Evangelicals See Declining Influence In U.S.

From the Religion News Service via the Huffington Post:

Randall Balmer, a historian of American evangelicals at Barnard College, said leaders of the religious right -- from the late Rev. Jerry Falwell to broadcaster Pat Robertson -- promoted a "cult of victimization among evangelicals" that may have worked at the voting booth but hurt them in the larger culture.

"I think there is some waning of cultural influence," he said, pointing to the politicizing of the movement as the reason for both greater visibility but also cultural decline.

"Like it or not, when you become politically active, you become associated with the politicians you support," Balmer said, alluding to many evangelicals' embrace of the GOP. "Once you begin to covet political power and influence, you lose the prophetic voice."

Researchers found that just 18 percent of U.S. Lausanne representatives surveyed said religious leaders should stay out of political issues, compared to 78 percent who said they should express their political views.

More here.

In ancient Rome, once the ruling elite had embraced Christianity, it was all over for the religion having any real social meaning. That is, for a given society, the moment it becomes socially, politically, and economically advantageous to become a Christian, any sort of sincerity associated Christianity becomes moot: people do it because there are great secular rewards for doing so, rewards that have absolutely nothing to do with spirituality, and everything to do with getting ahead. So the Church became corrupt, and has been so ever since.

Indeed, we've been past that threshold since the dawn of the republic. Politicians all have to pay lip service, at the very least, to Christian ideals and symbols whether they actually believe it or not. They do this eagerly because it helps them get into and gain office. And it's safe to say that, whatever they think is in their hearts, not a damned politician in Washington gives a shit about Jesus.

If they did, they'd actually be deeply concerned, as Jesus was, with people who are suffering. They'd sell all their possessions and give the money to the poor. They wouldn't wage war; rather, they'd be working their asses off to achieve world peace. Not a single one of our leaders even entertain such notions. Thus, not a single one of our leaders can rightfully call himself "Christian."

Christian evangelicals in recent decades, by attempting to gain cultural influence through the political process, have done nothing but render Christianity even more meaningless in terms of sincere spirituality. That is, by making Jesus more of a political object than he had been in the first two thirds of the twentieth century, the whole dynamic I described above has been heavily trumped up. Politics is about power. Religion is about spirituality. By combining the two, spirituality necessarily suffers. And it's looking like average ordinary Americans are starting to understand this.

And that's fine by me. I mean, I'm an agnostic, myself, but most of the values Jesus preaches about in the Gospels are principles I can get behind, albeit from my firmly secular point of view. If Americans really are starting to lose their taste for evangelical Christianity, it will probably mean that the religious right will play a much diminished role in the future, as far as politics goes.

Ideally, this leaves "love one another" open for sincere embrace. Without any political bullshit. Here's hoping.

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Stocks Of Socialized Countries Have Outperformed U.S. Since Reagan Era

From the Huffington Post:

That said, Kirkegaard also dismissed the traditional American capitalist contention that socialism is bad for market growth: "A lot of the finger-pointing we do at these countries is totally misleading. It's a myth."

Kirkegaard says that many socialized governments provide critical support for business growth, including first class infrastructure built by the public sector, retraining of workers and public education systems that result in better-prepared workforces, comparative to the US. "There are a lot of areas where the role of government is a benefit for the businesses in these countries."

"The idea that they are socialists and condemned to living in these bread bin-style housing complexes is illusional," he said. "It's ideological slander."

More here.

For me it all goes back to the day, maybe in 1993, that my economics of the cable industry class had a guest speaker from the local cable company: "any time the government gets involved in the economy it makes things worse," he told us all, very matter-of-factly. I didn't try to argue with him, but I remember thinking to myself, "Really? Any time? How about building roads? That's the government involving itself in the economy."

And there you have it. The cornerstone of conservative economic philosophy, that government intervention in the economy is always bad, is just plain wrong. I mean, my road building example above is generally an exception that most pro-capitalists will grant, but it's the exception that proves the rule. If building roads is good, isn't education good, too? Aren't poverty prevention, health care, housing, and a whole host of social programs that put people in a position to be able to be good workers, aren't these things good for the economy, too?

Of course, it depends on how you design and manage such programs, but apparently the Europeans have this all figured out. And we could, too, if we weren't mired in bullshit pro-capitalist propaganda that makes most Americans believe things that just aren't true.

If we lived in sane nation, I would expect such news to affect the public discourse in a decisive way. Sadly, our nation is not sane.

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Pew Research: Record Support For Afghanistan Troop Withdrawl

From the Huffington Post:

This latest result confirms the findings from four other recent national surveys, all of which indicate majority support for bringing some or all of the troops home. The numbers are bigger when pollsters allow options for returning "some" troops or "reducing" their number rather than implying a total drawdown. But majorities now support troop withdrawal, regardless of question phrasing:

•A CBS News poll in early June found nearly two-thirds of Americans (64 percent) want the number of troops in Afghanistan decreased, rather than increased (8 percent) or kept at the same level (22 percent).
•A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll from early June found even more who want to bring home all (39 percent) or some (35 percent) of the troops rather than keeping their number the same number deployed (18 percent) or send more (6 percent).
•An ABC News/Washington Post poll found nearly three quarters of adults, 73 percent, say the U.S. should withdraw "a substantial number of U.S. combat forces" from Afghanistan, while 23 percent say the troops should not be withdrawn.
•A Gallup poll in early May found a majority, 59 percent, agreeing that "the U.S. has accomplished its mission in Afghanistan and should bring its troops home," while only 39 percent chose the alternative, "the U.S. still has important work to do in Afghanistan and should maintain its troops there."

Both the Pew Research and CBS News polls, which have tracked these questions for two or more years, indicate a big jump in desire to withdraw U.S. forces since the killing of Osama bin Laden in early May. The Pew Research survey shows an eight-point jump over the last month (from 48 to 56 percent). The CBS News survey shows a 16-point jump (from 48 to 64 percent) since a survey conducted in the immediate aftermath of bin Laden's killing.

More here.

Yeah, I actually posted about that Washington Post poll back in March, and I've got the same question now I had then: why the fuck are we still there? I mean, I know why we're still there: it has nothing to do with democracy, which, if it did, would mean that we wouldn't be there anymore, and everything to do with rule by and for wealthy and powerful interests.

To be honest, I'm not quite sure what these special interests are actually gaining by our presence there, but I can speculate, of course. Certainly, the defense contractors want us there because it means lots of defense contracts. The oil industry wants us there because it means the US can directly influence politics in the Middle East, just because we've got a lot of guns and men on the ground. Global corporations want it because it shows that the US is keeping the world safe for capitalistic exploitation. And because the corporations like it, politicians like it, too. Indeed, Democrat honchos want us there because, in their pathetic minds, it means their dicks are as big as Republican dicks. Republicans want us there because their dicks are bigger than Democrat dicks--I mean, there are a few fractures showing now on this because Obama, a Democrat with a big dick, wants us there, but there is still a great deal of support from GOP leaders for fighting Muslims.

