Hellspawn

Tom Tancredo has crawled back into his nativist hole. To think, with that last name, he should end up saying the same thing people said about his ancestors when they were fresh off the boat. What an abject shit.

Speaking of Republicans, Rudy’s disgusting profiteering is coming to light, although nothing seems to stick to this creep among his worshippers. (Breslin had it best, describing Rudy as a little man in search of a balcony.) He’s insinuated himself into the same crony capitalist thugs that make up the oil/big pharma/robber barons Bush calls “his base” (in Arabic, the base is “al queda”). And he whores out his name to two-bit penny stock grifters. What a complete slut. America's Rent-A-Mayor.

Meanwhile, Mit “Schlag” Romney sees dead people. Marching with dead people. Smit’s dad George had a good record on civil rights, which is why he didn’t go any further in the GOP, but Witless claims he saw dad marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. and that turns out to have never happened. And that chestnut about Snit’s pulling over the car to cry in joy when the Mormon Church finally recognized that black people were human beings in 1979 (not a typo)? Yeah, I believe that.

Sub prime loansharking

The “sub-prime mess” continues… is it cascading towards an election year recession? The moralists and apologists blame the victims, of course, since that’s how our neo-social Darwinism works. They conveniently ignore the wide-spread corruption pervading the mortgage industry: the loan sharks were riding high, the grifters-in-suits were out in force, the cons were juiced, baby! Their masters, meanwhile, were fattening on the rot: Goldman Sachs is claiming to smell like a rose, touting that they have no write-offs; but that’s because they knowingly sold shit while they bet that it would end up stinking like what it is. Win-win for the Bonus Army, there. The game’s rigged. The national casino is mob-run, only the mob in this case is made up of MBAs from our finest business school, the usual shark-attack of lawyers, and all the politicians in their pocket, who make the thievery legitimate.
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62 filibusters from the Plutocratic-fundamentalist party in the Senate this year. Would that the Democrats had done as much when they were in the minority!

Rice

Condi Rice was wrong about the Soviet Union, her supposed specialty; she denied that the Russian state dictatorship could change itself, and she believed, along with the other military industrialist/national security state players who grew fat on the Cold War and the overestimation of Soviet capabilities, that Gorbachev was faking. She was oblivious and/or clueless about the warnings about Al Queda. She was of course dead wrong about Iraq, which posed no threat of weapons of mass destruction (remember, she said we had to strike before mushroom clouds blossomed over the US). She, along with the other members in the Bush Gang, bears responsibility for the dismemberment and destruction of that country and the death of hundreds of thousands there, as well as the crimes against humanity still being committed in our name. More recently, she was astonished that Hamas won the Palestinian elections. And, of course, she’s stuck like a limpet to the side of a moronic, messianic asshole through thick and thin. Can anyone argue that she’s not a hack?

Today I hear that, miracle of miracles, she has complained about the expansion of another illegal Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem. Finally! But, of course, seven years too late, and certainly not backed up with any stick. In a desperate effort to save her reputation, and the reputation of her capo Bush, for history, she’s pushing hard for “peace” in Israel/Palestine. I put that in quotes because it’s pretty obvious that, via the facts on the ground and the US’s long coddling of the Israeli project to deny Palestinian identity and statehood, that the peace they want is a weak and divided Bantustan-entity under the planes and highways of imperial Israel. It’s a post-modern peace, of course, about perception, and hence doomed.

Like the near-psychotic Clarence Thomas, Rice is symptomatic of the Right’s special form of affirmative action. Desperate for a black face, they’re hurl these very weird, often profoundly angry (in Condi’s case, the vestal virgin act covers a deeply closeted life) people to the forefront, playing up their “story” (for in celebrity-land, biography trumps politics). For Rice’s case, much is made of the fact that she was a friend of one of the four teenage girls assassinated by the Klan in Birmingham in 1963. Little is made of the fact that she hitched her star to the party that inherited the terror-based racist power-structure that the Klan acted as the muscle for.

The breaking news that the CIA has destroyed tapes showing what can only be evidence of war crimes comes just as I’ve been reading about Guatemala in a couple different places. A U.S. supported coup against the elected head of state in 1954 began the long reign of military terror in that nation. The resulting dictatorships killed at least 200,000 and waged virtual genocide against the indigenous Mayan Indians. The military and police were armed, trained, and paid by the U.S. An article in this month’s Harper’s reminds us that these state torturers and murders are also bureaucrats: they kept records of their deeds, and after years of denying that they did so, a trove of them was recently found. Thousands of the disappeared are being returned to memory; history will out. (There’s an exhibition at ICP about archeologists uncovering Franco’s handiwork in a Spain still very leery of examining the years of reaction; Spain remains a potent reminder that fascism was not defeated in 1945; three other exhibits at the same museum also reference the murder of Republican Spain). Meanwhile, a new book by Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? is about the 1998 execution of Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, a Roman Catholic human rights advocate in Guatemala who was killed just after releasing a large well-documented report on the “civil war” that ended there only two years earlier.

I remember when he was mayor

For your way of life

Iraq is just where they want it to be, supine, broken, occupied. And that is the way it will remain, for decades, even under the mainstream Democrats (the top three have all said there will be troops there when their first administration is done in 2013). Who likes it like that? For once the Ayn Rand-idoloter Alan Greenspan spoke the truth when he said it (DUH!) was all about the oil. The untold amounts of oil under those three old Ottoman provinces. Jim Holt lays it all out for all you drivers. Hell, it's your war.

Biophobia

Have you met nanosilver yet? They’re putting it into clothes, washing machines, and other things to KILL KILL KILL. All bacteria must die! The trouble of course is that bacteria is also good for you. You couldn’t digest food if not for the symbiotic bacteria in your gut. The bacteria in your mouth protects your teeth and fights off cooties. The bacteria crawling all over you skin right now acts as a frontline against the bad germs. We’re not actually alone on this planet, you know. Our bodies are complex systems made up of other lifeforms. Indeed, the very mitochondria powering our cells seems to have joined us long long ago, merging together with other cells. We've been chimeras for ever.

Washing machines? All these years not realizing how deadly our clothes are. What bullshit. Another manufactured necessity from the forces of biophobia, the killers of life.

62,000 or so manufactured chemicals in our environment, and we have no idea what most of them do, except collect in our bodies.

The Jungle Redux

They fill their so-called "food" with shit, blood, and gore and then blame us for not cooking it fully? They've turned grass-eaters into grain eaters, resulting in animals that are essentially always sick, necessitating huge doses of antibiotics, and crowd them together so that they can share their diseases. They feed vegetarians with ground up animal parts and wonder where weird prions come from to rot out human brains. Take pig farms, for instance: surrounded by lakes of pigshit, they can't be entered unless you wear a biohazard suit.

Stop buying this perverse filth.

We understand that the capo of Blackwater is an "evangelical Christian" heavyweight. Pray tell, on what planet is this war profiteer, who needs the Iraq diasaster to continue for the good of his business, any kind of follower of Christ?

Well, duh. They moved to Jena... This column by Gary Younge puts it perfectly.

I dread going to see Banished, about the racial cleansing of towns in George, Missouri, and Arkansas, just a few of the cases. Pogroms and cleansing actions, can't happen here? Already has, my friends. We know Jim Crow and American apartheid warped everyone involved, so that those poodle-skirted 50s white girls howling for blood in Little Rock (nice old grannies now, some of them?) were victims, too, but try as I might I can’t whip up any sympathy up for all that psychopathic hate. You know, don’t you, about the Hershel Gordon Lewis film, Two Thousand Maniacs? Car load of northerners gets waylaid by a village of down South. Sub-Corman, and yet virtually a documentary. I mean, these were people who picnicked while hanging, castrating, and burning their fellow human beings.

