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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VOTERS

From Hullabaloo, Digby quoting writer Chris Hays, who canvassed voters in Wisconsin during the 2004 presidential race:

"These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn't the word "issue"; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the "political." The undecideds I spoke to didn't seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief--not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

To cite one example: I had a conversation with an undecided truck driver who was despondent because he had just hit a woman's car after having worked a week straight. He didn't think the accident was his fault and he was angry about being sued. "There's too many lawsuits these days," he told me. I was set to have to rebut a "tort reform" argument, but it never came. Even though there was a ready-made connection between what was happening in his life and a campaign issue, he never made the leap. I asked him about the company he worked for and whether it would cover his legal expenses; he said he didn't think so. I asked him if he was unionized and he said no. "The last job was unionized," he said. "They would have covered my expenses." I tried to steer him towards a political discussion about how Kerry would stand up for workers' rights and protect unions, but it never got anywhere. He didn't seem to think there was any connection between politics and whether his company would cover his legal costs. Had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of tort reform, it might have benefited Bush; had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of labor rights, it might have benefited Kerry. He made neither, and remained undecided."

More here.

Just expanding a bit on yesterday's post.

I'm really starting to believe that whatever constitutes the political selves of most Americans has become so degraded in recent decades that we no longer have a population capable of democracy. Generally, the mainstream media have been hinting at this for years: think of all those silly tests offered by Time or USA Today, you know, the ones where you get to see how your political knowledge compares with high school seniors. Of course, as Howard Zinn used to observe, such journalistic exercises are much more about establishing that journalists know more than the rest of us than about showing where we really are in terms of political expertise. But even if these tests are something of a sucker punch, the overall idea that we have a wildly misinformed or uninformed electorate is right on. That is, that most Americans don't seem to know much about the formal structures of our nation's government is kind of a side show. The real problem is that voters have no real or relevant idea why they're voting on their chosen candidates.

I strongly asserted yesterday that cultural identity necessarily takes the place of rational consideration of issues for most Americans when it comes to voting. I think Republicans are better at appealing to this dynamic than Democrats are, but it probably wouldn't be much better if the situation was reversed. That is, while my lefty ideology makes me prefer the Democrats, the closest thing to a liberal party we have in the US, I don't want them in office just because Americans feel good about them. Rather, I want Americans to think deeply about the fate of the nation and to agonize accordingly over the issues. I want Americans to read every day about current events and political theory. I want Americans to have an understanding of political power, who has it, who doesn't, and why. I want Americans to study economics in their spare time, so they can truly decide when business should win, when workers should win, and when there should be compromise. And weighing the needs of consumers versus the needs of business ought to be in there somewhere, too.

In short, democracy isn't some passive thing, where citizens can go about their lives in their own personal bubbles, ignoring the world around them in order to concentrate on the details of their existences: rather, democracy is active, and requires a relatively high level of personal involvement from its people, study, contemplation, discussion and debate, and sometimes even street demonstration. Unfortunately, we have a society where such things are strongly discouraged, and, unsurprisingly, most people take the path of least resistance.

So, then, what do you get when you have the formal structures of democracy, but a citizenry which cannot or will not participate in a meaningful way? I have no idea what to call it, but it certainly isn't democracy. Somebody or something else runs the country; it sure as hell isn't the people.

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Bill Clements Dead: Former Texas Gov. Dies

From the AP via the Huffington Post news wire:

Former Texas Gov. Bill Clements, who in 1979 became the state's first Republican elected governor since Reconstruction, has died at 94, his family said.

Clements, whose belief that state government should operate like a big business helped change the face of Texas politics, died Sunday after what his family said was a brief stay at a Dallas-area hospital.

And

Clements, a Texas oilman, saw his first term in office as a major change in the way the state operated.

"It is the largest business in Texas and yet we run it like it was a soda water shed – or a barbecue stand," Clements said shortly before turning over the chief executive's job to Democrat Mark White, a lawyer and part-owner of a barbecue firm who upset Clements' re-election bid in 1982.

Clements came back four years later to defeat White as governor and served until 1991.

More here.

