AMERICAN COPROPHAGIA

Maureen Dowd: monstrous fucking death-cake

2010-11-12T00:51:00.001-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/opinion/10dowd.html?_r=1&hpw

Fuck.

2010-11-03T01:09:00.000-04:00

Economist Ann Pettifor on Pope, Secularism, impending disaster, etc.

2010-10-02T11:55:00.002-04:00

An excellent reflection:

We here in the UK have had blanket coverage of the Pope’s visit, which has apparently been global. On the whole the coverage irritated me, because, as always, the trivial dominated public debate. ‘Pope’s battle to save Christmas’ was a typical headline. ‘Pope: don’t let the PC brigade wreck Christmas’ – screamed Murdoch’s Sun newspaper. These headlines derive from the Pope’s speech at Westminster where he was quoted as saying that “there are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none.”

All of which I believe, misses the point. It is true that Christmas is being wrecked. But not by the PC brigade, despite the Sun’s attempt to discredit efforts to end discrimination. Instead Christmas is increasingly wrecked by capitalism’s ruthless exploitation of its values and sentiments, and by the unrestrained consumption unleashed by the finance sector’s interests and values. That is what the Pope should have attacked, explicitly. He could have taken a leaf out of the book of that admirable campaign, Operation Noah (and here I declare an interest) which has attacked the super-consumption associated with Christmas, and campaigns to ‘Reclaim Christmas’.

Instead, the Pope’s attack diverted attention from the meaning of Christmas, gave succour to the prejudices of readers of the Sun, and focussed instead on those who would defend a faith, Islam, currently under attack from all sides. (For a rebuttal to some of the anti-Muslim feeling, do watch Michael Moore on the New York Mosque: how all Muslims are often painted with the terrorist brush, and his defence: “I went to Catholic mass yesterday, but that does not make me a paedophile”.)

Which is why I was so struck by a letter in today’s Guardian, from Simon Clarke of Lewes, East Sussex, which is not, I believe, available online, so here it is reproduced it in full:

“While the Vatican presents itself as a champion of moral values, the abuse scandal and the prejudicial doctrines towards women, homosexuality and birth control leave me marvelling at the hypocrisy. But then I can’t but agree with the pope’s analysis of where secularism has got us, which incidentally matches radical Islam’s view of the decadence and immorality of the materialism of the west.

“Fifty odd years of unrestrained consumption and declining moral values have exposed to a large degree the failure of secularism to put in place an alternative morality. This failure I think can be directly linked to the resurgence of conservative religion as people become ever-increasing victims of unrestrained capitalism and the dominance of markets.

“Moral leadership is essential to us all, and if no one else will step forward with the message then we should not be surprised when religion does. We are in desperate need of a secular morality that puts human beings ahead of the bottom line and that’s where the “aggressive” secularists fail miserably, as they attack religion for all its obvious flaws but offer nothing in its place.”

So there we have it: a vacuum of moral leadership: a vacuum hollowed out by finance capital. While the pope cited the global financial crisis as an example of what happened when pragmatic solutions were applied in the absence of ethical considerations, that did not come across to me as an attack on unethical capitalism, and support for its victims, the millions rendered unemployed or impoverished by the reckless gambles of the finance sector.

We, as a society, battered and beat by the financial crisis, are searching for moral leadership (from faith or political leaders) that elevates the values and ethics of human security and well-being above the capital gains of a a few greedy gamblers. A moral leadership that would chase the moneylenders out of the temple that is our democracy; that would limit and restrain finance capitalism, and once again render it servant, not master of society and the economy. Despite the pope’s efforts to instil moral leadership, we still yearn for that grand vacuum to be filled.

It is true that the Pope's great encyclical on "Love in Truth" specifically and intelligently attacks the global financial death machine, a fact Pettifor doesn't acknowledge. But she is fundamentally correct -- the Pope is letting the focus get shifted away from what really matters by participating in stupid "War on Christmas" debates. And his credibility is undermined by his implication in pedophilia and his hateful scapegoating of gays.

everybody always say...

2010-09-28T23:53:00.005-04:00

"Yes, we know what you're against, but what are you for?". Juliet Schor answers the question:

Juliet Schor: Plenitude from toddboyle on Vimeo.

popery

2010-09-25T13:10:00.003-04:00

Seymour on the Pope's visit to the UK. Nicely put, imho:

When Dawkins et al repeat this ridiculous canard [that religion is the cause of the Irish conflict] and apply the same logic, mutatis mutandis, to the explanation of the Israel-Palestine conflict (or worse, to the 'civil war' in Iraq), I know all too well that this isn't really about atheism, or secularism. It is about representing those who do not partake of the relative wealth and stability of the Anglophone imperial core as tribal-minded, bloodthirsty, backward idiots. We do not have conflicts based on rational interests, each making a claim to universalism, in which imperialist powers have weighed in on one side. We have petty, parochial struggles over atavistic ideas which are childish premonitions of modern, scientific truth claims, and where imperial power is invisible. Indeed, as Eagleton suggests, part of the whole basis of Dawkinsian befuddlement and outrage over religion is the feeling that things couldn't be so bad as to require a spiritual, much less messianic, solution. Class privilege benights its beneficiaries in this respect.

...

... To the imperial chauvinism mentioned above, we could add his intolerance of cultural difference - he has said, for example, that he experiences a visceral revulsion at the sight of a woman in a burqa, a sensation which is probably similar to that which I feel on witnessing an upper middle class white Oxonian telling Muslim women that what they're wearing disgusts him. In relation to the Pope's visit, he described his Romanness as the head of the second most evil religion in the world. What, I wonder, might come first? Buddhism? Judaism? Hinduism? Jainism? Zoroastrianism? No? Ah, right - so it'll be Islam again. One form of religious intolerance informs another prejudice, one which is bound up with race-making processes across the 'white' world. Such a ranking of religions according to alleged harm is not really to do with atheism. Far from having an emancipatory, enlightened content, it precisely reinforces a hierarchical ordering of human societies and cultures at the apex of which invariably sits largely bourgeois, largely white, and largely male liberals of no faith, other than in the sanctity of the Holy Profit. For these and other reasons, the 'new atheism' is mainly a reactionary current...

you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have...

2010-09-09T04:07:00.005-04:00

So Petraeus sez burning books is bad because it hurts the troops. Which raises a couple questions:

1) Is anything ever bad anymore without having a bad consequence?

2) Is anything ever bad anymore without having a bad consequence for the troops?

And I suppose the converse question should also be raised:

3) If you do something bad, but can show that no troops were hurt, was it really bad?

A game:

Team 1 thinks of an action commonly thought of as bad. Team 2 then must think of a way in which this action hurts the troops.

If Team 2 has an answer, they win. If Team 2 has no answer, then the action isn't bad thus Team 1 broke the rules of the game and therefore Team 2 wins.

Innocence

2010-08-17T14:50:00.002-04:00

True innocence is that of the teen soldier who may only barely intuit the enormity of his or her crimes; of the larger crimes of the army within which he or she is a cog; of the near-unconscious imbrication of his or her sexuality with these crimes toward other human beings; and lastly of the crime of innocence itself.

Hitchens

2010-08-11T09:49:00.004-04:00

Arguably the two most prominent public intellectuals to come out in favor of the Iraq War in 2003 were Christopher Hitchens and Michael Ignatieff. I remember my seething outrage at Hitchens, of all people, taking perverse joy in contradicting the common sense of the left of that time, palling around with the terrorists in the Bush White House, etc. His key argument at this time was focused on ousting Saddam Hussein as a service to the Iraqi people; this ethical orientation superceded all discussions of oil, profiteering, and religious fanaticism that were clearly in play with other neocon pundits. I took him for yet another tool of a fascist administration, and little more.

In recent years, we have seen him defend his original stance, waterboard himself and publish lavish screeds against religion and a memoir. And now he appears to be dying.

I find myself strangely obsessed with this development and fearful of what the discursive landscape will look like without him. Perhaps this has something to do with Hitchens' writing since his fateful advocacy on behalf of Bush et al in 2003 and beyond, much of which can be interpreted as a twisted, involuntary apologia. It has been as though Hitchens has been trying to extricate his particular position from those who were by his side during the rush to perpetual war, the lovers of torture, shock and awe, a blockbuster clash of religions, not to mention anti-intellectual fervor on the home front-- to preserve the "good" kernel within his convictions both then and now. Hitchens has always seemed to really believe in the inherent goods of Western demystified modernity-- a vision of what culture might consist of minus religion, fundamentalism, intolerance, etc. It is essential to recognize how romantic and old-fashioned this promised land of cultural freedom is, how tied up in myths of collective literary production-- the idea that all might be resolved if everyone can write, drink, display wit, hash it out together. On this count, Hitchens has turned out to be, great irony notwithstanding, the last true believer.

hoo-ray

2010-08-04T13:52:00.001-04:00

The Baffler is back!

assholes

2010-07-07T18:32:00.002-04:00

So apparently if you are a newsperson you cannot "respect" anyone in Hezbollah. By standards of journalistic objectivity, you have to hate him.

he deserved it

2010-06-24T20:52:00.004-04:00

I finally read the Rolling Stone article that got McChrystal fired. The most damning revelation was, unsurprisingly, not reported on by the establishment media:

His favorite beer is Bud Light Lime.

Good riddance.

death sells

2010-06-22T18:56:00.004-04:00

Not as bad as Finchy's video below, but still...oy.

via Gothamist

more like this please

2010-06-21T01:56:00.002-04:00

In a historic action and unprecedented action today, over 800 labor and community activists blocked the gates of the Oakland docks in the early morning hours, prompting longshore workers to refuse to cross the picketlines where they were scheduled to unload an Israeli ship.

From 5:30 am to 9:30 am, a militant and spirited protest was held in front of four gates of the Stevedore Services of America, with people chanting non-stop, “Free, Free Palestine, Don’t Cross the Picket Line,” and “An injury to one is an injury to all, bring down the apartheid wall.”

link

And this:

Residents of the Florida Keys, an island chain potentially threatened by the ongoing BP oil disaster, are taking matters into their own hands...This involves training, clearing beaches to make potential oil cleanup easier, and organizing response teams...Residents are bypassing the obstructions that authority has placed in the way, and affecting changes through their own efforts.

...

Direct action has also won concessions from BP. After community members showed up uninvited to a meeting involving city officials and BP residents, they were promised that BP would pay $10,000 to fund hazardous materials training for 100 people. Not a ton of money for the Fortune-ranked fourth largest company in the world, but it will probably make a difference to local preparedness.

link

a funny

2010-06-21T01:25:00.001-04:00

link

Bullshit and death

2010-06-07T18:13:00.002-04:00

Israel is and will forever be protected by its bullshit rhetoric by which Israelis are converted into "Jews" and critique of the state is converted into sacrilege against the enduring memory of the victims of the Holocaust. The latest victim is Helen Thomas, who appears to have "brought this upon herself" precisely because she idiotically bought into this rhetoric by insisting that the JEWS get out of Palestine as opposed to the Israelis. In doing so, she missed an important opportunity to draw a distinction that no one seems capable of making-- and this is the heart of the entire problem.

This rhetoric allows murder to turn to "controversy" and bellicose actions in international waters into misunderstandings that allow for Antisemitism to flourish. It makes possible unthinkable shit-supervolcanoes such as this. I can say no more about this fucking shit or I'm going to have a stroke.

Brooks does Gladwell

2010-06-04T17:25:00.000-04:00

David Brooks (New York Times, 5/28/10) informs us that the idea that "government should have more control over industry" is one of the "predictably partisan and often puerile" reactions to the oil spill. The lesson that smart people derive from the spill, Brooks says, is "that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand."

