REAL ART (and politics and culture)

2012-02-18T23:34:00.001-06:00

MY FAVORITE INSTRUMENTAL BREAK OF ALL TIME...

...is in this song, Frank Zappa's "Fifty-Fifty":

I first came across this one, from FZ's 1973 album Over-Nite Sensation, during my second year in college, when I and it seemed almost all of my friends were voraciously ingesting as much Zappa as we could. At first, I noticed only the song's violin solo because it sounded remarkably like Jean-Luc Ponty, a jazz violinist who I had gotten into a few year earlier when I was in high school. I checked the liner notes, and, sure enough, it was Ponty. Upon repeated listenings, I started to really groove on how it fit so nicely between a synth solo, played by jazz pianist George Duke, that sounded like a mad calliope, and a guitar solo that has to rank among Zappa's finest. Then I started to really dig the entire solo section.

The song itself is simply a setup with some closure, a sort of manic and bluesy, but simple, tune, sung by a guest vocalist in the style of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, existing only to justify that fabulous instrumental break. And for this purpose, the song does its job. Really, that was something of a Zappa method of operation: song as platform for brilliant soloing.

Do check it out. And pay close attention when the mad calliope starts!

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2012-02-17T13:31:00.000-06:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Roi

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

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2012-02-17T00:43:00.002-06:00

Tea Party Demands That Schools Not Teach All Men Have Inalienable Rights

From Politics USA:

The other subject matter on the page displayed a website that listed 24 things that government schools dare not teach. Examples 1, 2 and 3 were staring back at me. The first ‘thing’ the schools DARE NOT TEACH was that all men were endowed with certain unalienable rights (I’ve compressed a bit). The second ‘thing’ the schools DARE NOT TEACH was that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men and finally, schools DARE NOT TEACH the meaning of liberty.

More here.

It is important to note that this comes from a local Tea Party rally, and is probably not some sort of official statement on their part at the national level. However, it is also important to note that such attitudes are very likely shared by most of the Tea Party faithful. That may be a little weird because the TPs are such Constitution fetishists: even though the phrase "inalienable rights" doesn't actually appear in the Constitution - Thomas Jefferson coined it for the Declaration of Independence - it is a notion deeply entwined in modern jurisprudence when it comes to the Bill of Rights, which is in the Constitution. Of course, Tea Partiers don't really understand the Constitution they cherish so deeply, so it's probably not that weird.

The above linked essay doesn't really explain why the Tea Party might oppose teaching foundational concepts behind the notions of American liberty and freedom, but I assume these people view anything coming out of the public schools as somehow tainted by communism or something, and therefore the opposite of freedom and liberty. Kind of reminds me of an argument I had with a pro-lifer at a street demonstration in front of an abortion clinic years ago: I told him the Bible said nothing about abortion; he told me I was using a "New Age" Bible that had perverted the sacred Word of God--in fact, the Bible says nothing about abortion, but that never stopped the pro-life movement from saying it does.

But, hey, I can tell you today that the Tea Party has absolutely nothing to worry about!

That's because, even though public schools do, indeed, teach the Declaration of Independence, as a text, it is done in the most eye-glazing and meaningless way. It's just words to be memorized and regurgitated for the test. There is, and can be, no understanding of what "liberty" means. There is no understanding of what it means for regular people to depose an authority and replace it with something better. As always, in the public schools, authority, discipline, and order dominate everything, and that reality drowns out what essentially amount to abstract concepts on a piece of paper. That is, to paraphrase a line from the indy film Schooled, we teach democracy from an authoritarian classroom. If kids want to understand freedom, they have to figure it out on their own 'cause they sure as hell aren't getting it in school.

I mean, the Tea Party, in itself, is a living example of this.

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2012-02-16T00:25:00.002-06:00

As teacher merit pay spreads, one noted voice cries, ‘It doesn’t work’

From the Washington Post:

Two weeks later, the researchers observed that the children in the second and third groups — who had either been given an unexpected award or no award at all — drew with as much enthusiasm as they had before the experiment. But the children who had been offered the reward showed less interest and spent less time drawing.

Other scientists replicated these findings through different experiments, proving the effect with not just children but adults, as well.

In 2010, the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University published what it termed the first scientifically rigorous study of merit pay for teachers. Researchers found that teachers in the Nashville public schools who were offered bonuses of up to $15,000 a year for improved student scores on standardized tests made no greater gains than teachers who were not offered merit pay.

Tangible, extrinsic rewards can dampen intrinsic motivation, Pink said, noting that these findings have been repeated in dozens of experiments over the decades. “The science on this is robust,” he said. “And it’s also among the most ignored.”

What does work?

Pink said research shows that people who hold jobs that require creativity and sophisticated problem-solving perform best when they have autonomy, an opportunity to master something and a sense of purpose.

And

“And how do you create those conditions? How do you motivate people? Do you do it through merit pay? No, it doesn’t work. You do it by engaging them with teamwork and a purpose and a meaningful life.”

The national debate over merit pay is a distraction from the challenges faced by the American educational system, Pink said, days after the Rockville event. “Well-intentioned public officials want to do something, and they look at [merit pay] as a silver bullet. The real problem is poverty,” he said.

If politicians want to improve academic performance, they should “reduce teenage pregnancy, give excellent prenatal health care and provide universal preschool — and test scores will go up,” he said. “But that’s a lot harder to do, and a lot more expensive than merit pay.”

More here.

Of course, my longstanding objection to the concept of merit pay for teachers is that it is based on standardized test scores, which correlate so strongly with socioeconomic status that you might as well, as one SAT official once joked, throw out the scores and simply write in parental incomes, which would give just about the same results. So it would be "pay" but it wouldn't have much to do with "merit," given how utterly skewed the process is for determining what constitutes "merit." That is, teachers in bourgeois neighborhoods all look pretty good because of the students they're teaching, while teachers in poor neighborhoods look pretty bad for essentially the same reasons. No merit there, which makes merit pay something of a joke.

Generally, however, I haven't been particularly opposed to the concept of merit pay for teachers, given a decent way to figure out exactly what constitutes merit. And that's pretty hard to do because learning is so extraordinarily abstract. Indeed, it often takes a decade or more after a teacher has taught a particular student to really see what kind of effect came from that relationship. Little did I realize, however, that learning is so abstract of a concept that merit pay just doesn't work in terms of motivating better teaching.

And really, that kind of makes sense. Making money, getting rich, while there are certainly practical reasons for accumulating money, being motivated by that and that alone, or even mostly that, is pretty base, and kind of antithetical to the very humanistic spirit of universal education. That is, I've believed for many years that I prefer the doctor who is motivated by compassion and a deep desire to heal and serve humanity than the doctor who went into medicine in order to make a lot of money. Same with teachers. When a teacher's desire is to serve humanity, that's where the focus is; when a teacher is in it for the money--yeah yeah, I know, just bear with me for a moment--the focus is on making money, rather than uplifting and edifying. And because it's so extraordinarily difficult to actually quantify educational success, motivation-by-money is certain to take teachers in truly weird directions, gaming the system and whatnot.

But really the big problem here is the political discourse's tendency to view education as some sort of business. It is not. Business aims to make a profit. Education aims to make better human beings. The two concepts are incompatible.

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2012-02-15T01:22:00.002-06:00

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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2012-02-13T23:23:00.002-06:00

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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2012-02-13T02:52:00.003-06:00

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

...Mr. Spock!

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2012-02-12T01:03:00.002-06:00

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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2012-02-10T13:36:00.000-06:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie

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

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2012-02-10T00:58:00.003-06:00

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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2012-02-09T00:34:00.002-06:00

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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2012-02-08T01:20:00.002-06:00

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

...Captain Kirk!

Yeah, I finally got my new calendar.

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2012-02-07T00:13:00.002-06:00

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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2012-02-06T00:24:00.002-06:00

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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2012-02-04T23:33:00.002-06:00

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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2012-02-03T14:00:00.000-06:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy

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

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2012-02-03T00:21:00.003-06:00

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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2012-02-02T00:42:00.002-06:00

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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2012-02-01T01:00:00.002-06:00

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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2012-01-31T00:59:00.002-06:00

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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2012-01-30T00:11:00.002-06:00

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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2012-01-29T00:58:00.002-06:00

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-land. 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-the-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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2012-01-27T13:11:00.000-06:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie

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

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2012-01-27T00:45:00.002-06:00

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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2012-01-26T00:25:00.002-06:00

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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2012-01-25T01:09:00.002-06:00

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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2012-01-23T18:54:00.002-06:00

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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2012-01-23T01:34:00.003-06:00

BLAST FROM THE PAST
LA detective in Simpson-Goldman murders dies at 70

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Philip Vannatter, the Los Angeles police detective who served as a lead investigator in the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, has died in Southern California, according to his brother. He was 70.

Vannatter died Friday at a Santa Clarita hospital of complications from cancer, his brother Joe Vannatter told The Associated Press on Sunday.

He was among the first detectives on the scene at former football star O.J. Simpson's mansion in June 1994, following the stabbing deaths of Simpson's wife Nicole and her friend, Ron Goldman. Vannatter testified at the murder trial, at which Simpson was acquitted.

More here.

So, of course, I'm sure Detective Vanatter was a dedicated, hardworking man who solved lots of crimes throughout his career and we all ought to respect his memory for that. It is interesting to me, however, that this AP obituary makes no mention of the fact that Vanatter single handedly made the policing blunder that almost certainly let OJ off the hook.

If memory serves, Vanatter was the guy who showed up at the crime scene with a vial of blood freshly drawn from the celebrated Heisman winner and murder suspect at police headquarters. We can only speculate as to why such an experienced detective would do something so stupid - okay, I'll admit, I'm in the camp that believes the LAPD tried unsuccessfully to frame a guilty man - but the long and the short of it is that the presence of OJ's blood, taken by the police, at the crime scene while it was being investigated, was enough to introduce reasonable doubt in the jury's minds about all that foolproof DNA evidence that was supposed to provide a slam dunk conviction. I mean, you can trash prosecuting attorneys Marsha Clark and Chris Darden all you want, but when you have cops running around the crime scene carrying vials of the suspect's blood, you've definitely got your work cut out for you.

So Vanatter, more than anybody else, blew the OJ case, most likely in his zeal to deprive the suspect of his civil rights, which ended up denying the victims' families their rights. That's how I'm going to remember him. I wonder if police departments since then have learned a lesson from this. Probably not.

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2012-01-22T00:38:00.002-06:00

CONGRATULATIONS NEWT!!!

From MSNBC:

Gingrich wins SC GOP primary, beating Romney

Newt Gingrich has won the South Carolina Republican primary, capping off a remarkable comeback for his presidential bid that reshapes the trajectory of the battle for the GOP nomination as the race now heads to Florida and beyond.

The results mark the end of a tumultuous week in politics that saw Gingrich erase and then overcome the lead former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney had in the Palmetto State following his victory in the Jan. 10 New Hampshire primary. Gingrich came on strong in the closing days of the campaign, looking to rally under his banner the many conservatives unwilling to get behind Romney, who had sought to posture himself as the eventual nominee.

More here.

And from Slate:

A glossary of Newt Gingrich’s historical references and out-of-nowhere terminology

The moment comes, inevitably, at a key point in any Newt Gingrich speech. Members of the audience lean in and whisper: “Huh?” As speaker of the House, Gingrich was notorious (ask the Romney campaign!) for pulling ideas out of the ether. During his post-congressional wilderness years, he’s written an average of a book every nine months. We can quote the man himself: He is a “cultural teacher, with a political campaign to change a government.” A mere voter or reporter hears him mention a random concept, and gets flummoxed.

Be flummoxed no more! Below is a work-in-progress guide to the names and phrases Gingrich whips out to score extra points with conservatives. Previous Slate word watches—Bushisms, Palinisms—tracked candidates’ malapropisms. This is different. This will track and demystify the terms Gingrich tosses out to demonstrate his brain size.

Click here for the glossary of Newtisms.

I wrote this only last Thursday about Rick Perry, but it just as easily applies to Newt Gingrich:

This is, of course, a prime example of what's ailing the GOP right now in its race to get the party's presidential nomination. The Republicans have gone so far out in right field, and are so used to denying reality in order to bolster their crackpot political ideas, that only the very stupid are really able to capture the imaginations of the party's rank and file. I mean, sure, Perry's not stupid: the guy managed to make it to the governor's mansion and stay there for longer than anybody else in Texas history. But he is stupid on the issues. Really stupid. Just drooling, hare lipped, gibbering stupid. Like Gingrich, Santorum, Paul, and all the rest.

Indeed. Gingrich, too, is not stupid in that he has been smart enough to have a political career, smart enough to get an advanced degree, smart enough to make a lot of money working the corrupt lecture and lobby circuit that he helped to build when he was a House leader, smart enough to see that what was essentially a book tour pretending to be a presidential campaign had some potential as an actual campaign. Gotta give him all that. But just like his former rival Perry, Gingrich is one of the biggest morons in the world when it comes to issues.

Sometimes I'm amazed that among establishment media fixtures, the Newt's considered to be an intellectual, but then I remember that establishment media fixtures are pretty fucking stupid, too. That is, for our college educated press corps, spewing pseudo-intellectual jargon and obscure names and phrases is the same thing as being an intellectual. So Newt has a reputation as a smart guy, which just makes his victory tonight all the more funny.

I mean, seriously. Can you imagine Gingrich debating Obama? It would be like the Globetrotters versus the Generals. Really, Newt's worst enemy is his own mouth. Sure, it plays well when he's racebaiting down in South Carolina, but all most Americans hear is the gibberish and bullshit that make up his absurd rhetoric.

Then there are all the scandals, the marital infidelity, the Congressional investigation, just albatross after albatross wrapped around his big fat neck. Running him in the general election all but ensures an Obama victory, and potential disarray in the GOP for years to come. So, while I'm no supporter of Democrats, I'm well aware that Republican rule is tantamount to national suicide: congratulations to Newt Gingrich! I hope and pray for your success, which, in the end, means a few more nails in the Republican Party's coffin.

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2012-01-20T13:58:00.000-06:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Reine

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

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2012-01-19T23:41:00.002-06:00

Rick Perry's stupidity causes diplomatic incident

From the Daily Kos:

MSNBC:

"The State Department 'absolutely and fundamentally' disagrees with Gov. Rick Perry’s statement in last night’s debate that Turkey is ruled 'by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists.' [...]

'When you have a country that is being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists,' Perry said, 'when you start seeing that type of activity against their own citizens, then yes, not only is it time for us to have a conversation about whether or not they belong to be in NATO, but it's time for the United States, when we look at their foreign aid, to go to zero with it.' [...]

In a scathing statement, Turkey’s ambassador to the United States expressed his disappointment and concern over Perry’s comments, calling them 'misplaced' and 'ill-advised.' The ambassador also said Turkey receives no significant foreign aid from the U.S."

More here.

I'm not surprised at all that my home state's governor caused a minor diplomatic incident by spewing bullshit.

This is, of course, a prime example of what's ailing the GOP right now in its race to get the party's presidential nomination. The Republicans have gone so far out in right field, and are so used to denying reality in order to bolster their crackpot political ideas, that only the very stupid are really able to capture the imaginations of the party's rank and file. I mean, sure, Perry's not stupid: the guy managed to make it to the governor's mansion and stay there for longer than anybody else in Texas history. But he is stupid on the issues. Really stupid. Just drooling, hare lipped, gibbering stupid. Like Gingrich, Santorum, Paul, and all the rest.

Except for Romney. He's not stupid, just conservative, and it looks like with a few dodges and weaves here and there, as well as the solid support of the last vestiges of intelligent voters in the GOP, he's going to get the nomination. But something like three quarters of the party hate him, you know, because he's not stupid, so this November's going to be fun.

At any rate, it's a shame Perry's leaving the race. He's made me laugh more than any serious presidential candidate I can remember. We won't have Rick to kick around anymore.

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2012-01-19T00:27:00.002-06:00

Higher abortion rates where it's illegal

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Abortion rates are higher in countries where the procedure is illegal and nearly half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe, with the vast majority in developing countries, a new study concludes.

Experts couldn't say whether more liberal laws led to fewer procedures, but said good access to birth control in those countries resulted in fewer unwanted pregnancies.

And

About 47,000 women died from unsafe abortions in 2008, and another 8.5 million women had serious medical complications. Almost all unsafe abortions were in developing countries, where family planning and contraceptive programs have mostly levelled off.

More here.

I think I've been pro-choice from the moment I first understood what the abortion debate was all about. For me personally, it's always been about principle: the government and society end where my skin begins, unless, of course, I give government or society permission to pass that boundary. Thus, it is up to the individual entirely as to deciding whether to have an abortion.

