Consult this, Bushpimps

So more ex-Bushies are starting to stab him in the back? Oooooooo, that's bold, less than a month before we flush him down the toilet of history. Because it's far too late to say you're sorry, shitheads. You are just as complicit. Fuck you for signing up with him from the get-go; fuck you for spending eight years enabling & defending him. The stain isn't going to come out.

Papal bull(shit)

The Pope is obsessed with sugar plum fairies and altar boys.

They can dish it out, but they sure can't take it

It is to laugh. Hedge fund pirates complaining about how bad the SEC‘s oversight was concerning Bernard Madoff? Please! Surely it’s some pointed comedy skit? After all, they’ve fought tooth and nail to gut regulation and they’ve purchased most the politicians to keep us, the people, as represented by the government, from regulating their high-end gambling pits. The Republicans, with plenty of back-up of the Democratic wing of the oligarchy, has spent a generation de-funding and perverting regulation. They put the proverbial foxes in charge of the hen house, and a great majority of the well-off, knowing how they would be further enriched by the organized looting of the American commonwealth that resulted, smiled upon it and said it was good. For a while, anyway. Mammon’s great fires are now consuming the high priests themselves. For a change, the conmen are the suckers. Just desserts.

Incoming!

I really enjoy watching the little shit ducking that Afghan shoe-bomb. Five more weeks until the Big Bush Flush!

Ponzi, ponzi, ponzi!

What has happened to the magic of capitalism? The sub-prime disaster, loan-sharking taken to new heights, virtual bank runs, hedge funds crashing, industry being strangled, and now 50 billion in Bernie’s scam. Where’s your Invisible Hand now? Where is the blessed Market, hallowed be its name?

American Taliban muders again

The Ecuadorian man who was jumped the other night in Bushwick has died. Drunk, he and his brother were walking down the street arm-in-arm, propping each other up. The men who jumped them shouted anti-gay and anti-immigrant slurs and attacked with a bat.

This comes at the same time that I hear that Ruban Diaz, a State Senator in the Bronx, is extorting the Democratic majority in that body to make sure there is no gay marriage law in the state. Diaz is a Christer taliban. What makes him particularly disgusting is that he’s also a member of a minority; racist assholes couldn’t tell the difference between him and an immigrant. Those who voted for Prop 8 in California, the hiphop pigs who pay their bills with homophobia and misogyny, and the perverters of Christianity, all these are co-conspirators in this murder.

Gladwell handling

Purveyor of conventional wisdom Malcolm Gladwell first came to my attention when I read a short piece of his in the New Yorker detailing his lovely lunch with a racist theoretician at a right-wing thinktank. I thought it a rather shameless piece of suck-up, even for the flagship of celebrity culture, and wrote in to the magazine saying that once journalists spoke truth to power, but now they supped with it. My letter was published, but their editing for space, as they like to say, took some of the sting out of it. Pity. Since then I’ve followed Gladwell’s ascension to the ranks of the best-sellers with dismay, but understanding; he tells people what they want to hear. The other week, I was in one of the supermarket book stores, (meeting someone in the rain; they are good for that, and restrooms) and an entire table right inside the door was piled high with his latest, which brings us the fresh news that the very successful had luck and help along the way. Here’s a swift demolition of his pabulum.

It's the fans, stupid

The sports/entertainment celebrity shots himself with an illegal gun. At the hospital, they violate their own protocol and call NFL security instead of the police. (The NFL has its own security force? In fact, private security is the norm now, a true cancer on the body democratic, for it is accountable only to profit.)

Of course, we all know that the rules do not apply to the hyper-rich, to the celebrity class, even boneheaded members of it who shoot themselves. Bread and circuses triumph uber alles in a nation of sheep and zombies.

Here in Putin-stan

"Emperor-Mayor" Bloomberg is a most appropriate title.

Finally!

Some good news. John Dingell is out of his powerful obstructionist position in the House. As a representative of the Big Three car makers, Dingell has worked tirelessly to protect his masters from higher gas milage requirements, safer cars, alternative fuels, and so on... and may be said as a result to have helped lead the fools to the edge of destruction they now teeter on. Dingellberries to you, dinosaur!

Henry Waxman will be taking his job on Energy & Commerce.

Change 0, Recycled Clintonism 6

So where’s the change? Appointments of “NAFTA” Emanuel and Eric Holder are re-cycling the disasters of Clintonism. More agents of that disaster, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, key players in the stripping of regulation from the financial markets, making them responsible for both the radically anti-democratic wealth gap and our economic meltdown, are still being touted as Treasury Secretary. That’s putting the looters in charge of the loot. Meanwhile, Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State would virtually ensure the continued destruction of Palestine, and thus endless war in Israel. And what does support for Joe Lieberman, admittedly tactical, tell us about accountability?

Sayonara, Ted Stevens

Incredible that the Alaska Senate race took so long to sort out. Who the fuck votes for a felon? A walking dead one, at that. Oops! It's the same voters who voted in Sarah Palin as governatrix, that’s who. Big strong independent Alaskans living on the great frontier, roughin’ it courtesy of the massive Federal sugar tit and their annual oil check. Sheesh! Little wonder that Senator-elect Begich is already in the pocket of the oil barons, and ready to despoil ANWR.

Figures

Lieberman's safe, with only 13 Democratic Senators voting against the turncoat in today's secret ballot on his future as chair of the important Homeland Security Committee . Much talk of unity, blah blah blah, but, of course, as we speak, the GOP is sharpening its knives, ready to carve up unity, togetherness, and other chimeras from the get-go. Lieberman's kinda-sorta mea culpa was the usual mush-mouthed bullshit: some of the things I'm quoted as saying I didn't say; some of them were misquoted; some I said, true, but while I was in the heat of the moment when I have no control over my mouth when I'm only one Karl Rove away from being a VP candidate again, only for the GOP this time. Blah blah blah. He's in the Senate for another four years. Sigh.

Say goodbye to Joe

Senator Joe Lieberman’s chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security committee is coming up for a secret vote, with Senators like Schumer and Durbin working to ax him from the job because of his support for McPalin, and Bill Clinton making calls to save his bacon. Now, that sounds ironic, since Lieberman came to fame with his moralizing speech taking Clinton to task during the Monica mess, but I always thought that smelled funny. The pious old fraud’s hit was probably sanctioned by Bill & Hill, and now Clinton is returning the favor. (This may foretell Bill’s ability to interfere with the new progressive majority’s desire for change; does the Great Triangulator still have the mojo to steer us rightward?)

Lieberman’s been liberal on some social issues, but his core constituency is made up of Connecticut’s insurance industry, and the likudniks and other Israel-firsters determined to abort any viable Palestinian state. He also claims that people without superstitious belief in an invisible sky god can’t be moral. Fuck that theocratic nonsense! He’s got nothing the new America needs. Throw him out of the Democratic caucus, and strip him of his chairmanship, already.

No to Summers

Well, the honeymoon's over. That first kick in the head in bed from your new spouse....

First Rahm "Nafta" Emanuel and now predatory capitalism pin-up Larry Summers? Please, no. Emanuel, at least, might function as Obama's whip, moving the many conservative Democrats in the House into line, but what does Summers have to recommend for himself? Nothing. He's part of the problem. He's part of the responsibility for the ruin we are in. He represents what we want to change. You can remind yourself of Summer's shitty career here and sign a petition against him here.

Sayonara Sarah

Admittedly, the gutter-fighters of the right have long knives, but the revelations coming out about Sarah Palin from McCain insiders are pretty amazing even for those of us who watched the Disaster from Alaska unfold. Palin didn’t know that Africa was a continent. Didn’t know what countries were involved in NAFTA. Refused to prep for the deer-in-headlights interviews. Had rages and tantrums. Greeted McCain campaign people in her towel (it’s ok, Dude Todd was in the room.) Went way off the reservation. Spent well over the 150,000 GOP sawbucks first reported on clothes….