What follows is, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out (5/28/10), largely cribbed from a 1996 New Yorker essay by Malcolm Gladwell (1/22/96) that argued that "accidents are not easily preventable" because of various psychological pitfalls that humans are prone to--e.g., in Brooks' paraphrase, "people have trouble imagining how small failings can combine to lead to catastrophic disasters," and "people have a tendency to place elaborate faith in backup systems and safety devices."

In other words, it's all very complicated, and what we need to do is work on "helping people deal with potentially catastrophic complexity" so we can "improve the choice architecture."

link

I see you

2010-06-02T06:46:00.003-04:00

link

Federal officials are hoping film director James Cameron can help them come up with ideas on how to stop the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Yes, I'm aware that Cameron is an expert at most things underwatery, but still...has all other "expertise" been exhausted that they're turning to film directors? Or do the people in charge just see this as a cool opportunity to meet somebody famous?

Whither America?

live on, AmCop

2010-06-01T09:31:00.002-04:00

AmCop swam into an anoxic area and began to suffocate-- but that doesn't mean there aren't still some immense and virulent shit-storms out there in desperate need of address.

Bush's chickens continue to come home to roost on Obama's watch, and while the comparisons with Katrina are sick and ridiculous, this is a major embarrassment and easily his lowest moment. But even this is a mix of act and image. What the press wants, what the public wants, is more than anything the -appearance- of trying to do something-- for O to fly over the Gulf, to "face" the "reality," and thus be shown working hard to "do" something. He cleans house in the department responsible but does so so quietly that it's barely reported on, while leaving the cleanup to BP's talented publicists. After many false calls, this is the true beginning of the end.

Meanwhile, Israel does what it can to protect O's reputation by draining attention from the Gulf with perhaps its most disgusting, shit-covered act ever-- at least since two years ago. The Gaza activists might, amidst appalling sacrifice, have achieved something great here-- they have reopened the discussion about the blockade and exposed unequivocally Israel's present fascism. Israel is still holding 100 of them... what now?

Antishock doctrine?

2010-04-16T17:17:00.001-04:00

How do we characterize those crimes that are "persecuted" long after they are obviously occurring, in the face of which we are supposed to be "shocked" but which in fact surprise absolutely no one on the planet and merely remind us of our powerless, which we were well aware of before?

whee

2010-04-11T01:22:00.009-04:00

RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

link

Well, sure, I guess. Have at it, I suppose.

The priorities though are pretty dubious. Hitchens, to his credit, once upon a time went after much more vicious criminals like Henry Kissinger. Apparently sitting heads of state are exempt from the injunction that Dawkins and Hitchens are trying to use here. Nevertheless, even with them excepted, if I was making up a hit list of criminals against humanity in dire need of prosecution, I'm not even sure the Pope would make my top 100.

You would think an atheist biologist would likely take aim at the purveyors and beneficiaries of the assorted unverifiable doctrines and mythologies that are driving humanity toward a truly species-threatening outcome. Given Dawkins' epistemology, capitalist economics or the legitimacy of nation-states is no more or less rational than monotheism. Although it's kinda hard to argue that even systematic kid-diddling is a greater evil than bringing on a global ecological catastrophe.

Hell, you don't even have to get that grandiose about it. Are the forty-five thousand people killed yearly by the US healthcare system (nevermind the wars of aggression) a lesser crime than those for which he wants to keel-haul the Pope? Why not indict some industry executives or their apologists and lackeys? Or, I dunno, Bush/Cheney for the systematic torture of adults. Why is that less of a priority than the systematic torture of children?

But I guess an economic system that is grinding the planet into ash will let you do science basically unmolested. Whereas sexual autistics who follow dudes in funny hats will like yell at you and make you feel bad or something.

Maybe he's fighting the good fight though. God knows, if Dawkins & Co. don't keep the bone-readers at bay, will there even be enough scientists left after the apocalypse to help us with the urgent task of terraforming Earth?

Pop Jihad

2010-04-02T11:01:00.005-04:00

This morning I find myself utterly stunned by this image of Dzhennet "Abdullayeva" Abdurakhmanov with her assassinated husband Umalat Magomedov. According to state-sponsored-- which should already give us pause-- Russian newspaper Kommersant the widow was one of the Moscow suicide bombers.

For me this is a new image: "Jihadists"/"extremists"/"terrorists"/etc. wholly sutured to the pop-cultural image bank of Bonnie and Clyde couples-on-the-run. The first thought in my mind was: this has to be a joke. These MUST be actors. Putin has concocted this she-badguy to put a face on his latest state of exception.

But then it occurred to me that this is the only logical conclusion of a media cycle that began with 9/11 and Osama bin Laden. This internet-era phase of Jihad has from the start been about invisible netizens forcibly inserting themselves into the streams of popular culture at the moment that all distinctions between media content are falling away. The doomed teen romance, one part Godard, one part Jay-Z's "'03 Bonnie and Clyde," merely takes us full circle.

our source of useful ideas

2010-04-01T12:01:00.000-04:00

WASHINGTON—In an effort to reduce wasteful spending and eliminate non-vital federal services, the U.S. government announced plans this week to cut its long-standing senator program, a move it says will help save more than $300 billion each year.

According to officials, the decision to cut the national legislative body was reached during a budget review meeting on Tuesday. After hours of deliberation, it was agreed that the cost of financing U.S. senators far outweighed the benefits they provided.

...

"Even just the space the Senate currently occupies could be put to better use," consumer advocate Michael Dodgerson said. "Were the government to open a day-care center, a homeless shelter, or even an affordable restaurant in that building, it would make more of a difference in the lives of everyday Americans than what's there now."

link

caretaking vs. transformation

2010-03-28T15:30:00.002-04:00

Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, on the prospects for transformational politics:

Perlstein is a student of liberal presidencies and right-wing backlashes and makes some pretty interesting observations. In spite of the title, the talk is quite sympathetic to Obama. Hilariously, he also notes that in the 60's in addition to the Birchers, whom I knew about, was the National Indignation Society, which I didn't. I wish they'd survived, if only for their name.

Basically Perlstein is noting some historical patterns of "transformational presidencies" and making suggestions about how Obama could conceivably have one. Unlike Reich, he doesn't see the healthcare bill as quite doing the job it needs to, mostly because it doesn't tell a clear story about liberalism vs. conservatism.

The Q&A is also worthwhile. It is noted that the New Deal and Great Society wouldn't have been possible without social movements like the CIO and civil-rights movement respectively. Perlstein is ambivalent on whether the netroots constitutes a sufficient movement to generate real change; on the one hand dismissing the idea that we need to get in the streets in order to have a social movement, but on the other noting how netrootsia has been boxed out by the Obama admin., and then on the third hand noting how they nearly scotched the health bill thus demonstrating their power...but not their lack of it...confusing.

As always with Obama, he concludes that it's still "up in the air" and the only thing to do is "wait and see" if BO initiates a more forceful phase II of his operation. While this is likely a proper attitude for an historian such as Perlstein, this posture is poison to social movements. If we don't get real change without movements, but can't get a movement underway because everyone is waiting to see how it turns out and hoping for the best, we're sunk.

a public service

2010-03-25T05:01:00.002-04:00

It took all day and all night, but I have finally done due diligence and read the entirety of the new healthcare bill. It turns out we were all wrong.

Basically once you get past the legerdemain, what it boils down to is that starting in 2011 ten uninsured families will be eligible for free health care for life courtesy of Uncle Sam. Said families to be chosen by National Lottery so do fill out your census forms. Each subsequent year will incorporate one additional American family into the system.

Thus passing the bill will indeed do some good which is better than no good. The bill is, therefore, good. In light of such facts, complaint and criticism have become churlish. Although it will of course take some time for the remainder of American families to reap the benefits, this is clearly and undeniably an important first step in a new and promising direction.

Now on to immigration reform! No doubt there will be much ink spilled about mass deportations and citizenship and "systemic overhaul" and what-have-you. I submit that when the dust finally settles, if we do nothing else than deport ten less immigrant families per year, we should nevertheless count ourselves victorious.

YES!!!

2010-03-24T04:00:00.006-04:00

According to this handy-dandy little gizmo, starting in 2014 I will save $570 per year on health insurance.

Sweet!

Unfortunately said gizmo does not tell me if that insurance covers much. But whatever. $570!!

As someone who cares deeply about his own purity, starting in 2014 I'll donate $570 per year to PNHP or like organization.

Or maybe in four years I'll grow up and embrace pragmatism or seriousness or something, buy an iPad and donate $70 to the Obama campaign.

No doubt by that time, despite rising popularity, he'll somehow manage to be in the fight of his life against Palin and Joe the Plumber's bastard spawn. Only with my unwavering attention to the news cycle and diligent conversational support against Teabaggers and Chomskyites alike will he be able to pull out another squeaker and save us all from Retard Apocalypse once again.

Decisions, decisions. Mercifully, I've got four years to figure it out. Either way it's all win-win though. The future is bright!

(It should be noted that in 2014 we can fully expect Obama to be gearing up for his third term made possible by some Bloombergian machination involving an arcane reading of the commerce clause. Two-terming is for losers.)

Santé

2010-03-22T09:19:00.003-04:00

Welcome to probably the high-water mark for Obama era legislation. Amidst the celebration, it is not too early to, in our traditionally pessimistic fashion, start assessing the "compromises" that were "required" to "pass the bill." What will an intelligent breakdown of this bill look like, one that considers both its benefits and its problems?

As I have yet to go carefully through the language of the bill, a few observations on media coverage. This vote is evidence that Team Obama has not lost a step in their masterful manipulation of the media/Republican shit-apparatuses' demonization of the Democrats. A pattern is now in place: doubts are raised whether the Dems can get it up-- and that even if they do, in going against their historic flaccidity, they'll surely suffer. The subsequent "surprise" of the enormous Dem majority actually passing legislation benefits everyone: don't fool yourself, Obama now looks Macho Man Randy Savage strong, cable news gets its artificial mini-drama, and Republican chiffoniers get their big bad n- and f-word baddies to sell to the party faithful.

What is missing is any engagement of the actual contents of health care reform that is not deranged or paranoid and sincerely looks at what is missing from a vision of total coverage. Not to mention a harder question, in some ways impossible to answer: how much closer could this bill have been to total coverage and still passed with the Obama gauntlet behind it? This, it seems to me, is the crucial piece of ideology we're getting today. With the Republican protesters saying such horrible things outside, with those irascible Blue Dogs inside, this is the best we could have gotten. Look how close the vote was! 32 million is a lot of people. Best we could have done. Hmmph.

Health Care...

2010-03-20T21:00:00.000-04:00

...looks like it has a good chance. Thoughts?

my new favorite blog

2010-03-13T16:48:00.001-05:00

Hot Chicks Smiling at Ground Zero:

Sick death-face asshole

2010-03-09T08:24:00.003-05:00

With the country and the world going to shit, Stanley Shit is always happy to point out that it doesn't really matter who is in charge, just what we think about them; thus one can be cheerily apolitical without remorse. What a true perversion of the 68-inspired French theory that he started from. Apparently life is sweetly linguistic when viewed from a perch at Yale.

Obama's new campaign ad

2010-03-09T03:00:00.001-05:00

media whores: retro edition

2010-03-09T02:04:00.002-05:00

John Swinton, former Chief of Staff of The New York Times, circa 1880, “On the Independent Press”:

There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the country towns.

You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.

I am paid $150.00 a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with – others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things – and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.

The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread.You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an “Independent Press.”

We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

via Louis Proyect

I did not see "The Hurt Locker"...

2010-03-08T00:20:00.003-05:00

... But I do not see how it could be better than "Avatar."

In fact, I strongly suspect that the taut, sleekly-made, terrifying war-thriller is not nearly as good as the extravagantly beautiful and sentimental epic about true love and the meaning of embodiment.

And no, I am not joking.

Umm...

