panopticonman

Electrifying Secrets of So-Called "Free Market"

2007-10-02T10:15:00.000-04:00

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein brilliantly proposes a compelling counter-story to the prevailing fable of free market infallibility. Buttressed by painstaking and wide-ranging research, and an ability to see connections where others only see coincidence, Ms. Klein amply shows that profit-making is not the essence of democracy as Milton Friedman and his minions would have it. She shows instead that the machinery of the state and the requirements of "disaster capitalism" are now so tightly synchronized in their exploitation of disasters both man-made and natural as to be virtually one in the same.

Citing pertinent examples to prove her thesis that "disaster capitalism" is now rampant around the world - in Russia, in China, in Iraq to name just a few - she describes how in times of crisis, elites everywhere have learned that they can profit by implementing policies, e.g., "shock therapy" or "shock and awe," that would have been vigorously opposed in normal times. When these changes to Friedmanite free-market dicta are opposed, as they were in Chile, a third shock is implemented. This, according to Klein is a shock that is entirely man-made - the torture and murder of those who would stand in the way of the takeover of the public sector, or, as neo-liberal economists would have it, the bringing forth of a new birth of freedom.

During the "Reagan Revolution," Klein argues, the notion of the `Entrepreneur As Hero' was buffed to a high gloss though the influence of right-wing think tanks whose pronouncements were reported by a cowed and obedient media. A decade later in the dot.com era, entrepreneurs were burnished to blinding sheen when the media fed the world images of swashbuckling venture capitalists who were touted as bringing forth a new millennium through the Internet. Klein maintains that George W. Bush's "public offering" -- the War on Terror - covered slavishly and avidly by the media, has been wildly successful, lining the pockets of investors in the new Homeland Security sector as promises of taxpayer money everlastingly flowing into the coffers of the military-industrial-energy complex have been fulfilled. This is the new "new economy:" the looting of the public sector through the now tried-and-true methods of disaster capitalism.

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE reveals the many wounds that disaster capitalism has inflicted upon the body politic both here in the U.S. and throughout the world over the past 25 years. It is a breathtaking achievement. Highly recommended.

Bush and Vietnam: Rewriting History

2007-08-26T11:50:00.000-04:00

Last week, Bush finally spelled out the neo-con re-write of the Vietnam war to explain why our troops must stay there forever. Almost two years ago, I wrote the following explanation about why the Bush administration can never pull troops out of Iraq. See if I wasn't right in my diagnosis.

Saturday, 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 supposedly 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 conquesst. 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.

Had the US only persisted long enough and strenuously enough, if only the military hadn't been hamstrung by the politicians who had foolishly listened to the anti-war elite, then -- and here's where I have trouble with the neo-con rewrite -- everything would have turned out the way we wanted it to turn out. Sound familiar?

I've never been very sure what that would have looked like, the American victory in Vietnam. And I'm wondering if it's a coincidence that we don't really know what the American victory in Iraq is supposed to looks like either. Here's some possible versions: A series of rigged elections the outcomes of which are consistent with US goals of freedom and democracy (and US business interests) are organized and executed. A puppet government is installed that opens the door to American business interests. Hydroelectric plants are built on the Mekong by US construction companies with loans from Citibank, suburban homes are erected in the outskirts of Saigon/Baghdad with loans from Fannie Mae. Oil fields are tended by Halliburton, roads are built across the desert by US companies paid for with Iraqi oil/and/or loans from Chase. Or maybe it just looks like Afghanistan looks nowadays what with its new birth of freedom, the reflowering of poppies and the Taliban. But I digress.

More recently, the neo-cons point to Reagan's withdrawal of the US Marines from Lebanon after their base was destroyed by a suicide bomber as a colossal misstep in recent foreign/Mid East policy. Again, according to the neo-con interpretation, by pulling up stakes, by doing the "cut and run" America lost credibility, sullied its image among consumers. Its enemies and friends saw the US as weak, a "helpless giant" -- a shameful and humiliating reiteration of Vietnam. Grenada was qickly invaded to wipe the stain from America's military escutcheon a couple weeks after, of course, but the neo-cons knew that this bit of public relations would have be redone on a much larger scale in order to build a stronger, more fearsome brand image. This new brand image would have to be scary enough so that even Arab extremists would think twice before going up against the rebranded "Bad 'Ol USA."

So the war in Iraq is an object lesson, (as well as the usual grab for the invadee's political and economic short hairs). It's a lesson to American's friends and enemies that we will not retreat again, that we are not weak as we were in the past, that, if need be we can be as resolute as any totalitarian state or terrorist gang. That in the Bad Ol' USA we will engage in torture, if need be, just as any totalitarian state or terrorist gang does. That we will not be hamstrung by an anti-war elite or student protestors or the liberal media because in totalitarian states those impediments to policy have been suppressed. There will be no further discussion, just like in any other -- but you get the picture.That's why all the shouting and hysteria this week from Bush and Cheney, the smear tactics used on Jack Murtha, the absolute refusal to put any end date on the U.S. occupation. Perception police, they cannot brook dissent.

To allow dissent would be to give credence to other points of view, to the possible desecration of the brand, maybe even to the opening the coffin of the "helpless giant" they have spent so much time, money and blood nailing shut.The monocultural machine that they have built through intimidation, blood and terror, must be maintained at all costs.

Brothers Myshkin & Raskolnikov

2007-07-07T21:13:00.000-04:00

My review of THE IDIOT. Read it for my bookclub.

Written immediately after CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Dostoevsky gives us THE IDIOT, whose hero, Prince Myshkin, is gentle and Christ-like - the polar opposite of Raskolnikov, the nihilist murderer. Taken together, the two novels give us a fascinating critique of Russian (and Western) society from the perspective of a sinner and a saint, and of a society that has produced both.

Admittedly, THE IDIOT must be seen a minor novel in comparison to CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. It lacks its psychological power and narrative drive. But I would suggest that the greatness of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT is enhanced by reading THE IDIOT. Further, I would argue that much of what is seen to be the greatness of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT originates in the location of the narrator's point of view inside the teeming and tortured mind of the ultimate outsider, Raskolnikov. The third person narrator inside a single consciousness became the "default" practice in the late 19th and early 20th century. This is perhaps why the story of Prince Myskin, our gentle insurgent in THE IDOT who is nearly always seen inside of a Russian society, and whose story is told in a mix of omniscient narrator and from Myshkin's point of view is seen to be old-fashioned or hard to read.

I would argue that given the nature of the story Dostoyevsky is telling here - of a society that cannot cope with an honest and compassionate man that the omniscient narrator's voice is warranted and appropriate (unlike a number of reviewers below for whom this technique comes off as creaky and plodding). To tell the story he wants to tell, Dostoyevsky must move from one drawing room to another, one set of eyewitnesses, gossips, and minor characters to another. These set pieces - such as Natasya's "party" where she chooses whom she will marry, or the nihilist Ipollit's reading of his Confession, also locate THE IDIOT more in the realm of traditional 19th century novel of manners than CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. And its ostensible subject matter - marriage - places it squarely in the genre.

I find it sad that the set pieces in THE IDIOT can seem interminable to some modern readers. Yes, characters do hold forth for pages and pages, propounding theories, relating anecdotes in excruciating detail. In the society of the 19th century, even in the chaotic society of post-feudal Russia where the social order was in flux, the conversational customs of a court society still held sway. Even in the considerably more democratic United States, the presence of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. at social functions was highly prized by elites because he was universally recognized for his acumen as a speaker and conversationalist. These days we don't talk anywhere near as intelligently, as passionately or grandly these marvelous characters, and our suburbanized circumstances reduce our chances for unsettling social encounters as well. Which do you more often attend - parties featuring a stew of anarchic social criticism, bizarre personal attacks and grotesque dissembling, or a dull pudding of sitcom japes and bumpersticker politics? Which would you prefer?

Dostoyevsky fills his drawing rooms with challenges to the status quo, with intemperate invective, with radical claims on the political and economic system. At the same time he gives voice to conservative views, e.g., that Russia was better before Alexander II freed the serfs (in 1861, only 6 years prior to the publication of THE IDIOT), better before the aristocracy began to rub shoulders with powerful merchants and usurers, better before the atheists, nihilists and anarchists attacked the church and the social structure.

Interestingly, many of these contretemps are, as in so much 19th Century fiction, posed in connection with "the woman question." Our heroine, Natasya, raised by her guardian and seduced at a young age. is intent upon exposing Russian society for its hypocritical attitudes and brutal behavior toward women. Brilliant and beautiful, Natasya concoct a series of circumstances that both outrage and shame conventional society. She is the demonic critic of Russian society, her vindictive spirit contrasting sharply with Prince Myshkin's penchant for compassion and forgiveness. Together they form a unique double-edged critique of the bourgeoisie. And both are broken by their society's cruel intolerance and vast hypocrisy.

Prince Myshkin's conversation marks him among members of his society an "idiot" because he speaks forthrightly and answers truthfully without regard for the consequences. So disturbing is this behavior that Aglaya, the woman he hopes to marry, tells him not speak at the gathering at which he is being introduced to high society as a suitor. But driven by the onset of an epileptic fit, he disobeys and gives himself up to a remarkable speech in which his praise for the assembled company, his views on politics and religion are interpreted by most as an insult, and by many as the ravings of a madman. His speech is a form of social suicide, self-murder, and as such the flip side of Raskolnikov's homicide.

In the largest sense, what's at stake in these conversations and disputes is no less than the soul of Russia. Through the prince's speech Dostoyevsky poses the question as to whether Russia will reawaken to her deep and unique Christian heritage and behave, like the prince, with virtue, compassion and honor, or become like the empires to the West whose money-grubbing ways have begun to infect Russia and her people.

THE IDIOT has flaws. There is too much disquisition and exposition even for a 19th century novel. Sometimes, Dostoyevsky will vamp along for a few pages, trying to figure out what to do next. But still, THE IDIOT is well worth reading by itself, or even better, in combination with CRIME AND PUNISHMENT for its psychological acuity and its devastating dissection of a unique social world under stress.

Attack of Ayn Rand & The Objectivists

2007-02-27T10:29:00.000-05:00

Here's my review of The Fountainhead, for which I've received a sound drubbing on Amazon. At the bottom I've posted comment that was made by a fan of the book. If you read my review and then the comment, I think you'll see how this person actually proves my point.

Unkindness as Philosophy, January 28, 2007
THE FOUNTAINHEAD has been described by one of its many followers - yes, followers, not readers, for the book is essentially unreadable -- as a "passionate defense of individualism [that] presents an exalted view of man's creative potential." This is a fair description, although it points unintentionally to the book's main flaw: it is not a novel, but a tract posing as a novel.

Traditional progressive novels tend to be suspicious of the exalted, especially of those who occupy exalted positions based on birth or social class. In the case of Ms. Rand, the exalted are those rare individuals who, like herself, must be allowed to work their will upon the world because they believe themselves exalted. A circular argument at best, a bad faith argument in truth, this tacit nod to the slow ascent of the common man and woman since the Enlightenment spares Ms. Rand from plumping for monarchy which, even by today's repellent neo-conservatives standards, is universally seen to be repellent.

Because her main character, Howard Roark, architect extraordinaire, is an argument and not recognizably a person, he not surprisingly suffers from a lack of inner-animation. Sensitive readers will chafe against the underlying and predictable framework that ultimately treats characters as props for Ms. Rand's objectivist philosophy, an anti-progressive stew of prejudices posing as a critique of the welfare state and its "leveling effects."

Here's the problem with her "philosophy:" for every Howard Roark it raises up as Hero, it writes off millions of people as unworthy of our interest, our sympathy and our compassion. Unkindness is not a philosophy most find acceptable. With THE FOUNTAINHEAD, Rand attempted to make it so and has managed to fool many. Because she has, she is therefore lauded by her conservative followers because her apologia absolves them of any responsibility for the fate of their fellow men and women.

Regrettably, this book and her other tendentious work, ATLAS SHRUGGED, have found their way into the backpacks of idealistic college students. One suspects that many, because their relative youth causes them to see themselves as unique individuals, are seduced by the notion that they, too, are slated for Heroic status. I have nothing against people having heroes; young people especially should have them. But Howard Roark is no hero. He's a stick figure that represents a hero. I suspect too, that because of their general unreadability, students think the books are "deep."

In retrospect, it seems true that those people whom I knew in college who didn't finish this tract-posing-as-a-novel were people who tended to be relatively reasonable in their social and political views. Those who did finish it, on the other hand, tended to be immoderate and dogmatic. Judging by some of the reviews posted here, this probably remains true today.

Now here's the comments of Lonnie E. Holder, a Top 500 Amazon reviewer.

Lonnie E. Holder
I disagree with your comments starting from the beginning. I have read this book, twice. I loved it both times. I found the book easy, yes, I said easy, to read. I was gripped by the story line and the concept of the purity of Roark's purpose.

Your second point is that this book is a "tract." A "tract" is defined as a leaflet or pamplet containing a declaration or appeal. Rand's novel contains elements of a philosophy, not a declaration. If there is an appeal, it is an appeal to sanity and away from socialism. Read Mikhail Bakhtin's "Discourse in the Novel." Rand meets Bakhtin's highest standard, an original voice. There are critical essays noting that when someone speaks (or writes) with an original voice and the voice attains authority that is substantially different from established authority, then frequently the voice is reviled. On the other hand, Rand knew that she would be reviled by those who failed to understand her and her not-so-subtle preaching against socialism.

In your second paragraph I see you totally missed the point of Rand's novel. Her central point was that no one should work their will upon the world. Rand deliberately fashioned Toohey to be someone who imposed his will on the world so that she could point out that these are the people she felt were destructive and anti-progressive. Roark did what Roark did and he knew that there would those who understood him and those who did not understand him could never be his clients and he would not work for them. Roark was an anti-manipulator because he could not manipulate or work his will on anyone, nor would he want to.

You next argue that "exalting" Roark is anti-progressive and anti-leveling. You sort of have that right. Rand recognizes that (revelation here) not everyone is equal. Oh my. Guess why communism failed. Some people are suited to be mathematicians and physicists, others art not. People are born equal in rights, but not in capability, and no amount of wishing and hoping will ever change that. I admire Roark's purity of purpose. Many in our so-called "modern" society would repress his creativity and talent for the sake of making inferior talents "equal." Such repression and imposition of will by the masses is wrong and removes the benefits of great creativity and genius from being able to improve our technology and our society.

Rand did not intend Roark to be a hero. She intended Roark to be a role model for purity of purpose. Never did she say that millions should be written off. Neither was she preaching or suggesting that we have no compassion for people that fail to meet the high standards of Roark. What she did say is that the vast majority of people will follow what someone suggests they should follow (read sheep), and those people should speak with their own mind rather than being dutiful robots. As noted above, people that speak with their own mind are often reviled by those who follow current authority.

You state that Ayn Rand's works are tendentious. Really? Well, is that not good? Your comments are tendentious, in case you had not noticed. Of course, they are also specious, but that is only because you failed to understand the novel.

You stereotyped people with respect to Rand's novel. Those who did not finish it are nice moderate people. You mean boring. So sad for them and their tedious little lives. Those who finished the book are dogmatic and immoderate. Those are your tendentious statements, not mine. I have a flexible point of view and am generally moderate. I have found that most people who have read this book, understood it, and enjoyed it, are seekers of truth and like people who think for themselves. They do tend to be generally in favor of individualism and are anti-communists. However, the converse (meaning those people who have not read the book) is not necessarily true, because there are people with those characteristics who have not read the book.

One final point. I suggested in my review of this book that Howard Roark would likely not have read "The Fountainhead." Something for you to think about.

I shall continue to think, but so far, count myself Roark-like in that I did not finish the book, while my critic did. Three times.

Meet the New Boss, Worse Than the Old Boss

2006-11-26T18:59:00.000-05:00

Here's a review I just posted on Amazon. The paragraphs in bold type at the bottom were not included in the Amazon review because of the 1,000 word limit there.

Mysteries of Corporate Mayhem Revealed!
November 26, 2006

Richard Sennett, in THE CULTURE OF THE NEW CAPITALISM reflects upon the reactionary extirpation over the past three decades of the Western social capitalist state. Starting with a discussion of Bismarckian social capitalism which was founded on the model of the Prussian Army's highly successful bureaucracy and which provided structure and discipline to cultural relations, Sennett ends with a bleak meditation on the values encoded in the New Economy versus the Old. These include the elevation of process over craftsmanship, of "flexibility" over stability, of superficial over deep knowledge, and of centralized power over mediated authority. Along the way, Sennett shares pithy insights into the nature of this revolutionary shift and the cultural and economic dislocations it has caused.

Sennett states that three new pages were turned in the late twentieth century workplace. "First has been the shift from managerial to shareholder power in large companies." (pg. 37) This shift in power, according to Sennett turned a second new page: "The empowered investors wanted short-term rather than long-term results." The third new page representing a challenge to the past "lay in the development of new technologies of communication and manufacturing." He notes that "one consequence of the information revolution has...been to replace modulation and interpretation of commands by a new kind of centralization." (pg. 43) At the same time, automation, growing out of technological innovation "...has affected the [social capitalist] bureaucratic pyramid in one profound way: the base of the pyramid no longer needs to be big." (pg. 43). Circuits replace people.

According to Sennett, the old model, built on the pyramid model with a mass of workers at the bottom responding to a chain of command situated at the top is on the way out. In contrast, the new model he likens to an MP3 player: "The MP3 machine can be programmed to play only a few bands from its repertoire; similarly, the flexible organization can select and perform only a few of its many possible functions at any given time. In the old-style corporation, by contrast, production occurs via a fixed set of acts; the links in the chain are set. Again in an MP3 player, what you hear can be programmed in any sequence. In a flexible organization, the sequence of production can be varied at will." (pgs.47-48). (Notably, and perhaps inevitably, the new model got its start in the cutting edge businesses of finance, technology, pharma and media and their support industries: marketing research, advertising, and business consulting).

In a remarkable section on the shift in how employees are assessed - based on achievement in the old structure and "potential" in the new -- he shows how SAT testing supports the new regime. Sennett notes that "in the search to consummate the project of finding a [Jeffersonian] natural aristocracy, the mental life of human beings has assumed a surface and narrowed form. Social reference, sensate reasoning, and emotional understanding have been excluded from that search, just as have belief and truth. ...These [flexible] institutions ... privilege the kind of mental life embodied by consultants, moving from scene to scene, problem to problem, team to team. He says that "...this talent search cuts reference to experience and the chains of circumstance, eschews sensate impressions, divides analyzing from believing, ignores the glue of emotional attachment, penalizes digging deep--the state of living in pure process which the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman calls 'liquid modernity.'" (pgs. 120-122)

He notes that while citizen-workers might have been trapped in Max Weber's "iron cage" under the old system, nevertheless the structure gave its denizens a sense of meaning and was roughly consonant with general social values. In essence, Sennett says: "Time lay at the center of this military, social capitalism: long-term and incremental and above all predictable time." (pg. 23).

This new architecture, crafted by the business consultant class to whom agency is given by the new corporation, enables the exercise of enormous centralized power through new communications technology, and at the same time evades the responsibility of its recommendations, as do those who hire them. Bloodless terms like "flexible" workplaces," "off-shoring" and "right-shoring," "downsizing" and "right-sizing" are, for instance, deployed to mystify mass firings and those responsible for them.

The ideal worker in this paradigm is conceived to be flexible, cooperative, efficient and not get too involved in the nuts and bolts when doing problem-solving. Want ads looking for "entrepreneurs," and "self-starters" are emblematic of this shift. The ideal worker is most of all attuned to short-term shareholder values, values which insist on change. Whether the change is good or bad is almost irrelevant: change is in and of itself a signal to investors of impending short-term gains.

Sennett offers "five ways in which the consumer-spectator-citizen is turned away from progressive politics," each element of which arises from the culture of the new capitalism. He says that the consumer-spectator-citizen is "(1) offered political platforms which resemble product platforms and (2) gold-plated difference; (3) asked to discount 'the twisted timber of humanity' (as Immanuel Kant called us), and (4) credit more user-friendly politics; (5) accept continually new political products on offer."(pg. 163). Summarizing these points, he says: "The culture of the new capitalism is attuned to singular events, one-off transactions, interventions; to progress, a polity needs to draw on sustained relationships and accumulate experience. In short, the unprogressive drift of the new culture lies in its shaping of time." (pg. 178).

In his last paragraph, Sennett attempts to end on a hopeful note: "What I have sought to explore in these pages is thus a paradox: a new order of power gained through and ever more superficial culture. Since people can anchor themselves in life only by trying to do something well for its own sake, the triumph of superficiality at work, in schools, and in politics seems to me fragile. Perhaps indeed, revolt against this enfeebled culture will constitute our next fresh page."

I don't know about you, but I'm not holding my breath.

Sennett offers as the historical turning point from the old pyramid to the unraveling of the Bretton Woods agreement in the oil crisis of 1973. This rupture caused the weakening of national constraints on investing. Wealth, suddenly liberated, was available for investment, and began chasing after short-term profits where once it had been satisfied with long-term dividends. The post-war consensus, that social compact which attempted to regulate business, government and labor, slowly came apart.

Notably, the unraveling of Bretton Woods happened at the same time that the U.S. and Soviet governments put aside their inflammatory anti-communist and anti-capitalistic rhetoric and sought to demonstrate to their unruly citizens and client states that as nations they could and would work together in peaceful coexistence. Jeremi Suri, in POWER AND PROTEST: GLOBAL REVOLUTION AND THE RISE OF DETENTE, suggests citizens had become unruly because of their leaders' charismatic rhetoric in the early 60s -- the "New Frontier," the "Great Society," "Communist Construction (and DeStalinization)" – a rhetoric of rising expectations that promised more prosperous, more egalitarian societies. But when these promises could not be kept, the U.S. and Soviet Union found it useful to engage in an era of détente, the strength of which "…derived from the fact that it addressed the fears and served the interest of the leaders in the largest states."

Doug Henwood in AFTER THE NEW ECONOMY, notes that it was at this same time that the conservative movement in the United States, which had been mostly quiescent in the 50s and 60s, gained a new counter-
revolutionary impetus as the ruling class, the top 1% which had traditionally controlled about 40% of the wealth in the United States, found their share reduced to approximately 20% in the early 70s. (Pg. 121). It was then that The Chicago School economists, led by Milton Friedman, sharpened their neo-liberal apologia for anti-Keynesian capitalism. Their theories were embraced by the denizens of the Business Roundtable, their friends in the Treasury Department and the White House. Eventually, in Henwood's words, "...through benefit cutbacks by employers, outsourcing, speedup, permanent downsizing, cutbacks in regulation, the central-bank-led class war succeeded in more than doubling the profit rate for non-financial corporations between 1982 and 1997" (pg. 210).

Also at this same time (1971) future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce entitled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System" that warned of an assault by environmentalists, consumer activists, and others who "propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it." The memo called for an organized effort by a powerful coalition of business groups and ideologically compatible foundations to align the U.S. political and legal system with their own vision. To see that this reactionary memo did in fact call forth the very forces that Powell sought to conjure, one has to look no further than the rise of K Street lobbyist and right-wing think tank in Washington, D.C.

And so we find a remarkable similarity in the goals of business and government during this pivotal time. All were reactionary attempts to tamp down the insurrection by citizen-workers as well as unruly client states and non-aligned and third-world countries.

At the same time in a feat of singular cynicism, as Thomas Frank (in THE CONQUEST OF COOL and ONE MARKET UNDER GOD) notes that while business which becoming more regressive in the 1970s, business also began to sell soft-core versions of revolution to world consumers: revolution by Nehru jacket, by suits with bell-bottom trousers, by VW bug, by blow-dryer and ever more outrageous entertainments. Then, in the 80s during the Reagan revolution, business took an even more amazing liberty: it began to position itself as promoters of Populism, Progressivism, and personal freedom. Business began to advertise itself as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement, a movement in which the magical workings of the market would smooth the way for a new birth of personal freedom and human dignity in the U.S.A., and throughout the world.

