FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie



Sammy



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

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HARD TIMES

Who says old school hip hop wasn't political? And this little Run DMC gem resonates now more than ever:

Hard times spreading just like the flu
Watch out homeboy, don't let it catch you
P-p-prices go up, don't let your pocket go down
When you got short money you're stuck on the ground
Turn around, get ready, keep your eye on the prize
And be on point for the future shock

Hard times
Hard times
Hard times

Hard times are coming to your town
So stay alert, don't let them get you down
They tell you times are tough, you hear that times are hard
But when you work for that ace you know you pulled the right card
Hard times got our pockets all in chains
I'll tell you what, homeboy, it don't have my brain
All day I have to work at my peak
Because I need that dollar every day of the week

Hard times

Hard times can take you on a natural trip
So keep your balance, and don't you slip
Hard times is nothing new on me
I'm gonna use my strong mentality
Like the cream of the crop, like the crop of the cream
B-b-beating hard times, that is my theme
Hard times in life, hard times in death
I'm gonna keep on fighting to my very last breath

Hard times
Hard times
Hard times
Hard times
Hard times
Hard times
Hard times

Sing along:



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Tenet and 9/11: a Real Cover-Up?

From CounterPunch, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern on a startling development that ought to make the 9/11 Truthers get their panties in a wad:

In an interview aired on Aug. 11 on a local PBS affiliate in Colorado, Clarke charges that Tenet and two other senior CIA officials, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, deliberately withheld information about two of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 — al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The two had entered the United States more than a year before the 9/11 attacks.

Clarke adds that the CIA then covered it all up by keeping relevant information away from Congress and the 9/11 Commission.

Lying by senior officials is bad enough, and there is now plenty of evidence that former CIA Director George Tenet and his closest agency associates are serial offenders. Think for a minute about the falsehoods spread regarding Iraq's non-existent "weapons of mass destruction" stockpiles.

But withholding intelligence on two of the 9/11 hijackers would have been particularly unconscionable — the epitome of malfeasance, not just misfeasance. That's why Richard Clarke's conclusion that he should have received information from CIA about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, "unless somebody intervened to stop the normal automatic distribution" amounts, in my view, to a criminal charge, given the eventual role of the two in the hijacking on 9/11 of AA-77, the plane that struck the Pentagon.

More here.

Unfortunately, it appears that no American official will ever see any criminal charges at all for, well, anything. Not torture, not war crimes, not lies about WMD, and of course, not rank incompetence or conspiracy regarding 9/11. Even if there ends up being mountains of evidence. Just for the record, I am in no way a 9/11 Truther. I mean, at one point I was convinced that Bush, like FDR with Pearl Harbor, knew that a massive terrorist attack was imminent, even if he didn't quite know when or where, but then I read Noam Chomsky's observation that the total debacle that was the Iraq occupation made speculation about some sort of US collusion in the WTC and Pentagon attacks pretty much moot. That is, I'm very much in the incompetence camp when it comes to understanding how it was all allowed to happen.

But there continue to be many unanswered questions.

The biggest of them is figuring out who, exactly, fell asleep at the switch. Another is about how the intelligence system, which costs hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars, broke down. It's been years now since the hurried, and probably white-washing, 9/11 Commission Report was released, but, as far as I know, nobody has been held responsible for the break down, certainly not the guy who was in charge of it all, President George W. Bush. But it sounds like some tantalizing information is starting to bubble its way to the surface.

So if we're to believe Clarke, who has a well deserved reputation as a straight-shooter, slimy CIA Director George Tenet purposely kept the US official who had the responsibility to keep terrorist attacks in the US from happening out of the loop. Why? Will we ever know?

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Three GOP Presidential Candidates Sign Pledge To Investigate LGBT Community

From Addicting Info courtesy of AlterNet:

Get ready for another round of McCarthyism. Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Santorum have all signed a pledge to form a commission to investigate the LGBT community if elected President.

This pledge was created by the National Organization For Marriage, and they have a history of extreme views against homosexuals and anyone who votes to extend marriage rights to them.

More here.

Wow. I'd be even more amazed if this wasn't very much like already existing GOP pushes to investigate American Muslims for terrorist sympathies...when the real threat for homegrown terrorism comes from the far right "patriot" movement.

Same thing here. The article goes on to explain that this pledge is coming from a sense that gay activists persecute and harass fundamentalist Christians, and that this problem is ostensibly so severe that it warrants massive show trials in Congress. All this despite the fact that LGBT Americans continue to suffer discrimination, on the job, in housing, from the courts, as well as plain old fashioned gay-bashing beatings out in the street. That is, fundamentalist Christians, who always feel persecuted anyway, think that gay political activism is much more of a national threat than the actual persecution that gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered suffer every fucking day.

It's tempting to chalk this all off to homophobia, which is definitely a factor, but I think the real issue here is that the LGBT movement is pretty much the only organized force in the nation that routinely calls out fundamentalists on their bullshit. So they just don't like being challenged, and are willing to use the power of the US government to inject persecutory fear into the hearts of Queer Americans.

Apparently, the notion of combating gay free speech with fundamentalist free speech is seen as a losing proposition. I guess.

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Health Reform Without an Individual Mandate? Yes, It's Called 'Medicare for All'

From the Nation via Common Dreams courtesy of Digg:

The individual mandate was always a bad idea. Instead of recognizing that healthcare is a right, the members of Congress and the Obama administration who cobbled together the healthcare reform plan created a mandate that maintains the abuses and the expenses of for-profit insurance companies—and actually rewards those insurance companies with a guarantee of federal money.

And

But those of us who have no desire to perpetuate the insurance industry can and should recognize that the proper—and entirely constitutional—reform is an expansion of Medicare to cover all Americans.

There is no question that Medicare is a sound and popular program. (Just ask House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, who took an epic political beating when he proposed a scheme to replace the successful single-payer system with a voucher scheme designed to enrich insurance firms.)

While Medicare is exceptionally popular, polling shows that the individual mandate is not—according to recent surveys, roughly 60 percent of Americans oppose it.

It also passes constitutional muster.

More here.

The individual mandate, if I understood all the horse trading correctly, was all about getting the insurance companies to accept customers with preexisting conditions, as well as other stinky new regulations. It was like, okay, we're going to make you do some stuff you don't like, going to make you take a few for the team, but in return we're going to require everybody to buy your product, which will more than make up for any revenue losses. Indeed, the mandate stands to go well beyond simply making up for lost income; if it passes an inevitable date with the Supreme Court, Big Health Care will make billions more than they're making now.