And speaking of the unredeemable, there will always be soldiers, won’t there, and cops, and Blackwater goons to enforce their master’s filthy will? Burma’s foots soldiers, many probably just peasant boys, are doing their masters bidding to destroy the will of their own people. So it ever is. Boys made into tools. Kent State. Jackson State. Newark. The state’s tools will gun you down when you get ahead of them.

India and Japan are both big investors in the Burmese generals (Pol Pot-like fantasists, the've created their own capital city deep in the jungle); they at least are democracies, susceptible to internal pressure. China, of course isn’t. Haven’t you boycotted Chinese stuff yet? For Darfur, for Burma, for poor Tibet? It’s no hardship, stopping the purchasing of that shit. It can’t make you happy; in case you haven’t noticed, the voracious machine of consumption doesn’t want you happy, because you might stop buying if you were happy, because you must keep buying to attain happiness, which is precisely the point because the shit isn’t happiness.

Where did they go?

50 years since Ike sent in the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to enforce the federal courts. Where today are all hate-filled people in the background of the pictures, the ones screaming, spitting, hurling garbage? Whatever happened to all those psychotic white people?

Blackwater

It's only surprising that it's taken this long. The Blackwater massacre is finally revealing the lawless mercenary economy of Iraq. These cowboys have been shooting up the dismembered ruins of Iraq for years now. This weekend they slaughtered eleven to twenty people. Unaccountable to the U.S. military and what has essentially become an Iraqi Shite police state, the mercs may number as many as 180,000 "private contractors" in-country, but nobody knows. That effectively doubles the US presence in Iraq (although, being mercenaries not all are American citizens: aparthied thugs, goons, and ex-state security killers from all over have signed up). They've been sucking millions from the US treasury and nobody knows how many, how much, and what's being purchased. And the merc companies insist that the US is legally liable for any lawsuits and death benefits (over a 1000 contractors have died there). Naturally, they're very wired into the GOP. Scahill's book reveals the psycho-right-fundamentalist connections at Blackwater, but that's only one of the 180 private force companies working there. Naomi Klein calls it "disaster capitalism." The old name is war profiteering.

Another creep job

Considering the corruption, incompetence, and constitutional-loathing masters of the regime, who would willingly work for these criminals? AG nominee Mukasey is getting positive burbles from the likes of Chuck Schumer, Senator from the Investment Banks, but that shouldn't impress you. Schumer, after all, is one of the dupes who have so notably failed to stop the Bush coup. Meanwhile, Mukasey's been advising Rudy G. in his retirement, which suggests something seriously wrong with his character. Combine that with his agreement to sign up for the lawless Bush/Cheney Gang and what do you get? More bad news.

Phalanx v. legion

The rightwing "phalanx" on the Supremes (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Cardinal “Sharia” Scalia) is dissected here by Ronald Dworkin.

So how do you defeat a phalanx? (Hoping for some bad hearts, and hence short lifespans, obviously doesn’t apply here since these trolls on the court don't have hearts). Well, judging from some reading I've been doing about the end of the Hellenistic Age, what defeats the phalanx is the legion. Then it was the Roman legion, but now, obviously, I mean the legion of democracy.

What I mean is that the turn to the courts was a mistake, precisely because these hidebound institutions could so easily be subverted by the money power. Courts are traditionally conservative, after all, and through most of American history they have been the defenders of power, wealth, and the corporations. In our own age, mildly reformist courts rose during the last half of the 20th century, a tendency the old enemy has fought back against furiously. They've largely succeeded. Packing the courts with faithfully partisan and reactionary ogres has been rather easy since the Democrats have refused to filibuster this perversion.

So where is this legion? It is of course unpopular, if not incomprehensible, to discuss mass action (for instance, strikes and occupations to shut down the system down), and in many ways it has been outlawed (even labled "terrorism" in some cases), but how else will gain the world we want? By asking politicians for it? By asking lawyers to get it? I don't think so. I think we have to rise and raise hell and take it.

Next week in Washington

Hey, I seem to have missed that memo. When was General Pretorian made "Deciderer"?

First Bush stole an election, then he further undermined the Constitution, and now he's given it up for some brass. If nothing else, the last seven years sure have proved a lot about the American people's willingness to be suckers.

Party Values

I go out of town for a week, pay no attention to the news, and look what I miss: worm-tongued Abu Gonzalez’s resignation and Larry “Family Values” Craig’s “wide-stance.” Bye-bye Abu, enoy the subpeonas.

As much as I like to see the bigoted hypocrites burn in the fires of their own making, there are two things in the Craig story that are particularly egregious. One is the GOP’s witch-hunting homophobia, not that that's news, of course. Craig’s out, but Vitter, the prostitute-employer, remains? (Of course, there’s the politics: Idaho’s GOP governor will appoint another Republican to Craig’s wide seat, while Louisiana’s Democratic governor would appoint a Dem. to fill Vitter’s.)

The second is that the Craig case sounds like pure entrapment. Doesn’t the Minneapolis police department have anything better to do than lay traps for saps in the john? What’s the crime exactly? Making a pass? Who gives a fuck if two consensual adults play footsie? (In this case, some wives, I suppose, but who else?) If you aren't interested, say so. The panic engendered by my fellow straights (man, talk about namby-pambies!) here is amusing. Will no bathroom be safe? Maybe it'll make you think twice about hitting on every women you run into....

Reading

Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crown through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites. Whereas citizens in a parliamentary democracy voted to choose a few fellow citizens to serve as their representatives, fascists expressed their citizenship directly by participating in ceremonies of mass assent. The propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated issues among a small group of legislatures who (according to the liberal ideals) were supposed to be better informed than the mass of the citizenry. Fascism could well seem to offer to the opponents of the Left efficacious new techniques for controlling, managing, and channeling the “nationalization of the masses,” at a moment when the Left threatened to enlist a majority of the population around two nonnational poles: class and international pacifism.

And so the conservatives essentially invited them in. Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism

Reading

“All governments lie. But disaster lies in wait for those countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.” I. F. Stone

Southeast where?

The other day, Bush referred to our adventures in Asia, mentioning Japan, Korea, and Vietnam as appropriate analogies for his ruinous war in Iraq. It’s only the latest excuse, of course, the potted history of a rat in a corner bullshitting to a loyal audience. But it must be noted that he left out the Philippines. Curious. 1898: after the quick defeat of the Spanish, the U.S. “bought” the islands, and suppressed the newly born Filipino Republic. A couple of years were needed to batter the Filipino army into submission. However, guerilla war, complete with its usual horrors of torture and concentration camps, lasted until 1913. The Philippines would remain an American colony, by God! (McKinley was another Republican who claimed to have discussed war with God.) The white man’s burden was accepted: 126,000 troops, many of them fresh from killing Indians, were sent in.

One of our great instinctive anti-imperialists, Mark Twain, wrote: “I thought we should act as their protector — not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now — why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.”

Speak to it, Horatio, thou art a scholar

K. Rove, front man for plutocratic restoration, turns out to be a lit’ry chap. Who knew? He claimed he was Moby Dick, the Democrats his Ahab. Full fathom five his bones don’t lie. He said he was a myth, “You know, I’m Beowulf, you know, I’m Grendel. I don't know who I am. But they're after me.” Hell, he’s probably the b’ar in Faulkner. But what about Grendel’s mother? From my own translation, the Soccer Hooligan’s Beowulf “Shite man, it’s Grendel’s mum, and she’s fookin’ pissed!” That’s a great scene when she eats Capt. Ahab and his boat the Ninapintasantamaria, with Scottie down in the coal shouting "I'm giving her all I can, Captain! She canna take much more!" As awesome as when Hester Prynne marries Jay Gatsby and they sit on the dock of the bay watching the green light in the fog waste away…

In answering a question about their belief in the power of prayer to prevent disasters like Katrina and falling bridges, only one of the Democratic candidates in the latest debate actually answered the question directly: no, he didn’t believe prayer could prevent disasters. Only one would actually say that. Stunning. What a fucked-up politics.
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A couple of years ago, I was listening to a panel discussion on this collection, when an elderly woman stood up to ask a question. It was Carolyn Goodman, whose son Andrew was murdered along with Michael Schwerner and James Chaney by the Klan in 1964 in Mississippi. It was one of those times when history reminds us that we are made of the past. She passed away the other day. Rest in peace.

