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.