Gregoire signs same-sex marriage bill

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

An emotional Gov. Chris Gregoire signed legislation Monday making Washington the seventh state to legalize marriage between same-sex couples, declaring it was time "to make history in this great state."

Gregoire's voice broke as she descrbed conversations with her two daughters, who told her that marriage equality was "the civil rights issue of their generation . . . Thank you to that younger generation and my two daughters."

The governor presided at a ceremony in Olympia, joined by legislative leaders and the longtime same-sex partners of such lawmakers as Sen. Ed Murray and Reps. Jamie Pedersen and Laurie Jinkins.

And

There was coast-to-coast action on marriage equality Monday. As Gregoire signed Washington's bill into law, the New Jersey State Senate voted 24-16 to legalize same-sex marriage in the Garden State. State Assembly approval is expected. But Republican Gov. Chris Christie says he will veto the legislation.

Ex-Sen. Rick Santorum, a scathing critic of marriage equality, will meet this afternoon in Olympia with opponents of the bill Gregoire signed into law. The Republican presidential candidate holds a rally with supporters tonight at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma.

More here.

I'm really thinking that this has now reached snowball status. That is, there's no stopping gay marriage now. Really, it's just a matter of enough anti-gay people dying off such that there's not enough of a constituency to which politicians can pander their homophobic rhetoric. And that seems to be happening quickly. I mean, really, we don't have to worry much about young people: brought up on MTV and other gay-friendly media, most teens and twentysomethings just don't give a shit if people are gay or not--sure, there are some anti-gay psychos among the young, but they're definitely in the minority. It's the over thirty crowd that has most of the anti-gay attitudes, and even with them, those attitudes have changed drastically over the last twenty years. Two more decades and most of these people are gone and it's no longer an issue. Gay marriage will be the norm.

Of course, this all may happen more quickly than that. It's very likely that a gay couple who was married in one state will one day sue to have their marriage recognized in a state that hasn't yet legalized it. From there it's a straight shot to the Supreme Court, which has already laid the groundwork for legalizing gay marriage in Lawrence and Garner versus Texas, the gay sodomy decision, which for the first time declared homosexuals to be a distinct social group under the equal protection clause. I mean, the conservative bloc on the Court often rules arbitrarily, but then sexual orientation is increasingly a non-partisan issue.

I guess we'll see how this all works out, but mark my words, it will all work out, sooner or later.

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Severe Conservative Syndrome

I can post two Krugman columns in a row, can't I? From the New York Times:

How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!

My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.

Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.

The point is that today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.

More here.

And I don't really have much to add to that, it was put so succinctly.

Except for maybe the influence that Fox News and right-wing radio have had on the process. Indeed, conservative media actually have slightly different goals from conservative politicians: while politicians seek office and the power that comes with it, the media crave ratings above all else, and the best way to get good ratings is to ramp the conservative narrative up to blockbuster/disaster flick status, creating a product that is as entertaining as it is political. And the conservative media is where the conservative rank and file have been taking their cues for at least a decade now.

That is to say, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have literally wrested control of the GOP away from its traditional monied establishment. Conservative media lead the Conservative Movement now, which is why conservative ideas are as absurd as anything you'll find on television today. Jersey Shore politics. I guess.

At any rate, that's what they get.

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THE STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE OF THE MONTH IS...



...Mr. Spock!

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REAGANOMICS IS LITERALLY DESTROYING THE AMERICAN FAMILY

From the New York Times, the latest Paul Krugman:

Money and Morals

Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.

And

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.

More here.

When I heard a few years ago that single parent families were on the rise among white Americans, I hammered the last few nails into the coffin that was the notion that the same demographic shift among African-Americans beginning many years earlier was somehow about black culture, a notion that was always, at the very least, troubling. It's just that there didn't seem to be any persuasive competing narratives; everybody, including lots of African-American leaders, seemed to think that the phenomenon of the single black mother had something to do with life attitudes among black people.

But for a long time, even though I halfheartedly accepted this pseudo-sociology, it presented nagging questions. Yes, we're all individuals, all of us making individual decisions about how we live our lives, but when millions of individuals all independently make the same choices, there are definitely social forces at play. But what were those social forces? The vague "black culture" concept was unsatisfying at best, and potentially racist at worst. And if it was "black culture" pushing African-American women into single motherhood, what changed? Black families had been relatively stable for generations until the 60s or 70s, and I don't recall any aspect of the Civil Rights Movement or any other political and cultural movements of the era that championed the notion of the single parent family. To accept the "black culture" explanation that even hooked Bill Cosby, you have to have a pretty vivid imagination. You have to pretend that feminism, or the sexual revolution, or welfare, or the end of Jim Crow, or something, pushed an idea that, if you go back and look, nobody was actually pushing.

But here's something that was happening in that era: good unionized jobs were slowly starting to disappear, which affected wages and benefits for the entire work force, union or not. As usual, whenever there is any sort of painful economic shift, Americans of color were the first to suffer. And that lack of good jobs for black men now stands alone as the sole persuasive explanation for the dramatic rise in black unwed mothers. Indeed, in the above linked essay, Krugman goes on to cite the work of sociologist William Julius Wilson, who accurately postulated in the mid 90s that this was exactly what happened.

Thing is, the same economic trends, the dismantling of the middle class, and the massive push of the American work force into the shitty service sector, have continued unabated since the 70s, affecting white men today in exactly the same way it affected black men thirty or forty years ago. In short, Reaganomics is literally destroying the American family, and it's completely obvious now.

So conservatives can wag their fingers, shame the American people for not being married, offer bullshit marriage initiatives, insist that marriage is the key to success, but until they couple that rhetoric with a plea for economic justice, they're barking up the wrong tree. Because only a good economy that shares its rewards with everybody will give Americans realistic family opportunities.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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Here Comes the Culture War!

From the New Yorker (by way of facebook, I think):

In recent weeks, the Republican candidates, cognoscenti, and congressional leadership have all made it increasingly plain that the culture wars have not been relegated to the days of the Reverends Falwell and Robertson. Mitt Romney is tweeting furiously about the Administration’s “attacks on religious liberty.” Speaker John Boehner said on the floor of the House that Obama is forcing Catholic hospitals and charities to “provide services they believe are immoral”—i.e., an “attack on religious freedom.” Rick Santorum called Obama “hostile to people of faith, particularly Christians, and specifically Catholics.” Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote in the Washington Post that “radicalism and maliciousness” has led the Administration to issue an “edict delivered with a sneer.” Gerson concluded, “The war on religion is now formally declared.”

