Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Politics

  • Taking Cues

    I’d intended to give this a little more thought, but the events in Arizona have prompted a response now.

    In the last post, I opined about the atmosphere in the country generated by overheated rhetoric and the irrationality that has resulted from seemingly intransigent positions.  Some of the responses I received to that were of the “well, both sides do it” variety (which is true to an extent, but I think beside the point) and the “you can’t legislate civility or impose censorship” stripe.

    As it is developing, the young man who attempted to murder Representative Gifford—and succeeded in killing six others—appears to be not of sound mind.  We’re getting a picture of a loner who made no friends and indulged in a distorted worldview tending toward the paranoid.  How much of his actions can be laid on politics and how much on his own obsessions is debatable.  Many commentators very quickly tried to label him a right-winger, based largely on the political climate in Arizona and that he targeted a moderate, “blue dog” Democrat.  This in the context of years of shrill right-wing political rhetoric that fully employs a take-no-prisoner ethic, including comments from some Tea Party candidates about so-called Second Amendment solutions.  It’s looking like trying to label this man’s politics will be next to impossible and, as I say, if he is mentally unbalanced, what real difference does that make?  (Although to see some people say “Look, he’s a Lefty, one of his favorite books is Mein Kampf ” is in itself bizarre—how does anyone figure Mein Kampf  indicates leftist political leanings?  Because the Nazis were “National Socialists”?  Please.)

    Whatever the determination of Mr. Loughner’s motives may turn out to be, his actions have forced the topic of political stupidity and slipshod rhetoric to the forefront, at least until Gabrielle Gifford is out of danger of dying.  Regardless of his influences, in this instance he has served as the trigger for a debate we have been needing to have for decades.  This time, hopefully, it won’t be shoved aside after a few well-meaning sound-bites from politicians wanting to appear sensitive and concerned, only to have everyone go right back to beating each other bloody with nouns and verbs.

    But while it may be fair to say that Mr. Loughner is unbalanced and might have gone off and shot anyone, the fact is he shot a politician, one who had been targeted by the Right.  Perhaps the heated rhetoric did not make Mr. Loughner prone to violence, but what about his choice of victims?

    There is a dearth of plain speaking across the political spectrum.  That is as far as I’m willing to concede the charge that “both sides” indulge the same rhetoric.  They do not, at least not in the same degree, and this is one time when the Right has more to answer for than the Left.  The rhetorical shortcomings of the Left are of a different kind, but nowhere near as divisive as what we’ve been hearing from the folks who bring us Fox News and the national pundit circus.

    “Why don’t we hear congressmen talking about banning Wicca in the military?  Or banning the occult in America?  This shooter was a stone-cold devil-worshiper!  A left-wing pot-smoking lunatic!”—Michael Savage.

    That’s helpful.  Now we’ve dragged the supernatural into it, something I don’t believe anyone on the Left has done yet.  Mr. Savage seems not to have understood the call for “toned-down rhetoric” for what it actually means, but somehow something to be responded to as if it were an attack on his freedom to make outrageous assertions.

    The fact is, the majority—the vast majority—of assaults over politically sensitive issues in the past three decades have come from a perspective that can only be characterized as supportive of the Right.  It may be that such issues attract the nutwings.  It may be that more nutwings find themselves in sympathy with conservative issues.   But it is more likely that the apocalyptic messaging coming from the Right has the correct tone and resonance to provide nutwings with proof that their personal paranoias are correct and they are justified in acting upon them.

    In his excellent book, Talking Right, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg chronicles the shift in language in our public discourse and shows how the choices made by pundits, think tanks, speech writers, and politicians themselves have pushed the discourse further and further to the Right and making it a battle, for some a war, to stop Liberalism.  Increasingly, right-wing rhetoric has adopted a “take no prisoners” intransigence.  Even when cooperation occurs, when bipartisanship happens, and compromise is achieved, the Right makes it look like they won over the Left, to the point where the Left appears to be not only ineffectual but a burden, a drag on society, and in some instances a scourge to be expunged.

    For the most part this has been carried out by the well-honed machine that is the right-wing media.  Republican politicians don’t have to say the truly objectionable things because there is a cadre of talking heads who will do it for them.

    It is fair to say, however, fair to ask: why can’t the Left do this?

    In a fascinating passage in Nunberg’s book he describes the problem:

    “I happened on a striking demonstration of the right’s linguistic consistency back in 1996, when I was playing around with one of those programs that produces an automatic summary of texts by analyzing their word frequency and recurrent syntactic patterns.  out of curiosity, I ran it on a collection of all the speeches that had been given over the first two nights of the Republican National Convention in San Diego, and it promptly distilled them into five key sentences…but when I tried the same experiment a month later on the combined texts of the speeches from the first two nights of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the software returned pure word salad.  Because Democrats are chronically incapable of staying on message, no single group of phrases rose to the statistical surface.”

    The five sentences?  Here:

    We are the Republican Party—a big, broad, diverse and inclusive party, with a commonsense agenda and a better man for a better America, [insert politician’s name].  We need a leader we can trust.  Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being part of this quest in working with us to restore the American dream.  The commonsense Republican proposals are the first step in restoring the American dream because Republicans care about America.  But there is no greater dream than the dreams parents have for their children to be happy and to share God’s blessings.

    (Lundberg traces the current demonization of Liberal to 1988, when in a speech Ronald Reagan—the Great Communicator—said “The masquerade is over.  It’s time to…say the dreaded L-word; to say the policies of our opposition are liberal, liberal, liberal.”  The Democratic candidate that year, Michael Dukakis, rather than counter the charge, ducked it, and the expression “the L-word” entered the lexicon of public discourse the same way as other unmentionable epithets have—the N-word, the F-word, etc.  So Liberal was reduces to a slur, something not said in polite company.  We have not recovered since.)

    It’s interesting to look at those five sentences and parse what they actually seem to suggest.  The word “dream” is in there four times, the word “commonsense” twice, the word “America” three times.  The question to ask is, what comprises the dream and what do they mean by commonsense?  And do you have commonsense dreams?  Dreams by definition are in some way outside the practical, and usually commonsense refers to some species of practical.

    But for the moment, let’s look at that American Dream so oft mentioned and so seldom examined.

    James Truslow Adams, in his book Epic of America  in 1931, first coined the phrase:

    The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, also too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

    This more than a year and a half into the Great Depression demands context.  The “dreams” of millions of Americans had been thoroughly dashed in the Crash of ’29.  People were out of work, losing their homes, with little or no possibility of relief.  At that time there were no safety nets.  No unemployment insurance, no welfare to speak of, nothing provided in the event that private enterprise failed to absorb the majority of available workers, who depended on wages to maintain themselves and their families.

    President Hoover stood resolutely opposed to providing any kind of direct aid, fearing it would sap the will of workers to seek employment.  He was, along with most “conservatives” of his time, willing to see millions destituted rather than risk undermining the vaunted “work ethic” that had fueled American industrial and economic ascendence to that point.

    This was also the era in which unions were still struggling to make inroads in the struggle to achieve fair labor practices.  Unions were opposed by the conservatives of the era because of fears that giving workers power to determine the conditions under which they labored would undermine the entrepreneurial spirit.

    What is most striking, however, about Mr. Adams’ words is his downplaying of the material in lieu of a kind of independent self value, a notion that people have a right to be treated equally as worthwhile, and to be free to pursue their own vision of improvement.  This kind of appreciation for what might be called a basic right of civilized life has been talked about and worked toward through most of  Western history, no less elsewhere that here, but seldom more polarized and equivocated than America.

    Consider:

    Self rule via a popularly elected government subject to recall—liberal idea.

    Recognition of individual value regardless of station—liberal idea.

    Emancipation of bond slaves as a fundamental human right—liberal idea.

    Electoral franchise available to all adults, regardless of race or gender—liberal idea.

    Recognition that women are individuals unto themselves with all the rights and privileges pertaining to a fully enfranchised person—liberal idea.

    Protection of children from exploitation through child labor laws—liberal idea.

    Right of workers to be free from arbitrary dismissal without cause from jobs—liberal idea.

    Limited work week—liberal idea.

    Universal public education—liberal idea.

    The list could go on.  And by Liberal I mean the notion that progress to achieve social egalitarianism is a positive value.

    It also means, implicitly, that people should not judge others according to myths, stereotypes, or prejudices.  This is embodied in the old maxim that in this country “anybody can become the president.”  The truth of this maxim is debatable, but underlying it is Liberal concept of egalitarian value.

    In each of the aforementioned instances, the conservatives of the time opposed—sometimes aggressively, even violently—the changes necessary to make these ideas a reality.  And by conservative I mean a philosophy of stasis, the maintenance of status quo, or at the very least the preservation of privilege among the propertied few.

    Whether it is true or not in every instance, conservatism has been the ideological partner of the well off.  It has stood generally in opposition to change, often for good cause (Speaker Reed of the House of Representatives during the McKinley administration stood in opposition to a change in policy that allowed for America to become an imperial nation by launching a war on Spain.  He was a conservative by any definition and in this instance he saw the manipulation of rules of procedure by those eager to go to war as an unsupportable change), but also quite often simply to preserve the privileges of those viewed as successful.

    So what is it Liberals have to be ashamed of?

    It is this:  for being unwilling or unable to define progress in such a way that the general public can support it and to stand up for their support of such progress.  Liberals have often been unwilling to take stands.  The Left does, but usually it is a Left that is even farther left than Liberal comfort allows.  Radicals.  Extremists.  And by their efforts, everything on the Left has come to be vilified.  Liberals ride the wave in to progress and after the achievement claim to support what has been accomplished.  Liberals tend to be accommodationist to the point of letting conservatives—or the Right—define them, usually to their detriment.

