The fascist position on capitalism is always meant to counter class warfare. It divides the rich into "good" capitalists - IG Farben Chemicals, Krupp Steel, military-industrial complex - versus "bad" capitalists - bankers, lawyers, filmmakers, Jews, Jews, Jews, and pins all blame on the latter as unproductive, hedonistic parasites.
When times are good, of course, bankers and factory owners are worshipped together as the indivisible team that they must be. The Left cannot be allowed in bad times to argue that this team should all be condemned together.
Now it's tougher, because our "good" capitalists have already moved out all the good jobs, and taken government bailouts to preserve some not-so-good jobs. The big-ticket military-industrial complex employs so few people that it's irrelevant. The military-police-prison personnel complex, however, is providing a lot of right-wing ex-jocks with the only decent wages they could ever have. That's political.
Hatred of the rich and their systematic looting and polarization of resources is driving street uprisings all over the world right now, from Egypt to Greece to Britain, and now even Israel.
For 30 years they took everything and claimed they would create a new golden age, and they used it to make themselves too big to fail and thus blackmailed governments into bailouts. So now we're seeing the reckoning. Where do you think is next?
The way to ruin Rick Perry is to force him to take a position on the empire.
He can't take a status quo position - he's already denounced Obama for that. But the far right in America is divided between two irreconcilable camps both founded on the idea that America is morally superior to the outside world. Either that means it shuns the outside entirely, or it attempts to conquer and "reform" the outside.
Make Perry have to say which of those he wants. If he goes for empire to oppose Paul, he ticks off a lot of enthusiastic secular reactionaries, and looks too much like Bush Junior in the bargain. If he goes for isolationism, the entire Christian Right and the Israel Lobby freak out.
While the Christians are a far larger camp, their support for escalating war (and persecuting gays) is running directly counter to the mood of the rest of the country.
I think the Tea Party, and the entire conservative movement for the last 30 years, has been a white petit bourgeoise rebellion against "interdependence". They don't want complex problems managed, they want the enemy exterminated.
"I doubt that the Seven Mountains Dominionists (aka New Apostolic Reformation) see Rick Perry as a King David. It is more likely that they see him as a King Cyrus, since the person who anointed him on September 28, 2009 said to Perry that he had prayed before his congregation “Lord Jesus I bring to you today Gov. Perry. I am just bringing you his hand and I pray Lord that he will grasp ahold of it. For if he does you will use him mightily.” Perry took ahold of it and the Texas and personal prophesies brought by those anointing him.
"This is what the LORD says to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of to subdue nations before him and to strip kings of their armour, to open doors before him so that gates will not be shut: I will go before you and will level the mountains; I will break down gates of bronze and cut through bars of iron. I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the LORD, the God of Israel, who summons you by name."' (Isaiah 45:1-3, NIV throughout).
In his book, "The Heart of the Treasure Bringers, Robert Fraser of the International House of Prayer puts as a header to the above verses: "God will release untold wealth, the Cyrus anointing."
For several years Dominionist pastors have been preaching about "The Great Wealth Transfer" which will be transferred from the wicked - everyone who is not of their "faith" - to the righteous - everyone who is of their "faith."
***
In other words, Cyrus was an outsider (Persian king) who did the Jews a favor, and the NAR sees Perry as the same; a tool to power instead of freedom. They don't need him to be of their twisted faith.
Though I've argued this with others, I felt that Bush Junior really believed his theocratic religious spoutings. He really believed his kind were meant to run everything, and that sincerity cued the Christian fundamentalist faction to fall in line behind him without his having to seduce them in the media too blatantly.
Rick Perry believes in nothing. He's just more aggressive about selling out than Mitt Romney. He doesn't bother with sincerity. He was a Democrat until Phil Gramm literally told him that he'd lose his job if he didn't switch parties. Then he was a perfect extension of Governor George Bush for 8 years. Then he sensed the Tea Party wind and became a secessionist.
So now I'm wondering whether the far right really gave a damn about sincerity at all, and whether they were simply judging whether a candidate would be an obsequious enough lackey to carry out their agenda regardless of the consequences. Rick Perry has no connections to any consequences; he's nothing without politics and he will only be as rich as he is rewarded by his constituency du jour. He's not part of a billionaire oligarchy clan like Bush.
Either they're willing to rent him to be a fanatic, or they reject him for another who really believes the theology.
And thank you for discussing the New Apostolic Reformation (please Google, everybody), the ultra-theocratic Pentecostal sect that was all over his prayer rally, but carefully toned down their self-serving crackpottery (literally that everyone who disagrees with them is under demonic influence) when the cameras were on them. They're a tiny, but fast-growing segment of far-right Protestantism, yet they count Palin as a long-time associate, Bachmann as a definite fellow traveller, and now they've made themselves indispensable for Perry. They sure want the White House bad- what do you think they intend to do with it?
Starving people can be persuaded to become serfs, sharecroppers, indentured servants, and henchmen. Most humans who have lived in the last several thousand years have had to make this deal with a rich man or were born into it, and many still are.
Why does no one on the Right recognize that medieval landowners, in fact, were businessmen?
As the great railway capitalist Jay Gould put it for all time: "I can always hire half the working class to shoot the other half."
Governments simply gave private property the right to organize the way it pleased, which as Adam Smith pointed out is to form combinations. Are you calling John D. Rockefeller anti-capitalist?
No one should be calling himself a libertarian if he doesn't understand the most basic concepts of markets:
Many buyers / few sellers = overwhelming power for sellers
Many sellers / few buyers = overwhelming power for buyers
The inherent unfairness in capitalism starts with the fact that both labor markets and consumer markets exist, and both are biased on the side of the fewest actors - the employers. Millions of laborers/consumers are being played off against each other by stable oligopolies that naturally form as the most ruthless titans get the backing of the most established banks and gobble up their competitors.
All unions do, sir, is reduce the number of actors on one side of the labor market transaction, so that the companies are the ones played off against each other instead of those for whom immediate wages are a matter of life and death. Without unions, the oligopolies will drive wages down in the normal course of their competition with each other. Sure that means that the workers - as consumers - will go broke; that's why laissez faire America (1865-1929) suffered a series of generally worsening crashes in every decade. In the 1920s workers received little improvement in wages compared to the massive profits created by getting them to buy new products; thus they had to go into debt, new forms of debt like installment payments designed to move durable goods. When this had gone too far, a crash was inevitable. However, those massive profits led to the assumption that growth was perpetual, so stocks were overvalued and set up for their own crash.
America had no stock market crashes from the Great Depression until 1987. Wages and Wall Street moved up together at a deliberate pace until 1980, when the two diverged for good. Employers have had the leverage since then, squeezing us harder and harder such that we must get further into debt in order to buy enough goods to prop up growth.
It is not a coincidence that this happened when unionized jobs in America were being eliminated industry by industry.
So where are your happy, fulfilled workers? Wal-Mart?
What's your position on ALEC's tireless crusade to "liberalize" prohibitions on the rental of prison slaves to private corporations for sweatshop labor? ALEC considers itself libertarian, and one-fifth of all state legislators in the United States are members. Yet here it is, with the Southern conservative base, working to bring back the prison-slavery system of the post-Civil War South to avoid having to pay "market" wages.
Note that with free laborers pushed to starvation wages by this unfair competition, the South remained poor and stagnant for generations until the system was dismantled by the outrage of a public not blinded by right-wing ideology. But the high priests of States' Rights and limited government did very well by this system.
In the libertarian fantasy world, money does not = power. Therefore it is communistic to observe that a guy with a billion bucks will buy the power to get two billion, whether by buying politicians, or by getting rid of the government and ruling with armed goons a la KKK Mississippi.
In fact, the libertarian version of history refusing to accept that any crimes whatsoever have ever been committed by private wealth is so convoluted that it resembles the Catholic church's attempts to square telescopic observations of planetary motion with Aristotlean cosmology. East India Company? Government monopoly. Slavery? Woulda been replaced by industrialization, really, if not for that tyrant Lincoln (the slaveowners were actually preparing to put slaves in factories, a concept that Albert Speer later proved was feasible). Pollution? Oh, the public will boycott the polluting companies into betraying their shareholders, because any layman can read an EPA analysis and figure out which factories spilled what and which conglomerates own which factory.
It goes on and on, because all of this is an evasion of the real agenda. The point is the total concentration of all power (denials aside) in the hands of the Master Race of total greedballs. If we just get greedy enough, we can develop enough tech to generate enough money to bribe each other into becoming whores who have no archaic concepts like values and conscience and justice. And then we'll all be as happy as crack whores.
But in fact, the post-Reconstruction Southern ruling elite still had tons of cash and access to Northern banks. It chose to keep the masses poor and backwards. The ruling families who hired death squads in El Salvador? The East India Company? The coal barons who rule West Virginia?
In fact, every aristocracy, caste system, apartheid system and slavery system started out as a meritocracy. What was merit in the ruins of the Roman Empire? Being good at cutting off people's heads from horseback. Once I've used this obvious merit to get me some land, and I'm slowly using comparative advantage to turn all the local farmers into my debt serfs (oh, that doesn't exist under free markets, sure), why shouldn't I use my wealth to guarantee my offspring every unfair advantage, even if they're entirely worthless scumbags? Feudalism is nothing more than private wealthholders arranging a monopoly on government offices for their families on the grounds that they provide the most to the common defense. Nothing to stop it from happening again if enough whorehouses like the Cato Institute can find a way to make it sound like we'll get a tax cut out of it.
That is human nature. Inequality becomes gross inequality. Every private property system that has ever existed either became polarized and fell to revolution, or fell to invasion, or fell to some new system of exploitation and inequality.
At least, until democracy. The crusade to emasculate democracy has no other purpose but to bring back the conditions that preceded it.
Would a military man have come up with the Prime Directive?
The fact that Kirk was always butting heads with the Prime Directive indicates that he still ultimately accepted civilian primacy in what essentially is an issue of sovereignity.
Which is why it's not surprising that the more PC-liberal New Generation series really enshrined the Prime Directive. Roddenberry was perhaps a generic Greatest Generation/Cold War liberal, but somehow his writing staff's little contrivance to make things harder for the heroes has come to appear prophetic. We DON'T know for sure what is best for alien societies.
Maybe they feel that the ballot box is pointless when Labor has already sold out to the Neocons, and the Liberal Democrats have now sold out to the Tories very cheaply, and the Tories are now plotting to dismantle national health care and no one is doing anything to stop them.
Who is on the side of these poor Britons that Standard & Poor's would allow to win an election?
If we'd never repealed Glass-Steagall, many of the financial divisions that issued bad debt due to other agendas might not have existed in the first place. There's also the matter of home equity loans, which poured trillions into the economy and logically made people far more willing to borrow more to build bigger houses, and the securitization of debt, which entirely destroyed the rational incentive of lenders to consider creditworthiness.
The crash was due to the previous bubble, thus the Kochs may have come out ahead in the entire cycle, like most rich people. That's what the worsening boom-bust cycles of your apparently preferred Gilded Age were doing, causing a growing gap between the top 1% and everyone else. The rich are always first into an asset bubble and the middle class are the last ones in and get creamed the worst by the crash. Thus the more volatile - uh, I forgot to use neoliberal-speak - the more "vibrant" the economy, the faster wealth is polarized.
The last time our forefathers stood up to the rich, capital was not mobile. Meaning a billionaire couldn't threaten to move his steel plant to Mexico, or even Alabama, to get Pennsylvania to cut benefits to the poor. It may be that the only thing that can stand up to globally-mobile capital is a global workers' movement, and we're a long way from accepting that we're in the same boat as the workers of China or South America.
However, I have a feeling that the politicians in those countries realize that they now have the leverage - multinationals want to move there to exploit cheap labor in the short term, but their governments can thus impose taxes and concessions on the carpetbaggers to invest in training for better jobs in the long term. Which means higher pay, and more taxes. Why can't our politicians see this? Are we in such an immediate crisis that all we can think to do is cut wages? Or have we lost hope that we can ever figure out what to do for a better living?
Actually, Assad Junior seems to have a lot fewer fawning fanboys here than Gaddafi, and I'd like to know why since he seems to tried a lot harder to find stopping places on his road to ruin than Muammar.
But it's hard to know how to feel about Assad's increasingly doomed regime because:
1. no one who posts here wants to do Israel any favors, given that the Greater Israel gang seems more powerful than ever.
2. few who post here want to do Saudi Arabia any favors, and it seems to be the leading puppetmaster against Assad.
Given that the remnants of the once-powerful Pan-Arab movement were the last defenders of anything remotely resembling secular progressivism in the region a year ago, it should have been hard for secular progressives to make a leap of faith to embrace the popular revolutions sweeping the Arab world.
It's different now. Said revolutions have gone far better than we had any right to demand, a real process of public engagement is underway and is mostly secular and forward-looking in nature, and in the broadest perspective the Arab uprisings are a continuation of a process of global rebellion that started in South America a decade ago against a seemingly invincible Wall Street-run neoliberal juggernaut. The two reactionary regimes that had most to gain from anything bad happening to Arabs, Israel and Saudi Arabia, look confused and paralyzed; clearly they didn't see this coming, and now they're afraid that their own populations will catch the bug. The Chinese, Russians, and yes, Washington are all scared as well.
So the US will do anything to hold onto its naval base in Bahrain, and Russia will do anything to hold onto its naval base in Syria. And "anything" means backing the status quo regime no matter how disgusting it is.
Seems pretty straightforward to me. We need to start arms talks between the US and Russia to close down both bases, and blow off both regimes. The Saudis will have to take their chances in trying to control Bahrain and Syria at the same time; I'm sure Syrians are very aware there are Saudi occupation troops in Bahrain.
A section from that article immediately before your 2nd excerpt is also significant:
"But the response of the business sector has been weak. This is not because the business sector is still in a bad shape; it is actually doing quite well.
In 2009, the unit product labor cost in the US' manufacturing sector dropped 17.2 percent, and in 2010 it fell by a further 3.9 percent. That means US companies are producing more goods using less labor. And this is the real secret behind the jobless growth."
This is the dirty secret undermining all economic debate in the US. Free-market fanatics refuse to accept that wage-cutting can create a permanent downward spiral, but they know it looks bad so they also refuse to admit that it's been underway for the last 30 years. This leaves uneducated Americans with a sort of default faith in classical economics, which claims that a good year of starving the poor will cause markets to clear and the resumption of virtuous growth. They are morally uncomfortable with that, but as long as their bosses form a solid wall of classical apologists, they accept that somehow things will work out.
In fact, the bosses are draining us in every way possible before abandoning America for greener suckers... uh, pastures.
But that will never happen, because the Tea Party is fighting for a tribal society that was dismantled by the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, the New Deal, and the World Wars. In other words, for a monopoly of power for "our kind". They will always fight harder than those who want to share power. The only times American progressives beat tribalists is when the capitalists are more afraid of the consequences of a right-wing victory, and don't throw all their weight behind it.
Which Constitution, sir? Many of them reject the Civil War as illegitimate federal tyranny, including Ron Paul. If you'd been paying attention a few years ago, many right-wing extremists who later resurfaced in the Tea Party were using the phrase "14th Amendment Citizen". In other words, black people were improperly given the right to vote by the Feds and state legislatures should have the right to take it away. Like many extremist ideas in the last 30 years, the repeal of the 14th Amendment is being mainstreamed by a sophisticated propaganda machine.
Back in the '90s, the talk in the hardcore gun magazines was that America was a "republic", not a "democracy". To translate this code word, you must acknowledge (a) that broad swathes of the GOP talk loosely about returning everything to the 1789 interpretation of the Constitution, and (b) that in 1789 you couldn't vote unless you were a property owner. Hint, hint.
The right of poor whites to vote was won by the Jacksonian democracy movement, along with the right to directly vote for US senators. The latter has already been attacked by a member of the US House. I expect that you will soon see the right-wing propaganda machine ramp up its smears not just on Lincoln, but on Jackson, and on all their actions to expand the franchise beyond white Christian landlords.
Since the media pointedly refuses to ask right-wing darlings when secession might be justified, you have no evidence that they intend to tolerate a white-minority democracy. But if you are in denial about the relationship between the militia right of the '90s and the Tea Party, there's nothing I can say.
I recall when a high-handed pinko cripple took a country broken by its capitalist oligarchy and made it into the world's greatest power. 4-term presidency, 94% top tax brackets, open statements of class warfare, labor unions allowed to win, federally-run war factories, all built on an old base of corrupt big-city ethnic political machines and a very corrupt deal with Southern reactionaries. My America. The America that existed before that, I would have been building bombs and waving red flags in, and I'll do it in the future if it's necessary. I bet a lot of Turks felt the same way before the AKP.
Allah bless the Turks, and God bless all the leftists who have saved Latin America from the Shock Doctrine from Chavez to Lula - two-fisted populism is the only force that seems powerful enough to keep down what Lincoln called "the money power". Get too liberal-squeamish about methods and you will end up under the thumb of fascist death squads in an instant.
Of the four big deadbeat European nations, Ireland, Greece and Spain are on the low end of the list, and Italy the exception is controlled by a far-right media baron who allied with the fascist tradition of northern Italy. They bought into the US-pimped idea of pandering to rich people and bankers, Ireland by cutting taxes to steal rich sociopaths from more advanced countries, Spain by selling vacation houses to Brits for way too much money. They were part of what Donald Rumsfeld called the "New Europe", and two were big backers of the invasion of Iraq. So a certain American stench to their pro-business ideology is no surprise.