2010-02-27T00:25:00.001-05:00

This can't be good.

this is a bit of an eyebrow raiser

2010-02-25T02:39:00.002-05:00

From Alex Knight:

“The founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Today, however, just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed.”

That is staggering. Just a generation ago, those numbers would’ve been the direct opposite. Now, this means only one in five Americans WHO VOTE believe in the U.S. government. This is to say nothing of the far greater numbers, myself most heartily included, who don’t participate in elections at all.

...

“Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters now view the federal government as a special interest group, and 70% believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.”

“That helps explain why 75% of voters are angry at the policies of the federal government, and 63% say it would be better for the country if most members of Congress are defeated this November. Just 27% believe their own representative in Congress is the best person for the job. “

“Among voters under 40, 25% believe government has the consent of the governed. That compares to 19% of those ages 50 to 64 and 16% of the nation’s senior citizens.”

“Seventy-eight percent (78%) of Republicans say the government does not have the consent of the governed, and that view is shared by 65% of voters not affiliated with either of the major parties. A plurality of Democrats (44%) agrees, but 32% of those in President Obama’s party believe the government has the necessary consent. “

“From an ideological perspective, most moderate and conservative voters say the government lacks the consent of the governed. Liberals are evenly divided. “

...

Now ingest, if you will, this stat: “63% of the Political Class think the government has the consent of the governed, but only six percent (6%) of those with Mainstream views agree.”

...

But hope springs eternal: “In his new book, In Search of Self-Governance, Scott Rasmussen observes that the American people are ‘united in the belief that our political system is broken, that politicians are corrupt, and that neither major political party has the answers.’ He adds that ‘the gap between Americans who want to govern themselves and the politicians who want to rule over them may be as big today as the gap between the colonies and England during the 18th century.’”

pictures

2010-02-21T09:43:00.014-05:00

Percentage of Americans who favor socialism: 20

Percentage of Americans involved in Tea Party Movement: 11 (Support for Tea Party is also about 12%).

Number of mentions of "Tea Party" past month in Lexis radio and tv transcript search: 1042*

Number of mentions of "socialism" past month in Lexis radio and tv transcript search: 69+

Moral of the story: If you're in the top 1% of the population, and you can keep middle 67% of people scared of the right 12%, you can completely ignore the leftmost 20% and give the 67% very little.

So for the cost of keeping 12% of the population in placards and bumper-stickers and rallies, and the cost of running television stations and radio outlets, you can do pretty much whatever the fuck you want and forget about 99% of the population. That's a pretty sweet return on investment.

(NB -- with a little extra seed money to throw an "election", you can offset the cost of the tv and radio stations by getting about 70% of the population to send money to pay for it every two to four years, thus increasing your margin.)

Bunch of stupid assholes

2010-02-18T15:06:00.002-05:00

The Mossad, that is.

A big gang of them murdered a mid-level Hamas guy in Dubai. They were traveling on faked British passports. Eleven of the killers were photographed -- which suggests a rather large degree of incompetence.

Their photographs have been all over the front pages of European newspapers for the past 4 days. The Mossad is an international punchline. From capturing Eichmann to botching hits in the U.A.E. One more sign of Israel's desperation.

It is pretty remarkable that this story -- hands down the biggest story in the international press this week -- has scarcely been mentioned in the U.S. at all.

gee, i hope they win

2010-02-12T14:04:00.003-05:00

Palestinians dress as Na'vi from Avatar and join protest against the wall.

via Juan Cole

Jokes from Colbert

2010-02-11T13:57:00.000-05:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/09/colbert-sarah-palin-is-a_n_454744.html

2010-02-11T11:54:00.000-05:00

Who dat?

2010-02-08T09:04:00.003-05:00

Something suspicious was underway last night at the Superbowl celebration-- a total whitewash of the now-celebratory image of New Orleans. First we had the white owner of the team, then the white coach, then the white quarterback-- and then... cut to commercial! Footage of a riotous New Orleans was inevitably focused on the Bourbon St., the fratty, white center of the city.

So the narrative being shoved down our throats is that the Saints are saving the city as the city is saving itself. Interesting, since it was precisely the Superdome that served as ground zero of government neglect-- murder, extermination?-- of the black population of that city during the worst week of the crisis.

What if the bloated spectacle of the Superbowl-- emblematized by the inflexible corpses of the Who twittering about on stage for the halftime show-- could be read somewhat differently: as the sickening triumph of the white and/or moneyed population of New Orleans, raising a glass to the successful displacement of the unwanted?

more like this please

2010-01-31T19:04:00.003-05:00

I have a feeling someone's done this before, but I can't remember when or where. Nevertheless, still good:

Westboro Baptist Church showed up to protest in front of Twitter’s San Francisco office on Thursday, but found themselves severely outnumbered by a crowd of absurdist pranksters, including guest blogger EDW Lynch above.

via Laughing Squid

Thoughts of the day

2010-01-31T03:22:00.005-05:00

stay classy NPR

2010-01-29T22:48:00.006-05:00

When progressive historian Howard Zinn died on January 27, NPR's All Things Considered (1/28/10) marked his passing with something you don't often see in an obituary: a rebuttal.

After quoting Noam Chomsky and Julian Bond, NPR's Allison Keyes turned to far-right activist David Horowitz to symbolically spit on Zinn's grave. "There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn's intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect," Horowitz declared. "Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse."

Mmm...I love the smell of smear in the morning. Smells like...integrity.

Well, I'm sure they've provided this sort of "balance" when prominent Right-wing intellectuals have died. Oh wait, they haven't.

UPDATE: Jon Schwarz responds. Well done.

"The mendacity of hope"

2010-01-26T11:21:00.002-05:00

Harper's editor Roger Hodge has a pretty devastating take (down) on Obama in the February issue. I can't link to the entire article here, but the last two graphs pretty much say it:

Public morality requires public action, and all available public evidence points to a man with the character of a common politician, whose singular ambition in life was to attain power; nothing in Barack Obama’s political career suggests that he would ever willingly commit to a course of action [ie, end the war in Afghanistan now] that would cost him an election. His preposterously two-faced approach to Afghanistan, wherein he simultaneously escalates the war while promising to begin “the transition to Afghan responsibility” just a year later, is a perfect illustration of his compulsion to split the difference on any given political question. (One could also point to the health-care boondoggle, or to his utter capitulation to Wall Street in economic matters.) He dilly-dallies, draws out both friends and opponents, dangles promises in front of everyone, gives a dramatic speech, and then pulls back to gauge the reaction. Since the policy itself is incoherent—and, as usual with Obama, salted with stipulations and provisos—he can always trim and readjust as necessary. Deadlines and definitions of “combat forces” are infinitely malleable. Since Obama is an intelligent man, surely he understands the meaning of the word mendacity.

Having embraced and professionalized the powers of force and fraud previously associated with the likes of John Yoo and Dick Cheney, Obama has embarked on a course of war that will certainly invite further abuses of power. His political survival now depends on martial success in a land that has defeated some of history’s most brutal strategies of conquest. Obama has set a trap for himself, but because he is such a clever politician, the spring is just as likely to fall on us instead. Such insidious governance demands serious, sustained opposition, not respectful disagreement or fanciful historical apologies or mournful lamentations about the tragedy of his presidency. Principles can be sacrificed to hopes as well as to fears.

Rush Limbaugh: "I don't even want to be here anymore."

2010-01-26T08:17:00.002-05:00

An admission:

What I should really do is just commit suicide. I have this little Sunday ritual I started around the time I publicly compared the torture at Abu Ghraib to a fraternity prank, where I climb into my Jacuzzi and put a gun in my mouth. But I can never work up the guts to pull the trigger. A few times I came close to overdosing on prescription pain pills, but my goddamn doctors were always there to save me. If I had any sense, I would just hole myself up in a Red Roof Inn with a case of Jack Daniel's and slowly drink myself into the gaping maw of death itself.

But what can I say? I guess I'm just too much of a fat fucking pussy to follow through.

You know what? I wish someone would just kill me. I'm serious. Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking: "Oh my God, how can you say such a thing? You can't print that in a newspaper!" But see, I don't care anymore. I've cried my tears. I've battled my demons, and I've lost. It's over. It's all over. The only thing left for me to do now is just go away. Have I even once contributed a single ounce of good to humanity? Put me out of my misery. I wouldn't make a fuss. I wouldn't even humiliate myself by saying goodbye. For the first time in my odious, pitiful life, I'd accept my fate with quiet dignity.

More here.

newest internet game

2010-01-26T02:22:00.003-05:00

Find a post, any post on any site by any writer with the sole exception of Whitehouse.gov, which argues the spending freeze is a good idea.

GO!

a funny

2010-01-23T11:25:00.002-05:00

Ha.

via ATR

Then again, maybe there's something we're missing...

2010-01-20T12:18:00.003-05:00

Let's not overestimate the brilliance of the voting public either, people.

Conventional Wisdom

2010-01-19T22:33:00.002-05:00

I suppose this could be, as the blogs say, a referendum on the compromised health reform bill, the bank bailouts, and the Obama administration's coziness with Wall Street and big business. In other words, the election result is an expression of their own greivances as members of a demoralized Obama-voting base.

Or (lol) it could be due to "liberal overreaching."

Or it could just be that Scott Brown is one awesome dude.

Donate to Haiti's Partners in Health

2010-01-14T12:31:00.003-05:00

Visit here for more information about Partners in Health and to make a donation.

Tracy Kidder's article in today's Times gives some info on Haiti and Partners in Health (this is the organization of Paul Farmer, about whom you've probably heard):

...Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted. (In more recent years American administrations fell into a pattern of promoting and then undermining Haitian constitutional democracy.)

Hence the current state of affairs: at least 10,000 private organizations perform supposedly humanitarian missions in Haiti, yet it remains one of the world’s poorest countries. Some of the money that private aid organizations rely on comes from the United States government, which has insisted that a great deal of the aid return to American pockets — a larger percentage than that of any other industrialized country.

But that is only part of the problem. In the arena of international aid, a great many efforts, past and present, appear to have been doomed from the start. There are the many projects that seem designed to serve not impoverished Haitians but the interests of the people administering the projects. Most important, a lot of organizations seem to be unable — and some appear to be unwilling — to create partnerships with each other or, and this is crucial, with the public sector of the society they’re supposed to serve...

This week, the list of things that Haiti needs, things like jobs and food and reforestation, has suddenly grown a great deal longer. The earthquake struck mainly the capital and its environs, the most densely populated part of the country, where organizations like the Red Cross and the United Nations have their headquarters. A lot of the places that could have been used for disaster relief — including the central hospital, such as it was — are now themselves disaster areas.

But there are effective aid organizations working in Haiti. At least one has not been crippled by the earthquake. Partners in Health, or in Haitian Creole Zanmi Lasante, has been the largest health care provider in rural Haiti. (I serve on this organization’s development committee.) It operates, in partnership with the Haitian Ministry of Health, some 10 hospitals and clinics, all far from the capital and all still intact. As a result of this calamity, Partners in Health probably just became the largest health care provider still standing in all Haiti.

Massachussetts

2010-01-12T23:58:00.002-05:00

Sweet. It appears as though the fucking Dem is going to lose Ted Kennedy's seat to the asshole Scott Brown.

1994 and 2002 all over again. The same pathetic shit.

dharma bums

2010-01-12T03:46:00.010-05:00

I'm still not convinced Americans care about what blow-dried clowns on TV say about failed underwear bombs. However, clearly some 'mercans do care about some other very different meaningless bullshit:

The president of the United States apparently feels he needs the "Lost" voting bloc and therefore will not schedule his State of the Union address the same night that ABC had planned to air the two-hour season debut of the second-most-convoluted drama series in the history of TV.

...