It took a while to figure this all out, but it very much now looks like Obama's universal coverage will be happening only because he's forcing everybody to buy private insurance. The above linked essay goes on to quote Obama the candidate criticizing Hillary's plan, which also included an individual mandate, saying something to the effect of how this is like solving homelessness by passing a law requiring everybody to buy a house. Indeed. Perhaps we should also consider passing a law requiring terrorists to stop threatening American interests abroad, or a law requiring drug users to stop taking drugs.

Oh wait, I guess they've already done that last bit, and with rip roaring success, I might add.

At any rate, Obama Care is now utterly exposed as nothing but a giant giveaway to the health insurance industry, at the expense of average ordinary citizens. And there is absolutely no guarantee that people will be able to pay for this shit, or that it will even cover the most dire illnesses, which is why people actually need insurance. I know liberals are really pissed right now at the President about the way he handled the whole debt ceiling mess, but the writing has been on the wall for several years. Really, the fact that Obama's a corporate shill became apparent almost immediately, when he handed over hundreds of billions without any strings attached to the bankers who nearly toppled the economy.

He's not our guy, and he never was.

That's why he'll never, ever, ever even attempt the simplest and most workable solution: extend Medicare to the entire nation. His bosses in the health insurance industry wouldn't like that. Not one bit.

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



...Kirk and McCoy!

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Roubini: Marx was right. Capitalism may be destroying itself.

From the Daily Kos courtesy of AlterNet:

They claim they're doing cutbacks because there's excess capacity and not adding workers because there's not enough final demand, but there's a paradox, a Catch-22. If you're not hiring workers, there's not enough labor income, enough consumer confidence, enough consumption, not enough final demand. In the last two or three years, we've actually had a worsening because we've had a massive redistribution of income from labor to capital, from wages to profits, and the inequality of income has increased and the marginal propensity to spend of a household is greater than the marginal propensity of a firm because they have a greater propensity to save, that is firms compared to households. So the redistribution of income and wealth makes the problem of inadequate aggregate demand even worse.

Karl Marx had it right. At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to Capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That's what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They're not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else's income and consumption. That's why it's a self-destructive process.

More here, with links to video.

First, here's a little background on the guy quoted above: suffice it to say, Nouriel Roubini, a well respected mainstream establishment economist, is no communist. But it really sounds like he's familiar with Marx.

And that's the thing.

Even though there are some really big problems with Marx's assertions for a just and productive economy - for instance, the failure of pretty much every large scale attempt at communism - his analysis and criticism of capitalism has always been spot on. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's not like I'm a voracious reader of Marx or anything. I've read the Communist Manifesto, a few excerpts of some of his other works, and gotten bits and pieces here and there, so I'm no expert, but his central notion that the rich exploit the poor while using their wealth to control the political process is undeniable to sane and reasonable individuals. Actually, as playwright George Bernard Shaw once noted, a lot of Marx's critique is totally obvious, once you get away from pro-capitalist orthodoxy.

This notion Roubini's hitting on, business squeezing labor so much that it effectively destroys consumer demand, is a great example. I've said as much myself here at Real Art on multiple occasions, not even thinking that the notion had anything to do with Marx just because it's so obvious. You've got to have consumers, and in order to do that, you've got to pay your labor enough to actually buy the things businesses produce. After all, consumers and labor are the same people. So there is definitely a lower threshold to what you can pay workers in order for a capitalist economy to actually function.

And Roubini seems to be saying that we're very close to crossing that lower threshold. So, if you like, it's not really even about Marx's sense of economic justice: rather, it's about the integrity of the entire economic system we've been propagandized our whole lives to love and champion. If we want it to continue, if we want to have some semblance of the "free enterprise" Americans have to love, enterprise must necessarily lose some of that freedom. That is, the government has to be involved in the economy, has to force what the Fox News people deride as "redistribution" on the business world.

Or there won't be a business world.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Reine



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

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The Hijacked Crisis

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

Check out the opinion page of any major newspaper, or listen to any news-discussion program, and you’re likely to encounter some self-proclaimed centrist declaring that there are no short-run fixes for our economic difficulties, that the responsible thing is to focus on long-run solutions and, in particular, on “entitlement reform” — that is, cuts in Social Security and Medicare. And when you do encounter such a person, you should be aware that people like that are a major reason we’re in so much trouble.

For the fact is that right now the economy desperately needs a short-run fix. When you’re bleeding profusely from an open wound, you want a doctor who binds that wound up, not a doctor who lectures you on the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle as you get older. When millions of willing and able workers are unemployed, and economic potential is going to waste to the tune of almost $1 trillion a year, you want policy makers who work on a fast recovery, not people who lecture you on the need for long-run fiscal sustainability.

Unfortunately, giving lectures on long-run fiscal sustainability is a fashionable Washington pastime; it’s what people who want to sound serious do to demonstrate their seriousness. So when the crisis struck and led to big budget deficits — because that’s what happens when the economy shrinks and revenue plunges — many members of our policy elite were all too eager to seize on those deficits as an excuse to change the subject from jobs to their favorite hobbyhorse. And the economy continued to bleed.

More here.

Yet another reminder that we don't have to be experiencing chronic ten percent unemployment, that we don't have to be witnessing the stock market wildly whipping its hair back and forth, that we don't have to be worrying about deficits, that we don't have to be on the verge of European style massive civic unrest because it has been within our power all along to jump start the economy. Huge amounts of spending, on the scale of the spending we did during WWII, would put a stop to all these economic troubles, just as the Big One put a stop to the Great Depression. And once people are back to work and spending again, tax revenues would skyrocket, greatly reducing deficit spending, putting our federal budget in a much more manageable position--as Krugman observed, because so many people are now putting their money into t-bills, the cost of federal borrowing is at an all time low: we really can get an amazingly large bang for our buck here.

I mean, we can do this.

The only thing stopping us is our leaders. Our leaders, who are so fucking stupid that they compare the federal government, which deals with monetary flows on a global scale, to a modest family budget, which is like comparing God to an amoeba. Our leaders, who have their heads shoved so far up their asses that they think Rush Limbaugh knows something about economics, or that they run for advice to the same Wall Street parasites who got us into this mess in the first place. Our leaders, who would destroy our economy instantly by defaulting on our national debts, or who would destroy our economy slowly, purposely shrinking it by way of federal spending cuts.