This would be otherwise unremarkable. I mean, Clements was an old man, 94, and people die when they get old. Clements didn't do much as governor to really change how Texas functions, either--sure, he did sort of serve as John the Baptist to the GOP's Jesus in its ultimate takeover of the Lone Star State, but Clements dealt with a solidly Democratic state legislature for his two staggered terms, and necessarily played by their rules. As far as I can tell, he pretty much left the Governor's office as he found it. Unremarkable.

Except for the fact that he was the first politician I ever voted for.

I was eighteen, right out of high school, and in my freshman year at the University of Texas, right there in political town, Austin. I didn't know a goddamned thing about politics, or power, or economics. But I thought I did. Actually, I was certain I did. And that's why I voted Republican the first chance I got, November of 1986. And in extreme hindsight, that's not so bad. I mean, this was well before the GOP had collectively decided to go bat-shit crazy, you know, the way it is today. Clements was a conservative, to be sure, but pretty tame compared to our current bunch of psychotic Republican super stars. Really, he wasn't too far off the beaten path from the guy he lost to, and then beat, Mark White.

But there is something in extreme hindsight that is pretty bad: I voted for Clements, a Republican, out of tribal loyalty more than anything else. My family was Republican. My home town, Kingwood, was Republican. It was the Reagan era, Morning in America, and liberals were fools to be mocked, which they increasingly were on television and in movies. It couldn't have possibly been about any real grasp of the issues because I didn't understand them. I mean, I was all for shrinking the size of government, but I didn't really understand what that meant, what the "big government" actually did that made it a valuable institution. I understood foreign policy in terms of WWII movies, which are, needless to say, fiction set against a factual backdrop, not any real explanation of how national governments ought to interact with each other. My heart swelled when I saw the stars and stripes, which was for real Americans, who never questioned our nation's greatness.

In short, I voted Republican because it felt good to do so.

Within a few short years, after encountering actual liberals who could actually defend themselves, I made it a point to never lose any debates with them. So I started looking at the liberal construction of reality, and eventually found that liberals were able to answer numerous questions that conservatives couldn't--I mean sure, conservatives had responses, but they were unsatisfying, not real answers. Like CS Lewis who went on an intellectual mission to disprove Christianity, but instead became a believer, I tried to arm myself against snotty elitist liberals, only to come over to their side.

I look at conservatives today, twenty five years after my first trip to the voting booth, and, for the most part, I see people who aren't too terribly different from the guy I was back in 1986. There are notable exceptions, of course, but for the most part I get the sense that conservatives in 2011 are people who don't really get the issues in an intellectually fair way, but don't realize it, and can therefore never admit it, to themselves or anybody else. Actually, liberals are like this, too, but at least their moral sense of fairness and compassion guides them, roughly, in an ideological direction that I can side with in a debate.

The long and short of all this is that American politics in the 21st century is far more about identity, about what kinds of people we think we are, than it is about rational consideration of numerous issues. I got lucky in that I hate losing an argument, so I forced myself to think it all out, forced myself to confront ideas and topics I didn't want to consider. I mean, it is, of course, much more complicated than that--I had close friends come out of the closet; I decided to be an artist, which put me in a tough place as far as conservative ideology and free market fundamentalism go; I hung out with arm chair radicals and socialists. But, for whatever reasons, I ended up taking a long hard look at my own ideology and saw that it couldn't stand on its own two feet. This is unusual for most Americans. I'm definitely not saying I'm better than anybody or anything along those lines: I just got lucky.

But ideology is serious business. We really ought not to leave it up to luck. I'm not fool enough to believe that conservatives would naturally agree with me on most issues if they, too, submitted themselves to some politically harsh introspection, but I do know that I can have honest discussions with such people.

Right now, honest discussion is impossible.

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FAREWELL GIL SCOTT-HERON

From Wikipedia:

Gilbert "Gil" Scott-Heron (April 1, 1949 — May 27, 2011) was an American poet, musician, and author known primarily for his work as a spoken word performer in the 1970s and 80s, and for his collaborative soul works with musician Brian Jackson. His collaborative efforts with Jackson featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues and soul music, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron. The music of these albums, most notably Pieces of a Man and Winter in America in the early 1970s, influenced and helped engender later African-American music genres such as hip hop and neo soul. Scott-Heron's recording work is often associated with black militant activism and has received much critical acclaim for one of his most well-known compositions "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". His poetic style has been influential upon every generation of hip hop since his popularity began. In addition to being widely considered an influence in today's music, Scott-Heron remained active until his death, and in 2010 released his first new album in 16 years, entitled I'm New Here.