Sigh. Just another GOP grifter, different only that she was a youngish woman and better looking than the usual gargoyles (male & female). But rather stunningly amateurish, too. Future career options don’t include much more than being a FOX network barker. Of course, no amount of revelation will diminish her standing among “the base” (in Arabic, that’s what “al Qaeda” means). Her façade of family, god, and guns trumps all reality among the lunatic fringe.

McCain & Co. are obviously trying to blame her for their defeat. But since McCain picked her, the buck stops there.

No on Prop 8/No on hate

I am sending out good vibes to the West Coast, where Prop 8, a fundamentalist plea for discrimination, is going to be a tough fight. The mullahs of the Catholic, Mormon, and right-wing Protestant churches have spent big-time for their dream of theocracy, so every thinking Californian has to get out and vote no on this piece of hate.

O bama, O mama!

spot on

Andrew Sullivan: "McCain has shown his character in this campaign: it's vicious, petty, lazy, reckless, vain and dishonorable. Campaigns do that. They reveal who someone really is."

Timeless

Somethings never change.

Yeah

Rags

Would-be tribune of the people Sarah Palin has been playing dress up on the RNC’s dime. $150,000-plus for her clothing allowance. Now, isn’t that special.

Hell, Ricky’s will sell you the wig for $49.99, the glasses for $9.99, the sash and glasses combo for $22.99. The special "sporty" edition of the wolf-killing M-16's only $9.99.

McLies

So “Joe the Plumber,” McBush’s best bud, isn’t a plumber, doesn’t make that much money, and is actually named Sam. Hmmm. So I guess his last name isn’t Sixpack. And that he isn’t married to a woman named “Hockey.”

Hate Talk Express

Have you seen them? The ones yelling “kill him” "traitor," and “terrorist” at McPalin rallies? The guy carrying a toy monkey with an “Obama” sticker around its head? The ignorant fool of a woman at the McPalin “town meeting” who said Obama was Arab, forcing McCain to correct her, and then try to salvage some of his dignity by defending his challenger, and being booed by his own supporters for doing so. (God, no wonder he called them "my fellow prisoners".)

So you’re voting for McPalin, eh, and you’re not personally a psychopath, racist asshole, or ignorant dumbfuck? OK, but you’ll still be known by the company you keep.

Jonathan Raban nicely summarizeds Sarah Palin's nativist & reactionary populist appeal. Smells like national socialism to me.

Cooked

So the polls tell us Indiana and other Bush-lovin’ states are very tight, forcing McPalin to campaign hard in what should be safe bets. But I think it’s a safer bet that Obama wont win Indiana. Why?

1. The Bradley Effect, in which white voters tell pollsters they will vote for a black candidate, but then don’t in the ballot box. That’s been figured as high as 7% in past elections.

2. The Supreme Court’s horrendous decision in April to deny voting rights to poor and rural and black Indianans: based on zero evidence of voter fraud, the state now demands a government-issued photo ID at the polls, and some 14.7% of the state’s potential electorate don’t have driver’s licenses, which are the de facto government issued ID.

Indiana, which nearly elected a Klansman governor in the 1920s until he was revealed to be dipping his white Protestant wicket in a woman not his wife (morality saves the day!), shows itself quite southern with this outrageous voter suppression law.

Combined with the usual dirty tricks, voter intimidation and suppression, voter list purges, and the denial of citizenship to 5.3 million people in the criminal justice system -- not to mention the inequitable distribution of voting machines, etc. -- the race is already cooked in some states. (Check out the Brennan Center's report here; an example of the New Jim Crow: in three states, 20% of the black male residents can't vote because they're serving, or have served, time). There’s been very little attention paid to these issues, which are hardly new. There was some news about a Virginia effort to strip college students of their voting rights, but that brought howls and was abandoned.

Simply put, as a minority-appeal faction, the GOP must aggressively cheat, and has to count on low voter turn-out. For instance, remember the so-called Gingrich Revolution? Less than a quarter of the American electorate actually voted for it .

My politics

Basically, there’s one political party with two fractious wings. I sometimes call it the Business Party, sometimes the Corporate Party. Its antecedents took power early on – from the beginning, actually, in a revolution from above of landed aristo-wannabes and merchants, and its incarnations have been called (by Andrew Jackson) the Money Power, and (by the Abolitionists) the Slave Power. Today, it’s a corporate-dominated, neoliberal version of capitalism in which the wealthiest one percent of the population owns more than the bottom 50%, and its tenets are shared across a rather narrow “bipartisan” spectrum. (“Neoliberalism” is essentially laissez-faire capitalism on a global scale with the largest military in the world backing it up.) The $700B transfer of the commonwealth to corrupt Wall Street speculators and usurious bankers shows that synergy quite nicely. As did Bill Clinton’s kowtowing fealty to the bond market.

The “right wing” of this ruling party is called Republican; the “left wing” is called Democrat. In a corporate polity, that “left” is in no way actually leftist. Rather it’s mildly reformist; capitalism with a human face, as personified in its current leader, B. Obama. As I read it, in the last quarter of the 20th century, the Democrats became the faction that used to be called Rockefeller Republicans, self-styled enlightened businessmen, willing to give a sop to the working class, accept that women are human beings, too, and build an new school or two. The Republicans, meanwhile, sunk into a retrograde swamp of reaction. The mire includes a chilling mash-up of Bible-thumpers, Birchers, disciples of Father Coughlin and other antisemites, libertarians (right anarchists), neoconservatives, Know-Nothings, and the new old South’s confederate leftovers, a fecal brew in the service of this generation’s robber barons.

Unlike Clinton, who took baby steps backwards with his wretched “triangulation,” Obama will take some baby steps forward. But real change? The point is that the system does not allow real change. After all, the “founders” didn’t want the rabble involved. Everything we’ve gotten since has come at an enormous price of blood and treasure against the system. The rotten boroughs of the Senate and the Electoral College are only a couple of the archaic constitution’s bulwarks against change. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, is returning to its historical role as safeguard of the wealthy and the policemen who protect the wealthy. Real change can’t come from within.

Put another way, the Democrats are the Mensheviks and the Republicans are the Bolsheviks of this capitalist party. Of course, intramural conflict is sometimes some of the bloodiest. Since faith in the basic economic power structure is a given, the two wings battle each other on the symbolic and cultural level. Hence the vital importance of emotion, of stories and characters, things easy to manipulate, script, and produce. Our politics are stunningly emotional, at least for some component of that proportion of people who actually partake (in the best of times, it’s barely half of the voting population, which is indicative of what a charade our democracy really is). Like advertising, the irrational appeal is essentially false, a way of making you feel a part of the action but, of course, not really anything but another cog in the machine. Historically, the irrational in politics was also the primary tool of fascism.

Republicans use greed, fear, hate, resentment, racism, and ignorance as their weapons of choice. The Democrats, so frequently hapless (remember the flailings of Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, & Kerry?) use wishy-washy hope, idealism, and dreams of a better place. Is it any wonder they are so frequently out-gunned, even though a majority of Americans agree with their mild, reformist take on capitalism’s ravages. Indeed, it’s the tanking of the economy at the hands of its corrupt masters that may propel Obama to the White House in a month.

The neighboring country of Eyeran

Is Iran going to be the October Surprise McBush needs to win one month from today? Wondered that when I saw the headline about the Iranians forcing down a plane over their airspace. Bush still has time to do more damage. And McBush has few other options, since the character issue isn't playing during an economic crisis. According to his book-banning running mate, Ms. Taliban, war is god’s will. "In’shallah" as the Ruskies Inuit tree huggers Arabs say.

Sun sets

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it.... the fifth conservative paper in town, The New York Sun, has set. Sayonara, kids! I only just got the word, so I obviously won't be missing you. Subsidized by fat cats, it made a play by icing itself with well-written cultural chitchat, but the stale cake under the sugar was avowedly Israel-first. May it presage the Likudniks’ loss of influence here in the U.S. and the end of their jones for permanent war in the Middle East.