Frank notes that this fake populist "revolution" continued in the 90s when Americans were told that average working stiff could easily become the "millionaire next door," and further, that the average guy was much better off owning stock than relying on his pension or Social Security to see him through his golden years. So pervasive did this free market farrago become in the media, that even now, well after the New Economy bubble has burst, many still hear it as gospel truth, believe that inevitably everything must be privatized for "efficiency's sake." So cunning has the pro-business rhetoric of the corporate state become that the average American blames himself for not being "entrepreneurial" enough, when instead Frank says he should be working to reverse the corporatocracy's 30-year rollback of worker's and citizen's rights.

I couldn't agree more.

One final thought. I was reminded in writing this review of THE CULTURE OF THE NEW CAPITALISM of Rory's Stewart's harrowing chronicle of his walk across Afghanistan, THE PLACES IN BETWEEN. At the end of his walk he makes the observation that the "neo-colonialists" have one plan for every developing country, a plan that is based on a modern "fundamentalism" -- the infallibility of the Free Market. And when this ideology fails, Stewart notes, as it has failed in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the new neo-colonialist administrators pack up their bags and move on to the next international hotspot, touting the same panacea despite its repeated failure to take hold. He observes that this kind of failure would never have been tolerated among earlier colonial empires; that it may be emblematic of America's schizophrenic, impatient, inconsistent brand of imperialism.

Sound familiar?

Frank Rich vs. The White House Propaganda Factory

2006-09-19T20:56:00.000-04:00

Here's my review of Frank Rich's THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD" that I posted on Amazon today.

There's a new twist on Amazon -- people can leave comments on reviews. The first comment I got was from someone who claims that the United States is practically the only democracy left, then called me a "bad American" and "Bushophobic." Read my review and see if you agree!

That's Showbiz!, September 19, 2006

In THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD, Frank Rich amply proves that in these United States, we no longer have a functioning democracy but instead a taxpayer-funded theatrical enterprise which serves up to an increasingly restless public endless variations of cynical melodrama designed to scare the American people into submission, neutralize opponents, and surreptitiously realize big profits for its investors in the military-industrial-energy complex.

As long-time theater critic at the New York Times, Frank Rich is clearly better suited to seeing though the stagecraft of the Bush administration than the so-called "hard news" reporters like those in the stage-struck White House press corps. Reporters like the New York Times' Judith Miller, for example, who swallowed the Nigerian yellow cake uranium melodrama hook, line and sinker, and credulously fell for one red herring after another.

Hypnotized by their front row access to the White House melodrama and the threat of losing it, Rich argues that hard news reporters were played for suckers in the run up to the war by the morality play presidency of George W. Bush. The White House press corps became invested in the story, Rich argues, perpetuating the story line and profiting from it in the form of a rapt readership, and high ratings. The apocalyptic story line of a smoking gun that would become a mushroom cloud was just too sensational to pass up.

Rich wrote in an editorial a week before he went on sabbatical to write his book: "The highest priority for the Karl Rove-driven presidency is...to preserve its own power at all costs. With this gang, political victory and the propaganda needed to secure it always trump principles, even conservative principles, let alone the truth. Whenever the White House most vociferously attacks the press, you can be sure its No. 1 motive is to deflect attention from embarrassing revelations about its incompetence and failures."

As much as I am grateful for Rich's book and his columns -- one of the last voices, along with Paul Krugman's, of the Times' once-proud bourgeoisie brownstone liberal tradition -- I find myself shaking my head at the notion that the Bush administration might be "embarrassed" by its "incompetence and failures." One can only be embarrassed at incompetence and failure if you believe you have been shown to be incompetent or to have failed. But since this production is designed only to line its investors' pockets with loot, and has been doing so very nicely, there is no reason for embarrassment.

The Bush troupe, cynically directed by Karl Rove, while not capable of embarrassment, is, as Rich points out, very good at sniffing the political winds and sensing what its audience needs. As Rich says, depending on the situation, Rove will put on a new performance to draw attention elsewhere, and/or shine a harsh interrogatory spotlight on those who dare to respond to their latest offering with a sigh, a snort, or a Bronx cheer. Rove is particularly adept at creating villains as foils to an heroic Bush. While it's nothing new -- the divide and conquer melodrama has been big box office for Republicans and conservatives since Joe McCarthy came up with the formula back in the 50s - Rove has refined the stagecraft, sharpened the script into soundbites.

Recall if you will Bush's "inability" to admit to making any mistakes in his Presidency a few years ago under questioning at a White House press conference. Many commentators saw that as an example of Bush's unwillingness to examine a new set of facts, draw new conclusions and make new plans. But, in fact, Bush was playing his role of heroic common man perfectly, "catapulting the propaganda" over the heads of elites to his real audience - those true believers who embrace with all their hearts the Rovian melodrama of the strong, tough hero.

The problem with a steady diet of melodrama, of course, is that after a while the audience begins to lose interest. At some point, as Mr. Bush's poll numbers suggest, the tear-jerking and fear-jerking no longer work. The Manichaean plot becomes ever more apparent and the players are at last revealed as stick figures, as puppets, as empty ciphers in the service of the deus ex machina.

Perhaps even Mr. Bush has at last grown tired of the limited role of cock-sure, tough-talking, God-loving hero, the stock character he and director Rove artfully recycled from movie westerns, dime novels and tall tales: recently Mr. Bush told Brian Williams of NBC that he read "three Shakespeare's" and "The Stranger" during his summer vacation.

The final tragic message of THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD is that the curtain on this base melodrama could have come down years ago had only the "reviewers" in the American press corps and the Congress been doing their jobs for the American people. Frank Rich has done his job from the very beginning of this longest running melodrama in American political history. Thankfully, he continues to do so.

The Sorrows of Neo-Colonialism

2006-09-10T19:30:00.000-04:00

Here's my Amazon review of "The Places In Between" by Rory Stewart, a remarkable book by a remarkable man.

Walking To Enlightenment, August 27, 2006

Serendipitously, I finished Rudyard Kipling's masterpiece, KIM, on the same day I read the NY TIMES review of Rory Stewart's THE PLACES IN BETWEEN, a review that was so compelling that I bought the book that very Sunday.

Serendipitous because there are many remarkable resonances between Stewart's narrative of his walk from Herat to Kabul in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion in 2002 and Kim O'Hara's fictional walk along India's Grand Trunk Road during the period circa 1900 known as The Great Game -- the struggle between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia.

In both works we find the omnipresent influence of religion upon the social and political spheres. Interestingly, in KIM, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists of many sects mingle with one another inside the discipline of an ancient feudal caste system, (a system the British adroitly exploited for economic gain). By Stewart's time, however, the Taliban's religious fundamentalism has violently undone the tradition of tolerance and hospitality.

Then, on a more mundane level, in both works, we encounter civilizations where distance is calibrated by a day's journey on foot. Both "characters" walk ancient routes dotted with caravanserai, roadside inns where travelers could rest and recover from the day's journey. In Stewart's case, these shelters are mostly abandoned; it is often the mosque that is now the way station. In Kim's world, the shelters and markets are teeming with travelers from far away places who trade stories, foods, goods, songs, jokes, and often hilarious verbal abuse. That Stewart is told by Afghani officials he will likely be killed during his walk is indicative of how much this ancient culture has changed.

In an arresting footnote (pgs. 247-248), Stewart, after reading a post-war development plan for Afghanistan when he arrives in Kabul, remarks that "Critics have accused this new brand of administrators of neo-colonialism," then goes on to say "Colonial administrators may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing."

That is certainly the case of the British in India as described by Kipling in KIM. Kim himself simultaneously takes up the roles of spy for the British and novice to a Tibetan Buddhist lama. Kim can dutifully attend a Catholic school for children of colonial officers where he becomes a skilled surveyor, then during vacations disappear into India's teeming masses of beggars, holy men, and traders -- the familiar life he grew up in as the orphan of a British soldier. In this, he is a perfect instrument of both British military intelligence, and, ironically, the questing Chinese lama whom he guides through the rough and tumble world of street thieves, beggars and mountebanks to a prophesied river of forgiveness and enlightenment.

The new neo-colonialists, Stewart suggests, have one plan for every developing country, a plan that is based on a modern "fundamentalism" -- the infallibility of the Free Market. And when this ideology fails, Stewart notes, as it has failed in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the new neo-colonialist administrators pack up their bags and move on to the next international hotspot, touting the same panacea despite its repeated failure to take hold. This kind of failure would never have been tolerated among earlier colonial empires; it may be emblematic of America's schizophrenic, impatient, inconsistent brand of imperialism.

In THE PLACES IN BETWEEN we see the vestiges of an ancient civilization, its passing hurried by the new version of The Great Game which demands adherence to the universalist creed of economic freedom. Common human decency, once supported by the strictures of Islam that demanded among its followers hospitality to strangers, is fading fast as the project for a new American century polarizes and radicalizes traditional cultures everywhere.

Whether you read it as an adventure, a travelogue, a guide to what's happened and what's happening in Afghanistan, THE PLACES IN BETWEEN is truly a remarkable achievement.

Prating Priests, Miscreant Managers

2006-09-09T11:38:00.000-04:00

Here's my Amazon review of "FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" by Thomas E. Ricks.

I wrote it a couple of weeks ago, before Rove kicked the 9/11 Fear Machine into high gear for the mid-term elections.

FIASCO is a potent antidote to the base fear mongering that the Bush gang is now fully engaged in. Highly, highly recommended.

Walking Toward Wisdom, August 26, 2006

From the first page, it is clear why Thomas Ricks' FIASCO has climbed to the top of bestseller lists. In the highly politicized public debate on Iraq, Ricks is an authoritative voice reporting facts -- facts that were in such short supply in the run up to the war, in the wake of the invasion, and even now three and a half years later.

Facts, we learn in agonizing detail, were pushed aside or fabricated to support the invasion. Invasion plans developed under the Clinton administration, detailed plans that anticipated an insurgency and had contingencies for dealing with it were ignored. The post-invasion plan developed by the Bush administration on the other hand, was a confused PowerPoint presentation of 15 or so slides which offered nothing to the commanders on the ground but bullet-pointed jargon.

As Ricks tells us at the outset: "None of this was inevitable. It was made possible only through the intellectual acrobatics of simultaneously 'worst-casing' the threat present by Iraq while 'best-casing' the subsequent cost and difficulty of occupying the country."

As you read FIASCO don't be surprised if you find yourself having to take frequent walks around the block to blow off a little steam. The exercise will do you good, and as you walk you may finally come to feel in your very bones as I have the vast ideological arrogance of the neo-con priesthood which argued for the war and the malevolent managerial incompetence of the Bush administration which had no plan to win the peace.

Baddest Bad Boy on the Block

2006-08-03T14:25:00.000-04:00

Here's a revew I recently posted to Amazon for Stephen Kinzer's book OVERTHROW: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq."

It's a terrific book and once that I highly recommend. Here's my review:

The Terrible Gift of American Freedom, July 30, 2006

Particularly timely give the current catastrophe in Lebanon, indeed throughout the Middle East, Stephen Kinzer in "OVERTHROW: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq," catalogs with the journalist's eye for the telling detail and the historian's attention to larger patterns of change and continuity, the mostly money-grubbing, plutocratically-driven regime changes undertaken by the U.S. government over the past 100 years.

To read OVERTHROW is to come to understand how very little American citizens have to do with their government's foreign policy decisions. To read this eye-opening book is to see how the U.S. goverment, when it does need to fabricate a reason for regime change crafts a cynical appeal always to Americans' belief in the exceptional goodness of themselves and their system. In reality, American citizen's are enlisted in these undertakings in only two ways: as cannon-fodder or cheerleader.

In fact, in almost all 14 cases of "regime change" that Kinzer covers, the U.S. government's actions are nearly always driven by corporate interests: bananas in Honduras and Guatemala, sugar cane in Hawaii, copper and telecommunications in Chile, oil in Iran and Iraq.

For instance, the perfect scenario for regime change in the 50s was to conjure up the specter of world Communism as the reason for deposing foreign governments who had the nerve to consider policies that interfered with American corporate interests such as the nationalization of Iran's oil resources. The perfect rationale now, of course, is global terrorism, a movement the U.S. helped create as the blowback from invasions and assassinations earlier in this century, and for which it continues to recruit with its ham-handed, simple-minded policies.

Highly recommended both for its brisk pace and its broad and balanced view of the U.S.'s mostly short-sighted and most disastrous career of regime change. Good companion reads are "HOUSE OF WAR: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power" by James Carroll, and "EMPIRE'S WORKSHOP: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism" by Greg Grandin.

The New Gospel of Wealth

2006-06-30T15:00:00.000-04:00

Here's my review of THE WORLD WE WANT by Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell. I posted it to Amazon in May, 2002. Little has changed since then: the idea that free-markets bring freedom continues to be sold and accepted as Gospel.

Slipping Out of the Soft-Noose Consensus, May 13, 2002

Along with other clear-thinking Canadian writers such as Norma Klein (NO LOGO), Stephen Dale (LOST IN THE SUBURBS), John Ralston Saul (THE UNCONSCIOUS CIVILIZATION), Mr. Kingwell cannot ignore the many perfectionist proclamations emanating from the U.S. Like them he is able think constructively about the political implications of the ideology of global consumptionism down here in the McMegastate.

Kingwell, a philosopher, refers to this latest eruption of economic imperialism as the "soft -noose consensus of production andconsumption," just one well-turned phrase among many in this fascinating meditation upon the meaning of citizenship and the importance of dissent in an environment where dissent is either marginalized or co-opted by commercial culture. For instance, he explores today's diminution of the polis through the "soft-noose consensus" by discussing Leibniz's 18th century theodicy of the "best of all popular worlds."

This neat bit of legerdemain hypothesized that since God could create any kind of world he wanted, and that since God is perfect, the world we live in is "the best of possible worlds." As Kingwell points out, Liebniz's contemporary critic, Voltaire says this idea does not take into account the existence of evil, i.e., if God is "omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, " then he would not allow evil in the world. Leibniz would reply by claiming the problem is not that God allows evil in the world, the problem is that we mortals cannot see his larger design, which indeed is benevolent.

Kingwell's point is that we no longer talk about the potential for evil in capitalism, because the same kind of "theodicy" can be found in capitalist ideology, which now "brooks no rational challenge." The only "debate" we are treated to here in the States is that we're living the "best of all possible worlds" a world being created by that best of all possible engines -- the free market -- case closed. Thus any caviling about disparities in wealth, or the misery that abounds in the Third World and pockets of the First, is met with a "chorus of incredulity" by the faithful. For them, the great Market God has "omnibenevolent designs" and to question Him is to doubt Him and his great works. This "rhetoric of inevitability" as Kingwell calls it, is so omnipresent here in the States and has come to explain everything we do, that our leaders can only think in terms of the marketplace. For example, only recently, we Americans were told that the best way to fight the "terrorist threat" was to go out and buy something. By charging a big-ticket item on our Visas, we too strike a blow for freedom.

A corollary to this theodicy not mentioned by Kingwell might be that the Market God's ultimate purpose is to bring all and sundry into the best of all possible First World, despite their kicking and screaming. The "rationale" directing this belief is that once all barriers are trampled down -- cultural barriers, religious barriers, geographic barriers, the barriers of unions, wage scales, etc. -- the dream of perfect production and consumption will be fulfilled, the telos of the Almighty Dollar will become immanent, and we will all enter Paradise together.

Here's Kingwell on some of the manifestations of the consumptionist theodicy: "...the contemporary branding and narrativizing of consumer products, which compresses desire and expectation intothe slick miniature plot of the television commercial, makes all of us de facto experts on names and logos and spokespeople. Our overwhelming exposure to these microtales of success and beauty transforms acquisition into a kind of hypercompetitive graduate school, with Phil Knight, or Bill Gates, or Michael Jordan our presumptive professors. All the buying and selling of cool naturally comes down to this: I know more than you about the available brands, I am more 'au courant' with the latest narrative, I discovered this logo sooner than you, and therefore I have an advantage over you. ...We all know this is true because marketers and their critics (who are sometimes in another elision the very same people) ....and yet we seem unwilling to act on that knowledge." Kingwell argues, overall, that a new humanist telos can take root and flower in the dry and cracked ground of the current theodicy, even in the fearful shadow of the Market God, and that is up to us to begin to think about to what that new telos should point.

Apologists for the free market may say the publication of books such as Kingwell's shows how free, and therefore morally good, the free market really is. They might further argue that the lack of popularity of such views indicates they are not shared by most Americans (thereby reflecting the true market "disvalue" of his thinking). This is, of course, a disingenuous argument at best, and it is the same familiar argument used to justify most of the free market project. In a time when the din of hypercapitalism drowns out everything else down here in the States, where its acolytes pounce on any idea which deviates from free market scripture because it might actually spark a public debate about the world we want, thinking like Kingwell's is dangerous, as dangerous as those pesky questions Socrates kept asking in Athens.

If the current "marketplace of ideas" were truly a free market, if Kingwell's probing ideas were broadcast in a weekly column in The Wall Street Journal, featured prominently on CNN, on Bloomberg terminals and TV stations, in Businessweek and Forbes, my guess is that the long twenty year huzzah for the miracles of the free market would sputter to a stop in about two months. Replacing it would be a realistic discussion of what we value in society, and how we might achieve it. How invigorating it would to converse about where we are going instead of bowing to a Market God as the Divinity that shapes our ends.

Post-Modernism and JFK

2006-06-22T17:25:00.000-04:00

Here's a review I wrote on Amazon a while ago oF KENNEDY AND THE PROMISE OF THE SIXTIES by W. J. Rorabaugh. I may have been one of its only readers, judging from the less than interested reception the book seemed to receive -- mine was one of only two reviews on Amazon. Still, I think it a good, short history and recommend it.

Postmodernism Begins
December 26, 2002

In KENNEDY AND THE PROMISE OF THE SIXTIES, Rorabaugh does a good job of supporting his thesis that the Kennedy administration, though short, was a critical era during which today's postmodern politics, culture, art and literature were born. In politics, it was Kennedy's reliance upon image marketing and private (his father's) money that undid the old backroom deals of the earlier political structure. Also, the civil rights movement came into new prominence in the March on Washington, the women's movement was reborn in its train, Pop Art replaced Abstract Expressionism, and Beat literature and the Folk music boomed.

Rorabaugh credits the Kennedy administration for encouraging a break with the introverted, conformist world of the 50s -- giving tacit permission to a new extrovert culture where how one felt could be more freely expressed. It was an "inside out" time, he argues, which unleashed great optimism and creativity, but chaos and uncertainty as well. He neatly traces the early 1950s rumblings of political and social dissatisfaction against the bland bourgeoisie pursuits of money-making and family raising, showing how that earlier era set the stage for the early 60s explosion of the civil rights movement, and identity politics. He shows how the pursuit of social justice combined with the pursuit of radical non-conformity were tacitly endorsed during that era as an antidote to the anti-communist panics as practiced most famously by McCarthy and Nixon.

But of course there was a darker side to the new "inside out" world Kennedy helped create: image politics were born -- a politics of money and marketing. He points out that Kennedy's platform was not a platform as much as it was a positioning against the previous administration. Kennedy merely promised he would "get the country moving again," talked provocatively of a (non-existent) missile gap. The Kennedy's used the media brilliantly and the media, especially television, used them. For the media recognized in Kennedy a perfect mythic story - Camelot - and could not get enough of Jackie, the kids, and the young president himself. In the photo spreads in LIFE, the White House tours on TV, the era of celebrity politics began.

Rorabaugh is at his best in showing how the myths of the Kennedy image machine served to shield it from criticism then and now. Starting with the Bay of Pigs disaster followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Rorabaugh shows how an administration hypnotized by its press-clippings never had any real policies, but reeled from one crisis to the next. Rorabaugh suggests because of the administration's embarrassment in its dealings with Castro and Khrushchev, Kennedy talked tougher and committed more money to supporting the corrupt South Vietnamese government than was necessary or appropriate, and thus laid the groundwork for the disaster in Vietnam as well.

The author also does a good job also of showing how Kennedy's love of intellectual brilliance and as his concentration on surface appearances got him into other kinds of trouble as well. For example, in bringing in from private business such bureaucratic luminaries such as McNamara and the other Whiz Kids, Kennedy set a new tone of technocratic brilliance and efficiency. Ultimately, the Whiz Kids gave bad advice to Kennedy during his two big crises with the communists, and terrible advice to Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam. Rorabaugh notes that Sam Rayburn commented at the time that he found it difficult to work with people who'd never so much as run for sheriff. The Washington of today is similarly filled with powerful unelected actors -- another vexed legacy of the Kennedy era. The difference is now perhaps that these powerful actors are more likely to be lobbyists, less likely to be government employees.

Rorabaugh, though he doesn't spend a lot of time on it, is particularly good on the cultural backdrop of the Kennedy years. Especially impressive is his brief history of the rise of Johns, Warhol, and Rauschenberg against the previous generation of Abstract Expressionists. Celebrating the surface like their president, the pop artists fully embraced the world of mass production and consumerism, celebrating it and taking it for granted in a way that the Abstract Expressionists, steeped in the strictures of the Modernists, never could.

At its best, the book serves to help demystify and put into perspective an era that seems to be recalled these days almost exclusively as hopeful and upbeat, as a kind of prelude to the storm of the "real 60s". Rorabaugh shows that while it was an era that was filled with hope, much of that hope was mere aura created by the myth makers in the White House and an all too willing media. Yes, most of the American people were ready for a new birth of social justice. Yes, the Peace Corp energized a lot of young Americans. But the high tenor of hope generated by the administration, Rorabaugh suggests, was so popular and dominant precisely because it balanced its very real and compelling opposite: the very real fear of nuclear annihilation - a fear which the Kennedy administration's ineptitude almost managed to make real.

On a personal level, I recall as an elementary school kid in the early 60s that both importance of physical fitness and mathematics were strongly emphasized for young people by the administration during those years. Kennedy told us not to ask what our country could do for us, but to ask what we could do for our country. And we wanted to do something for our country. At the same time we learned to clasp our necks (to keep the flying glass from a nuclear explosion from severing an artery) as we balled ourselves up like pill bugs under our little desks. I also recall that more than anything I wanted us to be a family that had a bomb shelter. I recall that somehow I thought that in digging a shelter I would not only help thwart the Russians, but that it would be good exercise, too.

"What's Left of the Campus Left?"

2006-05-15T10:30:00.000-04:00

The other day I got an email from an editor at "The Chronicle of Higher Education," Evan Goldstein, who had read my review on Amazon of Eric Lott's THE DISAPPEARING LIBERAL INTELLECTUAL (the post immediately below). He asked me to submit a question to an online colloquy the Chronicle was hosting with Todd Gitlin called "What's Left of the Campus Left?"

The occasion was prompted by an article Gitlin had written for the Chronicle in which he responded to criticisms leveled at him by Lott and others.

Below, I reproduce my question and Mr. Gitlin's response (the whole colloquy can be found here). I can't say that Mr. Gitlin actually answered my question, but I can say that he is masterful in the way he does not answer it.

Question from Peter S., former English instructor, SUNY Potsdam: The summary of Mr. Gitlin's article on the Chronicle's website says: "Leftists in academe spend too much time attacking "heretics" within their ranks... and too little time articulating a persuasive vision of a more just world."

In The Disapperaing Liberal Intellectual, Eric Lott makes the case that "boomer liberals" such as Todd Gitlin, Richard Rorty, and others spend too much time attacking the radical left.

Lott suggests that these attacks have been counterproductive to the stated goal of many liberal writers: to get the necessary electoral heft and to drive the right wing from power. He argues that by holding the left at arm's length, by marginalizing them as unrealistic radicals who need to learn moderation, that liberal intellectuals smoothed the way for the centrist conservatism of the Clinton years and the reactionary statism of the Bush administration.

Here's my question: "Instead of marginalizing the left, shouldn't "boomer liberals" challenge themselves to find common cause with those on the same side of the political spectrum?