"Lost" fanatics had their undies in a bunch Wednesday over news that the White House might push back the president's SOTU address to Feb. 2 to enable Obama to use a freshly signed health-care reform law as an audiovisual aid.

The State of the Union got pre-empted by Lost.

Granted, I'd planned to watch the Lost season premiere and not the SOTU regardless of time slottings for the simple reason that watching Lost will involve suspense, novelty and believable performances. Well, that and I've invested somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 hours of my life in that show, and don't have anything invested in Obama or the "Union".

Nevertheless, it's flat-out bonkers that:

1) People got upset about this.
2) The White House cared.
3) ABC couldn't just bump the show up an hour or a day or whatever.

terrorball

2010-01-06T16:49:00.010-05:00

As I stood with fellow travelers in the DC bus station on the way to New York, we watched the terrorball game on the TV machine. Everyone around me seemed completely non-plused. Granted, I'm probably projecting, but there was a pervasive sense that this spectacle had nothing to do with us and in addition to being dumb, boring, and absurd had officially become tiresome and tedious. The contrast between the excited near hysterical tones of the broadcasters and the flat affect of the audience was striking. The TV kept cutting to the still shot of the terrorist, a semi-candid photo of a youngish black guy in a white t-shirt looking exactly like 80% of the people in the station. No one seemed alarmed or compelled to tackle themselves. Paul Campos sums it up nicely :

.

Our national government and almost all of the establishment media have decided to play a similar game, which could be called Terrorball.

...

...in the week that began with a terrorist incident in which no one other than the pathetically incompetent aspiring terrorist was hurt, approximately 47,000 Americans died. Around 13,000 of these people never reached old age, including nearly one thousand children.

Indeed over the past seven days approximately 350 Americans were murdered. About twenty of these murder victims were women killed by their husbands and boyfriends, while something like 35 were children who died as a result of abuse. Several hundred Americans committed suicide between Christmas and New Year’s Day and several hundred others died as a direct consequence of not having any medical insurance.

...

On one level, Terrorball can be understood as a product of straightforward cynicism: Both politicians and media moguls know that fear can be exploited for power and profit. But the rules of the game have another source as well.

...

Another reason has to do the imaginative capacities of our elites. The typical Congressional subcommittee chairman or cable news anchor or syndicated columnist can’t really imagine not being able to afford to take his child to a doctor, or being wrongly convicted of a crime, but he is quite capable of imagining being on a Paris to New York flight that’s blown out of the sky. And while it’s true the risk he faces of suffering this fate are very close to zero, they are not, as they are for a poor person, literally zero.

duelling paranoias

2010-01-04T22:20:00.002-05:00

The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.
...

Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.

link

Gah! Terrorists or Pedo's?! Shall we die a firey death to save the children? Or sacrifice an innocent youth, Iphigenia-like, to win the wider war?

2010-01-02T17:16:00.002-05:00

via Canucklehead

probably more effective than writing your congressperson

2010-01-02T10:52:00.001-05:00

Happy 2010 Blicero.

2010-01-01T06:54:00.005-05:00

Souvenirs de Basel. A suspicious brioche:

Note the final menu item:

Happy New Year from North Korea!

2010-01-01T06:53:00.001-05:00

From the Vaults: A Very AmCop Christmas

2009-12-28T12:46:00.002-05:00

What follows are excerpts from a post originally made on December 24, 2004, updated for today's holiday season...

I got back not long ago from a trip to Barcelona. The Catalunyans love Christmas, and as you’d expect, the streets and public spaces of the city are decked out with "Bones Festes" signs, festive lights, you name it.

Plus, nativity scenes, lots of them, in public spaces, storefront windows, churches.

The Catalunyan nativity scene is a little different from our own, though.

The setting is a manger, of course. Barnyard animals, three wise men, Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus.

But there’s also "El Caganer."

...

"Caganer" in English is "crapper." As in, a guy (typically a shepherd with a little red cap) crouching, with trou dropped, taking a dump.

Sometimes he's off to the side of the nativity scene, sometimes hiding behind a tree, sometimes right there in the manger, next to the Holy Family and baby Jesus.

"Caganer" figurines of all shapes, sizes, and styles are for sale in virtually every Christmas shopping fair in any marketplace in Catalunya (like Barcelona’s Santa Llúcia market, in front of the old cathedral) and are featured in just about every nativity scene you come across.

Explanations abound.

1. Some say the crapper is a symbol of historical Catalunyan defiance of the fascist regime of Generalisimo Francisco Franco. (Franco was an ardent Catholic, so the crapper symbolically craps on Franco’s religion.)

2. Others describe him as a Santa Claus-like figure, who bestows gifts on the children in his own scatalogical way.

(A child is presented with a wooden log swaddled in blankets. When the child is shooed out of the room, the "caganer" magically appears, performs his singular function, and out comes a wonderful gift, which then replaces the log in the blankets.)

3. There’s the Catalunyan secularist/humanist explanation which has it that, even while the "greatest event in human history was happening someone, somewhere, was having a crap."

4. Some say that the crapping shepherd symbolizes fertility, that he "represents t he re-fertilization of the ground in the winter, in the hope of fertility in the spring" and thus "symbolizes fertility in general and hence good luck."

5. Then there’s this definitive explanation, from the website of an organization devoted, it seems, to the manufacture of ceramic crappers in a multiplicity of poses, costumes, themes, and styles.

CAGANERS
The " Castellers ", witches and firs of Anna Maria Pla, have two things in common: the made kneel positions of their bodies and the excrements in spiral form " that pay the ground, and bring luck to the home until next Christmas " explains Anna Maria.These peculiar figures are not nothing else that three of more than 50 models of "caganers" that produces the factory. To the conventional old Catalan man with barretina (tipical red hat) and canvas shoes, all type of peculiar clubs has been added him. Anna Maria Pla shows with pride his long collection, in that they appear devils with wings, papas Noel, grandmothers, navigators, angels, nuns, clergyman and fans of Barça and the Español, (spanish football teams).

And, the 2009 Update:

Bones Festes and Happy New Year!

Lieberman throws up, shits self, spits, wallows in all three like a fucking pig.

2009-12-27T11:02:00.001-05:00

Nothing like Iraq III to ring in the new year.

Happy Holidays!

2009-12-26T02:14:00.003-05:00

metaphor alert

2009-12-23T00:09:00.001-05:00

h/t hiaw

santa loves us

2009-12-22T03:12:00.001-05:00

Rudy Giuliani is set to throw his endorsement to 2010 GOP gubernatorial hopeful Rick Lazio a press conference tomorrow, where he's also expected to indicate he's not running for US Senate himself next year, Republican sources told The Post.

link

No more Giuliani. I can't think of a better Christmas present.

Smart big picture assessment

2009-12-21T15:38:00.004-05:00

This is by a Huffington Post blogger who is a grad student in health policy.
It seems pretty smart to me -- worth considering in trying to assess just what the current bill is and whether it is worth supporting:

The latest installment of conventional wisdom to emerge from liberal writers who support the current health care bill argues that the best entitlement programs come from bad bills. This caterpillars-into-butterflies narrative boasts Medicare and Social Security as the templates for how this flawed bill could form the cornerstone for single-payer, or something like it. Take, for example, Paul Krugman:

"Bear in mind also the lessons of history: social insurance programs tend to start out highly imperfect and incomplete, but get better and more comprehensive as the years go by. Thus Social Security originally had huge gaps in coverage -- and a majority of African-Americans, in particular, fell through those gaps. But it was improved over time, and it's now the bedrock of retirement stability for the vast majority of Americans."

Yet what they ignore is that so many entitlement programs enacted by Democrats, even the popular ones, are starved of funding, stripped of their authority, delegated to the states and left to fall by the wayside. Nothing exemplifies this more than the welfare programs enacted under the Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. From the moment of its inception it was slowly defunded and shrunken down only to be killed off - or rather 'reformed' (sound familiar?) - by the big-government ending Bill Clinton. A decade later, facing record unemployment, the federal government is compelled to re-authorize welfare payments to the states to stave of state bankruptcies and mass starvation.

And the current health care reform package in the Senate looks far more like a welfare program for the poor than Medicare or Social Security. Whereas Medicare and Social Security make the middle class stakeholders in a government run system, and entirely dependent on that system working properly and delivering results, the current reforms are selective in their effects, largely sidestepping those with employer based insurance. Instead, like welfare, the benefits are exclusive in nature, in this case targeting only those who are barred from the current insurance market, and thereby don't give the middle class a stake in its success. Without bringing these stakeholders into the policy it is far more likely to likely to follow the fate of welfare than Medicare or Social Security as services for the poor always become poor services.

With the Medicare buy-in and public option off the table there is no 'entitlement' or 'social insurance' program that can grow and expand. Instead there are subsidies to private insurance for those currently left out which are more likely to shrink over time than grow. For the liberals' argument to hold true, that the bill would get better over time, Congress would have to vote to increase the size of the subsidies at a rate higher the inflation of the price of health insurance. Given that nobody seriously believes this bill to "bend the curve" of costs, those subsidies would have increase greatly year-on-year just to remain at parity. The likely outcome is that the growth in subsidies will fall behind the rising cost of insurance, making health insurance more expensive, more regressive and less progressive as time goes on.

probably a more sane perspective

2009-12-21T07:55:00.001-05:00

Justina, commenter at The Field says:

Having reviewed the proposed "Manager's " 385 page amendment to the Senate Finance Committee bill, I'm still not clear on its real impact for those 47 million uninsured and the 50 million who are under-insured. I trust Howard Dean when he says its represents an improvement. But clearly, we are still not yet close to providing affordable health care to all those who need it. Until we know whats in the final bill, we on the left need to keep yelling so that any further changes aren't just more gifts to the private insurers and the conservadems they've bought and paid for.

Logically, no one who cares about providing the broadest possible coverage at the lowest possible price should be shouting "Pass this Bill" or "Kill this Bill" until we have gotten the best possible deal in the final bill that we can.

We have one more shot if we can push for a conference committee to reconcile the best parts of House and Senate Manager's Amendment bills. At the conclusion of that process is the time to decide whether we should support passage, try to get the best parts passed through reconciliation or advocate killing the bill and starting over.

In the meantime, exposing the Democratic Party's sell-out to, and control by, corporate interests is extremely important to generate support for electing progressives to replace the "Blue Dog" conservadems and, hopefully, to remove the power of the DLC to further pervert the Democratic (and democratic) agenda.

happy holidays

2009-12-20T16:49:00.001-05:00

(click to enlarge)

donkers

2009-12-20T14:38:00.006-05:00

Yglesias:

But to repeat—despite flaws, I think this is an excellent piece of legislation. Among other things, it represents a return, after fifteen years, of the idea that congress should be trying to pass major legislation that tackles major national problems. And even beyond that, it restores an even longer-lost tradition of congress trying to pass major legislation on specifically progressive priorities.

"represents a return...of the idea"...."restores...lost tradition" - These are the words a of a bullshit artist with nothing substantive left to say. When people start talking about representation and restoration, reach for your gun. Or your wallet. Or both. Or pawn your gun to have something to put in your wallet.

well put

2009-12-19T14:06:00.001-05:00

via Trollblog:

Our friends have been explaining things to us ever so kindly during the last few days: “Don’t let the best be the enemy of the good”, “politics is the art of the possible”, “politics is the art of compromise”, and just recently “We must obey he ethic of responsibility”.

...

This isn’t about purism vs. compromise, as many on both sides seem to think. In the end you’re going to get a compromise. This is about fighting for the best compromise.

But playing the game involves risk. In the example I just gave, over a run of auctions you’re going to come out ahead, but now and then it will happen that you would have been better off with the easy deal. If you play, sometimes you lose, but if you don’t play, in the end you lose more. For at least the last twenty years, Democratic negotiations have been defined from the start as finding the middle, with the progressive positions surrendered even before bargaining begins.