Gopmob

The lunatic fringe is on the loose. And McBush is going to need every single one of them at the polls. They are his only hope. They, along with the usual voter suppression, and all the sub rosa appeals to fear, racism, and resentment. It’s going to be an ugly month. The “silent majority,” as Nixon called them, of cretins, crackers, & paranoiacs. Palin is feeding them the red meat of lies they need to grovel at their master’s feet. Gun-toting, Bible-misunderstanding, plastic-fetus-doll-clutching. Pallid as zombies and just as dead. Hollow-eyed religious psychos. Gaunt or fat, a people of surprising ugliness, for their debasement and depravity is written all over them. An incipiently fascist mob, there to be exploited. And the Republicans, who’ve based a generation of power on them, are only too eager to do so.

Das Capital

Adam Smith on another of the myths of the free-market, where profits are privatized and loses are socialized. (Don’t like it? Remember who owns the government.)

“When workers combine, masters ... never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen.”

Predictable

Unsurprisingly, the House has passed the emergency the-sky-is-falling $700B Wall Street Speculators Conservation Bill. Actually, it’s going to cost much more than that because of all the sweeteners and bribes they put in to buy the bad little representatives who didn’t obey their mommy and daddy the first time on Monday. Chalk another one up for the ruling (bipartisan) Business Party.

Hey

What if all those people, good solid citizens, I’m guessing, who do these innumerable charity runs for this and that disease instead ran downtown and occupied their Senator’s and Representative’s office? And demanded some serious funding for public health, for medical research, for a simple system of national health for all Americans? And demanded some reasonable health priorities instead of the Pentagon's death priorities? And demanded that we as a nation put people above corporations? Sign me up for that run, kids!

McCain/Palin 08

John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin tells you everything you need to know about the man’s willingness to be President, as well as his readiness. The choice was short-sighted, cynical, and incompetent. For someone whose major overt claim to the office is his experience, military background, and appeal to national security, it was a disaster. He wants to put her a heartbeat (an old weak heartbeat) away from the Presidency. But of course, he’s a Republican, and his Party has been captured by the American Taliban, apocalyptic fundamentalist know-nothings who claim to be Christian, and he was desperate for their vote. The “Maverick” needs a new trademark.

And Palin herself tells you everything you need to know about contemporary American politics. She’s sold as a product summarized in little blurbs and jingles like “pitbull in lipstick,” and “hockey mom” that change like soap commercials over time. The contempt of her handlers for American democracy knows no bounds. Not that there isn’t any substance behind the marketing façade. It’s just that it’s so ugly, as grotesque as that which gets revealed when a rock is overturned. A creationist, she’s a tool of the oil industry. She’s a book banner. She’s vindictive and ready to go outside the law just like Cheney and Bush. She’s as fine a daughter of the American Taliban as the GOP’s turn to fundamentalism has produced. She proudly touts her daughter’s “choice” about her pregnancy while wishing to deny the rest of American women any choice at all in such matters.

Flame out

An excellent analysis of the "pity party" stirring in the media over the awful things that are being done to poor Sarah Palin, the erstwhile pitbull who is now revealed as a deer in the headlights. Cry me a fucking river says the author, Rebecca Traister...“When your project is reliant on gaining the support of women whose reproductive rights you would limit, whose access to birth control and sex education you would curtail, whose healthcare options you would decrease, whose civil liberties you would take away and whose children and husbands and brothers (and sisters and daughters and friends) you would send to war in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and wherever else you saw fit without actually understanding international relations, I don't feel bad for you.”

Succinctly

"The $700 bailout bill is being driven by fear not fact. This is too much money, in too short of time, going to too few people, while too many questions remain unanswered. Why aren't we having hearings…Why aren't we considering any other alternatives other than giving $700 billion to Wall Street? Why aren't we passing new laws to stop the speculation which triggered this? Why aren't we putting up new regulatory structures to protect the investors? Why aren't we directly helping homeowners with their debt burdens? Why aren't we helping American families faced with bankruptcy? Isn't time for fundamental change to our debt-based monetary system...?" Rep. Dennis Kucinich

Palinomics

Like Dan Quayle before her, the disaster that is Sarah Palin must be kept isolated, allowed only before well-managed crowds of the faithful and fed in tiny portions to the powderpuffs of television. They’re not even letting her fundraise. She must have special treatment in the one VP debate, where there will be no follow-up questions. In that context, she should by rights be squashed like a bug as a lightweight nutcase, but o, that would be disrespectful, wouldn’t it, for the greatest case of GOP affirmative action since hanging judge Clarence Thomas?

Bullshit Meter Breaks

From zero (“our economy is fundamentally sound”) to 90 (“Panic! Crisis! Disaster!”).

Virtual JFK

I’ve never been seduced by the Kennedys, for I came to political awareness much too late for that. The best thing to be said about JFK and RFK was that they could bend with the tide of history, as when the civil rights movement forced them to respond. People are always looking for leaders, but it is only when they make their leaders act that we get anything real done.

The documentary Virtual JFK suggests that President Kennedy would not have escalated military involvement in Vietnam. There were only “advisors” in-country at the time of his assassination; LBJ sent in combat troops; then, Nixon, whose election-year claim of a peace plan was bullshit, presided over the final years of slaughter. The movie’s thesis is based on earlier incidents in which JFK did not follow the recommendations of his war-mongering advisors during these crises: Bay of Pigs, Laos, Cuban Missile, Berlin Wall. That took some balls for a young, seemingly lightweight guy who’d only been a Senator briefly. (Of course, judging from all that shtupping, he had moy mucho cojones.)

In Oliver Stone’s hyperactive JFK, it’s argued that the military and LBJ team up to whack the President so that the war would go on. This doc is certainly more interesting than that nonsense. You can second-guess anything, of course, but I think a couple of things are missing in Virtual JFK, as well as in the 1000 days mythology in general. Kennedy was a hardcore Cold Warrior. He played up a non-existent “missile gap” with the dreaded Reds to win the 1960 election (of course, it was the dead of Cook Co. who won it for him), showing he knew the value of politicizing national security, and how important it was to undercut the GOP on that front. (Recall that the GOP had savaged the Democrats for “losing,” as they so presumptively said, China. Could JFK stand up to the charge of “losing” Vietnam during the 1964 election? As McPalin knows, we Americans like to “win” wars even if we don’t know what they’re about.) He, like every American President since FDR, has been a complete creature of the national security state, it’s assumptions, aims, and methods. He might not have believed in the heavy hand of the Pentagon, but he was right in there with the social scientist/cowboys like W.W. Rostow who, neocon-like, thought they could change the world with their ideas. The best and the brightest in their narrow ties, plus fortified hamlets and targeted assassinations, that was the ticket. Cf. his romance with Special Forces and counter-insurgency tactics, flipside of the Peace Corps.

In short, I don’t buy the film. I’m not sure why it’s even being sold except as a vanity project of the academic who’s the narrator and co-producer. The most interesting thing about it is seeing the vintage footage, especially the press conferences.

McPalin

Now that the "lipsticked wingnut" has been overshadowed by “it’s the casino economy, stupid,” I heard John McCain say, “We’re going to take care of the workers.” And I laughed all morning long...

He’s going to do it by filibustering minimum wage increases, make sure we have no universal health care, continue the non-enforcement of labor laws, further the busting of unions, and keep the nation’s money channeling upwards to the tiny top of the pyramid with his tax cuts. Just like he and his party have always done.

What a lying piece of shit.