Much more here.

Scott-Heron was a real artist. That is, he readily included political themes in his jazz poetry stylings, but more than that, his work blew me away when I first heard it. That's why I'm just going to let it speak for itself:



The words:

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.

So...you know why the revolution will not be televised, right? It's because revolutionaries will take over and shut down the oppressive capitalist propaganda institution known as the mass media.

How could this song not blow me away?

Farewell Gil Scott-Heron.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy



Frankie



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

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Medicare and Mediscares

From the New York Times, my favorite Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman on the recent GOP attempts to gut Medicare:

Mr. Ryan may claim — and he may even believe — that he’s facing a backlash because his opponents are lying about his proposals. But the reality is that the Ryan plan is turning into a political disaster for Republicans, not because the plan’s critics are lying about it, but because they’re describing it accurately.

Take, for example, the statement that the Ryan plan would end Medicare as we know it. This may have Republicans screaming “Mediscare!” but it’s the absolute truth: The plan would replace our current system, in which the government pays major health costs, with a voucher system, in which seniors would, in effect, be handed a coupon and told to go find private coverage.

The new program might still be called Medicare — hey, we could replace government coverage of major expenses with an allowance of two free aspirins a day, and still call it “Medicare” — but it wouldn’t be the same program. And if the cost estimates of the Congressional Budget Office are at all right, the inadequate size of the vouchers — which by 2030 would cover only about a third of seniors’ health costs — would leave many if not most older Americans unable to afford essential care.

And

In fact, it wasn’t really a deficit-reduction plan. Once you remove the absurd assumptions — discretionary spending, including defense, falling to Calvin Coolidge levels, and huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, with no loss in revenue? — it’s highly questionable whether it would reduce the deficit at all.

What the Ryan plan is, instead, is an attempt to snooker Americans into accepting a standard right-wing wish list under the guise of deficit reduction. And Americans, it seems, have seen through the deception.

More here.

Right. If you're actually serious about reducing the deficit, the first thing you want to do is get the economy revved up again such that more people are working and earning bigger incomes, which necessarily results in higher tax revenues. Indeed, as Krugman keeps reminding us, in addition to the reckless spending of the Bush years, on war and non-negotiable drug prices for senior citizens, the biggest factor increasing the deficit is the Great Recession, which has reduced government income on a massive scale.

But nobody in Washington really seems all that interested in getting people back to work. Instead, they want to gut the social safety net, Republicans because they just don't like the idea of a social safety net, and Democrats because they're stupid cowards. I mean, none of them actually say this. To them, it's all about being "serious" or about being "grownup." Hell, many of them have probably actually convinced themselves that this is what it's all about. But it's not. Nobody really gives a shit about the deficit. Republicans just want to fuck people over and Democrats are afraid of Republicans. That's what it's all about.

So there's this GOP Medicare "plan," which is increasingly looking like a deadly albatross around Republican necks, that its supporters insist is not destroying but rather modifying the very popular government program. This is, of course, a total lie, and it is only thanks to the resounding success of Medicare over the years that Americans immediately see such bullshit for what it is--I mean, Medicare is popular with everybody, from black and white to rich and poor, by and large because, unlike the private health care regime most Americans under 65 suffer, Medicare works, and it positively affects virtually the entire population. If it was a smaller scale program, one that only affected a much smaller percentage of the population, the GOP might have been able to get away with it. But no. The Republicans, drunk with a false sense of success based on national discontent with Obama's wishy-washy pro-corporate health care reform mixed with outrage over his being bedfellows with the banking sector, went for the knockout.

Instead, they've fallen flat on their faces. How long will it be before the Democrats fritter away yet another golden opportunity offered up by their opponents? I'd say about five minutes.

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The Crisis in America's Ghettos

From CounterPunch:

In case you didn't know it, what's called a "recession" in White America is called a "depression" in Black America. During much of last year white unemployment held steady at around 8.8 percent. Down the block, though, it was about 12 per cent for Latinos and in Afro neighborhoods across town it averaged 16 per cent. And as unemployment spiked at 24 percent for white teens last year it hit 45 percent for black teens, according to the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University.