    What is fascinating is how after every period of explosive progressive change, the new order, sometimes quite rapidly, becomes the status quo and defended by conservatism, so that Liberalism almost always loses credit for what it has accomplished.

    But that seems now to be just an appearance.  The Right has been trying to roll back progress for some time now.  Missouri is about to vote on a Right To Work bill—again—which sounds reasonable on its face, but is just one more attempt to break unions.  Unions have lost ground since the Seventies and in many instances they have been their own worst enemies.  Any long-established entrenched power system becomes corrupt and, yes, conservative, and can become unreasonable.  But if anyone thinks getting rid of them will redound to workers’ benefit, they are delusional.  Right To Work has in those states where it has been in force for a long time, translated into lowered pay, lowered benefits, lowered standards, and higher abuses—many of which have been countered by Federal laws prohibiting certain practices.

    By Mr. Lundberg’s analysis, the Right has taken control of the language and ridden that control into power more often than not since Reagan.  And those five key sentences of Republican solidarity seem to attract people, if not to join them outright, at least to demand some kind of compliance to them by their own ideological spokespersons.  But just what is it that those five sentences promise?

    Nothing.  They are an acknowledgment of sentiment, not a program.

    What the Right does speaks for itself.  Lower taxes, gutting of education, reduction of resources to basic research, and, since 9/11, an increase in domestic paranoia that targets an enemy it cannot clearly define but has resulted in restrictions on all of us.  A support of big business (and by that I mean corporations so large as to constitute de facto  governements within themselves, many of them functionally stateless), and an opposition to secularism.  A promotion of the idea of American Exceptionalism based less on actual achievement than on birth-right (hence the current discussions over revision of the 14th Amendment) at the expense of the very commonsense approach they tout.

    Lay on top of all this the superheated rantings on the part of their mouthpieces, you have an atmosphere in which anything that equivocates, that seeks to reflect, that calls for honest debate, that might require rethinking of positions, any compromise is seen by the faithful as treason.

    But against what?

    I have some thoughts on that.  Stay tuned.

  • If You Can’t Play Nicely With Your Toys…

    We finally have our Kennedy Moment in the current political climate.

    Saturday, January 8th, 2011, is likely to go down as exactly that in the “Where were you when?” canon.  On that day, Jared Lee Loughner, age 22, went on a shooting rampage at a supermarket parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people and wounding eighteen others before bystanders tackled him.  (There may be a second man involved, police are searching for him.)

    The rhetoric is already ramping up on both sides over this.  Loughner is a young man with, apparently, a history of mental difficulties.  What is interesting in all this is the suggestion that Sarah Palin is partly responsible.  Note:

    sarahpac.jpeg

    Sarah has made a great deal out of her  image as a gun-toting Alaskan Libertarianesque “True Amuricin” and she liberally deploys the iconography of Second Amendment fanatics in her publicity.  She knows her fan base, she’s playing directly to their self-image as Minutemen-type independents who are ready to pick up arms at the drop of a metaphor and defend…

    What?

    Here’s where it starts to get questionable.  Just what is it this kind of rhetoric is supposed to be in support of?  It’s a non-nuclear form of MAD, the suggestion that if people get angry enough they will “take back their government” by armed insurrection.  It’s the stuff of B movies and drunken arguments on the Fourth of July.  Just words, mostly.  Until someone decides it’s time to act.

    I have no doubt Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, Arthur Bremer, and  Leon Czolgosz were deeply troubled individuals, mentally unstable.  I would not be surprised if John Wilkes Booth was the same, although he did work in concert with a number of conspirators.  But there are degrees of “troubled” and it’s always difficult to predict what anyone will do under the right pressure.

    The fact is, we are in a period of the most extreme political ferment we have been in since the Sixties.  We’ve had people march on Washington, we have had well-aired and popularized conspiracy theories treated in certain media as fact, we have a cadre of the worst sort of pundits nationally extolling their audiences to extreme positions on—

    What?

    Health care.

    By early acounts, Mr. Loughner was upset over Representative Giffords’ support of health care reform.  Upset enough to consider gunning her down.  Upset enough to read Palin’s “metaphors” of “targeting” Democrats as a call to action.  About Health Care Reform.

    Yes, I know, it isn’t really about health care so much as it is about the role of government in something that has been the bailiwick of private industry for a long, long time.  It’s about the idea that the government will somehow keep people from getting health care (all the while overlooking that many people are now barred from affordable health care by the very industry funding the jeremiads against the so-called government “take over”).  It’s about the idea of increasing taxes, about “giving” something to people who don’t earn it, about changing our system to a socialist system, about—

    All of which is legitimate matter for serious national debate.  But this is not a revolution.  This is a change of policy and votes were cast.  (I find it ironic that all indicators leading up to the final version of what is now derisively labeled “Obamacare” suggested that the majority of Americans not only supported an overhaul but would have approved the one thing the health care industry fought tooth and nail to prevent, namely Single Payer, and now, from the sound of the AM stations and the Limbaugh Brigade you would think no one had supported anything of the sort except a few “liberal” Democrats in Congress.  We are allowing ourselves to come under siege over what is, by any metric of popular will, a non-issue.  What?  The fact that Republicans swept a Democratic majority out of the House in 2010?  Two things to remember—that was over the economy, namely unemployment, and that majority won with roughly 23% of the eligible vote.  In other words, they didn’t win so much as Democrats stayed home from the polls and lost.)

    Multiple ironies—Gifford is a gun rights advocate.  She is a self-styled Blue Dog Democrat, a moderate to conservative politician.  She beat a Tea Party challenge—barely—because she is more or less mainstream in Arizona.  This was not an enemy in anything but party affiliation.

    More ironies—Judge John Roll was killed in the shooting.  He was chief justice of the U.S. District Court in Arizona.  He was a Bush (senior) appointee and by all lights a conservative.

    This is not now a liberal-conservative matter.  Sarah Palin and the Tea Party crowd are not conservatives.  George Will is a conservative.  These people are not conservatives.  They are reactionaries who have decided to use the conservative base as their vehicle to ride rough-shod over American sentiments.  All they understand is “taxes are bad” and “anything that limits my right to make millions is wrong.”  Or some combination of the two.

    The philosopher Hegel characterized certain people as “clever” rather than intelligent.  He noted that there are those who exhibit the symptoms of intelligence, but in fact it is not true intelligence but a kind of animal cleverness masking as intelligence.  Shallow people who speak well and can manipulate people and systems, but who seem to, upon examination, have no real understanding of cause and consequence beyond getting for themselves what they want.  You might say amoral, but I think that misses the point.  They do what they do in order to obtain for themselves and nothing else matters.  Sociopaths fit this description.  They fail ultimately because they really don’t give a damn about the consequences of their actions—and part of their cleverness is a facility at spinning what they do to free themselves of any responsibility.  The current crop of big-mouthed right-wing ideologues fall into this handily.  They seem not to understand—or possible care—that when you flash a red cape in front of an angry bull, something is going to break.  If the bull is standing in a china shop at the time…

    We are perilously close to becoming a closed society.  We already do not listen to each other if we have differing opinions.  We are becoming so entrenched in our own viewpoints, with the help of a magnificently balkanized media, that we cannot see where we are tripping over general principles in our groping after being right.  Growing up, I remember an admonition from my parents that would seem apt in this instance:  If you can’t play well with your toys, you don’t deserve them.

    I have personally found the rhetoric of the right wing disturbing and sometimes reprehensible since the Eighties.  Exemplified by Rush Limbaugh, they have developed a canon of malign vitriol aimed at anything that strikes them as left or liberal or, more recently, in the least conciliatory to differing viewpoints.  They have staked their claim and made it clear they will be intolerant of any kind of bipartisanship.  The fact that the Republican Party has aligned itself with these people is a tragedy, because it has become a tar baby they are becoming increasingly bound to.  But it is not Congresses responsibility to counter them.  This is not a question of what our elected officials will do to tone down the venom, but what we will do.

    My advice?   Stop listening to these assholes.

    I can’t put it more civilly than that.  The Rush Limbaughs, Glenn Becks, Sea Hannitys, and Bill O’Reillys of our media landscape do not have our best interests at heart.  They are demogogues.  Insofar as there is any kind of media conspiracy, it is for one purpose only, to increase ratings and therefore marketshare, and this kind of petty, sub-intellectual reductio ad absurdum  does that very well.  Get people pissed off and they develop a taste for it.  They are no different in this regard than the Jerry Springers and all their feuding, pathetic, fame-for-fifteen-minutes-at-any-cost “guests” and as a source of information and erudition in support of a democracy they are worse than useless.  Stop feeding the animals.  Tune them out.

    I know this advice will not matter to those—like Mr. Loughner—who are addicted to the apocalyptic visions generated by that kind of rhetoric.  It’s not information to them, it’s the drug for their particular monkey.  But for the rest of us?  We can do better.

    Final irony for this post.  Christina Taylor Greene, the nine-year-old who was killed?  She was born on 9/11.

    Congratulations, Sarah.  You have us devouring our own.

  • So Right It’s Wrong

    Recently, Justice Antonin Scalia shot his mouth off about another bit of “social” judicial opinion and managed to be correct to a fault again.  Here is the article.  Basically, he is of the opinion that if a specific term or phrase does not appear in the Constitution, then that subject is simply not covered.  Most famously, this goes to the continuing argument over privacy.  There is, by Scalia’s reasoning (and I must add he is by no means alone in this—it is not merely his private opinion), no Constitutionally-protected right to privacy.

