Democrappy

State of the Union '06: a Drama in Four Acts

2006-02-01T00:06:00.000-05:00

Another year, another exercise in nearly unwatchable mediocrity.

What follows are my notes on the '06 State of the Union Address. They're partial and rather disjointed - but hey, at least this way you didn't have to actually watch the thing.

First off it's worth noting the very different approach Dub took this year, with a 39 percent approval rating and several potential scandals hanging over his head, as compared to last year when he was flying (relatively) high with a fresh re-election and a 53 percent approval rating.

Both speeches clocked in a just under an hour (55 minutes this year and 53 last year, by my decidely unofficial watch). But this year Dub's marionettes front-loaded the War on Terror and devoted the second portion of the speech to domestic issues - a reversal of last year's speech. Each section ran 25 minutes, give or take, as opposed to last year when the domestic piece lasted for more than a half hour and the foreign policy bit ran only about 20 minutes.

What does all this add up to? A weakened President, chastened by the misplaced arrogance of last year's attempt at Social Security ~~destruction~~ reform, tacks back to his strengths: national security and the War on Terror (although he's been steadily sinking on those counts as well).

And FYI, the obligatory CNN/USA Today "snap poll" taken just after the speech ended showed that 48 percent of respondents had a "very positive" impression of the speech. That's way down from 60 percent last year, and the second-lowest of Dub's Presidency (45 percent in '04; in '01, '02 and '03 he scored 66, 74 and 50 percent, respectively)

This comports with my general impression, which is that Jethro was flat, flat flat, and the speech itself was uninspiring, uninspiring, uninspiring.

Now, onto the highlights.

Act I. Affect and Images

The Thrill Is Gone. It was almost impossible to find the Gucci Cowboy Swagger or the Overgrown Fratboy Smirk this year. Without the unwarranted arrogance, Dub ain't got much left, which explains why his performance was so... limp. Which leads me to...
Crickets. For the most part, the applause was less enthusiastic, and of shorter duration, than last year and in most years past (which includes Dub, Clinton and Bush the Elder). It was just over three minutes from when Dub entered the chamber, to when the applause died down so House Speaker Dennis Hastert could formally introduce him. And it took only 30 seconds from that moment for the second round to end so Bush could start speaking. In both cases, the hootin' and a-hollerin' one normally hears at the SOTU was notable for its absence. With a couple of exceptions, this trend continued throughout the entire speech.
Here's Your Bobbit Moment. Towards the end, Dub introduced the Social Security issue by noting that many Baby Boomers were turning 60 this year, "including two of my father's favorite people - me and President Clinton." As the joke fell flat, CNN cut to Hillary, all pursed lips and daggers. I've never before seen someone look homicidal at the SOTU.
As with the ink-dipped finger trick from last year's Iraqi elections, I'm not sure if my reaction to the following was the direct opposite of what you'll be reading and viewing in the mainstream news media over the next few days - but I found the parading out of the family of a recently killed U.S. serviceman to be pathetic and not a little gruesome. The sadness in the eyes of the poor man's widow and parents seemed not at all attenuated by the ostensibly heartfelt tribute offered them by their Commander in Grief. But maybe that's just me.
Didn't See That Coming, Didya? After his bad joke about himself and Clinton, Dub continued his lead-in to Social Security by saying, "Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security" - and was interrupted mid-sentence by thunderous applause and a standing-O from every Democrat in the place. It was easily one of the top three applause moments in terms of volume and intensity, and I daresay even the most disinterested observer would have to agree that it was highly embarrassing.
Going Nukuler. This chimpanzee of a leader still can't say "nuclear." After all these years, one can't help but wonder if it's intentional at this point - perhaps Rove has made a virtue of a necessity by convincing himself that "nukuler" sounds folksy or down-to-earth. Whatever the reason, it never fails to boggle the mind, no matter how many times one hears Jethro utter it.

Act II. Language and Framing

The speech began with a tribute to Coretta Scott King (who died today, FYI in case you were hiding under a rock). One might argue that it was a cheap gesture, or simply a politically compulsory move. But even so, it does in my view indicate the progress that's been made in mainstreaming the advances wrought by the civil rights movement, even over the last 10-15 years.
All the Great Leaders Are Dead, and I'm not Feeling So Well Myself. Dub declared himself "humbled by the privilege" of giving the SOTU (even though it's, like, totally a Constitutional requirement), and told Congress in the first three minutes that "it's been my honor to serve with you." It seems rather like the sort of language one should use in one's final SOTU. Perhaps Dub's thinking that Mikie Brown had it right with his "Can I go home yet?" email.
It's All Good, Trust Me. "The state of the union is strong," said the President. Utterly unremarkable, except that he said it within the first three minutes of the speech, which in my memory is utterly unprecedented. Typically a President will wait to utter the famous line until he has provided some, you know, evidence to back it up. But I suppose the baseless assertion has worked for this guy in the past, so why not?
And in Case You Forgot: 9-11!!!! The first mention of September 11 came less than five minutes in (at about the 3:30 mark in fact). Of course.
Victory Is at Hand. "We are winning" in Iraq, said Dub, and our "strategy for victory" is working. Can't put my finger on it precisely, but for some reason he sounded more like he was talking about Vietnam than I've ever heard him sound before.
The War on... Isolationism. The speech was structured primarily as a critique of isolationism, as a way of justifying the war in Iraq, and also as a way of promoting free trade (in which context isolationism became protectionism). This, it seems to me, was a curious and not terribly effective choice, since it's a paper tiger. Thanks to decades of neoliberalism in American politics and cultural life, there's very little isolationist or protectionist sentiment among the President's enemies. In fact, with the partial exception of some segments of organized labor, one can safely say that isolationism thrives most these days in the rightwing Republican base. Put simply, fighting isolationism gets Dub nothing in terms of political leverage against Congressional Dems, or much of anyone else. Ditto for his attempt to bash Dems for "second-guessing" and "defeatism" - it didn't destroy Murtha the first - or second, or third - time, so why Dub's handlers expected it to work this time around is beyond me.
How Offensive Can You Get? The frame of isolationism allowed - or perhaps masked - a foreign policy agenda utterly lacking in specifics. Not until the 33-minute mark - when the foreign policy bit was well over - did Dub articulate a specific policy proposal or idea. Up until then, he simply repeated the mantra "we must stay on the offensive" to describe U.S. policy on, well, everything.
Keep Hope Alive, and a Place Called Hope, and, Well, You Get the Point. "A Hopeful Society" constituted the speech's secondary frame. "In a Hopeful Society," much of the domestic-issue portion of the speech went, something good happens - children achieve, people have health care, etc. And in order to encourage or produce that good outcome, Congress should support my policies - on tax cuts, tort reform, and so on. Not a great device, not a terrible device, certainly not an original device. I think it was serviceable enough to score a few points on some domestic issues.
The Sound Bite. On energy, Dub said, "America is addicted to oil." This was the first, and only, thing Wolf Blitzer noted right after the speech ended. And I'm sure it'll be the phrase on all the front pages, and on the tips of all the analysts' tongues, in the coming days. Big Oil Man Finds God, Embraces New Energy Technologies, etcetera, etcetera.
To Stem or not to Stem? Dub once again spoke out in favor of laws banning the sale of human embryos. This year he added to that a plea to Congress to outlaw human cloning in all its forms, the creation of embryos solely for use in scientific experiments, and, bizarrely, the creation of human-animal hybrids. It's difficult to tell because the language is so coded, but as I listened I wondered if perhaps the administration isn't considering softening its position a bit on stem cell research using embryos that have been created for purposes other than experimentation (i.e. from fertility attempts). Of course, it could just be wishful thinking on my part.

Act III. Substance (Sort of)

Social Security, Perhaps. Utterly defeated last year, Bush this time called only for the formation of a "bipartisan commission" to study the impact of the Baby Boomers on Social Security and Medicare. So now we can spell victory c-o-m-m-i-s-s-i-o-n.
Democracy on the March. He applauded the rise of democracy in the Middle East and around the world. In what was actually a pretty heartening moment, he observed that the world had "about two dozen" democracies in 1945, while today it has 122. (Of course, the definition of democracy is pretty slippery, but hey, effective rhetoric is effective rhetoric.) More specifically, he cited recent elections in Iraq. Afghanistan and, yes, the Palestinian territories. On the ticklish question of Hamas, he stated, "The Palestinian people have voted," and now Hamas must renounce violence, affirm Israel's right to exist, disarm, and cease terrorist activities. In other words, it was good that the Palestinians voted, and we respect that they voted for Hamas instead of Fatah - the only thing we require is that Hamas immediately and unilaterally transform itself into Fatah.
Maybe It's a Little More Complicated than the Axis of Evil. In addition to Iran, Syria and North Korea, Dub acknowledged Zimbabwe and Burma as places where people live with undemocratic states. It may not seem like much, but when was the last time a President mentioned Burma, with its appalling human rights record, in the SOTU?
College Loans, um, Nevermind. Nothing this year about increasing the size of Pell Grants - in fact, nothing at all about college education, which is unsurprising given that the administration has succeeded in cutting college loans in this year's budget.
Stay the Course, Withdraw the Troops. Troop levels in Iraq will decrease - there, he said it. But, talking tough as ever, he noted that "those decisions will be made by our military commanders, not by politicians in Washington, D.C." This statement is what is known in technical terms as a f*cking lie - the decisions, Dub was saying, will be made by politicians in the White House, under whose pressure the generals will continue to pursue a warped policy that prevents either the deployment of sufficient troops or the prompt withdraw of large numbers of troops, instead leaving the military in a limbo of large-scale but still insufficient force strength, with personnel pushed to their limits and forced to extend their tours of duty.
Get ~~Shorty~~ al Qaeda, Kill ~~Bill~~ al Qaeda. The old arrogance and brazenness made an appearance when Dub defended clearly illegal warrantless wiretapping by claiming that it's being used solely to track al Qaeda - another f*cking lie. Time for impeachment, plain and simple.
The Syrianna Plan. Dub unveiled the Advanced Energy Initiative, which promotes, among other things, non-corn-based ethanol production, wind power, solar power, "zero-emission coal-fired plants" (an Orwellian construction if ever there were one), and "safe, clean nuclear enegy" (beyond Orwellian, that one). On the plus side, he articulated a goal of "replacing 75 percent of Middle East oil imports by 2025" and "making our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past." Hard to be against that one - not only for U.S. self-interest but for the future political stability of the Middle East.
Health Care, or Not. Dub had specifics on health care, which would be a mark in his favor if his specifics didn't all, how you say, suck. He advocated wider use of electronic medical records to cuts administrative costs (of course, single-payer health care would eliminate tens of billions of such costs per year); increased use of Health Savings accounts (i.e. Social Security privatization by other means); portable coverage (with absolutely no sense of what he meant or how it would happen); and, my favorite, tort reform to lower medical malpractice premiums.
And the Rest. A wealth of other items came in rapid succession, including, once again, advocacy of an impossibly baroque bracero/gastarbeiter program, meant to placate both the business and rightwing camps of his party on the immigration issue; advocacy of re-upping the Ryan White Act for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment; declaring support for unspecified ethical reforms in Congress; pushing an initiative meant to promote math and science education; and, in a spectacularly unconvincing manner, trying to align himself with his own critics on the constellation of issues raised by Hurricane Katrina.

Act IV. The Biggest Whopper

"In recent years America has become a more hopeful nation."

(Coming soon: a brief recap of the surprisingly concise Democratic Response.)

The Grapes of ... Painful Obviousness

2006-01-22T11:58:00.000-05:00

From the Dept. of Well, Duh

FLASH - this is just in from The Old Grey Lady: a new study reveals that day laborers are exploited and exposed to poor working conditions.

When you've taken a moment to recover from your shock, head over to NYT.com and you'll find the following:

Three-quarters of day labors are illegal immigrants;
Eight-seven percent are from Mexico or Central America;
About half are employed by homeowners, and most of the rest by construction contractors; and
Virtually all of them earn less than $15,000 a year.

Who knew?

But that's not all:

The professors who conducted the study said the most surprising finding was the pervasiveness of wage violations and dangerous conditions that day laborers face. "We were disturbed by the incredibly high incidence of wage violations," said one of the study's authors, Nik Theodore of the University of Illinois at Chicago. "We also found a very high level of injuries."

Which of course begs the question, Who are these professors and under what giant rock have they been living for the past decade and a half?

Clearly, the most startling tidbit in the Times piece isn't that day laborers get stiffed by their "employers" or that they face more injuries than an NFL linebacker. Rather, it's that the study referenced in the article is "the first nationwide study on day laborers."

The shock and awe felt by these scholars - and presumably by the Times reporter, who appears to relate this sense of surprise with a straight face - owes less to moral repugnance and more to the appalling state of labor journalism and research in neoliberal America. No one in the mainstream press, and precious few in academia, cares much about workers as workers anymore. Rising scrutiny of firms like Wal-Mart is great, but in the mainstream press that attention generally comes through the culturally pervasive, individualizing lens of "human interest" rather than workers' rights. When, for example, was the last time you read anything in a daily paper or weekly newsmagazine (The Nation excepted) by a "labor journalist"? Or read a prominent review in the Sunday Books section of a new tract by a "labor historian"?

MLK, Reloaded

2006-01-20T12:29:00.000-05:00

As I watch soon-to-be-Justice Alito piously affirm, for the cameras, the humanity and equality of every homo sapien on God's Green Earth, even as his supporters, mentors and handlers eagerly await the day when he'll help sweep right into the overflowing dustbin of history any means we as a society might use to nourish, guarantee and protect that equality - as I watch this tragicomic spectacle, I wonder what Martin Luther King Jr. would think of our post-racist, post-feminist, post-bigotry, neoliberal world.

In that vein, for an interesting, if facile, thought experiment, check out the latest episode of Aaron McGruder's recently brought-to-TV version of his notorious comic strip The Boondocks. In it, MLK doesn't die after being shot on a Memphis hotel balcony on April 4, 1968 - he goes into a coma. He awakens 32 years later, at the end of October, 2000. He regains his faculties just in time to head to the polls for the 2000 Presidential Election - where he is denied the right to vote because of "irregularities." Soon after September 11, it is him, not host Bill Maher, who makes an "unpatriotic" remark on "Politically Incorrect" (King says that as a Christian he believes one should love one's enemies and turn the other cheek; he's pilloried in the media and labeled as pro-bin Laden by Fox News.)

I won't spoil the rest of it - suffice it to say it manages all sorts of critique of our current reality while imagining a final utopian moment, all while resisting the urge to portray the reanimated (pun intended) MLK as a saint. So pay no heed to Entertainment Weekly's hasty verdict (as if you would anyway), and check it out - you've got a chance to catch the repeat tomorrow, Saturday January 21, at 11:00PM EST.

A Holiday, Hard-Earned

2006-01-16T00:18:00.000-05:00

And let us remember not a saint, a redeemer, or a singular figure. Let us instead remember a fallible, ever-developing human being, influenced by Christ, Ghandi and Marx, whose philosophy and strategy changed and grew over time, for both principled and pragmatic reasons; a comrade working in concert with many, many others - some close allies, some fiercely independent, some remembered, some long forgotten - to build not just an idea of racial equality, but a broad-based movement for social justice.

Finally, let us honor his memory by appraising our world as he did his - and by comprehending, as he did, just how much remains to be done.

"I must confess that I have enjoyed being on this mountaintop and I am tempted to want to stay here and retreat to a more quiet and serene life. But something within reminds me that the valley calls me in spite of all its agonies, dangers, and frustrating moments. I must return to the valley. Something tells me that the ultimate test of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and moments of convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge and moments of controversy."
(1965)

Wiretap, Shmiretap: The Real Problem with the Eavesdropping Story

2006-01-12T17:05:00.000-05:00

Part One of Two

A well-publicized poll reveals that "the nation is divided over whether the Bush administration should use wiretaps without first obtaining a warrant."

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll of 1,003 adults found that 50 percent of those polled believe it's OK to forgo warrants when ordering electronic surveillance of people suspected of having ties to terrorists abroad. Another 46 percent said the policy is wrong, and 4 percent said they had no opinion.

It's certainly appalling that a plurality thinks this sort of practice is okay (or "OK" in CNN's excruciating syntax for the marginally literate). And it's hard to know whether to laugh or cry over the four percent who are so fixated on their PSPs and video iPods that they can't be bothered to give a rat's patoot about the most egregious domestic surveillance crime since Watergate. (Of course, given that more than twice as many respondents - nine percent - said they were following the wiretapping story "not at all," the poll also reveals that some Americans are happy to pass judgment on a matter about which they admit knowing absolutely nothing.)

But there's something much worse underlying this impressionist (or is it expressionist?) portrait of the national, er, mind: and that's the notion that warrantless domestic wiretapping is somehow a "policy," which should be evaluated as a matter of opinion.

The CNN poll shouldn't have asked, "Do you think the Bush administration was right or wrong in wiretapping these conversations without obtaining a court order?" By rights, it should have asked, "If it is determined that President Bush authorized the wiretapping of conversations in the United States without a warrant, do you think he should be impeached?"

Why didn't the poll ask that question. If you guessed, "Because CNN, USA Today and Gallup are cowards," you'd be right, but only in part.

The other, more important part of the answer is that there's no question of Dubya's culpability, because he hasn't denied it. You'll note there's been no plausible deniability here, no political firewall set up to insulate Dub from the lever-pullers. To the contrary, he's proudly admitted to the crime, and if you listen carefully you'll note that he hasn't even really bothered to argue that it's not a crime. Rather, he simply glosses over the question of legality and goes straight to an argument about necessity.

And it's that shift from law to necessity that's most telling, and frightening, as we'll see in the next entry here.

Dub to Alito: Stay Classy

2006-01-09T19:08:00.000-05:00

From Our ~~Thoughtless~~ Fearless Leader, this AM:

Good morning. I just had breakfast with Judge Alito. I told him I think he conducted himself with such dignity and class in the weeks leading up to the confirmation process, which begins today. Sam Alito is imminently qualified to be a member of the bench. ... [H]e is well qualified to be a Supreme Court judge. Sam's got the intellect necessary to bring a lot of class to that Court.

Who knew that class was an important qualification for the Supreme Court? And further, who knew that the Court, as currently constituted, was so deficient in it? Forget judicial philosophy and jurisprudential precedent; this dude's got a sharp suit and knows how to order a bottle of wine at a restaurant. If confirmed, he's really gonna raise the profile of the joint.

So ring-a-ding-ding, and away we go with the right to choose and limits on Executive power.

Wait, Is This the Press Room or the Funeral Parlor?

2006-01-07T11:20:00.000-05:00

Killing Sharon Softly with Dubya's Words

"Laura and I share the concerns of the Israeli people about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's health," reads President Bush's official statement, "and we are praying for his recovery. Prime Minister Sharon is a man of courage and peace. On behalf of all Americans, we send our best wishes and hopes to the Prime Minister and his family."

Very nice. Now here's what Dubya actually said, when he didn't have his speechwriters to talk pretty for him and had to rely on his own, um, wits:

We pray for his recovery. He's a good man, a strong man, a man who cared deeply about the security of the Israeli people and a man who had a vision for peace. May God bless him.

To his credit, he remembered to include the crucial words: "peace" and, of course, "God" (God forbid he not mention God). But notice how he calls a man who's just had a massive stroke and who's in a coma, a "strong" man. And note equally how he then proceeds to eulogize him, referring to him in the past tense.

These are subtle things, to be sure. But they sure made me stand up and take notice when I heard it on NPR. And it's the subtleties that shape language, that create meaning, and that provide little windows into the mind, and perhaps the sould, of one's Leader.

Towers of Capital: an Excavation

2005-09-12T16:01:00.000-04:00

The Buildings, the Site, Four Years On - Part Two

[See Part One here]

In the fall of 2001 I had been recruited at the last moment by a Philadelphia-area college to teach a course called, strangely enough, "Monuments and Society." As I drove to campus on the third day of class, the radio documenting the buildings' collapse in real-time, I realized that the World Trade Center had just become a retroactive monument.

A typical monument, as I had polemically asserted to my students the previous class session, is a memorial structure intended to resist historicity and emanate national glory. (Well-known outliers like Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial invariably set themselves against, and thereby acknowledge, the phallic inarticulateness that defines the genre.) The obelisks of ancient Egypt, for example, were literally and figuratively structures of congealed national energy, which explains why Napoleon stole one of them and took it to Paris (that and the fact that he couldn't figure out how to fit the pyramid of Cheops onto the Place de la Concorde). Though the memorial quality of its monumentalization manifested itself only in destruction, the WTC was in fact possessed of an explicitly iconic design that primed it for monumental status. In late 2000 Todd Gitlin critically noted the Towers' "pharaonic grandiosity," and though they lacked pyramidal peaks, the dean of the Yale architecture school told Newsweek in the aftermath of the attack, "When you got any distance from them, they read as solids, as powerful as the Pyramids."

Symmetrical like Ramses' twin obelisks at Luxor, one side of each building facing east toward Europe like the Washington Monument, endowed with a vaguely inscrutable quality like the obelisk of Kubrick's 2001, the Twin Towers functioned as visually impenetrable talismans of the culture that built them.

All of which is to say that ideologically and materially, they were designed to invite attention but repel scrutiny, to dominate as both signs and referents. Observed Eric Darton in early 2001, "How much more clearly you could see the city, with its layers of accumulated history, if only these two vast and imposing structures weren't here." Approached from a human scale, the Towers blotted out history as they blotted out the sky.

Now that Darton's hypothetical has become reality and the towers's replacement hasn't yet materialized, every anniversary in this transitional time affords an opportunity to examine some of those layers of accumulated urban history. But we need to think not only over and against the Twin Towers' form, but in dialogue with it, for there is after all a historicity to the appearance of this kind of historically inarticulate built form in U.S. cities.

In that vein, three statements suffice to summarize the history of the World Trade Center:

It constituted the sublime expression of urban planning as both a profession and a capitalist endeavor;
It was financed and created through a historically specific political-economic process that may now be understood as a transitional moment in American political and economic history; and
Its development provides a window into the rise to hegemony of finance in the U.S. and the world economy it dominates.

I have insufficient space to properly discuss even one of these statements, so, relying heavily on Darton's brilliant Divided We Stand: a Biography of New York's World Trade Center (published less than a year before 9/11), I will gloss them briefly.

A turn-of-the-century product of scientific rationality, utopian anti-industrialism and anarchist geography, urban planning initially understood the city as a complex organism dependent on the rational stewardship of its natural environment and human inhabitants. But by the 1920s, newly formed organizations like the New York Regional Planning Association (RPA), controlled by capitalists, had replaced the principle of land use with the law of land rent. The goal was to transform Manhattan from land into real estate. That meant prioritzing finance and getting rid of manufacturing industry and the port of New York. It meant eliminating low-rent housing and low-value land use. And because of steel's ability to reach far higher than masonry while occupying a fraction of each story's floorspace, it meant skyscrapers. As Darton writes,

From its inception, the skyscraper had allied its form to the leveraging of finance from the assumed productivity of land. The office tower … served as both an emblem of and a concrete vehicle for the practice of speculative finance."

So from very early on, there was a movement afoot to install on Manhattan what Darton calls the "monoculture" of FIRE—finance, insurance and real estate. And the skyscraper was this monoculture's physical manifestation. In this context, it is no coincidence that Le Corbusier, the century's most visible proponent of skyscraper aesthetics and design, was also a vigorous advocate for monocultural urban planning. Nor is it a coincidence that Jane Jacobs, Le Corbusier's intellectual arch-enemy, made her reputation opposing the entire discipline of urban planning and spent much of her civic life fighting to stop skyscraper projects and to preserve mixed-use neighborhoods.

As for the World Trade Center, it represented an unsurpassed architectural achievement for the forces of finance-driven planning. The two main towers provided for a heretofore unprecedented level of density. Eliminating both the internal columns and the exterior skin of the traditional skyscraper, architect Minoru Yamasaki made the towers out of steel columns that served as load-bearing exterior walls, leaving the interior as endlessly configurable, leasable space of almost limitless height. The Center's 16 square-block base plaza was enormous to behold, but it was downright microscopic when one realized that above it lay fully one-tenth of Manhattan's total office space.

Here, then, is an important link between the Towers' iconic quality and their role as a symbol of and vehicle for finance capital: their profit-maximizing design turned the buildings inside-out. Defined by their aluminum exoskeltons, they were pure structure, pure exteriority. Looking at the towers from the outside, one had to take it on faith that they even had windows. They were totally irrelevant to the WTC's social meaning.

The ideology of the Towers' physicality tells us much, but it does not tell us about the process by which the WTC came into being. We often hear two statements about the WTC, spoken in the same breath: the WTC was a center and symbol of high finance, and the WTC was built by the Port Authority (PA). This is not an intuitive conjunction of facts. The PA was created in 1922 to safeguard the ports of New York and New Jersey, specifically to build an underwater railway tunnel between the two of them. It never built the railroad, and it never did much of anything to improve the port of New York. Instead it built bridges and tunnels for the burgeoning automobile culture and took in millions in tolls.

In the 1950s, David Rockefeller built the Chase building, the first new skyscraper in lower Manhattan in a generation. Looking to leverage it and the Rockefeller family's other holdings in the area, he appropriated a proposal that had been floating around for a trade center to bolster the port of New York in its effort to face down competition from other east coast ports. He formed the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association to develop and promote the idea. He then got his brother Nelson, then governor of New York, to commission a formal study of the idea, which placed the project in the hands of the PA. The important thing to understand about the PA is this: it was a public corporation, the first in the nation. The fact that it was a corporation exempted it from the kind of democratic accountability to which politicians and public officials were subject, at least nominally. The fact that it was chartered by the New York and New Jersey state governments meant it was not accountable to the city, and that it was not liable for city taxes. The fact that it was public meant it could raise tremendous sums of money through bond issues guaranteed by taxpayers.

The trick in building the WTC was to claim it was a project meant to increase the amount of cargo going in and out of the port of New York while in actuality using the project to destroy the port and its attendant industrial infrastructure. So long as it was for the port, the PA could condemn the 16 square blocks of land used to house a collection of small businesses under eminent domain. But the real motivating force behind the PA's efforts was real estate speculation, which necessitated the conversion of the port from plant to real estate, and which required leasing the WTC's space to high-rent financial firms rather than the small and mid-sized import/export and customs processing firms that supported port operations. So even as PA head Austin Tobin was assuring the New York city council of the WTC's benefit for the port, even as the PA was successfully making its case for eminent domain in the courts by claiming the WTC was a public works project, even as a special ad supplement in the New York Times featured an artist's rendering of the towers next to the piers of the port, much of the port was already gone, covered in fill from the WTC's excavation - which fill formed the foundation upon which the giant luxury development of Battery Park City now rests.

As is well known, the WTC was completed in a time of economic crisis for New York and the country. In that climate its space could not be fully rented in the private market, so it received its final, gigantic public subsidy: Nelson Rockefeller rented out all of Tower Two as a state office building, paying triple the market rate at the time.

The instructive thing about the WTC's creation was that it constituted a transitional moment between the Keynesianism of the New Deal era and the privatism of our current neoliberal era. The PA was a quintessential demand-side public works agency, employing as many as 8,500 people and using public resources and publicly secured credit to stimulate investment. Yet it became a vehicle for creating private profit in a climate of minimal risk. In the late 1990s, the transition complete, the PA looked more and more like just another bloated government agency, and so it was severely downsized, its assets sold off to private interests.

Finally, there is the WTC as a symbol of finance capital, a symbolism widely, but only partially acknowledged, as exemplified in newspaper image at the top of this entry. Consistent with the fact that it destroyed the port of New York rather than preserving it, by 1993 only five percent of its tenants were engaged in trade-related activities. The majority of the other 95 percent were involved in the FIRE sector and its support industries — law, technology and so on. Before it was a symbol of finance and of the dematerialized sense in which the term "world trade" is now understood, it was a concrete manifestation of the FIRE sector monoculture of Manhattan. It was very much a city unto itself. The people who died in it on 9/11 occupied the highly stratified labor market of the FIRE-dominated national economy. Many had high-paying white collar positions in FIRE, law or high-tech, and many others had low paying jobs as secretaries, maintenance workers, waiters and so on. There was very little in-between, a perfect microcosm the the American economy.

All this meaning, all these accumulated layers of history - and many more, like the historic radio-and-television business district wiped out to make way for the WTC - congeal in the still-present absence of these buildings. Just as capitalism is about the circulation of value rather than fixed assets, there is no WTC-itself. It was a moment in history, a political economic process, an ideological project. At the same time, there was a WTC beneath, and prior to, the overarching and sometimes simplistic symbolism attributed to it. It was an urban development project, a structure of work, a site of capital circulation, and a shaper of social relations. If we are to properly vilify, critique or merely understand the symbolism of the WTC and its coming successor, we must understand it in these multiple ways and their multiple interactions. We must see it for what it was, the World Trade Center, itself.

The World Trade Center, Itself

2005-09-11T19:46:00.000-04:00

The Buildings, the Site, Four Years On - Part One

The obelisks of lower Manhattan, pre-2001
(www.september-11th.us)

The lives lost on 9/11 are still most important – as is the case with the devastation on the Gulf Coast. And the political consequences – the real ones and the ones manufactured for cynical gain by the White House – have altered the course of millions of lives worldwide. But what of the towers themselves, the buildings that - not unlike the now-submerged physical structures of New Orleans - carried the symbolic weight of a city and of some important aspect of the national character?