You know, one can almost forgive Herbert Hoover's retarded economic austerity programs early on in the Great Depression: Keynesian economics was fairly new at that point, and he very likely just didn't understand what was going on. But President Obama has taken the same high school history courses we've all taken. He knows how we spent our way out of the Great Depression. He knows, and yet he does his damnedest to reenact Hoover's great folly.

There will be no forgiveness for him.

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TONY BENNETT: BIG HUGE LIBERAL!

And I'm not talking the Hollywood bullshit kind.

From AlterNet:

Progressive Reader: Just to recap. What are some of the most telling moments of Tony Bennett’s political activism?

David Evanier: Marching at Selma, refusing to sing in the South after witnessing a cross burning from his car, refusing to sing in apartheid South Africa, insisting that Count Basie have first billing over him wherever they appeared, insisting that black performers be allowed to stay in the hotels where they where starring in the nightclubs. Also, asked if he would support his sons if they decided to evade the draft, Bennett [who served at the front lines in Germany as a U.S. infantry soldier in World War II] said, “All the way. In fact, I’d say that’s exactly what I’ve brought them up to do. I’ve told them to hate war.”

Reader: What or who do you think most influenced Bennett’s politics?

Evanier: Tony was most influenced by Dr. Martin Luther King, the voice of conscience of his generation; by his father, John, who expressed great compassion for human suffering and spoke to Tony about his heroes; by Paul Robeson and Gandhi; by his sister, Mary Chiappa, who also was deeply committed to civil rights; and by his older mentor, Frank Sinatra, who was a civil rights advocate when Tony was a soldier. Sinatra filmed “The House I Live In” about racial equality in 1945 and was outspoken on behalf of the civil rights movement from the outset. Harry Belafonte also had a profound effect on him and called upon Tony to take part in the march from Selma to Montgomery and in other civil rights activities.

More here.

Of course, I've loved Tony Bennett for many years. I even got to see him perform once, at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo of all places, back in the late 90s. But until now I had absolutely no knowledge of his left-wing street credentials. That is, the guy actually participated in the famous Selma march with MLK. I mean, that's enough, really, but he's been quietly doing his activist thing for virtually his entire career. Not quite the same thing I once called for in my "Real Art" post some years ago, but the above linked article goes on to explain that Bennett has long been conscious of the impact his singing can have on the public's political imagination, shying away from negativity, and refusing to sing anything that is pro-war or "jingoistic." He even walked away from a recording contract with Columbia Records during the Vietnam era because the label refused to allow him to set some peace poetry to music.

This is very cool. Tony Bennett's a big lefty. I love him all the more.



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Capitalism at the Guillotine

From CounterPunch:

History shows it does not matter whether an economic system is based upon feudalism or capitalism or socialism, or any ism. When it fails to accommodate the masses, the masses force change. Is capitalism the answer to, or the cause of, economic failure today? Stalwarts of capitalism like the United States, the UK, Italy, Spain, France, and Portugal have already had their turn at providing the answers and more questions than answers have now arisen. Are the tenets of capitalism, i.e., private property, competition, market-based, economic freedom, consumer sovereignty, and laissez faire today’s equivalent of the Ancien Régime circa 18th century? The answer is: There are ominous signs the masses are once again seeking change; after all, the president of the United States was recently elected on an amorphous promise of “change.” People are searching for it, and the operative question is: Why, if not for a failed economic system?

There should be little doubt that the 2008 financial meltdown influenced voters to vote for change in November 2008. The citizenry witnessed, live on the news and on Wall Street and in home ownership, the withering of capitalism, and as of today, every American knows the name Goldman Sachs, the catchword for failed policies for the republic at large but the savior of the aristocratic few. The question remains: Are the masses taking to the streets and where and why and how does capitalism play a role?

And

Every economic cycle has a beat or a rhythm unique to the times, but none has had such pervasiveness across the capitalistic world as the current one; no it is not a depression in the classical sense, but it may be a depression for more people on an absolute basis, and possibly on a relative basis, anecdotally speaking, than ever before, time will tell. What is certain, however, is a palpable tension is spreading across the lands, an undercurrent coming to surface sparked by global capitalism, providing a pathway for the invisible hand to find the cheapest labor in the least amount of time, a process undermining the very basis of a fluid, functioning capitalistic structure, a strong middle class. Thus, upsetting a time-honored formula for successful capitalism by reverting to the timeworn and dissipated economy of the 18th century Ancien Régime when “let them eat cake” literally had a perversely jovial meaning and a harsh means of enforcement, until the authorities pushed and they, the masses, pushed back.

More here.

Yeah, I'm really starting to feel this now.

The last couple of days the left-leaning sites I usually visit have been totally awash with an overwhelming sense of anguish over the recent performance of liberals' one-time champion President Obama in the debt ceiling debate debacle: the left, or at least the left-leaning people who write on the internet, are starting to wake up, starting to understand that the Democrats are just as much on the take as the ostensible enemy, the Republicans. That is, liberals are beginning to realize that they're on their own.

The Tea Party people, misguided as they are, have already figured this out. Of course, the GOP, seeking to harness such grass-roots emotion for their own benefit, has gone to extraordinary lengths to ride herd over this band of ignorant, race-resenting rabble, with some success, but it cannot be denied that Tea Party passion and anger is righteous and true: these rank-and-file American citizens are hurting, too, and are, by and large, excluded from from any real say in government dealings, too.

It is now crystal clear to large segments of the population, on both the left and the right, that the government manages the economy such that the people do not matter. Disgust and rage are in the air. The only real question is what form it will eventually take when it hits the streets for real.

Will it be a left-wing movement of peace and inclusion that seeks to affirm the dignity of every individual? Or will it be a right-wing movement of hate and division that seeks to destroy minorities branded as scapegoats by demagogues?

I think revolution is on the horizon. It could be beautiful. Or it could be ugly.

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HARLAN COUNTY, USA

From Wikipedia:

Harlan County, USA is an Oscar-winning 1976 documentary film covering the "Brookside Strike" or "Bloody Harlan", an effort of 180 coal miners and their wives against the Duke Power Company-owned Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1973. Directed by Barbara Kopple, who has long been an advocate of workers' rights, Harlan County, U.S.A. is less ambivalent in its attitude toward unions than her later American Dream, the account of the Hormel Foods strike in Austin, Minnesota in 1985-86.

