I think Prof. Cole is sensing that the attempt to stave off the unjust polarization of wealth by redistributive bandaids and education programs is doomed to get ever more complex and obtrusive as corporate-owned machines become ever more valuable than our own value as workers. We can't push this rock back up this hill.
Technically, this isn't a Marxist strategy in that the workers are being removed from the actual productive process, thereby solving the nasty problem of incentivizing workers. However, we could be introducing other problems, like incentivizing the managers of all these robots to be efficient in their use of capital and resources.
Another approach that is far less of a reach than what Prof. Cole was discussing is something that is actually happening: the ability of ordinary people to manufacture a wide variety of goods at home using rising technologies like CNC and 3-D printing. This is the first whiff of a revolution in the relationship between passive, addicted consumers and mind-controlling corporations. It's an outgrowth of what Linux has already done on the software side, encouraging private, nonmonetary collaboration between persons who want certain things.
Now if a lot of people were capable of generating their own electricity and putting it on the grid, or buying locally-grown food, there would be real income to sustain this alternative economy.
Hilarious that we whites justify vast gaps between ourselves and blacks when:
a. business magazines (and GOP nutjobs) increasingly attack higher education as obsolete (and Communistic), because there are no safe careers out there under modern capitalism
b. all these "black" pathologies are also at their highest rates in the overall population in the Republican-ruled states, which somehow have failed to solve any of them and yet imply that they can save America by putting blacks back in their place everywhere
c. all those homeless, brain-damaged white veterans who thought they were improving their future when they volunteered
We're living in the Stanford Prison Experiment. All these supposed proofs of blacks deserving their oppression are exactly the phenomena you would see among the "prison" caste in that experiment; violence and despair, cynicism about the future, thrift, and hard work for the bosses.
Yes, but black enrollment in the Army collapsed after Bush invaded Iraq. Blacks learned their lesson from Vietnam. They refused to aid the leader of their enemies in his hour of greed. You don't need JT McPhee to figure out that oppressing minorities to pressure them into joining your imperial military perpetuates another evil cycle that leads to societal collapse.
I have been putting out wacky crackpot stuff for the past several years about Israel's experiments in apartheid being a prototype for its admirers in especially the southern US to begin to restore Jim Crow here. After the gutting of voting rights and the freeing of Zimmerman for behaving like a West Bank settler, any questions?
Dominionist is a widely accepted term among the small group of people who watch out for Christian extremists in America. This comes from the extremists' own language for taking "dominion" over America as a holy act. But there are other factions with slightly different ideologies.
Technically, any religion based on the idea that there should be one set of favorable rules for the elite and one set of repressive rules for the rest is hypocrisy, so that officially gives us plenty of religions to work with.
I have obtained the book "Invention of the White Race", by Theodore Allen, a groundbreaking history of the process by which the early American colonial oligarchy manufactured the concept of the "white" race as an economic strategy of exploitation and oppression. It turned rebellious Scotch-Irish servants into loyal, brutal attack dogs of the English planter aristocracy. But it also carries the implication that this monstrosity was the first "American" identity to ever exist, the bedrock on which the United States was built and made successful.
This should shut up the closet racists who whine about anyone bringing up racial injustice simply "prolonging" the problem or covering up class injustice, or that "black history" is unfair because no one is allowed to teach "white history".
Because it still determines who has the power to shoot whom and get away with it, on average. And that ought to be a matter of concern between us citizens and all levels of our government. So stop being disingenuous and act as though you value Trayvon Martin's life when you wish to obscure what killed him yet would not have killed a white boy.
Sarai, see my comment above about how the averages have been skewed by the financial crimes of the all-white 1% since 1980. No "values" had anything to do with it. Blacks were kept out of a position to participate in that orgy, and their blue-collar jobs were wiped out by deliberate agendas to punish high-wage cities and states, replaced by robots and foreign sweatshops.
Remember the 1% whom everyone was protesting about a couple of years ago? They're practically all white, and they alone own most of the wealth in our country. Thus the average.
The problem is, so many poorer whites seem to regard their shared complexion with the oligarchs as proof of their own natural superiority, so the political effects are little different than if all whites really were that much richer. Since most of the 1%'s amassing has happened since Reagan came to power playing race cards, you could say that the elites used racism to scapegoat minorities and big government for their own worsening of the fortunes of many whites. Thus fooling the latter into destroying the very government barriers against vulture and casino capitalism that made our modern 1% possible.
We should also recall that Temperance and Prohibition could be regarded as a War on Catholics, as detailed in Ken Burns' documentary "Prohibition". Attacking the one was a way of punishing the other, in Protestant eyes. Prohibition was repealed because of the massive Democratic electoral gains caused by that event which discredited so much of WASP conservatism, the Great Depression. Yet only TWO years later, marijuana was banned in turn. Apparently there must always be a war on someone.
I would argue, with great regret, that white supremacy is more like speed or caffeine or some other drug that makes you work harder to get more highs. In fact it is the most dangerous drug ever seen.
Its potency is illustrated by the terrifying military prowess of the famous white supremacist states of the past: the CSA, South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Third Reich. Though all of them were eventually defeated by the insanity of their position vis a vis their neighbors, they put up a hell of fight. The Wehrmacht is credited with a 15 to 1 casualty ratio. The South tested the will of the North to keep fighting despite having only 2.5 million white men to draw its armies from versus the North's 15 million of all colors and an increasing # of freed slaves.
This should concern us, but we think of race war as something in the past. What matters is the ability of white supremacy to energize ordinary people into uniting to commit acts of historic and ambitious evil - in the case of America, the same acts over and over again, tirelessly revived and ingeniously disguised. We still can't kill this zombie.
What conspiracy? Is this the same "environmental conspiracy" that global warming deniers are always screaming about? I guess this will become enshrined as the official position of American patriots defending the right of business to poison us.
Uh Bill, if you lived next door to a man who you know murdered his last neighbor and got away with it, wouldn't you tend to be a little paranoid? You act as if being involved in a "few" overthrows of sovereign, even elected governments is a trivial matter that has no bearing on future behavior.
What, exactly, has changed such that we shouldn't be suspects in the future - given how unjustified, cruel, stupid and ultimately unpunished our past coups were? That pretty much eliminates all the rational criteria that one might use to rule out US involvement in the next coup, doesn't it?
Actually, that would be a wise move if the US wanted to cover all its bases - rather like a big corporation giving money to BOTH candidates in an important election. But I doubt the people running our foreign policy are that clever. We usually pick a side based on our Manichean belief in absolute good and evil and then get disappointed.
Of course this is mostly the political reality that the authorities reflect the double standards of the public.
However, there is also a disturbing logic that one could follow which permeates our society and thus ensures that the public will have this double standard.
Which is, America is one warrior tribe, whose right to self-perpetuation is deeper than the right of its residents to democratic government or human rights, and thus one who is an extremist in pursuit of that self-preservation automatically has a higher status than an extremist in pursuit of any amendment to the tribal dogmas and privileges - or all of us non-extremists whose votes should count for less because we lack the intensity of a true patriot.
The worst part of it is, most of us actually seem to buy the crap from "patriots" that, because they have evolved the least from their racist, classist, misogynist forefathers, they are more authentically American than the rest of us, thus exercising a minority veto over progress. That's why we always back down first, like liberals did in 1876 when Reconstruction ended. You could even say that the "tribe" only consists of white Protestant property owners, and the rest of us are inferior outsiders who have submitted to their God-blessed rule over the centuries. That is certainly how they treat us.
By tribal reckoning, using violence to override our votes would be perfectly reasonable. But no one else gets that privilege.
But since the rural poor sees the solution to all problems in theocracy and the urban poor opposes that, it sounds like they will cancel each other out - aided by the military allowing a low-level vendetta between them.
Eventually these self-destructive neoliberal policies become so bad that even the middle class starts getting hurt. Then things will get interesting.
I have spent the last 30 years warning people around me that the Reagan revolution was nothing more than a Trojan horse for an all-out attack on modern liberal democracy, financed by the rich and soldiered on by redneck suckers. They don't want the 1950s back; they want the 19th century back, and increasingly in the media their elected darlings hint that they have the right to armed rebellion if their special rights as Christians and "entrepreneurs" are not allowed to steamroll everyone else. They created a media machine that slowly mainstreams extremist ideas. In the '90s you had to go to gun magazines and Christian extremist pamphlets to find the ideas that are now an acid test to get nominated by the GOP in many states.
Over and over again in those gun mags then and increasingly in larger and more public forums now they say that America is, and only can be, a republic, not a democracy. The media refuses to accept that such... Good Americans... can be saying what they are obviously saying; that states must have restored their right to restrict the vote as it was restricted in 1789. We can't believe that anyone would seriously be that cruel and unjust, so we stop thinking.
The Right got this far because the rich wanted the 19th century back too. That's why our institutions will be (made) powerless to save us. The money spent to brainwash us with propaganda will mount into the billions and tens of billions; we will have no idea what the people we vote for really intend to do. Our system, like all systems, can be gamed by those with infinite cash, and once perverted, will be defended as sacred. We still need the power to take to the streets, or our enemies will take them instead.
We already had the pipeline disaster in Arkansas a few weeks ago. The energy corporations are really putting on a show about how they protect the public's safety.
The truth is, we are willing to sacrifice other people for our convenience and inertia; we just keep rolling the dice that it won't be our turn to suffer this time. The free market creates the illusion that the suffering is random, while "big government" would mean having to make tough decisions about who deserves what consequences.
And yet, if Air Force One was treated similarly while on a visit to China because of the mere possibility that a dissident was on board, you would freak out, Bill.
The Western media IS afraid of grassroots democracy, especially when it's anti-capitalist or anti-military. The media has it sweet when it only has to cover 2 political parties, and turn the election into a horserace with odds-makers and he-said-she-said videos, and collect a fortune selling campaign ads. The media loves doing press-release journalism, a stenographer for the government. The media hates when its corporate advertisers are denigrated.
Not surprisingly, Occupy was denigrated by the media for not having a "plan". Plans can be debated, and smeared, by the usual media-appointed experts, and we will rely on the media for our opinions instead of coming up with our own, unpredictable ideas for solving public problems.
If the media has such contempt for their own fellow citizens trying to exercise sovereignity, I'd hate to hear how the editors and publishers feel about foreign citizens trying to do the same.
I would be trying to overthrow the bastard long before all that, because I have spent years studying the Christian Right and have come to understand its mandatory long-term goals as outright theocracy. If Rick Perry tried to secede, I'd be organizing his future victims to battle his neo-Confederate hordes. No legal mechanism justifies sitting still while we go back to what we know was intolerable injustice.
However, we did impeach Nixon long before 100,000,000 Americans were out in the streets. You can argue there were specific legal charges that ruined him, not his unpopularity, but I strongly feel the economic mess in 1974 is why more of his followers didn't fight for him. It is Egypt's misfortune that they don't seem to have had an impeachment mechanism that could be used against Morsi's specific acts.
The restoration of Jim Crow has already begun in America. The rich are bankrolling the political party that works day and night to come up with new ways to make it harder for blacks to vote than whites. If the rest of us try to stop it, their pet governors and congressmen threaten nullification and secession.
Now of course the corporations probably lose money if actual secession occurred, but you can see that by such threats in the 1870s they obtained the ideal state of affairs: the country pretends to have civil rights, but in practice where the rich need to be able to crush and exploit the poor, it doesn't. It is not a coincidence that after Jim Crow began taking away black voting rights, the South began using massive convict slave labor, leased to private businessmen. Now, both disenfranchisement and broader convict labor are back on the American table. Once you've enacted both, all other restraint on corporate crime, pollution, fraud, usury, union-busting, etc will crumble.
But the corporate bluff only works if the Tea Party crazies they bankroll AREN'T bluffing. Any resulting bloodshed doesn't mean a damn to our investor class, as long as liberals chicken out on the brink of all-out war.
Our vaunted institutions can often be defeated and co-opted by economic interests. So our religious and racist extremists needed only to entangle themselves with those interests, which is what the Conservative Movement actually is.
It doesn't matter how much proof there is on the ground. The American cult of private property requires the supporting myth that individual greed can NEVER cause (undeserved) harm to others. So the harder these ranchers and used car salesmen and other pimps of material excess out West are pressed by fires and water shortages, the harder they will cling to magical thinking. If the weather is changing, it's not man-made (unless it's a punishment from Jehovah for toleratings gays and Moslems). They will die lashed to this mast, and suck us all down with them.
The question is, did the opposition legitimately have the right to believe that events since the election proved that there would never be another fair election again unless there was a change of government now?
Of course, that can be spun both ways. Every rebellion makes that argument whether or not their cause is just. And there are countries where the opposition waited too long to move against a government and got slaughtered.
What representative democracy does is take great conflicts between the citizens and dump them into the hands of rival politicians who often are unequal to the challenge. When representatives are no longer able to rule, the citizens are at each others' throats. But maybe a time comes when that is exactly what must happen for the concept of a nation to be more than a joke: the citizens must recognize and deal with each other. The question of civil war is still in the hands of those citizens glaring at each other over barricades tonight.
I think a lot of America's problems come from our citizens being strangers to each other, but I fear what would happen if they learned how utterly alien and exclusionary their conflicting worldviews are, and there happened to be some guns in the crowd.
What if "the people" don't really exist? Or if "the people" was originally fabricated to refer to members of a privileged caste, and they have never accepted the appending of their former slaves and exploitees to their corpus; thus are glad to support war against a broader public?
The Dutch Reformed Church is Calvinist. Calvin believed that wealth was a sign that you were one of the Elect, favored by God because you were already designated for Heaven. Not surprisingly, ur-capitalist greedbags took this and ran with it, to the far corners of a defenseless world. Thus the Protestant Work Ethic and much of the reason why America is the way it is.
I hope that you have some words to say about the overturning of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, making it damn near impossible to tell if a state is passing laws secretly calculated to reduce the black vote to irrelevance.
That is exactly how Jim Crow began.
And I have discovered recently that this is the THIRD time that the South has declared war on African-Americans' right to vote. I did not know that in the early Virginia colony, African indentured servants did have the right to vote. This was taken away from them when they were converted to slaves, so as to drive a wedge between them and disgruntled Caucasian indentured servants, thereby creating America's tripartite caste system. Jim Crow itself grew from the oligarchy's fear of black and white farmers uniting to demand fairer legal conditions.
It's sick that conservatives claim that anti-Jim Crow laws are no longer necessary because things have changed in 50 years when the entire impetus of the conservative movement is not just to go back 50 years, but 200. But not 350 years - then blacks would be able to vote and their enslavement would only be temporary.
Oh, and you are right that Bill could not refute Correa's claim that the world order is unjust and immoral, whatever Correa's own misdeeds are. Why just a couple of days ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the states of the Old Confederacy can gerrymander black and Latino voters into permanent defeat, no matter how many of them there are. How many corporations have contributed to the politicians, think tanks, foundations, and extremist churches who have thus put America back on the road to Jim Crow because they want America back to being run the way Ecuador used to be?