And

Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum are intent on fanning any ember of cultural anxiety, fear, or resentment that can be found. The more the economy shows signs of life—however slight, however deceptive in many ways—the more the Republicans, and their media champions, are likely to resort to the kind of battles outlined in Bill O’Reilly’s 2006 book, “Culture Warrior,” which posited a country divided between decent, hard-working people of faith and pernicious secular liberals—a small but powerful Soros-funded minority that knows only contempt for “traditional American values” and wants to mold the country into “the image of Western Europe.” (Note how, in the Republican debates, the word “Europe” is made to sound like the embodiment of “Soviet.”)

More here.

It's tempting to say that culture issues are what Republicans resort to when they got nothin'. But that's not true. Since Nixon figured it out back in the early 70s, divisive culture wars are the method by which the GOP gets Americans to vote against their own economic interests. I mean, the Republicans are, in the end, the party of rich people. How the hell do they get regular Joes to vote for candidates who will almost certainly fuck over the people who voted for them? You throw semen-spurting gays at them. You construct mythologies about lazy black people living large on your tax dollars while you toil away in the Spice Mines of Kessel. You turn obscure academics into a fifth column of communists who want to eat your babies. You reconfigure the Mexican immigrant who washes dishes at the restaurant where you dine into a member of a secret conspiracy to take back all the territory seized by the US during the Mexican War back in 1845. You change the capitalist created phrase "happy holidays" into a liberal plot to destroy Santa and Jesus. And on and on and on.

The reality is that the culture wars, if that's what you want to call the retarded demagoguery that is now bedrock Republican rhetoric, never really went away. Conservatives are always fanning the flames. Frankly, I can't see much of a difference between what Republicans are saying today about our culture and what they were saying twenty years ago. It's always here.

The good news, as I see it, is that this shit seems to be losing traction. MTV, and lots of other programming, made a lot of young people sympathetic towards the GLBTQ community. Everybody has premarital sex now. Nobody really gives a fuck about communism anymore because nobody is really communist anymore. People don't give a shit if you smoke pot. And, even though most Americans self-identify as Christians, they don't really feel like preachers, priests, and theologians really speak for them. And, oh yeah, racism and xenophobia are now decidedly cultural niches, thoroughly condemned by the mainstream.

In short, the Republican dumbshit constituency, composed of middle and working class paranoid white people, is getting old and smaller in numbers. In a decade or two, cultural wedge issues won't work anymore.

I hope I live long enough to see it.

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Obama Girl Amber Lee Ettinger says she's not sure how she'll vote

From Politico courtesy of Digg:

She has her own critiques of the man she once supported.

“I haven’t really decided which way I’m going to go yet,” said Ettinger when asked who she’s going to vote for. “I’m still keeping my eyes and ears open. I certainly don’t dislike Obama. I think he’s done a lot of really great stuff, but he doesn’t get enough credit for the things he does. What he does is just never enough. For me, being Obama Girl, it’s hard because I get people saying, ‘switch to the other side! Make videos for Ron Paul! Why are you with Obama? He sucks!’”

“I want what this country wants. I want this country to be better. I want everyone to have jobs and for gas prices to go down.”

Her biggest critique of Obama, however, isn’t political; it’s personal: He’s never said, “thanks.”

“It makes me upset, I’m not going to lie,” Ettinger said. “I kind of took it as a personal thing. Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

More here.

Obama Girl always fucking sucked.

Her bizarre, contemporary R&B, sexed-up, Youtube videos back in 2008 did nothing but encapsulate the whole mindless good vibe liberal mania about Barack Obama, pushing the sick belief, on which he coasted into the White House, that he somehow possessed the magic formula capable of obliterating deep differences between left and right, which would usher in an era of hopey-changey goodness. Needless to say, that didn't happen. Actually, it was obvious at the time to anybody who thought about it for two seconds that Obama couldn't deliver on this bullshit because, you know, there's no such thing as magic.

Indeed, the reality, then as now, is that Obama is a neoliberal, a strong supporter of the corporate state, who came to Washington to save the status quo, rather than change it. And, to some extent, he was up front about it, if you took the time to actually read the policy positions he had posted on his campaign website. But he certainly allowed liberals to think he was all about change, and fucking retarded Obama Girl was at the vanguard for this passive aggressive deception.

She represents everything I hate about the US political system. She is without substance, thought, or ideology, a sexualized piece of plastic pop culture product pretending to be something real. Indeed, her waffling about how she will vote this November is as petty as the concerns of The Jersey Shore's cast: she's disturbed because the President didn't thank her for her internet antics.

Stupid narcissistic bitch.

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LAST MONTH'S STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE OF THE MONTH WAS...




...Captain Kirk!

Yeah, I finally got my new calendar.

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Louisiana congressman duped by The Onion's Planned Parenthood satire

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

The Hill, a Washington, D.C., publication that covers Capitol Hill, reports that Louisiana Rep. John Fleming's office posted a story Friday from The Onion, a satirical publication, which reported Planned Parenthood opened an "abortionplex." The Onion's story, which was months old, had been re-posted on the paper's website after the controversy over the Susan G. Komen Foundation's funding of Planned Parenthood breast cancer screenings erupted last week.

More here.

In order to understand just how truly fucked up this is, you've got to read the Onion piece here. If you think it's funny, that's because it's supposed to be. It's comedy, satire, in particular. The dynamic of the piece is that it takes what are presumably pro-life views about the venerable women's health organization Planned Parenthood, and ramps them up into the stratosphere. That is, the Onion story isn't supposed to actually represent anybody's actual point of view at all. It presents a warped and fucked up pro-life view so as to criticize the actual pro-life point of view.

So, in order to understand the story as actual news, you have to already possess the warped and fucked up version of the pro-life point of view before reading it. That is, perhaps the Onion could have gone much, much further with its satire because it's looking like what I'm calling the "warped and fucked up" point of view may very well be some pro-lifers' point of view. And that's pretty frightening.

Atrios over at Eschaton says in regards to the Onion piece that for some pro-lifers "not only are abortions such an easy procedure that lazy sluts would prefer to go out and have them all the time rather than bothering with birth control, but that there's actually something fun and enjoyable about them." Maybe.