As for S. Korea, it has national health insurance, more advanced Internet infrastructure and dirt-cheap broadband, but then its whole chaebol oligopoly was started with US military aid money, wasn't it? While Chile is still recovering from the Pinochet/Milton Friedman agenda, with, I understand, its poorest kids still shut out of privatized schools handed over to right-wing Catholicism. In other words, they're still recovering from what the US is becoming. Turkey is the champion of the low-tax group, but the AKP is populist and increasingly in opposition to US regional domination, so hardly a friend of globalization.
Mexico and the US, all I can say is, H. Ross Perot was right about NAFTA in the absence of Canada's standards of civilization.
What makes America dangerously different than all these other places is that its wages have been flat or negative for the last 30 years. So we sense that we've been cheated in the pocketbook, and we look to slash the first thing we have the power to slash by demanding tax cuts to make up the difference, except that once the lobbyists of the rich are done we've been screwed again. So we run ever harder chasing that lost fortune and shooting at whomever we blame this instant for the loss. And our wages fall still further, as the rich planned from the start, as they lead lynch mobs to destroy minimum wage laws, child labor laws, progressive education, the abolition of debtors' prisons and prison labor, and perhaps even the abolition of indentured servitude and inheritability of debts?
And thus the entire machinery of progressive civilization, still moving forward in these other countries, lurches into reverse in America, pursuing a Frankenstein composite of an ideal past all the way into Somalia-hood.
I remember 20 years ago when cap & trade was a libertarian proposal meant to counter the heresy that markets cause problems that they can't solve. Looks now like these guys used it as a Trojan horse, leaving it on the mainstream liberal doorstep so that liberals would get the blame when it failed, unleashing that libertarian horde to say that this proves the environment isn't worth the hassle of any changes to our system whatsoever.
He had a network of communicants in northern European extremist political groups, and a flow of inspiration from Daniel Pipes and other Americans who share your bigoted paranoia. They may or may not agree with his means, but his ends were no different than theirs or yours. Just like the blood of the Holocaust properly ended up on the hands of all those who spread anti-Semitic hatred before the War and discredited their claims of a Jewish immigrant threat.
And since God is a collective delusion, religion is whatever the followers choose to believe, which is the reason we Christians don't still burn witches ("Suffer not a witch to live") and don't still ban the lending of money for interest, the basis for the West's entire global capitalist hegemony.
I could spend pages, and perhaps I will, detailing all the mass murders committed by Christians, and you will sit there saying it's different because Jesus didn't say so. You know better than that. If people believe in the Pope, and he calls for Christians to invade other countries or stand with Mussolini against Communism, that's on Christianity even if that's not all Christianity is. If the fastest-growing segment of modern Protestantism is the psychotically selfish and bloodthirsty New Apostolic Reformation, which claims everyone who disagrees with it on any subject is under demonic influence, and applauds itself in its promo videos for causing Mother Teresa's death, that is a reflection of what American Christians are searching for in the marketplace of ideas.
And if the socialist pacifist who came closest in our lifetime to representing what Jesus really meant got gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis by a redneck Christian, then what Jesus and Mohammad really meant is dead, and our personal prejudices and self-justifications are all that are alive in religion.
The GOP is carrying out the same anti-public ideology that its fellow capitalist stooges at the IMF and World Bank carried out as detailed in Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine"; the intentional collapsing of societies to justify handing everything over to the rich.
Some years ago Pakistan's military regime was under pressure from the international finance gang to cut government spending. They could have cut the military, but of course they didn't. They cut back on public schools. But by an amazing coincidence, the regime's allies from the war in Afghanistan, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, had armies of Wahhabi missionaries funded by noblemen, ready to fill the gap. The madrassa generation has had an impact in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the mess may never be cleaned up.
So when right-wingers here talk about slowly strangling public schools, I have to suspect that they have a replacement in mind, and so do you.
Gee Mark, why is America the only country in the First World that can't get public schools to work? Unless you are claiming that all those Germans, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Japanese, Koreans, et al are also ignorant since they all went to public schools.
In fact, your agenda is made clear when you claim public schools' inception was in the early 1900s. Implying that America was better off before that, when robber barons and plantation owners ruled the land unchallenged by liberals. But in fact public schools are much older than that. They won their key victories in the early 1800s, where they were part and parcel of the American industrial revolution in Massachusetts and New York. It was, as usual, the slaveocratic South that viewed them as a threat. Not surprisingly, the South paid dearly for its technological backwardness in the subsequent war and reconstruction. Even the robber barons of the North did not have the arrogance to believe that they should privatize the school system - they viewed it as an investment in growth. Why has ignorance grown so greatly among capitalists that they now think America can rule the world with a population indoctrinated cheaply in Christian Right madrassas to believe the Earth is only 6000 years old, evolution doesn't occur, and the solution to every problem is Guns, Guts and God?
Zbigniew Brzezinski brought up a depressing insight in a conversation at "Morning Joe" with, among others, Pat Buchanan. He said that when America was a rising power, it attracted immigrants who had a reasonable chance to become part of its middle class. But now that America's wealth is so polarized, it draws two kinds of immigrants; elite technicians who expect to get into America's power caste, and poor people so desperate that they come here even though they don't expect to ever get out of the lower class. This simply reinforces American wealth polarization further.
So circumstances do change the nature of immigration.
This gives me a nostalgic flashback to the heyday of the American militia movement, when in each state a few gun nuts would start stashing ammo and mimic military training. Then the networking began and the little bombs started going off.
Of course once McVeigh shone a very bright light on the enterprise, things kind of went into the cracks, the leaders forging ties with the Religious Right that the media ignored, waiting for the next crisis in white ocnfidence to move deeper into America's power structure and pick up those all-important corporate sponsorship bucks.
Wonder where Breivik's network is in this process, and whom their sponsors will be.
It is worth it to examine a tactically-conniving, organization-obsessed xenophobe who is continually trying to contact and rally his ideological comrades. I mean, big-government bashing considered nutty coming out of the mouths of Tim McVeigh and the Michigan and Idaho militias in 1995 is now pushed by the US corporate media as mainstream patriotism. Clearly, if Breivik's views are seen by Europe's owners as being potentially profitable, they will get mainstreamed.
Luckily, Europe's owners don't seem anything as shortsighted or maniacally greedy as their Wall Street kin, except in the City of London, so Europe will probably have a better fate than America. In fact, I think our duty to civilization is to let Europeans know how crazy and ignorant growing numbers of "good Americans" are so that they can get their countries out of NATO, jettison sick ideologies that we've recently infected them with, and form a stronger European Union that can veto the stinginess of the German bankers and build a 2nd democratic superpower to shame the 1st back to sanity.
It's either that or gamble on the long shot that China can save mankind, see what I mean?
Or stay tuned to talk2action.org, which surprised me by showing that the unfamiliar doctrines professed by Breivik at his old fave webpage do indeed have US ties:
The key is "Cultural Marxism", which Breivik mentions about once every other sentence. I think Mr. Berlet overdoes the religious overtones; guys like Paul Weyrich were secular extremists, meaning Kultur on top of religion, and that fits Breivik's remarks about being a conservative Protestant yet never prescribing theocracy or Old Testament law elsewhere in his rants. The man worships Western Culture as his shield against being called a racist or fascist, and he killed those poor kids for Socialism's role in enabling Moslems to become citizens and thus dilute the white majority... uh, "cultural conservative" majority.
Here's where a lot of the news stories you're seeing got their Breivik quotes:
I want to get this page seen, because it shows Breivik is smart, organized, and more lucid than the average American right-wing nut, meaning Michelle Bachmann. I think it's fascinating to watch right-wingers from a different society wrestle with rationalizations for unequal citizenship and ethnic cleansing. My takeaway: because he doesn't engage in the intellectual copout of using honkie Jehovah to justify all crimes economic, social and scientific, he actually has to articulate what he wants as a social model far more clearly than our Tea Partiers.
It's all culture with him, but it's rigged culture, with the standard of conformity set so ridiculously high that no first-generation immigrant could possibly meet it unless he was a self-hating sociopath like Dinesh DeSouza. (There, I said it.) America's senile neo-Confederates conflate God, guns, patriotism and capitalism in a giant ideological sphaghetti designed to obscure the only outcome that would really make them happy; living like the Ewell family in "To Kill A Mockingbird" with the right to beat up, frame and lynch other kinds of people whenever they need to feel better about themselves. Whereas Breivik simply wants other kinds of people to cease to exist around him. A cultural conservative who is willing to not keep the mud races around to dig all his ditches and build all his homes and fix all his highways and pay into his Social Security and Medicare and provide much of his entertainment is a lot more intellectually honest than what we have in this country.
Consider Thomas Jefferson, in his "Notes on the Commonwealth of Virginia", saying that (1) slavery must be abolished, and (2) the freed slaves must be expelled from Virginia on pain of death because whites would never act as his model republic required as long as there was a cultural conflict. Consider that the Texas school textbook commission deleted Jefferson as a significant 18th Century philosopher recently because he was TOO LIBERAL for them. That's the difference between Breivik and the kinds of maniancs getting elected to office in America now. Which is why ours don't have to go out and murder Socialist children their own damn selves.
From what little I've read of him so far, Mr. Breivik doesn't even seem to be as extreme a right-winger as many men one has to work alongside here in Houston. You know, the ones who routinely talk about murdering all the Arabs or all the fags. It will probably come out that his Christianity was mostly a worship of establishment white culture as it existed before Hitler discredited it throughout Europe, which means he is a moderately conservative Protestant by Texas standards.
But what makes him different is that he acted on his own, while the far more vicious bastards here in America seem to have been placated by the knowledge that they now have a political party that will do their dirty work for them, in turn protected by the corporate media. Why carry out one's murderous fantasies when one knows that his tax-supported military, police and prison guards regularly mete out "racial justice" at home and abroad? In fact, why not join one of those organizations and get the chance to be paid far better than modern capitalism pays productive workers, for gunning down towelheads and beating non-white convicts and protecting the interests of the elite more than those of the masses? Or wrap oneself in the flag by demanding that all tax dollars be routed to those organizations at the expense of schools, Social Security and hunger programs? Mr. Breivik would have been so much happier as an American.
I guess if the GOP hadn't done so well in 2010 things would have gotten more interesting here. But there is still the matter of the geographical origin of the concepts and rationalizations that impelled him to violence. Stay tuned to the non-US media.
Feudal landlords who held the population in debt bondage.
Which in fact is the bondage in which most humans have lived since the invention of private landowning several thousand years ago. We called it sharecropping here, and many of us were alive when it still existed. It's still the way of life for millions of peasants around the world.
How many humans have been starved, murdered, or died unneccessarily of disease because of this evil system that many conservatives consider the "good old days"? How many women and girls raped by their lords? How many children sold into slavery to pay off debts, as Edgar Snow described in 1930s China? From the Irish famine deliberately ignored by British authorities, to the worsening lives of third-world farmers under IMF neoliberalism today? Hundreds of millions? Billions?
Since Gandhi called poverty "the worst form of violence", I hope you're leaving a space for that on your scorecard.
And yes, I personally think we have a natural right to use violence against such a system, even if we risk putting a worse system in place. If our forebears were cowed by that risk, the bad guys would have won forever.
What about the successful terrorist campaign by the anti-abortion movement to kill, injure and harass doctors until it is nearly impossible to get an abortion in some states despite it being legal? The media refuses to admit that the terrorists have won, because they're Christian terrorists. And the ones who commit the violence get wink-wink-nudge-nudge support from the ones who spit on women going to clinics, who in turn get open support from the Palins and Bachmanns and Tea Party, who now run the GOP. So there are tens of millions of Christians who pretend that their dollars and their organizations might be helping shield and legally defend the killers. We are certainly talking about "normal" Christians by now. And since this Christianity has gained so much political power and voter strength in the last 30 years, it is stained by all the other right-wing criminals that it has helped put in office, and we have a right to regard it as a threat to our very lives.
They think the ends justify the means. That's not unusual in religious thought. But it means there is no real barrier preventing the monstrous ideas of an R. J. Rushdoony from becoming the platform for the entire conservative movement.
In fact, it is not the responsibility of the US Border Patrol to shoot every Mexican who gets through the fence. Its job is to apprehend them. The fact that America has become so barbaric that we aren't clear on the legal distinction is why it's possible for racist militias to prowl around the desert looking for children to shoot. These bastards are leading this country to hell just as the settler movement is doing to Israel.
In fact, James, you've pinpointed the cosmic problem with oil states: the oil reservoirs, refineries and pipelines are of greater value than the entire human population, regardless of the type of government. That defines how tyrants rule, hand out rewards to supporters, import loyal labor, and buy weapons to make rebellion nearly impossible. Whether the oil is controlled by tyrants, foreign corporations, or tribal militias, that becomes the sovereign institution.
Of course, much the same can be said of Afghanistan's poppies or Colombia's coca crop. Single-crop economies devalue citizens and make them expendable.
The problem is, what if Syrians have to choose between a regime propped up by Russia and a regime propped up by Saudi Arabia, which is a lot stronger there than in, say, Libya? Of course America will choose the latter; the Saudis have been propping us up with massive petrodollar investments since Henry Kissinger made clear to the Saudis in '73 what our military could do to them. The Saudis let that debt build up until they now have the financial power to do the same to us unless we support their growing sphere of influence.
Key is, the extent of collusion between Fox and any aspect of the GOP to manipulate elections, from the DeLay Congress to the Bush war apparatus to the Tea Party. But there's a lot of uninvestigated ground there already (Jack Abramoff and other DeLay associates, for instance). Could there really be a smoking-gun memo with the master plan for a one-party, one-network state?
Well, if it was profitable to do such awful things, then it's no surprise others were doing it. If markets are as rational as Murdoch's fans claim, then the way to correct the behavior is to make it unprofitable for both the firms and their directors. Prison is a very unprofitable place for a billionaire to be.
We might compare this to the Chartist movement in Britain, in which huge protests went on for decades in the early 19th century just to accomplish the purpose of expanding the right to vote from 1% of the male population to 3%. However, that small early success rolled on after the Chartists, such that by the end of that century 90% of males could vote, and not many years later women gained the vote - thus putting British democratic participation ahead of the Jim Crow USA.
Remember, that was in what was supposed to be the wealthiest, most powerful and advanced country in the world.
Sure, but multiparty systems have a weakness too: in Canada now, as in Britain under Thatcher, and Italy under Berluscogni, the Right can rule without a majority because it is more unified than the parties of the Left. We have yet to see about France. Even proportional representation doesn't solve this because eventually a parliamentary majority must be formed and the Right can hold the country hostage until someone else caves in.
But there seems to be a spreading conspiracy among minority conservative regimes to attack the public good, and in the case of American insurance conglomerates licking their chops at dismantling public health in Canada and the UK, I wouldn't be surprised if it's all being plotted from Wall Street.
Basically, the left doesn't have a Wall Street to hold its factions together, anywhere on Earth.
So why were corporations hiring Pinkerton mercenaries to murder workers who were organizing unions 100 years ago?
In fact, not once do you explain how the workers are actually supposed to fight back once they have no unions, no antitrust laws, and no government institutions to regulate finance. The only thing left is revolution. Commie much?
And explain to me what the hell Professor Cole's selfish interest is?
The Koch Brothers aren't the only ones there with fishy pasts. Many men associated a few years ago with extremist militias, armed anti-immigrant groups, and religious tyranny very quickly reinvented themselves as Tea Party leaders, and the media refuses to hold them accountable for their pasts or the implications of the beliefs they once honestly embraced in small circles. Michelle Bachmann has a long history of religious extremism, as Matt Taibbi pointed out in his Rolling Stone article, but now her face is plastered all over the airwaves as a secular figure.
Question is, in whose interest is it that these bastards get to reinvent themselves now that they are given the chance to expose themselves to millions of apolitical citizens who know nothing about those past movements and their sickening goals?
As for the government not representing them, why did so many of those inviduals not feel that way back when everyone in the government was white, Christian, and ostensibly heterosexual? If this is a movement about class interests, it would not be possible for the Kochs to turn it into a campaign for infinite tax cuts for the rich. If this is a movement about re-establishing the white monopoly on all forms of power, then it makes some sort of sense to destroy all barriers against the rich, since the rich are nearly 100% white and from a tribal perspective are the elders who are expected by the tribal mentality to lead their poorer "brothers" to conquest and prosperity as they did in ages past.
And no, it's no good for them to drag out the black Tea Party guy to prove they have a few black friends; the point of the 14th Amendment (which they want to repeal) is that minorities should have the right to vote even if their history has given them very different views than white conservatives; demanding that they must act and think exactly like "good" Americans to deserve to vote means that they have no effect whatsoever on the outcome of elections, since they'd vote exactly the same way as those already voting. Why would anyone want to restore to state legislatures the power to strip citizens of the right to vote when they claim to want to return government to the "people"? No point unless they want to greatly narrow the definition of "people" so as to change election outcomes.
Professor Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, Virginia Military Institute, was pretty good. So was Professor Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Bowdoin College, who held the line at Gettysburg. I would argue that modern generals are the ones who lack the intellectual breadth to understand the social and economic blowback from the wars they engage in, because they don't understand civilians.
Question is, if the rebels are now exporting oil, establishing financial credit and capturing heavy weapons, does this change the nature of the war on any of its fronts? Even a harangue from Gadafi will not make a tank run without fuel, so the issue of how he keeps getting fuel determines whether he can ever go back on the offensive. If not, the tanks can still defend his cities but his cause has no point because he cannot reunify the country on his terms.