Todd Gitlin:The author doesn't write the Chronicle's summary. That said, you don't properly fathom the weirdness of Eric Lott's book. He displays not the slightest interest in "getting electoral heft," but rather concocts a spurious analysis blaming "boomer liberals" for "nation-love" and "political complacency with a relatively youthful face" that inhibit an uprising in behalf of his purist causes. I maintain that this view is phantasmagorical. For someone so sure of his revolutionary project, it's curious, isn't it, that Professor Lott offers not the slightest evidence that, absent his nemeses, the young revolutionaries would be going about the right insurgency. Bless the students who want to improve the world, but I haven't observed throngs of them poised for real-world action until their enthusiasm is doused by these movement-busters.

There were, however, many excellent political efforts in 2004 and I hope for more this fall. I'm also partial to the policy work of the Roosevelt Institution (rooseveltinstitution.org), on whose advisory board I sit (stand?). As for me, I'm on the board of Greenpeace USA, and spend the bulk of my time outside the classroom writing and speaking directly about politics. I encourage other like-minded instructors to do so as well. This is a citizenly duty and it is urgent.

Getting the Left Right

2006-05-06T18:31:00.001-04:00

My review of THE DISAPPEARING LIBERAL INTELLECTUAL by Eric Lott, posted on Amazon last week, is only an attempt to report on this richly intellectual work. It's not an easy read, but it is a rewarding one.

Fairly Fierce, Fiercely Fair, May 2, 2006

In THE DISAPPEARING LIBERAL INTELLECTUAL, Eric Lott makes a convincing argument that liberal intellectuals such as Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, Henry Louis Gates, and Michael Lind among others have attacked the libertarian multicultural left in order position their nationalistic brand of "boomer" liberalism as the best hope against the tide of red state conservatism. And that by doing so, they are doing the work of the right wing.

To a large extent, because the brand of liberalism endorsed by these writers is for most Americans what the left is understood to be, some readers may find Lott's distinction between liberal and left confusing at first. But for those who can make the necessary distinction, Lott offers a bracing, erudite criticism that is long overdue

As one who has read many of the writers and Mr. Lott examines, I find his judgments fair but also, where appropriate, unsparing. Indeed, Mr. Lott bends over backwards to give credit to many of these authors.

For instance, he gives Michael Lind due appreciation for his original thinking on Jefferson and his influence (negative) on American culture. He also credits Stanley Crouch for Crouch's dead-on assumption that American culture is African American culture, or at the very least, a Creole culture. Lott is dismissive, and rightly so, of Crouch's quasi-conservatism on political issues as they relate to race, finding him to be cranky and wrong-headed. But Lott is not mean-spirited in this criticism. He simply believes Crouch is wrong.

Lott maintains that the attempted marginalization of the radical left by these writers has been counterproductive to the stated goal of many of them: to get the necessary electoral heft to drive the right wing from power. He argues that by holding the left at arm's length they have unwittingly promoted the reactionary statism of the Bush administration.

Making this case by showing that their ascendance paralleled the rise of the Clinton administration, an administration which pursued a "triangulated" center, a course which in most ways promoted a watered-down Eisenhower era Republican agenda, Lott shows that the Clinton era was more than problematic for the left, that in fact it was disastrous.

He offers considerable evidence for his views through close readings of these author's works. Indeed, one only has to read a recent column by David Brooks in the New York Times in which he congratulated liberals for turning away from multiculturalism and toward a more adult "Trumanesque" nationalism to see how much territory these writers have surrendered to the right, and to see how correct Lott is.

Lott offers up as an example of a cogent left-wing critical voice Armand White, whose collection of essays on popular culture, THE RESISTANCE: TEN YEARS OF POP CULTURE THAT SHOOK THE WORLD is, as Lott suggests, the work of an original radical voice. I had not read White, An African American cultural critic whose works in the collection were mostly published in "The City Sun," a black newspaper in New York, until Lott's book convinced me that I should. White's film and music criticism ranges freely from Metallica to Madonna, Spielberg to Spike Lee, Michael Jackson to Public Enemy. Like Lott he is bracing, gutsy, and original.

In reading many of the works of the boomer liberals Lott discusses, I often found they gave me a sense of possibilities foreclosed, of options elided, of nostalgia for a vanished pre-radicalized 60s. If you've ever had the same reaction to these writers, I highly recommend reading Lott. His prose is dense, but ultimately rewarding, and every once in a while, unexpectedly, hilariously funny.

Berman's "Dark Ages America"

2006-04-29T18:53:00.000-04:00

I posted this review of DARK AGES AMERICA: THE FINAL PHASE OF EMPIRE by Morris Berman yesterday on Amazon.

I also recommend you listen to Berman interviewed by Lenny Lopate on wnyc.org last week -- it's sure to pique your interest.

DARK DESTINY, posted on Amazon, April 27, 2006

A work of breathtaking erudition and synthesis, DARK AGES AMERICA offers no hope for arresting America's career as a self-destructive global hegemon. While that's a difficult conclusion to swallow, Berman amply defends his thesis, drawing his supporting evidence from a variety of disciplines: history, cultural studies, polling data, economic analysis, sociology and social psychology. The possibility of America's turning away from its dark destiny, which in Mr. Berman's analysis is now clearly manifest, is made to seem remote, and, regrettably, convincingly so.

Particularly compelling is Mr. Berman's discussion of America's need for an enemy, an Other upon which to focus in order that we never turn our attention to the emptiness at the center of the American psyche: The Red Menace, the Cold War, the War on Drugs, The War on Terror. Each of these wars has served to diminish and even outlaw critical thinking about America's empiric career. In a constant state of emergency, history for Americans is a set of bullet points which are cynically served up as justification for the latest military adventure. Berman's anecdotes and survey findings paint an American populace that is self-absorbed, provincial, and willfully anti-intellectual, a people for whom bullet points more than suffice.

We watch television shows about tightly knit families and groups of friends, staving off the loneliness generated by the individualistic, devil-take-the-hindmost ethos that is America's real civil religion, Berman says. We turn away from the terror that we inflict on innocent people in order that we may claim their oil wealth and so keep this dwindling life-blood flowing in the veins of the American project of global empire. We pay no attention to the vast sums of money spent to prop up the energy-military-industrial complex. Instead we are distracted by cynical stories of welfare queens, wicked tax and spend liberals, evil dictators and axes of evil, our resentments kept well-stoked and smoldering.

On a personal note, landing at Kansas City International Airport the other day, my vision of America altered by my in-flight reading of Mr. Berman's remarkable work, I saw the landscape through new eyes, a landscape I now understood to have been systematically vandalized by the corporatocracy: big box stores, chain hotels and restaurants, strip malls and gas stations, a landscape everywhere repeated across the United States, a landscape we intend to impose upon the world in order to fulfill our destiny as bringer of freedom as expressed through consumption.

While this cookie-cutter landscape had always before aroused in me a sense of unease, an unease that had become in me clich? and so easily subdued, with the assistance of Berman's perspicacious vision, I became alive to the fact that this American landscape represents in physical form the ingenuity and monomania of America's new empiric form.

Empty of community, driven by the ethos of radical individualism, I saw an interlocking system of endless consumption in which we are all driven by the relentless stoking of our vanity and desire by clever marketers who have taught us to confuse social goods with economic goods, and by a political structure which mystifies cause and effect, which ruthlessly condemns anyone who has the temerity to question the course of this bleak, empty empire.

The Royal Scam

2006-04-26T14:42:00.000-04:00

Michael Katz's "The Price of Citizenship" opened my eyes to the ways in which the right wing advances its anti-human policies through psuedo-science, public relations, and disinformation campaigns. Not much has changed since then, except that the volume of the lies has increased. Here's my review from May 2001:

METHOUGHT I HEARD A VOICE CRY "SLEEP NO MORE!" May 23, 2001

With "The Price of Citizenship," Katz performs a much needed demystification of the ways in which the social welfare state and the poor have been attacked and continue to be attacked by social and fiscal conservatives under the guise of consumer choice and the chimerical promise of the marketplace as the best of all possible ways to administer "welfare." A work of breathtaking scope, Katz examines each of the programs of the welfare state -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance, AFDC ("welfare"), Public Eduation, etc. -- gives a brief history of the inception of each, and then gives a recent history of how each program has come under attack by the forces of business and and their shortsighted friends in government.

Here's how they do it, according to Katz: Using the same master narratives of sorting citizens into deserving and undeserving categories to begin the assault, then tightening the screws on the "undeserving," the conservative business forces follow up with the panacea of the marketplace as the be-all and end-all solution: get those lazy minority mothers off the dole and into jobs; close down the loopholes in unemployment so that no one will qualify; drive people slowly toward the assumption of more and more risk by scaring them with junk statistics on the imminent demise of Social Security and then offering them the "solution" of mutual funds -- etc., etc., etc. The strategy is always the same: the market will knit up the ravell'd sleeve of care, when in fact it really serves to unravel the social safety net for those who need it most, and, weaves new money-making nets for others in the name of "efficiency" and "choice." These special stronger nets are the new welfare schemes for corporations and the upper and upper middle class.

One of the finest chapters deals with underhanded manipulation by conservatives of the public with regard to viability of Social Security. Katz convincingly shows that Social Security is not in any danger of going bankrupt -- period. He shows how the forces arrayed against Social Security, through misinformation, through the politics of playing younger workers against older workers, has managed to convince most Americans that they will either not recieve their benefits or recieved reduced benefits. Indeed, until I read this chapter, I was one sheep among the many. He then goes on to show how the various "choice" schemes proposed to "fix" Social Security through investment in the stockmarket -- either individually or collectively -- would serve to make financial companies billions and billions of dollars. In every chapter, Katz follows the money, and, sadly it usually leads to the ultra-right think tanks whose clients most stand to profit from the privatization of government social welfare programs.

It may sound by this review that "The Price of Citizenship" is a muckraking screed. Or that it was written by a conspiracy nut. It is neither. Instead it is a deeply researched work that convinces through facts as well as through narrative that the forces of the marketplace through the instrument of the ideology of the market as espoused by the right wing have been successful in undermining the foundations of U.S. social welfare programs (which frankly weren't much to begin with). Katz never uses invective -- the strongest word he uses is "underhanded" in his description of the scuttling of Clinton's health plan by business and medical interests -- instead he marshalls facts, questions assumptions, and draw important parallels and connections between the assaults on all of these programs. After reading this book, you'll be more than prepared to do some debunking of the conventional wisdom about Social Security, "Workfare" programs, HMOs, etc. May I dare say Katz has done us all, and even his country, a noble service by putting the lie to the master lie of the marketplace as the best solution for what ails us. Voucher this, baby!

The End of Democracy

2006-04-16T12:51:00.000-04:00

Here's my review of "The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocrac" by Marjorie Kelly which I posted on Amazon in November, 2001. I was so taken with her analysis that I wrote Ms. Kelly a fan letter to which she graciously responded.

I encourage you to click on the title link above which will take you to my review and others on Amazon. Read the one star reviews for a quick course on the brittle neo-liberal defenses of corporate power, where Ms. Kelly is charged with being a Marxist, with stupidity, with arrogance: all the usual names that are trundled out by the true believers in the corporate creed in response to Ms. Kelly's thoughtful, undogmatic insights into the anti-democratic ethos of the corporatist state.

Here's my review:

THE NEW FEUDAL STATE, November 19, 2001

I was thrilled with Marjorie Kelly's extended analogy of the corporate state as the last bastion of feudal state (and the belief system which upheld it, i.e., the great chain of being, the divine right of kings, etc.). In her introduction, Kelley warns us that she may overuse the analogy -- but really, it's not possible. Nor is the analogy of the American Revolution as a revolution against a regime which saw Americans as colonials (and thus with limited rights -- as England "owned" us, our energies and the goods we produced).

The feudal metaphor explains the queasy feeling most workers get when their advice is solicited in quality circles (it's because its like we're being patronized by the nobles, who are only asking us how we feel to have more effective dominion over us). It explains the pervasive lack of trust employees have for their employers (the lord of the manor only has his interests at heart, and only pays lip service to the importance of developing and keeping employees: when the chips are down, it's bye-bye serfs). She drags out of the shadows the biases of 18th century models of economic man and the nascent industrial system it described, and demostrates how current conceptual frameworks of business are based on feudal values. The king is the law, the law is designed for property owners to enforce their power, labor is always seen negatively, as a cost, an inconvenience, a population that must be ruled. She notes that in current accouting practices, labor and employees are seen on the expense side of the equation, as liabilities, not assets. This anti-democratic bias is so deeply woven into the fabric of how we think about business and how we're taught about business by MBAs, by business scholars, by the media, by the political and corporate establishmen, that to finally bring "wealthism" to surface amounts to a revolutionary act.

At its heart, the Divine Right of Capital is a conversion story. Ms. Kelly, as the 15 year editor/owner of a publication called Business Ethics, wakes up one morning to find that all the platitudes about growing corporate responsiblity, corporate environmental sensitivity, the new kinder and gentler workplace that she had been writing about was never going to work. That a revolution in how we think about business is required. She and her fellow business ethicists were trapped in the conceptual structures of corporate thinking, corporate doublespeak. Since the first commandment of this regime is: the shareholder is King, the Shareholder-King is the only party who needs should be considered (employees? those varlets!) and the Shareholder King is only interested in profit, and thus the corporation must only serve this one master -- a domination structure which is firmly embedded in Ford vs. Dodge, a 1919 Supreme Court Decision, that tends to be viewed as the "latest thing" in corporate governance law. With this conceptual structure in place, and reinforced in other Supreme Court decisions, common law, MBA programs, and the government, Kelly realized business can never become democratized, but must only serve the wealthy speculator or investor class who serves them.

Quoting American revolutionaries at length and efffectively -- a good strategy as the conservative business elements hold them in such idolatrous regard -- Kelly shows us why we Jeffersonian cube farmers must rise and throw off the psychological shackles of the private corporation! Undermine the bogus rhetoric of executive committee of the bourgeouisie and the speculation class! She studiously avoids Marx, because ultimately she believes in the market, she just believes in a new conceptual framework that more reasonably reflects the modern corporation: i.e., that in a knowledge economy, employees are the one thing that is really valuable unlike in the old Robber Baron days, when the track and locomotives and the right of way was valuable -- the things of a company.

Very reasonable, packed with good, well-researched facts, the only thing wrong with it is that she is entirely too reasonable. She's been living with the enemy too long and thus writes drily, and quotes facts and figures to make her points. Tom Paine, whom she often quotes here, was a bombthrower. And although what she is saying may be earth shattering to some, what's needed is cataclysmic break with the past.

The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

2006-04-05T21:33:00.000-04:00

Here's my review of "The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man," a paleoconservative classic by Albert Nock. It was fairly early on in my attempt to understand conservatives that I heard about the book -- late 2002. It wasn't easy to find; it's out of print, deservedly so; I finally found a copy at the Brooklyn Pubic Library.

Coincidentally I was reading Henry Adams'truly classic "The Education of Henry Adams" at the time, and so saw the extent to which Nock, though claiming that he was inspired by "The Education of Henry Adams," was really doing a one-dimensional impersonation of Adams.

The roving pack of neo-, theo- and paleo-cons who swarm any negative reviews of their foundational texts on Amazon have slammed my review: currently, of the 73 ratings of my review as of today, 59 of them are negative. If you go to Amazon and read the other reviews, you'll see examples of what Lionel Triling called conservaives' "irritated mental gestures that seem like ideas."

MEMOIRS OF AN INSIDIOUS MAN
November 28, 2002
On the surface, MEMOIRS OF SUPERFLUOUS MAN, is an often charming, occasionally misanthropic remembrance of a vanished America by a self-admitted nearly vanished American type. Deploying a literary strategy similar to Henry Adams' THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS, Nock identifies himself, his beliefs, his elite classical education as superfluous in modern day America (circa 1900 to 1943). But the crucial difference between Nock and Adams is how they qualify themselves as superfluous. Adams is a man of subtle and ironic self-awarness who recognizes that he and the elite class he belongs to has apparently outlived its time, certainly its usefulness. That his family's his long chain of service has come to an end with him, suddenly snapped against a new America where the new men of power (such as his once good friend Teddy Roosevelt who turned his back on his class and remade himself as a man of the people), is deftly, self-effacingly and ironically told, and often contains real pathos. The same cannot be said of Nock's version of superfluity.

Though he attempts to use the sophisicated distancing techniques of Adams, Nock only manages to appear inveterately opposed to everything that might upset his elitist equlibrium. Through the lens of his classical education, Nock sees mankind as unchanging, steeped in sin, a species whose small attempts at building effective governments are destined to end in futility and folly. Where Adams sees that those in power in his time have lost their ardor for and dedication to the ideals of the revolutionary era implicitly criticizing the new technocratic class in government and business for its bloodless utilitarian and pecuniary values, Nock criticizes all modern liberal governments, and anything remotely else remotely Lockean. He absents himself from the social and political movements of his time, such as the women's movement, scorning its outcome as all too predetermined -- since the disruptive liberal ethos demands equality no matter how violently it rents the social fabric, there was nothing to be done for Nock but watch it happen with a certain measure of glee. Nock is as elliptical and implict as Adams, but where Adams employs the technique to chide society (and himself), what Nock leaves unstated is his hatred for liberalism. He leaves unstated his belief, for instance, that the social fabric that had held women so securely in their place for so long -- that conservative and sensible fabric mystically woven over the course of time -- should remain intact because it always had, and thus always should. Interestingly, like other intellectuals of his time and Adams and James before him, Nock fled the new pecuniary America. But unlike other intellectuals of his time who fled to Europe because it seemed to offer them a more humane and more traditional culture as a potential corrective to the grasping, greedy money culture of the second industrial revolution, Nock apparently fled America because he wanted to hobnob with the European artistocracy, no matter how faded and tattered it had become.

MEMOIRS OF A SUPERFLUOUS MAN has become one of the early canonical works of the neoconservative movement. It has all the earmarks of the Straussians -- the hatred of liberalism, the belief that only a few can be trusted with the disturbing truths of philosophy and that this elect should be entrusted with the political leadership by dint of this hard won wisdom. Nock also displays the parternalistic populism of the neocons as he waxes poetic about the common lumberjacks he lived with as a boy when his father took the family from Brooklyn to Michigan to head up a lumber operation. He portrays these commoners as hardy Americans untouched by the evils of cosmopolitan liberalism, brilliant and unspoiled, rugged individualists all. In a particularly vivid sketch, he describes a musical evening where these common men of toil sang better than any professional chorus he had ever heard. What he leaves unstated here is the neocon belief that the common run of mankind should be made content with entertainments and religions fashioned and promulgated by the elect to keep the commoners happy in their ignorance of the true nature of the world.

Nock asks his readers to accept that he knows the true nature of the world. Like most conservative arguments, it is the argument from authority, a form of argument which refuses to engage in the hurly burly of real debate. And that is why ultimately, Nock comes off as as dry and passionless as the technocrats he and Adams abhor.

American Empire Begins

2006-03-21T14:52:00.000-05:00

Here's my review of THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE IN THE MAKING OF U.S. CULTURE by Amy Kaplan, which I wrote in May, 2003 on Amazon. The book is particularly resonant nowadays given the current administrations' unilaterialst foreign policy, so reminiscent of America in the late nineteenth as it rushed to take over Spanish colonial possessions to promote the interests of American business.

Installing the Circuits of Empire, May 3, 2003
In THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE IN THE MAKING OF US CULTURE Ms. Kaplan has put together a number of illuminating readings of selected American texts as a way to explore the beginnings of empire, its expression in the U.S. in the mid to late 19th century. Her sources range from women's magazine's such as Harper's, works by Twain and W.E.B. du Bois, through "Birth of a Nation" to Welle's "Citizen Kane." She shows how the boundaries of empire were drawn, and how no one was were untouched by its discourse whether they recognized its contours or not.

She begins with a discussion of Mark Twain's first real assignment as a newspaperman: writing "letters" from Hawaii that were published in a San Francisco newspaper intended to promote the island to mainland businessmen and settlers. These letters and his observations later formed the basis of his first lectures and thus served as the springboard to his later career as a novelist. Twain, she notes, in his personal letters to friends and family is drawn to and repelled by the exotic, anxious to witness the rites of the dying Hawaiian people before they pass from history, and at the same time scandalized by their cultural practices, such as their lascivious dancing. Known generally now as an anti-colonialist because of an article he wrote during the Spanish American War(s), she demonstrates how he, knowingly, and with no little anxiety, early on recognized he was implicated in the colonial project.

On the sea voyage to Hawaii, for instance, he comes down with a bad cold, and mordantly writes to a friend that the illness he bears may kill off a few more thousand more Hawaiians. Kaplan maintains that Twain's exposure to empire in the color line in Hawaii and the exploitation of that people, (a quite different experience from how he experienced the color line in Missouri), laid the foundation for his later perspective and production of "Huckleberry Finn" some twenty years later.

Other key readings include the first full-length films produced during the "Spanish-American War Mania" when documentary footage of U.S. soldiers was mixed with some staged battles and scripted domestic scenes drew huge audiences to the movies. She suggests that the public happily participated in the jingoistic pursuit of empire through these films, and that these productions laid the groundwork for not just the war movie genre, but the full-length film.

Prior to these movies, shorts were the order of the day. She notes these films influenced the structure and visual imagery of "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915, which, if you haven't seen it recently, presents African Americans as the lords of misrule in the American South. Encapsulated in all these cultural productions are the portrayals of non-white men as stupid, power-crazed savages who in their grab at power, attempt to deflower the flower of the white womanhood, while non-white women are seen as exotic and erotically destabilizing. The Birth of a Nation casts the Klan as heroic figures who must preserve civilization through lynching, terror and mayhem. The Rough Riders were seen as masculine white heroes who swept away the decadent vestiges of a cruel empire, freeing Filipinos and Cubans who as non-whites and subjugated peoples could not understand or appreciate the boon of freedom that had been conferred upon them.

Orson Welle's "Citizen Kane," the fictionalized life of Henry Luce, is also examined as critique of the circuits of imperial power. She notes that it is one of the few films that even touches on the Spanish American War as a subject, but that this war was central to Luce's creation of his own media empire. Making the point that the yellow press grew to prominence during this era, repeating the story that Hearst started the war in Cuba to sell newspapers, she shows how the media supported the drive toward empire, and in their cultural productions assigned roles to citizens.

Her larger point is that empire is not a one way street, but rather is complex circuit through which the dreams of the imperial power are modified and altered through contact with the Other. Through her examination of W.E. DuBois, she summarizes his view that WWI was not centered in a dispute between European powers but that it grew out of Africa. By decentering the standard narrative, he rewrites the conflict as the history as growing out of the contact of Europe with Africa. This chapter nicely resonates with her introduction She relates through a Supreme Court decision how Puerto Rico was both a possession, and not a possession, holding it through law at arm's length -- a place in which it still resides, in a limbo as both dependent and quasi-independent. A similar judgment was made during the 1830s by the Supreme Court when they ruled that the Cherokee was not a nation in the strict sense, but a dependent population so that they could be uprooted and sent forth on the Trail of Tears. (See the book "1831" Year of Eclipse" by Louis Masur for the history behind that similarly ambiguous decision.

This is a thoughtful book to which full justice cannot be given in a short review. Her location of the Spanish American War as a key node in America's consolidation of its colonial aspirations is important and convincingly done. As a chapter in history, the Spanish American War(s) has always been dismissed as a minor episode, portrayed as the U.S. trying on the role of the colonizer during the colonial era's last gasp, an activity for which as a democracy it was ill suited. What Kaplan shows is that it was a rehearsal for a different kind of imperialism, the stimulation of the American middle-class through narratives of power as presented through the media, and the later colonization of the world through the globalization construct put forth under the rubric of democracy and free trade.

Follow the Shoes. Version 2.1

2006-03-13T17:21:00.000-05:00

Back in the 70s I jogged for about half a summer. I was down in Raleigh, North Carolina because there were no jobs in upstate New York. Not for young men who were going to college at any rate. Scarce and soon to be much scarcer, jobs at the local lumber and paper mills were reserved for the sons and daughters of senior mill workers.