And, oh yeah, the military wants us there, too. Not quite the same as a wealthy interest, but the military is a powerful influence on national politics, simply because our leaders have so fetishized the military that they are now like mythological gods, and their opinion counts.

But guess whose opinion doesn't count? That's right. Yours. Your opinion doesn't count. Don't give me that old shit about how in a democracy people's opinions are supposed to be reflected by government action. We don't fucking live in a democracy. We live in an plutocratic oligarchy. Rule by the few, rule by the wealthy. You don't count. So the fighting continues, whether you like it or not.

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How the Right Wing's Worldview Is Torn Apart By Climate Change Science

From AlterNet:

Climate change poses a profound threat to many things that right-wing ideologues believe in. Conservatives tend to champion private property rights, small government, and above all else, unfettered industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism is an economic system predicated on the accelerating extraction and consumption of fossil fuels for energy, which is driving the climate change we face today. To accept this basic premise, one is compelled to question the wisdom of capitalism itself, which is a terrifying notion for conservatives. And it doesn't take long to recognize that conservative values are inherently antithetical to the desperately needed actions to tackle global climate change.

And

For a conservative whose entire identity is defined by faith in the economics of capitalism and free markets, acceptance of climate change poses a danger to their sense of self, and will be avoided at all costs. Therefore, attempts to persuade this portion of the country with science and logic is a lost cause.

More here.

What's really disturbing about the right wing's total embrace of ideology-over-reality is that it has slowly seeped into many many other major issues. Probably the first and foremost, historically speaking, is rejection of evolution as the organizing principle for the science of biology. So conservatives' strong taste for reality denial is something that goes way back. But it seems that only recently has this dynamic become so widespread that it makes political discourse problematic, at best, and impossible at worst.

And when the public isn't particularly well informed about a topic, the endless chest beating and howls from the right can alter public perception in dangerous ways. Remember those awful days of 2002 and early 2003 when nobody wanted the "smoking gun" evidence of Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" to be a "mushroom cloud"? Well, countless sources, most of them cited in the independent and foreign presses, were continually observing that there was just no evidence of Iraqi WMD, that the IAEA and the UN weapons inspectors were pretty much in lockstep that Saddam was essentially defenseless. But most Americans never heard about that. Instead, we heard the steady drum beat of Republicans, and cowed Democrats, on the war path. So everybody, not just the conservatives, knew that we had to invade Iraq.

And it's still happening today. All over the place. I mean, see yesterday's post about the "debate" between John Stewart and Fox News' Chris Wallace: the disconnect between their two respective views was so profound that the whole thing was virtually an absurdist performance. Fox really is a conservative ideological apparatus, and insiders pretty much admit this privately, but Wallace stuck steadfastly to the party line--we're just "fair and balanced." Stewart had no way of cutting through this bizarre psychological morass of reality-denial, and had to resort to sputtering frustration.

The right wing can no longer defend its views in a fact-based way, so it spins yarn after yarn to fool both themselves and the public into accepting its harsh and oppressive ideology. Thing is, we now live in an era when technology is so good at creating and mass producing illusion, it is extraordinarily difficult to unravel such bullshit in a gut-convincing way.

This may very well be the worst crisis our nation has ever faced. Illusion is preferable to reality. The Civil War, WWII, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights era, Vietnam, stagflation, presidential assassination, and on and on, none of these crises even come close to this one.

I'm afraid there's no way out.

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Jon Stewart LIVE On Fox News, Tells Host 'You're Insane'

From the Huffington Post:

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart entered the proverbial lion's den, appearing live on Fox News Sunday to debate "media bias" with host Chris Wallace.

Early in the interview, Wallace flashed a previous quote of Stewart's calling Fox News a "relentless agenda-driven 24 hour news opinion propaganda delivery system," and asked Stewart, "Where do you come up with this stuff?"

Stewart responded, "Uh, it's actually quite easy."

And

"The embarrassment is that I'm given credibility in this world because of the disappointment that the public has in what the news media does," he said.

"I don't think our viewers are the least bit disappointed with us," Wallace said. "I think our viewers think, finally, they're getting somebody who tells the other side of the story."

"Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?" Stewart shot back, his voice rising. "The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll."

More here, with video highlights.

Watch the entire segment here.

HuffPo's account of the events is somewhat misleading. Stewart did say these things, but reading the account I've linked above gives you the sense that these were some knockout blows when really it was nothing like that at all. On the other hand, Wallace didn't really score any points, either. Actually, the whole thing wasn't much more than an exercise in frustration. For twenty four minutes.

The gist, as best as I can explain, is that Wallace attempted to defend Fox's bullshit "fair and balanced" slogan while at the same time trying to pin Stewart into the corner as being a liberal ideologue--that is, projecting onto Stewart the same criticism he makes about Fox, but from a liberal perspective. Stewart, meanwhile, attacked Fox for its extreme right wing bias, while continuously retorting that he's a comedian, which simply cannot be compared to Fox's 24/7 demagoguery.

And that's about it. For nearly a half hour.

Neither had any moments of clear victory. Of course, I agree with everything Stewart said, but it was one of those things where you imagine liberals and conservatives watching while counting the points their guy makes but ignoring what the other guy says. In the end, it was all a waste of time.

So why is this important?

The lesson I get out of this is that, when arguing with conservatives, liberals must immediately reject how their opponents frame the debate. Wallace's opening gambit, from which he never really deviated, was dragging Stewart into an argument about media bias, and the Daily Show host totally went for it. Stewart actually did pretty well, but the most he could ever hope for was a stalemate. After all, Wallace was running the interview, cutting his guest off just as he was getting started, jumping in with new pieces of video before Stewart had adequately addressed the previous one--there was just no chance for Stewart to get down to the nitty gritty. Indeed, Stewart should have opened with his best stuff, the numerous studies showing how Fox viewers are wildly misinformed about current events, instead of squeezing it in at the end while Wallace talked over him, and taken it from there without letting up.

In short, Stewart probably should have stayed completely away from the "is Fox really biased?" question and just pounded away at how Fox isn't simply biased, it's just plain wrong, just pounded away at bullshit conservative notions the "news" network pushes day in and day out. I mean, it didn't have to be exactly that, but the point is to immediately figure out how your conservative opponent is setting up the terms of the argument and go somewhere else. Surprise these guys, get them into a talk for which they weren't prepared. Because if you let them tell you how to argue with them, you can't win. Actually, you'll probably lose.