    As far as it goes, this is correct, but beside the point.  The word “private” certainly appears, in the Fifth Amendment, and it would seem absurd to suggest the framers had no thought for what that word meant.  It refers here to private property, of course, but just that opens the debate to the fact that there is a concept of privacy underlying it.

    The modern debate over privacy concerns contraception and the first case where matters of privacy are discussed is Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965.  That case concerned the right of a married couple to purchase and use contraception, which was against the law in that state (and others).  The Court had to define an arena of privacy within which people enjoy a presumed right of autonomous decision-making and into which the state had no brief to interfere.  Prior to this, the Court relied on a “freedom of contract” concept to define protected areas of conduct.  Notice, we’re back in the realm of property law here.

    People who insist that there is no “right to privacy” that is Constitutionally protected seem intent on dismissing any concept of privacy with which they disagree, but no doubt would squeal should their own self-defined concept be violated.  Therein lies the problem, one we continue to struggle with.  But it does, at least in Court tradition, come down to some variation of ownership rights—which is what has made the abortion debate so difficult, since implicit in it is the question of whether or not a woman “owns” her body and may therefore, in some construction of freedom of contract, determine its use under any and all circumstances.

    Scalia would love to overturn Roe v. Wade and I have no doubt his pronouncement that women do not enjoy protection from discrimination in the Constitution is part and parcel of his desire to see the Constitution set in the same kind of stone as the Ten Commandments—unchanging, implacable, unadaptable.  Arguing that because something isn’t listed in the Constitution is an attempt to dismiss a priori any Court decisions that might address changed social conditions with which he doesn’t agree.

    The Fourteenth Amendment addresses discrimination against citizens.  So, are not women citizens?  Of course they are, and Scalia likely would not argue they weren’t.  However, they, like certain minorities, are citizens with specific attributes that make them in some ways separate from others.  At least, in theory.  Does, for instance, the Fourteenth Amendment protect men from sexual discrimination?  It should, but the question would arise if men can be discriminated against on the basis of gender—at least, in a specific and nonuniversal way.  In other words, can a man be discriminated against on the basis of his genital configuration and its implications the same way a woman can suffer discrimination?

    Scalia, as a strict constructionist, would like to believe that the framers intended that the Constitution never alter in its meaning.  This is impossible since context inevitably plays a role, and since times have changed and brought with them all manner of social adjustments not foreseen or even desired by the founders, his dismissals on these grounds of specific terminology are silly and even a bit pathetic.  Harry Blackmun wrote, in Roe, “The right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty…or…in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”  I think the same can be argued for any presumed protection against discrimination on any basis.

    Everyone, even, apparently, Justices on the Court, seem to forget the Ninth Amendment.

    But he does make a good point, that it is the Legislature’s job to enact laws to cover these things.  The purpose of the Supreme Court, at its simplest, is merely to vet these laws according to the Constitution.  If the Court, however, has already pronounced on a concept, why is it people seem content to sit back and assume that the matter is closed?  Shouldn’t laws have been enacted in the wake of Roe v. Wade to seal that right in legislation even more concretely than has emerged from a decision which could very well be overturned?

  • Thoughts On The End of 2010

    I may start doing this every year.  I’ve been trying to write some posts about some of the more recent events in politics, but I keep following my arguments into a kind of WTF cul-de-sac.  Watching the last four months has been amazing.  Not in a good way.  Just dumbfounding by any measure.  So maybe it will work better if I just do a summary of my impressions of what has happened this past year.

    I think I’ll say little about my personal situation.  It is what it is.  Like many people, the upside is hard to find.  To reiterate what I said a couple posts back, though, I am not in dire straits.  Uncomfortable, but not desperate.

    I should remark on the Lame Duck Congress Marathon of Epic Legislation.  I can’t help being impressed.  Obama said he wanted Congress to do with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, to repeal it legislatively, and not have it end up as a court-mandated order.  I can understand this, especially given the rightward shift of the judiciary.  But the way in which he went about it seemed doomed and certainly angered a lot of people who thought he was breaking a campaign promise.  (The puzzling lunacy of his own justice department challenging a court-led effort must have looked like one more instance of Obama backing off from what he’d said he was going to do.)  I am a bit astonished that he got his way.

    A great deal of the apparent confusion over Obama’s actions could stem from his seeming insistence that Congress do the heavy lifting for much of his agenda.  And while there’s a lot to be said for going this route, what’s troubling is his failure to effectively use the bully pulpit in his own causes.  And the fact that he has fallen short on much.   It would be, perhaps, reassuring to think that his strategy is something well-considered, that things the public knows little about will come to fruition by, say, his second term.

    (Will he have a second term?  Unless Republicans can front someone with more brains and less novelty than a Sarah Palin and more weight than a Mitt Romney, probably.  I have seen no one among the GOP ranks who looks even remotely electable.  The thing that might snuff Obama’s chances would be a challenge from the Democrats themselves, but that would require a show of conviction the party has been unwilling overall to muster.)

    The Crash of 2008 caused a panic of identity.  Unemployment had been creeping upward prior to that due to a number of factors, not least of which is the chronic outsourcing that has become, hand-in-glove, as derided a practice as CEO compensation packages and “golden parachutes,” and just as protected in practice by a persistent nostalgia that refuses to consider practical solutions that might result in actual interventions in the way we do business.  No one wants the jobs to go overseas but no one wants to impose protectionist policies on companies that outsource.  Just as no one likes the fact that top management is absurdly paid for jobs apparently done better 40 years ago by people drawing a tenth the amount, but no one wants to impose corrective policies that might curtail what amounts to corporate pillage.  It is the nostalgia for an America everyone believes once existed that functioned by the good will of its custodians and did not require laws to force people to do the morally right thing.  After a couple decades of hearing the refrain “You can’t legislate morality” it has finally sunk in but for the wrong segment of social practice.

    I don’t believe the country was ever run by people of significantly higher moral purpose.  There have always been two courts along those lines, one comprised of those who know how to aggressively and successfully capitalize and those who set policy and take care of the interests of those who are not so inclined or skilled at the art of fiscal rape.  The business sector, while it would like to see itself as made up of morally-inclined people, has always been willing to greater or lesser degrees to ignore moral principle if it became too costly.  They were blocked in practice by those in the other camp, who were able to do what they did because the country, frankly, was flush enough to afford principles.

    That’s the story, anyway.  A bit facile, though there are elements of truth in it.  One thing the Left has always been a bit chary of admitting is how big a role affluence plays in the policies it would prefer to see in place.  One of the reasons communism always fails historically (just one—I stipulate that there are many reasons communism fails) is that it emerges victorious in poor countries that simply can’t sustain it in any “pure” form.  (Russia included.  While Russia may be materially rich in resources and potential, it was poorly run, horribly inefficient at any kind of wide distribution, and structurally backward.  Marx, for his part, believed Russia one of the worst places to start his “workers’ revolution.”  He preferred Germany and, yes, the United States.)  This may be why we are so reflexively frightened of communism and its cousin, socialism—all the examples of it we have seen in practice are examples of destitute people, a destroyed middle class and elite stripped of all the material prosperity we value, replaced by a cadre of comfortable bureaucrats.  (It suggests that communism is an unlikely system for “raising” standards of living, but might be applicable once a certain level is achieved.  This presumes, of course, the other problems with it are solvable.)

    At a gathering recently, amid the conversation about all the other ills of the planet, I heard the declaration (again) that we are in a post capitalist world.  And I thought (and subsequently said),  no, we’re not.  Because its natural successor has not emerged.  We’re right in the middle of a capitalist world.

    The economic history of the 20th Century can be summed up as a contest between two ideas—collectivism and capitalism.  Around the fringes of both systems, hybrids developed.  It became clear in the 1930s that capitalism is deeply flawed and requires management, not of the sort supposedly provided by The Market, but of the sort provided by an enlightened social structure that can put the brakes on excesses.  Communism, it can be equally argued, gave up on any attempt to institute Marxist methodology, opting for a form of autocratic collectivism that lumbered along like a drunk troll for most of the century, never achieving much of anything for the so-called Masses.  If the best one could say of the Soviet Union through all that time was that the people were better off than they had been under the Czars, that frankly isn’t saying much.  While true, it begs the question why it couldn’t do better than the West.

    It could also be argued that during the period between 1930 and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, we managed our system in such a way as to guarantee a viable counterexample to the soviet system.  Which meant a growing, prospering middle class and progressively more inclusive social justice.  Civil Rights progressed as much from the self-evident morality of its assertions as from a profoundly uncomfortable recognition that apartheid systems are too easily compared to what happened in Nazi Germany and continued at a lower activity throughout the world to any and all minority groups.  To show ourselves superior to Them, we couldn’t countenance separate but equal nonsense, so there was movement on both extremes—the street and the halls of power.

    With the end of the Soviet Union, there was a sharp understanding (valid or not) that on some level “we” had won.  Our system proved superior.  We were “better” than they were, at least ideologically.

    Which apparently for a certain sector meant we could stop fooling around with all these hybrid systems that utilized partial socialist controls and put roadblocks in the way of capitalist excess.  Victory meant the aspect that seemed to make us superior would work even better if we stopped pretending we needed regulations.  If the rest of the world would just adopt our system, everyone would be better off.  We shouldn’t confuse the issue with concessions to non-capitalist ideas.