This leads to a second question: who are we bargaining with? Well, we’re not bargaining with the Republicans or the conservative Democrats — our representatives are in Congress to do that. We don’t have to figure out how to handle Joe Lieberman or Olympia Snowe or Ben Nelson or any of the other boodlers and rightwingers stinking up Congress. We’re bargaining with our own representatives in Congress, not the other side’s representatives. And in practice this means that we’re bargaining with the progressives in Congress, the Democratic leadership, and Barack Obama (as represented by Rahm Emmanuel).

We obviously shouldn’t take bargaining tips from the people we’re bargaining with. Progressive bargaining with the Democratic Party has been stuck at the “Shut up!” level for a good long time, and Obama (in the person of Rahm Emmanuel) has not changed that.

Centrists are always assuring us that they’re really on our side but are continually forced to compromise by the political realities. This is not true, however. Centrists are committed to centrism — some for ideological reasons, some for corrupt reasons, and most for both reasons. Along with the Republicans we are one of their two main adversaries, and we shouldn’t be too sure that they’ll side with us at crunch time. Beating us is one of their primary goals.

Democratic pros and Republican demagogues tend to speak of progressives and intellectuals as tiny, effete, inconsequential minorities, but that’s just bullying...The Democrats can’t win without intellectuals and progressives, but they don’t want to give us much, and that’s why we are continually having these dog-and-pony-show debates about purism and realism and moral seriousness and the ethic of responsibility and so on.

...

We should play the game to the end, and make our choices piecemeal as we go along. And remember — anything less than Medicare for all counts as a compromise.

blawwwg!!!

2009-12-18T23:54:00.022-05:00

Regarding the post below, Tankerbell writes:

It's pretty easy to use someone like Lanny Davis as a strawman, but the fact is there are also some prominent liberals... who are arguing that for all its flaws and shortcomings, the legislation still does important things and is worth passing.

... I think it's at least worth entertaining an alternative perspective...which is at least AS plausible as the notion that Obama is just shelling for the insurance industry and essentially in cahoots with that unnamable thing from the state of CT.

Yes. Obviously Lanny Davis is an easy target. Just as obviously there are intelligent sophisticated conflict-of-interest-free persons arguing in good faith for passage of this bill. Also just as obviously there are gradations of sophistication in argument on either side of the debate, as there are in any debate, from principled, tightly argued theoretically coherent data-heavy position papers to logical-fallacy lobbing flatulators like myself. I’m a dipshit who doesn’t get paid to read and think, with posting privileges on a blawg. If I had NYT real estate I’d say different things.

Logically Lanny Davis’ whorishness does not discredit his argument and neither should the good-faith attempts by people on his “side” be dragged down by guilt-by-association tactics. However, outside the realm of pure logic and into the realm of the “real” world, I do honestly believe and will stand by the notion that when whores like Davis start arguing for an outcome, a huge red flag should go up. Davis’ allegiance creates for me an even higher burden of proof for those on his side. When CEO’s, establishment journos and think-tanks that take corporate money, state officials and generally people with power and their minions start talking, I think heavy skepticism is warranted. Not only is it warranted, but it’s the most sane orientation to take. They may indeed occasionally be saying something true or worthwhile, but that’s not the way to bet. When it comes to the discussion of the welfare of powerless people, people with power are simply not to be given the benefit of the doubt.

Now Krugman:

And maybe I’m being unfair, but I don’t seem to see the same degree of soul-searching on the other side. Too much of what I read seems to come from people who haven’t really faced up to what it will mean for progressive hopes — not to mention America’s uninsured — if health care reform crashes and burns, yet again.

Honestly, Paul: Fuck you, you supercilious fuck. Yes you are being unfair, to put it mildly. People who think this bill is shit haven’t done the requisite soul-searching and are heedless of the consequences? Why? Because you "don't seem to see" it? That’s some ad-hominem bullshit if there ever was such. Only he’s writing for NYT, not AmCop. Anyone who knows how to search the internet can find plenty of thoughtful sophisticated good-faith criticism of this bill from people who care just as much about “progressive hopes” and America’s uninsured as Paul Krugman. Singling out some people who made a guilt-by-association argument to attack your position and then knocking them down is just another victory in the war on straw. If that’s the best critique you’ve got of your opponents, your shit is weak. Apparently it’s “not a time for cheap shots” unless you’re Paul Krugman. In which case, fire away.

Dionne’s argument appears to be fourfold. First, that the 60 vote supermajority is required and empowers obstructionists. Second that Rockefeller and Brown say it’s a bad idea to kill the bill. Third, killing the bill aids your enemies. Fourth, that the bad bill can and likely will be expanded upon in the future.

The first is pure mythology that has been well-debunked by the articles and links that Speakingcorpse has provided in previous posts and comments.

The second is merely an appeal to authority and therefore fallacious and worthless.

The third requires belief in a false dichotomy: that a loss for Dems is a win for Republicans, but even in politics the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend.

The fourth is highly debatable and I think we’ve already done a respectable job here arguing the other side, although you can find more disciplined stuff elsewhere on the interwebs.

Now regarding this split among progressives, I’ve read two posts today that I think sum it up nicely. One by IOZ and one by La Greenwald. I like IOZ and find his polemics highly entertaining and basically spot-on. Since he doesn’t adhere to standards of civil discourse and rational argument, and people in these parts seem not to like him, I’ll just provide the link. Greenwald is more measured and judicious. Quoth Glenn:

(Jake McIntyre) explicitly said, his intent wasn't to suggest that those individuals shouldn't be listened to because of their Iraq position six years ago (that would be an invalid and unfair claim), but simply that -- as Kilgore says -- there are underlying and significant differences in strategic and ideological outlook driving the health care debate that have been present for some time but are typically ignored.

...

There are many reasons for the progressive division on the health care bill. There are differences over the narrow question of health care policy, with some believing the bill does more harm than good just on that ground alone. Some of it has to do with broader questions of political power: if progressives always announce that they are willing to accept whatever miniscule benefits are tossed at them (on the ground that it's better than nothing) and unfailingly support Democratic initiatives (on the ground that the GOP is worse), then they will (and should) always be ignored when it comes time to negotiate; nobody takes seriously the demands of those who announce they'll go along with whatever the final outcome is. But the most significant underlying division identified by Kilgore is the divergent views over the rapidly growing corporatism that defines our political system.

...

The health care bill is one of the most flagrant advancements of this corporatism yet, as it bizarrely forces millions of people to buy extremely inadequate products from the private health insurance industry -- regardless of whether they want it or, worse, whether they can afford it (even with some subsidies). In other words, it uses the power of government, the force of law, to give the greatest gift imaginable to this industry -- tens of millions of coerced customers, many of whom will be truly burdened by having to turn their money over to these corporations -- and is thus a truly extreme advancement of this corporatist model. It's undeniably true that the bill will also do some genuine good, as it will help many people who can't get coverage now to get it (though it will also severely burden many people with compelled, uncontrolled premiums and will potentially weaken coverage for millions as well). If one judges the bill purely from the narrow perspective of coverage, a rational and reasonable (though by no means conclusive) case can be made in its favor. But if one finds this creeping corporatism to be a truly disturbing and nefarious trend, then the bill will seem far less benign.

...

Even if one grants the arguments made by proponents of the health care bill about increased coverage, what the bill does is reinforces and bolsters a radically corrupt and flawed insurance model and an even more corrupt and destructive model of "governing." It is a major step forward for the corporatist model, even a new innovation in propping it up. How one weighs those benefits and costs -- both in the health care debate and with regard to many of Obama's other policies -- depends largely upon how devoted one is to undermining and weakening this corporatist framework.

Etc. Etc. The whole thing is worth reading.

I have, as you’ve asked, “entertain[ed] an alternative perspective...” As someone who did his fair share of “agonizing soul-searching” years ago and came out firmly on the side of devotion to undermining and weakening the corporatist framework (to put it extremely mildly), my default stance is this: any bill Democrats are pushing is intended to strengthen this framework. Any claim by Democrats that this is not what they are doing is a lie. Most of the jockeying and jostling in Washington is undertaken for two purposes: to create the appearance that strengthening the framework is not what they are doing, and to settle intra-elite disputes among rival factions of the powerful. Their goal is to enact unpopular policies that benefit them and yet retain popularity. Thus they have to engage in prolonged and complex deception. So far, I haven’t seen enough evidence to convince me that this is not what is in fact happening.

So no, the “alternative perspective” is not “at least as plausible” as the notion that Obama is shilling for corporate America. The “alternative perspective” is highly implausible. I assume that Obama is shilling for corporate America until proven otherwise. I assume that fundamentally the State exists to serve the interests of the privileged and powerful, and its officials will so act until proven otherwise. I don't assume these things willy nilly, but based on my examination of history, theory, economics and the like I’ve concluded that such assumptions are warranted and quite useful tools of analysis. Your mileage may vary depending on your reading list and life experiences. It’s an ideological position to be sure, but there is no escape from ideology so understood. The idea that everyone should be given the benefit of the doubt regardless of their position in the power structure is equally ideological. It is certainly possible that other things being equal Obama is not going to serve corporate interests, no ideology or political theory is determinative, but I consider it highly unlikely that he will do so.

(I should also say that most of this “deception” is mostly unconscious. The various mechanisms, techniques and processes by which this takes place are perfectly mundane and generally understood and do not amount to “conspiracy theories” or paranoia. But that’s an argument for another time.)

At any rate, I’ve yet to see much evidence that those who hold the “alternative perspective” you mention, i.e. the mainstream perspective on the what and how of American political economy, have ever seriously entertained the notions held by those of us "devoted to undermining the framework” as Glenn puts it.

I see a lot of dismissiveness: charges of paranoia or conspiricism. I see a lot of goal post moving: when you polemicize you’re accused of lack of sophistication and rigor, when you adhere to scholastic discipline you’re accused of pedantry; when you discuss a point-of-view not widely seen and don’t give equal time to the opposition, you’re accused of lacking balance. I see a lot of downright ignorance among presumably educated people: lack of familiarity with the concepts and language of theoretical and political traditions outside of their own. Lack of willingness to “consider an alternative point of view” to their left, or even their right for that matter. I also see among mainstream progressives just as much if not more anger directed at the far left as at the far right.

I’m not questioning your good faith here, but frankly I’m really tired of being asked to “consider the alternative”. We live in the “alternative”. The “alternative” is the air we breathe. We never for a moment have any option but to consider it. We are schooled in it since birth and have it repeated to us incessantly through every symbolic medium possible. Every institution we participate in is built around “the alternative” and therefore every action we take forces us to confront or conform to “the alternative”. We are constantly in the position of reconciling ourselves with it even when we’ve stopped believing in it. You might as well ask the poor to consider the travails of the rich, or women to ponder the dilemmas of patriarchs, or blacks to see it whitey’s way for once. I say this not to appropriate the moral status of oppressed groups, I’m personally quite privileged and have no claim there, but to point out the relationship of dominant to marginal perspectives. You can’t ask me to do something I’m continually being forced to do.

jane takes it to the rim

2009-12-18T11:29:00.004-05:00

Damn:

Primarily posted for the takedown of Lanny Davis, but it should also be noted that when slime like Lanny Davis are braying about "caring about the 30 million uninsured" it's a dead giveaway that the argument is total bullshit.

if only

2009-12-17T22:01:00.003-05:00

“First they came for the rich. And I did not speak out because I was not rich. Then they came for the property owners, and I did not speak out because I did not own property. Then they came for the right to bear arms, and I did not speak out because I was not armed. Then they came for me and denied me my medical care, and there was no one left to speak for me,”

– Laura Ingraham, protesting the Senate healthcare bill at a rally in DC.