As we attempt to contemplate the almost inconceivable task of rebuilding New Orleans (and, more to the point, of rebuilding it in such a way that doesn't gentrify its poorest residents into permanent refugee status), and as we prepare for what may well turn out to be an idiotic, hopelessly contrived replacement WTC centered around a 1776-foot spire, it is easy to lose sight of the towers themselves, whose outline in the sky has faded, gradually, like an impression in memory foam, over the past four years.

Perhaps the most telling thing we can say about the emotional impact of the disappearance of the World Trade Center was that it turned back the clock. When the Towers fell, writes Beverly Gage, "they took with them the amnesiac’s confidence that history, like skyscrapers, moves only in one direction, ever upward to new heights and glories." Their absence peeled away a thick layer of national progress, the denuded skyline evoking a lesser time before the completed towers rose to their final, almost inconceivable, world-dominating height; and the missing 10 million square feet of leased office space harkening to the dark days of mass vacancies, municipal bankruptcy and national economic crisis in the 1970s (days of which a new foreboding now crosses the land, with gas prices skyrocketing and the economists and moguls holding their collective breath for the coming real estate bust).

At the same time, the disappearance of the WTC has also allowed a renewed consideration of the glory days of skyscraper-building: for even as the Towers marked the apogee of the form, they marked the end of an era. Their construction was fraught with controversy. Their completion in 1977 was marked by anticlimax: tallest buildings in the world, but only for a month; groundbreaking engineering, obscured by architecture deemed fussy and precious; towering vistas ruined by ridiculously narrow windows alternating with broad steel mullions (allegedly a product of the architect's own fear of heights, ironically enough); and of course, a generally embarassing ostentatiousness that spoke of a postwar building craze as dead as the postwar economic boom that had fueled it.

Upon reflection, this bifurcated significance of the WTC is rather remarkable. The Center may be understood as a powerful symbol of both descent into, and escape out of, national crisis. This duality certainly applied to the Center before the attack, but it became much more effective and affective after, prefiguring the polarized national political landscape in which some have seen renewed national purpose while others have seen hell in a handbasket on the horizon. "Once we gazed upon this site as a landscape of power," Sharon Zukin wrote in 2002, "but since September 11, we have viewed it in sorrow—as if it holds both the dark side of grandeur and our unspoken fears of decline."

It was unsurprising that the post-9/11 public meaning of the WTC focused on the escape from crisis rather than the descent into it, on the WTC of the 1980s and ‘90s that housed regional and national computer, broadcast and telecommunications nerve stems, that surged with two real estate booms and a quantum leap in U.S. financial power, and that withstood a terrorist bombing in February 1993 with remarkably little damage or loss of life. Outside the critical circles of the left, the WTC’s historical grandeur seems to have no dark side: it is all sweetness and light, refracted through the sentimental mourning of its loss; as for the unspoken fears of decline, Sharon Zukin was correct: they are indeed unspoken, precisely because they are so terrifying.

Yet with all that, it seems pedantic to say that the memorial reverie on the WTC was purely reactionary, that it whitewashed the history of the towers, and that by extension it's a good thing that the towers themselves and the saccharine mourning of their loss has faded from the American public sphere. For while such statements are true enough, they miss something important about the towers themselves, the structure of feeling they imposed upon us. To virtually everyone who has bothered to comment upon them in the past four years, the towers were fixtures. They anchored the Manhattan skyline. Their greatness, the story goes, was intrinsic: it was we who changed, our ability to perceive and appreciate their grandeur evolving and developing over the years. They were absolute presence, the WTC seeming simply to have always been there, a giant compass needle for orienting oneself in the city, or as Ken Burns told National Public Radio, "The prow of this great ship, which is Manhattan, and there, right where it points out to sea and sort of cutting into space and time is this extraordinary monument sticking up there." "[R]ooted in the bedrock of hard granite," CNN correspondent Garrick Utley mused in the wake of the attack, "they soar and thrust themselves ever higher, immovable, inviolable monuments to work and for work that New Yorkers have built for themselves." Declaring them "inviolable" in the wake of their destruction, setting them on the rock of ages instead of the water-logged concrete piers on which they’d actually rested, Utley invoked a wholly artificial permanence typical of the public mourning of these buildings. "They'll always remain in the sky," U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins declared on the day they fell, "in the air, the monument of air."

It is not difficult to see that these appraisals of the WTC—sentimental and reactionary, but also powerful and true—comport with both the physicality and the metaphysics of the WTC itself. The Towers were pure bigness. However much one loved or hated them, their very scale makes their loss difficult to comprehend. On October 5, 2001, I stood not two blocks away from Ground Zero, staring, blinking, trying to dispel the two-dimensionality of it, people walking this way and that in front of what seemed a giant, translucent screen. It didn’t look any more real than it had on my television screen. When the flattened pile of rubble, much of its contents already hauled away, still rises seven stories into the air, one knows one is dealing with something all out of human scale. And that, much to the chagrin of the architectural critics—and perhaps much to the horror of those of us attuned to the architectural lexicon of fascism—was precisely the source of the Towers’ bemused toleration by many New Yorkers before September 11, and of the nostalgic grandeur that was manufactured for them in the aftermath – and that seems to fade further into the national mist with each passing anniversary.

In Part Two: Towers of Capital

Homeland Security: Scaling New Heights of Competence

2005-09-09T11:33:00.000-04:00

Or, Why Noam Chomsky's Got a Toothache

For quite some time, I am told, Noam Chomsky had been experiencing pain in his jaw. His dentist told him he must be grinding his teeth, and asked Chomsky's wife to watch him during the night. Weeks passed, and the poor woman could not for the life of her figure out when the phantom grinding was occuring. Then one morning it finally hit her: Noam was grimacing and grinding his teeth every day at the breakfast table - when he read the New York Times.

I had a similar reaction myself this A.M., when I spied a piece in the Times about the political wrangling that caused delays in the Katrina rescue operation, written in the style of credulous anemia that only the Old Grey Lady's stylesheet can muster:

The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.

I hope Noam's getting his news elsewhere these days, because this little gem's pretty much a full-on case of TMJ all by itself.

By the Content of Their Character, or, like, Whatever

2005-09-03T18:38:00.000-04:00

There Ain't Nuthin' Left But the Cryin' - and the Racism

I've been a little skeptical about charges of racism against the news media in the wake of the catastrophe in New Orleans. The constant references to "looters" (most of whom stole such luxuries as food and water) has combined with video footage of African American survivors to lend a rather sinister tone to the coverage. But many of the hurricane survivors are indeed African American (most residents who couldn't evacuate beforehand are poor, and a disproportionate percentage of poor Americans are people of color).

But all that nuance and hesitation fell the wayside in an instant, when the following found its way into my email inbox:

It's a pretty self-evident juxtaposition, except to say this: we shouldn't underestimate the extent to which this apparently simple racism is actually intermixed with preconceptions about social class. Dark skin color is associated with poverty, and many of the kneejerk associations of African Americans with criminality are based on the accompanying assumption that African Americans are all poor.

As I wrote yesterday, it's that underlying classism that makes many of the powers-that-be so blind to the reasons many New Orleans residents didn't - couldn't - get out of there before Katrina hit. And it's that same class bias that made Dub say that the "security" situation in New Orleans was the aspect - and the only aspect - he'd been referring to when he'd said that the hurricane relief efforts prior to Friday had been "unacceptable."

Fiddling, Fiddling, Fiddling Away...

2005-09-02T10:11:00.000-04:00

... while New Orleans burns

As dozens die needlessly in the apocalyptic mess of the New Orleans Convention Center and other area sites, the Federal response continues to boggle the mind in its incompetence and heartlessness. Bill in Portland Maine over at Daily Kos sums it up well:

President George W. Bush said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." Well, no one except the entire world and even Mr. Bill.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went shoe shopping on Fifth Avenue, but not before she played tennis and yukked it up at Spamalot.

The Viceroy in charge of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff said "We're much better prepared than we've ever been." I'm not sure if that was before or after he reminded us that September is National Preparedness Month, so be sure to stock up on duct tape.

The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael D. Brown leapt into action, mustering all the emergency disaster management skills he learned as a lawyer for the International Arabian Horse Association Legal Department (from which he was fired). His money quote: "Paula, the federal government did not even know about the Convention Center people until today."

[...]

And Vice President Dick Cheney was still on vacation.

You can check out Bill's full comments here.

But the worst, the very worst - even worse than Chertoff's demented assertion that the relief efforts have been "magnificent" - is FEMA chief Michael Brown's assertion that the victims are partly to blame. The death toll is expected to reach into the thousands, and Brown told CNN, "Unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings."

Nevermind that half of New Orleans residents don't have cars and there were nowhere near enough buses to evacuate them all. Nevermind that most of them are poor and were waiting for their end-of-the-month paychecks and welfare checks so they could afford to, you know, eat. And nevermind that many of them stayed behind to protect ill parents or grandparents who couldn't safely be moved.

Nevermind all that. How about a federal government that didn't heed advance warnings that exactly this sort of catastrophe was in the offing? Warnings that said Homeland Security was trumping hurricane readiness, and that predicted the levees would fail, and that the city would flood, and that many people would not be able to be evacuated? And how about a federal government that cut funding to shore up the levees in order to help pay for the war in Iraq, and that's unremittingly hostile to environmental initiatives that would preserve and restore New Orlean's natural coastal barriers?

So isn't it rather more accurate to say, "Unfortunately the death toll is going to be attributable a lot to the President, and his Cabinent, and elected officials who did not heed the advance warnings"? Isn't it rather more accurate to say, This is what happens when you fill a government with government-hating, rightwing ideologues more interested in the abstract satisfactions of political messianism than the proper functioning of public agencies? Isn't this what happens when no one in charge is even remotely acquainted with a class-based understanding of the world that might shed a little light on the reasons why so many people didn't - couldn't - evacuate?

It seems like spitting into the wind to say so, but Brown and Chertoff need to be fired. Hearings need to be held. Competent people need to be put in charge. And this administration, which has turned the avoidance of accountability into an art form, must, just this once, be held accountable for its venal, and now mortal, sins.

Evolution: True, and a Nifty Time-Saver to Boot

2005-08-24T12:26:00.000-04:00

From the lead paragraph in a recent installment of the New York Times' ongoing Debate Over Darwin series:

At the heart of the debate over intelligent design is this question: Can a scientific explanation of the history of life include the actions of an unseen higher being?

Answer: No.

Now get back to work.

Beyond Belief

2005-08-15T22:13:00.000-04:00

On the Eve of the Gaza Pullout

The settlers are digging in. The Israeli soldiers are preparing to do what, for many, is long overdue, and what is for others unthinkable.

What keeps the hardest of the hard-core Jewish settlers in their tiny, isolated communities, surrounded by a hostile, colonized population? What makes non-resident Israelis flood into the settlements just before the military obliterates them? What gives the young children the bitter, entitled demeanor of battle-hardened adult militants?

Belief.

Belief in biblical prophesy. Belief in the historiographic ideology of "Greater Israel." Belief in the supposed intractability and universality of Arab hatred of Jews. Belief that, as almost every progressive American Jew has been told at one time or another in a conspiratorial whisper by a conservative American Jew, "There's no such thing as a Palestinian." Belief in that particular brand of enraged victimhood unique to oppressed peoples who obtain nationhood, so that policies of aggression get narrated as acts of self-defense. And belief that, when the moment arrives, their government, their soldiers, their fellow Jews, won't be able to bring themselves to go through with it.

What underlies all these beliefs is the core belief in the ethno-religious essence of Israel as a Jewish state, as The Jewish State. This unshakable, fundamental belief has made the two-state solution the outer limit of what most of us are willing to consider or even able to conceive. It's what makes the Security Wall seem rational. It's what justified the neocolonial policy of occupied-territory settlement, and it's what's now justifying the equally neocolonial terms on which Sharon is administering the withdrawal from Gaza.

And so a single-state, or binational solution - a democratic, multi-ethnic, secular state organized around the ethnic and religious diversity that already exists inside Israel, let alone in the Palestinian territories - remains beyond the pale. Is it naive to promote such an idea? Does even raising it disqualify one from being taken seriously? Perhaps. But at the end of the day it's not history, practicality or realism that rules out a one-state solution. What rules it out is belief - reactionary, exclusionary, essentialist belief.

We live in a time when belief has become an incredibly dangerous idea. Absolute, uncompromising, desperate belief legitimates a brand of fundamentalist terrorism that bears more than a passing resemblance to fascism. And that terrorism has provided an alibi for amping up a raft of other fundamentalisms - the Christo-fascism that now haunts the corridors of the West Wing; the rightwing Zionism that infects the Israeli settlements and much of American Jewry; the neoliberal colonialism privatizing water supplies and other life-essentials across the world in the name of the religion of the Free Market; and the xenophobic security paranoia that chews up civil liberties and calls for the formation of private militias to take target practice across the Rio Grande.

As a leftist living in these neoliberal times, I often feel I have nothing but belief, but conviction, but faith - in social justice and social equality. But as I wait for the inevitable press photos of Israeli Jews tearing each other to pieces to start zipping across the cyberwires, I can't help feeling that belief, no matter its content, is more likely to be our ruin than our salvation.

An op-ed in Ha'aretz suggests that Israelis on both sides of the withdrawal debate mourn for their fellow citizens, in order not to deny them their humanity. "Perhaps the most humanitarian and ethical way for any Israeli to participate," the author writes, "is to expose himself [sic] to these feelings of mourning, to attempt to confront them in all their unbearable contradictions."

By itself, mourning can't eradicate the plague of fundamentalism that besets us. But if it can interrupt the tyranny of belief, it might be a good start.

The Day the World Ended, Sixty Years On

2005-08-05T18:10:00.000-04:00

The sixtieth anniversary of World War II began on December 7, 2001 - because it marked the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and because we Americans can't be bothered to take time off from work to commemorate that little bit of unpleasantness that took place in Europe between September 1, 1939 and December 6, 1941.

A little less than four years later, the anniversary is coming to a close, with the two most disquieting moments of the war. Though the atom bomb that hit Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 was twice as potent, the one that exploded over Hiroshima three days prior did more damage and killed more people - and, of course, was the first such weapon ever used.

Aside from the obvious current-day confluences - the WWII anniversary began in the shadow of 9/11 and ends with the U.S. stuck in a (post)war prosecuted via a Big Lie about nuclear weapons - there's not much to say about the cataclysmic events of August 6 and 9, 1945 that hasn't already been said.

So while you sip your weekend coffee and ask yourself if our world is going to hell in a handbasket, check out some resources on the two days when no one had to wonder:

Go here for the Wikipedia entry on the bombings.
Go here for information on the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996 over the objections of the U.S. and China.
Go here for information and background on John Hersey's Hiroshima, which is just as stark and compelling as it was on that August, 1946 day when it first appeared as a whole-issue article in The New Yorker.
And finally, go here - or better yet, to your local independent bookstore - and get your own copy of Hiroshima. It should be in every thinking, feeling person's library.

What Does Toyota Have to Do with A Prisoner Dying of AIDS?

2005-08-01T14:43:00.000-04:00

The World We've Made, The World We've Lost

Consider:

(1) Today a Paul Krugman column from last week's New York Times showed up in my email inbox. It analyzes Toyota's decision to locate a new North American plant in Ontario, despite offers of tremendous public concessions and giveaways by Alabama and other southern U.S. states.

Toyota went north because it was shocked at the low educational level of the U.S. workforce, and because Canada's national health insurance system will save the company millions in employee benefit costs.

(2) Today's Times reports on the terrible state of AIDS care in Alabama's prisons. Housed in a single, rat-infested facility based on a discredited quarantine policy, stacked so close in barracks that "infectious abscesses 'spread like wildfire'," "rousted at 3 a.m. to stand in line outdoors, often in the cold or rain, to get their pills," and forced to load their own dead cellmates into bodybags, Alabama's HIV-positive prisoners have died in droves at the hands of private firms contracted by the state to care for them. The clinic has often lacked soap and paper towels, and many patients' charts read "no thermometer" in the place where their daily temperatures should be recorded.

What do these two items have in common? Hint: it's not Alabama. Every state in the union offers obscene giveaways to corporations like Toyota, and like Alabama most of them are unsuccessful. And Prison Health Systems (PHS), the current Alabama prison contractor, has been retained by dozens of other states, including New York, where PHS has compiled a similarly gruesome record.

No, the thread that links these two items is our American sickness of privatization and government-bashing. Corporate, political and media elites - but also many of us regular folks - promote the shrinking of government, reduction of taxes, and outsourcing of services.

And these are the ironic results:

Alabama's Governor tried to raise taxes on the wealthy in order to improve the abysmal education system that helped drive Toyota away. But his proposal lost in a referendum because opponents said it would cost the state jobs.
States offered Toyota gigantic tax breaks that would only worsen their ability to educate their future workforces - and Toyota still spurned them because the savings paled in comparison to the astronomical costs of having to pay health care benefits to employees in our privatized system.
Before being hired by Alabama, the State Corrections official who's in charge of oversight of PHS was Vice President of Sales and Marketing for... PHS.

This is the world we've made. We try to deny the public costs necessary to a civilized society. We let those with money and power encourage us to ignore them, to hide them, and then they pop up elsewhere in the form of corruption, poor schools, overburdened emergency rooms filled with people who have no insurance, and crisis-ridden Medicare and Medicaid programs - all of which end up costing us more money than a rational tax system and national health insurance would.

This is the world we've made, and in examining it we catch a glimpse of another world, a world we've lost. Look at Canada, where Toyota's going. It's a capitalist country, on our continent, with a similarly strong Anglophone culture, about as multilingual as today's U.S., with a similar standard of living and pretty much the same products and companies. All it has are a few different policies and a slightly different outlook on things.

The failures and horrors chronicled in the two Times articles that caught my eye today could have been avoided by what, from the broad perspective of national policy and international political economy, amounts to little more than minor tinkering.

Revolutionary change may not be on the horizon, and so-called Red State culture may be here to stay, via its Wal-Mart, Home Depot and NASCAR beachheads in the north. But surely a little tinkering isn't beyond the capabilities of a Democratic Party in transition, a growing progressive movement, and a national population increasingly disenchanted with neocon corruption and overreaching - is it?

The Evils of Liberalism, in Three Easy Steps

2005-07-29T14:59:00.000-04:00

aka Asstard of the Week

Asstard, n. sl. An individual or entity acting in a way indicative of diminished mental capacity, but retaining requisite culpable intent.

Newsweek is taking a beating again, this time from progressive precincts, for printing false information about John Roberts' non-membership in the Federalist Society (he was a member), and his merely-peripheral involvement in the Florida 2000 recount mess (he was integrally involved).

The criticism is well-deserved. But if you keep reading after the Roberts coverage in the most recent issue, you'll soon come across something less sensational but much more insidious, something that can't be addressed via a correction printed in the next issue.

I refer to the often-insightful (but tremendously overrated) Fareed Zakaria's column, "How to Stop the Contagion," which meditates on the need to fight a war of ideas against the barbarism of Islamic extremism. Whatever else it may be, the column is a textbook example of the power, and essentially conservative bent, of liberal ideology. By liberal I don't mean that narrow, historically specific slice of watered-down democratic socialism that we call the New Deal, and that the neocon right has been warring against for the past half-century. Rather, I mean classical liberalism, the liberal individualism that has functioned as the official ideology of capitalism since the days of Adam Smith (whose Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, coincidentally enough).

So here it is, Zakaria's insidious liberalism, in Three Easy Steps:

Step 1: Y'all Crazy
Writing of the recently-identified would-be suicide bombers in London, Zakaria begins by explaining that suicide bombers are not motivated by poverty, deprivation, discrimination or rage. These guys were working class but comfortable. They weren't well assimilated, but they were better off than their immigrant parents (who didn't cause any trouble) and they lived in Britain, one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Zakaria's point is that these were not The Wretched of the Earth, and so their actions are the result of ideology. The operative distinction here isn't simply that their world view is hateful or fundamentalist, but that it's ideological. It's ideological by virtue of being hateful, and it's hateful by virtue of being ideological. QED.

Ideology is here posited as something opposed to reason and common sense. It's the very definition of irrationality. If you have bad or extreme ideas, then you're "ideological" and you "have" an ideology - in other words, when all is said and done, you're nuts. If, by contrast, you have good or moderate ideas, then you're normal and reasonable and you don't have an ideology. In this manner, liberalism posits itself as non-ideological, the logical expression of human nature and human good. Anything liberalism promotes is said to be universal, essential and ultimately natural.

Step 2: It's the "Elites," Stupid
Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with poverty and oppression, Zakaria argues, because the London bombers were all from relatively stable, relatively economically secure working-class English households. "Like all ideologies," he writes, "radical Islam is a phenomenon of the educated class ... almost all suicide bombers have been men who read and write. ... Extremist ideology is a leisure-time pursuit."

And this is liberal ideology's second trick. Ideology is nutty and extreme because it is abstract - abstracted from the everyday world of work and productivity, in which folks don't have time to think about lofty ideas. Ideology is a product of philosophizin', with all the connotations of rigidity and disconnectedness that go with it.

So extremism is a "leisure-time pursuit," i.e. a luxury of the elite. Then the elite get defined as "the educated class," which in turn gets defined as anyone who can read and write, which then thereby includes the marginally assimilated, first-generation, working-class Englishmen of color who've been plotting to blow up the London subway. Nice trick.

I've often written about conservative populism as a political ploy, in which rightwing elites accuse moderate elites of being leftwing elites (see Bush v. Kerry 2004). What we have in Zakaria's article is rightwing populism's kissing cousin: liberal populism, in which moderate elites discredit anyone who believes anything else by accusing them of being elite.

Step 3: You All Look Alike to Me
The final piece of this puzzle comes in a passage I had to read twice because I wasn't sure I could believe my eyes:

Radical ideologies of hate and violence have often seduced disaffected young men searching for some great cause. Forty years ago whey would have embraced Leninist revolutionary dogma, with Che Guevara as the bin Laden of his day.

Now, Che Guevara was no saint. But he was a revolutionary socialist, a true internationalist who undoubtedly left the world better than he found it. And so to call him "the bin Laden of his day" - well, it's the sort of unbelievably stupid, hyper red-baiting nonsense that one might expect from Limbaugh, O'Reilly or some other crypto-fascist gasbag. But it's not what one would normally expect to emit from Zakaria's keyboard.

And yet it makes sense in the larger context here, for the chief way liberalism perpetuates the myth that it, alone among all word views, is not ideological, is to equate all competing world views with one another. Christian fundamentalism, communism, fascism, socialism, Islamic fundamentalism, communalism, social democracy, Hindu fundamentalism, even the great forgotten American alter-ego of civic republicanism - are all denigrated as "ideological" by virtue of being lumped together as "isms." Che's pan-American socialism is no different than Leninism, which is no different than radical Islam - all are "radical ideologies of hate and violence." You disagree? Then you must be some kind of communist - or something.

Like the pre-Copernican view of the universe, Zakaria places liberalism at the center, unmoving, i.e. outside of history and ideology. I wrote above that anything liberalism promotes is said to be universal, essential and ultimately natural - except it isn't said. The word "liberal" doesn't appear in Zakaria's piece, nor does he spend one single sentence articulating what his own view, the Western view, actually is. This is how liberalism - and the capitalism for which it speaks - naturalizes itself.

After all, what better example could there be of leisure-time ideology undertaken by a privileged member of the educated class than Zakaria's own column? The entire piece is structured around hypocrisy.

And finally, it's worth noting that all those hardworking, "non-ideological" people have no leisure time to think hateful thoughts because they spend all their time making money for owners, managers and stockholders, who spend quite a bit of their leisure time promoting the ideology of bootstrapping liberal individualism in order to maintain the status quo of corporate capitalism. Thus has it ever been - the Founding Fathers, who formulated our ruling ideology were themselves elites - financiers, merchant capitalists, landed gentry, slave owning planters.

Now, it's of course true that al Queda and the majority of its suicide-bombing brethren are adherents of one strain or another of Islamofascism (though we don't really know a whole lot about the specific views and motives of all the various factions of the Iraqi insurgents and bombers). And it's equally true that fundamentalism and fascism should be condemned and opposed wherever they rear their ugly heads (Baghdad insurgency, Mumbai communalism, White House senior staff, and so on). But the kind of arrogance that labels all world views but one as insane, extreme and above all indistinguishable from one another, is precisely analogous to the reactionary nationalism, dishonest foreign policy and imperial militarism that many of us - Zakaria included - feel has isolated the U.S. around the world and provided opportunities for the creation of new terrorists and insurgents.

So for reviving the worst aspects of Cold War liberalism and being a colossal hypocrite, Fared Zakaria joins the few, the proud, the Asstards of the Week.

Take this Union and Shove It (to the Left)

2005-07-25T16:09:00.000-04:00

The House of Labor - Re-energized

As I write these words, CNN is saying "The House of Labor is Divided" over and over again, lamenting yet another political blow to the Democratic Party, which relies mightily on unified union support.

To that I say, Hooey! Here's the story:

The SEIU and the Teamsters have officially broken from the AFL-CIO. The political issues are legion, but the bottom line is that the breakaway groups - united as the Change to Win Coalition (here too) - want to spend more money on organizing new unions, and proportionally less on supporting Democratic Party candidates who don't win elections and don't sufficiently stand up for organized labor.

In 1955, more than third of all American households were union. Now only 13 percent are. Want Democratic candidates to attend to labor issues? Want Republicans to respect the political power of organized labor? Want to see whole new candidates who not only pay lip service to worker issues but actually believe in them themselves? The best - and probably only - way to do all that is to create more unionized workers. That's the horse. Everything else is the cart. It's as simple as that.

In addition, the AFL-CIO began as, and has always been, a creature of Cold War America. Left members of the CIO were redbaited and purged when it merged with the more conservative AFL; and the union reliably supported the most retrograde - and anti-labor - of U.S. foreign policy initiatives and operations, all in the name of anti-communism.

Current AFL-CIO president John Sweeney comes out of the SEIU ironically enough, and he's a damn sight more progressive than most of his predecessors. Nevertheless, his decade-long tenure has primarily been one of failure, and the organization is still not much for the sort of progressive internationalism an international union should have.

So when any wishy washy liberal or Democratic party shill tells you that this split will only hurt the Democrats and organized labor, you tell them to go pound sand. I'm not thrilled to see Jimmy Hoffa's son acting as the public face of labor reform in America (I'm still mourning the downfall of Ron Carey), but I nevertheless say Good Luck to the new coalition as it seeks a new path in American labor history.

It's about freakin' time.

Blow Out, Blow Up, Whatever

2005-07-24T18:29:00.000-04:00

Dispatch from the Land of (Sur)reality

However diverse - and horrifying - the pathos of reality TV, the genre is united, nay defined, by a single ethos: Nothing's Sacred.

And with the storming of the Capitol, the White House, and soon the Supreme Court by the visigoths of the Christian Right, I've become something of a born-again civil libertarian, taking renewed glee from the goring of any sacred cow, no matter how corporate, money-grubbing or plain old dumb-as-a-lizard stupid the gorer may be. Which is to say, I'll take Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas over Hillary Clinton any day.

But, it turns out, there are limits to my secular-humanist degeneracy. I became aware of this recently while watching the second-season finale of Bravo's inane, horrible, but-it's-like-a-car-accident-that-I-can't-look-away-from reality series Blow Out.

The show centers on Jonathan Antin, straight yet massively drama-queeny hair stylist to the stars, salon owner and, as of this year, namesake of Jonathan Product, which includes items like "Dirt" texturizing paste -only $26 for a 3.35 oz. jar. (You know you're dealing with seriously high-fallutin' hair care when you're applying "product" - sans "s" - to your 'do.)

Generically Blow Out's actually pretty noteworthy, for the way in which its star shamelessly hawks products from the show's commercial sponsors (Amex, Lenscrafters, Revlon and others), both in the show's diegesis and in actual commercials that air during the breaks of his own show. This latter bit is, as far as I know, otherwise unprecedented in the annals, such as they are, of reality TV.

But let's get to the point - or, more accurately, the moment. It's the final scene of the season finale. Sephora has decided to carry Jonathan Product, and Antin's just been at the Times Square Sephora location all day for the product launch. He's outside in the afternoon, in front of the store, emoting like crazy for the camera. His dream has come true and all is right with the world.

Except not quite. Here's a closer look at the news crawl on the building behind him:

It's a little obscured by the bus, and it's easier to see in the full video sequence. But even here it's clear: that's breaking news of the London bombings, more or less as they happened. A quick look at Google's cached version of Sephora's Web site confirms:

Jonathan Antin, at Sephora, on... 7/7.

Ouch.

The only question - and I may be hopelessly naive in asking it - is, Did no one in the editing room notice, or did they notice and just not care?

John G. Roberts: Anti-Environmentalist, Yes; Originalist Loony, Maybe

2005-07-20T10:48:00.000-04:00

What is it with these Supreme Court nominees and the Endangered Species Act?