Vox Populism

I don’t know if Sarah Palin is going to burn up like the proverbial pan flash or carry McBush to the White House, but I do know how the Democrats can challenge her splashy appeal. It’s called populism, only it’s not the reactionary, know-nothing, fundamentalist, cowboy kind Palin’s peddling. I also know that the Democrats are deathly afraid of populism -- what the Republicans like to call “class war” as they wage it so successful for their masters -- because the Democrats are just as in hock to a tiny masterly elite. Not the same people, of course, but the same class of people. Back when Andy Jackson was around, it was called the Money Power. Later the Slave Power. More than just the names change, of course, but the principal remains. When the strong weight of the state is captured by elite interests, the ruling oligarchies crush us. But when the strong weight of the state represents the great majority of us, we have a much more equitable economic system, and a much more equitable democratic one, as well.

The Democrats have the titans of the financial services industry, currently imploding the economy, and the tech business -- all swells who think they are broad-mined -- in their camp, while the Republicans have the old extractive industries, old money, and the giant shopkeepers. Biden, after all, is a long-time water-carrier for the usurious bankers who camp out in Delaware to take advantage of its harlot-like incorporation laws. Like New York’s Chuck Schumer, who represents the financial services industry so well, these tools give us scraps of social liberalism wrapped around predatory capitalism and call it “progressive.” And of course, Obama’s change rhetoric, so shameless poached by McBush, is not about fundamental change to the economic structure of the land. Until it is, the yahoos are going to run to Palin’s bogus cultural noise and eat the red meat of hate and fear, regardless of how detrimental it is to their own interests, (jobs, pocketbooks, mortgage payments, public sphere, and social/civic services).

Grand Guignol Old Party

The modern Republican Party is the bastard child of Barry Goldwater. Goldwater mellowed in his old age, and looks sage-like (as would a rock), in comparison to Bush II, but when it counted he was on the wrong side of history, standing firm against civil and voting rights for African Americans. He lost big in 1964, but the true believers, a crowd that used to be known as the “lunatic fringe” (redneck racists, know-nothings, Bible-thumping fundamentalists, McCarthyites, Birchers, etc.) vowed revenge, and ended up capturing the party from its liberal internationalist business grandees. Sort of capturing it, for of course the party is still the flagship of oligarchy and plutocracy, the old Money Power; culturally, however, it is the arm of white resentment and reaction. The white counter-revolution is profoundly ironic because it is aligned now with the very capitalist powers which immiserates it. Nixon brilliantly worked to realign the Neo-Confederacy from its long allegiance to the Democrats (because, in a nice transference, it was the Republicans who had ended slavery). Reagan triumphed with a self-styled “movement” of mostly ethnic and Catholic ex-working class, who swallowed the pap of god, guns, and guts as they were deindustrialized and down-sized by the masters they rushed to serve, and suburban bourgeois afraid of falling into the widening gap created by their bosses. An unending supply of enemies (commies, hippies, darkies, femnazis, queers, raghead terrorists, and, this year’s model, back for a return engagement, “illegals”) has always been available to focus the anger and rage.

But Republican power, which is essentially authoritarian and plutocratic, is obviously a minority taste. In addition to the very successful flimflam, it’s predicated on the suppression and disenfranchisement of voters. It’s little wonder their convention is a horror show: their platform is medieval; their candidate is desperate to masquerade as something other than the standard bearer of the disasters of laissez-faire oligarchy; their vice presidential candidate is essentially Dan Quayle in drag, red meat for the American Taliban who work tirelessly to put the plutocrats in command.

when will it end?

After violence and sex, it is athletic prowess, when combined with primitive nationalism, that is unbeatable as the winning ingredient for bread and circus spectacles. The lesson of the Genocide Games for China and GE/NBC and other sponsoring corporations is clear. Authoritarian capitalism is the future, finally putting the nail into the lie that private wealth accumulation by a state-controlling oligarchy is somehow democratic. Bush, Putin, Berlusconi and the other gangster bosses ruling the globe can rest easy. The global peasantry is easily manipulated by pretty-shiny gold baubles, canned dramas, steroidal wonders, and prepubescent mutants. The people of Tibet, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Burma, not to mention the vast majority of Chinese? Well, fuck them, Michael Phelps* is swimming!

My favorite stories out of the “Games” so far, after the bogus fakery of the opening charade, is that there are officially sanctioned cheers for the audience, and that, while the state there lavishes billions on producing medal-winners in a system of conscripted child labor, they starve recreational facilities for most Chinese.

*It is instructive of our present moment that Phelps looks like a jarhead -- slang for a pupal Marine, shorn of his humanity to kill -- while Mark Spitz was a hippie in comparison.

Oligarchy Olympics

It’s only fitting the Torture President should attend the opening spectacle of the Genocide Olympics™. The Beijing “Games” promise to be an IOC-corrupted, drug-addled, hormone-twisted, gender-bent, corporate-sponsored orgy in celebration of the capitalist dictatorship’s coming out party, with little vanity-project athletes smiling for the cameras amid the deadly smog, wholesale repression, and ugliness of Han nationalism. All shoveled at us by the world’s leading companies.

Some coming out: China is successfully elbowing the US out of the way as the world’s greatest sponsor of state terror, leaving a trail of murder and destruction in Sudan, Burma, Zimbabwe, and Tibet, with Central Africa and other parts of Asia next up to the chopping block. China’s utter contempt for its own people, the vast majority of whom are being exploited by a tiny elite, nicely matches Bush II’s fathomless contempt for American democracy and the great majority of Americans. It’ll be a match made in hell. I hope he leaves his business card; come January, there will be much to be made in fixing lucrative connections between the oligarchies.

On Bush, and Helms

"His America, like that of his sponsors, is a population to be manipulated for the power to be had, for the money to be made. He is the subject of jokes and he jokes himself about his clumsiness with words, but his mispronunciations and malapropisms suggest a mind of half-learned language that is eerily compatible with his indifference to truth, his disdain for knowledge as a foundation of a democratic society." E.L. Doctorow has the criminal's number.
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I had thought Jesse Helms was long burning in hell, but it turns out the racist homophobic pig lived until the 4th of July. Well, he's being rended of his polluted fat in the fires now, isn't he? What a shit stain on the American flag, for half a century the pure cracker in service of his Bourbons (not the drink, the ruling white elite of the neo-Confederacy).

Bushslime

It’s exhausting, isn’t it? The criminality, corruption, incompetence, vindictiveness, and ideological blindness of the Bush regime goes on and on and on. The news out of the Justice Department’s inspector general office, that only ideologues were hired for summer internships, reminds me of neocon summer camp in Iraq. These children with connections and nothing else were sent to Iraq in the early days of the occupation. Clueless punks, their only claim to the mission was that they were Bushies, true believers, ignorant little frat boys. The disaster they helped make continues, a murderous debacle that has now lasted longer than US involvement in the Second World War. They’re lawyerly pals now run the Department of Justice, which has been turned into a partisan sewer, something even the GOP’s premier slime king himself, Richard Nixon, can envy from his perch in hell.

Her future?

With Ted Kennedy in bad shape, there’s an opening for the new liberal lion of the Senate. Senator Clinton should reach for it. She should shuck her stinking triangulating ways, renounce her shameless war-mongering, and make a stand among the 100. The fight is a long one, but it’s a good one, the best there is. The old white men who still run that outrageously undemocratic body need to have a fire lit under their plutocratic asses. She’s got lots of years left in her. It’s hers for the taking….

So the Pope and the Bush had a talk on the “fundamental moral values”? That’s the best joke I’ve heard all year. In the pseudo-state’s lush gardens, no less. A troll in the garden. I fell on the floor laughing at the thought. Bush greated Ratzy with "Your eminence, you’re looking good." The laughs keep coming.

Political economies

It’s fascinating how much attention is given to Vice Presidential candidates before an election. Afterwards, or course, they largely disappear -- unless they’re puppet-masters like Dick “Fuck Democracy” Cheney.

Barack Obama, fresh from pledging his fealty to toeing the disastrous Israeli-right line – guaranteeing continued colonialism, land theft, balkanization, and, not surprisingly, Palestinian reaction to these continued efforts to obliterate them as a people – is now hunting for a Veep. Needless to say, it must not be Hilary Clinton.