To be honest, the most rabid of pro-lifers are so weird and monomaniacal that I don't even pretend to understand them. I mean, I've talked with lots of anti-abortion people over the years and I fully understand their not entirely unreasonable position that abortion is tantamount to murder, but a few of them, and certainly leaders in the movement whose words I've heard on television or read on the internet, are bat-shit crazy, and I'm just not qualified enough in psychology to even begin to render a diagnosis as to what ails their fucked up minds. That is, if you think abortion is some kind of joyous occasion for the women who have them, and that's why we need to make the procedure illegal, there's something else going on besides taking a principled position on an important issue.

What's particularly disturbing is that Fleming is a Congressman, which means his opinions are far more important and influential than those of the rank-and-file crazies. The inmates really are running the asylum.

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WHEN WE TOOK THE PHILIPPINES

From the American Prospect:

A war anniversary that U.S. wishes to forget

Insurrection doesn’t begin to describe the full-fledged war that lasted three years, with more than 100,000 Americans involved. Depending on the accounts you read, the Filipino civilian death toll ranged from 250,000 to as high as 1 million, counting those who died from disease or starvation.

The war was an American betrayal. Nationalists, under Emilio Aguinaldo, had broken off from Spain and, relying heavily on a promise of U.S. support during the Spanish-American War, started their own independent republic in 1898 — the first in Asia. That promise was broken when the McKinley administration sought the Philippines as a colony and tapped into a new patriotic fervor for American Imperialism.

More here.

Our war to annex the Philippines barely gets a footnote in American history classes. But it's fairly typical of US warmongering behavior, typical in its bloodiness, typical in its betrayal of our deepest national values, typical in its underhandedness--indeed, the Filipinos believed we were there to liberate them from Spanish imperialism, instead of simply taking over, because that's what we told them. Indeed, from the moment we had our shit together as a nation, we've been conquering brown skinned people, from Native Americans, to Mexicans, to Filipinos, to Vietnamese, to Iraqis and Afghans.

How on earth have we been able to reconcile our love for democracy and justice with our love for killing non-white people and taking their land? Answer: we haven't. We haven't even tried. We just sort of allow two contradictory cultural strains to exist in our hearts simultaneously, without questioning it. And it gets us into trouble, deep trouble, again and again, in countless ways.

I wonder if we'll ever get this figured out.

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Arizona State Lawmaker Proposes Holiday For White People

From the Huffington Post:

After a Latino state legislator proposed a Latino American Day, lawmaker Cecil Ash stepped up before the legislature to suggest a holiday for white people. Seriously.

This is, after all, the land of S.B. 1070, the contentious and draconian immigration enforcement bill that has been mired in legal deadlock since it was signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer (R) in 2010. The legislation, considered the strictest of its kind when it was passed, is to be ruled upon by the Supreme Court later this year.

It's also home to Russell Pearce, the former Republican state senator credited with laying down the framework for the state's controversial immigration law.

And who can forget the ever-graceful Brewer, stateswoman and author, wagging her finger dismissively in the face of President Obama at an airport in Phoenix last month?

And the swashbuckling Sheriff Joe Arpaio lives there, too. He proclaimed himself "America's Toughest Sheriff," and now finds himself ensnared in a U.S. Justice Department investigation accusing his department of racially profiling Latinos, basing immigration enforcement on racially charged citizen complaints and punishing Hispanic jail inmates for speaking Spanish.

More here, with video.

Of course, it's very tempting to just say that there are a lot of racist weirdos in Arizona, which is true, but I think this white history month concept is fairly typical of how lots of white Americans understand identity politics. That is, lots of white Americans don't understand identity politics at all.

In brief, the reason there are various ethnic holidays and observances, ethnic studies classes, ethnic history months, affirmative action, racial and ethnic advocacy groups, and on and on, is because the dominant culture in the US is overwhelmingly white. So the idea behind all the identity stuff is to sort of bring non-white points of view into the mainstream, ideally creating a more inclusive society that values all cultures existing within our borders, with numerous side benefits, such as getting Americans more used to living and working with each other.

This isn't rocket science; it's a simple concept. But when people call for a white history month, or a white people's day, or affirmative action set asides for white people, they're at the same time revealing intense ignorance of the whole identity thing. To these people, observing the value of non-white American cultures is a liberal plot to take away status and power from whites.

Now, to be fair, there are some very good reasons that the white history people feel like they're losing power and status relative to non-whites: conservative economic policies have for some three decades been making American workers, most of whom are white, work much harder for less pay and security than in previous generations. If you have some residual racist tendencies in the first place, and don't understand politics and economics in general, it's easy to go a bit racist, and blame all the brown people. But throw in four decades of GOP rhetoric reinforcing this notion, that non-white people are taking from white people, and you bring in angry whites who have no residual racist tendencies at all, dupes with reasonable grievances aimed at the wrong parties.

Really, this has been a winning formula for the Republican Party for many years, and one wonders if they could even win elections if there were no racism to stoke so as to deflect from their anti-worker, pro-wealthy policies.

At any rate, such widespread ignorance about the actual nature of identity politics does everybody a disservice. The news media and the schools have done a lousy job explaining things. It's pretty easy for the uninformed to resent the situation, given the near total lack of information on the overall dynamic.

On the other hand, especially given the fact that, while white, the dominant American culture is now mass media driven, and therefore something of an artificial construct, I would welcome an honest dialogue among whites about what it means to be white in a pluralistic society. That's something else we never seem to think about. I mean, in a healthy way.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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Santorum to Sick Kid: Don't Complain About $1 Million Drug Costs

From Crooks and Liars:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum told the mother of a child with a rare genetic disorder on Tuesday that she shouldn't have a problem paying $1 million a year for drugs because Apple's iPad can cost around $900.

Speaking to more than 400 people at Woodland Park, Colorado, the former Pennsylvania senator said that demand should set prices for drugs.

And

"Look, I want your son and everybody to have the opportunity to stay alive on much-needed drugs," Santorum insisted. "But the bottom line is, we have to give companies the incentive to make those drugs. And if they don't have the incentive to make those drugs, your son won't be alive and lots of other people in this country won't be alive."

More here, with video.

It's tempting to dismiss it as more Santorum kookiness, but this is fairly typical of the right-wing view on health care. That is, for conservatives, economic orthodoxy trumps compassion and decency. Always. It is more important to worship capitalism than it is to heal the sick and feed the hungry.