Of course, the public discourse on abortion includes much, much more than pondering the concept of civil liberties. Indeed, pro-choice activists have for decades made the argument that the social, economic, familial, and personal pressures involved with unwanted pregnancies guarantee that legislating against abortion rights will not end abortion. Instead, these advocates have always argued, surgical pregnancy termination goes underground, hence the term "back alley abortion." That is, unlicensed hack doctors will take a desperate woman's money and cut her up, which may or may not actually end the pregnancy, and which may or may not end the woman's life or seriously injure her.

That's why pro-choicers proclaim "Keep abortion safe and legal!"

The study cited in the above linked article now lends a great deal of real life proof in support of this argument. When women don't have safe and legal alternatives, they get back alley abortions. And they do it in large numbers. And it kills and severely injures them.

Of course, the study's authors speculate that the higher abortion rates in countries where abortion is illegal may very well be a result of social attitudes against birth control, but it is fair to observe that attitudes about abortion usually walk hand in hand with attitudes about birth control. That is, if you're against abortion, there is a very good chance that you're also against wide and ready access to birth control. GOP presidential candidate and fundamentalist favorite Rick Santorum stands as an example of such thinking.

At any rate, the debate is now over. If you support making abortion illegal, then you support more abortions. And these kinds of abortions kill fetus and pregnant woman alike. If you want the abortion rate to go down, you must necessarily support abortion rights. Whether you think it's moral or not. Case closed.

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2012-01-18T00:22:00.002-06:00

Websites going black to protest anti-piracy bills in Congress

From the Los Angeles Times, culled from OWS or Anonymous on facebook, one of those subversive groups I'm friends with:

Strike organizers say the online grass-roots campaign is intended to inform the public about the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, which aim to crack down on foreign websites that traffic in pirated movies, music and counterfeit goods.

Internet companies have broadened the debate, recasting it from one about piracy and digital copyright protection to one about Internet freedom. Calling the bills well intentioned but seriously flawed, they say SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate are threats to free speech that could stifle the Internet economy, drive up legal costs and lead to censorship or the shutdown of some websites.

The proposed legislation "creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world," said a statement on Boing Boing, a group blogging site.

"Boing Boing could never coexist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site," the company said.

Erik Martin, general manager at Reddit, a social news community that was scheduled to shut down for 12 hours Wednesday, said the bills were "an existential threat to our company and the industry we work in."

More here.

I'm not sure which one of these, Bill Moyers interviewing the authors of Winner Take All Politics, or the book I'm currently reading, Stayin' Alive: the 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, probably both, made this point, but it is definitely pertinent to the SOPA/PIPA debate: money and lobbying are so extraordinarily pervasive within the US political process that gigantic corporations routinely and literally draft the bills on which legislatures vote. And most of these bills are just rubber stamped through to become the law of the land.

If that's the case, and I'm sure it is, the SOPA/PIPA bills are a prime example.

That is, they appear to be geared toward helping massive media companies recoup their "losses" to online pirates--I put that word in quotes because the assumption is that people who are happy to watch or listen to free media content would just as happily pay for it if there was no free option, which makes such "losses" highly theoretical. That's all good and fine, of course, but the way the laws are structured would place a massive burden on medium and small internet businesses, and even unimportant individuals such as myself, in short, anybody who links to any site that might somewhere have pirated material. It's not even linking to pirated material: it's linking to a site that has pirated material. That opens you up to massive lawsuits from corporate juggernauts.

I mean, what would I do if I linked to the wrong site and was suddenly hit with a million dollar lawsuit from Sony or GE? I don't know, but the risk here would make blogging quite literally dangerous. It would also render numerous successful websites unable to do business at all, thereby ending the internet as we understand it today.

It appears that the sound and fury already unleashed by SOPA/PIPA opponents online has made the dogs back off a bit, but I do support this blackout protest. One thing I've learned over the last decade or so is that corporate forces are never defeated: they just lay low until the shit storm dies down. Then they come back, stronger than before. It's looking like internet freedom needs to be a full court press. Forever.

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2012-01-17T00:33:00.003-06:00

Conservatives feud over Santorum endorsement

From the right-wing Washington Times courtesy of the Daily Kos:

A leading evangelical and former aide to President George H.W. Bush said he agreed with suspicions voiced by others at the meeting of evangelical and conservative Catholic activists that organizers “manipulated” the gathering and may even have stuffed the ballot to produce an endorsement of Mr. Santorum over former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

And

“The organizer was for Santorum, the person who created the invitation list was for Santorum, the emcee was for Santorum, and after making sure all of the Gingrich people had vented early, the last three speakers before the vote were for Santorum,” he said.

Added a Gingrich supporter, a prominent social conservative who asked not to be named, “My view is that the vote was manipulated.”

Yet another evangelical political organizer who attended the meeting said he witnessed a possible incident of ballot-box stuffing. In at least one instance, the witness said, a participant was seen writing Mr. Santorum´s name on four separate ballots and putting all four in the box.

More here.

Oh, this is funny and sweet! Live by the sword, and all that. The irony here is delicious. Of course, conservatives don't understand irony, so I'm sure it's utterly lost on the participants in this fundamentalist caucus, but ironic it is.

Just to spell this out a little if you're only a casual observer: modern day Republicans don't give a shit about democracy. From dirty tricks, like anonymous phone calls to voters in black districts telling them to go to the wrong polling places or that the election is already over or that it will be taking place on the wrong date, to ramming gerrymandered districts through state legislatures, to voter ID laws aimed at suppressing minority votes, to electronic ballot machine tampering, to straight up judicial interference, like with the inexplicable Gore v. Bush decision of 2000, Republicans have over the last decade or so shown utter contempt for the notion of one man/one vote.

They hate democracy, hate elections. I mean, that makes sense when you're absolutely certain that you are one hundred percent correct with your political analysis: Republicans are going to do the right thing, and voters be damned. It even makes more sense when you believe you're working for God. And, lemme tell ya, every single one of these fundamentalist idiots, Protestant and Catholic alike, believe they have God on their side. So any action is permissible. Especially vote tampering and event rigging. I mean, what's a bunch of voters compared to the Almighty?

Really, I'm sure that what pisses these anti-Santorums off so much is that they didn't think of it first.

Well, too fucking bad. You guys made your bed years ago, and I think it's only fitting that you now have to lie in it. Heh. Same thing with all that super PAC money coming in, money that was supposed to target Democrats, not Republicans. Cannibalize yourselves. I'm loving it.

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2012-01-16T01:38:00.000-06:00

Martin Luther King: "Beyond Vietnam"

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2012-01-14T20:54:00.002-06:00

US Marine Corps Soul Searching After 'Urinating' Video

From ABC News:

The U.S. Marine Corps is launching an internal investigation into the culture of the Corps in response to a video that purportedly shows troops urinating on the corpses of suspected Taliban fighters, a Marine official told ABC News today.

The probe will attempt to answer the question "What happened in the Marine Corps that this happened?" according to the official.

"It'll be a holistic look at everything surrounding this issue," he said.

USMC Commandant Gen. Jim Amos first announced an internal "preliminary" probe Thursday, saying the video showed behavior "wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history."

The video, which surfaced online Wednesday, appears to show four men in uniform looking around before urinating on three dead bodies. At least one of the men chuckles as they do so.

"Have a great day, buddy," one of the men is heard saying, apparently to a dead body.

More here.

A couple of observations.

First, it's looking like the Marine Corps, the DOD, and the government in general are doing the right thing here, condemning this desecration across the board, tracking down the Marines responsible, and trying to figure out how the culture of our military could collapse so profoundly. But I'll tell you, there's really no mystery for that last bit: this is obviously part of the overall erosion in the moral values of our armed forces, begun at the top, and then filtering down through the ranks, during the Bush years. It is not a coincidence that the urinating video looks so much like the sexual humiliation photos coming out of Abu Ghraib back in 2004. That is, such "isolated incidents" have been policy for nearly a decade, and it appears that Obama's people haven't done nearly enough, if anything at all, to reverse this slide into barbarity.

Second, crazy conservative pundits have already come out of the shadows to defend what is morally indefensible: it is apparently desirable to desecrate the corpses of our enemies because...well...because that's what they get for opposing America or something to that effect. As if killing them wasn't enough. Frankly, I don't think these truly evil statements really need much of a rebuttal. If you think it's necessary to piss on the bodies of the people you've just killed in war, then you are morally a lost cause. That is, there is no debate to be had with such heinous people. They're reprehensible scum, and, no surprise here, the same kind of people who have been screaming in support of torturing POWs for years now. Fuck them all.

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2012-01-13T14:26:00.000-06:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Dash

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

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2012-01-12T23:44:00.002-06:00

New York Times asks readers: Should reporters report facts?

From the Daily Kos:

But the question posed by the Times' Public Editor is considerably less colorful.

"I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about."

He goes on to explain that an opinion columnist, like Paul Krugman, clearly has the "freedom" to call out untruths in a way that mere, factually-based reporters somehow do not. His example is Mitt Romney constantly claiming that Barack Obama has been "apologizing for America" when in actual fact that has never, ever happened, as the Public Editor himself points out.

Now if you reflect for a moment, you may come to the conclusion that this is a Hell of a Thing, as the kids say today (where "kids" means your grandpa, and "today" means several decades ago). The writers of opinions are free to check facts, but the writers of facts are largely prohibited from it. This only makes sense if you consider facts to be opinions, and opinions to be facts, which in turn seems to make the whole point of reporting on either rather pointless: You might as well go to a palm reader and report whatever comes out of that as God's honest truth. It'd be the same damn thing, yes?

In any event, this leads to the grand question of the day, which is whether reporters should bother to check what spews from the primary face-orifaces of their subjects, or whether that is a separate job that should be done apart from the main article so as to not upset the cadence of the bullshit-spouting person in question.

And

Mind you, this is a novel fucking thing. It requires contemplation. If a candidate states a flat lie—not something dubious or ambiguous, but a clear, flat lie, on the order of my opponent eats puppies—ought a reporter, as part of reporting, report that the lie is a lie? This would seem to be all fine and good, except that it conflicts so greatly with the conventions of modern political reporting as to make it a daring-sounding thing. Convention dictates that you should just report "so-and-so says his opponent eats puppies," and ignore the obvious bullshit of the thing; if someone else in America wants to object and just happens to have their very own opinion column in one of America's top newspapers, they can feel free to take a stab at it, but otherwise convention dictates that we drop the whole thing because doing otherwise might insult the fellow who is declaring that his ideological rival eats puppies.

More here.

Virtually every lefty source I check out online was railing about this today, as they should have been. I mean, the piece I posted about a couple of days ago, the whining of the establishment journalist class over how tired they are of observing that GOP presidential candidates routinely lie about Democrats, was worth noting, but this one takes the cake. The New York Times, supposedly the "newspaper of record," meaning the first official take on history as understood by Americans, is asking if reporters ought to report that politicians are lying when politicians lie to them.

Of course, as virtually all observers have observed, such psychotic journalistic "values" come from caving, again and again, to right-wing claims of liberal bias in the news media. To some extent, I'm sympathetic. Conservatives have been relentless since the Nixon era in their attempts to pigeonhole the press as being some sort of mouth piece for liberalism, which is, of course, impossible because the establishment media are, well, establishment, and therefore necessarily reflect the concerns of the establishment, you know, government, the corporate state, Big Money, etc. But it's been a jihad for decades, and journalistic entities are, above all else, businesses, and very worried that a bad reputation would be harmful to the bottom line. So I'm not that sympathetic.

That is, the MSM are cowards, and instead of continuing to report facts that are inconvenient to conservatives, they transitioned into a sort of he-said-she-said point/counterpoint thing. As Paul Krugman once observed, the way the establishment press covers politics today is such that if a Republican asserted that the world is flat, the headline would be something like "Shape of Earth: Views Differ."

What's really damned annoying is that big time media people are arrogant condescending assholes and think that the way they currently report the news is the best possible way to do it, utterly refusing to admit to themselves that conservative attack dogs bullied them into it. That is, they've so fooled themselves into believing that they chose to do the news this way, that actually reporting the truth comes as a novelty or an idea with potential that needs contemplation or some such.

In short, their heads are so far up their asses that they can ask such a question and not for a moment suspect that everybody who knows what's going on is laughing at them like they shit their pants. All the news that's fit to print, indeed.

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2012-01-11T23:43:00.002-06:00

Socialist Party Derides Rick Perry 'Fairy Tale' Of Obama As Socialist

From the Huffington Post:

The Socialist Party USA is more than a little skeptical of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's claim Sunday that President Barack Obama belongs in their ranks.

"The notion that Barack Obama is a socialist ranks among the greatest fairy tales in American society -- right up there with the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the idea that if you work hard enough your children will live a better life than you," Socialist Party spokeswoman Lynn Lomibao said in an email. "Socialists know what Obama is: another corporate funded politician placed in the White House to protect the wealth and status of the 1 percent."

More here.

Ahem. From Wikipedia:

Socialism /ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/ is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises, common ownership, direct public ownership or autonomous State enterprises. There are many variations of socialism that differ in the degree of social ownership they champion and in their mechanisms for economic coordination.

A socialist economic system would be based on production for use: the direct allocation of economic inputs to meet economic demands and human needs (use value), with accounting based on physical quantities of resources, a common physical magnitude, or a direct measure of labour-time.

As a political movement, socialism includes a diverse array of political philosophies, ranging from reformism to revolutionary socialism. Proponents of state socialism advocate for the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange as a strategy for implementing socialism. Social democrats advocate redistributive taxation and government regulation of capital within the framework of a market economy. In contrast, anarchism and libertarian socialism advocate direct worker's control of the means of production without relying on state power to achieve such an arrangement, while also opposing parliamentary politics and state ownership over the means of production.

Probably the furthest one could go with the "Obama socialist" meme is to call him a social democrat. And that's about it. He's not very good at it, either. The whole point to socialism is to make life better for average ordinary citizens who work for a living. That's what wealth redistribution is about; there is an assumption that capitalists take much more than their fair share simply because they run the show, and only government intervention allows workers to get fair compensation for the wealth they create with their labor.

Obama's "redistribution" however, doesn't even come close. Consider the Affordable Care Act which is, in essence, a law that forces all citizens to hand over lots of money to massive corporations for health insurance that may or may not actually cover their health care expenses. Or consider the bank bailout, which is currently at around twenty nine trillion dollars, twice the national debt, a massive reward to financial corporations for plunging the world into the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Yeah, that's redistribution, but it takes away from workers and gives to the capitalists. Kind of the opposite of socialism. No, Obama is no socialist, and not even really a social democrat, and, for that matter, Republicans do exactly the same kind of social democracy, steal from the poor and give to the rich. This is all absurd.

It is no wonder that actual socialists are bewildered and a bit pissed off. If Obama's a socialist, then the Socialist Party is pro-corporate, pro-poverty, and anti-worker. What a fucking insult.

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2012-01-10T23:28:00.004-06:00

FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
BC MESS

From the AP via ESPN:

Alabama's D embarrasses LSU as five FGs, late TD seal national title

With a smothering display of old-school football, the No. 2 Crimson Tide blew out the top-ranked Tigers 21-0 in the Allstate BCS Championship Game Monday night.

Coach Nick Saban's Tide also moved into the top spot in the final Associated Press poll for the eighth time, tying Notre Dame for the most of any team in college football.

More here.

And again from the AP, but this time via the Huffington Post:

Oklahoma State Gets 4 No. 1 Votes In AP Poll After Alabama Beats LSU

Alabama's convincing victory in the BCS championship wasn't enough to convince all 60 Associated Press college football poll voters that the Crimson Tide is No. 1.

Four members of the media panel had Oklahoma State at No. 1, and Erik Gee, of KNML-AM in Albuquerque, N.M., picked LSU – as he said he would before the game.

"I was a lot closer than I thought I would be to changing my mind," Gee said during a telephone interview Tuesday. "I don't think I necessarily felt good about voting for LSU. But I also didn't feel good about voting for Alabama. I stared at the computer for 10 minutes. It wasn't an easy decision."

More here.

And, oh yeah, this happened, too. From the Houston Chronicle:

Texas QB Ash catches TD in Holiday Bowl win over California

In essence, No. 24 UT’s 21-10 victory over California boiled down to patience. The Longhorns had plenty of it when it came to waiting for David Ash, and absolutely none of it when it came to blitzing Zach Maynard.

Ash overcame an uninspiring start to lead three touchdown drives, and a relentless Longhorns defense made life a nightmare for Maynard, the Cal quarterback who was sacked six times and oversaw an offense that turned the ball over five times.