And

Year after year, decade after decade, Washington has cheated black communities out of economic opportunity. Instead of investing in a framework to help blacks advance by their own initiative, the Federal government has flushed billions down the toilets of friendly foreign strongmen such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarek. Black neighborhoods have been the last to get public services from flower gardens to tot lots to street lamps to garbage collection to low-rent housing. They've been the first to have their children pulled off to fill the beds of privatized prisons and fill the ranks that march off to fight Washington's wars of aggression. Their children have gone to the most run-down schools and have been expected to learn to read from raggedy books. The story of dilapidated housing is also well known. As one child in a Washington, D.C., slum not far from the White House told me, "The rats come runnin' through here like express trains."

Back in 1962, the Urban League's Whitney Young pleaded for a "domestic Marshall Plan" that would revitalize the nation's ghettos. But Washington preferred to spend its money on military hardware in Viet Nam. A half century has gone by and not that much has changed. Marc Morial, the UL's president, is hard at work pushing childhood education, trying to stop home foreclosures, and canvassing employers to provide jobs for minorities. The change is that instead of fighting in Viet Nam, Washington is fighting in the Middle East. Same difference.

More here.

The unemployment figures cited above are the official ones, which do not include part time workers who wish that they were working full time, workers working for less than their skill set would earn if the right jobs were available, and workers who have been so demoralized that they have given up looking for work. Throw those groups in and you have much higher figures. Of course, the figures are much much much higher in black ghettos.

Yesterday, I posted about President Obama's apparent impotence on, or utter disinterest in, doing something about the fact that the socioeconomic fates of African-Americans have plunged dramatically during his tenure in the White House. I thought it would be a good idea to follow up with a post showing just how badly most black people have been doing lately, and let me tell you, it's looking pretty bad.

Conservatives, and lots of moderates, like to look at this ongoing crisis from the individual's perspective: all black people have to do is get an education, or start a business, or save their money, get off the drugs, stop having children out of wedlock, act like responsible men, and on and on and on. And because conservatives and moderates control the public discourse, that's what the conversation is about, essentially how black people are lazy and stupid.

Without addressing the racism inherent in this notion, it is obvious to honest observers that chronic poverty and social dysfunction exist within a social context, and totally ignoring that context in order to focus on individual behavior makes for a truly warped understanding of the situation. That is, when you go to shitty schools in crime infested neighborhoods with absolutely no prospects for a career or economic advancement in sight, when your parents have endured the same situation, and their parents before them, and their parents before them, well, that's your lot in life, and bland platitudes such as "go to college" tend to look like total bullshit--indeed, when you're in the ghetto, a life of drugs and crime doesn't seem half bad when compared to spending your entire life working at Burger King.

The only way to break this cycle is with some intense and hardcore social intervention, the likes of which haven't even been discussed since the 60s. Obama's obviously not going to do this.

So who is?

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In the Age of Obama, Black America Suffering the Most

From the Nation via AlterNet:

In the black commentariat, opinion is divided over whether African-Americans should demand a more overt commitment to racial justice from a black president or refrain from doing so because it would weaken his appeal to others. The Rev. Al Sharpton insists that calling on Obama to be a “black exponent of black views” is “just stupid,” since it will embolden conservative attacks on projects black people need. Princeton professor Cornel West insists that Obama has “a certain fear of free black men” and “feels most comfortable with upper-middle-class white and Jewish men.”

By concentrating so heavily on race, both sides detract from his responsibilities. Obama should do more for black people -- not because he is black but because black people are the citizens suffering most. Black people have every right to make demands on Obama -- not because he’s black but because they gave him a greater percentage of their votes than any other group, and he owes his presidency to them. Like any president, he should be constantly pressured to put the issue of racial injustice front and center.

More here.

Indeed.

This is the track I've tried to take as a blogger and political critic: yes, Obama is a black man, but I accept and understand the position that he is the President of the United States, not chief representative for African-American concerns. I mean, obviously, it would have been suicide on the campaign trail to in any way encourage the notion that he would be going to Washington to clean up the centuries old mess of compounding injustices done to people of African descent in the name of America--we've come a long way as far as that goes, but we're still in a place such that white people, liberal and conservative alike, are freaked out by what they consider to be "identity politics," even though it's really all about justice.