That Stewart didn't lose is testament to how quick the guy is on his feet, but he completely gave up his opportunity to win from almost the very beginning.

Here's another lesson to be learned from this interview: conservatives don't argue in order to arrive at the truth; they argue in order to fuck up rational thinking. And they're very good at it.

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Global Commission on Drug Policy says war on drugs has failed

From the Washington Independent courtesy of AlterNet:

Breaking news: The war on drugs has failed.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy released its report a few days ago, and it isn’t pretty. Drug use of all kinds is up sharply over the last decade, even as governments spend billions to stop it. When one supply chain is interrupted, another fills the gap, seemingly within minutes.

The Commission recommends decriminalizing drugs and ending the stigmatization of users and the marginalization of small time growers and focusing on regulation and health care.

So, who is this band of liberal, drug-loving miscreants? The Commission includes as its members former U.S. Secretary of Sate George Schultz, former U.S. Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, former Secretary General of the U.N. Kofi Annan and a host of international figures of equal stature.

More here.

It's very nice that there is yet another study verifying what anybody with half a brain has known for decades now: behaving as though drug use is a criminal problem, rather than a public health problem, is really, really, really fucking stupid. But I've been thinking of this all as a fact for a long time now. You know, because it is a fact.

The United States figured this all out back in the 1920s and 30s with our failed experiment on alcohol prohibition. The nationwide ban on liquor didn't stop many people from drinking, but it did set the stage for organized crime to develop from penny ante stuff into some serious multi-million dollar enterprises. And without government regulation, lots of people got poisoned by the bootleg stuff. We spent a lot of money trying to stop people from drinking, but in the end it was all a big waste.

Unfortunately, nobody appears to have retained much from this real world lesson.

So it's the same thing with the modern "War on Drugs." Except on a much larger scale. Now organized crime is about multi-billion dollar enterprises. Drug violence is literally destroying Mexico. Millions of Americans who would otherwise be law-abiding citizens are turned into actual criminals by throwing them into prison for incredibly long sentences. And none of this enforcement stuff helps addicts at all.

Meanwhile, numerous industries associated with keeping drugs illegal are thriving, and their lobbying dollars help to keep serious discussion about legalization off the table. I mean, the "War on Drugs" is a socioeconomic force unto itself, regardless of drug realities.

Given that the study mentioned in the excerpt above is only the latest in a long string of studies proving the folly of prohibition, I seriously doubt it will amount to much in the grand scheme. Too many people have gotten rich from the scam. There's no way they're going to sit by idly while their gravy train comes to an end.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Reine



Dash



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

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Weiner Gives Up the Ghost

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo makes the ultimate observation on Representative Anthony Weiner's resignation:

I've been following congressional scandals for 15 years. And my God in the grand scheme of things this is pretty silly compared to the levels of wrongdoing, thievery and vicious behavior we've all seen. And that disconnect -- the most insistent and open demands for resignation ever compared to one of the silliest scandals ever -- just doesn't sit right with me. Especially when, last time we checked at least, his constituents did not want him to resign.

More here.

This really bums me.

Say what you want about Weiner's stupidity; he didn't break any laws or Congressional ethics rules--indeed, "sexting" is all the rage in numerous sectors of society. Not a good idea for a politician who is hated by his enemies, or even for a married man, to be sure, but his "crimes" are something I and no other Americans are in any position to judge. But Weiner was judged, just like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, complete with the usual media circus.

I mean, that's what this was, death-by-reality-show. Weiner was "voted" off Big Brother or Survivor, theatrically kicked off The Real World Washington because producers needed something to spice up sagging ratings. Does the corporate media even understand that they've been totally used by scum bag right-wing activists? Probably not. Actually, it probably doesn't even matter. No doubt Weinergate got the networks a nice bump in terms of viewership.

Meanwhile David Vitter, who did break the law, who actually had sex with women who are not his wife, remains a Senator in good standing.

This is all so disgusting. Weiner was hounded out of office by hypocritical conservatives riding herd on a predictable media frenzy that had potential defenders scurrying like the rats they are. And we bomb Libya. And we continue to kill Iraqis and Afghans. And we continue to send American youth to die in faraway nations for reasons unknown. And the rich get richer while everybody else gets poorer. And our infrastructure continues to rot. And the dismantling of our education system continues. And global warming fries the planet. And on and on.

But Anthony Weiner's dick pictures are the most important thing of all. Congress had to do something. The press had to do something. His dick! His dick! His dick! I'm so sad.

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LOCK HIM UP

From AlterNet:

Glenn Beck Asks, "Why Would You Get a Gun?"... Then Points to Obama

One would think after the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords, Fox would have done a little something to rein in Mr. Beck, a TV personality known for pondering such weighty questions as whether he could kill Michael Moore (he concluded he could), and pretending to give Nancy Pelosi poisoned wine.

Yet here he is again, blaming Obama again for civil unrest, food shortages, and of threatening to take your guns away. Then he asks his rhetorical question "Why would you get a gun" and guess who pops up on his TV screen but the President and close adviser Cass Sunstein to whom he immediately points with arm outstretched and answers his own question, stating "To prepare for tough times."

More here, plus video.

So we already know that Beck is either crazy or a pandering media asshole, and we also already know that violent rhetoric such as his has probably contributed to a hateful conservative environment that has seen both psychos and cold blooded but principled killers taking shots at liberals everywhere from churches to clinics to political events, sometimes even killing them. But to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time he's actually threatened the President.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it a felony to threaten the President? At the very least, doesn't such an act usually warrant a disturbing visit from FBI agents?

I don't care if Fox is finally cancelling his show someday. Beck has crossed the line. This really does look like he's calling on viewers to shoot President Obama. And that's a fucking crime. Lock the motherfucker up and throw away the key. This is some bad bullshit.

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Creationist Economics

From CounterPunch, economist Dean Baker on the irrationalities inherent in the bizarre beliefs of deficit hawks:

There is a standard econ 101 story about how reducing deficits can boost the economy. The theory goes that if the government reduces its deficit, and therefore borrows less, it will reduce interest rates. Lower interest rates will in turn give firms incentive to invest more.

Lower interest rates should also cause the dollar to decline, since it will make U.S. government bonds and other dollar assets less attractive to foreign investors. If the dollar falls in value then our goods will be more competitive on world markets. This will cause us to import less and export more, thereby creating jobs.

However is this what the deficit hawks believe will happen now? The interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds is already down to 3.0 percent. Assuming a 2 percent inflation rate, this translates into a real rate of about 1 percent.

How much lower do the deficit hawks think interest rates will fall if we were to sharply cut the deficit? Furthermore, how much more investment do they think we can induce even if we got a large (e.g. 0.5 percentage point) reduction in real interest rates?

