Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Bush and the Triumph of the Will

I've been listening to a remarkable series of lectures offered by the Teaching Company, taught by Allen C. Guelzo entitled The American Mind.

Professor Guelzo convincingly argues that the American mind has always been divided between those who argue for the primacy of the Will in human affairs and those who argue for the primacy of the Intellect.

Among those who line up on the side of Will are religious thinkers such as Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather. Those lining up on the side of Intellect include men such as Thomas Jefferson, and later, the Pragmatists. It's a rich set of lectures and I highly recommend them.

Anyway, what we have in the Bush administration is the triumph of the Will side of the American mind. We are constantly told by the Bush gang and their supporters that to think bad thoughts about what's happening in Iraq is to cause more bad things to happen. Anyone who thinks bad thoughts is a bad person and a bad American. With this construct they wield a displinary tool par excellence

This Friday, William F. Buckley switched his allegiance from Will to Intellect and was roundly attacked for it this Monday by the editors of the National Review. The editors summed up their opinion this way: "Defeatism will be self-fulfilling."

In BushWorld and in the world of conservatives, to believe in victory is to have victory. To believe in defeat is to have defeat. Heart is all. Facts need not apply.

So Buckley is now, I would suppose, a neo-paleo-con as he has not entirely relinquished his memberhip in the reality-based community.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

Resistance to King George: Then and Now

Here's my review of The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker which I posted on Amazon in October, 2003.

Now that the resistance to the Bush Dynasty is beginning to coalesce among even some factions of his own party, it seems like a good idea to contemplate the resistance offered by the Atlantic proletariat at the beginning of the maritime capitalist state.

The American revolution began when the middle class got their economic ox gored and threw in with the rabble. Perhaps in the present circumstances they'll wake up and see the crimson stain spreading across the American body politic, shut off the self-serving sirens of the Bush regime, and throw off the mind shackles so skillfully crafted by the Bush PR Theater Company.


EMPIRE BEGINS, October 12, 2003
In 1741 at Hughson's, a waterfront tavern in New York City, a motley crew of men and women, members of what Linebaugh and Rediker call the Atlantic proletariat planned a rebellion against the New York ruling class. They included among others radical Irishmen and women, African slaves, the wretched refuse created by the enclosure of the commons, the plantation system and the slave trade. The rebellion was uncovered by the authorities, its leaders were tried convicted, lynched or broken on the wheel, or sent off to slave in plantations in the West Indies. Newspaper accounts of the time described vast crowds gathering from all over New York and elsewhere to view a peculiar, emblematic and perhaps even prophetic phenomenon. The lynched bodies of two leaders of the rebellion, Hughson, an Irishman, and John Gwin, an African, were left to rot as a warning. In death, the white's body turned black, and the black's turned white

According to the authors, this resistance in New York was not unusual. It was just one of many, many rebellions and uprisings in the Atlantic colonies by what the authors call the "hydrarchy," appropriating Francis Bacon's scurrilous metaphor of the many-headed hydra which he borrowed from the myth of Hercules and used to characterize dispossessed and extirpated peasantry of the Atlantic, a characterization used thereafter by the ruling class to describe those whom they enslaved to the exigencies of capitalism. As the authors say in their conclusion on pages 327-328: "In the preceding pages, we have examined the Herculean process of globalization and the challenges posed to it by the many headed hydra. We can periodize the almost two and a half centuries covered here by naming the successive and characteristic sites of struggle: the commons, the plantation, the ship and the factory. In the years 1600-1640, when capitalism began in England and spread through trade and colonization around the Atlantic, systems of terror and sailing ships helped to expropriated the commoners of Africa, Ireland, England, Barbados and Virginia and set them to work as hewers of wood and drawers of water."

The authors go on to say that in the second phase, 1640-1680, "the hydra reared against English capitalism, first by revolution in the metropolis, then by servile war in the colonies. Antinomians organized themselves to raise of a New Jerusalem against the wicked Babylon in order to put into practice the biblical precept that God is no respecter of persons. Their defeat deepened the subjection of women and opened the way to transoceanic slavery in Ireland, Jamaica, and West Africa. Dispersed to American plantations, the radicals were defeated a second time in Barbados and Virginia, enabling the ruling class to secure the plantation as a foundation of the new economic order."

They describe the third phase in 1680-1760 as the "consolidation and stabilization of Atlantic capitalism through the maritime state, a financial and nautical system designed to acquire and operate Atlantic markets." They note it was "the sailing ship -- the characteristic machine of this period of globalization -- combined features of the factory and the prison." Consider in this regard the famous 'tryworks" chapter in Moby Dick. They go on to say "�In opposition, pirates built an autonomous, democratic, multiracial social order at sea, but this alternative way of life endangered the slave trade and was exterminated." They note that connected with this counterrevolution from above, "a wave of rebellion ripped through the slave societies of the Americas in the 1730s, culminating in a multiethnic insurrectionary plot by workers in New York in 1741."

The final phase of their history tells the story of how the "motley crew" with Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica and a series of uprisings throughout the hemisphere created "breakthroughs in human praxis--the Rights of Mankind, the strike, the higher-law doctrine--that would eventually help to abolish impressment and plantation slavery." He suggests these rebellions also helped to produce the American Revolution, which, they claim, "ended in reaction as the Founding Fathers used race, nation and citizenship to discipline, divide and exclude the very sailors and slaves who had initiated and propelled the revolutionary movement."

After reading this eye-opening leftist history, the polyglot streets of New York, indeed of any port city on the Atlantic, suddenly make a lot more sense. Caught up in the brutal, enslaving machine of capitalism starting in the 1600s, the Atlantic and (and eventually) Pacific proletariat fought back against this deadly system of terror, enslavement and extirpation. And it clearly appears, with the assistance of this people's history of the American colonies, that the sons and daugthers of the hydrarchy are caught up now in just the latest model of Blake's dark, satanic mills, trapped and impressed into the vast, destructive combine of the corporate hegemon.

Too programmatically left wing in its somewhat idealizing potrayal of the rabble as a motley crowd who sought freedom from their enconomic enslavement, who practiced democracy and rebellion in reaction to the vicious disciplinary system of the ruling class? Perhaps, but not as tidy as those histories told from the top down which use the fumigated version of the historical record to tell those grand and increasingly obtuse stories of the birth of freedom, equality and opportunity for all.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Paul Krugman: Osama, Saddam and Bush

Here's Krugman's NY Times column for today. The last paragraph really snaps the trap shut on the Bush gang's vicious, self-serving politics of hatred and fear.



OSAMA, SADDAM AND THE PORTS
By Paul Krugman
The storm of protest over the planned takeover of some U.S. port operations by Dubai Ports World doesn't make sense viewed in isolation. The Bush administration clearly made no serious effort to ensure that the deal didn't endanger national security. But that's nothing new — the administration has spent the past four and a half years refusing to do anything serious about protecting the nation's ports.

So why did this latest case of sloppiness and indifference finally catch the public's attention? Because this time the administration has become a victim of its own campaign of fearmongering and insinuation.

Let's go back to the beginning. At 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld gave military commanders their marching orders. "Judge whether good enough hit S. H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time — not only UBL [Osama bin Laden]," read an aide's handwritten notes about his instructions. The notes were recently released after a Freedom of Information Act request. "Hard to get a good case," the notes acknowledge. Nonetheless, they say: "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

So it literally began on Day 1. When terrorists attacked the United States, the Bush administration immediately looked for ways it could exploit the atrocity to pursue unrelated goals — especially, but not exclusively, a war with Iraq.