And

When the film was re-released film critic Roger Ebert praised the film, writing, "The film retains all of its power, in the story of a miners' strike in Kentucky where the company employed armed goons to escort scabs into the mines, and the most effective picketers were the miners' wives -- articulate, indomitable, courageous. It contains a famous scene where guns are fired at the strikers in the darkness before dawn, and Kopple and her cameraman are knocked down and beaten."

More here.

Facebook, for all its lameness, continues to be something of a place to exchange ideas, political, cultural, artistic, and, of course, trivial. I mean, most of it is trivial, but not always.

Case in point. A buddy of mine posted this trailer earlier tonight:



All I can say is "wow." As far as I can tell, this is what happens when you strip away the veneer of civility plastered over the facade of worker/capitalist relations. That is, everybody acts like the economic arrangement under which we all live is the way it's supposed to be, everybody in their place, everybody working toward common goals, whether you're a worker or a capitalist. But when workers start to object to the arrangement - and this only happens when workers disagree because capitalists make all the decisions - capitalists start to show their fangs and claws. Indeed, the entire power establishment starts to get really nasty really quickly when regular ordinary Americans start questioning "the way the world works." If the opposition becomes loud enough, that's when goons start to bust heads.

Seriously, this happened fairly recently, back in 1972, and as our economy continues to implode today, it's very likely that it's going to happen again soon. Don't be shocked when workers trying to get a fairer shake start showing up on television with blood running down their faces. Because that's ultimately what it's all about: capitalists call all the shots, take all the profit, and fuck you up if you resist.

After a little digging, I found the full documentary online, albeit with Spanish subtitles. So I'm watching this tonight. Care to join me?



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America in Decline

A few words from the legendary Noam Chomsky, via Truth Out, courtesy of Digg:

The self-inflicted blows, while increasingly powerful, are not a recent innovation. They trace back to the 1970s, when the national political economy underwent major transformations, ending what is commonly called “the Golden Age” of (state) capitalism.

Two major elements were financialization (the shift of investor preference from industrial production to so-called FIRE: finance, insurance, real estate) and the offshoring of production. The ideological triumph of “free market doctrines,” highly selective as always, administered further blows, as they were translated into deregulation, rules of corporate governance linking huge CEO rewards to short-term profit, and other such policy decisions.

The resulting concentration of wealth yielded greater political power, accelerating a vicious cycle that has led to extraordinary wealth for a fraction of 1 percent of the population, mainly CEOs of major corporations, hedge fund managers and the like, while for the large majority real incomes have virtually stagnated.

More here.

And that's just about as succinct as you can get when describing the massive Gordian Knot that our politics have become: the freeing up of capital controls resulting in the primacy of financial institutions, coupled with relentless, but bogus, "free market" propaganda have resulted in a governmental system that, by and large, now exists solely for the purpose of enriching and empowering the already fabulously wealthy--"the general welfare," which is what our government is Constitutionally bound to regard as an agenda, no longer matters; only the rich matter, not infrastructure, not employment, not public safety or health, not freedom, none of the things that most of us believe the government ought to be doing, just padding the pockets of the wealthy.

If you want to understand the seeming chaos in which Washington appears to operate these days, the words above are something of a Rosetta Stone. Sure, politicians go on and on about all kinds of bullshit, the debt, spending, the wars, all kinds of policy minutia. It can be overwhelming, but that's only because none of it makes any sense when you consider it at face value. Only when you look at it all in terms of who's getting rich and who's getting fucked does any of it become rational. And what you come to see is that politicians' words are almost totally irrelevant: what matters are actual deeds. So when Obama says he's making health care better, but the plan he signed allows insurance companies to make billions more than they're making now because the government is forcing everybody to do business with them, whether they want to or not, it becomes crystal clear that the whole thing is just a scheme to enrich the already wealthy.

Really it's not so much that politicians' words are irrelevant as much as that they often mean the exact opposite of their dictionary definitions. There's a word for that: Orwellian. We really are a nation in decline.

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Helicopter downing in Afghanistan kills 30 Americans

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Insurgents shot down a U.S. military helicopter during fighting in eastern Afghanistan, killing 30 Americans, most of them belonging to the same elite Navy SEALs unit that killed Osama bin Laden, as well as seven Afghan commandos, U.S. officials said Saturday. It was the deadliest single loss for American forces in the decade-old war.

The downing was a stinging blow to the lauded, tight-knit SEAL Team 6, months after its crowning achievement. It was also a heavy setback for the U.S.-led coalition as it begins to draw down thousands of combat troops fighting what has become an increasingly costly and unpopular war.

None of the 22 SEAL personnel killed in the crash were part of the team that killed bin Laden in a May raid in Pakistan, but they belonged to the same unit. Their deployment in the raid in which the helicopter crashed would suggest that the target was a high-ranking insurgent figure.

And

The deaths bring to 365 the number of coalition troops killed this year in Afghanistan and 42 this month.

More here.

Of course, the loss of any human life in this way is a terrible waste, but given all the talk of deficit reduction these days, it is well worth noting that these SEALs were the absolute best of the best, worth hundreds of millions of dollars in training alone, which is now gone, along with their lives. So Bin Laden is dead but the war continues. For some reason. I'm not entirely sure why. Needless to say, none of these men would be dead now if we weren't still there.

So...why are we still there? I mean, we're not seriously trying to get Afghanistan, which is, and has always been, more of a collection of tribes and clans than it is a nation, to actually become stable, are we? That's about as laughable as the notion that massive federal spending cuts are going to mellow out Wall Street investors.

Oh yeah. Right. Sorry. I forgot.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Roi and Dash



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

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THE POOR SHOULDN'T PLAY VIDEO GAMES OR WATCH TV

Because, you know, they're fucking poor.

From AlterNet:

Using material ownership as a means to assess poverty is highly flawed, for two main reasons. Derek Thompson of the Atlantic calls it the “productivity paradox.” Production costs have gone down due not only to new technologies, but the financial success of outsourcing and other neoliberal ventures. Electronics, clothing and even food are cheap or generally affordable for most Americans, regardless of their economic status.

Meanwhile, the true signifiers of American poverty are access to health care, education and the ability to find and keep adequate housing. Contrary to the report’s claims, homelessness has risen in America. Emergency food programs, though inadequate in many ways, have been overwhelmed with the numbers of new people seeking help in order to feed themselves and their families.