Do they think that this sort of decline in interest rates will send the dollar tumbling and thereby improve our trade balance? Against which currencies will a lower interest rate cause the dollar to fall sharply?

Neither of these stories really passes the laugh test.

More here.

The bottom line here is that the conservative voices driving forward the public discourse on economics are totally incoherent. We're in an ongoing recession with historically high unemployment, so the conservative solution is to take money out of the economy? I mean, that's what cutting government spending does. It takes money out of the economy, which is really fucking bad during an economic downturn because that's the problem already.

Of course, it's much more complicated than that. "The economy" is quite big, and even during a recession there is indeed a lot of money in it, and cutting government spending, coupled with all those wonderful right-wing tax cuts, really just kind of shifts it around. It's probably better to say that people and businesses aren't spending money, which means they're sitting on it, which means the economy doesn't grow. But the government is spending money. Taking government money out of the equation does nothing but make the problem much, much worse. Conversely, increasing government spending, on a scale much larger than Obama's meager stimulus spending a couple of years ago, makes the problem much, much better.

Conservatives, and increasingly a lot of people who think of themselves as liberal, simply don't acknowledge this dynamic. Instead, they harp on the deficit and how horrible it is to keep borrowing money on such a massive scale. Needless to say, the deficit is a problem, but one that is, at the moment, not nearly so dangerous as years and years of ten percent unemployment.

Indeed, one of the major factors keeping the economy from really gearing up is that people who aren't working, or are desperately afraid of losing their jobs, a much bigger percentage of the work force than those who simply can't find work, don't spend their dollars on anything except the bare essentials. Instead, they save their money for emergencies: a big part of the deficit is loss of tax revenue from the unemployed and underemployed. Fixing the economy, and thereby lowering the unemployment rate, is virtually the same thing as fixing the deficit.

So for now, what the government needs to do is to borrow and spend a whole hell of a lot more money than it has been willing to in the recent past. This will jump start the economy, which will massively increase tax revenues, which will, in turn, greatly lower deficit spending.

Instead, we're going in the opposite direction because our leaders are either stupid enough to think that government debt is the same thing as personal or business debt, or are evil enough to see this economic crisis as an opportunity to transform our society into third world feudalism. Either way, we're fucked because the entire fucking establishment is in on the game.

This is one of the things I think about when I consider bringing children into the world.

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'Book Of Mormon' Wins Best Musical, 9 Tony Awards

From the AP via the Huffington Post news wire:

The Book of Mormon won nine Tony Awards last night including best musical, best director, and others.

The satiric musical was a Broadway debut for Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the famed creators of Comedy Central's South Park. Parker and Stone met at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the early 90's and have been wrecking hilarious havoc ever since.

More here, with video.

I've heard that, back when the South Park movie was out, famed Broadway guy Stephen Sondheim said it was the best musical of the year. I've always chuckled about that. I mean, it's a good movie, funny, rousing songs and whatnot, uses Satan as a central character, but it's not brilliant or anything, just a whole lot of fun: it seems to me that Sondheim's comment was more about how shitty Broadway musicals have become over the last three decades or so than about lavish praise for South Park.

But here we have Parker and Stone totally dominating this year's Tony Awards, about which I almost never care. Now, of course, I haven't yet seen The Book of Mormon because, you know, it's in New York and I'm in New Orleans, but I imagine it's a good show, probably lots of fun without much pretension, and I'm definitely going to check it out when it finally goes on tour. But the Tonys this year do interest me because a couple of guys who are essentially total theater outsiders just waltzed into that world of upturned noses and essentially bloodied them all. Just by doing their goofy irreverent philosophical thing, which nobody else in bigtime theater land has even thought about doing.

I respectfully suggest that the American professional theater has totally run out of ideas and desperately needs a massive infusion of fresh blood from outside its navel-gazing circles. Couldn't hurt.

Actually, what I mean is that Andrew Lloyd Webber sucks big donkey dicks.

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Rule by Rentiers

The New York Times' resident Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman, in discussing why the government does nothing about unemployment and personal debt, but rather freaks out on phantom deficit fears, dances around the awful truth:

What lies behind this trans-Atlantic policy paralysis? I’m increasingly convinced that it’s a response to interest-group pressure. Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers — those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense.

Of course, that’s not the way what I call the Pain Caucus makes its case. Instead, the argument against helping the unemployed is framed in terms of economic risks: Do anything to create jobs and interest rates will soar, runaway inflation will break out, and so on. But these risks keep not materializing. Interest rates remain near historic lows, while inflation outside the price of oil — which is determined by world markets and events, not U.S. policy — remains low.

And

And that explains why creditor interests bulk so large in policy; not only is this the class that makes big campaign contributions, it’s the class that has personal access to policy makers — many of whom go to work for these people when they exit government through the revolving door. The process of influence doesn’t have to involve raw corruption (although that happens, too). All it requires is the tendency to assume that what’s good for the people you hang out with, the people who seem so impressive in meetings — hey, they’re rich, they’re smart, and they have great tailors — must be good for the economy as a whole.

But the reality is just the opposite: creditor-friendly policies are crippling the economy.

More here.

So you know what I think: corporations and too-big-to-fail banks run the US government. Literally. Or, perhaps it's better to say that the formal structure of our republic no longer represents the people's will, but rather serves the interests of the incredibly wealthy. Whatever. One way or the other our democratic republic is a thing of the past, replaced by what amounts to a plutocracy, rule by the wealthy.

Krugman, however, who is a liberal to be sure, which necessarily makes him deeply entrenched within the establishment, just can't bring himself to go as far as I, a radical, or leftist, whatever you want to call it, am willing to go. Instead, he speaks of the assumptions about our government that we're taught in school as though they were somehow still operational. I mean, he spells it out clearly enough: Congressional Representatives and Senators, hell, the President, too, are all far more focused on the interests of their wealthy campaign donors and country club pals than they are on the interests of citizens, which is very, very, very bad. And I agree. But he just won't go there. He just can't bring himself to say it's all over, that democracy is dead.

But deep down, I think he knows, but is afraid to admit it. Actually, I think that deep down lots of Americans have figured it out, but know that once they actually speak the truth out loud, there's no going back. And then what? New territory, beyond the looking glass, and all that shit. Scary.

Personally, I think we're in for a new consciousness about our nation's political and economic arrangements, one that makes the wealthy plutocrats out to be the villains they actually are. It may take a while, but as long as we're suffering such high unemployment, and all forecasts are saying we're probably in this slump for the long haul, people will start throwing out all that "we the people" shit under-girding the corporate political theater and propaganda to which we are subjected on a daily basis, and start demanding democracy.

And that's when the tyrants will be toppled, done in by their own arrogance and greed. It will be glorious.

