speak, or is it that they have premises that overwhelm evidence and exclude the fullness of facts and observations?

Since the nominees were named for the 2008 election season the "rhetoric" from the conservatives has been stridently bereft of facts, yet the multitudes seem to love it, and they vote for it. It makes me lie awake at night wondering what must be the level of critical thinking taking place in, say, fifty million heads nowadays. It cannot be critical thinking and is probably would best be labeled "wishful thinking" if it were the least bit positive, but it is not. It is decidedly negative and destructive. So what do we call it? A few regular handles spring to mind, but they really do not carry either the tone or the burden of what is going on. The closest I can come to the overall purpose and strategy of the conservatives is the expression "brainwashing."

I think they are brainwashing themselves primarily and happy to pick up a few hapless converts along the way. In that sense the nonsense that is repeated endlessly by the conservatives out on the edge is more like a mantra than dialog. It is the hopeful repetition of an incantation with the object in mind of having it come true by some magical means. "Nam myoho rengai kyo." And all your deepest wishes will be fulfilled.

The process is a page from every religious culture that ever was. It is, at its best, a prayer for something, probably protection from the hostile elements of a an uncaring world. At its worst it is a threat and call to arms to stamp out and kill anything that sounds different and leads to a different conclusion. It is a war chant, a deliberate denial of manifest truth in favor of a theory of how things are that was superseded by science and rational thinking ages ago. It is a desperate plaint in the wilderness for a simple answer to complexity.

All of this was made quite plain in Paul Krugman's essay on Friday. He absolutely nailed both the real facts and the mendacious ploys of the conservatives in one short essay—a real masterpiece!

JB

1/27/11

The news and commentary are full of the actions taken by ordinary people in Tunisia and now in Egypt against their repressive regimes that have run their countries for decades. Also in the news are the pitiful expressions of the U.S. Department of State, or at least the commentary about completely expected comments by Secretary Hillary Clinton and others.

Let's be clear about this at long last. The United States recognizes many governments that it does not like, governments that are repressive, illegally installed, and a host of other reasons for disliking them. Nevertheless, the position of our country now and in the past is that a regime that is de facto in charge of a nation for an appreciable time as in China, Burma, North Korea, endless (and mindless) African states, Cuba, Venezuela, and Beloruss, are all ... whether they are de jure states or not ... a fact of life.

It is the policy of every signatory to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (notwithstanding) that we try to arrive at the most peaceful accommodation between unfriendly states as we can to insure that lives are not lost and wasted in endless conflict. It is in some sense a matter of economic priorities. Simply: we cannot remake the world to suit ourselves, and we must depend on the people of a country to stand up for themselves.

Is this a realistic policy?

Yes. It is realistic and sometimes so antithetical to the "ideal" policy we would prefer to follow that the chasm between the two yawns viciously at our pitiful attempts to be true to our moral aspirations. So, with the State of the Union Address being ripped apart by fools, with the media giving them attention they do not deserve, with the question of Executive leadership in our country very much on the table, we must watch as Arab countries try to grow up and throw off the vicious dictatorships that follow closely on the demise of millennia of tribal authority.

We need a diplomatic system that promotes our ideals. All we have now is one that promotes our business interests and hopes for stability among people we understand very poorly. Would it be hypocritical to recognize a Mubarak in Egypt and at the same time beam information to the people of Egypt about the "blessings of democracy" and the eternal vigilance it requires? Would it matter if all advanced nations had such a policy, whether they act in concert or not? You are damned right it would make a difference! And, it is something that a Barack Obama should have been constructing from Day One. That would be Change we can believe in.

You might be interested to read the thoughts of veteran journalist Robert Fisk on the rebellions in the Arab world. I think you can begin to see the consequences of a 19th century view of diplomacy in an electronically invigorated world.

JB

1/24/11

In today's New York Times Paul Krugman, with whom I disagree rarely, sets off on a semantic trip against the idea of competitiveness as a theme (or even THE theme) of President Obama's State of the Union message. Frankly, I think he is missing the point and has fallen into what some might call an "elitist trap" of his own making. To Krugman "competitiveness" has business connotations that work against progress toward a saner economy, and he mentions one of them outright ... and I do not disagree with his judgment about that one example. Moreover, Krugman admits that as metaphor for rejuvenation of our economy and way of life, "competitiveness" might well be a good political move.

Why then, having admitted that the term is useful does he rankle so much about it being used? I think Krugman sees it as too simplistic and perhaps a ticket on a train moving the wrong direction philosophically as regards needed regulations, there being abroad in the land the foolish myth that regulations are inherently anti-competitive.

I would prefer to see the term "competitiveness" as a trope for building a esprit that incorporates the idea of regulations as necessary bulwarks for a competitive economy. The expression is already in the Constitution "a well-regulated militia being necessary ...," which says that militias to be effective in providing for the common defense require discipline and regulations. Is this different for businesses? Certainly not!

Deep in the thinking of Paul Krugman is the fear that root metaphors sometimes have pernicious effects and are taken too literally. I agree that root metaphors are important in a culture, but I sincerely doubt that Barack Obama's use of the term is going to reinvent the term as a mantra for the corporatists in our society.

JB

1/22/11

As an article in the New York Times this Saturday morning tells, this is the time for the so-called "pro-lifers" to pass their brand of regulatory rules for our society—social regulations! In this case, obviously, anti-abortion rules for people of all stations and means to abide by until the pendulum turns away from this kind of meddling.

Of course, the pro-lifers think of their efforts as undoing outrageous laws, bordering on rules for acceptable homicide. And, quickly the debate comes down to the issue of whether or not a human being exists at conception, three days later, three weeks later, three months later, or only at birth. And the argument is not specious; it is a question that is fundamentally unanswerable because the contexts in which the question is asked are so utterly different, one from the other, that the academic exercise of declaring a human being to be human or be a being is just about irrelevant.

I think that most Progressives and Liberals want there to be a Choice reserved in law to the woman who finds herself pregnant. That is a good principle upon which to found an argument. The question is whether there a point in a large, boisterous, and basically non-homogeneous society where Choice becomes something else, where some members of the society perceive it to be Permission, and having perceived it that way for a while take it to be akin to Promotion? I believe that the pro-lifers believe this to be true, and I also believe that Progressives and Liberals should give themselves the opportunity to examine this question thoroughly.

It comes down to an issue that a friend in California and I discussed just the other day ... the question of elitist hegemony in the Democratic Party, a state of affairs that is tolerated by the rest of the political left because they are content to have someone working out the theoretical and abstract principles upon which good old American pragmatism ultimately coupled.

Or, put it another way, the Yalies and Harvard boys in the Democratic Party (to use icons, but to include educational and economic elites wherever they may occur) are useful to the larger mass of the party both as vocal leaders, but may from time to time (perhaps always!) be orchids to the dandelions of the party, not living among the masses, but so differentiated as to be fundamentally disconnected and unable to see the pragmatic reality of our society.

I think that pro-life has this defect. I agree with the concept of Choice, but as believer in Emanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative ("act as though what you do will be a model for others") as a good rule for organizing one's behaviors, I think that personal Choice must not be confused with social Choice, that is, what one person does is presumably based on his or her own circumstances, his or her understanding of those circumstances, and his or her means and ability to effect a beneficial outcome within the circumstances. But, a social Choice has none of that. Social Choice is inevitably based more on trends and values than on pragmatic fact.

There is no question in my mind that people are having babies that they cannot really afford, given their incomes, their ability to nurture and educate, or their own health and family environments. Statistically the children born into these "deficit situations" tend to remain in deficit their whole lives, and that includes giving birth to their own children with similar life chances. The statistics also allow for miracles, and these are widely publicized to give credence to the idea that a person can bootstrap out of humble/deficit situations. You know where I am going with this.

Our society is not sufficiently mature to deal with issues like life and death rationally. Moreover, there are forces in the society that have dogmatic and entrenched positions on population growth: the Roman Catholic Church for one, and until robots are ubiquitous, industry for another. To be fair, there are groups and organizations that think the opposite ... that there are too many human beings already and that we need to slow the "natural increase" down so that the population subsides to a level more consistent with the environment and our own species' maturity.

Pro-life does not want to argue about this. They have staked out a dogmatic position that abortion is some level of homicide, perhaps not first degree murder, but clearly offensive to some universal morality they believe exists. Staking out a dogmatic position is always a mistake, because there are always going to be exceptions, particularly where the mother's life will certainly be lost if the abortion is not carried out. Pro-life fails on the question of Choice, too, because it restricts its rhetoric to the social Choice, not the personal Choice.

Pro-Choice mistakes its fundamental principle as sufficient. Choice is good, but what does it evolve into in the society generally. Is there evidence that people are using abortion for regular birth-control? If they are, is this what is intended, given the respect due the other side's view of the process as a kind of homicide? And, really, how much respect IS due?

I happen to believe that this is an issue that cannot be finally resolved in a society as large and diverse as our own. I believe that we do best when we understand that the issue is fraught with uncertainty and demands compassion. I fear that the new wave of anti-abortion legislating will not incorporate my views at all.

JB

1/20/11

My colleague has written about the House of Representatives, now under the sway of the GOP and the TeaParty, voting to repeal last year's Health Care Act. Everyone has heard about this "symbolic" act. But, what is it symbolic of? What was the real point, and does that reason point in a direction for the next two years of GOP frothing at the mouth in Congress? You betcha!

The GOP is playing a game with the American people which goes well beyond disingenuous and dishonest and mendacious and deceptive. It is playing what it believes is its trump card about big government, hoping that the long-standing battle cry "Kill the Beast" will eventually get the tax people off their gold-plated backs, hoping that the process will go slowly enough that they can milk the "starving beast" for all it is worth for their own districts, hoping that the American people will not notice that they are building a plutocracy and governing by corporatism in front of our very eyes.

The game is a lie. The GOP knows full well that all the major players in the Health Care Question want the 2010 Health Care Act. Dr. Aaron Carroll tells you why. [Read it now, please.]

Virtually no sector of the economy is worried about the Act ... or for that matter the deficit, which is the reddest of herrings floating around out there. The GOP needed to placate the TeaParty, to shut them up, to give them a Senate and White House to mouth off about on the Health Care issue.

Yes, this "repeal" game was predictable, but what is not obvious, because of GOP and TeaParty and media propaganda, is that the Health Care Act is a solid piece of work, yes, full of errors that can be and must be fixed, but functional and of great importance to THIRTY MILLION Americans (that's one person in every third dwelling in America). It is time that those thirty and the rest of us got a grip on this thing and demand that the Act be IMPROVED not repealed.

JB

1/19/11

On Monday, the Washington Post ran an article about the independence of the Legislative Branch from the Executive and from the Judicial. It is a very interesting piece, which bring into sharper focus the inherent problem of an independent Congress, a very important element of the Enlightenment view of governance that the Framers of the Constitution deliberately created. It should be said at this point that when our Constitution was written and ratified never had these principles ever been put into practice, and moreover, the Framers may have (deliberately or not) installed remedies for the all too obvious problems that "an independen legislature" might bring.

The problem is corruption, a thought that was not far off the table in Philadelphia at any time during the creation of the Constitution. Impeachment of erring officials was given to the legislative branch, including impeachment of its own, but the process is unwieldy and used far less often than instances of bad behavior appear, largely because the moral principle involved is encrusted with daily emotional content that the Framers tended to ignore (despite the fact that they were emersed up to their eyelids in that very situation—regional affiliations, personal affiliations, principled positions, and all the reverses, too. The corruption the Framers plastered over was slavery, of course, and their "solution" of delaying the issue to a newer generation was clearly a big mistake that cost the nation 600,000 dead in four bitter years of Civil War.

The problem today is personal corruption in an environment flowing with money from sources unlikely and all-too-familiar. It is easy to decry the corruption, but doing something about it when the machinery of prosecution (Executive) and of weighing the evidence (Judiciary) are deliberately missing, puts the burden on people (People!) who are at least in theory best suited to legislative deliberations. But, that is not the essential problem of separation of powers. The essential problem as the Framers saw it was an Executive that would harass and unseat members of the Legislature or the Judiciary. They did not see the Judiciary running amok, nor the Legislature, although there were some minor worries.

This built-in safeguard against an overweaning Executive does not have a cure that does not already exist in the moral fiber of the legislators themselves. The most basic principle of a republican form of government—a representative democracy (as distinguished from a direct democracy)—is the notion that The People can find among themselves good, intelligent, and honest men and women to form their government. If this axiom is not true, the whole business is but a lingering tragedy. The built-in safeguard is now being exercised by the corrupt to hinder prosecution that they so richly deserve.

Never in the history of the Legislative Branch of our government have the divisions on matters of basic principles been so diverse and rancorous. Not even the questions of slavery or of the gold standard or of excise taxes levied on whiskey were as divisive as the question about the basic role of government in this new century. The notion that the least government is the best government does not comport with the goals of anyone, yet it is a battle cry that also threatens the delicate mechanisms of self-governance that division of powers entails. Hoping that the Congress will understand the solemn nature of this issue may not be enough. It clearly is time for moral leaders in Congress to understand the nature of the chasm that is open and ready to swallow the government whole.

JB

1/19/11

This is an interesting interview. Already the rightwingnuts are poo-pooing the sentiments involved, and that should tell you where they are comirom reptil hatred and fear ... completely without dignity or class, appalling at every syllable. Gabby has tactile cues she is sending to Mark, it is not some "liberal" poppycock designed to ingratiate Giffords to the American public.

Here is Diane Sawyer's interview on her 20-20 broadcast Tuesday evening, in case you missed it.

JB

1/17/11

James Carroll's Monday column in the Boston Globe brings us the bad news that assassinations work. They divert history as if they were dams. They retard progress and often bring decades of backwardness. Carroll notes that the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday is different and a similar momentum has been re-established by President Obama in Tu yon. We can hope.

JB

1/16/11

I recall reading in the past week an article about how women's tears are full of chemicals that have a mollifying and calming, pacifying effect on males. The article, to attract attention, of course, related the research results to the notion that a crying woman is a man's first clue that "not tonight" will be the next words he hears. I am not convinced that the research on this subject was rigorously tested by other scientists, and in fact I did note that one dissenter claims that human beings do not even have a functioning vomero-nasal organ with which to detect the presence of pheromones, such as might be present in some tears. The other part of this research suggested strongly that the mollifying and pacifying effect would extend only to the limits of "the clan." This is another reason I am holding this new research in my highly provisional category for now. But I am holding it, because there are lots of research results that point to the sending and receiving of pheromones while other research points to the human "clan" as a basic organizational category. Who knows yet? I come away from this reading with two ideas.

One, it is very apparent that scientists have vitriolic comments to extend where they think other scientists are going astray. These are impolite comments and fully replete with disdain and even outright hostility. In other words, I see that contentiousness is not restricted to pundits, the mentally unbalanced, or politicians.

Two, I think that our mental horizons are quite a bit less extensive that we imagine them to be, even in a world dominated by mass communications and vivid depictions of far away people and their lives. In other words, we have on average, probably, a hard-wired limit to our willingness to engage people much beyond our "native group" our "clan."

Along a parallel path today, Frank Rich writes about the quick relapse and contraction of our moral imaginations in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, assassination, and murders. For reasons that lie deeper and, perhaps, more entrenched in our psyches than we want to admit, we are seemingly incapable of ridding ourselves of guns even as a matter of civilized principle and rational prudence. Something in us needs to be retained that permits us to "project our wills" out beyond our natural limits in such a way that is unmistakably authoritative and violent. This probably goes all the way back to the first use of tools, the fetishism of tools, the love-affair with the long stick, the pointed stick, the throwing spear, and onward technologically to the Glock Model 19.

There is a calculus to our unwillingness to disarm and be all that much safer. As this Washington Post article describes, those politicians who clearly remain in harm's way while guns are being purchased in record numbers are stepping out into the world again without any surety of their safe return to their own loved ones and clan. How can they do this, you should ask? Do they not understand the statistical profile of violence in this country, the gulf and chasm that separates points of view and separates our clans into Hatfields and McCoys on every corner?

Is there any way for people who detest violence to avoid becoming part of the rush to arms?

I feel it strongly, the urge to arm myself against those thugs who warned me to shut my liberal mouth ... or else. I feel it strongly that the next outbreak will be less ambiguous, more clearly partisan, more obviously (to some) that "shot heard 'round the world," the opening moment of insurrection, the beginning of a national bloodbath taking place in every neighborhood. I dread that next event, that seems so perfectly inevitable and yet preventable with courage.

JB

1/14/11

Today in the New York Times both Paul Krugman and David Brooks wrote on the subject of the hour, the lack of civility in the public dialog these days. Krugman believes that the problem is too deep to be swept away by the revulsion over the Tucson shootings. I agree. The far right is coming from completely different view of life and morality from that of the left. There is not much you can say to a person who believes, as Social Darwinists do, that the health of people is their own problem and that if they cannot afford health care it is because they are inferior to those who can. There is not much you can do with people who are so blind to the benefits of being governed democratically that they would risk it all for virtually no government at all.

I liked David Brooks's comments as well and believe with him that in the long run responsible leaders in government and industries can push aside the hatreds and misgivings of those who currently thrive on hatred. But the problems in our discourse will not be managed by the likes of Rupert Murdock or Roger Ailes. It is going to take some people with intelligence and starch to get beyond the situation in which we find ourselves today.

The point, whether the other side sees it or not, is that the contentiousness can literally be boiled down to the principles and assumptions involved and those revealed as part of the dialogue. I think that many liberals will be surprised how weakly their own programs and policies are supported by hard facts, rather than well-meant hypotheses. And, conservatives have even more to discover about themselves, particularly how utterly selfish they appear to the rest of us.

We have a lot of work to do. Liberals and Progressives have work that they are unused to doing successfully, namely, examining their assumptions in the light of ever clearer evidence that we have not much longer to go down this present road before it becomes a ditch and perhaps a sudden grave.

JB

1/13/11

These words filled my heart with hope. Thank you Captain Kelly for allowing President Obama to utter them at the memorial service here in Tucson yesterday. She opened her eyes for the first time, a sign unmistakable in the progress my Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is making. Survival is the main thing, of course, but we all want her to recover as much as is possible. Some brain material was removed in the surgery, but, as the neurosurgeon told us that day, the amount was minimal. Some brain tissue was permanently damaged, perhaps ruined, as the bullet traversed her left hemisphere.

You should read some of the stories about traumatic brain injuries of the past to get a sense of what we are dealing with. In the 19th c. a man in Vermont or New Hampshire had a metal rod jammed through his frontal cortex and lived, worked, and was almost normal for years afterward. The story is interesting because of the nature of the deficits he experienced. Bob Woodruff of news reporting fame, was grievously wounded in the head in Iraq and is back on the job today. Maybe we can hope for as much for Gabrielle Giffords, too.

But the news was that "she opened her eyes." And that immediately offered to me a metaphor or theme for an essay at ALP and at what is now my home website, Iron Mountain.

Being a co-founder of The American Liberalism Project has been a wild ride. The nation has undergone probably the worse presidency since that of James Buchanan, the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorism, two brutal political campaigns, and a disaster on Wall Street, the effects of which are still being felt strongly by millions of unemployed and dispossessed of their dreams. We have done a reasonable job, I think, of bringing to you the issues of the day with, of course, our Liberal and Progressive biases clearly there for people to see and emulate or just ignore. The question is whether we have be hateful about it, whether we have stooped to the mendacity that those we have described in our essays are wallowing in? I think not. We have not been hateful, but we have grazed close to that peril many, many times. I cannot tell you how much I dislike Rush Limbaugh, Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney, the owner of Xi Services (formerly Blackwater), O'Reilly, Beck, Coulter, Malkin, and a couple dozen more of the deliberate hate and fear mongers of our American society. I dislike them a lot; I think they are abusing the freedom of speech and the basic principles of honest journalism. They are dishonest people making a buck (lots of bucks) with their hate speech.

I do not think that I can open their eyes. There is almost nothing I can write that would divert them for a time long enough for the truth to burrow into the rat's nest of their minds to clear them of their hatreds and prejudices and love of money. I do not think I can open the eyes of my next door neighbor who, with his dear wife, is a devotee of Glen Beck, that atrocity of a man, weeping his way into the simpling minds of the aged and change-fearing people of our country. At that I fail every day.

So I ask myself in the wake of the tragedy in Tucson that struck down my friend Gabrielle Giffords and killed six, I ask myself what am I doing here at this keyboard hour and hours a day, reading disparate views from six or more sources, boiling them down, finding an eloquent statement of them for you to read if, perchance, you missed it yourself. What is the purpose? What is the really practical result?

She Opened Her Eyes. You must do the same. You must have the courage to open them and keep them open, to act, as old Emmanuel Kant suggested in his Categorical Imperative, as if what you do may be a model for others. No shorter statement of the importance of your motives is written anywhere. And so that is my reason, my raison d'etre. It is to remind you to seek out your next door neighbor and sneak into his heart and mind with a neighborly comment that proves that you are not the ogre he thinks you are. Take your time. Be well informed. Speak to friends about the issues first and practice your own words. Bring the message of a just society into your message. I hope we can help.

JB

1/11/11

We have a very sick society.

Two writers in the past twenty-four hours have put their fingers on the fundamental problem in our society, the alarming streak of violence that is shot through the fabric of our society, sold by the ton-load on television, in video games, in our real wars. I say "sold" because the activity is deliberate and profitable. Very profitable.

America dove back into depression in 1937 for reasons that you have all read about, FDR's misgauging of the 1936 "recovery" and extremely vocal opposition being the main reasons. The thing that brought us out of the tailspin of the late 1930's was FDR's gearing up for a confrontation with Hitler and Mussolini, first through Lend-Lease and then by stages an escalation of support for the United Kingdom after the Phoney War and the fall of France. WWII mobilized the economy in a way that the cranks and pulleys of classical capitalism never could, and we emerged the victor and, in due time we realized, the one remaining almost unscathed super-power.

What we did not realize or understand despite Ike's Farewell Address conclusion that we face the threat of becoming a military-industrial complex, was that the mantle that fell from the UK to our shoulders, did not fit us well. We easily succumbed to the riches that military might and constant and pervasive militarism provide. We became a different sort of society in the Cold War, and it is ironic indeed that the call to the "good ol' days" of the '50's is so prevalent. We did indeed lose our innocence, but we also became a society of violence, seething under the surface with the resolve to nuke enemies back to the stone age (but never used, the thought really never tested for its lack of sanity, and now resulting in a murderous undercurrent in our culture).

The two essays I am introducing are along these lines. First, I would like you to read what may be Bob Herbert's best essay in years, "A Flood Tide of Murder".

Then I would like you to entertain the contextual remarks made by William Hartung in the blog TomDispatch, run by Tom Englehardt, entitled "Lockheed Martin's Shadow Government". I think you will agree with the first sentence of my essay.

JB

1/10/11

There already has been much written about the motives of the shooter here in Tucson, the "troubled" young man who set out to kill his and my Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords. Sheriff Dupnik nailed it on day one. The climate of discourse in the United States has become literally toxic and there are repercussions. There may be more as Paul Krugman suggests in his eloquent and anguished comments on the situation.

I have been musing about my part in the escalation of rhetoric into the toxic zone. I am afraid that from time to time I do get quite angry about the other side and their lies. How does one confront a lie, you should ask. How else but by calling it or showing it to be a lie. Then can you not call the person a liar? They are liars, but they are also deliberately inciting people to anger, rage, and behaviors that have no place in our society. Lying to incite is at least double the sin of these people, and I for one cannot sit idly by and let them do it, because what is at stake is my country and my society.

Everyone knows that we have 1-2% (maybe double or triple that) of our population who are chronically unstable, unreliable, untrustworthy, unbalanced, uncivil. We really do not know what to do about them. So, it seems to me that in the absence of a societal resolve to deal with these persons, in the absence of initiative from us, we must—since this is real—accept the consequences of our inaction. That would be the loss of general security for the whole. It does not sound like a good bargain to me, but it is what you get when you steadfastly refuse to incarcerate and correct and cure the "unbalanced" members of society. Do nothing adult and responsible to address the problem, you get the result, mayhem!

We do not allow the "unbalanced" on airplanes and endure public humiliation from the security forces so that we can fly with a reasonable sense of security. We must provide something like that level of security for our elected officials, and that means a diminution of access, for there will be citizens who believe they (because they are "balanced") should have unfettered access to their representatives. After all the corporations and lobbyist have unfettered access and it has all but destroyed the heart of our representative democracy.

There is no easy road from here. Imposing rigorous security measures without addressing the problem on its own "demerits" will lead to a police state. We must provide security now, especially in this toxic environment. We must address the needs of society and the individuals who are unbalanced, even if that means incarceration at "great expense" (certainly less than the cost of the Tucson-style mayhem)! And we must deal with the agents of toxicity, principally Sarah Palin and Rupert Murdock and his FOX network of hate-mongers. Their "free speech" cannot be allowed to include incitement to violence!

JB

1/9/11

I live in a suburb of Tucson about 30 minute's drive from where a horrific shooting took place today. This shooting did not take place inside Safeway supermarket or the Walgreen's drug center next door. The shooter was not angry about high food prices or Big Pharma selling expensive pharmaceuticals. The suspect shot my Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, a woman whom I know from working for her campaign, with whom I spoke less than a month ago one on one, whom I hugged and kissed at a party celebrating her narrow victory. The shooter instead shot at a political figure. He shot Gaby and seventeen other persons, killing six (at this writing) and grievously wounding ten, all of whom are fighting for their lives tonight and tomorrow and the next day.

Gaby Giffords was shot through the brain, and she is grievously wounded. Our hope is for her survival and hopefully her recovery. I know that the whole country hopes she will. She is a remarkable human being for whom I have immense respect and love.