Say for a minute that those defined as living in poverty by the Census Bureau do own these modern amenities. It’s no surprise that those living in poverty would, like all Americans, subscribe to even an appearance of living the American Dream. Another accomplishment of capitalism is that success and failure in life are defined as either having or not having enough "stuff."

More here.

Right. Spending thirty dollars on a microwave oven, or fifteen on a DVD player, isn't really going to affect whether you can pay your rent or hospital bills. That's where the real poverty inducing element is: rent and health care have risen astronomically in recent decades, even though everything else has been getting less expensive. But it's not really much of a trade-off. Cheap trinkets and gaudy amusements just don't make up the difference.

So poverty here in "the land of plenty" generally doesn't resemble poverty in the third world. The poor here have access to cheap TVs. But when you can't afford to pay for cancer treatments, it doesn't matter whether you look like you're from Calcutta or not. You're just as dead. When you can't pay your rent, you're just as homeless.

Quite frankly, I'm fucking sick of hearing conservatives talk about how good the poor have it here. In the end, it's nothing but rhetoric designed to assuage the sense of guilt that must necessarily come when one champions an economic system like ours that guarantees masses of people will live their entire lives in poverty. But it's total bullshit, too. Like I said, cheap video games don't make it any easier to keep a roof over my head.

I think "fuck you" is as good of a response as any to this kind of right-wing claptrap.

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RICK PERRY IS WHITE TRASH SCUM

From the Huffington Post:

'Texas Miracle' Includes Crowded Homeless Shelters, Low-Wage Jobs, Worker Deaths

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas has created more jobs in the last year than any other state. These job openings have become known as the much-hyped, "Texas Miracle." In his February 2011 state-of-the-state address, Governor Rick Perry boasted: "Our economic strength is no accident. It's a testimony to our people, our entrepreneurs, and, yes, to the decisions made in this building. Employers from across the country and around the world understand that the opportunity they crave can be found in Texas, and they're headed our way, with jobs in tow."

Should he ultimately choose to run for the White House, Perry will be spending a lot of his time on the stump repeating those lines. Dig beneath the talking points and you find a more troubling picture: rising unemployment, a glut of low-wage jobs without benefits, overcrowded homeless shelters and public schools facing billions in budget cuts. Surita and Johnson have been airbrushed from the miracle. But they still can be found on the housing waiting lists and shelter entrances.

"If you want a bad job, go to Texas," said Texas Rep. Garnet Coleman (D), who represents a district in Houston, in an interview with The Huffington Post. "If you want to work at Carl's Jr., our doors are open, and if you want to go to a crumbling school in a failing school system, this is the place to come."

And

With Texas' minimal regulation and low taxes -- and Perry's cheerleading -- a spike in job growth during the past few years became known as the Texas Miracle. The rise in oil and gas prices, as well as a long-time state law protecting homeowners, helped stave off the recession for a while. And as a result, a miracle myth was created, with little exploration as to what impact Perry's policies actually had on the economic picture. The miracle is that anyone would call minimum-wage jobs a miracle. Of the all the jobs in Texas created last year, 37 percent paid at or below minimum wage -- and the state leads the nation in total minimum wage workers, according to a recent New York Times report.

"The important thing to do is not to just count jobs but to look at what kinds of jobs are being created in Texas," explained Dick Lavine, a Senior Fiscal Analyst with the Center for Public Policy Priorities. "Texas is tied for last with Mississippi for the highest percentage of minimum wage jobs and Texas is by far the leader of residents who don't have health insurance. It's low wage jobs without any benefits."

More here.

Ouch. Comparing my home state to Mississippi, for any reason at all, is cause for great pain. But here we are: Rick Perry has presided over the great state of Texas' long decline into trailer park ghetto abandon. And he appears to think this is a grand thing. No surprise there.

I've long described Texas as what the whole country would look like if the Republicans ever got total control over Washington, but we already went through some six years of that under Bush, and Texas definitely ended up worse. Of course, the Republicans have had total control of Texas for nearly twenty years, so maybe I should just wait a bit longer to see what happens. I mean, Obama might as well be a Republican, what with his zeal for fucking the middle class and the poor until they're raw. So maybe just a few more years.

But I digress. This is about Rick Perry.

Thing is, he's a true believer. In everything. He believes cutting taxes creates more tax revenue. He believes regulating industrial toxic emissions is bad for the economy. He believes global warming is an environmentalist/communist hoax. He believes Jesus died for our sins, and that his spirit engages in magical warfare with the demonic entities that surround us. He believes the Genesis creation story is literal fact. He believes states that don't like federal laws can secede and become nations unto themselves. And on and on.

In short, he's a total fucking moron who has run Texas according to his stupid beliefs, and has, accordingly, run the state into the ground. He's a bit more articulate than his predecessor, George W. Bush, so people don't seem to realize that Perry may very well be an even bigger tard, but, make no mistake, the guy's got brain damage. And he's proud of it.

Personally, I'd love to see him nominated, if only because it will make the GOP overall appear to be just about as stupid as he is. But really, it doesn't matter. Obama, who is way more intelligent, is just about as bad of a chief executive as Perry, but for different reasons.

Either way, we're all going to hell.

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The Rift

From Hullabaloo:

Obviously, nobody really cares about the silly, useless liberals. But for the first time today, I heard John King and the rest of the CNN clones muse about the coming election being close. And King said he's heard rumblings among political operatives that suppressing the liberal base could turn out to be a mistake. Even though they are never to be taken seriously on the merits, their puppy-like enthusiasm might be required to push the president over the top in a close election. The panel pooh-poohed the idea, saying they have nowhere else to go, so that's that. King pushed back saying that his sources say this could develop into a real problem.

This rift exists --- and the problem is that there's not a lot they can do about it now. The President and the Democrats have handcuffed themselves to this deficit reduction and they have no tools to fix the economy and have shown no fortitude in any of these fights. (And I have a sneaking suspicion that if they think a jobs program can consist of deregulation and free trade deals, this rift will only grow.) I don't see a way out.

More here.

Right, well, the writing's been on the wall for well over a decade now. I mean, that's what Ralph Nader's first run for the presidency was all about back in 1996: the Democrats have been captured by the corporations which means that there is absolutely no political voice in Washington for average ordinary citizens. Indeed, it was fairly obvious then. Clinton ended "welfare as we know it" in August of that year, and had already been extraordinarily friendly to Wall Street, which was his largest campaign contributor. Labor, as a political force, was already essentially impotent at this point, but then, as now, it continued to contribute to and get the vote out for politicians who hate them and never return their favors. Then, as now, Democrats can be counted on, to some extent, to favor the left in the so-called culture wars, which are meaningless to the corporate state, but that's about it. Obvious for years.