Mississippi, btw, still sends Trent Lott to the U.S. Senate. I don't say much good about the Democrats, but cutting loose the crackers, even if it meant losing them to the Republicans (who were most eager to take in the racists), was great thing.

The American Gulag

There are more prisoners in the US than any other country in the world. With a mere five percent of the world’s population, we have close to a quarter of the world’s prisoners. 2.2 million behind bars, another 5 million on probation or parole. Our urge for vengeance and punishment has largely hit low-level drug users; only about a third of prisoners are in for violent crimes. And in a nation that refuses to come to grips with the issues of race, one in eight African American males between 25 and 29 are imprisoned.

What else? This all means our unemployment level is actually rather higher than the official number, since prisoners aren’t counted. What happens when these skill-less, often brutalized people get out of jail? What about all the families ripped apart? What about the future?

Additionally, in a truly sick throwback to Jim Crow, prisoners are counted in censuses, meaning their number boost often rural districts, but they are unable to vote in those districts, so essentially they are subsidizing more conservative representatives. The millions who are prevented from voting means the GOP, those perfect inheritors of Jim Crow polls, gets to win in places like Florida in 2000. No wonder the right loves “law and order” so god-damned much.

More here.

Yum, pork chops!

A chirpy English lass put it well on the Beeb this morning: you have ten pork chops. One of them is off. You can’t really sell that one, so you grind them all up together to make sausages, figuring that just a little bit of badness won’t kill anyone. Only, once the trenchers find out that the sausage is tainted, nobody wants to buy any of it. Replace mortgages for porkchops and witness the financial hysterics “correct,” in the S&M terminology of financial capital, the market.

"Mesoptn" notes

A BBC reporter was discussing the Iranian penchant for seeing the black hand of the Brits behind everything evil. The International British-Bolshevik Conspiracy? This is almost amusing, but given the history of the area, fathomable. The Brits after all, cut up the whole region after WWI finished off the Ottomans, laying the groundwork for much of the war, chaos, and misery since. Here’s Lloyd George in 1919, according to Arnold Toynbee, then in the British delegation to make the world safe for Empire, “Mesopotamia …yes … oil…irrigation…we must have Mesopotamia; Palestine… yes… the Holy Land … Zionism… we must have Palestine; Syria…h’m… what is there in Syria? Let the French have that.” The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, more recently known as British Petroleum (or, laughably, “beyond petroleum”) needed the firm hand of a “Shah,” that usual British urge for instant monarchs (cf. the Hashemites put into power in Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq). Along with the US national security state, the Brits toppled Mossaddeq and waved the usual red scare banner to return the rot of the Pahlavis to power. All-in-all, an excellent way to become a Great Satan.

There’s plenty of fevered conspiratorial nonsense in the hothouse autocracies of the Middle East, but at the same time there is history. A century of promises unkept, neocolonial rule, and monstrous surrogates, all in the name of controlling the oil. Pity we don't have any history in the US, only fantasies of sweetness and light.

Speaking of black hands, here’s Churchill, ever in the thick of it, complaining about, “this odious Mesoptn embarrassment.” Nothing a little gas attack wouldn't fix, eh Winnie?

Special ed.

Exactly. Why didn’t I ever think of this? In the September Harper’s, not yet on-line, P. Schrag in “Schoolhouse Crock” essays why education may be the most hysterical subject in the land (next to gay marriage, anyway). In America, education is in constant crisis, and has been so from Sputnik. Schools are expected to do the impossible. Needless to say, they fail. Of course they do, because schools don’t exist without the context of stable families, good jobs, childcare, wellness/health care, and social welfare, and above all, the class divide then rends America. Regardless of how much money is spent, regardless of how many tests are given in No Childhood Left, schools alone can’t get over this divide.
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Jesus Christmas, that was bile-rising: hearing Rove choke up about his close pal George as he promised more time with his family (ha-ha-ha, I always love that one). O yeah, present at the counterrevolution...

The long sham

Just another act of the "the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history" that is the Middle East peace process. Siegman ends this piece optimistically:

If the US and its allies were to take a stand forceful enough to persuade Israel that it will not be allowed to make changes to the pre-1967 situation except by agreement with the Palestinians in permanent status negotiations, there would be no need for complicated peace formulas or celebrity mediators to get a peace process underway. The only thing that an envoy such as Blair can do to put the peace process back on track is to speak the truth about the real impediment to peace. This would also be a historic contribution to the Jewish state, since Israel’s only hope of real long-term security is to have a successful Palestinian state as its neighbour.

But this will only happen if, a) the neoconservatives are dethroned and b) American Jews act.

Reading

Joan Didion’s Miami makes me feel almost sorry for the Cuban exiles. Of course, no exile is sweet, but while there were plenty who fled the betrayed revolution (show me a revolution that wasn’t betrayed), it was the worst elements, the Batistists, the oligarchs, the autocrats, and fascists who rose to power as claimants of the mantel of los exilios; yet even these mucho macho assassins and bombers, dreaming of return, were toyed with by a national security state eager to use them, and just as eager to abandon them yet again. The Greeks had a word for it, the goat song of tragedy. The coast of broken dreams, and it’s cost? 40 years of absurdity that’s only fed Castro’s authoritarianism, and a reactionary stain on American politics only too eagerly absorbed by the Republicans, those tireless exploiters of resentment and hate. And in the Miami environs right now, “our” terrorists, sent to pasture in retirement.

What Didion’s so good at is the grubby little performance that is American politics, the sham of the contemptuous little prick behind the curtain as the Wizard has his photo-ops and stays on message until the next message comes along. All of them of the television age, from Eisenhower to Bush II, are props to varying degrees. And we’re the saps from Kansas, buying the bullshit year after year after year. Enough already! Basta!

Rudy can fail, and must

What’s so remarkable about the rise of Rudy Ghouliani is that the facts are irrelevant, just as was the case of Young Bush preceeding 2000. Then, the callow (in his 50s!!!!), clueless, spoiled brat who always got his way because his daddy’s friends helped him out of one mess after another (a story clear as daylight if you looked for it) completely foretold the incompetence, callousness, ignorance, and meanness that has led to the disasters of his reign. But the media just kept parroting the party line about restoring dignity and honor to the office, blah-blah-blah (and everybody still mouths the GOP lying point about Gore claiming to have invented the internet). Now, Rudy keeps repeating “9/11” and “terrorism” so that he’ll come across as the man on horseback a fair number of Americans crave. Kevin Baker and Wayne Barrett dissect this nonsense and show us the clannish, profoundly creepy little bully underneath the makeup. Baker argues that he’d be worse than Bush. Barrett lists five of the biggest lies. Personally, how anybody could support him after the Bernie Kerik episode is lost on me, but of course facts are pretty irrelevant to modern image-making. Brand Rudy is set in stone and the Big Lie is hard to overthrow. Certainly the corporate media isn’t going to set the record straight.