Yesterday we thought it was Edith Clement, a conservative Appellate Judge with very little in the way of a jurisprudential paper trail, who in a published dissent evinces an abiding hostility to the Endangered Species Act on rather bizarre grounds.

Today we know that it's John G. Roberts, a conservative Appellate Judge with very little in the way of a jurisprudential paper trail, who in a published dissent evinces an abiding hostility to the Endangered Species Act on rather bizarre grounds.

In Rancho Viejo v. Norton (2003), The D.C. Appellate Court rejected a California developer's claim that the Department of the Interior could not force modifications to its development project because of the threat it posed to an endangered species (the arroyo toad, in case you were interested).

At issue was the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which authorizes Congress to regulate activities that involve commerce among the states. Citing various Supreme Court precedents, the D.C. Court ruled for the government.

Seems simple enough. Roberts, however, dissented, on the following grounds:

The panel's opinion in effect asks whether the challenged regulation substantially affects interstate commerce, rather than whether the activity being regulated does so. Thus, the panel sustains the application of the Act in this case because Rancho Viejo's commercial development constitutes interstate commerce and the regulation impinges on that development, not because the incidental taking of arroyo toads can be said to be interstate commerce.

Try to follow Roberts' line of argument here:

The toads' activities, such as they are, are not interstate commerce. Nor do said activities impact interstate commerce in any way.
Therefore, by harming the toads, the developer is not engaging in interstate commerce, or impacting interstate commerce.
And so, because the "regulated activity" - the "taking" (i.e. harming) of the toads - is not related to interstate commerce, the government has no Constitutional right to regulate that taking.

Now, a normal person would say that the developer's, you know, development is the activity here, and that such activity impacts interstate commerce, and that the federal government therefore has Constitutional authority to regulate that activity.

But Roberts defines activity as the harming of the species. This puts the burden on the frogs: because they jump around, eat and do the nasty all within the confines of a single state, we can't protect them.

It's worth noting that this is the same logic that motivates Edith Clement in her Endangered Species-related dissent (covered here yesterday): she argues that animals can be protected only if they are involved in commerce in some way, i.e. if they're hunted, or if they're useful in medical research - or, I suppose, if they've got an eBay store.

Now, environmental rollback is certainly a bad thing. And environmental rollback promoted in a transparently pro-business manner is even worse.

But what's really worrying here is that Roberts, even more than Clement, pursues his agenda by means of narrow interpretation - so narrow, and narrow in such a way, that it defies rationality and common sense. And it is precisely this sort of insane, instrumental narrowness that defines the rightwing judicial philosophy of strict constructionism, aka "originalism."

So while he may appear to be more of a corporate lacky conservative, rather than a cultural wingnut conservative, Roberts may in fact turn out to be both.

Possible Court Nominee to Endangered Species: Get a Job

2005-07-19T16:38:00.000-04:00

* Update: ABC News says Clement will not be the nominee *

Edith Clement, Handmaiden to Capitalism

Matthew Yglesias has what looks to be the first hint of where ~~probable~~ ~~possible~~ unlikely(?) Supreme Court nominee Edith Clement's judicial sympathies lie.

Her jurisprudential record is notoriously undistinguished - much like David Souter's was and Clarence Thomas' still is - but Yglesias has found one interesting tidbit. Joining the dissent in GDF Realty Investments v. Norton, Clement argued that the Endangered Species Act shouldn't apply to any animal that has no value to the capitalist market.

I'm not making this up. Here's a bit of the dissent, taken from Yglesias's piece:

It is undeniable that many ESA-prohibited takings of endangered species may be regulated, and even aggregated, under Lopez and Morrison because they involve commercial or commercially-related activities like hunting, tourism, and scientific research. On this basis, the Fourth Circuit decision in Gibbs v. Babbitt approved federal red wolf regulations. Under reasoning like that in Gibbs, aggregation may be sustained on a species-by-species basis or across certain categories of species. The pursuit of hunting trophies, for instance, affects markets for hunting, outfitting, taxidermy, etc. Where the link between endangered species takes and commercial or economic activity is plain, courts need not be concerned about the limits of the aggregation principle.

In other words: no market utility, no protection from the state.

It's worth noting - and not at all a stretch - that this attitude towards wildlife is exactly the same logic that drives:

Welfare Reform, whose guiding objective is to channel poor people into the lowest echelons of the labor market, or, if they can't be sufficiently "productive" (i.e. exploited), to throw them to the wolves (pun intended) of a safety net-less society;

and -
Eminent Domain, which as we have seen in the wake of Kelo v. New London, is no longer guided by the public good but rather by the dictates of the market: if your land isn't making someone money, then it - and you - are fair game (again, pun intended).

So, thus far, we know Edith Clement will be good for the robber barons. Whether she's good for the antiabortionists and homophobes remains to be seen.

Return of the Black Bags: Terrorism, Dirty Tricks and ReBaathification in Iraq

2005-07-18T13:29:00.000-04:00

From the Dept. of The More Things Change...

While we're waiting for the offical transcript of the walls closing in on Scotty McClellan during today's White House press ~~grilling~~ briefing on the Rove-Plame scandal, let's examine the Cold War legacy of terror, death and destruction we're helping inflict upon Iraq these days. To wit:

One of the first acts of the national security state that emerged in the U.S. after World War II involved the stealing of the Italian national elections of 1948. In a clear violation of the fragile sovereignty of the new Italian Republic (founded in '46), the U.S. covertly pumped millions of dollars into the campaign and engaged in propaganda and dirty tricks, in order to stop a coalition of communists and socialists from winning. To do this, the newly formed CIA backed the Christian Democrats, at the time a haven for (among others) unreconstructed fascists from the Mussolini era.

This perversion of democracy, in a country that was a new ally trying to establish a new government, came in the broader context of a schizophrenic policy known as denazification - a purging of overt signs of fascist political and cultural influence in former Axis and Axis-occupied countries. At the very same time, and in part under the cover of denazification, the U.S. was importing former Nazis by the boatload and integrating them into our nuclear and intelligence programs. It was also initiating the fateful Cold War policy of allying with all manner of rightwing thugs and murderers across Europe (and, soon after, across the world) in the name of anticommunism.

Begun as "stay-behind" operations intended as a hedge against Soviet invasion of Western Europe, these covert alliances with fascists grew into horrifying programs like Operation Gladio, in which for decades the U.S. and its NATO allies funded and supported rightwing terrorists who killed civilians and pinned the blame on leftwing organizations. (In a case of supreme irony from our present-day viewpoint, Gladio operatives also helped Turkey brutally repress its Kurdish population.)

Called a "strategy of tension," this was all part of a campaign to destabilize European civil society during a time of left political upsurge. As the Nazis had shown the world in the late '20s and early '30s, rightwing forces can gain political power by fomenting social upheaval and then promising to restore order if they're elected.

Fast forward to 2005. Today Iraq is a fledgling democracy, a new ally of the U.S. trying to establish a legitimate government. As in postwar Europe, occupied Iraq's political culture is being shaped by a schizophrenic American policy of deBa'athification, in which Ba'athist fascists are initially purged, then not purged, as the occupiers come to value them as bulwarks against the occupiers' enemies - in this case, democratically elected Shiites whom the administration fears are too cozy with Iran. Case in point: the new Iraqi Secret Service was set up with a former Ba'athist in charge, who intended to recruit former agents of Saddam Hussein's Mukhabarat to quash an insurgency full of... Ba'athists.

And just as in Italy in '48, it turns out, the U.S. agenda in Iraq also appears to have included trying to rig national elections.

Seymour Hersh reports on this in this week's New Yorker, detailing Dub et al's attempts to covertly funnel money and resources to the party of administration friend and Bush campaign flak Iyad Allawi. Driven by the familiar core of delusional neocons, the White House worked assiduously to influence the Iraqi elections in order to reduce the power of the dominant Shiite coalition, and to try to keep then-Inerim Prime Minister Allawi in a high-ranking position in the new government by helping his party garner a respectable percentage of the vote.

It's not clear exactly what these plans amounted to, because they were so secret. When American NGOs - including one that normally has no problem supporting Washington-friendly parties abroad - balked at the idea, and when Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi objected, Hersh reports that the administration moved the operation from the CIA into the Pentagon, where everything could be done entirely "off the books," thereby circumventing Congressional oversight of the intelligence agencies.

Given the political realities of Iraq, the neocons failed to keep the Shiites out of the driver's seat. And Allawi didn't even get a position in the new cabinet. But, significantly, Hersh notes, the Shiite coalition got less than 50 percent of the vote even though it was polling near 60; and Allawi's party got 14 percent, fully 50 percent more than the 9 percent at which it had been polling in the election run-up. "It became clear" during the campaign, says one of Hersh's sources, "that Allawi and his coalition had huge resources, although nothing was flowing through normal channels. He had very professional and very sophisticated media help and saturation television coverage."

But that, believe it or not, ain't the worst of it. For if this report is to be trusted, the Pentagon's Off-the-Books Boys may actually be recreating Operation Gladio in Iraq, complete with death squads, as we speak. Combine that with National Intelligence Director John Negroponte's long, bloody history with human rights-abusing covert ops in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and you've got a heady mix indeed.

So take another look at Jethro's recent speech on Iraq:

Our mission in Iraq is clear. We're hunting down the terrorists. We're helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We're advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. We are removing a source of violence and instability, and laying the foundation of peace for our children and our grandchildren.

Kinda puts a whole new spin on it, yes?

The Comedian, Through the Looking Glass

2005-07-18T11:10:00.000-04:00

From the Dept. of I know It's Only Pop Culture, But This Is Getting Interesting

Fishbowl New York has a nice piece on Jon Stewart's continuing transformation of The Daily Show into a Real News Show. It's still funny as hell, but the comedic veneer is cracking. The serious stuff's in the driver's seat now, and it appears Stewart is on the verge of dropping any pretense otherwise. As Fishbowl notes of the Bernard Goldberg interview I wrote about here recently:

The fact that Stewart aired the full exchange with Goldberg, pre-empting a pretaped sure-to-get-laughs segment centered on the words "vaginal cream" [which Goldberg alludes to when he first comes on stage], says something about what he wants to do with his platform. He has the audience, he's prepared to use it. Perhaps that's what the new set means; no couch for you, don't get too comfortable, I'm asking the questions here.

Check out the whole piece; it's worth the read.

Daily Show 1, Bigot Channel 0

2005-07-14T23:19:00.000-04:00

Yes, yes, I know, it's become de rigueur to point folks to this or that Daily Show clip in which Stewart, Colbert et al perform a particularly satisfying skewering of this or that rightwing instapundit a-hole.

But this one's a little different. Turn your irony meter off for a moment, because I can honestly say that as a political progressive I was filled with pride by Stewart's recent sparring session with Bernard Goldberg, over Goldberg's newest book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken Is #37).

Stewart is hilarious in the segment, as always. He's razor-sharp as well, calling Goldberg on the fact that he vilifies far more liberals than conservatives in the book (97 to 3 apparently), and that he equates annoying people on the "left" (Barbra Streisand) with dangerous ones on the right (a guy who shot an abortion doctor).

But what really compels one's attention here is the content, tenor and scope (it's over 12 minutes long) of this interview-cum-debate. Comedy show segment though it may be, it's exactly what real television news-talk should be, and never is. Stewart disagrees with Goldberg repeatedly, doggedly pursuing a coherent argument. At the same time, he doesn't berate Goldberg, cut him off, or mock him into submission. If there's anything Stewart preempts, it's the celebrity-style softball treatment to which professional pundits like Goldberg have become accustomed, thanks to the shallow, indifferent ministrations of the hairdos who pass for anchorpeople on the mainstream news networks.

So go watch the clip and see Stewart link cultural permissiveness to capitalism. See him call the culture wars a "red herring" and argue that crude rap lyrics are a natural "part of the detritus and static of a society that is complex." And see him draw Goldberg into a debate over the relative importance of culture as entertainment, versus culture as the political life of a nation, via exchanges like this:

Goldberg: Once upon a time a drunk in a bar... wouldn't use the f-word. Now, ... Chevy Chase goes to the Kennedy Center, in Washington DC, at a gala where people are wearing tuxedos and gowns, and calls the President a Dumbf*ck.

Stewart: And once upon a time Thomas Jefferson f*cked slaves. I guess what I'm saying is that the nostalgia for the culture-- Yes, Chevy Chase used a bad word on TV at the Kennedy Center. But segregation no longer exists. Slavery is gone. That's real culture, and real vulgarity.

I dunno, maybe it's the new set design. Whatever it is, Sir Jon's clearly at the height of his powers.

Imperial America, from Rove to La Follette and Back Again

2005-07-14T15:35:00.000-04:00

It's heartening to see the mainstream press finally paying proper attention to The Treasonous Mr. Rove and His Traveling Sideshow. For those of us who've been tracking it for the past few weeks - or months, or years - it's been a very long and tedious course indeed. It's worth noting, in fact, that in a few weeks the duration of the Rove-Plame leak scandal will surpass the entirety of Watergate, from the June 1972 burglary all the way to Nixon's final four-fingered salute on Marine One in August of '74. And if you date our current arglebargle to its real beginning - Dub lying his smirking a** off about yellow cake during the '03 State of the Union and Joe Wilson calling him on it - we're already months beyond Watergate.

I note this because while gutter-dwellers like Rove dominate our present, the passing of such figures as Gaylord Nelson reminds us of a time when "politics" and "public service" were on speaking terms - and perhaps points to a time in the future when they might yet be again.

Nelson, a former U.S. Senator from Wisconsin who died earlier this month, is best known for being a prime mover in the founding of Earth Day. (He was unexpectedly and unceremoniously dumped from the Senate, along with other progressive stalwarts like Birch Bayh, in the Reagan landslide of 1980, which weakened the New Deal Congress and paved the way for the ascendancy of the horrid neoliberals, whose ranks today, ironically, include Bayh's son Evan.)

Nelson was way ahead of his time on the environment, prodding JFK to focus on the issue at about the same time Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was first published.

And Nelson's prescience extended beyond the birds and bees. As John Nichols notes in his latest column over at The Nation, Nelson was talking publicly as early as 1964 about the need to withdraw from Vietnam, and was one of only three Senators who voted against Lyndon Johnson's 1965 supplemental appropriation for the war, which marked the first major escalation and, in retrospect, the point of no return for both the war and the demise of New Deal-Great Society America.

Even more interesting, Nichols notes, is that Nelson came up "in the Wisconsin progressive tradition of former U.S. Sen. Robert M. 'Fighting Bob' La Follette, who courageously and correctly opposed Woodrow Wilson's decision to march U.S. troops into World War I."

The lesson for today's situation in Iraq, Nichols concludes, is clear: that it's a mistake to get into a war in a place where, as Nelson said of Vietnam, "the vital interests of this country are not at stake."

All well and good. The only problem is that Nichols neglects to mention the strongest and most important link among WWI, Vietnam and Iraq. The folksy, rural image of La Follette's Wisconsin Progressivism, and the rhetoric about American "national interests" hews dangerously close to isolationism - of which many on the left are routinely accused these days when they criticize the war on terror or advocate immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

The link Nichols' piece misses is imperialism, or what Lenin, writing just as La Follette was casting his vote against Wilson's entry into WWI, called "the highest stage of capitalism."

World War I was perhaps the most unjust - or more accurately justice-agnostic - war of the modern era, being little more than inter-imperialist rivalry run amok. Likewise, Vietnam and Iraq proceed from U.S. aspirations to control the world by exercising political and/or economic dominion over other nations.

Which brings us back to our good friend Karl (Rove, not Marx). As prime crafter of the Bush doctrine and Presidency, Rove is as responsible as Perle, Wolfowitz et al for the neo-imperialism of U.S. foreign policy, for which 9/11 constituted a fortuitous launching pad, and of which Iraq is the testbed.

And so we must always remember to call the War on Terror - at least in its current, Dub-waged form - a specifically imperial war. We must do this not only because it's an accurate label for our opponents on the right, but also, crucially, because it forces us into the only politically responsible position: anti-war for reasons of national, but also international, interest. In taking such a position, we're in very good company - including Rosa Luxemburg and other principled socialists of the last century, and Tom Engelhardt and the American Empire Project in this one.

Bernie Ebbers: Rational Actor, Dead Duck

2005-07-13T15:43:00.000-04:00

Bad Economic Theory Makes for Good Criminal Justice Policy

According to the AP, those were real tears Bernie Ebbers shed when U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Jones sentenced the former MCI/WorldCom CEO to 25 years in the federal pen for a gigantic act of accounting fraud that cost employees and investors $11 billion.

And no wonder. Ebbers is 63 and won't be eligible even for early release until he's 85. So this is probably a death sentence.

Now, the idea of this poor schmuck - er, I guess that's rich schmuck - croaking in a 6x9 cell circa 2020 gives me no joy. And while the duration of the punishment certainly fits the crime here, as a lifelong leftist I don't feel particularly moved to a-whoopin' an' a-hollerin' when someone - no matter how rotten - gets a long prison sentence.

What does excite me, though, is that unlike most of what goes on in our criminal "justice" system, today's sentence holds the potential to promote better social outcomes beyond the scope of this one case.

In "How to Deter White Collar Crime", David Feige of The Nation notes that "it is the power of deterrence that is regularly cited by politicians around the country to justify ever-harsher criminal laws and ever more draconian sentencing measures."

But numerous studies, not to mention common sense, tell us that deterrence schemes - most notoriously, the death penalty - don't work, because as Feige notes, "very few of those processed by the criminal justice system are actually rational actors - instead, most are driven by impulses far more powerful than reason" - like hunger, addiction, passion or rage.

Bernie Ebbers and other high-ranking white collar thugs, in contrast, "represent something we rarely see in the criminal justice system: true rational actors." Feige explains:

Ebbers and his ilk are intimately acquainted with the nuances of criminal law, the boundaries of accounting fraud and the implications of measures like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act ... . Moreover, they have access to expensive accountants and advisers well versed in the enforcement practices of the regulators who oversee their industries. Men like Ebbers ... weigh their options - objectively assessing risk and reward. This may make them canny crooks, but it also makes them supremely responsive to the deterrent factors that most legal economists wrongly imagine apply to everyone - chief among them is fear.

So harsh sentences actually do work when it comes to high-level white collar crime. There's something supremely satisfying about the fact that the rational actor hypothesis - the laissez-faire religion of elite clowns like Ebbers - becomes the means to justify policies promoting the knee-wobbling, hanky-dabbing punishment Judge Jones handed him in her Manhattan courtroom today.

Madam Justice may wear a blindfold, but her scales have a nice little class imbalance built into them - when was the last time someone told you prisons were warehouses for the rich? If Feige is right, however, and if Jones' sentence sets a precedent, then white-collar crime could become one of the few areas in which prosecutors and judges actually can "send a message" - and the scales might get just a little bit less uneven.

Impeachment: Slouching Towards the Mainstream

2005-07-13T10:04:00.000-04:00

Missed this one - and you probably did too, given the press's less-than-overwhelming coverage of it. From a poll by Zogby, June 27-29, summarized at PollingReport.com:

Question: "Do you agree or disagree that if President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment?"

Responses:

A 42 percent sentiment in favor of impeachment is rather impressive, as is the fact that there's no majority actively opposed to impeachment. But the fact that 25 percent of Republicans polled favor impeachment may be even more interesting.

At any rate, Zogby says he'll check again in a month. Stay tuned.

Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls... It Tolls for Iran

2005-07-12T14:21:00.000-04:00

From the Dept. of Didn't You Used to Be Ahmed Chalabi?

The always-fascinating Seymour Hersh has been warning for months that the neocons are trying to lay the groundwork for an invasion of Iran.

Now, contrary to what some of the more excitable among us are saying, I don't think the war in Iran has yet begun, nor do I think invasion is imminent. But if the Republicans don't get nailed in the '06 midterm, and if Dub and the Vandellas can figure a way out of Iraq by, say, the spring of 2007, then I wouldn't put it past them to go into Iran soon after.

If and when they do, there's no doubt they'll be greasing the skids with material from Countdown to Terror, the new book by ~~some poor ghostwriter~~ Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA 7th), which claims that a dysfunctional American intelligence establishment is ignoring clear signs that ~~Iraq~~ Iran is planning terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Much of Weldon's, ahem, intel, is based on a single source: an Iranian he calls "Ali." Over at The American Prospect, Laura Rozen has determined that "Ali" is really Fereidoun Mahdavi, former minister of commerce in the Shah's government. More significant, Mahdavi is a longtime associate of, and front for, Iranian arms-dealer, Iran-Contra middleman and Shah ally Manucher Ghorbanifar, who was officially declared a serial liar and a crank by the CIA in the '80s, and to whom CIA employees are still barred from speaking.

A well-credentialed neocon swept into Congress in the '86 Republican upsurge (after which the GOP held a majority in the Senate for a time), Weldon attacks the CIA's analysis by relying on a single, obviously corrupt source. This source enables him to make a series of rather dubious claims (to say the least) about Iran's hostile intentions towards the U.S. Sound familiar?

At this point, none of us should have any trouble recognizing where this is going. As a longtime terrorism maven, founder of the Homeland Security Caucus, and Vice Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Weldon is well-positioned to do the exact same kind of hatchet job on the intelligence community that Dick "Go F*ck Yourself" Cheney did in the buildup to the Iraq war in '02/'03, back before his public credibility took a powder to an undisclosed location.

This time around, the CIA seems a little better prepared to fight back: in response to Weldon's full-court press, they've had a retired Mideast specialist named Bill Murray (no, not him) interview Mahdavi, and Murray has been making the public rounds himself, telling anyone who will listen (RealPlayer stream link here) that taking Mahdavi's "emigre babble" seriously amounts to "feeding garbage into the system."

More on this sordid affair in subsequent entries.

Old MacDonald Had an Estate - and He Still Does

2005-07-11T16:05:00.000-04:00

Dispatches from the Class War, Green Acres Edition

This weekend the New York Times reported on an interesting new study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), examining the effect of the Estate Tax on family farms.

For years conservatives have been chomping at the bit to eliminate the tax entirely, and farmers have been their favorite human shield. The "Death Tax," they argue, destroys the Great American Farm. Farmer Brown kicks the milking bucket, leaving his heirs with immensely valuable land, and an equally immensely unvaluable bank account. So the poor wife and kids are forced to sell the farm in order to pay the Estate Tax on... the farm.

Oh the perversity! It's tax-happy government run amok. Be a Good American: Vote Republican and Save the Family Farm. It's rightwing populism at its best.

Except for the small detail that family farms are not endangered by the Estate Tax. The CBO study shows conclusively that:

Few farmers pay estate taxes. Only about 4,500 farmers' estates are large enough to qualify for estate taxes each year, a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of farms across the nation.
Farmers aren't players in the estate tax game. Only six percent of taxed estates in 2000 belonged to farmers.
Farmers don't pay big bucks. The average farm estate is worth less than the average estate in general, meaning the taxable amount is far lower.
Farms don't go under because of estate taxes. Only 138 farm estates lacked the cash needed to pay all estate taxes in 2000, when assets up to $650,000 were exempt from the tax. Using today's exemption level of $1.5 million, however, only 27 of those farm esates lacked sufficient cash. And the number goes down farther still, to 15, using next year's level of $2 million. That's not 15 percent. That's 15 farms, total.
No farms have to be sold at all. Even the tiny numbers above are overstated. The CBO points out that a farm estate, like any estate, may have extra money in a trust, which can be used to pay estate taxes and which doesn't show up on the tax returns the CBO examined. Combine that with rules that allow some farm estate taxes to be paid off gradually over the years, and the bottom line is, the number of farm estates that actually can't pay their estate tax without selling the farm is likely zero.

So the conservatives are full of bullsh*t - and cowsh*t, chickensh*t, horsesh*t and pigsh*t, I suppose - when they claim that the estate tax kills small farms.

But there's more, of course. What the CBO report doesn't say, and what the Times conspicuously fails to note, is that the same folks claiming to defend the family farm on the estate tax, have been falling all over themselves to kill it with every other form of tax policy they can think of. Since early in his Presidency, Dub and his Congressional allies have been accelerating the demise of the American family farm by taking your tax dollars and mine, and giving them to agribusiness.

(image courtesy of The Meatrix)

The Environmental Working Group reports that the largest ten percent of crop producers got nearly three-quarters of all tax subsidies from 1995-2003, averaging more than $34,000 each per year. The smallest 80 percent of farmers, by contrast, got an average of only $768 each per year. Those figures sound a lot like the relative gains in income among rich and poor Americans over the same time period - and of course the similarity is no accident.

So what we have here are two fronts in a class war. In the name of the American Family Farm, conservative elites fight to "solve" a tax problem small farmers don't actually have, and promote agricultural tax subsidies small farmers don't actually receive.

Check out GRACE (Global Resource Action Center for the Environment), particularly the Factory Farm Project, and learn more. And be sure to check out The Meatrix.

Mainstream Creep, or a Bunch of Mainstream Creeps?

2005-07-09T16:39:00.000-04:00

aka Asstard of the Week

Asstard, n. sl. An individual or entity acting in a way indicative of diminished mental capacity, but retaining requisite culpable intent.

This week it's ~~hats off~~ pith helmets on to Newsweek for its mangled view of the U.S. political spectrum. (Note to NPR: can't you give me a sub to Harper's or something when I re-up, instead of this rag?)

Assessing Sandra Day O'Connor's legacy using a dilettantish combination of dismissive know-it-al-ism and gushing hagiography unique to the corporate news media, the cover story of the July 11 issue positions the "Annie Oakley of the Bench" as a virtual liberal, confounding both the conventional wisdom and, well, you know, reality.

Tracing her votes on a series of pivotal Court decisions from '83 to the present, the piece locates her in the middle of a politically shifting court that, it is claimed, went from four liberals, three moderates and two conservatives (4-3-2) in the '80s, to 3-3-3 in the '90s (with Bush I's appointment of Clarence Thomas), and to 4-2-3 now (after Clinton's appointment of Ginsberg and Breyer).

Sounds reasonable enough - until you realize that Byron White (who stepped down in 1993) is classified as a moderate even though he voted with the conservatives on every pivotal decision Newsweek lists. This includes favoring local restrictions on abortion, allowing government-constructed Nativity scenes on public property, striking down minority contract set-asides, and, most notoriously, upholding the criminalization of gay sex in Bowers v. Hardwick. (He also was on the wrong side of both Miranda and Roe v. Wade.)

Moving from the incorrect to the bonkers, Newsweek further labels Anthony Kennedy(!) a moderate as well, allowing for the claim that the Court has had a moderate faction during the past thirteen years, when in actuality that "faction" has consisted of exactly one person (O'Connor).

Now, there are surely many explanations for this sort of stupidity among our friends in the MSM (not to be confused with the only slightly more unsavory MLM). For one thing, most of us are bundles of contradictions, and we don't march in ideological lockstep to the the cartoonish designations of liberal and conservative. And of all the nooks and crannies of government power, the Supreme Court - where the appointments last a lifetime, and where all sorts of arcane legal axes get ground, often cross-cutting larger political questions - is the one where party discipline is weakest (except for Bush v. Gore in 2000 of course), and where the contradictions of homo politicus can roam in relative freedom.

In this regard one must note that White regularly voted to uphold school desegregation efforts and was on the right side of Griswold v. Connecticut. One should also note that Kennedy's libertarianism has made him something of a defender of privacy rights. (Though he joined the liberals, of all people, in swinging the horrendous Kelo v. New London decision.) And by the same token, there are many perfectly sane and robust world views in which the liberal Gang of Four are moderates themselves, thin veneers of progressivism compared to the mighty New Deal oaks that were William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall.

But there's something much worse going on here besides the usual clumping of sophisticated political positions into a left-right spectrum graspable by your average macaque. And it comes in Newsweek's central claim about O'Connor's own political predilictions:

She could generally be found in the center - not of public opinion generally, but of so-called elite opinion, the consensus of the chattering classes that is often to the left of the rest of the country. ... [S]he slowly steered onto the moderate-left side of the cultural divide.

Moderate-left? If you're like me you're just now considering whether you can think of Madam Justice Cowgirl as a centrist (rather than a conservative) without throwing a clot. And here comes Newsweek to tell you that the Justice who sided with the conservatives throughout the '80s, who helped put Dub in office for transparently partisan reasons, and who retired now in case the 2006 and 2008 elections don't work out too well for the Party of Lincoln, is just two hairs short of a liberal.

Newsweek accomplishes this flight of political fancy in a particularly smarmy manner, by mobilizing that other great divide in American politics: the elite versus the regular folks. Sandra Day seemed like a centrist, but only in that rarified lefty world of post-hippie nancy-boys and latte-sipping limousine liberals. In reality, she was actually on the center-left. And if you don't think that's true, well, you chattering-class-belonging, Cote-du-Rone-by-the-case-buying Blue Stater, you must be one of the inauthentic, out-of-touch elite yourself.

It's rightwing propagandizing at its worst - and, in this case, at its most insidious given the source. It's faux-populist liberal-baiting - in which rightwing elites accuse moderate elites of being liberal elites - dressed up in a mainstream media desire to manufacture political balance in the name of objectivity. In short, it's Fox News with manners.