    (You can kind of see this in the Reagan years.  It’s obvious in hindsight with the increased spending in military R & D and the 600 ship navy and the development of other technologies under DoD auspices, that the Reagan philosophy—tactic, I should say—was to spend the bastards into penury.  There is ample evidence that this is exactly what happened.  We forced the Soviet Union to respond with their own increased spending, and this exposed their systemic weakness.  While our military spending has rarely gotten anywhere near 10% of GDP, the Soviet Union was never under it.  Indeed, toward the end, they were spending more than 30% of GDP on the military, a crushing burden, wholly unsustainable.  When all their best tech was brushed aside in the first Iraq War, it must have demoralized them profoundly.  The collapse came shortly thereafter.)

    Since Reagan we have seen a consistent, grinding war on anything that does not support a strictly market-based capitalist methodology.  It has now reached the point where we seem to be cannibalizing our own efforts at social justice in order to fuel an expanding private sector frenzy for…

    For what?  An expanding private sector frenzy for an expanding private sector?  Acquisitiveness for the sake of acquisitiveness?  It appears sometimes that we are laying up stores of wealth as if preparing for a siege.  But a siege against what?

    There are (arguably) two things that have made the United States a model to be emulated.  Aside from all the other ideas that inform our sense of national identity, two concrete notions have been at the heart of our success as a country.  The first is an idea of social equality.  In spite of the suspicions many of the Founders had toward the masses, they embraced a basic belief that individuals are not innately better or worse than each other.  This was, of course, an Enlightenment-inspired denial of aristocracies, that birth plays no part in individual merit.  Even though this idea was unevenly applied and took couple of centuries to manifest for a majority, it was there from the beginning.  The people had to live up to the idea, which is usually how such things transpire.  It was a powerful idea and would have come to little if not for the second idea, which is that we are entitled to be safe in our property.  That no one may take what we legally possess away arbitrarily and we have a right to defend our belongings in court and by legislation.  This has allowed for the eventual development of a large and politically powerful middle class which, to greater or lesser degrees, is socially porous, largely because of the first idea.  (Even in the worst days of segregation there have been wealthy blacks, and often in sufficient numbers to constitute a parallel middle class and entrepreneurial resource.)

    In fits and starts, this has worked well for us over two hundred plus years.  Not without cost, though.  Such as those times when the two ideas turn on each other and conflict.

    This has not been the only period when that has happened.  Our history is strewn with the corpses of such conflicts.  We have see-sawed back and forth between them.  Usually the property side of the conflict wins.  When the equality side wins, though, the gains are amazing.

    So what about 2010?

    It would seem to be a mixed bag, tilted (naturally) toward the property side.  But then the last-minute repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell would seem to be a check in the justice column.  Overall, the deployment of forces seem clear enough, and the skirmishes have taken tolls on both sides. But what’s the goal?  What, in the parlance of wartime diplomats and theorists, does victory look like?

    Globalization has brought about a fundamental shift in corporate culture, at least in the United States, which has made explicit what had always been potential and implicit at a certain level, namely that capitalist endeavor is not patriotic.  The foregoing of as much profit as possible is not consistent with nationalist sympathies and although I’m sure many an entrepreneur would like to think otherwise, the track record since Reagan has been clearly in the other direction.  The outsourcing of American jobs alone should serve as example for this.

    What has risen in place of substantial people doing the right thing for their country even if it costs them is a severe kind of quasi-religious patriotic substitute which at base serves to tell those who are paying the cost of this fact that it is their  patriotic duty to “man up” and live with it and to vote largely against their own self-interest in order to preserve a distorted idea of Americanism.  We have seen a resurgence of a social Darwinism that was never valid and lost ground during the heyday of middle class enlightenment in the post World War II booms.  The G.I. Bill underwrote a massive educational effort that gave people who never before had access the intellectual tools to recognize nonsense when they saw it and act against the norm, pushing back at the major corporations and a business ethic that required servitude rather than equitable participation on the part of the labor force.  Two things have worked to undo those gains.  The first was the matriculation of those very middle class successes into the positions of power that traditionally would have kept them out and over time they have become the people they once worked against.  The other has been a severe and consistent gutting of liberal education.

    At the aforementioned party there were gathered a number of academics.  I heard a lot of complaining about cutbacks and one in particular was going on about how her department was under siege.  One need not look far to see that universities and colleges are all scrambling for funding and a lot of what seems to be on the chopping block are courses that fall under the classical liberal arts.  If the course is not geared toward making a buck for the student immediately upon graduation, the sentiment seems to run, then what good is it?

    But it’s not just that.  Even legislatively we have seen assaults on the sciences.  The most recent is this from Oklahoma.  State Senator Josh Brecheen has introduced legislation to force Creationism to be taught in public schools, claiming that in the interest of teaching science “fully” all viewpoints should be taught or both should be removed.  This is hardly the first of these, nor will it be the last, but it shows a clear trend that is profoundly anti-intellectual, consistent with a tradition is America that derides education and promotes a faith-based approach to the world.  By faith-based I do not mean necessarily religious, although that is certainly a large part of it.  No, I mean a kind of fatalistic nationalism that suggests that simply because we are who we are we need nothing more.  Americans are just naturally superior.  In this model, education—too much education—erodes that essential nature and renders us susceptible to all manner of non-American ideas.

    There is a fundamental idiocy in this attitude.  It also seems counter to every other aspect of essential Americanism, basically that one never settles, that more is always preferable, that excess is the basis for sufficiency.  How does less education square with any of this?

    Back in the heyday of the great Red Scares, a political tactic evolved that equated intellectualism—mainly academic intellectualism—with Marxism and thus rendered learning suspect.  Certainly learning has a leftist character, Liberalism being an apparent property of education.  While this is not true in the specific (I defy anyone to make the case that William F. Buckley was uneducated, anti-intellectual, or even provincial), it does seem that the Right is represented by a less-than-stellar cadre of the intellectually challenged.  The spokespeople for the Tea Party are a singularly deficient lot, not least of which is Sarah Palin, who manages to declare her contempt for the intellect every time she makes an utterance.  The majority of frontline assailants on education are all self-styled conservatives and the debacle of school board absurdities and text book crisis sometimes seems to spring wholly from Texas and its consistent statements of solidarity with grassroots stupidity.

    It is more difficult to generalize when one knows more about a subject.  Ignorance is the benefactor of bigotry, stereotyping, and ideological myopia.  To preserve their hegemony over what they perceive as the true American landscape, it behooves the Right to curtail education wherever possible.

    Why?  How does this make any kind of sense?

    It makes sense in exactly the same way that the marrow-deep rejection of Evolution by many among this same group makes sense, as a way of denying change.  To freeze an essential identity in amber seems all important.  To draw a circle around a set of defining characteristics and say “this is what it means to be an American” seems the chief aim of the new nativists.  And anyone who doesn’t fit within those definitions or challenges their patriotic relevance is to be cast out, cut off, rendered mute.  That would be anyone who might suggest business as usual has to change.

    I see this as a long arc of historical trending.  After World War II, the United States was in an enviable position as a kind of savior of civilization.  We were the envy of much of the world, even if much of the world resented us and denied that it very much wanted to be us.  As long as there was a clear enemy—the Soviet Union and a perceived threat of encroaching communism—we maintained an identity for ourselves that acted as a kind of ideological and social glue.  Whatever else we may disagree with among ourselves, we knew we didn’t want to be Them.

    But that’s gone now.  The decade of the 1990s was a period of adjustment.  There were problems, but not the kind of iconic Good vs. Evil paradigms that had driven us for half a century.  It was a time when we should have realized that what we needed to do was learn to manage, not dominate.  And in order to do that effectively, we had to open our minds to wider understanding.

    Which, of course, let in all manner of ideas and influences that are Not American.

    2010, it seems, was a year in which the lineaments of the coming conflict were more clearly defined.  Issues over immigration, secrecy, taxation, distribution of wealth, and civil rights are played a part across the battlefield.  Overshadowing all else, though, is the financial crisis and the unemployment rate.  Congress was blamed for not fixing it, but really, what could they do?  Even if Obama had stood firm about the Bush tax cuts and forced Congress to let them expire on the wealthy, exactly what would that have done for the employment problem?  The Republicans keep saying that tax cuts fuel investment, but in the last 30 years we have not seen that to be the case, at least not in terms of people.  That extra money finds its way into dividend checks and off-shore accounts, not in higher employment.  The other claim is that small business is the real generator of higher employment and that seems to be true, so how does that square with cutting taxes on the top two percent?  It doesn’t.  This is a class issue.  That extra tax revenue would go toward paying down the deficit, but it would likely not add a single job.

    There is a savage equation in business.  A company has little control over most of the expenses incurred—rent, material, energy, all that is fairly rigidly fixed.  The only expense where most businesses have any kind of flexibility is labor.  Either cut salaries or cut numbers of employees.  For small to medium-sized businesses, this is a fairly straightforward calculus—one employee equals salary plus maybe health benefits and the concomitant taxes.  For larger firms, it’s more complicated—one employee equals salary plus health benefits plus ancillary insurance benefits plus retirement package plus bonus packages plus ancillary taxes.  It’s a larger sum at a certain level.  (Consider auto workers, who may have been making upwards of 60K in salary, but received an addition 50 to 70K in perks, pension promises, etc.)  Outsourcing to compete globally becomes a matter of serious money.  Even if you take away the egregious compensation packages for upper management, these numbers remain and they are a real concern.