Market of death

Is anybody surprised about the continuing revelations about the poisons being sent over in Chinese-made pet food, toys, toothpaste? Why? This is the free market in action. It’s nothing specifically “Chinese;” it’s the “invisible hand,” that will-o-the-wisp of Adam Smith’s, elevated to a religious mantra. It’s the inevitable corruption, oligarchy, and authoritarianism that marketism results in when not overseen by a democratic polity. It used to be standard operating procedure right here too, which is why we have an FDA, an FCC, an EPA, and so on. Which is why the radicals on the right who occupy these desks now work to undermine the old rules, and bring back the adulteration, the pollution, the toxins. You, your children, your pets, are irrelevant. Short term profit, y’all! Profit is all, so much more important than lives, communities, the very planet itself.

Now, for an example of actually-operating capitalism, where capital and the state it partially or wholly owns act together, there’s no finer example than ARAMCO, our oil boys in Wahhabi Arabia, the inheritors of the copper barons, mine owners, and others on the “mineral frontiers.” There was no discernable difference between the State Department’s team in Arabia and the oil firm (and the Company, since the CIA was all over the place), while the corrupt, autocratic, feudal local regime provided the muscle when the workers got uppity. You know, things like wanting to see the movies the American workers got to see; to stop being called “coolies” and “ragheads”; to get better living conditions; to make the same salary; in short, to stop being discriminated against in the segregated whites-only oil camps. The strikes that eventually came – after petitions, work stoppages, and a bus boycott before Montgomery (!) failed – were soundly beaten back, with the strikers carted off to torture chambers as agitators, communists, etc. Old story.

As I write, there’s a coalmine collapse in Utah: the lives of six miners are at stake in a mine that’s gotten 300 safety citations in the last three years. The mine owners and their tools, like the Senator from Coal, Mitch McConnell, maintain unsafe conditions year after year because they gamble that profits now are well worth the risk of other lives later… or as in Utah, right now. The owner of this particular collapsed mine seems like a real piece of work, ranting about the United Mine Workers and global warming and insisting it was an earthquake. He did have one good point: he’s providing the filthy shit that feeds our insatiable electrical need.

A mass murder of errors

No End in Sight is a catalog of errors. Would that it were a comedy of them, instead of the death warrant of hundreds of thousands. The bloody, disastrous errors: Bypassing the State Department’s post-conflict plans in favor of the neocons’ ignorant fantasies. Refusing to declare martial law and stop the trashing of the infrastructure and the looting of 7000 years of history. Disbanding the Iraqi military (incredibly, the US military in country wasn’t alerted about this beforehand). The Chalibi-fetish. The grotesque “neocon kindergarten,” in which baby ideologues with nothing but GOP connections where shipped in to make manifest their adolescent fantasies. And all presided over by the bon mots of Donald Rumsfeld (who unsurprisingly refused to be interviewed) grimacing through his death’s head skull while reporters chuckle at his witticisms.

But those who did talk are other insiders, members of what during the foreign policy disaster in Vietnam were called “the Establishment,” professionals (lots of lapel pins in evidence) from the War and State Departments and associated entities, who tell of their disbelief and disgust about what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Feith, & Powell (by dint of his “loyalty,” the god-damned fool) and the rest wrought. It’s a powerful document indeed.

And yet… the primary error, the invasion itself, is not a matter of discussion in this documentary. This is, after all, a rather mainstream perspective. Indeed, at one point there’s a title card about the “many people who tried to save a nation.” Bullshit! Good-hearted people trying to do the noble job of nation-building is simply irrelevant to the underlying motives for the war and the uses of the resulting chaos. Because the chaos is useful: it keeps troops in the Gulf, it maintains Cheney’s ministate and GOP dominance at home and continues the long national security state control over domestic democracy.

The national security state, bipartisan to its core, agrees that “withdrawal” is merely a soporific for domestic consumption: the military presence in the country formerly known as Iraq is supposed to be permanent. The front-runners of both parties fully subscribed to the hegemonic American mission to control Middle Eastern oil, not that they would ever admit that, of course. Oil out, weapons in, & finance capital uber alles are their gods and masters, Clinton/Obama as much as Ghouliani/Thompson.

Wahhabi Arabia

Reading America’s Kingdom, by Robert Vitalis, about “mythmaking on the Saudi oil frontier” and the devil’s bargain of oil for security that still binds us in a death grip with the carbon fountain of Arabia. And man, is the gang is all here: ARAMCO, Stardard Oil’s nasty spawn (nowdays known as Exxon/Mobile), Bechtel, innumerable al Sauds and al Fahds, Daddy bin Laden, the WWII-gut-punched Brits being cut out of the Middle East as the upstart Yanks take over. And bring along their Jim Crow notions…. Vitalis tracks the oligarchy’s move from mineral frontier in our SW to Latin America to the Persian Gulf, bringing with them their poisons of apartheid and union-phobia. An ugly, ugly story of modern imperialism in the century when the old version of imperialism was being put into its deserved grave.

One suggestive nugget: the “Arabist” St. John Philby called it “Wahhabi Arabia.” Got that right! This was of course Kim Philby’s father; according to WikiP, Kim was at one point spying on his dad for MI6. Another theory has it that he was first recruited by the Soviets to spy on the old man, since the old man was so tight with the Saudis and up to his gills in the tar patch of the American and British struggle to get the oil. Would have loved to sit around that dinner table!

Bridges to nowhere

For years, we’ve been hearing about how fragile our infrastructure is. Auto culture’s ugly foundations are crumbling, and very little has been done about. (It ain't sexy; no new taxes; the invisible hand will provide). We see the results in Minnesota. Anybody surprised? The death toll over the Mississippi is pretty modest, considering.

Mostly built after the Second World War, the nation’s highway system fueled the growth of sprawling suburbs and exurbs, white flight from the cities, and a transfer of wealth from the industrialized NE to the war-industry south and west, from city to 'burb. (Political power followed.) Not to mention finishing the decapitation of public transportation, that automobile/tire company plan to hook us to cars. Like junkies, we’re now stuck with long commutes, car after car with a lone driver, oil-run politicians, blood in the Middle East, continued devastation of the environment. Over forty thousand dead a year on our roads...

Where are you going? What's your hurry?

Global climate change

... is going to kill millions of people, force hundreds of millions to migrate, and, in general, massively destabilize the world. Darfur, Nigeria, New Orleans, Iraq: the pockets of instability we now experience will become arcs, nay, swaths of disaster, continental in scope. And some people are going to be very, very angry at the piggies who’ve gobbled up so many resources and expelled all the resulting poisonous waste out into the toilet we’ve made of the atmosphere and oceans.

Against this, what effect will recycling, solar panels, and carbon-trading (what a scam!), or the fantasy of sequestration, have? Little to nothing, methinks. And taxing carbon, which passes for a radical notion in a corporate-controlled polity, is only a start. No, what we need is a revolution in the way we live. We need to stop being consumers. We need to stop buying the shit; we need to reorient our selves. Growth for growth’s sake, which Edward Abbey called the ideology of the cancer cell, is killing the planet and, needless to say, us along with it. Indeed, we have to change what we mean by “progress.” Of course, progress’s hold on us akin to the Church’s before the Enlightenment…

Considering that people still buy SUVs, though, this is a huge order. Not least because this Western disease has infected China and India, where a couple of billion people have been suckered into thinking that plastic and cars are going to make their lives better. Most often I’m pessimistic and think change will only come after disaster, and not necessarily the right kind of change either, for in desperation people usually fall for the charlatans and the thugs. But then I remember that the Church’s power was broken. We enlightened up once…

And of course I don’t mean we need to change as individuals and be done with it. O no; we must act collectively, for the commonwealth of the planet.