America has two longstanding castes of poor people, masked by other groups of immigrants passing through poverty. The poor on average do vote more liberal, but low turnout has negated that. A poor person who doesn't show up on voting day has in effect ratified tax cuts for the rich.
But the struggle between those two castes is the great tragedy of American history, and perhaps its evil strength: by very artificial means placing Scots-Irish indentured servants over incoming African slaves, the colonial oligarchy set them at each other's throats (very unequally, of course) so that America could never have a unified working class. Yankee elites played immigrants the same way but never for as long or as murderously; the question is whether those elites looked South for inspiration.
Consider the thought problem of what America would look like if slaves had never been brought in. We'd have an all-white workforce just like France or Britain or any of the countries that now have strong unions and welfare benefits. Racism has made America uniquely lacking in class consciousness in all the advanced world.
Yet a few cynics in dark corners might point out that the excess profits thus extracted from our divided workers provided the capital that made America an industrial titan by 1920 (though it also created the financial imbalances that brought that titan to its knees 10 years later). So is this what our current masters are shooting for? To make America "competitive" by setting whites, blacks and Latinos at each others' throats while their bosses are free to drive down their wages and reward investors? If so, the process is slowly developing all the toxic symptoms of old-style boom & bust capitalism.
This very question has made me propose the 40-Year-Rule. It seems that a lot of dictators wear out their welcome after 40 years or more: the Warsaw Pact regimes, the apartheid regime in South Africa, Gadafi, Sadat/Mubarak, and now maybe the Assads.
But you see the problem this poses in America? We don't think we've been under an oligarchy for the last 30 years, we think we've been a normal functioning democracy with 230 years of perfect continuity. Even as most of us have refused to vote, or learn anything about politics other than self-serving dogmas. Democracy is someone else's fault, and if it goes bad, it is the leading candidate to take the blame, meaning that fascism is warming up in the batter's circle, all too happy to get its shot at 40 years of kleptocracy and genocide.
The problem is the crusader mentality of Americans. Conservative Americans are now indoctrinated that socialized medicine, gay marriage, tolerance of Moslems, decent unemployment benefits et al are proof of the greatest evil, comparable to Hitler and Stalin and thus a prelude to aggression against America. So no matter how much Ron Paul yammers about how friendly America will be with the rest of the world once we do shut down the empire, what will libertarians say when the rest of the world rejects his restoration of 19th century laissez faire and states' rights in horror, kicks out our imperialistic corporations, stops propping up our dollar, and even starts boycotting us when we actively reject global warming?
The libertarians will stand there slack-jawed, and the Christian fascists, whom most of the public can't distinguish from libertarians because the mass media wraps them in the same flag of unimpeachable white patriotism, will rush in and scream that the Commies are coming and that America must shut off all contact with the evil outside world, and take away all rights from those who might be contaminated by alien influences.
I mean, this has all happened before. But this time, it means that when everything gets privatized, only American businessmen will be allowed to bid and that's worth a vast amount of campaign funds from them. Consider what will happen when public schools are dismantled to root out leftist influences - a half trillion dollars in your tax $ will go as vouchers to whatever groups are fanatical and xenophobic enough to pass muster. By the time that the statistics have been gathered to prove that such a miseducation completely fails to produce a workforce competitive with the outside world, the leaders will have solved the problem by escalating crusades against any country whose success might discredit their ideology, and no one will be left who can understand that simultaneous war with Europe, Russia, China, Latin America and the Middle East is insanity.
I mean, do you really think our capitalist class would veto such a train wreck as long as they can cash out at the height of the final bubble?
Presumably the difference is that the sheer one-sidedness and ruthlessness of the operations against Panama and Grenada guaranteed that they'd end quickly enough to avoid anyone bringing up the War Powers Act. Putting a clock on war-making powers may not make them less violent, but in fact might encourage the use of ground forces to ensure a quick, mediagenic kill.
And once the Republicans take the White House back, in 2012 or 2016, the crusade against Russia will resume, with China thrown in for the sake of moral absolutism. The Tea Party cannot tolerate an outside world that rejects feudalist, white supremacist robber-baron capitalism, and our economy can't survive without the exploitation of the outside world. Then what will all us good anti-war folks do?
I'm not sure it was as simple as that in Latin America. I saw a chart of the trade blocs that arose when world trade collapsed during the Great Depression, and I was surprised to find that large parts of South America were shown as being part of the Sterling bloc, not the dollar bloc.
It would appear that the British let us have our pretense of the Monroe Doctrine, while its aging corporations managed to cling to power over the Latin oligarchs until WW2 finished off British power in every way. Argentina, you know, had the 5th highest per capita income in the world in 1900, and was part of the British sphere. Britain also supplied the battleships bought by Brazil, Argentina and Chile in their pre-WW1 arms race. The US was dominant in much poorer, more atomized Central America.
And yet, everybody in America to the right of Gates loudly proclaims that the UN is an evil Communist conspiracy that usurps our Constitution.
Remember, when the UN was founded, the only independent countries that existed that could be members were in Europe, the Americas, and a few small states like Thailand and Ethiopia. Otherwise, white as a Klan rally. Most of those countries were under US or Soviet domination and many desperately needed reconstruction aid. So we pretty much knew how the votes would come out.
It appears that when the colonial empires dissolved, whitey suddenly found himself outvoted, and the terms of UN power instantly looked very different. No more talk about world government.
Funny you should mention the Bonus March. Not long after that, a cabal of right-wing tycoons led by a member of the DuPont clan organized a conspiracy that sounds strikingly modern: the creation of an Astroturf crypto-fascist militia from the unemployed veterans that would outnumber the Regular Army of 1933 (80,000), then use it to intimidate Roosevelt into abandoning the New Deal.
Luckily, FDR fought back, after Gen. Smedley Butler informed him that he'd been approached by these bastards and what their plans were.
In practice, governments have the right to put down uprisings, and even massacre civilians. They do it all the time. What is striking in Libya is that Gadafi seems to have undertaken the physical destruction of most of its cities, which gets into a much deeper level of deprivation from which recovery may not be possible. Cities are civilization.
This is a special problem of oil countries, because nowhere else in the world is the population so much less valuable than the riches underneath their feet. Governments normally are financed by the population. But at the extreme level of oil to population that Libya has, rulers have no logical reason not to completely eliminate a rebellious citizenry and replace it with more cooperative immigrants. The oil is all that is necessary to rule. This is not true for Syria, and while it is true in Bahrain, the fact that everyone lives in the capital makes it impractical for its Saudi occupiers to carry out extermination. However, there are other countries in the region that might take heed of what Gadafi is and is not able to get away with.
The reality is, where have sanctions ever actually been decisive in overthrowing a government? They obviously failed against Saddam Hussein. The US in many regions can impose unilateral sanctions on countries that cause them great harm, but Hanoi and Havana still stand. The apartheid regime in South Africa gave in, but it was facing the real possibility of a mass Marxist uprising by the black majority.
It goes all the way to the sactions against Japan for its imperial rampage in 1940-41. The White House was restrained by the military's fear (shared by Britain) that serious sanctions would be viewed by Japan's fascists as an existential threat justifying an attack that neither the US or UK could afford. But the half-hearted sanctions were viewed by the fascists as an existential threat anyway.
Until the antiwar movement accepts that our current concept of sanctions is almost completely useless and needs to be replaced, we've got no credibility telling the public that there are alternatives to war.
The bigger the risks you take, the shorter your time horizon gets. To the point where you'll say any lie just to look like a winner for the next five minutes.
Problem is, the sort of "like-minded" people who would use guns at this moment are the sort who want to kill all the queers, enslave all the immigrants, and impose religious law. The ones who have the most experience at using and justifying violence are mostly the ones who back the bad causes that have plagued America since its beginnings. The ones who are driven to anger by the Medievalization of America can't compete. And if they did the media would denounce them as terrorists, not those other guys.
The difference is, the Bush administration was packed all the way to the top with people who had conspired specifically to attack Iraq for years. Cheney was the founder of the Project for a New American Century, which openly called for wars on Iraq and Iran for the domination of the Persian Gulf region and thus the world economy. Every act of that bastard for 10 years was in preparation for the occupation of Iraq, down to his Halliburton chairmanship.
Libya, on the other hand, was a complete suprise to all the power brokers, and their erratic and contradictory responses show that they hadn't really thought about what they would do. After all, Libya was already moving into the Western camp and making all the deals we wanted. If we cut off China from Libyan oil, you know what China does? It opens up a vault with 3 trillion dollars of foreign exchange in it, and bids up the price of oil everywhere on Earth. Which puts NATO politicians in the same bind as if we'd let Gadafi win by methods that would have legally required us to put sanctions on his oil. All the options in this crisis led to more expensive oil, meaning the danger of another global economic crash, which is not in the longer-term interest of the oil companies.
Along the lines you're discussing, maybe the way out of the global economic crisis is labor-intensive energy. Meaning that instead of a permanent drain of cash to fossil fuel exporters, each country swings the money to building renewables at home, which will require many employees for maintenance even after construction is over.
We've been inculcated with the capitalists' hatred of labor-intensive, versus capital-intensive, big projects to the point where we're now afraid to try big initiatives like dams. But now we're looking at many small labor-intensive projects that spread risk.
Trick is, where are you preparing to fight the war - on your own soil, like Sweden and Switzerland do, or on the soil of a few clearly-defined vital interests, as Great Powers have always done, or every damn place on the planet not inhabited by penguins, like Superpowers do?
That has gigantic long-term effects not just on your budget, but on your beliefs about the sovereign rights of other peoples versus your own.
You'd think the easiest way to get the US out of NATO is to jump up and down pointing at our Social Democratic allies and screaming "COMMIES! COMMIES!!"
After all, they all have socialized medicine, which Reagan assured us back in 1966 was the beginning of tyranny. They must all be deep into tyranny by now. We should go to Palin rallies and yell for America to pull out of this NATO den of pinko vipers and begin a long, unwinnable Cold War against every country that has gay rights, redistributive taxation, strong unions, enforced pollution laws, etc, etc.
Yet no one on the Right sees a contradiction here. Which led me to a terrifying thought: They don't want us in NATO to protect socialist Europeans. They want us there to occupy Europe and keep Europeans from spreading their Bolshevik evil by usurping their sovereign right to an independent foreign and military policy.
Everybody, run this by your right-wing friends and see if they expose their true feelings.
We can't refuse to consider the possibility that America is being reduced to 3rd World status on purpose; because some soulless accountant out there figured that the marginal short-term gains to the existing elites would be greater if America were a giant El Salvador instead of a giant Sweden. The scary part of this is that many poor, conservative Americans seem to agree that holding a gun or a whip on the evil, subhuman ni**er world is an honorable profession whether in foreign occupations or domestic prison farms, and that this therefore is the only proper function of government. It was literally the mentality of Europe until it blew itself up enough times to outgrow it.
I hope others choose to have a serious discussion in this thread about European social democracy and the problem with NATO, instead of pi**ing all over Germany for still being friends with the US or pi**ing all over Obama for still being an imperialist. The problem here is that power has corrupted us, as it's corrupted everyone before. When the title of top gun passed from one European empire to another, those societies had much the same brain-dead right-wing dogma as America does now. Once you believe that imperial success is the proof that your "traditional" and "patriotic" culture is infallible, commissioned by God, and immutable, any sign of weakening will justify retreating back into a mythical past when the empire was secure.
Until we make the case to the American people that we can safely retrench from a Superpower to a Great Power, their wounded pride and insecurity will make them cling, as someone once said, to guns and religion. Thus we will suffer the protracted misery of Spain instead of the decent post-imperial civilization of Sweden, both at one time the terrors of Europe.
We should note that Germany also did not allow its capitalists to exterminate its industrial sector, and thus its unions. German corporations are required to have labor representatives on their boards. Germany has even required its soccer league to transition to Packer-style fan-owned teams, and no one's complaining since it keeps away the American entre-pirates who bankrupted Manchester United.
In fact the only thing in Germany that looks right-wing by US standards is its central bank, which is making it impossible for southern Europeans to dig their way out of their crisis. But a very liberal social policy, free health care, 35-hour work weeks with generous time off, high-tech factories producing very expensive goods that sell overseas, and a bank that represents real conservatism instead of Prayer-Of-Jabez greed fantasies seems to have overcome the massive financial burden caused by the fall of East Germany 20 years ago. It's as if Germany has prospered despite annexing a Rust Belt at the very moment that America has tried to starve its Rust Belt out of existence (and in Michigan, even legislated the termination of democratically elected city governments on fiscal grounds more likely to apply to towns with large black populations, a new twist on Jim Crow).
Wow, Fuster, were you this all-fired diligent when Israel, and for that matter South Africa and Pakistan, were secretly working on nuclear weapons?
But then, all three countries were right-wing anti-Communist states, so we Americans knew they'd only use the bombs to slaughter the right people. Or as our racist cover story goes, only anti-American countries would launch nuclear first strikes on crowded cities.
Which is why they suffered no consequences. And why no one dares imply that Israel is on an ideological road to hype itself into a nuclear first strike on Iran. Where's the evidence of that? Who can tell when no government dares to even admit that Israeli nukes exist?
And humans in power always "interpret" their God's commands differently than humans out of power.
Thus the appearance of Israel has led to a change in the practical values of Judaism, the appearance of Saudi Arabia has led to a change in Sunnism, the Iranian revolution has led to a change in Shiism, and the unification of the former conservative factions of America's two political parties into a single Southern-led reactionary alliance has led to a change in American Christianity, which is now almost a unique religion of national self-worship.
"most folks don’t actually care about this stuff because they come home from a long day of hard work at ANY wage and they need entertainment to get them through the craziness of their daily grind..."
And yet, 80 years ago many of our forefathers were working longer hours under much worse conditions, and they spent their "leisure" time organizing unions and Socialist, Communist and Anarchist political parties. They were better informed about economics and world affairs than we are now, despite having to make an effort to find dissident news sources. They even had the guts to go out on strike and give up what little they were already earning.
So how was this all sabotaged? Who is to blame? And what condtions would it take to change people's values (since it seems the problem is that fundamental) to get the old radical outrage back? If we have to continue to regress to 60-hour weeks and starvation wages and Pinkertons shooting strikers, will even that get us angry again, or is something else missing in modern America? Like our souls?
I don't think we can automatically assume that young Americans are the bad guys in this self-lobotomization process. The problem is, America is run by white people, whose numbers are stagnant and aging while the young are increasingly non-white. For our corporate rulers, the young are a threat, and the old are a weapon to beat them down into silence and apathy. Why? The rich have already made clear they intend to keep America going by running wages down to Asian levels, and the old whites are being promised that their own govt handouts will be preserved in the present by screwing future, mostly non-white recipients.
Thus the actual opinions of young Americans are being ignored. A couple of years ago a survey showed the most liberal group of 18-year-olds seen in decades. Attitudes about gay rights are radically different among the young. Young whites are far less fearful of living in a multicultural society, which I think is why their elders hate them so much.
But most of all, young Latinos are being stuck with the role of the future proletariat, under working conditions that keep moving backwards, and some of them are trying to organize their workplaces. That is what the American Left has been missing all these awful decades - a real class struggle. It took from the end of the Civil War until 1932 for, mostly, immigrants to organize American labor into a force that could revolutionize society. We are now starting from scratch.
I think this will continue, because Latin America is deep into its own people's revolution, like the one that just began in the Arab world 4 months ago. You rightly decry the Anglo corporate media, but Spanish-speaking people have plenty of media from Central and South America in their lives, and how could they not be affected by the successful mass movements in country after country? The radical wave is now moving up through Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the discontent is ramping up in Mexico with Sicilia's movement to end the drug war. The Latino population does not exist entirely in the American bubble, simply because of language and the fact that they have to work actually making and building things. They have a foot in that outside world you so eloquently describe.
This is the price the Right must pay for their evil plan to take America back to the 19th Century - streets filled with hordes of workers waving red flags.
In fact, we don't know what the repair record of an electric car will be like once we get past the teething stage, but there's reason to believe that it has a lot fewer things that can go wrong - besides the fact that gas-engined cars pollute more as they get older. You're getting rid of transmissions (often), catalytic converters, radiators, and much of the lubrication system. And due to the use of regenerative braking, the regular brakes will last longer.
So what about a car that lasts 30 years? Doesn't that reduce manufacturing pollution? What if the car used zinc-air batteries, which have little environmental impact? What if the need to squeeze maximum range out of the batteries kept the cars smaller?
Did you know that Nissan is already working on ways to re-purpose the Leaf's battery pack after it has to be replaced after 100,000 miles - when it will still have 80% of its original capacity? Consider the need for less capacious batteries for home solar and wind installations.
Actually, I think the Israelis for the last century have been intentionally following the American logic: take the land, remove the inhabitants, create a Western-looking economy, and the Eurocentric world will call it "progress".
Failing that, there's always the backup defense: If we can just steal the land and hold onto it until we die and our children take over, then they can claim they are innocent of theft and that they would be victims if the natives got their land back. We Americans so overwhelmed the Indians with immigration and birthrate that we never had to go to the backup plan. Israel, on the other hand...
Plenty of old, affluent societies have falling populations. But according to the "laws" of economics, this is Bad because children force parents to spend more and work harder, and then enter the workforce and drive down wages, which is Good. Instead, parents have few children in those countries because they expect Social Security to be there for them, so you end up with not enough new workers to prop up Social Security. Oh, but the problem would be solved by getting rid of Social Security so that the unproductive old would die off, and parents would want more children to leech off of in their old age. But population expansion would increase pressure for territorial expansion and war.
