A thing barely noticed

Wikipedia: the Enemy Expatriation Act

Stephen D. Foster Jr., Addictinginfo.org: New Bill Known As Enemy Expatriation Act Would Allow Government To Strip Citizenship Without Conviction, January 6, 2012:

The new law would change a part of US Code 1481 which can be read in full here. Compare 3166 to 1481 and the change is small. The new section makes no reference to being convicted as it does in section (7). So even though the language of the NDAA has been revised to exclude American citizens, the US government merely has to strip Americans of their citizenship and the NDAA will apply. And they will be able to do so without convicting the accused in a court of law...

The SOPA/PIPA legislation encountered massive push-back, whereas the NDAA passed with BHO's signature, after language was inserted to exclude American citizens. And now this. SOPA is dead, at least for now, but the interests that favor it learned lessons about how to better market their wares, and in the meantime MoveOn.org types got to bask in the warm relevance of a still functional democracy. As with the Keystone Pipeline, one imagines SOPA/PIPA will be back, if in some other form. Of course as Arthur Silber recently pointed out, all of these measures are just designed to make legal (and seemingly respectable) things the government does anyway.


...

The Apostate Paul and Iowa

update below [16 January]

I have no idea if Ron Paul is racist, although I'm inclined to think he isn't. But the vehemence with which people on both the ostensible left and the right have gone after him for his newsletters from years past, and implicitly his seeming unwillingness to disassociate himself with some of his evidently racist supporters is fascinating. I realize it isn't exactly the same thing, but I'm reminded of how Obama so eagerly repudiated the reverend Jeremiah Wright in 2008, and vaguely said we should have a "dialogue on race", then decided not to.

At the time I thought, what if BHO had stood by his friendship with Wright, offering the distinction that while he disagreed with his views, and added that a lot of us have friends and associates who have views we wouldn't want to defend, people shouldn't have to disown their friends in order to run for office. After all, to expect that of a pol means that, as a society we expect , in fact require, our politicians to be shallow and venal and pliable, to only stand up for comparatively uncontroversial virtues, and not offend us by sticking with their friends, or by expecting us to grasp nuance, like the idea that one can have a friend who holds disagreeable views and only be responsible for our own.

(Yeah, I know, I'm talking about Barach Obama, and it's pretty hard to imagine him ever behaving that way. At any rate I assume the establishment media would have excoriated him in much the way they're doing with Paul now.)

Now I also doubt Jeremiah Wright is a racist, but that's not really the point. Actually, I gather that Wright and Paul both disapprove of the imperial quality of American foreign policy, even if they might both have supporters who like their differently expressed views on this subject but wouldn't care for each other too much. (Maybe they should get together and talk about it and try to understand one another's views, without the big media mediating. I wonder what would happen.)


It's not that racism is no big deal, but you have to ask, whose racism are we talking about? Racism is about the dehumanizing of an other, right? I don’t hear anybody at The Atlantic or The National Review, et al, calling racism on, say, Hillary Clinton for joking “we came, we saw, he died” about the killing of Qaddafi, or on Rick Santorum for saying he’d pre-emptively bomb Iran even if they don’t have nuclear weapons, or on Obama for yukking it up at the Washington Press Club dinner about how funny it is to send unmanned drones after people you don’t like.

But Ron Paul is marginalized as crazy and dangerous and possibly racist because of his newsletters, and because he doesn’t do things like that, and in fact takes issue with long-standing US foreign policies of financially ruinous imperial overreach and the farce of characterizing resentment of the US as “hating us for our freedoms.”

(If anything, I’d argue that his desire that we turn away from an aggressive foreign policy that requires us to demonize people in far off lands who have oil and other goodies we want to take from them may serve as prima facie evidence that he isn’t racist.(1)

I will admit that I dislike many of Paul's positions. He would get rid of social security and medicare, and certainly his dismissal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act doesn't sit right with me. All the same even if Ron Paul doesn't approve of the civil rights initiatives from the 1960s, somebody like that seems less harmful than numerous establishment pols, both right and left, who won't say something like that but are okay with indefinite detention and the endless imperial wars. Doesn't not wanting to jail people without charges and not wanting to kill so many people trump unsavory views, alleged or otherwise?

We shouldn't have to choose of course, but in repudiating Paul it's not as if we get a choice anyway. The supposedly less crazy non-Paul-like politicians in both parties also want to gut social security, but they are less upfront about it, avoiding alarming us by explicitly telling us their plans, and arguing about super-committees and interminable stop-gap budget deals instead to distract and confuse us. I guess this is pretty big of them, even if it suggests they regard us as a nation of distressed Tennessee Williams heroines who need to be protected from the truth of what's being done to us.

The people on cable TV news tell us again and again that Ron Paul doesn't have a chance in the long run, that his base of support is passionate but narrow. Maybe that's true, at least of politically oriented people who think elections make sense and actively support the two-party system, even if they routinely tell pollsters how much they disapprove of the actual politicians.

Monday night I watched Erin Burnett on CNN talking about the Iowa Caucus and how the turnout for the polls were expected to be about 100,000 out of over half a million eligible to vote. (About 17% of eligible Iowa voters participated in 2008's caucuses.) In other words, the Iowa caucus is kind of a joke, because of the complicated caucus system, but also because of the traditionally low turnout.