Apparently it is only tyranny when it is done against the rich. Since Bill previously has written that Latin American radicalism is unjustified because "they" are to blame for their historical economic woes, he is making it clear now that he only means poor Latin Americans and their leaders are bad, and oppression is only evil when carried out by the poor, not by Correa's wealthy enemies who would have handed over Snowden to their senior partners in America without hesitation if they still ruled.
Given the difficulty that non-Communist Latin American countries have with preventing people from getting kidnapped for money, I agree that this is not a good place for him to go.
Huh. So there's a traditional culture of corruption and inefficiency in Latin America, is there? And there's a traditional power elite consisting of lighter-skinned oligarchs dating back to Spanish and Portuguese rule, right? Now what was their relationship to us capitalists?
The scam you're pulling, Bill, is that Western capitalists were partners of that oligarchy in their crimes, both in the old banana republic era and in the neoliberal era inaugurated by Pinochet. So it's not a matter of Latin Americans looking for outsiders to blame, but one group of Latin Americans oppressing and murdering a much larger group of Latin Americans with Wall Street support. But you switch out the pronouns, so as to imply that 50% of the blame lies with lazy, socialistic Latin Americans, i.e., the poor.
DeSoto is just Friedman-Pinochet Mark II. New "entrepreneurs" can become fascists too, like the greedbags who fill up the ranks of America's Christian Right and Tea Party, owning businesses enabled by white-flight exurbanism and despising the people left behind in the city.
What's scary is that the Gulags were not unnecessary in a certain sense; they may have been the only really productive part of the Stalin-era economy. It is estimated that up to 1/3 of Soviet GNP was produced by the camps.
Which brings us, Bill, to the question of when our public will eliminate all restrictions to for-profit prison slave labor so as to quell their fears without having to pay taxes for prisons. Then it's open season to imprison anyone who's not popular, as was done in the Jim Crow-era South's for-profit convict labor system. Think of it as a kind of Final Solution for American capitalism; simultaneously destroying the black vote (Democrats), wrecking wage leverage for the non-imprisoned, and freeing corporations from having to kiss Beijing's ass.
Is this really about America versus Assad, or is this about America versus Saudi Arabia in a proxy war over who will rule Syria next?
Because if the Saudis, who are not stupid, recognize that we're funding the FSA to cheat the Saudis' fanatic proxies out of their victory, we are making an enemy out of a kingdom that has far greater power over us than Iran ever has.
The real negotiation, and the one the American people need to prepare to be involved in, is the one with the Saudi kingdom over whether the Arab Spring will end with republics or with jihadi states. We don't even know what the Saudis want, or why they're creating new Talibans when they know we will violently freak out over that. Everywhere in the world, Saudi-backed forces have turned civil wars from negotiable situations into apocalyptic struggles that allow US Islamophobes to claim that all Moslems are evil and plotting to enslave the world. Yet those Islamophobes never call for sanctions against Saudi Arabia, their partner in far-right capitalist greed and oil economics.
You are absolutely correct, but the history of the region indicates that the replacement for the bloodthirsty tyrant will also be a bloodthirsty tyrant. The people who support Assad are willing to commit mass murder because they are certain that they will be mass-murdered if they lose. Until you break that circle you accomplish nothing, and we are woefully unqualified to pick a sure-thing alternative.
But a collapse of communications systems would not cause the irreversible destruction of all non-human life. It might even be a temporary salvation for plants and animals for humans to suffer such a catastrophe.
On the other hand, if the planetary ecosystem breaks down and ocean life is seriously damaged, the effects will spread across all forms of life, and we don't have the means to keep many of us alive on what would become Mars.
It's simple. If methane hydrates are beginning to evaporate in the oceans, nothing can stop it, and nothing can save us. We just don't know.
Gaddafi was unfairly concentrating all the oil wealth in his own home region at the expense of everyone else. The conflict was essentially secular, so the rebellion against him was widespread. Libya has ethnic groups, but it has no longstanding genocidal grudge-matches such that if one ethnic group lost, it would absolutely expect to be exterminated.
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case in Syria. They have learned the lesson of post-Saddam Iraq; he who loses will be ethnically cleansed. So instead of broad sweeps of motorized forces along a single coastal road, Syria is a nightmare of dug-in resistance, village by village. Any winner in such a merciless war will be someone we will regret being associated with. I wish there was an alternative but the Saudis have already decided to outspend us on putting the fanatics on top, as they successfully did in Afghanistan.
It's because of people like you that Kennan lost faith in America and democracy later in his life. He was warning against America's habit of violent crusades when he wrote the Mr. X article; he knew democracies lacked the discipline to understand conflicts in alien societies. He specifically wanted the dispute isolated to Europe, where democracy had support and Americans could understand nonviolent incentives. Instead our arrogant belief that we know what's best for other races led to the smear that the Democrats "lost China", leading to the McCarthy horror and the Vietnam War.
Kennan on Vietnam:
""During the Eisenhower years, Kennan became an outspoken critic of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's policy towards the Soviet Union. He complained frequently that the U.S. had failed to take advantage of the liberalizing trend within the USSR following the death of the country's longtime leader Joseph Stalin. And Kennan was also a prominent critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Vietnam, he would say, "is not our business." He argued that the escalation of the war made a negotiated settlement much less likely."
The author of this quote noted that Kennan endorsed Eugene McCarthy in '68, the most anti-war of all Presidential candidates. Kennan clearly did not want what you want.
So I am sure he would have regarded with horror our series of operations in Afghanistan, which have been even more destructive for the Afghan people(s) than our actions were for the Vietnamese people, who were sophisticated and organized enough to eventually recover. What we did, Bill, was allow our tyrannical allies, Islamic-extremist Saudi Arabia and Islamic-extremist Pakistan, a free hand in flooding Afghanistan with, you guessed it, Islamic extremists, so our boys wouldn't have to die there.
Now since you know, Bill, that it is our tradition to cover up all the evils of our allies, how were we supposed to explain to our citizens the need to keep our "eye on the ball" after the Soviet withdrawal because those allies had flooded Afghanistan with relentless holy warriors? Our supposed secular alternative? Karzai, the Unocal lobbyist who actually tried to talk the Taliban into giving Unocal the pipeline it wanted in the '90s? He makes Diem look like, well, a ruler.
Kennan, not filled with a crusader's monomania, would have seen that we were being duped into building takfirism into the world's next headache.
I hope that you are correct, but it seems the longer and more fierce these wars are, the better a show the most extreme faction makes. Whatever happened to that broad coalition who joined Castro's tiny band in overthrowing Batista? They went back to their bourgeoise jobs, and he held on to the only thing he had. It was good for Libya that so many soldiers turned on Gaddafi, and thus could counterbalance other fighters in postwar politics, but that war was a lot more about resenting someone else's cut of the oil revenues than it was about wanting someone else to be eternally expunged from existence.
If I had the power to choose between a Middle East governed by Hezbollah and a Middle East governed by those medieval tyrants in Saudi Arabia, I would choose the former. We've been blinded by our love of the rich and our love of oil into loving only the Arabs rich enough to hate the real people they rule - just as we loved all the wrong people in Latin America and Vietnam.
The problem is, the Saudis are required by their special relationship with the US to keep their hands off Israel, which threatens their legitimacy as Moslem monarchs. So they made up for it by bankrolling every Moslem extremist everywhere else who had US approval. Then it all ran aground in Iraq, where the Saudis had to watch helplessly while America's quislings-du-jour ethnically cleansed the Sunnis from Iraqi cities.
I suspect the Saudi inner circle decided at that time to take matters into their own hands and forestall American idiocy. But their desire to control every scrap of the Middle East, disguised as yet another capitulation to America's wishes to screw Iran, is a far greater threat to America, freedom, women's rights, the evolution of Islam, etc. than either Hezbollah or Iran.
We Americans think we've won because we've put rich Saudi and Israeli oligarchs on top of hundreds of millions of icky Arabs. Most of us don't know that Richard Clarke reported that he witnessed spy photos in 1986 showing the Saudis were trying to sneak in Chinese-made IRBMs and launchers. Reagan shut them down before they got the nukes to go with them. But the Israelis have hundreds of nukes; why shouldn't the Saudis?
We've put the worst people in the Middle East in charge. How long do you expect these super-villains to put up with each other?
What libertarians are, versus what the Paul family's capitalist religion is, needs closer scrutiny.
Can you really be a libertarian if you want states to outlaw abortion?
Would Rand Paul retain his redneck vote if he explained to them that as a libertarian he wants to shut down their beloved empire and all the MIC jobs (and Moslem-killing opportunities) that it provides them? I mean, he DOES, doesn't he?
Does Paul think, like his father, that Lincoln had no right to fight secession or free the slaves? Does he feel the 14th Amendment should be repealed so that states could take the right to vote away from minorities again? (Many privately do.)
Of course a far right-winger wants state governments to have absolute authority. State governments have always been the prime tool of oppression of the poor, non-white and non-Protestant. But if Paul's definition of liberty consists only of what it meant in 1800 - when only white male property-owners were assured of the right to vote everywhere - then it only consists of what white male property-owners desired for themselves. F*** all the rest of us. Thus censorship boards run by clergymen, laws against race-mixing (not just blacks), and laws against trade unions were all okay in that "free" society.
And if you don't think tyranny can be decentralized and privatized, recall how a hooded terrorist group ruled much of America for generations on the principles of state's rights, property rights, and a monopoly of power for white men. At least they were honest about it.
Because the Turkish military is, like all NATO militaries except France, an extension of the Pentagon and its military rule was inherently an abrogation of sovereignity. If the Army had still been in charge in 2003, Bush would have had free rein to use Turkish soil to wage war on Iraq. I would argue that no country whose army has been absorbed into the US's command structure via NATO has a genuinely independent foreign policy. Which is why after the Turkish aid ships were shot up by the Israelis, non-US NATO officials were privately furious but unable to do anything that would offend Washington, while conversely Bush could compel his NATO minions to send forces to die in our mess in Afghanistan. NATO makes Europeans die for America, not the other way around. The Turkish Army had no problem with that, and thus under its rule the Turkish people were not free to leave.
Except that the Luddites were protesting a far greater injustice, the destruction of a fairly healthy and self-sufficient English peasantry by the new money power of corporate capitalism:
1. the rich bought Parliament to redefine private property, seizing the Commons that had existed for centuries, thus leaving the peasants with no food options so that they would have to move to overcrowded, disease-ridden cities and drive down wages for those very industrialists. That in turn made life worse for the millworkers who had been protected by tradition from the monstrous Social Darwinism that bastards like Herbert Spenser preached.
2. British democracy was a joke; only 1% of English men could vote. Not a legitimate government.
3. the American rebels, Mr. Lunsford, did far worse than the Luddites, for arguments not entirely different than Mr. Snowden's. Double standard?
1. The rightwingers hate all national service that falls outside their supernarrow interpretation of the role of government, which seems to consist only of violently punishing anyone at home or abroad who interferes with the needs of "real" Americans
2. How can anyone say that a country with a draft is "free"? In 1945 freedom was understood to be relative, because between the Depression and fascism we had too clear a memory of the alternatives. Now people think their own demands are the only definition of freedom, and any other demands are immoral. To admit the fundamental compromise of freedom that is the draft is to open debate about other compromises.
3. National military service means, "not just for white conservatives". The gun nuts think they can emasculate the federal government and rule the rest of us as their ancestors did under Jim Crow, because no other faction is as well-armed and organized (see: KKK). Probably not a coincidence that a great leap in American equality and civil rights happened right after many millions of blacks, Latinos, Jews, and radicals temporarily were forced to bear arms alongside the socioeconomic tribe that normally inhabited the peacetime Army. The goal of the "patriots" is to undo everything that was accomplished in that era.
Yes, the best bet would be amending the damn thing to define what a "well-regulated" militia has to do with a citizenry engaged in an arms race against itself. Then we would have the ultimate challenge to the gun nuts: How would you rednecks feel about a black, well-regulated, non-rightwing militia in every inner city?
I think besides your excellent observations, many ordinary people are fooled because guns have not changed their physical form very much over the last 200 years (despite massive leaps in lethality) and thus seem to be connected to the sacred weapons of our supposedly free ancestors and their sanctified expansion of their private property by violence. Whereas the forms of privacy under assault now have no real history; they are not just improved technology, they are new technologies. You still can't wiretap a phone because we still call it a phone, but now computers store data about all phone calls made, and that's new and not part of any tradition of liberty.
It is a problem that the wealthy have generally seized the initiative to lobby for new laws to convert new technology into new "property" for them, just as the first industrial barons of England exploited the new economy to privatize the common lands that had fed the peasants of the past, converting it into private property. Or the rail barons of the 1800s were rewarded with long strips of public land to subsidize their breakneck expansion. Ordinary people get left in the dust in these legislative bonanzas. The internet already belongs to the corporations in practice, and when they share your info with the Feds they also lay the groundwork to access that info to more skillfully exploit your appetites.
The problem, Joao, is that in America we've been so brainwashed by corporate media that we don't even know how far to the Right the entire political spectrum has been dragged, compared to the outside world. I mean, we're being indoctrinated by the Tea Party that Nazis were actually Communists, and that Franklin Roosevelt was actually a Communist, and the Federal Reserve was actually Communist.
Hell, maybe Lincoln was actually a Communist. Who does that leave as representing free enterprise, exactly?
I think for a lot of people like me it's also a matter that Erdogan has ended the slavish obediance of Turkey's military-dominated regime to US-NATO dictates - though not without a push from protestors in 2003. Between the refusal to let US forces invade Iraq through his territory and the crisis over the Israeli attack on the Gaza aid convoy, we saw a NATO country take a stand against US hegemony, and we would like to see a lot more of that, precisely because NATO is composed of democracies that have given up their independent foreign policy by having their militaries standardized under US command structures.
We forget what it was like 10 years ago when the neocons were fooling our media into believing they could control everything and everyone without resistance. For anyone to stand up to the US at all, even authoritarians like Putin, meant the spell of this drivel over our public might be broken. Instead, we believed the lies too long and our country got broken instead.
If your numbers mean you can outvote me, you are a terrorist monster who must be deprived of all human rights. If your numbers mean you will never outvote me, but you can still pay taxes, you're a citizen. That's all the politicians of Israel and America need to know.
What, you think humans aren't wicked enough to have their consciences flipped on and off like a switch by a mathematical calculation? You think the appearance of "Voter ID" laws targeting minorities has nothing to do with the danger that those minorities can flip local elections?
We may have consciences, but we will override them when our goodies are threatened. The Navajo are no threat to white people in general; if they have success in backing environmental and litigatory challenges that threaten the power structure, watch how fast that perception changes.
Although I have often been very critical of the Israeli state at this forum, I would never say that the hypocritical behavior of the Israeli people is abnormal for human beings. I think the object lesson of Israel is that modern humans are as lacking in empathy as ancient barbarians and conquerors. The unusual thing that happened is that after WW2, the greatest victims of the Nazis were given a get-out-of-camp-free card, the right to solve their statelessness problem by being given an exception to the reinforced laws against imperialism and occupation, reinforced specifically because of the crimes of those Nazis.