Twisted, isn't it? You can't get around the problem without dealing with redistribution of wealth, either from old to young or young to old or rich old to poor old.
Orwell could not have described this state because he grew up in a Britain where most people were poor and worked in horrible factories and coal mines and bitched loudly about it. Only Terry Gilliam could describe the state we're in, because he grew up in America when it was full of people who thought they were middle-class and white-collar. "Brazil" is a dystopia of greedy, narrow-minded people who cling to the barren proofs of their success while objective conditions worsen. There doesn't need to be a great dictator in such a system; everyone feels he must terrorize everyone else to fear change as much as he does.
Well, that's pretty much the same thing you can say about Juan's anti-war articles or the anti-war movement in general. Findings ways to spew more CO2 and arms contracts are two of the easiest ways to make a billion bucks and the people who really want to do that will fight like the Devil to preserve their opportunities.
Hell, if Islamic law means a hostile environment for white Protestant vulture capitalism, folks in the Middle East might have an advantage over us - now that we can't use their dictators to enforce the Shock Doctrine. The countries most wedded to Anglo-American greed-worship seem to be faring the worst since the crash, while Latin America and Turkey are being rewarded for overthrowing our neoliberal scam and asserting sovereign rights.
As usual, the decider will probably be China, now sitting on three trillion dollars of foreign exchange. I'm watching Chinese English-language newscasts and they've clearly been hostile to the Arab uprisings, but at the end of the day they need resources and there aren't many places to go where they haven't already established a beachhead.
I'm 46, and what I can recall is how miserable we all were after Vietnam because we weren't beating up on anybody, then how great we felt when Reagan ramped up the war machine and staged pathetic mismatches like Grenada to build up our spirits for bigger wars.
I think the politicians believe they've learned their lesson.
Actually, continuing this lucrative business would be like privatizing Social Security. In both cases, the State would be collecting tax dollars for a public service, but then handing it over to arrogant, ideologically deranged corporations for their supposed expertise in free-market "management". Practically the whole military budget now goes to private contractors or to salaries.
According to Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy", this militarization is pretty hard to avert in a declining empire. He sees it in terms both of the increasing short-sightedness of capital, which abandons productive industry for the financial rackets, and a growing self-love that turns patriotism into a religion of national restoration (if we're just fanatical enough, God will start favoring us again like he did during the old conquests).
Even with a botched occupation like this one, the US has many ways of influencing the countries where it operates. Because it was botched, what we have left in Iraq is largely towards keeping the poor powerless and manufacturing a pro-capitalist ruling elite. Sadr is an admirer of Hezbollah, which you could argue is an anti-capitalist movement of right-wing poor Shiites, but that seems terribly simplistic. The mere fact that it takes Mohammed's call for charity and brotherhood seriously, and the fact that Islam never legalized usury as Protestantism did, puts Hezbollah essentially at odds with Lebanon's capitalist elites, and in Iraq the capitalists were ruined long ago. Once the US clears out it can no longer sabotage Sadr's experiments in Islamic non-capitalism. But this has its own dangers: Hezbollah had to be pragmatic in Lebanon's coalition-driven society; Sadr could take a much harder line (Islamobolshevism?) with impoverished Shia being so much of the population, and miss the chance to develop something useful. Or he could just sell out his populism to his local military-industrial complex like Ahmadinejad did.
Well, given the special forces section that Seal Team Six belongs to is only budgeted at one billion $ per year, it does make one wonder how much of the other $699,000,000,000 per year has accomplished anything. Of course, Seal Team Six benefitted from technological and logistical resources from the rest of the military budget, but it shows how hard it is to prove you're spending money on the right stuff.
As awful as this behavior is, America did not invent it. I understand that the tradition in diplomacy is that great-power states have a right to designate certain foreign matters as being a "vital national interest", a sort of red line that they will go to war over. Every important country had them. Since all the great powers were private-property monarchies, ideological disagreements over what interests were "vital" must have been muted, but the fact that wars were so common in the 18th century shows that there wasn't much respect for the interests of others.
The real problem begins when you make yourself a "superpower", which has economic interests everywhere. Now this should REDUCE the "vitalness" of any one interest, but you know that's never how it works in practice. The more interests you have, the more your economy becomes a giant financial bubble overseen by oligarchs who fear any signs of imperial decline anywhere. So EVERYTHING becomes a vital interest because it might cause a market crash. Even an anti-capitalist state like the USSR got put in that situation, and it wasn't the market that collapsed because of the defiance of Poland, but the entire Soviet bloc.
The old UK, the US and the USSR all put forth the claim that they were so important to the survival of civilization that they could not allow any disruption of their economy of any size by any country anywhere on Earth.
There you have it, the corruption of absolute power, and the unsustainability of absolute power, all bound together and waiting to explode. Every country that will ever claim the same status in the future will suffer the same trap, because the problem is in the nature of power itself.
No kidding! What's the point of having a nuclear arsenal if it doesn't win you special treatment from other nuclear powers? It always had seemed to work that way before.
Well, given that the Pakistani army used the mujaheddin movement in the war against the Soviets, and then created the Taliban, you'd think they'd know their own handiwork. "Darn, those Arabs look awfully familiar..."
What we used to have was a balance of terror in class warfare. Before 1932, the rich could do whatever they pleased, and the poor who tried to organize were gunned down in the streets. But the threat of revolution forced the rich to tolerate FDR's experiments, though if you Google the Dupont coup plot you will see some bastards were trying to organize far-right militias to bully FDR into becoming a figurehead sellout (sound familiar?).
The Right couldn't get away with it then, but now it can. Because there are no institutions of radical workers to create a legitimate threat of revolution. Whatever they believe as indivduals, the rich collectively think like investors; if they screw us too much and we fight back they lose everything. Since they still made massive profits during the 50 years of the New Deal era, they had plenty of incentive to compromise. But if they can cheaply destroy one institution after another that stands in their way, as they have, and no one fights back, then why not screw us to death and abandon the burnt-out husk of America for some new host body?
The very ambitions that brought the rich to where they are will always make them believe that no matter how much money they make by sharing power with the workers, European-style, they can make still more by seizing total power. As individuals, they choose to act on that belief or not based on what they think is reasonable. We don't do a damn thing to convince them that such monstrous behavior is unreasonable.
I'd like to revise part of what I wrote above. The Arab people decided not to choose a charismatic gun-toting superman as their hero. Instead, they chose to be their own heroes.
I think John Shorter and Bob F have some good points. Sometimes tactics don't really fit strategy. Was the collapsing of American domination bin Laden's strategy, or tactics? Well, if Robert Scheuer was right, the goal was simply to serve as an exemplar to encourage Moslems to rise up against their own governments, not necessarily by using his same methods. If the usual Islamophobic narrative was true, bin Laden's strategy was to quickly build some sort of all-jihadi 3rd Reich that would conquer the world.
Now if the latter was true, then collapsing America was merely a tactic, since a lot of things would still have to happen to creat an actual caliphate. In fact, it turned out to be a terrible tactic, because America's decline is causing a power vacuum that is being filled by two states that a Wahhabi should abhor: Iran and China.
But if the former was true, then collapsing America was a strategy for empowering people in countries like Egypt to recognize that their governments were US puppets, and then having enough power to overthrow those governments. If this was true, then bin Laden was very successful. The problem then, however, is that he didn't mean for those governments to be replaced by parliamentary democracy ruled by mostly secular law.
So he exposed America as a villain all right, but Arabs chose a different replacement than he wanted.
Another way to look at this is that sometimes a movement, or a group trying to start a movement, will create something very different than what it intended. The Japanese militarists in WW2 claimed they wanted to liberate the Asian peoples from the Western empires. They were lying, but some Japanese officers really believed it, and so when things went bad they worked hard to prepare their local collaborators to rebel against the returning West. Most importantly, the mere fact the Japanese had beaten the West for a while destroyed the racist myths that the West used to keep Asians impotent. So the revolutions happened, the West was driven out, but instead of fake nationalism controlled from Tokyo, Japan had inadvertently gifted Asia with real independence, with at least a chance for democracy. This may be what is happening to al-Qaeda's legacy.
Once you were right - AQ was on the cutting edge of anti-imperialism only because bin Laden, the Saudi regime, the Pakistani dictatorship, and many other right-wing powers around the world collaborated with Reagan to destroy alternatives on the Left to Western capitalism. Reagan never understood that the unnatural evils of imported capitalism would not be abolished by the fall of communism, so people would turn to the next most powerful challenger, but bin Laden understood it.
Which allowed him to get away with presenting a very bad alternative indeed. His ideology was contaminated by the Wahhabist sellout to Saud feudalism before it ever fired a shot in anger. The Sauds are ideologically the worst of all worlds, hypocrites about Islam, capitalism, and Israel, and his solution was to accuse them of being too liberal.
Saudi backing of the petrodollar and the far right enabled insane extremism to infect America via its wealthy sponsors, and gave us a world in which we could truly say this prayer:
"There is no god but money, and Reagan is his prophet."
But this war of right-wing "civilizations" was not the only alternative, and as US hubris and overstretch allowed first Latin America, then Central Asia, now perhaps North Africa, to slip from Wall Street's reach, we have to ask who is the leading movement against capitalist imperialism today? How about the Bolivian anarchist Indians, who have encouraged mass actions all the way up to the Zapatistas in Mexico? How about the stirrings of labor in China, and its intellectuals' renewed discussion of the meaning of socialism?
Even the Islamist movements whose followers are concentrated in the hell-slums of modern globalization have to deal with modernity and the issue of economic justice. Three billion people crammed in there, too many to shoot, making all our stuff with technologies few of us understand. The cities, after 5000 years, are still the vanguard of civilization against a newly-barbarized capitalism extending from Wahhabi palaces to teabagger exurbs. That's the real war, and the US has already lost it.
Trump does not believe in the things he says when he gets in front of a camera. Birtherism was simply the thing he chose to grab to get attention.
But there are millions out there who WANT to believe that Obama is a foreigner, because they wanted a reason not to accept the 2008 election outcome. There are millions out there who want to believe that whites should have a monopoly on power, that the only minorities that are Real Americans are the ones who happen to agree with white conservatives on every single matter so that letting them vote is in no way a form of power-sharing, that the moment minority voting becomes large enough to tip an election, excuses should be found to ban them from voting or holding office. People who hold those beliefs rarely admit it openly, but logically convince themselves of other beliefs that they openly advocate to obtain the same ends: that ACORN was a giant criminal conspiracy, that millions of illegal aliens voted in 2008, that the 14th Amendment is tyranny, that un-American thinkers can be prosecuted without affecting "liberty" because liberty only consists of the cravings and lusts of Real Americans.
I doubt Trump holds a single one of those subsidiary beliefs, or that he will understand the mindset of that faction to realize that he must recite them with a sincere face in order to pass their initiation rituals. Bush Junior did pass the rituals in 2000 to get the faction's support, but now the bar is set higher since the talk is more violent, more 1860-ish. Trump can't pass muster because he's from Manhattan, because people will point out that his fortune depended on the financial industry inflating the value of Manhattan real estate (not to mention the Saudis and now the Chinese), that his genial martinet bossman act is not properly grounded in Christian values and gun rights.
But he can force all the candidates who may REALLY believe in that insanity to spend a lot more money on the road to the GOP nomination, and sow dissension between the neo-confederates and the other far-right factions, so more power to him.
You're saying that America has been Hell since 1912? Are you forgetting what this country accomplished in-between? We were a vastly more powerful country in 1945, or even 1940, than during the laissez-faire racist paradise that libertarians, neo-confederates and theocrats endlessly rhapsodize. Thanks to the GI Bill, America became the leader in world arts, music, literature and architecture - the Bill gave many working-class veterans a chance at a liberal arts education they couldn't afford before or since. By the start of the 1970s, the wage gap between blacks and whites was down to only 10%. Union workingmen could provide for their families with a single wage. For a while, homeless and hunger nearly disappeared. The entire world was in fact in an economic boom after WW2, made possible by both Cold War competition and the Bretton Woods pact that ended currency speculation, imposed by FDR during WW2 as part of his super-program to prevent the global depressions that made Hitler inevitable.
Read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" for the story of how this civilization was murdered abroad by the sponsors of Milton Freidman, aided by Reagan who also laid the ideological foundation for the current Shock Doctrine USA. Note that American wages have been in decline since about 1980.
It wasn't just the banks, it's the entire capitalist class exploiting our loss of collective memory of the Hell of life under laissez-faire, repackaging it as the hip new "Contract With America" and now again as "Reclaiming our Country" (from the mud races). They make big short-term profits by crushing the unions, brainwashing us into vast consumer debt, and dismantling all our public goods to buy themselves tax cuts, and if things get worse in the long run, they claim the solution lies in turning the clock back even further to the past!
And I can tell you from here in Texas that the hatred of California is vast, violent and implacable. The hypocrisy of condemning CA's debt crisis by people who voted for Rick Perry, a man who broke his state's own unemployment fund by cutting business taxes for it and then took a Federal bailout to fix it. What we really need is a sodium pentathol test to find out how many Texans are willing to send gays, blacks, Latinos, Moslems, Californians and the poor to death camps - I've certainly heard such sentiments expressed in several Houston workplaces and never criticized.
The South has a significant and growing and increasingly aroused minority that claims Lincoln was an evil tyrant (Texas' Ron Paul and presumably his faux-Kentucky son), that FDR was un-American (Texas governor Rick Perry), and that the KKK monster Strom Thurmond would have saved America from "these problems we're having" (the former Senate Majority Leader from Mississippi). These are the people we must condemn, but they have friends everywhere in the Southern power structure, who in turn have allies everywhere else in America who see the old Jim Crow South as a moral model for our children's future. Doesn't this scare the Hell out of you?
The African-American opinion of the South's ideology is neatly shown: when Southern whites were Democrats, blacks tried to be Republicans; when the Democrats were willing to negotiate with the Civil Rights movement, those blacks became Democrats and those whites became Republicans in only a decade, with Nixon's Southern Strategy completely transforming the GOP. The KKK endorsed Barry Goldwater in 1964, a sort of passing of the torch.
We've been miseducated about the nature of Jim Crow. The point was not water fountains or seating on buses. The key laws did not specify race, yet always eliminated types of voter likely to be black, and often poor whites as well. All the other laws were made possible by this first victory in scaring blacks away from the polls.
The Bush Administration had already become a clearing house for the new Jim Crow. Check out the career of GOP operative Hans von Spakovsky, who went from organizing "anti-vote fraud" campaigns designed to make blacks fear they'd be arrested at the polling place if their papers weren't in order, to a job at the Dept of Justice that's supposed to stamp out this very activity!
But of course, how dare we say that these new laws are racist. That's just as racist as saying a literacy test or a grandfather law is racist! Because surely you liberals don't want to imply that blacks and Latinos have some greater reason to fear scrutiny of their paperwork, that they're criminal races or something...
Doubtless the exact same poison that they used to impose Jim Crow the first time. White people in the Sunbelt can see the racial makeup change all around them; they hear the dogwhistles and they can decide quietly for themselves that they will save America by purging the electorate of inferior, welfare-loving races. No one can prove anything.
Which is why Trump's campaign is laughable. Birtherism works because of its tie to the idea that blacks and Latinos are to blame for Big Government, an idea that an urban Yankee like Trump dare not even dogwhistle, while a rural Christian extremist like Palin or Huckabee can send the message simply by the company they keep. The Tea Party needs birthers who are genuinely committed to the rest of the agenda: the restoration of America to exactly the legal system of 1789, with no voting by non-whites or the poor or running for office by non-Christians (Palin has still not explained why her Original Intentism doesn't apply to women, though).
And the proof of all this - look up the recent history of the movement to abolish the 14th Amendment, and who was involved as it moved from the fringes of the militia movement to the lips of GOP officeholders.
But how many of those other 3rd world countries exported 2,000,000 barrels of oil per day, with a population of only 8 million to share the proceeds? Seems that in order to have widespread poverty we have outright theft going on here. And even Palin's Alaska believes that oil revenues from public land should be split between its citizens.
A Libyan doesn't have to quote Tom Paine to make the case that every man, woman and child should be expecting a daily check from that oil.
So your alternative is to do just the sanctions, leaving them in place for years while people starve? Or maybe your preference is to just do business as normal with Gaddafi.
That's the problem. We all know sanctions don't work and invasions don't work, but we have believed ever since the Nuremberg Trials that atrocities should have consequences. Well, should we now abandon this belief?
In Iraq, if your party doesn't win the election, the consequences are rather more severe than in other democracies. Someone has to lose, and then his party's militia goes from being hunter to hunted, while his enemies take over the uniforms and weapons of the government security organs.
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The fascist position on capitalism is always meant to counter class warfare. It divides the rich into "good" capitalists - IG Farben Chemicals, Krupp Steel, military-industrial complex - versus "bad" capitalists - bankers, lawyers, filmmakers, Jews, Jews, Jews, and pins all blame on the latter as unproductive, hedonistic parasites.
When times are good, of course, bankers and factory owners are worshipped together as the indivisible team that they must be. The Left cannot be allowed in bad times to argue that this team should all be condemned together.
Now it's tougher, because our "good" capitalists have already moved out all the good jobs, and taken government bailouts to preserve some not-so-good jobs. The big-ticket military-industrial complex employs so few people that it's irrelevant. The military-police-prison personnel complex, however, is providing a lot of right-wing ex-jocks with the only decent wages they could ever have. That's political.