It’s yet another numbing irony of our politics that Clinton enjoys greater (white) working class support than Obama, since her DLC-wing of the Party has done so much to destroy the last vestiges of the (white) working class (cf. NAFTA) in the name of the neoliberal order. As Jesse Jackson showed, the white populist revolt, usually ignored by the Democrats, is a rich source of votes when not abandoned to the “god, guns, and gays” (and race) confidence game of the Right. This is why I think someone like Jim Webb or John Edwards should be Obama’s Veep; a populist firebrand who can shore up this flank, and then spend the next four years pushing hard for the long hard struggles ahead (global warming, health care, the war).

More than 3/4ths of adult American don’t have 4-year college degrees. What’s the matter with Kansas? What’s the matter with Manhattan, more likely: a liberal upper middle class and some enlightened rich folk don’t make much of a majority. But it’s this thin spectrum of the ruling class which funds the Democrats, making it a bourgeois party par excellence, beholden to the money. The Democrats, of course, are held up by African American voters, who aren’t much participants in the bourgeois pie. Meanwhile, the Republicans, equally bourgeois, are held up by poor whites, who also don’t get much more than ideological crumbs.

Harper's

“Everybody” reads the New Yorker, but for my money, Harper’s is where you should be if you want to break out of conventional wisdom. The latest issue is particularly rich: Mark Slouka wonders why Americans have become so subservient to “boss culture” authority, bootlicking and celebrity-worshipping, kissing up as we get kicked from above; Jonathan Rowe explains why a terminally ill man going through a divorce is the best thing for the Gross Domestic Product, that bogus and destructive way of measuring the economy (in the May issue, Kevin Phillips gave the history of the numbers racket, in which both Republican and Democratic regimes have fixed official statistics to mislead the rest of us); Garret Keizer examines the Episcopal Church’s battle over homosexual bishops, while Rome (the planet, the poor, etc.) burns. I’m half way through that last article, so I don’t know what else is to come, but I know it beats the shit out of the star-fucking that the Fleet Street hack Tina Brown debased the New Yorker with. Yes, I know she's gone, but the magazine remains largely what she made it: light, celebrity-oriented, fashionable, and soothing of its readership. There certainly are things worth reading it in, but they are few and far between.

Quaking

The response to the Chinese earthquake makes for an interesting comparison with cyclone-devastated Burmese. Authoritarian states are supposed to be good at this sort of thing, making the trains run on time and being in control, but as we saw with the Bush non-response to New Orleans’ destruction, there’s a direct connection between democracy/citizenship and responsibility, including the state’s caring for the people it represents. China’s doing a relatively good job, even loosening their grip on their pravadamedia, but they realize they have little choice; the magnitude of the disaster, which reveals the ruling military-based kleptocracy in a most unfavorable light, means they really have to deliver to tamp down any dissatisfaction among the people. China in recent years has been bursting with little rebellions, mostly from the brutalized peasantry, who see all the talk of happy-happy shop-shop from their masters and spit in disgust. Nationalism is an excellent crutch, but it only goes so far. Their masters fear them terribly and know they can’t let them down here

Meanwhile, the murderous myrmidons of Myanmar are only too happy to see the Karen people of the Irrawaddy delta killed off. Naomi Klein calls it “laissez-faire ethnic cleansing.” As clients of China, who are hungry for Burman’s hydrocarbons, the generals don’t fear their own people. The big panda is on their side. And so is, shamefully, India, a democracy that should know better.

But it takes more than democracy, doesn’t it? The Italians, back under capo di capo Berlusconi, are whipping up for some internal ethnic cleansing of their own. Last week there was a petit (bloodless) pogrom against a Roma encampment in Napoli (a bitter pun) and a roundup of undesirables. And many Italians, suffering under near universal Camorra-ization, another version of the kleptocracy, are only too happy to find a scapegoat in migrant workers.

people have the power

Mark Kurlansky’s Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea is a brief, intense, and invigorating book I’d recommend to all. In a culture that glorifies violence -- indeed, our entertainment system is largely predicated on violence (particularly against women) – and fetishizes militarism (about half the federal budget pays for past, present, and future wars), it’s good to be reminded of the Anabaptists, Quakers, and other non-conformists, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, AJ Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation, Bayard Rustin and CORE, King, SANE and the anti-nuclear movement, women’s liberation, gay liberation, Solidarity, the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union and it’s “bloc” (hideous appellation!), People Power in the Philippines, the defeat of the PRI in Mexico, the examples do pile up even though those invested in power do not want us to think about them.

civil fairness

California’s Supreme Court’s decision on “gay marriage” is a no-brainer. It’s an issue of civil rights and fairness, plain and simple. The haters and fear-mongers confuse civil unions with religious ones, which are completely different. Personally, I think the state has no place in regulating adult sexuality, nor in defining who gets the economic benefits, which is very much what marriage is about in civil society, but as long as it does, then there must be equity.

Now the Right, led by such liars and hypocrites as Vito Fossella, Larry Craig, and a cascade of whore-mongering preachers, is going to use this legal decision to gin up fundamentalist votes in November. They are already gathering signatures for a state-wide referendum to overturn the CA Court’s decision.

The American taliban must be fought. Unenlightened heterosexuals are pretty clueless how fundamentalism is ultimately very much a threat to us, as well, for their agenda includes banning all birth control and making women nothing more than incubators.

Sinking feeling

Thomas Powers is none too optimistic on the continuing wars, regardless of who our next President is:

"At first, perhaps, all runs smoothly. Then things begin to happen. The situation on the first day has altered by the tenth. Some faction of Iraqis joins or drops out of the fight. A troublesome law is passed, or left standing. A helicopter goes down with casualties in two digits. The Green Zone is hit by a new wave of rockets or mortars from Sadr City in Baghdad. The US Army protests that the rockets or mortars were provided by Iran. The new president warns Iran to stay out of the fight. The government in Tehran dismisses the warning. This is already a long-established pattern. Why should we expect it to change? So it goes. At an unmarked moment somewhere between the third and the sixth month a sea change occurs: Bush's war becomes the new president's war, and getting out means failure, means defeat, means rising opposition at home, means no second term. It's not hard to see where this is going."

Powers also reminds us how Afganistan has been the ruin of Empires: the British, twice, the Russians, and now the US.

Veto Vito

Last week, Republican Congressman Vito Fossella, one of the Biggest Little Bushes in the region, was revealed as a drunkard, luckily pulled off the road before he maimed or killed someone. This week, he was revealed as an adulterer, fathering another mouth to feed by a woman not his wife. Next week, will it be complaints from alter boys?

The Staten Island/Brooklyn Congressman has yet to go down in flames, but there’s plenty of kindling. And I’m bringing the popcorn. How sweet it is! This, after all, is the sleazebag who charged his opponent in 2004, Frank Barbaro, with being a communist and a pedophile. I know, I was stuffing mailboxes in Bay Ridge (Barbaro handily won the Brooklyn side of the 13th CD) when I found one of Fossella’s glossy campaign fliers. Not a word about Vito’s good work as a tool of the Bush/Cheney agenda, needless to say; it was all about smearing his opponent with vague connections, associations, and lies. Classy work, Vito, you little shitball.

Disenfranchisement

The long struggle over justice at the ballot box took a huge hit from anti-democracy forces yesterday. The Supreme Court has declared an Indiana Republican effort to limit access to the polls constitutional. Bullshitting with a bogus fraud argument, the state GOP, well-aware of its minority appeal, sees limiting rural, poor, black, physically-handicapped, and elderly voters as one of the ways to maintain its power. (Some 12% of voting-age residents of Indiana don’t have driver’s license, btw, a serious number in an era of razor-thin margins.) Surprisingly, Stevens joined with Business Party man Roberts & the pallid Kennedy, while radical-reactionaries Scalia and Thomson (who don’t believe there is any right to vote) teamed up with Scalito, to say that this effort towards disenfranchisement was cool. Scalia, Thomas, & Scalito all wanted more, of course, in their effort to roll-back the 20th century. So Stevens, some say, strategically went this Plessy-way to keep the swinger Kennedy out of the clutches of the motherfuckerjudges, and allowing for future challenges to this appalling, partisan betrayal of democracy.