But to exploit the atrocity, President Bush had to do two things. First, he had to create a climate of fear: Al Qaeda, a real but limited threat, metamorphosed into a vast, imaginary axis of evil threatening America. Second, he had to blur the distinctions between nasty people who actually attacked us and nasty people who didn't.

The administration successfully linked Iraq and 9/11 in public perceptions through a campaign of constant insinuation and occasional outright lies. In the process, it also created a state of mind in which all Arabs were lumped together in the camp of evildoers. Osama, Saddam — what's the difference?

Now comes the ports deal. Mr. Bush assures us that "people don't need to worry about security." But after all those declarations that we're engaged in a global war on terrorism, after all the terror alerts declared whenever the national political debate seemed to be shifting to questions of cronyism, corruption and incompetence, the administration can't suddenly change its theme song to "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

The administration also tells us not to worry about having Arabs control port operations. "I want those who are questioning it," Mr. Bush said, "to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company."

He was being evasive, of course. This isn't just a Middle Eastern company; it's a company controlled by the monarchy in Dubai, which is part of the authoritarian United Arab Emirates, one of only three countries that recognized the Taliban as the legitimate ruler of Afghanistan.

But more to the point, after years of systematically suggesting that Arabs who didn't attack us are the same as Arabs who did, the administration can't suddenly turn around and say, "But these are good Arabs."

Finally, the ports affair plays in a subliminal way into the public's awareness — vague but widespread — that Mr. Bush, the self-proclaimed deliverer of democracy to the Middle East, and his family have close personal and financial ties to Middle Eastern rulers. Mr. Bush was photographed holding hands with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (now King Abdullah), not the emir of Dubai. But an administration that has spent years ridiculing people who try to make such distinctions isn't going to have an easy time explaining the difference.

Mr. Bush shouldn't really be losing his credibility as a terrorism fighter over the ports deal, which, after careful examination (which hasn't happened yet), may turn out to be O.K. Instead, Mr. Bush should have lost his credibility long ago over his diversion of U.S. resources away from the pursuit of Al Qaeda and into an unnecessary war in Iraq, his bungling of that war, and his adoption of a wrongful imprisonment and torture policy that has blackened America's reputation.

But there is, nonetheless, a kind of rough justice in Mr. Bush's current predicament. After 9/11, the American people granted him a degree of trust rarely, if ever, bestowed on our leaders. He abused that trust, and now he is facing a storm of skepticism about his actions — a storm that sweeps up everything, things related and not.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Bush Dynasty: "We Owe Dubai...A Lot"

Dead-on dissection of the Bush dynasty and their real agenda in a BuzzFlash editorial today. Here's a couple of key paragraphs:

What the Dubai port deal represents is the seedy, treacherous, greedy, cynical underside of the Bush dynasty. They are experts at playing the American public for suckers while they and the Republican Party -- which is really their Royal Treasury (along with private firms like Halliburton and the Carlyle Group) -- gorge themselves at the trough of big oil and multinational corporate sellouts.

The Dubai arrangement is perfectly reasonable to Bush: it's about the money. And as Kevin Phillips might tell you, for the Bush Dynasty, money and corporate cronyism trump national security any old day.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Bush on UAE Emirs: "I Owe Them...A Lot "

It's with trepidation that I suggest that Bush, who is accusing of anti-Arab racism those who oppose selling the supervision of America's six biggest ports to the seven emirs of the UAE, is in thrall to these selfsame seven emirs.

But shieks and emirs have been cultivating American politicians for nearly 40 years now, especially Texas oil men with whom they have found much in common, and whom, in the particular case of George W. and his father have been at the ready with investment and bail out money whenever the Bushes needed it.

It's laudable that George W. is not a racist when it comes to his rich Arab friends and their money, and that he enjoys such good, close relationships with them. What's not so laudable is how he and Rove fires up much of the American public with racist depictions of wild-eyed Arab terrorists and plays the terror card to silence his growing army of critics.

Perhaps with this latest in that growing array of missteps the truth about the shady dealings of the Bush's and much of America's political elite will finally come to be known more generally by the American public. Perhaps the mostly moribund media will actually provide the personal context for Bush's veto threat.

That'd be nice for once.

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Brooks: Questions of Culture -- Wha? Huh?

Below is David Brooks’ column from today's NY Times. It’s one of his “big idea” columns.

From a surface reading, we would take away from the column that he does not advocate the vulgar Smithianism touted by neo-liberal economists that man is merely a wealth maximizer and the corollary that wealthier societies are thus economically and morally superior. Rather he appears to embrace the early twentieth century insight of anthropologists like Franz Boas that individuals are culturally bound and that judgments of cultural "superiority" are culturally bound as well.

But not so fast. Brooks, being a man of the right and thus a man with a predominantly nineteenth century colonialist worldview, can't help interjecting conservative theories about human nature as well as judgments about of the inferiority of one culture over another.

First let's look at Brooks' "big idea" observation that:
...“the big questions of the next century will be understanding how cultures change and can be changed, how social and cultural capital can be nurtured and developed, how destructive cultural conflict can be turned to healthy cultural competition.”


Here, although he claims to reject the universalistic economists’ view of man as a wealth maximizer, he is endorsing that basic assumption of capitalism that competition is generally good. But weirdly, when it comes to cultural competition, Mr. Brooks seems to be arguing for some kind of regulation or discipline to curb the potential for conflict. Presumably, the state would do this. Or some kind of international organization like the UN, which Mr. Brooks says does not work very well.

One wishes that Mr. Brooks could regulate the revanchist cultural program of neo-conservatism, a program launched in the 50s by Joe McCarthy as a vicious smear campaign that has recently seen its ultimate expression in the divisive and unhealthy (to use Mr. Brooks' terminology) tactics of Karl Rove. These Machiavellan masters of the divide and conquer strategy could certainly tone it down. Just ask John Kerry. Or John McCain. Or Max Cleland. Or all those blacklisted writers from the 50s.

But conservatives don't believe in regulation, however, and instead promote the race to the bottom both economically and ideologically, a competition which has made the world a more brutal and dangerous and unhealthy place.

In fact, the argument could be made that the culturally insensitive policies of the Bush administration has made the world less safe, that it has not promoted healthy competition between cultures.

The argument could be made, for instance, that the competition of the world's biggest oil consumers for Middle East oil has generated some pretty unhealthy competition. Perhaps we could have regulated the culture of consumption in the U.S. and other Western and Eastern nations toward healthier outcomes.

The argument could be made, too, that the US’s failure to respect sacred sites in Saudi Arabia by placing US military bases there generated Osama Bin Laden’s monstrous attack on New York and Washington. Or that the United States' continued illegal occupation of Iraq fans the flames of unhealthy ideological competition.


Finally on this score, if we take Brooks at his word, that cultures are “wildly diverse” then could we not assume that some cultures are not based on competition but cooperation? And if this is true than we could also argue that their cultures should be spared competition imposed upon them from outside?

In other words, Brooks, while claiming cultures have rights to their cultures is also saying that if they cannot engage in healthy competition, then they will suffer the consequences of irrelevance, or destruction by those who do engage in competition and promote it as a prime cultural value.