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IRAQ WAR DELUSIONS CONTINUE

From the AP via the Huffington Post news wire:

U.S. Congressman Suggests That Iraq Pay Back U.S. For War Cost

A U.S. congressman visiting Baghdad Friday suggested that Iraq pay back the United States for the money it has spent in the eight years since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher spoke during a one-day visit by a group of six U.S. congressman. The California Republican said he raised the suggestion during a meeting with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that some day when Iraq is a "prosperous" nation it pay back the U.S. for everything that it has done here.

"We would hope that some consideration be given to repaying the United States some of the megadollars we have spent here in the last eight years," Rohrabacher told reporters at the U.S. Embassy after the meeting.

More here.

In a related development, the GOP floated the idea that Native Americans pay for the "reservations" the US magnanimously gave them when Anglo settlers stole what had previously been tribal lands. Also, Republicans began debate on whether African Americans ought to compensate the families of former slave holders for their loss of property after the end of the War of Northern Aggression. And Dow Chemical wondered openly whether Vietnam should compensate the corporation for napalm used there during the war to defoliate jungles and burn civilian women and children.

Is this for real?

The US invaded Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts back in 2003: it was essentially a war of choice, an invasion against what was already known to be a mostly defenseless nation without weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was left in ruins and chaos, with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands dead. If anything, the US owes the Iraqi people hundreds of billions of dollars, not the other way around. That anybody, anybody, here in the US would even imagine that Iraq owes us money is testament to the deep denial in which war supporters continue to exist.

Just when I think nothing can shock me anymore, something shocks me.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING
Canine Edition!

Kuzco



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

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SEX SCANDALS II

My old pal Shane chimes in on my Weinergate post from a couple of days ago:

I agree with your commenter from this standpoint: I'm aggravated with Weiner in the same way I was aggravated with Clinton for being careless. you have to be aware of how the game is played and keep yourself above it, or you won't amount to shit. I don't remember anything useful coming out of Clinton post hummers, and I really dug Weiner and his energy and gravitas, and now he has nothing left of his political career except to be a joke, and it's because he should have had more sense. for me it's not about morals or any of that nonsense, it's you have to be smart enough to keep your job, and keep it effective in a playing field that will stone you right out of town at the first crack of a public fart. damn shame.

And here's a little background for my response. From AlterNet:

The Breitbart Effect

Weinergate, as it has been dubbed by pundits across the political spectrum, must be the lamest (non-)sex scandal to come down the pike in years, yet it seems to be getting as much play as Watergate.

That such trivia as an adult sending relatively benign photos and “racy messages” to other consenting adults should be of interest to anyone besides the Representative's wife – much less the making of a week-long “news” story – is obviously a sad reflection of our shallow, sex-and-celebrity-obsessed culture.

But it's also a testament to what you might call the "Breitbart effect" – the ability of conservative activists to push a news story to the forefront of the national discussion, and hold it there for an extended run. Breitbart, like the Drudge Report and a host of other dedicated right-wing provocateurs, has learned the value of gaming the refs – of hounding the mainstream media with angry and unsubstantiated accusations of “liberal bias” for so long the latter tend to overcompensate and give prominence to whatever story the activists are interested in amplifying.

More here.

Actually, I would add to the "working the refs" dynamic a pre-existing media lust for sex and sensationalism, that is, a non-ideological need for reporters and news organizations to swim in the sewers because it is a cheap and easy way to bring in readers and viewers to look at ads, which is how the news makes its money--there is also a bonus with scandal mongering, unlike real reporting, in that it is highly unlikely to offend powerful interests which might heavily fuck with news organizations. But "working the refs," a love for tits and ass, or explosions and bitch-slapping, whatever causes the self-sustaining political and media sex scandal maelstrom effect, is, at the moment, beside the point. What deeply concerns me is that the maelstrom effect exists at all.

I am very sympathetic to my buddy Shane's anger with Weiner. Apart from the New York representative's blind support for the vicious policies of Israel toward the Palestinians, Weiner is one of the few guys in Congress who actively speaks out against entrenched corporate interests, and unlike, say, Bernie Sanders, who as a socialist has even better rhetoric, Weiner is actually fun and interesting to watch. And he has seemingly thrown it all away. Down goes one of the better defenders of the faith, and he could have avoided it by keeping the little Weiner in his pants.

But it kind of strikes me as terribly misguided to blast someone you support for breaking non-existent, but nonetheless devastatingly powerful, rules that are extraordinarily unfair. And these unwritten rules, which are something to the effect of "public figures cannot be sexual beings," aren't simply unfair; rather, they are repressive to the entire nation. That is, there is absolutely nothing wrong at all, at all, with sending dick pictures to consenting adults over the internet. Millions of Americans do this every day. Millions of Republicans do this every day. And many of those Republicans serve in Congress and are currently demanding that Weiner resign his office for...well, I'm not sure why they think he needs to resign. It's just like "Sex! Bad! Sex bad! Burn the witch!"

Yes, Weiner dicked himself, in a big way. But we have a choice here: we can condemn him for breaking these rules that exist solely for the purpose of scoring political points, or we can condemn the entire unhealthy, anti-sex, anti-democracy dynamic that has everybody in a Scarlett Letter style Puritanical and hypocritical tizzy right now. I mean, what's worse, breaking these fucked up rules, or the fucked up rules themselves?

Further, when, if ever, are conscientious Americans going to put a stop to it all? It seems to me that the best time to call bullshit on this kind outrage is when it is blasting out of TV sets and taking up miles of column space in newspapers. Indeed, finding one's own personal reasons to join the mob - that is, making it not about the sex, but about the realpolitik - makes no difference in the grand scheme: instead, it just makes the mass of torch and pitchfork waving citizens appear to be much larger than it actually is. That is, the DC assholes, politicians and pundits alike, don't care if liberals who are angry with Weiner have their own reasons for it. To them, the more the merrier. That anybody is angry with Weiner at all, for whatever reasons, simply serves as justification for their own sick sense of self-righteousness.

In short, registering anger with Weiner for not being smart enough to keep his job does nothing but feed the fire, making things even worse for everybody in the long run.

I know who the enemy is, and it's not Weiner. Rather, it's this amazingly disgusting practice of castigating political enemies for their perfectly normal sexual behavior in order to advance a repressive political agenda that has nothing at all to do with a Congressman's sex organs, and everything to do with throwing the poor and elderly out in the street to fend for themselves. I won't have anything to do with it.

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The Default Specter as Political Theater

From CounterPunch, former Reagan economist Paul Craig Roberts on the debt ceiling and raw power:

However, regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised, the US government is not going to go out of business. Why does anyone think that the President, who does not obey the War Powers Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, US and international laws against torture, or any of the laws and procedures that guard civil liberty, is going to feel compelled to obey the debt ceiling?