    This a direct result, however, of the kind of civilization we run.  We are a consumer culture.  The More More More demand to keep the economy expanding has resulted in exactly this kind of problem.  In order to provide the goods that fuel that growth at a cost people can afford, costs of manufacturing must be kept down.  But we’ve been buying the whole world’s production at some level for 50 years now and in order for us to have the money to keep doing that, we have to derive income from somewhere that enables us to maintain, and if the world cannot afford what we make or offer…

    Which does not, of course, justify the pillage of American industry that we have seen take place or the obscene transfers of wealth from the public sector to private hands.  This has all been done in the name of self-preservation by those who, as I suggested at the beginning of this, are no longer able to afford their otherwise self-proclaimed patriotism.  They have somehow defined themselves as America and for all the rest of us?  Well, we are welcome to make our own fortunes if we can, but they are removing their sense of responsibility from us.

    Before I go on, one other number must be added to the above calculus.  The Census has just come out. We have almost 309 million people here now.  By comparison, in 1970 there were a bit over 203 million.  I chose 1970 because that was a year in which one could clearly see American power and prosperity across the greatest extent of the population.  American cars were still the top sellers, American industry still the envy of the world, the American worker the highest paid, most skilled, our educational system on its way to becoming the jewel in the crown.  We had just put men on the moon, the future looked to be imminent in so many sparkling and wondrous ways, and we were experiencing a surging liberal commitment to inclusiveness.  Nixon was about to create the EPA and the NEA.  In spite of the blight of Vietnam, we were doing great.  The top 5% economically owned only 14% of the wealth.

    Add an additional hundred million people to that, all of whom have had the same expectations of increasing wealth and prosperity, and ask yourself if it is reasonable to have expected anything other than disappointment.  Numbers matter.

    The world has changed.  Easy to say, difficult to understand why that makes a difference.  In the face of everything that has changed since 1970, does it make sense to try to maintain a national identity rooted in the 1940s?

    I have some thoughts on that score, but I think I’ll save them for another post.  I will say that I do not see a slide into oblivion as inevitable.  But to prevent it will require something progressives have lacked since Reagan—a clear vision.

  • Explain It To Me

    In the movie Philadelphia, Denzel Washington plays a savvy courtroom litigator whose catch-phrase in front of a jury is “Explain it to me like I’m eight-years-old.”  It’s a great line and maybe I’m looking for that kind of clarity now.

    I really don’t know what to make of this.  Obama—who won election with a very solid majority of the popular vote and a most impressive majority of the electoral—has managed to be reasonable to the point of impotence.  He’s on the verge of validating every cliche about spineless intellectuals.  The man is smart, erudite, has charisma, and can’t seem to say no to the Right.  It is possible that this is another one of those situations where we the people simply don’t know what’s going on and cannot therefore grasp the tactics or strategy.  Maybe this is cleverness at such a level that it looks clumsy and gutless.

    I don’t believe that for a second, though.  (The only thing that makes any kind of sense in that vein is the idea that he is handing the GOP more and more rope with which to hang themselves.  The problem with that is any rope, in order to work in an execution, has to be tied to something substantial on one end.)

    Let me be clear up front.  I am unemployed.  My benefits are nearing an end.  I’m annoyed by that but not desperate.  We did many sensible things over the last several years.  We paid off our house.  We never carried a balance on our credit cards.  Never.  We locked away surplus funds in C.D.s and money markets.  We bought a new car only because it was cheaper to do that than to keep paying out a few hundred a month to keep the old one running.  We told ourselves no a lot.  So when my job went away (I’ve talked about this before; it was a combination of technological obsolescence and the ’08 crash) we were not devastated.  We had breathing space.

    Many of the unemployed do not.

    One major reason they do not is because so many bought into the program sold to them by the very people who are now working to strip them of everything else they have.

    One of the far Right arguments against Entitlements runs like this: it’s your responsibility to take care of your well being, not the State’s.  That, in fact, the State stepping in in any way to alleviate circumstances brought about by personal irresponsibility (lack of savings, buying on credit, relying on a job that might not be there in ten years) fosters an environment of dependence and undermines the work ethic of the population, creating a welfare state with hundreds of thousands of dependent, lazy people.

    This is nothing new.  Herbert Hoover expressed exactly these arguments in 1929 as the reasons for refusing direct aid to the catastrophically unemployed.  He was afraid that if people got used to sucking off the government teat, they would never go back to work, because, you know, people are fundamentally lazy and will not work if given half a chance.

    Which kind of flies in the face of the other Great American Myth of Our Character, that of self-reliant, self-motivated, hard-working, independent people.  Both of these views cannot be true, and any halfway serious look at the history of labor in this country shows that the contradiction is entirely in the minds of the greedy or morally myopic.  People traditionally hate being dependent for handouts.  Most—the vast majority—will go off any kind of assistance as soon as they can find viable work.  People are not fundamentally lazy.  Idleness makes most people crazy.

    Besides, this view also fails to take into consideration the other fact of life, which is that economically the unemployed serve a purpose.  They are a pool of threat with which management keeps labor in line.  It’s convenient, therefore, that a certain level of unemployment is inevitable.  No system is 100% efficient.  (During WWII, when if one stood in the middle of a street and declared a willingness to work, half a dozen employers would fight each other to snatch you up, we had between 3 and 4 % unemployment.)  This is not a moral failing, it is simply the reality of large, complex systems.  We have never and can never have a system in which 100% of the available work force is employed.  (For one thing, if we did, it couldn’t last long—upward pressure on wages would spiral toward infinity in such a system and it would quickly break down.)

    Now, given that, it would seem to me that arguments about the moral correctness of denying assistance to the unemployed are horribly inappropriate.  If you are unemployed because no job is available, how are you to be held personally accountable for that?

    Nevertheless, the pronouncements of the increasingly moralistic Right continue against anything that smacks of socialism.  We will not have universal health care—not because it would cost too much—because it’s socialism.  We will not have continued unemployment aid to those who are unemployable by virtue of American downsizing, realignment, orthe march of technological progress, because it is socialism.  We will not indulge any dialogue about the redistribution of wealth, because that is…

    I voted for Obama because he said he would work to change business as usual.  The Right is engaged in a very effective effort to wreck the middle class and establish themselves as some sort of aristocracy.  The people for whom the GOP works today are the ideological descendants of the Robber Barons.

    What dismays me most, though, is how working people have been brainwashed into believing that voting for the Right is in their best interest.  What, do they think they’ll get a Christmas bonus for backing the Koch brothers agenda?

    Assistance in this country since LBJ has been crippled by the Right.  It should never have cost so much, but it does because of all the conditions heaped upon what should have been simple programs for alleviating short-term disadvantage by politicians who wanted, apparently, to guarantee that no advantage was ever given to someone “not of their class.”  It is supposed to be anathema in this country to talk about class, we aren’t supposed to have classes.  But the fact is we do, they just happen to be porous to anyone with money.  Or without.  There is no genteel poverty in America.  Lose your money, lose your friends, your status, your reputation.  No matter what kind of person you may be, no one will help you if you go bankrupt and fall from the hallowed halls of the supremely rich.  It may may be a pretend class in many ways, but it is very real, and the only validating factor is wealth.

    I do not have a problem with wealth as such.  I don’t believe in stripping someone of their millions.  The problem is not money for personal use, it is money used to manipulate markets and control social conditions.  It is not the fact that Bill Gates is worth 80 billion that I find troubling, but that MicroSoft with its three hundred or so billion in net worth is capable of dictating social conditions.  Buying politicians and funding campaigns is not the job of private enterprise, especially if the purpose of those purchases is to screw Joe and Jane Citizen out of another cost-of-living increase, health care, and the possibility of educating their children.

    The Supreme Court has said that money is speech.  As far as I know, it is still illegal to bribe a public official.  Campaign financing is basically, as it is practiced today, bribery.  It would seem to me a good place to begin a class action suit to roll back Citizens United.

    But I do not know what to do about the spineless Left.  Senator Sanders is up there speaking truth to power, but he is doing so as an Independent, not a Democrat.  This is a problem we have been floundering with since the end of Vietnam—what do we stand for?

    Obama has apparently decided that the only viable strategy is to cave in and hope he gets reelected.  This is a pity, because during his first 18 months he did a lot of good things.  But on the big issues he has backed off consistently and refused to take a stand and say “No further” to the moneyed interests who own the GOP.  At this point, it seems obvious that he will not be reelected because his supporters will not trust him to carry their message.  For someone who so effectively worked the grass roots to become the first black president in our history, this is so utterly bewildering that I can only assume he has been bought by the power elite who are even now trying to shut WikiLeaks down so we don’t find out anything else we shouldn’t.

    On the other hand, I don’t actually know why anyone is panicking over WikiLeaks.  From what I’ve seen, the people who ought to read those documents won’t, and it will change nothing, because apparently, for many Americans, it’s just too damn much trouble.

    I don’t know.  Explain it to me like I’m eight-years-old.

  • Rubble

    There are several things in politics that I could write about.  I did post a screed yesterday over on Dangerous Intersection, so I think I’ll do something a bit more personal and, um, artistic here.  Of course, metaphorically, the theme sort of carries.  Ruin, rubble, the crumbling of ancient temples.  The overturned and broken remnants of an Aztec pyramid perhaps?

    aztec-rubble-copy.jpg

    It was fun to play with some of the values in this image, make it more epic than it already was.  Of course, this is nowhere near Mexico.  It’s an old, abandoned mine down in Bon Terre.  A Kodachrome original, though, and I must admit I’m still getting some of the best transfers from those.

    Back to rabid political screelings on another day.

  • Steel Flag…Some Post Election Observations

    I’m calming down.  People go through periodic spasms of irrationality born out of frustration, fear, incomprehension, anger, or some combination thereof.  So, too, do communities, and by extension, countries.  Spreading it out across a wider base tends to mitigate some of the worse aspects of these spasms, but not all.