However, before the World Wars made most peoples desirous of having limits placed on their capability for depredation, we have many examples of the victims of oppression becoming monsters at the first opportunity. In ancient warfare that was a matter of course; the losers who survived the typical atrocities nursed their wounds and taught their children to build up for revenge, though this would obviously renew the cycle. The conquered people of Scotland and Ireland were damn fast to become murderous henchmen for their masters in the New World and Australia.
And let's not forget the ancient Hebrews themselves, unleashed from slavery, according to their holy word, to slaughter an endless succession of foreign communities under orders from Jehovah.
If the memory of the World Wars and the fear of nukes is what taught most of the modern world a degree of restraint, what does it mean now that those with living memory of those dark days are dying off, that Hiroshima is now in the distant past, and the nation-states that actually erected international law are often said to be overshadowed by new forces greater and smaller? Will our inner beasts re-emerge?
The problem is, during the Bush regime, Ethiopia was a known neocon whore in the process of becoming an authoritarian state. Then it invaded Somalia to install a UN-backed regime because of its fears that its own growing ethnic Somali population might be a threat. For all practical purposes it was acting as Bush's proxy in the War on Moslems, Horn of Africa subdepartment. Do we trust neocons anywhere else where they're still in power?
He didn't mention Egypt, did he? Seems he's bringing up the issue of Israel's own future water shortages, and the suspicion of many that it will one day seize Lebanon up to the Litani River as an attempt at a solution. Which would require destroying Hezbollah so that the Shia population there would be defenseless.
To say that there are no ties between the Likud and the American evangelical right is foolish, as these stories show. To say that evangelical right is not incredibly extreme is to ignore the substantial % of GOP adherents in the South who believe Obama is the Antichrist, a position no stranger than Bachmann's.
Palin served her purpose, to be replaced by Bachmann, who served her purpose, to be replaced by another token extremist woman who will be even more extreme. Each will retire to much greater affluence than they had before being plucked from obscurity by the propaganda machine.
Remember when Gingrich represented the far right fringe of the GOP? Now he's just moderately conservative by comparison. He served his purpose and was succeeded by radio extremists as the designated vanguard.
Entire political positions taken by the conservative movement were merely cynical waystations to train the public to forget past positions, in preparation for new positions that should have gotten the GOP laughed out of existence. Your mission, if you accept it, is to look at the people driving this entire process, and discover what their end game is. Hint: in the publications of those people, it is most repeatedly stated that "America is a republic, not a democracy." In other words, their mania for Founding Fathers and Original Intent and States Rights boils down to restricting the vote to those who had it in 1789 - and all the barbaric practices that this would resurrect. Getting to that point requires a lot of turnover of "conservative spokesmen", including the token women and black presidential candidates all pre-set to fail in the primaries after creating the illusion that there's any room in their kind of republic for real power sharing. Oh yeah, let's cobble together an Ayn Rand Catholic to cover that demographic too.
How many bulletheads voted for Bachmann BECAUSE she said stupid things, things at odds with the reality that they despise and wish to war against? Not that the media is any good at explaining what qualifies as a fact to audiences it has trained to have the attention span of rodents.
Ironically, America's reactionary religious fringe wants all its boys to infiltrate our military. Wonder what they have planned?
The logical solution is to end the draft. But that does not necessarily produce a more liberal society. Andrew Bacevich, certainly a critic of American militarism, noted in his works the complex ironies caused by the end of the US draft. A bourgeoise so glad to dump its military responsibilities onto poor whites in effect became the hostage of that gratitude, afraid to criticize anything the military did as it became more and more insulated from democratic safeguards.
The question is, must Memorial Day be a pro-war holiday (they died for a good cause), or an anti-war holiday (more will die if we don't change)? If we can't answer a simple question like that, then we must still fear that having too much of an anti-war attitude will harm our interests as a society.
Right now, Paul Lukas over at http://www.uni-watch.com is continuing his stubborn crusade to stop sports teams from commemorating every damn holiday they can get their hands on as "Blind Military Worship Day", mostly by wearing camouflage uniforms. This time it was really bad, with all baseball teams, even the team in Canada, re-coloring their team logos in US Marine-pattern camouflage. His arguments on the need to separate the dead from the glorification and normalization of war are eloquent and need our support.
Scientists are now investigating whether the horrible flu pandemic that killed 100,000,000 people during and after WW1 was spread from British troops, to arriving American troops, and then to the German troops retreating before them, causing it to spread to the German civilian population and leading to the panicked collapse of Germany. That led in turn to the paranoid fantasies of Germans that they were betrayed, aiding the rise of Hitler and yet another war.
Make what you will of that, but it shows how messy war is as a tool to achieve a "noble" end. British gold, American ambition, all serving a microscopic army more powerful than us all: a supervirulent strain of influenza. Maybe the flu won the war, and humans lost.
I think that was the good thing about Armistice Day, before it was converted into Veterans Day. "Armistice" = cease-fire. But that only worked because most of the dead of WW1 came from neighboring white Christian countries, and thus the survivors could see the other side as human beings. ("All Quiet on the Western Front" depicted German soldiers this way to Americans only 12 years after it ended.) Besides, the overwhelming waste of that war cast a pall on the leaders who normally use dead boys to glorify war. WW2 and the Cold War had radically different emotional dynamics.
I've only seen one Hollywood movie that ever depicted our enemies in Vietnam in a human way ("The Iron Triangle"), and none for Korea or the wars on Moslems.
Illuminating find, JT. My ultimate horror is that if all dissenters against these wars finally succeeded in eradicating all the lies that enabled them, the ordinary, greedy, entitled American would simply resort to the final defense, exactly the words of this GI you quoted.
Because at that point there is no argument left except that one day the world will unite against our crimes and destroy us.
Consider if the public applied that same final defense to the possibility of global warming:
To protect our prosperity, we will refuse to make any concession to reduce pollution, and play a game of chicken to make the weaker countries make all the sacrifices instead. And if they refuse, we will use our nuclear weapons to wipe out their societies and thus reduce their CO2 output while our continues unimpeded.
Same logic, as long as we believe we can get away with it. If not, we lie low and bide our time. But we never learn the lessons that the Nuremburg trials and the post WW2 changes in international law were trying to teach: if offensive war profits anybody, we are all doomed.
It is a great untold chapter if the average American
doesn't know about it, and thus thinks that the conquest of non-whites by whites is actually beneficial to the non-whites. How many Americans washed their hands of the blood of Iraq in recent years by saying "those savages didn't deserve our rule"? Which means they've learned nothing when the war drums start beating again.
Apologizing for slavery by Congress still raises controversy because of all the Christians who think that slavery was good for blacks.
I noticed before about 2005 or so that there were indeed conservatives and libertarians who expressed concerns about global warming. For instance, neocon James Woolsey who pushed for energy efficiency at home, unusually enough.
However, something changed. I didn't understand it until the famous study showing that when people were shown evidence that opposed their leanings, they actually grew more extreme in their prejudices. Reason? The evidence was coming from the mouths of identifiable enemies. Thus the rampant hatred that exploded against Al Gore when his movie came out.
I think from that time on it was impossible for Republicans to take even a precautionary position on AGW. Once it had been added to the list of evil schemes to bring about world socialism, such dissent meant brutal harassment from the ideological enforcers on the right.
It was no longer a matter of what they understood about science. The implication of global warming is that greed will destroy the world. That idea must be eradicated at all costs, because it threatens the entire justification for private property, unregulated markets, and the infinite polarization of wealth under the guise of infinite economic growth.
A century ago it was okay for Americans to debate each other about the distribution of wealth and the distribution of benefits and costs by government. Thus when Teddy Roosevelt implemented the first peacetime income tax he argued that extreme inequality was bringing the validity of democracy into doubt. According to William Greider, millions of farmers once maintained healthy dialogue on the differential effects of monetary policy.
Now, we don't have these discussions. Thus there is an invisible elephant crowding our fiscal room:
Does our global military stance serve the rich and the poor equally?
We always treat the military as a collective good, but who really benefits the most from our having troops in 130 countries versus, say, spending the money instead on repairing bridges? Does dominating the globe militarily give American businessmen abroad a certain leverage that Swiss businessmen lack? Do those businessmen use that advantage to more rapidly outsource the jobs of ordinary Americans?
The highest possible standard against making any kind of attack is that it is defined as an act of war. Governments don't care much about killing foreigners, but they do care about being at war with foreign governments, so that's a deterrent.
It seems the US can strongarm governments into allowing our drone strikes, whereas the use of more traditional assaults would cause the citizens of those governments to force them to treat them as acts of war. Thus the deterrence is being eroded, and the intent of that deterrence is being lost.
Problem 2:
As I've warned many times before, drones and dirt-cheap cruise missiles can be built by many countries, and America will be the net loser once everybody's playing by our loose rules. 20 years ago I conceptualized a $10,000 cruise missile using GPS. One billion bucks buys 100,000 of those things. Lots of countries have a billion bucks. Even lots of non-countries have a billion bucks.
Now that magazines are already assuring us that private firms will make our lives wonderful using drones, it is truly too late to stop what's coming. Think of the Terminator movies, except that Skynet is replaced by an infinite number of governments, Mafias, murderous crackpots, sociopathic nerds, maybe even cults and street gangs. And the Terminators will fly 600 mph and crash into your house.
Every American thinks that he is productive, and every other American who is too different from himself is a parasite. But most Americans don't have the fanaticism to do anything about it, so the resentment is usually harmless. Unfortunately, the exception is now ruling much of the land, in defiance of all statistical evidence about whom the actual parasites are. Look at any study that quantifies the amount of economic activity produced per $ of various government activities, including tax cuts. The GOP never mentions those.
When you get to the point when your movement tries to eliminate public universities and schools just because teachers as a class give money to your opposition, or it tries to invent new wars just to justify cutting social programs associated with rival races, or it even tries to pass election laws as convoluted and racist in their impact as Jim Crow laws, you probably will be willing to consciously demand that spending be skewed by double standards so as to destroy entire regions of the country that you hate. It's just civil war carried out by cowards and bullies.
We must not ignore the possibility that high-level right-wing conspirators like Mr. Inhofe in fact intend to ruin all Federal institutions except the military-security complex. The whole Scott Walker mess was a result of Wisconsin Republicans doing their duty to destroy entire classes of people for the sin of giving money to Democrats, such as state employees. If you are literally a religious fanatic who sees a strong democratic government as an impediment to your theocratic dreams, then even a public school providing a shelter to children sounds like a Commie gateway drug to a cradle-to-grave state. Better to make public schools as miserable as possible, so that parents will turn in despair to the Christian madrassas you're helping to fund. Oh wait, there's the GOP voting in school choice programs so that everyone's tax money is transferred to those madrassas instead! Just in time!
Once you've locked all the kids safely in the Christian wayback machines, they can be indoctrinated to accept that their safety and health must not interfere with the destiny of our corporate patriarchs to conquer the world and exterminate all alternative ways of thought.
Your state used to have plenty of progressives, back when progressivism was perceived mainly as helping the poor and helping the poor was perceived mainly as helping one's fellow white farmers. Once liberalism was seen as helping gays or blacks or atheists, your fellow citizens quickly embraced an ideology that fundamentally demands the Samson option: better to destroy civilization than share it with the Other. This has consequences, like sabotaging all public institutions, destroying the environment, demanding explicit favored status for Christians over others, even the revival of nullification and secession talk. If I sound condescending when pointing out these consequences, I am sorry, but I would have told Southerners the same thing in 1860 for all the good it would have done. Pointing out people's backwardness will always sound insulting to them, always, but backwardness has real consequences which impose unfair costs on other citizens.
Funny, that's just what everyone said here in Texas when that chemical plant blew up.
No, no, disasters cannot be foreseeable if that would impose a moral burden on investors. Because investors are rich because they are doing God's work of enslaving the rest of the world to America, and thus eventually to our God-attuned traditional values, so their morality cannot be questioned.
When the rich push closer and closer to the economic edge to extract maximum short-term profits because they don't really know how to create long-term value, they must force the same behavior onto all of us: they cut our wages to increase profits, so we must cut all corners and max out all forms of credit and hope our future will be luckier. Perversely, this makes us more willing dupes to their political agenda, because we resent the long-term costs of government, infrastructure, environmentalism, education, union dues, and just getting along with each other sans gunpoint. We have no surplus of good will left for those things, so we embrace a magical thinking that if we cut Gordias' knot with a sword of reactionary simplification, somehow all those impediments to our "natural" superiority over those different than us will reassert itself and restore our affluence, under the leadership of those most superior of all, the business class.
In other words, we will kick each other out of the lifeboat one by one, but not the guy wearing the yacht cap, who obviously knows what he's doing.
Excellent post. But I assumed that the US hegemony was gonna collapse back in 1991 when the first Bush blew it. We've been propped up by powerful forces behind the scenes who fear the loss of our empire more than the alternative. If we were wise, we'd explore who those forces are and what role they have in mind for us as we slide down the slope.
That's why they call it "The Samson Option", isn't it?
Of course, just calling it that implies that one is bluffing, just as when Nixon called it "The Madman Doctrine". You only invoke Biblical destruction when you're putting on a show, because God doesn't clean up the consequences of our actions in the real world.
It may be that the "limits of the military", any military, is that its very prowess, its enshrinement as being better than democracy in general, causes the citizens to become unable to accept losses in real wars. Let's look at some distant analogies to that problem:
1. Battleships getting too valuable to use. You know this story from WWI, where the UK and German fleets only clashed once because they represented so much of each nation's resources and prestige that losing them in a decisive battle was unbearable. Many critics say America's aircraft carriers are in the same category today, such that military exercises are rigged so they cannot be reported "sunk".
2. Sparta. Not being a democracy, that country's military cult simply raised the standards of military service and elitism to a point where there just weren't enough Spartans to man the army. It only took one disastrous war against an experienced opponent to wipe it out. Perhaps this is analogous to the growing "hero" military cult that Andrew Bacevich so eloquently condemns. The US and Israel definitely have the same neurosis about casualties, leading to their growing reliance on half-blind killer robots.
I would say that the cultural third-worldism you are talking about led pretty directly to the physical third-worldism that is coming about around us.
Back when the rich could get away with murder, they demanded the short-term benefits of running an unregulated boom-and-bust economy whose deflationary cycles kept the poor in tenements and shanties, kept their children hungry (which we now know lowers adult IQ), and maintained college education as a private club for their own brats only. Empirically, the rich were better off after they were forced by the effects of their '29 Crash to share power with the masses; infrastructure spending, the GI Bill, child nutrition programs, etc actually gave the rich big long-term benefits in getting better workers and consumers. But the rich will only pursue long-term benefits when they are forbidden from pursing short-term benefits. So regaining their ancient power over government has restored the characteristics of Gilded Age America. Except, of course, that on the other end of the imperial curve we now have huge military commitments that some of the rich refuse to give up to make their neo-Victorianism consistent. And now the rich don't even need to build factories in the US because modern capital is so mobile and Asia is so ready thanks to its educated, high-savings citizenry.