Within a few years though, those jobs would be sent to the Pacific Northwest, and then Canada, then overseas, leaving in their wake unpaid mortgages, unrepaired snowmobiles, abandoned trailers and shotgun shacks, their abject yards clotted with broken washers and refrigerators. But the job diaspora hadn’t come to that yet, although the seams were beginning to show.

Through my brother I got a job as an electrician’s helper. Paid minimum wage, barely able to afford one meal a day, I spent every evening in the air conditioning of the college library to get out of the stifling swampy North Carolina air.

At closing time, I’d trudge slowly back to the small second floor attic room I shared with my brother and two other struggling beneficiaries of the State of North Carolina’s right-to-work policy. The tiny air conditioner we shared could only about half wring the water from the sludgy, musty attic air. It could not actually cool off the room, but it did at least dry the sweat off of our skin.

Waking up in this musty airless den, I’d pull on my Converse sneakers and jog out to the college track and do laps for about half an hour. It was relatively pleasant in the early morning, about eighty degrees, dewy, which somehow held the mugginess in check.

Eventually, I got the point where I thought I deserved some real running shoes, and so putting aside money for a couple of weeks toward their purchase, I went to the local mall on a Friday night and bought a pair of no-name brand running shoes, bright blue with three yellow diagonal stripes on either side. I could not afford Nike’s or Adida's, which cost about twice as much as the knock-offs I bought.

The next morning, elated with my purchase, I ran an extra fifteen or so minutes to break them in, enjoying the sense of mastery my new shoes promised and seemed to deliver. Spongy, springy, they were clearly a departure from the thin-soled basketball shoes we had all grown up with.

But it was me that was broken in, not the shoes. The next morning I could barely walk. I couldn’t climb the ladder at work and could barely climb stairs. Back at home later that summer I described my symptoms to a friend who had become an expert jogger who told me I had given myself shin splints. I never wore those shoes again, but nevertheless kept them for years as literal object lesson of Thoreau’s teaching.

My boss, deservedly nicknamed Lard, couldn’t understand why anyone would run anywhere at anytime, much less run and injure one’s legs to the extent that they could barely work and cost him money. Although he was irritated to have less than half a worker for the week or so it took me to recover, he got a lot of mileage telling other bosses on the worksite about the northern college boy who hurt his legs “jogging.”

Jogging was new concept back then and Lard was able to put an extraordinary spin on it, a spin that spoke volumes about idiocy of Yankee college boys, and Yankees in general. To run in the heat, even of an early summer morning, was to him and his cohorts just plain crazy. Sauntering with grave rotundity, drinking Co’ Cola for breakfast, that was the sane and accepted practice.

In hindsight I can see that mid 70s was when the Counterrevolution of the Bosses was just beginning to kick in. Not the bosses like Lard, of course, but the big bosses. The thousand or so guys who tell Wall Street what to do. You know, the plutocracy whom if you mention people call you crazy. Because in America the plutocracy has managed to convince people they don't exist. Good ol' boys like George W. and his Daddy ain't no plutocracy. They's good folks, and don't you forget it, you damn liberals.

The post war consensus of business, labor and government was just starting to crack apart in the mid 70s. Northern jobs were being exported to the South and East, US banks were recycling petrodollars and colonizing the third world with indebtedness, and Paul Volcker, friend of Wall Street, was squeezing the money supply until he was able to establish the rentier economy so devoutly wished by the captains of the economy, and their neo-liberal apologists at the University of Chicago.

The Counterrevolution is now so complete that the wealthiest families in America have managed to get back most of the money and power they ceded during the short-lived liberal era that lasted roughly from Roosevelt through Nixon. They have managed to assert their will in every sector of the economy, demanding from workers longer hours on smaller paychecks, from the government more tax breaks and fewer regulations, from Wall Street greater returns on their investments. Further, they now support an apologist class so large and so vociferous that to propose an alternative to the plutocracy is to be attacked as mad, or even worse, a liberal.

I started thinking about this because I recently bought pair of retro 70s walking shoes made by Born. The shoes look similar to those bad jogging shoes, but are more upmarket. And also, the circumstances under which I bought them are entirely different than the 70s. These new shoes are made in China from a corporation -- Born -- whose headquarters is possibly in Europe, but like Haagen Dazs could be in located in New Jersey; I bought them from a national shoe discount store at a mega shopping center in Brooklyn that is soon to be a mega-mega shopping center: Mega-ization, globalization and anti-unionization were just barely on the horizon when I bought those first bad jogging shoes.

Back in the Watergate 70s, Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money.

Me -- I’m following the shoes.

Plutocracy, Bush, The 70s, Paul Volcker, Stagflation ,Wall Street

Things Are Going So Well in Iraq That...

2006-03-11T08:51:00.000-05:00

Japan May Delay Iraq Withdrawl
By Associated Press
March 11, 2006, 5:57 AM EST

TOKYO -- Japan may extend its humanitarian mission in Iraq beyond a reported May deadline because of the deteriorating security and political crisis there, a news report said Saturday.
...

The U.S. government has repeatedly asked Britain and Japan not to withdraw troops for the time being amid intensifying sectarian violence and political confusion in Iraq, the newspaper said.

Paul Krugman on Spurned Suitors: "The Conservative Epiphany"

2006-03-10T13:28:00.000-05:00

Here's Krugman's column from the NY Times today where he says "Nyah, nyah, I told you so" to conservatives like Barlett and Sullivan who have come around to his -- and most of the American public's -- point of view on the Bush gang.

In my opinion, conservatives like Bartlett and Sullivan were in the early years of the Bush regime trying hard to win the love of King Bush with the fawning (and now mortifying) praise common to such court supplicants. That's why their love was so willfully blind, their epiphany so belated -- they were hoping to get a piece of the action.

George W. and his gang, Bartlett and Sullivan and others like them now realize, are not conservatives, but rather reactionary statists.

Finally, I'm wondering if Krugman is reading my blog. See my blog entry from March 3rd where I talk about Krugman's previous column and an ephiphany of the Will. Probably just a coincidence, but weird.
Here's his column from today:

THE CONSERVATIVE EPIPHANY
By Paul Krugman
Bruce Bartlett, the author of "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," is an angry man. At a recent book forum at the Cato Institute, he declared that the Bush administration is "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept."

It's no wonder, then, that one commentator wrote of Mr. Bartlett that "if he were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald Duck during one of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his ears."

Oh, wait. That's not what somebody wrote about Mr. Bartlett. It's what Mr. Bartlett wrote about me in September 2003, when I was saying pretty much what he's saying now.

Human nature being what it is, I don't expect Mr. Bartlett to acknowledge his about-face. Nor do I expect any expressions of remorse from Andrew Sullivan, the conservative Time.com blogger who also spoke at the Cato forum. Mr. Sullivan used to specialize in denouncing the patriotism and character of anyone who dared to criticize President Bush, whom he lionized. Now he himself has become a critic, not just of Mr. Bush's policies, but of his personal qualities, too.

Never mind; better late than never. We should welcome the recent epiphanies by conservative commentators who have finally realized that the Bush administration isn't trustworthy. But we should guard against a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says there's something praiseworthy about having initially been taken in by Mr. Bush's deceptions, even though the administration's mendacity was obvious from the beginning.

According to this view, if you're a former Bush supporter who now says, as Mr. Bartlett did at the Cato event, that "the administration lies about budget numbers," you're a brave truth-teller. But if you've been saying that since the early days of the Bush administration, you were unpleasantly shrill.

Similarly, if you're a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now says, as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that "the people in this administration have no principles," you're taking a courageous stand. If you said the same thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded by Bush-hatred.

And if you're a former hawk who now concedes that the administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you're to be applauded for your open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago that the administration was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy theorist.

The truth is that everything the new wave of Bush critics has to say was obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts.

Mr. Bartlett's book is mainly a critique of the Bush administration's fiscal policy. Well, the administration's pattern of fiscal dishonesty and irresponsibility was clear right from the start to anyone who understands budget arithmetic. The chicanery that took place during the selling of the 2001 tax cut — obviously fraudulent budget projections, transparently deceptive advertising about who would benefit and the use of blatant accounting gimmicks to conceal the plan's true cost — was as bad as anything that followed.

The false selling of the Iraq war was almost as easy to spot. All the supposed evidence for an Iraqi nuclear program was discredited before the war — and it was the threat of nukes, not lesser W.M.D., that stampeded Congress into authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war. The administration's nonsensical but insistent rhetorical linkage of Iraq and 9/11 was also a dead giveaway that we were being railroaded into an unnecessary war.

The point is that pundits who failed to notice the administration's mendacity a long time ago either weren't doing their homework, or deliberately turned a blind eye to the evidence.

But as I said, better late than never. Born-again Bush-bashers like Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Sullivan, however churlish, are intellectually and morally superior to the Bushist dead-enders who still insist that Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, and will soon be claiming that we lost the war in Iraq because the liberal media stabbed the troops in the back. And reporters understandably consider it newsworthy that some conservative voices are now echoing longstanding liberal critiques of the Bush administration.

It's still fair, however, to ask people like Mr. Bartlett the obvious question: What took you so long?

Technoratic Tags: Paul Krugman, Conservative Epiphany, Bush

Maureen Dowd on Deception: "Nipping and Tucking on Both Coasts"

2006-03-08T09:05:00.000-05:00

Here's Maureen Dowd's column from today's NY Times with some links, as appropriate, to some of my musings on the productions of the Bush PR Theater Company.

NIPPING AND TUCKING ON BOTH COASTS
By Maureen Dowd
There is a crash of ideologies between the country's two most self-regarding and fantasy-spinning power centers. The Bush crowd cringes away from gay cowboys spooning, gay authors flouncing, transgender babes exploring and George the Dashing Clooneying in movies about the glories of free speech and the dangers of oilmen influencing policy.

But as I looked around Vanity Fair's slinky Oscar party on Sunday night, it struck me that the bellicose Bushies do share a presentation aesthetic with Tinseltown's trompe l'oeil beauties: you see no furrowed brows, no regretful winces, no unflattering wrinkles, no admissions of imperfection, no qualms about puffing up what you really have, no visible signs of hard lessons learned, and no desire to confront reality in the mirror.

Who ever thought Dick Cheney and Mamie Van Doren would have so much in common?

The White House is constantly trying to do laser resurfacing on its Iraq policy, to sandblast away the damage from its own mistakes. But its veneer may be beyond repair.

In Hollywood terms, we've reached an Indiana Jones crisis moment in our parlous protectorate. The cave is collapsing, the snakes are encroaching, the vehicles are exploding, the crushing ball is rolling down on us. The public has stopped buying the administration's sugary spin. The Washington Post reported yesterday that 80 percent of Americans — cutting across party lines — say sectarian violence makes civil war in Iraq likely. More than a third call it "very likely." Half also think the U.S. should begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, the poll found, and two-thirds say the president has no clear plan for Iraq.

The widespread resistance to the Dubai ports deal, even among newly fractious Republicans, indicates that Americans have lost faith in the president's competence — a faith shredded by the White House's obtuseness and lies on Katrina.

As Hollywood often does, the administration scorns introspection and originality. It sticks with the same worn themes: Stay the course. Victory's around the corner. Anyone who expresses skepticism is a defeatist, a softie on terrorism.

On "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Iraq was "going very, very well, from everything you look at." And at a Pentagon briefing yesterday, Rummy, who should have resigned in shame long ago, tried to blame the press, echoing Gen. George Casey in saying: "Much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation."

He added, "The steady stream of errors all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists."

After all the horrible mistakes in judgment the defense secretary has made — mistakes that have left our troops without proper backup and armor, created an inept and corrupt occupation, and confused soldiers into thinking torture was O.K. — it takes humongous gall to suggest that the problem is really the reporters.

Many experts say we're close to a civil war — or already in one. Even the U.S. envoy, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, told The Los Angeles Times on Monday that the invasion of Iraq had opened a "Pandora's box" of tribal and religious fissures that could devour the region. His words evoked a harrowing image of the bad spirits swarming up the mountain in Disney's "Fantasia" as Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" played.

He said that if there's another incident like the Shiite shrine's being blown up, Iraq is "really vulnerable."

The Pentagon says it'll look once more at the death by friendly fire of the football player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, because the first three inquiries had problems — one more sad illustration of the administration's cynical attempt not to let anything get in the way of its heroic, and dermatologically plumped up, story line for America.

Technoratic Tags: Maureen Dowd, Bush

Bush: "Treaties Are From Liberals, Convenants Are From God"

2006-03-07T10:41:00.000-05:00

Once again the New York Times (below) accuses the Bush administration of incompetence in an editorial today.

This is like accusing a fish of not being able to walk.

The Bush administration is not about competence. It is about the assertion of power in ways that benefit itself and its friends in miltary-industrial-energy-infotainment complex. It is about getting enough votes from their disparate factions so that that can stay in power and loot the Treasury.

Treaties like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or the Geneva Convention were made to be broken among this crowd. And when it comes to supporting allies like Pakistan who have taken great risks by proclaiming themselves US allies, this administration only supports them for PR purposes and only until they can be quietly moved to the backburner.

Like Krugman yesterday, the Times' editors think this gang can be brought low by pointing out their incompetence. And perhaps it's true that over time the drip, drip, drip out of their venality and maladroitness may undermine the adinistration.

But it isn't competence that their followers are looking for. Their followers are looking for the the stimulation of their resentments, the vindication of their beliefs and ideas.

Right on time for the mid-term elections, their followers on the cultural side are being whipped to a high froth as they anticipate the consternation the new anti-abortion law in South Dakota will cause the evil liberals.

For the fiscal conservatives, the administration is endorsing the line-item veto so Bush and the Executive can cut "government waste." Never mind that they have spent the US into a massive deficit and that Bush has never vetoed anything from the Republican Congress. It's appearances and rhetoric and "ideas" that count among ideologues.

In a few months the national media will be reporting on the latest cynically deployed manisfestation of the usual Republican wedge issues, and the only incompetence we'll hear about will be liberal incompetence: e.g., Liberals who can't run wars, who can't run governments without spending the public's hard-earned money on quixotic schemes to promote racial equality, Liberals can't say no to people who don't deserve help, who can't keep their pants zipped up, who kill babies, etc.

I will, however, predict it's going to be really, really ugly this time around for the very reason that the Republicans are losing some moderate and independent voters who are troubled by their incompetence.

But when push comes to shove the Republicans, led by Rove, are going to go to the mats and use their biggest anti-Liberal guns to scare these undecideds back into the enfolding, paternalistic arms of the Family.

The New York Times, March 7, 2006
MR. BUSH'S ASIAN ROAD TRIP
There is a lot of good a president can do on a visit to another country: negotiate treaties that enhance American security, shore up a shaky alliance, generate good will in important parts of the world. Unfortunately, President Bush didn't do any of those good things on his just-completed visit to Pakistan and India and may have done some real harm.

The spectacularly misconceived trip may have inflicted serious damage to American goals in two vital areas, namely, mobilizing international diplomacy against the spread of nuclear weapons and encouraging Pakistan to take more effective action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters operating from its territory.

The nuclear deal that Mr. Bush concluded with India threatens to blast a bomb-size loophole through the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It would have been bad enough on its own, and disastrously ill timed, because it undercuts some of the most powerful arguments Washington can make to try to galvanize international opposition to Iran's nuclear adventurism.

But the most immediate damage was done on Mr. Bush's next stop, Pakistan. Washington is trying to persuade Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani military dictator, to defy nationalist and Islamic objections and move more aggressively against Pakistani-based terrorists. This is no small issue because both Osama bin Laden and the Taliban's leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, are now believed to operate from Pakistani soil.

But sticking Mr. Musharraf with the unwelcome task of explaining to Pakistanis why his friend and ally, Mr. Bush, had granted favorable nuclear terms to Pakistan's archrival, India, while withholding them from Pakistan left him less likely to do Washington any special, and politically unpopular, favors on the terrorism front.

It's just baffling why Mr. Bush traveled halfway around the world to stand right next to one of his most important allies against terrorists — and embarrass him. India and Pakistan are military rivals that have fought each other repeatedly. They have both developed nuclear weapons outside the nonproliferation treaty, which both refuse to sign. When India exploded its first acknowledged nuclear weapons eight years ago, Pakistan felt obliged to follow suit within weeks.

So when Mr. Bush agreed to carve out an exception to global nonproliferation rules for India, it should have been obvious that Pakistani opinion would demand the same privileged treatment, and that Mr. Musharraf would be embarrassed by Mr. Bush's explicit refusal to provide it.

Mr. Bush was right to say no to Pakistan. It would be an unthinkably bad idea to grant a loophole to a country whose top nuclear scientist helped transfer nuclear technology to leading rogue states. Granting India a loophole that damages a vital treaty and lets New Delhi accelerate production of nuclear bombs makes no sense either.

Mr. Bush should have just stayed home.

Technorati Tags: India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bush, Bush's Road Trip, Wedge Issues, South Dakota Abortion Law ,Line-item veto

Follow the Shoes. Version 2.0

2006-03-06T17:01:00.000-05:00

Back in the 70s I jogged for about half a summer. I was down in Raleigh, North Carolina, driven there by the promise of a summer job. There were no jobs in upstate New York at the time. Not for young men who were going to college at any rate. Scarce and soon to be much scarcer, jobs at the local lumber and paper mills were reserved for the sons and daughters of senior mill workers.

Within a few years though, those jobs would be sent to the Pacific Northwest, and then Canada, then overseas, leaving in their wake unpaid mortgages, unrepaired snowmobiles, abandoned trailers and shotgun shacks, their abject yards clotted with broken washers and refrigerators. But the job diaspora hadn’t come to that yet, although the seams were beginning to show.

Through my brother I got a job as an electrician’s helper. Paid minimum wage, barely able to afford one meal a day, I spent every evening in the air conditioning of the college library to get out of the stifling swampy North Carolina air.

At closing time, I’d trudge slowly back to the small second floor attic room I shared with my brother and two other struggling beneficiaries of the State of North Carolina’s right-to-work policy. The tiny air conditioner we shared could only about half wring the water from the sludgy, musty attic air. It could not actually cool off the room, but it did at least dry the sweat off of our skin.

Waking up in this musty airless den, I’d pull on my Converse sneakers and jog out to the college track and do laps for about half an hour. It was relatively pleasant in the early morning, about eighty degrees, dewy, which somehow held the mugginess in check.

Eventually, I got the point where I thought I deserved some real running shoes, and so putting aside money for a couple of weeks toward their purchase, I went to the local mall on a Friday night and bought a pair of no-name brand running shoes, bright blue with three yellow diagonal stripes on either side. I could not afford Nike’s or Adida's, which cost about twice as much as the knock-offs I bought.

The next morning, elated with my purchase, I ran an extra fifteen or so minutes to break them in, enjoying the sense of mastery my new shoes promised and seemed to deliver. Spongy, springy, they were clearly a departure from the thin-soled basketball shoes we had all grown up with.

But it was me that was broken in, not the shoes. The next morning I could barely walk. I couldn’t climb the ladder at work and could barely climb stairs. Back at home later that summer I described my symptoms to a friend who had become an expert jogger who told me I had given myself shin splints. I never wore those shoes again, but nevertheless kept them for years as literal object lesson of Thoreau’s teaching.

My boss, deservedly nicknamed Lard, couldn’t understand why anyone would run anywhere at anytime, much less run and injure one’s legs to the extent that they could barely work and cost him money. Although he was irritated to have less than half a worker for the week or so it took me to recover, he got a lot of mileage telling other bosses on the worksite about the northern college boy who hurt his legs “jogging.”

Jogging was new concept back then and Lard was able to put an extraordinary spin on it, a spin that spoke volumes about idiocy of Yankee college boys, and Yankees in general. To run in the heat, even of an early summer morning, was to him and his cohorts just plain crazy. Sauntering with grave rotundity, drinking Co’ Cola for breakfast, that was the sane and accepted practice.

In hindsight I can see that mid 70s was when the Counterrevolution of the Bosses was just beginning to kick in. Not the bosses like Lard, of course, but the big bosses. The thousand or so guys who tell Wall Street what to do. You know, the plutocracy whom if you mention people call you crazy. Because in America the plutocracy has managed to convince people they don't exist. Good ol' boys like George W. and his Daddy ain't no plutocracy. They's good folks, and don't you forget it, you damn liberals.

The post war consensus of business, labor and government was just starting to crack apart in the mid 70s. Northern jobs were being exported to the South and East, US banks were recycling petrodollars and colonizing the third world with indebtedness, and Paul Volcker, friend of Wall Street, was squeezing the money supply until he was able to establish the rentier economy so devoutly wished by the captains of the economy, and their neo-liberal apologists at the University of Chicago.

The Counterrevolution is now so complete that the wealthiest families in America have managed to get back most of the money and power they ceded during the short-lived liberal era that lasted roughly from Roosevelt through Nixon. They have managed to assert their will in every sector of the economy, demanding from workers longer hours on smaller paychecks, from the government more tax breaks and fewer regulations, from Wall Street greater returns on their investments. Further, they now support an apologist class so large and so vociferous that to propose an alternative to the plutocracy is to be attacked as mad, or even worse, a liberal.

I started thinking about this because I recently bought pair of retro 70s walking shoes made by Born. The shoes look similar to those bad jogging shoes, but are more upmarket. And also, the circumstances under which I bought them are entirely different than the 70s. These new shoes are made in China from a corporation -- Born -- whose headquarters is possibly in Europe, but like Haagen Dazs could be in located in New Jersey; I bought them from a national shoe discount store at a mega shopping center in Brooklyn that is soon to be a mega-mega shopping center: Mega-ization, globalization and anti-unionization were just barely on the horizon when I bought those first bad jogging shoes.

Back in the Watergate 70s, Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money.

Me -- I’m following the shoes.

Plutocracy, Bush, The 70s, Paul Volcker, Stagflation ,Wall Street

Follow the Shoes

2006-03-06T09:59:00.000-05:00

On doctor’s orders I’ve taken to walking. The prescription: a half an hour a day at least three days a week. I’m doing five days a week and feeling quite good about it, thank you very much.

This regime encouraged me to purchase a new pair of walking shoes. Knowing of Thoreau’s injunction to beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, I did not act immediately to purchase the new shoes, but walked for a couple of weeks in my clunky, though not too uncomfortable work shoes. Eventually, however, I gave in to the urge to outfit myself properly, an urge I could justify to Mr. Thoreau, if necessary, under the heading of cardiovascular health.

The shoes, by Born, are a now retro version of jogging shoes that I wore -- that joggers all over the world wore -- in the 1970s: narrow, with slender diagonal racing stripes on the side, cut low around the ankles, long tongue and laces. The shoe form of the skimpy basketball shorts of the 70s.

Back in the 70s I jogged for about half a summer. I was down in Raleigh, North Carolina, driven there by the promise of a summer job. There were no jobs in upstate New York at the time. Not for young men who were going to college at any rate. Scarce and soon to be much scarcer, jobs at the local lumber and paper mills were reserved for the sons and daughters of senior mill workers.

Within a few years though, those jobs would be sent to the Pacific Northwest, and then Canada, then overseas, leaving in their wake unpaid mortgages, unrepaired snowmobiles, abandoned trailers and shotgun shacks, their abject yards clotted with broken washers and refrigerators. But the job diaspora hadn’t come to that yet, although the seams were beginning to show.

Through my brother I got a job as an electrician’s helper. Paid minimum wage, barely able to afford one meal a day, I spent every evening in the air conditioning of the college library to get out of the stifling swampy North Carolina air.

At closing time, I’d trudge slowly back to the small second floor attic room I shared with my brother and two other struggling beneficiaries of the State of North Carolina’s right-to-work policy. The tiny air conditioner we shared could only about half wring the water from the sludgy, musty attic air. It could not actually cool off the room, but it did at least dry the sweat off of our skin.

Waking up in this musty airless den, I’d pull on my Converse sneakers and jog out to the college track and do laps for about half an hour. It was relatively pleasant in the early morning, about eighty degrees, dewy, which somehow held the mugginess in check.