    First, an image:

    steel-flag.jpg

    I shot that some time in the late 70s, a stack of automobile frames on a railroad car.  I shot it precisely because it looked like a waving flag and at the time I thought something along the lines of “this would be a more appropriately national symbol.”

    So the tone is set.  It’s questionable if our much-vaunted industrial might is any longer our primary strength.  In fact, it seems to be slipping into the realm of myth.  The nation that manufactured the arsenal that brought victory in WWII and gave us here the highest standard of living in history has moved on and we no longer make all that neat stuff anymore.  Some of it and our capacity is still nothing to underestimate, but really, is steel the image for our country anymore?  Maybe it should be a ledger.

    Which would be historically appropriate, because America—the United States—is where the capitalist system flowered into perfection.  All that we have has been the result of the material wealth and subsequent comfort zone of our embrace of capitalism.  An embrace that has from time to time nearly destroyed us.

    What can be drawn from this recent election that speaks to that America?

    To listen to the bombast, this election is all about money.  Who has it, where it comes from, what it’s to be spent on, when to cut it off.  An angry electorate looking at massive job loss and all that that implies tossed out the previous majority in Congress over money.  This is not difficult to understand.  People are frightened that they will no longer be able to pay their bills, keep their homes, send their children to college.  Basic stuff.  Two years into the current regime and foreclosures are still high, unemployment still high, fear level still high, and the only bright spot concerns people who are seemingly so far removed from such worries as to be on another plain of existence.  The stock market has been steadily recovering over the last two years.  Which means the economy is growing.

    Slowly.  Economic forecasters talking on the radio go on and on about the speed of the recovery and what it means for jobs.

    Out of the other end of the media machine, concern over illegal immigrants and outsourcing are two halves of the same worry.  Jobs are going overseas, and those that are left are being filled by people who don’t even belong here.  The government has done nothing about either—except in Arizona, where a law just short of a kind of fascism has been passed, and everyone else has been ganging up on that state, telling them how awful they are.  And of course seemingly offering nothing in place of a law that, for it’s monumental flaws, still is something.

    Throw into this mix the new healthcare law, which has as one its most unpopular features that everyone will be required to buy policies.  Among people who are already scrambling to pay inflated mortgages and don’t know if they’ll still have a job next week, this is salt in the wound.  How dare the federal government burden me with essentially a new tax and then do nothing—nothing—to fix my economic situation!

    On top of that are complaints about both the TARP program and the stimulus package, the former of which carries more than a little appearance of gross unfairness, the latter of which is purported not to have worked.

    And finally, the Supreme Court overturned decades-long precedent that barred unlimited spending by corporations in political campaigns, declaring that, well, we can’t see any difference between a corporation and an individual and to restrict the presumed rights of one is to do so to the other.  Whether you agree with that decision or not makes no difference, it is still the same issue—money.

    There were other, non-monetary issues that drove voters—same-sex marriage, possibly Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the state of education.  If you work at it you can connect those to money as well, but for most people I think it’s fair to say that at first glance the connection is dubious at best.

    So.  Establishing the chief cause of the recent election, what can we learn from it?

    Mainly, that people will vote on that basis and then apparently refuse to consider the ramifications of the problem.  With a clear track record of pro-business support, the Republican Party appears to be the least likely to do anything on behalf of working people that does not also feed the coffers of Big Business.

    Consider: health care costs have been spiraling out of control for decades.  Partly, this is a consequence of technology and the expansion of choice.  Medically, we can do more now than ever before, so logically people expect it.  They expect it regardless of cost.  They make a demand on the industry based on (loosely) moral grounds—I have a right to the best shot at a longer, healthier life, and no one has a right to deny it to me—that must then find a way to provide these services based on financial realities.  As the price goes up, people fall out of the program because they can’t afford it.  Businesses also stagger under the weight of increased premiums, because the demand on the industry doesn’t automatically go down just because people can’t pay.  This is one industry where by law the services must be provided regardless of circumstance.  If you stagger into an emergency room, bleeding freely, they have to take care of you.  The cost gets shifted to those who can pay, hence premiums keep going up.  Not only that, but hospitals place leins on families under circumstances where there is clearly a source for payment.

    Of course, if you’re in a plan, the insurer can negotiate with the providers to get the costs down, but that just shifts things around again.  It has become a continual game of Peter-and-Paul and no one is happy.  More and more people drop their insurance because they can’t afford it, fewer and fewer young, healthy people buy policies, so the shortfall has to be made up from those who can pay, and hence the spiral.

    One can complain about the pricing practices of big pharma, etc, but that doesn’t mean the problem of smaller and smaller pools of paying customers supporting an industry that keeps growing isn’t real and basic.

    Okay, so we need a solution.  The simplest would be to somehow turn everyone into a customer, which, expanding the pool of payment, would lower the cost per person.  But in order to do that, conformity to a standard must exist, which suggests that either the entire industry sit down at the table and come up with a single method, or some outside entity imposes the method.  What might that be?  Well, the only that can is the federal government.

    Simple.  So-called single payer.

    Except.  The common sense solution is met with massive resistance that casts the problem in terms of national identity.  We can’t take choice away from individuals.  (Even though it is taken away by the current system simply by pricing people out of the pool.  They then have two choices—be sick or go to emergency rooms.)  We can’t take away the autonomy of the Market.  (Despite the fact that in this instance the Market has demonstrated a persistent inability to address this problem, since the driving force of the Market is maximizing profits.  Change only happens when a method is shown to be counterproductive to that goal.  In other words, broken.)  We must not abandon the myths of autonomy from which we draw our common sense of identity (in spite of the fact that such myths are exactly that and even in those instances where substance can be found it is substance based on conditions long out of date and largely inapplicable to present reality).

    So the solution was compromised by an insistence that nothing change, even in those matters where for any solution to work change is the only way.  The insurance lobby, in the person of spokesperson Karen Ignani, argued, cajoled, threatened all through the debate to guarantee that Washington would not set price controls, that Washington would not offer a single-payer option, that government would end up doing nothing but guarantee more customers for private insurers.  Obama and his people caved in just to get a bill, which is the currency of politics, and when the smoke cleared from the battlefield no one was happy, even though most people did not even know what was in the bill.

    So again, the issue was money.

    The irony of the vote is that while everyone recognizes that the issues all in one way or another come down to money—whose and how much and what will it be spent on—that recognition did not translate to a rational outcome.   Instead of insisting that the government stand up to the money interests, voters condemned government for getting in their way, as if somehow Washington standing up to Big Business is exactly the same as oppressing people who have to hold a job.  The masterful propagandistic coup on the part of Big Money in the last couple of decades is impressive.  One can admire it on rthe level of achievement to purpose.

    But what has been played on here comes down to a betrayal of everything about us that is not—at least, in our individual view—tied up with money.  The United States has been one of the most cooperative communities on the planet.  We have a rich history of coming together to solve problems, stand up for rights, and work together, even when the work demands that we change our fundamental view of ourselves.  Yet a significant number of us have been convinced that in this climate to cooperate is to somehow betray ourselves.  We have been convinced that the only thing that will work is to allowed to stand alone.  We have been told that cooperation on these issues leads to a political condition which will undermine our fundamental identity.

    An identity we barely understand in any cogent fashion anymore.

    In desperation we have been driven to defend myths and reject solutions.  Of course this has happened before, but never so egregiously.

    One of the myths is that the individual states and can do these things better than a Washington-based effort.  The problem with that is that it has no basis in fact.  Maybe states would be better at managing their own affairs and finding solutions, but the fact is that for the really big ones the states almost never have tried.  They have retrenched, defended the status quo, and resisted solutions.

    The solution for slavery would have been for states to pass laws abolishing it.  They did not.  When pressed, they seceded.  Emancipation was imposed by Washington.  No doubt there were mistakes made along the way, but when the choice was to leave everything alone or free people, the states failed.

    The solution for female enfranchisement would have been for the states to begin granting the vote, but with one or two exceptions they refused.  A national solution in the form of a Constitutional amendment was required and Washington has had to police it ever since. The same with general enfranchisement where individual states, in order to maintain the power structures as they were refused to do anything about voter oppression.
    The solution for segregation and the mindless bigotry that resulted was for states to start implementing desegregation on their own, perhaps county by county.  They refused.  Washington forced the issue.

    In order to compete in the world, educational standards had to be brought up to a national level.  States cherry-picked what they wanted in the classroom.  Actions that redressed shortfalls came out of Washington.

    We are still fighting equal pay arguments.  Now we have issues with outsourcing that is ruining local economies and robbing us of good-paying jobs.  Does anyone honestly believe that states will do anything to force businesses to conform to local hiring standards?  No, that will smack of fascism if the state begins telling business who to hire.  Yet there are many national solutions that can be brought to bear to make it more feasible for businesses to hire local which will not be addressed because everyone is so terribly frightened of a Washington solution that might actually work.

    I do not for a minute suggest that even int he above list Washington has done a wonderful job, but I do not buy the argument that if left alone states will do the necessary work of taking care of citizens who live below certain income levels.

    It comes back to the money.

    When America was the biggest and most capable player on the global scene in manufacturing and distribution, when the rest of the world looked upon our manufacturing engineering with envy and our capacity to create goods and ship them anywhere, many of these issues did not rise to the surface.  Back then the steel flag would have been a symbol without irony, representative of a nation capable of creating, working, and supporting a major global position that floated the majority of its citizens up to comfortable levels of income and security.  That’s no long the case.  The rest of the world is catching up.  We’ve been helping it.  But the industries that once made most of their profits by the handiwork of their factories are now making it by the dexterity of their procurement and distribution and much of that is no longer here.  They are competing with global competitors that can do the job pretty well, which means we no longer have a lock on expertise and can no longer depend on a situation-normal attitude to maintain ourselves.