In the news

Billions in dollars in arms sales to the Saudi princelings. As famed fighters, at least on the slopes of Gstaad, the stuff’s unlikely to be used. Certainly it’ll never be deployed against the Great Satan Iran unless operated by mercenaries, US canon fodder, or whomever else they’ll buy before fleeing back to the slopes. I understand the goodies have to be stored far out in the desert so that the population won’t be able to get near it should they finally throw off the yoke of the “House of Saud.”
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Does Roberts’ benign idiopathic seizure give us hope? In his early 50s, he otherwise promises decades of reactionary activism on the Court, breaking the back of civil rights, returning women to their place, making the rich richer, and completing the turn-over of American democracy to the CEOs. Fall some more, Johnny-boy. More likely, they’ll just dope him up and have his little Federalist Society clerk/assassins write his hateful opinions.
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Speaking of Frankenstein monsters, I missed the results of the search for Cheney's heart. The President for tax cuts, torture, and pollution needed a new battery evidently. His last words before they put him under: "Must destroy democracy! Must destroy democracy!"
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They're going to bust down a retired general for the Pat Tillman Show?? Oooooo!

Falco peregrinus

Reading about peregrine falcons. The name comes from the Latin for wanderer; the same root is in our “peripatetic.” In the western hemisphere, peregrines can migrate across the breadth of both North and South America. Imagine that for a moment. A pound or so of bird making a trip of that distance, sometimes flying a couple of hundred miles a day. Born near the Arctic circle, then flying south along a route not known to it, unless the route is imprinted genetically. And then, the following spring, returning to the place it was born to reproduce. Not all go as far. Some of the Eastern subspecies, reintroduced after DDT extirpated the locals, tend to enjoy the rich supply of pigeons found in cities. They return from the south to aeries in the buildings and bridges of NYC, among other places. Niches in the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are popular (you can see the whitewash of old mutes, or droppings, if you look carefully). For several years a pair have raised young in a scrape at 55 Water St., under the eye of a webcam. Not this year, though.

We nearly exterminated them, and the other raptors, through the use of persistent deadly chemicals, still present in the environment even though banned, and still concentrating up the foodchain. At the top of that chain stands the giant killer ape H. sapiens sapiens: the poisons in us are our own doing. We’re all steadily accumulating PCBs, DDT, dioxin, other organochlorines, flame retardants, uranium, mercury… the list goes on. The Arctic is being devoured by the need for gas and oil, while the permafrost melts due to the burning of all those hydrocarbons. In the south, the pampas have been converted to cash crops and cattle, the same things that vanquished our great prairies; the jungle between is being burned down; herbicides are sprayed wantonly in the “drug war.” These are crimes against ourselves, of course, but they are also a betrayal of the planet. We, because we have the ability, should be stewards the planet, but we’re the destroyers instead.

Aqua Bull

Pepsico’s Aqua Fina will now have to be labeled as what it is: publicly sourced tap water. One of the most destructive tentacles of world capital has been the privatization of water. You can read about that here and here. The bottled water “sector” in the advanced capitalist states is only one component of this privatization. But let’s say you don’t mind that something so utterly necessary for life can be controlled by profiteers. Consider the huge amounts of water wasted in the production of the plastic bottles that tap water goes into. You might recycle your plastic bottles, but most of the rest of the world doesn’t. That shit is choking our world. The industry is unsustainable.

On the subway the other day, a couple of preteen boys were drinking Red Bull. How happy the marketers must be: get them hooked early and own ’em for life. The boys’ dad was there, displaying some terrible parenting. Yet blaming him without the context of the ideological indoctrination he swims in makes no sense.

The defenders of the faith insist that they give the people what they want. That the shit they produce tastes good and makes consumers happy. But then why can't we have opium and heroin?

Q. And children?

A: And children.

Couldn’t see this coming… right. Stories of summary execution, imprisonment, and torture of Iraqi civilians who earn the wrath of the world’s greatest war machine, from soldiers disgusted at their own actions and the works of their “band of brothers.” Of course it was foreordained: clueless about the language, history, culture, religion, and politics of the people they are amidst, ignorant, callow, and purposely brutalized (to kill, their humanity has to be broken) soldiers lash out with a fury. Their racism (“sand nigger” and “haji,” [a term of respect in Moslem societies, here bastardized] are the “gook” of the day) and arrogance play superbly into the hands of their enemies, alienating the locals, fostering anti-Americanism, stoking the fires of vengeance. An army of occupation is a sitting duck in the filthy politics of war; right out the Algeria playbook.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died as a result of George Bush’s war. Two million are exiles. How much longer are we going to put up with this?

It isn't pessimism that makes me say this, merely history: even if the war ended tomorrow, there will still be years of revelations about war crimes committed in our name. And the soldiers themselves, traumatized by all the brutality, what’s to become of them?

A Fool's Errand

Tony Blair’s off to the Middle East as a semi-plenipotentiary of sorts, but he looks to me to be plenty impotent. With the U.S. firmly on the side of the long Israeli project to eradicate Palestinian self-determination, no real peace will come of continued oppression and occupation and apartheid. The Western plan to prop up Fatah as a client regime won’t last. Puppets never do. The human dignity of a people can’t be suppressed forever. Unfortunately, we’ve now taught the Palestinians that all our talk about democracy means nothing, since we promptly strangled the legitimate voice of the Palestinians who voted for Hamas. Hamas -- which was once fostered as a bulwark against the secular, socialist Fatah, ah the bitter ironies of the past -- is going to end up looking like a moderate force in comparison to the nihilists who emerge with all hopes smashed.

Meanwhile, the realities on the ground are what count: Israel controls the air and the water and all the good land in-between, penning Palestinians into Bantustans. The settlers on the hills, in their fortress towns connected by their own highways, are like the pieds noir in Algeria, fanatical, vigilante colonialists who have stolen the best land, in yet another spasm of European colonialism. Of course, the other fact on the ground is demographic, which means that all the walls in the world can’t keep the peace.

Throughput

That’s all you are as a patient, you know. "Throughput." You have, on average, 8 minutes of face time with the MD. Meanwhile, they've got from 25 to 70 more patients to see today; I'm sorry what was your problem again? Ironic, isn’t it, that doctors, who did so much to kill the devil of “socialized medicine” after the Second World War have now become highly-trained assembly line workers themselves.

Elsewhere, of course, productivity has skyrocketed, but wages are retrograde if not stagnant. What else? Your masters are making tens of millions off of you (while "income tax" cuts put the burden on those, the great majority of us, whose wages are taxed). The hedge funds, unregulated as pirates until they crash and burn and come begging to be rescued by the rest of us because “they are too big to fail,” are creating an unprecedented ruling class. The politicos of both parties are snugly in their pockets. Garbage made of cheap corn is subsidized to fatten and stupefy you. They want you to be "team players": passive and orderly and powerless. Unthinking. You are being creamed, skimmed, even proletarianized in your white collars. Harry Potter, Inc. and the other technologies to prevent you from reaching (conscious, critical) adulthood are here to pretend to massage your soul, sooth the ache of anomy, alienation, the hollowness, but only to leave you wanting more. They want you to think you have to buy your way to happiness, again and again and again, instead of fighting for it.

The solution remains an old one: Unite and take it back.

Misinformation

Passing three women yesterday. One said, Turkey is having an election today. Another said, yes, isn't it exciting; they'll get rid of those burkhas. Actually, the moderate Islamic party won convincingly, and they seem to be the equivalent of Christian Democrats in Europe. Also, they don’t do burkhas in Turkey. There are headscarves, but under secular law such things are illegal in schools, jobs, etc. It is a complicated situation, but I fear the misinformation, half-truths, and stereotypes of even educated folks here don’t do anything to further the understanding of what’s going on.

Iraq

Waiting for September... or is it now November? Whatever the date is, it's another bullshit deadline desined for the US domestic market, not any realistic response to facts on the ground in Iraq. The war’s already lost. Peter Galbraith has it succinctly: “The Shiites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shiite state. By their boycotts and votes the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously rejected the Shiite vision of Iraq’s future, including the new constitution. The Kurds’ envisage an Iraq that does not include them.” He doesn't call it this, but there's talk of "soft partition" cycling among the so-called governing class of America.