Eventually, I got the point where I thought I deserved some real running shoes, and so putting aside money for a couple of weeks toward their purchase, I went to the local mall on a Friday night and bought a pair of no-name brand running shoes, bright blue with three yellow diagonal stripes on either side. I could not afford Nike’s or Adida's, which cost about twice as much as the knock-offs I bought.

The next morning, elated with my purchase, I ran an extra fifteen or so minutes to break them in, enjoying the sense of mastery my new shoes promised and seemed to deliver. Spongy, springy, they were clearly a departure from the thin-soled basketball shoes we had all grown up with.

But it was me that was broken in, not the shoes. The next morning I could barely walk. I couldn’t climb the ladder at work and could barely climb stairs. Back at home later that summer I described my symptoms to a friend who had become an expert jogger who told me I had given myself shin splints. I never wore those shoes again, but nevertheless kept them for years as literal object lesson of Thoreau’s teaching.

My boss, deservedly nicknamed Lard, couldn’t understand why anyone would run anywhere at anytime, much less run and injure one’s legs to the extent that they could barely work and cost him money. Although he was irritated to have less than half a worker for the week or so it took me to recover, he got a lot of mileage telling other bosses on the worksite about the northern college boy who hurt his legs “jogging.”

Jogging was new concept back then and Lard was able to put an extraordinary spin on it, a spin that spoke volumes about idiocy of Yankee college boys, and Yankees in general. To run in the heat, even of an early summer morning, was to him and his cohorts just plain crazy. Sauntering with grave rotundity, drinking Co’ Cola for breakfast, that was the sane and accepted practice.

So with this retro purchase, I find myself thrown back in time to the mid 70s just at the moment when the Counterrevolution of the Bosses was beginning to kick in. Not the bosses like Lard, of course, but the big bosses. The thousand or so guys who tell Wall Street what to do. You know, the plutocracy whom if you mention people call you crazy. Because in America the plutocracy has managed to convince people they don't exist. Good ol' boys like George W. and his Daddy ain't no plutocracy. They's good folks, and don't you forget it, you damn liberals.

The post war consensus of business, labor and government was just beginning to crack apart in the mid 70s. Northern jobs were being exported to the South and East, US banks were recycling petrodollars and colonizing the third world with indebtedness, and Paul Volcker, friend of Wall Street, was squeezing the money supply until he was able to establish the rentier economy so devoutly wished by the captains of the economy, and their neo-liberal apologists at the University of Chicago.

The Counterrevolution is now so complete that the wealthiest families in America have managed to get back most of the money and power they ceded during the short-lived liberal era that lasted roughly from Roosevelt through Nixon. They have managed to assert their will in every sector of the economy, demanding from workers longer hours on smaller paychecks, from the government more tax breaks and fewer regulations, from Wall Street greater returns on their investments. Further, they now support an apologist class so large and so vociferous that to propose an alternative to the plutocracy is to be attacked as mad, or even worse, a liberal.

And so what that means is I’m buying shoes made in China from a corporation whose headquarters is possibly in Europe, but like Haagen Dazs could be in located in New Jersey, buying them from a discount store located on the site once offered by the Borough of Brooklyn to the O’Malley’s for a new Ebbets Field, but which, in fact, was never really seriously considered by same as secret talks were nearing completion with Los Angeles.

And right next door to that shopping center there probably is soon to be a Trojan horse of a basketball arena erected by a canny real estate speculator named in fine Dickensian fashion, Ratner, a project which is being sold to us as a means to bring Brooklyn back into the world of major league sport where we are told that we the people of Brooklyn belong and which some of the more gullible believe.

It is possible to buy clones of the Converse and Keds basketball sneakers that I wore before buying those crippling jogging shoes back in the 70s. I see people wearing them all the time these days. Not for playing basketball, but rather as a campy emblem of 50s Americana, a time when juvenile delinquency, Communists, the Warren Court and atomic destruction reigned as the four horsemen of the American Apocalypse: you know, that pre-lapsarian American favored by conservative mythologizers, that kinder, gentler America that was actually pretty much like America now, at least in it's right-wing fear mongering. I may be wrong about why people wear them; that’s why I would wear them, that’s what Converses say to me.

Back in the Watergate 70s, Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money.

Me -- I’m following the shoes. Until I get tired. Which is right about now.

Plutocracy, Bush, The 70s, Paul Volcker, Stagflation ,Wall Street

Paul Krugman: On Bush "Feeling No Pain"

2006-03-06T09:26:00.000-05:00

Here's the key section, followed by the entire column, of Krugman's NY Times column today, "Feeling No Pain":

...Between 1979 and 2003, according to a recent research paper published by the I.R.S., the share of overall income received by the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers fell from 50 percent to barely over 40 percent. The main winners from this upward redistribution of income were a tiny, wealthy elite: more than half the income share lost by the bottom 80 percent was gained by just one-fourth of 1 percent of the population, people with incomes of at least $750,000 in 2003.
Funny isn't it, how when you're rich, you get to have so many good friends in government (as per my essay on the end of the American Dream, "Follow the Shoes"). Anyway, here's Krugman's entire column...

FEELING NO PAIN
By Paul Krugman
President Bush's main purpose in visiting India seems to have been to promote nuclear proliferation. But he also had some kind words for outsourcing. And those words help explain something that I know deeply puzzles the administration's political gurus: Mr. Bush's dismal polling on economic issues.

Now the American economy isn't doing as well as Bush partisans think it is. In fact, since the end of the 2001 recession, the recovery in jobs, output and especially wages has been unusually weak by historical standards. Still, the economy is expanding, so it's impressive just how large a majority of Americans disapproves of Mr. Bush's economic management.

Why doesn't Mr. Bush get any economic respect? I think it's because most Americans sense, correctly, that he doesn't care about people like them. We're living in a time when many Americans are feeling economically insecure, but a tiny elite has been growing incredibly rich. And Mr. Bush's problem is that he identifies so totally with the lucky, wealthy few that in unscripted settings he can't manage even a few sentences of empathy with ordinary Americans. He doesn't feel your pain, and it shows.

Here's what Mr. Bush said in India, when someone raised the question of the political backlash against outsourcing: "Losing jobs is painful, so let's make sure people are educated so they can find — fill the jobs of the 21st century. And let's make sure that there's pro-growth economic policies in place. What does that mean? That means low taxes; it means less regulation; it means fewer lawsuits; it means wise energy policy."

O.K., so you're a 50-year-old worker whose job has just been outsourced, and Mr. Bush tells you that you should go get a 21st-century education and rejoice in the joys of a lawsuit-free economy. Uh-huh.

Actually, Mr. Bush's remarks were even more off-key than they seem, coming during a visit to India. India's surge into world markets hasn't followed the pattern set by other developing nations, which started their export drive in low-tech industries like clothing. Instead, India has moved directly into industries that advanced countries like the United States thought were their exclusive turf. When Business Week put together a list of areas "where India has made an impact ... and where it's going next," that list consisted almost entirely of high-technology activities like software and chip design.

What this means is that American workers whose jobs are threatened by Indian competition are, in many cases, people who thought they already had acquired the skills to "fill the jobs of the 21st century" — but have just discovered that Indians, who are paid about a tenth as much, also have those skills.

Am I saying that we should try to stop outsourcing? No. But if you don't feel conflicted about the effects of globalization, if you don't worry about the many losers from the process, you aren't paying attention. And American workers deserve a better answer to their concerns than yet another assertion that a rising tide raises all boats, because that's manifestly untrue.

The fact is that we're living in a time when most Americans are seeing little if any benefit from overall income growth, because their share of the economic pie is falling. Between 1979 and 2003, according to a recent research paper published by the I.R.S., the share of overall income received by the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers fell from 50 percent to barely over 40 percent. The main winners from this upward redistribution of income were a tiny, wealthy elite: more than half the income share lost by the bottom 80 percent was gained by just one-fourth of 1 percent of the population, people with incomes of at least $750,000 in 2003.

And those fortunate few are the only people Mr. Bush seems to care about. Look at what he had to offer after asserting, in effect, that workers get outsourced because they don't have the right education: lower taxes, deregulation and fewer lawsuits. Funny, that doesn't sound like "pro-growth" policy to me. Instead, it sounds like a wish list for wealthy individuals and big corporations.

Mr. Bush once joked that his base consisted of the "haves and the have-mores." But it wasn't much of a joke. His remarks in India show that he really can't imagine what it's like not to be a member of a privileged economic elite.

Bush Approval Ratings: Bottoming Out

2006-03-04T10:13:00.000-05:00

You gotta love this graph from Gallup's latest survey.

But this is pretty exciting, too: Only Nixon -- just before he was impeached -- and Truman back in 50'-51', had lower approval ratings at this point in their presidencies.

George The Unready and His Triumph of the Will

2006-03-03T09:24:00.000-05:00

Below are the key paragraphs from Krugman's column today in the NY Times, "George The Unready."

I like Paul Krugman, but he keeps insisting that the Bush gang is a failure because of its managerial and administrative incompetence.

In fact, the Bush cabal are ideologues who are reaching toward an epiphany of the Will. By their lights, they are succeeding.

They are manufacturing a new reality, a reality governed by propaganda under the cover of which they are looting the public treasury and robbing the American people.

In Krugman's column he notes Bush's reaction to a pessimistic report from the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief: "What is he, some kind of defeatist?"

Earlier this week I said that 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." Bush's statement is just another example of this gang's preference for will over intellect.

Krugman, a member of the reality-based community, still thinks the Bush PR Theater Company can be brought low by citing their incompetence.

Krugman doesn't get the fact that much of the audience for Bush productions prefers the mendacious thrills of the long-running white hat vs. black hat melodrama to the mundane rewards of good, competent government.

GEORGE THE UNREADY
By Paul Krugman
Iraqi insurgents, hurricanes and low-income Medicare recipients have three things in common. Each has been at the center of a policy disaster. In each case experts warned about the impending disaster. And in each case — well, let's look at what happened.

Knight Ridder's Washington bureau reports that from 2003 on, intelligence agencies "repeatedly warned the White House" that "the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war." But senior administration officials insisted that the insurgents were a mix of dead-enders and foreign terrorists.

Intelligence analysts who refused to go along with that line were attacked for not being team players. According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush's reaction to a pessimistic report from the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief was to remark, "What is he, some kind of defeatist?"

Many people have now seen the video of the briefing Mr. Bush received before Hurricane Katrina struck. Much has been made of the revelation that Mr. Bush was dishonest when he claimed, a few days later, that nobody anticipated the breach of the levees.

But what's really striking, given the gravity of the warnings, is the lack of urgency Mr. Bush and his administration displayed in responding to the storm. A horrified nation watched the scenes of misery at the Superdome and wondered why help hadn't arrived. But as Newsweek reports, for several days nobody was willing to tell Mr. Bush, who "equates disagreement with disloyalty," how badly things were going. "For most of those first few days," Newsweek says, "Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing."

Now for one you may not have heard about. The new Medicare drug program got off to a disastrous start: "Low-income Medicare beneficiaries around the country were often overcharged, and some were turned away from pharmacies without getting their medications, in the first week of Medicare's new drug benefit," The New York Times reported.

How did this happen? The same way the other disasters happened: experts who warned of trouble ahead were told to shut up.

We can get a sense of what went on by looking at a 2005 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office on potential problems with the drug program. Included with the report is a letter from Mark McClellan, the Medicare administrator. Rather than taking the concerns of the G.A.O. seriously, he tried to bully it into changing its conclusions. He demanded that the report say that the administration had "established effective contingency plans" — which it hadn't — and that it drop the assertion that some people would encounter difficulties obtaining necessary drugs, which is exactly what happened.

Experts within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services must have faced similar bullying. And unlike experts at the independent G.A.O., they were not in a position to stand up for what they knew to be true.

In short, our country is being run by people who assume that things will turn out the way they want. And if someone warns of problems, they shoot the messenger.

Some commentators speak of the series of disasters now afflicting the Bush administration — there seems to be a new one every week — as if it were just a string of bad luck. But it isn't.

If good luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, bad luck is what happens when lack of preparation meets a challenge. And our leaders, who think they can govern through a mix of wishful thinking and intimidation, are never, ever prepared.

We Were Kind of Duped: The Brave New Wold of Work

2006-03-02T09:28:00.000-05:00

"Most of us thought we would work and have kids, at least that was what we were brought up thinking we would do — no problem. But really we were kind of duped. None of us realized how hard it is."
- CATHIE WATSON-SHORT, 37, on women in the work force from the NY Times today.

I've got news for you, Cathie, there's been a whole lot of dupin' goin' on, and not just women. Below is my review of Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy by Vicki Smith, which I reviewed on Amazon in July of 2001.

THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF WORK, July 6, 2001
In "Crossing the Great Divide," Ms. Smith explores four organizations and sizes up their employment and personnel practices against the rhetorics of social science and global economy theorists. What she finds is a much more complex picture than the theorists allow for.

In and of itself, this is a great service to readers interested in the "Brazilianization" of the Western work force(see Ulrich Beck's "The Brave New World of Work for a good companion read), because, as Smith notes, most of the writing on this phenomenon tends to either demonize those companies who practice "perma-temp" strategies as exploitative, or to praise them as leading-edge companies which are reacting to the exigencies of global capitalism. An example from Smith's book may be helpful.

One of the companies where she conducts research, a new company which she pseudonomously calls "Reproco," contracts with firms (such as law firms and other organizations) to provide copying service -- a complete service including copiers and copy machine operators. The machine operators are paid a little more than minimum wage, are shuttled from one location to another every six months, are given little chance of advancement, but they are given training in interpersonal relations, scheduling, business goals, etc.

For many Reproco employees -- most of whom worked in low-paying jobs in the service industry flipping burgers and have a high school education or less, this training gives them insight into business and handling business relationships that they never had before. So, while the constant shuttling from location to location works to prevent the formation of unions, the lessons in business practices activates a new sense of self-regard and potentiality the employees have rarely experienced.

Smith then contasts these workers at "WoodWorks" an old economy "extractive" business in the Pacific Northwest which manufactures building materials (plywood, studs, etc.) The workforce has been downsized through technology upgrades and in reaction to the global market, and employees hopes for lifetime employment are coming to an end.

"Woodworks" has employed a quality control program which attempts to engage workers more fully into all aspects on the business -- from understanding balance sheets, improving manufacturing quality -- as a means to creating teamwork. Theorists have charged that the devolution of authority makes workers work harder than ever, that it disrupts traditional worker/employer identities in ways that privelege employers and disadvantage workers, and Smith does find evidence of that.

Yet at the same time, she notes that workers, under the gun of the global economy, choose the quality program as the best option in that it demonstrates their desire to keep the factory productive so that they can maintain the lifestyles and their local economy. Many workers to whom she spoke claimed to have learned much about business from the training programs, and some thought they could use this training if (or when) the plant finally shut down. While middle-class managers found the quality program an affront to their business acumen -- just another program cooked up by some distant consultant that didn't understand their business -- the plant workers, with some notable exceptions,were willing to try and some found the knowledge they gained useful.

The third case study "Computech" looks at a high tech firm with "MicroSerf" temporary/permananent employment practices. The fourth, and the most dispiriting of the 4 organizations examined, is a special job search service for out of work executives based in Sacramento. It is the most dispiriting because the executives -- for instance a nuclear engineer, an environmental consultant -- are told they must become non-specialist multi-taskers, remodeling themselves in lieu of the latest buzzwords of the employment market.

Smith points out that this rhetoric is a roundabout way of telling the mostly 40 years plus people who frequent this organization that they need to lower their sites and to get used to lower wages and less job stability. She also notes that most of them do not find the jobs at the salaries with the benefits they want. There is no upside for these workers, it's almost all downhill.

Smith does a good job of putting a human face on the Brave New World of Work. She demonstrates today's workers are more resourceful, and their reactions to their new work situations more complex than are presumed by theorists. Not exactly earth-shattering -- people are always more complex than theorists would have it, but a nice corrective to the high-flown rhetorics and partisanship usually encountered in such discussions.

In short, Smith shows us examples of the willingness of business and government to renege on the "worker-citizen" model (the post-war Keynesian model) and substitute to "worker-capitalist" (the post-modernist conservative, Friedman model). She treats the devolution of risk downward, examines the American "jobs miracle" (where lots and lots of low-paying service jobs are created for those who can stay out of the vast penal colony) through the real work lives of real American workers.

Bush "On the Road" Update: Light at the End of the Tunnel

2006-03-01T15:06:00.000-05:00

Guess I was wrong in my previous post today.

Looks like there is light at the end of the tunnel for Bush in his visit to India.

Oh, yes, and if you have time -- and the stomach -- check out the screeds on this right wing site that I've linked to for the AP story and photo.

Bush On The Road: No Light at End of the Tunnel

2006-03-01T12:05:00.000-05:00

Bush can run to Afghanistan and India for photo ops, but he's going nowhere fast.

Per the Washington Post:
"The release of a new CBS News poll showing Bush's approval rating dropping to 34 percent, a low for him in that survey, sent tremors through Republican circles in Washington. Scott Reed, who managed Robert J. Dole's presidential campaign in 1996, called the results "pretty shattering." Most distressing to GOP strategists was that Bush's support among Republicans fell from 83 percent to 72 percent.

"The repetition of the news coming out of Iraq is wearing folks down," Reed said. "It started with women and it's spreading. It's just bad news after bad news after bad news, without any light at the end of the tunnel."

Bush and the Triumph of the Will

2006-02-28T12:13:00.000-05:00

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.

Resistance to King George: Then and Now

2006-02-26T21:09:00.000-05:00

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 "ï¿½In 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.

Paul Krugman: Osama, Saddam and Bush

2006-02-24T09:42:00.000-05:00

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.

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

2006-02-23T11:57:00.000-05:00

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.

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

2006-02-22T09:46:00.000-05:00

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.

Brooks: Questions of Culture -- Wha? Huh?

2006-02-19T10:27:00.000-05:00

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.

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

2006-02-18T09:18:00.000-05:00

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?

Technorati Tags: Newt Gingrich, Democrats, Media, Washington Post

Rumsfeld: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Al-Qaida

2006-02-17T17:37:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-17T12:28:00.000-05:00

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).

When Cheney Shot Harry: Big PR Botchification

2006-02-16T17:52:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-02-16T10:11:00.000-05:00

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.

Technorati Tag: When Cheney Shot Harry

Maureen Dowd: Shooter Slips on a Silencer

2006-02-15T10:32:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-15T09:17:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-15T09:09:00.000-05:00

"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

Cheney's License to Kill

2006-02-14T09:17:00.000-05:00

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.

Technorati Tag: Cheney

Maureen Dowd: World Turned Upside Down?

2006-02-13T10:18:00.000-05:00

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.

Bush & Rove and Their Power Tools

2006-02-12T16:08:00.000-05:00

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.

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

2006-02-11T08:13:00.000-05:00

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.

Lester Crawford: Cashed Out to Cash In

2006-02-10T17:21:00.000-05:00

"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"

2006-02-10T14:09:00.000-05:00

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.

Technorati Tags:Bush, Lies

Paul Krugman: Bush's Children and the Vanishing Future

2006-02-10T10:39:00.000-05:00

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.

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

2006-02-09T15:00:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-09T10:55:00.000-05:00

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.

Maureen Dowd on Hillary: Not Angry Enough

2006-02-08T10:33:00.000-05:00

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...

Shame? Among Republicans? Not Possible!

2006-02-07T12:22:00.000-05:00

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.

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

2006-02-05T14:57:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-05T10:11:00.000-05:00

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.

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

2006-02-03T16:49:00.000-05:00

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!

Bush: Pillaging the People for Fun and Profit

2006-02-02T15:38:00.000-05:00

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.

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

2006-02-01T08:50:00.000-05:00

"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.

Bush's (Mis)State(ment) of the Union: Postmodern PR Theater

2006-01-31T22:46:00.000-05:00

Watching George "Divine Right" Bush's State of the Union address tonight I was reminded of Shadia B. Drury's excellent dissection of the American right-wing in her book, LEO STRAUSS AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT, which I reviewed on Amazon in January, 2003. I was thinking specifically of her observation that Straussian right-wingers believe there is no ultimate truth, but that instead there are only discourses of power and that whoever controls the discourse wins. And further, because the right and much of the left operates from the same bankrupt premise American politics are now at their narrowest and most tedious. Here's my review:

POSTMODERN CONSERVATISM, January 3, 2003

The chief insight offered by Shadia Drury in LEO STRAUSS AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT is that Leo Strauss's political philosophy is a radical variant of conservatism whose assumptions and strategies are at odds with traditional conservatism. While both Straussian and Burkean philosophy appear similar in that they both make the assumption that the only choice is between a beneficent plutocracy and anarchy, the Straussians are unsentimental about the past, rejecting the older conservative view that naturalizes pre-modern hierarchy and the inequalities preserved therein as intrinsic to and representative of mankind. Straussians are instead post-modern activists, who use the past as repository from which to cull whatever elements are necessary to build whatever institutional machine is necessary to regulate lesser mortals. They imagine themselves as an intellectual pastorate who must defend society against the depredations of liberalism -- that socially disruptive idea which insists on equality of opportunity and justice.

According to Drury, Strauss's philosophy accepts the death of God, (unlike traditional conservatism) and then moves positivistically (unlike traditional conservatism) to fill the vacuum with elite group of self-elected philosopher kings. This elite, alive to the nihilism of the liberal ethos and its potentially anarchic consequences, believes it must act forcefully to paper over the hole left by His demise. Their esoteric/exoteric readings of philosophy tell them they must forge from the ashes a seamless, monocultural machine to encourage obedience and staunch chaos. This nationalistic machine must be equipped with a religion (any religion) and a mythic culture based on flag-reverence and knee-jerk patriotism. This is necessary because pluralistic, liberal societies cannot meet the challenge posed by well-organized, culturally cohesive states. Because the mass of men are primitive, credulous, prone to error and evil, the state with the best machine necessarily will win. Straussians, unlike traditional conservatives who see the state as malevolent, justify their activism by insisting that as philosophers they are immune to temptations of power.

According to Drury, a particularly striking strategy of Straussian conservatives is their struggle to identify and mythologize American traditions. She points out that while Burke had the last remnants of feudalism to extol as a naturally just system, American conservatives have been forced to create a "traditional" America out of whole cloth. To do so, according the Drury, Strauss's followers have invaded history departments across the US where they have been working hard to uncover "tradition" in the beginnings of America -- a difficult task given that America was the first truly modernist state. Nevertheless, these historians, depending upon which ax they are grinding, rewrite American history either to prove that colonial America was feudal, or to prove the Founding Fathers were not Deists and creatures of the (Liberal) Enlightenment, but rather Platonists. Drury notes that like postmodernists on the left, Straussians believe there is no ultimate truth, but that instead there are only discourses of power and that whoever controls the discourse wins. She notes that this is what makes American politics so narrow and so tedious -- the right and the left both operate from the same morally bankrupt premise.

This goes a long way toward explaining the bizarre combination of libertarianism and fundamentalism in neo-conservative thought. Like other dogmas which have been used to support those in power -- Social Darwinism and eugenics come to mind -- neoconservatism is just the latest apologia for the up-to-date reactionary. Notably, its adherents are generally unaware of the contradiction. This does not deter them from defending this instrumental hodgepodge of Ayn Rand "objectivism" and millenarian "revivalism" however. Such a philosophy is, of course, its own best self-satirization.

Well-written, its conclusions careful and amply defended, LEO STRAUSS AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT, is not the ravings of conspiracy theorist. It does not imagine that Straussians have come to run the United States, nor that they form a secret cult which pulls the strings behind the scene. It exposes rather the infiltration of post-modern intellectual cynicism into the once decent, and even honorable, Republican Party.

By the way, when I was writing this review, I was reading a collection of essays by Randolph Bourne, an inspiring American writer and social critic whose insights into American power are as fresh, compelling and as controversial now as when he wrote them just prior to World War I. Yes, World War I. WWI featured America's first massive government propoganda effort and was guided by American intellectuals and progressive thinkers, including John Dewey, who helped promote the U.S. entry into the war. Bourne opposed the war and suffered professionally for it. Bourne's political insights are preternaturally prescient, his prose style lucid and bristling with moral disgust.