    But that does not mean the methods by which American companies continual increase their quarterly profits at the expense of the American middle class are inevitable or desirable.

    Not all companies are like this, but we have allowed to come into existence a savagely predatory environment that feeds cannibalistically on itself whereby companies must have the higher possible profit margin or risk dismemberment.  We have, even while apparently rejecting evolution emotionally, embraced a discredited form of social Darwinism that condemns us to self-immolation.  This recent election reveals an impulsive dependency on the stories of the lone gunman and the industrial captain that we all would like to believe in at least a little bit.

    The Republican—or should I more properly say the Conservative—approach these days seems to be to privatize everything.  This is American.  This is Who We Are.

    Really?  Or is it more like handing the keys to the town over to Billy the Kid and abandoning any notion that civil society requires civic controls?

    We have some large problems.  They require large solutions.  It might be a good idea to stop thinking impulsively and stop using the same old cookie cutter metrics to judge every proposal.  But based on November 2nd, 2010, we don’t yet seem ready to do that.

    There’s just too much money at stake.

    (cue Joel Gray and that Kurt Weill number.)

  • Reaction

    I should probably wait a few days or weeks before writing my reaction to last night’s national insanity exhibition.  But I doubt I’ll “level out” on what has happened.

    First off, what part of Mr. Obama’s  “fixing this will take a long time” did people not understand?  Did anyone seriously expect all this mess to be cleaned up in two years?  Or is it really just that people are only concerned about their own situation and everyone else can just—well, worry about their own situation?

    Let me say this slowly, so there can be no misunderstanding:  we have been digging this hole for 30 years.  It will take a bit longer than two years to climb out of it.

    Thirty years, that’s right.  Since Reagan.  Dear Ronnie, so classically American in so many ways.  Carter began the deregulation frenzy with oil, hoping the oil companies would plow their new profits into development of American resources in the aftermath of the first major OPEC embargo.  Reagan was surrounded by the rest of the business community, who whispered into his ear, sweetly, oh so sweetly, “Take the restraints off, Ronnie, and we will build you that shining city on the hill all those Moral Majority types are going on about.”  So he did.  And that started it.

    (Unlike others, I am inclined to believe that Reagan was naive about this.  I think he was from that generation that actually trusted people of a certain stature, relied on native patriotism, and so was completely blindsided by the corporate vampires who talked him into deregulating damn near everything.  I think he expected them to reinvest in America, not start the whole ugly off-shore account boom and the outsourcing of American jobs.  Inclined, I say, but not willing to give him a complete pass.  Because along with that, Reagan oversaw the foreign take over of hundreds of American businesses, many of which were involved in basic research and development and manufactured things vital to our national interest.  Throughout the 80s, one company after another was bought by Japanese, British, German, French, and occasionally Korean interests and the result was a serious hemorrhage of expertise, know-how, and manufacturing capacity, not to mention the loss of good-paying, high-tech jobs as those businesses were all moved out of the United States and to their new host countries.  Why did he do this?  Because Reagan was a traditional conservative who believed government should have nothing to do with  private sector business, either pro or con, and he refused to establish an “industrial policy” that would have protected these businesses.  At the time there was a tremendous wave of sentiment opposed to protectionism, which smacked of a “liberal” or at least Democratic program, but in hind sight clearly was all about keeping international boundaries as open as possible for the multinationals that have presided over the disemboweling of our economy.)

    Deregulation has been the culture in Washington ever since.  And while that has been the case, we have been through bubble after bubble after bubble.  Most people may be forgiven for not understanding what exactly is going on—after all, in the case of derivatives, even the people who write them admit they don’t understand how some of them work—but basically we have permitted large financial institutions to use more and more of the money with which they are entrusted—yours, in other words—to make bets on the rising and falling of markets, which generate virtual dollars.

    Now, virtual dollars don’t actually damage anything unless you try to turn them into real dollars—by, for instance, taking your paper profits from such instruments and using them as if they are real and buy into other instruments.  Or just by removing what the stock market says is yours and putting it into a regular bank account (protected by FDIC).  Now you are removing real money from the economy upon which the bets are placed.  Taking it out of play that way means more virtual money must come into existence to fill the void and keep the markets up.

    Someone has to actually pay real money into this at some point and that’s where the bubbles run into problems, because in real terms there isn’t enough actual capital—in the form of products or real estate—sufficient to cover the bets.  The bets are all made on credit and when the interest on the loan can’t be met, real money has to be brought in to bolster the bubble—hence liquidations occur, foreclosures occur, inflation occurs, defaults happen.  Defaults are the worst because it is an admission by one or more players that they know the money isn’t there.  Panic ensues, more and more players try to turn their virtual money into real money, but the only place they can get real money is out of the accounts made up of real things—other peoples’ homes, bank accounts, businesses, jobs…

    Sounds silly expressed this way, but this is what has been going on for 30 years, and the continual growth and sapping of the economy has left us ragged.  It can’t be sustained now.

    One might complain that we oughtn’t to have done all that betting in the first place, but that doesn’t get you far.  We did it.  Why?  Because we could.  From the top all the way down to the bottom.  Gambling.

    Not just the big banks, although the damage done by their gambling is the most visible and sweeping, but really they couldn’t have done it had it not been the national pasttime on the individual level.  Young graduate gets his (expensive) degree with loans he has to repay.  Out the door and into the wilderness, he snags a job that pays a salary his father or grandfather would have found unimaginable at the same time in their lives.  But they likely didn’t have the same debts to service from day one, they, or their parents, had to shell out money from savings to get them through college or they themselves worked to put themselves through semester by semester, paying as they went.  That is, if they went to college at all, which has itself become a symptom of the new era because the preceding generations fueled the notion that their children would not have to work with their hands and would have degrees.  (We have a dearth of tool and dye makers, machinists, practical engineers, carpenters, etc because of this sincere and short-sighted dream, which has in turn made us less competitive in a world where actually making things is still necessary.)  But does the newly-minted grad work to pay off his existing debt?

    No.  He gets married, buys a house, two cars, maybe a boat, they have a couple of kids and start their college funds.  All on credit.  Now on top of the student loans, he adds all this, so he goes to his new boss and says “I need a raise” and because thousands of these people are doing this, companies start going into overdrive to (a) cover the expenses and (b) find ways to cut costs to remain profitable.  And while all this is going on, health care costs rise, competition becomes more cut throat, forcing companies to load on more debt to make them unattractive to larger companies seeking to buy them and gut them.  But the extra debt means they then have to cut more expenses and the new grad gets fired in a wave of cut-backs.

    And on and on.  The simple truth is, you cannot have everything right away, but we have convinced ourselves we can and, more than that, it is our right.

    The overburdened system, staggering under the load, collapses when the financial market goes into one of its periodic fluctuations and the people with real money at the top pull out to wait for “an adjustment” and cause the ruination of marginal enterprises…

    I could go on.  All this is the result of the government being stripped of its power to say No to the betting.  The predators at the top are the worst because they know exactly how this works and always walk away intact, leaving a trail of debris behind them, looking for the next bubble.

    Yet people seem not to understand that the problem isn’t that companies can’t make enough money but that they can’t finance the virtual economy and survive.  They can’t gamble.  They can’t do what they’re supposed to do in the financial equivalent of Dodge City.  Where there is no law there is chaos.  And chaos is what we have.

    So the Democrats failed to fix a three-decade-old problem in two years and the voters threw them out of power in a fit of pique.

    Of course, this was after a roughly 41% voter turnout nationwide.  Had the turnout been the same as 2008, which topped 60%, we might not be looking at an insane outcome.  Once more, we do not so much have majority rule as minority veto.  Given how close some of the races were, this means Republicans have won with a bit more than 20% of the eligible vote.

    Twenty percent.

    It is tempting to do a Pilate and walk away.  What is it with Americans and their aversion to participate in their own destiny?  A question perhaps never to be answered.

    But maybe this is a good thing.  I’ll look at it that way.  This crop of Republicans has two years to prove they can do this better than the Democrats.  (And believe me, I don’t think much of the Democrats, but at least they were trying to spend the money where it mattered—here in the country.)  Maybe after they fail, they’ll be tossed out on their ear again.

    Not, however, for the right reasons.  It will be once more an exhibition of the only true national party—the Where’s Mine? Party.  Because that’s all this was.  People pissed that Happy Days aren’t here after waiting two whole years!  Wahhhh!

    If the Republicans manage to roll back the new regulations and head us back into the economic environment conducive the great betting game that produces virtual money, we will be…I can’t honestly think of a clearer image, so forgive me…fucked royally.  The gap between rich and poor has been the direct result of power brokers throwing dice with the personal goals and lives and dreams of millions of people who do not have the power or the savvy to tell them no.

    I guess you can tell how I feel about this election.  The monkeys are back in charge of the zoo and it’s bananas for everyone.  Don’t like bananas?  Tough.

  • Why I Am (Partly) Not A Conservative

    I try to ignore Glenn Beck.  I think he’s pathetic.  All he can do is whine about things he quite often doesn’t understand.  For instance, his latest peeve has to do with being bumped out of line by science fiction.  Yeah, that’s right.  Glenn Beck’s book Broke has been number 1 on Amazon for a while and it apparently got beat out finally by a science fiction anthology.