So many parallels

The French army wanted to believe they were drawing the line against international communism. Paris thought all the weapons and money was coming from Cairo. In fact, the Algerians were nationalists first. They had little but rhetorical support from the blowhard Nasser until after Suez and Third World anti-imperialism forced his hand. Meanwhile, Moscow and Beijing were Johnny-come-lately as well, but I suppose you get what you wish for.

Bush needs to claim that “al-Qaida in Iraq” is the main enemy in Iraq, and that it’s the same as the al-Qaida who attacked the U.S. He’s wrong on both accounts, but I assume he thinks we’ll fall for if he keeps repeating it enough.

Our own CIA, our own FBI!

The "little lady who started the war," Judith Miller, was gushing about the NYPD’s counterterror and intelligence functions this morning on Brian Lehrer’s show this morning. Oh-oh. Be afraid, be very afraid. Love the way she’s moved over to Manhattan Institute, though.

Against The Beast

When asked what he thought should replace the Christianity he so unfailingly attacked, Voltaire replied that since the beast was sucking the blood of his family, he most surely did not want to replace it. This is quoted in Curtis White’s two-part article in Orion on the nature of our destruction of our own lives that is the continued assault on the environment. Food for thought:
Part One: Idols of Environmentalism
www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/233
Part Two: The Ecology of Work
www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/267/

White’s essay is excerpted in August’s Harper's, which also has a piece by Jonathan Kozol about the continuing effort to swap America’s public education system, a hallmark of democracy, for one based on profits. He introduces me to a term I hadn’t heard before, the EMOs, or “education management organizations” set on the thin edge of the pro-voucher wedge to become the HMOs of one of the last frontier of the public sphere, and hence our democracy. If nothing else, in the ruins of our antihealth care system, one can see the irony of the financiers deciding to use so similar a name for their attempted take-over.

Algeria

The stab-in-the-back theory of Vietnam still echoes: the media, the politicians, the hippies, et al. kept the grunts from “winning.” But that post-colonial war was not “winnable” by military force, even if every battle was won. There isn’t going to be a “victory” in Iraq, either. I worry about the effects of this loss on the military. Its so-called professionalization has in many ways cut it off from civil society. Ending the draft and tossing the notion of citizen-soldiers into the dustbin of history positioned the military outside the mainstream, while the self-styled romanticism of “warrior” culture threatens to imbue them with the sense that they’re better than that mainstream because they’re protecting it. A strong identification with the Right hardly helps. It’s not hard to imagine the circumstances that will make them feel like they have to step in. For you know the reasoning will be that they are saving democracy (from itself).

The reason I’m thinking such dark thoughts is that I’m reading Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. I’ll be coming back to the many disturbingly relevant themes in this must-read, but for the moment I want to touch on the dangers of a defeated military to a democracy. The French Army, humiliated in 1940, rode back to glory in ’45, but only on the coattails of the Allies; then it had its ass kicked in Dien Bien Phu, after another decade of war; the colonels, who had by then spent their entire adult lives fighting, drew the line in Algeria. They damn sure wouldn’t let the politicians betray them again (as they saw it; this was before the “media” was such a whipping boy) and went so far as attempt a coup d’etat. Well before then, they had been deeply compromised by the use of torture.

Why?

Add the corporate media’s stenographic services, a cheap forgery about Niger yellowcake, and the fantasies of a crazy informant to the headlong determination of the neoconservatives to go to war in Iraq and you’ve pretty much got the “how.” Thomas Powers gives an amazingly good summary in the NYRB of the neocon drive to war as he takes apart Richard Tenet’s self-serving whitewash of a book. Tenet should have written his book in prison along with the others who have gotten away with mass murder: Cheney and his crew of neocon ghouls; Rumsfeld playing patty-cake at the war department; good soldier Colin Powell, who knows from Nuremburg that being a good soldier is not a legitimate excuse; that hack Rice and the rest of the President’s lapdogs; and of course, the Idiot Prince himself.

But the question still remains “why.” Politically, it seems clear that the War Party wanted both to show it had the right stuff to do something about 9/11 and to use that right stuff to consolidate its power domestically. I mean much more than paint the Democrats as treasonous, of course, although that too was rather successful for a time.

For our history shows us time and again that overseas adventures are the perfect excuse to clamp down on threats to elite control, as shown by the dissolution of the populist movement during the Spanish- American War, the suppression of the progressive movement by the First World War, and the taming of radical elements in the labor movement during the Cold War. These threats to the powers-that-were were set nicely aside by the tides of conforming nationalism, xenophobia, jingoism, Red Scares, and the like. (An exception is the Civil Rights movement, which survived even as Vietnam bled and the original "neocons" of the Neoconfederacy used the Red Scare playbook in attempting to de-legitimize it.)

Of course, there was no reformist threat at the beginning of the 21st century. (The bond market’s bondsman Bill Clinton had seen to that quite nicely). But there was the long project of the neoconservatives to supplant what we have of democracy with their brand of authoritarianism, a combination of neoliberal market fundamentalism (excepting for unfettered government control in matters of police, incarceration, and wealth transfer), with its magnificent success in restoring class power to robber baron levels, and the supposed moral rigors of Christian theocracy (in practice, just another corrupt patronage mill). Cheney and Rumsfeld, for example, both made plain their burning desire to undo the mild constraints on Executive overreach following Watergate, where they both cut their very sharp teeth, and largely succeeded in the wake of the national emergency of 9/11. They got their Reichstag fire. Cheney, the Cardinal Richelieu behind the Son King’s empty throne, and the intellectual gurus of neoconservatism have made their contempt for democracy loud and clear from their offices, coin-operated think tanks, corporate sinecures, and media cat-bird seats. War is their dream come true: they need it to last forever, it’s what gives them meaning, and power.

They saw their chances and took ‘em. Politics 101. It’s an oft-brutal endeavor, especially when the stakes are hegemonic. When you add hegemonic domestic power to military control of Middle East oil (plus keeping China at bay), pouring billions into the war industries (and gutting social spending), it all adds up.

Representation

Due to our archaic Constitution, the Senate is controlled by Senators from 26 states, and should those states add up to only 20% of the population, too bad, they’re still calling the shots in that body. Of course, 20% isn’t the proper proportion, because a good percentage of people in those states, sometimes more than half, don’t vote at all. So roughly ten percent of the US population controls the Senate. It gets worse when you consider the narrow margins of victory in many elections: those who voted for the loser aren’t represented in a winner-take-all system.

The Senate, you will recall, was Founded by artisto-wannabes who made no bones of their fear of the unruly and unwashed mass (of white male property owners, the only people enfranchised), and wanted a House of gentleman (they were mostly appointed by governors to the office until the early 20th century) to keep the lid on any potential popular excesses. (In the so-called “People’s House” meanwhile, you may recall that the vaunted Gingrich “Revolution” came about even though 4/5ths of the American people did not vote for it.) It’s little wonder that most Senators are millionaire members of the economic elite, and that it now costs tens of millions to get a seat at that particular banquet.

Solutions (these are just off the top of my head, so I’m probably missing some good ideas):

Publicly funded campaigns. Of course power will out, and the money will flow, so strict disclosure, equitable air-time, and a vastly more investigative media are needed. (The Supreme Court’s decision in Buckley that money equaled speech was typical of that body’s adherence to elite class power.)

Electoral reform. There are ideas and local examples aplenty: proportional representation, instant run-off, cross-endorsement, non-partisan administration of registration & ballot access, an Election Day holiday.

Constitutional reform.

Citizenship. An informed, participating citizenry… imagine that.