And even though it wasn’t always stylish, UT used that combination well enough in front of 56,313 at Snapdragon Stadium to reassert their belief it could lead to a higher-profile finish in 2012.

More here.

When it was all said and done, my two teams for the 2011 season had some similarities. Both had excellent defenses; both had mediocre offenses. I mean, this is all on a sliding scale, of course. Texas was coming back from last year's utterly dismal and disappointing season, and had almost no place to go but up. LSU, however, was pretty solid coming off of last year, with an incredible defense, and a great offense that was mediocre only because Les Miles was never able to figure out the quarterback puzzle. That is, LSU was, indeed, great this year, but its fatal flaw was the guy taking the snaps, no matter who was doing it.

But, as they say, you go to war with the army you have, not the one you want.

LSU's stifling defense was able to simply wear down other teams. By the second half, the Tigers didn't really need a brilliant offense, just one that could take advantage of the opportunities the defense set up for them, usually against an opposing defensive line that had become exhausted by the mountains-as-college students LSU kept rotating in on their side of the scrimmage line--like I said, the offense was pretty darned good, just no QB worth mentioning. It was a formula that worked well, smash mouth football essentially, which I like to watch. I mean, they beat everybody, even the national champion. On their home field.

And that's why, once again, the BCS has left the taste of shit in my mouth.

In short, Alabama's experience playing LSU the first time gave them the scouting advantage they needed to put together a game plan that ultimately spoiled the Tigers' admittedly flawed formula for success. Usually, almost never, in fact, does the challenger for the national championship get such a scouting opportunity. I call bullshit. I also think this affected LSU psychologically, and you could see it in their faces on the sidelines. It was almost as if the system said to the Tigers, "It doesn't matter that you went into Tuscaloosa and beat these guys on their home field. It doesn't matter that you played a tougher schedule and won more games. Our formulas and bloviating opinion people want a rematch, and fuck you."

So now, the team that won on a neutral site is called "national champion," even though the team they beat to win this "honor" had already beaten them. On the road. Alabama didn't win their division, and didn't win their conference, but LSU did. This is bullshit.

And, oh yeah, let's not forget Oklahoma State, a one loss team that did win its conference, and also had a harder schedule than the Crimson Tide, was squeezed out. Because the system wanted a fucking rematch. This is also bullshit.

At any rate, things are looking up for both Texas and LSU next year. Both have good defenses. The Longhorns' Ash is definitely improving, and LSU just signed that hotshot QB out of Indiana. I'm expecting good things from both schools. I'm also halfway expecting one or both to once again be fucked by the BCS.

Also, now that both Texas and LSU have lost national championship games to Alabama within just a few seasons of each other, I hate the Crimson Tide with all the darkness and evil I can find in my heart. They suck, suck, suck, and get help from a corrupt and fucked up system that exists only because universities don't want to lose bowl money.

What a way to end the season.

Texas quarterback David Ash throws a pass against California during the first
half of the Holiday Bowl NCAA college football game, Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2011,
in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

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2012-01-09T19:29:00.002-06:00

THE BEATITUDES: THE BEST THAT CHRISTIANITY HAS TO OFFER

From the Bible, Luke 6:20-26 (KJV):

20And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.

21Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.

22Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake.

23Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets.

24But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation.

25Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.

26Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets.

For more on the Beatitudes, click here.

I was watching my favorite journalist with a Master of Divinity from Harvard, Chris Hedges, in a sprawling three hour interview on CSPAN's Book TV last night. He was talking about how he's debated both proselytizing atheists like Chris Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and conservative Christians alike, and mentioned how in one of those debates, against a fundamentalist, he observed that everything his opponent was citing from the Bible is the Old Testament, Hebrew stuff: real Christianity is derived from Christ, and those values are embodied best in the Beatitudes.

And they're damned fine values, to be sure. Indeed, not only do I not have a problem with the Beatitudes, by and large, I embrace them as my own values. I mean, minus all that reward in Heaven shit. But really, deep compassion for the poor, the hungry, the suffering, the powerless, the oppressed, and stern warnings for the rich and powerful, that's what I'm all about, as far as how I think the world ought to work. And, if humans made any sense at all, that's what Christianity would be all about, too.

Instead, the mainline, moderate Protestant denominations speak only quietly about these ideas, and mingle them with the salvation imperative. The Catholics have their parishioners reciting the Beatitudes, but when does this powerful and global institution use its great influence to make the Beatitudes actually happen in the real world? And the fundamentalist Protestants, well, their Christ has an AK-47 in one hand and a bag of money, complete with a dollar sign symbol, in the other, pushing a vision of Jesus that has nothing at all to do with the Beatitudes.

Yeah, I think I have a grudge against Christianity for not really pushing the values of Jesus Christ, the ones they say they embrace, but don't. Who knows? If things were different, I might still call myself a Christian, in spite of my agnosticism.

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2012-01-09T00:38:00.006-06:00

Casual allegations of treason

From the Washington Post's Political Animal blog, courtesy of AlterNet:

Rick Santorum argued earlier this week, with a straight face, that President Obama has “sided with our enemies.” The same day, Santorum also accused the president of engaging in “absolutely un-American activities.”

The New Yorker’s George Packer raised an excellent observation about the way in which these allegations were covered. (thanks to D.K. for the tip)

[T]his kind of gutter rhetoric is so routine in the Republican campaign that it’s not worth a political journalist’s time to point it out. In 2008, when Michele Bachmann suggested that Barack Obama and an unknown number of her colleagues in Congress were anti-American, there was a flurry of criticism; three years later, when a surging Presidential candidate states it flatly about a sitting President, there’s no response at all.

Certain forms of deterioration … become acceptable by attrition, because critics lose the energy to call them out. Eventually, people even stop remembering that they’re wrong…. How many times and ways can you say that the Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism before you lose your viewers and readers?

There was a point not too long ago when the standards of our discourse included more meaningful norms. Accusing the president of the United States, leading during a time of war and crisis, of “siding with our enemies” and engaging in “un-American activities” was just about the most extreme accusation imaginable.

More here.

Um, hey journalists, here's how you deal with this kind of bullshit: you make it part of the ongoing narrative; your writing should always include the fact that Republicans constantly lie about Democrats; you give the GOP absolutely no deference when they start this shit; you call them liars to their faces when you interview them. That is, you do your fucking job and report the fucking news. And the news here is that Republicans constantly lie about Democrats. Anything short of this is a failure to report the news. Any journalist who doesn't push back on this crap is not a journalist at all. I mean, I don't know what such "journalists" are, but they're not reporters, that's for sure.

The reason Republicans get away with calling the president a traitor is because journalists let them do it. I have no pity for "attrition." And I don't really believe that the news business would lose readers and viewers if reporters reported the truth. Really, I'm not sure who is more annoying. Republicans for lying constantly, always, all the time, or corporate journalists who have pity parties because they're tired of observing that Republicans lie all the time.

It's really beginning to disturb me how fucking stupid people in the establishment appear to be.

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2012-01-07T23:20:00.003-06:00

Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies

Glenn Greenwald explains why liberals hate Ron Paul so much:

It’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else. An honest line of reasoning in this regard would go as follows:

"Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court."

Without my adopting it, that is at least an honest, candid, and rational way to defend one’s choice. It is the classic lesser-of-two-evils rationale, the key being that it explicitly recognizes that both sides are “evil”: meaning it is not a Good v. Evil contest but a More Evil v. Less Evil contest. But that is not the discussion that takes place because few progressives want to acknowledge that the candidate they are supporting — again — is someone who will continue to do these evil things with their blessing. Instead, we hear only a dishonest one-sided argument that emphasizes Paul’s evils while ignoring Obama’s (progressives frequently ask: how can any progressive consider an anti-choice candidate but don’t ask themselves: how can any progressive support a child-killing, secrecy-obsessed, whistleblower-persecuting Drug Warrior?).

Paul’s candidacy forces those truths about the Democratic Party to be confronted. More important — way more important — is that, as vanden Heuvel pointed out, he forces into the mainstream political discourse vital ideas that are otherwise completely excluded given that they are at odds with the bipartisan consensus.

More here.

Of course, I'm a liberal who doesn't like Ron Paul too terribly much.

On the other hand, I don't hate him, especially relative to most of the GOP. Indeed, as Greenwald has been observing for months now, Paul has been absolutely and consistently correct about our Middle Eastern wars of adventure, as well as the massive erosion of foundational civil rights over the many years of "The War on Terrorism." Paul also gets some extra points with me for opposing the fruitless and destructive and ongoing "War on Drugs."

Really, my big fear with Ron Paul are all the teenagers and twenty-somethings who hear about his pro-marijuana and anti-war positions and totally embrace him without stopping to consider how, exactly, he came to these views. Don't forget that Paul is primarily a Libertarian, which means he doesn't accept or see that private business can be, in its own way, every bit as oppressive and anti-freedom as government, so when he talks about "freedom," he's not simply talking about peace and pot; he's also talking about allowing corporations to run wild in ways that are far, far worse than what we see right now. Indeed, Paul is the ultimate Big Business candidate, a man who as president would remove virtually all regulations on business. His America looks much more like the sterile corporate future envisioned in the Alien movies than the apple pie and baseball images he likes to conjure with all his "freedom" rhetoric. The kids don't seem to see this, and it scares me.

But having said all that, he is pro-pot and anti-war. You gotta give him his props for that. So I don't hate him.

I haven't personally noticed in my reading around the 'net the kind of liberal vitriol against Paul that Greenwald mentions, or perhaps I have and just haven't characterized it that way because, you know, I'm a liberal. But Greenwald's observation fits a preexisting liberal pattern that's driven me nuts for years: trash conservatives and Republicans because of their politics, but do your damnedest to destroy utterly any and all liberal dissenters.

Of course, Paul's no liberal, but his Libertarianism has brought him to embrace some very key liberal positions, which are no longer embraced by the so-called "liberal" establishment. That is, Paul, a conservative, has establishment liberals totally beaten on their home turf. And it pisses them off in the same way Noam Chomsky pisses them off by relentlessly exposing liberal complicity in US imperialism and corporate enabling behavior, in the same way Ralph Nader pisses them off for doing essentially the same thing. It pisses them off in the same way when Chomsky and Nader supporters such as myself dare to repeat their arguments in liberal company.

So, while I haven't personally seen the anti-Paul liberal dynamic that Greenwald bashes here, I take him at his word that it's happening. It's totally par for the course. And it pisses me off because it shows that liberals are just as tribal, emotional, and stupid as their conservative counterparts.

Sometimes I'm amazed that the human race isn't still eating bananas up in the trees.

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2012-01-06T13:00:00.000-06:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Roi

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

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2012-01-06T00:43:00.002-06:00

Doctors going broke

From CNN courtesy of the Huffington Post:

Doctors in America are harboring an embarrassing secret: Many of them are going broke.

This quiet reality, which is spreading nationwide, is claiming a wide range of casualties, including family physicians, cardiologists and oncologists.

Industry watchers say the trend is worrisome. Half of all doctors in the nation operate a private practice. So if a cash crunch forces the death of an independent practice, it robs a community of a vital health care resource.

"A lot of independent practices are starting to see serious financial issues," said Marc Lion, CEO of Lion & Company CPAs, LLC, which advises independent doctor practices about their finances.

Doctors list shrinking insurance reimbursements, changing regulations, rising business and drug costs among the factors preventing them from keeping their practices afloat. But some experts counter that doctors' lack of business acumen is also to blame.

More here.

While distressing, this news simply underscores an obvious fact that the ruling establishment absolutely refuses to accept: in the modern era, there is simply no free market model that allows the field of medicine to function in an effective way. For over two decades now, it's been patients who have suffered the brunt of free market medicine, from people who can't afford health insurance to people who have it but with providers refusing to pay for necessary treatments for bogus reasons. It has been and continues to be a total mess. It now appears that doctors are beginning to feel capitalism's ill effects, too.

Maybe we'll finally see some real reform, if only because doctors are getting to the point that they have nothing to lose.

The bottom line here is that it is the height of foolishness to consider medicine as a business. Indeed, medicine isn't an economic transaction: it's a vital public service, like roads, or courts, or police, or fire fighters. Sure, you can figure out how much money you're spending on it, but that doesn't make it a business. Clearly, the economic incentives alone rule out consideration of medicine as business from the get-go.

We have to totally revamp the entire industry, coordinate it, throw the middle men out, figure out how to get the best bang for our buck, and utterly remove the notion of patient payment altogether because it fucks over huge segments of the population, and it is apparently no longer enough to keep doctors in business. And this isn't rocket science. Economists already have several successful models that they can adapt for usage here.

All we need is for the ruling class to get on board. I'm not holding my breath.

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2012-01-05T00:32:00.002-06:00

FACEBOOK DEBATES
CULTURAL SELF-IDENTIFICATION IN 21ST CENTURY AMERICA

I was particularly articulate tonight on a facebook thread dealing with issues of ethnicity and pluralism that I don't talk about much here. So I figured, this is a decent post for Real Art.

Background: I work with two individuals who have more than a little Hawaiian blood running through their veins. And when I say Hawaiian, I mean the indigenous people of Hawaii. One takes her heritage very seriously; the other doesn't. Apparently, she's taken him to task for this a bit, and the feud spilled over onto everybody's favorite social networking site.

As usual, I just couldn't keep my mouth shut:

If it's possible to put aside the bad blood, so to speak, for a moment, this is a really fascinating and important topic: how we ethnically define ourselves in an overall culture that is, at this point, corporate driven and rammed down our throats by mass media. It's not even about whiteness anymore; white culture in the US used to be subdivided regionally, and even that's disappearing. So being a Southerner means a lot less than it used to mean--indeed, the bizarre fits and stops of the GOP primary this year are something of a last gasp for white Southerners.

I learned a Cajun English dialect a few years back for a play I did at LSU, and in my research I learned that not only has Cajun French disappeared almost entirely, but that the Cajun way of life is nearly as dead. So what does it mean to be Cajun in 2012? I don't know. I have enough Choctaw blood in me to be recognized by the Choctaw nation; indeed, my uncle, who long ago changed his name to Lucas Greywolf, has spent many years living on a reservation. But I was raised as a white suburbanite. What does my Choctaw heritage mean? I have no idea. On the other hand, I've known about my Indian roots all my life, and it has been a semi-important part of my personal identity, just because.

For that matter, is our President black or white? I mean, he obviously identifies as black, but he was raised by a white mother, and is clearly very comfortable within white culture. And is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who may very well be the most conservative member on the court, and who has for years consistently ruled in ways that hurt African Americans, really a black man? I mean, sure he is, and he self-identifies that way, but a lot of people, black and white, take issue with that.

In the end, ethnic self-identification is in great flux right now, and sometimes a dangerous mine field because shit like this MATTERS and there's a lot on the line for pretty much everybody. There are no easy answers here. Culture and ethnicity are IMPORTANT. And we, as a society, continue to be pretty bad in our ability to discuss it constructively.

At this point, my buddy who was under attack for not being Hawaiian enough chimed in:

Exactly. I think it's fair to say that those who cling tightest to these things are well....the most backwards.

To which I responded:

I agree with your last statement to an extent, but I don't want to delegitimize $$$'s sense of valuing her culture, either. I think fucking with you for how you self-identify is unfair; this is ultimately a matter of deep individuality. But I also think, if we can remove the personal attacks, that $$$ has a point, that has less to do with you as a person, and more to do with American society more generally.

My buddy again

We're taught as children to be "colorblind". But nobody actually "walks the walk". Well, I choose to actually see it that way. I want humanity to be ONE people so that we can move forward. Evolve.

Me again:

Ah, but colorblindness is virtually impossible, which creates a massive paradox in the general understanding of how we're all supposed to get along. I prefer diversity and pluralism, an overall culture composed of many cultures, such that we can value our differences while celebrating our common humanity. That's one people, too.

And there you have it, some of my thoughts on pluralism and culture. I think it's safe to say that, as the white demographic gradually becomes only the largest American minority among many minorities, this issue is going to become more, not less, contentious.

Get your thoughts in order now. Otherwise, you'll be debating without a net.

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2012-01-04T00:16:00.002-06:00

QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From AlterNet:

Dash Cam Apparently Catches Cop Planting Evidence on Black Man

The Utica Phoenix has obtained a video that shows two police officers making a traffic stop. During this stop, the dash camera on the squad car catches one officer suspiciously pull something out of his back pocket before placing it inside the car he had been searching. The cop emerges shortly after, holding and slickly shining a flash light on the same object, as if he had just seen it for the first time. It looks a lot like a bag of drugs.

More here, with video.