Hatred of the rich and their systematic looting and polarization of resources is driving street uprisings all over the world right now, from Egypt to Greece to Britain, and now even Israel.
For 30 years they took everything and claimed they would create a new golden age, and they used it to make themselves too big to fail and thus blackmailed governments into bailouts. So now we're seeing the reckoning. Where do you think is next?
The way to ruin Rick Perry is to force him to take a position on the empire.
He can't take a status quo position - he's already denounced Obama for that. But the far right in America is divided between two irreconcilable camps both founded on the idea that America is morally superior to the outside world. Either that means it shuns the outside entirely, or it attempts to conquer and "reform" the outside.
Make Perry have to say which of those he wants. If he goes for empire to oppose Paul, he ticks off a lot of enthusiastic secular reactionaries, and looks too much like Bush Junior in the bargain. If he goes for isolationism, the entire Christian Right and the Israel Lobby freak out.
While the Christians are a far larger camp, their support for escalating war (and persecuting gays) is running directly counter to the mood of the rest of the country.
I think the Tea Party, and the entire conservative movement for the last 30 years, has been a white petit bourgeoise rebellion against "interdependence". They don't want complex problems managed, they want the enemy exterminated.
Whoops! Found the answer to my own speculation at a blog (thanks to CWells for his reply):
http://godsownparty.com/blog/2011/08/perrys-response-a-disturbing-altar-cult/
"I doubt that the Seven Mountains Dominionists (aka New Apostolic Reformation) see Rick Perry as a King David. It is more likely that they see him as a King Cyrus, since the person who anointed him on September 28, 2009 said to Perry that he had prayed before his congregation “Lord Jesus I bring to you today Gov. Perry. I am just bringing you his hand and I pray Lord that he will grasp ahold of it. For if he does you will use him mightily.” Perry took ahold of it and the Texas and personal prophesies brought by those anointing him.
"This is what the LORD says to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of to subdue nations before him and to strip kings of their armour, to open doors before him so that gates will not be shut: I will go before you and will level the mountains; I will break down gates of bronze and cut through bars of iron. I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the LORD, the God of Israel, who summons you by name."' (Isaiah 45:1-3, NIV throughout).
In his book, "The Heart of the Treasure Bringers, Robert Fraser of the International House of Prayer puts as a header to the above verses: "God will release untold wealth, the Cyrus anointing."
For several years Dominionist pastors have been preaching about "The Great Wealth Transfer" which will be transferred from the wicked - everyone who is not of their "faith" - to the righteous - everyone who is of their "faith."
***
In other words, Cyrus was an outsider (Persian king) who did the Jews a favor, and the NAR sees Perry as the same; a tool to power instead of freedom. They don't need him to be of their twisted faith.
Though I've argued this with others, I felt that Bush Junior really believed his theocratic religious spoutings. He really believed his kind were meant to run everything, and that sincerity cued the Christian fundamentalist faction to fall in line behind him without his having to seduce them in the media too blatantly.
Rick Perry believes in nothing. He's just more aggressive about selling out than Mitt Romney. He doesn't bother with sincerity. He was a Democrat until Phil Gramm literally told him that he'd lose his job if he didn't switch parties. Then he was a perfect extension of Governor George Bush for 8 years. Then he sensed the Tea Party wind and became a secessionist.
So now I'm wondering whether the far right really gave a damn about sincerity at all, and whether they were simply judging whether a candidate would be an obsequious enough lackey to carry out their agenda regardless of the consequences. Rick Perry has no connections to any consequences; he's nothing without politics and he will only be as rich as he is rewarded by his constituency du jour. He's not part of a billionaire oligarchy clan like Bush.
Either they're willing to rent him to be a fanatic, or they reject him for another who really believes the theology.
And thank you for discussing the New Apostolic Reformation (please Google, everybody), the ultra-theocratic Pentecostal sect that was all over his prayer rally, but carefully toned down their self-serving crackpottery (literally that everyone who disagrees with them is under demonic influence) when the cameras were on them. They're a tiny, but fast-growing segment of far-right Protestantism, yet they count Palin as a long-time associate, Bachmann as a definite fellow traveller, and now they've made themselves indispensable for Perry. They sure want the White House bad- what do you think they intend to do with it?
Starving people can be persuaded to become serfs, sharecroppers, indentured servants, and henchmen. Most humans who have lived in the last several thousand years have had to make this deal with a rich man or were born into it, and many still are.
Why does no one on the Right recognize that medieval landowners, in fact, were businessmen?
As the great railway capitalist Jay Gould put it for all time: "I can always hire half the working class to shoot the other half."
Well, they're down to 35 hours a week in France and Germany, and those are the ones who did better than us in the crash.
Mr. Metzler;
Governments simply gave private property the right to organize the way it pleased, which as Adam Smith pointed out is to form combinations. Are you calling John D. Rockefeller anti-capitalist?
No one should be calling himself a libertarian if he doesn't understand the most basic concepts of markets:
Many buyers / few sellers = overwhelming power for sellers
Many sellers / few buyers = overwhelming power for buyers
The inherent unfairness in capitalism starts with the fact that both labor markets and consumer markets exist, and both are biased on the side of the fewest actors - the employers. Millions of laborers/consumers are being played off against each other by stable oligopolies that naturally form as the most ruthless titans get the backing of the most established banks and gobble up their competitors.
All unions do, sir, is reduce the number of actors on one side of the labor market transaction, so that the companies are the ones played off against each other instead of those for whom immediate wages are a matter of life and death. Without unions, the oligopolies will drive wages down in the normal course of their competition with each other. Sure that means that the workers - as consumers - will go broke; that's why laissez faire America (1865-1929) suffered a series of generally worsening crashes in every decade. In the 1920s workers received little improvement in wages compared to the massive profits created by getting them to buy new products; thus they had to go into debt, new forms of debt like installment payments designed to move durable goods. When this had gone too far, a crash was inevitable. However, those massive profits led to the assumption that growth was perpetual, so stocks were overvalued and set up for their own crash.
America had no stock market crashes from the Great Depression until 1987. Wages and Wall Street moved up together at a deliberate pace until 1980, when the two diverged for good. Employers have had the leverage since then, squeezing us harder and harder such that we must get further into debt in order to buy enough goods to prop up growth.
It is not a coincidence that this happened when unionized jobs in America were being eliminated industry by industry.
So where are your happy, fulfilled workers? Wal-Mart?
What's your position on ALEC's tireless crusade to "liberalize" prohibitions on the rental of prison slaves to private corporations for sweatshop labor? ALEC considers itself libertarian, and one-fifth of all state legislators in the United States are members. Yet here it is, with the Southern conservative base, working to bring back the prison-slavery system of the post-Civil War South to avoid having to pay "market" wages.
Note that with free laborers pushed to starvation wages by this unfair competition, the South remained poor and stagnant for generations until the system was dismantled by the outrage of a public not blinded by right-wing ideology. But the high priests of States' Rights and limited government did very well by this system.
In the libertarian fantasy world, money does not = power. Therefore it is communistic to observe that a guy with a billion bucks will buy the power to get two billion, whether by buying politicians, or by getting rid of the government and ruling with armed goons a la KKK Mississippi.
In fact, the libertarian version of history refusing to accept that any crimes whatsoever have ever been committed by private wealth is so convoluted that it resembles the Catholic church's attempts to square telescopic observations of planetary motion with Aristotlean cosmology. East India Company? Government monopoly. Slavery? Woulda been replaced by industrialization, really, if not for that tyrant Lincoln (the slaveowners were actually preparing to put slaves in factories, a concept that Albert Speer later proved was feasible). Pollution? Oh, the public will boycott the polluting companies into betraying their shareholders, because any layman can read an EPA analysis and figure out which factories spilled what and which conglomerates own which factory.
It goes on and on, because all of this is an evasion of the real agenda. The point is the total concentration of all power (denials aside) in the hands of the Master Race of total greedballs. If we just get greedy enough, we can develop enough tech to generate enough money to bribe each other into becoming whores who have no archaic concepts like values and conscience and justice. And then we'll all be as happy as crack whores.
But in fact, the post-Reconstruction Southern ruling elite still had tons of cash and access to Northern banks. It chose to keep the masses poor and backwards. The ruling families who hired death squads in El Salvador? The East India Company? The coal barons who rule West Virginia?
In fact, every aristocracy, caste system, apartheid system and slavery system started out as a meritocracy. What was merit in the ruins of the Roman Empire? Being good at cutting off people's heads from horseback. Once I've used this obvious merit to get me some land, and I'm slowly using comparative advantage to turn all the local farmers into my debt serfs (oh, that doesn't exist under free markets, sure), why shouldn't I use my wealth to guarantee my offspring every unfair advantage, even if they're entirely worthless scumbags? Feudalism is nothing more than private wealthholders arranging a monopoly on government offices for their families on the grounds that they provide the most to the common defense. Nothing to stop it from happening again if enough whorehouses like the Cato Institute can find a way to make it sound like we'll get a tax cut out of it.
That is human nature. Inequality becomes gross inequality. Every private property system that has ever existed either became polarized and fell to revolution, or fell to invasion, or fell to some new system of exploitation and inequality.
At least, until democracy. The crusade to emasculate democracy has no other purpose but to bring back the conditions that preceded it.
Would a military man have come up with the Prime Directive?
The fact that Kirk was always butting heads with the Prime Directive indicates that he still ultimately accepted civilian primacy in what essentially is an issue of sovereignity.
Which is why it's not surprising that the more PC-liberal New Generation series really enshrined the Prime Directive. Roddenberry was perhaps a generic Greatest Generation/Cold War liberal, but somehow his writing staff's little contrivance to make things harder for the heroes has come to appear prophetic. We DON'T know for sure what is best for alien societies.
Maybe they feel that the ballot box is pointless when Labor has already sold out to the Neocons, and the Liberal Democrats have now sold out to the Tories very cheaply, and the Tories are now plotting to dismantle national health care and no one is doing anything to stop them.
Who is on the side of these poor Britons that Standard & Poor's would allow to win an election?
If we'd never repealed Glass-Steagall, many of the financial divisions that issued bad debt due to other agendas might not have existed in the first place. There's also the matter of home equity loans, which poured trillions into the economy and logically made people far more willing to borrow more to build bigger houses, and the securitization of debt, which entirely destroyed the rational incentive of lenders to consider creditworthiness.
The crash was due to the previous bubble, thus the Kochs may have come out ahead in the entire cycle, like most rich people. That's what the worsening boom-bust cycles of your apparently preferred Gilded Age were doing, causing a growing gap between the top 1% and everyone else. The rich are always first into an asset bubble and the middle class are the last ones in and get creamed the worst by the crash. Thus the more volatile - uh, I forgot to use neoliberal-speak - the more "vibrant" the economy, the faster wealth is polarized.
The last time our forefathers stood up to the rich, capital was not mobile. Meaning a billionaire couldn't threaten to move his steel plant to Mexico, or even Alabama, to get Pennsylvania to cut benefits to the poor. It may be that the only thing that can stand up to globally-mobile capital is a global workers' movement, and we're a long way from accepting that we're in the same boat as the workers of China or South America.
However, I have a feeling that the politicians in those countries realize that they now have the leverage - multinationals want to move there to exploit cheap labor in the short term, but their governments can thus impose taxes and concessions on the carpetbaggers to invest in training for better jobs in the long term. Which means higher pay, and more taxes. Why can't our politicians see this? Are we in such an immediate crisis that all we can think to do is cut wages? Or have we lost hope that we can ever figure out what to do for a better living?
Actually, Assad Junior seems to have a lot fewer fawning fanboys here than Gaddafi, and I'd like to know why since he seems to tried a lot harder to find stopping places on his road to ruin than Muammar.
But it's hard to know how to feel about Assad's increasingly doomed regime because:
1. no one who posts here wants to do Israel any favors, given that the Greater Israel gang seems more powerful than ever.
2. few who post here want to do Saudi Arabia any favors, and it seems to be the leading puppetmaster against Assad.
Given that the remnants of the once-powerful Pan-Arab movement were the last defenders of anything remotely resembling secular progressivism in the region a year ago, it should have been hard for secular progressives to make a leap of faith to embrace the popular revolutions sweeping the Arab world.
It's different now. Said revolutions have gone far better than we had any right to demand, a real process of public engagement is underway and is mostly secular and forward-looking in nature, and in the broadest perspective the Arab uprisings are a continuation of a process of global rebellion that started in South America a decade ago against a seemingly invincible Wall Street-run neoliberal juggernaut. The two reactionary regimes that had most to gain from anything bad happening to Arabs, Israel and Saudi Arabia, look confused and paralyzed; clearly they didn't see this coming, and now they're afraid that their own populations will catch the bug. The Chinese, Russians, and yes, Washington are all scared as well.
So it can't be all bad.
So the US will do anything to hold onto its naval base in Bahrain, and Russia will do anything to hold onto its naval base in Syria. And "anything" means backing the status quo regime no matter how disgusting it is.
Seems pretty straightforward to me. We need to start arms talks between the US and Russia to close down both bases, and blow off both regimes. The Saudis will have to take their chances in trying to control Bahrain and Syria at the same time; I'm sure Syrians are very aware there are Saudi occupation troops in Bahrain.
A section from that article immediately before your 2nd excerpt is also significant:
"But the response of the business sector has been weak. This is not because the business sector is still in a bad shape; it is actually doing quite well.
In 2009, the unit product labor cost in the US' manufacturing sector dropped 17.2 percent, and in 2010 it fell by a further 3.9 percent. That means US companies are producing more goods using less labor. And this is the real secret behind the jobless growth."
This is the dirty secret undermining all economic debate in the US. Free-market fanatics refuse to accept that wage-cutting can create a permanent downward spiral, but they know it looks bad so they also refuse to admit that it's been underway for the last 30 years. This leaves uneducated Americans with a sort of default faith in classical economics, which claims that a good year of starving the poor will cause markets to clear and the resumption of virtuous growth. They are morally uncomfortable with that, but as long as their bosses form a solid wall of classical apologists, they accept that somehow things will work out.
In fact, the bosses are draining us in every way possible before abandoning America for greener suckers... uh, pastures.
But that will never happen, because the Tea Party is fighting for a tribal society that was dismantled by the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, the New Deal, and the World Wars. In other words, for a monopoly of power for "our kind". They will always fight harder than those who want to share power. The only times American progressives beat tribalists is when the capitalists are more afraid of the consequences of a right-wing victory, and don't throw all their weight behind it.
Which Constitution, sir? Many of them reject the Civil War as illegitimate federal tyranny, including Ron Paul. If you'd been paying attention a few years ago, many right-wing extremists who later resurfaced in the Tea Party were using the phrase "14th Amendment Citizen". In other words, black people were improperly given the right to vote by the Feds and state legislatures should have the right to take it away. Like many extremist ideas in the last 30 years, the repeal of the 14th Amendment is being mainstreamed by a sophisticated propaganda machine.
Back in the '90s, the talk in the hardcore gun magazines was that America was a "republic", not a "democracy". To translate this code word, you must acknowledge (a) that broad swathes of the GOP talk loosely about returning everything to the 1789 interpretation of the Constitution, and (b) that in 1789 you couldn't vote unless you were a property owner. Hint, hint.
The right of poor whites to vote was won by the Jacksonian democracy movement, along with the right to directly vote for US senators. The latter has already been attacked by a member of the US House. I expect that you will soon see the right-wing propaganda machine ramp up its smears not just on Lincoln, but on Jackson, and on all their actions to expand the franchise beyond white Christian landlords.
Since the media pointedly refuses to ask right-wing darlings when secession might be justified, you have no evidence that they intend to tolerate a white-minority democracy. But if you are in denial about the relationship between the militia right of the '90s and the Tea Party, there's nothing I can say.
I recall when a high-handed pinko cripple took a country broken by its capitalist oligarchy and made it into the world's greatest power. 4-term presidency, 94% top tax brackets, open statements of class warfare, labor unions allowed to win, federally-run war factories, all built on an old base of corrupt big-city ethnic political machines and a very corrupt deal with Southern reactionaries. My America. The America that existed before that, I would have been building bombs and waving red flags in, and I'll do it in the future if it's necessary. I bet a lot of Turks felt the same way before the AKP.
Allah bless the Turks, and God bless all the leftists who have saved Latin America from the Shock Doctrine from Chavez to Lula - two-fisted populism is the only force that seems powerful enough to keep down what Lincoln called "the money power". Get too liberal-squeamish about methods and you will end up under the thumb of fascist death squads in an instant.
Of the four big deadbeat European nations, Ireland, Greece and Spain are on the low end of the list, and Italy the exception is controlled by a far-right media baron who allied with the fascist tradition of northern Italy. They bought into the US-pimped idea of pandering to rich people and bankers, Ireland by cutting taxes to steal rich sociopaths from more advanced countries, Spain by selling vacation houses to Brits for way too much money. They were part of what Donald Rumsfeld called the "New Europe", and two were big backers of the invasion of Iraq. So a certain American stench to their pro-business ideology is no surprise.
As for S. Korea, it has national health insurance, more advanced Internet infrastructure and dirt-cheap broadband, but then its whole chaebol oligopoly was started with US military aid money, wasn't it? While Chile is still recovering from the Pinochet/Milton Friedman agenda, with, I understand, its poorest kids still shut out of privatized schools handed over to right-wing Catholicism. In other words, they're still recovering from what the US is becoming. Turkey is the champion of the low-tax group, but the AKP is populist and increasingly in opposition to US regional domination, so hardly a friend of globalization.