Finally, here's a link to a very succinct and useful interview with Shadia Drury.

Krugman: " 'Balance' Not Always 'Truth' "

2006-01-30T15:08:00.000-05:00

Here's a few paragraphs from Paul Krugman's column today, A False Balance, which speaks to how the right wing spinmeisters, under the guise of insisting on fair and objective "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand" journalistic practice, have succeeded in gulling the Washington Post and The Today Show, among others, into reporting the Abramoff scandal as a standard (and demonstrably untrue) "pox on both their houses" narrative wherein both parties accepted money from Abramoff.

...(snip)
...over the past few weeks a number of journalists, ranging from The Washington Post's ombudsman to the "Today" show's Katie Couric, have declared that Mr. Abramoff gave money to both parties. In each case the journalists or their news organization, when challenged, grudgingly conceded that Mr. Abramoff himself hasn't given a penny to Democrats.
...(snip)

There have been both bipartisan and purely Democratic scandals in the past. Based on everything we know so far, however, the Abramoff affair is a purely Republican scandal.

Why does the insistence of some journalists on calling this one-party scandal bipartisan matter? For one thing, the public is led to believe that the Abramoff affair is just Washington business as usual, which it isn't. The scale of the scandals now coming to light, of which the Abramoff affair is just a part, dwarfs anything in living memory.
...(snip)

So the reluctance of some journalists to report facts that, in this case, happen to have an anti-Republican agenda is a serious matter. It's not a stretch to say that these journalists are acting as enablers for the rampant corruption that has emerged in Washington over the last decade.

Waking from its recent slumbers, The Times also in an editorial yesterday put the lie to George "Divine Right" Bush's "Would You Rather Die Or What" justification for warrantless domestic spying, laying out clearly and in abundant detail the cynical methods employed by this most cynical of regimes to put another lie over on the American people.

Right Wing: "Threats 'R' Ideas"

2006-01-29T14:20:00.000-05:00

Recently on Bill O'Reilly's hateathon, Ann Coulter said that liberal have ideas that are so intellectual that they "just can't fit on a bumpersticker." Further, she claimed that all liberals can't formulate counterarguments to conservative "ideas," all they can do "is throw food." Here's the quote:

If you go speak at a college campus, I promise you, if you don't have a security detail, they will physically attack you, because they are the party of ideas, and they're so intellectual their ideas just can't fit on a bumper sticker. You know, everything else they're always saying about themselves. But when it actually comes time to formulate a counterargument, all they can do is throw food.

Coulter was referring to an incident at the University of Arizona in October 2004 where two men threw a pie at her and missed. The pie throwing incident was an inexcusable breach of civility, but it can hardly be said to constitute a fair and balanced characterization of liberal counterarguments to Ann Coulter's "ideas" or the ideas of the right-wing reactionaries whom she defends so splenetically.

Here's one counterargument, short enough to fit on a bumpersticker, that to my knowledge that neither Ms. Coulter nor her masters and minions have ever addressed: THREATS ARE NOT IDEAS.

Further, threats which pose as ideas, are not ideas, they are threats in disguise. When George "Divine Right" Bush justifies spying on Americans because it would have saved and will save American lives, not only is he lying, he is also invoking a threat of death while at the same time pointing toward those who would stop him from rewriting the Constitution as those who are responsible and will be responsible for American deaths: terrorists, and by extension, their liberal dupes.

One of the favorite strategies of the right is to project onto liberals their own hate-mongering tactics. For instance, Coulter in her statement above suggests that it is Liberals who are unwilling to engage in the free exchange of ideas, who would instead simply throw food.

Ms. Coulter, to my knowledge, has never advanced any ideas. She has worked energetically to attack any person or group who might attempt to suggest that real political debate is something other than the constant reiteration of the cynical collection of focus-group-tested wedge issues so beloved of the right: Guns, God, and Gays. And the corollary to the God "issue": God = Free Market.

And, of course, she has made threats against her political enemies, most recently, and interestingly, a food-related threat against Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. She suggested that someone should put rat poison on his creme brulee. After making this threat she explained: "That's just a joke, for you in the media."

I'm not sure how this can be seen as a joke. At best it's a jokey threat, but in the same way that threats are not ideas, suggesting that one's political enemies should be poisoned simply can't be accepted as a joke.

If such a suggestion can actually be claimed and taken as a joke, then the political sphere has become so toxic, so coarsened by the hate- and war-mongering of the right-wing, then this "joke" must be taken as a sign that reasonable people must work even harder to resurrect and renovate the shattered public forum of decent democratic debate in this once great country of ours.

George "Divine Right" Bush: "Let 'Em Eat War"

2006-01-29T10:29:00.000-05:00

In today's New York Times the editors finally (although timidly, and way too belatedly) call George "Divine Right" Bush for his assumption of the American imperial throne:

He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance.

Gore Vidal, who was excoriated when he began calling the U.S. an imperial power back in the 70s, has written a great piece, President Jonah, on the Bush court's crazed gropings for absolute power as a bellwether for the end of American Empire.

In reaching for absolute power, George "Divine Right" Bush betrays the totalitarian predilictions of his court and the military industrial defense energy infotainment complex whom they serve, even, of course, as they serve themselves in doing so.

George "Divine Right" Bush: "Let 'Em Eat Smoke"

2006-01-28T20:47:00.000-05:00

According to The New York Times, "The top climate scientist at NASA [James E. Hansen, picture at right] says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming."

Revelations of the Market God

2006-01-28T10:10:00.000-05:00

Here's a review I wrote a while ago of Thomas Frank's ONE MARKET UNDER GOD. In his more recent work WHAT HAPPENED TO KANSAS, which I also highly recommend, Frank relates the story of his political awakening from unexamined Republican (by family affiliation) to left-wing writer.

His conversion occurs at a large Midwestern college where he discovers a social hierarchy which reinforces the dominance of the rich, Republican kids at the expense of anyone less rich, including less rich Republicans. Awakened by the starkly visible lineaments of this regime, the scales drop from his eyes, he begins to read classic sociology texts. He is especially drawn to fellow midwesterner Thorstein Veblen's crititque of "conspicuous consumption" in THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS and eventually embarks on his career as left-wing social critic, publishing a magazine called The Baffler.

In ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, Frank deconstructs and then deflates the claims of the neo-liberal economists, revealing their theories for what they are: the latest apologia for the ruling class, a ruling class which, under the class-compassionate Bush regime, is experiencing an obscene recrudescence rivaling the era of Veblen's leisure class robber barons.

Revelations, October 12, 2005
In ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, Thomas Frank brilliantly unpacks the self-serving ideology of the corporatocracy. As he did in CONQUEST OF COOL and WHAT HAPPENED TO KANSAS, he examines the many self-serving narratives of the corporate state, showing how each story supports a pseudo-populist philosophy designed to whip up anti-elitist sentiments in order to better serve the interests of that elite.

Legitimacy, since the Great Crash, had, until fairly recently been a fairly daunting problem for business. Now, as Frank points out, with the children of the Depression passing away, the corporatocracy and its junior partners in government have been emboldened to portray themselves as the heirs to Populism, Progressivism, and the New Deal, to advertise themselves as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement, a movement which through the millennial workings of the market is clearing the way for a new birth of freedom in the U.S.A., and throughout the world.

Frank notes, for instance, that throughout the 90s Americans were told that average working stiff could easily become the "millionaire next door," and further, that the average guy was much better off owning stock than relying on his pension or Social Security to see him through his golden years. So pervasive did this free market farrago become in the media, that even now, well after the New Economy bubble burst, many still hear it as gospel, believe that inevitably everything must be privatized. So cunning has the pro-business rhetoric of the corporate state become that the average American blames himself for not being "entrepreneurial" enough, when instead Frank says he should be working to reverse the corporatocracy's 30-year rollback of worker's and citizen's rights.

A profoundly funny writer with a razor-sharp satiric edge, Frank will have you laughing out loud at the transparent self-serving cant of the corporatocracy and their handmaidens in the media, academia, and government. Frank knows his history, and clearly sees through the latest lies of that great unregenerate beast, redder now in tooth and claw than ever before.

Dowd on Dems: "Judy" to Rove's "Punch"

2006-01-25T10:14:00.000-05:00

Here's a key sentence from Maureen Dowd's column, Delusion and Illusion Worthy of Dickens, from today's NY Times that reiterates what I've been saying about Rove's "All Terror, All the Time" strategy.

As Dowd says, for the right wing it's all about testosterone and putting the American body politic and American bodies in jeopardy and then promising to protect those bodies against terrorists and liberals.

Delusion and Illusion Worthy of Dickens by Maureen Dowd

The Democrats will never win the White House as long as they're stuck in Bleak House. They're slipping and sliding in the same crust-upon-crust of mud and caboose-creeping fog and soft black drizzle and flakes of soot that blacken the chamber of law in the opening of the terrific Dickens novel (now an irresistible PBS series).
....(snip)

The party simply seems incapable of getting the muscular message and riveting messenger needed to dispel the mud, fog, drizzle and soot emanating from Karl Rove's rag-and-bone shop on Pennsylvania Avenue.

As the White House drives its truckload of lies around the country, it becomes ever clearer that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore are just not the right people to respond to the administration's national security scare-a-thon.
...(snip)

But Karl Rove is still dishing out the same line, and it's still working: those who want to re-evaluate the strategy in Iraq are soft. Those who want to rein in the Patriot Act are soft. Those who question the Alito doctrine of presidential absolutism are soft. Those who don't want to break the law and snoop on Americans are soft - not just soft, but practically collaborating with the terrorists.
.... (snip)

In their usual twisted way, the Bushies are reducing their abuse of the law to a test of testosterone - knowing that the Democrats will play Judy to their Punch.

Mastering War: The Rove Prescription

2006-01-24T01:30:00.000-05:00

Here's a review I wrote of WAR: The Lethal Custom by Gynne Dyer. The book seems particularly relevant now that Karl "Divine Right" Rove has anounced that he will be sticking to the "All Terror, All the Time" brand messaging for the 2006 elelctions.

To quote myself from the last paragraph of the review below: "Dyer questions the notion of a 'War on Terror' as espoused by the current American regime as emblematic of its naivete. The idea of war implies an end, a truce, an armistice. Dyer suggests that the U.S., by declaring a 'war' on terror fell into the trap laid by Osama Bid Laden. For it is not a war that can be won through warfare. 'Police Action Against Terrorists,' while not as compelling from a rhetorical standpoint, has been shown to be the more effective strategy over time."

Mastering War, October 29, 2005
When a tourist lodge opened about twenty years ago in Kenya, the alpha males of a nearby baboon troop helped themselves to the easy pickings at the garbage dump. In the time honored tradition of baboon despotism where status obsessed males strictly enforce the prevailing hierarchy, the top ranking males claimed the spoils for themselves, and drove away their lower ranking brother baboons. The alpha males then perished en masse when they become infected with bovine tuberculosis from the rotten meat they ate at the dump. Once the alpha males died and their terroristic bullying tactics with them, the survivors were suddenly able to relax and began treating each other more decently. A new more peaceful baboon society was born.

Gwynne Dyer recounts this incident in the last chapter of "WAR: The Lethal Custom" to summarize and exemplify one of his main arguments in this thought-provoking work -- that our species' penchant for violence, although it does have roots in our evolutionary past, does not mean it is inevitable. He argues that as sentient beings we do have and have shown the capacity for making peace, too. In what is a hopeful but realistic retelling of the founding of the League of Nations after WWI and the United Nations after WWII, Dyer suggests that through it these organizations human beings are attempting to deal with the very real possiblity of species annihilation. He argues that the reversal of despoliation of the world must begin in earnest now so as to prevent the international anarchy that will undoubtedly follow if nations choose not to cooperate and instead chase after and fight over diminishing resources.

Tracing the rise of war from our early ancestors to the present day, Dyer relates a convincing story of increasing technological efficiency in the art and machinery of death, where the technology of war comes to outstrip the capacity of most human societies to contain and direct it. Early on when our species lived in egalitarian societies of roughly thirty individuals to a band, killing one's neighbors was a rare occurrence. In a sparsely peopled world with few competitors for game or territory, it was rare that roving bands would skirmish or fight each other. War appeared as a more constant and sustained human enterprise with the rise of agriculturalism with its settled communities ripe for plunder by marauding bands whose economic lives and assumptions about tactics were based on their experience as shepherds of livestock. Highly mobile, schooled in techniques of herding, these bands employed the same principles when facing armies of settlers, e.g., using speed, terror, bluff and deception to terrorize settled communities into giving up their treasures.

War figures heavily in explaining the rise and fall of civilizations and peoples throughout history. The Roman phalanx, for instance, an early "machine" of war which used men as its moving parts, remained effective for hundreds of years, until guns eventually rendered it passe. Walled cities and medieval castles too, were marvels of defensive engineering, until they met a similar fate. Then with the end of professional and mercenary armies with the levee en masse in the wake of the French Revolution, came the era of total war when civilian populations, the manufacturers of the materiel of war, became defined as combatants, too, ushering in totalitarian states, weapons of mass destruction and the possiblity of annihilation.

Dyer also does a particularly fine job on guerilla warfare, which acquired that name during the resistance to Napoleon's invasion and annexation of Spain. He questions the notion of a "War on Terror" as espoused by the current American regime as emblematic of its naivete. The idea of war implies an end, a truce, an armistice. Dyer suggests that the U.S., by declaring a "war" on terror fell into the trap laid by Osama Bid Laden. For it is not a war that can be won through warfare. "Police Action Against Terrorists," while not as compelling from a rhetorical standpoint, has been shown to be the more effective strategy over time.

A history of the humankind told through the changing techniques of warfare and the key confrontations marking these shifts, written with verve, psychological and anthropological acuity, WAR is a valuable exploration of this most uncivil custom. Dyer sees evidence of and movement toward the restoration on an international level of the cooperation of early egalitarian societies. He suggests the spread of cross-cultural communication, which is opening a field for international debate (as evidenced in the massive worldwide anti-war protests against the invasion of Iraq), is restoring the possiblity of dialogue and a democracy of the multitude.

Frank Rich VS. "White House Propoganda Factory"

2006-01-22T11:44:00.000-05:00

Below is an excerpt from Frank Rich's column today "Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito." The entire text can be found at Nevada Thunder.

Rich shows that his earlier career as a theater critic prepared him well for his reviews of the Bush PR Theater Company. (Below he calls it "Rove's White House propoganda factory").

He's also hip to the right wing propoganda strategy of putting the body politic in somatic jeopardy and then promising to protect it against terrorists and Democrats. Rich is going on book leave to write "nonfiction about our post-9/11 fictions" and will be back in the spring.

Let's hope he comes back swinging even harder against the lyin' spyin' Bush cabal.

....
As everyone knows now - except for the 22 percent, according to a recent Harris poll, who still believe that Saddam helped plan 9/11 - it’s the truthiness [emphasis added] of all those imminent mushroom clouds that sold the invasion of Iraq. What’s remarkable is how much fictionalization plays a role in almost every national debate. Even after a big humbug is exposed as blatantly as Professor Marvel in “The Wizard of Oz” - FEMA’s heck of a job in New Orleans, for instance - we remain ready and eager to be duped by the next tall tale. It’s as if the country is living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief.

Democrats who go berserk at their every political defeat still don’t understand this. They fault the public for not listening to their facts and arguments, as though facts and arguments would make a difference, even if the Democrats were coherent. It’s the power of the story that always counts first, and the selling of it that comes second. Accuracy is optional. The Frey-like genius of the right is its ability to dissemble with a straight face while simultaneously mustering the slick media machinery and expertise to push the goods. It not only has the White House propaganda operation at its disposal, but also an intricate network of P.R. outfits and fake-news outlets that are far more effective than their often hapless liberal counterparts.

....
If Karl Rove’s White House propaganda factory is the NBC Universal or Time Warner of G.O.P. fictionalization, then the Miramax and Focus Features of the right are such nominally “independent” satellites as Cybercast News, the Lincoln Group (which places fake news stories in Iraqi newspapers), the Rendon Group (which helped manufacture the heroic image of Ahmad Chalabi) and the now-dormant Talon News (the fake Republican-staffed news site whose fake White House correspondent, Jeff Gannon, was unmasked last year).

Rove, 2006: Riding the "Terror Train" To Victory?

2006-01-21T09:19:00.000-05:00

The director of the Bush PR Theater Company, Karl "Divine Right" Rove, yesterday announced an upcoming refurbishment of the company's long-running, marginally sucessful melodrama, "All Terror, All the Time."

Insiders say the production, which met with limited success in its earlier runs in 2002 and 2004, will soon be getting a massive infusion of investment capital from a number of economic angels in hopes of revitalizing the production.

"They've got some work to do if they want to keep it viable," said a highly placed source in the theatrical community. "I'd heard they're trying out different angles on their promotional messaging. But based on what Rove said in the Post, (a theatrical trade publication) I'd say he's going to stick pretty close to his usual approach: Republicans are Men, Democrats Are Gay. It could still work, but it's a little risky."

In the meeting the insider referrred to, the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee yesterday, Rove was quoted as saying the following: "At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security. Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic -- not at all. But it does make them wrong -- deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong." (actual quote).

Both Rove and assistant director Ken Mehlman are considering adding a scene where the Democratic anti-heroes, Pelosi and Dean, will, in their fussiness over Miss Liberty's right to privacy will "liberally" choose to let her die with her "rights" intact. As reported in the Washington Post: Rove and Mehlman "defended Bush's use of warrantless eavesdropping to gather intelligence about possible terrorist plots. 'Do Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean really think that when the NSA is listening in on terrorists planning attacks on America, they need to hang up when those terrorists dial their sleeper cells in the United States?' Mehlman asked. (actual quote).

Outside the White House Theater, Republican voter and veteran theatergoer Randy Jones, 33, of Bethesda Maryland, who has seen the production hundreds of times since its opening, when informed that "All Terror, All the Time" might undergo some modifications said: "That whole bit at the end where they have that guy with the beard and the turban tie that Miss Liberty woman to the train tracks? And they have that giant smoking, snorting "Terror Train" is coming down on her? They better keep that in, for sure, because people go nuts over that schtick!"

Divine Right Bush: Just Call Me King, Boy

2006-01-20T20:46:00.000-05:00

Here's a key paragraph from Al Gore's speech on Monday:

The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch's claims of...previously unrecognized powers: "If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution."

I'm sure Dr. Koh thought he was exaggerating the powers that the Bush administration might arrogate to itself as a way make his point about how serious a breach of law the torture memo and the subsequent outcomes at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were.

What's scary is that under the justification of 9/11 they will apparently do whatever they want, whenever they want, and, if they deem it necessary in the name of defending the U.S., up to and including the heinous crimes he cites.

Instead of the rule of law, we now have Bush as sovereign and the soverign as law.

Abramoff and the Golden Eggs

2006-01-19T15:31:00.000-05:00

Hendrik Hertzberg's short piece on the Abramoff scandal in the Talk of the Town section in The New Yorker on Monday features a paragraph which nicely summarizes the corruption now endemic in Washington, D.C. He shows that not only are the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government all run by Republicans for the benefit of their friends and donors, so is the lobbying branch:

Abramoff was the apotheosis of the “K Street Project,” a highly successful, years-long effort to turn the capital’s “lobbying community” into a Republican auxiliary, by pressuring lobbying firms and trade associations to support a broad conservative agenda, hire only Republicans, and give money overwhelmingly to Republican politicians. In some ways, the K Street Project is a national, and grander, version of the big-city political machines of old. But those machines, corrupt though they were, had their Robin Hood aspects. The pols got the graft and the diamond-stickpin boys got the contracts, but the poor got turkeys, jobs, and, sometimes, genuinely useful public programs. The K Street Project is strictly Sheriff of Nottingham. K Street, by its nature, promotes the interests of the rich, especially the well-organized corporate rich: they’re the only ones who can afford its services. The lobbyists’ alliance with the dominant wing of the Republican Party is a near-perfect match. The reigning conservative ideologues in the White House and on Capitol Hill believe, with apparent sincerity, that the path to economic and social progress for all is to reward—“incentivize”—the rich and to liberate private business from the wealth-destroying fetters of regulation. When these become the highest purposes of public policy, and when the ameliorative functions of government are held in contempt, then a single thread ties together upper-income tax cuts, the dismantling of environmental and safety protections, the shredding of the social safety net, the peopling of regulatory agencies with cronies hostile to their purposes, and, finally, outright corruption. If government is seen as a whore, why not treat her like one? All that remains is to fleece the johns and divide the take.

Very well said, Hendrik. I think it can be summed up this way, too: There is no Bush "administration." What we have is an "attack/patronage machine" ("attackronage?") which shouts splenetic attacks from its upper mouth and lays golden goverment eggs for its friends from the lower.

Bodies In Motion: Part II

2006-01-18T14:16:00.000-05:00

Bodies in Motion: Part II (See Part I)
We are constantly told by the right-wing ownership class that we should embrace economic contingency, freely flow to new jobs, to be ready instantly retrain ourselves in some new esoteric specialization in order to better serve the latest economic and technological exigency.

At the same time, we are under the strict orders of the Right that we must have traditional, intergenerational families with traditional values, including strong, long-standing religious and community ties. (Sennett, in FLESH AND STONE, has a marvelous chapter where he discusses the strains and dislocations caused by beginning of capitalism in Paris in the Middle Ages, occurring as it did about the same time as the religious revival movement known to as the Imitation of Christ. The first portended the rise of homo economicus, that profit-seeking individualistic actor who eventually overruns the world, and the second, a blossoming forth of human sympathy for one's fellow beings under the image of Christ's suffering. Kinda incompatible, no?)

Liberals are accused by right-wing propagandists of attempting to limit the free flow of goods, calling any socially responsible redistributive programs socialism or communism. They accuse liberals of screwing up the proper free ciculation of goods with their "bleeding heart" policies that prevent the full and complete appearance of Smith's miraculous Indivisible Hand, the ne plus ultra of circulation.

Speaking of hands, on the other hand, there is the conservative's Visible Hand of Discipline. Conservatives claim liberals promote the free circulation of bodies under unclean social circumstances, e.g., the endorsement of homosexual relationships, the mixing of the races. The right-wing also frequently resurrects a self-serving shorthand of the 60s during which they claim a tidal wave of orgiastic behavior, fueled by drugs and radical left politics, nearly poisoned the American body politic. Moral police, they only trust the circulation of people under the goad of economic circustances. Under other circumstances, like the free association of one body with another, the free sociality of desire, the heavy-handed scold appears and slap the bodies back into line.

The rightist economic fantasy, that we as a nation practice the free-market values we espouse, that we promote the free circulation of goods, is pure nonsense, of course. What we actually have socialism for the wealthy, or, crony capitalism. Through our post WWII grasp on the short hairs of the world economy, the U.S. government tampers with the free flow of goods and labor all the time according to the needs of US business (which are now closer to identical than any time since era of the Robber Barons).

Anyone even marginally acquainted with the doings of business knows that as much as possible companies try to find ways to create monopoly positions in their markets. Or, to continue using the analogy to circulation, to staunch the flow of life-giving money to its competitors. Either that or they engage in a form of tacit price-fixing with the competition to insure profits. Or coerce the government to grant them some favorable circumstance under which to conduct their business to the detriment of their competitors. Or all three at once. In any case, these strategies attempt to freeze circumstances advantageous to them, to close off competition, interrupt the free circulation of goods and ideas, or to stimulate the growth of government hand-outs so they may suckle at the government teat.

Poor people are a good example of market flows which do not promote economic health. Marooned in urban environments where healthy foods are either not readily available or too expensive, poor people purchase and prepare foods which inexpensively short-circuit hunger and which incidentally promote conditions like diabetes: starchy, sugary, super-processed snacks and meals. (Incidentally, if you haven't read the recent NY Times series on diabetes, you really should; it's a chilling indictment of the price we as a society pay in medical and social costs for the free circulation of diabetes-inducing foods. Poor New Yorkers are twice as likely as middle class New Yorkers to have diabetes).