The shooting was perpetrated by a disturbed young Tucsonan, a boy of twenty-two tortured years, but his target was an elected member of Congress. It was an attempted political assassination. It was, in my opinion and the opinion of the Pima Country Sheriff, politically motivated and the result of hate speech gone rampant in this country, broadcast for money by the electronic media and repeated endlessly on the political and social networks of our age. Whether Gaby survives or not, this has to stop.

Free speech does not include incitement to riot or any other form of physical violence. It is dangerous and deadly and six people in my city have died because, as the Sheriff said, we have no shortage of unbalanced people in this country who cannot distinguish and evaluate hate speech for what it is. The suspect may be unbalanced, we just don't know yet. He is "troubled" and like the boy who killed at Virginia Tech a while back, he could have been stopped before he acted. Instead he was brought to his dreadful act by adult persons making a buck dealing out the rhetoric of hatred and violence.

Tucson was the place this time, but everyone of you knows that it could have happened where you live, too. You just are not lucky enough to have a Representative as beautiful in her heart and soul as Gabrielle Giffords.

JB

1/7/11

The main problem as Texans see it, at least those within a half-day's drive of the Capitol Building in Austin, is the drought. There was a drought there when I decamped from central Texas and dropped anchor in Arizona (more or less on my way back to California). I like Texans and some of the folks that move there to become in four or five generations Texans theyselves. And, yeah, they are a bit hubristic about their Lone Star Republic and all the good football they generate under those fabled Friday night lights, but them Texans are a sturdy, if not completely educated lot. Anyway, I spoke with my former housemate and she said drought, even though I had forwarded to her the latest essay from Paul Krugman in the New York Times.

Paul never did live in Texas far as I can see, but he likes it pretty much as conditionally as I do. His prognosis is a different kind of drought, a bankrupt state, and underneath the obvious problems that Governor Whatshisname is gonna have trying to make Texas look good to Texans, is the other drought down there—the honesty drought. The Governor, vying for leadership on the GOP Rightwingnut side, told Texans and any other fools who would listen that Texas was a blamed miracle right before their eyes. They bought it hook, line, and chaw plug, but now theys in for a rude awakenin'.

The GOP has no problem with lies. They tell 'em often enough so that the begin to sound like the truth to the folks who listen ... and to the folks that tell 'em, too. The GOP risks it credulity, of course, but their quick answer is ..."well, son, that there was politics. You gotta unnerstand politics, son. It ain't always pretty." And truly, it ain't!

For me, Texas with no state income tax, but ruinous property taxes that favor the farm against the homeowner, they can all rot in the hell hole of insects, humidity, vipers, they have made down there, 'ceptin' my friends, of course. They're gonna need federal help to get out of this one, and so look for NASA to be doing some of the heavy lifting, and for the many Army camps and bases, look for consolidations under Secretary Gates (former president of them Aggies) that leans toward the Lone Star. And look for more lies. They'll be blaming Oklahoma for sure, and always California!

JB

1/5/11

The other day in the New York Times there was an article about Alan Grayson, the well-spoken, junior, but nevertheless fearless leader for the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party. He was voted out of office in Florida by "values" voters in that riven state that ought to know better. A friend and I were talking about leaders for the future and after tossing around Howard Dean's name a bit and wondering whether the corporate press would be continuing their practice of feeding us ground glass sandwiches with Dean's effigy on both pieces of bread, the name of Alan Grayson came up.

Readers of ALP know that Grayson has outdone virtually every Democrat in Congress on standing up for what is right. He is a champion of everything Liberals and Progressives hope to stand for in their daily lives. But, more than that, Grayson is unabashed about his Liberalism.

Politics in the modern Democratic Party has been conducted on the principle that Left is often too far Left for the American public, and so Democrats have drifted, speechlessly of course, into the so-called Center, where when they say something they hope is intelligent, it comes out as Republican Lite, foolish, and more often than not has the finger-prints of corporate agendas on it. Not so with Grayson. He understands the corporate agenda and rightfully despises it. And, as I have said, he was voted out of office.

My friend and I believe this man has a long career in politics ahead of him, so this brief essay is simply to alert you to his name again and to urge you to keep an eye out and an ear cocked for Alan Grayson. We will do our part.

JB

1/3/11

James Carroll, writing his Monday column in the Boston Globe echoes my sentiments about the real state of the union. The union is anything but "unum" these days, as Carroll quickly explains the newest disparity between the rich and the poor, the causes of which seem to elude the voters, who being trained in "values politics," rather than reasoning from evidence to conclusion, vote away their own standards of living. Carroll is a little short on the attitude side, but he understands fully what the implications of the latest spread are.

The fact is that the super wealthy, who by the way control corporate America, act reflexively to preserve the way of life they have become accustomed to. They also act collusively through corporate board rooms and PACs and lobbying firms to influence legislation. In fact it has gone way beyond mere plumping for a valence on legislation. They actually write the legislation and hand it to the "overworked" and "underprepared" members of Congress. The result is class rule with the interests of corporations—the real Base—brought to the top of the national legislative agenda. It is corporatism, but it is, as Carroll says outright, fascism.

As it happens I read the Paul Krugman essay today before reading Carroll. If you wait to read these references until after reading my brief comments, then read Krugman first. If you do, you might have the Krugman forecast still circulating among your synapses as the bottom line is being laid down by Carroll. Your brain is going to ask you why the country is taking the wrong road to recovery. The answer is twofold.

First, the contemporary "public" has been trained since the days of Reagan to distrust big government, unless it is a big government project in their city, of course. The corollary to this fear of big government is the fear of being outvoted by interests that are not congruent with one's own. How ironic then, that voters have been trained to vote on "values issues" where they do have congruent views with many people of different stations of life, but completely irrelevant to their lives and livelihoods! Voting the so-called "values" issues, including all the smarmy rugged individualist and I-ain't-gonna-take-any-more-of-this-shit confabulations from Palin and the TeaParty, brings in the people who can afford to train you to vote this way (often over long periods of time ... money has a way of insulating rich folks from the exigencies of daily life) and who have real political motives and economic agendas that are exactly antithetical to your own. That's how it happens, except for the second item.

Second, We the People have never been very good at argument, logic, evidence appraisal and testing, or drawing timely conclusions from what we know. In fact, the state of education in civics in this country has got to be near the bottom of all the avowed democracies in the world. We are pathetic citizens and as the saying goes, sunshine patriots, who lose interest in virtually anything that forces us to think about contesting wills with contesting facts (real facts that seem to contradict each other) and long-term outcomes that we might not enjoy. We are living proof of the skeptics of democracy. But, and I am sincere in this statement, Liberals believe that ordinary citizens if presented with political choices based on verifiable and tested evidence can rise above their normal lethargy and self-imposed ignorance to cast reasonable votes that represent BOTH their own private economic and social interests and the long-term interests of the nation (that gives them the right to vote).

Millions of people vote rationally. Millions vote irrationally. As Alan Grayson said as he strode out of the Capitol, giving up his seat to a "bizarre fundamentalist," the problem is not statistical. Democrats do not become better by moving toward the so-called Center. They become better by being Democrats committed to the welfare of the bulk of the population. In this sense, Obama and Clinton are/were wrong. The Bayhs are/were wrong. For slightly different reasons, but based on statistical inferences that ignore the truth of liberal democracy, Rahm Emanuel is/was wrong.

It is, as Krugman says, going to be another tough year. The GOP and TeaParty may finally decide who is in charge in the House, but in the meantime nothing productive for the 85% of the population is going to get done. That is another clue that our representative democracy has been taken over by fascistic corporatists.

JB

1/1/11

Yesterday was last year, and today is the day of hope, the day we gather our inner resources (hopefully optimistic ones) and conceive of a better way ... for everything in our lives. Yesterday I was cynical and, maybe, brought your spirits down a bit. I am not retracting anything I wrote, but I am saying that human courage extends to this, to the process of finding a pony in a room full of puckey. Liberals and Progressives are fundamentally optimistic people. We believe two things: one, that our fellow man and woman are capable of doing wonderful things, and two, that they will occasionally falter or fail. We believe that the point is to establish social structures that prevent the failures from undoing us all, while providing maximum flexibility for creativity and innovation. We need to attend more to the former right now, while making some strong public statements about the latter.

JB

12/31/10

You can have 2010. It was a bad year for billions of people, me and my family among them. Needless to say, the universe does not care a whit about unemployment, heart attacks, environmental and political disasters, cancer, cynical mendacity, corruption, rapacious drug lords or petroleum tycoons. Life is messy and despite our best efforts to put things into categories of expectation and behavior, moral people turn out to be fundamentally undependable, and moral people may well be the minority on this planet. That is a tough statement, but one needs to decide whether sunshine morality like sunshine patriotism is all we can hope for. Or, more importantly, is that how we decide morality: on easy situations. If so, next year will be a real test of the population, and if I am right, people will act way outside the Golden Rule to survive, to get ahead, to seize a fleeting opportunity, to take advantage of situations. Translate that into the behavior of nations and reduce the pot to three: China, Russia, and the United States (with appropriate apologies to the European Union, India, Brazil and other hopeful countries and cultures) and you will have my prognosis.

China is on everyone's thoughts from the dude down at Walmart marveling at the inexpensive goods shipped four or five times a day from the sweaty ports of resurgent China. But China is feeling their window of opportunity closing as the realities of bringing a nation and culture out of 5000 years of navel-gazing self-absorption into a competitive world of peers and commonwealths. The window is closing slowly enough for the Chinese to emerge with few cultural impediments, but the politics of China are not. The leadership in China is jealous of its position—defacto committee dictatorship—and seemingly unable to assert itself in the international community with adult and mature behaviors, as exemplified by the threats against Norway and other nations for acknowledging the captive Liu Xiaobo winner of the Nobel Prize, for taunting the West with the delinquent leadership of North Korea, for over-reaching against the Japanese for a wayward fishing vessel, and most recently for establishing an economic embargo and quotas on 97% of the worlds supply of rare earth minerals. China is like a new kid on the block, older than the neighborhood kids, but emotionally and socially backward, missing chances to be a leader right and left, failing to show what 5000 years of civilization can produce, exploiting its workers, and denying them basic civil rights, while playing nationalist internal propaganda for all it is worth. China will be a problem next year—a serious and growing problem.

Russia, the largest land-mass country in the world, (but a mere fading shadow compared to China's 1.3 billions) stands at its own windows of opportunity as well. Russia is and always has been behind the West in the development of law, despite valiant attempts by the autocracy to impose a codified system of law on a country savagely engaged in medieval serfdom as the Americans were fighting one another over negro slavery. Russia's problem is autocracy and the sense of smallness and helplessness that pervades the individual in Russia. Vladimir Putin understands the deep anxiety of Russians about getting along with one another as equals under law. He knows that Russians fundamentally distrust. He knows how to perpetuate that for his own power, and so this nation that gave us unparalleled advances in the arts in the 19th century, in rapacious politics in the 20th, stands poised at the end of the first decade of a new millennium to fall backward into political lethargy and dictatorship because it cannot deal with law. The oil tycoon Khodorkovsky was given seven more years in prison for his crimes (and believe me, he did not become a billionaire petroleum tycoon overnight by prayer alone, he is guilty of gargantuan thievery of state property and manipulation of corrupt government officials). Khodorkovsky is guilty, but Putin is also guilty of using power instead of law to bring people like Khodorkovsky to justice. What he got was not "justice" but a naked whipping with the ancient Russian knout. Putin, whose power seems to virtually absolute—in the autocratic tradition of Russia—seems to have given up trying to reform the 140 million and slowly declining numbers of Russians. His failure is Russia's failure and it means more problems from Russia, not fewer.

The United States may be the more volatile of the nations in our pot today. There is abroad in the land of the free and home of the brave a steady buzz about decline, an aching restlessness about the kinds of progress our county now makes, about the stratification of society along socio-economic lines (which has been the case for centuries, by the way, but never so vivid and disparate). The decline of the United States may be a matter of the failure of the democratic experiment begun in 1787 with our Constitution. The open question is whether our form of government can resist the power of wealth or not. Clearly, the United States has long since ceased to function as a representative democracy, a republic in the classical sense, and instead has entered for the second time a period of transition to a corporatist state where representatives elected by the people (democratically) are so beholding financially and ideologically to their corporate benefactors that they see their mission to serve the people as properly mediated by serving corporations that hire people. Corporations are tumors—cancers— in political terms, but U.S. law gives them civil rights as if they were individual citizens.

More than the silent imposition of corporations between the people and their government is the lie that it has not happened, and the cascades and floods of lies that support that basic lie. Paul Krugman notes how pervasive the lying has become, taking over one of the main political parties completely, and a good part of the other. But, lies told upon lies do not alter the reality of things. They may alter the perception, and certainly they have. Americans are so confused by the lies these days that they cannot reason from evidence to sound conclusions, as if an entire nation had been lobotomized and its common IQ reduced 50 points. The good ol' days in America, which were marked by violent racism, sexism, poverty, subordination of individual spirit to a cold war manufactured for the aggrandizement of powerful elites, are gone. We should be thankful and should build a new America on sturdier foundations, but will we? We have a Congress that is corrupt and 60 some new members whose mission is to make sense of what has befallen us but from false premises and lies. America has a window, too, and it is closing on us. If we do not get some fresh air into the body politic soon, America is going to be the biggest problem on this glorious blue planet.

JB

12/30/10

Colman McCarthy, a former writer for the Washington Post takes up the cudgel against ROTC (and presumably NROTC [Navy's version]) on college campuses. You can read his reasons for objecting to ROTC if you want, but to summarize them, he is against war. Nice!

Yes, I am against war, too, but I think we have been down this path several times in my lifetime, with new wars hatching on the horizon ahead of us. Humans are feisty, foolish, and fierce competitors for power and riches, so war is, I am afraid, more or less inevitable in the long run. In the short run we are sentient beings with memory and conscience, so we should be doing all we can to forestall the outbreak of wars (and all the little military actions we don't want to call "war," per se.)

How do you set up a society to be prepared for military action in such a way as to be INTRINSICALLY against war. Well, my friends, the way NOT to be intrinsically against war is to have service academies where young men and women are selected and trained to be "professional" officers in the military services. The very idea of service academies goes against the concept of civilian control of he military, and if you live in the Washington, D.C. area, as I did, you know that military careers are built on wartime feats, not on sitting in the Navy Annex on Columbia Pike or down the hill in the Pentagon.

Sitting or fighting the question is really one of the kind of preparation our young officers get. The service academies are as close to a monoculture of militarism as you will find this side of places like The Citadel, a notoriously militaristic "college" for the sons (and a few daughters) of colonels and generals (and the occasional admiral).

The best preparation for an intrinsically civilian and non-militaristic (and I only mean by that term a monocultural view of the military) will be obtained in civilian universities. There the young and impressionable ROTC student mixes daily with young men and women (like McCarthy) who hate the idea of mass killing and all that the military really encounters in practice. This exposure is the best guarantee we have that a substantial portion of the officer corps will be "multi-culturally" trained to do their duty.

The liberal education in America is not dead. There are many students who go to college or university to become well-rounded thinkers. By contrast, the number of students majoring in the humanities in the service academies is insignificant. The nature of modern society is, they say, that what you learn in the first year of a four or five year baccalaureate degree program from a college or university like, say, the University of Maryland or Florida or Tennessee or Georgia or Iowa or Oregon ... will be obsolete before you graduate. That may be true as to facts and methodologies, but as to reasoning processes, probably not. And this, of course, is the essence of education in the Humanities and in matters of Critical Thinking that challenges assumptions and authority. And that is not happening in the service academies like it happens on civilian campuses.

McCarthy is right that war is hell, and wrong about ROTC. ROTC is the more reliable source of humane reasoning for our military services. Critical Thinking will not lead them into foolishness nearly as often as the so-called "discipline" that the academies so revere. I have said it before, and will repeat it now. The service academies should be shut down and ROTC remain subjected to the rigors of academic governance.

JB

12/29/10

Today in the New York Times Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, architect of "perestroika" (continuous change and evolution), and the single most important character in Russian life since Stalin ... but on the other side ... wrote about the necessity for nailing down a comprehensive agreement among the nations of the Earth to get rid of nuclear weapons. He cites the failure of the United States Senate to appreciate the awesome responsibility it has.

With the likes of Arizona's senators Kyl and McCain leading the knee-jerk machismo movement in the direction of deadlier and more plentiful nuclear weapons, the nations of the earth who have grudges against neighbors, who have the economic means to buy their way into the proliferation of these weapons, who have nothing of the political or moral safeguards against their use, who have no compunctions about nuclear blackmail, all have reason to believe that the United States fundamentally does not care. This because of a few senators with shopworn ideas of national security.

When you read the prognostications of what probably will befall the planet in the next year and the next decade, author after author mentions the Iranian bomb threat and the loose-canon of North Korea both being emulated by nations with eager dictators willing to sacrifice world peace for an extra helping of political gravy. The world quite possibly will back into proliferation because the United States was too stupid to see its leadership role for what it is. We are not admired for inventing nuclear arms ... we are envied and we frighten them. It is time, way past time, actually, to turn this page and get on with the business of removing all nuclear weapons from the planet.

JB

12/27/10

The title of today's little essay is designed to make your blood pressure rise enough to get your attention. I am not trying to disable you, just get you to understand that the time has arrived to begin extraordinary measures to retrieve our democracy. I will let you define "extraordinary," but the idea is that we are now fighting an uphill battle that must be won.

The editors of the Washington Post, happy that the great Christmastime blizzard of 2010 has missed them, have written an indictment of the Republican Party so transparently negative that there can be no doubt that even the voice of the military-industrial complex is alarmed at the outright declarations of the fascist corporatists that now control the GOP.

The process is painstaking, and the outcome is uncertain. But progress is being made — and the House Republican leaders want none of that. Representative Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the next chairman of the House Financial Services Committee told The Birmingham News that “Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” He later said he meant regulators should set parameters, not micromanage banks, yet he seems to prefer the parameters that were in effect before the crisis when regulators did serve the banks. -- Washington Post

Notice the frame and point of view expressed in "“Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” Notice that "for the People" is missing! Now consider that "of the People" is missing as well. Bachus is from a small population state without the kind of political subscriptions among the constituency to fund a Senatorial candidate, so the candidate has sold his constituents' birthright and representation to a group of corporations that can afford to support him. This is the very definition of "corporatism."

Corporatism is a synonym for fascism (as broadly-defined; not specifically Germany's Nazism nor the Mussolini variety), which carries a somewhat-undeserved stigma. During the interwar years, fascism was widely recognized, even by Churchill and Roosevelt, as a bulwark against the spreading threat of marxism, and possibly as an effective economic strategy in countering the Great Depression. -- Wikipedia

The author(s) of the Wikipedia definition go on to show that "corporatism" is, indeed, the sort of system that emerged in both Germany and Italy as a result of the Great Depression of the 1930's. Bulwark against communism or not, corporatism is anti-democratic, effectively subverting the relationship between the electorate and the elected. Or, you could say that it substitutes corporate interests and support for electorate interests and support. In all cases, whether rising out of the financial ashes of a debacle like the Great Recession of 2007-2012 or arising in cold-war peacetime as the way to defeat a determined and entrench enemy and his system, the result is the same. The democracy is lost.

There is only one way to stop the Republicans from enacting their corporatist view of governance in America. That way is to defeat them at every turn between now and the next election. At the 2012 elections they must be consigned to the dustbin of history ... and then we take care of the corporatists in the Democratic Party, too.

JB

12/26/10

Frank Rich, writing in Sunday's New York Times, asks the question that gives title to his essay: Who Killed the Disneyland Dream, a question that glides into the more general question about the so-called American Dream. Rich is aware of the excitement among my generation about the building of Disneyland in Anaheim, California (still the Golden State in those innocent days.) After all daily "newsreels" were presented by the Mouseketeers detailing the advancing progress of the theme park. Whether we admitted it or not, we were all hoping to go to Disneyland as soon as possible and see the wonders of the "gravity defying" imagination brought to life.

But, the question that Rich wants to ask is not really about Disneyland or the imagination of fantasies. It is about the American Dream that we have heard so much about during our lives. That "dream" is actually nationalistic propaganda designed to weld a loyalty to the American system of representative government and private capitalism. The term "American Dream" goes no further back than 1931, although many would argue that the idea behind the expression "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence is the true source of the American Dream. (If you read the history of the drafting of the Declaration, you will learn that "happiness" was a compromise term thrown in at the last by men whose experience in statecraft already included the major compromises of the soon-to-be born nation, slavery chief among them.

So, the American dream is, nevertheless, a major theme in 20th century American mythology, a constant drum beat, a pervasive idea that breeds the sort of "exceptionalism" that most Americans tolerate because of the goodness of the idea. We are taught, trained, and all but brow-beaten into the acceptance and steadfast support of the idea that America does better than any other country in providing a realistic chance for people to get happy through accumulation of wealth. Or, at least that is the subtext of Frank Rich's description of the American Dream.

I will dissent more than just slightly. I believe that many of us take the American Dream to be a promise of freedom of thought and conscience that transcends (and incidentally avoids) the notion of economic gain. I think most of us understand that the economic American Dream is likely to benefit only a relatively few people, that in reality we are more likely to achieve comfort, but not real wealth.

And so the question really is what leads me to this conclusion and why? There is a story in the Washington Post today that goes most of the way toward explaining the loss of faith in the mythos of the American dream, being the economic dream that happiness is achievable through accumulated wealth or the more general one about freedom of thought and conscience. It is the story about suborning and soliciting of bribery by the elected representatives of our government, principally the members of Congress. It is the story of the loss of the defining element of the American Dream, the loss of our democracy to corporatism, yes, fascism. The process began in the Gilded Age after the Civil War, was almost stopped by the Great Depression, and renewed itself shortly after WWII, bringing us to the point now where we know (whether we are TeaParty or not) our government was bought and paid for by special interests that have no reason to even pay lip service to the ideas of the American Dream.

The answer: corporate America killed the Disneyland Dream and the American Dream.

JB

12/25/10

JB

12/24/10

Paul Krugman today reaches for a Christmas fable to frame the fables being created by the corporatists (aka GOP)(aka American Fascists). It is a good article with instructive explanations of what eager conservative ears are hearing from their leaders. It is a desperately pathetic situation, which does not lead to optimism about politics in our country.

If you examine the GOP you will find that it represents people of all stripes and economic conditions, with a much larger representation at the high income end than the Democrats. But, the point is that as a cross-section of religious and economic America, conservatives are everywhere, so they have either transcended economic categories or there is something more powerful than economics at work to sustain them.

Yes, there is something, and we have identified it long ago as FEAR. Conservatism is based on reluctance and aversion, both negative and both based in primal fear of things that are different from their mental constructs of what is reality. But, fear is what potentially unites the conservative hoi polloi together as a category. What glues them together, as Krugman describes is professional propaganda, which he calls "humbug" to resonate with the season, but which we call black lies at all other times.

Professional propaganda is orchestrated lying to achieve an end. In the case of the GOP it is the goal of the super rich, the rich, and the hopefully rich that riches be accepted as the currency of survival. It is a Gospel of Wealth idea that was popular the last time the wealthy began to rewrite reality to reflect their points of view. It is pseudo-Darwinism, an attempt to suggest that those who become wealthy are by definition the most fit of human beings. It is, however, like saying that the fattest steer is the fittest, ignoring the facts that brought the steer to its well marbled fleshy state, namely, a system of animal husbandry that includes the hand feeding by employees in the system, and the appetite of one and all for a juice steak from time to time.

Professional propaganda needs money to continue its appeal to fear and to the hope that riches will become the reward to the lucky and loyal supporters of the corporatist system. The money comes from organizations of corporate leaders, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and think tanks and lobbying operations and from rich individual donors who seek only to perpetuate their own luck.

The corporatists will stop at nothing to achieve their principal aim, which is to so insulate themselves from the rigors and vagaries of the commonweal that they are effectively "above the system." They have glommed onto the notion that big government is a problem, largely because a competent government can assist the poor as well as he rich, and the rich don't want to support the poor. The poor are only exploitable as long as they believe themselves to be consigned to poverty. The attack on the middle-classes is precisely in this vein. Inflation slowly erodes the foundation of middle-class life and so as the leap to riches is revealed to be mostly chimerical and mythical, the leap made by professional athletes and media celebrities being a miniscule part of the total population, the ground beneath the lower middle-class drops away leaving them hovering over the chasm of poverty.

And yet, these people vote against their own economic interests on the "principle of individualistic economic self-determination," as if anyone gets ahead by him- or herself! In fact, the average economic life is so fully and thoroughly embedded in a matrix of government and private support systems indispensable to the accumulation of wealth.

Krugman's humbug is a big subject and well on its way to becoming the dominating mythos of our times. It is necessary that those who see clearly the reality of this situation speak frequently, loudly, and authoritatively against it. Memorize the lessons Krugman teachs for the argument that will surely follow Christmas dinner tomorrow.

JB

12/24/10

Recently I began an association with the SPLC, largely because I believe that the racism of the TeaParty and even the mainstream of the GOP is about to get out of hand...again and that we are in for another round of hate violence, probably not restricted to the south, but SPLC is not restricted to the south, either.

I know it is Christmas Eve and you would rather read a pleasant homily about whether reindeer really "know" how to fly .... (And I sent the URL of SueZ's reindeer mushroom piece everywhere to personal friends, because I love a good explanation for myths and tales.) But, the fact is that The Family Research Council is a bad group of people whose leadership, at least, is bent on a program of hatred based on myths about gays and lesbians. Here is an email newsletter that I got from SPLC that orients you to the issues at hand. I applaud SPLC for coming out and naming FRC as a hate group, because truly they are.