So I guess we now live in the worst of all worlds.
Furthermore, the big protests and riots that are happening in the backwater towns of China seem to be about layoffs at state enterprises and the corruption of government by money. Yet if these eruptions are discussed on the Internet at all it's by pompous neocons looking for signs that the Chinese people are about to overthrow the government in favor of Ayn Rand. Let's not forget the violent riots by workers in India. They've all suffered through a period much like that of the capitalist Gilded Age in the West, whose abuses were the sole cause of the worker radicalism that followed. These citizens are more opposed to rule by corporations than we Americans, so far.
You told us that Gadaffi would be better. He was increasingly stealing everything from every province that didn't support him. Was the Philippines better off with Marcos completing his ransacking of the country? How about Egypt and Musharraf? Thus what you must prove is that the bankrupt Libya that Gadaffi was inexorably creating would be better. How would that not have been violent and cursed by Islamist uprisings?
I have agreed with you about many things, JT, but at this point I must ask you, in your curdled perspective is any government better than any other government? Because if you think that people who prefer a messy, violent life under rickety elected governments are suckers, you imply that the ones who love their inherited tyrants are better, or at least no worse. Which absolves ordinary people from any responsibility for, say, the rise of the Third Reich. Or the difference between what the American Revolution produced and what the French Revolution produced. Now that sequence of events from 1775 to 1815 was packed as full of cynical power plays, interventions, corruption, and atrocities as the Cold War or the wars for oil, but as a result we certainly do not live in the manner of people before that time, and very few of us would want to go back. Defining everything using conspiracy theories is a way to pretend to oppose the system while giving oneself an excuse to hide in one's apartment and embrace helplessness.
In the past, before US state governments embraced legalized gambling, lotteries were associated with societies where people had lost hope in economic reward for virtuous behavior. In the '70s, we all chatted about the Irish lottery, and sometimes Latin American lotteries. Even the Soviet Union had lotteries! None of these were places where the rich were perceived ever having been anything but oppressive, exploitative, and parasitic. I think their perceptions were not without merit.
So what does it mean that America is now a place where, according to The Economist (a right-wing magazine), inter-class mobility has become slower than in Europe? And now we look to the lottery, as European peasants under the thumb of feudalism looked to fairy tales about magic rewards, for the hope to get through each miserable day?
You are correct, C, but part of the problem is that modern economies trade with each other. If everyone saves and invests, in theory the resulting surplus goods will have to be exported in order to bring in real money to then trigger greater domestic consumption. However, this has to be seen in the context that the values of the currencies of the trading countries are expected to move to counter these surpluses, such that this exporting country's currency will rise against that of the importing country until the former can no longer sell goods competitively there.
The problem is that no one accounted for one country, the USA, running infinite trade surpluses and then having its currency artificially propped up by the global capitalist class because of their fear of American decline and loss of its import markets. This allows US capitalists and workers alike to get away with short-sighted behavior, while Chinese capitalists and workers have to deal with the complex effects of suppressing the value of their currency.
They are representatives of the culture that capitalists created in America, in fact the very reason they created America in the first place. Recall the role of English joint-stock corporations in financing the American colonies looking to make a quick kill in tobacco.
Where would General Electric, General Motors, the TV networks, the housing industry, and the energy industry, as a small sample, be without the indoctrination of the American people in instant gratification through consumption? Ever heard of GM founder Al Sloan, who developed planned obsolence by endless trivial design changes that were indoctrinated into national crazes by mass advertising?
Everything, including the stock market, is built on a short-sighted demand for the quick kill. When the workers were getting very revolutionary in the early 20th century over the boom & bust economy that resulted, it was necessary to co-opt them by giving them the illusion of a piece of the action. It is a fact that after WW1, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover chaired a commission of industry leaders who determined that social stability would require the cultivation of a culture of mass consumption, via mass advertising.
Logically, how could any values of thrift survive once, as Keynes realized, over-saving could cause a closed economy ( no free trade then) based on durable goods purchases (which can be deferred) to suffer a catastrophic, unending contraction?
The purpose of competent sourcing and reporting of facts would be to win over voters who currently oppose them.
That is not the way it works in a country with low voter turnout.
What you do is build up an army of fanatics, who then bully, harass, and lecture everyone else. The weak-willed ones (whom we call "independents") have common prejudices easily played upon, and will always give a nice-talking patriot one break.
As for the rest of the voters? Simply nullify the 14th Amendment, claiming for state legislatures the power to strip those people of their franchise. Fanatics always can bum-rush a state legislature.
These things don't happen in other democracies because they have 90% voter turnout and there's no room for these tactics.
I think one question that must be studied if we are going to fight back is, why are poor white conservatives so happy to support this usurpation by the rich? Is it because they see that the billionaires are overwhelmingly right-wingers? But that's more true on economic issues than on the cultural issues that rednecks supposedly treasure.
I suspect it's something far uglier. You can no longer openly proclaim yourself a white supremacist and expect to get anywhere. The economic gap between whites and blacks has become the plausible deniability for closet bigots, especially since Charles Murray literally wrote the book on how to play this putrid game, The Bell Curve. Thus supporting free enterprise now means supporting the "natural" entrepreneurship of whites, represented by the lily-white billionaire oligarchy, as the sole basis for fitness to rule all races.
In tribalism, it doesn't matter that I'm poor while my clan oligarch is rich; what matters is that said oligarch is ruthless, cunning, and relentless, and he will surely lead our village in many successful conquests and enslavements of the Other. That not only is what keeps bigots proud of the rich, but it's what is replacing democracy as their sovereign loyalty.
This explains the contradiction that so many right-wingers love America's government when it uses its wealth and technology to overpower other peoples everywhere on Earth, yet despise that same government when it tries to alleviate the overwhelming wealth polarization inherent in capitalism at home. Abroad, the tribe, the oligarchy, and the government are one. At home, social programs, democracy, and diversity are mortal enemies of the oligarchy and the tribe.
It's even more malicious than that. When I was in school I learned the story of how an English entrepreneur landed in the early 19th century central Philippines, barely governed by distant Spain, and made his fortune. He brought in cheap mass-produced English textiles, which destroyed the local trading networks of handmade textiles as everyone bought the new cloth and ruined each other's livelihoods. With these victims now facing starvation, he hired them cheaply as mercenaries, armed them and overran other territories, which became his personal empire.
It's that second punch that the libertarians say doesn't exist. But considering how Cecil Rhodes created Rhodesia with a private army, by massacring tribesmen with his own Maxim gun, and then funded the Rhodes scholarship as part of his plan to ensure eternal Anglo-American white dominion of the world before his early death, and you have to wonder if it isn't just the logical path of all genuine entrepreneurs freed of all restraint. The pursuit of wealth is exposed as truly the pursuit of power, rushing to fill the vacuum where government isn't functional. Are these men not part of a continuum from Alexander to Pablo Escobar?
The market is the only measure of value that libertarians can allow in their government-free arrangements.
Thus black token libertarian Thomas Sowell argued that black culture had proven itself inferior because, well, blacks were economically inferior to whites. Therefore black culture had no right to exist.
Consider that. Jazz, the blues, soul, the Harlem Renaissance, Dr. J's impossible dunks, Dr. King's impossible dream, August Wilson, Malcolm X, Spike Lee, all of it, worthless because it doesn't make black people rich... Though Sowell somehow failed to observe how many white people, in our system, got rich off of this inferior black culture.
In that same era, the royal governor of Ireland, who held the same hyper-capitalist social Darwinist beliefs that Libertarians specifically claim they are trying to revive, presided over the horror of the Potato Famine. He and Adam Smith shared a belief that markets could not succeed unless small farmers were forced out of their lazy way of life by any means necessary, and the Irish were the greatest threat of all.
This article in The Exile illustrates why the governor cheered on the early stages of the famine and blocked relief efforts until he faced a disaster that reduced Ireland's population from 8 million to a few million. It also shows why the capitalists got the Enclosure Acts passed to destroy the common lands and force peasants onto a very unfair industrial labor market. In effect, the idea sacred to libertarians that all land had to be someone's property was manufactured by lobbyists, just as "intellectual property" rights are manufactured.
None of what we believe about the rise of Free Enterprise is true. These ideas also reflect Locke's view that it was okay to steal land from Indians because whites would use it more productively.
If your society doesn't believe in private property, or believe in it the way an Anglo-American greedbag does, then you are subhuman and your rights are false and must be sacrificed to the true rights of the Western entrepreneur. I guess this is when it's okay for the rich to call in the military.
When the system "corrects" itself, modern global investors simply move on to their next crime. Maybe they went from making billions polluting the land, to making billions cleaning up the pollution the very least amount they could get away with, or selling pharmaceuticals to treat the cancer that resulted. There is ALWAYS economic crime going on somewhere in the world, and the same people always seem to come out ahead.
Private property did not precede government. The first civilization, Old Kingdom Egypt, started with no personal property at all when it carried out its greatest accomplishments. But centuries later court favorites were granted land by the pharoah-state and became the first rich people in the sense we understand it now. Since then, every private property system has degenerated into extreme inequality of wealth and thus power, unless the threat of rebellion by the poor led to the creation of structures to regulate the process. This is how Athenian democracy occurred, and worked until it was overthrown by the rich.
American inequality exploded in the capitalist golden age before the '29 bubble burst, but after the "big government" measures that followed, inequality and the power of wealth remained fairly steady while the country itself enjoyed broad prosperity for two generations. The entire point of the conservative movement was to bring back the era when the rich could literally get away with murder, in the guise of "restoring" traditional limited government.
In other words, it is possible to keep the 1% under control, but not if your society comes to worship the rich as a master race.
The DC snipers were black and got plenty of coverage. The Central Park gang-rapists - who were really innocent - got plenty of coverage. The media will sell the stories that our population wants to buy, and there's no lack of negative stories about black people on local TV news during a sweeps month.
I guess there's nothing to make one go from fighting to maintain a profitable supremacy to fighting to just survive by removing the Other than the election of a black president. If that's the case, the next era of American racism should be marked by ideological excuses to justify actions to terrorize minorities into fleeing entire states, or surrounding cities with walls and declaring them special security zones. Each Republican state will make life unbearable for blacks, Latinos, etc and then celebrate the supposed economic gains caused by eliminating "parasites". But in practice they can only push these populations into other states, so frustration will grow until either the rest of us rebel, or we cave in to the temptation for a more final solution.
Ms. Wertheimer scores many points that also apply to American history. It appears that, given that the master caste consists of people with varied economic lots, both exploitation and competition can be tools of the same racist movement. For instance, when the slaves were freed in America, they immediately were seen by poor whites as economic competition (though in fact they already were as slaves). Before the Civil War the system to keep blacks in chains was led by the grandest figures in Southern society, while poorer inland counties remained skeptical; after that war the movement to return blacks as close to slavery as possible seems to have consumed whites in every corner of the South, a truly fascistic populism of vengeance. Yet once blacks were crushed by Jim Crow, the narratives of exploiters described by Ms. Wertheimer reasserted themselves. Basically, when blacks are effectively suppressed, they are stereotyped as retarded, slow, and childlike. But when blacks have a fighting chance, the stereotype instantly flips to that of violence, deceit, and rioting. Like the title of a pioneering book on the portrayal of blacks in movies, "From Sambo to Superspade", both stereotypes are readily available for use by whites depending on tactical advantage.
Note that when black Tulsa was burned down by white rioters after WW1, it was for the sin of blacks being too successful.
This is why it's dangerous for white lefties to think they can get back at Obama for stealing "their" party from them by helping the Tea Partiers destroy Obama and the government. The people running the Right don't use Benghazi as part of a narrative for the need to return to isolationism (which is why Ron Paul never gets more than a few % of GOP delegates every four years); they use it as part of a narrative to claim a birthright to infinite security on every square inch of the globe for American "interests" regardless of our crimes.
The problem is that Democratic presidents act as though they will be lynched if they cannot maintain that impossible standard, and the peace movement is doing nothing to allay the paranoia of ordinary idiots and prepare them for the unpleasant short-term consequences of our necessary loss of global hegemony.
He would need to fly a lot less if he wasn't spending all his time running the Israel Lobby worldwide and having to run around explaining to governments his regime's latest outrages. Messy itineraries are part of the price of deliberately avoiding peace with his neighbors.
Although I certainly hope we return to respecting the sovereignity of Pakistan, the win for Nawaz Sharif is likely a win for Saudi Arabia, which has helped him in the past. The Saudis have finally been flexing their political muscles in the last 6 years or so, creating a string of governments more friendly to them than to Washington. Great news on drones, but bad news on women's rights.
We have to look at this in the context of why Saudi and the US got involved in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the first place in 1980. They wanted the destruction not only of Soviet puppets, but of the Left in general. The Pakistani Army beheaded the last serious leftist democrat in the region. Meanwhile Egypt was brought under heel by Mubarak, and other states hostile to the US, Israel and Saudi were neutralized. But at a certain point our interests (perhaps plus Israel's?) and Saudi's brand of fundamentalism could not be reconciled. I'd point to the crisis in Iraq in 2006-7, with the US backing the Shia government over the Sunni rebels in Anbar over Saudi objections, as the time when the Saud family decided to start backing any Sunni rebels against any regime anywhere from Libya to Pakistan, as well as elected Islamist politicians.
Question is, will the Saudis allow any of these countries to have normal politics afterward, or has it created a new bloc of satellites to challenge American power? Recall that Richard Clarke claimed he discovered in the mid-1980s the Saudis trying to acquire Chinese nuclear-capable IRBMs, which attempt Reagan quashed.
The difference is, if terrorists attack embassies under Bush, it's clearly because he's a Good Guy fighting to make the empire bigger and more powerful, which benefits "real" Americans somehow. If terrorists attack embassies under the black Democrat, it's because they're carrying out his secret orders to... uh, no one seems to be able to explain what those secret orders are, because that would divide the Obama-haters on the Right from the Obama-haters on the Left. You don't have to be Frank Lutz to understand how wedge issues work.
Because everybody knows an Arab will never invent anything of sufficient value to earn him the basic human right to not be run off his land by Jewish colonists, right?
Let's see Israeli scientists refuse to use Arabic numerals.
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I think Prof. Cole is sensing that the attempt to stave off the unjust polarization of wealth by redistributive bandaids and education programs is doomed to get ever more complex and obtrusive as corporate-owned machines become ever more valuable than our own value as workers. We can't push this rock back up this hill.
Technically, this isn't a Marxist strategy in that the workers are being removed from the actual productive process, thereby solving the nasty problem of incentivizing workers. However, we could be introducing other problems, like incentivizing the managers of all these robots to be efficient in their use of capital and resources.
Another approach that is far less of a reach than what Prof. Cole was discussing is something that is actually happening: the ability of ordinary people to manufacture a wide variety of goods at home using rising technologies like CNC and 3-D printing. This is the first whiff of a revolution in the relationship between passive, addicted consumers and mind-controlling corporations. It's an outgrowth of what Linux has already done on the software side, encouraging private, nonmonetary collaboration between persons who want certain things.