This seems to be very much par for the course. The essay goes on to observe that, in the wake of a similar scandal in New York City involving multiple cops, this may very well be a widespread phenomenon, cops planting evidence, just so they can meet their bust quota. I don't have to explain to you why this is totally awful, but I'd be totally failing as a blogger if I didn't point out that in both cases, NYPD, and these Utica Bozos, the people being framed are black. I mean, I have no doubt that these cops would do it to white people, too, if they felt inclined to do so, but it seems to me that African Americans are easy targets in that when they enter the courts as defendants their skin color almost changes the presumption of innocence to one of guilt. That is, the whole freaking criminal justice system is aimed at black people, so this kind of bullshit is easier to pull off with them as victims.

Racism, corruption, abuse of power, this is all some sick fucking shit.

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2012-01-02T17:07:00.002-06:00

Chris Hayes on the Iraq War Architects: Where Are They Now?

From Crooks and Liars:

On Chris' list, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Judith Miller, David Addington, Paul Wolfowitz, Cindy Sheehan, General Eric Shinseki, Ari Fleischer, Jessica Lynch, Ken Pollock, Scooter Libby, Doug Feith and Paul Bremer. Sadly as Chris noted here, no bad deed has gone unrewarded when it comes to this group, most of whom are now making a comfortable living at conservative think tanks and are sadly still allowed to come on television and are asked for their opinions.

I'm quite sure we'll never see a segment like this on Meet the Press since David Gregory wouldn't want any of them to fall off of his potential guest list.

Best line of the segment:

HAYES: Doug Feith, the Undersecretary of Defense, who General Tommy Franks once called "the f-ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth," is advising Rick Perry on foreign policy.

More here, with video.

Most of the people mentioned above, with some notable exceptions, Shinseki and Lynch, for instance, who were actually career-victims of the ideological pro-war juggernaut rather than supporters, would be in prison today if we lived in a just society. Instead, they roam free, reputations and careers relatively intact. Indeed, this is very much in keeping with the American cultural template for official oppression that I mentioned a couple of days ago writing about nostalgia for the old South: America only does the right thing, always, and if you remember it differently, you're not much of an American. Thus, our greatest official monsters never see justice.

People attribute this comment to Edmund Burke, although Wikiquote says it's disputable, but whoever said it, I think it's appropriate: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

And that's what we've seen with the Bush administration's successors, good men doing nothing. Because Obama has refused, presumably for "political" reasons, to indict any of these criminals, evil has triumphed. That is, there is no punishment for the cadre of individuals who, more than anybody else, got us into a disastrous and illegal war which has killed tens of thousands, wasted billions of dollars, and left Iraq in a much worse condition than it was in before the invasion.

America has failed.

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2012-01-02T00:45:00.002-06:00

Nobody Understands Debt

From the New York Times, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman:

This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.

Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!

And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.

More here.

Click through for details on how, exactly, our ruling class gets it totally wrong when it comes to deficits and debt. But the fact that I, a lowly restaurant server, understand this shit better than the people who get paid to understand it is what concerns me most at the moment.

The financial collapse of 2007 proved spectacularly, and beyond any doubt at all, that one of the most foundational assumptions of our ruling elite about economics, that markets are self-regulating, is wrong, wrong, wrong. If humans were truly rational creatures, such nose rubbing in the shit, as it were, would be cause for immediate and intense reevaluation of everything concerning the field of economics. But that didn't happen. I mean, for a very brief moment, it was looking like a few of the smarter conservatives, David Brooks, for instance, when he called Bobby Jindal's jingoistic GOP response to Obama's 2009 SOTU address "a disaster" for the Republican Party, were starting to take a long hard look in the mirror, but that evaporated quickly. Instead, the Tea Party started making a lot of noise, and, like the lemmings they are, professional Republicans doubled down on their now utterly disgraced neoliberalism. And for the last twenty years or so, Democrats take all their cues on economics from Republicans.

Now the financial debacle and its fallout aren't directly related to the notion of debt and deficits, but the point that facts and observable phenomena are far less important in Washington than conventional wisdom that "everybody knows" is the same. Indeed, we're already starting to see how austerity programs, which are supposedly the way to get out of debt, in the EU are, in fact, reducing tax revenues so sharply that the debt situation is actually getting worse, not better. And that's an observable phenomenon that is being ignored utterly because it doesn't fit with what "everybody knows."

And what really gets me is that most of our leaders aren't lying about this. They honestly believe their own bullshit, and facts be damned. I'm not entirely sure what the end result of all this will be, what it means that, in the end, humans are more emotionally driven animals than contemplative beings of reason, but I'm quite sure that things are going to get much worse before they get better. Indeed, the ruling class needs to have a complete change of its world view before our economic prospects improve.

And such a thing has happened only rarely in the history of human affairs.

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2011-12-31T19:42:00.002-06:00

2012 phenomenon

From Wikipedia:

The 2012 phenomenon comprises a range of eschatological beliefs according to which cataclysmic or transformative events will occur on December 21, 2012. This date is regarded as the end-date of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. Various astronomical alignments and numerological formulae have been proposed as pertaining to this date, though none have been accepted by mainstream scholarship.

A New Age interpretation of this transition is that this date marks the start of time in which Earth and its inhabitants may undergo a positive physical or spiritual transformation, and that 2012 may mark the beginning of a new era. Others suggest that the 2012 date marks the end of the world or a similar catastrophe. Scenarios suggested for the end of the world include the arrival of the next solar maximum, or Earth's collision with a black hole, passing asteroid or a planet called "Nibiru".

Scholars from various disciplines have dismissed the idea of such cataclysmic events occurring in 2012. Professional Mayanist scholars state that predictions of impending doom are not found in any of the extant classic Maya accounts, and that the idea that the Long Count calendar "ends" in 2012 misrepresents Maya history and culture. Astronomers and other scientists have rejected the proposed events as pseudoscience, stating that they are contradicted by simple astronomical observations.

More here.

Right. So no Cthulhu-like monsters digging their way up into the world, no Jesus and Buddha oriented good vibes depositing themselves in our souls, no blockbuster spectacular disaster flick-as-reality coming to life outside your front door. Just another year. But, hey, that ain't so bad. Stability is very desirable these days.

So happy New Year. Here are a few celebratory videos:

And, of course, this...

Happy 2012!

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2011-12-30T14:09:00.001-06:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie

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

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2011-12-30T01:16:00.002-06:00

Why the White South Is Still in Denial About Slavery

Really, this ought to be titled "Why America Is Still In Denial about Slavery," but whatever. From AlterNet:

When the Civil War ended, there were no truth and reconciliation commissions formed to process memories, no Nuremberg Trials to enable reflection, no Great Emancipator to free the future from the past — only ghosts and the ravenous politics of memory. The need for national reckoning was quickly subordinated to the political imperative of reunification, and on both sides of the Mason Dixon line, forgetting became more valuable than remembering.

And

Instead of beginning a period of reflection, the South spent the late 19th century dressing up in old uniforms and comforting itself with revisionist stories.

The Reconstruction-era South didn’t invent dishonesty, but its response to America’s defining trauma has become a foundational lie, supporting an ever-growing edifice of false history. It’s a lie so big no one will forcefully challenge it, a lie that’s too big to fail. In the sesquicentennial year of the Civil War, the “stars and bars” fly over state capitals, proclamations are issued that honor the Confederacy without mentioning slavery, and commuters drive to work on highways named after white supremacists. And appeals to wounded pride and the lost values of imagined pasts are an everyday part of our political culture.

And

If America is a family, it’s a family that has tacitly agreed to never speak again — not with much honesty, anyway — about the terrible things that went on in its divided house. Slavery has been taught, it has been written about. There can’t be many subjects that rival it as an academic ink-guzzler. But the culture has not digested slavery in a meaningful way, hasn’t absorbed it the way it has World War II or the Kennedy assassination. We don’t feel the connections to it in our bones. It’s hard enough these days to connect with what happened 15 minutes ago, let alone 15 decades, given the endless layers of “classic,” “heirloom,” “traditional” “collectible,” “old school” comfort we’re swaddled in. But isn’t it the least we could do? What is the willful forgetting of slavery if not the coverup of a crime, an abdication of responsibility to its victims and to ourselves?

More here.

Here's another question: what does it mean that "the greatest country in the world" spent half of its history forcing an oppressed people to work in slavery? Here's a quick and brief answer that hardly exhausts the topic: it means that America isn't "the greatest country in the world."

I mean, maybe we could be "the greatest country in the world" if we ever came to terms with our slaver past in a repentance oriented way, in a way that made human rights and the dignity of each and every individual around the world the most important concern for ourselves as Americans, in a way that makes us always, always, always search for methods to pay for our deep national sin until Kingdom Come. If we, as a nation, were always sorry for such an unpardonable crime, if redemption were a national imperative, part of who we are as Americans, then, well, maybe we could start thinking about being "the greatest country in the world." But not until then. For now, we continue to have blood on our hands that we refuse to wash off.

And this isn't simply some abstract exercise in morality (as if that would make our crime less grave): the above linked essay goes on to observe that Civil War revisionism created the cultural template for how we, as a nation, deal with our many crimes: Vietnam, Iraq, and many other debacles and atrocities committed by the US over the years don't make us feel bad at all. We just change history around and focus on whatever myths and lies make us feel good. This allows us to go on sinning forever because we never acknowledge that we are sinners. Consequently, we never learn from our mistakes. Ever.

You see a similar dynamic with how the US establishment deals with the plight of African-Americans. It's like, why don't black people just go get jobs, or get an education and then go get jobs? Slavery was in the past, not now, why are they still bitching? Of course, the past isn't the past: the past is right now. Indeed, if you consider the Jim Crow era as simply the continuation of the slavery era, but with a few social and legal modifications, slavery didn't really end until the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, three and a half years before my birth. That's just a few decades ago. White and black America alike are literally reeling, to this day, from the unrepentant, sink-or-swim liberation of a people who were once held in bondage.

I mean, how do you just make the transition from prisoner-for-life, from "inferior" species, to free and equal? How do you do that within a cultural context that doesn't recognize at all the enormity of such a change? How do you do that within a cultural context where many are openly hostile to such a transition?

Slavery is our original sin. It's written all over everything we do, everything we say and think. But we ignore it, and such dishonesty about who we are leads us again and again to folly and failure. And one day, perhaps, our doom.

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2011-12-29T00:57:00.002-06:00

The Real Reason the GOP Primary Is a Pathetic, Incompetent Clown Show

From AlterNet, civil liberties lawyer and blogger Glenn Greenwald on how the long term shifting of the political spectrum has fucked the GOP pretty badly:

In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.

In July, the nation's most influential progressive domestic policy pundit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, declared that Obama is a "moderate conservative in practical terms". Last October, he wrote that "progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion", because the president – "once you get past the soaring rhetoric" – has "largely accepted the conservative storyline".

And

Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul, who vehemently condemns Obama's policies of drone killings without oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties assaults in the name of terrorism.

In sum, how do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, and in some cases extended, what was rightwing orthodoxy for the last decade? The core problem for GOP challengers is that they cannot be respectable Republicans because, as Krugman pointed out, Obama has that position occupied. They are forced to move so far to the right that they render themselves inherently absurd.

More here.

For the entire history of this blog, I've been relentlessly pushing the notion that conservatives have been agitating so intensely for so long that the center of the American political spectrum has essentially been pulled well into right-wing territory. So today's "liberals" like President Obama are, in fact, conservative, while today's "conservatives" are what we would have thought of as far right-wing psychos thirty years ago. Guys like me, who are well within normal non-radical liberal territory, historically speaking, are no longer counted as part of the ideological spectrum--it's like every point of view even slightly to the left of conservative Obama is tantamount to supporting Chairman Mao or Stalin, which is, of course, bullshit.

Usually, when asserting this notion, I'm talking about the Democrats, and how disappointing they are to actual liberals in this day and age; I've long assumed that this spectrum pull has been nothing but beneficial to conservatives. But if Greenwald's analysis is to be believed, and I think there is definitely some truth here, the chickens are coming home to roost.

Noam Chomsky recently said flat out that the Democratic Party is now in essence the Republican Party, and that's pretty accurate if you disregard the so-called "social issues." But what does this mean for the party that's actually called "The Republican Party"? Apparently, it is now a party of crazy people, which is fairly obvious when you listen closely to what they have to say. So I'm now wondering how long the Crazy Party can continue to have any actual relevance on the American political scene. I mean, they're crazy people, after all, and why vote for crazy Republicans when you can just as easily vote for the sane Republicans who now run the Democratic Party?

Is it possible that decades of hard core conservative propagandizing will soon drive the GOP into total irrelevance? Silver lining, I suppose.

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2011-12-28T00:17:00.002-06:00

'Abstinence-plus' emerging in more Texas schools

From the Houston Chronicle:

A shift is occurring in Texas as more school districts move from abstinence-only programs to a comprehensive approach that teaches about condoms and other contraceptives, according to an advocacy group's study of state data.

In 2007, about 4 percent of the state's school districts used comprehensive programs, according to a study by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund, a research group that supports the comprehensive approach known as abstinence-plus. A more recent analysis, based on data from a Texas Education Agency health education survey, found that nearly 25 percent of school districts had abstinence-plus programs in 2010.

"That's a huge increase in a three-year period," said Kathy Miller, president of the education fund. "The quiet revolution is taking place at the local level."

And

National studies, including a 2007 study mandated by Congress, have shown that abstinence-only programs do not stop teens from having sex, research center director Susan Tortolero said. But federal funding over the past decade has supported abstinence-only programs, and Texas has led the nation in receiving those dollars.

That might change under President Barack Obama, who has poured more federal money into evidence-based, abstinence-plus programs.

More here.

I'm not sure, but I think "abstinence plus" is just a Puritan friendly moniker for comprehensive sex education, or more simply, sex education. And I say that because "abstinence based" sex ed isn't really much more than wishful-thinking oriented anti-sex propaganda when it comes to teaching teens how the real world functions in terms of sexual behavior. That is, "abstinence based" sex education isn't sex education at all, and was an extraordinarily bad idea from the get-go.

It's good to hear that we may very well be moving beyond this really stupid chapter in the culture wars, and toward some semblance of responsibility and ethics when it comes to teaching youth about sexuality.

For that matter, why are people so disturbed by the notion of teens doing exactly what their parents did when they were teens? I'm not joking about this, either: for decades now, virtually all Americans have lost their virginity by the time they turn eighteen, which means that nervous Puritanical parents who support this abstinence bullshit are totally taking the "what's good for me, but not for thee" line with their kids. And I call bullshit on that. Seriously. When I was getting certified to teach, I remember a class discussion on exactly this issue, and among my fellow teachers-in-training were several who just straight up asserted that "teenagers have no business having sex." They were very emotional about the topic, so I didn't really try to mix it up with them, which is something I've regretted for years. I mean, what could they say? That teens are immature? Well, sure, but so what? We let them drive, for god's sake, and that's dangerous for society, not simply for teens themselves. Indeed, we let teens, who are the worst drivers out there, run the roads because it is convenient for their parents, and no other reason. By the same token, we have adopted this dangerous abstinence shit for essentially the same reason: parents worry about their little baby teenagers getting it on in the back seat, so we teach them abstinence to calm parental fears.

It is ironic, indeed, that we give teens access to automobiles, the best place by far for teen sex, while tut-tutting them about sex in school. It's all so fucking stupid.

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2011-12-27T01:28:00.003-06:00

NO, A MINOR PROGRAM THAT ENCOURAGED HOME LOANS
TO THE POOR DID NOT CAUSE THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

From Paul Krugman's blog:

Today Joe once again goes after the Big Lie — the claim that Fannie and Freddie caused the crisis — and drives home the point that the people advancing this story aren’t just wrong but are acting with intent, engaged in deliberate deception:

In Wallison’s article, he claimed that the charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against six former Fannie and Freddie executives last week prove him right. This is another favorite tactic: He takes a victory lap whenever events cast Fannie and Freddie in a bad light. Rarely, however, has his intellectual dishonesty been on such vivid display. In fact, what the S.E.C.’s allegations show is that the Big Lie is, well, a lie.

And

...what’s going on in the discussion of economic affairs (and other matters, like justifications for war) isn’t just a case where different people look at the same facts but reach different conclusions. Instead, we’re looking at a situation in which one side of the debate just isn’t interested in the truth, in which alleged scholarship is actually just propaganda.

More here.

So, of course, the whole "Fannie and Freddie were forced to give out loans to people who couldn't repay them is what caused the financial crisis" story line is a total lie: the two hybrid federal/private lending institutions dealt with mortgages in the hundreds of millions; the financial meltdown dealt with toxic mortgage securities in the tens of trillions. How could a few hundred million dollars worth of mortgages, many of which weren't even bad loans, result in trillions of dollars in junk securities? Answer: it couldn't.