As long as the US is at war, the American President is a Caesar. He is above the law. The US Justice (sic) Department has ruled this, and Congress and the Courts have accepted it.

Moreover, the Federal Reserve is independent of the government. In its approach to regulatory matters and bailouts, the Fed has ceased to follow its own rules. Regardless of the debt ceiling, the Fed will continue to purchase the Treasury’s bond issues, and the Treasury will continue to fund the federal deficit with the proceeds. If Goldman Sachs is too big to fail, certainly the US government is.

And

If the President can declare on his own authority, without statutory basis and in defiance of the US Constitution, that he can assassinate US citizens who he considers to be a threat to national security, he certainly can declare that default is a threat to national security and that it is within his powers as commander-in-chief to ignore the debt ceiling.

More here.

I don't know that Obama actually has the balls to do this, to push back against outrageous GOP demands to dismantle the New Deal and throw the poor and elderly out in the street, to hang tough instead of all that usual bullshit "compromising" he likes to do. What will probably happen is that he'll consent to some godawful cuts in social spending and get the Senate to go along. That's how he's governed the whole time he's been in office.

On the other hand, he really has embraced all the new executive powers amassed by his predecessor as far as "The War on Terror" goes, which is just horrible. But it is nice to know that he could probably get away with what Roberts is suggesting if he wanted to. At the very least, we can sleep easy knowing that the total economic disaster a federal default would cause will most likely not happen.

Either way, though, this is all fucking depressing.

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SEX SCANDALS

One of my former students comments on my post yesterday about Weinergate:

I agree the coverage this story is getting is diversionary, but earlier today I did feel my own political bias. Had he been a righty, I would have called it typical, and reaffirmed the convictions of my political leaning. Truth is, Anthony Weiner is one of my favorite acting congressmen. I feel a little hypocritical for my willingness to dismiss accusations against him last week , and the ease with which I dismissed the whole story as irrelevant to his job and capacity for moral judgment after his admission. After all, the guy did fuck up. To err is human but at the least, accidentally tweeting your dick to the world shows a discouraging level of incompetence.

My response:

I hear what you're saying, but I think my deal is that I just don't take sex scandals where there's no victim too terribly seriously. I mean, I guess you could call his wife a victim, but marital infidelity is so amazingly widespread that it doesn't really seem to be anybody's business to wag the finger at someone over what is essentially a personal issue. Gingrich was at the forefront in going after Clinton, but he did it while he was cheating on his own wife. I don't even think anybody in Washington actually gives a shit; rather, this is all about political opportunism meeting the media's lust for sex and violence. Politicians don't want to talk about issues, but they still want to score points. Sex "crime" serves as a handy surrogate for issues, for both politicians and journalists.

And as for wanting to give Weiner a pass because he's on our side, I certainly feel the temptation myself. But I've been writing about right wingers caught up in sex scandals for some years now, and I've forced myself to be careful about it because, like I said, sex scandals without an actual victim aren't really scandals. So I went after that Senator Craig when he tried to solicit gay sex in a Minnesota airport restroom, not because of what he did, which is a relatively minor crime, but because he's one of those family values assholes: it is really fucking lame to preach Christian sexual morality in the political sphere, but to live your own life in total contradiction of it. What a scum bag. I've railed away against my own Senator here in Louisiana, David Vitter, for essentially the same thing, although in his case it was prostitutes. (Full disclosure: I waited on Vitter and his cuckolded wife a few weeks ago at the restaurant where I work; he's a good tipper and a nice guy, but nonetheless a hypocritical scum bag.) Mark Sanford, however, the former Republican governor of South Carolina who got caught having an affair on his wife, I just felt sorry for. He never really was one of those family values guys; I mean, he apparently used public money to fly to Argentina to see his mistress, which is definitely not cool, but the affair itself was and is his personal business. I don't think I wrote about the scandal at all.

And remember NY state's Democratic Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace? He really was one of the good guys, going after corrupt bankers and businessmen on Wall Street when Bush's feds refused to do so. He, too, got caught up in a prostitute scandal. Thing was, he had used his office to crack down repeatedly on prostitution! So I blasted him, too, for the corrupt hypocrisy that is usually the domain of the Republicans. I didn't like doing it, but felt duty bound to hold liberals to the same standards to which I hold Republicans, and Spitzer just didn't hold up.

So bringing this all back to Weinergate, I just don't know what it is we're supposed to be angry about. Yeah, he lied about it for a few days, but I can totally see myself doing the same thing. I mean, I would be freaking out, too. But in the end, he came clean. It's all very human, the fear, the breakdown, and then the recovery and reclamation of dignity. So how does this affect his role as a Congressional representative? It probably makes him look, like you said, incompetent, but that's not a crime, or even a Congressional rules violation; if New Yorkers want to vote him out for incompetence, that's their call.

But sending out pictures of your crotch to people who are cool with it is just fine. I mean, we have such a sexually unhealthy culture that Americans are ready to froth at the mouth about it, but that's all so much misguided latent Puritanism. There may be smoke, but there just isn't a fire. But apparently it doesn't matter. The GOP operatives who pushed this story into the salacious mass media are now toasting their success in bringing down one of their fiercest critics.

And the amazing thing is that these very same operatives very likely have no personal problem at all with Weiner's actions. They just wanted to take him out, and a sex "scandal" is a good way of doing it.

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WHADAYA KNOW? BREITBART GOT ONE RIGHT

From Talking Points Memo:

Weiner Admits He Tweeted Lewd Photos, Will Not Resign

"Last Friday night i tweeted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle," he said, fighting back tears. "Once I realized I had posted to Twitter, I panicked, I took it down and said I had been hacked. I then continued to stick to that story which was a hugely regrettable mistake."

He added: "To be clear, the picture was of me and I sent this. I am deeply sorry for the pain this has caused my wife Huma and our family and my constituents, friends, supporters and staff."

As for his own future, Weiner pledged to remain in Congress, saying he had not broken any law to his knowledge. "I am not resigning," Weiner said, telling reporters he would try to convince his constituents this was a "personal failing" and did not alter his record.

More here.

So the other day I blasted Andrew Breitbart, who usually not only gets these things wrong, but straight up lies about them, for taking up the Weiner scandal as his latest cause célèbre. Turns out that, in this single instance, Breitbart got it right. Of course, as they say, a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day. So big deal. Breitbart's still a lying scumbag. Just not about Weiner showing his weiner on the internets.