You have to wonder about people who are afraid of the facts, afraid of people who are different, afraid their venerated institutions like marriage will wilt under the pressure for truth mounted by people suppressed and oppressed for centuries. I have been lucky enough to have been surrounded by gays and lesbians and to get to know them as people, as human beings equal in moral worth, but not the same as me in that seemingly fundamental way, their sexuality. Well, I did not always understand and regretfully I sometimes acted irrationally about both gays and lesbians. I watched as gay men died off from AIDS and as women abused into fleeing heterosexuality were pummeled with social opprobrium. I learned soon enough that MOST of these people were born the way they are and that socialization in a largely hetero- world has given them sensitivities to the human psyche that most of us never achieve.

I urge you to seek out and support the Southern Poverty Law Center and take a stand for the natural rights of gays and lesbians in the world.

JB

12/22/10

I saw "Tron: Legacy" yesterday in 3D. It is, from a technical point of view a tour de force movie, and despite the shallow tween-aged focus on virtual killing by violent means, the acting goes beyond the usual cardboard. It does not compare to anything in "The Matrix" series. It does begin to point out the trend in gaming computing, however, that being that more and more people are getting sucked deeper and deeper into "the grid."

In fact, "grids" are proliferating, providing rapid, graphic, human-like, and sensuous media for communication along the lines that most human beings are familiar. Grids like "Second Life" and "Blue Mars" will someday interconnect and people (users) will have the opportunity to establish identities that transcend the limitations of one commercial grid, according to "Elenia Llewelyn," founder of a grid called "InWorldz". This is pretty exciting stuff for USERS in any of these "worlds," but unlikely if the net neutrality regulations do not allow sufficient elbow room for entrepreneurs to compete profitably. That is half the story.

The other half is that entrepreneurs are the least likely people on this planet to worry about civil rights. They issue terms of service for USERS to accept or not (if not they don't get to use the service). The terms of service recitations are long, fine-print, legal documents that reserve most rights to the vendor and restrict the users to certain (usually mundane and reasonable) kinds of activities. But that is about grids. Not all things on the internet are about grids (yet).

A simple form of computing nowadays is a free-email account, say at Juno or hotmail. There are terms of service for using these systems for communicating with friends, but hardly anyone reads the ToS carefully, and will be surprised when they try to forward a big video clip of Britney Spears taking a bath to their old college buddies. It is easy to see why ToS limit the size of email attachments. They clog the internet with mindless stuff.

An even simpler form of internet usage is clicking on an icon that contains the URL (uniform resource locator, which means "internet address") and reading what is being posted at that website. You are doing that right now. This website is small potatoes compared to Macy's or BestBuy, so small accounts like ALP and Iron Mountain will be granted equal access to the broad internet, but only if they are propagated through cables, wires, and other physical means. So far, then, net neutrality is good.

What is bad about the new net neutrality regulations is that there are no regulations for internet propagated wirelessly, as for instance to that new Droid 4G device in your pocket that has a telephone service embedded in a nest of other electronic marvels, including access to everything on the internet including Google. Specifically, what is bad is that if you want to read my rantings wirelessly while riding to work in carpool, you may be out of luck. ALP and Iron Mountain may get pushed back in the router queues so far back that you give up trying.

Google is a good emblem of what goes on in the internet. Zillions of people a day ask Google questions about things they are interested to know more about. Google provides the answers lickity-split and, if you are "Googling" from Home Depot, you know almost instantly whether Lowe's has a better price on a particular bar-coded Ryobi drill set. Could save yourself tons of money over an extended shopping spree, you know! Well, Google also provides you with paid commercials when you ask it a question. Underlying that ploy is the question of whether Google is putting paid-for information at the top of the list of 23,202 "hits" on your subject. Net neutrality says that they should not do that.

Scale that question up a bit and consider that monopoly is not just a Parker Bros. game, but the holy grail of many high-end businesses. They know they will never achieve a real monopoly in their product or service line, but they hope to get as close as possible so they have more elbow room on pricing (aka "price gouging"). Net neutrality regulation cover this, if the service is wired, but not if wireless.

Then there is "the cloud." The "cloud" is computing services that you do not download, or only download a thin, lightweight interface for. Microsoft is in favor of cloud computing for Office, for instance, where you will pay a small fee for using Word or Excel or Powerpoint on their servers, which will have the latest up-to-date versions of the software, of course, thus eliminating all the hassle of propagating versions to a hungry world containing relic computers and high-end quad-core beasts that easily defeat the bad guys found in Matrix and Tron. There will be some applications in "the cloud" that are useful to mobile, wireless users. These will not be regulated.

So the big question is whether the Comcasts of the world have decided that they can get sufficiently rich from wireless apps, or whether they can mount pressure on the physical network regs from catbird seats in the wireless regime? In fact, as this article and its reference (be sure to read both) indicates, this situation is polarized along partisan lines and the GOP and large corporations are going for the jugular of the FCC.

Personally, I am satisfied that "net neutrality" has been recognized for what it is, a serious issue akin to the issues that resulted in the breaking-up of ATT a generation ago. ATT got too big for its britches and telecommunications suffered. Now, "land-line" telephones are produced by the billions by anyone who wants into that market and service has improved and broadened so that you can call anywhere in the world these days for a very nominal fee. Understand the ATT issues and you understand the Net Neutrality issues.

Of course, I despise the likes of Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) who will fight tooth and filthy finger nail to cripple the FCC. She believes in the power of corporations to progress, but she ignores human nature, the human condition, and human history in so doing.

JB

12/20/10

James Carroll, writing his usual Monday column in the Boston Globe today, takes on the subject of our animal irrationality rather than writing some homily about Christmas. Congratulations to him on that score. Perhaps the late revelations about predatory priests in Belgium, Ireland, and here in Boston (and all across the land) last week, just tipped the scales for him. But, he begins with interesting news about the Winter Solstice conjoining with a lunar eclipse and a full moon. If that won't get the lunatic fringe out for a howl, what will?

Carroll's point in this column is well taken. We are in our poorly prepared democracy subject to all manner of howlings from the fringe, the appeal of Glen Becks and Ann Coulters and Newt Gingriches playing on the hindbrains of a society that so little understands its own history that bald-faced lies about our country today pass unnoticed or, worse, pass as truths superior to the complicated facts of our existence. But, Carroll's subject is narrowly war and more precisely the Afghanistan involvement, which matches the arrogance of a rich nation with the dishonest depths of a poor one, corrupting everything in sight. The truth, Mr. Carroll, is that we are in Afghanistan to rout out the people who flew four commercial airplanes on 9/11 into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a pasture in Pennsylvania.

We all remember that purpose, what we do not think about is what Carroll reminds us: we have now thousands of reasons for revenge, not to mention that we have laid bare the seething animus of Pakistan and awakened within our center of fears the truth that Afghanistan is right next to Iran on the west. The chess players of the world understand why we are there.

And Carroll's thoughts persist through the gloom of the long, dark night of our national humiliation in this rugged, backward, place of common evils and political hopelessness. Karzai is corrupt, no doubt and no surprise, except that we are a main cause of his corruption, arrogantly instructing this egotist in the governance of a land and people who have no concept of the starting place of our values. And, perhaps, Carroll is telling us that neither do we.

JB

12/18/10

A book review in the 12/13/10 edition of The New Yorker magazine reveals some startling news for libertarians and other addicts of free-market enterprise Kool-Ade©. Protectionism in contemporary China is not a new model of state capitalism at all. The practice of government "interference" in commerce and industry began with the Dutch mercantilists of the early 18th century and was quickly perfected by Great Britain, adopted by Alexander Hamilton for the new United States, and has been used by many nations since. This book review is much more detailed and rich with facts than the abstract suggests. Get a copy of this issue and read this article, if nothing else. (If something else, then read Joyce Carol Oates on her husband's death.)

There is another point to be made beyond the context of the economic emergence of the People's Republic of China, however. The question of the relationship between government and commerce is ever present and it is all too easily forgotten how very "intrusive" government really is in the creation and sustenance of a national economy. First, and obviously, let us not forget that government is the architect of how economic entities measure their success ... they print the money and maintain a monetary policy that rewards national industries in the main. Second, government creates the legal infrastructure within which "private" enterprise is organized and conducts business. Corporate law, interstate commerce concerns, intrastate commerce regulations, zoning ordinances, and much much more are all the undisputed province of government.

The use of subsidies for certain industries and agriculture are a form of support that used to—and still quietly do—be accomplished by restrictive tariffs. Taxes rates are discounted and tax breaks and benefits are government largesse for "private" enterprise.

The modern method of supporting national industries ... (or even foreign industries as a matter of international agreements that improve the lot of poorer nations) ... is for governments to buy substantial amounts of industrial and commercial goods and services. Government contractrs are the essence of the military-industrial-congressional complex. They are very much out of control at the moment, of course, having taken on the trappings of patriotism and national security as a virtual economic ideology that engineers and provokes the use of military hardware (to ultimately be replaced under future contracts) in needless and deliberately wasteful wars and other forms of military activity ... including garrisoning the entire planet with hundreds of bases of operation.

When you hear the TeaParty folk ranting about free-enterprise over the next few years, please understand that they have no clue about the reality of national economies, of the nature of industry, agriculture, or commerce. They have only the slogan that government is bad, repeated endlessly by demagogues and charlatans on Fox network.

JB

12/17/10

Paul Krugman this morning in the New York Times writes about the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission created by Congress to discover what went wrong, in what order, and why. As you will discover, the Commission failed utterly to carry out its task, split along partisan lines and, on the GOP side, committed to an Orwellian toeing of the corporate line. At least they were clear about it. Their lies and misrepresentations completely discrediting the work of the Commission, so we really do not have to worry about it taking on an authoritative aura.

Funny that Krugman did not write about the self-defeating nature of the Commission. Perhaps he thinks that the GOP in the new House of Representatives will try to use the GOP report as a focal point for their machinations against government. I hope that is not what happens. It is bad enough that we spent good money on this farce.

It brings up the point, though, that Sam Graham-Felson, formerly a techie in the Obama campaign, writes about Obama shifting his weight to compromise with the GOP. He thinks that Obama's shift amounts to an abandonment of the Liberals with an unspoken notion that he can somehow win the nomination of the Democrats in 2012 just because he is the sitting president and the election with the center returning to his fold.

Well, horse pucky! The Liberal and Progressive wing, also known as the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party, will not accept the hypothesis that the nation has gone over wholesale to Republican Fascist Corporatism. The evidence we see is that the center-leaning leadership of the Democrats is weak, mute, and spineless. Picture Evan Bayh dancing with Barack Obama.

The people of this country are sick to death of unemployment, fecklessness in Washington, corporate power over their own representatives, and outrageous waste of lives and treasure in useless wars that cannot be won by playing according to the rules of petty tribal and sectarian popinjays. They are sick of Obama's cave-in philosophy of compromise, his lip service to Liberal principles and Progressive programs. The vast majority of Americans want a strong, vital and humane country, freed of the criminal element in the private sector and the saboteur element that destroys government from within.

Fundamentally, it comes down to this: the Democratic leadership does not know how to express the Liberal and Progressive ethos without falling prey to the radical rightwingnut rhetoric about galloping socialism. Here is the point: Liberalism sees public life as 50% competitive and 50% cooperative. Conservatism will not even mention cooperation. Liberalism will keep the balance, Conservatism will drive us off the cliff again and again until we finally learn not to believe their fairy stories that are designed to gull the innocent and stupid so that the economic elites can further insulate themselves from the commonweal.

JB

12/16/10

The New Yorker magazine ran an article last week with a subtitle suggesting that the scientific method might be wrong. I found this both annoying and gratifying, being (among other things) an historian of science and particularly of the history of progress of societies with science in the core of their methodologies.

I found it annoying because "the scientific method" is simply formulated as the development from observations, intuitions, and inductions of hypotheses and research to falsify or confirm these hypotheses. It is wrong to call the publication process part of the scientific method.Lehrer's article concentrates on the "confirm" side of research and takes the prejudicial rhetorical position that "falsification" of hypotheses is less the objective of scientists.

I was gratified because as an historian of science with a good deal of reading about all kinds of science under my belt and as a former university administrator charged with promotion of scientific research and research ethics (particularly with live animals and with human beings as subjects of the research), I felt that my many years of effort were vindicated (in absentia, since I am retired). Scientists are often sloppy and arrogant, and all too willing to brow beat "civilians" to their will.

The bottom line on Lehrer's essay is that the need to publish or perish leads scientists to take extraordinary means to obtain or to find confirmatory results in the data of their research. Lehrer does not question broadly the design of research, which he could have, of course. And, indeed, the essay concludes from reasonable research on research that from the very beginning of the process of defining an hypothesis, scientists are thinking of things like finishing degree programs, getting tenure and promotions, getting published, becoming famous, and so forth, none of which is likely to produce objectively replicable results. We all know this to be true. It is not the fault of the scientific method, however, except as humans are necessary to the carrying out of science. But, the point of the essay should have been that other researchers find errors and do not find the statistical significance that first reporting scientists find. So, in fact, not only is the scientific method sound, but the social infrastructure of science is sound, as well, especially given neutral contexts where millions and millions of free dollars are not at stake, as unfortunately they are with pharmaceutical research and high-roller grantsmanship.

The Lehrer essay also glosses over the processes involved in the formulation of research hypotheses. A good deal of falsification as goal takes place to hone down an hypothesis sufficiently that a rational research project can be undertaken to verify or disconfirm the major elements of the hypothesis. Leaving this out of the essay seriously derails the truthfulness of the message.

The message is, of course, that science is a human activity completely at the mercy of human foibles and unspoken (or unconscious) goals. The scientific communities must be vigilant always to see to it that replicable studies are done when new science is "discovered" by earnest researchers. They often are not. National politics plays into the way moneys are spent in the National Institutes of Health, for instance. And, I can tell you from personal experience that program officers in the federal agencies (leaving out their office names deliberately) are little interested in getting involved in ethical disputes with rich universities or corporations.

The ironies in the Lehrer article are instructive. You will be able to read the abstract of the article online, for instance, proof that information science (and engineering) are stable enough to provide you with this little miracle of dissemination. And, the world is full of success stories emanating from the use of the scientific method and its social infrastructure. For me the article proves only that we get lulled into a false sense of security periodically, and that a jostling in the popular media is perhaps sometimes necessary. We are not about to dispense with the scientific method, however, and certainly not on the say-so of ambitious writers in the New Yorker.

JB

12/14/10

Eugene Robinson, columnist in the Washington Post, writes today (Tuesday) about Wikileaks, and his words are spot on. We, our civilizations, are going to encounter more and more of these dilemmas, more instances where something valuable (as Twitter and Facebook and other viral media seem to be in places like Iran and China) have downsides that are truly breathtaking. And, as we know from civics ... but keep forgetting ... human enterprises are run by human beings (or computers programmed by human beings) and, therefore, are subject to the vagaries of human emotion and integrity. Robinson is right that we have to find the correct principle to defend and manage the misbehaviors of human beings, even those with whom we might agree temporarily. Eternal vigilance is the phrase that democracy depends on.

On Monday, Paul Krugman wrote his own piece about the trouble we have reconciling principles. Krugman truly despises the direction Obama and Congress seem to be headed on economic policy, but he is realist enough to know that if 70% of Americans polled (yesterday by stakeholders, of course) want the tax break even if it means giving the break to the super-rich as well, then bad policy is sure to emerge and we will not only have this same argument in 2011 and 2012 and 2013 and so on, but each iteration will be clouded with the false, misleading, and ambiguous rhetoric of the preceding events. We never seem to learn anything.

It is said that civilization stands at the threshold of marvelous opportunities for advancement of human dignity, perhaps a four-fold acceleration of human rights and human health, mental and physical, if only we can deal with the devils in our midst: climate change, over-population, disease, malnutrition, and terrorism. My feeling is that we will probably miss the best opportunities and have to make decisions to put off fixing civil rights, just as the founding fathers did. You see, now, that responding to the bounty of opportunity that the onrush of history provides is very difficult, sometimes totally muddled in absolutely intractable disagreement.

JB

12/12/10

The word "nashi" in Russian means "ours." It is an omnibus sort of word that has many colloquial uses extending from the idea of "us" as a people (Great Russians) to "we" as a subset of Russians, that is, the presumptive majority people. In the sense it is described in an OpEd by Oleg Kashin in the Sunday New York Times it draws on the "possession" definition of "ours" and suggests that for those unlucky people not part of the group called Nashi, Russia is not theirs to meddle with, to argue about, to vote one way while majorities vote the other. Kashin knows intimately about Nashi and has suffered greatly for his trouble.

I read an article yesterday that I did not quote about about the Eisenhower "fairwell address" that contains the warning about the military-industrial complex. That article said that the twentieth century was almost completely involved in a struggle to the death between three contesting views on how nations should be organized and governed. The three are capitalist democracy, fascism, and communism. I say "are" because, if nothing else, what happened to Kashin (and the other Russian journalists) and to hundreds of others impedimenta to Putin's re-establishment of Stalinism in Russia proves the truth of that idea.

The problem we have with political choices, of course, is that we assign roles to nations such that Russia is seen as "the communist country" and Germany/Italy as the "the fascist countries" and the United Kingdom and the United States as "the capitalist democracies" AS IF these roles were not in jeopardy of shifting among the nations we focus upon. Clearly, Nashi is not far off the course taken by the Italian fascisti or the Brown Shirts in Germany. They are state-sponsored thugs.

But, let me take this idea a step further. If Russia can shed the ideological baggage of Marxian communism and is left with Leninism and Stalinism, what separates that from the thuggery of Nazi fascism? Quite a bit, of course, but the idea is still valid as a pry into the real meaning of political systems, and of course, the suggestion I have made here many times that corporatist government has overtaken popular democracy here and abroad fits right into the idea of there being a tri-polar constellation of political systems available to ANY nation.

Russia has a troubled past, and that means it has a troubled social, cultural, and political inheritance from that past. Many of us have said that the Russian intelligentsia is poorly equipped and positioned to educate the mass of people in Russia toward Enlightenment theories and forms of government. This does not mean that Russians will always be slaves to their overlords. It simply means that any democracy has to have native roots and the soil for growing them in Russia is infertile.

It is the Kashins and Politkovskayas of Russia who fertilize that barren ground with their blood and lives, and they cannot do it alone. Russia is vast and her people are too long suffering to see (much less pull on) their own bootstraps. The roles played in the west to keep popular democracy alive are played by a much larger group of advocates, and yet we see that secret elites are always created and active in the pursuit of goals antithetical to our democracy, even to our view of capitalism. Like Putin in Russia these people have a focused goal of stability and financial bounty for themselves.

As the "debate" over nuclear arms reduction treaties with Russia meander across the political landscape of contemporary Washington, I wonder if the people like Senator Kyl (R-AZ) have any idea what the consequences of teasing the Russian bear might be. It seems to me, always, that engagement is the better way to move ideas into Russia and to pry loose the Russian rictus grip on authoritarian rule.

JB

12/11/10

There was a book back in the early 1970's entitled The Report from Iron Mountain," written by Richard Lewin. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and that's how I happened to get my copy. I showed it to a professor of U.S. Diplomatic History, who it turns out had never seen it. He was amazed and converted and also not quite converted to the book's thesis that a military-industrial complex would have theoretical underpinnings going deep into the marrow of what industrial capitalism is in a representative democracy—a republic—like ours.

My own website: Iron Mountain is dedicated to the concept that Americans have lost sight of and understanding of the consequences to the democracy of having a military-industrial-Congressional complex. That is, the inevitable thing has happened: the military and industrialists have converted the Congress to their preferred system of capitalism right in front of our backs!

Dwight David Eisenhower is given credit for coining the term "military-industrial complex" and today we find out that the expression was debated hotly in the few days before the speech in which it appears. This article does include the fundamental reason why the M-I Complex has survived despite the huge financial cost and the damage it does to our democracy, namely, that with thermonuclear weapons there is no possibility of a slow build-up of arms to counter an attack. You have to be ready and vigilant always.

What the Americans have NOT done is take the necessary precautions for their form of government that such a change has entailed. We are completely a the mercy of the military-industrial-Congressional complex these days. Our thinking, as exemplified by Dick Cheney and PNAC proceeds along militaristic lines just as Eisenhower predicted. We proclaim from some quarters that America is an empire to succeed all past empires. Even so-called liberals decry the loss of empire in these battered days of Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of China. You won't find the word "empire" in the U.S. Constitution, by the way. And, if you are astute you will read the history of the founding of this country and note that standing armies were looked upon with a jaundiced eye even back then.

Well, the problem continues to exist. We must be ready. So, the safeguards against adventurism and empire mongering have to be found and institutionalized. Better get started on this, we are thinking at Iron Mountain.

JB

12/9/10

By now nearly everyone has spoken or written about the blockbuster announcement that President Obama has cut a deal with the GOP to extend ALL the Bush Tax Relief provisions for two years in exchange for 13 more months of long term unemployment insurance, a deal which is touted as being the necessary economic stimulus package the country needs by the very people who are ... at present ... ignoring the fact that it adds $900 billions dollars to the deficit.

Among the most vocal opponents of this "deal" are Progressives and Liberals who see the continuation of tax cuts for the top 3% as a humiliating defeat of Liberal and Progressive principles. In fact, though, the entire Liberal wing of the Democratic Party is aghast and vocally so.

I am, and I like what E.J. Dionne, Jr. of the Washington Post had to say about who will be supporting Barack Obama in 2012, if the Liberals and Progressives find a better candidate ... and how could they not find one!

My guess is that Barack Obama, having read the awful inside information on the economy he inherited from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, decided that his would probably be a one-term presidency because there was no way—even with both houses of Congress—to dig the domestic economy out and preserve the U.S. position of pre-eminence in the world in just two years, that is, before mid-term elections buried him in an untenable position. Having made such a technocratic decision he then determined that to show the GOP obstructionism for what it is ... cynical obstructionism ... would be too difficult. So, instead, following the Clinton voices in his administration and his own predeliction for avoiding a fight, he tried to guide the situation in a middle area where the GOP's campaigning for the 2012 elections would appear to be radical and wrong for the state of the nation.

I do think he failed to accomplish that because his path toward the center has been completely and forcefully derided by one and all in the press as naive, simplistic, misbegotten in the first place, and wrong-headed in the extreme. Obama, with his remarkable rhetorical abilities chose to shelve his best weapon and let the public figure out for themselves the real damage done by the Wall Street economy rapists. You could say that he was forced off the lectern by the ears of world opinion, given that the U.S. is way out of balance on trade and debt, ... and you would be right.

The thing is that world opinion is very much a fickle thing and I am quickly persuaded that he could have explained the bailout of Wall Street in terms that European and American publics would have understood as reasonable. He didn't. Moreover, he did not explain to the domestic public what a mess he inherited, and he could have without creating more fear, which obviously was his reason for not so doing.

He has no plausible aces up his sleeves, so he must be content with the idea of one-term. The appalling thing is that he seems not to care that the Democratic Party is going to take another shellacking because of his inability to deal with the fact that his plate was piled high with feces when he arrived. This is definitely "change" only he can believe in for most presidents know in their marrow that changing the face of the party is a matter of leadership, not of shaming or scolding. Moving the Democrats toward some center defined by the pundits or the opposition is clearly a betrayal of the votes that Progressives and Liberals cast for him in 2008. And there is no reason on earth, given the plate of crap he inherited, that he could not have moved the whole nation toward a better understanding of the balance between competition and cooperation that lies at the heart of Liberal thinking. But he didn't.

JB

12/7/10

Every once in a while there comes along an essay really worth your time, but demanding of your intellect and close attention. Such is Professor Sean D. Kelly's essay in Monday's New York Times entitled "Navigating Past Nihilism."

This is a good time for this essay, because we are confronted with a future on this planet that is full of peril, and we seem not to know how to get to a safe future without paying our dues for the free ride and coasting we have done in the past. As a result the sounds in the back and in the corners of the room are frightening sounds of people who are in the process of giving up hope and curiosity. Although we have spent decades discussing the "descent" of the United States into the "oblivion" of mere countries, of empires lost, of exceptionalism revealed as hypocritical arrogance, we have not felt the immediacy of the the descent so palpably as today. And we know like we know our own teeth that tomorrow will be worse and the day after even more so.

Nihilism is the watchword of the day. Authors rant about the loss of empire, as if America was meant to be a globe-straddling colossus imposing its unruly opinions off on hapless 2nd and 3rd and 4th world denizens yearning to be human like us. Such hubris standing in for civility! Or replacing god in the imagination of people who have been so poorly educated that they cannot understand that our country was founded in a time when the Zeitgeist was considerably different from the mood today.

When the founding fathers brought forth upon this continent a nation conceived in Liberty, they did so against a tradition of government extending back to the very tribal beginnings of human civilization. Yes, of course, there had been progress among "enlightened" nations (those that took part in the Renaissance and then, more importantly, the "Enlightenment." But, clearly, nations without the slightest idea about electricity could not think like nations where children carry around cellphone computers capable of accessing all the world's literature. There just is no comparison, so why then would nations cling so desperately to a god they killed off and buried so long ago?

Nihilism is, partly, a psychological adjustment to the possibility of a meaningless existence. The Hubble Telescope in orbit above our atmosphere has shown us the scale and the imponderable vastness of the Universe, and this contributes to the sense of meaninglessness, but it does not prove it or authorize it, it merely demands that we reconsider things from a newer perspective. And that means throwing off even more of the familiar, comfortable, but useless baggage of our intellectual and cultural inheritance.