Putinization

For now, the neocons can only dream of Putinization, but you know they wake with soiled jammies. In Russia, “managed democracy,” a Tsarist-like power structure, tightly controls dissent. Media, NGOs, and other aspects of civil society are highly constricted, and although the state itself may not have had thirteen journalists assassinated in recent years, it also hasn’t convicted anyone for these crimes and it has benefited from the cowed press. Admittedly, murder is rare; more usual is this "soft" repression story.

At least for the moment, the Russian people seem to agree with these methods. They were so traumatized by the post-Soviet shocks of western-enforced neoliberalism (the economy was looted by finance capital, new oligarchs emerged, thieving their way to billions, and average life span plummeted, a story little covered here), that they demand the stability, the ol’ law and order, that Tsar Vlad & Co. claim to deliver.

Ah, the bitter irony, that neoliberalism, long sold under the rubric of “freedom,” so inexorably leads to authoritarianism, either directly, as concentrated power and wealth maintains its grip, or indirectly, as when nationalists respond to its depredations in anti-democratic ways.

Thoughts for the day

Well, now we know how many dead and wounded it takes to break Senators Lugar, Voinovich, and Domenici’s slavish devotion to the Iraq Disaster. How many more for the next GOP defector from the holy cause of party-above-all?

Not, mind you, that we're seeing much dissent against military industrial keynesianism & (paradoxically, but one of many contradictions) neoliberalism that the Democrats are mostly signed up in a bloodpact with, too. Senator Clinton's quietly admitted that the megabases in Iraq will not go unmanned, and Obama the Hopeful One is only selling a notion (one bottle will cure what ails you, friends), so don't expect much from him. In fact, nothing should be expected from them; they need to be forced to represent us.

“Executive privilege” is the latest bullshit defense being put up the anti-democracy team bunkered in the White House. Unitary executive, fourth branch of government, monarchy, if the President does it isn’t illegal, Commander-in-Chief, yadda-yadda. A government of men -- or corrupt dwarves, as the case now is -- instead of laws is not a pretty thing.

Sicko

Saw Sicko tonight and liked it more than any of Moore’s other agitprop interventions. I can’t say I learned anything new, since I’ve long thought universal health care is a requisite human right. A profit-driven (un)health system is criminal and barbaric. That part’s a no brainer, but of course getting there is the heart of the matter. Tony Benn states it forthrightly: when the people demand it they get it. That’s democracy, not the charade we have now. Of course an anxiety-ridden, fearful, demoralized, unhealthy, debt-bondage populace trained to think as if they are the problem, that's most difficult to organize. The power against us, a system profiting off our very bodies and actual lives, is tremendous.

Moore’s point that it’s all about “we” instead of “me” is right on. We already know how shared social costs like fire and police protection work. Wellness and health should be no different. We know that public institutions like schools and libraries are key to democracy. So's health: it’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” after all. We know that some of us already have aspects of socialized -- i.e. costs borne across society -- medicine: look at Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and the great healthcare Congress gets.

Stand and demand it, people.

A gang of moderate conservatives

What are we going to do with the Democrats? Mike Davis has an interesting, if long-winded analysis
here. Sure, the party is liberal in cultural matters, but it is just as beholden to the corporate power structure of America (and the world). (Nader’s critique is still valid, even though he is persona non grata and a convenient scapegoat: after all, it was Gore who couldn't get those Nader votes, nor fight for his actual plurality.) It’s just as ensnared in the money power, which has developed a “bipartisan” system very much to its liking. Instead of the GOP’s oil, health profiteers, and mercenaries, the Dems have hitched their stars to high tech and high finance. Yes, they’re just plain nicer than the GOP, but they’re still in thrall to the bond market and the rest of the neoliberal project. As such, even if they win the Presidency and larger majorities in Congress, they will give us nothing but tepid measures. Unless, of course, we force them to change our nation for the better, towards a socal democracy that cares for its citizens, not the profits of a few, for us and not that tiny elite of owners whose boots they polish and hope to wear. And that force, of course, doesn’t come from the checkbook.

So while it’s sweet that lots of people are writing checks for Obama, I remained stupefied about the willingness of people to continue in their infantile course of hoping something will happen instead of making it happen. We already had the Man from Hope, an absolutely fucking disaster who paved the way for GOP control, so now it’s the man of hope? When are people going to realize that a symbolic politics keep leading to the same winners, and that’s not us.

This is a nation of taxi passengers. The driver breaks all the rules and the passengers just sit there hoping to get to their destination without saying anything, contributing to the lawlessness, recklessness, and obnoxiousness of the journey.

Happy Birthday

For a bunch of property owners, not a bad piece of work…the Declaration. Check out that bill of particulars about the crimes of the then George.

And here's to the continuing struggle to make it real. The reign of witches shall pass!

The Cat in the Machine

“The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction,” wrote Wm. Blake, no doubt thinking of those plodding old nags in the Royal Academy…

I love dogs! Case in point, the border collie: handsome, brilliant, and comes in cool colors (check out the merles). I love them perhaps a tad more than cats, but I’m not one of these either/or extremists; I believe there’s nothing wrong with dogs and cats living together, but I have to admit that dogs are usually to be found the wrong side, iconographically speaking. Think German shepherds, Birmingham’s dogs loosened on the crowd (“we feed our dogs on Civil Rights” sang Phil Ochs), and Abu Ghraib. Cats, it’s true, have witchcraft marked against them, but wasn’t witchcraft just a nasty old patriarchal purge of uppity rhymes-with-witches?

The cat, actually, is curiously and most often associated with the left (baring A. Spiegelman’s Nazis). Must be the nine lives: the glorious future of unfettered capital having resulted in ruin, anomie, and those glories of what the market will bear (porn/drugs/sex/violence), resistance emerges from the shadows, from under the couch to rub its back against your thigh. Le chat noir, le chat rouge: the old trickster. Chris Marker’s long meditation on what happened to the ‘68ers, Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de l'air est rouge, revised) and his shorter exploration of “M. Chat” in the Case of the Grinning Cat (Chats Perches) are cases in point. The sly, secretive, wily feline with the grin, against all the odds? Able to melt into the air like all that is solid? Think the Cheshire Cat, the Reverend Dodgson’s elusive kitty. On my side of Okeanos, the Wobblies had their black cat (a wild cat, of course, hence the strike), arched in hissing menace.

The Cat in the Hat, though not specifically radical (although under the Prussians, it must be said that elementary school was banned as subversive) is still an anarchic spin on things, and oh-so-elegantly dressed. And Krazy Kat, who was neither crazy nor a cat according to his hip cat inventor Geo. Herriman, may be the most radical of all in her/his optimism. (The man was playing with race, gender, & identity long before Weimar, much less the academy.) There is a heppy heppy land, my friends, and though it be far away, in monumental Coconino of the mind, the journey is worth taking. You can read C. Van Vechten’s Tiger in the House along the way, the book having been reissued by one of my favorite imprints, New York Review Books. Meanwhile, in the tiger’s stripes, Walt. Ford sees the ghosts of warriors past fighting colonial invasions. Meow, you motherfuckers.

Scootered

No, seriously, how do you deal with these motherfuckers? In my effectless rage, I sent this into the maw of the White House tonight... adolescent of me, I know, but...

Thank you for commuting I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's sentence. The thought he might have to serve time for subverting the fundamental basis of our judicial system was entirely too much for my old heart to take. Two counts of perjury, one of obstruction of justice, and one of making false statements to federal investigators, crimes which go to the very heart of the integrity of our judicial system, well pish! In your America, only the poor and stupid should suffer the full weight of the law. The rest of us have either good lawyers or Presidents who are above the law. Hooray! A government of laws is for losers, communists, terrorists, and other unamericans. Keep up the good work, Commander. Law and order, law and order, law and order forever!