Is it possible that this debt ceiling charade fight was the last straw? Are liberals going to stay home in November next year, or will they, gasp, vote for an independent or third party candidate? It would be just desserts for the Democrats, who, like I said, haven't been a liberal party since I was an undergrad. I mean, it would also be awful: the GOP is clearly being run by total psychos who would, once again in control of the White House, do their damnedest to gouge out Lady Liberty's eyes. On the other hand, I'm really starting to wonder if Republican rule would be that much worse than Democratic rule: there's no way the GOP could have gotten away with this under a Republican president; House and Senate Democrats would have galvanized against it. But with a Democratic president leading the way, there was virtually no opposition in Congress, just bickering and bitching about how much to cut, rather than whether to cut at all.

Personally, I welcome an Obama loss in 2012. Perhaps in exile the Democrats will take the opportunity to reevaluate the self-destructive course they've taken, and hopefully liberals, who couldn't possibly be punked again after all this (could they?), will lead the way.

At any rate, Obama was right about one thing: change is better than the status quo. It's just that he's one of the people we need to throw out of office in order to get some of that change.

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DEBT CEILING ENDGAME
The myth of Obama's "blunders" and "weakness"

From Glenn Greenwald courtesy of Digg:

With the details of the pending debt deal now emerging..., a consensus is solidifying that (1) this is a virtually full-scale victory for the GOP and defeat for the President (who all along insisted on a "balanced" approach that included tax increases), but (2) the President, as usual, was too weak in standing up to right-wing intransigence -- or simply had no options given their willingness to allow default -- and was thus forced into this deal against his will. This depiction of Obama as occupying a largely powerless, toothless office incapable of standing up to Congress -- or, at best, that the bad outcome happened because he's just a weak negotiator who "blundered" -- is the one that is invariably trotted out to explain away most of the bad things he does.

It appears to be true that the President wanted tax revenues to be part of this deal. But it is absolutely false that he did not want these brutal budget cuts and was simply forced -- either by his own strategic "blunders" or the "weakness" of his office -- into accepting them. The evidence is overwhelming that Obama has long wanted exactly what he got: these severe domestic budget cuts and even ones well beyond these, including Social Security and Medicare, which he is likely to get with the Super-Committee created by this bill (as Robert Reich described the bill: "No tax increases on rich yet almost certain cuts in Med[icare] and Social Security . . . . Ds can no longer campaign on R's desire to Medicare and Soc Security, now that O has agreed it").

More here.

Well, this all seems to be working out as expected: Obama is Bush in Democrat's clothing. The wealthy elite get everything, and the American people get nothing. Actually, less than nothing because they're about to suffer massive spending cuts to programs that provide vital services. It's all pretty sick.

Really, this Greenwald post is yet another extraordinarily persuasive argument that liberals have essentially been locked out of the Washington discourse. I mean, when politicians and pundits almost completely across the board assert in lockstep that massive cuts to historic social programs amount to the liberal position, then there is no liberal position. I mean, there is, indeed, a liberal position, but it doesn't matter to anybody in Washington. To them, Obama is "liberal."

I wonder what that makes people like establishment-media-exception Rachel Maddow? I wonder what that makes me? Because if Obama's a liberal, then I must be to the left of Stalin! Of course, I'm not, but you get my drift: actual liberal views in the mainstream discourse are cynically substituted with this neoliberal bullshit championed by right-wing Democrats like Clinton and Obama, and the nation suffers greatly as a result--if you don't have the full array of political options in front of you, then you don't really understand what's going on, which is pretty much how the establishment wants it, you know TINA, and all that horse manure.

I really wonder if I should ever have kids. The nation they stand to inherit is not going to be the one in which I grew up, to put it kindly. That is, bringing children into the dark future now facing us may very well amount to an immoral act.

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Tattooed moms and the generation gap above and below

From Mom Houston, a Houston Chronicle blog:

According to a 2006 Pew Research Center survey, 40 percent of people in Generation X, those born between 1966 and 1980, have a tattoo. That’s up from just 10 percent of Baby Boomers, people born between 1946 and 1964, who have them.

And

As more and more of the younger side of Generation Xers are reaching parenthood themselves, I wondered if their perspective on tattoos had changed. It’s always interesting to see how people’s decisions, clearly in contrast to their parents’ traditions, change once they become parents themselves,

More here.

I must admit that the biggest motivation for my getting a tattoo was precisely because it seemed my whole generation was doing it. That, and it seemed to be part of the zeitgeist of the 90s. But all the anti-tattoo arguments I'd been hearing for years rang true to an extent: it will be there forever; it may very well be something you hate later in life; it might keep some employment opportunities closed, and on and on. Okay, all reasonable points. So I thought about it for nearly the entire decade. At one point, I was considering getting a Vladimir Lenin tattoo, but a friend pointed out how the communist revolutionary was also a murderous scum bag, so I kept on thinking. In the end, I just picked out a design I liked in a shop:



It was small and unobtrusive. I put it on my upper arm, where my t-shirt sleeve would cover it. It was a sort of universal symbol, a black sun, hearkening back to ancient cultures while also looking forward and outward, the whole man-in-space theme I've loved since I was a kid. At the time, it seemed like something I could not only live with for decades, but also something I could love, too.

And you know what? I've had it over a decade and I still love it. Art on my body, which I personally chose and placed. It also has the unexpected benefit of reminding me of the era in which I first started to assert my identity into the adult world. It's cool.

Of course, lots of people from my generation weren't so contemplative about their tattoos, and I have no doubt that, at this point, years later, many of them don't feel the way I do. To some extent, I have no sympathy for these of my generational comrades. I mean, they knew what they were getting into, just as I did, but they had to go for stupid shit, or for way too many. And now some of them are apparently perplexed over what to tell their kids about the issue.

So here's my advice:

Don't put it in terms of tattoos good/tattoos bad. Put it in terms of how long people live, how people change their attitudes and opinions, how often times people look back on their youth and judge themselves to be stupid or naive. Put it in terms of career, but also in terms of aesthetics and quality of life, as well as personal identity, and how people must often balance these concepts in order to successfully pursue whatever goals they end up pursuing. Take great pains to validate the individuality of your child, to let him or her understand that once past the age of eighteen, it is a personal decision to physically alter one's appearance in this way: this is just wisdom the parent is offering, not some kind of authoritarian control.