Pitiful

With Clinton’s 10% our long national nightmare continues.

The problem: she can’t win nationally because of the misogyny, and that other irrational hate, that of the lunatics. Plus, what a shitty President she'll make, as her stunningly immoral nuclear-weapons mongering the other day showed. Muy macho! Not to mention psychotic.

But her winning Pennsylvania’s working class/Catholic white ethnics means Obama probably can’t win them in the fall. The “Reagan democrats” will vote racially/culturally in lieu of the class battle that the Democrats have refused to wage for a generation (duh! for the simple reason that the party is ruled by the ruling class). It seems unlikely that Obama will reach for the necessary populism. And if not, Dr. Strangejaw, John McCain, a.k.a. Bush III, will be the next President.

To market, to market

Let the market decide!

The trouble with the market (hallowed be its name, amen, etc.) is that it’s people. Just like Soyent Green. An interesting NPR piece on thieving mortgage brokers. None of the interviewed did anything nasty, naturally, but they knew about all sorts of scams going on. There was just so much money in play, hardly anybody could say no to the lies, forgeries, cons, by the brokers, bankers, and other wankers.

Meanwhile, the same crowd that cheered on the frenzy is now wagging its finger at the suckers. Tom Tomorrow does it nicely here.

Enemies of the People

I. Little Dougie Feith, called by his critics the “undersecretary for defense fiascos,” the “Michael Brown of the Iraq disaster,” and the “dumbest fuck in the room” (I may be paraphrasing that general’s verdict) has a new book out. The son of a bitch should be in prison for war crimes and mass murder; instead he’s a “distinguished” faculty member at Georgetown and now the proud daddy of a book (wonder who the ghost was?) trying to shuck off his portion of guilt. But his real legacy continues to grow: 4333 "coalition" military killed; over 1000 mercenaries killed; tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis killed.

II. Mark Penn was Clinton's chief strategist until yesterday. We've long known he was a corporte whore, working directly against the interests the Dems claim to support. His company's clients include union busting firms, mercenary companies like Blackwater, and the neo-liberal capos of foreign countries. There was a lot of bad blood between him and other Clintonistas, but only because he was doing such a crappy job of getting the nomination, not for his anti-populist, anti-working class, pro-neoliberal life's work. This is what you're voting for when you vote for Clinton.

Genocide Games

Putting aside the International Olympic Committee (IOC), one of the more corrupt organizations in recent history, and the Chinese state, both one of the more corrupt and most repressive (corruption + army) nations in existence, we are presented with two arguments for the Genocide Olympics: that “the Games,” as the dopefest/nationalist frenzy/commercialized spectacle is called, shouldn’t be politicized; and that the athletes, the poor athletes, have spent their whole lives waiting for this moment and shouldn’t be denied.

Not politicized? The whole point is political; China’s hosting, as it’s so endlessly repeated, for its “coming out” party on the world stage. It’s a propaganda exercise for them, plain and simple. Not to speak of the rank nationalism, as every nation grasps for medals like the brokers in a scrum over the money thrown into the trading pit by Abbie Hoffman & Co. And speaking of money, with the billions in sponsorship and advertising, it’s all about the reactionary politics of international capitalism.

But what of the athletes? Isn’t the real question why should the rest of us care about them? When did a few thousand excellent specimens get to dictate world events and traduce human rights? Does their egoism have the remotest equivalence to the raped, tortured, and murdered in Tibet, Darfur, and Burma, not to speak of the prison camps and other manifestations of repression in the host nation? There was a piece on Genocide Games-bound BMX riders on NPR the other day: so rad, they’re stoked, dude! So’s NBC. Show ‘em the money; they’ll need it wash off the blood.

Why

Why did she vote for Bush’s war? Clinton says she didn’t know then what she knows now. Does anybody believe this? Twenty-three other Senators knew something then, and they voted against the war. Plenty of us outside of the Senate Club said Bush’s war would be: a mistake, illegal, imperialist, nothing to do with 9/11, a disaster in the making, and a blood-bath to come. So what the hell didn’t she know? Where were her vaunted smarts, competence, & experience when it really meant something? Tens of thousands killed, a tab in the trillions, a generation maimed, bloated war-profiteering, a nation dismembered, a region made more instable, unprecedented Presidential power, and no end in sight. And she is one of the responsible ones.

Does anyone really doubt that she voted yes because she was thinking of her political career, her viability, her run for President, and little else? The war was, after all, supposed to be quick and easy, relatively painless (for “our” boys and girls); a yes vote was also supposed to be quick and easy, certainly painless in the face of the criminal cries of “treason” by the war-party. And the benefits of voting with Bush? It would show she was strong on national defense, a patriot, someone with the toughness to commit other people’s children to war. She was playing by Republican rules, taking the bait hook, line, and sinker. In her otherwise cautious Senate career, Clinton has more than proven that she will support the Pentagon’s grotesquely warping budget and otherwise show she has pro-military balls; a quick little war would be the ne plus ultra of the Clinton tradition of “triangulation,” or absorbing the right’s psychosis as its own, ever dragging the “moderate” into the depths.

Stadium Bullshit

We killed Boomberg’s West Side boondoggle of stadium, but the tab for the new Yankees and Mets stadium is approaching 2.5 billion dollars. The indefatigable Neil deMause is on the beat. About half of that is our money, commonwealth funneled to sky boxes for the rich, and thick wedges of profits for the owners of those teams, and the very, very few lucky boys who make millions playing the game. What a fucking waste. In the Bronx, a public park was sacrificed to private profit. Yankees fans, many of them well-off folks from the ‘burbs, should enjoy the shows to come, knowing the proles will paying for their precious proxy entertainment for generations to come. Sometimes, I really do wish we had a free-market instead of the in-plain-sight thievery that is our state/capitalist model.

China

Corporatists and their politicians have long been telling us that capitalism will democratize China. Bullshit. Authoritarianism and capitalism work hand-in-hand, as the American experience in the 19th century and the Asian Tiger economies of the late 20th show so well. The Chinese elite, a nexus of Communist Party and People’s Army, along with the new bandit kings, likes its power too much to democratize. It’s far too corrupt to allow for any kind of openness. Indeed, there’s so much discontent in the nation that they are terrified of reform, thinking even a little loosening will blew the whole filthy system apart. They will, and have, used the tanks to crush any threats. This is usually phrased by their apologists, who are also often their hirelings (see: Henry Kissinger) as their fear of chaos; what this means is that they know the chaos is aimed at their fat throats.

Unfortunately, Han nationalism remains a potent weapon in the hands of the ruling class. Whenever I hear a man-in-the-street interview with a propaganda-stuffed nationalist in China, I hear their like in America: know-nothing, duped, proudly militant in their ignorance.

Free Tibet. End the genocide in Darfur. Free Burma.

Boycott the Olympics.

RIP Iraq

It’s the fifth anniversary of Bush’s war in Iraq. Nearly 4000 Americans have died, a small proportion of the entire death toll wrought by this madness, but, significantly, those tens of thousands of Iraqi do not count. They aren’t real people, those slaughtered thousands, in the American mind. In addition, two million Iraqis are internally displaced; two million of them live wretched as exiles in surrounding countries. Tens of thousands killed! That damns this war, and this country.

War-monger John McCain was over there the other day, completely complicit in the folly and slaughter, eager to continue on until some undefined “victory.” Whole hog into the neocon fantasy, McCain’s victory is a massive, permanent military presence in the region to safeguard the continued ruin of the planet through oil.

An excellent article on Pakistan: the recent breaking of the feudal landowners’ power; the rise of the middle class; the military’s dawning realization that they bred a monster in Islamic terrorism (lately striking at the military; talk about blowback).