Mexico and the US, all I can say is, H. Ross Perot was right about NAFTA in the absence of Canada's standards of civilization.
What makes America dangerously different than all these other places is that its wages have been flat or negative for the last 30 years. So we sense that we've been cheated in the pocketbook, and we look to slash the first thing we have the power to slash by demanding tax cuts to make up the difference, except that once the lobbyists of the rich are done we've been screwed again. So we run ever harder chasing that lost fortune and shooting at whomever we blame this instant for the loss. And our wages fall still further, as the rich planned from the start, as they lead lynch mobs to destroy minimum wage laws, child labor laws, progressive education, the abolition of debtors' prisons and prison labor, and perhaps even the abolition of indentured servitude and inheritability of debts?
And thus the entire machinery of progressive civilization, still moving forward in these other countries, lurches into reverse in America, pursuing a Frankenstein composite of an ideal past all the way into Somalia-hood.
I remember 20 years ago when cap & trade was a libertarian proposal meant to counter the heresy that markets cause problems that they can't solve. Looks now like these guys used it as a Trojan horse, leaving it on the mainstream liberal doorstep so that liberals would get the blame when it failed, unleashing that libertarian horde to say that this proves the environment isn't worth the hassle of any changes to our system whatsoever.
He had a network of communicants in northern European extremist political groups, and a flow of inspiration from Daniel Pipes and other Americans who share your bigoted paranoia. They may or may not agree with his means, but his ends were no different than theirs or yours. Just like the blood of the Holocaust properly ended up on the hands of all those who spread anti-Semitic hatred before the War and discredited their claims of a Jewish immigrant threat.
And since God is a collective delusion, religion is whatever the followers choose to believe, which is the reason we Christians don't still burn witches ("Suffer not a witch to live") and don't still ban the lending of money for interest, the basis for the West's entire global capitalist hegemony.
I could spend pages, and perhaps I will, detailing all the mass murders committed by Christians, and you will sit there saying it's different because Jesus didn't say so. You know better than that. If people believe in the Pope, and he calls for Christians to invade other countries or stand with Mussolini against Communism, that's on Christianity even if that's not all Christianity is. If the fastest-growing segment of modern Protestantism is the psychotically selfish and bloodthirsty New Apostolic Reformation, which claims everyone who disagrees with it on any subject is under demonic influence, and applauds itself in its promo videos for causing Mother Teresa's death, that is a reflection of what American Christians are searching for in the marketplace of ideas.
And if the socialist pacifist who came closest in our lifetime to representing what Jesus really meant got gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis by a redneck Christian, then what Jesus and Mohammad really meant is dead, and our personal prejudices and self-justifications are all that are alive in religion.
Juan isn't, but I am.
The GOP is carrying out the same anti-public ideology that its fellow capitalist stooges at the IMF and World Bank carried out as detailed in Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine"; the intentional collapsing of societies to justify handing everything over to the rich.
Some years ago Pakistan's military regime was under pressure from the international finance gang to cut government spending. They could have cut the military, but of course they didn't. They cut back on public schools. But by an amazing coincidence, the regime's allies from the war in Afghanistan, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, had armies of Wahhabi missionaries funded by noblemen, ready to fill the gap. The madrassa generation has had an impact in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the mess may never be cleaned up.
So when right-wingers here talk about slowly strangling public schools, I have to suspect that they have a replacement in mind, and so do you.
Gee Mark, why is America the only country in the First World that can't get public schools to work? Unless you are claiming that all those Germans, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Japanese, Koreans, et al are also ignorant since they all went to public schools.
In fact, your agenda is made clear when you claim public schools' inception was in the early 1900s. Implying that America was better off before that, when robber barons and plantation owners ruled the land unchallenged by liberals. But in fact public schools are much older than that. They won their key victories in the early 1800s, where they were part and parcel of the American industrial revolution in Massachusetts and New York. It was, as usual, the slaveocratic South that viewed them as a threat. Not surprisingly, the South paid dearly for its technological backwardness in the subsequent war and reconstruction. Even the robber barons of the North did not have the arrogance to believe that they should privatize the school system - they viewed it as an investment in growth. Why has ignorance grown so greatly among capitalists that they now think America can rule the world with a population indoctrinated cheaply in Christian Right madrassas to believe the Earth is only 6000 years old, evolution doesn't occur, and the solution to every problem is Guns, Guts and God?
Zbigniew Brzezinski brought up a depressing insight in a conversation at "Morning Joe" with, among others, Pat Buchanan. He said that when America was a rising power, it attracted immigrants who had a reasonable chance to become part of its middle class. But now that America's wealth is so polarized, it draws two kinds of immigrants; elite technicians who expect to get into America's power caste, and poor people so desperate that they come here even though they don't expect to ever get out of the lower class. This simply reinforces American wealth polarization further.
So circumstances do change the nature of immigration.
Abortion clinic bombers. Case closed.
This gives me a nostalgic flashback to the heyday of the American militia movement, when in each state a few gun nuts would start stashing ammo and mimic military training. Then the networking began and the little bombs started going off.
Of course once McVeigh shone a very bright light on the enterprise, things kind of went into the cracks, the leaders forging ties with the Religious Right that the media ignored, waiting for the next crisis in white ocnfidence to move deeper into America's power structure and pick up those all-important corporate sponsorship bucks.
Wonder where Breivik's network is in this process, and whom their sponsors will be.
It is worth it to examine a tactically-conniving, organization-obsessed xenophobe who is continually trying to contact and rally his ideological comrades. I mean, big-government bashing considered nutty coming out of the mouths of Tim McVeigh and the Michigan and Idaho militias in 1995 is now pushed by the US corporate media as mainstream patriotism. Clearly, if Breivik's views are seen by Europe's owners as being potentially profitable, they will get mainstreamed.
Luckily, Europe's owners don't seem anything as shortsighted or maniacally greedy as their Wall Street kin, except in the City of London, so Europe will probably have a better fate than America. In fact, I think our duty to civilization is to let Europeans know how crazy and ignorant growing numbers of "good Americans" are so that they can get their countries out of NATO, jettison sick ideologies that we've recently infected them with, and form a stronger European Union that can veto the stinginess of the German bankers and build a 2nd democratic superpower to shame the 1st back to sanity.
It's either that or gamble on the long shot that China can save mankind, see what I mean?
Or stay tuned to talk2action.org, which surprised me by showing that the unfamiliar doctrines professed by Breivik at his old fave webpage do indeed have US ties:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/7/23/8287/32273/Front_Page/Updated_Norway_Shooting_Suspect_is_Islamophobe_Using_Antisemitic_quot_Cultural_Marxism_quot_Model
The key is "Cultural Marxism", which Breivik mentions about once every other sentence. I think Mr. Berlet overdoes the religious overtones; guys like Paul Weyrich were secular extremists, meaning Kultur on top of religion, and that fits Breivik's remarks about being a conservative Protestant yet never prescribing theocracy or Old Testament law elsewhere in his rants. The man worships Western Culture as his shield against being called a racist or fascist, and he killed those poor kids for Socialism's role in enabling Moslems to become citizens and thus dilute the white majority... uh, "cultural conservative" majority.
Here's where a lot of the news stories you're seeing got their Breivik quotes:
http://translate.google.com/translate?client=firefox-a&hl=en&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&rurl=translate.google.com&twu=1&u=http://www.document.no/anders-behring-breivik/
I want to get this page seen, because it shows Breivik is smart, organized, and more lucid than the average American right-wing nut, meaning Michelle Bachmann. I think it's fascinating to watch right-wingers from a different society wrestle with rationalizations for unequal citizenship and ethnic cleansing. My takeaway: because he doesn't engage in the intellectual copout of using honkie Jehovah to justify all crimes economic, social and scientific, he actually has to articulate what he wants as a social model far more clearly than our Tea Partiers.
It's all culture with him, but it's rigged culture, with the standard of conformity set so ridiculously high that no first-generation immigrant could possibly meet it unless he was a self-hating sociopath like Dinesh DeSouza. (There, I said it.) America's senile neo-Confederates conflate God, guns, patriotism and capitalism in a giant ideological sphaghetti designed to obscure the only outcome that would really make them happy; living like the Ewell family in "To Kill A Mockingbird" with the right to beat up, frame and lynch other kinds of people whenever they need to feel better about themselves. Whereas Breivik simply wants other kinds of people to cease to exist around him. A cultural conservative who is willing to not keep the mud races around to dig all his ditches and build all his homes and fix all his highways and pay into his Social Security and Medicare and provide much of his entertainment is a lot more intellectually honest than what we have in this country.
Consider Thomas Jefferson, in his "Notes on the Commonwealth of Virginia", saying that (1) slavery must be abolished, and (2) the freed slaves must be expelled from Virginia on pain of death because whites would never act as his model republic required as long as there was a cultural conflict. Consider that the Texas school textbook commission deleted Jefferson as a significant 18th Century philosopher recently because he was TOO LIBERAL for them. That's the difference between Breivik and the kinds of maniancs getting elected to office in America now. Which is why ours don't have to go out and murder Socialist children their own damn selves.
From what little I've read of him so far, Mr. Breivik doesn't even seem to be as extreme a right-winger as many men one has to work alongside here in Houston. You know, the ones who routinely talk about murdering all the Arabs or all the fags. It will probably come out that his Christianity was mostly a worship of establishment white culture as it existed before Hitler discredited it throughout Europe, which means he is a moderately conservative Protestant by Texas standards.
But what makes him different is that he acted on his own, while the far more vicious bastards here in America seem to have been placated by the knowledge that they now have a political party that will do their dirty work for them, in turn protected by the corporate media. Why carry out one's murderous fantasies when one knows that his tax-supported military, police and prison guards regularly mete out "racial justice" at home and abroad? In fact, why not join one of those organizations and get the chance to be paid far better than modern capitalism pays productive workers, for gunning down towelheads and beating non-white convicts and protecting the interests of the elite more than those of the masses? Or wrap oneself in the flag by demanding that all tax dollars be routed to those organizations at the expense of schools, Social Security and hunger programs? Mr. Breivik would have been so much happier as an American.
I guess if the GOP hadn't done so well in 2010 things would have gotten more interesting here. But there is still the matter of the geographical origin of the concepts and rationalizations that impelled him to violence. Stay tuned to the non-US media.
Ever heard of the Michigan Militia? They're the Legislature now.
What was the Right at that time?
Feudal landlords who held the population in debt bondage.
Which in fact is the bondage in which most humans have lived since the invention of private landowning several thousand years ago. We called it sharecropping here, and many of us were alive when it still existed. It's still the way of life for millions of peasants around the world.
How many humans have been starved, murdered, or died unneccessarily of disease because of this evil system that many conservatives consider the "good old days"? How many women and girls raped by their lords? How many children sold into slavery to pay off debts, as Edgar Snow described in 1930s China? From the Irish famine deliberately ignored by British authorities, to the worsening lives of third-world farmers under IMF neoliberalism today? Hundreds of millions? Billions?
Since Gandhi called poverty "the worst form of violence", I hope you're leaving a space for that on your scorecard.
And yes, I personally think we have a natural right to use violence against such a system, even if we risk putting a worse system in place. If our forebears were cowed by that risk, the bad guys would have won forever.
What about the successful terrorist campaign by the anti-abortion movement to kill, injure and harass doctors until it is nearly impossible to get an abortion in some states despite it being legal? The media refuses to admit that the terrorists have won, because they're Christian terrorists. And the ones who commit the violence get wink-wink-nudge-nudge support from the ones who spit on women going to clinics, who in turn get open support from the Palins and Bachmanns and Tea Party, who now run the GOP. So there are tens of millions of Christians who pretend that their dollars and their organizations might be helping shield and legally defend the killers. We are certainly talking about "normal" Christians by now. And since this Christianity has gained so much political power and voter strength in the last 30 years, it is stained by all the other right-wing criminals that it has helped put in office, and we have a right to regard it as a threat to our very lives.
They think the ends justify the means. That's not unusual in religious thought. But it means there is no real barrier preventing the monstrous ideas of an R. J. Rushdoony from becoming the platform for the entire conservative movement.
In fact, it is not the responsibility of the US Border Patrol to shoot every Mexican who gets through the fence. Its job is to apprehend them. The fact that America has become so barbaric that we aren't clear on the legal distinction is why it's possible for racist militias to prowl around the desert looking for children to shoot. These bastards are leading this country to hell just as the settler movement is doing to Israel.
In fact, James, you've pinpointed the cosmic problem with oil states: the oil reservoirs, refineries and pipelines are of greater value than the entire human population, regardless of the type of government. That defines how tyrants rule, hand out rewards to supporters, import loyal labor, and buy weapons to make rebellion nearly impossible. Whether the oil is controlled by tyrants, foreign corporations, or tribal militias, that becomes the sovereign institution.
Of course, much the same can be said of Afghanistan's poppies or Colombia's coca crop. Single-crop economies devalue citizens and make them expendable.
The problem is, what if Syrians have to choose between a regime propped up by Russia and a regime propped up by Saudi Arabia, which is a lot stronger there than in, say, Libya? Of course America will choose the latter; the Saudis have been propping us up with massive petrodollar investments since Henry Kissinger made clear to the Saudis in '73 what our military could do to them. The Saudis let that debt build up until they now have the financial power to do the same to us unless we support their growing sphere of influence.
Key is, the extent of collusion between Fox and any aspect of the GOP to manipulate elections, from the DeLay Congress to the Bush war apparatus to the Tea Party. But there's a lot of uninvestigated ground there already (Jack Abramoff and other DeLay associates, for instance). Could there really be a smoking-gun memo with the master plan for a one-party, one-network state?
Well, if it was profitable to do such awful things, then it's no surprise others were doing it. If markets are as rational as Murdoch's fans claim, then the way to correct the behavior is to make it unprofitable for both the firms and their directors. Prison is a very unprofitable place for a billionaire to be.
We might compare this to the Chartist movement in Britain, in which huge protests went on for decades in the early 19th century just to accomplish the purpose of expanding the right to vote from 1% of the male population to 3%. However, that small early success rolled on after the Chartists, such that by the end of that century 90% of males could vote, and not many years later women gained the vote - thus putting British democratic participation ahead of the Jim Crow USA.
Remember, that was in what was supposed to be the wealthiest, most powerful and advanced country in the world.
Sure, but multiparty systems have a weakness too: in Canada now, as in Britain under Thatcher, and Italy under Berluscogni, the Right can rule without a majority because it is more unified than the parties of the Left. We have yet to see about France. Even proportional representation doesn't solve this because eventually a parliamentary majority must be formed and the Right can hold the country hostage until someone else caves in.
But there seems to be a spreading conspiracy among minority conservative regimes to attack the public good, and in the case of American insurance conglomerates licking their chops at dismantling public health in Canada and the UK, I wouldn't be surprised if it's all being plotted from Wall Street.
Basically, the left doesn't have a Wall Street to hold its factions together, anywhere on Earth.
So why were corporations hiring Pinkerton mercenaries to murder workers who were organizing unions 100 years ago?
In fact, not once do you explain how the workers are actually supposed to fight back once they have no unions, no antitrust laws, and no government institutions to regulate finance. The only thing left is revolution. Commie much?
And explain to me what the hell Professor Cole's selfish interest is?
The Koch Brothers aren't the only ones there with fishy pasts. Many men associated a few years ago with extremist militias, armed anti-immigrant groups, and religious tyranny very quickly reinvented themselves as Tea Party leaders, and the media refuses to hold them accountable for their pasts or the implications of the beliefs they once honestly embraced in small circles. Michelle Bachmann has a long history of religious extremism, as Matt Taibbi pointed out in his Rolling Stone article, but now her face is plastered all over the airwaves as a secular figure.
Question is, in whose interest is it that these bastards get to reinvent themselves now that they are given the chance to expose themselves to millions of apolitical citizens who know nothing about those past movements and their sickening goals?
As for the government not representing them, why did so many of those inviduals not feel that way back when everyone in the government was white, Christian, and ostensibly heterosexual? If this is a movement about class interests, it would not be possible for the Kochs to turn it into a campaign for infinite tax cuts for the rich. If this is a movement about re-establishing the white monopoly on all forms of power, then it makes some sort of sense to destroy all barriers against the rich, since the rich are nearly 100% white and from a tribal perspective are the elders who are expected by the tribal mentality to lead their poorer "brothers" to conquest and prosperity as they did in ages past.
And no, it's no good for them to drag out the black Tea Party guy to prove they have a few black friends; the point of the 14th Amendment (which they want to repeal) is that minorities should have the right to vote even if their history has given them very different views than white conservatives; demanding that they must act and think exactly like "good" Americans to deserve to vote means that they have no effect whatsoever on the outcome of elections, since they'd vote exactly the same way as those already voting. Why would anyone want to restore to state legislatures the power to strip citizens of the right to vote when they claim to want to return government to the "people"? No point unless they want to greatly narrow the definition of "people" so as to change election outcomes.
Professor Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, Virginia Military Institute, was pretty good. So was Professor Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Bowdoin College, who held the line at Gettysburg. I would argue that modern generals are the ones who lack the intellectual breadth to understand the social and economic blowback from the wars they engage in, because they don't understand civilians.
Question is, if the rebels are now exporting oil, establishing financial credit and capturing heavy weapons, does this change the nature of the war on any of its fronts? Even a harangue from Gadafi will not make a tank run without fuel, so the issue of how he keeps getting fuel determines whether he can ever go back on the offensive. If not, the tanks can still defend his cities but his cause has no point because he cannot reunify the country on his terms.