Beyond that, it is depressing that this relatively minor event has been dominating the news cycle for the last week or so. I mean, Weiner now looks like a lame douche, but that's just about the entire significance of it. After all, it's not like he's one of those "family values" guys, so there's no hypocrisy here--I mean, there's lying, to be sure, but I take him at his word that he got sort of freaked out about it. There doesn't appear to be any sexual harassment. No laws broken. No prostitutes. Not even any adultery, as if that matters in terms of his job. Maybe his wife is pissed at him, but that's between him and her. And maybe his constituents, who, if they decided to vote him out of office on this one issue, would be fools.

In the end this is all diversionary. We continue to be at war in three separate nations. We continue to hover at around ten percent unemployment. The rich continue to get richer, riding on the teat of social welfare funded tax breaks, while everybody else continues to get poorer. Global warming continues to fry the planet making prospects for the continuance of civilization all the more dim. And all the media can talk about is Weiner's weiner.

As Atrios said over at Eschaton, "Finally a happy press corps." They really do love to munch on human feces.

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No Opt-Out For Opponents Of Gays In The Military

From Reuters courtesy of the Huffington Post news wire:

Congress voted in December to repeal the so-called "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy which allows gays to serve in the military only so long as they keep their sexual orientation to themselves. The Marine Corps has been one of the services most resistant to the change.

The new policy will not go into force until 60 days after the president, defense secretary and nation's top uniformed military officer certify that it can be implemented without affecting military readiness. The military is currently in the process of training service members about the new policy.

"Sir, we joined the Marine Corps because the Marine Corps has a set of standards and values that is better than that of the civilian sector. And we have gone and changed those values and repealed the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy," the sergeant told Gates during the question and answer session.

"We have not given the Marines a chance to decide whether they wish to continue serving under that. Is there going to be an option for those Marines that no longer wish to serve due to the fact their moral values have not changed?" he asked.

"No," Gates responded. "You'll have to complete your ... enlistment just like everybody else."

"The reality is that you don't all agree with each other on your politics, you don't agree with each other on your religion, you don't agree with each other on a lot of things," he added. "But you still serve together. And you work together. And you look out for each other. And that's all that matters."

More here.

A few observations.

If I understand correctly, some of the problem facing the Marines in particular is that much of their culture is based on humiliating any man who shows even the slightest hint of non-masculinity. The idea is to build up a social sense among Marines of being the biggest badasses in the world, and girly-men, from this point of view, are decidedly not big badasses. Because being gay is perceived as being extraordinarily non-masculine, it makes sense that allowing gays to openly serve would, like a freight train, run smack dab into this hyper-masculine cultural imperative.

Of course, history - think of the bisexual Spartan warriors and their great accomplishments - proves this cultural point of view to be completely wrong, and, of course, organizational cultures can be changed, which is exactly what's happening to the Marines and all other branches of the armed forces right now. In the end, Marines like the one quoted above will be relegated to the dustbin of history.

But I continue to be a bit perplexed by such attitudes. If the US Marine Corps is, indeed, the most hardcore group of badasses in the world, and I think they are, how is it that a few gay men serving openly among them can cause such distress? I mean, it's like, so what? You can chew veins and unleash death on a massive scale, but you're "uncomfortable" because a gay guy might see your penis in the shower? Yeah yeah, I understand the whole military cultural indoctrination thing, the whole sense of hyper-masculinity and all that, but it just doesn't seem to jibe with the notion of these intense warriors being unnerved by gay men. It's like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger standing on a chair and freaking out over a mouse. It seems impossible.

The weirdest thing about the above linked article to me, however, is this Marine asserting as though it is common knowledge that "the Marine Corps has a set of standards and values that is better than that of the civilian sector." I don't know that I would say "better" standards, but I wholeheartedly agree if he actually meant "higher" standards--that's just self-evident. But to assert that the Marines have better values than civilians, all civilians, deeply disturbs me. How is this determined? Actually, such a notion cannot be determined because it is utterly subjective. Worse, it sets up the military as being somehow better than the people their sole purpose is to protect. And this is apparently what they're teaching Marines to believe, that they're better than the American people, and that's bullshit.

I mean, I'm grateful for their service and sacrifice, but the military's function is to protect civilization, which necessarily makes their role an ancillary one. That is, if civilization is worth protecting, its protectors can in no way be deemed to be better than the civilization they're protecting. It's kind of fucked up, especially when you couple it with the General McChrystal affair: I'm really starting to wonder if civilian control of the military is ultimately doomed.

I mean, once we've lost control of the military, it's all over.

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



...Spock and Kirk!

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Roi Seeking Human Skin to Slash



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

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Madison Ave. Declares ‘Mass Affluence’ Over

From Too Much courtesy of AlterNet:

The Mad Men 1960s America — where average families dominated the consumer market — has totally disappeared, this Ad Age New Wave of Affluence study details. And Madison Avenue has moved on — to where the money sits.

And that money does not sit in average American pockets. The global economic recession, Ad Age relates, has thrown “a spotlight on the yawning divide between the richest Americans and everyone else.”

Taking inflation into account, Ad Age goes on to explain, the “incomes of most American workers have remained more or less static since the 1970s,” while “the income of the rich (and the very rich) has grown exponentially.”

The top 10 percent of American households, the trade journal adds, now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, and a disproportionate share of that spending comes from the top 10’s upper reaches.

“Simply put,” sums up Ad Age’s David Hirschman, “a small plutocracy of wealthy elites drives a larger and larger share of total consumer spending and has outsize purchasing influence — particularly in categories such as technology, financial services, travel, automotive, apparel, and personal care.”

America as a whole, the new Ad Age study pauses to note, hasn’t quite caught up with the reality of this steep inequality. Americans still “like to believe in an egalitarian ideal of affluence” where “everyone has an equal shot” at “amassing a great fortune through dint of hard work and ingenuity.”

In actual life, the new Ad Age study points out, “the odds of someone’s worth amounting to $1 million dollars” have shrunk to “1 in 22.”

More here.

What do you get if you take a nation with a strong and thriving middle class and then deregulate the hell out of business, lower taxes on the rich again and again for decades, virtually destroy the unions and refuse to enforce labor law, begin an industrial "race to the bottom" seeking the lowest wages in the world enabled by an insidious "globalism" meme, and convince huge percentages of the population that all these "reforms" are in their best interests?

Why, you get what we've been calling "the third world" for five or six decades now. That is, you get a nation with an hourglass shaped distribution of wealth, a relatively larger group of wealthy people at the top, a very small middle class, and an extremely huge group of poor people at the bottom. You know, like India. Or Algeria. Needless to say, that's what's happening to the US, and Madison Avenue, a major player in the plutocracy, now understands this as a fact, not as some wild leftist conspiracy theory.