Now if a lot of people were capable of generating their own electricity and putting it on the grid, or buying locally-grown food, there would be real income to sustain this alternative economy.
Hilarious that we whites justify vast gaps between ourselves and blacks when:
a. business magazines (and GOP nutjobs) increasingly attack higher education as obsolete (and Communistic), because there are no safe careers out there under modern capitalism
b. all these "black" pathologies are also at their highest rates in the overall population in the Republican-ruled states, which somehow have failed to solve any of them and yet imply that they can save America by putting blacks back in their place everywhere
c. all those homeless, brain-damaged white veterans who thought they were improving their future when they volunteered
We're living in the Stanford Prison Experiment. All these supposed proofs of blacks deserving their oppression are exactly the phenomena you would see among the "prison" caste in that experiment; violence and despair, cynicism about the future, thrift, and hard work for the bosses.
Yes, but black enrollment in the Army collapsed after Bush invaded Iraq. Blacks learned their lesson from Vietnam. They refused to aid the leader of their enemies in his hour of greed. You don't need JT McPhee to figure out that oppressing minorities to pressure them into joining your imperial military perpetuates another evil cycle that leads to societal collapse.
I have been putting out wacky crackpot stuff for the past several years about Israel's experiments in apartheid being a prototype for its admirers in especially the southern US to begin to restore Jim Crow here. After the gutting of voting rights and the freeing of Zimmerman for behaving like a West Bank settler, any questions?
Dominionist is a widely accepted term among the small group of people who watch out for Christian extremists in America. This comes from the extremists' own language for taking "dominion" over America as a holy act. But there are other factions with slightly different ideologies.
Technically, any religion based on the idea that there should be one set of favorable rules for the elite and one set of repressive rules for the rest is hypocrisy, so that officially gives us plenty of religions to work with.
I have obtained the book "Invention of the White Race", by Theodore Allen, a groundbreaking history of the process by which the early American colonial oligarchy manufactured the concept of the "white" race as an economic strategy of exploitation and oppression. It turned rebellious Scotch-Irish servants into loyal, brutal attack dogs of the English planter aristocracy. But it also carries the implication that this monstrosity was the first "American" identity to ever exist, the bedrock on which the United States was built and made successful.
This should shut up the closet racists who whine about anyone bringing up racial injustice simply "prolonging" the problem or covering up class injustice, or that "black history" is unfair because no one is allowed to teach "white history".
Because it still determines who has the power to shoot whom and get away with it, on average. And that ought to be a matter of concern between us citizens and all levels of our government. So stop being disingenuous and act as though you value Trayvon Martin's life when you wish to obscure what killed him yet would not have killed a white boy.
Sarai, see my comment above about how the averages have been skewed by the financial crimes of the all-white 1% since 1980. No "values" had anything to do with it. Blacks were kept out of a position to participate in that orgy, and their blue-collar jobs were wiped out by deliberate agendas to punish high-wage cities and states, replaced by robots and foreign sweatshops.
Remember the 1% whom everyone was protesting about a couple of years ago? They're practically all white, and they alone own most of the wealth in our country. Thus the average.
The problem is, so many poorer whites seem to regard their shared complexion with the oligarchs as proof of their own natural superiority, so the political effects are little different than if all whites really were that much richer. Since most of the 1%'s amassing has happened since Reagan came to power playing race cards, you could say that the elites used racism to scapegoat minorities and big government for their own worsening of the fortunes of many whites. Thus fooling the latter into destroying the very government barriers against vulture and casino capitalism that made our modern 1% possible.
We should also recall that Temperance and Prohibition could be regarded as a War on Catholics, as detailed in Ken Burns' documentary "Prohibition". Attacking the one was a way of punishing the other, in Protestant eyes. Prohibition was repealed because of the massive Democratic electoral gains caused by that event which discredited so much of WASP conservatism, the Great Depression. Yet only TWO years later, marijuana was banned in turn. Apparently there must always be a war on someone.
I would argue, with great regret, that white supremacy is more like speed or caffeine or some other drug that makes you work harder to get more highs. In fact it is the most dangerous drug ever seen.
Its potency is illustrated by the terrifying military prowess of the famous white supremacist states of the past: the CSA, South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Third Reich. Though all of them were eventually defeated by the insanity of their position vis a vis their neighbors, they put up a hell of fight. The Wehrmacht is credited with a 15 to 1 casualty ratio. The South tested the will of the North to keep fighting despite having only 2.5 million white men to draw its armies from versus the North's 15 million of all colors and an increasing # of freed slaves.
This should concern us, but we think of race war as something in the past. What matters is the ability of white supremacy to energize ordinary people into uniting to commit acts of historic and ambitious evil - in the case of America, the same acts over and over again, tirelessly revived and ingeniously disguised. We still can't kill this zombie.
What conspiracy? Is this the same "environmental conspiracy" that global warming deniers are always screaming about? I guess this will become enshrined as the official position of American patriots defending the right of business to poison us.
Uh Bill, if you lived next door to a man who you know murdered his last neighbor and got away with it, wouldn't you tend to be a little paranoid? You act as if being involved in a "few" overthrows of sovereign, even elected governments is a trivial matter that has no bearing on future behavior.
What, exactly, has changed such that we shouldn't be suspects in the future - given how unjustified, cruel, stupid and ultimately unpunished our past coups were? That pretty much eliminates all the rational criteria that one might use to rule out US involvement in the next coup, doesn't it?
Actually, that would be a wise move if the US wanted to cover all its bases - rather like a big corporation giving money to BOTH candidates in an important election. But I doubt the people running our foreign policy are that clever. We usually pick a side based on our Manichean belief in absolute good and evil and then get disappointed.
Of course this is mostly the political reality that the authorities reflect the double standards of the public.
However, there is also a disturbing logic that one could follow which permeates our society and thus ensures that the public will have this double standard.
Which is, America is one warrior tribe, whose right to self-perpetuation is deeper than the right of its residents to democratic government or human rights, and thus one who is an extremist in pursuit of that self-preservation automatically has a higher status than an extremist in pursuit of any amendment to the tribal dogmas and privileges - or all of us non-extremists whose votes should count for less because we lack the intensity of a true patriot.
The worst part of it is, most of us actually seem to buy the crap from "patriots" that, because they have evolved the least from their racist, classist, misogynist forefathers, they are more authentically American than the rest of us, thus exercising a minority veto over progress. That's why we always back down first, like liberals did in 1876 when Reconstruction ended. You could even say that the "tribe" only consists of white Protestant property owners, and the rest of us are inferior outsiders who have submitted to their God-blessed rule over the centuries. That is certainly how they treat us.
By tribal reckoning, using violence to override our votes would be perfectly reasonable. But no one else gets that privilege.
But since the rural poor sees the solution to all problems in theocracy and the urban poor opposes that, it sounds like they will cancel each other out - aided by the military allowing a low-level vendetta between them.
Eventually these self-destructive neoliberal policies become so bad that even the middle class starts getting hurt. Then things will get interesting.
I have spent the last 30 years warning people around me that the Reagan revolution was nothing more than a Trojan horse for an all-out attack on modern liberal democracy, financed by the rich and soldiered on by redneck suckers. They don't want the 1950s back; they want the 19th century back, and increasingly in the media their elected darlings hint that they have the right to armed rebellion if their special rights as Christians and "entrepreneurs" are not allowed to steamroll everyone else. They created a media machine that slowly mainstreams extremist ideas. In the '90s you had to go to gun magazines and Christian extremist pamphlets to find the ideas that are now an acid test to get nominated by the GOP in many states.
Over and over again in those gun mags then and increasingly in larger and more public forums now they say that America is, and only can be, a republic, not a democracy. The media refuses to accept that such... Good Americans... can be saying what they are obviously saying; that states must have restored their right to restrict the vote as it was restricted in 1789. We can't believe that anyone would seriously be that cruel and unjust, so we stop thinking.
The Right got this far because the rich wanted the 19th century back too. That's why our institutions will be (made) powerless to save us. The money spent to brainwash us with propaganda will mount into the billions and tens of billions; we will have no idea what the people we vote for really intend to do. Our system, like all systems, can be gamed by those with infinite cash, and once perverted, will be defended as sacred. We still need the power to take to the streets, or our enemies will take them instead.
We already had the pipeline disaster in Arkansas a few weeks ago. The energy corporations are really putting on a show about how they protect the public's safety.
The truth is, we are willing to sacrifice other people for our convenience and inertia; we just keep rolling the dice that it won't be our turn to suffer this time. The free market creates the illusion that the suffering is random, while "big government" would mean having to make tough decisions about who deserves what consequences.
And yet, if Air Force One was treated similarly while on a visit to China because of the mere possibility that a dissident was on board, you would freak out, Bill.
The Western media IS afraid of grassroots democracy, especially when it's anti-capitalist or anti-military. The media has it sweet when it only has to cover 2 political parties, and turn the election into a horserace with odds-makers and he-said-she-said videos, and collect a fortune selling campaign ads. The media loves doing press-release journalism, a stenographer for the government. The media hates when its corporate advertisers are denigrated.
Not surprisingly, Occupy was denigrated by the media for not having a "plan". Plans can be debated, and smeared, by the usual media-appointed experts, and we will rely on the media for our opinions instead of coming up with our own, unpredictable ideas for solving public problems.
If the media has such contempt for their own fellow citizens trying to exercise sovereignity, I'd hate to hear how the editors and publishers feel about foreign citizens trying to do the same.
I would be trying to overthrow the bastard long before all that, because I have spent years studying the Christian Right and have come to understand its mandatory long-term goals as outright theocracy. If Rick Perry tried to secede, I'd be organizing his future victims to battle his neo-Confederate hordes. No legal mechanism justifies sitting still while we go back to what we know was intolerable injustice.
However, we did impeach Nixon long before 100,000,000 Americans were out in the streets. You can argue there were specific legal charges that ruined him, not his unpopularity, but I strongly feel the economic mess in 1974 is why more of his followers didn't fight for him. It is Egypt's misfortune that they don't seem to have had an impeachment mechanism that could be used against Morsi's specific acts.
The restoration of Jim Crow has already begun in America. The rich are bankrolling the political party that works day and night to come up with new ways to make it harder for blacks to vote than whites. If the rest of us try to stop it, their pet governors and congressmen threaten nullification and secession.
Now of course the corporations probably lose money if actual secession occurred, but you can see that by such threats in the 1870s they obtained the ideal state of affairs: the country pretends to have civil rights, but in practice where the rich need to be able to crush and exploit the poor, it doesn't. It is not a coincidence that after Jim Crow began taking away black voting rights, the South began using massive convict slave labor, leased to private businessmen. Now, both disenfranchisement and broader convict labor are back on the American table. Once you've enacted both, all other restraint on corporate crime, pollution, fraud, usury, union-busting, etc will crumble.
But the corporate bluff only works if the Tea Party crazies they bankroll AREN'T bluffing. Any resulting bloodshed doesn't mean a damn to our investor class, as long as liberals chicken out on the brink of all-out war.
Our vaunted institutions can often be defeated and co-opted by economic interests. So our religious and racist extremists needed only to entangle themselves with those interests, which is what the Conservative Movement actually is.
"Luis Posada is revered in Miami as a hero of the anti-Castro Cuban exile movement and had long-documented ties to the U.S. intelligence community."
Sounds to me like good reason to believe that he is the sort who would murder innocent civilians.
It doesn't matter how much proof there is on the ground. The American cult of private property requires the supporting myth that individual greed can NEVER cause (undeserved) harm to others. So the harder these ranchers and used car salesmen and other pimps of material excess out West are pressed by fires and water shortages, the harder they will cling to magical thinking. If the weather is changing, it's not man-made (unless it's a punishment from Jehovah for toleratings gays and Moslems). They will die lashed to this mast, and suck us all down with them.
The question is, did the opposition legitimately have the right to believe that events since the election proved that there would never be another fair election again unless there was a change of government now?
Of course, that can be spun both ways. Every rebellion makes that argument whether or not their cause is just. And there are countries where the opposition waited too long to move against a government and got slaughtered.
What representative democracy does is take great conflicts between the citizens and dump them into the hands of rival politicians who often are unequal to the challenge. When representatives are no longer able to rule, the citizens are at each others' throats. But maybe a time comes when that is exactly what must happen for the concept of a nation to be more than a joke: the citizens must recognize and deal with each other. The question of civil war is still in the hands of those citizens glaring at each other over barricades tonight.
I think a lot of America's problems come from our citizens being strangers to each other, but I fear what would happen if they learned how utterly alien and exclusionary their conflicting worldviews are, and there happened to be some guns in the crowd.
So do I have the formula right?
It's only treason when you try to stop your country from waging war; it's patriotism when you try to get it into one.
I'm not being sarcastic. If people really believe that peace is more of a threat than war, what can be done?
What if "the people" don't really exist? Or if "the people" was originally fabricated to refer to members of a privileged caste, and they have never accepted the appending of their former slaves and exploitees to their corpus; thus are glad to support war against a broader public?
The Dutch Reformed Church is Calvinist. Calvin believed that wealth was a sign that you were one of the Elect, favored by God because you were already designated for Heaven. Not surprisingly, ur-capitalist greedbags took this and ran with it, to the far corners of a defenseless world. Thus the Protestant Work Ethic and much of the reason why America is the way it is.
Calvinism is not dead by a long shot in America.
I hope that you have some words to say about the overturning of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, making it damn near impossible to tell if a state is passing laws secretly calculated to reduce the black vote to irrelevance.
That is exactly how Jim Crow began.
And I have discovered recently that this is the THIRD time that the South has declared war on African-Americans' right to vote. I did not know that in the early Virginia colony, African indentured servants did have the right to vote. This was taken away from them when they were converted to slaves, so as to drive a wedge between them and disgruntled Caucasian indentured servants, thereby creating America's tripartite caste system. Jim Crow itself grew from the oligarchy's fear of black and white farmers uniting to demand fairer legal conditions.
It's sick that conservatives claim that anti-Jim Crow laws are no longer necessary because things have changed in 50 years when the entire impetus of the conservative movement is not just to go back 50 years, but 200. But not 350 years - then blacks would be able to vote and their enslavement would only be temporary.
Oh, and you are right that Bill could not refute Correa's claim that the world order is unjust and immoral, whatever Correa's own misdeeds are. Why just a couple of days ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the states of the Old Confederacy can gerrymander black and Latino voters into permanent defeat, no matter how many of them there are. How many corporations have contributed to the politicians, think tanks, foundations, and extremist churches who have thus put America back on the road to Jim Crow because they want America back to being run the way Ecuador used to be?
Apparently it is only tyranny when it is done against the rich. Since Bill previously has written that Latin American radicalism is unjustified because "they" are to blame for their historical economic woes, he is making it clear now that he only means poor Latin Americans and their leaders are bad, and oppression is only evil when carried out by the poor, not by Correa's wealthy enemies who would have handed over Snowden to their senior partners in America without hesitation if they still ruled.