Now let’s take this paragraph on education, and do a deep dive into the conservative cultural assumptions it contains:

At home, we spend more money on education than any other nation. We have undertaken a million experiments to restructure schools and bureaucracies. But students who lack cultural and social capital because they did not come from intact, organized families continue to fall further and further behind — unless they come into contact with some great mentor who can not only teach, but also change values and behavior.

Here, in Brooks' typical soft-pedal construction is the conservative idea that poor people are morally degenerate because their families are not “intact.”

Poor families are not intact in Brooks’ conservative cultural universe because liberal welfare policies forced poor families to eject the father in order to realize the largest economic benefit from the government in the form of a welfare check. Let’s leave aside for the moment the purely economic motivation this ascribes to poor families for the absence of the father, a economistic, not culturally-based, explanation that flies in the face of Brooks’ larger argument that behavior is culturally bound.

Instead let’s counter that this simplistic economically-based charge against liberalism’s social welfare with a little history by pointing out this standard conservative explanation leaves out the fact that the great engine of job creation after WWII (an engine so powerful that even the poorest Americans were pulled in to service it), came to a shuddering halt in the 70s as America’s former enemies came roaring back with new plants, more efficient processes, better quality controls and government planning and financial assistance. American producers fought back by exporting American jobs, and with them went the dreams of many for stable a middle-class existence. Families buckled and broke under the strain.

According to the conservative’s master narrative, jobs were lost to a large extent because liberal social policies promoted lazy workers and their unions, and this, according to conservative economists, made US workers less productive than non-union workers both here and overseas. Workers and unions are thus made to shoulder to blame for complacent and shortsighted US corporate managers. Liberal supporters of social safety nets and unions are made responsible for the destruction of not only the family, but the US economy as well.

Brooks then goes on to suggests that the poor’s moral degeneracy can only be cured on an individual basis -- not by the State's manipulation of levers, economic or otherwise, but rather only by one’s family or in morally degenerate families by an individual, a hero, a mentor. This a favored fairy tale of the Right – the kind of Horatio Alger story that places undue pressure on the family and the individual and none on social circumstances.

In actual fact, it has been shown there is a direct correlation between spending and good grades: the more money spent on students per capita the higher the grades. And even Brooks' individualistic mentor solution has a better chance of happening if teachers’ salaries were commensurate with the importance of the work they do.

Not only that, but Brooks tacitly admits what is really at work in producing the best and brightest students: the leg up that kids who come from economically successful homes intrinsically enjoy over poor students. Brought up on the successful side of the economic divide, kids from better off families also enjoy a privileged perspective on how the cultural levers of power can be manipulated to maintain and extend their own economic power.

But, enough. I’ve got work to do. Healthy competitive work. My corporate culture pitted against another corporate culture. This will ultimately result, according to Mr. Brooks, in a better world. But as for me, I’m not so sure.

QUESTIONS OF CULTURE
By David Brooks

Once, not that long ago, economics was the queen of the social sciences. Human beings were assumed to be profit-maximizing creatures, trending toward reasonableness. As societies grew richer and more modern, it was assumed, they would become more secular. As people became better educated, primitive passions like tribalism and nationalism would fade away and global institutions would rise to take their place. As communications technology improved, there would be greater cooperation and understanding. As voters became more educated, they would become more independent-minded and rational

None of these suppositions turned out to be true. As the world has become richer and better educated, religion hasn't withered; it has become stronger and more fundamentalist. Nationalism and tribalism haven't faded away. Instead, transnational institutions like the U.N. and the European Union are weak and in crisis.

Communications technology hasn't brought people closer together; it has led to greater cultural segmentation, across the world and even within the United States. Education hasn't made people moderate and independent-minded. In the U.S. highly educated voters are more polarized than less educated voters, and in the Arab world some of the most educated people are also the most fanatical.

All of this has thrown a certain sort of materialistic vision into crisis. We now know that global economic and technological forces do not gradually erode local cultures and values. Instead, cultures and values shape economic development. Moreover, as people are empowered by greater wealth and education, cultural differences become more pronounced, not less, as different groups chase different visions of the good life, and react in aggressive ways to perceived slights to their cultural dignity.

Economics, which assumes people are basically reasonable and respond straightforwardly to incentives, is no longer queen of the social sciences.

The events of the past years have thrown us back to the murky realms of theology, sociology, anthropology and history. Even economists know this, and are migrating to more behaviorialist and cultural approaches.

The fundamental change is that human beings now look less like self-interested individuals and more like socially embedded products of family and group. Alan Greenspan said that he once assumed that capitalism was "human nature." But after watching the collapse of the Russian economy, he had come to consider it "was not human nature at all, but culture."

During the first few years of life, parents, communities and societies unconsciously impart ways of being and of perceiving reality that we are only subliminally aware of. How distinct is the individual from the community? Does history move forward or is it cyclical? How do I fulfill my yearning for righteousness? What is possible and what is impossible?

The answers to these questions are wildly diverse, and once worldviews have been absorbed, they produce wildly different levels and types of social and cultural capital. East Asians and Jews, for example, seem to thrive commercially wherever they settle.

It turns out that it's hard to change the destinies of nations and individuals just by pulling economic levers. Over the past few decades, America has transferred large amounts of money to Africa to build factories and spur economic development. None of this has worked. As the economists Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian demonstrated, there is no correlation between aid and growth.

At home, we spend more money on education than any other nation. We have undertaken a million experiments to restructure schools and bureaucracies. But students who lack cultural and social capital because they did not come from intact, organized families continue to fall further and further behind — unless they come into contact with some great mentor who can not only teach, but also change values and behavior.

It all amounts to this: Events have forced different questions on us. If the big contest of the 20th century was between planned and free market economies, the big questions of the next century will be understanding how cultures change and can be changed, how social and cultural capital can be nurtured and developed, how destructive cultural conflict can be turned to healthy cultural competition.

People who think about global development are out in front in thinking about these matters. (I'd recommend rival anthologies: "Culture Matters," edited by Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington, and "Culture and Public Action," edited by Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton.) But the rest of us will catch up soon.

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Do Dems Need Their Own Newt? Or Does Press Need Backbone?

A Washington Post "think piece" today suggests that "Dems Need A Newt Of Their Own", because
"The Party Can't Have a Revolution Without the Revolutionaries."

I would suggest the Media needs a Washington Post because you can't have a Democracy without Journalists. And that there can't be real politics without publications like the Post used to be. You know, back when they actually investigated scandals and informed the U.S. public about those scandals and their perpetrators.

It's true the Dems are a mess, that they mostly have no message, that they can't seem to mount any kind of insurgency campaign, that they need a revolutionary vanguard, but there are some Democrats who do speak out like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, andrecently, even Hillary Clinton.

And it's true Newt had a gift for the kinds of stunts the media likes: The Contract With America is his most well remembered coup de theatre, and it's true the Dems could use somebody with the same kind of flair for dramatization of their ideas.

But when they do speak out now, their views are quickly denigrated by the right-wing attack machine, the Rovian smears and slurs immediately reported by a press which believes 'tit for tat' reportage absolves them of having to do anything more. Like, for instance, investigate the cornucopia of scandals pouring out the Bush administration, put them in context, provide perspective, and do their job.