    His complaint that this is from “the left” is telling.  First off he’s trying to make it sound like some profound philosophical issue, that a science fiction collection outsold his book on Amazon.  (He also noted that the Keith Richards autobiography bumped him as well and please note the twist he gives that.)

    Why the Left?  Is science fiction a left-wing thing?  I know a lot of SF writers who style themselves right-wing, libertarian, conservative, etc.  Some of them are very good, too, and I have read some of their work with pleasure.  Unless they were writing from an overtly political stance, I found no reason to call them on their “rightishness” because they outsold another writer’s work that might have been a bit leftish.  This is just a silly complaint and displays an obsession with partisan politics or just immaturity.  This is, of course, Glenn Beck we’re talking about, who seems to find more reasons to evoke Nazi similes than any other pundit I know of and has occasionally shed tears over the abuse he sees our great country enduring from the left.

    But this is ridiculous.  Because isn’t this…I mean, Glenn, isn’t this just the free market making itself heard?  Your book can’t stay number one because that would belie the whole principle of competition you claim to believe in.  Everybody who works hard and honestly should have their shot at being number one for a little while and this anthology is a poster-child for hard work and perseverance because, well, it’s self-published!  It doesn’t even have a major (or minor) publishing house behind it!  It got there all on its own, man!  This is the flower of the free market!  David whupping Goliath’s ass!  This should make you proud!

    No, he berates it because it has to do with death or the culture of death, which he equates with left-wing politics somehow.  And for good measure drags Keith Richards into the whole death equation.

    If the Right wants to know why people on the Left or even in the Center have no patience for them, this is ample explanation.  The expression  “Get a life” comes to mind.

    I recall listening to Rush Limbaugh once trying to trash U2 on the air and managing to demonstrate his utter cluelessness and inability to deal in metaphor.  Is hyper-literalism symptomatic of right-wing thinking?  It must be, because literalism is where they get all caught up and their incompetence shows.  I listened once in complete dismay to Pat Robertson condemning the film Trainspotting for its “glorification of drugs” and I sat there dumbfounded wondering how on earth anyone could see that film as a glorification of drugs.  I remained baffled until I realized, based on a couple of other articles from fundamentalists and right-wing pundits, that in their view the mere mention of drugs, regardless of context, is glorification.  Somehow they could not see a film that takes a serious, unvarnished look at drug abuse as perhaps critical of the lifestyle.  I suppose because there was no father-figure character preaching in the film.

    But it showed me another problem.  The possibility that an audience might empathize with the characters—not approve, because clearly in the case of Trainspotting approval is virtually impossible, but understand.  These are human beings, with a problem, certainly, but human beings all the same and maybe they deserve some sympathy, some help, some understanding.

    Because understanding is not what they’re about.  They don’t want to understand —they only want to condemn that of which they disapprove.

    Upon Obama’s election and his early attempts to reach across the aisle and his calls to work together, Rush Limbaugh made a broadcast in which he declared that he did not want to understand, to cooperate, to reach across the aisle, to work together.  He flatly refused the idea that common ground could be found.  While I’m sure there are some far Left ideologues who feel the same way, I hear very little of that from most of the Left.

    Let me be clear, I’m talking about the mouthpieces here, and by extension those who fawn over them.  I’m talking about the Hannitys, the Becks, the Limbaughs, the Robertsons, the Savages.

    They have no depth.  No perspective.  They in fact seem to have no sense of proportion and certainly no grasp of anything but the plainest equations of Us versus Them.  Their comparisons are absurd and frightening, their intransigence at times borderline obscene, and the culture they would see dominant is inarticulate, graceless, and vapid.  Like their last president, W., they “don’t do nuance” and it shows.

    I can deal with conservatism.  I can even sympathize with some of it and agree with certain aims.  We spend too much, often regulations seem arbitrary and ill-conceived, and the tax structure is a Rube Goldberg agglomeration of bad compromises, loopholes, and penalties badly in need of revision.

    I cannot deal with humorless, puddle-deep, anti-intellectual, squeamish petulance masking as political philosophy.  The Tea Party candidate for congress in Texas who declared that armed insurrection in the case that the midterm elections don’t go their way is not “off the table” does not impress me as mature patriotism—which I’m sure it was designed to look like, the moronic conflation of the willingness to do violence with a twisted idea of “adult”—but as the posturing of a ten-year-old in a schoolyard showdown ala the Duke facing down the bad guy.

    It is possible that these folks have been there all along, but when we had a Soviet Union and a global communist conspiracy to fix their attention we didn’t notice them so much.  Since the Soviet Union collapsed and the only thing responsible government should have done was go around cleaning up the messes left over by all the proxy wars we’d fought with them since the end of World War II, these folks have had really nothing to vent their conspiracy-obsessed, uptight, puritanical faux-patriotism on.  It took a while for them to build an empire of disinformation and fear-fostering on the multitude of petty gripes and cultural shifts they rigorously and doggedly label Liberal or Left, even when those labels have nothing to do with the subject being so condemned.  9/11 was a gift to them, finally something to fix their attention on and get people stirred up to a rousing level of hyper-adrenalized nationalism—the politics of aversion carried to almost virtuoso heights.

    At the end of the day, in all honesty, I have to admit that I cannot join with these people not so much because I disagree with their politics—I do, but not completely, and I find much that could feed a useful dialogue in some of their saner examples—but because I dislike them as human beings.  I don’t know if their deep conservatism has made them such feckless mooks or if their culture blind puritanism has made them conservatives, but however it worked, the result is, to me, repulsive.  They seem compelled to slot people all the time, in this category or that; even when something goes the way they think it should, if it does so for the “wrong people” they’re unhappy; and they have no sense of irony.

    Really, Glenn.  You got bumped out the number one spot on Amazon and it’s because of the Left?  Get a life.

  • Didn’t They Throw The Tea In The Harbor…?

    Christine O’Donnell is one of those public figures that emerge from time to time that make any writer of fiction envious of reality.  Only a truly gifted writer could make someone like this up and then sell her as a plausible character.

    At the heart of it, she is the problem with the Tea Party.

    Here’s the thing I’ve never understood about the far right: fiscal responsibility is well and good and certainly we could do with a lot more—we could have used some for the last thirty years, certainly, a period during which Republicans (and by inference conservatives) have been largely in control of Congress—but how come is it we can’t seem to get candidates who are just about that without dragging all the social issue crap along with them?  I for one am tiring of having my alternatives clipped because some whack-a-do who may well have a sound fiscal policy in mind is also hell bent on “correcting” the lax, immoral, godless state of the country.

    Now we get right down to the basic issues with Ms. O’Donnell: jacking off.  It’s destroying the country.  People are going blind from this, divorce rates are record high because selfish people are doing themselves at the expense of the shared relationship god intended they have.  Abstinence means all of it!  Tie those peoples’ hands behind their backs!  Put those genital safety belts on those young fellows who can’t leave johnny alone!  Why, if we root out the evil of self-pleasuring, we’ll be on the road to sound financial policy and security in no time!

    Then of course there’s the usual slate of absurdities—she’s a young earth creationist.  (What, may I ask, does this have to do with fiscal conservatism?  Well, in her case, apparently, a difficulty with basic math…)  Naturally she opposes abortion and since she’s so down on pud pounding, we may presume she hasn’t much use for birth control of any kind, sex education, or possible female orgasm.

    She is that perfect contradiction of modern far right womanhood—someone who probably thinks women’s place is in the home who is attempting to establish a powerful political career in order to legislate herself back into a state of chattel bondage.

    And then there’s the Libertarian wing of the Tea Party that basically believes people ought to be free to choose their own lives without interference from anyone, especially the government, and eventually they will create the fissure in opposition to the Talibaptist contingent who want more than anything to tell people how to live decent lives.

    It may do this country good to elect some of these folks into public office so we can see, really see how they perform.  How they make their philosophies mesh with what most Americans really want.

    It’s a sad time for American politics.  We’re in a depression (why they insist on continuing to call it a recession is purist political cynicism), Obama has not miraculously fixed that, and people are pissed off.  They are in a “Throw the bastards out” mood, but unfortunately they have little to choose from.  The Republican Party, self-deluded that they may ride this tide back into power for “all the right reasons”, has so bankrupted its credibility right before, during, and since W that even conservatives must hold their noses to vote for them.  The Democrats have failed once again to define an American Ideology behind which the people can get and although right now they are probably on the right track fiscally, it will take time for their actions to result in anything fruitful.  (Didn’t Obama say all along it would take a long time?  Didn’t he say this would not be painless?  Didn’t he say a lot of work would have to be done before things started drifting back to something good?  Didn’t he?  But he’s been in office 19 months!  My god, just how long is a long time?)  They haven’t “fixed things” so people don’t like them either.

    So there’s the Tea Party.  This is bottom of the barrel time.  These are the screeling, apocalyptic, neo-revisionist, founding-principled-though-illiterate gang of conspiracy theorist candidates who have gained momentum through sheer quality of nerve, who intend to save the country from our foreign-born Muslim president and the anarcho-socialist intellectual elite.  They are the ones who wish to remove all the interfering laws and restrictions that hamper the marrow-deep entrepreneurial American essence and allow people to make millions on their own or starve in the gutter with their families because while Darwin was wrong about biology he was right about economic policy and the weak ought to perish so the strong can dominate.  These are the folks who would free us to be dominated by Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Banking, and Big Insurance.  These are people who believe corporations are people, too, and back the American dream nurtured in the heart of every kid who wants to grow up to be a corporation.  Or an oligarch.

    But first, they have to curtail masturbation.  The country has had enough of people jacking off.  Time to get them back to work.