So then I guess you're casting a vote in favor of our capitalist surveillance state instead?
Given the difficulty that non-Communist Latin American countries have with preventing people from getting kidnapped for money, I agree that this is not a good place for him to go.
Huh. So there's a traditional culture of corruption and inefficiency in Latin America, is there? And there's a traditional power elite consisting of lighter-skinned oligarchs dating back to Spanish and Portuguese rule, right? Now what was their relationship to us capitalists?
The scam you're pulling, Bill, is that Western capitalists were partners of that oligarchy in their crimes, both in the old banana republic era and in the neoliberal era inaugurated by Pinochet. So it's not a matter of Latin Americans looking for outsiders to blame, but one group of Latin Americans oppressing and murdering a much larger group of Latin Americans with Wall Street support. But you switch out the pronouns, so as to imply that 50% of the blame lies with lazy, socialistic Latin Americans, i.e., the poor.
DeSoto is just Friedman-Pinochet Mark II. New "entrepreneurs" can become fascists too, like the greedbags who fill up the ranks of America's Christian Right and Tea Party, owning businesses enabled by white-flight exurbanism and despising the people left behind in the city.
What's scary is that the Gulags were not unnecessary in a certain sense; they may have been the only really productive part of the Stalin-era economy. It is estimated that up to 1/3 of Soviet GNP was produced by the camps.
Which brings us, Bill, to the question of when our public will eliminate all restrictions to for-profit prison slave labor so as to quell their fears without having to pay taxes for prisons. Then it's open season to imprison anyone who's not popular, as was done in the Jim Crow-era South's for-profit convict labor system. Think of it as a kind of Final Solution for American capitalism; simultaneously destroying the black vote (Democrats), wrecking wage leverage for the non-imprisoned, and freeing corporations from having to kiss Beijing's ass.
Is this really about America versus Assad, or is this about America versus Saudi Arabia in a proxy war over who will rule Syria next?
Because if the Saudis, who are not stupid, recognize that we're funding the FSA to cheat the Saudis' fanatic proxies out of their victory, we are making an enemy out of a kingdom that has far greater power over us than Iran ever has.
The real negotiation, and the one the American people need to prepare to be involved in, is the one with the Saudi kingdom over whether the Arab Spring will end with republics or with jihadi states. We don't even know what the Saudis want, or why they're creating new Talibans when they know we will violently freak out over that. Everywhere in the world, Saudi-backed forces have turned civil wars from negotiable situations into apocalyptic struggles that allow US Islamophobes to claim that all Moslems are evil and plotting to enslave the world. Yet those Islamophobes never call for sanctions against Saudi Arabia, their partner in far-right capitalist greed and oil economics.
You are absolutely correct, but the history of the region indicates that the replacement for the bloodthirsty tyrant will also be a bloodthirsty tyrant. The people who support Assad are willing to commit mass murder because they are certain that they will be mass-murdered if they lose. Until you break that circle you accomplish nothing, and we are woefully unqualified to pick a sure-thing alternative.
But a collapse of communications systems would not cause the irreversible destruction of all non-human life. It might even be a temporary salvation for plants and animals for humans to suffer such a catastrophe.
On the other hand, if the planetary ecosystem breaks down and ocean life is seriously damaged, the effects will spread across all forms of life, and we don't have the means to keep many of us alive on what would become Mars.
It's simple. If methane hydrates are beginning to evaporate in the oceans, nothing can stop it, and nothing can save us. We just don't know.
I'm pretty sure most Americans don't understand what "sovereignity" means.
Gaddafi was unfairly concentrating all the oil wealth in his own home region at the expense of everyone else. The conflict was essentially secular, so the rebellion against him was widespread. Libya has ethnic groups, but it has no longstanding genocidal grudge-matches such that if one ethnic group lost, it would absolutely expect to be exterminated.
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case in Syria. They have learned the lesson of post-Saddam Iraq; he who loses will be ethnically cleansed. So instead of broad sweeps of motorized forces along a single coastal road, Syria is a nightmare of dug-in resistance, village by village. Any winner in such a merciless war will be someone we will regret being associated with. I wish there was an alternative but the Saudis have already decided to outspend us on putting the fanatics on top, as they successfully did in Afghanistan.
It's because of people like you that Kennan lost faith in America and democracy later in his life. He was warning against America's habit of violent crusades when he wrote the Mr. X article; he knew democracies lacked the discipline to understand conflicts in alien societies. He specifically wanted the dispute isolated to Europe, where democracy had support and Americans could understand nonviolent incentives. Instead our arrogant belief that we know what's best for other races led to the smear that the Democrats "lost China", leading to the McCarthy horror and the Vietnam War.
Kennan on Vietnam:
""During the Eisenhower years, Kennan became an outspoken critic of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's policy towards the Soviet Union. He complained frequently that the U.S. had failed to take advantage of the liberalizing trend within the USSR following the death of the country's longtime leader Joseph Stalin. And Kennan was also a prominent critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Vietnam, he would say, "is not our business." He argued that the escalation of the war made a negotiated settlement much less likely."
The author of this quote noted that Kennan endorsed Eugene McCarthy in '68, the most anti-war of all Presidential candidates. Kennan clearly did not want what you want.
So I am sure he would have regarded with horror our series of operations in Afghanistan, which have been even more destructive for the Afghan people(s) than our actions were for the Vietnamese people, who were sophisticated and organized enough to eventually recover. What we did, Bill, was allow our tyrannical allies, Islamic-extremist Saudi Arabia and Islamic-extremist Pakistan, a free hand in flooding Afghanistan with, you guessed it, Islamic extremists, so our boys wouldn't have to die there.
Now since you know, Bill, that it is our tradition to cover up all the evils of our allies, how were we supposed to explain to our citizens the need to keep our "eye on the ball" after the Soviet withdrawal because those allies had flooded Afghanistan with relentless holy warriors? Our supposed secular alternative? Karzai, the Unocal lobbyist who actually tried to talk the Taliban into giving Unocal the pipeline it wanted in the '90s? He makes Diem look like, well, a ruler.
Kennan, not filled with a crusader's monomania, would have seen that we were being duped into building takfirism into the world's next headache.
I hope that you are correct, but it seems the longer and more fierce these wars are, the better a show the most extreme faction makes. Whatever happened to that broad coalition who joined Castro's tiny band in overthrowing Batista? They went back to their bourgeoise jobs, and he held on to the only thing he had. It was good for Libya that so many soldiers turned on Gaddafi, and thus could counterbalance other fighters in postwar politics, but that war was a lot more about resenting someone else's cut of the oil revenues than it was about wanting someone else to be eternally expunged from existence.
If I had the power to choose between a Middle East governed by Hezbollah and a Middle East governed by those medieval tyrants in Saudi Arabia, I would choose the former. We've been blinded by our love of the rich and our love of oil into loving only the Arabs rich enough to hate the real people they rule - just as we loved all the wrong people in Latin America and Vietnam.
The problem is, the Saudis are required by their special relationship with the US to keep their hands off Israel, which threatens their legitimacy as Moslem monarchs. So they made up for it by bankrolling every Moslem extremist everywhere else who had US approval. Then it all ran aground in Iraq, where the Saudis had to watch helplessly while America's quislings-du-jour ethnically cleansed the Sunnis from Iraqi cities.
I suspect the Saudi inner circle decided at that time to take matters into their own hands and forestall American idiocy. But their desire to control every scrap of the Middle East, disguised as yet another capitulation to America's wishes to screw Iran, is a far greater threat to America, freedom, women's rights, the evolution of Islam, etc. than either Hezbollah or Iran.
We Americans think we've won because we've put rich Saudi and Israeli oligarchs on top of hundreds of millions of icky Arabs. Most of us don't know that Richard Clarke reported that he witnessed spy photos in 1986 showing the Saudis were trying to sneak in Chinese-made IRBMs and launchers. Reagan shut them down before they got the nukes to go with them. But the Israelis have hundreds of nukes; why shouldn't the Saudis?
We've put the worst people in the Middle East in charge. How long do you expect these super-villains to put up with each other?
What libertarians are, versus what the Paul family's capitalist religion is, needs closer scrutiny.
Can you really be a libertarian if you want states to outlaw abortion?
Would Rand Paul retain his redneck vote if he explained to them that as a libertarian he wants to shut down their beloved empire and all the MIC jobs (and Moslem-killing opportunities) that it provides them? I mean, he DOES, doesn't he?
Does Paul think, like his father, that Lincoln had no right to fight secession or free the slaves? Does he feel the 14th Amendment should be repealed so that states could take the right to vote away from minorities again? (Many privately do.)
Of course a far right-winger wants state governments to have absolute authority. State governments have always been the prime tool of oppression of the poor, non-white and non-Protestant. But if Paul's definition of liberty consists only of what it meant in 1800 - when only white male property-owners were assured of the right to vote everywhere - then it only consists of what white male property-owners desired for themselves. F*** all the rest of us. Thus censorship boards run by clergymen, laws against race-mixing (not just blacks), and laws against trade unions were all okay in that "free" society.
And if you don't think tyranny can be decentralized and privatized, recall how a hooded terrorist group ruled much of America for generations on the principles of state's rights, property rights, and a monopoly of power for white men. At least they were honest about it.
Because the Turkish military is, like all NATO militaries except France, an extension of the Pentagon and its military rule was inherently an abrogation of sovereignity. If the Army had still been in charge in 2003, Bush would have had free rein to use Turkish soil to wage war on Iraq. I would argue that no country whose army has been absorbed into the US's command structure via NATO has a genuinely independent foreign policy. Which is why after the Turkish aid ships were shot up by the Israelis, non-US NATO officials were privately furious but unable to do anything that would offend Washington, while conversely Bush could compel his NATO minions to send forces to die in our mess in Afghanistan. NATO makes Europeans die for America, not the other way around. The Turkish Army had no problem with that, and thus under its rule the Turkish people were not free to leave.
Except that the Luddites were protesting a far greater injustice, the destruction of a fairly healthy and self-sufficient English peasantry by the new money power of corporate capitalism:
1. the rich bought Parliament to redefine private property, seizing the Commons that had existed for centuries, thus leaving the peasants with no food options so that they would have to move to overcrowded, disease-ridden cities and drive down wages for those very industrialists. That in turn made life worse for the millworkers who had been protected by tradition from the monstrous Social Darwinism that bastards like Herbert Spenser preached.
2. British democracy was a joke; only 1% of English men could vote. Not a legitimate government.
3. the American rebels, Mr. Lunsford, did far worse than the Luddites, for arguments not entirely different than Mr. Snowden's. Double standard?
Sure, but this creates a new set of problems:
1. The rightwingers hate all national service that falls outside their supernarrow interpretation of the role of government, which seems to consist only of violently punishing anyone at home or abroad who interferes with the needs of "real" Americans
2. How can anyone say that a country with a draft is "free"? In 1945 freedom was understood to be relative, because between the Depression and fascism we had too clear a memory of the alternatives. Now people think their own demands are the only definition of freedom, and any other demands are immoral. To admit the fundamental compromise of freedom that is the draft is to open debate about other compromises.
3. National military service means, "not just for white conservatives". The gun nuts think they can emasculate the federal government and rule the rest of us as their ancestors did under Jim Crow, because no other faction is as well-armed and organized (see: KKK). Probably not a coincidence that a great leap in American equality and civil rights happened right after many millions of blacks, Latinos, Jews, and radicals temporarily were forced to bear arms alongside the socioeconomic tribe that normally inhabited the peacetime Army. The goal of the "patriots" is to undo everything that was accomplished in that era.
Yes, the best bet would be amending the damn thing to define what a "well-regulated" militia has to do with a citizenry engaged in an arms race against itself. Then we would have the ultimate challenge to the gun nuts: How would you rednecks feel about a black, well-regulated, non-rightwing militia in every inner city?
I'm thinking Yugoslavia in 3...2...1...
I think besides your excellent observations, many ordinary people are fooled because guns have not changed their physical form very much over the last 200 years (despite massive leaps in lethality) and thus seem to be connected to the sacred weapons of our supposedly free ancestors and their sanctified expansion of their private property by violence. Whereas the forms of privacy under assault now have no real history; they are not just improved technology, they are new technologies. You still can't wiretap a phone because we still call it a phone, but now computers store data about all phone calls made, and that's new and not part of any tradition of liberty.
It is a problem that the wealthy have generally seized the initiative to lobby for new laws to convert new technology into new "property" for them, just as the first industrial barons of England exploited the new economy to privatize the common lands that had fed the peasants of the past, converting it into private property. Or the rail barons of the 1800s were rewarded with long strips of public land to subsidize their breakneck expansion. Ordinary people get left in the dust in these legislative bonanzas. The internet already belongs to the corporations in practice, and when they share your info with the Feds they also lay the groundwork to access that info to more skillfully exploit your appetites.
The problem, Joao, is that in America we've been so brainwashed by corporate media that we don't even know how far to the Right the entire political spectrum has been dragged, compared to the outside world. I mean, we're being indoctrinated by the Tea Party that Nazis were actually Communists, and that Franklin Roosevelt was actually a Communist, and the Federal Reserve was actually Communist.
Hell, maybe Lincoln was actually a Communist. Who does that leave as representing free enterprise, exactly?
I think for a lot of people like me it's also a matter that Erdogan has ended the slavish obediance of Turkey's military-dominated regime to US-NATO dictates - though not without a push from protestors in 2003. Between the refusal to let US forces invade Iraq through his territory and the crisis over the Israeli attack on the Gaza aid convoy, we saw a NATO country take a stand against US hegemony, and we would like to see a lot more of that, precisely because NATO is composed of democracies that have given up their independent foreign policy by having their militaries standardized under US command structures.
We forget what it was like 10 years ago when the neocons were fooling our media into believing they could control everything and everyone without resistance. For anyone to stand up to the US at all, even authoritarians like Putin, meant the spell of this drivel over our public might be broken. Instead, we believed the lies too long and our country got broken instead.
If your numbers mean you can outvote me, you are a terrorist monster who must be deprived of all human rights. If your numbers mean you will never outvote me, but you can still pay taxes, you're a citizen. That's all the politicians of Israel and America need to know.
What, you think humans aren't wicked enough to have their consciences flipped on and off like a switch by a mathematical calculation? You think the appearance of "Voter ID" laws targeting minorities has nothing to do with the danger that those minorities can flip local elections?
We may have consciences, but we will override them when our goodies are threatened. The Navajo are no threat to white people in general; if they have success in backing environmental and litigatory challenges that threaten the power structure, watch how fast that perception changes.
Although I have often been very critical of the Israeli state at this forum, I would never say that the hypocritical behavior of the Israeli people is abnormal for human beings. I think the object lesson of Israel is that modern humans are as lacking in empathy as ancient barbarians and conquerors. The unusual thing that happened is that after WW2, the greatest victims of the Nazis were given a get-out-of-camp-free card, the right to solve their statelessness problem by being given an exception to the reinforced laws against imperialism and occupation, reinforced specifically because of the crimes of those Nazis.