PS: take notes from that Putin guy, since he knows how to run a country good.

The Activist Court

Bleating Leahy, who voted for Roberts, was complaining this weekend how disappointed he is with Roberts’ partisan leadership of the reactionary Supreme Court. WTF? How can someone this bright be so clueless? The GOP agenda to radically transform the Court into the pro-corporate anti-democractic entity it used to be has NEVER been secret. Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy: five conservative Catholic men are now the activist majority at the Court (talk about bad news for women!), and the Democrats did nothing to stop them from gaining that control. These guys stand for the power of the state (as a corporate tool), the corporation, and the church; they are the handmaidens of the elites. They are against desegregation, for control of the polity by wealth, for sectarian division, for controlling women’s bodies. Last week’s string of precedent-turning 5-4 decisions for “fee speech” (sic) for corporations and against free speech for high-school students; for the continuing re-segregation of education; and against antitrust were long ago foretold. Once again, thanks Democrats, for nothing.

Fantasy Islands

In the fantasy Gulf States, third world laborers build Xanadus for the world’s masters and their pet scribes (cf. flathead Thomas Friedman). Working as indentured servants, if not downright slaves, these East Asians are shipped in, have their passports confiscated, and housed in barracks away from the glitter, completely at the mercy of authoritarian states making their hellholes safe for finance capital. In the hotels, imported maids clean the excrement of highflying capital accumulators, consultant pols (Bill Clinton’s been pimping in the region), and other reps of the Global One Percent, from the rims of toilets. Meanwhile, prostitutes shipped in from the ruins of eastern Europe and Russia service other needs.

A long way from here? Not really. This model of the global service economy is alive and well on the resort island of Nantucket. Now thickly warted with what I call SUV-houses, grossly overscaled (and a real perversion of the island’s character), the place has become a case study of the workings of the global gastarbeiter system. A quarter century ago when I graduated from high school there, it was American college kids who used to do the lawn-mowing, bed-making, cleaning, and cooking; I washed dishes and cooked there myself there during college summers. More recently, there was a cohort of Irish kids; today, it’s workers from Brazil, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. Last week, there was an article in the local weekly (which I also used to work for) about three young Bulgarians who were suckered into paying serious coin to come to work as maids on the island. Only, once they got there, there were no jobs. Nor any place to live, either.

Dorm-like workers housing, pimping job brokers both here and abroad, dubious legal status and hence limited protections, profiteering landlords, pampered wealthy being clean up after; it all adds up to an old story, really.

Manufactured Landscapes

Just before leaving town for some time away, I saw Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary about Edward Burtynksy’s photographs of the human exploitation of the planet. The movie was so-so: Burtynsky was rather full of himself, so the filmmaker could have used some distance, but the themes were wide. We’re the only animal that has no sense of balance: we live wantonly. While the culturally dominant view of nature is as a competition, this view is woefully ignorant of all the many forms of cooperation manifested in the natural world. And in our destructive, unsustainable frenzy to chop, mine, burn, eat, & scour, we are so incredibly out of balance that the tipping point, to return a phrase, seems imminent.

Reading David Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism, so the film’s concentration on China (endless factories producing consumer junk, toxic dumps recycling electronic garbage, and the Ozymandian Three Gorges Dam) was a propos. There’s hardly a finer example of neoliberalism’s authoritarian essence.

Alas, poor China. For the people and culture of Tibet, for those in Darfur, Burma, and Zimbabwe, whose leaders are all propped up by Beijing, and for the millions of Chinese themselves debased by the currupt dictatorship of the Party, next year's Olympics are anathema. Shame on all who participate, and all who profit.

The authoritarian

The threat to democracy is from within. Benjamin Franklyn famously said we had a republic, if we could keep it (we can discuss the differences between our republic and more direct democracy at another time), well suggesting both the fragility, and our responsibilities as citizens, therein. The examples of these threats are many and include Putin’s neo-tsarism, the so-called “managed democracy” favored by a majority of Russians if we are to believe the polls; the Hindu nationalist threat to India’s multicultural pluralism; and Berlusconi-style media control. Closer to home we have the revived Gilded Age, where money in politics usually wins, and those with wealth largely control the discourse, write the laws, and getter richer still. Meanwhile, there’s the unending assault on voting rights; the purposeful effort to disgust people out of voting at all; the apathy and the complacency of a citizenry only too happy to forsake their citizenship.

And then there’s Cheney. An unabashed authoritarian, Cheney has total contempt for the necessary transparency of democracy. The lesson he took from his master Nixon is that Presidential power must trump all. The so-called “unitary executive” is his gift to the American body politic. In this theory of dictatorship, the President isn’t the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, as per the Constitution, but of all the land. It’s the rule of one man, and of course the evil little dwarf behind the throne. Secret prisons, abductions, torture, domestic spying, declarations of Congressional laws as null and void… Nixon must have a boner in his tomb.

And now this. After all these years of claiming “executive privilege,” Cheney’s just come up yet another attack on our tripartite checks and balances. Now, because he's also President of the Senate, he claims he’s not a part of the Executive. (Nothing, of course, is inconsistent in the struggle for power.) Unfortunately, we have such a fragile, largely Potemkin-village style democracy that he’s gotten it away with it so far and probably will get away with until his richly deserved final heart attack. His party stands behind him, for their principle remains power; the loyal opposition is precisely that, loyal, like a beaten puppy; the media bows before him, with softballs from Brit Hume, caresses from Jim Lehrer, and a refusal to follow-up by Juan Williams; and the majority of the population either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. At heart, we get what we deserve. If we can keep it indeed!

Partisanship

These are desperate times when I’m reduced to quoting the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal* dripping with hateful filth and immorality as it usually is. But the other day, they arched their furry Tory brows at Bloomberg’s pontifications on the yearning for an end to partisan political strife and noted that there’s strife precisely because there’s so much at stake. Duh! The Journal should know! It’s the flagship of the war on a just America. These warriors speak for the concentration of money, and hence political power, in an undemocratic elite. The new robber barons have no problem using fundamentalists hungry for the irrational frenzy and sectarian hell of theocracy, after all, they’re the ones who eagerly adopted the Bourbons and the murderous myrmidion rednecks from the Democratic Party once American Apartheid was finally outlawed. Anything for power, my friends.

*I’ve long argued that the excellent reportorial crew of the Journal legitimizes its reactionary editorial pages. Never mind the “wall” separating news and editorial; the reporting makes the paper and gives the Op-Ed scumsuckers all the props they need. It’s only fitting that a man who represents the complete and utter immorality of capital, Rupert Murdoch, is set to eat the paper alive.

On a minor note, I liked how State Senate Kingpin Joe Bruno didn't beat around the bush: campaign finance reform will kill GOP power in the state. Here's to more truthtelling like this!

Welcome

...to my Secret Commonwealth. I've taken the name from Robert Kirk's 17th Century essay about the lingering beliefs in faery in Scotland, but that's otherwise quite irrelevant. What I’m after here is the notion of a secret commonwealth dissenting against the conformity of the neo-liberal consensus and the tyranny of the Market. I believe another world is possible. I believe that another country is, too. For all their bitter struggles over social issues, the two wings of the American Business Party are neo-liberal to the core, which is one reason the Democratic-wing can’t get any traction against Republican-wing domination: to do so would go against what used to be (and still should be) called the Money Power.

About my politics, I am a non-doctrinaire reformist leftist, sometimes socialist, sometimes anarchist, sometimes anarcho-syndicalist, always environmentalist, and always a democrat with a small “d.” Red, black and green, mixed together.

Of course, being in a minority amidst the ruins of capitalist triumphalism, sometimes I just need to vent. I hope to do it articulately. Considering the appalling condition of the U.S., there will be a lot of discuss.