And so for once again doing the right's handywork for it, and for hopelessly muddying our understanding of the politics of the Supreme Court, Newsweek gets our Asstard of the Week award. Clearly the Koran in the toilet was just the beginning.

What to Say?

2005-07-07T12:08:00.000-04:00

We are all Londoners today.

Live8, in Three Acts

2005-07-06T16:59:00.000-04:00

Why Live8 Didn't Suck ... and Why It Did

The Good:
If the experience in my hometown of Philadelphia is any guide, Live8 was a mess. Gigantic crowds, trash everywhere, and barely controlled chaos on the ground (though it sure looked nice from above, on TV).

Live8 was a mess because it wasn't a "concert" - no venue per se, no tickets (except in London, where free tix to Hyde Park were given as contest prizes), no physical containment or boundaries to speak of. And it wasn't a concert because, unlike Live Aid, it wasn't a charity drive and so there were no tickets to sell and no stadiums to fill. Live8 was organized with a keen recognition of the most crucial fact about international development, which I've touched on in the past (here and here): only states have the authority, and the resources, to address the massive social and political inequality that plagues our planet.

In this respect the criticisms leveled against Live8 artists for not donating portions of their own personal riches to the event, miss the point. And they're more than a little hypocritical too, as they come primarily from fellow First Worlders who either have similar wealth themselves, or who regularly buy the artists' albums instead of donating to anti-poverty efforts. Which is why the private sector can never begin to solve problems of mass immiseration. If your solution to poverty is to get people to spend more of their discretionary income on charity for the poor than on stuff for themselves, you can be sure of the results: hundreds of thousands of iPod zombies wandering the urban avenues of the First world, and millions of dead children littering the dusty earth of the Third.

So maybe Sir Bob Geldof is a self-satisfied prick, and maybe the musical performances weren't uniformly great (London and Berlin kicked Philly's behind, for sure), and maybe the event appallingly underrepresented African musicians (actually, there's no maybe on that one). But Live8 was good because it did not depend on the privatist ideology of charity that has reigned over an unprecedented widening of the gap between rich and poor, in the U.S. and across the world, in our neoliberal era.

The Bad:

On the other hand, as John Pilger writes in a scathing analysis, Live8 has occupied center stage on the progressive side of the globalization debate, shoving aside the global justice movement. Savaging "the unrelenting sophistry of Geldof, Bono, Blair, the [London] Observer et al," Pilger notes:

Africa's imperial plunder and tragedy have been turned into a circus for the benefit of the so-called G8 leaders ... and those of us willing to be distracted by the barkers of the circus: the establishment media and its "celebrities". The illusion of an anti establishment crusade led by pop stars - a cultivated, controlling image of rebellion - serves to dilute a great political movement of anger.

When Live8 displaces the global justice movement in the public sphere, masses of people lose their political voice, and the course of a "movement" (though Live8 is nothing more than the apparition of a movement) is controlled by a small number of elites whose political instincts and taste for mass, liberatory politics is questionable at best. Which leads us to...

The Ugly:

Pilger and African feminist blogger Black Looks note that current proposals for African debt relief are shams, reducing development assistance grants to African nations by $1 for every $1 they receive in debt relief. In other words, the whole thing is a wash, as the leading industrial nations giveth and taketh away at the same time. Moreover, the reduction of development assistance is part of a campaign by the G8 nations to force poor nations to privatize public industries and utilities, lower taxes, and generally create economic and political climates friendly (or, in many cases, more friendly) to international business. In short, the idea of debt relief is being used as cover for promoting ever-more neoliberal policies in the world's poorest countries.

And so in "fighting" to "force" the G8 to adopt all the recommendations of its own reports, the organizers of Live8 are doing the G8 nations' bidding for them. This naivete, writes Black Looks in a superbly titled essay, is part of a larger stupidity, a "[barely] concealed self-congratulatory, paternalist and arrogant attitude towards Africa and Africans":

My prediction that the presentation of African countries during Saturday's concerts would be a negative pitiful one was correct. We were presented with Africa as the "scar of the world," passive, starving, diseased, dying and helpless. This was a conscious decision by the organisers of the concert to make the crowd sympathetic to their cause and at the same time make them feel good, make them feel as if they had made a contribution to saving Africa.

• • •

So is the combination of heart-of-darkness celebrity politics and bad international policy a lethal one for Africa, or does Live8's massive consciousness-raising effort ultimately bode well for the continent? In the short term, I don't know the answer. And I'm willing, against my better judgment, to hope for the best. (And I've signed the One Declaration, and you should too.)

But in the long term - hell, even in the medium term - Pilger and Black Looks are undoubtedly correct. The displacement from the public stage of a true mass movement that has a firm understanding of the issues, by a contrived event whose organizers appear hopelessly politically naive, indicates nothing if not the cooptation of anti-globalization sentiment by globalization's standard bearers, and the packaging of Africa as a problem that global capitalism can "solve" using the very tools that have created this problem in the first place.

"The protesters going to the G8 summit at Gleneagles [in Scotland] ought not to allow themselves to be distracted by these games," notes Pilger. Against the false construction of a passive, sublimely victimized Africa, he offers the following:

If inspiration is needed, along with evidence that direct action can work, they should look to Latin America's mighty popular movements against total locura capitalista (total capitalist folly). They should look to Bolivia, the poorest country in Latin America, where an indigenous movement has Blair's and Bush's corporate friends on the run, and Venezuela, the only country in the world where oil revenue has been diverted for the benefit of the majority, and Uruguay and Argentina, Ecuador and Peru, and Brazil's great landless people's movement. Across the continent, ordinary people are standing up to the old Washington-sponsored order. "Que se vayan todos!" (Out with them all!) say the crowds in the streets.

What these indigenous movements and the global justice movement understand, and what "Geldof, Bono, Blair, the Observer et al" don't (or won't), is that corporate capitalism itself is the root problem. The organizers of Live8 understand that governments, not individuals, must act. But they don't understand what it is those governments actually need to do, and on whose behalf. At the least - at the very least - political and economic room must be made for popular democracy, for the allocation of resources and the production of goods in a way that does not correspond to the need for private profit, but rather to the needs of people.

It may sound simple and naive. But as simple and naive goes, I'll take it over the Live8 brand anytime.

Don't Rent that "All the President's Men" DVD Just Yet

2005-07-03T10:58:00.000-04:00

The Fixer reports that we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves on the Karl Rove leak story, noting that Rove signed confidentiality waivers, allowing reporters to reveal his name to the grand jury. So why would journalists risk jail to protect the identity of a source who's already waived confidentiality? Go check it out.

On the other hand, it still doesn't raise the larger question, which is, what in the Sam Hill is a reporter doing using Karl Rove as an anonymous source? Aren't some government officials sufficiently well-known and powerful that it's unethical to quote them anonymously? When you get to a certain point at the top of the political ladder, can anonymous sourcing be anything other than propaganda for the administration? What's next - Cheney as an anonymous source? Bush?

In a related noted, take another look at the linked video from yesterday, in which pundit Lawrence O'Donnell posits why Time turned over its reporter's notes and emails to the grand jury, against the reporter's wishes:

"I don't think Time Magazine, as a publicly traded company, had any real choice. They were going to be hit with very substantial fines, more than $1,000 a day. I don't know how you can stand by and say you're protecting stockholders if you're defying Supreme Court orders."

And there you have it.

As for why the New York Times hasn't (yet) turned over its reporter's documents, it's likely because doing so would dilute its brand identity.

Karl Rove, Leaking Like a F*cking Sieve

2005-07-03T01:20:00.000-04:00

Here it is, with a variety of substantiating secondary links, in case you haven't heard.

And here is a Quicktime movie of the relevant video, thanks to Crooks and Liars, my new favorite site.

A very happy July 4th weekend indeed.

Aaaaaaaahhhh!

2005-07-01T11:41:00.000-04:00

We are so totally, completely f*cked.

Shouldn't be a surprise, I suppose, but given the erudition and political independence of her recent majority and dissenting opinions, one may be forgiven for having hoped that O'Connor wouldn't pull such a punk-ass, partisan-hack move. It's the most unnecessary, politically disheartening development on the Court since Lyndon Johnson conned Arthur Goldberg into stepping down in '65.

All for now; I'm headed off to my bunker in an undisclosed location.

Cannon Fodder? Why Would You Think That, Son?

2005-07-01T01:23:00.000-04:00

Two factoids broadcast five minutes apart on All Things Considered, June 30:

Number of recruits the U.S. Army plans to enlist this year (which continues to appear unreachable):

80,000
Number of extra soldiers needing treatment at VA hospitals because of the Iraq war (which has bankrupted the VA):

80,000

'Nuff said, yes?

The Neutron Bomb Theory of Architectural Symbolism

2005-06-28T13:26:00.000-04:00

From the Dept. of The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance - and Maybe Burning to Death in a Really Stupid Building

Not too long after 9/11 I came across a doctored image called "When We Rebuild."

It didn't appeal to my sense of political ethics, but apparently my Id found great satisfaction in the image of an impossibly, foolishly tall building flipping off the terrorist threat to the East, as I've kept the image on my hard drive lo all these years.

Now, from Ron Rosenbaum, perhaps the most underrated and underfamed feature journalist of our time (see here and here to get started), comes a review of the actual replacement building proposed for the World Trade Center site.

At 1776 feet high (get it?), the Freedom Tower is meant to do exactly what my Photoshopped JPEG file does: give the finger. But it gives the finger not to the enemy but to the poor saps who'll have to work in it. Sacrificing security for hypernationalist symbolism, the building "will be Terrorist Target No. 1 as long as it exists," he writes. "[A]ll the politicians and developers became so absorbed in glamorous 'design competitions' and their proximity to 'genius' architects and the Medici buzz it gave them that they utterly lost touch with what it would mean for a lower-middle-class office worker whose C.E.O. decided to move into 'Freedom Tower'."

The priority of aesthetics over human lives is so extreme that Freedom Tower is designed like the city-clearing neutron bomb: let the people die, just spare the structure. Here's Rosenbaum again, referencing a recent piece in the New York Times:

It seems that many of the security improvements are designed to insure the survival of the building, as much as the inhabitants. To make sure that "Freedom Tower" is "reusable" after an attack that incinerates a good many of its human inhabitants. I'm not making this up: The "security goal is to make Freedom Tower structurally reusable after an explosion," The Times tells us. Did you catch that? Why worry about a new 9/11—it sounds like new tenants will be able to move right in after they clear out the dead.

"Isn't it dreadfully apparent now," Rosenbaum asks, "that the entire project — and the lives of its potential inhabitants — is in the hands of a group of egotists, idiots, political opportunists and incompetents?"

By the time you get to the end of the article, an answer hardly seems necessary.

Somebody Please Render this Guy

2005-06-27T23:57:00.000-04:00

aka Asstard of the Week

Asstard, n. sl. An individual or entity acting in a way indicative of diminished mental capacity, but retaining requisite culpable intent.

"[W]hatever the time frame for a Supreme Court vacancy, the process for selecting the next associate or chief justice should reflect the best of the American judiciary — not the worst of American politics. We deserve ... a confirmation process that is civil, respectful, and keeps politics out of the judiciary."

Reasonable enough, yes? Except that it comes from an article written for the National Review Online, by none other than Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, who, you may recall, condoned domestic terrorism by blaming "judicial activism" for a spate of murderous violence against federal judges and their families:

I don't know if there's a cause and effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country ... And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception ... where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence. (Statement on the Senate floor, April 4, 2005 - the anniversary of MLK's assassination, by the way)

The self-righteous hypocrisy of Cornyn's NRO screed earns him a seat on a Gulfstream V to Skopje, courtesy of The Company. But the Book of Buckley makes it art by giving this clown 1,600 words under the headline:

R-E-S-P-E-C-T:
For the law, for the Court, for the Constitution, for the nominee...

I swear I'm not making that up.

Other highlights include:

Whoever the nominee is, the Senate should engage in respectful and honest inquiry, not partisan personal attacks.

After years of unprecedented obstruction, and destructive politics, we must restore dignity, honesty, respect, and fairness to our Senate confirmation process. That is the only way to keep politics out of the judiciary.

So the Asstard of the Week award goes to John Cornyn - who's going to give Satan fits deciding if he should stick him in the Fifth, Eighth or Ninth Circle of Hell - with an honorable mention to The National Review, for so cravenly and stupidly giving voice on this particular issue to this particular scumbag.

New PBS CEO: Separated at Birth?

2005-06-26T14:01:00.000-04:00

So you probably know that rightwing, McCarthyite Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chair Ken Tomlinson has just hired Patricia Harrison to be the CPB's new President and CEO. And you probably know that this was part of a deal by which Congress agreed to restore $100 million in proposed cuts to CPB/PBS (except not really).

And you probably know that Ms. Harrison is well-qualified to stamp out liberal bias on public television, being that she's a former Co-Chairperson of the Republican National Committee(!), and being that as a high-ranking State Department official she has praised State Department propaganda videos that are distributed to news agencies worldwide as documentaries. "[T]elevision and video products," says the new boss of public television, are "powerful strategic tools for bringing America’s foreign policy message to worldwide audiences."

But you're probably not aware that Harrison was separated at birth from another fine upstanding rightwing media citizen - that's Pat Harrison on the left in the picture above, and Ms. Anita Bryant on the right.

A cheesy singer wildly popular in the mid '70s for shilling for Florida orange juice, Bryant earned infamy for her public rampage against gays and lesbians later in the decade, in which she got both gay equal rights and gay adoption outlawed, emboldening the then-embryonic national rightwing movement. She has since found herself financially bankrupt (a nice touch given her evident moral bankruptcy).

Now Pat Harrison has been hired to continue PBS's own anti-gay witchhunt, bringing political bankruptcy to PBS even as Congress forestalls the network's financial bankruptcy - for now.

All Harrison needs now is a banana cream pie in the face.

(Be sure to click on that last link - the video is priceless.)

Is That a Big Tent in Your Pocket ...

2005-06-25T13:05:00.000-04:00

... or are you just glad to see me?

Tired of all that praying and good deed-doing just to make sure you get into heaven? Still pining away for the days of Pope Leo? Want to run your adult video business and hang out with the devout, righteous and powerful?

Then join the Republican Party, where, the Daily Show reports, they're selling indulgences to pornographers for 200 bucks a pop (no pun intended).

(Direct video link here, courtesy of the excellent Crooks and Liars)

Pay No Attention to that Capitalist Behind the Curtain

2005-06-24T15:43:00.000-04:00

More on Why the Eminent Domain Decision Sucks

As I noted in my last entry, yesterday's execrable Supreme Court decision in the eminent domain case of Kelo v. New London gives developers and corporations carte blanche to use government power in order to take land from other private owners.

The plaintiffs in the case are nine residents of Fort Trumbull, a working class New London, CT neighborhood, who refused to sell their homes to the city as part of a redevelopment project associated with Pfizer's recent construction of a $270 million complex nearby. When the city condemned their homes and tried to seize them through eminent domain, the residents went to court, arguing that eminent domain is about the public good, and can't be used to take property from one private party in order to give it to another private party for private development.

In the wake of the residents' defeat yesterday, a blogger who punliciously calls himself Chainsaw has a great take on the case, laying out exactly the sort of land- and power-grabs it will enable. Here's an excerpt:

[Y]ou just know this ruling is going to open up a lot of avenues for new and ever more creative graft and corruption.

But outright corruption notwithstanding, most deals will fall in a gray zone where local governments "partner" with private developers in "win-win" deals to accomplish great things. And with private money flooding in to support these deals, local officials will be able to pander to voters' "no new taxes" predilection, and thereby escape most of the scrutiny that usually accompanies these kinds of deals.

This starts to get at the heart of the matter. Corruption is a very real and damaging force. But it's the "gray zone" deals - the deals that suck not because they're illegal but because they're part of the everyday vicissitudes of capitalism - that do the heavy lifting in terms of displacing poor and working class people and running roughshod over their lives and rights.

Cities - like the Court in this decision - play fast and loose with the definition of the public interest (more on which in a subsequent entry here). But the Court deludes itself when it claims that there's any sort of ethical authority for such semiotic contortions. Rather, cities do it because they're forced to. A nice piece at Counterpunch explains:

The Fort Trumbull residents are represented by the libertarian Institute for Justice, which has presented this as an issue of property rights. If the Supreme Court sides with Pfizer and New London, it argues, then any poor or middle income family could lose its home for no other reason but that a corporation wants it. The argument is leading the Court astray, however. It forces the Supreme Court to choose between the rights of people to live in their homes and the ability of government to pursue policy in the public interest, whereas the real issue is whether corporations should be allowed to play one jurisdiction against another in order to extract large giveaways.

In 2004 this question was examined by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, which ruled that the city of Toledo, Ohio, could not offer Daimler-Benz tax subsidies to locate there. The court banned giveaways because they interfere with interstate commerce. Had this ruling been upheld everywhere, the Fort Trumbull issue would never have arisen. If Pfizer wanted a particular property, in New London or anywhere else, it would have had to find willing sellers.

And so we come to the following passage from Sandra Day O'Connor's minority dissent. She doesn't quite get Counterpunch's point, but she comes within striking distance:

The Court's holdings in [previous cases] were true to the principle underlying the Public Use Clause. In ... those cases, the extraordinary, precondemnation use of the targeted property inflicted affirmative harm on society. ... Thus a public purpose was realized when the harmful use was eliminated. Because each taking directly achieved a public benefit, it did not matter that the property was turned over to private use. Here, in contrast, New London does not claim that Susette Kelo's and Wilhelmina Dery's well-maintained homes are the source of any social harm. Indeed, it could not so claim without adopting the absurd argument that any single-family home that might be razed to make way for an apartment building, or any church that might be replaced with a retail store, or any small business that might be more lucrative if it were instead part of a national franchise, is inherently harmful to society and thus within the government's power to condemn.

But of course this is exactly the absurd argument adopted by the majority - and by neoliberal city governments across the nation. Anything but the most profitable use of land is considered a public harm. Whatever the biggest available capitalist wants must be granted by the city, or else the capitalist will just go to another city and seek the same concessions there.

In this respect, O'Conner should also be credited for seeing through the smokescreen of New London's "carefully considered development plan":

[The plan] will ... retain the existing Italian Dramatic Club (a private cultural organization) though the homes of three plaintiffs in that parcel are to be demolished. Parcel 4A is slated, mysteriously, for " 'park support.' " ... At oral argument, counsel for respondents conceded the vagueness of this proposed use, and offered that the parcel might eventually be used for parking.

An ethnic Dramatic Club adds to the marketability of a tourist and consumer destination. Working-class residents who've dedicated their lives and life savings to building a stable neighborhood, however, offer no such financial benefits. And so for them it's pave over paradise, put up a parking lot.

Blackshirts in Black Robes

2005-06-23T15:44:00.000-04:00

Neoliberal Fascism on Maryland Ave.

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

As I've noted here before, one of the most vexing aspects of fascism is its relationship to capitalism. Rightwingers, and some liberals, never tire of pointing out that Nazi is a contraction of National Socialist, and therefore that fascism is a form of communism.

In contrast, many on the left view fascism as sublime capitalism: the free market run completely amok, with no civil protections whatsoever to get in the way of profit-making. Totalitarianism with rapid capitalist development, is how one friend of mine recently shorthanded it.

Unsurprisingly, this view is much closer to the truth than the rightwing one. It's a bit simplistic, but it captures the essential, apparent paradox of fascism: a libertarian-style promotion of capitalism (rhetoric about "international Jewish financial conspiracies" notwithstanding) - but at the same time a decidedly non-libertarian, authoritarian state.

The peculiarity of fascism is that, unlike most other forms of dictatorship, it uses this strength to increase social inequality by making it easier for certain capitalist interests to turn a profit.

Fascist states certainly engage in libertarian forms of deregulation, eliminating social-democratic-style strictures on private enterprise. But the key way fascist states enhance profit is by what Karl Marx called primitive accumulation: basically, hitting people over the head - or sending them away, or enslaving them, or gassing and incinerating them - and stealing all their stuff. While fascist leaders take plenty for themselves and their cronies, primitive accumulation under fascism is more systemic than that, aimed at providing, say, free material and slave labor to large corporations on a massive, national scale.

Today, as many of us wonder whether our fair country is headed towards some kind of fascist future, comes an ominous sign from the branch of government upon which we normally rely to keep the Presidential and Congressional wolves at bay.

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that local governments may seize private property for private development projects. In other words, the doctrine of eminent domain, enshrined in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and for centuries used to take land for public highways, schools and the like, now applies to taking property from one private interest (typically a small homeowner) and giving it to another (typically a large corporation or developer).

With the decision in Kelo v. New London, the definition of what the Fifth Amendment specifies as "public use" has now been expanded to absurd proportions. The first eminent domain case to reach the Supreme Court in years, Kelo ratifies the neoliberal, supply side lunacy that has constituted our civic religion for the last three decades: private development helps everyone; therefore the use of land for private development is a public use; therefore anyone whose house stands in the way is also standing in the way of the public good; therefore your ass is out and the bulldozers are coming through for Del Boca Vista Phase III.

The neoliberal character of this logic perhaps explains why the majority here includes the four moderates: John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, David Souter and Stephen Bryer.

As for the dissenters, they include Sandra Day O'Connor, as well as - believe it or not - the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse: William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. One can only surmise that they see this as a fight between private property owners on the one hand, and a city government on the other, and so in Pavlovian rightwing lockstep they argue against the government - even though it's really private development interests they're opposing.

And as for why Anthony Kennedy, the most libertarian of the rightwing Justices, joined the majority, well, it'll take a smarter cookie than me to figure that one out.

At any rate, the idea that the little guy gets screwed for the greater good certainly isn't new in the history of statecraft. (In this vein it's interesting that class here makes a rare appearance in American public discourse, with CNN identifying the plaintiff as a resident of a "working class neighborhood.") Nor is the fact that "the greater good" is really a cipher for "some developer's ability to put a down payment on a new yacht" anything new in the history of capitalist governance.

What's a bit more novel here, and really troubling, is that this sort of stupidity has now been translated into more or less direct control of the power of the state by private interests, in a way that gores the sacred ox of capitalism: property rights. It's an example of exactly the sort of convergence of strong government and big capital that has characterized the political economy of fascist regimes in decades past.

This is primitive accumulation, straight-up gangster capitalism, legalized under cover of the U.S. Constitution, ratified by the court of last resort, accruing to an ever more ominous-looking state.

Yikes.

One Goosestep Forward, Zero Goosesteps Back

2005-05-12T10:33:00.000-04:00

From the Dept. of The ~~Worm~~ Scumbag Is Turning

Just when you thought John Bolton's nomination was sunk, being that he's an abusive lunatic with a pathological hatred of the U.N. who's publicly fantasized about slicing off the top of the building... he's baaaack. The rightwing PR machine is in full swing, with David Brooks (the Reasonable Republican®) declaring the battle won in today's Old Grey Lady, and with CNN, as I write these very words, airing a kneepadded profile describing Mr. "The U.N. Doesn't Exist And I'm Going To Chase You Down This Hallway Screaming" as a man dedicated to vigorous debate without grudges, a public servant so dedicated to getting the job done that he sends emails at 4:00AM, and a regular guy with "blue collar roots" and a work ethic inherited from his angelic parents.

So, if Mssr. Brooks is right - and he probably is, owing not to his unbelievably overrated intelligence but rather to his undoubted access to the lanes down which such things are whispered - Bolton will likely win confirmation in a close vote.

And lest we think that a close vote will damage him out of the gate, recall that Clarence Thomas - another conservative fellow with a nasty temper and a predilection for chasing women around in the workplace - was confirmed by the razor-thin margin of 52-48 (thanks again, Southern Democrats) and is now under consideration for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

The Vatican: 99 and 44/100ths as Corrupt as the Rest of the World

2005-04-19T13:30:00.000-04:00

The Church fathers have chosen as the Vicar of Christ a man who has earned such nicknames as "the enforcer," "God's rottweiler" and the "panzer cardinal." A political hack, and a former Hitlerjugend, Joseph Ratzinger will continue and perhaps intensify John Paul II's legacy of authoritarianism within the church, while likely letting his legacy of social justice advocacy wither on the vine.

Unsurprising as Ratzinger's ~~coronation~~ election is, it's worth taking a moment to reflect on the distasteful obviousness of it all. Ratzinger's nothing if not an operator. He was the guy behind the guy in the John Paul II era, his chief theological advisor for two decades, and a classic power broker. The supposed divine character of the Papacy has never been more obviously or crassly a construction of men as it is today.

"Dear brothers and sisters," the newly crowned Pope Benedict XVI told the world, a suspiciously unchristian-looking smile on his face, "after the great Pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me - a simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord." There he was, looking and sounding every bit the secular-style politician that he is, spinning false modesty while the keys to the kingdom (and the bank, and the diplomatic muscle) jingled in his pocket.

As for the near-term future of the church, it's not too difficult to figure out. Ratzinger's election marks a victory for the centralized bureaucracy and social conservatism of John Paul II's church government, and a defeat for the Third World and for progressives within the church. As CNN reports:

In the Vatican, he has been the driving force behind crackdowns on liberation theology, religious pluralism, challenges to traditional moral teachings on issues such as homosexuality, and dissent on such issues as women's ordination.

He has also called rock music sinful, saying it's a "vehicle of anti-religion" (guess Bono won't be invited over for tea anymore). As recently as Monday, delivering the homily in a public Mass, he stated, "Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism." Which is just peachy, since a billion-member church led by a crusader for the rights of fundamentalists is just what the world needs.

If there's a silver lining, it's that Ratzinger's rigidity on celibacy and women's ordination, combined with his evident charisma deficit, will abet the ongoing decline of the priesthood, and in many countries the membership, of this most rigid and anachronistic of Christian institutions. Of course, in Latin America the Catholic church's failings have helped deliver millions into the warm embrace of Pentecostalism, whose record on fundamentalism makes the Vatican look like The Church of Light. But in Europe the people are turning to secularism, and there B16 is sure to hasten the ongoing fruition of the Enlightenment.

Everything You Didn't Know You Wanted to Know about Wall Street

2005-04-19T10:10:00.000-04:00

From the Dept. of Some Good Things Still Fit on Floppy Disks

If you're a regular reader here (or if you're conversant in regulation theory), you know that the ascendance of the Christian right in U.S. politics has been matched by the rise to dominance of the financial sector in the U.S. economy. Many epithets and honorifics have been used to describe this state of affairs - postmodern, postindustrial, post-Fordist, and globalized, among others. But most of these terms obscure as much as they reveal, and many of their proponents are, how you say... dumb as lizards. Few have bothered to actually describe in detail the economic, cultural and political workings of the brave new world of finance capital.

One bright, shining exception is my good friend Doug Henwood, founder of Left Business Observer (unofficial motto: "if you look at the economic statistics you'd be surprised how many powerful and supposedly smart people are just totally, absolutely full of sh*t in every way"), regular contributor to The Nation, and author of some rather good books on our so-called economic life.

Not too long ago, Doug wrote a book on Wall Street called, interestingly enough, Wall Street. This rarest of tomes - edifying and entertaining, analytically detailed yet sharply written, broad and deep - has now gone open source, i.e. free, as in beer. Doug's gotten ahold of the rights from the publisher and is making the book available, online, as a nice, compact 1.1MB download:

http://www.wallstreetthebook.com/

So snap it up, and while you're at it, donate a few bucks to Doug for his trouble, and consider subscribing to Left Business Observer; it's well worth it.

Sins of Papal Commission

2005-04-07T00:38:00.000-04:00

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
-- Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

I've written repeatedly (here and here) about the appalling conservatism of John Paul II's views on sexuality, and the ominous impact of his approach to the governance of the Catholic Church.

Now, over at Salon, Joan Walsh writes about why she, a Catholic herself, won't be shedding any tears for John Paul II. In a moving, personal idiom, her piece illustrates the concrete political and human consequences of his reactionary policies, putting to bed any misguided notion that the Pope's orthodoxy was merely old-fashioned or that there was anything at all charming about his upholding of "traditional" morality.

"My mother stopped going to church a few months before she died" of breast cancer, Walsh recalls. "She came home on a Sunday in early 1976 in tears. Looking for spiritual comfort, time with God, transcendence as she approached death, she'd instead been subjected to a sermon that was a fiery antiabortion harangue":

... she was appalled by the church's turn to blatant political campaigning on culture-war issues, especially abortion, at the expense of dispensing spiritual wisdom and comfort. ... Although [John Paul II] didn't reach the Vatican until two years after she died, when he got there he promoted leaders just like the antiabortion zealot who so wounded my mother. He cracked down on all dissent and toughened the church's teachings on issues of sexuality -- which happen to be issues of love -- which even my somewhat conservative Catholic mother was wise enough to know might require different answers for different hearts.

It's a relatively brief piece - you've just read about one-eighth of it - but it's incredibly evocative, touching on the malign folly of theological rigidity; the ecumenical, humanistic promise of Vatican II; and the relationship of American Catholics to the social upheaval of the sixties and the neoconservative reaction of the seventies. It's an eloquent corrective to the kneepadded hagiography of the news media's Papal obituaries, and a nice alternative to some of the more detached critiques penned by secular anti-Papists (including yours truly).

So go check it out. You won't be disappointed.