America has two longstanding castes of poor people, masked by other groups of immigrants passing through poverty. The poor on average do vote more liberal, but low turnout has negated that. A poor person who doesn't show up on voting day has in effect ratified tax cuts for the rich.
But the struggle between those two castes is the great tragedy of American history, and perhaps its evil strength: by very artificial means placing Scots-Irish indentured servants over incoming African slaves, the colonial oligarchy set them at each other's throats (very unequally, of course) so that America could never have a unified working class. Yankee elites played immigrants the same way but never for as long or as murderously; the question is whether those elites looked South for inspiration.
Consider the thought problem of what America would look like if slaves had never been brought in. We'd have an all-white workforce just like France or Britain or any of the countries that now have strong unions and welfare benefits. Racism has made America uniquely lacking in class consciousness in all the advanced world.
Yet a few cynics in dark corners might point out that the excess profits thus extracted from our divided workers provided the capital that made America an industrial titan by 1920 (though it also created the financial imbalances that brought that titan to its knees 10 years later). So is this what our current masters are shooting for? To make America "competitive" by setting whites, blacks and Latinos at each others' throats while their bosses are free to drive down their wages and reward investors? If so, the process is slowly developing all the toxic symptoms of old-style boom & bust capitalism.
This very question has made me propose the 40-Year-Rule. It seems that a lot of dictators wear out their welcome after 40 years or more: the Warsaw Pact regimes, the apartheid regime in South Africa, Gadafi, Sadat/Mubarak, and now maybe the Assads.
But you see the problem this poses in America? We don't think we've been under an oligarchy for the last 30 years, we think we've been a normal functioning democracy with 230 years of perfect continuity. Even as most of us have refused to vote, or learn anything about politics other than self-serving dogmas. Democracy is someone else's fault, and if it goes bad, it is the leading candidate to take the blame, meaning that fascism is warming up in the batter's circle, all too happy to get its shot at 40 years of kleptocracy and genocide.
The problem is the crusader mentality of Americans. Conservative Americans are now indoctrinated that socialized medicine, gay marriage, tolerance of Moslems, decent unemployment benefits et al are proof of the greatest evil, comparable to Hitler and Stalin and thus a prelude to aggression against America. So no matter how much Ron Paul yammers about how friendly America will be with the rest of the world once we do shut down the empire, what will libertarians say when the rest of the world rejects his restoration of 19th century laissez faire and states' rights in horror, kicks out our imperialistic corporations, stops propping up our dollar, and even starts boycotting us when we actively reject global warming?
The libertarians will stand there slack-jawed, and the Christian fascists, whom most of the public can't distinguish from libertarians because the mass media wraps them in the same flag of unimpeachable white patriotism, will rush in and scream that the Commies are coming and that America must shut off all contact with the evil outside world, and take away all rights from those who might be contaminated by alien influences.
I mean, this has all happened before. But this time, it means that when everything gets privatized, only American businessmen will be allowed to bid and that's worth a vast amount of campaign funds from them. Consider what will happen when public schools are dismantled to root out leftist influences - a half trillion dollars in your tax $ will go as vouchers to whatever groups are fanatical and xenophobic enough to pass muster. By the time that the statistics have been gathered to prove that such a miseducation completely fails to produce a workforce competitive with the outside world, the leaders will have solved the problem by escalating crusades against any country whose success might discredit their ideology, and no one will be left who can understand that simultaneous war with Europe, Russia, China, Latin America and the Middle East is insanity.
I mean, do you really think our capitalist class would veto such a train wreck as long as they can cash out at the height of the final bubble?
Presumably the difference is that the sheer one-sidedness and ruthlessness of the operations against Panama and Grenada guaranteed that they'd end quickly enough to avoid anyone bringing up the War Powers Act. Putting a clock on war-making powers may not make them less violent, but in fact might encourage the use of ground forces to ensure a quick, mediagenic kill.
And once the Republicans take the White House back, in 2012 or 2016, the crusade against Russia will resume, with China thrown in for the sake of moral absolutism. The Tea Party cannot tolerate an outside world that rejects feudalist, white supremacist robber-baron capitalism, and our economy can't survive without the exploitation of the outside world. Then what will all us good anti-war folks do?
I'm not sure it was as simple as that in Latin America. I saw a chart of the trade blocs that arose when world trade collapsed during the Great Depression, and I was surprised to find that large parts of South America were shown as being part of the Sterling bloc, not the dollar bloc.
It would appear that the British let us have our pretense of the Monroe Doctrine, while its aging corporations managed to cling to power over the Latin oligarchs until WW2 finished off British power in every way. Argentina, you know, had the 5th highest per capita income in the world in 1900, and was part of the British sphere. Britain also supplied the battleships bought by Brazil, Argentina and Chile in their pre-WW1 arms race. The US was dominant in much poorer, more atomized Central America.
And yet, everybody in America to the right of Gates loudly proclaims that the UN is an evil Communist conspiracy that usurps our Constitution.
Remember, when the UN was founded, the only independent countries that existed that could be members were in Europe, the Americas, and a few small states like Thailand and Ethiopia. Otherwise, white as a Klan rally. Most of those countries were under US or Soviet domination and many desperately needed reconstruction aid. So we pretty much knew how the votes would come out.
It appears that when the colonial empires dissolved, whitey suddenly found himself outvoted, and the terms of UN power instantly looked very different. No more talk about world government.
Funny you should mention the Bonus March. Not long after that, a cabal of right-wing tycoons led by a member of the DuPont clan organized a conspiracy that sounds strikingly modern: the creation of an Astroturf crypto-fascist militia from the unemployed veterans that would outnumber the Regular Army of 1933 (80,000), then use it to intimidate Roosevelt into abandoning the New Deal.
Luckily, FDR fought back, after Gen. Smedley Butler informed him that he'd been approached by these bastards and what their plans were.
In practice, governments have the right to put down uprisings, and even massacre civilians. They do it all the time. What is striking in Libya is that Gadafi seems to have undertaken the physical destruction of most of its cities, which gets into a much deeper level of deprivation from which recovery may not be possible. Cities are civilization.
This is a special problem of oil countries, because nowhere else in the world is the population so much less valuable than the riches underneath their feet. Governments normally are financed by the population. But at the extreme level of oil to population that Libya has, rulers have no logical reason not to completely eliminate a rebellious citizenry and replace it with more cooperative immigrants. The oil is all that is necessary to rule. This is not true for Syria, and while it is true in Bahrain, the fact that everyone lives in the capital makes it impractical for its Saudi occupiers to carry out extermination. However, there are other countries in the region that might take heed of what Gadafi is and is not able to get away with.
The reality is, where have sanctions ever actually been decisive in overthrowing a government? They obviously failed against Saddam Hussein. The US in many regions can impose unilateral sanctions on countries that cause them great harm, but Hanoi and Havana still stand. The apartheid regime in South Africa gave in, but it was facing the real possibility of a mass Marxist uprising by the black majority.
It goes all the way to the sactions against Japan for its imperial rampage in 1940-41. The White House was restrained by the military's fear (shared by Britain) that serious sanctions would be viewed by Japan's fascists as an existential threat justifying an attack that neither the US or UK could afford. But the half-hearted sanctions were viewed by the fascists as an existential threat anyway.
Until the antiwar movement accepts that our current concept of sanctions is almost completely useless and needs to be replaced, we've got no credibility telling the public that there are alternatives to war.
The bigger the risks you take, the shorter your time horizon gets. To the point where you'll say any lie just to look like a winner for the next five minutes.
Problem is, the sort of "like-minded" people who would use guns at this moment are the sort who want to kill all the queers, enslave all the immigrants, and impose religious law. The ones who have the most experience at using and justifying violence are mostly the ones who back the bad causes that have plagued America since its beginnings. The ones who are driven to anger by the Medievalization of America can't compete. And if they did the media would denounce them as terrorists, not those other guys.
The difference is, the Bush administration was packed all the way to the top with people who had conspired specifically to attack Iraq for years. Cheney was the founder of the Project for a New American Century, which openly called for wars on Iraq and Iran for the domination of the Persian Gulf region and thus the world economy. Every act of that bastard for 10 years was in preparation for the occupation of Iraq, down to his Halliburton chairmanship.
Libya, on the other hand, was a complete suprise to all the power brokers, and their erratic and contradictory responses show that they hadn't really thought about what they would do. After all, Libya was already moving into the Western camp and making all the deals we wanted. If we cut off China from Libyan oil, you know what China does? It opens up a vault with 3 trillion dollars of foreign exchange in it, and bids up the price of oil everywhere on Earth. Which puts NATO politicians in the same bind as if we'd let Gadafi win by methods that would have legally required us to put sanctions on his oil. All the options in this crisis led to more expensive oil, meaning the danger of another global economic crash, which is not in the longer-term interest of the oil companies.
Along the lines you're discussing, maybe the way out of the global economic crisis is labor-intensive energy. Meaning that instead of a permanent drain of cash to fossil fuel exporters, each country swings the money to building renewables at home, which will require many employees for maintenance even after construction is over.
We've been inculcated with the capitalists' hatred of labor-intensive, versus capital-intensive, big projects to the point where we're now afraid to try big initiatives like dams. But now we're looking at many small labor-intensive projects that spread risk.
Trick is, where are you preparing to fight the war - on your own soil, like Sweden and Switzerland do, or on the soil of a few clearly-defined vital interests, as Great Powers have always done, or every damn place on the planet not inhabited by penguins, like Superpowers do?
That has gigantic long-term effects not just on your budget, but on your beliefs about the sovereign rights of other peoples versus your own.
Thanks for mentioning Mancur Olson, a wise man.
You'd think the easiest way to get the US out of NATO is to jump up and down pointing at our Social Democratic allies and screaming "COMMIES! COMMIES!!"
After all, they all have socialized medicine, which Reagan assured us back in 1966 was the beginning of tyranny. They must all be deep into tyranny by now. We should go to Palin rallies and yell for America to pull out of this NATO den of pinko vipers and begin a long, unwinnable Cold War against every country that has gay rights, redistributive taxation, strong unions, enforced pollution laws, etc, etc.
Yet no one on the Right sees a contradiction here. Which led me to a terrifying thought: They don't want us in NATO to protect socialist Europeans. They want us there to occupy Europe and keep Europeans from spreading their Bolshevik evil by usurping their sovereign right to an independent foreign and military policy.
Everybody, run this by your right-wing friends and see if they expose their true feelings.
We can't refuse to consider the possibility that America is being reduced to 3rd World status on purpose; because some soulless accountant out there figured that the marginal short-term gains to the existing elites would be greater if America were a giant El Salvador instead of a giant Sweden. The scary part of this is that many poor, conservative Americans seem to agree that holding a gun or a whip on the evil, subhuman ni**er world is an honorable profession whether in foreign occupations or domestic prison farms, and that this therefore is the only proper function of government. It was literally the mentality of Europe until it blew itself up enough times to outgrow it.
I hope others choose to have a serious discussion in this thread about European social democracy and the problem with NATO, instead of pi**ing all over Germany for still being friends with the US or pi**ing all over Obama for still being an imperialist. The problem here is that power has corrupted us, as it's corrupted everyone before. When the title of top gun passed from one European empire to another, those societies had much the same brain-dead right-wing dogma as America does now. Once you believe that imperial success is the proof that your "traditional" and "patriotic" culture is infallible, commissioned by God, and immutable, any sign of weakening will justify retreating back into a mythical past when the empire was secure.
Until we make the case to the American people that we can safely retrench from a Superpower to a Great Power, their wounded pride and insecurity will make them cling, as someone once said, to guns and religion. Thus we will suffer the protracted misery of Spain instead of the decent post-imperial civilization of Sweden, both at one time the terrors of Europe.
We should note that Germany also did not allow its capitalists to exterminate its industrial sector, and thus its unions. German corporations are required to have labor representatives on their boards. Germany has even required its soccer league to transition to Packer-style fan-owned teams, and no one's complaining since it keeps away the American entre-pirates who bankrupted Manchester United.
In fact the only thing in Germany that looks right-wing by US standards is its central bank, which is making it impossible for southern Europeans to dig their way out of their crisis. But a very liberal social policy, free health care, 35-hour work weeks with generous time off, high-tech factories producing very expensive goods that sell overseas, and a bank that represents real conservatism instead of Prayer-Of-Jabez greed fantasies seems to have overcome the massive financial burden caused by the fall of East Germany 20 years ago. It's as if Germany has prospered despite annexing a Rust Belt at the very moment that America has tried to starve its Rust Belt out of existence (and in Michigan, even legislated the termination of democratically elected city governments on fiscal grounds more likely to apply to towns with large black populations, a new twist on Jim Crow).
Can a liberal support ethnic cleansing?
That gets us to the heart of the tragedy of what Israel has done to the liberal spirit of Jewish America over the last 60 years.
Wow, everyone here seems to be cheering for Gadafi today. Not a single comment on the substance of the accusations against him.
Wow, Fuster, were you this all-fired diligent when Israel, and for that matter South Africa and Pakistan, were secretly working on nuclear weapons?
But then, all three countries were right-wing anti-Communist states, so we Americans knew they'd only use the bombs to slaughter the right people. Or as our racist cover story goes, only anti-American countries would launch nuclear first strikes on crowded cities.
Which is why they suffered no consequences. And why no one dares imply that Israel is on an ideological road to hype itself into a nuclear first strike on Iran. Where's the evidence of that? Who can tell when no government dares to even admit that Israeli nukes exist?
Humans are hypocritical monsters.
And humans in power always "interpret" their God's commands differently than humans out of power.
Thus the appearance of Israel has led to a change in the practical values of Judaism, the appearance of Saudi Arabia has led to a change in Sunnism, the Iranian revolution has led to a change in Shiism, and the unification of the former conservative factions of America's two political parties into a single Southern-led reactionary alliance has led to a change in American Christianity, which is now almost a unique religion of national self-worship.
"most folks don’t actually care about this stuff because they come home from a long day of hard work at ANY wage and they need entertainment to get them through the craziness of their daily grind..."
And yet, 80 years ago many of our forefathers were working longer hours under much worse conditions, and they spent their "leisure" time organizing unions and Socialist, Communist and Anarchist political parties. They were better informed about economics and world affairs than we are now, despite having to make an effort to find dissident news sources. They even had the guts to go out on strike and give up what little they were already earning.
So how was this all sabotaged? Who is to blame? And what condtions would it take to change people's values (since it seems the problem is that fundamental) to get the old radical outrage back? If we have to continue to regress to 60-hour weeks and starvation wages and Pinkertons shooting strikers, will even that get us angry again, or is something else missing in modern America? Like our souls?
I don't think we can automatically assume that young Americans are the bad guys in this self-lobotomization process. The problem is, America is run by white people, whose numbers are stagnant and aging while the young are increasingly non-white. For our corporate rulers, the young are a threat, and the old are a weapon to beat them down into silence and apathy. Why? The rich have already made clear they intend to keep America going by running wages down to Asian levels, and the old whites are being promised that their own govt handouts will be preserved in the present by screwing future, mostly non-white recipients.
Thus the actual opinions of young Americans are being ignored. A couple of years ago a survey showed the most liberal group of 18-year-olds seen in decades. Attitudes about gay rights are radically different among the young. Young whites are far less fearful of living in a multicultural society, which I think is why their elders hate them so much.
But most of all, young Latinos are being stuck with the role of the future proletariat, under working conditions that keep moving backwards, and some of them are trying to organize their workplaces. That is what the American Left has been missing all these awful decades - a real class struggle. It took from the end of the Civil War until 1932 for, mostly, immigrants to organize American labor into a force that could revolutionize society. We are now starting from scratch.
I think this will continue, because Latin America is deep into its own people's revolution, like the one that just began in the Arab world 4 months ago. You rightly decry the Anglo corporate media, but Spanish-speaking people have plenty of media from Central and South America in their lives, and how could they not be affected by the successful mass movements in country after country? The radical wave is now moving up through Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the discontent is ramping up in Mexico with Sicilia's movement to end the drug war. The Latino population does not exist entirely in the American bubble, simply because of language and the fact that they have to work actually making and building things. They have a foot in that outside world you so eloquently describe.
This is the price the Right must pay for their evil plan to take America back to the 19th Century - streets filled with hordes of workers waving red flags.
In fact, we don't know what the repair record of an electric car will be like once we get past the teething stage, but there's reason to believe that it has a lot fewer things that can go wrong - besides the fact that gas-engined cars pollute more as they get older. You're getting rid of transmissions (often), catalytic converters, radiators, and much of the lubrication system. And due to the use of regenerative braking, the regular brakes will last longer.
So what about a car that lasts 30 years? Doesn't that reduce manufacturing pollution? What if the car used zinc-air batteries, which have little environmental impact? What if the need to squeeze maximum range out of the batteries kept the cars smaller?
Did you know that Nissan is already working on ways to re-purpose the Leaf's battery pack after it has to be replaced after 100,000 miles - when it will still have 80% of its original capacity? Consider the need for less capacious batteries for home solar and wind installations.
Actually, I think the Israelis for the last century have been intentionally following the American logic: take the land, remove the inhabitants, create a Western-looking economy, and the Eurocentric world will call it "progress".
Failing that, there's always the backup defense: If we can just steal the land and hold onto it until we die and our children take over, then they can claim they are innocent of theft and that they would be victims if the natives got their land back. We Americans so overwhelmed the Indians with immigration and birthrate that we never had to go to the backup plan. Israel, on the other hand...