Spitzer

Don’t cry for Spitzer. He was no progressive. These overweening hyper-prosecutors (Rudy G., anyone?) are incredibly dangerous, even when they go after the bad guys. Tom Robbins, whose piece in this week’s Voice is quite good, notes Spitzer’s similarity to the last golden boy prosecutor to ride the political system up, up, and almost away: Thomas Dewey. (As in Dewey Defeats Truman.) In 1936, Dewey became famous for putting away Lucky Luciano, but it eventually developed that he did it crookedly, with perjured testimony. Now, Luciano was undoubtedly a mobster, but that is no excuse for subverting the rule of law. Dewey eventually helped get Luciano out of jail and exiled, perhaps out of his own guilt.
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Now, Patterson sounds much more promising. A progressive, who has long reprsented a poor district that's most African-American, he has a sense of humor. Unheard of in Albany.

Clients 1-8

Who are they?

Bile

Re Iraq: “We went in there for a reason. Now we’ve got to finish it.” Thus a nationalist in support of John 100 Year War McCain. Evidently, nationalism is like testosterone; a surfeit of it makes you particularly stupid.

Once, long ago, Hillary Clinton modestly suggested that the Palestinians were human beings, too. In 2000, shitbags Rudy Ghouliani and Little Ricky Lazio both tried using Clinton’s smooch with Suha Arafat against her in her carpet-bagging Senate run. That failed because she had quickly retracted; she’s has been a faithful supporter of the Israeli effort to deny Palestinian statehood and, indeed, even identity, since. So her desperate attempt last night to Farrakan Obama was particularly disgusting, but then she’s learned from the pros like Rudy G. The stench of desperation surrounding her flailing campaign is getting rank.

William F. Buckley is dead. One of the last of Joe McCarthy’s buds; a Catholic nationalist who always defended his daddy’s dirty money, quite the quintessence of American conservatism. Combined with his queenly manners and his mean-spirited little magazine, he was some kinda guy. See you in hell, Billy boy.

I’ve been reading the Stephen Jay Gould omnibus, The Richness of Life, and want to share this from one of his essays, “Carrie Buck’s Daughter.” In 1927, the Supreme Court declared compulsory sterility fine and dandy when Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in Buck v Bell, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Part of the eugenics craze of the late 19th & early 20th century, forced sterilizations for “hereditary defects” (including alcoholism, blindness, and deafness) were so popular that more than 30 states had them on the books by the 1930s. These laws were much challenged, and most states didn’t enforce them, but California did, performing about half the total 20,000 forced sterilizations that occurred in the US by 1935. Infamously, the Nazis based some of their thinking and laws on US precedents. Virginia was another state that was zealous in applying sterilization (care to bet on the color of the majority of the victims?) The 1927 case concerned Carrie Buck, who was 21 at the time and incarcerated in the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. She was supposedly mentally defective. Evidence was presented that her mother, Emma, was likewise mentally defective; there was also evidence that Carrie’s daughter Vivian was defective, hence Holmes’ “three generations.” Mental deficiency was heredity according to vulgar Darwinism (as Gould points out elsewhere, “social Darwinism” should really be named after Herbert Spencer). Vivian had been examined at six-months, a tad early to be sterilized even by Virginia’s standards, but certainly early enough for the alleged expert, a Red Cross social worker, to declare that she wasn’t “quite normal.” By gawd, three generations were enough! The old men of the Court ruled, and Buck was sterilized (so was her sister, but under cover of an appendicitis).

Vivian died at the age of 8. But in 1980, while Carrie Buck was still alive, the records were brought back to light. Turned out that Carrie Buck was in the Colony because she’d gotten pregnant (raped by a relative of her foster family) and her foster family wanted her out of sight. They dumped her there to get rid of the embarrassment and to cover up the crime. There was no evidence of mental impairment anywhere in the three generations, beyond assumption, pseudo-science, and notoriously flawed IQ tests. Vivian, in the few years of schooling she had, was a perfectly average little kid. The case was really about poverty and sexuality; add “race” to the mix, and we hear its echoes in debates of intelligence, IQ, bell curves, the “cultures” and “pathologies” of poverty, and so on to this day.

Damn, but Gould’s voice is sorely missed in our pestilentially reactionary age.

Trouble

I’m not usually a member of the Democratic Party; before yesterday I can’t remember when I last voted in a Democratic primary. So I come to party machinations late. But it’s beginning to look like the Clinton/Obama contest will go down to the wire of the convention, where the super delegates, some 20% of the total delegates, could well make the difference. What, you might well ask, is a super delegate? Another manifestation of the fear of democracy, that’s what. This short piece explains it nicely: essentially they are the contemporary equivalent of the smoke-filled backroom, the party apparatchiks who maintain party control over the insurgents, grassroots, and other troublemakers. They are the ones who gave us Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, & Kerry. (If Perot hadn’t run, Clinton would have made it five out of five). Nice work, team! Note to self: little wonder I’ve been voting Democratic all my voting life. Since these SDs are mostly politicians (every Democratic member of Congress, for instance, and the Dem governors) and party regulars, you can bet the Clintonoids are working them hard, if they haven’t already stuffed 'em into their pockets.

Prediction

The GOP ticket is going to be McCain-Huckabee.

ABC, damn it!

Now, as usual in our wretched politics, I rarely have good words to say about the candidates. You already know my ABC mantra, Anybody But Clinton, and her top-down, big money, DLC-dominated campaign stuffed by the likes of the corrupt Terry McAuliffe, the ghastly Rahm Emanuel, and Chuck Schumer, the senator from the financial services industry, not to mention all the rest of the hacks who have thrown election after election rather than give in to the grass roots. Thanks to these people -- who every four years pulled out the threat of GOP takeover of the Supreme Court to make the lesser of two evils distinction -- voila, the Supreme Court is the most reactionary since the early 1930s. PLUS, that war she voted for. Shame! Shame! SHAME!

Obama, on the other hand, with his background in community activism, is buoyed by the grass roots. I find this heartening. His politics are currently tepid, but the point of grass roots is that they can push. (This is why the DLC has been so concerned with keeping us penned out.) Most Americans have the mistaken notion that we need leaders. But we are not children. We should be forcing our surrogates to represent us, to follow us... for in a democracy, the people are the leaders. Maybe someday…

Rudy has failed

Boy’s got no stomach for a fight. Remember how he bailed out of battling Clinton for the US Senate seat? A gutless wonder, buoyed by the shouts of the mob, hoping to be put on the balcony by acclaim. But the mob is fickle… after all, who was the last Catholic Italian American nominated for President by the GOP? Or even broader, the last white ethnic? Um, have they ever? But don’t cry for Rudy, he'll go back to exploiting the dead of 9/11 with his whorish consulting firm, enriching himself and his cronies by bilking the gullible. Tonight, he's said to begin licking McCain's ass, building those bridges to suck up those national security contracts. Soon after, he'll trade in his latest wife for a new model.

In reviewing 4 Monthes, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the new film about a woman trying to get an illegal abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania, Hoberman nails Waitress, Knocked Up, & Juno as movies which present women as being without agency, as being fated to give birth after unwanted pregnancies. Acts of “God,” you might say, or “nature,” or in Waitress, brutal spouses. The endless drumming from America’s Taliban, who use the Orwellian phrase “pro-life” to describe their fundamentalist/misogynistic/anti-sex/anti-contraception agenda, has mostly drowned out the reasons why reproductive freedom is such a touchstone for women’s liberation. But not all of us have forgotten, and as cute as Ellen Page is, I’m not buying the sugarcoated fantasies of the patriarchs, fascists, fetus-fetishists, and priest-mullahs. The dictatorship of "God/nature/men" looks like this: half a million Romanian women are estimated to have died from botched abortions between 1966-89, and the infamous orphanages were overflowing hellholes.