The key is to find meaning. It is not to be found with the New York Jets or even the New England Patriots, and although these organizations provide a certain amount of entertainment between our gropings for knowledge, they are not the truth of our humanity or depravity or humility or arrogance. They are cultural artifacts that prove only that we are capable of organization, given the appropriate motivations.

Still, though, Professor Kelly is onto something when he notes that organizations flourishing in medieval times that organized human beings into societies, religions, are inappropriate now that we know that there are other truths. The medieval popes were correct that science would undermine religion, not because it would falsify religion, but because religion is too hidebound to change with the advance of human knowledge and thus destroys its own credibility. It lives on, of course, in arrogant defiance of reason and the advance of civilization, the idea of advance over stasis.

For Liberals in America these are times fraught with "nihilism," confronted and thwarted by a President who some say is incapable of crisis leadership. I say this, as well, by the way. Barack Obama is inept, and this conclusion is contextual. If he were president during good times we might see a different man, but what we have is a man paralyzed by the processes of fear. And that is no reason, you know, to slide into nihilistic depression, either. We have our heads and hearts and we are humans capable of dreaming, conceiving, implementing, and building. We do not have to have a George Washington at every turn.

We have to have confidence in ourselves, in our context, in our association with one another as sentient beings DEDICATED to finding meaning. That the Universe is vast is daunting to be sure, but it is not off-putting. We do not turn away from our destiny to know because we do not know. We must build the steps to the place where we can see the next steps to be built. It is exciting, and mere politics should not sway us, cripple us, turn us back.

JB

12/6/10

Today, Dr. Paul Krugman presents a compelling, if lopsided, case for what appears to be an inevitable tax increase. Krugman just flat leaves out the pain and damage a tax increase will produce, and/but he does point out that the damage will be less with the lapse of the Bush tax cuts than with the massive cuts in the federal budget that will be necessary if the cuts are extended. You will recall that the GOP mantra a few years ago was "kill the beast," meaning pare the federal budget down to absolute essentials and let "federalism" work. Ha! Since when do Louisiana and Texas and Ohio work, much less Michigan and the rest of the rust belt states!!! Give me a break!

Read Krugman for encouragement that we are on the right path if we resist the tainted "deal" the Senate Republicans are offering. Smear the GOP with their own merde is the order of the day. The public will soon enough understand that they are being screwn for the benefit of people who are immune to recessions and unemployment and everything but death.

JB

12/5/10

There is a strain of thought in Americans, probably other nationalities as well, certainly the various peoples of the United Kingdom, Germany, France, The Netherlands, probably greater Scandinavia, Spain, Italy, a line of logic and belief which is essentially an illogical commitment to the idea that flaws of the personality can with diligence be overcome. We believe that drunks can get sober and stay that way. We believe that gossips can silence themselves. We believe all manner of annoying things about people can, with sufficient strength of purpose, be resolved into something we like better.

In a way the hypothesis that Frank Rich, of the New York Times, has today about the appalling lack of political leadership from Barack Obama is in that tradition of belief. Something is wrong, there is a reason for it, and once we get to that reason and show Obama the problems it is causing the rest of us, he will of his own volition decide to repair the problem that gives rise to his annoying behavior. The trouble is that Barack Obama is in a category of one (okay, five!) people who have been or are President of the United States. It is difficult to compare his/their behaviors with plumbers and stock brokers and short-order cooks.

In Sunday's Times Frank Rich unveils the "Stockholm Syndrome" hypothesis about Barack Obama's personality, a reach if ever there was one that managed, nevertheless, to shed some cold, hard light on a subject. I agree with Rich that Obama has a very wrong-headed idea about what his role is in the White House, and I suspect that Rich is correct in invoking the Stockholm hypothesis into the situation at hand, which is, of course, that we are hanging precariously over an enormous economic chasm, divided bitterly on what to do about it, heir to decades of foolishness and maleducation about issues like this, and simultaneously conducting at least two foreign wars (maybe four), and hostage to every crack-pot on the planet with infrastructures like airlines and other situations where human beings are unable to fend for themselves, the most poignant of which dangers are the many-times-increased threats on the lives of the President himself and his extended family.

In other words, there is ample evidence that Obama's deficient leadership is caused by a psychological process analogous to the process at work in the Stockholm Syndrome. What is not certain, and maybe never will be, is whether Obama brought any of this compromise is preferable to leadership behavior with him, and if he did how did so many millions of spectators, even Republicans, miss this crucial point?

In a democracy we have to take responsibility for our own behaviors as well as those of our elected officers. Our system for taking care of the elected provides only slow and painful processes, quadrennial elections or impeachment. The processes for understanding and accepting our own failed judgments is not nearly as formal and might best be described as something akin to wallpapering. We hardly ever take responsibility for our history because we hardly ever understand our democracy for what it is. We are more likely to wallpaper over the flaws in our logic and selection processes than to unearth the internal logic of them and accept the failure points, since of course, the failures are mass failures and lead inexorably to the conclusion that we are easily duped, easily blinded by our private and public hypotheses, and blinded by our ambitions for the country (and our own places in it).

Okay, now you know, either you made a mistake about Barack Obama beginning way back when he made the Keynote Speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and ever since, probably resting your weary case on his remarkably fresh and seemingly lucid rhetorical styl(ings). The process developed and you kept yourself from seeing the truth of Obama's weakness for collaboration with the "enemy." Finally, he was elected and the world seemed to turn upside down as a Black man in a White world took hold of the levers of planetary power. And, the world's economies shuddered under the inexorable and inevitable abuse they had received from their most intimate caretakers, in what has surely got be considered a rape!

You see, Frank Rich is beginning to sound more and more plausible. (It certainly suits my preference for not being labeled as a blind and foolish person for two long years of campaigning leading up to the 2008 election.) Rich's theory is that Obama has succumbed (in a way that the less imaginative of the previous presidents did not) to the awful pressures of the Office, pressures redoubled and made crystal clear by the obstructionism and foolhardy petty treasons of the GOP. And, if Rich is right, and if our notions about redemption and surcease are correct, then there is something we can do to save Obama and this situation, but what is it?

The first and quick answer is that the family of Democrats must congeal over the situation in what amounts to "an intervention," rather than doing what I and others are currently doing, namely un-congealing the Progressive Liberals by exhorting them to find a replacement for Obama as quickly as possible and to run with it. You see, then, that our optimism that "an intervention" would work is threadbare and our better bet is to go full throttle the other direction. This is abandonment of Obama to lick his own wounds and deal with his own "collaborationism" as best he can. And that does not sound right, either.

The best of all possible worlds would be for Obama to resign his office immediately. The outfall from that is obvious and full of mischief, but the gravity of a complete surrender of the office to someone, like Joe Biden, who could at least put up a good show against the petty treasons of the GOP and who could deal with the political sourness abroad in Washington would stun the GOP for the time necessary for the Democrats to regroup (recongeal) and find a candidate for 2012. There are plenty of aspirants, and there are some good ones among them. About this we ARE optimistic!

JB

12/3/10

You all know that I have abandoned hope that Barack Obama will rise to the occasion of his presidency. He appears to me and to others to be fundamentally incapable of doing that part of the president's job that we generally call political leadership. Yes, it has been easy for him to assume the talismanic prerogatives and "powers" of the job, but anyone who can knot a tie or smile at an adversary could exercise the talismanic effects of the office. What Obama lacks is a fundamental courage of his own convictions ... or at least those things of which he spoke for two years while running for the office. The extension of the Bush Tax Relief bill is a case in point. Obama has signaled that he is okay with the top 1% getting relief too. So, we know where his bread is buttered and we are more than just angry.

Along comes a Nobel Prize-winning Economist like Dr. Paul Krugman who is adept, actually razor-sharp, at discerning problems and announcing the battery of solutions down to those that, being-half solutions or worse, are necessarily going to cause more trouble than they solve. Krugman's analysis this time doesn't mince any words. He is in full accord with me and my associates who believe that Howard Dean must begin the process of finding a different leadership voice for the Democratic Party with the aim in mind of finding a credible and winning candidate for 2012. Howard himself might not be the one, but he is clever, astute, connected, and politically successful ... the fifty-state system that Dean invented is what put Obama in office, and believe me, it will put him out of office just as fast.

Look. I do not say these things lightly. I have waited until the very last moment to say them, but I truly believe that Obama has some fundamental flaws that prevent him from EVER rising to the occasion of his presidency. He is dangerous in office to every notion of governance that Progressive Liberals hold dear. For the middle of the road people, he is less than a triangulating windsock like Clinton, and more a puppet of the last strong voice he heard. It is a crying shame, and I am crying, but I refuse to lay down my principles to re-elect him.

JB

12/2/10

One of the things that the State Department WikiLeaks this past weekend has produced is a bottom line ... or at least a sighting of the bottom line of our diplomacy. The revelations show that our diplomats are not, as sometimes it appears, so sucked into the party line on "getting along" with some other country that they cannot see the forest and the trees. The revelations about modern Russia are classic and provide new information for some of us about the leadership, Putin particularly.

Here is a good article about diplomacy in Russia, as published today in the New York Times. You should read the whole thing. It is four pages, so I will be brief in my comments.

Briefly, the Russian revolution of 1991 shows the classical outlines of a state (that is, the government and the social infrastructure of governance) predicated for centuries (including most of the 20th century) on exploitation of powerless people. The Tsars and Emperors of Russia did it, codifying it in serfdom. The Soviets did it, wrapping it in the mumbo-jumbo of Leninism and Stalinism. But, now, in the aftermath of a not-so-valiant attempt by Boris Yeltsin to establish a rule of law in Russia, we can see that not only was there no preparation for such a feat of social engineering, but that in fact the root metaphor of government is theft. Russia is a congeries of rackets with dons as evil as any in the Sicilian Mafia running the facade as if going through the motions of statecraft would make it seem more legitimate and civil and honest. But it is not. Russia is a crime happening every day through six time zones, amounting to very little more than the attempts of more-or-less honest people to survive among rampant theft of their native land's productive resources, their personal bequest to the future, and their civil rights and honor.

Those of you who are trained in political science and history will recognize that all governments tend toward theft, and that Russia is merely a classic case of the revealed truth of government.

JB

11/30/10

By now the whole world knows that Mr. Ansange of WikiLeaks has published thousands of classified documents from the U.S. Department of State, some of which, apparently, are embarrassing to their authors and to the persons mentioned or characterized. This column by Gene Robinson in the Washington Post gives you a decent perspective on what was revealed, what has not yet been revealed, and the importance (if any) of it all.

Having been involved decades ago in classified material and continuing my interest in the problems of classification in government, I am delighted that Ansange has lifted the curtain a little on some of the abuses of the classification system. My own experience was that senior personnel used the classification system to burnish their egos (sending invitations out to senior Naval officers to a cotillion via Confidential radio message), and to cover their asses when they made mistakes (usually by claiming some mythical "personal privilege" and hiking a Confidential message up to Secret level, just because some of the contents would bear on disciplinary proceedings if they were to occur.)

But the WikiLeaks revelations, as Robinson so nicely portrays, are about the general difficulty in being a super-power. Perhaps, Gene could have said the difficulty arises from the hubris that we have about being the last of the 20th century contestants standing (or wobbling around the ring)! There is no doubt that foreign service officers must report their human evaluations of the leadership of other nations. To characterize Sarkozy as thin-skinned and arrogant, however, does not belong in official communications; it is an abuse of official access and of the classification system. Were the classification system written properly, communications like the Sarkozy-gram would be automatically downgraded to unclassified status in a year or less. But, the geniuses who run this system do not understand the time-value of information is limited. They believe that it is eternal and has a meta-level which, if opened to scrutiny, would reveal the weaknesses and shallows of our diplomatic and military processes.

The good thing about the WikiLeaks is that they will have a chilling effect on abuses of the system. The bad part is that there will inevitably be an inflation of classification to cover the errors that take place. The solution is a top-down insistence that classification be used properly, giving reprimands for mis-classified communications ... on the spot!

JB

11/29/10

James Carroll's essay this Monday morning in the Boston Globe is both elliptical and not. He does not actually come out and say that Republicans like Kyl (R-AZ) are drunk with new-found power, but he almost does. I think what he says is that nuclear materials and policies are both being treated as if there were no hazard in being drunk and stupid.

I do not know whether the American public, juiced up as it is on the emotions of racism, anarchy, disregard for the law, anti-government mantras with drum beats for social services, can see through the behaviors of the GOP as cutting into the fabric of national security or not. I suppose not, because I have very little faith that the infrastructure of democracy is healthy and providing the public with truth and reason.

John Kyl must be dealt with. I am not talking about physical harm to the man, but I am talking about making of him an example of the sort that will give the reasonable (but timorous) members of his party the cajones to stand up for Americans and pass this nuclear arms treaty with Russia. Denying Obama any semblance of success is a good policy for the GOP to have, since they are no good at governance themselves, obstructionism is the perfect answer while they lack the intelligence to see that it will backfire on them in the mid- and long-terms. But, there is "obstructionism" and then there is irresponsibility to the nation and the planet. We know that nuclear war is still possible with Iran arming itself, with Pakistan holding several dozen weapons, with India and Israel both armed, with China fully prepared for intercontinental mayhem (and perhaps their client state North Korea ready to lob disaster down upon the industrious folk of South Korea.) Russia, however, is where the trouble now lies because we have an infrastructure of control fraying at the edges, a population full of restive and non-stakeholding nationalities, and a military brought to the edge of desperation by forces larger than Putin and Medvedev can control.

Senator Kyl, back away from this position you have taken and we will let you continue your awful and silly work in other areas. If you do not back down, we will do it for you.

JB

11/24/10

My colonial ancestor was a Puritan, "a Grave and Godly man" it says in the family genealogy. He was educated and when he arrived some eighteen years after the first thanksgiving of 1621 he was made useful to the then elders of the Plimoth Plantation, Captain Miles Standish and others. He did the surveying and helped with the bargaining with the Wampanoag Indians of the region, securing for his own family a quarter of what was to become the town of Bridgewater, due west of modern Plymouth. He established an annual relationship with "the Colledge at Cambridge" (Harvard Divinity School) by donating several bushels of maize and some other goods for their use there.

Four hundred and eighty-nine years later a Professor of History at that school writes of the people my ancestor represented to better tell us the nature of the inheritance we have from them. The Puritans were not pure, nor extraordinariy self-righteous, nor prigs or bullies. They were people eking out a hard living from a tough environment, and they were founding governments small and large based on principles that were recently theoretical and, it turns out, true!

JB

11/22/10

Thanksgiving is my favorite "holiday." It is a big one for the grocery stores and the day after for the Xmas present stores. But, Thanksgiving is about Thanks, not about gifts and hoopla (although football has made inroad on the hoopla front).

It occurred to me this morning, anticipating my read of James Carroll in the Boston Globe that columnists are usually assigned by their editors and contracts to specific days of the week for their offerings, and Carroll on Monday does not work efficiently for turkey day, but nevertheless I anticipated.

Carroll's "Hindsight" of Thanksgiving this year is a worthy subject, even if as he wrote it, it spreads out over a terrain of history that nearly loses the point of our obsession with nostalgie. In fact, the people around me here in retirement Arizona are full of this baloney and wax nearly poetic about the pelting on the internet of stuff about the golden days of the 1950's and even of the virtues of hard-scrapple times in the Great Depression. It is as if they never heard of Senator Joe McCarthy or drinking fountains for Coloreds Only, or WWII vets bottled up inside themselves with grisly visions manifested as tirades against their own children, beatings, and incomprehensible fears about polio.

Americans are a pretty good cross-section of humanity, and it turns out that humanity does not like to deal with Change very much. We prefer a regular diet of whatever it is, tacos or burgers or meat and potatoes, or garlic on pasta. We regularize ourselves around familiar things so to be alert to differences in our lives. We accommodate ourselves to the differences or fight them tooth and nail until we have prevailed or have not. Mostly we have not. There is now more computing and information power in my left pocket than was present on the moon in 1969 when Tranquility Base came into being at the end of a long held breath.

No it is not fair to judge Barack H. Obama for his inability to restore hoary old Currier and Ives scenes and attitudes to the American landscape, but I think that Carroll is wrong to offer Obama a blanket amnesty just on the triptophan daydreams of Thanksgiving.

JB

11/21/10

Frank Rich in the Sunday New York Times has opened a can of night crawlers that look like they might just make an escape. My colleagues and I don't normally advertise our disagreements, but in this case—the prospects for Sarah Palin in 2012—the disagreement is not serious, just a matter of perspective over time.

Read Rich now, please.

Okay, then; the issue we have here in the Liberalism corner is not whether Sarah is popular, whether she lies like a drunken sailor, whether she has a clue about constitutional government in a republic or a representative democracy, whether she would be a good person to hand off the nuclear football to (decidedly not!), or even whether she is being run by somebody else or a group of others who prefer to keep their heads down. No, our disagreement is basically on why Frank Rich, who from his catbird seat has much to write about, why he wrote this piece today? The answer is (contentiously viewed) that he felt he needed to.

Well, I am of the opinion that Sarah will be buried by the "powers that be" in the GOP long before the next nominating convention they put on. The corporate press will do to her what they did to the real threat of Howard Dean. They buried him with a faked and trumped up side-story about emotional outbursts (thus playing the domestic nuclear card) and good Howard was gone. They will do the same for Sarah, but right now, I maintain, Sarah is Queen for A Day and probably many months. She has a bully pulpit and is using it better than anyone of her adversaries either side of the aisle. In fact, aisle begins to make no sense when you are talking about Sarah.

Sarah is a "rim" candidate. She draws her strength from the much stronger sense of dismay among those out on the precarious edge of society (and it is all relative, folks, so people living next door in a well-heated, well-fed, and well-entertained family might think of themselves as disenfranchised and dismayed). Sarah knows that the rim averages out to the center in the final analysis, but there is no "energy" in the center, just tension. So, Sarah performs for the energy and to release tension, and people love her for it. If the presidential election were held on December 1st, she would beat Barack Obama with historic numbers. And, of course, our national canoe would run aground in about two weeks, leaving the world wondering what happened to the U.S.?

What happened is this: we have become a nation of hypocrites and pigs. We care, in the mass, nothing for truth or honesty, but only for sound bytes that resonate with our preconceptions, ideas that have been carefully nurtured by the corporate press for corporate ends. We are the come-uppance of a failed educational system, unable to distinguish or value truth from outrageous fiction. We have allowed our republic, our representative democracy, to become a corporatist state, where representation of the people is definitively secondary to representation of corporate interests in the financial world, the environment, and in the halls of government.

Sarah has very little to do with these things. She is a wild card and a demagogue. She is bucking the corporatist system in her own way, but notice that she is at the corporate trough along with the rest (both parties). So, yes, the plutocrats are running her now. They love her willful destruction of the faith in a government of, by, and for the People, and they know they can turn off her spigot any time they choose.

JB

11/20/10

Elizabeth Kolbert is a damned good writer—too good, perhaps. She ruined my day yesterday with this piece: "Uncomfortable Climate." I have been musing about it ever since, railing at the stupidity of our countrymen and -women for electing these bombastic know-nothings whose main intellectual accomplishment is the perfection of political mendacity and bullying.

Climate change is a little like your front lawn (if you have one ... I have rock and cactus). If you let it go, then your lawn-mower will not work properly in the long grass you let grow. It will be ineffective and force you into heroic measures you do not even know about today. And it will be expensive. And while the grass is long the vermin will begin to collect and soon enough they are in the basement (if you have one) or rattling around inside the walls. just for leaving the grass untended&mash;you've got a major situation and will need help.

Help for managing the climate comes from Mars. No, sorry, they packed up and left this system shortl before we crawled out of the ooze. There is no help. We understand the period of some of the sun's cycles, but we are no where near projecting the detonation of nearby stars that could send a (another) shock wave through our part of the branch off the Sagittarius Arm of our galaxy in which we live. Life is dreadfully contingent upon things we do not know, so it is all the more galling that these "professional conservative skeptics" think they have the answer.

Anyway, the point of bringing Elizabeth's essay to you is to underscore the point that the next two years (or probably more) are going to be terrible. The House will be a bee hive of obstructionism and glib told-you-so-ism, beguiling the really pathetically informed public with lies so bald that cueballs will run in terror. Gird your loins my friends, but stay out of airport security lines, too.

JB

11/18/10

Last time I wrote about Nobelist Paul Krugman's "report card" on Barack Obama as president. I can tell you that I am not alone in echoing these remarks and the sentiment of sadness that is coming with the ever more insistent option of beginning the dumping process. The prospect for Democrats in the next election depends very much on the progress of the economic recovery. If Krugman and Stiglitz and many others are correct, the economy will not recover the jobs lost, although the stock markets may flourish and the rich get richer. The fundamentals of the economy will remain stagnant because there is no chance that the GOP politicians and plutocrats will provide Obama with anything like a legislative win. Obama will not be elected because he will be seen (aside from the racism and ideological fury of the radical right) as inept and ineffective ... at least half of which will be his own fault (and the other half the cynical obstructionism of the GOP.)

Perhaps a good place to start the opinion review is with the New York Times and the letters received about Krugman's column. These are short and pointed letters. Read them now.

Perhaps the most important of the recent comments on the failure of Obama to abandon his weak-kneed centrist compromising, however, is the comments by George Soros yesterday in Huffington Post. Mr. Soros represents the brighter side of extreme wealth, that is, the intelligence that understands the difference between a rational cooperative and competitive economy and a tooth and claw, abandon the masses, all competition and no significant cooperation point of view. He sees Obama as lacking the fundamental qualities of character that would direct his energies toward the needed solutions. You should read this now.

A good vantage point of view is the description of the context in which we and Obama are embedded, as described by Nicholas Kristof today (Thursday) in his column entitled "A Hedge-Fund Republic", for clearly (with notable exceptions like Soros) the United States is very much a plutocracy, a corporatist state with the flywheel of a military-industrial-congressional complex feeding the hungry mouths of the top 10% of income in the population. Read this: this 10% owns 70% of the United States, including the current president ... who being owned by selfish money must go.

Dumping Barack Obama is going to painful for Democrats, because he is the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, ex officio. The process of detaching him from this role would best by accomplished, I think, by the process that Lyndon Johnson detached himself, by declaring his future for the war in Vietnam (rather than with keeping the Republicans out of office and away from their sabotage of the Great Society they so effectively achieved). For anyone, even Howard Dean, to rise up against him for control of the "hearts and minds" of the party in any other way is going to be bloody. Pundits may rant, but Obama remains insulated and, frankly, isolated with the ex officio role in his pocket. Maneuvering the president into the situation where he accepts the fact that one way or another he is a one-term president is not going to be easy, but ... and this is important ... he has already made a statement to this effect, so the ground is already partly prepared for him to release the Party leadership to Howard Dean, who, of course, can choose to run or find another who will galvanize the despondent masses in our Party. The other side of this is us. We must begin the hew and cry for him to step aside. Now! The next two year are going to be quickly spent on this process, so we must begin now!

JB

11/16/10

On Sunday, Dr. Paul Krugman wrote his report card on President Barack Obama, entitled "The World as He Finds It". It is a scathing indictment of Obama's fatal underestimation of his role and powers in this crisis. It reveals a side of Obama that the pundits have been circling around (like vultures) for months and months. It is disconcerting to those of us who have had a glimpse of the severity of our economic problems and a glimpse of the incredible flaw in our President. He just does not understand the true nature of the political situation, and (I am afraid) it stems from a certain hubris about his election. He truly believes that he is President of all the People in our country, but that is politically incorrect.

My colleague, Dr. John Searle, has written a philosophical treatise on how social institutions are created by human beings. The review of his new book is in the New York Review of Books this week, and the reviewer did a terrible job of it, misunderstanding an entire generation of structural linguistics and padding his essay with sophomoric debating ploys. But, Searle's ideas shine through anyway.

We create government by verbal consent of the governed and the act of consent is either linguistic declaration thereof ... including repetition of the Pledge of Allegiance through endless days of schooling ... or by symbolic behaviors for which there are ample linguistic descriptions, such as a curtsey or any other symbolic obeisance to authority. Clearly voting is an intentional act (unmistakably stipulating a choice) that qualifies as both acceptance of the system and of its meaning and boundaries. Obama misunderstands the nature of the vote. Over forty-six percent voted against Obama. These people accept the system that puts Obama in charge, but they are not behind him or looking to him for leadership. He is foolish to try to enlist them to his retinue, especially when doing so disregards the group that elected him.

But such is the hubris of politics.

The report card on Obama raises several very large questions. First question the reporter. Is Krugman qualified to make these assertions? My answer is that he certainly is qualified to review the activities of the president in the area of his own expertise and to call him up short for a series of miscalculations that Obama and his advisors clearly made. But, you should note that Krugman has his own irons in the fire, if not a horse in this race other than Obama himself. Krugman believes that governments should act as the parachute and structure bracing for national economies when they (inevitably) self-destruct. Others do not believe that this is a function of government, but rather of the market-place, ignoring (of course) the horrible damage to humans and the environment when markets remain paralyzed from inconsistencies in their internal logic.

So, for instance, we read in the New York Times on Tuesday (today) that small European nations are having trouble financing their role as backstops for their national economies. Is this a refutation of Krugman's ideas or is it a situation of oranges being compared to watermelons? Clearly Iceland, Portugal, Ireland, and the others are not nations like the United States, nor do they or can they be expected to have the resources that rich and large nations have. Austerity that Germany and the United Kingdom are promoting may be the only way for their small fellow nations in the European Union, but austerity is a final measure (as you will read) when the parachute fails to open.