However, before the World Wars made most peoples desirous of having limits placed on their capability for depredation, we have many examples of the victims of oppression becoming monsters at the first opportunity. In ancient warfare that was a matter of course; the losers who survived the typical atrocities nursed their wounds and taught their children to build up for revenge, though this would obviously renew the cycle. The conquered people of Scotland and Ireland were damn fast to become murderous henchmen for their masters in the New World and Australia.
And let's not forget the ancient Hebrews themselves, unleashed from slavery, according to their holy word, to slaughter an endless succession of foreign communities under orders from Jehovah.
If the memory of the World Wars and the fear of nukes is what taught most of the modern world a degree of restraint, what does it mean now that those with living memory of those dark days are dying off, that Hiroshima is now in the distant past, and the nation-states that actually erected international law are often said to be overshadowed by new forces greater and smaller? Will our inner beasts re-emerge?
The problem is, during the Bush regime, Ethiopia was a known neocon whore in the process of becoming an authoritarian state. Then it invaded Somalia to install a UN-backed regime because of its fears that its own growing ethnic Somali population might be a threat. For all practical purposes it was acting as Bush's proxy in the War on Moslems, Horn of Africa subdepartment. Do we trust neocons anywhere else where they're still in power?
He didn't mention Egypt, did he? Seems he's bringing up the issue of Israel's own future water shortages, and the suspicion of many that it will one day seize Lebanon up to the Litani River as an attempt at a solution. Which would require destroying Hezbollah so that the Shia population there would be defenseless.
Has Israel repudiated her? Hell, it doesn't even repudiate known anti-Semites as long as they hate Moslems too:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/11/2/141343/402/
To say that there are no ties between the Likud and the American evangelical right is foolish, as these stories show. To say that evangelical right is not incredibly extreme is to ignore the substantial % of GOP adherents in the South who believe Obama is the Antichrist, a position no stranger than Bachmann's.
Palin served her purpose, to be replaced by Bachmann, who served her purpose, to be replaced by another token extremist woman who will be even more extreme. Each will retire to much greater affluence than they had before being plucked from obscurity by the propaganda machine.
Remember when Gingrich represented the far right fringe of the GOP? Now he's just moderately conservative by comparison. He served his purpose and was succeeded by radio extremists as the designated vanguard.
Entire political positions taken by the conservative movement were merely cynical waystations to train the public to forget past positions, in preparation for new positions that should have gotten the GOP laughed out of existence. Your mission, if you accept it, is to look at the people driving this entire process, and discover what their end game is. Hint: in the publications of those people, it is most repeatedly stated that "America is a republic, not a democracy." In other words, their mania for Founding Fathers and Original Intent and States Rights boils down to restricting the vote to those who had it in 1789 - and all the barbaric practices that this would resurrect. Getting to that point requires a lot of turnover of "conservative spokesmen", including the token women and black presidential candidates all pre-set to fail in the primaries after creating the illusion that there's any room in their kind of republic for real power sharing. Oh yeah, let's cobble together an Ayn Rand Catholic to cover that demographic too.
How many bulletheads voted for Bachmann BECAUSE she said stupid things, things at odds with the reality that they despise and wish to war against? Not that the media is any good at explaining what qualifies as a fact to audiences it has trained to have the attention span of rodents.
Ironically, America's reactionary religious fringe wants all its boys to infiltrate our military. Wonder what they have planned?
The logical solution is to end the draft. But that does not necessarily produce a more liberal society. Andrew Bacevich, certainly a critic of American militarism, noted in his works the complex ironies caused by the end of the US draft. A bourgeoise so glad to dump its military responsibilities onto poor whites in effect became the hostage of that gratitude, afraid to criticize anything the military did as it became more and more insulated from democratic safeguards.
The question is, must Memorial Day be a pro-war holiday (they died for a good cause), or an anti-war holiday (more will die if we don't change)? If we can't answer a simple question like that, then we must still fear that having too much of an anti-war attitude will harm our interests as a society.
Right now, Paul Lukas over at http://www.uni-watch.com is continuing his stubborn crusade to stop sports teams from commemorating every damn holiday they can get their hands on as "Blind Military Worship Day", mostly by wearing camouflage uniforms. This time it was really bad, with all baseball teams, even the team in Canada, re-coloring their team logos in US Marine-pattern camouflage. His arguments on the need to separate the dead from the glorification and normalization of war are eloquent and need our support.
Scientists are now investigating whether the horrible flu pandemic that killed 100,000,000 people during and after WW1 was spread from British troops, to arriving American troops, and then to the German troops retreating before them, causing it to spread to the German civilian population and leading to the panicked collapse of Germany. That led in turn to the paranoid fantasies of Germans that they were betrayed, aiding the rise of Hitler and yet another war.
Make what you will of that, but it shows how messy war is as a tool to achieve a "noble" end. British gold, American ambition, all serving a microscopic army more powerful than us all: a supervirulent strain of influenza. Maybe the flu won the war, and humans lost.
I think that was the good thing about Armistice Day, before it was converted into Veterans Day. "Armistice" = cease-fire. But that only worked because most of the dead of WW1 came from neighboring white Christian countries, and thus the survivors could see the other side as human beings. ("All Quiet on the Western Front" depicted German soldiers this way to Americans only 12 years after it ended.) Besides, the overwhelming waste of that war cast a pall on the leaders who normally use dead boys to glorify war. WW2 and the Cold War had radically different emotional dynamics.
I've only seen one Hollywood movie that ever depicted our enemies in Vietnam in a human way ("The Iron Triangle"), and none for Korea or the wars on Moslems.
Illuminating find, JT. My ultimate horror is that if all dissenters against these wars finally succeeded in eradicating all the lies that enabled them, the ordinary, greedy, entitled American would simply resort to the final defense, exactly the words of this GI you quoted.
Because at that point there is no argument left except that one day the world will unite against our crimes and destroy us.
Consider if the public applied that same final defense to the possibility of global warming:
To protect our prosperity, we will refuse to make any concession to reduce pollution, and play a game of chicken to make the weaker countries make all the sacrifices instead. And if they refuse, we will use our nuclear weapons to wipe out their societies and thus reduce their CO2 output while our continues unimpeded.
Same logic, as long as we believe we can get away with it. If not, we lie low and bide our time. But we never learn the lessons that the Nuremburg trials and the post WW2 changes in international law were trying to teach: if offensive war profits anybody, we are all doomed.
It is a great untold chapter if the average American
doesn't know about it, and thus thinks that the conquest of non-whites by whites is actually beneficial to the non-whites. How many Americans washed their hands of the blood of Iraq in recent years by saying "those savages didn't deserve our rule"? Which means they've learned nothing when the war drums start beating again.
Apologizing for slavery by Congress still raises controversy because of all the Christians who think that slavery was good for blacks.
I noticed before about 2005 or so that there were indeed conservatives and libertarians who expressed concerns about global warming. For instance, neocon James Woolsey who pushed for energy efficiency at home, unusually enough.
However, something changed. I didn't understand it until the famous study showing that when people were shown evidence that opposed their leanings, they actually grew more extreme in their prejudices. Reason? The evidence was coming from the mouths of identifiable enemies. Thus the rampant hatred that exploded against Al Gore when his movie came out.
I think from that time on it was impossible for Republicans to take even a precautionary position on AGW. Once it had been added to the list of evil schemes to bring about world socialism, such dissent meant brutal harassment from the ideological enforcers on the right.
It was no longer a matter of what they understood about science. The implication of global warming is that greed will destroy the world. That idea must be eradicated at all costs, because it threatens the entire justification for private property, unregulated markets, and the infinite polarization of wealth under the guise of infinite economic growth.
A century ago it was okay for Americans to debate each other about the distribution of wealth and the distribution of benefits and costs by government. Thus when Teddy Roosevelt implemented the first peacetime income tax he argued that extreme inequality was bringing the validity of democracy into doubt. According to William Greider, millions of farmers once maintained healthy dialogue on the differential effects of monetary policy.
Now, we don't have these discussions. Thus there is an invisible elephant crowding our fiscal room:
Does our global military stance serve the rich and the poor equally?
We always treat the military as a collective good, but who really benefits the most from our having troops in 130 countries versus, say, spending the money instead on repairing bridges? Does dominating the globe militarily give American businessmen abroad a certain leverage that Swiss businessmen lack? Do those businessmen use that advantage to more rapidly outsource the jobs of ordinary Americans?
Problem 1:
The highest possible standard against making any kind of attack is that it is defined as an act of war. Governments don't care much about killing foreigners, but they do care about being at war with foreign governments, so that's a deterrent.
It seems the US can strongarm governments into allowing our drone strikes, whereas the use of more traditional assaults would cause the citizens of those governments to force them to treat them as acts of war. Thus the deterrence is being eroded, and the intent of that deterrence is being lost.
Problem 2:
As I've warned many times before, drones and dirt-cheap cruise missiles can be built by many countries, and America will be the net loser once everybody's playing by our loose rules. 20 years ago I conceptualized a $10,000 cruise missile using GPS. One billion bucks buys 100,000 of those things. Lots of countries have a billion bucks. Even lots of non-countries have a billion bucks.
Now that magazines are already assuring us that private firms will make our lives wonderful using drones, it is truly too late to stop what's coming. Think of the Terminator movies, except that Skynet is replaced by an infinite number of governments, Mafias, murderous crackpots, sociopathic nerds, maybe even cults and street gangs. And the Terminators will fly 600 mph and crash into your house.
Every American thinks that he is productive, and every other American who is too different from himself is a parasite. But most Americans don't have the fanaticism to do anything about it, so the resentment is usually harmless. Unfortunately, the exception is now ruling much of the land, in defiance of all statistical evidence about whom the actual parasites are. Look at any study that quantifies the amount of economic activity produced per $ of various government activities, including tax cuts. The GOP never mentions those.
When you get to the point when your movement tries to eliminate public universities and schools just because teachers as a class give money to your opposition, or it tries to invent new wars just to justify cutting social programs associated with rival races, or it even tries to pass election laws as convoluted and racist in their impact as Jim Crow laws, you probably will be willing to consciously demand that spending be skewed by double standards so as to destroy entire regions of the country that you hate. It's just civil war carried out by cowards and bullies.
Here's a Texas company selling something like what you're talking about, but after many years of excellent results there are still few takers:
http://www.monolithic.com/topics/benefits-survivability
We must not ignore the possibility that high-level right-wing conspirators like Mr. Inhofe in fact intend to ruin all Federal institutions except the military-security complex. The whole Scott Walker mess was a result of Wisconsin Republicans doing their duty to destroy entire classes of people for the sin of giving money to Democrats, such as state employees. If you are literally a religious fanatic who sees a strong democratic government as an impediment to your theocratic dreams, then even a public school providing a shelter to children sounds like a Commie gateway drug to a cradle-to-grave state. Better to make public schools as miserable as possible, so that parents will turn in despair to the Christian madrassas you're helping to fund. Oh wait, there's the GOP voting in school choice programs so that everyone's tax money is transferred to those madrassas instead! Just in time!
Once you've locked all the kids safely in the Christian wayback machines, they can be indoctrinated to accept that their safety and health must not interfere with the destiny of our corporate patriarchs to conquer the world and exterminate all alternative ways of thought.
Your state used to have plenty of progressives, back when progressivism was perceived mainly as helping the poor and helping the poor was perceived mainly as helping one's fellow white farmers. Once liberalism was seen as helping gays or blacks or atheists, your fellow citizens quickly embraced an ideology that fundamentally demands the Samson option: better to destroy civilization than share it with the Other. This has consequences, like sabotaging all public institutions, destroying the environment, demanding explicit favored status for Christians over others, even the revival of nullification and secession talk. If I sound condescending when pointing out these consequences, I am sorry, but I would have told Southerners the same thing in 1860 for all the good it would have done. Pointing out people's backwardness will always sound insulting to them, always, but backwardness has real consequences which impose unfair costs on other citizens.
Funny, that's just what everyone said here in Texas when that chemical plant blew up.
No, no, disasters cannot be foreseeable if that would impose a moral burden on investors. Because investors are rich because they are doing God's work of enslaving the rest of the world to America, and thus eventually to our God-attuned traditional values, so their morality cannot be questioned.
When the rich push closer and closer to the economic edge to extract maximum short-term profits because they don't really know how to create long-term value, they must force the same behavior onto all of us: they cut our wages to increase profits, so we must cut all corners and max out all forms of credit and hope our future will be luckier. Perversely, this makes us more willing dupes to their political agenda, because we resent the long-term costs of government, infrastructure, environmentalism, education, union dues, and just getting along with each other sans gunpoint. We have no surplus of good will left for those things, so we embrace a magical thinking that if we cut Gordias' knot with a sword of reactionary simplification, somehow all those impediments to our "natural" superiority over those different than us will reassert itself and restore our affluence, under the leadership of those most superior of all, the business class.
In other words, we will kick each other out of the lifeboat one by one, but not the guy wearing the yacht cap, who obviously knows what he's doing.
Excellent post. But I assumed that the US hegemony was gonna collapse back in 1991 when the first Bush blew it. We've been propped up by powerful forces behind the scenes who fear the loss of our empire more than the alternative. If we were wise, we'd explore who those forces are and what role they have in mind for us as we slide down the slope.
That's why they call it "The Samson Option", isn't it?
Of course, just calling it that implies that one is bluffing, just as when Nixon called it "The Madman Doctrine". You only invoke Biblical destruction when you're putting on a show, because God doesn't clean up the consequences of our actions in the real world.
It may be that the "limits of the military", any military, is that its very prowess, its enshrinement as being better than democracy in general, causes the citizens to become unable to accept losses in real wars. Let's look at some distant analogies to that problem:
1. Battleships getting too valuable to use. You know this story from WWI, where the UK and German fleets only clashed once because they represented so much of each nation's resources and prestige that losing them in a decisive battle was unbearable. Many critics say America's aircraft carriers are in the same category today, such that military exercises are rigged so they cannot be reported "sunk".
2. Sparta. Not being a democracy, that country's military cult simply raised the standards of military service and elitism to a point where there just weren't enough Spartans to man the army. It only took one disastrous war against an experienced opponent to wipe it out. Perhaps this is analogous to the growing "hero" military cult that Andrew Bacevich so eloquently condemns. The US and Israel definitely have the same neurosis about casualties, leading to their growing reliance on half-blind killer robots.
I would say that the cultural third-worldism you are talking about led pretty directly to the physical third-worldism that is coming about around us.
Back when the rich could get away with murder, they demanded the short-term benefits of running an unregulated boom-and-bust economy whose deflationary cycles kept the poor in tenements and shanties, kept their children hungry (which we now know lowers adult IQ), and maintained college education as a private club for their own brats only. Empirically, the rich were better off after they were forced by the effects of their '29 Crash to share power with the masses; infrastructure spending, the GI Bill, child nutrition programs, etc actually gave the rich big long-term benefits in getting better workers and consumers. But the rich will only pursue long-term benefits when they are forbidden from pursing short-term benefits. So regaining their ancient power over government has restored the characteristics of Gilded Age America. Except, of course, that on the other end of the imperial curve we now have huge military commitments that some of the rich refuse to give up to make their neo-Victorianism consistent. And now the rich don't even need to build factories in the US because modern capital is so mobile and Asia is so ready thanks to its educated, high-savings citizenry.