Indeed, Fannie and Freddie were relatively minor players in the toxic mortgage security scam. Instead, it was the private banking industry, which had found what it thought was a veritable philosopher's stone in mortgage backed securities, that created massively huge demand for what ended up being what economist Duncan Black, who blogs as Atrios over at Eschaton, has been calling for years the "Big Shitpile." Actually, lots of these banksters knew at the time that what they were buying and selling was worthless shit, which is why they bought buttloads of credit default swaps, financial instruments that essentially served as insurance policies against their lousy bets on lousy horses, in order to protect themselves if they weren't able to find a chair in this high stakes cake walk before the music stopped.

So the banks went wild with these mortgage backed securities, literally demanding that more and more and more mortgages be granted to as many people who would sign up for them, whether they were good risks or not, and lenders gave the financial sector what they were screaming for. And then the insurance industry fucking insured these securities for their full purchase value, which, needless to say, had very little to do with their actual value. A bubble worth trillions grew up very quickly. And then it burst.

But that's not nearly as easy to understand as "liberals forced Fannie and Freddie to give home loans to poor people," which is a lie that fits very neatly into the right wing's preexisting narrative about how poor people, poor black people, really, are destroying the country with their shifty and lazy fraudulent ways.

Note to Democrats: in this day and age it is perfectly acceptable, preferable actually, to call Republicans, to their faces, big fucking liars. Because, you know, that's what they are, big fucking liars.

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2011-12-23T00:07:00.002-06:00

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I'm going off the grid for a few days here, so that I can return to the egg for family obligations and such. Back Monday night probably.

In the meantime, here's It's a Wonderful Life:

Merry Christmas!!!

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2011-12-22T01:04:00.004-06:00

Christopher Hitchens and the protocol for public figure deaths

Glenn Greenwald finally chimes in:

When someone dies who is a public figure by virtue of their political acts — like Ronald Reagan — discussions of them upon death will be inherently politicized. How they are remembered is not strictly a matter of the sensitivities of their loved ones, but has substantial impact on the culture which discusses their lives. To allow significant political figures to be heralded with purely one-sided requiems — enforced by misguided (even if well-intentioned) notions of private etiquette that bar discussions of their bad acts — is not a matter of politeness; it’s deceitful and propagandistic. To exploit the sentiments of sympathy produced by death to enshrine a political figure as Great and Noble is to sanction, or at best minimize, their sins. Misapplying private death etiquette to public figures creates false history and glorifies the ignoble.

All of this was triggered for me by the death this week of Christopher Hitchens and the remarkably undiluted, intense praise lavished on him by media discussions. Part of this is explained by the fact that Hitchens — like other long-time media figures, such as Tim Russert — had personal interactions with huge numbers of media figures who are shaping how he is remembered in death. That’s understandable: it’s difficult for any human being to ignore personal feelings, and it’s even more difficult in the face of the tragic death of a vibrant person at a much younger age than is normal.

But for the public at large, at least those who knew of him, Hitchens was an extremely controversial, polarizing figure. And particularly over the last decade, he expressed views — not ancillary to his writings but central to them — that were nothing short of repellent.

And

Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading. One of the only writers with the courage to provide the full picture of Hitchens upon his death was Gawker‘s John Cook, who — in an extremely well-written and poignant obituary – detailed Hitchens’ vehement, unapologetic passion for the attack on Iraq and his dismissive indifference to the mass human suffering it caused, accompanied by petty contempt for those who objected (he denounced the Dixie Chicks as being “sluts” and “fucking fat slags” for the crime of mildly disparaging the Commander-in-Chief). As Cook put it: “it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong”; indeed: “People make mistakes. What’s horrible about Hitchens’ ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made.”

More here.

Yeah, I have to admit that I wasn't too terribly saddened by Hitchens' death.

I used to kind of like him. I mean, I only ever read two or three of his essays: it was his appearances on television, usually championing socialism in some way, or attacking God-believers, that gave me my impression of what he was about. I remember thinking that he was an excellent debater, really good at thinking on his feet and on the fly, masterful at spontaneous turns of phrase. And that proper British accent had more than a little to do with my good feelings about him. I also thought he was something of an asshole. But, hey, he was our asshole. And conservatives almost never looked good when he was in the room.

All of that changed, of course, after 9/11.

My sense at first was that he went a bit insane, thoroughly traumatized by the devastating attacks, and transitioned overnight from being a liberal darling attack dog to a conservative firebrand. My insanity defense for him evolved over the years, though, and it occurred to me that his intense disdain for religion of all varieties might have been the linchpin for understanding his Saul-to-Paul conversion in the early 2000s. That is, coupling his preexisting anti-religious attitudes with the death and carnage wrought by Al Qaeda might explain it all--he just really, really, really hated religion, and the notion of Muslims with nuclear bombs might have been too much for him to bear. Crazy, to be sure, but with a method to his madness.

Lately, however, I've been wondering if I've been completely wrong about all that. Perhaps Hitchens didn't go around the bend at all. Perhaps he was in full command of his emotions and intellectual faculties the whole time. Hitchens' came from an old school socialist background, and old school socialists, unlike with my own particular variety of leftism, are just fine with violence as a means to accomplish political ends. And this is where it gets interesting: American neoconservatism, which was the driving intellectual force behind the US invasion of Iraq, has its roots in Trotskyite socialism, which is exactly the brand of socialism to which Hitchens subscribed as a youth. That is to say, Hitchens made the same ideological leap from left to right that many American socialists had made decades earlier. He became a neoconservative, himself, and found that he was very much at home on this new warmongering side of the street. For the original neocons back in the fifties and sixties, it was the evil of Stalinism that provided motivation; for Hitchens, it was the evil of Al Qaeda.

But, whatever the cause of the Vanity Fair writer's stunning change of heart, it is certain that he became a bloodthirsty bastard during the last decade of his life, and a champion intellectual apologist for that which cannot be defended. I'd say these years he spent promoting war and hatred pretty much erased anything and everything he ever did that was good. That's because, as Mark Antony said in Julius Caesar, "the evil that men do lives after them."

People continue to die violently in Iraq, and Christopher Hitchens bears some small responsibility for that.

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2011-12-21T00:47:00.002-06:00

The Left Right Paradigm is Over: Its You vs. Corporations

From the Big Picture, courtesy of Occupy Wall Street's facebook page:

For those of you who are stuck in the old Left/Right debate, you are missing the bigger picture. Consider this about the Bailouts: It was a right-winger who bailed out all of the big banks, Fannie Mae, and AIG in the first place; then his left winger successor continued to pour more money into the fire pit.

What difference did the Left/Right dynamic make? Almost none whatsoever.

How about government spending? The past two presidents are regarded as representative of the Left Right paradigm – yet they each spent excessively, sponsored unfunded tax cuts, plowed money into military adventures and ran enormous deficits. Does Left Right really make a difference when it comes to deficits and fiscal responsibility? (Apparently not).

What does it mean when we can no longer distinguish between the actions of the left and the right? If that dynamic no longer accurately distinguishes what occurs, why are so many of our policy debates framed in Left/Right terms?

In many ways, American society is increasingly less married to this dynamic: Party Affiliation continues to fall, approval of Congress is at record lows, and voter participation hovers at very low rates.

More here.

Well, that's what I've been saying for years now. More or less.

The reality is that there continue to be vast differences between liberalism and conservatism, as far as political and economic philosophies go. But the above linked essay is absolutely correct in that the two terms, liberal and conservative, have, to a great extent, divorced themselves from any real connection to such philosophy in common usage. It's all about tribalism now, us and them, and apologetics for what Chris Hedges accurately calls "the corporate state."

That is, for decades now we've been hearing rhetoric, from both the left and right, that very much sounds as though it's liberal or conservative, but actually lays the intellectual groundwork for rule by corporations. Conservatives, for instance, are always going on about business, and how the government needs to get out of the way so the economy can flourish, and that's fairly run-of-the-mill philosophy for conservatism, dating back to before the American Revolution. But this pro-business rhetoric has ultimately been used to allow corporations to gradually increase their control over the government, doing an end run around the Constitution and the electoral process in order to exercise power indirectly, by way of lobbying and campaign contributions: real conservatives, the ones who actually admit what's happening, are outraged by this...because real conservatives greatly value the Constitution and the electoral process!!! Somehow, though, most Americans who self-identify as conservative won't allow themselves to see how their centuries old pro-business stance has been warped to usurp the very democracy they love.

And you get the same bullshit from liberals. They support the Democrats no matter what they do to empower corporations while disempowering individuals. A couple of years ago I played an open mike night at New Orleans' Neutral Ground coffee house. It was a few days after Obama politely asked the bankers to start lending again now that they had been bailed out with trillions of tax payer dollars. In between songs, I asserted that this was disgusting behavior: when you essentially own the banks, you do not ask politely; you fucking dictate terms. An aging baby boomer hippie type engaged me in discussion after my set. Actually, it was more of a dressing down. He told me that the President had so much on his plate after the Bush era that it was totally unreasonable for me to make such assertions. He was a patronizing asshole, and totally loyal to President Hope And Change, all in spite of the fact that I was completely right and he was completely wrong. I didn't even try to argue with him. But his behavior is fairly typical of liberals. You know, Bush was my fault because I voted for Nader.

We now live in an era when we can read essays by conservatives such as Paul Craig Roberts or Andrew Bacevich that come off very much like something that Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky might have written. We see the Tea Party, a right-wing social movement motivated by outrage over the bank bailouts; we also see Occupy Wall Street, a left-wing social movement motivated by outrage over the bank bailouts. Everyone's confused. Everyone's angry. Everyone's getting fucked over. And neither the liberal party nor the conservative party appear to give a shit about anything but being reelected.

I don't know if all this really means an end to the liberal/conservative dynamic, but it may very well signal an end to these terms being hijacked and redefined by the corporate state. If so, democracy in America might have a snowball's chance.

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2011-12-20T01:20:00.002-06:00

ECONOMIC MYTHS

From CounterPunch:

What’s So Great About Efficiency?

The claim that Professor Mankiw makes (see his New York Times editorial responding to the student protest), but that is endemic to Western economics in general, is that his economics is a methodology rather than an ideology. But a methodology is a means of accomplishing a goal. Whose goals are accomplished with the methodology of his economics? Why would a generic methodology be better at accomplishing specific goals than specific methods? And most pressing to readers, why does a purported non-ideological methodology always come to such ideologically loaded conclusions—why are there winners and losers if in theory everyone benefits? And why are the winners always the already rich and powerful and the losers always the already marginalized?

And

The goal of economics always given by Western economists is to maximize economic efficiency. Who could object to getting the most out of society’s economic efforts? If free trade agreements drive a few million peasants from their land through the destruction of their indigenous economies, don’t a few capitalists getting rich from hiring the newly “freed” labor that results mean that efficiency has been served? Lest one think this tale improbable, take a look at Mexico following implementation of NAFTA. If capital is globally mobile while labor is embedded within national boundaries, linguistic and cultural difference and the accoutrement of complex social life, how do economic models that assume that none of this embedding has economic content maximize anything?

More here.

Yeah, just what the hell is "economic efficiency," anyway?

Years ago, when I was a senior in high school attending what was ostensibly a public speaking seminar hosted by the Rotarians, but was actually a far right-wing neoliberal indoctrination camp, an economist told me that economics is not concerned with morality or altruism; rather, he went on, economics is about finding the most efficient allocation of goods and resources. Well, okay. Who can be against "efficiency"?

It wasn't until I was approaching my thirtieth birthday that I learned to start asking the question "efficient for whom?" That's the trillion dollar question. And the answer to that question, if you're an economist, is "efficient for the capitalist class" because that's who they serve. So, necessarily, the concerns of the entire field of economics reflects the relatively small group of people who can afford to pay them.

I mean, can you afford to have an economist working for you? Has it ever even occurred to you to hire an economist? No, of course not. Economists don't work for labor; they work for capital, and it is capital with which they concern themselves. Yeah yeah, I'm aware that many economists work for universities, but they get paid way more than, say, English teachers because economists routinely move back and forth between academia and the business world, and can command much higher salaries in the Ivory Tower because they are so in demand in the corporate sector. Bottom line: economists almost always are working for business, helping business, justifying business, intellectualizing business, always about business and what's good for business, but never working for you and people like you.

This is justified, very poorly, with the worn out assertion that what's good for business is good for the nation at large: numerous events over the last five years or so, however, have proven far beyond a doubt that business can do just fine, excel even, when everyone else is going to hell. Indeed, half of America is now in poverty or very near poverty, while corporations continue to post record profits.

As usual, I'm not saying that the field of economics is without value. Far from it. But economics is not a science. It does not deal entirely with facts. It definitely serves a propaganda function benefiting the wealthy plutocrats who own and operate the United States. It is concerned with the economic "efficiency" of business and only business.

But when half the nation is in dire economic straits, I'd say economists need to look at other kinds of economic "efficiencies." You know, like how the fuck are people going to pay their fucking bills.

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2011-12-19T00:51:00.002-06:00

Vaclav Havel, dissident playwright and former Czech president, dies

From the Washington Post:

Václav Havel, a Czech writer who was imprisoned by his country's former communist rulers, only to become a symbol of freedom and his nation's first president in the post-communist era, died Sunday morning at his weekened home in the Czech Republic, the Associated Press reports. He was 75.

More here.

I first encountered Vaclav Havel back in 1989 when I saw a production of his play Temptation, a reworking of the Faustian myth aimed vaguely at communist totalitarianism, performed by the Vortex Repertory Company in Austin. This was a new theater company, so the show was a bit clunky, but Havel's weirdness and honesty shone through. I was definitely intrigued by this dissident writer from behind the Iron Curtain, which was falling apart the very year I first heard of him. Later, I learned that Havel had become president of the newly democratic Czechoslovakia, a post which he retained when the two nations split thereby creating the Czech Republic. During the 90s, as the Bohemian and artsy reputation of Havel's nation became legendary in the West, I heard fun stuff about the playwright: he rode a tricycle around his office from time to time; he appointed Frank Zappa, whom Havel loved, to be the minister of foreign culture.

During the late 90s, when I was teaching high school theater, I found a copy of his play Largo desolato, in our department's play library. It blew me away and I decided then and there that I would direct it some day. That opportunity came only a few years later, with the now defunct dos chicas theater commune in Houston, and it took on special significance for me in that the tale of the dissident writer who is driven to anxiety-induced isolation from his friends and family by his government's constant harassment matched my own sense of social isolation that had been waxing during my teaching tenure.

In short, Havel was a great playwright who personally affected me, and I mourn his passing, if only because I love his work. But he was also the real deal. He always said he didn't care for politics, but his role as an artist in an oppressive country gave him no option: he had to create, and this necessarily pitted him against the powers-that-be; increasingly, his plays became political simply because his art reflected his life. And, in the end, he became leader of the nation that had imprisoned him multiple times. Really, people who don't crave power are the best leaders. They lead because it is their civic duty, and for no other reason.

Farewell, Vaclav Havel.

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2011-12-18T00:43:00.002-06:00

The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq marks the end America’s great expectations

From the Washington Post, historian, West Point grad, and a Vietnam veteran who retired with the rank of colonel, Andrew Bacevich, on the meaning of the Iraq withdrawal:

Launched in 2003 amid assurances of a rapid victory, the war is ending nearly nine years later with the United States settling for considerably less. Undertaken to demonstrate our supremacy, the war has instead revealed the stark limits of American power. It has laid waste to the post-Cold War era of great expectations once thought to define the future.

And

Back in 1945, the United States had accrued vast stores of moral and political capital. Thanks to Iraq, those stores are now all but depleted.

After Iraq, the future no longer bears the label “Made in the USA.” In places such as China, alternatives to liberal democracy stubbornly persist and show no signs of flagging. Where demands for democracy sound the loudest — as in the Arab world — the outcome may not favor liberal values. Across Asia, Africa and Latin America, the American model, today damaged and more than slightly tarnished, is only one among several.

Confidence that globalization will (or should) define the economic future has taken a nose dive. While we’ve been making war, rising economic powers have been making hay, frequently at American expense. At home, meanwhile, deference to the market has produced corruption, recklessness and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Furthermore, even if globalization works for the some, it’s by no means certain that it works for the many — a point to which Occupy Wall Street protesters insist on calling attention and one that political leaders ignore at their peril.