Update:

Driftglass has his version:

First they came for the bigots, and I did not speak out because my cousin had a gay friend, and there's a black guy in my office;

Then they came for the oligarchs and fascists, and I did not speak out because I'm broke and brown makes my ass look fat;

Then they came for the theocrats, and I did not speak out because, Jeez, those people are just friggin scary;

Finally they came for me and the other eleven people left in the Conservative Movement — and there was no one left to speak out for us.

And America lived happily ever after.

prisencolinen sinaincusol. oll raigth!

2009-12-17T18:18:00.007-05:00

Ok, I need a few minutes off from the apocalypse.

In 1972 Adriano Celantano composed a song made up of scrambled English phonemes to demonstrate to anglophones what their language sounds like to non-anglophones. Remarkably it is more edifying than anything in our national political scene:

Thanks to GAS for a brief respite.

Not over

2009-12-17T10:21:00.005-05:00

Very good stuff from SEIU. A key, key point: rejecting the Senate bill is not saying "fuck it." It is saying that the fight is not over. The bill can still be changed. The final outcome can be changed even after the Senate bill is passed. But Obama-Lieberman will have to be forced kicking and screaming.

This is from the FDL post on the SEIU statement about the Senate shitpile:

Andy Stern, the President of the SEIU, published a letter to his membership on the union’s website today, saying that they cannot accept the Senate health care bill without fighting to improve it.

...He weighed the pros and cons, and agreed that the coverage expansions and insurance regulations are worthy goals. But he wasn’t blind to the negative aspects of reform in the Senate bill:

And while it is not entirely clear what the Senate bill will look like, it is becoming clearer that for many people, care will still be too expensive to afford. Some of you would face an additional burden because your health insurance benefits would be taxed. [Note: the major way to pay for the bill is taxes on supposedly 'luxurious' health-plans that are not really luxurious; they have often been won through years of collective bargaining, at the cost of pay raises; and many of the so-called 'luxurious' plans are essential in high-cost areas like the Northeast U.S. The companies would pay the tax for these programs, a cost which would immediately be transferred to people who use them, and to others whose premiums would rise. --speakingcorpse]

The first point is really key. Health reform is starting to look like a way to make coverage attractive to those least likely to use it, while making those most likely to use insurance – such as older customers, who would have to pay rates four times what the young pay, with no sense of where that age-banding begins; or those with pre-existing conditions, who would get charged 50% more – unable to afford it. As Jon Walker put it, “This sounds like a recipe to price out the old (nonprofitable) and force only the young (profitable) to buy insurance.”

Mcjoan had a host of other points to make on the weakness of the insurance regulations, including the most important fact, that there’s no regulatory framework created at the national level to actually enforce these rules.

On the excise tax, this is obviously a key concern for unions, and the best practice would be to enact a carve-out for those who arrived at their health benefits through collective bargaining. The White House is trying to defend the excise tax by saying that it only impacts 3% of all health plans, but with health inflation not expected to end with this bill (perhaps slow down if everything goes well), that 3% number will grow. The CBO score tells you the number will grow. That’s why reformers like it, because it raises more revenue than health inflation! [R.J. Eskow, a good moderate longtime professional healthcare analyst who writes for HuffPo, makes a key, key point: 3% of healthplans is misleading, because there are only a few plans, and some of them are big. 3 % means a much larger percentage of actual customers -- Eskow has it at 20%, many who have sacrificed pay-raises to get these healthplans; and the number will most certainly grow; the premiums which determine the tax are going up $ thousand+ yearly. --speakingcorpse]

...After laying out the particulars, Stern says that his organization will fight for improvements – and he calls on a certain DC resident to fight as well:

President Obama must remember his own words from the campaign. His call of “Yes We Can” was not just to us, not just to the millions of people who voted for him, but to himself. We all stood shoulder to shoulder with the President during his hard fought campaign. And, we will continue to stand with him but he must fight for the reform we all know is possible...

...This is one of the first times that any union has publicly called on President Obama to actually use his power as President. It’s significant, in that context.

Senator Feingold: Blame Obama

2009-12-16T12:05:00.004-05:00

The voters certainly will! Not to beat a dead horse, or to campaign against a doomed president, but...

Feingold: "This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth."

Glenn Greenwald: ...From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House -- hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama's campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN). Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn't pass it...

...Numerous Obama defenders... have been insisting that there is just nothing the White House could have done and all of this shows that our political system is tragically "ungovernable." After all, Congress is a separate branch of government, Obama doesn't have a vote, and 60 votes are needed to do anything...

...Does anyone actually believe that Rahm Emanuel (who built his career on industry support for the Party and jamming "centrist" bills through Congress with the support of Blue Dogs) and Barack Obama (who attached himself to Joe Lieberman when arriving in the Senate, repeatedly proved himself receptive to "centrist" compromises, had a campaign funded by corporate interests, and is now the leader of a vast funding and political infrastructure) were the helpless victims of those same forces?

...we've seen before what the White House can do -- and does do -- when they actually care about pressuring members of Congress to support something they genuinely want passed. When FDL and other liberal blogs led an effort to defeat Obama's war funding bill back in June, the White House became desperate for votes, and here is what they apparently did (though they deny it):

'The White House is playing hardball with Democrats who intend to vote against the supplemental war spending bill, threatening freshmen who oppose it that they won't get help with reelection and will be cut off from the White House, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) said Friday. "We're not going to help you. You'll never hear from us again," Woolsey said the White House is telling freshmen.'

That's what the White House can do when they actually care about pressuring someone to vote the way they want. Why didn't they do any of that to the "centrists" who were supposedly obstructing what they wanted on health care? Why didn't they tell Blanche Lincoln -- in a desperate fight for her political life -- that she would "never hear from them again," and would lose DNC and other Democratic institutional support, if she filibustered the public option? Why haven't they threatened to remove Joe Lieberman's cherished Homeland Security Chairmanship if he's been sabotaging the President's agenda?

...What remains is a politically distastrous and highly coercive "mandate" gift to the health insurance industry, described perfectly by Digby:

'Obama can say that you're getting a lot, but also saying that it "covers everyone," as if there's a big new benefit is a big stretch. Nothing will have changed on that count except changing the law to force people to buy private insurance if they don't get it from their employer. I guess you can call that progressive, but that doesn't make it so. In fact, mandating that all people pay money to a private interest isn't even conservative, free market or otherwise. It's some kind of weird corporatism that's very hard to square with the common good philosophy that Democrats supposedly espouse.'

Nobody's "getting covered" here. After all, people are already "free" to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won't make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn't or didn't want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people's money against their will, saying it's for their own good --- and doing it without even the cover that FDR wisely insisted upon with social security, by having it withdrawn from paychecks.

Grand Guignol

2009-12-14T16:33:00.003-05:00

I'm all for pursuing pragmatic liberal policies, etc., and talking endlessly about the monolithic system is boring and pointless. Yes.

At the same time, however, it is not edifying to imagine conflict, drama, and actual events to be occurring when they are not.

TPM (a world away from IOZ):

As Politico first reported, the White House is pressuring a reluctant Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to cut a deal with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to keep the prospects for health care reform legislation alive, a keyed in aide confirms.

Reid's inclination is to wait until the CBO reports back on the public option compromise at the root of Lieberman's filibuster threat. But the White House has made it clear that they don't want to mess around.

The White House denies the charge. Spokesman Dan Pfeiffer tells TPMDC, "The report is inaccurate. The White House is not pushing Senator Reid in any direction. We are working hand in hand with the Senate Leadership to work through the various issues and pass health reform as soon as possible."

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was less responsive. "The President is anxious to see progress and will continue to work with Democrats and Republicans and independents and everyone in between."

Today, Interior Secretary, and former Colorado Senator, Ken Salazar paid a visit to Lieberman. The White House has dispatched Salazar to the Hill numerous times over the course of the health care fight to finesse things with swing vote members, and today his focus is Lieberman.

So let's say Democratic leadership does cut a deal with Lieberman to scrap the public option compromise entirely. What happens next? Does Lieberman get off scot free with his former party?

A Senate Democratic aide says they're not thinking about that yet. "The anger is too raw, and the task of figuring out what to do now is too pressing, to ponder that," the aide said.

Can any initial interpretation of events exclude the possibility of Obama and Lieberhole acting in concert?

Update: Hamsher at Firedoglake (who is not commenting from a distance but from within the fight -- she has been the single person most responsible for the strong alignment of House Dems in support of the now-defunct public option):

It’s quite convenient that what Joe Lieberman is demanding — no public option, no Medicare buy-in — happens to look just like the Senate Finance Committee bill that the White House wrote with Baucus. Now the White House is saying Reid should take it...

Joe gets his way by giving Obama what he wanted anyway. Sweet. The weak and ineffectual/corrupt Reid will no doubt find a way to do just that. And Byron Dorgan’s drug reimportation bill that Harry Reid is blocking from coming to the floor? Well, we probably won’t see that either. Because it’s not part of the White House’s PhRMA deal, it can’t be in the bill. And if we’ve discovered one thing, it’s that the White House and Harry Reid will do anything to deliver on those secret deals...

wow

2009-12-14T01:00:00.003-05:00

link

In a move that senior leadership aides say has left them stunned, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) that he will filibuster a tentative public option compromise unless it's stripped of its key component: a measure that would allow people aged 55-64 to buy insurance through Medicare.

The development casts substantial doubt on whether or not a health care reform bill can pass in the Senate, and even more doubt on whether a bill that does pass the Senate will be reconcilable with substantially more progressive House legislation in such a way that a final reform package can once again pass in both chambers of Congress.

I don't even want this thing to pass, but surely there's a special place in hell reserved for Lieberman. What an amazing world-class prick. I mean, I get that his job is to whittle away any part of the bill that actually helps people and just leave the Insco subsidy, but still...it's breathtaking.

Addendum:

IOZ has the solid on Lieberman's role in this little bit of grand guignol:

Lieberman. You have to admire his tenacity. He cut himself an admirable deal. Senate leadership lets him run a committee and do whatever he wants, and in exchange, he willingly functions as a convenient scapegoat and target for ineffectual Progressive wrath, as they are constitutionally incapable of understanding that he is not an impediment to the Donk's grand plans, but a primary component. Indeed, if "Republicans apply the torque that turns the thing rightward [and] . . . Democrats are the pawl," then the likes of Lieberman (see also, Ben Nelson, the Blue Dogs, et al) are the teeth on the gear, which is to say, the sharp protrusions against which the Democratic pawl clicks to prevent backsliding. The wheel turns right; the Donk slips in; Lieberman cries "Across this line . . . you do not . . ."; and the Progressive internet goes bonkers and ignores the rest of the machine. Whether health care or the terror war. Doesn't matter. The effect is the same.

Shit struck with miniature Duomo statue, bleeds.

2009-12-13T17:13:00.001-05:00

Better than assassination?

bwahahahahahaha

2009-12-13T15:34:00.001-05:00

Ha:

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

sunshineandponiesophagia II: Son of sunshineandponiesophagia

2009-12-13T02:48:00.004-05:00

Also good news:

GEORGE GOEHL: What we're trying to do is really organize around a set of ideas. And when we think a real successful movement would be more around an allegiance to ideas over party. And some of that'll contain protests. But it's really about a vision of what we want to create. Around a more fair and just economy. So, right now, I think a lot of the action is around banking reform. But I think we're building the foundation for a big movement around an economy that serves us all.

...

This is an incredible opportunity to turn a tragedy into something good. So, if we can get it together, and I really think is not about the Congress. This is not about the President. This is about the people watching this show and other Americans saying, 'Enough is enough.' And I'm going to move from my seat out into the streets, from fingers on a keyboard, boots on the ground, and get out there." Whether that means calling the Members of Congress. Whether it means organizing a little protest in front of a bank. Whether it means making a YouTube video and cutting up your credit cards and posting it and sending it out to your friends. If people get engaged, we can win this fight. And that's happening. There are actions planned all across the country in 25 states over through the end of the year. And then as next year comes around, you'll start to see more events like the showdown in Chicago.