But instead of facing the disastrous effects of its anti-poor, anti-middle class policies on actual bodies, this administration instead points to terrorists, homosexuals and liberals as those who would put American's bodies in jeopardy. It promises to defend the bodies of true believers, and in the ultimate revenge fantasy of the fundamentalists – the "Left Behind" series – they get the pleasure of watching unbelievers get slaughtered by Jesus. This gang stimulates hatred of the Other, of the dissenter, as a means to keep the resentment of its shock troops stoked and ready for action.

So how can the Left get out from under this mythological version of how the U.S. economy works? How can it stop being cast as a promoter of the circulation of dangerous, debased and defiled bodies? And how can it defend itself from Jesus' terrible swift sword, which, according to the fundamentalist right, will soon spill the blood of the infidels all over the Promised Land?

I'll get back to you on that.

Bodies in Motion: Part I of II

2006-01-16T11:07:00.000-05:00

I've been reading FLESH AND STONE: The Body and City in Western Civilization by Richard Sennett (Norton, 1994), which I suspect is responsible for my focus over the last week on the idea that right-wing propaganda operates by placing the body politic in jeopardy under the sign of liberals and terrorists, and at the same time promises to defend and protect the body under the sign of strong, unflinching moral leadership.

Sennett, a colleague of Michel Foucault's, with whom he began the book back in the 70s, examines in FLESH AND STONE how ideas about of the human body are reflected in the built environments of cities and the behaviors and perceptions of its citizens from ancient Athens to modern New York with stops along the way in Rome, Venice, Paris, and London. It's an extraordinarily rich work, deep in scope, scholarly erudition and insight.

I'm in the third section where Sennett is making the case that "A new master image of the body took form" through the discoveries William Harvey made about the circulation of the blood, that "Harvey launched a scientific revolution in the understanding of the body: its structure, its healthy state, and its relation to the soul" (page 255).

Harvey's discovery in the 1630s that blood flowing through the circulatory system is driven by mechanical means (the heart), and not because of the blood's heat (the ancient Greek notion which remained current until Harvey), were also responsible for "new understandings of the body that coincided with the birth of modern capitalism and [brought] about the great social transformation we call individualism. The modern individual is, above all else, a mobile human being" (page 255-56).

Adam Smith took Harvey's insight into the connection between freely circulating blood and health and used it to claim, according to Sennett, that the "free market of labor and goods operat[es] much like freely circulating blood within the body [and brought] similar life giving consequences" (page 256) Sennett goes on to say that a consequence of human mobility in the service of economic circulation promoting human beings increasingly desensitized to their environment, resulting in cities "which have succumbed to the dominant value of circulation" (page 256). (On this last point, I'm reminded of Robert Moses' destruction of the social fabric of neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens in order to move traffic around the New York metropolis.)

The idea of freely circulating blood as promoter of good health was reflected then and now in urban designs where new "arteries" and "veins" were constructed for the free circulation of people and goods and waste, e.g., new boulevards, underground sewer systems, etc. Similarly, around the same time human skin was discovered to be instrumental in the circulation of air in the body. This resulted in more frequent bathing to open pores clotted with dirt, the loosening of clothing, and in terms of cities, the introduction of "lungs" in the form of parks and the paving and cleaning of city streets.

What particularly strikes me in Sennett's discussion is that the foundational text of neo-liberal free-marketeers, Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" is based on an analogy with the free circulation of blood and its healthful effects. Every neo-liberal economist assents to this powerful mostly unexamined analogy that equates circulation with health. However, the circulation of goods and labor since Smith's time have, in fact, yielded mixed results insofar as the health of people, their cities, and ultimately the earth and its atmosphere. Recently, the supreme value of circulation has yielded the near instant global distribution of deadly local germs on international jet passenger flights.

Also destructive has been the forced circulation of the neo-liberal market orthodoxy by the United States through its organs the IMF and World Bank which have forced Southern and Eastern peoples to swallow the bitter pill of neo-liberal economic reform or be denied life-giving flows of foreign exchange.

Sennett notes that Harvey's discovery also began a medical revolution, a "medical revolution [which] seemed to have substituted health for morality as a standard of human happiness among those social engineers by motion and circulation" (ibid).

Here is the intersection where I locate the primary (and contradictory) program of the reactionary right: the (claimed) promotion of the free circulation of goods and labor on the one hand, and a tightly regulated circulation of bodies and desires on the other. In short, the free circulation of people in pursuit of work is deemed critical to a healthy society, while the social circulation of different people with different desires is deemed unhealthy, immoral, unclean.

Malkin: Would You Rather Die or What?

2006-01-14T13:49:00.000-05:00

This is almost getting to be funny. Check out this post on Crooks and Liars referencing a column by Michelle Malkin where to justify Bush's warrantless spying on American citizens, she passes along a fake news story about Arabs buying 60 cells phones to be used as detonators, a "plot" stopped by an alert clerk. Her conclusion? We Are All Homeland Security Agents Now.

This has all the earmarks of the kind of disinformation campaign the right is known for (e.g., Reagan's welfare queen who was not an actual person, but a "straw man," used to justify his reactionary welfare policies).

Malkin, cunningly, is trying to put every American clerk's body into motion as a defender of the body politic, thereby casting a large segment of the polis into the role of posse. I can only hope that we non-clerks can something to prevent non-terrorists from engaging in non-terroristic activities, too.

MSNBC's Matthews: Would You Rather Die or What?

2006-01-14T09:34:00.000-05:00

Chris Matthews, MSNBC's Hardball host, has thrown in with the Bush gang's justification for warrantless spying on Americans: Would you rather die or what? Here's a summary of what Matthews said (from Media Matters):

On the January 12 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, host Chris Matthews asserted that wiretapping Americans in an effort to track down terrorists -- which his guest asserted would be "breaking the law" -- was "maybe ... part of the job" of the president of the United States."

In the "all terror, all the time" post 9/11 construction of the Bush public relations theater company, all the bodies of the body politic are in jeopardy and the first reponsiblity of government is the preservation of those bodies, a responsiblity which overules the rights of citizenship and justifies the total power of the sovereign. The sovereign is law.

In his endorsement of this view, Matthews is endorsing the teachings of Carl Schmitt, German political theorist and enthusiastic supporter of Hitler who believed, that "Debate, deliberation, and persuasion obscure what is essential for politics -- firm sovereign decisions for dealing with political enemies" (From Richard Bernstein's The Abuse of Evil , page 91).

Grounded on the familiar conservative judgment that enmity is the basic existential condition of mankind from which it follow that a strong sovereign must be in place to staunch chaos and enforce order, Schmitt, according to Bernstein, contends that "Sovereigns may pretend that they are making decisions in the name of some 'higher principle' or that they are following proper legal and political procedures, but this should not disguise the fact that such decisions are ungrounded; they are solely the sovereign's decision." (page 91). The "higher principle" here is actually the low materialist principle of bodily preservation.

The directors of the Bush theater know that bodies running before the scream of sirens and exhausted in the aftermath of adrenal panic, would gladly bargain away the preservation of rights for the preservation of the body. Matthews, in saying breaking the law is part of the president's job, gives away the rights of citizens under the "argument" of the siren.

He is not alone in this, of course. The media, under Wall Street's demand for higher corporate profits, has been cranking up the society of the siren for the last two decades. Knowing that fear, terror, sex and loathing captures more "eyeballs" for resale to advertisers than do reasoned appraisals of the issues confronting the commonweal, the media races to find new stimulations for eyeballs and the bodies attached to them, aiming now squarely for the reptile brain -- the limbic system -- the lowest common biological denominator. Increased stimulation means more eyeballs, higher ratings, higher advertising rates, higher profits, higher returns on investment for the wealthiest Americans especially the top 1% of the American ruling class who hold 44% of all privately held stock.

The Bush PR theater has been embraced by Big Media because they have mastered the stimulation of the American body. Unlike television shows and advertisements which inculcate fear and envy on the mundane basis of one's appearance or possessions (the possiblity of social death because one's deodorant does not fully repress body odor), the Bush gang are able to place the American body in total somatic jeopardy: "Buy Bush As Sovereign or Die."

Side-effects like the loss of rights are masked or downplayed -- e.g., the loss of rights is limited to a small population who have spied on Americans -- just like in the pharma industries' direct-to-consumer advertising where the announcer glosses quickly over the side-effects and keeps pointing to the benefits of the enhanced and continued life of the body.

At the same time the sovereign put the body in jeopardy and protects it, he claims for himself and his gang, higher, purer, more honorable motives than his enemies. The military, for example, are constantly held up an exemplars of moral virtue because they willing to place their bodies in jeopardy for the good of the American body politic. Those who would question Bush's unilateral military invasion of Iraq, or the invasion of the privacy of Americans, are then coded as dishonorable, weak, corrupt. And, of course, once again, as liberal.

How then to counteract the BushMedia construction of reality? I'll get back to you on that one. I promise.

Bush's Body Politics: Why Impeachment Is Unlikely

2006-01-10T17:13:00.000-05:00

Summary:The lower prong of the right wing's two-tier marketing strategy, simply stated, focuses on placing the American body in jeopardy and then promising to defend or release it. Since Bush's presidential body is not in jeopardy, like Clinton's was, there can be no impeachment.

The Argument: In the right wing's brand differentiation strategy, liberals are portrayed as architects and advocates of unnatural bodies and unnaturally used bodies. Liberals are careless of the bodies of the people. They would put people of different colors together, fostering "race mixing." Liberals would give license to homosexuals who express their unnatural bodily desires and gender preferences. Liberals would reach into mother's wombs, and shut off life-support machines. Liberals, soft on communism/ terrorism/ Marxism/ socialism, put the bodies of average Americans within the grasp of death-dealing Others. Liberals take away guns, which is the average American's last line of defense of the body, against criminals, criminals coddled by liberal courts, as well as the usual non-whites and radical Others. And, liberals would let bodies live that have murdered the lives of innocent bodies. The list goes on.

It seems to me that these body politics play particularly well in the South, and that the Bush brand strategy emphasizes Bush's Southern white male body to reinforce his power and his policies with his base. I reference here a empirical study on the "Southern Culture of Honor" which talks about how the Southern white male thinks of and uses his body differently than the Northern white male. I saw a short documentary about it on PBS a couple of years ago, and it seems relevant here.

This "experimental ethnography" involved an experimental design that had having one male researcher walk down a long, narrow hallway, accidentally bump against an unsuspecting test subject coming from the other direction and mutter "asshole" at contact. A camera was mounted in the ceiling to observe what happened and metrics devised to measure reactions, and included measuring and comparing testosterone and cortisol levels. The main finding? Men from the South were much more likely to take affront at the contact, for instance, to demand an apology, threaten the other man with physical harm, and to fight. They also exhibited higher levels of testosterone and cortisol in the blood. Men from the North who were bumped typically paid less attention to the contact, and experienced lower levels of hormonal change.

The researchers cite at some length what I guess one might call an culture-anthropological explanation for the difference referencing "shepherding behavior" which I find somewhat interesting. In this explanation, the ancestors of Southern men, coming from some "herding economies on the fringes of Britain" are more prone to violence because the herding life is all about terroritoriality. The paper also mentions the institution of slavery as a potential contributing factor, but seems to me to give it short shrift. It would seem to me that the Southern Culture of Honor was at least reinforced the South for about 250 years was a gigantic slave labor camp. This was massive prison which required that all white males, who as a population were outnumbered by slaves, be on constant guard against the possibility of slave rebellion. In addition, each southern male was enjoined to participate in the capture of runaway slaves as a duty of citizenship.

This vigilante behavior did not go away after the Civil War. The disciplinary regime merely changed from discipline and punish to discipline and lynch. Also, the South has, perhaps because for much of its history it was a prison camp, the South has always been much more militaristically inclined than the North. The military, of course, has very strict codes regarding personal honor, and a strict hierarchical structure which dovetails with the disciplinary regime of the Slavocracy.

So what's that got to do with the lower prong of the two-tier marketing strategy? The marketing messages that claim liberals put the body in jeopardy has worked particularly well in the South because they fit with the culture of honor. The flip side of maintaining honor is fighting back against those who would humiliate you and would thus call into question your honor. As the losing side in the War Between the States, the South has been resentful of Northern power ever since, and has fought back so ably and with such dedication that U.S. politics have been effectively Southernized over the past 30 years.

Okay. Let's turn to the Southern male body of George W. Bush, noted often for its swagger, its cockiness. As Bush's brand manager, communicating news about the presidential body, Karl Rove knows that the image is much more powerful than the word. He places Bush in dramatic situations where Red Staters can see the language of Bush's Southern male body, and in so doing identify themselves in that language. The foremost example, of course, is Bush walking across the aircraft carrier in his flight suit to declare "mission accomplished." And more recently we were treated to his long walk the park in New Orleans to his podium, shirt sleeves rolled up, his walk a simulacrum of force, resolve and purpose. Bush has mastered this language, and its all his supporters, both South and North, need to see to understand that he's the one running the show, and that Liberals haven't got a chance.

Now consider Bill Clinton's southern male body. Consider how the American public was made to imagine "unnatural acts" being performed on that body. His body was coded as corrupt, unclean, unnatural, illegal and immoral. In other words, impeachable.

The reason, I'm claiming, why we don't have any serious, sustained calls for impeachment for Bush lying and spying is because in the Southernization of the American psyche we have become so captive to the language and imagery of the body that the violation of rights has become too abstract. It's not visceral enough. We do not squirm in our seats. The body does not recoil in fear or repugnance when we think of other people getting spied upon. The American people just don't get excited enough about principles anymore unless they are described in such a way as to put the body in jeopardy.

Further, that this is the problem that afflicts the left on many of its classic issues. The left tends to see the political in more abstract terms, terms of fairness and equality and rights: the right to privacy, to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, free from discrimination, from exploitation, from want, etc. For each of these, the right points to a body in jeopardy. For instance, in the case of Privacy the right asks: Would you rather die or what? In the case of discrimination the right asks: You want "race-mixing" and homosexual teachers? It's the Anxious Either/Or (Control vs. Chaos) tied time and time again to the body.

What can the Democrats do to counter-punch the right-wing strategy of the body? I'll have to get back to you on that one.

Frank Rich and The Bush PR Theater Company

2006-01-08T13:46:00.000-05:00

Indented below are a few key sentences from Frank Rich's editorial today in the NY Times which I borrowed from AMERICAblog.

First, a word of praise for Frank Rich. Rich's incisive dissections of the taxpayer-supported Bush Public Relations Theater Company, a key node of the military-industrial-defense-energy-infotainment complex, are always welcome. Mr. Rich, longtime theater critic, is clearly well-suited to reviewing the latest improvisations of the Bush troupe since we no longer have a functioning democracy but instead have this very well-funded theatrical enterprise, which, for the benefit of its many investors in the corporate complex, puts on spectacular shows of dissembling, disinformation, and deception. Without further introduction, here's Rich's quote:

The highest priority for the Karl Rove-driven presidency is...to preserve its own power at all costs. With this gang, political victory and the propaganda needed to secure it always trump principles, even conservative principles, let alone the truth. Whenever the White House most vociferously attacks the press, you can be sure its No. 1 motive is to deflect attention from embarrassing revelations about its incompetence and failures.

As much as I am grateful for Rich's columns -- one of the last voices, along with Krugman's, of the Times' once-proud bourgeoisie brownstone liberal tradition -- I find myself shaking my head at his last sentence. He seems to imply that the Bush administration might be "embarrassed" by "incompetence and failures."

Rich, perhaps because he seems to be a person with strong moral and professional values, seems to believe that Bush and his supporting cast might share his belief in professional, if not moral values. I commend him for his charitableness in this; but Bush and his henchmen, immoral, are incapable of embarassment over "incompetence. "

They are instead very capable of sniffing the political winds and sensing what their audiences need. They know when others think they should be embarrrassed, and depending upon whom they wish to discipline or stimulate, will put on a performance to draw attention to themselves and, if necessary, shine a harsh interrogatory spotlight on anyone in the crowd who dares to respond to their latest show with a sigh, a snore, a catcall or Bronx cheer.

You can only be embarrassed at incompetence and failure if you believe you have been shown to be incomptent or to have failed. And since, as part of the Bush troupe's image they cannot admit to failure, they must lash out or humiliate anyone who might suggest a mistake was made.

Recall if you will Bush's inability to admit to making a mistake in his Presidency a couple of years ago. Many liberal commmentators saw that as an example of his inability to look inward or to examine a new set of facts, draw new conclusions and make new plans. But, in fact, he was playing to an audience elsewhere. He used this moment, and very skillfully I might add, to humiliate and mock a representative of "liberal media" for the pleasure of his base. As the president of Good and Evil, Bush doesn't make mistakes. His word is The Word.

Bush's recent "softer focus" pre-Christmas speech suggesting that there might have been "wrong" intelligence about Iraq but that attacking Iraq was still the best course of action was not an admission of failure or incompetence; it was a small off-Broadway one-man designed to mollify a press that was suddenly waking up to Bush's low poll ratings and felt emboldened enough to begin to wonder about the usual performance. Only these critics really noticed Bush's attempt to try a "stretch" role.

Can an administration that is always talking in high moral terms about Good and Evil really be so cynical as to see the world as merely a stage for the launching of lies and cover stories? Much as Mr. Rich might expect or wish otherwise, yes. Yes, indeed.

The Bush Gang's One-Two Punch of Two-Tier Marketing

2006-01-07T16:11:00.000-05:00

Congress released a report today that says the Bush's administration's spying on Americans was probably against the law. A Bush administration official was quoted as a counter to the report saying administration's interpretation of the law is correct and proper and will hold up in court.

The Washington Post story describing the report and the administration response provides just the kind of message that Republican propogandists would want. It targets the upper tier of their basic two-tier propaganda/marketing segmentation in which the masses are marketed demagogic messages that place the body in jeopardy, while elites receive Scholasticist messages marketed at the mind. This particular story obviously will target the latter segment, and the smaller segement within the top-tier interested enough to read the paper on Saturday.

The message for the masses on warrantless spying was delivered last week by President Bush: Would You Rather Die or What? In his message he insisted this illegal spying is required when dealing with terrorists. Strong, heartful, heavily-backboned cowboy hero that he is, he 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).

The more elite are meanwhile treated with articles like the one in the Post. For them there is a constant stream of obfuscating statements that remind them of the vexed bureaucratic white collar regime they must navigate at work, an environment where right and wrong is a matter of power and who wins depends on which side has the better lawyers. Many simply tune out because to focus on the details and hair-splitting interpretations is to take too much time from the increasingly demanding rigors of the speed-up at work. Some enjoy the reportage on bureaucratic infighting and will follow every bulletin and update.

Of course, some right-wingers like both the stimulation of the body and the mind. Murdoch's Molechs, i.e., O'Reilly, etc., engage in "intellectual" defenses of the politics of the right-wing body all the time. The "intellectual" David Brooks likes getting hot under the collar as much as he enjoys feeling smart when he repeats the Scholasticist arguments provided by him by the right-wing tanks, those simple-minded, slash and burn arguments that echo the populist marketing prong in slightly trickier language.

The right has been practicing this two-tier marketing approach profitably since the Nixon era when it first developed its "southern strategy," a strategy it still employs and which must therefore be one of the longest-lived marketing campaigns ever. Since then, many high-end brand names have appropriated and refined the strategy. Gucci, for instance, found it could sell its logo emblazoned T-shirts to the masses in the malls, and continue to sell its haute couture lines to the elite without a negative impact on the brand profile. The cross-pollination and evolution of branding strategies between business and politics (which are actually one in the same these days) has given us right-wing T-shirt slogans for the mall crowd, and smartly tailored, quasi-academic screeds for those who prefer to think of themselves as "right wing thinkers."

The Right has identified some issues it finds particularly successful which are strongly keyed to the stimulation of the body, commonly referred to as "wedge issues." These issues, which it generally wheels out during elections are Guns, God and Gays. The issues stress visceral emotions, primarily fear and disgust, connected with the maintenance of control and power of one's body, and the bodies of one's family. On the flip side, the issues call forth the possibility of performing valorous acts against one's enemies in order to preserve the bodies of one's family and fellows.

For example, families with a gun in the house are protected against criminals who would kill them and liberals who would take their guns (which would permit criminals to kill them), families with a Bible in hand are protected from the gray moral relativism of secular humanists who maliciously mock their values and advocate what they deem to be unnatural and sinful acts that threaten the very basis of the patriarchal regime, acts such as abortion and the homosexual "lifestyle." Under the logic of the body any counter arguments to such closely-held beliefs are instantly ruled out of order, anti-God, anti-family, or anti-patriotic because to tolerate such arguments would place the body in jeopardy. All kinds of jeopardy. And overlaying it all is resentment at those (liberals) who would put their bodies in jeopardy, and a wish to humiliate those liberals for doing so.

These wedge issues do have an elite component: there are "intellectual" arguments attached to gun ownership, abortion, homosexuality, and moral values, and these arguments are vigorously advanced as well. These arguments mostly rest upon a conviction that with God in His Heaven and His Commandments Followed all will be Right with the World. For those right-wingers that do not wish to invoke Him as justification, the rationalizations are made under the Cartesian Either/Or (Autocracy vs. Anarchy), Tradition for the sake of Tradition, or under the inviolate rules of that other God popular with the crew at the country club, the Market God. This unsentimentally but always correctly God assigns value through the workings of an Invisible Hand, and, miraculously tends to support those in power, especially those in dominant positions of power, which is a very nice theory indeed for those in power.

So how can the Left hope to win against what seems to be massively-funded, comprehensive and dominating marketing strategy?

I'm going to have to get back to you on that one.

Chomsky: Putting the Lie to the Liars

2006-01-06T17:00:00.000-05:00

Here's my recent review of Noam Chomsky's Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World . A friend of mine, a member of that vanishing breed, the moderate Republican, once asked me: "Why does Chomsky hate America so much?" Never having read Chomsky, I decided to find out if indeed he does hate America. After reading about four of his books, I felt informed enough to tell my friend that Chomsky doesn't hate America. What he hates are the money and power grubbing that is done in the name of America. He's also pretty upset about injustice, lying, and war. All good things to hate.

Facts Are Stubborn Things, October 23, 2005

There is an exquisitely satisfying moment in the DVD documentary "Manufacturing Consent" where Noam Chomsky flatly contradicts William F. Buckley's version of events in Greece in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Clearly flabbergasted by Chomsky's command of the facts but perhaps even more so by his refusal to accept the standard cold-war inspired interpretation of these events, Buckley eventually loses his temper and is reduced to insisting that he is right and that Chomsky is wrong.

At this remove, the interview, conducted sometime in the late 70s or early 80s, is a disturbing artifact of a time when facts were important in the making of political argument, for it is apparent that Buckley is chagrined by his inability to rebut Chomsky on the facts and reduced to repeating his position with greater and greater insistence. Now, of course, as the right itself acknowledges, conservatives do not deign to traffic in "fact-based reality." They instead weave and then don bright, shining garments of red, white and blue, and viciously attack anyone who might suggest they are clothed in raiment of gray lies and dun dissemblance.

And that is precisely why Chomsky is so valuable. He offers a compelling, fact-based counternarrative to the triumphalist ideology of Buckley and the scores of conservative apparatchiks that Buckley and his billionaire inheritance-baby buddies have spawned over the past 30 years -- that same triumphalist nonsense that, for instance, predicted US troops would be greeted in Baghdad as they were Paris in WWII -- with flowers, champagne and kisses.

A self-described "anarcho-syndicalist" in the one-party state that is the US these days, Chomsky's views are apparently too dangerous to allow him more than an occasional interview on radio or television in this great democracy of ours. (Why is it that in the US media that is supposed to be so "liberal," Chomsky is rarely if ever seen, but that we have an endless supply of right wing provocateurs preaching their furious farrago of free market fantasy and unchristian Christianity?).