Hopefully, with such an approach, the GenXer's child will make a decision that everybody can live with. I mean, your kid may very well end up getting some ink, but probably something tasteful and small scale.

Unless your kid's a cutter. Which means he'll probably end up getting shitloads of tattoos, very likely in awful taste, and buttloads of body piercings, including the genitalia. You won't really want to take him to family gatherings, but that's okay because your abuse very likely made him this way in the first place, and that's what you get, asshole.

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NFL Players’ "Remarkable" Labor Victory

From Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviews leftist sports writer Dave Zirin:

Troy Polamalu, All-Pro for the Pittsburgh Steelers, he said, "I think what the players are fighting for is something bigger. The fact is it’s people fighting against big business. The big business argument is 'I got the money and I got the power, and therefore I can tell you what to do.' That’s life everywhere. I think this is a time when the football players are standing up and saying, 'No, no, no, the people have the power.'" I mean, this is a guy who is best known for doing Head & Shoulders commercials, and now he sounds like Big Bill Haywood.

Click here to watch, read, or listen to the rest.

So like lots of other Americans, I'm glad the strike is over. As you know, I'm a much bigger fan of college ball, but, you know, the Saints are infectious when you live in the New Orleans area. And they've got something the Oilers and the Texans never had, a Super Bowl victory. But I also really like that the strike happened at all.

It gave the NFL fans who read the sports pages regularly a great lesson in the economics of labor, and if these fans understood what they were reading, they ought to also walk away with a new understanding of the power that regular ordinary work-a-day guys have when they stick together. The power to bring a mighty corporation to its knees.

Yeah, pro football is glamorous, and the players are extraordinarily skilled, but the basics for their strike are the same for workers in all fields. That is, like Polamalu says, big business has money and power which they think allows them to dictate terms. And usually, almost always in fact, they get away with it, at least here in the US because nobody knows how to challenge them anymore. Until now, that is. I mean, among those above mentioned guys who read the sports pages. All they have to do is understand that their lot in life isn't too terribly different from the guys in the NFL: they work for very wealthy people who think they have the power to tell them how they're going to work, how much they will earn, and the conditions of the workplace; if workers stick together, however, a lot of that power simply evaporates, once the wealthy elites realize that their wealth absolutely depends on the people who actually do the work.

It's that simple. And as American as the NFL.

Okay, are you ready for some football?

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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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THE FOLLY OF OUTSOURCING

From the Nation:

How America Could Collapse

It was in the 1990s that American multinationals, spurred by government policy, began outsourcing operations to China. At the same time, the Clinton administration steadily relaxed antitrust enforcement, leading to massive corporate consolidation and the creation of the virtual firm. By the early parts of the last decade, the ideal American multinational made its profits by using its market power to gut labor and supply prices and by using its political power to eliminate taxation. All of this turned giant American institutions against making things. This is why we rely on a British factory to make our flu vaccine, why global videotape production was knocked offline by a tsunami and why that same event slowed the gigantic auto industry. US corporate leaders now see the idea of making things as a cost of doing business, one best left to others. What has happened as a result is that much of the production for critical products and services that make our economy run is constructed by a patchwork global network of suppliers all over the world in unstable regions, over which we have very little control. An accident or political problem in any number of countries may deny us not just iPhones but food, medicine or critical machinery.

More here.

This well articulates something that has made me uneasy since the late 90s. I mean, I've never liked the fact that all the old good unionized manufacturing jobs that were once the nucleus of the American middle class have essentially been permanently sent to nations where people will work for pennies on the dollar. That's obviously bad for the economic well being of our country. But after all the blood letting of the 80s and 90s it started occurring to me that all this downsizing and outsourcing was also destroying our capacity to make things. Important things. That is, sending production to foreign nations means we no longer have a manufacturing base.

My free trade oriented acquaintances have assured me on multiple occasions that not only was it no problem, but that it was actually good for the economy overall, that it would increase trade, which would make life better and more lucrative for everybody in the long run. Nice theory. I'm still waiting to see if it pans out after all these years. But nobody's ever really offered any theory to calm my nerves about the fact that America no longer makes things. Just assurances that outsourcing production is good economics.

But how can it be good economics if, say, hostile nations decide to just take over the factories and manufacturing plants owned by American corporations? I guess that's why we have a massive military, to make the world safe for global capitalism. But it still makes me uneasy that we depend on other nations for really important things we need. Sure, it's nice to have that great capital inflow--I mean, I guess it's nice, at least for the wealthy elites who get the vast majority of such profits. But, in the end, how nice would it be to have a whole lot of money but without the ability to buy the things we used to make here in great quantities because other nations refuse to deal with us? Right, not very nice at all.

So I know it's a weak hypothesis on my part: nations hosting American industrial capacity band together and cut us out. Probably not likely. At least, not all at once. But the above linked essay outlines some scenarios that don't seem so unlikely at all, scenarios that are already coming to pass, environmental disaster, political instability, oil price spikes. Put them all together at the same time, and we have economic chaos. That is, suddenly we won't be able to put food on the table, or fix our air conditioners, or take heart medications. We'll have money, but not things.

So all these decades of outsourcing American industry may very well make good economic sense in terms of cheaper labor costs or efficiency, but they have left us wide open to catastrophic risk. I don't see how anybody can think that's good sense.

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Right-Wing Media Outraged Norway Attacker Accurately Labeled A Christian

From Media Matters courtesy of Eschaton:

On The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly claimed: "The New York Times and other liberal media have branded the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik a Christian, even though there is absolutely no evidence the man is a follower of Jesus Christ." O'Reilly later claimed: "There is no evidence this man was a member of a church. No evidence that he followed the teachings of Jesus Christ. As you know, they're nonviolent. OK? No evidence that he had anything to do with the Christian faith. Yet, they call him a Christian because he says he is? Come on."

And

On the July 27 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade asked Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham if she was "surprised" that the media "quickly label[ed]" Breivik a "Christian." Ingraham replied that Breivik didn't represent "any mainstream or even fringe sentiment in the Christian community."

More here.