I'm probably being too hard on the Post. The Times has been a mess, too, pulled to the right by the 40-year campaign of intimidation by the Right against the 'liberal media.' And, newspaper readership has been sinking for years, replaced by the hyper-twitchy super-contentious ratings-driven watchership journalism practiced on cable news stations -- very hard to compete against with real news.

The Post is right to want some real back and forth between the two parties. They are right to want some stunts, some Democrats with some charisma, someone to help them sell more newspapers. I think we all would.

But they shouldn't put it all on the Democrats. They should look to their own house as well, and the houses of their brothers and sisters in the media. They should look to who owns the house of the media in which they labor, write about whose interests are served by the infotainment formats that submerge hard news under the fuzzy 'news you can use' formats that suffocate the political for the commercial.

Easy for me to say, of course. I don't have a ravenous Wall Street looking for bigger profits every year, a CEO who has good friends in the Bush administration, contacts in the government that will shun me or smear me if I don't play ball.

But really, if the Dems need a Newt, then doesn't the Post need a Katherine Graham?

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Friday, February 17, 2006

Rumsfeld: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Al-Qaida

You gotta love Rummy for his unflinching, blindly ironic insistence that Al Qaida is responsible for America losing the propoganda war in the Middle East -- not because the morally corrupt, detention-and-torture-inclined regime he works for has destroyed America's reputation as a nation founded on the protection of basic human rights, e.g., habeas corpus, speedy trial by a jury of one's peers, protections against of cruel and unusual punishment, etc.

He is apparently going for the gold as the supreme ironist of our time. Only recently, remember, he told us that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is like Hitler -- getting elected legally then consoldiating power once he got into office." Sort of like the Bush regime, of course, a fact completely lost on him.

Anyway, here's the opening graph on Rummy's latest comic sally:

Rumsfeld Says Extremists Winning Media War
By AMY WESTFELDT
Associated Press Writer
February 17, 2006, 4:34 PM EST
NEW YORK -- Al-Qaida and other Islamic extremist groups have poisoned the Muslim public's view of the United States through deft use of the Internet and other modern communications methods that the American government has failed to master, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday.

By the way, Rummy's going to be on with Charlie Rose tonight on PBS. Tune in and watch with horror and contempt as Charlie covers himself with shame as he fawns over Rummy in that pathetic way he employs with any and all powerbrokers of whatever stripe or moral complexion.
May I recommend that you keep the anti-nausea medications close at hand?

Cheney / Bush: Compassionate Giveaway to Big Oil

Another sterling example of the Bush regime's compassionate conservatism: a $7 billion giveaway to their their friends in the energy industry.

U.S. Has Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies
By Edmund L. Andrews, NY TIMES
WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.
[snip]

Yet another confirmation of Carol Brightman's observation of the takeover of the government in TOTAL INSECURITY: THE MYTH OF AMERICAN OMNIPOTENCE (Verso, May, 2004): "Now that both the defense and energy industries, having thrown off nearly all vestiges of regulation, regard the US government as their best customer, they have implanted themselves at the helm of the ship of state."

Further, she notes: "There is no longer much government left to defend the interests of lesser institutions, including other businesses, or the welfare of mere citizens, or the actual security of the nation."

This administration, this kleptocracy, this gang of thieves will not be diverted from plundering the American taxpayer. It's the Enron "deregulation" strategy all over again in a slightly different guise (as per this 2001 NY Times article just before the roof fell in on the crooks).

Thursday, February 16, 2006

When Cheney Shot Harry: Big PR Botchification

You gotta like an AP Wire story on Cheney's botched PR like this one: Cheney's PR: How Not to Do Damage Control.

Ah, Slanderous!

Ever notice how the right wing always employs slander -- both defensively, to get themselves off the hook by blaming the victim, and offensively to smear their opponents by calling their veracity into question?

In Dowd's editorial in yesterday's Times, she describes the 4 step Bush-Cheney cycle (see my post from yesterday). Step 4 is: Blame the victim without leaving fingerprints by outsourcing the smear to the private sector.

In the case of When Cheney Shot Harry, Cheney outsourced the smear of Whittington to Mary Matalin, who told the media that Whittington had, in a way, been asking to get shot because he didn't inform his hunting partners about his location.

Cheney supposedly "accepted the responsibility" in his interview with Brit Hume last night when he said, "You can talk about all of the other conditions that exist at the time, but that's the bottom line and - it was not Harry's fault." But as the Bush PR Theater Company knows, first impressions have the most impact and are what is remembered, follow-up explanations are not as impactful, and less well remembered.

In the world of the Bush gang, top gang members experience no consequences for their actions. Everyone else, however, is wholly reponsible for their fates.

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Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Maureen Dowd: Shooter Slips on a Silencer

A pretty good column from Maureen Dowd in today's NY Times. Here's a few key paragraphs. Best part? The four step Bush-Cheney cycle.

Shooter Slips on a Silencer
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 15, 2006

Who did this old guy think he was, coming between Dick Cheney and his helpless prey?
[snip}

This version of "The Most Dangerous Game" neatly follows the four-step Bush-Cheney cycle:

Step 1: Set out to pick off what you think is an easy target, like quail this time or pen-raised and netted pheasant in the past, or a certain sanction-caged Iraqi dictator.

Step 2: In the corrupt company of lobbyist-contractor friends, botch things up. Ignore the peril at hand - as with, oh, Osama at Tora Bora, or Katrina, or the Iraq occupation - and with steely resolve, indulge your raging incompetence. (Oops.)

Step 3: Stonewall. Resist giving Congress information about 9/11 or Katrina; don't tell the public how you're tapping phones at home, setting up gulags abroad and making war and energy policy in secret. Why give the taxpayers, who are ponying up for these weekend hunting trips, the extraordinary news that Vice shot his hunting companion in the face and chest? Scott McClellan knew before yesterday's White House briefing at noon that Mr. Whittington was worse, but did not tell the reporters. He left that to Corpus Christi doctors, who spun the heart attack as "an inflammatory response to a metallic foreign BB."

Step 4: Admit no mistakes. Express sympathy. Blame the victim without leaving fingerprints by outsourcing the smear to the private sector.
[snip]

He didn't talk to the sheriff for 14 hours, or even call the president to notify him after the 5:50 p.m. accident. Vice left that to Andy Card, who called Mr. Bush at 7:30 p.m. to say there had been a hunting accident, without mentioning that Vice was the gunman. Soon after that, Karl Rove called Mr. Bush back with that little detail.
[snip]

Usually when there's a White House cover-up, the president's in on it.

Hillary: Cheney's Troubling Pattern of Secrecy

Looks like Hillary is taking up the challenge to use the Cheney shooting incident as a way to call the administration's practices into question. It's not much, but at least it's getting politically interesting.

HIL BLASTS TEAM BUSH 'PATTERN' OF SECRECY
BY MICHAEL McAULIFF and JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - The White House's failure to come clean about the vice president's shooting of a 78-year-old fellow hunter is part of a pattern of unacceptable secrecy, Sen. Hillary Clinton charged yesterday.

"A tendency of this administration from the top all the way to the bottom is to withhold information, to resist legitimate requests for information, to refuse to be forthcoming," Clinton (D-N.Y.) said.

"Putting it all together going back years now, there is a pattern that should be troubling," she said, apparently referring to the CIA leak case, Cheney's secret meetings with energy execs and White House refusal to release documents relating to judicial nominees.