More Constitutional Disembowelment from the CRA

2005-04-06T01:09:00.000-04:00

Two additional items on the Constitution Restoration Act, which would bar federal courts from ruling on cases where it is alleged government has violated the Separation of Church and State:

(1) Wreck Two Constitutional Principles, Get One Free
As G. Adams points out in a comment on my last entry on the CRA, the bill also includes a nifty little provision vacating all prior federal court decisions that enforce Separation of Church and State:

SEC. 301. EXTRAJURISDICTIONAL CASES NOT BINDING ON STATES.
Any decision of a Federal court which has been made prior to, on, or after the effective date of this Act, to the extent that the decision relates to an issue removed from Federal jurisdiction under section 1260 or 1370 of title 28, United States Code, as added by this Act, is not binding precedent on any State court.

As Adams explains, "Not only is this matter removed from federal courts for the future, but for all time, and for state courts as well. According to the bill, all past rulings that would not have been allowed under the CRA are ex post facto nullified as legal precedent."

As the CRA tries to shove a camel through the eye of the Establishment Clause needle by taking a hatchet to Separation of Powers, so too does it violate the judiciary in an effort to get around Section 9, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which says:

No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

The CRA wants to declare, ex post facto, that legal precedents are not in fact legal precedents - or in other words, that the law is not, and has not been the law. And by prejudging all cases involving potential violations of the Establishment Clause, the CRA would in effect constitute a Bill of Attainder.

Technically a Bill of Attainder is defined as "a legislative act that singles out an individual or group for punishment without a trial." But the Supreme Court has ruled that "The Bill of Attainder Clause was intended not as a narrow, technical (and therefore soon to be outmoded) prohibition, but rather as an implementation of the separation of powers, a general safeguard against legislative exercise of the judicial function or more simply - trial by legislature" (U.S. v. Brown, 1965).

And James Madison wrote, "Bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligations of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation. ..." (Federalist 44).

So that makes three fundamental Constitutional principles (Separation of Church and State; Separation of Powers; No Ex Post Facto Law) destroyed by a bill that's only 570 words long. One essential foundation of our national life eviscerated every 190 words: that's gotta be some kind of record.

(2) Well, then, What Is to Be Done?
If this thing becomes law, then I'm with the survivalists and the neo-Minutemen: take up arms as Jefferson advised, and throw our own damn Constitution Restoration party.

But for now there's still time to stop it the boring way. Lorraine Berry, of the excellent Stregoneria, was good enough to check on the current status of the CRA. It's been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Chair of which is none other than my own state's senior Senator, Arlen "Wouldya-Believe-a-Single-Bullet-and-Boy-That Anita Hill's a Real-Kurva" Specter.

So if your state has a Senator on the Judiciary Committee, contact him or her here and politely request that the Committee not destroy the entire f*cking country if it's not too much trouble.

The End: Pretty Damned Nigh

2005-04-05T01:46:00.000-04:00

Christo-Fascism on the March

You may already have read about Republican Texas Senator John Cornyn's condoning of terrorism against American judges. But unless you regularly root around at ZMag.org or surf the super-fringy rightwing blogosphere for fun, you may not have had the pleasure of reading Senate Bill 520 (and House Resolution 1070), an even more frightening bit of judiciary bashing called the "Constitution Restoration Act" (CRA).

Introduced in the Senate by Republicans Richard Shelby (AL), Richard Burr (NC) and Sam Brownback (KS), the CRA would singlehandedly turn the United States into a theocracy by allowing government and its representatives to promote religion with impunity.

Don't believe me? Here's the relevant text of the bill:

[T]he Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or personal capacity), concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

The law adds new sections to Chapters 81 and 85 of Article 28 of the U.S. Code, which concern federal and Supreme Court jurisdiction over certain kinds of cases. This portion of federal law takes its cue from Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which states that the Congress can regulate, and make exceptions to, the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction - i.e. its status as the court of last resort.

Now, one would think this bill would violate a little thing called the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; [...]

But it appears this thing has been crafted to make an end-run around the Establishment Clause. Rather than actually establishing a government religion, the law says the Supreme Court cannot declare illegal acts of religious establishment by local, state or federal government, or by representatives or agencies of government. So the United States may not make a law that says Christ Is Our Savior; but if federal officials put giant neon nativity scenes or "Christ is our Lord" posters, or Ten Commandments plaques, up in the lobbies of every government office, the federal judges can't do anything to stop them. In fact, if they try, they can be impeached:

SEC. 302. IMPEACHMENT, CONVICTION, AND REMOVAL OF JUDGES FOR CERTAIN EXTRAJURISDICTIONAL ACTIVITIES.

To the extent that a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States or any judge of any Federal court engages in any activity that exceeds the jurisdiction of the court of that justice or judge, as the case may be, by reason of section 1260 or 1370 of title 28, United States Code, as added by this Act, engaging in that activity shall be deemed to constitute the commission of--

(1) an offense for which the judge may be removed upon impeachment and conviction; and

(2) a breach of the standard of good behavior required by article III, section 1 of the Constitution.

Never mind that the CRA amends existing judicial review laws in a way never intended by the Founding Fathers; or that it does irreparable injury to separation of powers; or that it aims to allow precisely the kind of endorsement of religion by government against which this country was founded.

Those issues, important though they may be, are dwarfed by the fact that the CRA explicitly authorizes government officials to violate the law by preventing citizens from availing themselves of the judiciary - the one mechanism they have to protect them from tyranny of the majority.

More than religiosity run amok, more than a sodomizing of the constitution with a rusty word processor, the CRA is organized thuggery of precisely the sort that characterizes the legislative agenda of every fascist state.

You should of course contact your senators and Congresspeople posthaste and tell them to oppose this stinking dungheap of a bill. (It didn't pass last year, but the Congress is even more rightwing now, and for what it's worth Shelby claims he has the votes in the Senate.)

But in the end, our only chance, ironically, may be the Supreme Court - which won't be able to rule on religious establishment, but will still be able to rule on the constitutionality of the CRA itself.

Or so we hope.

(Thanks to Matt Merlino for the initial heads-up on the CRA.)

One Pope, Two Pope, Red Pope, Blue Pope

2005-04-02T16:13:00.000-05:00

Karol Józef Wojtyła was a social reactionary, anti-choice and possessed of comically sexist and homophobic views on birth control, sexuality and love. But he was in many respects a political progressive, an internationalist who travelled more than any other Pope (and way more than our own President), opposed capital punishment, condemned war, promoted nuclear disarmament, and called for "a new world economic order" grounded in fair wages and labor rights rather than the unfettered accumulation of capital. Some even called him the "socialist pope" - totally untrue given his antipathy for all political shades of red, but an encouraging slur nonetheless.

So it's pointless, and rather simple (as in simpleton), to blame the Pope for spouting the retrograde propaganda that verily defines his sect. The fox doesn't kill chickens because he's evil; he kills them because he's a fox. If you've got a problem with Catholic doctrine, become an Episcopalian, for Chrissakes.

The real problem isn't the views of the Pope; rather, it's the very existence of the Papacy. Religions shouldn't have kings or governments. Such sovereign authority lends the Church the sort of political legitimacy that makes pharmacists think they can get into heaven by refusing to fill birth control prescriptions. Regardless of a Pope's particular views, centralized religious government is fundamentally reactionary and has no more place in an enlightened world than a divine empire or a hereditary monarchy.

Not coincidentally, it's precisely in this area - the institutional functioning of the Church - that the blackest marks may be given to this Pope. In the sixties he represented Poland at the Second Vatican Council, a triumph of humanism, ecumenicalism and reason that brought the Church into modernity (better 300 years late than never). And while as Pope he carried on some of the legacy of Vatican II in the world at large, within the Church he did just the opposite. He stacked the Vatican leadership with conservatives, took a hard line on the role of women in the Church, crushed progressive activity in the ranks, and did more than even Mel Gibson to lend authority, legitimacy and voice to some of the most tyrannically conservative interests in the Church hierarchy. If his legacy is to be an honest one, it must include his two greatest sins:

Sin #1: The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth (Except for Latin America). Perhaps shaped by his experience with the repressive Communist regime in his home country of Poland, John Paul II went after the liberation theologists in Latin America, persecuting the most progressive Catholic movement in modern history because it dared promote social justice and human rights by mixing Catholicism and Marxism, the region's two dominant belief systems. The Pontiff's disciplining of progressive clergy who courageously stood up to dictators, despots, narco-traffickers and U.S.-funded death squads is particularly repulsive when juxtaposed with...

Sin #2: The Fascism of the Christ. John Paul II was a champion of Opus Dei, a far-right, cult-like movement within Catholicism founded by a fascist sympathizer. He elevated it to a personal prelature - a structure created in the progressive ferment of Vatican II, ironically - not long after he became Pope. And he canonized its founder in 2002 - the fortieth anniversary of Vatican II, even more ironically. I've already written about Opus Dei here at Democrappy, the last time it looked like the Holy See was going to kick the Holy Bucket. So get the details on this sinister organization here.

No one seems to know what the next Pope will do or be like. Given this Pope's packing of the Vatican hierarchy with theological conservatives, however, it's a safe bet the next fellow will walk the same ultraconservative walk on gender, sexuality and Church structure. Regardless of who wears the big hat, JP2's ensured that the current orthodoxy will continue to reign long after St. Peter meets him at the pearly gates with a heavenly box of Cubans, a divine stripper, and a solid gold Escalade.

As for the Pope's progressive legacy, well, that seems rather more precarious. But when in the long, bloody history of the Catholic Church has it ever been otherwise?

And the Wheel Goes 'Round

2005-04-01T14:35:00.000-05:00

From the Dept. of the The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall:

This just in:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Americans' incomes, bolstered by strong gains in hiring, rose by 0.3 percent in February while consumer spending climbed at an even faster pace of 0.5 percent, the government reported Thursday.

The personal savings rate as a percentage of disposable income dipped slightly to 0.6 percent in February compared to 0.8 percent in January.

That's it, people. Every time you earn another dollar, be sure to spend 167 percent of it on assorted crap, while depleting your rate of savings. It's the only way to keep the economy afloat. And it makes the credit card companies happy.

(Yes, I know the Pope's about to die; expect an entry soon.)

Terri's Dead, and You're Next

2005-03-31T14:31:00.000-05:00

The Culture of Life: ready for its close-up

If you've been away from the TV today - doing something frivolous like, you know, working - you may not have heard that Terri Schiavo just died.

In the two weeks it took her body to shut down from lack of food and water, a half-million children starved to death around the world, from the untreated but eminently curable disease of poverty; and 81,000 children died of diarrhea, caused in large measure by tainted water.

Dependent on others for food, Terri Schiavo joined 26 million Americans who depend on emergency food donations for survival, and over 36 million Americans who are hungry or on the edge of hunger (the ten worst states in this regard are all red states). Deprived of liquid, she became one of 1.1 billion people who lack access to potable water. As her weight dropped, she shared the predicament of 183 million unhealthily underweight children around the globe. She was fed and cared for thanks to a $1.6 million medical malpractice award of a sort that will become illegal if the Republicans have their way, and that surpasses the combined annual income of 5,500 of the world's poorest people, who live on less than a dollar a day.

The White House released a statement today, which reads in part:

I urge all those who honor Terri Schaivo to continue to work to build a culture of life, where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected, especially those who live at the mercy of others.

The administration's proposed FY2006 federal budget welcomes and values those who live at the mercy of others by:

Depriving 300,000 people a month of food stamps (via a half-billion-dollar cut over five years);
Dropping 45,000 people from the Community Supplemental Food Program;
Terminating the Community Food and Nutrition Program;
Eliminating more than seven million Medicaid coverage slots for children and seniors over the next five years (via $7.6 to $20 billion in cuts);
Cutting housing subsidies, youth services and adult literacy programs; and
Mandating agriculture cuts that may lead Congress to cut nutrition programs for low-income populations.

All the bluster over Terri Schiavo's fate masked the fundamental fact that it was none of the nation's damned business. But on this particular day I'm willing to join the ideologues in making her a national symbol. For I can think of nothing that better symbolizes the human consequences of the right's "culture of life" than the slow death of an innocent woman.

Put the Damn Feeding Tube Back In

2005-03-22T10:58:00.000-05:00

The other day I saw Terri Schiavo's brother on CNN, making his case, verily ranting about the sanctity of his sister's life. He had the look of someone who's been through one too many press conferences, who's been prepped and briefed by lawyers one too many times. In his overaggressive bearing one could perceive the desperation of someone who's willed himself out of the guilt, doubt and uncertainty of personal struggle, and into the self-righteous certainty of political theater.

All of which is to say, the bluster of Terri Schiavo's blood relatives needs to be seen for what it is: the defensive posturing of caring people who've become deranged by their efforts to resist the secret truth that there is no hope for their loved one. (The shameful maneuvering of the pro-lifers and the politicians is another matter altogether; see the always-insightful Rude Pundit on that.)

So put aside the family's pathetic fantasies that she smiles, or that her blinks are winks, or that she can engage in conversation. Instead, concentrate on that feeding tube.

Imagine what it would be like to watch your daughter shrivel up and die, slowly, agonizingly, over the course of two or three weeks. Imagine watching her face winnow away, her skin go sallow, her eyes sink into her head, her lips crack and bleed, her tongue swell up. Imagine the wasting of your daughter's body around her shoulders, ribs and hip bones, grotesque protrusions covering the rapidly shrinking organs within, which themselves begin to shut down, one by one, with gruesome results, as the end nears. Imagine being told that through all of this, your beloved sister feels no pain and does not suffer. Would you believe it?

If it were your daughter, even if you'd resigned yourself to the inevitability of her death, could you countenance, or even contemplate, this progression of "treatment"? Would you be willing to write off the possibility that, impaired and disconnected though she may be, your sister might in fact be suffering horribly in a way she cannot communicate to anyone?

The real lesson of the appalling spectacle of the Schiavo case is that we are a barbaric nation when it comes to death. We kill each other in the tens of thousands with guns each year, in numbers that dwarf those of all the other industrialized nations combined. And yet, someone who wants a say in the terms of his or her own impending, inevitable end has to sneak around looking for secret methods, and relatives and doctors risk criminal prosecution for helping those who cannot help themselves.

As a nation we lack a proper alternative to death by starvation and thirst. We need a more progressive national understanding of "do no harm," and a less Puritanical - and, truth be told, less retarded - understanding of what it means to cherish and respect life. We need a federal law that allows - after the satisfaction of multiple safeguards and conditions - for a painless, medically assisted death when the only alternative is painful or unnecessarily prolonged, medically assisted death. We must dispense with ridiculous distinctions between what is "natural" and what is "artificial," and focus instead on what is humane and inhumane. We need to acknowledge, as other civilized, life-affirming societies have, that we can in fact distinguish between assistance and homicide, between ethical intervention and depraved indifference - and that in so doing we neither gain the world nor lose our souls.

Terri Schiavo isn't going to recover. And at any rate, her husband - her proper guardian, who never walked away, who never divorced her, who's got no credible ulterior motive, who's stuck to his guns for eleven years - insists she told him she wouldn't want to live like this. By that reckoning, she's spent eleven years having her wishes ignored. That should be all we need to know.

So put the damn feeding tube back in. Gather the family. Let them look into the eyes of a wife, a sister, a daughter, whom they can feel confident is properly fed, hydrated, and resting comfortably. Let them gently press their lips to an unsunken cheek. Let them say their loving farewells, for a moment, for an hour, for a day, for a week. Then let someone inject her with enough morphine to send her on her way, quickly, peacefully and painlessly.

Holding life sacred makes us human. But we cannot be human if we are not first humane.

Boob Tube + Smack = Christo-Fascism (Part One)

2005-03-21T00:49:00.000-05:00

From the Dept. of Clichés are Clichés Because They're True

Cornell University has a nice little policy shop called the Media & Society Research Group (MSRG). Lately they've publicized a couple of interesting studies that prove your grandmother was right when she told you that television makes you stupid, and that religion is the opium of the people.

Exhibit A is a report with the very catchy title, Civil Liberties, Views of Islam, and Muslim Americans. (Therein lies the difference between progressive scholarship and conservative scholarship: the lefties are pathologically averse to verbs.)

Among the many questions (more of which in our next installment), respondents were asked whether they agreed with four policy statements about Muslims in America:

All Muslim Americans should be required to register their whereabouts with the federal government.
Mosques should be closely monitored and surveilled by U.S. law enforcement agencies.
U.S. government agencies should profile citizens as potential threats based on being Muslim or having Middle Eastern heritage.
Muslim civic and volunteer organizations should be infiltrated by undercover law enforcement agents to keep watch on their activities and fundraising.

The study reveals that 1.5 to 2 times as many Republicans agreed with these proposals as Democrats. The same held true for statements about restricting freedom of speech, assembly and the press. (FYI the responses of self-identified Independents tracked very close to those of Democrats.)

Then the surveyors tracked opinion on these matters according to two other metrics: TV viewing and religiosity. Respondents identifying themselves as highly religious were twice as likely to support the four statements about Muslims, compared with respondents who said their religiosity level was low. (Those identifying as moderately religious were in-between in their views, but overall noticeably closer to the highly religious folk.)

Likewise, respondents who said they pay a lot of attention to TV news agreed with the statements about Muslims at a rate 1.5 times that of respondents who said they don't watch much TV news. (Those who said they watch a moderate amount of TV news were smack dab in-between.)

Finally, those clever eggheads at Cornell decided to see what would happen if they stuck TV news and religiosity together. Here's the result:

Now, the more smart-assed among us will say that this chart simply proves that religious people watch Fox News. But it is striking to notice that if you mix the bully pulpit with the sensationalist, jingoistic soundbite medium of TV, you get the only group in the survey in which an actual majority supports making the entire country into a virtual Bantustan for people of the Wrong Religious Faith.

Back in the early nineties, I cut my post-college political teeth doing counter-demonstrations at women's health clinics in Philadelphia, fighting Operation Rescue and their assorted misogynist looney-toon allies. Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry, a rightwing fundamentalist and a master of TV news, achieved a fair degree of notoriety at the time by wearing a t-shirt that read, "Intolerance is a Beautiful Thing," and by saying things like,

I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good ... It's that simple. Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country.

The pro-choice movement sued Operation Rescue back into the Stone Age (ideologically speaking, no one could tell the difference of course), and Terry has faded into relative obscurity. Clearly, however, his t-shirt's still kicking some serious ass a decade later.

• • •

(Credit for the heads-up on the Cornell study goes to this month's Atlantic - the high-class rag that secretly embodies everything you're supposed to hate about The New Republic, and which would go right into the bottom of the birdcage were it not for the periodic contributions of James Fallows.)

Jonathan Swift on Municipal WiFi

2005-03-17T15:53:00.000-05:00

From the Dept. of Modest Proposals

Who better than the man who gave birth to the creative commons to come out in favor of the people's internet?

Larry Lessig has a nice little piece at Wired savaging the recent passage of laws in Pennsylvania and elsewhere prohibiting cities and towns from creating public wireless internet networks.

I've previously dissected the fallacious arguments of the rightwing think tanks and industry front groups that have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into lobbying against municipal wifi. Beneath soundbites and headlines expressing "concern" about the "hidden costs" and "unforeseen inefficiencies" of public wifi, lies a nasty rhetoric of good old-fashioned red-baiting, accusing mayors, muni wifi advocates, and the media (of course) of being pinko shills for an "anti-business" agenda.

Lessig picks up on this moronic undercurrent, noting that "it's a slippery slope from free Internet access to Karl Marx," and takes it to its (il)logical conclusion:

Let's hope this is just the first step. For if you look closely, you'll see the communist menace has infiltrated governments everywhere. Ever notice those free photons as you walk the city at night? Ever think about the poor streetlamp companies, run out of business because municipalities deigned to do completely what private industry would do only incompletely? Or think about the scandal of public roads: How many tollbooth workers have lost their jobs because we no longer (since about the 18th century) fund all roads through private enterprise? Municipal buses compete with private taxis. City police departments hamper the growth at Pinkerton's (now Securitas). It's a national scandal. So let the principle that guided [PA Governor Ed] Rendell guide governments everywhere: If private industry can provide a service, however poorly or incompletely, then ban the government from competing. What's true for Wi-Fi should be true for water.

It's a quick, entertaining and galvanizing read. Check it out - Mssr. Swift is no doubt chuckling in his grave.

(Thanks to Jo Miller for the heads-up.)

Why Libertarians are Stupid

2005-03-14T11:39:00.000-05:00

First in a Series of... Infinity

A quick hit from the always entertaining Libertarian Man of Mystery (nee Libertarian Girl):

Let Druggies Die

I'm as in favor of legalizing drugs as the next libertarian. But government funded "needle exchanges" ... is something I just don't get.

How can a rational government on the one hand say an actviity[sic] is illegal, and on the other hand give out equipment to help people engage in said illegal activity?

If people are dying because they are stupid enough to use AIDs infected needles to shoot themselves up with illegal drugs, then I say our society is better off without such people! Let them die.

Did you catch the trick there? No, it's not the casual disregard for human life; that's too obvious for our taste. Nor is it the belligerent ignorance of the idea that people use drugs and dirty works because they're stupid. It's not the cartoonish dismissal of the power of addiction either. Nor is it the complete obliviousness to issues of public health, or to the very existence of the policy philosophy of harm reduction. Nor is it the total lack of awareness that hundreds of thousands of police officers get stuck with potentially contaminated needles every year while frisking suspects.

No, the real red herring here is the word "rational." Libertarianism is wedded to the fiction of the free, rational actor, which makes it not only an offensive belief system but a rather dimwitted one.

Individuals routinely find themselves in "irrational" situations because their agency is constrained (necessarily, unjustly, or both), or because they've got multiple, rational-yet-conflicting interests at stake. But let's put that aside for the moment and focus on government. Government is not a person, and it doesn't and shouldn't function like one. (Neither should a corporation, but we'll leave that for another day.)

Nor is government rational - or irrational, for that matter. Rather, government is a site of political contestation. It is a storehouse of surplus value, and as such, questions of taxation and social service spending are - as we are seeing so vividly today with bankruptcy and Social Security - battles in a class war. More generally, government spending and policies are the product of multiple, competing interests. On drugs and needle exchange, one could list the following diverse interests: restrict the flow of certain destructive drugs; ensure profits for the pharmaceutical companies; prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS; pay back political favors owed to the religious right; protect police officers; get politicians re-elected for being tough on drugs; look the other way on Third World drug production in order to secure the allegiance of foreign governments; and so on.

As such, government policy often is inefficient and inconsistent. Reason indeed plays a key role in shaping one's interests, and in debates over whether certain policies will promote or retard those interests. But government, as the product of these accumulated clashes of interest, is neither rational nor irrational. Hard as it may be for the feeble libertarian mind to grasp, rationality simply has nothing to do with it.

So the most grievous sin committed by our Libertarian Man of Mystery, then, is not the sin of moral offense or ethical turpitude - though as a board member of a sterile syringe exchange program I certainly take note of those. Rather, his sin is the original sin of libertarianism: a fundamental misunderstanding of politics.

Which presents a bit of a problem given that libertarianism is supposed to be a political philosophy.

All Fascism, All the Time

2005-03-10T19:04:00.000-05:00

From the Dept. of If They Can Have Golf and Home & Garden Channels, Then We Get to Do This

Fortunately, Democrappy is far from the only blog with an abiding concern about nascent fascism in Dub's America. A group of us have banded together to create a site specifically devoted to this issue. Named for a 1939 novel about the earliest days of anti-fascist resistance in Germany, The Seventh Cross aims to be a resource for all things protofascist in our current conjuncture. So be the first kid on your block to check it out.

Citi, Chase, MBNA: the New Robber Barons

2005-03-10T18:31:00.000-05:00

It's not surprising that the Republicans' stinking, festering, dungheap of a bankruptcy bill passed, given the financial industry's generosity over the past 15 years in sharing some of its $30 billion in annual profits with our elected officials.

By forcing many debtors to avail themselves of Chapter 13 Bankruptcy instead of Chapter 7, the new law will make it much more difficult for people to get a fresh start after going through a financial setback. And while I'm sure lots of folks are buying way too many shoes, iPods, ringtones, and bottles of gin, the lion's share of personal bankruptcies currently happen because someone in a family has the gall to, you know, get sick (only a few of which illnesses are gin-related).

Of course, if you're rich, you've got nothing to worry about, because the Senate - the vast majority of whose members are millionaires - shot down a proposed amendment to crack down on "asset protection trusts," which are used by the wealthy to keep all their stuff even while they file for bankruptcy.

The Senate similarly refused to do anything about large corporations destroying employee pension funds when they go through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, or credit card companies charging usurious interest and fees via terms and conditions buried in fine print.

The overall effect, then, is simply to force poor, working class and many middle class people into debt peonage, where they will quite literally be working for their creditors for years, their wages garnished in the service of usurious "repayment plans."

This is all terribly unfair, of course, a raw deal for the working man and woman. It's tempting to call it class war, but it's more like a class battle, a skirmish in a much larger war that's been going on not since Dub's election, or even Reagan's, but rather since the late sixties. (Of course, in an even larger sense it's been going on since the dawn of industrial capitalism, but that's a subject for another clambake.)

You've no doubt heard many times before that America has a "service" economy now, rather than a manufacturing economy. Like most truisms, this one obscures as much as it reveals. A florist is a service firm, and so is Citibank; the category means little. And on the flip side, the notion that nothing gets manufactured in America anymore is a fantasy, and a stupid one at that. The U.S. remains a goods-producer of world-historic proportions, and likely always will.

What we have, rather, is an economy dominated by the FIRE sector: finance, insurance, and real estate. It reaps the lion's share of profit in the economy as a whole, and it has leverage over both individuals and other, non-FIRE sector industries, including manufacturing. It also plays a key role in keeping the corporate contribution to the nation's tax bill relatively low, and the individual contribution relatively high.

We got here because the U.S. economy experienced a meltdown a third of a century ago. The postwar economic boom had been fueled by the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan, and accelerating suburbanization. It ground to a halt amid the rising costs of the Vietnam War, increased competition from rebuilt industries of Europe and Japan, the maturation and saturation of those countries' domestic markets, and the proliferation of import substitution policies in developing and newly decolonized nations. Then Richard Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard, diluting the international power of the dollar (and as a response to the dollar's sagging value; but again, another pigroast for that subject). Oil embargoes followed, further destabilizing the economy and triggering stagflation.

All of these developments eroded corporate profits, which peaked in 1966 and then fell for the next decade and a half. In the midst of this slide, the oil shocks, explains Mike Davis in his least-known, and arguably best, book, "challenged the entire structure of existing capitalization, based, as it was, on super-cheap energy, and led to the forced depreciation of vast quantities of existing plant and technology." The oil companies got fat in the short term, quickly accumulating one-third of total corporate profits at the time. But the broader, more long-term trend favored the FIRE sector:

Although these shifts in the energy-price substructure of manufacturing costs probably had some positive spin-offs for certain high-tech capital-goods producers, their pricipal result was spectacularly to strengthen metropolitan finance and rentier interests at the expense of the productive economy as a whole (a trend which, of course, ... continued after the 1981 decline in energy prices). (Davis)

In the face of declining profits from increased energy costs and intensified international competition, the only solution was to increase productivity, either through modernizing existing plants and equipment, or by lowering the cost of labor. Inflation and high interest rates made the cost of the former high, while the same inflationary tendencies had increased wages, thus making the potential savings of laying off workers extremely attractive. As a result, U.S. industry, with the help of an ascendant crop of neoliberal and neoconservative politicians, began a full-scale assault on labor, cutting social services (including, crucially, welfare and unemployment), and relocating manufacturing plants domestically and abroad to locales where resources were cheap, and where organized labor was weak or nonexistent.

In this manner a large amount of productive overcapacity was bled out of the U.S. economy and the U.S. workforce was decimated. Unemployment hovered above the post-World War II average of 5.7 percent virtually every month between 1976 and 1995, rising above 8 percent in the mid-1970s and then above 10 percent in 1984. Between 1973 and 1995 real weekly earnings went down almost every year. The 1970s and 1980s are the only decades since record-keeping began in 1820 in which workers' real wages were lower at the end of the decade than at the beginning.

The result, beginning in the early eighties, was the desired return to rising profit rates for American corporations. But, crucially, these profits did not accrue equally across the economy, and they did not accrue according to their pre-1970s patterns. In order for manufacturing firms to relocate their operations, and later to keep the labor market loose through mergers and acquisitions, they had to assume debts of historic proportions. "By the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, and for the first time since the Depression," Davis writes, "corporate interest payments comprised a larger share of the GNP than corporate profits."

These kinds of shifts provided massive increases in profit and power to the FIRE sector. While total corporate profits increased more than 300 percent between 1980 and 1996, the financial sector saw an increase of a whopping 443 percent. Manufacturing firms realized only a 120 percent rise during the same period - barely enough to keep up with inflation. In 1980, financial firms' profits totaled less than one-third of manufacturing firms' profits. By 1995, they were equal to well over three-quarters of the manufacturing firms'.

At the corporate level, the rapid increase in debt put manufacturing firms in a subordinate position to financial firms. It also deprived the government of much-needed revenue, as corporations wrote off more and more debt and thereby lowered their tax burden, increasing the proportion of the nation's tax bill paid for by working stiffs like you and me.