A guilty admission: I've stupidly bought into the media-pimped notion that the Teabaggers are the Official Face of Popular Outrage at the Banks. In my defense, I'll say that I wasn't very wholehearted about it, I just hadn't heard of any good shit coming from the left. Bill Moyers, god bless him, shows it ain't so. The video is worth watching, although Heather Booth is a bit muddle-headed, a regrettable necessity in activist interviews. It will be a huge loss when Moyers does his last show soon.

Also of note, I learned from Doug Henwood's peerless radio show Behind the News, that Evo's re-election was by a huge margin and turnout and that Bolivia's economy is doing so well that even the IMF praised it. Venezuela meanwhile isn't looking as good. Which is further evidence to bolster my core belief that change is best when it's from the bottom up and not the top down. It isn't easy being this right all the time, people. But I do it because I care.

If you like radio, Behind the News as well as Chuck Mertz's show are the best things on the air. Sane speech. Very refreshing.

sunshineandponiesophagia

2009-12-13T02:05:00.005-05:00

Naomi Klein:

We are seeing a redefinition of environmentalism, which has always been a bit of a kind of, sort of touchy-feely movement here in the North. “We’re all in it together. Let’s hold hands,” right? There’s nothing wrong with holding hands, but the fact is, we’re not all in it together in the same way. There is an inverse relationship between the people who created the problem and where the effects of those problems are being felt. There’s an inverse relationship between who created the problem and who can afford to save themselves from the problem, and it isn’t only in the Global South. Think about New Orleans. Right? It’s also the South in the North. The people who had resources could drive out of the disaster zone; the people who depended on the state were left on their roofs, a kind of a climate apartheid, in the United States.

So we have this discussion of reparations. In the United States, when you talk about reparations, it’s not about the stealing of resources as much as it is about the stealing of people. So this movement that we are talking about today is part of that movement, as well. In fact, at a conference in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, the Conference on Racism, the issue of ecological debt was one of the issues on the agenda, but so was reparations for slavery. And I think there are some people here from N’COBRA from the United States, which is the national coalition calling for reparations for slavery. And they deserve to be acknowledged, because this movement is building on their work, as well.

...

I said at the opening of Klimaforum that there’s a place for rage and there’s a place for civil disobedience. I was not saying, as some news reports claimed, that Copenhagen should be trashed. I really don’t think so. I think that’s a very bad idea. And I’m going to say that explicitly, even though people are always telling me, “Don’t say it’s bad. Don’t say it’s bad.” Listen, the reason why it’s bad is precisely because of what we’re seeing here. This conversation that has started here about the real face of environmentalism, as a class war that is being waged by the rich against the poor, has never happened before. There has never been global media attention on this discussion. If we allow the media to change the discussion into broken windows in Copenhagen—which is the boringest discussion in the world, OK?—we have truly failed.

But I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be direct action. There should be direct action

So the protests are well underway and according to the Telegraph some windows have been broken and there've already been mass-arrests, pre-emptive and otherwise. So the pens are filling up as planned. I haven't looked widely and so I don't know whether corporate media has latched onto this and made this all about broken windows.

What's interesting about Klein's words here isn't so much her denunciation of property destruction as a form of direct action, although I agree with her in this instance, but her sketch of the new form of the Global Justice movement. To the extent that her sketch is accurate I find this a very promising direction indeed.

Essentially what she's outlining is the late Murray Bookchin's idea of social ecology, the central insight of which is that ecological problems are rooted in social problems. Since I basically agree with this, I find it very promising that mass-movements are starting to organize around this principle, even if sans la lettre. I don't expect anything of any worth to come out of the official portion of this conference, but if the Global Justice movement can successfully forge organizational, rhetorical and theoretical links between environmental struggle, class war, and slavery reparations as a result of converging at this place and time, it would be invaluable. Linking these elements would be an achievement on par with the long-hoped-for unity of labor, student and environmental groups that made Seattle so effective. This is a ray of hope that the movement of movements can find its feet again after its post-9/11 dissolution.

It does also illustrate a key function of these protests, which isn't only to contest power. Most protests don't put very much pressure on power and many people feel they are worthless for this reason. But these convergences, and protests generally, act as sort of mini-conferences. Morale is boosted by learning you are not alone, connections made, information and ideas exchanged, hope, solidarity and agency are cultivated, alienation and frustration dissipated. Oddly, all of this sort of thing doesn't happen very much at actual movement conferences. Having the imperative to action makes consensus, actually listening to others, and finding common ground more urgent thus reducing the sectarian squabbles that occur when the discussion is purely academic. Not that there's not sectarian squabbling at protests, but vitriol and length are greatly reduced.

The next phase of course would be devising new tactics that break out of the ritualization pattern JHD commented on earlier. This is a good beginning though. Even if they don't get the right headlines in the right media outlets, resistance is still fertile.

Good. Blow it Up.

2009-12-12T01:35:00.005-05:00

Huffington Post:

The White House, aided by Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), is working hard to crush an amendment being pushed by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) to allow for the reimportation of pharmaceutical drugs from Canada, Senate sources tell the Huffington Post. As a result, the Senate health care debate has come to a standstill: Carper has placed a "hold" on Dorgan's amendment and in response, Dorgan tells HuffPost, he'll object to any other amendments being considered before he gets a vote on his.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) is a lead co-sponsor of Dorgan's amendment... The amendment has the support of a number of other Republicans, including Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Charles Grassley (Iowa), John Thune (S.D.) and David Vitter (La.). Opponents of the amendment worry that many more Republicans may join the amendment not because they agree with it, but because they want to put the health care bill in jeopardy.

So the White House and the drug makers are trying to persuade as many Democrats as they can to oppose the amendment despite their previous support for it.... Publicly, President Obama continues to support reimportation, as he did during the campaign. "The President supports reimportation of safe and effective drugs. He made that clear in his FY 2010 budget, which included $5 million to enable the FDA to begin developing policy options," reads a statement from the White House. "The Food and Drug Administration has raised safety concerns about the current proposal and will continue exploring policy options to create a pathway to importing safe and effective drugs."

And: it turns out that the "reform" bill allows InsCo's to continue arbitrarily capping the amount of coverage patients can receive per year. The caps are what cause people to go bankrupt when they get seriously ill.

Tip #1

2009-12-11T23:26:00.004-05:00

Tiger has on the one hand played the typical celebrity-sacrifice game, offering an "apology" to people who deserve none: the media and its consumers. On the other, his choice to stop playing golf "indefinitely" is a brilliant fuck-you to this system's nihilistic insatiability. Thus: refuse to provide any further fodder to both informational revenue producers, gossip and sports industries alike, henceforth.

Had Obama any of Tiger's shamelessness or moxie (not, mind you, the libidinal fecklessness, which is indeed a good thing to lack), he would have realized long ago that a similar mechanism is in place to nail him one way or the other. He will never be tough enough or popular enough to not be embarrassed and toppled. Agency only lies the way of refusal; refusal to play along, to feed the monster that exists, to believe your own myth at our expense.

so...THAT was fun

2009-12-10T19:18:00.002-05:00

Now let's get on with it:

I see that the process of liberal disllusionment with Obama is well underway, somewhat earlier than I’d expected it to set in.

...

...there’s great political potential in popular disillusionment with Democrats. The phenomenon was first diagnosed by Garry Wills in Nixon Agonistes. As Wills explained it, throughout the 1950s, left-liberals intellectuals thought that the national malaise was the fault of Eisenhower, and a Democrat would cure it. Well, they got JFK and everything still pretty much sucked, which is what gave rise to the rebellions of the 1960s (and all that excess that Obama wants to junk any remnant of). You could argue that the movements of the 1990s that culminated in Seattle were a minor rerun of this. The sense of malaise and alienation is probably stronger now than it was 50 years ago, and includes a lot more of the working class, whom Stanley Greenberg’s focus groups find to be really pissed off about the cost of living and the way the rich are lording it over the rest of us

Obama FAIL

2009-12-10T16:26:00.005-05:00

Today we heard Obama's Nobel speech, in which he gravely lectured the world about its moral obligation to acknowledge that it deserves American bombing, which should be received without childish resentment. Presumably the international community should welcome mass carnage in the same spirit as it ought to consent to the theft of a large portion of the world's wealth and resources by American bankers.

We also had it confirmed today that the entire process of legislating health care reform, from its beginnings last winter through this morning, was indeed a charade.

Also, I read this:

...the Obama administration has authorized the United States Army Corps of Engineers to design a vertical underground wall under the border between Egypt and Gaza.

In March, 2009 [after the IDF terrorist massacre of Gaza] the United States provided the government of Egypt with $32 million in March, 2009 for electronic surveillance and other security devices to prevent the movement of food, merchandise and weapons into Gaza. Now details are emerging about an underground steel wall that wil be 6-7 miles long and extend 55 feet straight down into the desert sand.

The steel wall will be made of super-strength steel put together in a jigsaw puzzle fashion. It will be bomb proof and can not be cut or melted. It will be "impenetrable," and reportedly will take 18 months to construct.

The steel wall is intended to cut the tunnels that go between Gaza and Egypt. The tunnels are the lifelines for Gaza since the international community agreed to a blockade of Gaza to collectively punish the citizens of Gaza for their having elected in Parliamentary elections in 2006 sufficient Hamas Parliamentarians that Hamas became the government of Gaza...

The underground steel wall is intended to strengthen international governmental efforts to imprison and starve the people of Gaza into submission so they will throw out the Hamas government.

...One more time, the American government and the Obama administration has been an active participant in the continued inhumane treatment of the people of Gaza and should be held accountable, along with Israel and Egypt for violations of human rights of the people of Gaza.

I can just hear the liberal response: how childish are these idealists! They do not know the cost of peace!

What a contemptible sanctimonious prick is Barack Obama.

on the profusion of excrement

2009-12-10T16:21:00.001-05:00

other great moments in mindbending horseshit:

QOTD

2009-12-10T13:51:00.003-05:00

From 30 Rock:

Jenna Maroney: ...You've got to lie to her, coddle her, protect her from the real world.

Jack Donaghy: I get it! Treat her like the New York Times treats its readers!

link

Systems theory

2009-12-06T13:39:00.006-05:00

As this astonishing article makes clear, Denmark is treating its climate change conference as though it were another meeting of the G20, warranting $122 MILLION in security measures. Apparently such measures include a host of bold declarations, all with the same message: the imperative of keeping the conference peaceful permits the police to do whatever they must to curb troublemakers. The excessive beefing up of security is, in a sense, a dare to protest groups who are themselves looking for a fight with police. Any clashes would benefit both sides, justifying the expenditure on the police's end and providing publicity for the leftist/anarchist groups.

We have reached a point where almost all repression and opposition have been radically systematized so as to be efficiently fed into internet- and cable-bound media circuits. Such farcical, carefully preplanned and staged "political violence" has its analogue in Iraq and Afganistan, terrains where US and anti-US forces can meet and act out their aggressions at a safe distance from the serenity of the developed world. Copenhagen's holding pens are a masterful metaphor for what is going on here: all political action will henceforth be contained, delimited in space and time. The holding pens anticipate the protesters who will willingly enter them in devotion to their cause; they are the "event" of the conference writ small, as a parceled unit of "conflict" with previous and future such units around it. More conferences, more street battles, more protests, more deliberations by powerful people, more inaction as a result of said summits-- but no surprises. Without the spontaneous political event, can we really understand that which occurs as "history" at all?