The Best Cheney Joke

"The Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington.

Now, according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78- year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face.

He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Wittington's face."
--"Daily Show" correspondent Rob Corddry

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Cheney's License to Kill

Pardon me while I yawn.

The press is in an uproar because of the way Cheney and his staff handled notifiying them about Cheney accidentally shooting a 78 year old lawyer in the face on a ranch owned by a Republican lobbyist.

This is, of course, exactly the kind of story the media prefers to cover: a media story where they get to criticize Cheney's staff for not adhering to accepted media practices. Again I yawn.

A New York Times editorial today - White House Shoots Foot - concludes that "The vice president appears to have behaved like a teenager who thinks that if he keeps quiet about the wreck, no one will notice that the family car is missing its right door. The administration's communications department has proved that its skills at actually communicating are so rusty it can't get a minor police-blotter story straight."

I can't imagine that the White House is shaking in its boots on this one. They know that there's no one on the Left with the propaganda skills to turn this story into a larger indictment of Cheney and Bush gang. Nor are there any mainstream media outlets that would carry such a story.

Remember how the media jumped all over the (untrue) story about Clinton's haircut on the runway on Air Force One snarling air traffic and costing taxpayers millions of dollars? That story, manufactured by the right wing noise machine, had the media chattering for weeks. The right managed to turn this (untrue) story into a sign that Clinton didn't really care for the little people, that he was selfish and imperious. The press took the bait and ran with it. Then ran with it some more.

It seems to me that a real "liberal" newspaper would not scold Cheney for acting like "a teenager." A real liberal publication would point out that Cheney was hunting on an illegal license. Then it would go on to say this disregard for the law is similar to his behavior on the war in Iraq: that he manufactured an illegal license for the invasion of Iraq, a license to kill based on lies. Behavior more like a warlord than a teenager.

Cheney is lucky the man he accidentally shot didn't die, unlike the thousands of Americans and Iraqi civilians who have died, some accidentally but mostly otherwise, in his illegal war based on a faked license to kill.

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Monday, February 13, 2006

Maureen Dowd: World Turned Upside Down?

Here's the key paragraph from Maureen Dowd's scathing editorial this morning, SMOKING DUTCH CLEANSER:

SMOKING DUTCH CLEANSER
[snip]
Instead of just going after the 9/11 fiends, as W. promised with his bullhorn, the president and Vice President Strangelove have cynically played the terror card to accrue power and sidestep blame. They have twisted our values, mismanaged crises, fueled fundamentalist successes and violence around the world, and magnified a clash of civilizations.
[snip]

Seems to me that in order to win in November the Democrats must heap enough shame and obloquy upon the fear mongers' fear card strategy to make Rove think long and hard about the political price they will have to pay every time they invoke their deceitful and dishonorable "All Terror, All the Time" reelection strategy. It's going to be a long uphill battle, but absolutely necessary to the electoral success of the Democrats.

They simply must cast the Bush gang as dishonorable, as unmanly. And I believe that Hillary Clinton may actually be able to do this more successfully than a male candidate.

W's quasi-steely look, his semi-macho swagger is all pose. Protected by his family and his money, he's never actually had to prove his "manhood." Hillary on the other hand has been through the right's sulphorous fires and come out the other side even stronger. By passing this public test by fire she has been revealed as strong, powerful, and persistent. Her mental toughness is an earned toughness, not just a collection tough guy mannerisms like those of W., the poseur.

On a side note, I think it's a very good sign therefore that Dowd is invoking Hillary's language about the Republicans' "playing the fear card."

By the way, "smoking Dutch cleanser" is what Arlen Specter suggested Attorney General Gonzalez must be doing if he thinks he can actually justify torture and warrantless spying.

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Bush & Rove and Their Power Tools

The Bush gang, headed by Karl "Terror Boy" Rove, are masters of conspiricist propaganda. Recasting liberals as enemies of the state is just one of Karl's coup de theatres. He has recently begun to threaten Republican moderates with rewrites of their scripts, too.

But Rove, we must remember, stands on the shoulders of giants like Roy Cohn (left), Joseph McCarthy (on right), and Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. Carrying on this tradition more recently, men like Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes took the smear campaign to new heights and have clearly been an inspiration to Rove as executive producer of Bush PR Theater Company and Lie Factory.

Here's my review of Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America by Robert Alan Goldberg which I posted on Amazon back in March, 2003. Since we're going to hear nothing but right wing conspiricist propaganda from here until November 2006, Goldberg's insights may help us weather the increasing intensity of the s***storm.

Power Tools, March 9, 2003

ENEMIES WITHIN affords deep insight into the gothic "conspiricism" that has infected our public discourse in the United States. Countersubversives such as Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, Louis Farrakhan, Pat Robertson, and various writers like Whitley Strieber all have used conspiricism to rally the troops (or consumers) to their various causes, to suppress or destroy rivals, to form power bases through an insurgency against the mainstream, and to make money. American as apple pie, they are enacting the same "paranoid style" first described by Richard Hofstadter in the aftermath of the McCarthy era, a style which was initiated by the likes of Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and in later generations by the Anti-Masonic movement in 1820s New York, and the Know Nothings a generation later.

Goldberg argues that Hofstadter's theory looks in retrospect too bound to the ideas of deviant psychology popular after WWII. Instead, he sees conspiricism, rightly, I think, as a struggle for power. To demonstrate his thesis, he takes five well-known recent examples of conspiracy thinking: the "master conspiracy" (i.e. the Birchites Robert Welch's fabrication of the New World Order which postulates an elite who run the world through the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign relations, " "The Rise of the Antichrist (exampled through Pat Robertson's take on Revelations), "The View from the Grassy Knoll" (the Kennedy assassination), "Jewish Devils and the War on Black America" (a brief history of the exploitation of the exploitation of the ill-feeling between Louis Farrakhan and Jews, and "The Roswell Incident" (the "cover-up" of the alien invasion in 1947, and the mainstreaming of these theories through TV -- the X-Files, Independence Day, etc.)

What's fascinating is that Goldberg shows how these various conspiracy often borrow from and reinforce each other. The KKK, Farrakhan and Robertson, for instance, all point to the "Jewish banking conspiracy" or ZOG of running the world, pulling the strings behind the scenes, duping the masses into thinking the governments they live under have any real power while the real masters start wars, and kill national leaders like Kennedy when those leaders interfere with their grand designs. Farrakhan, like those who accuse the government of a disinformation campaign over the so-called Roswell incident, teaches his followers that there is "mother plane" circling the earth, ready to pick up the faithful when the time of tribulation ends, a strand of belief that links them also to the revelations scenario of Robertson and other millenialist preachers.

Goldberg summarizes all these discourses with admirable clarity, showing how all use using circular logic, exclude other explanations, and, in the process form dense self-referential webs of commentary that cannot be breached by reason. Whether its the Illuminati, ZOG, the hand-picked members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Masons, or aliens who have infiltrated the highest reaches of power, the story is always the same: a powerful elite whose only scruple is the preservation of power, and the making of profits is behind everything. Conspiricism, in Goldberg's view, offers the faithful complete and seamless explanations for the radical discontinuities and fragmentation of modern and post-modern existence.