Plenty of old, affluent societies have falling populations. But according to the "laws" of economics, this is Bad because children force parents to spend more and work harder, and then enter the workforce and drive down wages, which is Good. Instead, parents have few children in those countries because they expect Social Security to be there for them, so you end up with not enough new workers to prop up Social Security. Oh, but the problem would be solved by getting rid of Social Security so that the unproductive old would die off, and parents would want more children to leech off of in their old age. But population expansion would increase pressure for territorial expansion and war.
Twisted, isn't it? You can't get around the problem without dealing with redistribution of wealth, either from old to young or young to old or rich old to poor old.
Orwell could not have described this state because he grew up in a Britain where most people were poor and worked in horrible factories and coal mines and bitched loudly about it. Only Terry Gilliam could describe the state we're in, because he grew up in America when it was full of people who thought they were middle-class and white-collar. "Brazil" is a dystopia of greedy, narrow-minded people who cling to the barren proofs of their success while objective conditions worsen. There doesn't need to be a great dictator in such a system; everyone feels he must terrorize everyone else to fear change as much as he does.
Well, that's pretty much the same thing you can say about Juan's anti-war articles or the anti-war movement in general. Findings ways to spew more CO2 and arms contracts are two of the easiest ways to make a billion bucks and the people who really want to do that will fight like the Devil to preserve their opportunities.
Hell, if Islamic law means a hostile environment for white Protestant vulture capitalism, folks in the Middle East might have an advantage over us - now that we can't use their dictators to enforce the Shock Doctrine. The countries most wedded to Anglo-American greed-worship seem to be faring the worst since the crash, while Latin America and Turkey are being rewarded for overthrowing our neoliberal scam and asserting sovereign rights.
As usual, the decider will probably be China, now sitting on three trillion dollars of foreign exchange. I'm watching Chinese English-language newscasts and they've clearly been hostile to the Arab uprisings, but at the end of the day they need resources and there aren't many places to go where they haven't already established a beachhead.
I'm 46, and what I can recall is how miserable we all were after Vietnam because we weren't beating up on anybody, then how great we felt when Reagan ramped up the war machine and staged pathetic mismatches like Grenada to build up our spirits for bigger wars.
I think the politicians believe they've learned their lesson.
Actually, continuing this lucrative business would be like privatizing Social Security. In both cases, the State would be collecting tax dollars for a public service, but then handing it over to arrogant, ideologically deranged corporations for their supposed expertise in free-market "management". Practically the whole military budget now goes to private contractors or to salaries.
According to Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy", this militarization is pretty hard to avert in a declining empire. He sees it in terms both of the increasing short-sightedness of capital, which abandons productive industry for the financial rackets, and a growing self-love that turns patriotism into a religion of national restoration (if we're just fanatical enough, God will start favoring us again like he did during the old conquests).
Even with a botched occupation like this one, the US has many ways of influencing the countries where it operates. Because it was botched, what we have left in Iraq is largely towards keeping the poor powerless and manufacturing a pro-capitalist ruling elite. Sadr is an admirer of Hezbollah, which you could argue is an anti-capitalist movement of right-wing poor Shiites, but that seems terribly simplistic. The mere fact that it takes Mohammed's call for charity and brotherhood seriously, and the fact that Islam never legalized usury as Protestantism did, puts Hezbollah essentially at odds with Lebanon's capitalist elites, and in Iraq the capitalists were ruined long ago. Once the US clears out it can no longer sabotage Sadr's experiments in Islamic non-capitalism. But this has its own dangers: Hezbollah had to be pragmatic in Lebanon's coalition-driven society; Sadr could take a much harder line (Islamobolshevism?) with impoverished Shia being so much of the population, and miss the chance to develop something useful. Or he could just sell out his populism to his local military-industrial complex like Ahmadinejad did.
Well, given the special forces section that Seal Team Six belongs to is only budgeted at one billion $ per year, it does make one wonder how much of the other $699,000,000,000 per year has accomplished anything. Of course, Seal Team Six benefitted from technological and logistical resources from the rest of the military budget, but it shows how hard it is to prove you're spending money on the right stuff.
As awful as this behavior is, America did not invent it. I understand that the tradition in diplomacy is that great-power states have a right to designate certain foreign matters as being a "vital national interest", a sort of red line that they will go to war over. Every important country had them. Since all the great powers were private-property monarchies, ideological disagreements over what interests were "vital" must have been muted, but the fact that wars were so common in the 18th century shows that there wasn't much respect for the interests of others.
The real problem begins when you make yourself a "superpower", which has economic interests everywhere. Now this should REDUCE the "vitalness" of any one interest, but you know that's never how it works in practice. The more interests you have, the more your economy becomes a giant financial bubble overseen by oligarchs who fear any signs of imperial decline anywhere. So EVERYTHING becomes a vital interest because it might cause a market crash. Even an anti-capitalist state like the USSR got put in that situation, and it wasn't the market that collapsed because of the defiance of Poland, but the entire Soviet bloc.
The old UK, the US and the USSR all put forth the claim that they were so important to the survival of civilization that they could not allow any disruption of their economy of any size by any country anywhere on Earth.
There you have it, the corruption of absolute power, and the unsustainability of absolute power, all bound together and waiting to explode. Every country that will ever claim the same status in the future will suffer the same trap, because the problem is in the nature of power itself.
No kidding! What's the point of having a nuclear arsenal if it doesn't win you special treatment from other nuclear powers? It always had seemed to work that way before.
Well, given that the Pakistani army used the mujaheddin movement in the war against the Soviets, and then created the Taliban, you'd think they'd know their own handiwork. "Darn, those Arabs look awfully familiar..."
What we used to have was a balance of terror in class warfare. Before 1932, the rich could do whatever they pleased, and the poor who tried to organize were gunned down in the streets. But the threat of revolution forced the rich to tolerate FDR's experiments, though if you Google the Dupont coup plot you will see some bastards were trying to organize far-right militias to bully FDR into becoming a figurehead sellout (sound familiar?).
The Right couldn't get away with it then, but now it can. Because there are no institutions of radical workers to create a legitimate threat of revolution. Whatever they believe as indivduals, the rich collectively think like investors; if they screw us too much and we fight back they lose everything. Since they still made massive profits during the 50 years of the New Deal era, they had plenty of incentive to compromise. But if they can cheaply destroy one institution after another that stands in their way, as they have, and no one fights back, then why not screw us to death and abandon the burnt-out husk of America for some new host body?
The very ambitions that brought the rich to where they are will always make them believe that no matter how much money they make by sharing power with the workers, European-style, they can make still more by seizing total power. As individuals, they choose to act on that belief or not based on what they think is reasonable. We don't do a damn thing to convince them that such monstrous behavior is unreasonable.
I'd like to revise part of what I wrote above. The Arab people decided not to choose a charismatic gun-toting superman as their hero. Instead, they chose to be their own heroes.
I think John Shorter and Bob F have some good points. Sometimes tactics don't really fit strategy. Was the collapsing of American domination bin Laden's strategy, or tactics? Well, if Robert Scheuer was right, the goal was simply to serve as an exemplar to encourage Moslems to rise up against their own governments, not necessarily by using his same methods. If the usual Islamophobic narrative was true, bin Laden's strategy was to quickly build some sort of all-jihadi 3rd Reich that would conquer the world.
Now if the latter was true, then collapsing America was merely a tactic, since a lot of things would still have to happen to creat an actual caliphate. In fact, it turned out to be a terrible tactic, because America's decline is causing a power vacuum that is being filled by two states that a Wahhabi should abhor: Iran and China.
But if the former was true, then collapsing America was a strategy for empowering people in countries like Egypt to recognize that their governments were US puppets, and then having enough power to overthrow those governments. If this was true, then bin Laden was very successful. The problem then, however, is that he didn't mean for those governments to be replaced by parliamentary democracy ruled by mostly secular law.
So he exposed America as a villain all right, but Arabs chose a different replacement than he wanted.
Another way to look at this is that sometimes a movement, or a group trying to start a movement, will create something very different than what it intended. The Japanese militarists in WW2 claimed they wanted to liberate the Asian peoples from the Western empires. They were lying, but some Japanese officers really believed it, and so when things went bad they worked hard to prepare their local collaborators to rebel against the returning West. Most importantly, the mere fact the Japanese had beaten the West for a while destroyed the racist myths that the West used to keep Asians impotent. So the revolutions happened, the West was driven out, but instead of fake nationalism controlled from Tokyo, Japan had inadvertently gifted Asia with real independence, with at least a chance for democracy. This may be what is happening to al-Qaeda's legacy.
It demonstrates that Americans are clueless and indifferent about what people think outside of America.
Wasn't it a criminal matter when Tim McVeigh killed hundreds?
Oh, but that was not for a "foreign" ideology. A patriot can be a criminal, but not truly alien.
Once you were right - AQ was on the cutting edge of anti-imperialism only because bin Laden, the Saudi regime, the Pakistani dictatorship, and many other right-wing powers around the world collaborated with Reagan to destroy alternatives on the Left to Western capitalism. Reagan never understood that the unnatural evils of imported capitalism would not be abolished by the fall of communism, so people would turn to the next most powerful challenger, but bin Laden understood it.
Which allowed him to get away with presenting a very bad alternative indeed. His ideology was contaminated by the Wahhabist sellout to Saud feudalism before it ever fired a shot in anger. The Sauds are ideologically the worst of all worlds, hypocrites about Islam, capitalism, and Israel, and his solution was to accuse them of being too liberal.
Saudi backing of the petrodollar and the far right enabled insane extremism to infect America via its wealthy sponsors, and gave us a world in which we could truly say this prayer:
"There is no god but money, and Reagan is his prophet."
But this war of right-wing "civilizations" was not the only alternative, and as US hubris and overstretch allowed first Latin America, then Central Asia, now perhaps North Africa, to slip from Wall Street's reach, we have to ask who is the leading movement against capitalist imperialism today? How about the Bolivian anarchist Indians, who have encouraged mass actions all the way up to the Zapatistas in Mexico? How about the stirrings of labor in China, and its intellectuals' renewed discussion of the meaning of socialism?
Even the Islamist movements whose followers are concentrated in the hell-slums of modern globalization have to deal with modernity and the issue of economic justice. Three billion people crammed in there, too many to shoot, making all our stuff with technologies few of us understand. The cities, after 5000 years, are still the vanguard of civilization against a newly-barbarized capitalism extending from Wahhabi palaces to teabagger exurbs. That's the real war, and the US has already lost it.
Trump does not believe in the things he says when he gets in front of a camera. Birtherism was simply the thing he chose to grab to get attention.
But there are millions out there who WANT to believe that Obama is a foreigner, because they wanted a reason not to accept the 2008 election outcome. There are millions out there who want to believe that whites should have a monopoly on power, that the only minorities that are Real Americans are the ones who happen to agree with white conservatives on every single matter so that letting them vote is in no way a form of power-sharing, that the moment minority voting becomes large enough to tip an election, excuses should be found to ban them from voting or holding office. People who hold those beliefs rarely admit it openly, but logically convince themselves of other beliefs that they openly advocate to obtain the same ends: that ACORN was a giant criminal conspiracy, that millions of illegal aliens voted in 2008, that the 14th Amendment is tyranny, that un-American thinkers can be prosecuted without affecting "liberty" because liberty only consists of the cravings and lusts of Real Americans.
I doubt Trump holds a single one of those subsidiary beliefs, or that he will understand the mindset of that faction to realize that he must recite them with a sincere face in order to pass their initiation rituals. Bush Junior did pass the rituals in 2000 to get the faction's support, but now the bar is set higher since the talk is more violent, more 1860-ish. Trump can't pass muster because he's from Manhattan, because people will point out that his fortune depended on the financial industry inflating the value of Manhattan real estate (not to mention the Saudis and now the Chinese), that his genial martinet bossman act is not properly grounded in Christian values and gun rights.
But he can force all the candidates who may REALLY believe in that insanity to spend a lot more money on the road to the GOP nomination, and sow dissension between the neo-confederates and the other far-right factions, so more power to him.
Michelle Bachmann is shocked, I tell you, shocked!
You're saying that America has been Hell since 1912? Are you forgetting what this country accomplished in-between? We were a vastly more powerful country in 1945, or even 1940, than during the laissez-faire racist paradise that libertarians, neo-confederates and theocrats endlessly rhapsodize. Thanks to the GI Bill, America became the leader in world arts, music, literature and architecture - the Bill gave many working-class veterans a chance at a liberal arts education they couldn't afford before or since. By the start of the 1970s, the wage gap between blacks and whites was down to only 10%. Union workingmen could provide for their families with a single wage. For a while, homeless and hunger nearly disappeared. The entire world was in fact in an economic boom after WW2, made possible by both Cold War competition and the Bretton Woods pact that ended currency speculation, imposed by FDR during WW2 as part of his super-program to prevent the global depressions that made Hitler inevitable.
Read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" for the story of how this civilization was murdered abroad by the sponsors of Milton Freidman, aided by Reagan who also laid the ideological foundation for the current Shock Doctrine USA. Note that American wages have been in decline since about 1980.
It wasn't just the banks, it's the entire capitalist class exploiting our loss of collective memory of the Hell of life under laissez-faire, repackaging it as the hip new "Contract With America" and now again as "Reclaiming our Country" (from the mud races). They make big short-term profits by crushing the unions, brainwashing us into vast consumer debt, and dismantling all our public goods to buy themselves tax cuts, and if things get worse in the long run, they claim the solution lies in turning the clock back even further to the past!
And I can tell you from here in Texas that the hatred of California is vast, violent and implacable. The hypocrisy of condemning CA's debt crisis by people who voted for Rick Perry, a man who broke his state's own unemployment fund by cutting business taxes for it and then took a Federal bailout to fix it. What we really need is a sodium pentathol test to find out how many Texans are willing to send gays, blacks, Latinos, Moslems, Californians and the poor to death camps - I've certainly heard such sentiments expressed in several Houston workplaces and never criticized.
The South has a significant and growing and increasingly aroused minority that claims Lincoln was an evil tyrant (Texas' Ron Paul and presumably his faux-Kentucky son), that FDR was un-American (Texas governor Rick Perry), and that the KKK monster Strom Thurmond would have saved America from "these problems we're having" (the former Senate Majority Leader from Mississippi). These are the people we must condemn, but they have friends everywhere in the Southern power structure, who in turn have allies everywhere else in America who see the old Jim Crow South as a moral model for our children's future. Doesn't this scare the Hell out of you?
The African-American opinion of the South's ideology is neatly shown: when Southern whites were Democrats, blacks tried to be Republicans; when the Democrats were willing to negotiate with the Civil Rights movement, those blacks became Democrats and those whites became Republicans in only a decade, with Nixon's Southern Strategy completely transforming the GOP. The KKK endorsed Barry Goldwater in 1964, a sort of passing of the torch.
We've been miseducated about the nature of Jim Crow. The point was not water fountains or seating on buses. The key laws did not specify race, yet always eliminated types of voter likely to be black, and often poor whites as well. All the other laws were made possible by this first victory in scaring blacks away from the polls.
The Bush Administration had already become a clearing house for the new Jim Crow. Check out the career of GOP operative Hans von Spakovsky, who went from organizing "anti-vote fraud" campaigns designed to make blacks fear they'd be arrested at the polling place if their papers weren't in order, to a job at the Dept of Justice that's supposed to stamp out this very activity!
But of course, how dare we say that these new laws are racist. That's just as racist as saying a literacy test or a grandfather law is racist! Because surely you liberals don't want to imply that blacks and Latinos have some greater reason to fear scrutiny of their paperwork, that they're criminal races or something...
Doubtless the exact same poison that they used to impose Jim Crow the first time. White people in the Sunbelt can see the racial makeup change all around them; they hear the dogwhistles and they can decide quietly for themselves that they will save America by purging the electorate of inferior, welfare-loving races. No one can prove anything.
Which is why Trump's campaign is laughable. Birtherism works because of its tie to the idea that blacks and Latinos are to blame for Big Government, an idea that an urban Yankee like Trump dare not even dogwhistle, while a rural Christian extremist like Palin or Huckabee can send the message simply by the company they keep. The Tea Party needs birthers who are genuinely committed to the rest of the agenda: the restoration of America to exactly the legal system of 1789, with no voting by non-whites or the poor or running for office by non-Christians (Palin has still not explained why her Original Intentism doesn't apply to women, though).
And the proof of all this - look up the recent history of the movement to abolish the 14th Amendment, and who was involved as it moved from the fringes of the militia movement to the lips of GOP officeholders.
But how many of those other 3rd world countries exported 2,000,000 barrels of oil per day, with a population of only 8 million to share the proceeds? Seems that in order to have widespread poverty we have outright theft going on here. And even Palin's Alaska believes that oil revenues from public land should be split between its citizens.
A Libyan doesn't have to quote Tom Paine to make the case that every man, woman and child should be expecting a daily check from that oil.
So your alternative is to do just the sanctions, leaving them in place for years while people starve? Or maybe your preference is to just do business as normal with Gaddafi.
That's the problem. We all know sanctions don't work and invasions don't work, but we have believed ever since the Nuremberg Trials that atrocities should have consequences. Well, should we now abandon this belief?
In Iraq, if your party doesn't win the election, the consequences are rather more severe than in other democracies. Someone has to lose, and then his party's militia goes from being hunter to hunted, while his enemies take over the uniforms and weapons of the government security organs.