And that's what the situation described above actually is, the worship of capitalism. I mean, the equation Santorum sets up here, survival of the capitalist system versus the need to avoid bankruptcy, or to avoid death, is totally false, generally speaking. For starters, a lot of these super-expensive drugs sold in the US sell for greatly reduced prices on the global market simply because other nations don't worship capitalism the way we do, and tell Big Pharma that if they want to do business in within their borders they can't charge that much. And guess what? The drug companies still make a profit. Furthermore, US health insurance companies, as well as the VA, don't have to pay that much, either, because they use their massive purchasing power to bargain for lower prices. Again, the drug companies make a profit selling at these lower prices.

But Santorum's real, and by "real," I mean "false," knockout punch here is invoking the drug companies' go-to justification for price gouging, "research." That is, capitalist worshipers always assert that Big Pharma just has to price gouge because they need the money for research, and without all that research money, they won't be able to sell us the latest version of Prilosec or Prozac or whatever chemical to which they add a new molecule so as to create a new patent and start the price gouging cycle over once again. And apparently America, the only market that puts up with this shit, is also the only market that has to pay for all that "research."

Well, I don't know the exact percentage breakdown off the top of my head, but I do know that a lot of drug research, but not all, is done at universities and other federally supported scientific institutions: generally, the patents on these drugs, researched using taxpayer dollars, are simply handed over to Big Pharma, for free, ready to be manufactured and distributed at exorbitant costs to the US market. Licensing these patents, with strict regulations on prices, rather than just giving them away to greedy corporations, would be a nice start for dealing with this issue, but it wouldn't solve the problem entirely.

Frankly, I think the real solution is putting all drug research into the feds' hands. Either that, or just straight-up funding private research using federal dollars, with lots of strings attached, of course, particularly on prices in the US market. In other words, worship of capitalism and good health care for the population are simply incompatible. You've got to go socialist to some extent. And that's the point, really. The economics of health care are just fucked up when you try to push them into the neoliberal platitudes of a college freshman intro to econ class. Health care, academically speaking, is an advanced course.

Unfortunately, our public dialogue on health care, which is dominated by conservative retards, is decidedly eighth grade. Our fucked up system will probably be the death of me one day.

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Taliban will rule Afghanistan again, says leaked US military report

From the Guardian:

The Taliban, backed by Pakistan, are set to retake control of Afghanistan after Nato-led forces withdraw from the country, according to reports citing a classifed assessment by US forces.

The Times described the report as secret and "highly classified", saying it was put together last month by the US military at Bagram air base in Afghanistan for top Nato officers. The BBC also carried a report on the leaked document.

"Many Afghans are already bracing themselves for an eventual return of the Taliban," the report was quoted as saying. "Once Isaf (Nato-led forces) is no longer a factor, Taliban consider their victory inevitable."

The document stated that Pakistan's security agency was helping the Taliban in directing attacks against foreign forces – a charge long denied by Islamabad.

More here.

After ten years, numerous deaths, and untold billions of dollars, we're going to lose, whatever that means. I say "whatever that means" because I never really knew what "winning" was supposed to be. I mean, at first, it was all about getting Bin Laden, but then it turned out that he wasn't even in Afghanistan. Then we got him, and the mission seemed to be "nation building," again, whatever that means. But we can't even do that, if part of "nation building" means establishing a stable government that is friendly to US interests. And the Pentagon knows we can't do it.

Actually, it's been clear for many years that we wouldn't be able to effectively "nation build" in Afghanistan. Indeed, it was clear to many before we even invaded.

So that leads to a very reasonable question. If we're fated to fail in Afghanistan, and the US government is well aware of that fact, why the hell are we still there? And, for that matter, why do we consider Pakistan to be our ally? I mean, they're training the Taliban, who are apparently fated to take over Afghanistan again. How can Pakistan be our ally? None of this makes any sense. It's never made any sense. There has been no profit, no gain at all from our time in Afghanistan. Are we really such a fucked up people that we can hoot and holler for a war for no reason other than making ourselves feel like badasses because terrorists destroyed some buildings?

Absurdity and irrationality and murder are the zeitgeist. We might as well be a bunch of chimps.

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RELIGION AS POLITICS, RELIGION AS CULTURE

From AlterNet:

Religious Groups Bash Contraception, and Other
Reasons I'm No Longer Quiet About My Non-Belief

But from where I stand these days, the only thing I see religion doing in the public sector is gay bashing and telling women, mostly poor and desperate and in deplorable financial and personal situations, what to do with their bodies. I see busybodies deciding what drugs they can dispense to which customers, or deciding that they don’t have to issue a marriage license because of some petty deity that I don’t believe in told them to hate their fellow citizens and ignore the law. In a country in dire financial straits but still spending billions and billions of dollars on education, I see religious folks actively and openly working to make our schoolkids dumber. I see them shooting people who provided a medical procedure, and I see others rummaging through people’s personal lives to find out who hasn’t lived up the word of God. I see glassy-eyed fools running for President claiming that vaccines that save lives actually cause cancer, or that if you get raped and are pregnant, you should just lie back and think of Jeebus and make the best of a bad situation. In fact, everywhere you look these days, if Christianity or religion is getting a mention, it means something ugly is happening and someone somewhere is being victimized, marginalized, or otherwise abused. Go read some of the arguments against integration and you’ll see the same bible verses used today against homosexuals. Fifty years from now, they’ll be recycling them again to trash someone else they don’t like or who isn’t good enough for them.

More here.

I think, and this is a guess based on personal experience, so I may very well be wrong, that most Americans who describe themselves as religious aren't like the people this guy is talking about in the excerpt above. They may give lip service to this or that Christian idea, and try to live up to it to some extent, but aren't really all that concerned with everybody else living up to that standard. That is, most Americans may self-identify as Christian, but they're not terribly devout about it, and not rabid about proselytizing.

Problem is, this majority of mellow American Christians have a sort of tribal identification with the minority of asshole American Christians, and are unwilling to tell them to shut the fuck up when their mouths spew the diarrhea known as fundamentalism. Further, when non-believers take it upon themselves to tell fundamentalists to STFU, the mellow Christians stand a decent chance of thinking themselves the target, and getting offended. It's always dicey jumping into the waters of religious debate masquerading as political debate.