He also shows how the entertainment industry has found this all very profitable. The mainstream media has learned from Oliver Stone's remake of the Kennedy assassination, that rewriting history to conform to fringe theories can capture the public imagination, and more important, loose the purse strings. Conspiracy theories have also been mainstreamed by U.S. corporations notes Goldberg, such as U-Haul, which uses the standard bulb-headed, big-eyed alien icon on the side of its New Mexico trailers and moving vans as emblematic of that state.

Goldberg notes with equanimity that there have been cover-ups fostered by government bureaucrats, and that these cover-ups have eroded the public's faith in its institutions, i.e., the infiltration of the FBI into the Black Panthers, the Black Muslims, or the paranoid scrutiny of Martin Luther King by Hoover's men, the black men whose syphilis was never treated in Tuskegee as part of an "experiment," etc. Given these abuses of power, Goldberg says conspiricism gains in credibility and influence. At the same time, he argues that this conspiricism is serving to debilitate belief in government to an unwarranted extent. When Ronald Reagan expressed the idea that "government is not the solution, but that it is the problem," he gave voice to a group of countersubversives that later managed to make David Koresh a hero, who spun a web of egregious nonsense about Vincent Foster's suicide to support and extend their attacks on the Clintons and, in the process, driven nearly mad with hatred, turned the U.S. government into a machine to wreak vengeance on a too-amorous young woman and her prevaricating paramour.

He notes the proliferation of "Gates" from the original "Watergate," to include such "conspiracies" as "Whitewatergate," "Travelgate," "Irangate," has blurred them all into one messy symbol of the business-as-usual corruption of the U.S. government, when in fact some of these events did constitute abuses of power, while many more did not. What countersubeversives know is that if you can get your label to stick to an issue, a label that either contains the seed of your side of the argument or negatively characterizes your opponents side, you have already half won the battle. Thus the jockeying around such phrases as "Tort Reform," which more correctly should be called "The Liability Ceiling Law."

Conspiracy thinking is not new in America. But, Goldberg notes, the intensity of this type of thinking has picked up considerably the past five decades. Most recently, he says, driven by an insatiable desire for profits, the purveyors of infotainment have raised the volume of conspiricist claims to such a pitch that it is difficult to advance less scabrous theories against them. Reasonable theories don't draw audiences, he suggests. They can't sell ad space. They don't foster fanaticism, build mass support, or scare into submission citizens or politicians who hold opposing views.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Bush: "Liberals Want to Kill You, Again. And Again"

I know that all I do is talk about the Bush Theater Company's "All Terror, All The Time" PR melodrama. That I keep reviewing their endless variations on the scene where well-meaning but spineless liberals help the terrorists tie Miss Liberty to the railroad tracks just as the infernal Terror Train appears stage left. Of the Republicans' knowledge of the theatergoing public's sweet tooth for violent entertainment.

And how the Terror Train, which is one day packed with WMD and the next with anti-domestic-spying liberal wimps, is bearing down on Miss Liberty's precious, fulsome body, which by God, is also under constant threat of violation by feminists and liberal judges as well as the Islamic infidels.

Yes, I know I keep complaining about the cynical and completely implausible nick of time arrival of the Bushian hero (of Western civilization, of right-thinking Americans, of good Christians everywhere, of the Constitution, of the free enterprise system, etc.). And that we're all pretty tired of it.

But in my defense, it's the only show in town, and until it closes, we're stuck with it, you and I.

This week saw some developments that gives one hope that the Terror Train might get derailed. Hillary Clinton, reviewing the Bush/Rove melodrama, noted that the Republicans "are doing it again," "playing the fear card" to win elections. She encouraged other Democrats to question the production's creaky dramaturgy and cheap special effects.

But it was also a week that saw Ken "Sniffy" Mehlman dutifully repeat yet again the melodrama's plot synopsis (see below), a synopsis that we will be hearing until doomsday apparently, or such time as the public gets tired of the spectacle of Miss Liberty surrounded by infernal Arab men and weak-kneed liberals.

At this point, we critics can only hope that the American theater-going public will grow as tired of this melodrama as they have of every other recent production of the Bush PR Theater Company.

For instance, there was their recent failed attempt to stage the marriage of Miss Social Security and her fortune to the fortunes of Mr. Stock Market. Then there was the incompetent medical drama they mounted wherein Mr. Free Market Choice would save the old and sick American People by letting them choose freely from a free choice menu prepared by the the kindly "Mr. Big" Pharma.

And then there was their supremely bad performance in a real drama, "Katrina" where the Republicans, working from their usual melodramatic anti-Democrat, anti-poor, anti-government script, actually tied Miss New Orleans even more tightly to the tracks, then ignored her for days after she was run over and drowned.

Which all goes to show that if they can't control the script, they can't win. As more Americans refuse to be cast as an audience incapacitated and demoblized by fear, or hyperstimulated by false heroics, the better the chance we have of shutting this stinker of a production down for good.

GOP CHAIRMAN QUESTIONS DEMOCRATS ABILITY TO PROTECT AMERICANS
BY JEFF ZELENY
Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, declared Friday that Democrats who have condemned the Bush administration's controversial eavesdropping program may not be suited to safeguard Americans against terror attacks.
...snip

In a speech to activists gathered at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mehlman suggested Republicans should make an election-year example out of Democrats who criticize the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program...

"Do Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean really think that when NSA is listening in on terrorists planning attacks on America, they should hang up when those terrorists call their sleeper cells in the United States?" he said, referring to the House minority leader and the Democratic National Committee chairman.


Here's the link to the full story.

Friday, February 10, 2006

Lester Crawford: Cashed Out to Cash In

"There is no longer much government left to defend the interests of lesser institutions, including other businesses, or the welfare of mere citizens, or the actual security of the nation," says Carol Brightman in TOTAL INSECURITY: THE MYTH OF AMERICAN OMNIPOTENCE (Verso, May, 2004). Here's yet another example of the takeover of government...

Former FDA Head Cashes In
Lester Crawford, the veterinarian appointed to head the Food and Drug Administration by President Bush who later resigned the post under a cloud of scandal due to his wife's massive pharmaceutical stock holdings, has now joined a lobbying shop that represents such upstanding clients as Altria (the new face of Phillip Morris) and PhRMA, the lobbying arm of big drugs.

From Sirotablog

George "Divine Right" Bush: "My Aim Is True"

According to Paul R. Pillar, former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and 28 year CIA veteran, when you're the president of good and evil, George "Divine Right" Bush, it appears you don't need military intelligence.

Instead you listen to neo-con priests, consult your heart, and go to war for freedom.

The only reason to consult with the CIA is for cherry picked, scare-mongering factoids for release to a credulous elite and a panicky public to justify the imperial designs of the neo-con priesthood and their weak-minded sovereign.

But, of course, we've known that for a long time now, haven't we?

Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq
Intelligence 'Misused' to Justify War, He Says


By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 10, 2006; Page A01

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.


See the full story here.


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Paul Krugman: Bush's Children and the Vanishing Future

Paul Krugman in his editorial in the Times today, THE VANISHING FUTURE, (from which I've excerpted some key paragraphs below) accuses the Bush administration of childishly ignoring what will happen when the economic chaos caused by their tax giveaways finally comes a calling.

He's probably right to call their denials and deceptions childish. For it is written in Luke 18:15 wherein Supply Side Jesus says: "Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of the Supply Side God as a little child will never enter it."