But like the essay above asserts, Obama, as President of the United States, is, as an individual, the person who is most responsible for dealing with issues of racial justice, regardless of his own race and ethnicity--for that matter, so was Bush when he was in office, and Clinton before him, and back on down the line to the very beginning. So blasting the President for what appears to be utter impotence when it comes to making things right for African-Americans is totally fair game. I get that Obama is hyper-aware of the political risk he would take in being perceived as being too black, whatever that may mean, but frankly, I don't care. It has always been politically risky doing the right thing for black people in America--I mean, President Lincoln was fucking murdered for doing the right thing for black people; LBJ lost the South for the Democrats, an extraordinarily important region for the party's political fates, because he signed the Civil Rights Act back in 1965. There is no way to do what's right in this country for African-Americans without massive white backlash.

That is, no guts, no glory. If you sidestep the issue, things get worse. The only way to go is to deal with it head on. And Obama is most decidedly not dealing with the issue head on.

To some extent, I differ with Cornel West's point of view: while I agree with most of what I've heard him say about Obama in terms of political critique, I don't have the ability to stare into the President's soul to see what he's all about. That is, my view, based on Obama's issue positions and actions, is that he's a conservative pro-corporate Democrat, like the Clintons before him, meaning that he favors America's wealth-dominated establishment, which provided the lion's share of campaign funding that got him into office, and governs accordingly. In short, he's a neoliberal with socially progressive attitudes--neoliberals don't "fear...free black men;" they just don't give a shit one way or another unless such free black men have wealth and power.

But of this I am certain: African-Americans' lot in life has indeed gotten worse since Obama came to power, and it is his responsibility to reverse that trend, regardless of political risk. It is an absolute shame that his political ideology by and large rules that out.

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



...Dr. McCoy!

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Coalition Tangle

From Digby over at Hullabaloo:

This is the source of the mistrust that characterizes the relationship between the progressives and the centrists (or neo-liberals in Cruishank's piece ) in the Democratic Party coalition. It's not just that progressive goals are often thwarted --- so are conservatives'. Nobody always gets what they want. It's that progressive values and issues are actively disdained and used as bargaining chips in negotiations. It's one thing to feel that you aren't getting what you want, it's quite another to be constantly worried that you will lose what you already have --- and at the hands of your own coalition allies.

This all worked for the centrists when the Republicans played bipartisan politics. But they don't anymore. They have adopted a hardcore partisan approach that does not allow give and take with the opposition party. The Centrists learned this during the health care battle and their response has been to manipulate and strong arm the progressives in their coalition to get the votes they need. (In the old days, they could just leave them standing on the sidelines and make deals with Republicans.)

And

You simply can't have a working coalition in which a very large faction is constantly used as political cannon fodder. If the anger doesn't kill you the disillusionment will. The old bipartisan way is dead for now and Democrats had better adjust to dealing fairly and equitably within its own coalition or they're going to find that they don't have one.

More here.

Frankly, I'm amazed that the Democrats still manage to count progressives in their coalition.

Back around 2003 I was having one of those friendly arguments, fashionable at the time, about whether to vote Green or Democrat. It ended up being kind of tense, a bit less friendly than how it started, with my buddy trying to pin me into a corner: "Sure, vote Green and satisfy your conscience, but the Greens are in no position to do anything; the Democrats, at least, have some political power, and can get some results." My pleas that the Democrats actually don't get results, or at least the results I want, went unheeded. The conversation ended unsatisfyingly, with with my friend thinking I was an idiot for choosing ideology over pragmatism, and me frustrated that my friend didn't realize that, either way, practicality or idealism, the Democrats were no longer a party that could call itself liberal.

That was nearly a decade ago and things have just gotten worse since then. I've grown much more unflinching in my criticism of the Democrats, and pretty much refuse to vote for them until they get their shit together. I don't know these days if the Greens are the way to go, but I'm all the more certain that the Democrats have moved even further to the right. Meanwhile, the Republicans have become far right extremists. And I don't really talk much anymore with the above mentioned guy who got in my face about voting for Nader.

Digby's right in observing that liberals and progressives can take this bastard-child status only for so long before they bolt the party. I mean, I've been gone for years, myself. Lately, the Democrats have been enjoying some success, but only because the Republicans have gone so far around the bend that they're obviously bat-shit crazy, and most Americans know it. Sooner or later, though, they're going to figure out how to hide their lunatics, going to find a smooth-talking movie star type to be their party's public face, develop some language that sounds less psychotic, and then start winning again. All while the Democrats continue to be in profound disarray.