As I've written before, this situation is actually pretty fascinating. Religion is culture, deeply embedded in people's sense of who they are, and should be respected, if only for that. On the other hand, religion is also a set of values, principles, and narrative mythologies about how people ought to live their lives. This brings religion into the sphere of public discourse and politics, which is necessarily rhetorically boisterous and confrontational. Is it disrespectful to criticize Christianity? Hell, no. In the abstract, at least. I mean, there are ways to disagree with religious thought and still respect that religion as important culture.

Of course, it's not easy to do that when religion's defenders' opening statement is that you're so fucked up that you ought to be tortured for eternity by the mythical, supernatural, and evil being known as Satan. That is, some of those religious principles are straight-up offensive to non-believers, showing disrespect to their culture. Compounding matters is the sense that these fundamentalist assholes have about how respecting their religion also means never criticizing it, which is, of course, total bullshit--if you're going to play rough, my father always used to say, you've got to expect to get hurt.

I'm really sympathetic to the guy who wrote the above excerpted essay. These fundamentalists are, indeed, crazy fucktards, and are dead set on pushing their dangerous and lunatic ideas into the mainstream, forcing people who disagree with them into living by their rules. But religion itself, isn't the problem. I mean sure, there are some good arguments out there that religion is, in fact, the problem. But I just don't feel persecuted by Methodists and Lutherans. It's the Southern Baptists, so-called "Bible churches," and other varieties of fundamentalism that frighten me. They're the ones trying to fuck up society.

There's just got to be a way to differentiate between these two kinds of Christianity when you go after the bad guys.

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Republicans have only themselves to blame

From the Washington Post, professional talking head and beltway insider guy Richard Cohen makes a very good point:

The Republican establishment acts as if this season’s goon squad of presidential candidates has come out of nowhere, an act of God — a tsunami that hit the party and receded, leaving nothing but nitwits standing. In column after column, conservative commentators lament the present condition, but not their past acquiescence as their party turned hostile to thought, reason and the two most important words in the English language: It depends.

And

This rampant anti-intellectualism is worrisome. The world is a complex place, but to deal with it, the GOP presented a parade of hopefuls who proposed nostrums or, in the case of Michele Bachmann, peddled false rumors about vaccinations. When this started I cannot say — the late Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize for his “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” in 1964 — but the embrace of Sarah Palin by the GOP establishment has got to be noted. The lady has the gift of demagoguery and the required anti-elitism, but she knows next to nothing about almost anything — and revels in her ignorance.

More here.

I know when it happened, not long after Hofstadter's book, the 1970s.

Here's the brief version. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law in 1965, announcing to the Democrats that they had just lost the South for a generation or more. Meanwhile, the Democrats were also losing the labor unions. Either that or the labor unions were losing the Democrats. Actually, it was both. The so-called New Left, that is, political forces sympathetic to the hippies and identity politics movements, took over the party; the labor establishment, however, was socially conservative, pro-war, and hated the hippies. It also didn't help that the Democratic establishment was pissed off with labor for not supporting the party bosses, and basically quit trying to help out what had previously been their most important constituency. This put the Democrats and labor hopelessly at odds with one another, and the party's infighting handed the presidency to Nixon in both 1968 and 1972.

And Tricky Dick had a plan: exploit the Democrats' offending of its Southern racist wing while diving straight into the labor/Donkey rift by playing up patriotism and race fears. Watergate shut the operation down for about four years or so, but midway through Carter's administration Reagan and other Republicans picked up where Nixon left off, using the same tactics to attract a weird coalition of fundamentalist Christians, Southern racists, and disaffected union members, all of whom were former New Dealers desperately needed by the Democrats to win national elections. The GOP strategy cut off the legs of its opposition and ultimately led the way to continuing majorities in both houses of Congress by the 90s, and got three Republicans into the Oval Office, two of them serving two terms.

So the Democrats had nothing to offer the working class, but the GOP, at least, offered them patriotism and someone to blame for continual layoffs and the end of the middle class, black people and liberated women. Democrats never had anything at all to offer fundamentalist Christians, especially after they had given up on supporting the labor unions, but the GOP offered them lots of rhetorical red meat that ultimately didn't amount to much in terms of policy, but sure gave all the Jesus freaks a bunch of big huge hard-ons. And for Southern racists, there was red meat rhetoric, too, code words and phrases that let the drooling inbred people of Mississippi and Alabama know that the GOP is a party that hates black people.

Meanwhile, as far as actual legislation goes, the Republicans continued doing what they've always done, stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. But that didn't matter. Nixon's grand strategy was enough. He put together a brand new coalition of voters plucked from the ashes of the old Democratic New Deal coalition. And this new coalition was based on resentment, hatred, a sense of persecution, and intense anger. That is, the Republicans created and then rode herd over a rowdy mob of work-a-day schmucks who were and are far more about being pissed off than about thinking and deeply contemplating the nation's fate. And they've been fanning the flames of such anger and resentment to the party's benefit for some thirty years.

Now, it turns out, they've created a Frankenstein's monster of stupidity and cruelty. The rowdy mob they assembled and exploited is now apparently attempting to take over the party completely. No longer satisfied with rhetoric, they want actual policy victories, and the GOP establishment that ran the show for years is frightened.

Well, that's what they get. You play with fire you get burned. Or, as the case may very well be, you burn the whole fucking house down. I'd laugh if I wasn't so disgusted.

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LEARNING LINES TONIGHT...

...because my acting teacher dropped a scene on me for class at the last minute. So no blogging today. However, here's the film the scene comes from (courtesy of Wikipedia):

Three Days of the Condor

Three Days of the Condor is a 1975 American action thriller film produced by Stanley Schneider and directed by Sydney Pollack. The screenplay, by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Rayfiel, was adapted from the novel Six Days of the Condor by James Grady.

The film is a suspense drama set in contemporary New York City, and is considered an exposition of the moral ambiguity of the actions of the United States government following the Vietnam War and Watergate. It stars Robert Redford as an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency who inadvertently becomes involved in a deadly power struggle within the agency.

The film was nominated for the 1976 Academy Award for Film Editing. Semple and Rayfiel received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Motion Picture Screenplay.

More here.

Great movie. Really great movie. We're doing the scene from the end when Redford and von Sydow calmly and casually discuss all the bloodshed and carnage they've just been dealing with. So I'm annoyed by the last minute nature of this, but really excited about the scene.

More regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow night.

And here's the trailer for Condor:



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FACEBOOK DEBATES
FINDING A NEW LANGUAGE TO DISCUSS ECONOMICS

So I posted a link to an article on facebook that I posted here on Thursday. You never can tell who's going to come out to play on facebook, and the link got a nice mix of liberals and conservatives who all apparently disagreed with me completely. Indeed, they didn't even appear to understand what I was talking about with my opening remark right before the link.

Here, check it all out:

Ronald

I've been saying for a few years now in regards to incessant right-wing whining about the evils of "redistribution" that the real redistribution takes place when an employee is first hired. That is, employers essentially dictate what your wage will be, no negotiation, take it or leave it, without any regard to the actual amount of wealth you create on the job. And it's a rigged game: go to a similar company across the street and it's the same thing, fixed wages that wildly undervalue the work you do.

Who says capitalists should get to call all the shots just because they put up the financing? I mean, without labor, all their capital is just paper and a bunch of useless crap.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/24/beyond-loser-liberalism/

Like · · Unfollow Post · Share · Yesterday at 1:19am.

Stephen So, what you're saying is that you are unfamiliar with the demand curve.
Yesterday at 2:08am · Like.

Ronald I think the "labor market" is to a great extent nothing more than a construct designed to bolster the position that labor is worthless relative to capital.
Yesterday at 2:11am · Like.

Stephen If it were worthless, slavery would be back in fashion. It has value, therefore it is remunerated.
Yesterday at 2:12am · Like.

Ronald Stephen, there are more people in slavery today than at any other point in human history:
https://​www.freetheslaves.net/​SSLPage.aspx?pid=301
Yesterday at 2:43am · Like · .

Stephen Sure, but not in the capitalist West. Only out there in nasty-brutish-and-short-la​nd. It is still widespread wherever the bane of mohammedanism holds sufficient sway to retard the progress of Mankind, along with beating women who drive and hanging homosexuals from construction cranes.
Yesterday at 2:59am · Like · 1.

Eric Get a degree and call the shots yourself or go across the street and work for the other guy
Yesterday at 4:52am · Like · 1.

Robin So I took the job at the wage they dictated. I did a great job and I got more wages. I saved as much as I could for as long as I could and kept doing a great job. I kept getting more wages... 20 years later I took the money I saved for so long and I opened my own business. Now I'm the "dictator". I employ 130 people, I fight with federal and state government every day and am constantly at risk of losing my business (my 20 years of saving) due to pretty much anything (happy to elaborate if you want but it would be long). If I lose my business, 130 people lose their jobs. I have no degree. I went to work for someone that took care of me. I am an employer that takes care of their employees. If you are unhappy with your situation, change it (or negotiate based on what you have to offer, not what you think you are worth). Go across the street. Don't expect the government to change it for you; if that's what you want then you are living in the wrong country. Sorry for the rant but I'm just an everyday person who gets peeved when somebody else says I should be doing something different when I'm doing all I can to just stay in business and provide a good, stable job.
Yesterday at 8:27am · Like · 7.

Bradley Ron, I don't think your comment matches the article, and I'm pretty sure the comments on this thread are a reaction to your post. From the fact that I'm pro-choice and a supporter of single-payer health insurance, I accept the label of liberal as a result, but I find myself agreeing with Eric, Robin, and Stephen's first post in this case. I had limited support from my mother in college, but I mostly paid for it by working 30-35 hours per week. My grades suffered (partly) as a result of that, but I got our with fairly low debt. I took a job in a bead store (yes, a bead store) at $6 per hour and worked my way to manager in two years by making valuable contributions and doing what others couldn't or wouldn't do. I managed to save $3,000 working for $8 per hour after three years and started my own business. I didn't have Robin's success, but I was my own boss and ended my business on my own terms, free of debt, with plenty of savings. Be the ball. On the other hand, Stephen's assertion about slavery is wrong. If labor had no value, buying and feeding slaves wouldn't make sense.
Yesterday at 9:51am · Like · 1.

James agrees with Bradley above. Comments like that from Robin seem to be more in reaction to Ron's statement, not to the article which makes a completely different point (a very good one) about the hypocrisy of corporate welfare.

Interesting that the free market keeps the wages of some jobs considerably higher than the minimum required by law, yet labor law (what's left of it anyway) keeps the wages and conditions of other jobs considerably higher than what a "free" market would allow. All of us are fortunate to at least live in an era when the Fair Labor Standards Act still exists. Stories like that of Robin and Bradley wouldn't be nearly as common without it.
Yesterday at 12:34pm · Like.

Ronald Go back and re-read the section on unions and how the government rigs the system in favor of capital. That's what I was commenting on, and I think my conclusions are in keeping with that.
Yesterday at 3:36pm · Like.

Ronald Further, the labor market is global. Consequently, the 27 million people in slavery today DEFINITELY push wages down everywhere. Indeed, a lot of that human trafficking is here in the US.
Yesterday at 3:38pm · Like.

Ronald Also, nobody has commented on the fact that capital without labor is nothing, and therefore labor is wildly undervalued. Going to college, working hard, none of this changes that fact.
Yesterday at 3:39pm · Like.

Ronald Finally, the whole point here isn't to change the overall system of compensation; rather, it is to say that the entire way of thinking about wages, benefits, and quality of work is utterly flawed, which means the government HAS to intervene with higher taxes on the capital class, health care, and other social welfare programs.
Yesterday at 3:54pm · Like.

Ronald A couple more thoughts. @James: Needless to say I got something completely different out of the article. It's title, "Beyond Loser Liberalism," is about rejecting the notion that liberalism concerns helping out the losers in our economic system. Rather, the article asserts, liberalism concerns redressing "the actions (government) takes to determine the initial distribution" of wealth in our society. That is, government, owned and operated by the rich, artificially creates a playing field that is unfair, unequal, and unreasonable from the get-go, a playing field that massively favors the rich. Indeed, I don't even know where you got the notion that corporate welfare - direct governmental payments and tax breaks for corporations - has anything to do with this essay--I mean, sure, it's a part of the puzzle here, but not the main topic.
4 hours ago · Like.