Only in the realm of military power has American dominance remained unquestioned, as politicians and generals constantly assert. Yet after years of fighting in Iraq, and with the Afghan war and other “overseas contingency operations” continuing, the value of that claim is fading. No doubt U.S. forces have matchless combat capabilities. Yet the sad fact is that they cannot be relied upon to win. Merely avoiding defeat has become a staggeringly expensive proposition.

More here.

I've been following Bacevich for a couple of years now, and, as tickled as I am that he, a conservative, comes to many of the same conclusions I reach as a liberal, what's important about his writing is that he has one of the more compelling arguments out there right now about the state of our nation.

In brief, Bacevich's overall argument, in his books and essays, asserts that post Cold War triumphalism allowed capitalism to run wild, morphing what Bacevich calls the "production economy," which made the US economically powerful for decades, into a "consumption economy," which is all about credit and financial maneuvering: this transition has, in effect, hollowed out our domestic economic infrastructure, dissolving jobs and prosperity alike for most of the nation, while enriching the connected few. Meanwhile, vague fears that America is no longer relevant on the world stage have prompted the ruling class to look to the still strong military as a substitute for our former economic might.

The meaning of Iraq is that the military is not a substitute for economic might. Indeed, trillions of dollars later, such aggressive adventures are the exact opposite of a substitute for economic might.

So America is an empire in steep decline. The only real question for our future is how we're going to handle it. Will we admit our situation and intelligently plan for a soft landing that puts us as a nation in the best position possible given the circumstances? Or will we continue to delude ourselves that we're the greatest nation ever, fucking ourselves over, again and again, trying to prove it? There's a lot more than dignity on the line here.

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2011-12-16T13:52:00.000-06:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy

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

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2011-12-16T01:33:00.002-06:00

'Dismal' prospects: 1 in 2 Americans are now poor or low income

From MSNBC courtesy of Eschaton:

Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.

The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."

More here.

This is worth repeating: "prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal." Now go back to the excerpt's first paragraph and note that the poor and near poor now comprise half the country. Half the fucking country has "dismal" prospects. Because they are poor. Meanwhile, politicians from both parties wrangle about how to dismantle the social safety net.

A few days ago, the New York Times' Paul Krugman decided that we should just straight up call this a depression. Not quite as bad as the Great Depression--I mean, the unemployment rate hasn't hit twenty percent yet--but still pretty fucking bad. Indeed, this is a severe crisis. Half the country is in poverty or on the verge of it, with absolutely no prospects for improvement.

And conservatives dismiss the Occupy movement as a bunch of stupid hippies trying to reinvent the 60s.

Anybody, anybody, who argues that we should do nothing, or that the government should cut social spending, or that we should cut taxes on the rich, or that the way out of this is to give business whatever it wants, is an enemy of the United States. I don't give a fuck if they wave the stars and stripes like it was a big enormous penis; I don't give a fuck if they've served in Congress for twenty years, or fought in the Big One, or make the greatest apple pie ever. If you're opposed to helping the poor, you know, half the fucking country, you're the enemy.

And you'll end up like the French aristocracy did, circa 1793.

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2011-12-15T00:55:00.002-06:00

Rush Limbaugh's Ratings Have Fallen 30% In The Last Six Months

From Business Insider courtesy of Daily Kos:

With a lull in ratings since November, Rush Limbaugh had a 3.0 share of listeners for his radio time slot, which is a 33% slide from October and from last April, reports Crain's Business.

Meanwhile, The Sean Hannity Show was reported to be down 28% from its peak numbers in the fall.

More here.

This might mean nothing. On the other hand, it might also mean everything.

After all, it is impossible not to note that this ratings slide coincides with the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has altered favorably the mainstream news media's overall narrative regarding economics. That is, for the first time in decades, there is now out there in America a compelling and alternative story line that makes the standard right-wing version of reality problematic: "go out and get a job, you welfare mooching lazy parasites" just doesn't seem to bear the same gravity it used to have when we've got five unemployed people out there for every job opening, when we've got corporations and investment banks working elected officials for every dollar they can squeeze out of the crony capitalist system, and when the entire political establishment seems more intent on cutting essential services than it does on creating jobs. In short, what Hannity and Rush have to say, what they've always had to say, no longer has the appearance of addressing the nation's economic problems. And even their listeners are starting to notice.

At least, I think that's what's going on. It could just be a coincidence. Either way, it's a good thing.

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2011-12-14T01:27:00.002-06:00

Bigoted Conservative Fringe Group Pressures
Advertisers of Program Featuring Law-Abiding Muslims

From AlterNet:

How else to explain the fact that dozens of major companies promptly pulled their ads from TLC's innocuous new reality show All-American Muslim, thanks to an extremist Christian group's concern about its depiction of the titular citizens living normal lives in front of the lens?

Apparently episodes about Muslims in Dearborn, Mich., doing frothy things like planning weddings, sending their kids off to school, and occasionally facing discrimination was so offensive to the Florida Family Association (whose mission is to "educate people on what they can do to defend, protect, and promote traditional, biblical values") that this fringe group launched an energetic email campaign targeting advertisers. And according to a statement they gave the Washington Post, the campaign worked

And

The reason the FFA objected to the show? It didn't show any terrorists. Really: "The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish." In perhaps one of the most poorly worded press releases I've ever encountered, the group continues, "Many situations were profiled in the show from a Muslim-tolerant perspective while avoiding the perspective that would have created Muslim conflict, thereby contradicting The Learning Channel’s agenda to inaccurately portray Muslims in America." Umm, what? With fail-proof logic like this, it's obvious why dozens of advertisers agreed to pull their advertising — not.

And

Now, after all, a politician is threatening a Lowe's boycott, 13,000 Facebook comments on the company's psuedo-apology, and most declaring it to be bigoted, while a new, fast-growing online petition at Signon.org is directed at the CEOs of all the companies named by FFA. At some point, Lowe's may have to backtrack even further to avoid really having a bad brand.

More here.

Okay, this is going pretty well, I think.

On the one hand, I don't really see this so much as a free speech issue as it is an activism issue. I mean, there is, indeed, free speech on the line here, but the speech that concerns me is what's coming from these right-wing activists and the left-wing backlash they've created by opposing this reality show. That is, television is big business, not a platform from which concerned citizens pontificate about important issues: TLC's All American Muslim is simply a vehicle by which the cable network's owners make a whole lot of money.

Sure, it disturbs me a bit that these Christian bigots are pressuring the show's advertisers in this way--while I don't at all care for reality television, I certainly approve of portraying American Muslims as regular, ordinary people who are not terrorists, which is, in fact, what the vast, vast majority of American Muslims are, regular, ordinary people who are not terrorists. But there is nothing sacred about business ventures that kinda sorta appear to be like "free speech." So I don't like FFA's activism, but they're totally free to do it.

I mean, remember the whole Imus "nappy headed ho" controversy? Some of his defenders cried "censorship" when the shit hit the fan and he was suspended for a few weeks, but it was never about censorship. It was, from the very beginning, a coldly calculated business decision to take him off the air. For his network controllers, it was all about the money, and how the negative public reaction to his on-air racism might cut into the bottom line. In short, the entertainment industry doesn't give a shit about free speech; they give a shit about money, which is the only thing that gets them to do what you want.

Okay, they care about the government, too, but that's not what's going on here.

The bottom line for me is that even though I don't like it when conservative groups gather and shoot what Noam Chomsky has called "flak" at entertainment companies, I fucking love it when liberal groups do the same thing. And I don't want citizens to lose the ability to affect and alter the programming we endure simply because it seems to be a free speech issue. The proper way to respond when conservatives pull shit like this is actually what's happening right now: fight flak with flak.

Lowe's is in a real pickle at the moment. In order to escape a potential boycott from the American Jesus set, they've withdrawn advertising from All American Muslim, and that very act has made very real the potential for a boycott from Americans who support pluralism and religious tolerance. And I think the other companies that have done the same thing may very well be hit by liberal activism, too. In the end, I think the good guys will win this.

And that's democracy.

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2011-12-13T00:12:00.002-06:00

Film Tha Police

From Hullabaloo:

There has been a nationwide move to restrict the people's right to film the authorities in the course of their duties and I would expect there to be much more of that as the culture of dissent explodes across the country.

In one of the most pointed opinions yet, the U.S. First Circuit ruled unanimously against the police in one of these cases:

And

"Naturally, the police officers moved to dismiss on the basis of qualified immunity, but Judge Young was having none of that, denying the motion from the bench and ruling that 'in the First Circuit . . . this First Amendment right publicly to record the activities of police officers on public business is established.' The police officers then appealed to the First Circuit, but they have now struck out on appeal as well, with the First Circuit ruling that 'Glik was exercising clearly-established First Amendment rights in filming the officers in a public space, and that his clearly-established Fourth Amendment rights were violated by his arrest without probable cause.'"

More here.

I've written on this topic fairly recently, about how extraordinarily important it is that we "watch the watchers," as it were, and compared the need for doing so to the reasons that the founders adopted the second amendment. That is, our founding fathers believed so strongly in counterbalancing government power with an armed citizenry that they made the ability to keep and bear arms a foundational right, on par with freedom of speech and freedom of worship; recording video of the police while they work fulfills essentially the same function as an armed citizenry.

What I didn't realize the last time I visited this topic is that there is, apparently, an abundance of case law that makes recording public police actions an activity protected as free speech under the first amendment. So perhaps my call for "civil disobedience" in my last post was premature. If recording the cops falls under the first amendment, any and all laws and ordinances against it are unconstitutional from the get-go. I mean, that doesn't stop states and municipalities from passing anti-recording laws, and you may need to get an ACLU lawyer or something to point out to asshole prosecutors and cops that they're breaking the law by putting you on trial, but, in the end, you're rock solid when you shoot video of the police.

Really, in addition to being a civil right, filming the police is your civic responsibility. Checks and balances, and all that.

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2011-12-12T00:00:00.003-06:00

NO POST TONIGHT...

...because an audition for tomorrow dropped into my lap earlier today. So I'm prepping tonight. Here's a little something to tide you over, though, the Beatles' Christmas recording, originally released only to members of their fan club, for 1968. It's fun and weird:

Wish me luck!

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2011-12-11T01:00:00.002-06:00

Bailout Total: $29.616 Trillion Dollars

From the Big Picture courtesy of Eschaton:

The researchers took all of the individual transactions across all facilities created to deal with the crisis, to figure out how much the Fed committed as a response to the crisis. This includes direct lending, asset purchases and all other assistance. (It does not include indirect costs such as rising price of goods due to inflation, weak dollar, etc.)

The net total? As of November 10, 2011, it was $29,616.4 billion dollars — (or 29 and a half trillion, if you prefer that nomenclature). Three facilities—CBLS, PDCF, and TAF— are responsible for the lion’s share — 71.1% of all Federal Reserve assistance ($22,826.8 billion).

And

The amount of overnight lending reflects how broken our financial system really is. A well capitalized, moderately leverage system does not require this massive liquidity from a central bank — interbank lending should be sufficient. What the data reveals is that the financial sector remains dangerously under-capitalized and overleveraged.

More here.

Let's put this massive number in perspective: the US debt, that is, the amount of money owed by the federal government, is only fifteen trillion dollars. To be fair, my understanding is that most of this bailout money is considered to be loans, which would mean that it's not counted as part of the debt, which I suppose is obvious, given that the bailout money is nearly twice what the US government owes. But just because it's not on the official ledger in red ink doesn't mean it's not a big fucking deal.

Some questions.

How the fuck are the banks going to pay back all this money? I mean, it really does sound like the only thing holding the banking system together is a veritable mountain range of government cash. Indeed, it sounds as though the banking system essentially is government money. So the banks have nothing except government money with which to do business. Is it even possible to ever make enough on loans and investments to pay back the principle? How long will it take? Decades? And if the banking system is, in fact, all government money, why the hell doesn't the government just take all these banks into receivership, fire all the crooked assholes who got us into this mess, and start making very low cost loans to individuals and businesses in order to jump start demand?

It is now clear that the financial crisis of 2007 was far, far worse than anybody was letting on at the time, and at the time it looked pretty fucking bad. And now the banks have tied up an amount of money worth twice the national debt in their system, a rather significant percentage of the GDP, and all those dollars don't appear to be doing a damned thing to get the economy going again--of course, executive bonuses continue to be big, big, big.

This is just too fucked up for me to even really comprehend. Politicians quibble about how to cut Social Security and Medicare while the bankers sit on twice the national debt, partying down on Wall Street like it was 1929. Can it really be this bad?

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2011-12-09T14:59:00.000-06:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Dash

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

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2011-12-09T00:44:00.002-06:00

FAREWELL HARRY MORGAN

From the Washington Post:

On the small screen, Mr. Morgan was best remembered for “M*A*S*H,” a long-running sitcom set during the Korean War, and for which he won an Emmy in 1980 as Col. Potter, a crusty cavalry veteran.

In the part, he took a seen-it-all approach to his aide, Cpl. Maxwell Q. Klinger, who wore women’s clothes in his quest for a discharge for psychological unfitness. “Soldiers, I’ve seen every dodge in the book,” Potter tells Klinger in one episode. “We had a man who pretended he was a mare — carried a colt around in his arms. Another thought he was a daisy and insisted on being watered every day. Get out of that frou-frou and back into uniform, soldier.”

And

As a hobby, he found work with Washington theater troupes and by 1937 was part of the Group Theatre in New York, which included Elia Kazan, John Garfield and Karl Malden. With that company, he appeared several times on Broadway in minor parts, notably in two Clifford Odets plays, “Golden Boy” and “Night Music,” as well as Irwin Shaw’s “The Gentle People” and Robert Ardrey’s “Thunder Rock.”

More here.

In addition to being a really fabulous character actor who was all over the place when I was a kid, Morgan's biggest role was, of course, as Colonel Harry Potter on M*A*S*H. Even though the show was ostensibly set during the Korean War, pretty much everybody understood that the whole thing was about Vietnam. And it was just about as anti-war as anything I've ever seen on television. It was totally obvious that Morgan was fully on board with the program's political sentiments. I mean, you could tell just from how he played the role--for that matter, it was obvious that the entire cast fully supported what the show was about; this was important work, and they all knew it.

For his M*A*S*H work alone, Morgan gets my respect and reverence as a practitioner of Real Art, but I had no idea until I read the above linked obituary that he started out with the Group Theater. And lots of those guys were communists. That is, Morgan came out of a politically radical scene, and no doubt carried some of those politics with him for the rest of his life. He really was the real deal.

Farewell, Harry Morgan.

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2011-12-08T04:01:00.002-06:00

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

...Dr. McCoy, Captain Kirk, and Mr. Spock!

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2011-12-07T00:25:00.002-06:00

The Muppets Are Communist, Fox Business Network Says

From the Huffington Post:

Last week, on the network's "Follow the Money" program, host Eric Bolling went McCarthy on the new, Disney-released film, "The Muppets," insisting that its storyline featuring an evil oil baron made it the latest example of Hollywood's so-called liberal agenda.

Bolling, who took issue with the baron's name, Tex Richman, was joined by Dan Gainor of the conservative Media Research Center, who was uninhibited with his criticism.

"It's amazing how far the left will go just to manipulate your kids, to convince them, give the anti-corporate message," he said.

"They've been doing it for decades. Hollywood, the left, the media, they hate the oil industry," Gainor continued. "They hate corporate America. And so you'll see all these movies attacking it, whether it was 'Cars 2,' which was another kids' movie, the George Clooney movie 'Syriana,' 'There Will Be Blood,' all these movies attacking the oil industry, none of them reminding people what oil means for most people: fuel to light a hospital, heat your home, fuel an ambulance to get you to the hospital if you need that. And they don't want to tell that story."

More here, with video.

Oh god, where do I even start with this?

It's tempting to put this in the same category with the gay-baiting of Tinky Winky, or the accusation that Mighty Mouse snorted cocaine during his 80s revival. I mean, this Muppet thing is easily as absurd. But there's a bit more going on here than with the standard psychotic fundamentalist penchant for seeing Satan in the shadows.

For starters, Hollywood is not anti-corporate or anti-business. Hollywood is corporate. Hollywood is business. And it will do anything it can to make a whole lot of money. If that means bashing capitalism, fine. If it means glorifying capitalism, that's fine, too. Just as long as it makes a whole lot of money. So to assert that Hollywood consciously pushes any sort of anti-business agenda at all is ludicrous. They're just trying to make money, and, to be fair, I have my own problems with that, but from a leftist perspective. The long and short is that it is impossible for Hollywood to be anti-business.

But wait, there's more!