Go-go

Wooo-wee! The hysterics running the markets, that o-so-rational beast, are frothing at the mouth after a bomb run of a Monday in the international gambling pits. “Wall Street” is yo-yoing after a Fed rescue mission; must be those damn unflattering smocks they are forced to wear on the floor.

This traitor-to-his-class has a great piece in Harper’s on our bubble economy. Others call it casino economy, gambling nation, or lottery fantasyland, but whatever you want to call it, it’s all about speculation and the hysteria of mobs. That is our only growth mechanism. Janszen breaks down the internet bubble (glory days!), the bursting-as-we-type housing bubble, and wonders what’s next. The alternative energy market!

Cloned fecal-meat product, yum!

The industry-friendly (if not industry-enslaved) FDA claims cloned animals are the same eatin’ as natural animals. In way, they’re right: the stuff is as tasteless, poisoned, and nasty as the shit that already comes from the industrial food complex. It’s not meat anymore and hasn’t been for ages; it’s meat-like product.

Cloning is a form of in-breeding; it defeats of the genetic point of reproduction, which is to mix genes and throw a new toss of the dice into the evolutionary gamble. Cloning thus reproduces the errors, breakdowns, and corruptions of the past. Of course, it’s inevitable that h. sapiens will be cloned. All is vanity, after all. People are going to be surprised how different these clones turn out to be from their models, though. “From fairest creatures we desire increase,/That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,/But as the riper should by time decrease,/His tender heir might bear his memory;" (W. Shakespeare, Sonnet 1)

Michigan

Man, isn’t the economy talk from the GOPpers in Michigan sickening? This is the party that has led (and make the mistake, the Democrats have followed) the assault on the working class and the undermining of the middle class; this is the party of oligarchy, of heredity elites, of channeling money to the top. This is the party that has looted the commonwealth and gutted our health, welfare, and environmental safe-guards. Sure, the GOP’s numbers come from cannon fodder among the proletariat and the white ethnic working class, but that’s because they’ve been suckered by the god-talk and the covert race talk. God-damned fools keep voting against their interests; perhaps one day they will realize you can’t eat culture or the Bible.

And what's up with the Democrats in Michigan? The national party got pissy (and suicidal) because the state wanted to move up their primary and "threaten" the nonsense of Iowa and New Hampshire; so the bosses stripped the state of its delegates. Only Clinton and Kucinich are on the ballot (and there's no write-in). God-damned losers, those Democrats.

Tom Engelhardt’s one of the best commentators on our appalling times that I know. Here he reminds us that the US has been long been using waterboarding (since at least the long war to colonize the Philippines a century ago), that torture has been standard operating procedure for the national security state (either directly or through trained surrogates), that projects like the CIA’s Operation Phoenix kidnapped, tortured, and murdered tens of thousands of Vietnamese. But most of these things were far away, marginal to the general run of the American fantasy, and, of course, officially deniable. No longer. Now the kidnapping, torture, and imprisonment of enemies (or as Abu Ghraib and our own domestic criminal justice system reveal, alleged enemies), is right out in the open, acceptable and official. Concentration camps, torture centers, and extrajudicial execution are a given. Politicians lobby for it. It’s permeated our culture, our politics and of course our entertainment. GOP candidates, to show how “tough” they are, boast that they’ll be the ones to expand the camps, torture more people, and make habeas corpus but a dream of pussy fifth-columnist liberals. Even third party dreamboats like Mike Bloomberg have accepted it; his instant prison camp during the GOP convention was a squalid containment of legitimate and vital dissent.

Don't you love Torture Guy extoling his hollow version of democracy amidst the kleptocratic/theocratic/feudal bandit kinglets of the Oil Kingdoms?

Ron Paul's Freakshow

So there’s an internet stirring of support for this strange Texas Republican named Ron Paul because his libertarian stance just seems so darn cool. Curiously, Paul’s resolutely not libertarian when it comes to women: like the rest of the American Taliban, he thinks they should be the wards of the state(s), the sum of their reproductive parts, biological devices to foster surrogate GOP-voter fetuses. Paul’s main thing is that he believes in the fantasy of the free market to solve all our problems and make everybody rich. That’s some serious crack. There is no such thing as a free market; markets are almost instantly captured by those with power, either old elites or the new ones which often rise with the market. History shows us the results: monopoly and oligarchy. Unfettered capitalism leads to stunted lives, poisoned land, food, water, and… children’s toys. China’s the perfect model: an utterly corrupt military/party dictatorship, rampant befouling of the land and the products in a race to the bottom.

Paul’s recent comments on ending slavery are another clue to his disturbing thinking. He said the American Civil War was unnecessary, that slavery would end like it did in the UK and all those other places. What astonishing ignorance (or is it just cracker justification?) of the circumstances of 19th century America. The first half of that century was dominated by the struggle over slavery, with crisis after crisis and compromise after compromise as Southern elites tried to expand their filthy institution into the emerging Midwest and Western territories and states in order to maintain their wealth and power, both in the south and nationally. They showed the distance they would go to maintain their command of property (capitalism’s grail, no matter that it was made of human beings); they seceded and they started the war.

Because Reconstruction was drowned like a unwanted baby by whites in the North and South alike, the “unfinished revolution” never really got to dismantle the Slave Power’s hold on the South; American apartheid lasted another century, and the Southern barons largely ruled the nation with their hammerlock on the Senate, making, for instance, sure that the New Deal would barely touch southern blacks. More recently, the GOP replaced the Democrats as the ruling party of the “Solid South,” anchoring their national dominance, but things haven’t changed all that much; the Bourbon barons are still in charge. And the white underclass, whose ancestors were canon fodder during the civil war, are still firmly loyal to their masters, like the true house slaves they are.

Suharto: straight to hell

The former dictator of Indonesia, one of the late 20th century’s genocide-masters, is on his deathbed. Pity he’ll die in a hospital surround by friends and family, but at least the mass murderer will be dead and gone. Half a million were killed after he took power; thousands of the names were provided by the U.S., although even the CIA ultimately considered the results one of the great mass murders of the century. Many thousands more were killed over the decades of his rule. Some estimates reach upwards of a million dead, but no one will ever know the extant of it. Under the rubric of fighting communism, Suharto enriched himself, his family, and cronies like the gangster he was. Plenty of western companies got fat contracts to destroy the local environment and profit off of brutalized work forces. It was a filthy mix indeed.

Don't cry for me, Argentina

Change, change, change… this campaign’s empty word. Clinton talks about the ones she made, but doesn’t actually mention any of them. For obvious reasons. Yesterday’s teary performance, in which she said she didn’t want to go back, blew me away. What is she talking about? The timid retreat of her centrist Democtrats against the rampage of the Right? Bill’s record of softening up the nation for the GOP? I know many Democrats have very warm feelings for Bill, but his record was shit: “triangulating” to emasculate progressives and give into the Right, again and again and again: welfare “reform,” the reprehensible Defense of Marriage Act, the odious Communications Decency Act, “free” trade for the rich, and the continued gutting of habeas corpus. Not to mention his silence and do-nothingism on genocide in Rwanda. First “black president”? Latest genocide president, more likely.

For my politics, Edwards is the best of the top three Democrats, Clinton the worst. Obama’s “change” message/brand is, like all such advertising, hollow. It’s the epitome of the surface and celebrity that passes for politics. Because change doesn’t come from wishful thinking or hope; it comes from struggle. Edwards knows that and expresses it; unfortunately, he’s been storied by the media as a case of noblesse oblige. Obama is still a cowardly Democrat, refusing to take the plunge into the populism that will win. The forces arrayed against us are mighty: the financial services industry; the insurance and drug companies; the oil industry and the car manufacturers; and of course that great cancer long eating away at the Constitution: the national security state. Coming together in a big ol’ multiracial group hug is sweet, but isn’t what will to take on these monsters. It could be a first step, though, if we put the pressure on Obama and force him to represent.