I really do want this country's traditional liberal party to get its shit together, if only because being a Democrat pisses off Republicans. But I just can't support a party that has nothing to do with my vision for the country. As far as I can tell, the Donkey Party is ultimately doomed.

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Why Are Cops Allowed to Film Citizens, But Citizens Not Allowed to Film Police Brutality?

From AlterNet:

But wait -- why not?

Though you'd expect that uncomfortable question to evoke dissembling, Fraternal Order of Police spokesman Jim Pasco was quite straightforward about it.

Police officers, he told NPR, "need to move quickly, in split seconds, without giving a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences for them might be." He added that law enforcement authorities believe "that anything that's going to have a chilling effect on an officer moving -- an apprehension that he's being videotaped and may be made to look bad -- could cost him or some citizen their life."

Obviously, nobody wants to stop officers from doing their much-needed job (well, nobody other than budget-cutting politicians who are slashing police forces). In fact, organizations such as the NAACP have urged citizens to videotape police precisely to make sure police are doing ALL of their job -- including protecting individuals' civil liberties.

This is not some academic or theoretical concern, and video recording is not a needless exercise in Bill of Rights zealotry. The assault on civil liberties in America is a very real problem and monitoring police is absolutely required in light of recent data.

More here.

Yeah, this is nuts and is becoming increasingly disturbing to me. The whole point to video recording the police is precisely to get them to hesitate. That, of course, and to catch them red-handed when they don't hesitate. And by "hesitate" I mean "make sure they don't shoot the wrong guy" or "make sure they don't tase the wrong guy" or "make sure they don't shoot or tase a guy who's already on the ground and not resisting" or "make sure they don't throw the elderly woman they just pulled over on the ground in a rage of self-righteousness and hyper-masculinity." Because, you know, bystanders have captured all that shit and more on video in recent years. All in the news, and it wouldn't have been if it hadn't been recorded on video.

What I haven't seen in the news is any story suggesting that cops hesitated in life or death situations because they were afraid of somebody with a video camera. I'm not saying it never happens, just that I've never heard of it. Certainly I've never heard of any academic studies suggesting such a thing. It's really difficult not to conclude that this is bullshit. Cops just don't want to be on video--it's too inconvenient for the power tripping that attracted them to the job in the first place.

Look, this really is basic civil rights stuff. If you believe that the 2nd amendment is about making governmental authority honest, then you've got to support the concept of recording the police. I mean, it's a lot less lethal than weapons, and essentially serves the same purpose. Except that nobody has to die. Unless of course there's actually something to the cops' undocumented fear of "hesitation," which there isn't, and, even if there is, can easily be overridden with training.

Seriously. There is an enormous problem with police misbehavior in this country, really, and video does a small part in helping to stem the tide. I'm not much of a video hound, myself, but in no way do I feel constrained by any of these anti-video laws, or any prosecutor's creative interpretation of existing statutes that don't really say anything about video. That is, I strongly advocate civil disobedience as far as recording the cops goes.

I mean, if we're not watching the cops, who is?

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Dash



Reine



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

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BIGGER THAN BIN LADEN: OBAMA CALLS
FOR ISRAEL WITHDRAWAL TO 1967 BORDERS

From the Washington Post:

The president pressed Israel, in unusually frank terms, to reach a final peace agreement with the Palestinians, citing the boundaries in place on the eve of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War as the starting point for negotiation about borders.

The formulation goes beyond principles outlined by President George W. Bush, who stated during his first term that “it is unrealistic to expect” Israel to pull back to the 1967 boundaries, which were based on cease-fire lines established in 1949. Obama said the negotiations about final borders, which he indicated may include land swaps to accommodate Israel’s large settlement blocs, should result in “a viable Palestine, a secure Israel.”

The president said a “full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces” from the West Bank should be carried out in coordination with Palestinian security forces. He described a future Palestinian state as “nonmilitarized,” a key Israeli demand.

More here.