At the individual level, rebounding productivity and falling wages meant the economy grew throughout the eighties and nineties, but workers reaped few of the benefits, certainly much less than they had enjoyed in the postwar boom decades of the fifties and sixties.

And that's where exploding consumer debt comes in. With an economy producing more and more goods, requiring more and more consumption, people have to buy more and more stuff. If they're not making enough money to keep pace, then the only way to fill the gap is to extend them historically unprecedented amounts of credit. As Doug Henwood presciently wrote in the midst of the nineties boom:

So we have a world where the capacity to produce far outstrips the capacity to consume. Yes, profitability has been partly restored in the U.S., but the only way we've been able to sustain a mass consumption economy on stagnant wages is through heavy domestic and international borrowing: consumer debt is at record levels and the U.S. is now [1998] around $2 trillion in debt to the outside world. The old strategy for coping with overcapacity problems, deficit spending worldwide and the U.S. pumping up consumption in its role as the world's buyer of last resort, is just not on offer this time around.

Now, of course there's a fundamental contradiction here. If workers ultimately can't afford to buy all the products they're making, something's gotta give. Eventually production has to decrease, or wages have to increase - or you have to give some of the previously purchased stuff away for free, so people can start spending again instead of using all their money to pay off their debts. And that's precisely what the new bankruptcy law seeks to make harder.

So not only does the law screw over everyone (well, anyone you'd want to hang out with, at any rate), but it does nothing to solve the larger problem of chronic overcapacity (or underconsumption) in capitalist economies. It's a giant passing of the buck, not only to you and me, but also, down the road, to non-financial firms that depend on consumer access to cash and credit. In this regard the law simply represents an affirmation of the constantly growing political-economic power of the industries that lobbied for it.

Today's financial firms are the new robber barons. Where the mining company garnished paychecks for company equipment, and the steel mill worked people 12 hours a day, seven days a week, the credit industry hopes to obtain, at its discretion and with the help of the bankruptcy courts, the power to foist wage slavery on any indebted American working in any sector of the economy. And with the average industrial wage accounting for less than two-thirds of the median family income, there's likely to be chattel aplenty.

All the Great DLCers Are Dead (and I'm Not Feeling So Well Myself)

2005-03-05T16:56:00.000-05:00

From the Dept. of Na Na Na Na, Hey Hey Hey, Good-Bye

Some days, you really hope that today is not, in fact, the first day of the rest of your life. Take for example the day you learn there's something in the world called mycoplasma pneumoniae, an unclassifiable organism that - lacking a cell wall, let alone the eyes and opposable thumbs necessary to read a map - apparently has mistaken you for Daytona Beach, as it's moved in to your chest for spring break.

Fortunately this scary little misbehaving f*cker is a damn site easier to eject from your body than Tom DeLay from Congress, so we're convalescing nicely after a week of radio silence here at Democrappy.

Speaking of vile pathogens in the body politic, while we get back up to speed here I direct your attention to a nice piece by Ari Berman at The Nation online, covering what I hope will be the final days of the notorious D-L-C.

Beginning with an account of the DLC's underhanded, pathetic attempt to declare Barack Obama one of its own, Berman recounts the organization's history and helpfully analyzes the manner in which reinvigorated Democratic political formations are wresting control of the Party from the DLC, making its agenda obsolete and robbing it of its reason for being. He notes with admirable restraint the delusional pronouncements of such DLC flaks as Marshall Whitmann, who asserts that the group holds the "tried and tested formula for the Democratic Party's resurgence" (which is true if by "resurgence" you mean "utter failure"; it's rather like the CIA motto, "Proudly overthrowing Cuba since 1959").

Berman sees this self-styled "progressive," "reformist" and "modernizing" group of elitists for what it really is, calling the DLC "the old dinosaur of the Democratic establishment" and noting that not only has Howard Dean helped energized the Party, but he's the first notable Presidential candidate to have openly challenged the DLC since Jesse Jackson in 1988.

So go check out Berman's article, which we can only hope will turn out to be the first of many eulogies for a schlerotic regime whose time was past before it ever began.

And we'll be back to full strength here at Democrappy before you know it.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About American Fascism (and More)

2005-02-25T16:22:00.000-05:00

Being relatively new to the blogosphere - Democrappy is part of the Bushie Boom of blogs born in the wake of the election - I'm still learning about this brave new world.

One important lesson is that the blogscape is nearly infinitely spatial, and almost totally atemporal. It's vast and decentralized - much like the internet itself - so that even the most prominent, acclaimed sites remain unknown to gigantic online publics. At the same time, it seems to have no history, its past almost immediately forgotten like so much ephemera. (I regularly link to previous posts here for just this reason, to facilitate a sense of intellectual continuity and cohesiveness; in my view the best blogs present themselves as ongoing projects rather than expressions of personalities).

All of which is a fancy of way of saying, Holy Crap, have you seen David Neiwert's amazing blog series on "The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism," and his 15-part essay (PDF version available here) entitled "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis"?

As you know, this subject has been a favorite here at Democrappy (check links on the sidebar, or go here). Neiwert, a professional journalist based in Seattle, composed his much more detailed pieces throughout 2003 and 2004, B.D. (Before Democrappy - the ahistoricity of blogging in action). I found out about them via the recent announcement of this year's Koufax Award Winners.

As you'll have exactly zero trouble surmising, Neiwert's fascism writings remain relevant as ever. So go check them out, right now. And consider making a small donation if you like what you see.

(Top image from Cursor.)

Let No Good Deed Go Unpunished

2005-02-25T01:53:00.000-05:00

Industry's War on the People's Wi-Fi

Lately, a number of cities and towns have begun working to implement free or low-cost, universal wireless internet access. While these plans don't provide poor people with the computers necessary to actually, you know, do stuff on the internet, they are a first step in bridging the so-called digital divide. Imagine the kid who gets a loaner computer from school, or a donated computer from a nonprofit organization, only to take it back to a neighborhood with no coffee shops, let alone wi-fi hotspots; and a home where the parents can't afford to pay the phone bill, let alone an internet service provider.

Combine that potential upside with the relatively modest cost - an estimated $10 million to equip my entire home city of Philadelphia (fifth-largest city in the country), for example - and you've got a winner on your hands.

But not so fast. After months of positive press, efforts by local governments to take cities wireless have started to receive criticism in the Op-Ed sections. In fact, I recently came across one such piece in my local ~~corporate media rag~~ newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Municipal networks, it says, will only benefit middle-class people who could afford to pay for private internet access. And besides, today's wi-fi technology will be outdated in a few years, requiring more public investment to update; and the coverage probably won't be so good anyway, because the technology is flawed.

Perusing this and other missives around the country and in cyberspace, it's as if a small band of socially responsible technologists has spontaneously arisen to bravely challenge the misguided plans of governments everywhere.

Confederacy of...
In actuality, these voices of protest all belong to an organized public relations campaign centered around a report called "Not In The Public Interest - The Myth of Municipal Wi-Fi Networks." The report is published by the New Millennium Research Council (NMRC), a supposedly "independent" policy group that's actually been created by Issue Dynamics (IDI). As Broadbandreports.com explains, IDI is a PR firm and lobbying outfit specializing in astroturf (i.e. fake grassroots) campaigns on behalf of corporate clients. It funneled $200k from the Baby Bells to the Gray Panthers, for example, to wage a clandestine battle against MCI/Worldcom on behalf of the Baby Bells.

In the same vein as its parent's subterfuge, the NMRC report claims to offer "in-depth analysis" otherwise lacking in the public discussion of municipal wi-fi. It features the thoughts of "six notable scholars and telecommunications policy experts" on "the practicality and impact of municipal governments turning Wi-Fi networks into public utilities."

These "notable scholars" and "policy experts" turn out to be executives and resident fellows associated with conservative think tanks and telecom industry trade groups, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Institute for Policy Innovation, The Heartland Institute, The Beacon Hill Institute, Veriprise Wireless, and the U.S. Internet Industry Association. The think tanks comprise a regular rogue's gallery - see for example here, here, here and here. Funded by the usual rightwing suspects - Olin, Bradley, Scaife - they form a conservative echo chamber, quoting and citing each other in their publications, and cross-posting each other's screeds on their Web sites and in spam emails. (The author of the Philadelphia Inquirer piece is a "resident scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute.)

Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been...
As for the report itself (available on the NMRC homepage if you don't mind never being able to get that 45 minutes of your life back), it contains a handful of issues that might actually lead to useful discussion were they raised in a less sinister context. But it's dominated by red-baiting, media-bashing and barely concealed reactionary fury that belie the objective claims made for it in the press campaign.

David P. McClure, President and Chief Executive Officer of The US Internet Industry Association (which, to be fair, has done one good deed), starts things off by complaining about "the fog of poorly written, anti-business media reports regarding the implementation of municipal networks." I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to comb the news reports on this topic (or any other, for that matter) and find evidence of this supposed anti-business slant in the corporate-owned American press.

Tom Giovenetti, President of the Institute for Policy Innovation - which even the rightwing Accuracy in Media calls a "conservative" organization - claims to be non-ideological and "pragmatic," yet feels compelled to "point out that 'government owning the means of production' is a hallmark of communism, not of market capitalism." He goes on to observe that

the trend across the nation (and across the world) is to privatize government services. Governments have found tremendous cost savings by contracting out traditional government functions such as jail management, landscaping maintenance, even emergency services, to private companies. They have found that the best way to get needed services to the people is through market forces, not through government command and control.

As we've noted before here at Democrappy, "command and control" is code among eggheads and policy wonks for "The Red Menace." More importantly, a quick Google search on privatization reveals that it's been anything but a winning proposition, across industries and nations. (Two examples to get you started: here and here.)

Things start to circle the bowl even faster when David G. Tuerck of The Beacon Hill Institute - whose work a Columbia University professor called "deliberately shoddy" - weighs in on the problems of public networks. "[T]he municipality," he writes,

avoids accountability to shareholders and enjoys other competitive advantages by shifting responsibility to taxpayers and ratepayers who, unlike shareholders, do not have the option of selling their shares once the municipal enterprise gets into trouble. ... Government providers, once confronted with competition or technological obsolescence, have every incentive to squelch the very competition they profess to offer and to put in its place a government monopoly that tolerates no competition.

One has to admire his chutzpah. Something like 70 million American households get cable television, and the overwhelming majority of them are "served" by private companies with total monopolies, who do with cable exactly what Tuerck says government - and only government - would do with wi-fi. Add Microsoft and corporate media consolidation to the mix, and you've got a technology and communications industry that is verily defined by monopoly control far in excess of what any poor city or town could ever hope to do even in the most sinister of fantasies. The idea that monopoly corruption is produced by the lack of a profit motive, rather than its presence, is a figment of a paranoid, rightwing-libertarian imagination.

This fear and loathing of government is, at root, a disgust for the public, for the very idea of collective endeavor undertaken for reasons of social progress rather than private profit. This is evidenced by the report's constant labeling of advantages of municipal wi-fi as liabilities. Here's Giovenetti again:

By removing profit from their operating goals, municipal ISPs reduce the required return on their investment to that of providing just enough revenue to fund the building and maintenance of their network and service their debt.

Why, if cities don't seek to maximize profits, then they can offer services inexpensively, or even for free! How awful! And what if cities do manage to bring in more money than they spend? That too would be a disaster, cautions Giovanetti:

And where will the profits (if any) go from the municipal network? Will they go toward constant technological research and development, continually upgrading the network to make sure customers have a competitive package of services? If history is any guide, the answer is no. The revenues instead will be diverted to other city obligations, making the city dependent on an outdated and crumbling network for revenue, and saddling the residents with the financial burden of obsolete infrastructure. It will look much more like a failed Soviet-era five year plan, rather than the kind of dynamic product and service offerings delivered by the market.

The grevious sin Giovenetti says will be committed by cities is that they won't properly use the money they derive from their wi-fi networks. Instead of plowing profits back into a private business - and, he neglects to mention, paying them out as executive bonuses and stockholder dividends - cities will instead invest revenues in "other obligations." In this manner, the best-case scenario - cities actually make money while providing a public service - becomes a worst-case scenario of economic inefficiency and oppressive (Soviet!), anti-capitalist government.

And what "other obligations" does Giovanetti imagine will receive municipal wi-fi revenues? For this we have to go down the rabbit hole:

... [O]ne is forced to conclude that what is really driving municipalities toward offering municipal networks is that they view such networks as a new source of revenue for their unlimited spending appetites. In their imaginations, once built, the network will provide them with a new stream of cash with which they can build new administrative buildings and new vehicles, all the while playing at big business with the tax dollars of their constituents.

School construction? Health clinics? Police salaries? Development incentives? Corporate tax reductions, even? No. Using language and imagery formerly reserved for the critical depiction of corporate fatcats and robber barons, Giovanetti claims that city fathers will build giant brick and glass monuments to themselves, and travel to and from them in luxury cars. Looks like someone's been hittin' the Ayn Rand a little hard lately.

Spite Is a Beautiful Thing
Now, It's not ultimately surprising that this sort of reactionary, adolescent know-nothingness lies at the heart of the "case" against municipal wi-fi. But it's of great concern - and cause for eternal vigilance, to borrow from Mssr. Jefferson - that this intellectual thuggery operates under the cover of policy wonkism and think-tank respectability. And it's even more disturbing that these rightwing institutions, their power decades in the making, now operate as corporate skunkworks in clandestine servitude to the highest bidders pursuing the most narrow and selfish of interests.

As it turns out, yours truly isn't actually a huge fan of Philadelphia's wi-fi ambitions. Even that $10 million - a relative pittance - could be put to better use in a city so desperately lacking in funds. But until I see the New Millennium Research Councils of the world decrying the much bigger public expenditures for sports stadiums, and until I see the American Enterprise Institutes of the world lobbying for a reversal of the criminal negligence of cities by federal and state governments, I'm going to support municipal wi-fi, if for no other reason than to spite these smug motherf*ckers.

And don't underestimate the ethico-political value of spite.

Comics Say the Darndest Things

2005-02-24T12:03:00.000-05:00

From the Dept. of Wow, Laying off the Coke Really Does Improve Cognitive Function

Now begins the process of trying to protect the second part of the equation. Every day [insurgents] are trying to foment civil war. And, [Iraqis] have to write a constitution. I say, take ours, we're not using it.

That's Robin Williams, on the Iraqi election aftermath, on the season premiere of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. Turns out that when he's not doing teeth-grindingly annoying schtick, the guy's actually articulate and well-informed (he talked about the legacy of colonialism, African conflict diamonds, and fraud in Iraq reconstruction funding, among other things). Finally, someone famous cleans up and doesn't turn into a born-again idiot.

All for now. A real entry (on the attack on municipal wifi) is coming soon.

Goodnight, Sweet Prince

2005-02-21T22:00:00.000-05:00

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005
Next to the man himself, Jo Miller says it most elegantly, while Rude Pundit delivers the obit you wish were in all the papers. As for the establishment, you can try The New York Times or Salon.

An Army of One... Dumb Guy

2005-02-21T21:11:00.000-05:00

aka Asstard of the Week

Asstard, n. sl. An individual or entity acting in a way indicative of diminished mental capacity, but retaining requisite culpable intent.

If you're a regular reader here you know I've been ranting for some time (from the beginning, in fact) about how smart the rightwing has been in waging the culture wars and consolidating political power, and how important it is for us to start learning from them.

Today, though, we take on a horse's ass of a different color. If you've been on planet earth this past week, you know Sunday night's episode of The Simpsons was about gay marriage. (Homer Simpson as Gavin Newsom; who'da thunk?)

As you might imagine, the rightwing culture warriors have got their undies in a bundle over this one, in which one of Marge's sisters (Patty, if you care) comes out the of closet and gets married to another woman (sort of - see here if you need the 411). Today's New York Times has a piece on the reaction, which includes commentary from L. Brent Bozell III, president of the Parents Television Council (PTC).

As this bio reveals, Bozell is the rightwing equivalent of a red-diaper baby, and has spent his entire adult life on such honorable pursuits as leading a smear campaign against those opposed to Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court nomination, and working to eliminate PBS. Of late, as head of the PTC, Bozell's been responsible for increasing the number of indecency complaints lodged with the FCC from less than 350 in 2001, to nearly a quarter-million in 2003. The PTC was responsible for an estimated 99.8 percent of all indecency complaints lodged with the FCC in 2003.

This means one organization - one man, really - is singlehandedly responsible for the record fines levied by the FCC against broadcasters of late. In fact, as this report explains, one fine of $1.2 million was levied based on complaints lodged by a total of three people.

So what did Mssr. Bozell have to say to the Times about Ms. Patty Bouvier switching teams?

[Bozell] criticized "The Simpsons" for addressing the issue of gay marriage, though he cautioned that he had not seen the episode. A parental advisory preceded the broadcast.

"At a time when the public mood is overwhelmingly against gay marriage, any show that promotes gay marriage is deliberately bucking the public mood," he said.

"I'd rather them not do it at all," he added. "You've got a show watched by millions of children. Do children need to have gay marriage thrust in their faces as an issue? Why can't we just entertain them?"

It's hard to tell where the stupidity ends and the disingenuousness begins, isn't it?

For starters, it's ironic that Marge Simpson has blue hair, for by equating the depiction of gay marriage with its promotion, and protesting to the poor Times reporter that he didn't actually, you know, see the episode, Bozell's the proverbial blue-hair who demands that an "indecent" book be banned from the library. Asked what exactly she finds indecent about it, the blue-hair replies that she doesn't know, because of course she would never read such a filthy book.

Then there's Bozell's brilliant argument that because the show goes against public opinion, it's, well, going against public opinion. Which is going to be a real problem when Matt Groening tries to run for the U.S. Senate I guess.

But the ripest peach lies in Bozell's exasperated plea: "Why can't we just entertain them?" What Bozell's really asking is, "Why can't we entertain people in a way I personally approve of?" (I figure Bozell wouldn't be concerned about the preposition at the end there.)

The obvious answer is, "For the moment at least, this is still a free country, you Asstard." The larger, more important answer, however, is that Fox - which by the way was the recipient of that $1.2 million fine - is a gigantic capitalist enterprise that makes its money by getting as much attention as possible for its products. As a corporate entity, Fox couldn't care less what Bozell - or even Rupert Murdoch, for that matter - thinks about gay marriage, so long as high ratings keep the ad money flowing to The Simpsons. In this vein it's worth noting that in the episode itself, the town of Springfield legalizes gay marriage over the protests of Reverend Lovejoy, in order to increase tourism; and that Homer becomes a gay-friendly minister when he learns he can get ordained online and pocket $200 per ceremony.

In the eighties when I was much younger - and in the nineties when I was only a little younger but Clinton was in the White House - I thought cultural politics didn't matter. The culture wars got me angry, to be sure, and they found their way into my studies. But I felt they constituted a distraction from more important matters, and that in the final analysis they didn't really mean much politically, outside the media echo chamber in which they'd germinated.

These days, however, I attach rather a lot of importance to the airing of a Simpsons episode on gay marriage - not because I think a mass media depiction of lesbian nuptials will do anything to shift public opinion, but rather because it reaffirms my faith in liberal capitalism to act as a powerful force against the theocratic intolerance of the L. Brent Bozell III's of the world. As Marx and Engels maintained, capitalism is at root a relentlessly modernizing, secularizing force:

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

(There's a little more to it than that, but for now this'll suffice.)

So this week we give our Asstard Award to L. Brent Bozell III, but we do so with some ambivalence. On the one hand, we feel a degree of cheer that The Simpsons has baited this one-man censorship machine into saying such stupid things in public. Ideally we'd love for Bozell to have fallen down a deep, dark well long ago. But since we're stuck with him, it's nice to see him diluting his political strength.

On the other hand, we give this award with some degree of concern, for two reasons. First, with friends like Fox... well, you know the rest. And second, to return to where this entry began, if we can't beat someone as moronically illiberal as Bozell, then we don't deserve to win.

Gannonization, Done Right

2005-02-18T16:22:00.000-05:00

From the Dept. of Yes, I Have in Fact Been Hiding under a Rock

Don't know how I missed this, but The Daily Show has done a bit on the Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert scandal that's just about pitch-perfect. It has media criticism, administration critique, well-framed commentary on the sexual aspect, and Hitler's grandson. And of course it's also gotta-change-your-undies-afterwards funny. Check it out at:

One Good Move (Quicktime version, and transcript).
MyNetRoots (Windows Media version)

Links courtesy of WTF Is It Now?, a great blog I've just discovered (more proof I've been under a rock), which is doing a nice job of tracking Gannon/Guckert-related stories.

Happy Friday.

Another Sign of Democratic Spinal Regeneration

2005-02-18T02:13:00.000-05:00

Recently I noted the effectiveness of Newt Gingrich's theatrical shadow government in the early nineties, just prior to the Republican Congressional takeover of '94. The Dems are now doing something similar, and at least one rightwing blogger fears they might be on to something. Check it out.

Our Fascism, Ourselves

2005-02-18T01:32:00.000-05:00

Or, the Roehmosexual Fallacy

If you haven't thrown a clot over the murder conviction and 30-year sentence for the Zoloft Kid in South Carolina (reason number one hundred thirty-eight to hate the Secession State), then you're probably compos-mentis enough to be familiar with the ongoing saga of Jeff Gannon, aka Jim Guckert. I won't rehearse the entire story here. Suffice it to say Guckert:

worked for Talon News, a rightwing press outlet owned by GOPUSA and run by a Republican activist;
was denied a Congressional Press Pass for this reason;
got White House press credentials despite the above, and got them under a fake name (Jeff Gannon) to boot;
lobbed loaded, softball questions to Dub and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan at press conferences and briefings;
was leaked key information by the White House in the Valerie Plame scandal;
has just been outed as gay by members of the left blogosphere; and
apparently worked as a prostitute, soliciting business via a series of military themed escort service Web sites, on which he appeared au naturale.

For more, check out posts at Daily Kos and AmericaBlog, two of the left blogs whose writers broke this story, putting the mainstream media to shame (which, alas, isn't too tough to do these days).

It's obvious this story has the makings of a real scandal. The way Guckert got his credentials - and that he got them at all - raises suspicions, as does the bogus nature of his employer. So too does his role as an administration shill.

But what most folks are really interested in is the ideological angle, the hypocrisy of a "moral values" administration granting daily access to the inner sanctum of the West Wing to a gay prostitute, and using him to help promote an anti-gay, family-values, law-and-order agenda.

And it's this aspect that's worth a little nuanced reflection, even as we revel in the delicious irony and fight to get the mainstream news media to take this story seriously.

Now, the rest of this entry strays a fair distance from the straightforward type of discussion one might expect to find on a political blog. Consider yourself warned. From here on in, it's through the looking glass we go.

• • •
The blogs are full of people emphasizing that administration hypocrisy, not Guckert's sexuality, is where the scandal lies here, and whence progressive outrage emanates. Fair enough. And yet, there's more going on than that persuasive but facile formulation would indicate.

There are a number of historical antecedents feeding into this mess, particularly when you consider the persistent injection into the Guckert discussion of ongoing allegations of homosexuality among other prominent Republicans, including McClellan and RNC Chair Ken Mehlman.

One of the more recent, and baroque, such antecedents is the Craig Spence incident, in which a high muckety-muck in the Reagan-Bush I era, who claimed to be working for the CIA, was discovered running a gay, adolescent prostitution ring. Spence had enough political juice to get midnight tours of the White House for his "employees," and he may or may not have been blackmailing major political and media figures in the bargain.

Moving back in time a little farther, there's the J. Edgar Hoover-Clyde Tolson-Roy Cohn axis, in which a cabal of homosexuals helped lead repressive government initiatives undertaken in the name of traditional morality, and targeting, among others, homosexuals.

But the root case that's really functioning as the model here is much older. It's lurking in the background, but it's come to the forefront here and there, specifically in two recent blog comments I've seen. The first comes in response to the aforementioned AmericaBlog story:

I would like to propose a new word for the queer lexicon to easily describe right-wing men who turn out to enjoy dilly-dallying with the boys - y'know, the Mehlman, Cohn, J. Edgar, Matt Drudge, Guckert/Gannon types - meat-eaters in public, and, as it turns out, meat-eaters in private.

Here it is, in honor of the most famous self-hating right-wing faggot who came to a bad end, Ernst Roehm, I would like to coin the word "roehmosexual." I hope no one has beat me to this, 'cause I really want my 15 minutes (seconds?) of fame.

Rob in the PacNW

Congrats, Rob. You got your 15 seconds. (Despite Democrappy's recent mention on Salon.com, you'll have to get quoted on the front page of DailyKos or Eschaton if you want 15 minutes. Sorry.)

Rob's comment refers, of course, to Ernst Roehm, leader of Hitler's SA (the Storm Troopers), who were notoriously homosexual, and sadistic, in their sexual practices. (Hitler had Roehm killed and the SA purged during the "Night of the Long Knives" in 1934.) The SA, and the Nazis in general, have created an historical association of homosexuality, and sexual deviance in general, with political and moral evil - an association gleefully mobilized in the appellation "Roehmosexual."

Which brings me to the second blog comment. This one comes from a rather hateful fellow who goes by the handle "mynym" and writes in dissent to my series on protofascism in Dub's America:

All fascist parties came from socialist parties because fascism is the heretical branch of socialism. Sometimes they would retain the association in their names as in the case of the National Socialists. The foundational agreement between socialists and their heretical branch is philosophic naturalism and immanence.

Religion and Fascism:
(The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
William L. Shirer (Simon and Schuster) 1990 :238-40)

The Pagan Chant Grows Louder.

Most that video was an artifact of a psychological projection typical to socialists.

Besides that, American Leftists pet cause is sexual perversion.

Yet, "...not ten percent of those men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands, were sexually normal...."

What this fellow is trying to say with his awkward sentences and quotations from Shirer's famous chronicle of Nazism, is that fascism equals socialism plus homosexuality. The American left, he argues, gathers the panderers and sodomites into its welcoming, godless bosom just like the Nazis did, while the American right cannot be fascist because of its abiding Christian faith and antipathy towards socialism.

Now, put aside for a moment the fact that fascist governments are capitalist; that fascists hate, persecute and murder socialists; that there are plenty of Christo-fascist organizations in the U.S. today; and that fascism has managed to coexist politically with the church (and vice-versa) in many places and at many times.

And put aside the obvious fact that mynym's politics are the mirror image of Rob's, mine, and yours.

At root, what mynym is doing here is not very different from what one does when one coins a term like "roehmosexual": perpetuating, wittingly or not, a deep-seated conventional wisdom that uses the example of German fascism to posit that sexual "deviance" and bad politics are two peas in the pod of moral evil.

In this vein, I haven't been able to stop thinking about a unique, provocative contribution to the literature on Nazism, that rejects simplistic sexual moralism even as it delves into the psychodynamics of the evil that was German fascism.

I refer to Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies, which examines the world of the Freikorps, the protofascist German militia that midwifed the Nazi movement after World War I, murdered Rosa Luxemburg in 1919, morphed into the SA in the late twenties, and ultimately produced many high-ranking Nazi officials - including not only Roehm, but Rudolph Hoess (not to be confused with Hess), who ran Auschwitz.

The book's difficult to read, and even tougher to excerpt. Fortunately, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote the Foreword, and she's pretty clear:

As a theory of fascism, Male Fantasies sets forth the jarring - and ultimately horrifying - proposition that the fascist is not doing "something else," but doing what he wants to do. When he throws a grenade at a working-class couple who are making love on the grass, he is not taking a symbolic stand against the institution of heterosexuality. When he penetrates a female adversary with a bullet or bayonet, he is not dreaming of rape. What he wants is what he gets, and that is what the Freikorpsmen describe over and over as a "bloody mass": heads with their faces blown off, bodies soaked red in their own blood, rivers clogged with bodies. The reader's impulse is to engage in a kind of mental flight - that is, to "read" the murders as a story about something else, for example, sex... or the Oedipal triangle... or anything to help the mind drift off.

Through painstaking analysis, Theweleit shows that Freikorper culture was defined not by a love of other men but by a fear and hatred of women - their bodies and their sexuality. And so fascism partook of the everyday misogyny of the general culture. "Theweleit," Ehrenreich notes, "refuses to draw a line between the fantasies of the Freikorpsmen and the psychic ramblings of the 'normal' man." (The link between misogyny on the one hand, and fascist hatred on the other, involves an antipathy towards disorder; there's insufficient space to go into the details here.)

Theweleit's analysis demonstrates that the roehmosexual idea - the notion of the "homosexual cabal," with its implied equation of political and sexual aberrance - is a red herring. Psycho-sexual terms like "repression" and "sublimation" seem to refer to the abnormality of the fascist mind. In actuality, Theweleit argues, these terms describe our own desire to repress or sublimate the possibility that the horror of fascism springs from "normal" human desire, rather than something "abnormal" or inhuman.

And so, when The Rude Pundit - who, I hasten to note, is brilliant, f*cking funny and the top blog link on my sidebar - asks:

So, like, between the potential sodomite McClellan, the outed sodomite and GOP Chair Ken Mehlman, and the whoredom of Guckert, would one be wrong to think that the vicious sexual repression of the conservative movement is actually masking a burgeoning buggering brotherhood?