So, Krugman's criticism of Obama actually goes to to Obama's failure to distinguish between the necessary roles of the federal government, on the one hand, and the plight of small nations and minority politicians domestically on the other. Moreover, his failure is very much a failure of leadership, a really cold and galling technocratic response to the emotions of despair surrounding him.

With this in mind, what are our options? Will Howard Dean see the opportunity or will he toe the line to avoid further embarrassment to Obama? Will someone else emerge? Is there time to bring forth a new candidate (or revive old ones) and would an improvement of the economy under Obama during the next two years pull the rug out from under these alternative leaders? Krugman is saying, and I agree, that Obama has no more than six months to change his spots into stripes. I don't think he has the strength of political acumen and personal character to do it. So I am deliberately and earnestly looking around!

JB

11/14/10

The lessons of history are difficult to learn when the history books are written by people whose interest it is to disguise their part in that history. So it was during the so-called Gilded Age of steel magnates, bankers, and railroad titans in the half century following the Civil War. In fact, the Civil War itself could be seen (and has been written) as an economic war between the industrial north that could have opted for industrial slavery on the model of Romanov Russia's industrial serfs. They did not, of course, because slavery is messy and there were too many other factors, not the least (or greatest, either) was the moral question of slavery. But, if you were educated in some southern school systems, your take-away ideas about the Civil War and Reconstruction are fashioned on the lathe of a beaten plantation plutocracy trying desperately to disguise the fact that they were, like their Roman models, up to their ears in horrible slavery.

Historians revise their own accounts or the accounts written before them, and so the titans of industry were "outted" by some historians during the Great Depression. But, the message is mixed, and the mixing is deliberate and caste in the terms of a battle to the death with godless communism and creeping socialism. By the time I was in public schools in the 2nd half of the 20th century the emphasis in the textbooks was on the idea of industrial Progress and jobs that industries created ... not on the abuses of the environment, the low wages in those jobs, the union-busting ideology, the accumulation of riches so great that no one in government could stand up to the temptations of political campaign support and sometimes of graft and corruption.

Big money does not care anything about the niceties of government. It cares about perpetuation of their own position and wealth, as if it really were important that they add another billion to a reserve fortune that they cannot possibly use productively within the economy. Frank Rich, by no means a person of great wealth despite his name, has a good deal to say about the relationship between wealth and government and the distinct feeling we now have that government at the granularity level of "the next election" has succumbed to the temptations of unimaginable wealth and its power.

Notice in his essay, by the way, how the expression "class warfare" now has a vibe to it that suggests excess and red menace. The fact of it is that we are in a system in which economic classes are deliberately pitted against one another with the rules of the game distinctly favoring the super-rich. Let me tell you that this will change, even if it does not Change in terms of the current President. The lessons of history are that people are pushed beyond their tolerances and then spring back with vengeance. Vengeance is not productive energy, but with the super-rich believing they can insulate themselves from it, they continue their strategy of buying our government out from under us.

Look at the last election and try to tell me this is not so. But, having done that, look at your own interests and see which party and leaders are representing your basic needs. I do not think any family earning less than $200,000 a year can say that the super-rich are on their side. Quite the reverse and, you know, it is time to do something serious and permanent about it!

JB

11/12/10

Austerity is the watchword across the planet. Germany, the United Kingdom, and others have voted democratically to employ fiscal stringency as a way of promoting recovery. Their tooth-fairy theory is that when entrepreneurs and big corporations see that government is smaller then they will try to get bigger ... and then we will all be happy. The chain of causation within the "austerity" movement is murky and more than slightly illogical, but ... it does have the weight of public opinion on its side right now. Public opinion, by the way, is notoriously bereft of understanding of national and international economies, but does understand personal micro-economics enough to stay out of debtors prison and buy a few toys.

This week in Seoul, South Korea, Obama ran into a threshing machine of austerity-minded countries, including those two allies mentioned above. Obama's hope for a united front to stimulate growth was shredded, baled, and tossed to the side. It was not a pretty sight. We know that stimulation economics has little chance in the Congress now that the GOP holds a rictus grip on the House. We know that TeaParty demogogues are ranting about "big government" and that stimulus planning reeks of "big government." We know that certain countries are trying to isolate the U.S. to take advantage and maybe even wrest "world reserve currency" from the U.S. dollar, which would be a disaster all around, given that China is too immature (even after 5,000 years of trying) to manage a monetary system for our little blue planet.

But, I think that the domestic situation in the U.S. counts for more than air-fairy theories or even the common sense of stimulus economics. First, the whole world knows that the Democrats lost 60 seats in the election last week. What the House will do to Obama's plans is speculated about everywhere in one form or another. The election, as predicted has created an international instability that will be very dangerous, if Obama and the other leaders play their cards poorly.

But, even more than the domestic politics, there is the sense abroad that the U.S. democracy does not (yet) contain that necessary discipline to take good-times revenue and apply it properly to past-times debt. Time and again the U.S. during bull markets and phenomenal industrial growth has squandered the excess revenue on the military and military adventures. The old PNAC typified the attitude that a strong U.S. economy does not have to look backward and repave its pot-holed streets, retire its debt, and educate its citizens in effective micro-economics for the household. Instead, ... and this is what Europe and India and China are afraid of ... the U.S. cannot be depended to not stick the rest of the world with the costs of maintaining an excessively high standard of living for, say, 5% of the U.S. population. And, they are damned sick of it.

Preferring austerity is a losing game, of course, because the German, U.K., and other economies will inevitably follow something like the "lost decade" path of Japan in the 1990s. Their economies will not spring to life and pay off the stimulus infusions. They will languish and, sure as hell, politics will pendulum back toward stimulus economics in a few years, but it will be too late.

Obama must hold on to the stimulus economics as tightly as anything he believes in. The only way out of this fragile economy is for confidence to be renewed at every level. Trickling it down will never jump start consumer spending. Only stimulus economics will work. But, the world wants austerity, and so lost decades are there for us. Gird your loins, folks, it is gonna be a long slow and dangerous road ahead.

JB

11/11/10

The veterans have this day for themselves, and they well deserve this special day, but it is worth noting that the reason we fought--and we did fight and die and suffer greatly!--is for the intelligence that is innate in a liberal democracy, a people who can govern themselves not with fear and horror, but with clear thinking about the way to prosper and to contribute to the commonweal, the common good, the common wealth.

Here is a story you will not soon forget, about a new ice cream shop in Santa Cruz, California and the people who made it possible and good.

JB

Lieutenant, USN, ret.

11/9/10

There are lots of products out there now that advertise their ability to rid your hands of germs. Handsoaps are the main product type among these, and I have to admit that I have purchased some. I also purchased handi-wipes that clean kitchen surfaces. The active ingredient in these products is the key to whether I or you should buy them. Mostly these products are effective against 85-95% of bugs and leave 5-15% right where they are, a little dazed perhaps, but busy procreating and sending new generations off into the future, generations that are impervious to these "active ingredients." There is one product that works, of course. Bleach. Use it. The mechanism is oxidation of the cell membranes of the germs, and they cannot build a "resistance" to it or transmit defenses into future generations of mutant ninja germs. Bleach is like a baseball bat to the head.

In Soviet and still in modern Russia prisoners in the penal system were given a course of anti-tuberculosis meds. They were given the meds whether or not their incarceration would last as long as the course of injections. As a result thousands of prisoners were released to the general public in Russia with only a half a course of anti-tuberculosis treatment, and guess what! Some of these ex-cons came down with a variant on tuberculosis that is literally resistant to the widely used innoculents. So, tuberculosis is back and the threat is dire because the strain of germs has evolved with our help and misapplication of medical science is virile and deadly.

The point of telling you this is that there are reasons to avoid half measures and incomplete cures. The principles involved in keeping a sanitary kitchen and bathroom or in trying to eradicate persistent tuberculosis are the same with some social phenomena, and Dr. Paul Krugman has a case in point. He sees The Fed as pursuing a half measures on our prostrate economy and suggests that both economically and politically the consequences of this weak-kneed approach to a country divided by shrill advocates of nonsensical theories will be severe.

Already the Fed has "used up" its ability to regulate markets by using the rediscount rate for keeping commercial banks in line. You cannot charge less than zero interest, which is about what they would have to do now. The warnings were given years ago about playing with that tool, and now they have essentially broken it. The current situation is a lesson in scale and granularity. The rediscount rate makes a difference in modern banking when profits are tied to slender margins in the overnight borrowings, but it is ineffective against stock-market crashes and lending malpractice.

It is time, folks, not to disband the Fed for its very predictable political and economic cowardice, but to teach it the lessons germs have provided us. Who would have ever predicted that!

JB

11/7/10

Welcome back to Standard Time, folks. We Arizonans never touch our clocks and get along pretty well considering that we need the early morning daylight in summer ... and anyway, those geniuses up the road in Phoenix think it is socialist to be monkeying with God's own time.

So, Keith Olbermann, however, did send some money to Grijalva and Giffords here in Tucson. He could have saved himself some trouble by skipping Grijalva, and Giffords (whom I worked for assiduously) really needed the infusion of cash. He shouldn't have violated that onerous GE/NBC contract, btw. It is totally enforcible, but probably unconstitutional in theory.

That's where Keith should take this issue ... to the Supreme Court (if need be). The idea of pristine journalism was put to rest with Ben Franklin. NBC is an old, beat-up, ugly whore of a company (not syphilitic and HIV+ like Fox, however) who thanks to the Supreme Court can make unlimited donations to candidates, PACs, and fifth columnist organizations to their black heart's content. Do they actually believe Keith has to pimp for them, too??? Give us a break!!!

I gave up on Keith over a year ago, largely because his show (and it is a "show" not a newscast) contains so much puerile crap. Rachel bested Keith within a few weeks of her own "show" taking off, and I gave up on her too ... just up to here in the waste of precious television time on coddling the cyber generation into 90 second attention spans. MSNBC is GE and GE is one of the major parts of the military industrial complex, so I read the newspapers and take a pass on all that tv fun.

Oh! You might want to read Frank Rich's column in the New York Times this beautiful Sunday in November. He rarely froths quite this much on a leaves-are-changing, football and tailgate Sunday, after an election, when everyone is finally at five minutes peace with the world.

JB

11/6/10

Washington is all antsy about Nancy Pelosi's completely reasonable and rational decision to run within the Democratic Caucus for Minority Leader. After all, if you look at it from a decent perspective, no one in Congress knows more about Congress than she! Why would you throw that away?!!!

If you read the Washington Post article on this story and wade through the sports metaphors (and having grown up in the Washington area and been a WaPost deliveryboy, I can tell you there is no reason for the Post to use sports analogies), you will notice that the whiners are from the "blue dog," GOP lite, bench-warming side of the Democratic party spectrum and not the leadership, i.e., Pelosi's ideological compatriots! On a sports team you weed out the ineffective players and only as a last resort fire the coach, and never fire him or her for being too effective. Remember, Nancy Pelosi was the whipping girl of the GOP and still managed miracles with the fractious majority she inherited.

But, read the New York Times article on the subject. Here you see the truth of the matter emerging more clearly. The so-called "blue dogs" who are straddling the great divide between democracy and corporatism, the Evan Bayhs and the little squeaks mention in the Post article are the ones feeling the pain. If they would stand up on their hind legs and be Democrats they would find the going a lot easier.

Bob Herbert yesterday was completely correct in describing this election as a clearing out of the confused and incompetent middle. The "indies" may have been the efficient mechanism for that, but independents have the sense to see when a mugwump is causing more trouble than he is doing good. And clearly the problem we face now is that there were too many meek, timid, ineffective Congressmen to pass effective legislation two years ago. Now, of course we are stuck for two more years with the results of a housecleaning on one side, ready for the clean up two years hence as the TeaParty folk overplay their hand.

JB

11/5/10

I have begun lecturing about the perils of coddling China. Today we learn that China is trying to blackmail European nations into a boycott of the Nobel Prize ceremonies and courtesies. They feel that Prize-winner Liu Xiaobo is a criminal for trying to get democratic reforms into the Chinese government, which is decidedly un-democratic and equally anti-democratic. One party rule in China is a dictatorship not of the proletariat, but of a self-selected clique of party stalwarts. There is competition within the Chinese Communist Party and the brighter members seem to have an advantage, but the Red Chinese Army packs a huge wallop in governance as well. It is a governmental structure unwilling to accommodate itself to the progress of the individual throughout the world.

I am sorry for harping on this issue, but 2005 was the time to stop buying Chinese goods. 2010 is not too late. Boycott China wherever you can. Look at labels and understand that buying things of Chinese manufacture is not in your or your children's long term interest. China must be taught a lesson. Hoisting themselves up economically on the backs and shoulders of millions of underpaid workers is not going to provide China with the social or political experience they are going to need to be part of the community of nations. Send them a message!

JB

11/4/10

Dan Balz is a veteran reporter and writer for the Washington Post, and some of what he says in his article today on interpreting the results of election day make sense, and frankly some do not.

First, there is the overwhelming fact that 50+ races for the U.S. House of Representatives up-ended Democratic incumbents. That raw information is useful, but "interpreting it" vis-a-vis any particular piece of government business or potential legislation is hazardous until you read the records of each of those up-ended, their beginning chances for re-election, and the platform of the winning GOP person. Clearly the removal of some sitting Democrats was personal and some was ideological, some both, and some neither. Balz and others have not done their homework on the effect of massive amounts of money in some races.

Second, the pieces on the chessboard are being thought as a referendum on President Barack Obama. This is a favorite idea of pundits and analysts, and I agree with it up to a point. It is a bit like taking a book of matches away from a kid who has just burned down the dog's house. It goes almost without comment that the kid learned his behaviors from the GOP who burned down the main house and have left millions without jobs. But, Obama has been clearly deficient in communicating to and from we the people, and even more importantly the base.

Balz says that the center expected a Centrist presidency. Horse manure! Obama's short record in the U.S. Senate labeled him the most LIBERAL of all 100 Senators! How can Balz say something so foolish! The Center expected Change and movement toward the Liberal ethos, and they did not get it. Obama reneged on many promises that were in his personal-presidential power to effect: open government for one, ethical treatment of terrorists, skepticism about the war in Afghanistan, Realpolitik in Iraq. He should have prosecuted the worse offenders on Wall Street and led "the mob" to Congress to tighten up the impossibly loose rules governing finance. So, yes, people voted their discouragement and their disappointment, but that does not mean they have turned to the big money party for relief. I doubt that 20% of the voters who removed a Democrat really want to turn rightward again. They have attention spans that encompass two years, and want relief from this economy now!

Yes, I know that interpreting elections is an industry with vested interests in keeping the topic hot and sweaty. I think readers would be well advised to understand that and to understand that the corporate press and media have an agenda, and that agenda is not ours!

JB

11/1/10

The American Liberalism Project that I (and my distant cousin Susan B. Goodwin) founded years ago was not intended as a bully pulpit for individual political campaigns. It was originally meant to combat the insidious campaign by the GOP and all the stripes and spots of rightwing ideology to smear the very name of Liberal and Liberalism. It is a testament to the courage of today's Liberals that they have largely failed to win over the center of American politics to their creed of mendacious distortions.

American Liberalism is alive and well, and one need only have read the "Interview" section of the Sunday New York Times and have read Gary Wills's parting comment about voting. You may not like the guy who is running, but voting for his opponent to prove that is a complete folly, Wills said in so many words. You not only bring in a guy from the other side, but you bring in all the trappings, apparatus, and ideology that follows along. In the case of the Republican voters of New York state, the choice of Paladino for Governor presents a special case. The man is a throwback to the 19th century, a man of rigid prejudice, and a liar. It would be hard to vote for Paladino, but should the honest GOP voters then vote for Cuomo, who is going to have his hands full with some of the jackasses in Albany of both parties?

My answer is that if voters understand that Liberalism is exactly the ideology upon which this country was founded, that welfare is not the central position of Liberalism, that the five elements of Liberalism—Individual Liberty, Progress, Humanity, Ethics, and The Rule of Law—are the essence of a Liberal view of government, then "hell yes!" they should vote for Cuomo. Why not? If you understand that these essential principles are in deliberate daily conflict and that politics, particularly Liberal politics is the reasoning and bargaining of solutions that give more than lip service to each element ... always, then you are a Liberal and should vote that way.

If on the other hand you prefer the guidance and money of corporate board rooms and executives to the reasoning of an educated electorate, if you believe that government is there to provide special favors to special interests, if you believe that government has no business safeguarding the civil rights of people whose rights are being trammeled, if you believe that Progress is a myth and that the purpose of life is to get as rich as you can and buy as many toys as you can manage, then you are not a Liberal. Vote for Paladino or not.

This election may contain a few surprises for the corporate press. I have been closely monitoring the major publications in this country for the past year with an eye to the subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) attempts to influence tomorrow's election by insinuating opinion onto their front pages as if it were news. The main way they do this is through poll taking, where they design the questions and interpret the results. Believe me, reports of these activities are not "news." They are opinion, and most of it is untruthful, deceptive, and misleading. The main thrust of corporate press interference in our political process is to suggest to Democrats that they have already lost the election, so they might as well stay home. The pressure on this message has been relentless ... and it has been based on polls the media news organizations produce for themselves. You can bet that the money it takes to do this is a concern at the highest levels of the corporations and their money pool, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

And so we have an article today in the Times that suggests that young voters feel abandoned by politics. Horsefeathers! They cannot possibly know whether young people are feeling "abandoned," "bewildered," "patronized," "propagandized," or any other thing. Polling data on young people is notoriously inaccurate, as young people frequently "play" the pollsters for the reckless fools they certainly are. There is only one reason that an article like this appears the day before an election. They mean to keep young voters home and feeling "abandoned" so they tell them they are "abandoned." It just isn't so.

I have spent hours on the phone banks here and young people are the heart of the operation along with middle-aged and retired persons. Liberal politics is not about special groups or special interests, it is simply about us trying to accomplish our democracy as best we can. We believe in it, and we reject categorically the idea that corporations and the rich know better than we.

JB

10/31//10

Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times this fine Halloween Sunday writes on the two-year report card on Barack Hussein Obama. She is not happy!

Lots of people are unhappy ... and out of work, lost their homes, changing college plans or dropping out, keeping the clunker for a couple more years, indulging their petulance, and even cosying up to the far right ... to teach those bums in Washington a lesson. But, anger and disappointment are not good political motives, and replacing Representatives and Senators with members of the OTHER party just indicates that the primary system does not work. Why, if you believe that Cheney and Bush started all this mess, would you believe that people to the right of them would do better?

Obama has lots of reserve goodwill on this day two days before the election. There are those who believe that if he shapes up his own act in the next two years, they will forgive him the last two. But, Maureen is relentless in her criticism and goes for the throat several times. And, yes, there is a sense that Obama is arrogant, but is he more arrogant than anyone else that has inhabited the Oval Office? I think not. I think that the hubris of being elected "leader of the free world" went to his head like it does ALL the others, but that his failures were more political than personality problems.

I will say it one more time: Obama, Geithner, and Summers had to save Wall Street. They had to save the world financial system by saving the hub and brains and US reserve currency position. Yes indeed this wrankles the rank and file. It was not a populist move and it sticks sideways in our national throat. But it had to be done, and it is foolish indeed for Obama to have been so quiet about these reasons. Shot himself in the foot, he did!

JB

10/20/10

The New York Times is running a series of articles about the economics that Japan, as the 2nd largest economy in the world (up until last month), experienced and why. The model of Japan is not one we want to emulate, but there seems to be a remarkable parallelism in our economic track records over the past few years. This is decidedly a bad thing and one which Republicans are by virtue of their assumptions and gnarly attitudes currently about government are likely not going to avoid.

You need to read this article by Marvin Fackler and Steve Lohr and consider the parallels of our situations and the differences. One of the differences not mentioned by the authors is the fact that the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency of the world, a position that benefits the U.S. economy tremendously, induces domestic governmental behaviors that are not necessarily what Japanese economists would have had to worry about, and makes the U.S. simultaneously a hostage to certain monetary policies that would not otherwise obtain. It is a bit like owning the only lawn mower on the block. It is easy to rent out, but difficult to maintain. The bailout of Wall Street was exactly for this purpose ... to make sure that the U.S. kept the mower, the wherewithal to manage a global currencies system. Without Wall Street we could not.

The Times series is about DEFLATION. It is the opposite of inflation with which we are all very familiar. We reason that debt incurred today will be paid off with revenue purposefully inflated and thus be easier to manage, since each dollar is worth marginally less than the dollars borrowed. Well, it is the opposite with deflation. It means that the dollars spend retiring debt are more valuable than the debt dollars borrowed. You can see how that creates an up-hill battle to get out of debt. Republicans are not thinking about deflation when they say that we should not incur more debt, in fact their program would cut the necessary stimulus to growth that the Japanese also failed to produce and thus lead exactly to slow or no growth and deflation.

JB

10/29/10

Paul Krugman, Nobelist, Economist at Princeton, and columnist at the New York Times, whom we have quoted endlessly these past two years, has one more chance to dissuade you from your dogmatic irritability, your vent on the Democrats because they were asked to do too much with too little. He tells you, and I am repeating it, a Republican sweep on Tuesday will be a disaster for our country and for the economy. And, I think Krugman's diagnosis is spot on. The Republican rightwing, the TeaParty, will go for the throat of the hapless Barack Obama. He will be a one-term president.

There are a lot of things that you can say about this, and most of them land at the President's desk in the Oval Office.

My take is that Obama's fingerprints are all over the insane "bipartisanship policy" he took. He read Rahm Emanuel as a person who could work miracles across the aisle, and that was wrong. He understood his victory in November 2008 as coming from support he garnered in the center of the political spectrum and assumed that this meant people expected a centrist administration, and this was wrong. People knew Obama to have the highest liberalism rating in the Senate, and they expected him to produce change that reflects the core tenets of American Liberalism.

The bipartisanship issue led to a health-care bill that has too many deficiencies to remain unassailed when the Republicans take over the House. Health care is a huge part of the national economy, so throwing it into chaos by pulling the rug before the good parts of the bill come on line will do what chaos always does. It will retard the recovery, which is inching along right now at 2% growth. We need 4%.

Krugman's dread will be fulfilled. There will be disruptions to government and good, innocent people will be damaged as the swash-buckling TeaParty flexes its muscles and corporate America lines up at the trough they have so assiduously built for the Republicans to feed them. The descent into corporatism will be painless, as all quiet revolutions in government tend to be. All you will have lost is the democracy and the republic.

JB

10//26/10

Rebecca Solnit is a liberal, a Californian, and is often quoted in liberal circles. She has a knack with images. Her essay today is built on the imagery of dinosaurs, although she is quick to point out that she really means corporations. She despairs over the power of these behemoths and the motivations that move them. She is satisfied that her metaphor carries with it sufficient associations that you will get the point ... that corporations are, in terms of human civil liberties, in terms of democracy, in terms of our caretakership of this planet, obsolete. They are constructs of our imagination, and they must be ... will be ... brought under permanent control before they ruin us all.

I need to point out that corporations do fit into my mantra about life, especially political life, being 50% competition and 50% cooperation. Conservatives and libertarians believe that corporations are the embodiment of cooperation. Read Solnit and see if you think so.

But, of course, the sort of cooperation that is embodied in corporations is not real human cooperation on a daily basis. It is, rather, a sterile process of investment in which pooled resources (not necessarily or even usually "cooperating resources") are put in the hands of people who survive a highly competitive game of organizational ladder climbing (or are handed passes to skip the lower rungs of the ladder by virtue of their chance of birth). Where the thinking and planning and work goes on in corporate dinosaurs it is 100% competitive with legal restrictions about having other motivations and goals.

In other words, corporations are to extend Solnit's metaphor an evolutionary step in the progress of cooperation that is the hallmark of civilization. But, corporations are but a first step in that evolution and like most such things they are faulty ... but extremely powerful.

So, think about that while you are reading this amazing article by Fareed Zakaria from Time magazine. The point of view here is completely different, far more pragmatic, less critically aware of the evolutionary process, as if we had not much to say about what our organizational constructs have become. Zakaria is optimistic, and it is a relief to read his ideas in these "sour times."

Both of these authors are right, both are talking about the way things are in the planetary political economy, but one sees the forest and the other the trees, yet even that hackneyed notion does not fit. Read both these essays and feel the gestalt shift between them, and know that all the while you are reading about your own life as well.

JB

10/25/10

I suppose the most salient feature of American politics today is the restive noise coming from pundits and members of the so-called TeaParty "movement." There is no question that millions are angry about job losses within their families, the consequent devolution of the life-style to which they had become accustomed, and the widely publicized increases in "ethnic" populations, particularly those who are said to be existing "on the dole."

The anger is directed outward against these seas of troubles and rarely the opportunity for a self-evaluation, particularly since the majority of the population believes that the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not apply to social phenomena. And, who knows, maybe it doesn't, maybe if you just dream the American dream it will come true. Your toys will repair themselves, your home will appreciate endlessly, your savings will be irrelevant because you will earn more next year. Oh, but when this all stops, grinds to a halt, and turns tails and begins a free-fall into some kind of lower-class oblivion, well sir, that's somebody else's fault.

James Carroll, in the Boston Globe on Monday's (usually) writes today about something going on in Europe, something which has been going on during better economies but subdued by the illusions of economic success. His essay is about Germany and Europe, but it struck me while reading that it is really about an epiphenomenon that often accompanies hard times. We have hard times now around the planet. To listen to the Republicans on this you would think that Barack Obama started it all and has been throwing gasoline on the fire.