I mean really, when the business press, and that's what Advertising Age is, part of the business press, starts saying stuff like this, treating it as utterly uncontroversial, just reporting it to their industry, you can be sure it's very likely to be true. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal, as Chomsky likes to observe, is probably the best paper in the country: they don't have to propagandize because they're reporting to the business community, which, unlike the population at large, does not need to be continually indoctrinated. They just want the facts, and WSJ delivers.

If you're an ad man, you are now living in a nation where it's a bad idea to target anybody but the rich simply because nobody else has enough money to buy what you're selling. That's a fact you must believe if you're going to make any headway with your career. So if the business world now fully understands that all that stuff about the "American Dream" is a big steaming load of horse shit, why doesn't our political discourse in any way reflect that?

Okay, that's a more complicated question to answer, but a lot of it has to do with ignorance, greed, and just plain old evil.

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The Darth Vaders of Business Law

From CounterPunch, consumer advocate and presidential candidate Ralph Nader writes an open letter to corporate business lawyers:

You spent just one or two classes on what are called "contracts of adhesion"—those fine print one-sided contracts that only make up 99% of all the contracts we'll ever sign.

There they are—page after page exuding the silent message of "take it or leave it." If you "leave it", then you must cross the street to a competitor—an insurance company, credit card firm, bank, auto dealer, hospital, realtor, airline, student loan company or cell phone company, awaiting you is the same fine-print contract designed to nail you to the mast. Then there are the shrink-wrap software contracts you can't even see before you buy.

And

You misuse your intellect to create a modern contract straitjacket that gets tighter year by year. Your innovations are enforced by status-quo judges, credit ratings, credit scores and the absence of any competition over contracts between companies in the same industry.

The straitjacket is made of figurative steel fibers composed of enforceable words. Here is a partial list of your inventions which Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren aptly calls "mice type" the equivalent of "shrubbery for muggers!"

They include (1) seller's power to unilaterally change terms or assign the contract, (2) waiver provisions of the seller's liability and payment of seller's attorney fees, (3) acceleration and delinquency clauses, (4) binding arbitration and blocking the consumer's resort to the courts and right to jury trials, (5) liquidated damage clauses. On and on go the layers of incarceration.

More here.

I got to see Nader speak back in 2000 when he was running for President. He was hitting on exactly this topic when he asked the audience to visualize the moment when you get your sales contract in hand down at the local auto dealership: imagine what would happen if you told the salesman that you didn't like this or that clause and that you wanted it removed from the standard form. Everybody laughed for a moment or two. All of us in the audience knew that such a thing was absurdly unthinkable: contracts, at least corporate contracts with consumers, are not negotiable. That is, if you want to buy it, or rent it, or retain services, you either sign the pre-printed stack of legalese, or you get nothing. And that's disturbing, because, to the best of my knowledge, pretty much all contract law assumes that contracts are, indeed, negotiable.

Here's an actual contract negotiation:



Okay, it's the Marx Brothers here, so it is, of course, absurd, but it is undeniably a negotiation. I, for one, did not get to wrangle with various aspects of the lease contract I recently signed for the apartment I just moved into, which is owned by a local Big Apartment Company. Like almost all consumer contracts in the United States, it was take it or leave it. I mean, I suppose if I looked hard enough, I could have found a place, probably a house or duplex, that was owned by an individual, a situation that often has enough wiggle room for some dickering, but if you're looking for an apartment, odds are you get the standard lease form, and that's that. Same thing with cell phones, cars, cable and internet service, and on and on. You sign these contracts, but they always favor the seller, never you, and it is impossible to negotiate for better terms.

I don't understand how we can even call this kind of paperwork a "contract." But that's the way it is in Corporate America: if you want to participate in society, you have to sign away your rights. Sooner or later the corporate state will shred the Constitution while Tea Party "constitutionalists" whoop and cheer.

The whole world's fucking crazy.

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CORPORATE MEDIA IN BED WITH RIGHT WING SMEAR MACHINE
or
JOURNALISTS LOVE TO INGEST FECES FOR SEXUAL PLEASURE

As usual.

From Media Matters for America courtesy of Eschaton:

One Year After Debunking Breitbart's "Slander,"
CNN Welcomes Him Back As Newsmaker

Proving once again that there's no standard by which many mainstream media outlets are willing to hold sloppy propagandist Andrew Breitbart, CNN this afternoon invited the discredited blogger on the air to discuss the Rep. Anthony Weiner (NY- D) Twitter story.

Conveniently setting aside the fact that virtually every attack campaign that Breitbart has launched in recent years has collapsed under the weight of modest scrutiny, CNN presented the fatuous blogger as some sort of expert who could walk people through the Weiner story, which he's been hyping for days. (The whole right-wing blogosphere launched itself into a creepy tizzy over the holiday weekend regarding the story.)

The invite was odd because last summer CNN's Anderson Cooper helped debunk Breitbart's shoddy Shirley Sherrod attack and announced the clips of Sherrod that Breitbart posted online "were clearly edited to deceive and slander Miss Sherrod." Cooper added that Breitbart's behavior was "a classic example of what is wrong with our national discourse."

More here, with video.

So the story here isn't really about a picture tweeted from Representative Weiner's account: rather, it's that the corporate media are all over it after being herded there like so many lemmings by the always discredited right-wing smear merchant Andrew Breitbart. You remember Breitbart, I hope. He's the guy that brought us idiot James O'Keefe's doctored video about ACORN presumably being willing to facilitate a mortgage for a pimp, ridiculously played by O'Keefe, and his ho. He's the guy who, as mentioned above, brought us the doctored video of a USDA worker made to look like she hated white people. And a whole lot more.

Breitbart is, almost literally, the snotty conservative boy who cried wolf. He's always wrong. Actually "wrong" isn't really fair: Breitbart is a total liar, a man who knowingly distorts reality in order to score right-wing smear points. He's total scum. I mean, at least Karl Rove understands political strategy, and uses lies like Breitbart's as part of overall GOP planning, but Breitbart is just a scum bag liar--as far as I can tell, lying is the only activity at which he excels, but he's not even very good at it because he always gets caught.

If I know this, and the corporate media know it, too, why the fuck do they continue to give this bastard a platform from which to spew his total bullshit? I'm tempted to claim right wing bias, and I'm sure that's part of the picture here, but this all really strikes me as being part of the corporate media's bias toward the salacious--sex, lies, and violence sell better than any other topic in the media, and reporters instinctively understand this. That is, journalists love dirt and feces, and Breitbart has so much feces in his foul mouth that the news just gets in line for endless deep tongue kisses with him. Again and again. It doesn't matter if he's always wrong. Breitbart's got those delicious turds oozing from his lips and the media just can't help sucking it out and swallowing it down.

Actually, this would be really funny if it didn't totally fuck up what little honest public discourse we actually have in this country. Which is exactly the way Breitbart wants it--maybe he's smarter than I thought.

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