THE VANISHING FUTURE
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 10, 2006
At this point we've had six years to grow accustomed to Bush budget chicanery. (Yes, six years: George W. Bush's special mix of blatant dishonesty and gross irresponsibility was fully visible during the 2000 presidential campaign.) What still amazes me, however, is the sheer childishness of the administration's denials and deceptions.
(...snip)

...the administration has no idea how to make its tax cuts feasible in the long run. Yet it has never, as far as I can tell, allowed unfavorable facts to affect its determination to make the tax cuts permanent. Instead, it has devoted all its efforts to hiding those awkward facts from public view. (Any resemblance to, say, its Iraq strategy is no coincidence.)

At this point the administration's budget strategy seems to be simply to ignore reality. The 2007 budget makes it clear, once and for all, that the tax cuts can't be offset with spending cuts. But Bush officials have decided to ignore that unpleasant fact, and let some future administration deal with the mess they have created.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Bush: Al Queda Raid on L.A.s' Liberty? Library? Tower

Check out the paragraph in bold below from this story in the Financial Times today. It's the perfect miniature of the Bush gang in action: Rove's fear mongering combined with Bush's dyslexiconia.



TERROR LEADER PLOTTED RAID ON LOS ANGELES, SAYS BUSH
By Edward Alden in Washington and Shawn Donnan in Jakarta
Published: February 9 2006 15:51

The White House said yesterday that Hambali, the captured Indonesian leader of Jemaah Islamiah, the south-east Asian terrorist group, had participated in an elaborate al-Qaeda plot aimed at using hijacked aircraft to attack the tallest building on the US west coast in early 2002.
...snip

“We believe the intended target was Liberty Tower in Los Angeles,” Mr Bush said. His aides later corrected him to say that he meant Library Tower, the city’s tallest skyscraper.

Hillary Clinton Pans Bush "Fear Card" Melodrama

Seems the Republicans are afraid of Hillary.

Seems that since she's been through their sulphorous fires a couple of times and has come out intact and even stronger for it that she's a real problem for the attack machine.

That's why they're already going after her. That's why they'll be stoking the boiler on the Terror Train with extra enthusiasm over the next few months.

And now they must be getting a little extra anxious because she's fighting back. In the words of the AP, she's "accusing the Republicans of 'playing the fear card' of terrorism to win elections."

The Replicans have been playing the fear card, waving the bloody shirt, blasting the sirens for three years now. Prior to that they cynically set off the siren on evil sex-crazed liberals, welfare queens, student radicals, fluoride, Commies, immigrants. It's been the politics of fear for the last century.

The AP story mischaracterizes Hillary's statement as an "accusation." A verifiable observation is not an accusation. Yes, there is a vast right wing conspiracy.

So here's to you Hillary, for fighting back, for your dead right "review" of the Bush PR Theater's long-running melodrama.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Maureen Dowd on Hillary: Not Angry Enough

Here's a few key paragraphs from Dowd's column today: Who's Hormonal? Hillary or Dick? The last paragraph is absolutely dead on: not only is Hilary not angry enough, no credible Democrat is angry enough.

The Democrats were once a party of righteous anger, with populist instincts, but over the past 30 years the Republicans have managed to portay themselves as the party of heroic masculine power, and the Democrats as whining and ineffectual women. Here's Dowd:

The Republicans succeed because they keep it simple, ruthless and mythic.
...(snip)

Now, in the distaff version of Swift-boating, they are casting Hillary Clinton as an Angry Woman, a she-monster melding images of Medea, the Furies, harpies, a knife-wielding Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" and a snarling Scarlett Johansson in "Match Point." ...(snip)
...(snip)

The hit on Hillary may seem crude and transparent. But in the void created by dormant Democrats, crouching in what Barack Obama calls "a reactive posture," crude and transparent ploys work for the Republicans. Just look at how far the Bushies' sulfurous scaremongering on terror, and cynical linkage of Saddam and Osama, have gotten them.
...(snip)

The G.O.P. honcho Ken Mehlman kicked off the misogynistic attack on George Stephanopoulos's Sunday show. "I don't think the American people, if you look historically, elect angry candidates," he said. Referring to Hillary's recent taunts about Republicans, he added, "Whether it's the comments about the plantation or the worst administration in history, Hillary Clinton seems to have a lot of anger."
...(snip)

Hillary's problem isn't that she's angry. It's that she's not angry enough. From Iraq to Katrina and the assault on the Constitution, from Schiavo to Alito and N.S.A. snooping to Congressional corruption, Hillary has failed to lead in voicing outrage. She's been too busy triangulating and calculating to be good at articulating.

As I said in my January 7, 2006 post, in the right wing's two-tier marketing strategy:
Strong, heartful, heavily-backboned cowboy hero that he is [portrayed to be], [Bush] has sworn himself to protect the American people from near certain death at the hands of terrorists and their weak misguided liberal friends who would insist on rights even for killers.

As usual, the populist message is couched in black and white terms of good vs. evil (strong male republican leadership founded on Good principles which will defend and protect the body from evil versus the weak female democratic non-leadership founded on Evil unwilling to defend the body of the people against Evil).
And it looks like Bush PR Theater and Lie Factory is getting away with it yet again...

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Shame? Among Republicans? Not Possible!

From America Blog:

Why do Republicans continue to accept being lied to by their own government?

I suspect the folks at Americablog are asking that question in an attempt to shame some Republican leaders into breaking with the Bush gang's "All Terror, All the Time" PR campaign. I'm doubtful.

Republicans of conscience know what happens to those who would question the pronouncements of George "Divine Right" Bush: severe punishment, or might I say, divine retribution.

The Republican party once adhered to honorable ideals: now they are merely thieves, and the administration a kleptocracy.

Sunday, February 05, 2006

"Mr. Danger" Bush To Win On Warrantless Spying?

Read this paragraph from today's Washington Post story "Surveillance Net Yields Few Suspects" and tell me that there's a chance in hell Bush will ever get impeached for it.

From Wash. Post:
The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the high proportion of bystanders swept in, sheds new light on Bush's circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program's lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged "reasonable" if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable. Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained.

I mean The Post and Times can publish a thousand stories on what was done, quote a thousand experts on why it's illegal, and it won't make a bit of difference. It's just too "complicated" when compared to the Bush PR Theater's long-running melodrama "All Terror, All The Time" which was recently reprised during the State of the Union address.

All George "Mr. Danger" Bush has to do is sound the siren, shout his favorite rhetorical question "Would you rather die or what," and the American people stick their fingers in their ears and hide under the bed.

George "Dr. Jekyll" Bush vs. Hugo "Mr. Hyde" Chavez

The irony is so rich you can choke on it: U.S. administration critics like Donald Rumsfeld accuse Hugo Chavez, president of Venezeula, of their own acts:

Critics accuse [Chavez] of consolidating power, punishing opponents and instigating confrontations…(from Wash. Post)

Over and over these Dr. Jekyll's attack their shadow selves, their murderous Mr. Hydes.

Unconscious stooges of the neo-cons' updated version of Manifest Destiny, they project upon their enemies their own moves and dark tyrannical desires.

Friday, February 03, 2006

Robertson, Rummy on Chavez: "Would You Rather Die or What?

That fine exemplar of Christian virtue, Pat Robertson, has once again suggested that the world would be a better place if Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was assasinated.