Carroll at one point puts it this way:

In Europe, the pressure comes from Muslim populations, and though American anti-Islamic prejudice has been sparked by the war on terror (and fueled by Fox News), the real point of contention here is the burgeoning Latino population. This year, in fact, marks a demographic tipping point, with more US children born to minorities than to whites. It won’t be until about 2050 that the national percentage of whites will fall below half, but many already feel as though the privilege and power of being part of the dominant group are being ripped away. The political hysteria, including rampant hatred of the black president, that has seized the Republican Party is a result.

Carroll has a point, we have known that human beings are a lot more comfortable in themselves when they have someone to look down upon. When that lower individual or group begins to share some of the resources of civilization with you because your position has dropped or theirs has improved relatively, you become annoyed, begin to resist, find that the whole thing is a horrible trap, strike out with first one then both fists, and end up hating fiercely and down into the crumbling core of your soul. An antiseptic term like xenophobia does this process a disservice, for the consuming hatred of the stranger, the alien, is built into our gray matter from hundreds of thousands of years of pre-history.

You have to wonder at people, like Merkel and Beck, who stroke these ancient atavisms and coax out our worst nature.

JB

10/23/10

No one said that the American republic had to be a direct democracy. Franklin is alleged to have answered the question of what the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had come up with the almost tart answer: "A republic, if you can keep it." Most people have no idea what the definition of a "republic" is and how it (the one they thought they came up with) differed from life as they knew it in 1763 or 1665.

A republic is a "A republic is a form of government in which the people or some portion thereof retain supreme control over the government and in which the head of government is not a monarch.". Yep. That's the core of the definition. You can see there are already some provisions for latitude on who "the people" are. And, typically, the people of a republic are "represented" by persons elected specifically to carry out the wishes of those who elect them.

But it is not all transparent. The Franklin story reveals something that should not go unnoticed. The fellow who asked Franklin what sort of government had been created had almost nothing to say about it. The Constitution was written as a fait accompli, albeit by well-meaning, well-educated, successful, and earnest men (no women) whose intent was to replace the Articles of Confederation form of weak central government (designed in a period of backlash against the central authority of King George III and the Parliament in London). They came up with what is an amazing compromise about power and posed the question of the ages: can human beings govern themselves in an enlightened way (remember all of this happened in the full maturity of The Enlightenment in Europe and North America)?

The question is partly about monarchs and father figures and whether we can in our inner selves do without this imagery of authority. If you read the newspapers from then and now you will see a constant strain of thought that looks to the father figure, the President in our republic, for his (her someday) talismanic effect, the embodiment of authority the likes of which many feel must be transcendent and superior to the daily appetites and dishonesties we all know about.

The question is also partly about the nature of representative government and, specifically, whether a "representative" can a) truly represent a congeries of opinion such as existed in, say, Philadelphia or Charleston at the time ... or now? And b) whether a "representative" has a talismanic honesty that he (or she) self-appreciates and holds transcendent to all the other forces and pressures that come along during endless days of compromise?

The answer, class, is that, no, we did not keep the republic. It turns out that the transcendent ideas of political and moral equality were barely present at the beginning, rotten from the compromise over slavery that continued for three more generations of Americans, disabled by the exclusion of women, and given a back seat by the financial interests of the day, including dear old Ben Franklin himself with his press empire. Good thing he was an idealist, eh!

It turns out that money owns the Constitution and money owns the press and money owns the hearts and minds of those for whom daily bread is a bounty from those with money. So, you will not be surprised ... no matter how angry you get ... at this report of the latest in the two hundred years of corporate efforts to undermine the essential element of our republic, that is, who the government represents. It boils down this question, class: if in a republic the sovereign power resides in the people or a sub-set of them, who are those sub-set people today? In the 18th century they were white males who were literate and owned property. But are they now the unelected, unsupervised, unaccountable, fabulously rich and insulated CEOs of corporations whose money absolutely drowns the voice of the guy down on the street, ... or will it finally be us?

JB

10/21/10

The news from Europe is not good. When the news from Europe is not good it is not good for us in North America, either. They do not call the Atlantic Ocean "The Pond" just because of jet aircraft and the reduction of three month Mayflower trips to five hour hops to Gatwick. The fact is that the European economy and the North American economy are closely intertwined. Some of your favorite stores (Target, Trader Joe's, to name a couple of mine) are European. Some of your favorite products are European. You have the picture: what happens in Europe does not stay in Europe ... it affects us quickly and surely.

So. The bad news is the willful ignoring of John Maynard Keynes, possibly the best-known economist ever, and his prescription for economic stagnation and slow (or medium fast) rot of the industrial and financial prowess of an economy. That would be (boiled down into one phrase) "Keep consumer demand no less than level." Of course, in a market economy consumers do basically what they individually want and the microeconomics of that is separate from and should not be a metaphor for the macroeconomics of what governments must do in troubled economies like ours and Europe's and Japan's and everybody else's.

The lesson of The Great Depression was that government must prime the pump and provide the opportunity for consumers to express their demand for goods and services. They won't when they have no jobs and few, if any, prospects for getting one (or a bunch of part-time jobs). So, government must insure that people are put to work ... and must be the employer of last resort, if the private sector goes catatonic as it has in the past two years ... here and in Europe.

But, this answer is being willfully ignored all across Europe. The main reasons for this tragic mistake are two: politicians do not understand large numbers. We see this when times are prosperous. Polticians run up huge bills for stuff, completely oblivious to the overall expenditure. Armed forces are a major part of this spend-freely attitude. But, when times are bad, like now, politicians forget the flip side of good-times spending, namely, that most government expenditures create jobs and taxes that more than pay for the expenditures.

The second cause of the current willful ignorance is that the people, including those in government and in corporate offices, are frightened by the colossal losses of 2007 and 2008, the hair-breath's encounter with a world-wide melt down. In their ensuing paranoia they transfer what they feel at the microeconomic level to the macro with these two utterly meaningless, misleading, and wrong-headed metaphors.

One, they are afraid that foreign parties will tell them what to do on a false analogy with foreclosure processes. Yes, China (and others) own a lot of U.S. and European debt, but China (in particular) is trapped by that ownership and cannot afford to be stupid about devaluing the assets it holds abroad.

Two, there is a sense that large sovereign debts are "morally" indefensible. Well, yes, there are such things as macroeconomic "morals," but debt is not one of them. The problem is that the microeconomic moral is that individuals should not owe more than they can pay back. At the macrolevel, however, there are many ways of paying back, but almost all of them depend on a thriving economy. So, you see, AUSTERITY—the new watch word in Europe, and soon in North America if the election turns out the way the corporate press is reporting it— is precisely the wrong thing to do.

We are in for some very bad years, probably decades of miserable economic performance, and we could have done something to avoid it, but we (and the Europeans) didn't. In fact, as the Europeans plunge into one austerity program after another, and as their economies grind down to mere shadows of their real potential, the North American economies will be directly and tragically affected. Yes, these ideas are too big for most politicians to understand, and the tragedy for democracy lies in that horrible truth.

JB

10/19/10

I am old. I am older than I ever thought as a kid that I would be. I have been through a serious automobile accident, two typhoons at sea where things looked quite grim for the little cork we were riding, the fascinating horror of being crushed by an 8 foot thick ice pack a hundred miles wide thousands of miles from anywhere off the "coast" of Antarctica. I was in the Vietnam combat zone for months, off the coast of Haiphong, chasing downed aviators. Yet, here I am, old. I am not alone. This very interesting article in the Sunday, New York Times Magazine, which is the best read anywhere week after week, is about aging at the national level—the statistical and social impact.

My country is aging, you will discover, but not as fast as some. China is aging much, much faster and this bald fact contributes to the anxious metaphor of China's closing window of opportunity to modernize. China is the place to watch, for what happens to the aged their will define our species for what it really is. Next door in Japan where aging has really taken over, one in four of the aged are living in poverty. Japan is the third largest economy in the world, by the way, so the distortions in Japanese society that allow that to happen may be headed China's way, as well, and certainly the United States is primed and ready to send us old folks into oblivion very much poorer than when we first got a discount at the movies.

In a market economy like ours the aged are merely a market demographic, a like-minded, like-need, like-responding consuming populations with eyes squinting focused on not outlasting our financial reserves, if any. We will be poached, swindled, sold into pharmaceutical slavery, and our kids and their kids will hardly notice. The poor among us will lead wretched lives of bad nutrition and inexorably encroaching disease.

In the broadscape of history, though, we have not experienced aging like we are seeing today. This is terra incognita for insurers, marketers, merchants, and politicians. We have, however, seen some remarkable mass movements based on national demographics. France lost so many of its young men in the First World War that it quickly capitulated in the Second. Today, Russia with a negative population growth rate stands to irrevocably self-destruct unless it can find a work force that will put up with continued Putinesque curtailments of civil liberties and mismanaged state capitalist ventures. And, as you will read, places like Equador and the Philippines are over the edge and cannot possibly develop with what they have left of their populations.

We probably will not ... as this essay's title suggests ... end up eating the aged as mystery meat, but the opportunities for disasters just as repugnant exist now and will be the inheritance that we and then the Boomers will leave to our country.

JB

10/17/10

Frank Rich is one of the most respected columnists in America. He is the dean of OpEd in the New York Times and very much the wiser man compared to Gary Wills in the corporate press represented by the Washington Post. Rich's essay today, Sunday, is about what I have been writing about all week. He even turns of couple of phrases from my lathe, interestingly. The subject is rage and the antidote ... well, Frank and others do not have it.

But, rage there is in the public about the destruction of our economy by the greedy bastards on Wall Street and scattered throughout the financial sector of this country ... and other countries. I was not kidding when I wrote that there is going to be an explosion. If it is organized and not just a dozen hotheads somewhere, it is going to mean big trouble. I have been pondering the reasons for a long time, and would like to try this reasoning out on you.

People are fucking mad about losing their homes. No question about that. They are angry and afraid, and they don't know whom to kick in the groin about it. Most people have not lost their homes, but they have seen their retirements go down the tubes. They have seen their children having to select less expensive, less prestigious, and presumably less capable colleges, thus diverting their hopes and dreams into shallower waters and evaporating ponds. Most people have someone in the household or slightly extended family who has lost their job and cannot find work. I have! I am righteously pissed off about all of this, because it was avoidable in theory ... if not in the by-play of national politics and national mythologies.

The people need expiation, a release, an event, a reason they can call their own for the disaster. They are mad at Washington for the bail-out, but are TOTALLY MISINFORMED about who is going to pay off the 760 billion dollars of debt. Do you know who?

Paul Krugman has been trying to explain to you that deficit spending to buoy up and stimulate an economy is paid for by the economy. It is quite simple. The gross domestic product is taxed by the federal government at many levels. When the economy gets percolating, it pays for itself. DUH!

Do you think this knowledge is widely known? Of course it isn't and, equally, it is unlikely that if it were it would have any effect on the rage that Obama has not quelled or even given a reasonable chance to die of its own irrationality. No ... Rage is rage. It is the hind-brain in action, the seat of fear and hubris tormented by the certain knowledge of personal failure to foresee how crooked the American economy really is, considering the rampant amorality and the emptiness of Adam Smith's "hidden hand" that is supposed to check human failings and keep the boat afloat.

The event, as Rich and Brett are saying, will happen. As an historian I am saying "it has to happen." You can quote me. Study the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and the American Civil War carefully and explain to yourselves the Grand Peur and the bloody guillotine, the doggedness of the Red Army under Leon Trotsky, the loss of 40 million people to starvation at the hand of Mao. Study Pickett's Charge and Reconstruction. Get down in the guts of those histories and study and know fully and with appropriate apprehension how very savage we are.

This election is about to put the likes of John Boehner into the 3rd spot in American government. Can you think of anyone else you would rather have there? I am pretty sure you can, and if you can, you know now why the rage is bipartisan. We are about to have a debacle.

JB

10/15/10

I began this little series of essays with the comment that I thought there will be an explosion in America and soon. I put that under a title that suggested the outcome of that explosion will be a revolution. I deceived you. The outcome at worst will be a civil war and, more likely, an insurrection in the South, in Idaho and Arizona, in small places in other states, and accompanied by riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, and a few other well-known places where riots erupt.

If it gets out of hand we will have a civil war with conservatives of all stripes and creeds coalescing into a murderous army of anti-government, anti-Black, anti-Hispanic hot-heads who are armed right now to the teeth, and whose staying power will trip several alarms among those in the target minorities and among liberals. The "war" will last a few months and then, with the regular armed forces culled of fifth columnists, the national armed forces will suppress it, also with considerable bloodshed.

The 2nd Amendment will be re-read to exclude "militias" the operational purposes of which are not coordinated with national good order and discipline, i.e., those which would remove duly elected officials and destroy government because they believe them to be too corrupt for remedy. This re-reading will prolong the "war," but the president will have no choice but to call this an insurrection or rebellion ... like the last time.

More likely, though, there will be outbreaks of violence against government, large and small, spread out across the land where militias are already formed and their caches of arms are already secured. The internet that coordinates these groups will be taken down, the ring leaders will be rounded up, and some of them shot to death in the process. There will be other bloodshed among innocent people, and there will be enormous property damage, but the real effect will be to so chasten the general public that the far right, racist groups will be tarred and feathered by their own hand. What happens to the rest of the nation is the more important outcome.

I have said that America is not ready for a revolution, because there is not anything like an agreement on grievances or on goals. The right wants so much less government that it cannot possibily compromise with the center and left that want merely to repair or reorganize existing forms. The outcome of the promised insurrections (promised, by the way, not by me, but by them: Sipsy Street Irregulars among several nation-wide groups who also travel under the banner of the Three-Percenter organizations, the former of which has threatened my own life online and with emails directly to me) will be a chilling of civil rights and civil liberties in this country. The corporations will love that. A docile population is an ideal workforce!

There is nothing good that can possibly come from either civil war or insurrection in America today or in the next few years. On the contrary, we in academe have been talking about the relative and absolute declines in our nation's prospects vis-a-vis the emerging nations like China, Brazil, India, and in comparison with our own long-standing ideals. We in the academy effectively reached a conclusion, albeit tentative and extremely pessimistic, about the time of the Mogadishu debacle (Blackhawk Down), but based more on the outrageously scandalous behavior of Reagan Republicans urging behind President Carter's back that the Iranians not free the hostages until the presidential elections that year. Our conclusion then, which has been written with innocent blood here and abroad in the ensuing decades, is that elite corporate power is now so strong in America that the pretense of them lurking in the shadows of some bizarre Kabuki play is no longer required.

As my colleague Phil Rochstroh correctly pointed out recently, in addition to the more and more brazen exercise of power by the corporate elites, the average American searching and yearning for a "normal" life now tends to internalize the stresses and distortions of reality played out in the corporate press. Americans have now generally chosen to "confine themselves" to innocent blather about passing events, rather than to take a serious look at the real issue, that the locus of power in America is now firmly in the hands of a class of people whose first and foremost mission is to make a quarterly profit and to keep their own positions at the head of these behemoth corporations. They understand that somewhen during the 1950s a corporation was able to begin accumulating so much more money relative to the common man (just like what happened in the Gilded Age of the 1870-1890s period) that they live in a different universe where gravity is reversed ... or even better, is subject to their own whims.

Revolution is impossible in America now. That is my conclusion. Certainly any revolution that leads to a better republic, a cleaner government, and based on ideals shared among a strong majority and consent of the governed is impossible. It is true that in our colonial revolution against Great Britain there were those who remained loyal to the idea of a constitutional monarchy, who believed that a Parliament that taxed without regard to the wishes of those taxed was annoying, but not sufficiently annoying to throw off the transcendent principles that governed their political philosophy up to that point. The Tories were a minority, and they either had to go back to England or change their minds and accept new transcendent principles. Many did.

Today the revolutionists, those of us who are so angry we could answer a call to arms, are a tiny minority of a population that is effectively self-disciplined to avoid disruption of the status quo at all costs, even the costs of their own liberties, but, interestingly, not at the cost of their own pursuit of Happiness. Go figure!

JB

10/14/10

I am disappointed about what has happened to our country. Actually, on some days when the worst features of our system are more apparent, I am angry. As I have said, anger is irrational, and it feels good to be irrational once in a while. And, I notice you have the same progression of thoughts, at least that's what your behavior suggests. And, that is the crucial step. It isn't about me or about you, it is about "us," and so the question becomes, who are "we" that we seem to share the same kinds of emotions and thoughts?

Well, the easy answer is, we are We the People, and we subscribe to a set of transcendent principles, such as the absolute right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Ah, you say, that is what I'm talking about. But, a second later you notice that we have a whole range of ideas about life, including the death penalty, the conduct of offensive war, the pulling of plugs when there is a "do not resuscitate" order, traffic fatalities that are statistically going to involve 50,000 human beings a year in our country alone, and so on. WE have different ideas about Life.

Liberty, too, you notice, is fraught with all kinds of additional thoughts packed in like jewels in a bag being smuggled into a destitute land. And, happiness, a thought doubtless first conjured up by Ben Franklin, is a hazy idea that nevertheless has animated untold millions of Americans to pursue IT, whatever IT is. These concepts, that I must unpack to get to the revolution we are promising ourselves, all arise from a common understanding among us, also transcendent, that is absolute and not subject to shopping around for alternatives. That concept is about Equality, an assertion about the worth and standing of every human being on this planet now and forever.

Equality, indeed! We are not equal in height, weight, in age, or maturity. We are not equal in tennis or golf or skiing or swimming. We are not equal in business acumen or engineering design intelligence, nor in our understanding of machines and, especially these machines, our computers. We are not equally educated and we are not equally educable. Some of us are very healthy and some are ill, disfigured by accidents, crippled, blind, deaf, mute. Some of us were raised by two quarrelsome parents, some by loving couples. Some of us have no moral code and prey on others, and sometimes among these the person seems to be pursuing his or her own version of happiness

We are totally unequal, except that we subscribe to a notion that we are by definition "transcendently equal before the law." We believe various versions of this idea, most or many of them coming down to that moment of birth where a new person of equal moral worth appears, fresh, not quite a tabula rasa, unsullied by worldly affairs (except for pre-natal conditions that the mother might have avoided).

We cling to this idea of transcendent equality partly in recognition of systems that deliberately promote inequality, social ranks, kings, queens, and privileged classes of people born to their superior economic situations. We accept because of this that there is a necessity for some kind of pervasive Justice in the world such that when things are manifestly unequal the system itself has the machinery to make them more closely equal.

But, theory is one thing and practice quite another. We do not in theory give the captain of an industry an easy out because of her position in society. Under the law we are equal ... and that principle is not in theory subject to shopping for alternatives. But, much of our current anger stems from the sure knowledge that we are being lied to about equal application of our laws. We know the rich have better opportunities for education and health that almost no amount of government intervention can level out.

In fact, we know that this foundation of our ideas of economic, social, and political justice has been badly undermined by unscrupulous people, especially people teamed up against those of us whom they think are less equal ... by virtue of cognitive skills, economic success, or any other measure you want to name. We know that the transcendence has begun to evaporate, that the educational system has been perverted to deliberately avoid discussing these issues, that there are powerful forces in our culture who do not want people to understand fully the nature of the inequalities that transcendent equality would otherwise have the power to correct.

A theory of Justice exists that incorporates the ideals we have and the pragmatism that runs through our daily lives. In fact there are several. The United States was founded on English and French philosophers' ideas: Locke, Rousseau, Bentham, Adam Smith, to name just four important ones. We are a nation founded on Bentham's "utilitarianism" supported by Adam Smith's ideas about markets and their supposed self-correcting mechanisms, but obviously the foundational agreement is breaking down under the pressure of several important things: populaton, diversity, technology, and the scale of opportunities within the economy. I might add that amorality of corporate culture contributes strongly to the decay of our assumptions about ideals and even our pragmatism.

Our liberal and progressive assumptions about Justice are now evolved toward a system that understands that there will be failures, but steadfastly holds that old ideal of equality sacrosanct and demands that the table be leveled at every opportunity.

And,no. We are not all in agreement about this. Many of us are so battered by the mischances of life and by the presence of rules designed honestly to help disadvantaged, that they feel the system does not work for them, that their liberties have been weakened or destroyed, that their pursuit of happiness has been more or less permanently thwarted. So, remembering the triad of "Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness," and with Libery and Happiness on the ropes, they think that their lives are not respected, as well.

The sad part is that these frustrated people have been trained by agents of an entirely different system of government ... corporatism ... to believe that government is irresponsible and must curtailed, rather than reformed, in fact that it be reorganized if necessary by violence (including giving their own lives and yours) if necessary.

In point of fact, we are not fully ready for revolution in this country because there is no fundamental agreement on basic principles. This is what the far right corporatists have done. They have deliberately separated us from one another to make it impossible to agree on a new way forward. This was planned in advance by such groups as The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and News Corp. There scores of such organizations and people within them that long since decided that the United States as we thought we knew it is irrecoverably malfunctioning.

They have the resources of enormous funding from corporations. Corporations like America the way it is, although you hear them whining about the American People asking too much for their labor, an excuse they use to send jobs elsewhere for short term profit, forgetting that the internal market is the very reason for their existence. In science we call this cancer. In political philosophy we call it corporatism. In the 1930s and 1940s we called it Fascism.

Corporations have the imagination of the working man and woman, even though more jobs are created by small enterprises that use the name corporation but do not have the resources to buy and promote ideologies or to own a Congress and President. People think that corporations are the way human beings cooperate to pool resources, and surely they used to be that. But now, folks, corporations use the governments they buy to tax the ordinary citizens for their own profit, selling governments goods and services at outrageous prices, with outrageous defects, all for no particular benefit to the those taxed. No wonder corporations love this system!

To be continued

JB

10/13/10

There is going to be an explosion in America soon. I know this because one after another individual people are exploding with frustration like a long disjointed pack of lady-finger firecrackers. They hate the situation that Wall Street has gotten us in, that the corporations have contributed to, and that the government has not been able to get us out of. They have a say in government, of course, so they focus there, but if they had a say on Wall Street or down in Delaware (where a disproportionate number of corporations are home-ported because of the beneficial, more laissez faire rules governing corporations) angry people would be all over these financiers and moguls for sure.

Life is a struggle, they say. It truly is. We are born helpless and would not last a week were it not for our mothers, and mothers would not last if it were not for mates and families and communities that recognize need. Life is competitive, of course, we "struggle" for good grades in school, on the playground we tussle, behind the high school gym we fight, in the Army we kill, in business we compete as best we can for disposable income of the community and passers-by. But, as child rearing suggests, life is equally a matter of cooperation. Life is 50% competition and 50% cooperation. Never forget that.

But, people are angry at government not only for its failures, sometimes hugely expensive failures, sometimes dishonestly promoted and narrowly beneficial programs that fail most of us. People are angry at government because of the pervasive indifference to ethical codes (balances of competition and cooperation) the citizenry accepts and tries to live by. People are angry about politicians' arrogance and, yes, the gall they have to lie continuously about virtually everything we out here in the weeds hold dear. And, there is going to be a come-uppance based on this anger.

Anger is a freakish state of the emotions, a breakdown of the delicate balance we have within ourselves between our need to compete and our need for cooperation, and it is chemically induced, a relic or inheritance (take your pick) from days when we needed to shut down certain parts of our personality and moral codes and aesthetic senses to survive—just to survive the next minute! Anger does not employ higher cortical processes, although a slow burning anger, such as we experience with government (and parents when we are teenagers), seems to base itself on clear thinking. It doesn't. It feeds the fires of anger from a pipeline to the centers of fear, envy, and hubris. Fragments of thoughts are piped into these systems, basted, soaked, brined, and sent on down to the seat of anger where we just plain burn.

Still, anger has its uses, if we are able to harness our attavistic emotionality, to express ourselves rationally after a peak of loathing hatred and fear. Anger helps us associate with people who are, like us, angry and burning slowly. It helps us concentrate our inner forces, it teaches us that we are fundamentally not in control of the social environment or, even, our own bodies. Anger brought this country, the United States, into being and then sundered it ... and it is still repairing from that mighty blow it took in the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The anger we see today is the anger of wounded pride, lost illusions, a sense of terrible injustice, a feeling of betrayal, and of helplessness. We the People are sick and tired of being trampled down or ignored or used by people we elect to serve us. We know from 10th grade on that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Now we know that distant power believes itself to be socially distant and less responsible to the constituency. We know that money is the root of all evil, but we also know that huge amounts of money are involved in our political circuses. Do we wonder then that the evil money brings has infected and effectively destroyed the government we were taught we deserved?

You may have seen this circulating around the internet through emails and various websites.

Congressional Reform Act of 2010

1. Term Limits.

12 years only, one of the possible options below..

A. Two Six-year Senate terms

B. Six Two-year House terms

C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

2. No Tenure / No Pension.

A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.

4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

7. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

8. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.

Pretty good thinking, isn't it! I like it a lot and were I king or emperor here, I would implement these ideas tomorrow, October 14th! And, now that is the rub, isn't it. How do you get a corrupted government to reform itself? Does the system itself provide for this kind of massive reform based on decades, even centuries, of slow burn? Yes and no.

Yes, there is the amendment process, and huge gains have been made through this process. And, there is the lesser known part of the Constitution that provides, in Article V, for a convention ...

Article V

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

So, yes, we have a way, but Congress is still in the mix and, you know, this was deliberate. The Founding Fathers were not at all convinced that a democracy could actually function. The "rabble" in the streets was no more trusted then than now.

So, how do we reform Congress by imposing these changes on it. And, more importantly, do we need to reform the Judiciary and the Executive as well? I think that History (the narratives written, including the opinions of people like myself who are formally educated in history, but inevitably have points of view,) tells that there is a certain inertia in the organizations we build, including government, and that those on the inside will fight those of us on the outside because we are threatening their livelihoods ...if nothing else.