So I guess we now live in the worst of all worlds.
Furthermore, the big protests and riots that are happening in the backwater towns of China seem to be about layoffs at state enterprises and the corruption of government by money. Yet if these eruptions are discussed on the Internet at all it's by pompous neocons looking for signs that the Chinese people are about to overthrow the government in favor of Ayn Rand. Let's not forget the violent riots by workers in India. They've all suffered through a period much like that of the capitalist Gilded Age in the West, whose abuses were the sole cause of the worker radicalism that followed. These citizens are more opposed to rule by corporations than we Americans, so far.
You told us that Gadaffi would be better. He was increasingly stealing everything from every province that didn't support him. Was the Philippines better off with Marcos completing his ransacking of the country? How about Egypt and Musharraf? Thus what you must prove is that the bankrupt Libya that Gadaffi was inexorably creating would be better. How would that not have been violent and cursed by Islamist uprisings?
I have agreed with you about many things, JT, but at this point I must ask you, in your curdled perspective is any government better than any other government? Because if you think that people who prefer a messy, violent life under rickety elected governments are suckers, you imply that the ones who love their inherited tyrants are better, or at least no worse. Which absolves ordinary people from any responsibility for, say, the rise of the Third Reich. Or the difference between what the American Revolution produced and what the French Revolution produced. Now that sequence of events from 1775 to 1815 was packed as full of cynical power plays, interventions, corruption, and atrocities as the Cold War or the wars for oil, but as a result we certainly do not live in the manner of people before that time, and very few of us would want to go back. Defining everything using conspiracy theories is a way to pretend to oppose the system while giving oneself an excuse to hide in one's apartment and embrace helplessness.
In the past, before US state governments embraced legalized gambling, lotteries were associated with societies where people had lost hope in economic reward for virtuous behavior. In the '70s, we all chatted about the Irish lottery, and sometimes Latin American lotteries. Even the Soviet Union had lotteries! None of these were places where the rich were perceived ever having been anything but oppressive, exploitative, and parasitic. I think their perceptions were not without merit.
So what does it mean that America is now a place where, according to The Economist (a right-wing magazine), inter-class mobility has become slower than in Europe? And now we look to the lottery, as European peasants under the thumb of feudalism looked to fairy tales about magic rewards, for the hope to get through each miserable day?
You are correct, C, but part of the problem is that modern economies trade with each other. If everyone saves and invests, in theory the resulting surplus goods will have to be exported in order to bring in real money to then trigger greater domestic consumption. However, this has to be seen in the context that the values of the currencies of the trading countries are expected to move to counter these surpluses, such that this exporting country's currency will rise against that of the importing country until the former can no longer sell goods competitively there.
The problem is that no one accounted for one country, the USA, running infinite trade surpluses and then having its currency artificially propped up by the global capitalist class because of their fear of American decline and loss of its import markets. This allows US capitalists and workers alike to get away with short-sighted behavior, while Chinese capitalists and workers have to deal with the complex effects of suppressing the value of their currency.
They are representatives of the culture that capitalists created in America, in fact the very reason they created America in the first place. Recall the role of English joint-stock corporations in financing the American colonies looking to make a quick kill in tobacco.
Where would General Electric, General Motors, the TV networks, the housing industry, and the energy industry, as a small sample, be without the indoctrination of the American people in instant gratification through consumption? Ever heard of GM founder Al Sloan, who developed planned obsolence by endless trivial design changes that were indoctrinated into national crazes by mass advertising?
Everything, including the stock market, is built on a short-sighted demand for the quick kill. When the workers were getting very revolutionary in the early 20th century over the boom & bust economy that resulted, it was necessary to co-opt them by giving them the illusion of a piece of the action. It is a fact that after WW1, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover chaired a commission of industry leaders who determined that social stability would require the cultivation of a culture of mass consumption, via mass advertising.
Logically, how could any values of thrift survive once, as Keynes realized, over-saving could cause a closed economy ( no free trade then) based on durable goods purchases (which can be deferred) to suffer a catastrophic, unending contraction?
The purpose of competent sourcing and reporting of facts would be to win over voters who currently oppose them.
That is not the way it works in a country with low voter turnout.
What you do is build up an army of fanatics, who then bully, harass, and lecture everyone else. The weak-willed ones (whom we call "independents") have common prejudices easily played upon, and will always give a nice-talking patriot one break.
As for the rest of the voters? Simply nullify the 14th Amendment, claiming for state legislatures the power to strip those people of their franchise. Fanatics always can bum-rush a state legislature.
These things don't happen in other democracies because they have 90% voter turnout and there's no room for these tactics.
I think one question that must be studied if we are going to fight back is, why are poor white conservatives so happy to support this usurpation by the rich? Is it because they see that the billionaires are overwhelmingly right-wingers? But that's more true on economic issues than on the cultural issues that rednecks supposedly treasure.
I suspect it's something far uglier. You can no longer openly proclaim yourself a white supremacist and expect to get anywhere. The economic gap between whites and blacks has become the plausible deniability for closet bigots, especially since Charles Murray literally wrote the book on how to play this putrid game, The Bell Curve. Thus supporting free enterprise now means supporting the "natural" entrepreneurship of whites, represented by the lily-white billionaire oligarchy, as the sole basis for fitness to rule all races.
In tribalism, it doesn't matter that I'm poor while my clan oligarch is rich; what matters is that said oligarch is ruthless, cunning, and relentless, and he will surely lead our village in many successful conquests and enslavements of the Other. That not only is what keeps bigots proud of the rich, but it's what is replacing democracy as their sovereign loyalty.
This explains the contradiction that so many right-wingers love America's government when it uses its wealth and technology to overpower other peoples everywhere on Earth, yet despise that same government when it tries to alleviate the overwhelming wealth polarization inherent in capitalism at home. Abroad, the tribe, the oligarchy, and the government are one. At home, social programs, democracy, and diversity are mortal enemies of the oligarchy and the tribe.
Don't forget that Montt, an evangelical Protestant, relied on the American Christian Right to protect him in many ways:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2012/3/5/133636/9012/Front_Page/Rios_Montt_Hero_to_the_Christian_Right_Guilty_of_Genocide_in_Guatemala
Big Business and Big Religion have supported fascism before, and they support it now.
It's even more malicious than that. When I was in school I learned the story of how an English entrepreneur landed in the early 19th century central Philippines, barely governed by distant Spain, and made his fortune. He brought in cheap mass-produced English textiles, which destroyed the local trading networks of handmade textiles as everyone bought the new cloth and ruined each other's livelihoods. With these victims now facing starvation, he hired them cheaply as mercenaries, armed them and overran other territories, which became his personal empire.
It's that second punch that the libertarians say doesn't exist. But considering how Cecil Rhodes created Rhodesia with a private army, by massacring tribesmen with his own Maxim gun, and then funded the Rhodes scholarship as part of his plan to ensure eternal Anglo-American white dominion of the world before his early death, and you have to wonder if it isn't just the logical path of all genuine entrepreneurs freed of all restraint. The pursuit of wealth is exposed as truly the pursuit of power, rushing to fill the vacuum where government isn't functional. Are these men not part of a continuum from Alexander to Pablo Escobar?
The market is the only measure of value that libertarians can allow in their government-free arrangements.
Thus black token libertarian Thomas Sowell argued that black culture had proven itself inferior because, well, blacks were economically inferior to whites. Therefore black culture had no right to exist.
Consider that. Jazz, the blues, soul, the Harlem Renaissance, Dr. J's impossible dunks, Dr. King's impossible dream, August Wilson, Malcolm X, Spike Lee, all of it, worthless because it doesn't make black people rich... Though Sowell somehow failed to observe how many white people, in our system, got rich off of this inferior black culture.
In that same era, the royal governor of Ireland, who held the same hyper-capitalist social Darwinist beliefs that Libertarians specifically claim they are trying to revive, presided over the horror of the Potato Famine. He and Adam Smith shared a belief that markets could not succeed unless small farmers were forced out of their lazy way of life by any means necessary, and the Irish were the greatest threat of all.
This article in The Exile illustrates why the governor cheered on the early stages of the famine and blocked relief efforts until he faced a disaster that reduced Ireland's population from 8 million to a few million. It also shows why the capitalists got the Enclosure Acts passed to destroy the common lands and force peasants onto a very unfair industrial labor market. In effect, the idea sacred to libertarians that all land had to be someone's property was manufactured by lobbyists, just as "intellectual property" rights are manufactured.
http://exiledonline.com/recovered-economic-history-everyone-but-an-idiot-knows-that-the-lower-classes-must-be-kept-poor-or-they-will-never-be-industrious/
None of what we believe about the rise of Free Enterprise is true. These ideas also reflect Locke's view that it was okay to steal land from Indians because whites would use it more productively.
If your society doesn't believe in private property, or believe in it the way an Anglo-American greedbag does, then you are subhuman and your rights are false and must be sacrificed to the true rights of the Western entrepreneur. I guess this is when it's okay for the rich to call in the military.
When the system "corrects" itself, modern global investors simply move on to their next crime. Maybe they went from making billions polluting the land, to making billions cleaning up the pollution the very least amount they could get away with, or selling pharmaceuticals to treat the cancer that resulted. There is ALWAYS economic crime going on somewhere in the world, and the same people always seem to come out ahead.
Private property did not precede government. The first civilization, Old Kingdom Egypt, started with no personal property at all when it carried out its greatest accomplishments. But centuries later court favorites were granted land by the pharoah-state and became the first rich people in the sense we understand it now. Since then, every private property system has degenerated into extreme inequality of wealth and thus power, unless the threat of rebellion by the poor led to the creation of structures to regulate the process. This is how Athenian democracy occurred, and worked until it was overthrown by the rich.
American inequality exploded in the capitalist golden age before the '29 bubble burst, but after the "big government" measures that followed, inequality and the power of wealth remained fairly steady while the country itself enjoyed broad prosperity for two generations. The entire point of the conservative movement was to bring back the era when the rich could literally get away with murder, in the guise of "restoring" traditional limited government.
In other words, it is possible to keep the 1% under control, but not if your society comes to worship the rich as a master race.
The DC snipers were black and got plenty of coverage. The Central Park gang-rapists - who were really innocent - got plenty of coverage. The media will sell the stories that our population wants to buy, and there's no lack of negative stories about black people on local TV news during a sweeps month.
I guess there's nothing to make one go from fighting to maintain a profitable supremacy to fighting to just survive by removing the Other than the election of a black president. If that's the case, the next era of American racism should be marked by ideological excuses to justify actions to terrorize minorities into fleeing entire states, or surrounding cities with walls and declaring them special security zones. Each Republican state will make life unbearable for blacks, Latinos, etc and then celebrate the supposed economic gains caused by eliminating "parasites". But in practice they can only push these populations into other states, so frustration will grow until either the rest of us rebel, or we cave in to the temptation for a more final solution.
Ms. Wertheimer scores many points that also apply to American history. It appears that, given that the master caste consists of people with varied economic lots, both exploitation and competition can be tools of the same racist movement. For instance, when the slaves were freed in America, they immediately were seen by poor whites as economic competition (though in fact they already were as slaves). Before the Civil War the system to keep blacks in chains was led by the grandest figures in Southern society, while poorer inland counties remained skeptical; after that war the movement to return blacks as close to slavery as possible seems to have consumed whites in every corner of the South, a truly fascistic populism of vengeance. Yet once blacks were crushed by Jim Crow, the narratives of exploiters described by Ms. Wertheimer reasserted themselves. Basically, when blacks are effectively suppressed, they are stereotyped as retarded, slow, and childlike. But when blacks have a fighting chance, the stereotype instantly flips to that of violence, deceit, and rioting. Like the title of a pioneering book on the portrayal of blacks in movies, "From Sambo to Superspade", both stereotypes are readily available for use by whites depending on tactical advantage.
Note that when black Tulsa was burned down by white rioters after WW1, it was for the sin of blacks being too successful.
Hey Bart,
First they came for the Communists, and you did nothing.
Oh wait, no, you cheered them on.
Go heil yourself.
This is why it's dangerous for white lefties to think they can get back at Obama for stealing "their" party from them by helping the Tea Partiers destroy Obama and the government. The people running the Right don't use Benghazi as part of a narrative for the need to return to isolationism (which is why Ron Paul never gets more than a few % of GOP delegates every four years); they use it as part of a narrative to claim a birthright to infinite security on every square inch of the globe for American "interests" regardless of our crimes.
The problem is that Democratic presidents act as though they will be lynched if they cannot maintain that impossible standard, and the peace movement is doing nothing to allay the paranoia of ordinary idiots and prepare them for the unpleasant short-term consequences of our necessary loss of global hegemony.
He would need to fly a lot less if he wasn't spending all his time running the Israel Lobby worldwide and having to run around explaining to governments his regime's latest outrages. Messy itineraries are part of the price of deliberately avoiding peace with his neighbors.
Although I certainly hope we return to respecting the sovereignity of Pakistan, the win for Nawaz Sharif is likely a win for Saudi Arabia, which has helped him in the past. The Saudis have finally been flexing their political muscles in the last 6 years or so, creating a string of governments more friendly to them than to Washington. Great news on drones, but bad news on women's rights.
We have to look at this in the context of why Saudi and the US got involved in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the first place in 1980. They wanted the destruction not only of Soviet puppets, but of the Left in general. The Pakistani Army beheaded the last serious leftist democrat in the region. Meanwhile Egypt was brought under heel by Mubarak, and other states hostile to the US, Israel and Saudi were neutralized. But at a certain point our interests (perhaps plus Israel's?) and Saudi's brand of fundamentalism could not be reconciled. I'd point to the crisis in Iraq in 2006-7, with the US backing the Shia government over the Sunni rebels in Anbar over Saudi objections, as the time when the Saud family decided to start backing any Sunni rebels against any regime anywhere from Libya to Pakistan, as well as elected Islamist politicians.
Question is, will the Saudis allow any of these countries to have normal politics afterward, or has it created a new bloc of satellites to challenge American power? Recall that Richard Clarke claimed he discovered in the mid-1980s the Saudis trying to acquire Chinese nuclear-capable IRBMs, which attempt Reagan quashed.
The difference is, if terrorists attack embassies under Bush, it's clearly because he's a Good Guy fighting to make the empire bigger and more powerful, which benefits "real" Americans somehow. If terrorists attack embassies under the black Democrat, it's because they're carrying out his secret orders to... uh, no one seems to be able to explain what those secret orders are, because that would divide the Obama-haters on the Right from the Obama-haters on the Left. You don't have to be Frank Lutz to understand how wedge issues work.
Because everybody knows an Arab will never invent anything of sufficient value to earn him the basic human right to not be run off his land by Jewish colonists, right?
Let's see Israeli scientists refuse to use Arabic numerals.