And just a couple of days ago Donald Rumsfeld said that Chavez is like Hitler" -- getting elected legally then consoldiating power once he got into office.

I must say I feel better now hearing that. That means that because Bush came to power illegally, that means he's not like Hitler at all!

But watch out, Hugo, I got a feeling you might be joining the scads and scads of other South American left wingers so unbeloved by the American government. Watch out especially for those special exploding helicopters!

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Bush: Pillaging the People for Fun and Profit

Perhaps misunderstanding conservative Grover Norquist's recommedation to get government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub," the Bush administration has been working hard to drown the American people in a sea of red ink.

Maybe they're just doing now to the U.S. poor what the enforcers of U.S. global economic policy, the IMF, the World Bank, ECAs and commercial banks have been doing in poor nations for years: sucking out their lifeblood for transfusion to the wealthy, and leaving in return the tell-tale sea of red ink.

Below is my review of THE DEBT THREAT by Noreena Hertz (photo above). See what you think...


The Plague, February 21, 2005

Back in the good old days of Western imperialism, Western powers used the same tried and true approach over and over again to extract wealth from and subdue non-Western peoples: invasion and/or colonization, and/or enslavement. This method was effective for a few hundred years, until subjugated populations after living in close quarters with their masters and learning their weaknesses, mounted various successful forms of resistance against them, e.g., the Algerians' violent resistance of the French, or Gandhi's non-violent resistance of the British. After the First World War, the Western powers (although with much backsliding, evident now in Iraq), began to withdraw their armies and close up their colonial shops. After the great bloodbath of WWI the old cover stories -- "The White Man's Burden" - were so threadbare that the average Westerner could at last see imperialism for the nasty racket it was.

But wait. It turns out that was just the opening chapter of imperialism. There's a new chapter, or in business-speak a "new paradigm." Through the relatively abstract miracle of debt, rich countries since WWII have been able to reclaim their hegemony. The beauty part for the West has been that invasion through debt does not require much in the way of armies and colonists. In fact, what is really sweet about the new way of doing business is that invaders get to dictate terms to poor countries and don't usually have to back up their threats with armies. Instead there's the threat that global traders will lower poor nations' bond ratings, squeeze their economies, and, by extension, their people, until they see the light. Kind of like loan sharking when you think about it.

Loan sharks, contrary to the stories told in movies and books, generally like to keep their customers alive, because after all, they want to get their money back. In this new form of colonialism that's pretty much true, too. But still, people do get killed like they did during the traditional imperialist paradigm. Hertz shows in chilling detail, for instance, how a cholera epidemic swept through Peru because Alberto Fujimori, following the dictates of the IMF and World Bank, sent every nickel he could get his hands on to pay the interest on Peru's national debt so Peru would get back into the good graces of the financial markets. Healthcare services, welfare and other human services were curtailed or cut to pay the debt. When Peru and opened up its economy to the international market as per the IMF just as commodity prices dropped, unemployment and poverty rates went through the roof. Rural dwellers moved to the city seeking work. Work was not available; unsanitary conditions were. So desperate was their poverty that these Peruvians couldn't afford soap to wash their hands or kerosene to boil their water. And so cholera killed nearly 4,000 in less than a year.

Ms. Hertz provides much needed insight into the history of the debt threat. It began in the Cold War - the era of the "chessboard and the checkbook" in Thomas Friedman's phrase - when the U.S. and the Soviets were buying allies. Few restrictions applied to these loans. Dictators and oligarchs could spend it any way they wanted as long as they remained friends. Then in the 70s came the commercial U.S. banks, awash in petrodollars, making loans and betting that Uncle Sam would reach into the pockets of the U.S. taxpayer to bail them out if necessary. After the Soviet collapse ended the era of checkbook diplomacy, a newly invigorated IMF and World Bank began its recent career as a lender of last resort. Their one size fits all free market approach placed the same onerous restrictions on every nation they did business with. Debt enslaved nations meekly agreed to more enslavement lest these agencies tighten the screws further.

Ms. Hertz takes us through this history at a brisk pace and shows through examples that though the approach may have changed, the result is the same: poor countries in thrall to rich countries. She shows with gripping examples not only how the racket works but, more importantly, how these practices put the West in danger by promoting dangerous conditions around the world. For instance, disease can now board an airplane and land in any Western nation in a matter of hours. Poor people grown even poorer because of their nations cannot afford basic health services and so grow weaker, more susceptible. Their afflictions mutate and metastasize, and soon the entire body of humanity is at risk. Then, of course, there is the wholesale destruction of the environment as poor countries rip up their forests and sell their oil to the West so it may be burned or turned into toxins. And, of course, there are terrorists who find an ever expanding pool of ready recruits among the poor, a whole new class of young men who are boiling with resentment and rage. Tragically, in the narrow Western ethos of profit and loss, payment of debt must override all other concerns, because profit-making is the only goal, and capitalism the best of all possible alternatives.

With THE DEBT THREAT, Ms. Hertz's continues to demonstrate how the forces of global hypercapitalism that she explored in her first book ("The Silent Takeover") put the lives of everyone in physical, and at the very least, moral jeopardy. As in that book, her personal story gives one hope: an economist trained at Wharton (she was there to help "jump start" the Soviet economy in the early 90s and was witness first hand to the anti-human ethos of the free-market fabulists), she has switched her allegiance to the other side of the barricades. On a positive note, global protests and activism has managed to arrest some of the worst abuses of the World Bank and IMF, the commercial banks and ECAs. One can only hope that this cogently argued work will awaken more and more people to this latest, and perhaps even more deadly strain of imperialism.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

What Dowd Doesn't See: Bushies Pig-Headed and Proud of It

"It's stunning that nearly four decades after Vietnam, our government could be even more culturally illiterate and pigheaded," says Maureen Dowd in her NY Times column of today, Didn't See It Coming, Again. "The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react."

Dowd, I would suggest, is incorrect in her analysis here. Pig-headed and proud of it, the Bushies continue to ignore the facts on the ground in Iraq because they are fighting an ideological war that began a generation ago in America. As I said in my post of November 19, 2005, The Importance of Being Earnest or Why the Cabal Won't "Cut and Run":

The Bush administration will never pull U.S. troops out of Iraq. To do so would be to violate a sacred principle of the ideologues who run George W. Bush and the U.S.: America must never again retreat.

"Again" is the operative word here. Again because this principle rests upon the foundational belief of the neo-cons that the US must never show weakness again as it did in Vietnam. According their view Vietnam wasn't an unwinnable conflict against an enemy that could not be defeated in the conventional US manner. Nope. That view wouldn't serve their imperial agenda, or stimulate their appetite for conquest.

No. According to the neo-con rewrite, the U.S. was on the cusp of victory when American leadership knuckled under to student protestors (dupes of Communism), lily-livered peaceniks, dope-smoking journalists in the liberal media, limousine liberals in Congress, etc., etc.

Since Bush's last State of the Union speech, the conditions in Iraq by most measures have badly deteriorated: more Americans killed than in previous one year period, more Iraqi police killed, more bombings, more civilian deaths, and less electricity being delivered to Iraq citizens, etc.

In Iraq-nam the Bush team were and continue to be -- deliberately -- pig-headed and culturally illiterate because they were and are continuing to fight a domestic battle against "weak liberals" who lost the war in Vietnam because they (according the right-wing narrative), "didn't have the guts to win." Monstrous.