So the question soon becomes a question of who will light the match and how bloody will be this next revolution, if evolution is not the answer? The answer to that question lies in the temperament of the nation, and the certain knowledge that those who lead may not survive. It is often the case. Wars are fought primarily by the service and commitment of the "unclasses" of their nations, people who do not really fit in anywhere else, generally. Are we to put our faith in these people to press our cause, our need to clean up our government? Can you clean up your livingroom with the mop that cleans the garage or the rake for the garden? The plot thickens, doesn't it!

(to be continued)

JB

10/11/10

Paul Krugman is a columnist and economist I trust. So, perforce, you see me writing about his writing a lot. In the Monday New York Times Dr. Krugman addresses three aspects of the current political-economic situation in which were are wallowing: the disappointing response of the Obama Administration to the recent Crash, the persistent drum beat of lies from the Republicans about the response, and the more than disappointing lack of response from Obama and his friends.

This column by Krugman is too late to have much of an effect on voting in about 20 days ... and begun already where I live. Summers, Geithner, Obama, and Emanuel flubbed their opportunities to read the situation in late 2008 correctly ... not without plenty of advice, by the way. They listened to the politicians who did not want to be obliged to explain to their constituents the nature of sovereign responsibility for the economy and their participation in government programs. They chickened out.

The Republicans, girded to the hilt, found themselves with a "power point presentation" against the expected "socialization" of the economy, and when it did not materialize, the just presented their arguments anyway, making up the evidence and facts as they went along. It was and is the worst behavior of a political party since the days of Jim Crow.

Then, Obama did not want to sully his "above politics" mythology in a scrap with the Republicans so the drum beat of lies persists to this day and will throw the election of many a liberal. Obama is central to this failure of leadership ... and, frankly, he does not deserve another term. He, personally, has been found wanting and that's that.

JB

10/11/10

In today's Boston Globe James Carroll writes about the importance of Columbus Day, that day which Italians celebrate ... and curiously the Spanish, who thought at the time they were benefiting most, do not. Carroll explains that the historical consequences of Ferdinand and Isabella's decision to support Columbus went way beyond mere tragedy.

It is the way with history to play out everything that is going on. Sometimes the seething movements among the people are amplified, as by the opening of new continents and the rush of opportunists to take advantage, but sometimes by germs and ideas. Some ideas are defeated in the playing out over time just as some peoples are defeated, obliterated, and disappear from the history books. Sometimes the ideas find a hold in the imagination of an epoch and thrive. As Carroll points out the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from Spain in 1492 has had consequences to this very day.

The Italians can be rightfully proud of Cristoforo Columbo, for his imagination and enterprise was the necessary ingredient for the (re)discovery of the Americas. Personally, I think Amerigo Vespucci should be honored this day as well, for who among us have not at some time thought that the word "America" was endowed with magical, perhaps sacred meaning. Of course it isn't any more than the names Dodge, Ford, Olds, Porsche, endow their cars with special powers.

Still, let's celebrate the day. It is what happened. The natives of the new world were destroyed, the Moors were vilified, the Jews loathed, and everything we are and say is based on these facts. It gives you a little pause I hope. We are not trapped in these tragedies forever, unless we continue to refuse to acknowledge them.

JB

10/8/10

You probably did not know there IS an international currency crisis! Well, the U.S. lost 95,000 jobs in September and the official unemployment rate was stated at 9.6%. Of course this is a fabrication. The real unemployment rate is about 15%, counting those who have fallen off the far end of the treadmill and are no longer "looking for work." The importance of these statistics is that they reflect the sad state of U.S. industry, and that sad state is due in no small measure to trade imbalances, that is, fewer nations are buying U.S. goods than three years ago.

There are many other reasons why our economy is languishing in the weeds, but George Soros knows that a good part of it is caused ... deliberately ... by Chinese monetary policy. Below the "fold" (next page) is a copy of the emailed essay that Mr. Soros sends out to subscribers. I think you will find it illuminating ... and that you will reconsider your purchases from now on. Just sayin' ... Chinese goods are good for China and not for us.

China must fix the global currency crisis

George Soros

Financial Times October 8, 2010

I share the growing concern about the misalignment of currencies. Brazil 's finance minister speaks of a latent currency war, and he is not far off the mark. It is in the currency markets where different economic policies and different economic and political systems interact and clash.

The prevailing exchange rate system is lopsided. China has essentially pegged its currency to the dollar while most other currencies fluctuate more or less freely. China has a two-tier system in which the capital account is strictly controlled; most other currencies don't distinguish between current and capital accounts. This makes the Chinese currency chronically undervalued and assures China of a persistent large trade surplus.

Most importantly, this arrangement allows the Chinese government to skim off a significant slice from the value of Chinese exports without interfering with the incentives that make people work so hard and make their labor so productive. It has the same effect as taxation but it works much better.

This has been the secret of China 's success. It gives China the upper hand in its dealings with other countries because the government has discretion over the use of the surplus. And it protected China from the financial crisis, which shook the developed world to its core. For China the crisis was an extraneous event that was experienced mainly as a temporary decline in exports.

It is no exaggeration to say that since the financial crisis, China has been in the driver's seat. Its currency moves have had a decisive influence on exchange rates. Earlier this year when the euro got into trouble, China adopted a wait-and-see policy. Its absence as a buyer contributed to the euro's decline. When the euro hit 120 against the dollar China stepped in to preserve the euro as an international currency. Chinese buying reversed the euro's decline.

More recently, when Congressional legislation against Chinese currency manipulation emerged as a real threat, China allowed its currency to appreciate against the dollar by a couple of percentage points. Yet the rise in the euro, yen and other currencies compensated for the fall in the dollar, preserving China 's advantage.

China's dominant position is now endangered by both external and internal factors. The impending global slowdown has intensified protectionist pressures. Countries such as Japan , Korea and Brazil are intervening unilaterally in currency markets.

If they started imitating China by imposing restrictions on capital transfers, China would lose some of its current advantages. Moreover, global currency markets would be disrupted and the global economy would deteriorate.

Internally, consumption as a percentage of GDP has fallen from an already low 46 per cent in 2000 to 35.6 per cent in 2009, as China expert Michael Pettis has shown. Additional investments in capital goods offer very low returns. From now on, consumption must grow much faster than GDP.

Thus both internal and external considerations cry out for allowing the renminbi to appreciate. But currency adjustments must be part of an internationally coordinated plan to reduce global imbalances.

The imbalances in the US are the mirror image of China . China is threatened by inflation, the US by deflation. At nearly 70 per cent of GDP, consumption in the US is too high. The US needs fiscal stimulus enhancing competitiveness rather than quantitative easing that puts upward pressure on all currencies other than the renminbi.

The US also needs the renminbi to rise in order to reduce the trade deficit and alleviate the burden of accumulated debt. China , in turn, could accept a higher renminbi and a lower overall growth rate as long as the share of consumption is rising and the improvement in living standards continues.

The public in China would be satisfied, only exporters would suffer and the currency surplus accruing to the Chinese government would diminish. A large rise would be disastrous, as Premier Wen says, but 10 percent a year should be tolerable.

Since the Chinese government is the direct beneficiary of the currency surplus, it would need to have remarkable foresight to accept this diminution in its power and recognize the advantages of coordinating its economic policies with the rest of the world. It needs to recognize that China cannot continue rising without paying more attention to the interests of its trading partners.

Only China is in a position to initiate a process of international cooperation because it can offer the enticement of renminbi appreciation. China has already developed an elaborate mechanism for consensus building at home. Now it must go a step further and engage in consensus building internationally. This would be rewarded by the rest of the world accepting the rise of China .

Whether it realises it or not, China has emerged as a leader of the world. If it fails to live up to the responsibilities of leadership, the global currency system is liable to break down and take the global economy with it. Either way, the Chinese trade surplus is bound to shrink but it would be much better for China if that happened as a result of rising living standards rather than a global economic decline.

The chances of a positive outcome are not good, yet we must strive for it because in the absence of international cooperation the world is heading for a period of great turbulence and disruptions.

The writer is chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC

JB

10/7/10

I have not had a conversation (email) with Phil Rockstroh in many years. I like his mind, though, and his rhetorical style is lucid and colorful. He knows where we are in history, and I am afraid few really do. Common Dreams published an essay of Phil's that speaks for itself. Read it. There is a pretty darned good video interview with Phil at the end.

The only thing I want to say is this: notice in Phil's interview how often he uses the term "corporatism." If you thought I have been inappropriately ranting about this, maybe another voice will help you "get off your own couch."

JB

10/7/10

A couple weeks ago (9/25/10) I wrote a quick article about Paul Krugman's and Robin Wells Krugman's (his wife and amanuensis and [it is said] his "courage") first essay on getting out of the awful slump we are in (see the Economics tab). As promised the Krugmans have concluded their two-part series of book reviews in the New York Review of Books and, unhappily, they have not provided us with a cure-all. We should not have expected one.

Paul Krugman continues to argue strongly and clearly and logically that deficit spending by sovereign powers, including our own federal government, is the way out of the prolonged slump. We have considerable uncertainty abroad in the land caused by the inability of major players to see a safe passage anywhere on the horizon, so they are not spending ... or borrowing. The economy is "awash" in capital ready to build the next new world, but as capitalism is usually its own worst enemy ... a characteristic downplayed by entrepreneurs (even the ones on today's sidelines biding their time) and financiers (almost all of them unable to take a risk today that would have not registered in their adrenal glands in 2007), here we sit in a paralysis of risk aversion and literal hopelessness.

Krugman believes, as do I, that hope springs eternal in the breast of man, but that in the free market "visionaries" must be able to see, literally, the path forward. Today in the U.S. they do not see it for neither the federal adminstration nor its opposition have a clue what will work politically. We have the feeling that Obama and Summers and Geithner know what Krugman is saying is true, but they are afraid that the psychos on the other side will call them names ... communist, for one, which is utterly laughable ... and their paralyzing fear lamentable.

The basic truth is that relatively small amounts (compared to the size of the U.S. economy) are sufficient to carry off the stimulus function. They are huge numbers to civilians who make less than a half a million a year, but they are chicken feed. The chicken eats, the chicken lays beautiful taxable eggs and when everyone is happy with the result, the chicken is retired with the huge profits that the chickenfeed produced. It is elementary arithmetic, but the other side paralyzed as usual by political fears refuses to acknowledge it.

Yes, they can see it, but no, they do not believe it will work for them as designed. They fear that their efforts will not be rewarded sufficiently for the risk to be taken ... EVEN THOUGH a scant two-three years ago they would have taken the same risk. You have to look at this point because I have made it twice now. What is holding back the "titan" of industry is a combination of abject fear ... the consequence of their own over zealous risk taking and their fear-born need for soft landings until they can remount their steed and charge of into the future with some degree of optimism. If you have learned anything about human beings at this website is has to be that FEAR is the number one problem of mankind.

Krugman and Well leave us on a sour and despairing note. The politics is not right for the correct response to the massive and growing unemployment we have. Obama cannot transfer the blame to the Republicans even if, as well they might, take over Congress next January. Obama and his advisors have no more courage than the captains of industry have these days. They too are paralyzed by fear. It's a pretty pathetic situation when you consider that the solution is staring us in the face!

JB

10/6/10

There is no question that Barack Obama has played his intra-party cards very poorly. It is understandable that he very much did have a pile of shit on his plate when he took office, as Mr. Emanuel noted time and again. And, he had fifth columnists sprinkled (sometimes "packed") throughout his rambling Executive Branch agencies, and to add misery to that, hundreds of his appointments were held up in the Senate because Harry Reid could not find a handle on the Republicans who were deliberately sabotaging the Democratic Adminstration. Of course the Republicans were being "Obstructionist"; they had little other choice without a leader, with eight years of disaster to cover up, with no viable plan to bring the government back to an even keel ... except by way of removing the masts, keel, and engineroom.

But, Obama made decisions that sorely vexed the liberal and progressive wings of the party. Some commentators think that he truly believed that a new age of bi-partisanship had arrived and he was going to preside over that. Well, Obstructionism from the Republicans was evident enough early on that Barack should have ditched that bi-partisanship mythology quickly. He didn't. Emanuel had something to do with that.

In issue after issue, however, Obama took the line of least resistance. He could have closed Guantanamo political prison in a trice, moving the internees to mainland prisons. He could have done this early and the blame for holding these people would have still rested on the Cheneyites. But he did not.

And so it goes up and down the agenda, one miscue after another, and nothing by way of apologies or explanations from the guy who is now hiding behind that pile of shit on his plate. He now own the stuff and as this political note details he wants the liberals and progressives to have a bite. Sorry Charlie!

The liberals and progressive may stay home for this election. They can assure themselves that two things will happen if they do. First, a large number of long-term incumbent Democrats are going to flame out and crash into their native hills. Good riddance, is the sub-text of this election. Second, as a result of the Democrats coming in massively behind, one or both houses of Congress will revert to the Republicans, who will probably not have a 61 vote super-majority in the Senate, nor will they have a sufficiently strong position in the House to have their way with the Republic. And, (my point), Barack Obama's plate of shit will loom larger and larger as nothing substantive gets done in the next two years.

Well, something substantive will happen, but it will not be legislation. The world will do its best to recover from The Crash, but without U.S. leadership, de facto strength (pronounced "China") will begin to prevail. The U.S. economy will languish, because Republicans are wrong about temporary public stimuli, dead wrong.

So, Barack Obama will not have any believable momentum going into his re-election year and at the Democratic National Convention he can expect a serious challenge from the liberal and progressive wings, which will have momentum from the terrible two years the Republicans are about to give us.

Yes, these things are on our minds. Yes, this essay is the very sort of anti-Obama stuff that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and yes this breaks the sort of party discipline that I have been calling for for two years. Well, the point is that no one listened and party discipline never existed (as is the tradition in the Democratic Party) and the corporate press has intervened with the help of the more outraged and frankly tantrum-throwing liberals and progressives and we have a debacle roaring down on us.

The take-away is this: if you thing we are strong enough as a Party and a nation to handle two years of Republican posturing and trouble-making, then stay home in November. I have outlined the most probable outcome of that. If you think the country and the Party are too weak then, of course, you must vote for our Party and weed out only the most egregiously corrupt of our own.

JB

10/4/10

The question posed above has answers that depend on a variety of assumptions, but whatever you believe is happening right now and leading us as a nation and culture down a yellow-brick road or a primrose path, there are sign-posts along the way. "Emerald City 150 miles" is not among them, but the signs are unmistakable if you pay attention. From my point of view the signs are overwhelmingly not good.

The editors of the New York Times this fine Monday tell us that the Supreme Court will be hearing the plaints of corporations and, generally, will be disposed to help corporations along ... as the outrageous demolition of Oxley-Sarbanes Campaign Finance Law suggests.

In a similar vein Paul Krugman opens up on the issue of influence becoming corporate control of our political system.

The trouble began, as you probably know from reading these essays, back in the so-called Gilded Age during the latter stages of Reconstruction after the Civil War when a Supreme Court, completely bought and paid for by the titans of industry and finance decided a case by including the notion that corporations have civil rights equal to (perhaps superior to mere) citizens. There is no doubt that the activities of corporations contribute to the economy and thus to livelihood for the people. We set these organizations loose in the economy and environment and hope that the the real people inhabiting them will rise to the occasion and treat the rest of our civilization well. Often they don't. More often they do a slip-shod job, puttering along after a grand opening ... like General Motors ... building something, selling it in various conscionable and unconscionable ways, and leaving the natural environment to fend for itself against all manner of theretofore unexpected hazards. But, corporations are not citizens, and they should not be granted any civil rights. The notion is fundamentally wrongheaded and it is, in fact, the very basis for the constant threat of "classical corporatism" in this country. You will recall that Benito Mussolini described his brand of Fascism as "classical corporatism."

There is a line of thought current in this country that "the masses are, in fact, asses" and that governance should be accomplished not by reference to the wishes of people, but to the needs of corporations and other super-entity components of the contemporary economy. Republicans when pressed will tell you stories about the dangers of democracy ... government of, by, and for the People. They believe they "know" that a democratic electorate will eventually try to vote itself a free lunch and thereby bring down the system. They have built mythologies on welfare queens to support this line of reasoning, but at the heart of it is their fundamental distrust of the vox populi. They would rather put their trust in the (pardon the expression) "meritocracy" of corporate competition, believing that those who rise in the corporate world are better qualified to think about stem cells, sputniks, levees, highways, charity, air forces, navies, and armies than mere people with high school educations. That is really what is at stake in America today. The forces on the right care nothing for democracy and your civil rights. You are cannon fodder, a consumer, a laborer (white, tan, blue collar, it matters not). You are already a statistic in the corporate culture; you are there to be used. And, reading this morning's news, you certainly will be.

JB

10/3/10

A couple days ago a note was passed to me about yet another report of rampant, militant, Christian evangelical, fundamentalists in the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The problem at the Academy is not getting enough attention, especially in this bizarre election campaign season, but it needs to get full attention, now.

I have written here and elsewhere about the pernicious influence of far right wing Christian fundamentalists in the Armed Forces, particularly at the Air Force Academy, where the problem got so bad a while back that a national hew and cry went up and there was supposed to have been an investigation and clean up. Well, there wasn't and the situation is all the more dangerous because of that. It is like stopping a course of anti-biotics before you're cured. The germs remaining are the tough-to-kill germs and they are now forewarned about people who think they are bad news.

Well, I appreciate SueZ bringing this up, but there is more to be said about the situation. These are not, definitely NOT, benign people. They are a malignancy that threatens the safety of the entire planet. The reason is that Christian fundamentalists are not reasonable. They do not hold rational beliefs about the nation. They believe in an apocalypse that will come very soon. They are in the position in SAC B-52s and missile silos, and in Polaris submarines, to pull the trigger on the authority they recognize ... which is not the Commander-in-Chief, but their version of God.

Look, if they were doctrinal Christians, they wouldn't be in the armed forces at all. They would have subscribed to the pacifistic core of Christianity and not to the "Onward Christian Soldiers" malarky that we drag out for our wars to convince the reticent to enlist. They are quite the reverse. They are the instruments of God's will, and they get to choose what they think God's will is. And, people on the ground, pastors with no credentials in public affairs, international relations, or anything else (often including theology, amazingly) get to make decisions for those who are used to taking order without questioning them ... like Air Force cadets and Air Force colonels hoping for selection to flag rank ... and Navy officers with captive audiences on their ships.

No. This is has gone far enough. Colorado Springs is not the right place for the Air Force Academy and the reason is that it is by itself a hotbed of right wing Christian fundamentalism. Moving the Academy from this place would only partly solve the problem, and admittedly moving it is not going to happen soon ... but it should.

What must happen and must happen quickly and surely and forcefully, is a complete house cleaning of the Academy from the top down. Begin now and finish it in three years. Complete house cleaning ... and expulsion of any and all cadets implicated in the harassment of other cadets on religious grounds. Period. Can their asses! We don't want any of them anywhere near a nuclear warhead or launch code. They cannot be trusted.

JB

10/1/10

Just a note on Paul Krugman's column today in the NYT to help with perspective. China is the 2nd largest economy in the world. It will soon enough be the world's largest economy and it is a "command economy" organized and run by a group of people who are accountable only to themselves at the top of a pyramid of power. Anything and everything in China of any importance is owned and operated by the government, and everything you read about "privatization" of industries in China is either completely false (because there is not a shred of truth to it) or it is misleading because CEOs of Chinese enterprises are outranked and secondary to Party officials, who are ubiquitous. You probably missed this little article in the New York Review of Books, wherein the author debunks one after another of the modern press-generated and market-hopeful voices that have declared China to be emerging as a capitalist society.

Folks, it just is not, and the Chinese Communist Party is not about to commit suicide. They are playing the West for all they are worth until that point when they do have the largest economy, playing by rules that maximize this window on modernization, including the monetary policies that are fleecing Western capital and building a very dangerous commercial empire that will begin to take on political agendas ... ask Japan!

Krugman is right. We need to dispel the mythology of Chinese "coming around" to capitalism and understand that politically they are doing no such thing. State and command capitalism are not free- (or even well-regulated-) Western-style capitalism. Not even close. Congress, especially needs to get a grip and understand that the likes of Walmart are going to be plumping for caution when in fact caution plays right into the hands of people who are going to dominate the 21st century.

If you need a reason to slow down your purchase of things you don't absolutely need that are made in China—clothing, home furnishings, electronics—this is your best reason to do so. Some one has to put on the brakes, and Congress will understand that only when it is too late.

JB

10/1/10

Yes, I am elated. Rahm Emanuel is O U T and the new guy is a "fixer." Believe me he has a lot to fix.

The most striking comment in the Washington Post article this morning is "...reducing staff members to tears..." said of Emanuel the profane, the bully, the complete jackass. As noted, I have been against Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff since, say, week three of this administration. I knew of the troubles caused directly and avoidably by Rahm Emanuel early on and I am more than regretful that Barack Obama did not have the moral courage to stand up to Emanuel's crassness and blunt boorishness.

The New York Times still dodges the truth of the era of Emanuel, and I wonder why (or if) they think that Emanuel is a facet of Barack Obama's personality and management style. I think nothing could be further from the truth. I believe Obama hid behind the gruff and gnarly Emanuel on purpose, precisely because he does not possess that rangy, puerile, sense of bullyhood, yet felt it necessary to "protect" himself from the jackals that inhabit the capital city. In that single sense Barack Obama is an abject failure as a president, because he just did not have the moxey to deal with jerks like Mitch and suntan-Boehner and Cantor on his own. Emanuel set the tone of the White House and the press knuckled to it, "growing a pair" if necessary, but accepting the vulgar as currency they could exchange for value elsewhere. So, the press has been utterly complicit in this terrible two years.

I wish Mr. Rouse all the luck and hope for success in the world. His president needs a do-over, and I hope with Axelrod skinnying out of town (with his tail between his legs, some pundits say) and Larry Summers, the other jackass at the economy end of the table also winding down, that Barack Obama himself can rise above the daily pelting of national security threats that seem to have him walking on egg shells and to be that man we saw in the long primary, eloquent, thoughtful, grounded in the real emotion of the people.

JB

9/28/10

We are all about war. It seems sort of hard to believe most of the day, but nearly 60% of our federal budget goes to the Department of Defense and other external focuses of departments like Homeland Security and State. Still, DoD is the grand-daddy of budget consumption, and we are, whether you want to admit it or not, very much a military-industrial complex. And, if you stop to think about that fact for a moment you will realize that things military in the mid- and long-term require war. So that's what we have: a decade of war in Afghanistan, which we are losing, an occupation force (called a security and training force) in Iraq after six plus years of fighting, a war building in Yemen, where Islamist militants are alternately harbored or pursued, a seething problem with North Korea that diverts the attention of the the Seventh Fleet, the Marines, the Army and Air Force in their occupation (called Support Forces) in both South Korea and Japan's Okinawa and Yokosuka. I have left out Israel, the recipient of the greatest chunk of foreign aid from the U.S. with which they constantly find themselves military purposes and short-lived excitement that feeds their righteous paranoia and much else.

We are a military-industrial complex despite Ike Eisenhower's warning. The meaning of this term is obscured by the tradition of leaving off the name of Congress from the label. But, this all happens because of the pork value of military installations, bases, camps, forts, ports, and hospitals. The pork absolutely sustains some economies—mine for instance. We have a huge Air Force Base in our region and just to the south an eerie educational center and training camp for those who will go out and track Taliban and drug lords and shieks' sons and the special forces of other nations and non-sovereign groups, like al Qaeda.

But Congress is not entirely to blame. The Executive is very much in play here, the White House with its policy concerns making real life choices for the country based on academics' opinions (Kissinger) and military advisors' reflexive readiness to fight. Then there is DoD itself and all its manifestations, some of which we hear about now from Mr. Bernstein's new book.

The military is huge and in Washington it is more huge. The entire culture of Washington, northern Virginia (where I grew up), and suburban Maryland is dominated by military agencies and their physical structures, rentals, camps, halls, and forts. We see from Bernstein's book that they are over whelming and that our president is very much a captive of the military mind and the public mind that reveres the military and the echo-chamber of pundits who cannot imagine an America that does not use its might to fix the world.

I got this link to a set of photographs of the Vietnam era today in my email. I was reluctant to open the link, not because I was already late for breakfast, but because—being a Vietnam combat vet myself—I have not quite yet resolved my conscience on that distasterous war. So, friend, give them a try. Thumb through these fragments of our history and our commitment to the insanity of war. I think you will read the next link with more meaning than otherwise.

The next link also appeared this morning and although it has none of the historical vividness that the photographs have, it has poignant meaning, and I present it to you as much as reassurance as outright information. There is a way out of hell, Gandi is supposed to have said. There is a way out of being a military-industrial complex, too. Michael Nagler writes one opinion about how to do it for CommonDreams Website in his "Replace the War System" essay. You do have to understand that it will not fall all by itself. the MIComplex needs our concerted and continuous attention and our understanding of the awful trade-offs for our civic life and opportunities that the MIComplex swallows whole ... like Goya's depiction of "Saturn Eating His Son."

We have better things to do with our public resources than to be the arms dealer and user to the world. We are the nation that went to the moon, and now we are the nation that does not even have the initiative or resolve or funds remaining to build modern railroads or solutions to the energy budget or effective educational systems or viable corrections for those who break the law. We have an agenda longer than DoD's, yet they have the dollars, the story and mythology, the venue, the men and women on the ground committed to the preservation of millions of MIComplex jobs. When you are voting in just about a month, think about what the vote means in terms of the MIComplex. Think about taking strong and resolute action to begin the climb down from our catbird seat on the engine of planetary destruction.