Some brief history you probably don't know:

When Israel emerged triumphant from 1967's Six Day War they ended up occupying land that had previously been controlled by the Palestinians, Arabs who had lived there for centuries before the Zionist movement brought hundreds of thousands of Jews to the region starting in the nineteenth century. The problem was that Israel's leaders didn't really intend to end up with all this new territory. They had no plans for dealing with it. It was nice to take more of what had historically been Jewish land in Biblical times, but there were already lots of people living there who were not friendly to the recently formed Jewish state. Israel had no idea what to do.

They couldn't just expel the Palestinians. The world would freak out on it, and besides, Arab nations in the vicinity already had tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees from the previous conflict of the late 40s, and didn't really want any more. In short, there was no place for the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories to go, and it would be diplomatically unwise to force them out, anyway. So Israel settled on long term occupation and control of these newly conquered Arabs. The idea, however imperfect, was to make life for the Palestinians so insufferable that they would leave voluntarily, in spite of the fact that there wasn't really any place for them to go. As Israeli General and statesman Moshe Dayan once said, “You shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave.”

But like I said, there was no place for them to go, so Israel just continued to treat the Palestinians like shit for decades, with no end in sight. That is essentially the Jewish state's official policy to this day, with a few variations here and there, such as Jewish settlements, or sending in the tanks from time to time. Of course, the whole thing is a total failure, and America's blind, deaf, and dumb support for Israel, no matter what it does, has gotten us into diplomatic hot water again and again--indeed, 9/11 and the whole "War on Terror" is simply another chapter in the ongoing epic tale.

That President Obama would even casually utter a desire to see Israel withdraw to the 1967 borders, which is pretty much what the entire civilized world has wanted since the late 60s, is a profound break with the last thirty years or so of US policy in the region. I mean, for decades we've just supported everything Israel has done regarding the Palestinians. But not now. Indeed, Israel's political establishment is freaking out about it even as I write this. And the political forces here in the US that have driven our schizophrenic policy toward Israel/Palestine, from both parties, are freaking out, too.

In some ways, this is as groundbreaking as an announcement that we were putting Bush and Cheney on trial for war crimes would be. I mean, mainstream US political discourse insists that Israel's existence is on the line here, which is, of course, entirely untrue because Israel is easily the dominant power in the region, a minor superpower, even. But that's what the US establishment believes. And Obama just told them all to go to hell.

I'm still pissed at the President for all kinds of shit, but this is good, really good. Now let's see if he can put his money where his mouth is.

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Catholic Church Investigation Says Hippies
Made Catholic Priests Sexually Abuse Children

From Think Progress courtesy of Eschaton:

"Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed in the midst of the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s."

More here.

This info was presented on the left side of the blogosphere with a sort of understanding that it's total bullshit to blame the massive pedophile scandal on the sexual revolution, and of course, that is total bullshit. After all, hundreds of millions of Americans went through the 60s and 70s and did not become child rapists. Catholic priests, presumably the guardians of traditional Christian morality from a Catholic perspective, should have seen themselves as a bulwark against such social changes, rather than as the new sexuality's vanguard. Indeed, this kind of makes no sense. If the Catholic Church has always been opposed to sexual liberation, how, then, could priests celebrate sexual freedom by molesting defenseless boys?

On the other hand, this is an interesting thought in the way of explaining such vile behavior, rather than providing an excuse.

I'm forty three years old, too young to have really seen or understood what it was like before the sexual revolution, so I certainly have no way to compare the world today to how it was then. But I imagine the change must have been fairly profound. It happened fairly quickly, over the course of about a quarter century. First, explicit sexual imagery started to appear in the mass media. Then the birth control pill hit the market. Then everybody started getting divorces. Then disco and Three's Company. Like I said, I can only imagine what it must have been like to have watched it all happen, but some sort of dysphoria must have surely resulted in a not insignificant portion of the population. I mean, Protestant clergy wasn't exempt, either, lots of sex scandals for them, too, over the years. Human beings are, in the end, human beings, whether they claim to speak for God or not.

On the third hand, short of NAMBLA, I don't recall reading that there was a substantial pedophilia aspect to the sexual revolution. So this notion that the sexual revolution played a role in the ongoing scandal is, to say the least, incomplete in terms of providing an overall understanding. I just think the Bishops have a point worth considering, and that liberals shouldn't dismiss it with a bunch of elitist snickering.

As long as they don't use the sexual revolution as an excuse. Because, you know, there is no excuse.

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