Ronald ‎@Robin and Brad: I'm very sympathetic to your plight as small business owners, so I have to point out that you guys don't have lobbyists, don't own politicians through massive donations to PACs and whatnot, and don't generally have much say in how the overall economic playing field functions. This means I'm not really talking about you. Okay, I am talking about you in the abstract, in terms of labor/capital relationships, but the point is that you're not causing all the inequality; you're just trying to swim in shark infested waters playing by the rules as they exist. But wouldn't it be nice if government paid for your employee's health care instead of you? Wouldn't it be nice if your employees had free day care for their children while they're at work? If they could go to college for free? If they had mortgage or housing assistance? All kinds of stuff that you, as employer just wouldn't have to worry about, or spend money on. Wouldn't it be nice if YOU had access to all that stuff, too?

Like I said upthread, the point is not to start over from scratch, to create a new calculus about the value of labor relative to capital, but rather to allow the government to repair the savage inequalities of capitalism with all that "redistribution" Fox News hates.

BTW, a recent study indicates that we can go as high as a 75% tax rate on the super rich before it starts to interfere with how well the economy functions. So we really can do this. We've always been able to do this:

http://mnpublius.com/post/​13213489179/​the-optimal-tax-rate-for-th​e-super-rich-76-percent
3 hours ago · Like

Note how none of my comments got any "likes," but the comments asserting the conventional wisdom on the value of labor relative to capital did get a few, with the most "liked" comment getting seven clicks, one of which was my older brother. It is very important to observe that this well "liked" comment is really just a standard right-wing talking point conflating the interests of big business with small business ownership. Well, okay. Compounding matters, my old school chum, James, who is definitely a liberal, didn't seem to get the point of the linked essay.

I've learned something here: the existing intellectual structures, the language of how we discuss economics, if you will, essentially assume the perspective of the capitalist so intensely that it is virtually impossible to discuss or criticize the underlying assumptions of capitalism without being utterly misunderstood.

I mean, the statement "capital without labor is nothing" is, at face value, completely non-controversial--you gotta have workers or the work won't be done and no money will be made. My intention in making such a statement was to justify taxing the rich and using it for social welfare programs, asserting that such programs aren't so much "redistribution" as a way to address the fact that labor is wildly undervalued. And, of course, to make a better, more livable society that serves to uplift its entire population instead of the privileged few. But nobody understood this. Indeed, if I understand correctly, these people think I'm a crazy Marxist or something.

So this discussion was a non-starter.

I'm thinking that there has to be a way to jump into such discussions without invoking knee-jerk pro-capitalist responses. But I wonder if that's even possible right now, that capitalist indoctrination is so strong and pervasive that people might not be able to even consider criticizing it as an economic system. On the other hand, Occupy Wall Street, in only a couple of months, managed to introduce the term "wealth inequality" to a public discourse that eight weeks earlier would have treated such a concept as absolute absurdity.

Maybe it's just a matter of getting people used to different ideas. That is, even if what I and other critics of capitalism have to say is immediately dismissed, there might be some long term value in simply exposing people to different ways of thinking. I should be patient.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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REAL REDISTRIBUTION

From CounterPunch:

Beyond Loser Liberalism

Anyone trying to understand the role of the government in the economy should know that whatever it does or does not do by way of redistribution is trivial compared with the actions it takes to determine the initial distribution. Rich people don’t get rich exclusively by virtue of their talents and hard work; they get rich because the government made rules to allow them to get rich.

And

In a similar vein our policy on labor unions is incredibly one-sided in management’s favor. If a company illegally fires a worker for trying to organize a union, the complaint would go to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It is likely to take months and possibly years before the complaint is settled. Even if the worker can prove their case (employers rarely admit that they fired someone because they were organizing a union) the fine to the company is trivial. As a result, breaking the law and getting rid of agitators can be very profitable for the company.

On the other hand, if workers stage a strike that violates the law, for example a wildcat strike at a time when a contract is in force or a secondary strike in support of other workers, a company can typically get an injunction immediately. If the workers continue their strike, their assets will be seized and their leaders thrown in jail.

Needless to say, this incredible asymmetry tilts the field in management’s favor. It is difficult for workers to organize unions and it is often difficult for organized workers to push for better wages and working conditions. That is not just a market outcome; this is the result of deliberate government policy.

More here.

I've been saying for a few years now in regards to incessant right-wing whining about the evils of "redistribution" that the real redistribution takes place when an employee is first hired. That is, employers essentially dictate what your wage will be, no negotiation, take it or leave it, without any regard to the actual amount of wealth you create on the job. And it's a rigged game: go to a similar company across the street and it's the same thing, fixed wages that wildly undervalue the work you do.

The law, cultural custom going back centuries, the establishment public discourse, and "conventional wisdom" all favor the capital-owning class. The widespread belief is that if you put up the financing, you get to call all the shots--you get to control the people you've enlisted to help you do things with your capital, and you get to decide how much value from the venture these helpers get. But that's only because that's how everybody thinks it ought to be. It's not some law of nature that because it's your toy you get to control utterly everything that happens to it. And that's not even a good metaphor because workers aren't really part of the "toy," which is to say, the capital or financing; rather, workers are human beings who just want to make a living. Why don't workers get more of a say in how they are compensated for the wealth the capitalists could not create without their help?

Because that's the real point here. Without labor, capital is just paper, and nothing more. Who the fuck put the paper-pushers in charge of everything?

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Castro lambasts US Republican primary as idiotic

From the AP via the San Francisco Chronicle, courtesy of the Daily Kos:

Fidel Castro lambasted the Republican presidential race as the greatest competition of "idiocy and ignorance" the world has ever seen in a column published Wednesday, and also took shots at the news media and foreign governments for seizing on the death of a Cuban prisoner to demand greater respect for human rights.

Castro's comments came in a long opinion piece carried by official media two days after Republican presidential hopefuls at a debate in Florida presented mostly hard-line stances on what to do about the Communist-run island, and even speculated as to what would happen to the 85-year-old revolutionary leader's soul when he dies.

And

"The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been," said the retired Cuban leader, who has dueled with 11 U.S. administrations since his 1959 revolution.

More here.

There is a lot of legitimate criticism one can direct at Fidel Castro. He's never been really good with freedom of speech, for instance. Indeed, Cuba's prisons have long held a number of political dissidents, and the island nation is routinely on Amnesty International's list of countries that hold political prisoners. On the other hand, of course, so is the United States, and even though we have some relatively profound Constitutional protections for free speech, generally, dissenting views are kept out of the public discourse by non-governmental means.