JB

9/27/10

Today, Monday, in the Boston Globe our old mentor James Carroll shifts gears and gets into the grist of this mill. His essay is worth your time, especially in these last weeks before the election. I think you will find The Time Required for Change to have hit the nail squarely on the head.

The biggest question these days is whether the voting public will come to its senses in time to register a responsible vote or, as the media are suggesting, teasing, promoting, will they follow through with their little temper tantrums, their little revenge for little injustices. Will they be able to see the thieves in the forest, or will they concentrate on the big tree and fell it and all around it out of pique and distress.

The question actually resolves down to a question of whether Americans can stand on their own two feet anymore. Are they so spoiled by a half century of economic expansion that broadened the middle income strata out to include a rainbow of collar colors that they will just stammer out their puerile rage against the universe that no longer tucks them in and kisses them good night.

Yesterday I had a wonderful conversation with a prostitute. You might think that a poor employment of my valuable time, but in fact I am also a prostitute, concocting an exchange of something I want for something I want you to want. I think she was dead on right in the convolutions of our cryptic verbal intercourse. We all have raging desires and most of us have the means to attempt getting our way. There is no guarantee that anyone will get satisfaction, but at least there is the road to satisfaction as Michael Douglas's new "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" deftly demonstrates. The movie slowly and inexorably pulls away the curtains of techno-babble within which the finance sector has shrouded itself. We are left finally with a vivid picture of how distorted are many of the personalities that run our world.

In the movie it comes down not to money or credit default swaps or any other unconscionable means of profiting without working, but to animal aggression and murderous competition laid bare as the engine of life on this planet. Finally, the financiers adopt Darwin, but only half. In all of life there are two modes and forces, and yes, one of them is competition, ubiquitous and unrelenting. But, in parallel, just as all- pervasive and just as inevitable is cooperation. Oh yes, cooperation! I remember! Isn't that the basis of communism the right wing screams from its vulgar perch on the obstructionist side of competition?!

The key word of this essay is "glib," not because glib is unprepared communication, but because glib is slick. Yes SLICK. It is the carrier of unannounced infections and illogical conclusions. It is the Trojan horse of rhetoric, the fast sales talk, the appeal to our infantile need for simplicity. It is the life blood of Fox and many others all over the political spectrum. We imbibe at the peril of our republic.

JB

9/25/10

There is rarely any one reason for a disaster. Sometimes there is, but usually there are several reasons with one or two being proximate causes, the fuse to the bomb, so to speak. Because there are usually several reasons the history of disasters and the politics of them becomes complex, too complex for most, so people tend to rely on programmed thinking, systems, and (as I mentioned in the last essay) their minds become "captive" of those ideas, which may be right in some small measure, but miss the point that things are complex.

About the most complex thing going these days is the American economy, which is more or less STUCK in the doldrums. The doldrums are areas where the wind does not blow, suggesting that we are in a period when capital does not flow. There are many reasons for that, but Paul Krugman and Robin Wells think it is a massive loss of nerve among the finance capitalists, a pendulum swing back from those "heady" days when they were the lords of creation and any bet was worth billions of dollars.

You should take some time out of your weekend to read their account of the past decade and the past two years particularly. Go to "The Way Out of the Slump" and compare it to the daily news. Journalists are not historians. Notice also how the authors treat their intellectual adversaries with more than the usual amount of respect you hear in the mass media, almost all of which has adopted "the frenzy" as a way of life. In other words, this article should recalibrate your bullcrap meter for the 38 days that remain before the election.

JB

9/23/10

I was reading in the New York Review of Books a posthumous article by Tony Judt in which he argues that among the "literati" of our world there has been a problem of selling one's mind over to a system of thought, perhaps an ideology or an economic theory. The piece is called "Captive Minds", and it struck me as instructive and probably wrong in some sense. You have to read it for yourself to get your own drift of it.

A captive mind is one, Judt says (along with an impressive bunch of European public intellectuals who, btw, have much to answer for), that gives over its discriminating and critical faculties to the cause represented. Judt notes that for these men and women one part of the cause seems to cloud out the inevitable onerous bits, as with the intellectuals from all over the world who bought Leninism and Stalinism, especially Stalinism, hook line and sinker. It seemed in public that they fully supported the Party line and all that entailed.

This raised the question of whether there is such a thing as a non-public intellectual, since we gauge one another publicly in periodicals like the NYRB and others. It is mentioned that the sorts of bright and lucid men and women who gave themselves over to Stalinism were thought to harbor private reservations, for example. But, what the hell is a "private reservation," anyway? If we know about it, it is public. If, on the other hand, it remain invisibly or inaudibly private, then is it actually a reservation? I think not. But the point is also made that these people accepted the full doctrine and faith out of some kind of mental laziness, which strikes me as both too true and yet hard to pin down.

And now, of course, there is the problem of what party politics really means. Does belonging to a political party mean that you believe in and support everything that goes on among party members or every word of party manifestos, platforms, planks, and so forth? Of course not. So what is the difference we Americans make of subscribing to Stalinism versus being a Yellow Dog Democrat who would vote for a yellow dog if it were nominated? See, the problem seems to lie somewhere in the moral texture of affiliation to organizations. Democrats are not malevolent characters and their party platforms, at least, are rarely (any longer) prescriptions for legal or social injustices or for deliberately bilking the public treasury.

Stalinism, I can say from years of study, was known internally differently than externally to the Soviet Union. Many Soviet citizens had no clue that Stalin was responsible directly for the enslavement and murder of literally (not figuratively!) millions of hapless and innocent dissidents. Then, again, there were many who actually did know about the horrors, thanked their lucky stars that they had not (yet) been ratted out, and saw some sort of physical "progress" being made in the relic regime that Lenin and Stalin "inherited."

The key to living with Stalinism was to be vocal as an advocate and absolutely quiet about dissent. The key to being a Democrat ... as opposed to being a Republican ... is that you can be vocal about your dissent, but in a democracy you count in the polls as a Republican when you do. So, the question is: what constitutes being a Democrat, if Republicans act with more party discipline?

Well, the ending of the Tony Judt piece is that there are "ideologies" like Libertarian "Market Fundamentalism" that appeal to intellectuals, capture their minds, and lead them off cliffs, just as Stalinism led intellectuals to their deaths and modern Republicanism is leading non-intellectuals into the clever trap of an (Orwellean) ideology of rugged individualism that does not exist in fact or reality.

The point is that there must be a place lying between faithful slavery and captivity to an ideology (Stalinism, Market Fundamentalism, Christian Fundamentalism, Yellow Dog-ism, and Corporate-sponsored American Individual-ism on the one hand, and "mere anarchy" on the other.

Bob Kall polled his readers to see if (my criticism) OpEdNews is too critical of the Obama Administration and, lo!, the poll revealed that OpEdnews is not. What a surprise! He did not offer to have ME write the polling questions, and he has no credentials for writing them himself, so I am going to let the poll rest in its own lack of authenticity and veracity.

But, this is treacherous ground, folks. Republicans get themselves into lots of trouble and into relationships with mad-hatters like Dick Cheney for the lack of spontaneity among the faithful. Republicans have the tradition to refuse to speak ill of a fellow Republican despite the fact that it is obvious that he might, like Cheney, be less a Republican than a Fascist ... a believer in corporate will over the government in a mutual symbiosis of money and power.

Journalist Bernstein's new book, about which I have read (only), suggests that the issues within the White House, (as I have speculated for two years now,) have been divisive and have put the Obama Administration into the public view in a very strange and uncomfortable light, namely, that perhaps Obama and his advisors were bought out by the ailing financial sector. Occam's Razor argues against that, and most thoughtful analysts know it, but it is popular conspiracy-minded (pseudo)-journalism and earns practitioners a living.

Bernstein also makes public the idea ... which should be obvious to everyone ... that there are many more things on the president's plate than are ever reported publicly, especially national security issues, including a torrent and deluge of threats against the president and his family and relatives. Why any analyst or pundit believes they can know the mind of government when they discount the weight of all this, is beyond me, except that such pundits are captive of their own livingroom couch imaginations. No less so than the intellectuals who got themselves sucked into Stalinism or Market Fundamentalism.

There is a way to approach a sitting president with criticism that does not go for knee-caps and next of kin. You read Frank Rich and you see it. You can even read Brooks and see its effect. Many writers, honed in the Bush era where hyperbole lost all meaning missed those opportunities for responsible criticism relentlessly. But, the final point must be made that their lack of party discipline will have consequences, a point that was crucially obvious all along.

Finally, I must answer whether my own mind is captive of Democratic Party ideas. No, it is not. It entertains each platform of ideas and chronicle of events, statements, and rulings on a daily and weekly basis, subjecting every last idea to the method of multiple working hypotheses. This is, as we noted a few weeks ago, the very meaning of liberal, in the expression "liberal democracy" bequeathed to us by the men of the Enlightenment. It is the scientific method applied to politics. And, it is a burdensome chore, believe me, but it is the only way to land somewhere sanely between having a captive mind and the irresponsible, undisciplined anarchy of the ego-centric existence.

JB

9/21/10

James Carroll, in Monday's Boston Globe wrote a column that is very worthy of your time. "Teetering on the Apocalypse" makes a point lightly that should be hammered until everyone knows that the implication is the danger of planetary annihilation, and worse, it is purposeful annihilation. You don't have to go back to Jonestown to understand how utterly brainwashed people react to "orders" from on high. The idea that a prophecy of apocalypse is a) real, and b) about to happen, is the most dangerous idea a species could have. But, yet, here it is, throbbing in the hind-brains of literally millions of mindless people, caught up with their childish egos still central to the universe and cock sure they (but not you) will be "saved."

The point the Carroll makes about those people who believe this "revelation" is that they vote. They vote in America, in American elections, and they vote for people just as misguided and mentally unstable as themselves. With TeaParty candidates dotting the landscape, more crazy apocalpse-seeking candidates will win. The law of averages says they will. Each such win is a nail in our planetary coffin. Yes, there are ideas so dangerous that they must be fought at every turn. Apocalypse-ism is the very worst of these.

JB

9/18/10

Recently, (about a month ago), I challenged Rob Kall the owner and operator of OpEdNews, a political website where I have posted over 200 essays. With a sharp tongue in cheek I accused him of prescience he clearly does not possess, and told his audience that drubbing the Democrats from Democratic pulpits was at the very best counter-productive, probably suicidal. Rob called me delusional in return, as if my allegiance to the Democratic Party and to Liberal ideals were some sort of particularly perverse naiveté.

I have stopped writing for OpEdNews largely because of this incident and despite the fact that just weeks earlier Mr. Kall offered me an editor job at OEN ... without pay, of course. The other part of my reasons for dropping OEN off my list is the surly behavior of the audience, many of whom are clearly poorly educated and whose critical thinking skills are virtually non-existent. In other words, I got sort of tired of responding to folks' concerns that my doctoral degree in Russian History might be fake (U.C.L.A., 1975) or that despite my intention to come off as a Progressive Liberal I am really a professional elitist. Enough was enough.

In Saturday's edition of the New York Times Charles M. Blow writes about the calumny being heaped on the Democrats, some by Democrats and some like Rob Kall and his regulars, and the inverse relationship of those digs and puerile disappointments to the facts. Blow does mention the tradition within the Democratic Party for dissention and outright rebellion. We know about that, all of us, but it always has seemed reasonable to me that if you are going to call your movement a political party, you should have some discipline, not Leninist or Trotskyist "democratic centralism" where dissent is actually not tolerated, but something like what the Republicans have ... namely, to be circumspect about commenting on other Republicans, particularly those who have serious jobs and may have some information that is not widely available to street-side pundits and commentators.

Well, if you read Charles Blow's graphic you will see that the Democrats are in far or at least somewhat better shape than the Republicans as told by a NYT/CBS poll conducted recently. The Democrats are likely to lose some seats in the House and maybe a couple in the Senate. This is the tradition in our country. Every party at every juncture feels pressure at the first mid-term election. The reason should be obvious.

Two years is not enough time to plant new programs and harvest a new crop of benefits. It is particularly difficult when the opposition continuously says you have planted the wrong crop and has no compunction whatsoever about lying about your efforts. Moreover, usually the fields are pretty badly abused by the opposition that has just been recently defeated, so their objective is to cover up their maladministration with ever more lies and mispresentations.

But, two years is all you get. You, as a Progressive and Liberal Democrat have to understand that people like Rob Kall ... ostensibly on our side ... are trying to make a living dealing in opinion. Controversy attracts more attention (along with scandal) and so they do what they can to keep an audience coming back, and that often turns to unwarranted criticism for its own sake and gossip mongering. Kall is actually the least of the practitioners of this sort of journalism. Kall knows full well that the President's plate was heaped with manure on Day One and that Republican obstructionism has hurt Obama's legislative plans and administration staffing. But, Democrats choose to have short attention spans and high ideals, to ignore salient facts and demand actions that are clearly impossible once you know the facts. Frankly, it is time that Democrats grow up and fact the real truth that their petty activities do add up to trouble and that endless repetition of falsehoods gives them credence in the mind of the untutored public.

JB

9/17/10

SueZ at The American Liberalism Project and I have a last common ancestor who died suddenly in 1760 or so, leaving his bride with three young sons to raise. That man's ancestors trail on back to the time of John and Priscilla Alden, Captain Miles Standish, et al, among whom this "colonial ancestor" of ours, a bare twenty, but educated in maths, literature, and the sciences of the day, performed much of the surveying of lands purchased from the Wampanoag tribe who had nearly two decades earlier been at that now famous autumn harvest meal we call Thanksgiving.

Our William came across the Pond nearly a generation after the group who sailed on the Mayflower, arriving in 1639 in Duxbury. The reason he ventured out of Sussex or Kent (or both) was that the King of England at the time, Charles I, was deeply mistrusted (ultimately executed, beginning the Commonwealth Period of English history) for his leanings toward the Roman Catholic Church (and taking a Roman Catholic for his wife). Charles was not the brightest candle in the chandelier of the English monarchy, and his emulation of the new breed of autocratic monarchs served neither himself or the nation. Rather he cemented a distaste for Rome that might have otherwise eroded over time.

All of these thoughts flashed through my head this morning as I read Roger Cohen's column in the New York Times on the arrival of the first pope to visit England in over 400 years. Benedict XVI could not have been a more poorly chosen emissary to that sceptered isle, as Cohen clearly points out.

The interesting thing about the visit is the tone-deafness that pervades the entourage of the Pope, the almost studied indifference to the the real world havoc created by thousands of child rapes at the hands of Roman Catholic priests and under the averted eyes of the Roman Catholic nomenclatura including Benedict himself, once specifically detailed as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to "take care of" this affront to civilization, but which he steadfastly attempted to sweep under the rug. It is interesting that the people of England and of Europe, generally, are disgusted with Rome and her emissaries, with her medievalism and recalcitrance in the face of modernity.

As last week's issue of New Yorker magazine concentrated on the C St. fundamentalists of recent notoriety and the quiet evangelism of the power elite that is their mission, secular England has to put up with the likes of Benedict, and they are not the least bit happy about it (either). Fortunately, the press is not cowed by strong secular talk anymore, and although the "rampant new atheism" of Europe is scorned by the power elites of the corporate press and pulpit in America, the time is nearly here when a young person can opt out of the conspiracy of social control that religion has become. The elites tremble in their palaces, the clergy wring their fat fingers, wondering what is to become of them.

The answer is, of course, that state and church must separate finally, and the means to that end is for thoughtful people to leave their ancestral churches in the lurch, that uncomfortable assertion of freewill that denies the popes and prelates, bishops and pastors their centuries of free lunch.

JB

9/15/10

In Delaware yesterday, as predicted over the weekend when I was enjoying myself in Los Angeles, a "TeaParty" candidate on the Republican primary list beat out a nine term, until then, very popular centrist candidate. This is happening here and there across the nation, not so often that you could call it viral, but clearly there is "movement" in the winds. Sarah Palin and Karl Rove ... as unhealthy and swinish pair as I could imagine while cold sober ... are very much a part of this movement and so is News Corp the parent of Fox and its "fair and balanced" approach to presenting GOP and Libertarian propaganda as news.

Well, I don't write about this stuff much because it is mostly a figment of the imaginations of a few wild-eyed ultra-conservative Emersonian-individualist klepto-anarchists, who believe that the national economy is a dog fight into the midst of which innocent and unwary civilians are thrust to see how they fare. Dog eat dog is the pseudo-Darwinian con they have perpetrated on the public, red and grizzly, but masquerading under the garb of biological science fitted to their brand of deliberate deceit to achieve riches beyond the imagination of or the need of anyone.

But, I have to write. It is a "movement" and it has consequences for the election in November, widely trumpeted to be a potential disaster for the Democrats who have been unable without the help of the GOP to manage our way clear of the Great Recession. Columnists like Brooks in the NYT recently declared the Democrats to be on a spending spree the likes of which no one has ever imagined or dreamed. The "bail out" was signed into law by Geo. W. Bush, remember. The bailout was too small to accomplish what it needed and the small part came from the GOP and conservatively trained Democrats.

Well, Christine O'Donnel in Delaware is on the November ballot because she has ranted sufficiently to convince middle-class and working class (often the same people) that they are being screwed by corrupt politicians who look out for themselves first. This message is true! American politics is decidedly ugly and disingenuous. The problem is that O'Donnell and Palin and all the rest of the "TeaParty" folk have their examples of corruption mostly wrong. The take-away from them and the Fox folk, however, is that you cannot trust government and those in it. That's what people are voting ... distrust ... fear!

The biggest question is whether this will split the unthinking Republicans in the electorate from those who see through this fog occasionally. A few pundits think this will happen and that the GOP will continue to destroy itself on the racist and anarchist axes that it has embraced on the far right. I tend to agree, but I am worried that Democrats will become complaisant and not get out the vote.

You see, the furor over on the GOP side is more than slightly disorienting to Democrats, who like most voters understand that politicians are likely to be disappointing in the short-, mid-, and long-term. Politicians are people who must compromise their agendas and schedules, so they always disappoint someone. They also tend to become fatheaded about themselves and protective of those things that make their ugly job bearable ... the trappings of power and the elite.

So, the O'Donnell victory is a mixed bag. It does spell trouble inside the GOP which is good, but it does also spell a more generalized distrust of politics in general and that usually means that Democrats quietly do not vote. That is bad!

JB

9/15/10

Every once in a while someone, often Mark Morford strings together a bunch of words that makes some kind of primal sense. In this case Morford understands and recites back to us the primal need for bogeymen that inhabits the social consciousness of our experimental ... and by no means mature ... society.

Taken as a group ... admittedly a very large 303 million men, women, and children group ... we are amazingly stupid and prone to fears more appropriate in our origin-source African habitat where real panthers and lions and hyenas preyed on the hapless amongst us. Anthropologists will tell us that either the primitive wiring of our brains does not actually interfere with our ability to procreate or that the "fear of things that go bump in the night" sense we have is actually productive and gets us to and through those procreative years.

I am not convinced.

I think that we carry around a lot of genetic and cultural baggage that could and should be examined for efficacy at the level of, say, taxes, so that we have some idea of cause and effect. M. Night Shyamalan might end up banned, and what is the point in wallowing in fear anyway?

Muslims will not be the last group scourged by fear and hatred in the U.S., but you should understand that the strain in our collective subconscious that "permits" this kind of behavior was brought to these shores fully developed and ready for the galvanizing experience with the Native Americans. We are, apparently, people used to small tribal communities and innately wary of strangers, particularly strangers who have within their small tribal groups folks with hypertrophy of their wariness software.

Think about our history and our radical demonization of one group after another. It should give you pause.

JB

9/8/10

It is September 8th, 2010. Hamas has claimed direct and jubilant responsibility for last week's murders of four Israeli civilians, the outrage designed specifically to interrupt or close the peace talks now a week old and so far unscuttled.

It is two plus days until Saturday, September 11th, where in Gainsville, FL, a fundamentalist Christian pastor has convinced his flock of fifty equally moronic sheep to burn some Korans to let the Infidel know that "we still outraged Christians" are gonna settle accounts with y'all A-rabs one way orn tuther.

But Bibi Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas are still talking, the stakes never being higher than they are right now. To give you some perspective on the situation Thomas Friedman, columnist in the New York Times, suggests that the King of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, offer his plan to Netanyahu as a power-broking gesture. You have to read this column, because if you had any illusions about Israel being able to walk out of these talks with peace, security, and territory acquired since 1948, you had better consider the situation anew.

Let's take as a premise that Netanyahu, being the arch conservative that he is, the pacifier-in-chief of the war party in Israel, the last, best hope for only a minor civil war inside Israel as a result of these talks, ... let us suppose he understands that Abdullah's answer comes with security from all Arabs, if not the Persians in Iran, and that it is a last, best, and final offer, will Netanyahu take the bait and see if he can forge a real and lasting peace from it. (Long sentence, I know, but the situation requires holding several thoughts in mind simultaneously.) The next two thoughts are: 1) will Netanyahu be impeached, overthrown, assassinated by the war party inside Israel, and 2) will Hamas and Hezbollah, both funded by Iran, thumb their noses at Abdullah and commit more atrocities, just to make the point (in Tehran and elsewhere) that Israel cannot be recognized or tolerated by the dispossessed Palestinians themselves and all other Muslims who "feel their pain."

The answer, I think, to #1 question is that, owing to his solid credentials in Israel that Netanyahu could survive, but might choose to forge the agreement and then opt out of the way shortly after, that is, he would take his personal licks, but get the statecraft accomplished. In this respect, it is Netanyahu who holds the key and must have the personal courage to act.

The answer, I think, to #2 questions is that, as Friedman suggests, there will be "civil war" in Palestine, Gaza particularly, but that the stature of Abdullah (and I am sure Abdullah understands the jeopardy this puts his "standing") will calm the situation sufficiently that Netanyahu could "try out the security arrangement" with some sense of optimism.

After all, the expected "civil wars" inside each opposing force will take time (weeks and perhaps months), will involve some serious activity most of the internal of which can be swept under the carpet, but can be "managed" by nearby cajolery and appropriate activities and support from abroad. Having written that, I do not think that Hamas can be kept from violence, so Hamas will have to be reorganized under Addullah instead of under Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs of Iran.

The more I write the more fantastic this begins to sound. Going back to the pre-Six Day War boundaries seems to me to be too much to ask Netanyahu to take back to the Knesset. But, with Abdullah acting as Arab guarantor and with nuclear warfare just a year off, something along these lines might be possible. And, you have to ask, what are the alternatives?

You also have to ask whether Abdullah is really that important, given that Wahabbist Islam is probably the most conservative and least tolerant form of Islam, suggesting that Israel gives the opposition too much in any bargain with Abdullah? But, is there an intermediate position that Abdullah can take that lessens the security guarantee, but provides room for the parties to negotiate relatively long term incremental steps toward fulfillment of the Abdullah plan?

Is it cynical to think that the Palestinians and Israelis can buy some peace with half-hearted acceptance of provisional steps, knowing they can walk away from the "settlement" at a moment's notice? In fact, what is it that will bind the parties to a settlement? Does Abdullah have that kind of standing? Does the United States? What keeps Texas in the Union, you might ask. Answer: Sober reflection about where their bread is buttered. Now you have a whole set of new questions! Where is Israel's bread buttered, if not by American Jewry?

Finally, what keeps Iran from committing the unpardonable, but nevertheless hard-to-prove act of sabotage? It seems to me that you have to get Russia and China into the final security guarantee, because I doubt Abdullah has any real power over the Shiites in Iran.

These essays will resume in one week, assuming that Virginia, traveling to a first time game in Los Angeles, beats the University of Southern California ranked 14th in the nation, but if not, probably not sooner. LOL

JB

9/6/10

Today is Labor Day. It is a marker on the calendar that nearly everyone recognizes as "the end of summer" or the "return to school" or EVEN "the recognition of the dignity and essential, fundamental, and socially worthy toil of men and women who work on the land, in factories and offices, in the armed forces." Labor Day is fun and slightly sad. It is a day of recuperation from labor and it is a time for reflecting on what progress has been made in personal and family goals.

James Carroll, columnist in the Boston Globe usually writes on Mondays, but the subject he chose to write on today is not a Labor Day theme. It is something both less universal, yet clearly more pressing and important to the welfare of our planet. Today he tackled the festering wounds at the heart of the Israel-Palestine confrontation. He takes a moment of your repose on Labor Day to emphasize that the labor of making peace is the more strenuous and disconcerting task we have. It is, in fact, the crucial event of this year, for the status quo in Israel is actually festering, and that means that it is changing for the worse. Within the manifold of this status quo is the distinct possibility that Israel (and her allies) will soon be confronted by hostile nuclear weapons. In other words, the status quo is not static ... and it is not stable.

Israel exists because there was a Holocaust—the Shoah. Were it not for Hitler's and the Nazi's crime of genocide against European Jews, modern day Israel would not exist. And, one has to add quickly, there would be very little trouble in the middle east ... just the normal dislocations and growing pains of Arab societies moving all to slowly into the modern epoch.

I think that Carroll's essay today is especially enlightening because it clearly shows the historical basis of the present day attitudes in the streets of Palestine and Israel ... and arrayed around the table in Washington. There is no party in this situation without fault, without cause, without moral certitude. It is a thicket into which Brer Rabbit would not want to be pitched. It is for most who try to wrap their minds around it the paradigmatic "intractable situation," one without hand holds or foreseeable solutions.

Yet, the truth is that we have no choice. We must do the work ... including the hard labor of the conscience and hard labor of the soul ... to avoid what clearly is the inevitable nuclear exchange that will bring world civilization to the brink and maybe beyond.

JB

9/5/10