If you've never read Chomsky, this latest work is a very good introduction to his bracing, fact-based version of American history as imperial adventure and botched conquest. If you're content with the fumigated Sunday school version of reality offered by the mainstream media or the knee-jerk nationalism peddled by the revanchist reactionaries on Fox, Chomsky is probably not for you. But if as a thinking American you have come to doubt the infallibility of our president's heart as naturally right in all things -- e.g., his latest nomination to the Supreme Court, etc. -- you will in reading Chomsky come to use your own head and your own heart, and see American foreign policy for what it truly is.

Coulter: Liberals Are Killers

2006-01-05T15:11:00.000-05:00

You only have to read the first sentence of Ann Coulter's defense of the Bush administration's lyin' and spyin' in her column today to see the gigantic straw man she's frantically stuffing so she can, oh so satisfyingly, knock it down. And beat it. And set it on fire in her usual 5 alarm fashion.

It seems the Bush administration -- being a group of sane, informed adults -- has been secretly tapping Arab terrorists without warrants. (Column here if you can stand it.)

Guess those liberals just aren't sane. Or informed. Guess those liberals are weak. Really weak. So weak in fact that liberals allowed, even enabled and, yes, almost even planned 9/11!

Coulter's is the vitriolic version of Bush's more "presidential version" of why he felt it was necessary to spy on Americans: Would You Rather Die or What?

Bush, Etc: Lying, Spying Liars

2006-01-04T11:57:00.000-05:00

I think that the review I wrote back in 2003 of Al Franken's Lies and Lying Liars Who Tell Them is particularly relevant during these days of extra special lyin' by the Bush administration and their oh-so-many PR flacks on Fox.

Work on the Haymaker, Al, October 12, 2003
Thank you Mr. Franken for refuting the scurrilous, anti-democratic cant of the oh-so-many assorted tools of the rich and powerful, the murderous mouthpieces Coulter, O'Reilly and Hannity, et. al. Murdoch's Molechs have gotten away their vicious innuendo, distortions, and lies for far too long. With "Liars," Mr. Franken, you, with the help of your Harvard-trained research staff, have put the lie to the hoohah of this hydra-headed beast.

But really, Al, I wonder, do you really think reason and point-by-point refutation, no matter how accurately executed, will have the slightest effect on the beast and its minions? It's a shame that it's gotten this bad, but the bought-and-paid-for rhetoric of the hydra has so polarized America, so marginalized, circumscribed, and even criminalized any other point of view that one wonders if there really is any hope for book like yours actually changing anyone's mind. Yes, it's a shame the so-called liberal media has been missing in action like in the old McCarthy days, and your valiant attempt to throw a monkey wrench into the well-oiled attack machine is laudable, but, really, maybe you should consider doing what so many Americans have already done: relax into the warm bath of slander and take the draught of diminished hope.

Think about it, Al. Maybe it's time to get your heart into the right place, if you know what I mean. Harden it. Stop the bleeding. As we have been told so many times by the Coulter O'Reilly Hannity hydra, there are only two kinds of people in the world: the deserving people who own and run everything because they deserve to, and the undeserving people who are lazy and will never have anything and therefore don't deserve to. You're successul. You deserve your fame and money. You worked hard for it. Luck had nothing to do with it. Not your family either. It was all you, you Rugged Individualist.

So why not gratefully abandon yourself to delicious knee-jerk patriotism and flag reverence of the Fox Network? Remember that war is the health of the state. Punch your fist in the air as the Fox tools toadie to the cynical oligarchy which has swallowed up the once-honorable Republican party. Shout huzzahs to the perfection of the cabalistic policies of George Jr., Cheney, Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bremer and the corporatist state. It'll feel great. Really, Al. And you deserve it, Al. You're proof that the American system works, aren't you?

Whew! Boy that feels good, that "us" and "them" stuff. The deserving and the undeserving thing. You can almost see how the Coulter's and Hannity's get carried away with that stuff. Kind of gets you all puffed up, don't it? But anyway, seriously, Al, by engaging in this dogfight, this parsing of truth and untruth, you're in mortal danger of becoming a pawn in their game of one-upmanship. This is a hard game to win.

I'm not saying you shouldn't have done it, or shouldn't continue to, but consider this, too: the best parts of your book are not the sections where you talk how the conservatives have shredded the social safety net and made off with the family silver, or the parts where you show how Americans have been sold down the trickle-down river, but rather those humane and decent parts of the book where you, for instance, talk about your long and abiding friendship with Paul Wellstone, or talk about the inspiration you find in the American government programs of the New Deal when social justice and equality were embodied in the social safety net, the one that was there for your wife's family when her father was killed in the war.

It is the language of compassion, of community and love that best refutes the devil-take-the-hindmost ethos of Supply Side Jesus. (By the way I suspect that's one of the reasons you like Clinton so much -- he knew how to strike the chord of compassion in most decent Americans, whether Democrat or Republican. This was the gift that drove his enemies wild with hatred: the common touch conservatives claim to have, but don't).

So what if Hannity doesn't have the number one show on television as he claims? Or that O'Reilly never won those two Peabody he claims he did? Until someone with similar bandwidth can get up and slap down that hydra, head by head with the human language of real compassion -- and short-circuit the sound-bite, tough-love, focus-group language of compassionate conservatism -- we're going to be forever treated to Murdoch's Manichean world of good and evil: it simply plays so much better on television.

You're right, someone has to put the lie to the liars, and this is a good start, and we appreciate it. But the other, and, perhaps the more powerful weapon you have at your disposal is your decency and humanity, especially your gift for admitting your own zealousness might sometimes have led you astray. This weapon is powerful because, as you point out, Americans prefer moral persons to scoundrels and liars. And Americans very much want to act morally toward their neighbors, their communities, their country and the world. They are beginning to awaken to the deceptions of these venal and vituperative hacks and their political puppet masters. The weapons of humility, decency and humanity are powerful too because those who have arrayed themselves against the best interests of America are people who are sorely lacking in these estimable traits. You and TeamFranken have the good left jab; use it to keep the bums off-balance while you work on the haymaker.

Bush on Spying: Would You Rather Die or What?

2006-01-02T20:11:00.000-05:00

Today our president, against his usual backdrop of US soldiers (although, notably, this time he used wounded US soldiers as props) -- offered his latest, revised reasons for spying on Americans.

Guess what? He says that he had to spy to save Americans from terrorists and liberals. What a surprise! And oh, he also said that because it was only a little spying that makes it okay.

What's fascinating here is Bush's temporization of the rights of Americans. I thought liberals were the ones who engaged in "moral relativism" and that conservatives had hard and fast beliefs about good and evil. I would have thought that government spying is evil -- a black deed, not a gray deed as Mr. Bush seems to be saying, as if grayness makes it kind of okay. I thought liberals were the ones who always saw things in shades of gray.

But now without further adieu, here's Bush's latest:

"This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America, and I repeat limited," Bush said before flying back to Washington after six days cloistered on his ranch in Crawford, Tex. "I think most Americans understand the need to find out what the enemy's thinking. Takeway: Because the spying is limited (whatever that means) therefore it's okay.

"If somebody from al Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why." Takeaway: Anybody/any liberal who would stop us from spying on people without a warrant is an al Queda terrorist or sympathizer

The president's first public comments of the new year after no public appearances last week offered a glimpse into how his administration intends to deflect congressional inquiries into his authorization of wiretaps on terrorism suspects -- with a vigorous defense of the program as a matter of national security. Bush acknowledged in a live radio address last month that he authorized the four-year-old surveillance program and defended it as "critical to saving American lives," a tool to prevent another attack on U.S. soil. Two days later, he defended the legality of domestic spying in a lengthy year-end news conference at the White House. Takeaway: Weak liberals want to kill Americans, just like terrorists do.

"It seems logical to me that if we know there's a phone number associated with al Qaeda or an al Qaeda affiliate and they're making phone calls, it makes sense to find out why," Bush said at the Brooke Army Medical Center, where he met with about 50 wounded soldiers, Marines and airmen and their families. He also awarded nine Purple Hearts to troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. "They attacked us before, they'll attack us again."Takeaway: It just does not make sense to have to get a warrant when you're finding out why al Queda is calling a liberal or even a moderate Republican.

I can hardly wait to see Krugman's next editorial!

Mlitary, Too, Now Looking For The Exit In Iraq

2006-01-02T18:27:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Democratic Undergound for the links to a poll taken among active duty military personnel and published yesterday at MilitaryCity.com which finds:

Approval of the president’s Iraq policy fell 9 percentage points from 2004; a bare majority, 54 percent, now say they view his performance on Iraq as favorable. Support for his overall performance fell 11 points, to 60 percent, among active-duty readers of the Military Times newspapers.
...
The poll also found diminished optimism that U.S. goals in Iraq can be accomplished, and a somewhat smaller drop in support for the decision to go to war in 2003.
....
• Nearly two-thirds said the military is stretched too thin to be effective, though that figure is down substantially from two years ago.
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• For the first time in the three-year history of the poll, more than half of respondents said they had deployed in support of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The declining support is not surprising as the military is composed, like the American public, of mostly resonable people who can be fooled for some of the time, but not all the time. More and more it's looking like time is up for this lyin' & spyin' White House gang.

Not reported in the write-up on the site is whether those deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan are more or less or similarly positive/negative in their appraisal of Bush's Iraq policy than those who have not served there. Now that would really tell the story of what's happening over there.

Republicans Are From Action; Democrats From Consulting

2006-01-02T12:37:00.000-05:00

The headline of a post on AMERICAblog reads Congressional leaders were informed, not consulted about domestic spying. Then a couple paragraphs from a TIME article (which I've shortened and posted below) are cited in the post:

Tom Daschle, then the Senate Democratic majority leader, says the Administration knows it did not have that implicit authority [to spy on Americans without a warrant] because White House officials had sought unsuccessfully to get congressional leaders to include explicit language approving no-warrant wiretaps in the resolution. Attorney General Gonzales says the Administration decided to go forward with the program anyway because it was convinced that the President possessed the inherent power to act.

What I'm particularly interested in pointing out here is the AMERICAblog headline really shows in summary form how the Bush administrations manages to dominate the Democrats and, most of the time, manipulate the media and thereby the American people.

According to the Republican's master narrative, "consulting" is something liberals would do. The Bush gang acts (always for their own benefit, of course), and then excoriates straw-men liberals for being too weak to act. Republicans then claim liberal inaction puts American lives at risk, which disqualifies them for leadership. Very neat. Very effective.

Cynically, Republicans take advantage of the American culture's admiration for "men of action." Couple this with the way media companies are organized -- to pursue and report news -- and the mostly positive depiction of the actions of "men of action" -- newsmakers -- become clear. Bush and his gang have been a total action system since 9/11, acting, acting, acting. Democrats have been wathching, watching, watching, and occasionally complaining, complaining, complaining. This could perhaps be summarized in the following journalistic metaphor: Republicans Do Headllines. Democrats Do Sub-Heads.

One can only hope that soon the Bush gang's execrable "actions" -- all of them tyrannical, self-serving, and, of course, simply bad -- and the regrettable results of those actions -- anti-democratic and anti-human results most of them, will finally become so apparent that the scales will fall from the eyes of enough Americans that the Bush gang will begin to "consult" with more moderate voices in its own party. Then maybe some of the worst excesses of this total action system will be stymied, at least for a while.

Because You're Dull, Spying On You Is Okay

2005-12-31T10:54:00.000-05:00

I was checking out the blog World O' Crap's very funny and very troubling "Ultimate Wingnut of 2005" contest (whose nominees include some of the leading lights of the RadCon right such as John Hindrocket and Michelle Malkin, when I clicked on a link that took me to a column by Kathleen Parker --Spies Like Us-- on Townhall.com.

The conservative columnist Kathleen Parker seeks through the trivialization of our right to privacy to justify the Bush administration's warrantless domestic spying. Her main justification is that those who have nothing to fear from government spying should have nothing to fear from government spying. She also tells us that it's better to have our embarrassingly dull lives exposed to government scrutiny than to be exposed to death by terrorism. Here's a key paragraph:

"Sometimes we might get it right and prevent another attack; sometimes we might mistakenly eavesdrop on an innocent conversation. What we save - possibly thousands of lives - compared with what we lose (mostly the exposure of our embarrassingly dull lives) would seem sufficiently self-evident to preclude the meme-driven hysteria now clotting airwaves: Bush lied; Bush spied. And, oh yes, People Died.

What's fascinating here is Kathleen Parker's temporization of the rights of Americans. I thought liberals did that. I thought conservatives had hard and fast beliefs about good and evil. I would have thought that government spying is evil -- a black deed, not a gray deed as Kathleen Parker seems to be saying. And here I thought liberals were the ones who always saw things in shades of gray.

If America is to be a moral examplar of Western civilazation -- one of the key tenets of conservatives (Remember The Lewinsky)-- then shouldn't America practice what it preaches? Especially during a war that was justified on the basis of liberation from a totalitarian regime which spied on its own citizens and intimidated its citizens through its surveillance of them?

In addition to not invading the privacy of its own citizens, the morally superior invading/liberating Bush administration should have also refrained from ignoring the rights of Iraqi citizens in the country it was invading/liberating, too. I'm referring here to the administration's justification of torture, which is an extremely serious abrogation of human rights. Previous administrations had promised never to engage in such acts, endorsing the idea that there are certain human rights which should never be violated. And once the United States was universally recognized by other countries for its absolute moral commitment to that ideal.

Kathleen Parker says she "can't muster outrage over what appears to be a reasonable action in the wake of 9/11." The problem with "resaonableness" in this case is that what one person or one organization thinks is reasonable, may only reasonably serve the interests of that individual or organization. Te problem with reasonableness as practiced by a government which engages in secret acts like executive fiats undoing privacy rights and writes secret torture memos undoing human rights is that reasonableness tends to wither in the corridors of power. The NSA thought it reasonable to spy on a vegan group, and to spy on Greenpeace. The Bush administration thought it was reasonable to suspend previous agreements on the rights of prisoners.

Democracies attempt to promote reasonableness by encouraging lots of people with different views to talk about what should and shouldn't be done. In the case of warrantless spying, for instance, by having to obtain a warrant from a judge another party would have been introduced into the decision-making process. Perhaps another kind of reason might have prevailed. In the case of the torture memo, perhaps Congress, as the representatives of the people, could have been consulted and a more reasonable course of action would have been pursued.

It also occurs to me that if Congress and the American people hadn't been disinformed by the Bush administration about Iraq's (non-existent) WMD to justify the invasion, that if there had been a truthful and reasonable national discussion of the known potentialities for anarchy and chaos in the wake of the invasion, then perhaps our national reputation as moral exemplar supreme would have remained at least somewhat inctact.

No matter how embarrassingly dull our lives, the obdurateness of prisoners, or the real facts about WMD in Iraq, the Bush administration does not have the right to unilaterally decide what's best for us. Nor does have the right to torture prisonders, or to manufacture intelligence to support its invasion plans. These acts are immoral and anti-democratic. If Kathleen Parker is truly on the side of due process as she claims, which in a democracy means lots of people have a say in that process, her trivialization of these rights is truly troubling. Another quote from the column:

"In theory, I don't want to be wiretapped without due process, no matter how unlikely it is that anyone would want to know the shade of my highlights."

We have certainly come a long way from the American conservative movement of the 50s and 60s which used to warn of the fearsome power of the State, whether totalitarian or liberal. Now conservatives apparently support a surveillance state, believing that because they control the state they have the best interests of its citizens at heart. The benevolent state -- that would have been a real stretch for conservatives like William F. Buckley back in 50s and 60s.

Particularly ironic then is that Kathleen Parker is director of the School of Written Expression at the Buckley School of Public Speaking and Persuasion in Camden, South Carolina, founded by Reid Buckley, William F. Buckley's brother. Apparently the Old Model Conservative who used to fear the power of the "State" was replaced once the insurgency took over the reins of power. How remarakable that the New Model Conservative now sees the State as a benevolent surveillor of its embarrassingly dull citizens, a role it must take up to protect them against the communists -- oops, I meant terrorists.

The supposedly New Model conservative apologists like Kathleen Parker and David Brooks (on the NewsHour last week) justify their temporization of the right to privacy by advancing the notion that the terror threat constitutes a brave new set of circumstances which requires that rights be trampled because there is a new set of circumstances which require that rights be trampled because the terror threat …etc., etc., etc.

What is particularly ironic here is that in the 50s and 60s the threat of total nuclear annihilation was much more real and immediate, with circumstances that were truly unique. We were told that Russian spies were everywhere. It was a time of one of modern U.S. conservatism's great early triumphs -- the House Un-Aemrican Activities Committee presided over by McCarthy and ably assisted by a young William F. Buckley, Jr. What seems clear is that those with authoritarian bent, whether New or Old Models, although they claim otherwise, can always find a new "unique" set of circumstances to justify that the U.S. spy on its citizens.

Did the NSA spy on Kathleen Parker, I wonder? Or Mr. Brooks? Probably not. As New/Old Model conservative apologists, I somehow doubt they represent much of a threat to the State.

Go, Krugman, Go!

2005-12-30T11:34:00.000-05:00

Krugman's column today is a real demolition of the Bush administration. Below are some key paragraphs. I've linked back to some of my older posts that speak to the lies Krugman reveals.

Heck of a Job, Bushie, Paul Krugman
...
A year ago, before "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" became a national punch line, the rising tide of cronyism in government agencies and the rapid replacement of competent professionals with unqualified political appointees attracted hardly any national attention.
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A year ago, Dick Cheney, who repeatedly cited discredited evidence linking Saddam to 9/11, and promised that invading Americans would be welcomed as liberators - although he hadn't yet declared that the Iraq insurgency was in its "last throes" - was widely admired for his "gravitas."
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A year ago, it was clear that before the Iraq war, the administration suppressed information suggesting that Iraq was not, in fact, trying to build nuclear weapons. Yet few people in Washington or in the news media were willing to say that the nation was deliberately misled into war until polls showed that most Americans already believed it.
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A year ago, when everyone respectable agreed that we must "stay the course," only a handful of war critics suggested that the U.S. presence in Iraq might be making the violence worse, not better. It would have been hard to imagine the top U.S. commander in Iraq saying, as Gen. George Casey recently did, that a smaller foreign force is better "because it doesn't feed the notion of occupation."
...

Deconstructing the American Sublime

2005-12-29T11:17:00.000-05:00

Below is my review of The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History by Richard Haw. I think the book is quite a remarkable achievement, and recommend it.

What I particularly like about Haw's work is its identification of the end the Grand Experiment of American democracy with the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. It is with the dedication of the bridge that the anti-democratic ethos of the plutocracy is made visible, where the early workings of the public relations state and the softer techniques of domination it employs is made manifest.

We hardly notice the extent to which we have been drafted into the discourse of the American technological sublime nowadays; that's why books such as Haw's are important. To see and understand the beginnings of the discourses of cultural domination, to experience them in their nascent, still rough-around-the-edges form, is to peek behind the curtain and see through the smoke and mirrors of the Bush administration's present construction of reality.

Like me, author Haw clearly admires cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg's work, citing Trachtenberg's Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, as a seminal text of the "myth and symbol" school of U.S. historical discourse, holding it in even higher regard as such widely praised works as Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden. Based on Haw's recommendation and my own reading of Mr. Trachtenberg's other works, I plan to read Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol soon.

Deconstructing the American Sublime
For students of U.S. cultural history, Richard Haw's The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History offers a complete, and engagingly written interpretation of the cultural meanings and materials inspired and evoked by this iconic American structure. Those who work in cultural studies would be wise to acquire this book, not only for Haw's superlative treatment of the bridge's cultural history, but because Mr. Haw also identifies and nimbly employs the discipline's key theoretical texts. His end notes are especially detailed and useful.

Mr. Haw seems to have read or viewed every cultural text that references the bridge and this extensive scholarship is laudable. At the same time, Mr. Haw, whose main theme is officialdom's exclusion of countervailing interpretations and histories of the bridge, should have given more thought to excluding some of the minor works he cites. True, there are works once thought to be minor whose reputations have waxed over time and vice versa. In addition, minor works can be employed to exemplify important insights, a strategy Mr. Haw uses very effectively, but a more rigorous selection of such minor works would have served to sharpen this history with little cost to it comprehensiveness. But this is a minor quibble.

As Mr. Haw's relates the official and non-official versions of the bridge's history and the meanings ascribed to it, he shows how official versions, such as the opening day speeches, present an idealized bridge freighted with high civic aspirations – democracy, social and economic justice, etc. -- but actually exclude the voice of the average citizen and worker, and not just from the speeches and images, but from the ceremonies, too. He notes, for instance, that the opening day ceremony on May 24, 1883 and during the subsequent 50th and centennial celebrations, it was only government and business elites who through speeches interpreted the bridge's meanings and walked its walkway during the ceremonies.

On opening day, for instance, the mostly Irish immigrant men who built the bridge were excluded from the ceremony. Earlier, they had protested the fact that the date coincided with Queen Victoria's birthday. When they asked for the event to be rescheduled, the organizers refused and called in extra police to quell a potential disturbance (which did not materialize). Contrast this with the opening of the Ead bridge across the Mississippi in St. Louis 10 years before, an occasion where workers, citizens and city officials all participated in a massive 15 mile parade across the bridge. In the 1983 ceremony, which I personally observed from a tightly policed East Side highway along with thousands of other average New Yorkers, the more well-heeled citizens, those who could afford a $500 ticket were enjoying back-stage access to New York's other movers and shakers, where they could drink complimentary cocktails well away from lesser mortals.

This points up another of Haw's observations: the exclusionary tactics of Brooklyn Bridge's opening day ceremony where the average citizen participates only as a distant spectator has been the ruling condition of such events ever since. As Haw points out, this is an era in American history where the conditions of mass industrialization and the concomitant exploitation of workers was rampant, where, in the years immediately following, "strike actions would sweep through Jay Gould's expansive railroad network, and troops would be dispatched to the streets of Cincinnati. In just two years, the Haymarket affair would divide the nation. At this time of national crisis, the men responsible for the bridge's opening manufactured an image that blurred the realities of life in America and sponsored a wholly conservative vision. At the day's speeches, amelioration was less the promise than the desired effect" (page 32). Mr. Haw suggests that opening day was perhaps the first public relations event, or citing Daniel Boorstin's construction, the first pseudo-event, the beginning of the society of the spectacle.

Mr. Haw's discussion of Walker Evans' Depression era photographs of the bridge offers an example of how most depictions of the bridge serve the official version of reality. This version makes reference to the soaring aspirations of the American people, suggests that only a free people could build such a marvelous structure, that it is in keeping with Americans' innovative and daring spirit that the world's first suspension bridge was built in America, etc. So, unlike the powerfully affecting Evans' photographs of destitute farm families in the 30s Dustbowl, when he photographed the bridge Evans captured the socially approved version empty of individuals, a modernist emblem of the "technological sublime" to which people need not apply, except perhaps as witnesses kept well off-stage.

Haw makes brief reference to the "New Criticism" as a parallel manifestation of the modernist sensibility which preferred aestheticized interpretations of texts and provided readings shorn of social context, sealed off from an examination the political and economic arrangements. Having been schooled, albeit sloppily, in the New Criticism, I can attest to the powerful attraction of the method as entrée to an intellectual priesthood. I am also aware that because the method mostly treats the surface of works that yields mostly surface insights. It was perhaps the most politically acceptable method for American intellectuals at mid-century, a time when to question the political orthodoxies of the Cold War was to invite blacklisting. And so we of the next generation were taught to look at the urn and its well-wroughtness, and not to wonder at the circumstances that supported or impeded its manufacture.

Until I read The Brooklyn Bridge, I was not aware of the place the bridge occupies in the firmament of America's civic religion. Mr. Haw convinced me of its importance as a sign of the plutocratic takeover of America political and economic system, the first "revolution of the bosses," a reprise of which we are experiencing today. Indeed Mr. Haw obliquely suggests that there are many parallels between the late 19th, late 20th and early 21st centuries, that the cynical coupling of exclusionary tactics and inclusionary rhetoric practiced on opening day continue to be employed now with an ever more cynical intent and to greater and more pernicious effect.