I have to answer - at the risk of splitting hairs, missing the irony, sounding humorless and waxing PC - "Yes, in fact, one would be wrong to think that." Like the Freikorps, today's rightwing warmongers don't lie, oppress and kill because of sexual repression or abnormality. They lie, oppress and kill because they're lying, rightwing warmongers.

So what's the point, finally? Just this: when we gleefully seize upon Jeff Gannon's - and Scott McClellan's, and Ken Mehlman's - sexuality, we're not being homophobic. But we are misunderstanding the nature of evil. We risk underestimating just how culturally powerful (and rooted in misogyny) the triple threat of religious extremism, militaristic neoconservatism, and rightwing journalism might actually be - how it's about violence and oppression in the name of order, rather than the Bacchanalian disorderliness of secret and so-called "deviant" sexual practices.

In the rough-and-tumble of partisan politics, with Social Security and the entire future of the country at stake, we probably can't afford such esoteric notions of what's right and true. But I think it's important to think about them, even if we don't have the luxury of acting upon them.

It's the Social Transformation, Stupid

2005-02-17T02:03:00.000-05:00

The Establishment Misses the Boat on Dean's DNC

In Philadelphia we're blessed with WHYY, one of the original, and still one of the brightest, stars in the NPR galaxy. It's the place, for example, where the legendary Fresh Air is produced. (Don't throw stuff at me, folks. The show annoys the crap out of me too sometimes; but Terry's very good at what she does, even if it's not your cup of herbal tea.)

Fresh Air's younger sibling is Marty Moss-Coane's Radio Times, a call-in show that often features a hybrid panel of local and national guests. This past morning's installment featured the topic, "Is selecting Howard Dean as the face of the Democratic National Committee political suicide for the party?"

Despite the horrid title (another bumbling attempt by public broadcasting to lure listeners), the show contained a good deal of cogent analysis.

The part that's stayed with me, however, is memorable not for how good the discussion was, but rather how telling. Check out this exchange between a caller and one of the guests. First we have June from Camden, NJ calling in, and interacting with Marty, the host. Then we have Marty asking for a reaction from Dick Polman (yes, that's his real name), National Political Correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer (a former Pulitzer machine turned cookie-cutter Knight-Ridder rag, by the way).

June from Camden: Republicans pretend they want Howard Dean, but in reality I think they're scared of him. I think they're scared to death of him and they shake in their boots at the notion that he might be the [Presidential] candidate one day. And I think the media's afraid of him.

Marty: And do you say that because you're a Dean supporter?

June: Absolutely I'm a Dean supporter!

Marty: And what do you think they're afraid of?

June: Well, because he's an unabashed liberal. [Republicans] want to scare the Democrats. And a lot of [Democrats] say, "Oh no, I'm not a liberal," and they shrink from that word. But Howard Dean, he came out and said, "I represent the democratic wing of the Democratic Party" - well, I mean, my heart melted. I fell in love. I sent him money three times.

Let's pause for a moment to reflect. First off, if you could've heard June's tone, phrasing and diction - and if you weren't a dingbat like Marty - you'd realize as I have that June doesn't think Republicans and the press fear Dean because she's a Dean supporter. Rather, it's the converse: she's a Dean supporter because she likes that Dean says things that tend to give powerful Republicans and establishment media types a touch of the agita. (Or, not to put too many words in June's mouth, she likes the way Dean's populism confounds current stereotypes about liberals and holds the potential to splinter parts of the conservative coalition.) Marty's dumb question exemplifies the manner in which the press - even the "liberal" press - tends to delegitimate progressive voices by casting doubts as to their authenticity.

Second, without getting too deep into crass sociological overgeneralization, it's worth noting that June is an African American woman who lives in one of the poorest cities in the whole of these United States, and she sent money to Howard Dean three times. That's not switching to Working Assets for the free pint of Ben & Jerry's. That's making a serious decision to take a real bite out of one's monthly budget. It indicates a level of political conviction that has to be at least a kissing cousin to what Depression babies felt about JFK.

Okay, onward. Marty asks Polman for his professional opinion about Dean's obvious ability to "tap into people's passions." Polman says Dean got the DNC job in large measure because he went around the country fundraising for hundreds of local candidates - "like county supervisors, county sherrifs, pretty much under the media radar. I think a lot of the local party people saw that he wasn't just talk, he was walking the walk." He continues:

By the same token, to refer to what the caller was saying, he can't just go out over the next few years and talk in ways that are going make the liberal base feel good. I think the caller felt good from what he said a couple years ago, the rhetoric. But he can't just do that because the fact of the matter is, in the last election, in the exit polls, 34 percent of people were self-identified conservatives, [while] only something like 21-22 percent were self-identified liberals. The conservative base is much bigger than the liberal base at this point in this country. And so he can't just preach to the choir. He has to be able to speak more broadly.

Now this little moment encapsulates perfectly what the neoliberals have done, not only to the Democratic Party, but to mainstream American political thought and discourse in general. They have exterminated from the national imagination the idea of social transformation, which is the very raison d'etre for progressive politics. As I've written here before, when confronted with a 34-to-21 conservative-liberal balance, you don't win by pandering to the right for a few months every four years. You win by working day in and day out to change that balance over the long term.

This sort of blindness to the possibility - nay, the inevitability, one way or another - of change is all the more ironic because the current, supposedly frozen-in-bedrock status quo is itself the product of massive social change wrought by the right. In fact, had the neocons of the sixties seen the world in the same offhandedly hopeless way Dick Polman does, there never would have been any rightward shift in American politics, and we'd still be living in a New Deal world of Johnson Democrats and Eisenhower Republicans. (Would that it were so!)

Equally noteworthy in this regard is a notion that's been circulating ever since Howard Dean's DNC candidacy became a reality: namely, that Dean's election as DNC Chair means relatively little because the Presidential candidate really dictates the complexion and direction of the party. There are numerous examples, but this column at Slate remains a classic. Entitled "Empty Chair," the piece advises us to "Stop pretending the DNC can change the party" and calls the DNC chair "Washington's political eunuch." Recounting the frustrations and limitations of being DNC chair in what the author admits has been a DLC-dominated era, the piece assumes exactly what Dick Polman assumed on Radio Times: that things are the way they are and will never change.

Forgotten in the presentism of this smug little formulation is the national political and ideological dominance of Lee Atwater's RNC, even over and above Bush I, who was President at the time. Or the influence wielded by Newt Gingrich's early '90s faux shadow government just prior to the Republicans winning the House.

The point is, nary a thought has been given, in the precincts of the Democrat and media establishments, to the idea that the end of the DLC nightmare will afford not only the voicing of different political views at the head of the Party, but also the creation of different mechanisms for organizing, fundraising and recruiting - many of which Dean has already begun, as Polman himself explained on Radio Times. In short, the fact that the DNC Chairmanship hasn't mattered much in the recent past doesn't mean that Dean won't transform it into something that does.

It's easy to be right most of the time - just make the most boring and pessimistic predictions possible. But, as the centrists and the gatekeepers of the Conventional Wisdom seem about to prove, if you keep betting against change, one of these days you're going to look really, really dumb, and no one will remember or care about all the times when you were right.

Some time ago I wrote about how, under the influence of the DLC, "social justice has become a dead letter in the Democratic Party, and therefore in mainstream U.S. politics in general." Now, with the DLC itself poised to fall upon history's trash heap, we may yet see the most fundamental change of all: the revival of the idea of progressive social change.

Democratic Pulse: The Beat Goes On

2005-02-16T03:00:00.000-05:00

A Spectre is Haunting the Party... and It's about F*cking Time

Here's something I didn't think we'd see, at least not so soon. The mainstream press is talking about a newfound unity in the Democratic Party and among fellow-traveler activists. "Democrats Seek to Outmaneuver Republicans by Imitating Their Strategy" is a column by Ronald Brownstein in the L.A. Times that documents an emergent, Republican-style political discipline among the Dems. This, as you know, is something I, along with many other liberal and left bloggers, have advocated repeatedly (i.e. here, here and here). The piece speaks of leading Congressional Dems promoting "scorched earth opposition to Bush's central proposals," and notes the possible reemergence of actual ideas and principles in Party strategy:

Bush's [electoral] success is provoking more Democrats to challenge the party's central electoral assumption of the 1990s. Clinton and his allies in the "New Democrat" movement (like [Al] From, the founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council) argued Democrats could win only by devising an agenda that appealed both to their base and moderate swing voters.

But Bush led a GOP 2004 sweep while pursuing a staunchly ideological agenda that polls showed many moderates resisted. He remained competitive with centrist voters — by stressing leadership and strength — and won mostly by generating enormous turnout from his base.

What's especially gratifying - and amusing, and promising - is the fear and loathing of a lefty boogeyman among the Al From DLC types in the face of this newfound backbone in the Party of Jackson:

Plenty of Democrats still worry that this drive for greater unity and ideological consistency, if it becomes a lurch left, could hurt the party by repelling voters in red states whom the next nominee will need to win the White House. For now, these doubters are reassuring each other that a presidential candidate determined to court the center (paging Sen. Hillary Clinton!) can redirect the party in 2008.

When there's fear of a leftwing takeover of, well, anything, you know things are looking up. We shouldn't delude ourselves about how big the actual shift will be, but something is most definitely better than nothing in these rotten times. The point is that not only is the Party getting its act together, but it's doing so under an ideological banner that is - after two excruciating decades - not that of the neoliberals. How sweet it is.

Doctor, We've Got a Pulse

2005-02-14T12:11:00.000-05:00

An Encouraging Sign from Dean's DNC

It's way too early to say anything definitive about the Democratic National Committee under newly elected Chairman Howard Dean.

But I'm struck by the almost complete congruence between his five-point plan for the Party, and Rick Perlstein's account, in his brilliant book on Barry Goldwater and the rise of the neocon movement, of how the Right took over the Republican Party. To wit:

1. Show up! Democrats should never concede a single state, a single district, or a single voter to the Republicans. We must be active and compete in all 50 states and work with the state parties to build a true national party.

In the early 1960s, the new head of the Republican National Committee poured money into Operation Dixie, a state-by-state organizing effort to make the Party competitive in the South for the first time since Reconstruction. You can get details in an earlier Democrappy dispatch; but suffice it to say that in the midterm elections of 1962, Republican Congressional candidates garnered more than three times the votes in Southern states than they had earned in 1958 and laid the foundation for the Party's current dominance in that part of the country.

2. The success of the national party depends directly on the success of the state parties — we must better integrate our operations by:
Having the DNC pay the salary of each state party executive director to help ensure that the state parties have adequate funds.

Collectively building and sharing supporter lists between the national and state parties.

Recruiting, training, and encouraging candidates to run for office at every level — building tomorrow's farm team from the ground up.

Actively grow local Democratic committees and communities by working with neighborhood activists who can reach out in their communities and enable the grassroots to support state and local candidates.

Maintaining a permanent campaign in every state. We need to establish an ongoing, active presence, which does not have to be recreated every four years for four months.

As noted above, the revitalization of the Party happened precisely through the state parties. And the neocon movement took and maintained power at the state level through precisely the type of coordination Dean's now prescribing for the Dems. In Operation Dixie and other initiatives, the RNC paid young organizers to take over moribund state Party operations. The state Parties coordinated with - and in many ways were sustained and pressured by - youth and student organizations, citizens' committees, auxiliaries, and other grassroots formations that cultivated a full-time political culture. It was this culture (later supplemented by evangelical church congregations in many communities) that produced neocon candidates for school boards, city and township offices, state legislatures, and so on - many of whom have since moved up to national office.

3. Set core principles that define the Democratic Party and what we stand for and take a bottom-up approach to the development of the Party's message.

The neocons worried themselves not one bit about appealing to moderates in their Party. They did learn (the hard way, with Goldwater's resounding defeat in '64) how to message and how to frame their issues for a wider public. But they understood that their core principles were not a sales pitch that would help them get elected. Rather, their core principles were the reason they were in politics in the first place. They wanted - and if they were to obtain true, nationwide power, they needed - to change the political complexion of the country. Their task was not to slide by and be deemed acceptable by voters on a candidate-by-candidate basis. Rather, their task was to persuade voters that the neocon agenda was the right one. In this they succeeded admirably.

4. Use cutting-edge Internet and other technologies to fundraise, organize, and communicate with our supporters.

Beginning with Goldwater's U.S. Senate campaign in 1958, neocon operatives pioneered marketing techniques virtually unknown in advertising at the time, let alone in political campaigning. Goldwater's campaign manager Stephen Shadegg took his cue from Mao Tse-tung: "Give me just two or three men in a village, and I will take the village." Writes Perlstein:

Shadegg's version of the technique was to pool the names of everyone in the state with whom he and his staff could claim personal association. Researchers uncovered each name's banking, church, business, lodge, media, and family connections to create a massive card file. People on the list got a "personal" letter from the senator about some piece of legislation that was threatening to them. When recipients replied, they were added to the names on the bulk mailing list that received various campaign letters "personally" addressed from their new friend. This produced over three thousand people loyally working in concert for the campaign, none aware of any other's efforts -- spreading the right rumors, sending bits of intelligence to the office, setting up events and selling to their friends. Forty years later, labeled "one-to-one marketing" and aided by artificial intelligence technology, this approach would be advertising's cutting edge. Back in the late 1950s such practices were unheard of. (pp. 39-40)

These techniques constituted the pre-internet-era version of email, viral marketing and Dean-style "Meet-ups." They preceded the more well-known advertising innovations of Lyndon Johnson's and Richard Nixon's 1964 and 1968 campaigns by several years, and they were much more integrated into on-the-ground organizing.

5. Strengthen our political institutions and leadership institutes to promote our leaders and our ideas — these organizations must work together in a coordinated and integrated fashion to elect Democrats at every level, so that we can take this country back.

One need only scan the Op-Ed page of any major newspaper to know that the neocons have been funding think tanks, professorships and scholarships for the last half-century. Unlike charity oriented liberal foundations, rightwing foundations have recognized the importance of funding intellectual communities and ideological change, and they certainly have gotten their money's worth.

Now, some of the stuff in Dean's Plan is fairly obvious, and for now it's just rhetoric (good luck ousting the corrupt, reactionary Chairpeople of many of the state party operations, Doctor). But it's already a damn sight better than Terry McAuliffe's corporate, PR-style, DLC-infused version of the Party.

Post-SOTU: Dub Drops Down, Dean Days Dawn

2005-02-13T11:39:00.000-05:00

Some potentially encouraging news about the SOTU's effect (via Daily Kos).

Now go tell the good doctor what we should do next.

The Devil's in... Everything

2005-02-11T11:51:00.000-05:00

Budget Follies, Part One

"Back on September 11, terrorists attacked our metropolitan cores, two of America's great cities. They did that because they knew that was where they could do the most damage and weaken us the most ... . Years later, we are given a budget proposal by our commander in chief, the president of the United States. And with a budget ax, he is attacking America's cities. He is attacking our metropolitan core." (Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, via The Washington Post)

Social Security is a nice enough flim-flam, but there's quite a lot going on in the dank, dark corners of the administration's policy house as well.

It's hard to track some of these items on the radar, what with Social Security, the Inaugural, the State of the Union, the DUI coverup man as Attorney General, and Condi's new religion of All Diplomacy All the Time.

Nevertheless, these budget "details" are where Mephistopheles hangs his hat; and so today we focus on as telling an instance as you're likely to find of what the Ownership Society means in terms of facts on the ground.

Case in point: Dub wants to "consolidate" 18 economic and community development programs into a "Strengthening America's Communities Initiative." Seems reasonable - except for the minor detail that the new program's pockets will be fully 35 percent shallower than its predecessors'. This $2 billion in cost savings is of course a major motivation for the consolidation in the first place - but it's only one of three. Herein the other two, whence we learn everything we need to know about the Ownership Society.

1. Cities Blow
The lion's share of the $2 billion cut is proposed for the Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which faces a 40 percent body blow (about $1.8 billion) to its $4.7 billion budget.

For the last 30 years, the CDBG program has provided general development grants to state and municipal governments, allowing cities to fund numerous initiatives - including affordable homeownership, health clinics, recreation centers, day-care facilities, literacy programs and more. If you've lived in a city anytime during the last 30 years, your life has been touched, directly or indirectly, by CDBG funding. The very fabric - not to mention the fate - of the modern American city is inextricably tied to the CDBG program.

And I should know. When I'm not the Dark Knight of blogging, I preside over the board of directors of my local neighborhood association. In Philadelphia, such associations form part of a comprehensive urban network supported by CDBG funding, helping to build housing; promote commercial development (and, just as important, control runaway development); provide first-time home buyer counseling, job referrals and low income heating assistance; fight nuisance bars; organize town watch patrols; and generally do all those things that make a neighborhood into a community, and that make life in a big city truly livable.

But, as is always the case with this administration, there's more. Even cut by 40 percent, the CDBG program would remain, by far, the largest of the federal development initiatives. Despite this fact, however, the new, consolidated "Strengthening America's Communities Initiative" would be taken from HUD and absorbed into - wait for it - the Department of Commerce, whose current economic development budget (about $325 million) is less than one-tenth the size of HUD's. Imagine Tom's of Maine buying out Proctor & Gamble, and you get the picture.

This ridiculously inverted movement of funding would take urban-oriented, city friendly HUD out of the picture, thereby making it much more difficult for mayors and other urban interests to obtain a fair share of federal funding for cities.

And so this "consolidation" is rather transparently an assault on the nation's cities, as indicated by Martin O'Malley's comments above. Not surprisingly, O'Malley's since been publicly savaged by the Republicans, his own party, and the press. But the fact is, he's right. This administration, like its Party in general, hates cities.

And no wonder. The GOP's national constituency doesn't include cities - particularly the racially diverse, poor and moderate-income urban populations most directly served by HUD programs - and hasn't for some time. Most of the Blue States are in fact Blue Cities surrounded by Red (or in some cases Purple) suburbs and small towns. The up-and-coming type of development in the country is the outlying exurb, which is not nearly as tied to or dependent upon cities as conventional suburbs are. And in November Bush won 97 of the 100 fastest-growing exurban counties. (It is worth mentioning, though, that not every administration is quite so thuggish and vindictive in its patronage; many a President has realized that he's supposed to be the President of everyone, not just the people who voted for him. Dub, however, remains blissfully unburdened by such a quaint notion.)

2. Neoliberalism Rules
HUD, explains the Post,

has evolved into an agency designed to support urban interests and low-income citizens, while Commerce and Labor are more receptive to business needs. ... One White House official agreed that HUD programs have more of a community focus, while the Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration is more interested in economic growth.

With all the talk of the neocon takeover of the government, it's worth pointing out - again - that the Ownership Society is less a neoconservative policy rubric than a neoliberal one. As the Post reporter evidently grasped, the fundamental goal of the Ownership Society - like all neoliberal initiatives - is to replace social equality with economic growth as the driving force of government policy, the primary object of government funding, and the main repository of national endeavor and purpose.

In this vision, government power and resources cease to promote community development and social stability, and instead become oriented towards the direct subsidy of private profit, based on a blind faith in the market. And, given the abysmal failure of such market-driven community development programs as Enterprise Zones and Empowerment Zones in cities during the 1980s and '90s, it's about as blind as blind faith can get. Spin notwithstanding, the issue is not about efficiency or effectiveness. Both HUD-style and Commerce-style programs have their effective and bureaucratic aspects; it's just that government subsidies of failed private enterprises are called "risks," while subsidies of flawed public programs are called "failures." Rather, the issue is simply to virally propagate neoliberalism throughout the social body.

The root priority is to align government as closely as possible with the market, so that facilitating private profit is transformed from a means to an end, into an end in itself. When government stops working to ameliorate the worst abuses and inequalities of the market, and instead works to make the market more market-like, the results are a massive increase in social and economic inequality and - less tangibly but just as importantly - a weakening of community spirit and social contract that does untold long-term damage to the health of our society.

And for what? In the end, the financial impact of all these proposed cuts - not just the ones I've been discussing, but the total of all proposed domestic cuts in Jethro's FY06 budget - amounts to just six percent of the deficit, as against the 50 percent of the deficit created by his tax cuts.

So write, fax or email your Congressional Representatives (House; Senate) and tell them that the "Strengthening America's Communities Initiative" is a crock. Tell them that Community Development Block Grant funding must be preserved, and must stay at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Tell them this is a priority, and that you'll be watching.

Why are you still here? Go, now! Git!

Us Hate Environment. This Policy Am Ugly Nice.

2005-02-08T15:31:00.000-05:00

Dateline: Bizarro World

Consider: You've just proposed cutting the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by almost a billion dollars. And the lion's share of the cut comes from gutting a fund that helps cities replace outdated sewage systems. What do you do next?

Why, you give a speech on... the need for a comprehensive energy policy. And you give that speech in... Detroit.

Welcome to the world of the Karl Rove mandate. This morning, Jethro gave a speech on his proposed FY2006 budget (more on which in future entries) to the Detroit Economic Club (ranked the "#6 Speaking Venue in the Country," in case you were wondering). Looking every bit the part, he used his bully pullpit to press Congress to pass legislation codifying his energy policy.

We must, he said, have an energy policy that increases domestic production, develops alternative fuels, and promotes conservation. And we can do this, he emphasized, with that smug smirk we've come know so well, "in an environmentally friendly way."

Now, he's right, naturally. We certainly can do that in an environmentally friendly way. We can, but of course we won't. Because he plans to promote the production of the following:

Clean Coal - which is not so much a type of coal or a production process as it is an oxymoron, and as such has no more ability to produce energy than, say, an aphorism or a synecdoche. You can, however, write "clean coal" on a piece of paper, dip the paper in wood alcohol, and use it to start a fire in your fireplace.
Ethanol - a corn-based gasoline substitute that uses as much oil to produce at it's meant to conserve, which pretty much limits its usefulness to... winning the Iowa caucus in a Presidential primary.
Clean, Safe Nuclear Energy - a form of nuclear energy that produces no harmful byproducts and poses no real risk of catastrophic meltdown, owing to the fact that it doesn't f*cking exist.

Lest you think Karl Rove's marionette has gone and become a raving tree-hugger, never fear. He also took care to revive the central energy strategy from his first term: drilling for oil - sorry, "exploring" - in the Arctic Wildlife National Refuge. (Take action on this issue HERE.)

There's plenty to say about the political philosophy embodied in the proposed budget and the farcical "policies" of this administration - not least of which are (a) a pervasive anti-urbanism, and (b) a pervasive desire to convert all government support of social development into private development.

But in regards to the Bush energy plan, there's little need for such analysis. It's very simple: if you set about trying to craft an energy policy less environmentally responsible, and more detrimental to the long-term national interest, you'd have a hell of a time. It's the exact opposite of what an energy plan should be.

In the texts, Bizarro is often referred to as the Thing of Steel. Other texts call him a blundering menace, "a grotesque, imperfect double" of Superman, a "pathetic, grotesque creature," and ... "the imperfect, unliving duplicate of Superman who does things in a crazily mixed-up manner."

Bizarro, however, thinks of himself somewhat more generously, as the "most famous monster in history," the all-time "champion monster," the "most famous monster of all," and the "scariest monster" of all time. However, he sometimes sees himself as others do: "Me unhappy!" he declares sadly ... "Me don't know difference between right and wrong - good and evil!" (Superman Through the Ages)

Deux Ex Machination: The Boogeyman in the Vatican

2005-02-06T15:49:00.000-05:00

Today we devote ourselves to that most solemn of rites in our national religion. It's still a Sunday, though, and so the other sects soldier on. This morning Pope John Paul II delivered a blessing for the world from the hospital bed where he recovers from a death-defying bout with the flu, which he caught despite having been vaccinated.

It's not yet clear whether his improving condition is anything more than a figment of the Vatican PR machine's rather fertile imagination. But perhaps I'm just a cynic, hailing as I do from the town where they boo Santa Claus and pelt him with snowballs. Regardless, The Holy See's got a variety of chronic illnesses, and it's safe to say the sun's getting pretty low on the horizon.

So now's the perfect time to start inoculating yourself against the inevitable onslaught of tributes and hagiographies that will beset us when the Great Man (who has, to his credit, spoken against poverty and war) finally shuffles off this mortal coil. And there's no better way to get your shot than to direct your attention to the most rotten, venal, FUBAR thing this Pope has done: give credibility and power to Opus Dei, a rightwing Catholic organization with a fascist history and a cult-like structure.

Opus Dei attained notoriety in much of the world in 2002 when the Pope canonized its founder, Spanish priest and fascist sympathizer Josemaria Escriva.

Here in America, where we don't pay attention to such trivialities as "international politics," we know Opus Dei through its appearance in Dan Brown's inane, mystifyingly popular The DaVinci Code, without a doubt the most overrated non-diet book in the history of history.

But make no mistake: Opus Dei's villainy isn't fictional, and its status in the Church isn't just symbolic. John Paul II has elevated it to the highest levels of the Vatican government, and has granted the organization unprecedented autonomy within it.

One sign of just how scary Opus Dei is, is that it's surprisingly difficult to find critical information on it via the internet. The entry at the normally reliable Wikipedia.org, for example, has been hijacked by the group's members, and reads like the world's most defensive press release.

Fortunately a dedicated - and pretty fair-minded - fellow named Franz Schaefer has compiled the Unofficial Opus Dei Web site, which contains a wealth of information and helpful links. The site's FAQ is, in itself, a wonderful source of information, including a summary of Opus Dei's history, philosophy, positive and negative characteristics, and activities in multiple countries - as well as a nice capsule summary of fascism (a subject that comes up in the same sentence as "Opus Dei" with surprising frequency).

So check out Herr Schaefer's site, FAQ and links, as well as the Opus Dei Awareness Network.

And be sure to check under the bed before you go to sleep tonight.

For Your Viewing, um, Pleasure

2005-02-04T22:59:00.000-05:00

Check out a lovely new Flash movie on our So-called Fascist Life:

BushFlash

And, for purposes of review, our own, less entertaining but rather more nuanced three-part Democrappy special on the very same:
It's a Fascist, Fascist, Fascist, Fascist World (Maybe)
More Fun with ProtoFascism
Bush's America: 64.3% Fascist (give or take)
And, as we contemplate the corporate wolves at the door of Social Security:

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group." (FDR)

SOTU 1.3: The Democrats... Don't Do Sh-t

2005-02-03T23:11:00.000-05:00

Is it me or does the SOTU seem like it happened a month ago already?

At any rate, as the horror ebbs, to be replaced with Dub's traveling Privatization Show through Montana and Dakota, I offer a few quick impressions of last night's Democratic "Response" to the SOTU. (There's got to be a better word than "response" to describe this farcical non-event; perhaps the British "cockup" will do the trick.)

The only real bright spot for Democratic Majority Leaders Nancy Pelosi (House) and Harry Reid (Senate), I thought, came in the area of Reid's turns of phrase, specifically:

Dems want to defend the "guaranteed benefit" American workers have earned with SSI, Reid said, while Bush is promising a "guaranteed benefit cut."
Bush's run-up of debt has resulted in what Reid called a "birth tax" that costs $36k for every new child born in America.
The extra $2 trillion in debt for Social Security privatization constitutes "an immoral burden on our children."

Other than that, it was all the sound of crickets chirping. Pelosi, for whom I generally have a good deal of regard, got stuck with the foreign policy part of the response, which was so hard-hitting I can't remember a single word of it.

Moreover, Reid introduced his bit with an unbelievably poorly related anecdote, in which he revealed that he comes from a small town called ~~Hope~~ Searchlight in ~~Arkansas~~ Nevada. Evidently this town has only one restaurant, and this fact apparently makes anything said inside that restaurant into an allegory of the American Dream. Or something.

The one truly interesting failure of Reid's speech was his call for a "Marshall Plan for America," which he pitched as a successor to the Highway system of the 1950s and the internet of the 1970s. He said we need a national effort to "build the next economy." He neglected to describe, beyond the invocation of the word "technology" like a tantric mantra, what that economy might look like - because of course he has no f-cking idea. Nor does anyone else. And nor did anyone in the '50s or the '70s: those past infrastructural investments were made primarily for reasons of national defense, not economic growth. So he promoted a vaguely Keynesian agenda - when no one knows what Keynesianism was anymore - to build something he could not describe even in the faintest outlines, via a "national effort" that sounded very much like the sort of government program the Dems regularly get flayed for by the Republicans and the news media.

Now, I'm all for a revival of Keynesian, New Deal government. But speaking in vague, historically ill-informed platitudes about "funding new technologies," well, that'll vanquish our foes on The West Wing - but out here in the desert of the real, with deficits exploding, Social Security being hunted to extinction, and poll respondents still reporting that the war on terror is Job One, that dog ain't gonna hunt. At least not without a much more sophisticated pitch and well-developed agenda to back it up.

Finally, Reid said Americans have a choice: give breaks to big corporations, or say "we're all God's children" and promote opportunity for all. Once again, the Dems manage to take two winners - economic populism and the G-word - and put them together in a way that makes them sound totally inauthentic on both counts.

In the end, Pelosi and Reid did accomplish one thing: they proved Democrats can be just as wooden and ineffective as the Republicans were in their SOTU responses when Clinton was President. Remember the time Bob Dole did the Republican response? The E.D. meds were working that night. He was stiff as a board.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Polls

2005-02-03T13:31:00.000-05:00

Asstard, n. sl. An individual or entity acting in a way indicative of diminished mental capacity, but retaining requisite culpable intent.