Well, maybe Breivik doesn't represent "any mainstream" variety of Christianity, but he definitely represents the fringe. The KKK, Timothy McVeigh, various militia groups, anyone who has ever taken a shot at an abortion doctor or bombed a clinic, all these people are self-identified Christians, often with more mainstream support than people are willing to admit, who both advocate and engage in political violence because of their Christian faith. And those are just some examples off the top of my head from the last twenty years: indeed, Christianity's history is extraordinarily bloody and violent, from the destruction of the Serapeum, to the Crusades, to the Spanish Inquisition, to the wars between Protestants and Catholics, to the "Christianizing" of indigenous populations under European colonial control. Jesus may have been called "the prince of peace," but his followers have often been warriors and torturers.

Breivik is, in short, following the grand tradition of Western Christianity, which is written in blood.

But what really gets under my skin about this is how Christianity's defenders so easily shrug off this fact. I mean, it's all like the standard response when you tell a fundamentalist about how you hate Christian hypocrisy: "Well you know, Ron, we're all hypocrites; it's just that some of us are trying to make themselves better." And of course "some of us" are Christians. So the argument is something along the lines of "don't judge Christianity by the actions of Christians; rather, judge Christianity by its principles and values." But there doesn't really seem to be any universal agreement about what those principles and values actually are. Southern Baptists support the death penalty and torturing POWs; Catholics don't. Both Southern Baptists and Catholics oppose women in key clerical positions, but increasingly lots of other Christian denominations embrace women in leadership roles. Some churches ordain gay clergy; others think this is a sign of the end times. Orthodox Christians reject the trinity, and therefore Christ's divine nature; Catholics and Protestants think this is heresy. And on and on and on.

Christianity is a big tent religion. Whether you like it or not.

So it's kind of impossible to refrain from judging the actions of individual believers and Christian groups in lieu of judging the philosophy. I mean, for all intents and purposes, all you have to do is grab a Bible and declare yourself a Christian and that's that. You're a Christian. Indeed, the only way humanity has to judge Christianity is by the actions of people who call themselves Christian. Because that's what Christianity is, people who call themselves Christian.

Now don't get me wrong. There's no way I'm going to say that Breivik's actions are in any way representative of most people who are self-described Christians any more than I'm going to indict Muslims for the actions of Al-Qaeda, or Jews for the actions of the Israeli government. My whole point is that it's a complicated situation. We must necessarily take a nuanced and sophisticated point of view if we're ever going to understand violent religious extremism.

But make no mistake: as various Muslims and Jews, most notably Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories, have become more violent in defense of their religious views in recent years, so, too, have Christians. And that's a problem that denial will only make worse.

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GOING OFF THE GRID FOR A COUPLE OF NIGHTS

Carly and I are getting a room in the French Quarter for Monday and Tuesday night, one of those "staycations" they talk about on the internets. It'll be fun drunkenly prowling the dark corners in the wee hours, especially if we don't get mugged.

Anyway, I should be back for more blogging late Wednesday night. In the meantime, here's a great Duke Ellington song, one that, before I actually lived here, I would always play as I neared NOLA on I-10. It really does capture the spirit of the city:



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U.S. wastes $34 billion in Afghan and Iraq contracting

From Reuters via the Huffington Post:

The United States has wasted some $34 billion on service contracts with the private sector in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a study being finalized for Congress.

The findings by a bipartisan congressional commission were confirmed to Reuters by a person familiar with the draft of the study, which is due to be completed in coming weeks.

And

The report blames a lack of oversight by federal agencies for misuse of funds and warns of further waste when the programs are transferred to Iraqi or Afghan control as the United States withdraws its troops.

More here.

A couple of brief observations.

First, this is something of a supplement to my post from Thursday night highlighting Ralph Nader's assertion that if we really wanted to get serious about debt and deficit reduction, we could and should go after military expenditures for our useless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as for our constant readiness to fight the Soviet Union in WWIII--of course, because there is no Soviet Union, such preparation, like our Middle East wars, is useless, and therefore a massive waste of tax dollars. But this Reuters article isn't even about money actually used to fight or to prepare to fight: it's about money lost to simple mismanagement. That is, it's more money than you and a thousand of your friends could ever hope to earn in their lifetimes just lost, gone without rhyme or reason, because the US establishment loves to throw money at the military, and doesn't really give a shit if it does anything useful.

Why aren't we looking first to the most frivolously spending arm of the government, the Pentagon, when it comes to deficit reduction? Answer: the deficit hawks aren't really concerned with the deficit; they just want to cut social programs because they think all that money goes to black people.

Second, this news presents yet another real-world problem with the cherished economic notion that the private sector always does it better than the government. The reality is that often the government is absolutely the best way to go about accomplishing national goals, while private sector ventures often crash and burn. Remember that the vast majority of new businesses fail, and that's pretty much all you need to understand that the conventional wisdom regarding the private versus the public sector is not an honest discourse.

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Study: U.S. Flag 'Primes' Voters Toward Republican Viewpoints

From Fox News courtesy of Digg:

Just a glimpse at the American flag can sway voters, even Democrats, toward more Republican voting behavior, attitudes and beliefs, a new two-year study says.

The authors, from the University of Chicago, Cornell University and Hebrew University, say the research proves the American flag has a powerful effect on voters.

"A single exposure to an American flag resulted in a significant increase in participants' Republican voting intentions, voting behavior, political beliefs, and implicit and explicit attitudes, with some effects lasting eight months," reads the study titled, "Long-Term Effects of U.S. Flag Exposure on Republicanism."

More here.

Leaving aside the fact that the University of Chicago, what with its professors emeritus Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss, was an incubator for both neoliberalism and neoconservatism, as well as the fact that this is being reported by "fair and balanced" Fox News, it looks to me like this flag effect, if true, does nothing but reflect the now decades of relentless conservative propaganda that only they are true Americans. That is, in your face nationalism and arrogant American exceptionalism are the primary domain of the Republican Party, not the Democrats. No surprise that Old Glory makes people gravitate toward the party of "we're better than you." We've been socially conditioned to do so.

I mean, the GOP has been literally draping itself in the American flag since the Reagan era, while Democrats, hammered by even more years of Republican red-baiting, as well as a continual flow of media images connecting them to anti-American hippies and other 60s fun, just don't seem so serious in their nationalistic zeal by comparison. It is as though there is nothing they can say or do which will make them out to be the stars-and-stripes armband wearers their conservative opponents are.

Propaganda really does work.

In the end, this is just another example of how the Democrats simply don't understand the modern political environment.

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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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