Global Shitstorm Update

2009-12-05T12:44:00.002-05:00

From Chomsky's speech at Columbia two days ago. Notes and summary by David Bromwich, professor at Yale. Bromwich is, by the way, a liberal intellectual and not a real follower of Chomsky. But the summary he provides here is objective and shows that Chomsky's basic outline of what is happening now is entirely accurate.

I'm not a huge fan of Chomsky, because he is fundamentally a rationalist who operates on the assumption that people would do the right thing if they knew the truth. He doesn't have much to say about the roots of fascism in the thwarted desire for a beloved community... But the guy has been basically right for so long, and the basic points he's making should really be acknowledged by all, as the basis for any future discussions about reality and how to deal with it:

...In the big constellation, Enlightenment/Rationalism/Liberalism/Democratic Values, a missing word and concept that should be understood to accompany the others is Imperialism. He addressed "the unipolar moment," which started in 1989 with the end of Soviet Communism and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. The self-congratulatory tone of recent commemorations of November 1989 tended to make people forget certain other stopping points on the way to unchallenged U.S. hegemony. A short survey followed of the destructiveness of the "settler colonialism" that cleared North America of its indigenous peoples. J.Q. Adams spoke out clearly of the policy as "perfidious" and regretted "the heinous sins of this nation" against "that hapless race." The equanimity, by contrast, of the mainstream wisdom now is epitomized by J.L. Gaddis: "expansion is the path to security."

On the moral fallacy of self-congratulation: "We focus laser-like on the crimes of enemies, but crucially we make sure never to look at ourselves." If now we chose to look at ourselves in the light of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, we might admit the imperative of dismantling a much larger wall "snaking its way through Palestinian territory." The right name for it is: the Annexation Wall. Its purpose is to take over valuable land and water resources; Israel’s leading authorities recognized this early on as a violation of international law. None of it would have been possible without the support of Israel by the United States as "its partner in crime."

On November 16, 1989, shortly after the Berlin Wall came down, there occurred an event of great importance in Latin America: the killing of six prominent Jesuit priests in El Salvador. The U.S. denied any knowledge of the agents and any complicity in the crime; but documents, revealed in the mainstream Spanish press just two weeks ago and carried by the wire services, show that the order was given by authorities in El Salvador; and given the proximity of American advisers to that government at the time, it is hard to imagine the order being carried through without American knowledge and consent. This was part of a larger design–successfully pursued by the School of the Americas and other arms of U.S. policy–to suppress the Liberation Theology which had done much for the cause of social justice in that region, in the wake of Vatican II. All this was happening in 1989, while the West was celebrating the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. It is still happening and we are still celebrating. The U.S. ambassador in Honduras recently congratulated that country on having completed its own "great celebration of democracy," in an election where both candidates were selected by Honduran business interests. Chomsky said it was difficult fully to understand the Obama administration’s embrace of the de facto coup in Honduras. In this case the U.S. has separated itself from all of Latin America and from most of Europe as well, by our "brazen contempt" for real democracy.

Latin America was thus the proving ground for the first U.S. tests of what had become possible in the unipolar world. Another instance was the invasion of Panama in December 1989. Noriega, a dictator of no importance, and previously of no concern to the U.S., was punished for "dragging his feet in support of Reagan’s terrorist wars in Nicaragua."...

A distinct challenge of the transition of 1989: what to do with NATO? Here was an institution solely devised for the express purpose of protecting Europe and North America from the Soviet menace during the Cold War. The only logical response at the end of the Cold War was: to close down NATO. Instead, under Clinton the organization expanded eastward, and it has since expanded farther. Recall Gaddis: "expansion is the path to security." There has been in fact a continuous line from the expansionist U.S. policies under FDR, covering both Europe and the Pacific, to the policies pursued by Bill Clinton and codified in the Bush Doctrine. The use of violence goes hand in hand with the unilateral commitment to the opening of new and profitable markets....

***On another recent use of an international double standard when convenient for U.S. interests: Barack Obama was asked why he supported Mubarak who is an authoritarian leader. Obama replied, "I tend not to use labels for folks." Chomsky: "When a political leader uses the word ‘folks,’ you know you’re going to shudder at what comes next."

***Obama is almost too obvious a proof–a caricature almost–of the "investment theory of party competition," outlined by Thomas Ferguson. The heads of the important banks and the brokerage houses preferred Obama to McCain. He would accomplish what they wanted more smoothly. They got what they paid for....

***John Kerry, one of the people running interference for the administration on Israel/Palestine, gave a recent speech which was mostly boilerplate: we are pursuing a two-state solution in earnest, looking for reasonable compromise from both sides, etc. etc. But sometimes, in such speeches, "something really new" comes out; and in Kerry’s speech there was something new. Kerry said: now for the first time, we have a partner we can negotiate with. And what was the proof of the adequacy of the partner? That during the Gaza assault, there had been no unruly protests on the West Bank. Dissent was successfully controlled. And the reason for this? Effective surveillance by Palestinian forces trained and advised by Keith Dayton, the general heading the American Task Force in Palestine. Dayton’s presence is an acknowledged fact, though the content of the training is unknown. Unacknowledged are CIA advisers in Palestine whose actions we know nothing about.

What a goddamned fucking asshole

2009-12-03T20:13:00.004-05:00

What a fucking piece of shit turd-eating motherfucker.

And he admits it without shame.

I'm talking about Ben Bernanke, who has without irony aligned himself with legendary criminals like Willie Sutton.

But am I not also talking about the entire establishment that embraces this murderous shit? - the establishment that is led by that paragon of discipline and achievement of success, Barack Obama? After all it's Obama who keeps on bringing Pete Peterson into the various "summits" on Social Security -- Pete Peterson, the genocidal maniac whose goal it is to destroy Social Security.

See HuffPost on Bernanke's spraying of shit all over Congress today:

Ben Bernanke has overseen the greatest expansion of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet in its history, pouring trillions of dollars into Wall Street firms at roughly zero interest rates.

His generosity, however, has a limit.

In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee today, where he's seeking re-appointment as the Fed's chairman, Bernanke called for cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security even as unemployment rises and the middle class is endangered.

Citing legendary bank robber Willie Sutton, Bernanke said of the retirement and health care funds that are the legacy of the New Deal: "That's where the money is."

Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) sympathized with Bernanke, saying that, because of entitlement spending, "you're going to be looking at a situation where the Congress will be unable to provide any kind of fiscal discipline because of the mandatory spending. That puts an enormous burden on your plate."

"Well, Senator, I was about to address entitlements," Bernanke replied. "I think you can't tackle the problem in the medium term without doing something about getting entitlements under control and reducing the costs, particularly of health care."

Bernanke reminded Congress that it has the power to repeal Social Security and Medicare.

"It's only mandatory until Congress says it's not mandatory. And we have no option but to address those costs at some point or else we will have an unsustainable situation," said Bernanke.

Fuck these assholes. (And by the way, this shit strikes me as more utterly craven and shit-wallowing and -shoveling than the Afghanistan decision -- perhaps only because I haven't had the stomach to follow the Afghanistan shit, but probably also because the Iraq policy in the last 2 years hasn't seemed like the worst thing in the world, given the horror that had already been unleashed.)

medium lobster FTW

2009-12-03T02:31:00.002-05:00

Hasta la Fafblog siempre:

Let us never forget just what's at stake in the war in Afghanistan: nothing less than the success of the war in Afghanistan. This war may be a mistake, a blood-soaked blunder, an unholy charnel house mindlessly consuming the bodies and souls of untold thousands, an open sore on the pockmarked face of history and an abomination before the sight of God and men, but it is first and foremost a war, and wars must be won. If the United States doesn't win this war, then will it not lose it? And if the United States loses this war, then won't the Unites States have lost it? And if the United States has lost this war, will that not then make the United States a kind of thing that loses wars? And then where would we be?

And just as America can't afford to abandon this war, surely it can't afford to abandon the Afghan people, who without the American military would be left to the savage whims of their hated enemy, the Afghan people. Indeed, it remains America's solemn duty as the leader of the free world to bring freedom and security to the Afghan people by hunting down and eliminating the Afghan people. Nor can America forget its own national security, and the dire threat posed by the Afghan people to our war against the Afghan people.

...

And so the President will be sending additional troops to Afghanistan - but a precise number of troops, carefully determined by the nation's top warologists after long months of carpet-bombing villages of laboratory mice - and they will kill Afghans there, but only for a precise period of time, calculated to be the exact interval necessary to protect our freedoms, or restore our security, or for all of us to grow bored and forget.

signs, times

2009-12-02T05:46:00.002-05:00

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

link

Morgan Stanley Vice-Chairman Rob Kindler's License Plate:

GW wins

2009-12-02T01:15:00.003-05:00

George W. Bush's eternal victory was officially established today, as Obama became the first American president to knowingly pursue a guaranteed-fail military policy PRECISELY in the cause of reelection. Topsy-turvydom become mundane.

Hapy Thanksgiving

2009-11-27T20:37:00.002-05:00

all in the game

2009-11-17T01:14:00.004-05:00

Someday, when there's sufficient distance, someone will look back and wonder what the fuck was going on here. They'll save themselves a lot of time if they just spend a week watching one show. Ah, The Wire, how I do miss thee:

Joshua Basso for President?

2009-11-13T15:39:00.003-05:00

If Obama doesn't run in 2012, a strong replacement candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination (far stronger than, say, Joseph Biden or Evan Bayh) would be the man described in this article from the Times:

Fla. Man Arrested for Calling 911, Asking for Sex

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- Florida police say a man arrested for repeatedly calling 911 looking for sex claimed it was the only number he could dial after running out of cell phone minutes. Tampa police said 29-year-old Joshua Basso made sexual comments to the 911 dispatcher and asked if he could come to her house. Investigators say she hung up, but he called back four more times.

He was arrested about 15 minutes later at his home late Wednesday and charged with making a false 911 call. Basso reportedly told officers that he didn't think he would get in trouble for calling 911.

Tampa jail records show Basso is being held without bond but don't indicate whether he has an attorney. He is listed as unemployed with arrests for theft and other crimes dating back to 2001.

sweet

2009-11-13T10:19:00.001-05:00

TV host Lou Dobbs abruptly quit his CNN program yesterday, bringing a sudden end to a television program most notable for its remarkably one-sided presentation of immigration issues.

...

Dobbs' propagandistic approach to journalism was an embarrassment that CNN seemed more than willing to tolerate as long as his ratings were high; with much of the cultural anxiety formerly going into the anti-immigration movement now focused on the Tea Party movement associated with Glenn Beck, Dobbs' viewership has been in a prolonged slump, so it's not too surprising to find him looking for a new home.

link

Note from Austin...

2009-11-09T15:38:00.001-05:00

...where it is still summer and Zizek is writing, beautifully, for the NYTimes...

Get Off the Cross, We Need Wood for the Fire (R-Ga.)

2009-11-09T00:15:00.006-05:00

...a man standing just beyond the TV cameras apparently suffered a heart attack 20 minutes after event began. Medical personnel from the Capitol physician's office -- an entity that could, quite accurately, be labeled government-run health care -- rushed over, attaching electrodes to his chest and giving him oxygen and an IV drip.

This turned into an unwanted visual for the speakers, as a D.C. ambulance and firetruck, lights flashing, pulled in just behind the lawmakers. A path was made through the media section, and the patient, attended to by about 10 government medical personnel, was being wheeled away on a stretcher just as House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) stepped to the microphone.

...

By the time it was over, medics had administered government-run health care to at least five people in the crowd who were stricken as they denounced government-run health care.

Zing! Why do emergency responders hate teh Freedom?

she's my sister... she's my daughter... my sister, my daughter...

2009-11-07T03:25:00.001-05:00

"I cannot comprehend that the enemy was among us," Padilla said.

An image

2009-11-07T02:15:00.003-05:00

of someone with, evidently, a clear sense of the "center."