About that CNN/USA Today SOTU "snap poll" I noted yesterday? Turns out CNN's on-air talent neglected to mention one little detail last night:

"Of the 485 people surveyed, 52 percent identified themselves as Republicans, 25 percent as Democrats and 22 percent as independents.

"The strong positives for the president's policies," says a story today at CNN.com, "may in part be a reflection of the poll's sample." Ya think?

SOTU 1.2: All You Need to Know, in One Paragraph

2005-02-03T10:53:00.000-05:00

"We have to move ahead with courage and honesty," said Dub in his best Orwellian pose. Here's the inimitable Rude Pundit on the subject:
"[T]he Rude Pundit is sick of hearing how 'bold' is every fucking thing Bush proposes. If George Bush took a shit in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Orrin Hatch would appear on Fox 'News' to declare how bold a shit it was and how mighty a loaf was pinched out and how are the Democrats going to deal with a President who is unafraid to take a dump with a stone Lincoln staring at him. It is not 'bold' to target gays for isolation and denigration in the Constitution; it is not 'bold' to cut domestic programs that mainly help those in poverty so that massive tax cuts can be made 'permanent;' it is not 'bold' to say that you want to create a Social Security system that no longer guarantees a retirement benefit for seniors and that cuts benefits to others; it is not 'bold' to hinder scientific developments under the veil of 'protecting life;' it is not 'bold' to declare that that we should make sure that people on death row are actually guilty; it is not 'bold' to imply that you will use military force to impose your political will on other nations. If this is what passes for 'bold' in this America, then, indeed, cowards should hold their heads high and declare that their pusillanimity is actually 'bold' retreat. Or maybe such 'bold' people will just ink their fingers purple in solidarity with Iraqi 'voters.' Or the truly 'bold' will dress in purple (like Condi)."

Amen brother.

SOTU 1.1: Rapid Response

2005-02-03T01:42:00.000-05:00

Get the facts and take action at the Social Security "Rapid Response" page.

SOTU: A Drama in Five Acts

2005-02-03T01:09:00.000-05:00

Herein my rather disjointed and fragmented notes on the State of the Union. But hey - I took the bullet for you by sitting through this unwatchable excrescence, so deal.

First off, I should note that the speech lasted about 53 minutes and consisted of two main parts: a first section on domestic issues running about a half-hour and focusing in large measure on Social Security; and a second section on freedom's march around the world, lasting about 20 minutes and focusing in large measure on the Middle East.

And FYI, the CNN/USA Today "snap poll" taken just after the speech ended showed that 60 percent of respondents had a "very positive" impression of the speech. More folks liked his '01 and '02 efforts (66 and 74 percent, respectively), while fewer liked his '03 and '04 ones (50 and 45 percent). So on balance it looks like Jethro's got about half his groove back.

Now, onto the drama.

I. Affect and Images

Speaking of the polling bounce, I'm betting that something between 99 and 101 percent of it came from one moment: the mother of a slain American marine embracing an Iraqi woman who voted in the elections this past Sunday. Its emotional impact is undeniable, despite its appalling contrivance. But since it will no doubt be on television every 12 seconds for the next few days, you'll be totally sick of it by the weekend.
I hate to be pedantic, but it's been four and half years, and this clown is Leader of the Free World, and he still can't find anyone to teach him how to pronounce "nuclear." The mind reels.
There's something about Dub's smile that just ain't right. It's not the stupidity of it per se, or even the arrogance. It's that he put on this sh-t-eating grin virtually every time he got applause. It betrays a certain simplistic, even infantile understanding of who he is supposed to be as President, and what his relationship to the Congress, and the public, is supposed to be. Just as he has interpreted votes of 49 percent and 51 percent as mandates, he mistakes applause for some weird combination of existential adoration and political carte blanche. It reminds one of Mussolini strutting and preening on the balcony as the crowd applauds his comical nationalist ravings about a new empire.
In the midst of the section on Social Security, he said, "I will listen to anyone who has a good idea to offer" - at which point Cheney (sitting behind him in his role as President of the Senate), visibly smirked and chuckled. I'm way past being scandalized by the gall of such a gesture; but I remain surprised that he'd do it so openly in front of all those cameras at the State of the Union. Perhaps he forgot himself, lost in thought: "Why would we listen to Democrats in Congress when we don't even listen to our own State Department?"
I'm confident my reaction to the following was the direct opposite of what you'll be reading and viewing in the mainstream news media over the next few days, but I found the ink-dipped index fingers of many Republican Congresspeople - in solidarity with Iraqi voters, who got their fingers inked to avoid fraud - to be crass and repulsive. To see these overfed, over-privileged, overly pink rightwingers waving their stained fingers in the air with the arrogance only a neocon can muster... well, let's just say it was a good thing I'd eaten an early dinner.
Beginning a brief section urging Senate Democrats to stop holding up votes on his judicial nominees, Dub said that as President it's his job to nominate responsible judges, not judges who "legislate from the bench." Then - and I swear I'm not making this up - he winked. To whom I don't know. But he did it just the same.

II. Language and Framing

The speech was framed in an interestingly generational way. Our parents, he said, left us a secure world. Now, as we - the President's generation - "look in the mirror and see a little grey," and as we see our children growing up, "we have to ask ourselves about the state of their union." Under this rubric, he introduced the "values" portion of the speech by alluding to his own colored past, noting how, like many in his generation, he'd come back to "family and faith" after "a long journey" (i.e. DUIs and lots of coke).
He introduced his support for a Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage by saying it was government's job to "lay the foundation for a free society."
Similarly, he introduced his desire to make his debt-inducing tax cuts permanent by thanking the Congress for joining him in embracing fiscal discipline.
He said we must make our economy "flexible, innovative and competitive." Cliched words, to be sure, but another indication of the neoliberalism that lies underneath, and coexists with, the better-publicized neoconservatism of the administration.
Intending to indirectly reference stem cell research, he said he will "work to ensure that human life is never bought or sold as a commodity." So I suppose we'll soon be seeing administration proposals to outlaw international adoption and eliminate capitalist social relations.
He framed a call for reduced government regulation in terms of affirmative action. Small business is the main avenue to success, he said, especially for women and minorities, and so we need to get government regulation off the back of small business. He also said we need to put a stop to "irresponsible class action suits" and "frivolous asbestos claims." How these - particularly the former - affect small businesses I'm not sure, but hey - it was his speech, not mine.

III. Surprise! (Sort of)

He said Saudi Arabia could set an example by increasing the participation of its people in governance, and that the "great, proud country of Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East," could set an example by "leading the way toward democracy." These were not-so-subtle digs at the dictatorships of the Saudi Royal family and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. I should note that I don't think this was an attempt to begin "regime change" in these countries. I think it was the administration's way of saying to the Saudis and Mubarak, "We pay you good money to run client states for us, and you're doing a sh-tty job. Now put in some reforms to placate your dissidents before they sweep in governments full of imams and intellectuals who hate us even more than you do."
He said he wants to increase the size of Pell Grants. Of late this program, which is the main way poor folks attend college, has been cut significantly. Assuming he's not just creating fewer, larger, grants but is actually proposing to increase the pool of available money, this is a welcome reversal.
He wants to fund a federal training program for defense lawyers in capital cases. One certainly can see this as a move to relegitimate a delegitimated capital punishment system. But it was surprising to hear this President say that everyone deserves not only a defense but a competent defense.
He continues to openly push his bracero/gastarbeiter program for immigration, to the chagrin of the rightwingers who run the Republican machine, but to the joy of the corporate honchos who bankroll it.

IV. Social Security
This was the biggie, taking up a significant chunk of the first two-thirds of the speech (the final third was devoted to foreign policy). From where I sit, Dub didn't do much to help himself here. But we'll see how the news media and the fainthearted faction react.

And again, be sure to go over to ThereIsNoCrisis.com for concise explanations of the Social Security situation, and detailed, factual, "rapid response" refutations of Dub's SOTU lies and misrepresentations.

When he got to the heart of the crisis argument (including the claim that Social Security will go bankrupt in 2042), numerous Democrats in the audience heckled him, yelling "No! No!" repeatedly. It's a purely symbolic gesture, of course, but it must be stressed how totally beyond the pale this sort of thing is for a State of the Union. It just doesn't happen. Even at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, some Republicans sat with their arms folded while Clinton delivered the State of the Union; but they never heckled him. So hopefully tonight's reaction is a heartening indicator of how dedicated Democrats (or at least many Democrats) are to fighting the good fight on this issue.
Speaking of which, Dub really tried to bait the hook, citing ideas that have been batted around by Democrats in the past (raising the retirement age, changing the way benefits are calculated, and so on). The idea here - in addition to looking bipartisan - is to invite Democrats to an "open" discussion about how to "reform" Social Security. The trick, of course, is that if you engage in the discussion, you've lost the battle. Social Security doesn't need to be reformed.
He tried to create the impression that opponents of privatization think the program's bankruptcy is "a small matter." This, I think, fell flat.
He tried to drive a wedge between younger and older workers, promising that Social Security will not be changed at all for workers over the age of 55. Again, I doubt this will have much effect, especially because the AARP - which represents over-55 workers - has already come out firmly against privatization.
He also said that our society has undergone changes - notably, the increase in life expectancy - that "the founders of Social Security could not have foreseen." This, like most of what comes out of his fool mouth on this subject, was a straight-up lie. The program's designers expected people to live longer in the future; in fact, their predictions were almost exactly on-target.
He said he wants to "solve the financial problems of Social Security once and for all." In this one area, he was telling the truth. Killing the program (through privatization and benefit cuts) will indeed provide a final solution.

V. And Finally...

"We have to move ahead with courage and honesty."

(Coming soon: a brief recap of the somnambulent Democratic Response.)

High Noon, at 9 (6 Pacific)

2005-02-02T16:35:00.000-05:00

Whatever else it may be, tonight's State of the Union address represents a pivotal moment in the battle for Social Security, "the transcendent issue today for the Democratic party - indeed, for the country as a whole," as Josh Marshall so aptly puts it.

For now, head on over to ThereIsNoCrisis.com for the 411 on the SOTU.

And have a refresher on the basic facts, and the tangled web, here (as well as here, here and here), at Democrappy.

Talkin' 'bout a - Oh Never Mind

2005-02-02T01:18:00.000-05:00

A Quickie From the Dept. of It's Even Worse Than You Thought

The New York Times has an article posted on the teaching - or, more to the point, non-teaching - of evolution in our public schools these days.

Relying on anecdotal but apparently wide-ranging research, the article includes the following tidbits:

Many teachers ignore evolution in the classroom for fear of getting in hot water with their principals.
Many avoid discussing it for fear of creationists organizing protests.
Many don't have time to cover everything in the curriculum, and so they drop evolution because it's convenient to exclude the controversial stuff, all else being equal.
Some don't formally teach a unit on evolution, but instead sneak it in by bringing it up occasionally in other (presumably related) discussions. "I don't force things," one teacher says. "I don't argue with students about it."
Some won't use the word evolution, employing toothless euphemisms like "change over time."
Many "fly under the radar" by saying evolution is controversial even when they know that, as a matter of science, it is not.

And finally, the skull-crushingly ironic bit that makes you want to take a hostage:

the fear that attends the teaching of evolution makes it impossible to know just how many teachers are giving in to the fear. For "political reasons," says a researcher, "nobody will do a survey among randomly selected public school children and parents to ask just what is being taught in science classes."

Veyismir. That's a hell of a long way from my public school days, when evolution was taught openly not only as scientific fact, but in its full historicity, as a crucial advance in enlightment reason over the well-intentioned foolishness of Lamarckian inheritance.

What's so disturbing about these examples, of course, is that in all cases evolution is part of the curricula; it's just not actually taught. Or it's taught in a way that guarantees it will carry little weight.

When teachers use euphemisms; when they feel they can't argue with students about ideas; when they fear teaching a subject or ignore it because it's "too much trouble"; when they say things about it that they don't even believe: that's beyond censorship. It's tyranny.

Which brings us to the punchline of the Times piece: the most recent survey available says 53 percent of Americans believe in evolution. This is about 30(!) points lower than the average belief-rate in all other industrialized nations. "Even in socially conservative, predominantly Catholic countries like Poland," the article reports, "perhaps 75 percent of people surveyed accept evolution." Two popes - John Paul II and Pius XII (who apparently got at least one thing right) - "have endorsed the idea the evolution and religion can coexist."

So putting all this together, you have to ask yourself, How on earth can so many Americans be so stupid?

And as soon as you ask the question, you have to come to the realization that it's the wrong question.

Stupidity and faith (not the same thing) do not account for the sort of intellectual fascism being visited upon our nation's public school teachers. This isn't a question of warring beliefs. It's a question of political insurgency. The religious right is ascendant, and a rigid adherence to creationism serves its political objectives. Despite the relatively low percentage of Americans who believe in evolution, the Times explains, the 53 percent figure represents the highest on record (at least for the organization that did the polling).

So there's no evidence that the belief in creationism is rising in any organic or religious way. This is good news of a sort, although it does provide a rather vivid sense of just how venal our opposition is in this regard.

What the right has succeeded in doing, then, is not so much to persuade more people that evolution is false. Rather, they've persuaded more people who believe in creationism that creationism is a political issue. Insofar as they promote creationism to others, they do so not simply as a transcendent truth from the bible, but rather as an affirmation of a whole way of life, and a whole way of looking at the world - religiously, yes, but also politically and culturally. It's not that these people promote censorious politics because they believe in creation. Rather, they proclaim a belief in creation because it suits their political aims.

The recent tarting up of creationism as "intelligent design" in order to make it look like a scientific theory is evidence of this.

This, one would think, makes it abundantly clear that we have to go on the offensive on evolution's behalf. This isn't about respecting anyone's beliefs. It's about the grandest of all American traditions: resisting tyranny.

In this vein I direct you to an entry I wrote some time ago, in which I recommend that we run aggressively pro-evolution school board candidates across the country. And I recommend that we do so in districts where evolution already enjoys substantial support. Just because people believe in evolution, it doesn't mean they're primed to act politically on its behalf. So we should stop taking pro-evolution sentiment in big cities and college towns for granted, and start wielding that sentiment as a political weapon against the fascist thugs of the creationist right.

No Humanity Please, We're Americans

2005-01-31T23:54:00.000-05:00

Perhaps it's less the scope of the tsunami disaster than the scale that makes one tend towards abstraction and, at the same time, long for simplicity. Somehow the distant views of shores swamped, entire coastlines gone, villages wrecked like model toys, communicate more of the impact in their very incomprehensibility than do the closeups of individual anguish and suffering that populated the covers of the major newspapers and trade magazines.

The coastlines and overheads tug not only at the cognitive mind and the sentimental heart, but also at the conscience, for one realizes that one is forced to imagine what these areas looked like before, because one invariably has not previously paid attention to the topography - or much of anything else - of this oft-ignored corner of the world.

And so, from here at least, behind the keyboard upon which I compose these words, one feels obligation, over and above the more poignant but also much more dangerous feelings of pity, guilt, sorrow and shame. Obligation belongs to ethics, which, in contradistinction to morals, has the benefit of concerning itself with, as a wise man once asked, What Is to Be Done?

In this frame of mind, with abstraction, simplicity and obligation at the fore, I'm drawn to the public service announcement currently making the televisual rounds, in which George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton appeal for a continuation of the outpouring of individual donations to the relief effort.

The PSA's memorable title and tagline is "What Happens Next." But the most compelling words come from Clinton (how does this guy always manage to get the best lines?):
"...despite our differences, we are bound together by our common humanity, and we all have an obligation to help the victims of the tsunami have the blessings of a normal life. ... Please join this worldwide cause."

The invocation of common humanity and global purpose is simplicity itself, facile and yet so welcome in these times - as is the remarkably direct and forceful focus on obligation. We are human beings; we help simply because we should and we must. QED.

It's lovely, and more than a little compelling, even for a cynical leftist internationalist like me.

The only trouble is that no one in the United States has ever seen, nor likely will ever see, Clinton deliver those lines on American television.

You see, they come from the script of what the State Department calls the "international message" version of the PSA, and neither they nor anything remotely like them appear in the "domestic message" version.

The domestic version makes no mention of a worldwide effort, or of commonality, humanity, obligation, or even everyday normalcy. Instead it directs viewers to a list of "reputable" aid organizations to which they can make their tax-deductible contribution, and speaks of reaffirming "the strength of the human spirit" and - in an odd, disturbingly glib turn of phrase - giving victims "hope in the brighter future."

The rest of the world gets a humanistic message of global mutual assistance, while we Homelanders get an unmistakably American message of spirit, hope and consumer assurance.

It's hard to know what's more disheartening: the contrast between the language of the two versions, or the fact that there are two versions at all.

The difference is telling, though. It indexes the gigantic political and symbolic gulf - or at least what the powerful folks think is a gulf - between the sensibility of Dub's America and that of the rest of the planet.

And it's worth spelling out the most cruel irony: the very existence of two versions makes a total mockery of the universal, globalist humanism of the international version. It's the White House giving the finger to the international community. Again.

As for the meaning of the American version itself, all you need to know is how Clinton and Bush Senior introduce themselves at the outset: "We are speaking to you not as Presidents, but as private citizens." The American version imagines a world in which large-scale relief - and for that matter any collective, ethical action in service of the greater good - is the exclusive province of individual volunteerism.

This imagined world, in which government supposedly has no capacity or responsibility for doing much of anything, is already familiar. It's called the Ownership Society. By erasing the distinction between relief and redevelopment - and between investment and social insurance (Social Security privatization, anyone?) - this "ownership" philosophy throws the poor to the wolves, and makes you and me shoulder impossible burdens that can only be properly taken on by governments.

And so, while the World Social Forum convenes in Brazil with the idea that a better world is possible, and Clinton gets to tell the world about our uniting humanity and existential obligations to one another, our leaders stick we Americans with the "domestic message" that there is no world community, and that government need do nothing so long as we keep dropping quarters in the collection jar at the grocery checkout counter.

It's a story worthy of the stupid son at the seder table. Or the C student at Yale.

Where's Bev Sutphin When You Need Her?

2005-01-27T22:29:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the recent absence of updates. More coming real soon.

For now, a quick note on taste, in our latest installment of...
Asstard of the Week
Asstard, n. sl. An individual or entity acting in a way indicative of diminished mental capacity, but retaining requisite culpable intent.

Bad taste is no crime.

But with the death toll from the South Asia disaster rocketing towards a quarter-million, and folks still insisting on using the T-word as a metaphor, it's tough not to wish for the return of Kathleen Turner's Serial Mom, fresh from beating Patty Hearst with a telephone receiver for wearing white shoes after Labor Day.

Take for example the utterly repulsive Doctor Bill "Hey AP photographer, make sure you get all the devastation in behind me" Frist. This moralistic hypocrite shills for Dub's Social Security scam by raising the alarm about a... well, read for yourself:

"On the ABC News program 'This Week,' Dr. Frist said that a 'huge demographic tidal wave' would hit the program in 2008, when the first baby boomers reach the age of 62 and can obtain benefits, reduced for early retirement."
(New York Times, via Talking Points Memo)

Now, Dr. Bill's pretty much out there on his own rotting limb, in that he's one of the only ones to persist in using this language post-12/26. There's a certain ghoulishness there, which exceeds the limits of the regular level of charlatanry associated with the effort to kill Social Security.

That said, it is worth noting that if you Google "demographic tsunami" or "demographic tidal wave," you'll get hundreds of hits, nearly all for pages (created before the disaster) on which neoliberal and neocon Chicken Littles talk about the need to address a nonexistent crisis in Social Security by privatizing, and thus destroying, the program.

And it's worth contemplating why none of these think-tankers, finance-sector flacks and political pundits have felt it necessary to update their pages in the aftermath of the disaster. (In an admittedly unscientific search through the Internet Wayback Machine, I found a grand total of one such page that had been so revised.)

But it appears the rightwingers and the suits don't have the monopoly on this produce-pelting-worthy offense. Recently Harvard President, former World Bank Chief Economist, former Treasury Secretary, and Robert Rubin mentee Larry Summers put his foot in it at a conference, positing that women might be genetically disadvantaged when it comes to succeeding in math and science.

One member of the audience apparently stormed out in disgust. Another, to her credit, challenged him.

"Denice D. Denton, the dean of engineering at the University of Washington who confronted Mr. Summers over his remarks at the conference, said that her phone had not stopped ringing and that she had received scores of e-mail messages on the subject. She said Mr. Summers's remarks might have put new energy into a longstanding effort to improve the status of women in the sciences. 'I think they've provoked an intellectual tsunami,' Dr. Denton said."
(New York Times)

Can't you just see the Times reporter, notebook in hand, struggling to stifle his or her ecstatic joy at getting such a colossally inappropriate, embarrassingly self-important quote?

Now, of course Dr. Denton's (no relation) intellect, politics and heart are miles closer to being in the right place than the execrable Dr. Frist's. But it never ceases to amaze how utterly narcissistic we First Worlders can be about the lives and problems of all those little brown folks on the other side of the beachball.

Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness - the classic proto-modernist text that uses dark people as symbolic fodder for Western navel-gazing - 106 years ago, and apparently we've learned exactly d*ck in the meantime.

So this week our Asstard Award goes to Bill Frist, with Second Place to Denice Dention, and a big, fat Honorable Mention to the general symbolic decrepitude of the West.

True dat! dot com

2005-01-20T21:15:00.000-05:00

Normally I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member, but desperate times... well, you know the rest.

If you haven't yet seen www.thereisnocrisis.com, check it out right now.

Formatted as a blog (what else?), it's an information clearinghouse and advocacy site maintained by a group of committed folks, and supported by a blogroll of more than ~~150~~ 200 bloggers.

As its name indicates, There Is No Crisis is dedicated to creating political will in support of the most fundamental argument against Dub's plan to gut the most successful social insurance and anti-poverty program in word history: there simply is no crisis in Social Security. (Debates about privatization are important to have, but in this case they're a red herring meant to get moderates to concede the underlying claim that there's a crisis in Social Security.)

The only real threat to the program, of course, is the throng of rabid wolves in the White House and the financial services industry, trying to huff and puff and blow the SSI house down.

So check it out: get the facts, make a contribution if you can, and If you've got a blog, get on the blogroll by clicking HERE.

"Let Us Turn Our Thoughts Today To Martin Luther King..."

2005-01-17T01:07:00.001-05:00

"We have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We are still called upon to give aid to the beggar who finds himself in misery and agony on life's highway. But one day, we must ask the question of whether an edifice which produces beggars must not be restructured and refurbished."
(1968)
On this National Holiday, so long in coming, so hard-won, let us remember the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who preached nonviolence, led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, wrote the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and made the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington a foundational moment in our national history.

But let us also remember the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who understood that "True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice"; who opposed the Vietnam War; and who stood in solidarity with workers, sought to bring national attention to American poverty, and spoke eloquently of economic justice for people of all races.

And let us remember not a saint, a redeemer, or a singular figure. Let us instead remember a fallible, ever-developing human being, influenced by Christ, Ghandi and Marx, whose philosophy and strategy changed and grew over time, for both principled and pragmatic reasons; a comrade working in concert with many, many others - some close allies, some fiercely independent, some remembered, some long forgotten - to build not just an idea of racial equality, but a broad-based movement for social justice.

Finally, let us honor his memory by appraising our world as he did his - and by comprehending, as he did, just how much remains to be done.

"I must confess that I have enjoyed being on this mountaintop and I am tempted to want to stay here and retreat to a more quiet and serene life. But something within reminds me that the valley calls me in spite of all its agonies, dangers, and frustrating moments. I must return to the valley. Something tells me that the ultimate test of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and moments of convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge and moments of controversy."
(1965)

Phuket, on $2 a Day

2005-01-15T11:49:00.000-05:00

It's the Development, Stupid
In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami tragedy in South Asia, I posted an entry here about how development, not relief, is the underlying problem for the region, and will persist long after the relief effort has been completed and the press planes have flown off the airstrips.

I also noted that a half-century of ideological war (and in many cases, actual covert war) by the U.S. and other industrial nations has taken our focus away from the pressing question of meaningful development in the so-called Third World, and has even deprived us of the ability to envision or model what such development would look like.

In this vein I'm glad to see the issue finally get some play in the mainstream press, however briefly, via Fareed Zakaria's recent column in Newsweek.

The final three paragraphs of his piece are crap, exemplifying the impoverished vocabulary of development in our neoliberal time. But the first two-thirds, from which the following is excerpted, are worth the price of admission.

The United States may be consumed by the war on terror, but development is Asia's daily fight. ... [T]he Bush administration has been somewhat blind to this reality. I remember touring Asia right after Bush had attended an economic summit of Asian and Pacific states in 2003. I was struck by how his entire focus was on the threat of terrorism to the region, post 9/11 - and how completely he misread his audience.

Take the three countries most strongly affected by the tsunami: Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India. It's not that they don't understand the problem of terrorism. They have all dealt with it for decades. It's not that they don't have big political problems. They do. ... This is not, however, the big picture for these countries. The big picture is that large numbers of people here still live on less than $2 a day, that infant mortality and malnutrition are still at unconscionably high levels, that for large parts of the population, life is not that different than it was 200 years ago. This is the big picture. This is the war they are waging.

Check it out.

Gone Moose Huntin'

2005-01-13T15:13:00.000-05:00

aka Asstard of the Week
Asstard, n. sl. An individual or entity acting in a way indicative of diminished mental capacity, but retaining requisite culpable intent.

It should be clear by now that Al From and Bruce Reed's Democratic Leadership Council poses the greatest threat to the Democratic Party as a real alternative to the Republicans.

It should be clear, but it's still not, at least not entirely. Fortunately Matt Taibbi over at the New York Press gets us the rest of the way there with his most recent column, in which he covers the potential candidacy of one Marshall Wittmann for Chair of the Democratic National Committee (a.k.a. The Whole Damned Party). In the cybernetic ether, Wittmann goes by the nom de blog The Bull Moose. (Mea culpa: I linked to Bull Moose on my front page, without knowing much of anything about it, until recently.)

Turns out Wittmann is trying to manufacture a groundswell of support for his "grassroots" (in the Concord Coalition meaning of the term) candidacy.

As the Moose himself points out - rather too proudly, in fact - his main qualification is that he knows the enemy: he used to be Legislative Director for - wait for it - the Christian Coalition.

These days, as Tiabbi helpfully points out, Wittmann is the enemy, working as a paid operative for the DLC, which also funds and maintains his blog. (If you've made a contribution via the Support Bull Moose link on the blog's front page, you'd better go take a shower; you've given your hard-earned scratch right to the DLC.)

To get the whole story, check out Taibbi's column; it's worth the read. But for now, some choice bits I couldn't resist excerpting. First, Taibbi, in the form of a letter to Wittmann, riffs on Wittmann's tendency simply to copy Republican ideas – in this case Republican National Committee Chair Ed Gillespie and his animal-pun blog The Yak:

"The reason Ed Gillespie can pull off treating politics like a game is that it is, and should be, a game to an Ed Gillespie. He is, unabashedly, a professional con artist. That's what a Republican political operative is supposed to do—con Americans who've had their jobs taken away by big business into voting Republican anyway. ... Government is a big frat prank to people like [Grover] Norquist and Gillespie, which is why frat names work for them. It could have been Otter or Flounder. Gillespie chose Yak. It makes sense."

"Democrats don't want to be conned by their leaders; they want their party to actually represent them. They do not want Otter or Flounder returning from the offices of Eli Lilly or (more to the point) Loral Satellite with some grand 'realistic' plan to put a pair of Bible-thumping arms-industry executives on the 2008 ticket. They do not want to be told that this is the only way to get the 'McCainiac' swing voter (another one of your cute words) to go against the Republicans the next time around. That shit does not work with the vast majority of Democrats. They want men, not clowns, running things. And you, Marshall Wittmann, are a fucking clown."

Second, here's Taibbi on the utter bankruptcy of Wittmann and the DLC's political vision:

"If even one of your charges should win the DNC chair elections next month, the time will come soon thereafter that you and [DLC Chair] Al From and Bruce Reed are going to replace the Bushes and Rumsfelds and Ashcrofts as the chief villains among progressive young Americans. The next four years will not see George Bush's face morphed with a white beard onto a photo of bin Laden and sent rocketing around the internet; it will be your face, your beard. The next antiwar demonstrations are not going to see 'Buck Fush' and 'No Blood for Oil' posters by the tens of thousands racing down the mall; the signs will read 'Fuck Al From' and 'I Hunt Moose'."

"People are slowly coming to understand what the DLC is. You are a tiny gang of needle-nosed cubicle slaves hired to sell out the genuine political aspirations of millions of people. You have been hired to rush from newsroom to newsroom badmouthing almost every principle your constituents have held for decades, and to propagandize at every opportunity the hopelessness of such ideas as peace, tolerance and ideological backbone."

Now, don't let Taibbi have all the fun. You too can write Wittmann a letter, as he's soliciting opinions on his possible DNC run. Just click HERE to email him. As you'll note when you click on that link, I've helpfully filled in the Subject line for you.