So for my money, it's difficult to say whether Castro's Cuba is better or worse in terms of freedom than the US. I mean, sure, Cuba's no democracy, but then neither are we--I don't remember the last time I voted for a candidate who stood a chance to win but hadn't been bought out by corporate interests. I do know this, however. Nobody is hungry in Cuba. Nobody goes without decent medical care. And their prisons are not full of black people.

At any rate, Castro is necessarily a student of US politics. After all, as the article observes, he's lived through eleven American Presidents who were all out to get him--indeed, some even attempted multiple times to assassinate him. So when he calls the current GOP primary "the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been," it's not propaganda; it's truth coming from experience. I mean, you know, you can say what you want about Ike, or Tricky Dick, or George HW Bush, but they weren't ignorant idiots--they were worthy adversaries to the Cuban dictator.

Why the fuck won't serious public observers here in the US say the same thing, that the Republican primary field is full of morons? It's the fucking truth. What keeps our establishment from admitting what everybody outside the American echo chamber fully understands? I know, I know. Media, yadda yadda, "Washington Consensus," yadda yadda, "American Exceptionalism," yadda yadda. It all adds up to a ruling class that is just about as stupid as the GOP presidential contenders are. I mean, more suave and sophisticated, to be sure, but just as fucking stupid.

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Andrew Sullivan is Right: Obama Has Governed as a Conservative

From AlterNet:

Last week, Newsweek magazine and The Daily Beast published an article by Andrew Sullivan, “How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics,” which excoriated left-wing critics for failing to appreciate how much Obama has accomplished, while at the same time trying to convince conservatives that Obama is not a liberal, let alone a socialist, and that, in fact, he has governed as a conservative. The fact that these two critiques are internally inconsistent has somehow managed to escape Mr. Sullivan.

More here.

So the rest of the piece is pretty much a take down of Sullivan's assertion that liberal Obama critics should give the President more credit for all he has "accomplished." And, of course, that's a fairly easy task, given that, as Sullivan correctly observes, Obama is a conservative; liberals don't have much reason to celebrate conservative accomplishments, unless, of course, such conservative successes actually accomplish some real good, which actually happens from time to time. But, short of keeping Great Depression II at bay, and maybe taking out Bin Laden, in spite of the fact that it was an extrajudicial killing of an unarmed and unresisting man, all of Obama's accomplishments are decidedly conservative.

Okay, I'll also credit Obama with signing the legislation that ended Don't Ask Don't Tell, but that's the thing: Obama, as a Democrat, must necessarily salute the so-called social issues, a.k.a. "identity politics," whatever you want to call it. But on issues like national security and economics, you know, everything else, he's conservative. Indeed, most of the Democratic Party is conservative in this way, too, embracing the so-called "Washington Consensus" that neoliberalism's "free markets" are always the best way to go, that continually enacting legislation that makes the rich richer is the best way to "economic prosperity," a term I don't think I, personally, understand any more.

So I'm happy that at least one conservative appears to get it.

On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan is English and gay, which means he can't possibly share most American conservatives' xenophobia and homophobia. Sullivan's probably not a racist, either, so that further distances him from the GOP rank and file. Indeed, as a man whose accent makes plain that he wasn't raised within the context of the US's longstanding culture wars, he very likely doesn't even have the typical American conservative knee-jerk and tribal revulsion toward liberals, who they perceive as dirty, foul, and immoral. That is, he may very well self-identify as conservative, and, indeed, he is, but he's not part of the tribe, and therefore not possessing the thought-filter that makes conservative Obama look like Stalin or Chairman Mao when seen through the eyes of the truly tribal.

I'm not really expecting many right-wingers to respond favorably to his argument.

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Lobbyist Helps a Project He Financed in Congress

From the New York Times courtesy of the Daily Kos:

Soon after he retired last year as one of the leading liberals in Congress, former Representative William D. Delahunt of Massachusetts started his own lobbying firm with an office on the 16th floor of a Boston skyscraper. One of his first clients was a small coastal town that has agreed to pay him $15,000 a month for help in developing a wind energy project.

Amid the revolving door of congressmen-turned-lobbyists, there is nothing particularly remarkable about Mr. Delahunt’s transition, except for one thing. While in Congress, he personally earmarked $1.7 million for the same energy project.

So today, his firm, the Delahunt Group, stands to collect $90,000 or more for six months of work from the town of Hull, on Massachusetts Bay, with 80 percent of it coming from the pot of money he created through a pair of Energy Department grants in his final term in office, records and interviews show.

More here.

One way that lobbyists influence legislation is through direct campaign donations to candidates. All candidates, or, at least, the candidates who have a snowball's chance of winning. You know, just to hedge their bets. Ideology is irrelevant. The money's the thing. Give a candidate lots of money and he's yours.

Another way is, of course, rewarding the officials they've already bought by giving them lucrative lobbying/consulting positions once they've left office. John Breaux, for instance, the former Louisiana Senator, and a good friend to the pharmaceutical industry, became a lobbyist for, you guessed it, the pharmaceutical industry when he retired from the Senate. This system is valuable to politicians because it makes them rich once they leave public service; it's valuable to business interests because it gives them access, and lots of it.

In these ways, and a few others I haven't mentioned, business does an end-run around democracy, and rules the nation with influence rather than votes. It is corrupt and against everything for which America supposedly stands, but that's how it works.

This guy in the excerpt above, Delahunt, appears to have cut out the middle men, that is, already existing lobbying organizations, and formed his own firm. But it's the same thing: he's getting rich using his access to and understanding of the legislative system, smoothing the wheels of government for anybody willing to pay. On the one hand, I like that he's not working directly for big business interests; on the other hand, it's exactly the same kind of anti-democratic corruption that would be happening if he was working directly for big business interests.

And he's a "liberal," too. I guess that "liberal" now means milking the system for as much as you can get. He also may very well have broken the law in that he's lobbying on a project that he put together when he was serving in Congress--the overly obvious conflict of interest stands a chance of pissing off his Congressional brothers who are waiting for their turn on the gravy train; that is, he's going too far and doing it too flagrantly, which might bring public scrutiny down on the whole edifice of corruption.

In the end, though, that's the key word, "corruption." Right now, the revolving door between Congress and the lobbying business is, by and large, legal. That Delahunt may have crossed the line between legal and illegal lobbying is kind of irrelevant. The legal stuff is bad enough.

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