The way these Fox guys spin it, if you're going to criticize negatively the oil industry in a movie, you also have to present the other side, the pro-oil side, as though Muppet movies were trying to adhere to some journalistic standard. Of course, that's fucking stupid. Muppet movies aren't CNN or ABC News projects; they're entertainment vehicles. But getting outside the movie business and into general argumentation, the whole notion of having to include praise with your criticism is just patronizing bullshit: why the fuck should I make your arguments for you?

I'm reminded of a discussion thread for a post I made here at Real Art a few years ago about Vidor, Texas. In it, I pointed out Vidor's longstanding Klan presence, and a few commenters took great issue with my characterization of the town's problems with racism. It got to the point that I was being strongly urged to point out that racism exists everywhere and that not everybody in Vidor is a racist. Finally, I was, like, must I always dilute my arguments in this way just because you're uncomfortable with your town's racism? Indeed, to point out that racism exists everywhere automatically takes the focus away from the point I was trying to make. And that's pretty fucking stupid.

Same thing with these Fox people discussing the new Muppet movie. They offer totally invented rules for argumentation that do nothing to make an argument better, and everything to make it confusing and less effective. If I'm trying to make people aware of how the oil industry is destroying the planet, I'm not going to go into a fifteen minute diversion to talk about how oil helps us all, and is actually a good thing. I mean, oil helps us all only because we've constructed the entire economy to depend on it, not because it's the magic substance that helps us all live better lives--we could just as easily base our economy on solar and wind.

And this Muppet movie apparently doesn't even go into any real issues concerning oil; all they did was make the bad guy an oil baron.

I guess the lesson here is that you should never accept conservative rules for debating: such rules are always stupid, and are created on the fly for the express purpose of undermining their opponents. But that's no real surprise. If the situation were reversed, with liberals condemning a movie with some sort of conservative message, conservatives would be insisting on entirely different rules, which, of course, would benefit their position, and only their position.

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2011-12-05T23:58:00.002-06:00

FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
FUCK THE BCS SYSTEM

From the AP via the Huffington Post, in an article published before the bowl games were announced:

Alabama Or Oklahoma State For No. 2 Spot?

A rematch between LSU and Alabama in the national title game seemed almost a foregone conclusion heading into conference championship weekend.

But with Alabama idle, Oklahoma State made one last, strong push by beating Oklahoma 44-10 to win the Big 12 title.

Now, instead of Sunday being a coronation there's another BCS controversy: Should Alabama get another shot at the only team that beat the Tide, even if that means an all-SEC title game and a matchup that will surely play far better in the South than anywhere else? Or should the Cowboys, who beat five teams ranked in the last BCS standings and whose only loss was a double-overtime upset on the road to Iowa State, get the nod?

More here.

Let me get this out of the way first. Texas lost, which was not unexpected, but still gets to go to the Holiday Bowl, where they've gone several times before, but with much better records. LSU won the SEC championship in grand style, and Tyrann Mathieu played so well that he made it into the Heisman final round. So, of course, LSU gets to play for the national championship now that they're 12-0 for the first time in team history.

That's where they'll play a team that they've already beaten, that lost its conference, as well as its division, and had fewer victories against top 25 teams than the BCS number three squad, whose only loss was immediately after the school suffered the devastating deaths of two well known basketball coaches.

In short, the BCS system is way fucked up.

It really ought to be Oklahoma State versus LSU. And it really should have been Texas versus Florida for the 2008 season national championship. I'm getting sick of this shit. I mean, a playoff system may very well have achieved the same result, a rematch between Alabama and the Tigers, but, at least, we would have known that the Crimson Tide earned its berth without a doubt. Indeed, a playoff system would shut everybody up, except, maybe, for the university athletics departments that make millions off the entire bowl game institution. After all, that's why we have this big fucking Frankenstein mess: none of the powers-that-be want to risk all that money coming in from all those December and January bowl games, and fuck the fans, and fuck the teams.

How much more football bullshit must we tolerate? How bad does it have to get before the outrage outweighs the greed? I have no idea. But this pisses me off.

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2011-12-05T00:21:00.002-06:00

AT LEAST ONE CONSERVATIVE GETS IT

From the New York Times, conservative boy-wonder Ross Douthat on Occupy Wall Street relative to institutional liberalism:

The Decadent Left

But there’s a sense in which the pipeline protesters and Midwestern unions are exactly the people that the O.W.S. crowd should not learn from, if they aspire to appeal to a wider audience than left-wing activists usually reach.

Yes, Occupy Wall Street was dreamed up in part by flakes and populated in part by fantasists. But to the extent that the movement briefly captured the public’s imagination, it was because it seemed to be doing what a decent left would exist to do: criticizing entrenched power, championing the common good and speaking for the many rather than the few.

The union rallies and the Keystone demonstrations, by contrast, represented what you might call the decadent left, which fights for narrow interest groups rather than for the public as a whole.

More here.

Setting aside for the moment such catty barbs as "flakes" and "fantasists," and observing that blocking the Keystone pipeline and crusading for worker rights does, in fact, speak for the many, right-wing Douthat makes an extraordinarily good point: the decades old liberal penchant for chasing single issues within an institutional framework has left liberalism, as a big tent, addressing the big questions, to atrophy utterly.

I remember arguing with a liberal friend years ago about how I had voted for Nader. I told him I was voting my conscience. He told me that the Greens were in no position to get anything done. I responded that the Democrats weren't, either, that they were all about rearguard action, defending (poorly) liberal victories from long ago, while allowing liberalism itself to be chipped away incrementally--in effect, I argued, the Democrats were doing less than nothing in that they had ceded the overall narrative to the conservatives, which is why dramatic change, however hopeless it seemed to be, is the only hope we have. He was unconvinced. The only liberal show in town, he thought, was the Democratic Party, so we might as well throw our lot in with them, instead of some lefty upstarts who had no hope of getting any legislation passed, ever.

OWS has shown a third way. Fuck the liberal institutions. Fuck the Democratic Party. Fuck the political system. Fuck legislation. Fuck elective office. Instead, change the rules of the game. Change the way people think. Change what people expect from the government. Redefine the conflict. Show the true oppressors in all their sordid opulent decadent glory. Change the whole fucking culture. Once that happens, once we pass a certain as yet unknown threshold, legislation becomes just a formality, a ratification of what the people already want.

Politics, as practiced by the Democrats, have become an insider's game, something those other people over there do, but not us right here. OWS is about us right here. It's about the people. And it's very nice that even conservatives are starting to understand this.

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2011-12-03T22:52:00.002-06:00

Pat Robertson: What is mac and cheese, a black thing?

From the Houston Chronicle:

"A confused Robertson, who grew up in Lexington, Va., acted like he had never heard of the culinary dish, a popular American staple for generations and absent-mindedly singled out the meal as a food reserved for blacks. Smithsonian Magazine notes that Kraft Foods first introduced its boxed macaroni and cheese in 1937.

'It is a black thing, Pat!' exclaimed Watts. 'Listen! And you guys! The world needs to get on board with macaroni and cheese. Seriously, I just– Christmas and Thanksgiving, we have to have macaroni and cheese and it just trips me out that you just don’t.'"

Video here.

It's tempting to just shrug this off as Robertson slipping into senile dementia, or stupid Southern racialist thinking, something that's just about the fundamentalist preacher and one time GOP presidential contender as an individual. This bizarre gaffe, however, fits into a much wider pattern of total conservative cluelessness about not only racial issues, but all kinds of stuff. I mean, we've got Rick Perry's racist-named hunting lodge out in West Texas. We've got Herman Cain's "Uz-becki-becki-beckistan." We've got Newt Gingrich wanting to turn poor children into sub-minimum wage janitors. Sarah Palin thinking that Alaska's proximity to the Bering Strait makes her an expert on diplomacy. And, of course, there's the global warming denial. And creationism.

I mean, it really looks like conservatives are just as droolingly stupid as people can get. But these people are also capable of mounting very successful propaganda campaigns and winning elective office. They're also pretty good at business. No, they're not stupid. So what gives?

Frankly, I don't know. I mean, obviously, it's some kind of self-imposed ignorance on some subjects but not others, and it's clear that a lot of this bullshit has something to do with how certain facts render key conservative beliefs inoperative--for instance, the financial implosion of 2007 proves beyond a doubt that markets are not self-regulating; acceptance of man made global warming means embracing governmental regulation of business. But not all right-wing cluelessness is about protecting foundational assumptions about the way the world works. I mean, a lot of it appears to be just straight-up ignorance.

At any rate, it seems that conservatives see ignorance as some sort of strength. Maybe it has to do with this nation's traditional anti-intellectualism--book smarts aren't too helpful out on the frontier when you need to kill Indians and harvest the crop. I don't know. It's all very maddening.

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2011-12-02T14:54:00.002-06:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Reine

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

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2011-12-02T01:22:00.002-06:00

The Lessons of Obamamania

From CounterPunch:

Obama’s capitulations are galling, and so is his milquetoast leadership style. But the real kicker is and always has been his austerity politics. In fairness, though, on that score, he is no worse than anyone else presently occupying the commanding heights, and probably better than many. The entire political class of Europe and North America is of a similar mind, and it would take a genius of Freud’s stature or greater to figure out why an intellectually bankrupt nineteenth century economic philosophy would have them all in its thrall. Obama deserves plenty of blame on this account, but so would anyone else likely to be in his position.

In any case, the Occupy movements broke the spell — for the more than 99% who are the victims of the system in place. If only for this, they deserve the unflinching gratitude of every (small-d) democrat. For too long, the 1% or less that owns our political parties has had the whole show run for their benefit alone. It took seemingly forever for the vast majority to take consciousness of how intolerable that situation had become. The Occupy movements made that happen.

As this awareness deepens and expands, new forms of struggle are bound to emerge, and they are unlikely to have much to do with ordinary electoral politics. For now and for the foreseeable future, the most elections can do is ratify changes that take place outside the electoral arena. Victorious candidates will not, and probably cannot, initiate changes except at the margins. Electoral outcomes can still be consequential; they do matter. But elections are not where the action now is. This is the lesson of the Occupy movements.

More here.

This was a lesson I learned when back when I was teaching: if you work within an institution, and you depend on your paycheck from that institution, you cannot change it.

Same with politics in the US. The problem is that American politics are controlled by vast concentrations of wealth; politicians utterly depend on those concentrations of wealth in order to succeed in their chosen career, politics. It is impossible for politicians in this current context to change the situation. They're in way too deep, so deep, in fact, that it totally colors their perception of the situation, the way they think about how the nation functions. It's actually far worse than loss of career or pay: in order to do the dirty filthy work of fundraising, of hitting up the wealthy and corporations for the millions in campaign donations needed to win elections, American politicians have internalized the values and worldview of the people who dole out the money. Most politicians, from both parties, are just fine with corporate control of the nation. To them, it's as American as apple pie.

So we simply cannot depend on our leaders to make the changes our nation desperately needs. We've got to create first an overall culture that demands change, that demands democracy, that demands economic justice, a culture that you can feel walking down the street, that is the topic of conversation at dinner parties and night clubs alike. We've got to make America shame the entire leadership class, the entire corporate sector. Once that happens, electoral change will simply be a formality.

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2011-12-01T00:41:00.002-06:00

Kentucky Church Votes to Ban Interracial Couples

From AlterNet:

Gulnare Freewill Baptist church of Pike County, Kentucky appears to have undergone a racist freak-out. According to the Kentucky Herald-Ledger, Stella Harville brought her black fiance, Ticha Chikuni, to the church in June. There, she sang while he played piano. Aww? Nope. On Sunday, in a 9-6 vote, church members decided to keep mixed couples out of most church activities. They did it “to promote greater unity among the church body,” because that makes a lot of sense.

More here.

I bet it was a Southern Baptist church. I mean, that's the denomination that was born for the express purpose of supporting slavery. Once there were Baptists. Then the Abolition Movement came along and some Baptists up North got involved. And then, suddenly, there were both Baptists and Southern Baptists. So, fuck you abolitionists.

To be fair, the Southern Baptist Convention apologized back in the 1990s for its historic stance on slavery, but like with the Mormons and polygamy, there continue to be die-hard dead-enders, and some even speculate that the Southern Baptists' sordid and intolerant past continues to have cultural reverberations lasting until this very day. How many Southern Baptists are also in the Tea Party? How many are birthers? How many think Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Socialist? I'm quite certain that the vast, vast, vast majority of Southern Baptists vote Republican.

For them, it's conservatism first, old school conservatism, and Jesus second. Anytime there's a contradiction between the two, they just interpret the Bible to make Jesus a Republican. Or a racist.

My mother was a wonderful woman, one of the few Southern Baptists I've known in my life who put Jesus first, and everything else second. But all her family was from Kentucky, and like I said, she was a Southern Baptist. From time to time, she would utter a bizarre thought that laid bare her cultural heritage. I once asked her what she thought of interracial marriage. "I just don't think that's how the Lord meant for it to be." Really, Mom? Then it should be in the Bible. What verse? What chapter? "I don't know, Ron. I'll have to look that up." By the same token, my father, who is from a long line of Houstonians, but embraced the Southern Baptists when he was my age, once told me that he almost threw up when he saw Kevin Costner kissing Whitney Houston in the otherwise forgettable film The Bodyguard. I didn't even try to engage him in discussion on this. What do you say? Really, Dad, you almost vomited because you saw a white man kissing a black woman?

We think this kind of bullshit is well behind us, but it's not. Indeed, and I say this often, the most lasting legacy of the Civil Rights era among whites is that it is now an insult to call somebody a racist. Never mind whether the statement is true, it's just that you'd better be ready for an argument, or a fight, if you point out that somebody is behaving in a racist way. I'd bet fifty dollars that the members of this Kentucky congregation who voted to ban interracial couples do not believe they are racist.

How do you fight racism when the racists strongly believe they're on your side and you're just being an asshole?

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2011-11-30T00:52:00.002-06:00

Austerity Is Bad for Us and No Fun

From Bloomberg courtesy of Hullabaloo, Rutgers history professor James Livingston on the disconnect between history and economic "conventional wisdom":

As British author John Lanchester explained, when the “jet engine of capitalism was harnessed to the oxcart of social justice” after World War II, the lives of ordinary people got better, and the “most admirable societies that the world has ever seen” were born. Everybody knows that “the prosperity of the few is to the ultimate benefit of the many.” To which I say, baloney.

Growth has happened precisely because net private investment has been declining since 1919 and because consumer expenditures have, meanwhile, been increasing. In theory, the Great Depression was a financial meltdown first caused, and then cured, by central bankers. In fact, the underlying cause of this disaster wasn’t a short-term credit contraction engineered by bankers. The underlying cause of the Great Depression was a fundamental shift of income shares away from wages and consumption to corporate profits, which produced a tidal wave of surplus capital that couldn’t be profitably invested in goods production -- and wasn’t invested in goods production.

In terms of classical, neoclassical, and supply side theory, this shift should have produced more investment and more jobs, but it didn’t. Paying attention to historical evidence allows us to debunk the myth of private investment and explain why the redistribution of income has become the condition of renewed, balanced growth. Doing so lets us see that public-sector incentives to private investment -- say, tax cuts on capital gains or corporate profits -- are not only unnecessary to drive economic growth; they also create tidal waves of surplus capital with no place to go except speculative bubbles that cause crises on the scale of the Great Depression and the recent catastrophe.

Robust, balanced growth requires a more equitable distribution of income that favors consumers over investors, with all that implies for public policy, social theory, and, yes, moral philosophy. But to see this last requirement clearly, we have to rid ourselves of the conventional wisdom on the heedless extravagance of consumer culture.

Why do we accept the commonsense notion of how growth happens? The short answer is that the mainstream theories of prominent economists and the conventional wisdom of serious journalists constantly reinforce the myth. But the culprits are not just the supply-side insurgents who stormed the Keynesian citadel in the 1970s, then planted their flag inside the Beltway. The Democratic Party that reinvented itself in the 1990s now shares the same assumptions that guide the Republican Party -- the same assumptions that let the liberal New York Times scare its poll respondents off taxing the wealthy.

More here.

A few observations:

1. Karl Marx asserted as far back as the mid 19th century that one of capitalism's problems, among many, is that it has a tendency to squeeze profits so much that it ultimately robs itself of any real markets in which to do business. That is, there is a certain lower threshold in wages below which capitalism loses its ability to function on a large scale. So if capitalism, in its totality, gets too greedy, it destroys itself. That's one problem, among many, with the lopsided distribution of wealth with which we are now dealing.

2. I've written at great length here at Real Art about how utterly fucked up the public discourse is on economics, and a great deal of that is because politicians and pundits alike don't really know much about the field and rely heavily on "conventional wisdom." But I've also written, to a lesser extent, about how economics itself is a bit fucked up, too. That is, economics as a field of academic study. In brief, people in the profession like to think that the field is a science, like chemistry or physics, but it's not. I mean, it approaches the topic in a scientific way, but relies on so many assumptions for the construction of its models, assumptions which are often flawed, that there's just no way you can compare economics favorably to any of the hard sciences. Don't get me wrong: economics does, indeed, possess a great deal of value as a field of study. But it's faulty in numerous ways. And the herd like behavior of economists described above is only one of those ways.

3. It cannot be understated how extraordinarily significant it is that the Democrats embraced the neoliberal point of view back in the 90s. That's when they became virtual Republicans on everything but the so-called social issues. That actual Republicans twist themselves in knots concocting differences between the two parties on economic issues these days is a source of great amusement, but irrelevant in the grand scheme: the economic affairs of our nation are now, and have been for some years, governed by false conservative economic principles. To call Obama a "socialist" is to make Marx turn in his grave.

4. I have to think deeply about this writer's assertion that heavy consumption is the only way to make the economy function. I mean, it makes sense, millions of Americans buying toothpaste and flat screen TVs. But, as longtime Real Art readers already know, I'm very troubled by the materialism and its component selfish values that necessarily accompany consumerism. How can we consume lots of stuff while at the same time pursuing higher humanistic values?

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2011-11-29T00:04:00.002-06:00

Miley Cyrus Releases Song, Video in Support of Occupy Wall Street

From AlterNet:

To pre-empt any criticism: Miley Cyrus may be a teen star who got her start with corpo megalith Disney, but that's precisely why she's possibly the music world's most valuable Occupy Wall Street ally to emerge yet. The 19-year-old has loads (millions!) of young fans whose parents are Red State, Christian, working class or poor, who may be OWS holdouts but who would be served well by the movement. She's incredibly influential for young girls (the song's opening rap seems directed at them), and she's making protest seem cool (which it is). Maybe this song, "It's A Liberty Walk," isn't Bob Dylan, but that's not the point: within the pop landscape, her incorporation of dubstep and techno leanings are right on point, plus the chorus is awesomely singable. Also, if she were seriously trying to co-opt the movement, would she release a video with so many images of it—and of the cops getting brutal on protesters?

Click here to watch the video.

The 2006 documentary film The US vs John Lennon makes a very compelling argument that the reason he was deported in the early 70s is that he was just on the verge of taking big time what had been a fairly low key and artsy peace project managed by him and Yoko.

Indeed, Lennon had been making friends with 60s radicals and activists who had been showing him the ropes, and who were also very optimistic that he would join the anti-war movement for real instead of just kind of cheering from the sidelines. As he prepared to tour the United States, as not only a rock music performer, but also as a radical peace activist, presenting guests such as Abbie Hoffman and others to middle American audiences, President Nixon's Immigration and Naturalization Service presented him with a deportation order, which was ostensibly based on a trumped up pot charge from years earlier in London, but was probably more about Nixon's abject terror that the cute moptop Beatle who everyone loved was about to go into politics. Lennon had to cancel the tour and go to court. He eventually won, and got his green card. But by that time, the Vietnam War was over, John had a son, and he was tired of public life--he went into semi-retirement, and we never got to see just how influential a beloved pop star might be if he took politics really seriously.

Miley Cyrus is, of course, not John Lennon, and it hasn't been the early 70s for forty years. But, thanks to her run as Hanna Montana on the Disney Channel, she has a very similar fan base, clean cut middle American kids who are in the process of coming of age, of defining their identities, of figuring out where they stand on the political spectrum. Her joining the movement may not be as significant as John Lennon doing so, but it is quite significant, nonetheless.

Occupy Wall Street looks like it's going to be around for a while. And it's probably going to grow in ways nobody could have ever expected.

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2011-11-28T00:01:00.003-06:00

FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
TEXAS, LSU: WEEKEND OF GLORY!

From the AP via ESPN:

Justin Tucker lifts Texas by Texas A&M in likely end of rivalry

Texas spoiled Texas A&M's going away party.

Justin Tucker kicked a 40-yard field goal as time expired to give the Longhorns a 27-25 victory over Texas A&M on Thursday night in the likely end of a more than century-old rivalry.

Texas A&M's last Big 12 game and the 118th meeting between the bitter rivals before the Aggies depart for the Southeastern Conference next season was a thriller befitting one of college football's oldest and most storied matchups.

"Sports can be really cruel," Texas coach Mack Brown said. "I think it was a time tonight where both teams deserved to win."

The Aggies were down 24-19 before Ryan Tannehill found Jeff Fuller on a 16-yard touchdown pass with 1:48 remaining. But the 2-point conversion failed, leaving A&M (6-6, 4-5 Big 12) ahead 25-24.

The Longhorns' winning drive was helped by a 15-yard personal foul penalty and a 25-yard run by quarterback Case McCoy.

More here.

Again from the AP via ESPN:

No. 1 LSU pulls away from No. 3 Arkansas in fourth quarter

Tyrann Mathieu answered the call for a game-turning play when LSU needed one most, and the top-ranked Tigers piled on from there.

Mathieu returned a punt 92 yards for a game-tying score and the Tigers punished third-ranked Arkansas with 286 yards rushing, wiping out a 14-point deficit with a 41-17 win Friday that secured a spot in the SEC championship.

"I could hear my teammates in my ear saying, 'Man, we need you to go make a play,'" Mathieu said. "I was able to help the momentum really go in our favor.

More here.

Oh god, what a great weekend for football.

The Texas game was, of course, something of a nail-biter, especially toward the end, after that Aggie touchdown. But then, there was a little under two minutes left on the clock, which constitutes the circumstances from which legends are made. And, my god, that Case McCoy run, right when we needed it. Amazing, just amazing. I mean, the defense actually won this for us, what with the offense's running corps being decimated with injuries: given that situation, it is amazing, indeed, that we were able to move the ball at all. But we did when we needed to, and the defense, which has turned into a real quality act, kept us in it so we could.

And we beat them at Kyle Field, which to the Aggies is kind of like nailing a nun, or a priest, right inside a cathedral. Winning in College Station is always the sweetest victory of all. And I've read that the Aggies took this really hard, crying in the locker room and all that, which makes beating them even sweeter. Nothing like the delicious taste of sheep-fuckers' tears. I'll be remembering this game for a long, long time.

Also, I had a lot of fun talking shit about the game on facebook, while it was in progress. I quoted the announcers. Stuff like "A&M is melting down right before our eyes!" I taunted the Aggies. Given all my old high school acquaintances with whom I am facebook friends, some of whom went to Texas, and some of whom went to A&M, it was a really nice trash-talk fest. It is especially good that we won in that I didn't end up having to remove my foot from my mouth. I could proudly leave it there while hopping around doing the hook 'em sign. Ha! We won!

And the next day, LSU continued its take-no-prisoners campaign through the SEC. Sluggish start, but Arkansas did come into the game as the number three team in the land, and they have been something of a thorn in the Tigers' side these last four or five seasons. So big fuck that the Razorbacks scored a couple of touchdowns before LSU got it going. In the end, they kicked ass. As usual.

And Mathieu may very well be the best college football player I've ever seen. Playing on what may be the best college football team I've ever seen. So Georgia's next, which ought to be pretty easy, and then...you know, we already beat 'Bama, and I understand that they're probably going to the national championship game in New Orleans because they're the number two team and all, but...we already beat them. A rematch is yet another reason why I hate the BCS system.

Are we ever going to do playoffs?

Texas A&M quarterback Ryan Tannehill (17) is tackled by Texas linebacker
Keenan Robinson (1) and cornerback Carrington Byndom (23) during the first
quarter of an NCAA college football game at Kyle Field Thursday, Nov. 24, 2011,
in College Station. Photo: Houston Chronicle, Brett Coomer

LSU's Tyrann Mathieu (7) returns a punt for a 92-yard for a touchdown during
the second quarter of an NCAA college football game against Arkansas in Baton
Rouge, La., Friday, Nov. 25, 2011. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

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2011-11-27T03:22:00.003-06:00

CONSUMERISM=MATERIALISM=NARCISSISM=INTENSE SELFISHNESS

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Alleged LA-area pepper-spraying shopper surrenders

The attack took place about 10:20 p.m. Thursday shortly after doors opened for the sale. The store had brought out a crate of discounted Xbox video game players, and a crowd had formed to wait for the unwrapping. Valle says the woman began spraying people in order to get an advantage.

The incident was among those nationwide in which violence marred the traditional kickoff to the holiday shopping season.

In the most serious case, a robber shot a shopper who refused to give up his purchases outside a San Leandro, Calif., Walmart store, leaving the victim hospitalized in critical but stable condition.

Police in San Leandro, about 15 miles east of San Francisco, said the victim and his family were walking to their car around 1:45 a.m. Friday when they were confronted by a group of men who demanded their shopping items. When the family refused, a fight broke out, and one of the robbers pulled a gun and shot the man, said Sgt. Mike Sobek.

Meanwhile, police in suburban Phoenix came under fire when a video was posted online showing a 54-year-old grandfather on the floor of a Walmart store with a bloody face, after police said he was subdued Thursday night trying to shoplift during a chaotic rush for discounted video games.

The video, posted on YouTube, shows Jerald Allen Newman unconscious and bloodied as outraged customers yell expletives and say "that's police brutality" and "he wasn't doing anything."

More here.

I've written about exactly these kinds of Yuletide events here and there for the last few years, not because it's a pet topic or anything like that, but rather because it's happening with increasing frequency. Violence in pursuit of Christmas presents. This is how we now celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. Okay, yeah yeah, I know. This isn't how "we" celebrate. This is a relative few individuals. But these reports don't mention all the nastiness out there that comes up short of violence, don't mention the sour angry attitudes produced by the whole cattle herding experience of modern Christmas shopping, don't mention the 24/7 advertising bombardment that affects children and adults alike. In short, all that's newsworthy, apparently, is when the whole sick and depraved pile of cultural Christmas shit spews over into something truly awful--the cultural shit pile itself is ignored.

And what do the worshipers of the man whose name is half the holiday have to say about all this? Well, I don't really know; they're too busy confusing retailers' unwillingness to lose non-Christian business, by saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," with a bizarre and imaginary liberal plot to destroy the happiness of Dr. Seuss characters. To be fair, I'm sure that a lot of Christians out there have problems with the rampant consumerism that is now virtually synonymous with the word "Christmas," but the loudest voices are the psychotic fundamentalists, and they think Jesus is totally cool with buying stupid shit.

Listen to me, I sound like Linus. But that's a good point, too. A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired in 1965, and the entire plot revolves around Charlie Brown's disgust with the commercialization of the holiday, and his search for an authentic sense of Christmas. That was nearly a half century ago. And things have become much, much worse than they were back then.

Sigh.

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2011-11-25T14:43:00.003-06:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Pumpkin Roi

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

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2011-11-24T22:28:00.002-06:00

Black Friday

From Wikipedia:

Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. On this day, most major retailers open extremely early, often at 4 a.m., or earlier, and offer promotional sales to kick off the shopping season, similar to Boxing Day sales in many British Commonwealth countries. Black Friday is not actually a holiday, but most non-retail employers give their employees the day off, increasing the number of potential shoppers. It has routinely been the busiest shopping day of the year since 2005, although news reports, which at that time were inaccurate, have described it as the busiest shopping day of the year for a much longer period of time.

More here.

Black Friday is also very strong evidence of the fact that America has become both narcissistic and hyper-materialistic. I mean, I hope that's changing, you know, what with all the economic troubles and Occupy Wall Street. But I assume that many Americans continue to fall prey to the consumer-conditioning they have endured for many decades, believing that self-satisfaction and happiness can be obtained through the purchase of stupid shit they don't need or really even want. In other words, Black Friday is a day of sadness: America has become a vapid shallow nation, doing itself in with its own irresponsible behavior.

Personally, I greatly prefer this "Black Friday":

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2011-11-24T00:22:00.001-06:00

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

Sorry 'bout the popup, if you get it. Just click on through; this is classic shit.

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2011-11-23T01:06:00.002-06:00

Fox, WSJ Still Falsely Claiming Lower Taxes Generate More Revenue

From Media Matters for America:

EPI: Bush Tax Cuts "Added $2.6 Trillion To The Public Debt Over 2001-10." In a September 26 article, Andrew Fieldhouse of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) wrote:

A spending-cuts-only approach is regressive in that it forces the brunt of deficit reduction on the backs of poor and working families while ignoring a prime culprit of the budget deficit: the expensive, ineffective, and unfair Bush-era tax cuts. These top-heavy tax cuts added $2.6 trillion to the public debt over 2001-10 and will add $3.8 trillion to deficits over the next decade if fully continued. [EPI, 9/26/11]

Bartlett: Revenue Has Been Historically Low Because "Taxes Were Cut In 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2006." In a July 26 New York Times blog post, Bruce Bartlett, former policy adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, wrote:

In a previous post, I noted that federal taxes as a share of gross domestic product were at their lowest level in generations. The Congressional Budget Office expects revenue to be just 14.8 percent of G.D.P. this year; the last year it was lower was 1950, when revenue amounted to 14.4 percent of G.D.P.

But revenue has been below 15 percent of G.D.P. since 2009, and the last time we had three years in a row when revenue as a share of G.D.P. was that low was 1941 to 1943.

Revenue has averaged 18 percent of G.D.P. since 1970 and a little more than that in the postwar era. At a similar stage in previous business cycles, two years past the trough, revenue was considerably higher: 18 percent of G.D.P. in 1977 after the 1973-75 recession; 17.3 percent of G.D.P. in 1984 after the 1981-82 recession, and 17.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1993 after the 1990-91 recession. Revenue was markedly lower, however, at this point after the 2001 recession and was just 16.2 percent of G.D.P. in 2003.

The reason, of course, is that taxes were cut in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2006.

[...]

According to a recent C.B.O. report, they reduced revenue by at least $2.9 trillion below what it otherwise would have been between 2001 and 2011. Slower-than-expected growth reduced revenue by another $3.5 trillion.[The New York Times, 7/26/11]

Krugman: After Reagan's 1981 Tax Cuts, "Revenues Are Permanently Reduced Relative To What They Would Otherwise Have Been." In a July 2010 post on his New York Times blog, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote that "the revenue track under Reagan looks a lot like the track under Bush: a drop in revenues, then a resumption of growth, but no return to the previous trend." He added, "This is exactly what you would expect to see if supply-side economics were just plain wrong: revenues are permanently reduced relative to what they would otherwise have been." [The New York Times, 7/15/10]

More here.

Then the article goes on to quote some five or six more economists who plainly state that tax cuts do not result in increased revenue. And, of course, tax cuts don't result in increased revenue. How could they? When you cut taxes, you're depriving the government of revenue, not increasing it. What's amazing isn't that the right wing would be so brazen to insist for decades that something so obviously false is, in fact, true. What's amazing is that they got so many people to believe it. My Dad, for one, and lots of other rank-and-file Republicans.

The idea is that when you cut taxes, people take that extra money and use it to stimulate the economy; they say this works best with cutting taxes for the rich because they supposedly invest their tax savings, which allows businesses to grow and hire more workers, who then pay taxes, and all this new economic activity supposedly results in even more income for the government simply because the power of tax cuts grows the economy, creating much more income to be taxed.

Except that, in the thirty years that conservatives have been pushing this claptrap, economists have been studying the actual data about what happens to the economy when the government cuts taxes, and what happens in the real world just doesn't match the theory. At all. I mean, no surprise, of course, because cutting taxes fucking deprives the government of income, not the reverse. But it's nice to have some real study on the topic. Apparently, what happens is that the rich simply stick the money into savings accounts where it earns them some interest, but doesn't expand the economy, doesn't create new jobs, doesn't grow businesses.

But when have facts ever had anything to do with Republicans? Okay, once upon a time, Republicans and facts had a sort of passing relationship, but that was long ago. Today, they're happy to live in their intellectually constructed fantasy world where cutting taxes is the solution to every economic problem that has ever existed--you know, sometimes I wonder what would happen if there weren't any taxes to cut; what would the GOP say then?

What really kills me about this is how the corporate media and Democrats don't just scoff at Republicans when they push this bullshit. So yeah, Republicans are lame, but perhaps the Democrats are worse, because they know better for sure, and do nothing to cut these guys off at their knees. I mean, really. The GOP is all tax cuts all the time and nothing else, and it's all based on a concept that is totally false, that tax cuts are good for the economy. If the Dems made a massive rhetorical push on this, made all their campaigns about how the Republicans are in shit up to their ears on the tax cut issue, maybe they'd see some headway.

But no. They're idiots, too.

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