Evidently its purpose is to push candidates who don't have money to burn out of the race, so that the "serious" candidates who do know how to raise buckets of money don't have to deal with the unserious in New Hampshire and elsewhere. The fact that it's a low-density, low-population state with lots of opportunities to showcase scenes of serious fundraiser candidates pressing the flesh and meeting normal people is a nice bonus. I guess noticing the ridiculously low turnout numbers and concluding that Iowans also think their caucus is a joke will simply mean you'll never get invited to those swell Washington D. C. parties the jus' folks fundraisers probably can't wait to get back to after Iowa is in the can.


Of course if Ron Paul did luck out and somehow win Iowa the script for that was ready. One imagines it would’ve proved how out of touch Iowa GOP voters are, at least according to the fine folks at the cable TV networks. (A week or so ago I saw a discussion on HLN(the former CNN Headline News) in which one of the panelists argued that Iowans should be concerned that if Paul won it would prove that their caucus was irrelevant, which struck me as the height of arrogance, and reinforced my long-held sense that Iowa is intended to weed out populists and others who don't toe the corporate line, or problematic figures like Ron Paul, whose views and appeal serve to highlight in sharp relief the phoniness and mutual complicity of the major political parties and the press who tell us about them.

Christian Science Monitor, "If Mitt Romney wins both Iowa and N.H., it may be 'game over'"

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic,"Grappling with Ron Paul's racist newsletters"

Dave Lindorff, "Why the Establishment is Terrified of Ron Paul"


KFO, "How to prove bigotry"

KFO’s pal Glenn Greenwald at Salon,"Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies"who writes

Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.

Cüneyt,"Pardon My Glibness in Response to Glibness"


[FYI: The girl in the triptych above is pop singer Kelly Clarkson, who endorsed Paul last week. I was tempted to be willfully obscure and not tell you, but decided against it. I have no idea of her views of PIPA and SOPA, etc.]


update:

JM of Political Anxiety Closet writes in the comments, sharing 3 links. One doesn't seem to work, but here are the other two:
Judd Legum, Think Progress, FACT CHECK: Ron Paul Personally Defended Racist Newsletters

Teddy Partridge, FDL Is Ron Paul Also Homophobic?

Both are from December 27th.



...

some preliminary notes for a post on Libya

above, Ron Paul talks to David Gregory on "meet the press" via Mediaite and Salon.com.


below: Fox News interview with Michele Bachmann regarding Gadhafi and Libya, via Crooks and Liars, October 23, 2011 09:00 AM
Bachmann: Gaddafi 'May Be' Still in Power If I Were President



via Xymphora, who writes:

"Bachmann: Gaddafi 'May Be' Still in Power If I Were President" I believe that Bachmann is certifiably insane, but her voting record, and her stated positions on many of the most important issues, are in many ways far more progressive than most Democrats, and most so-called American progressives. It is simply sad that this 'progressive' website is using her better instincts to make fun of her. The United States is fucked for a very good reason.

According to Wikipedia,

In 2009 Libya had the highest HDI in Africa and the fourth highest GDP (PPP) per capita in Africa, behind Seychelles, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. Libya has the 10th-largest proven oil reserves of any country in the world and the 17th-highest petroleum production.

from the CIA Factbook about Libya:


The Libyan economy depends primarily upon revenues from the oil sector, which contribute about 95% of export earnings, 25% of GDP, and 80% of government revenue. The weakness in world hydrocarbon prices in 2009 reduced Libyan government tax income and constrained economic growth. Substantial revenues from the energy sector coupled with a small population give Libya one of the highest per capita GDPs in Africa, but little of this income flows down to the lower orders of society. Libyan officials in the past five years have made progress on economic reforms as part of a broader campaign to reintegrate the country into the international fold. This effort picked up steam after UN sanctions were lifted in September 2003 and as Libya announced in December 2003 that it would abandon programs to build weapons of mass destruction.

The process of lifting US unilateral sanctions began in the spring of 2004; all sanctions were removed by June 2006, helping Libya attract greater foreign direct investment, especially in the energy sector. Libyan oil and gas licensing rounds continue to draw high international interest; the National Oil Corporation (NOC) set a goal of nearly doubling oil production to 3 million bbl/day by 2012. In November 2009, the NOC announced that that target may slip to as late as 2017.

Libya faces a long road ahead in liberalizing the socialist-oriented economy, but initial steps - including applying for WTO membership, reducing some subsidies, and announcing plans for privatization - are laying the groundwork for a transition to a more market-based economy. The non-oil manufacturing and construction sectors, which account for more than 20% of GDP, have expanded from processing mostly agricultural products to include the production of petrochemicals, iron, steel, and aluminum. Climatic conditions and poor soils severely limit agricultural output, and Libya imports about 75% of its food. Libya's primary agricultural water source remains the Great Manmade River Project, but significant resources are being invested in desalinization research to meet growing water demands.

Children under the age of 5 years underweight:
5.6% (2007)

Life expectancy at birth:
total population: 77.65 years
country comparison to the world: 58
male: 75.34 years
female: 80.08 years (2011 est.)

Literacy:
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 82.6%
male: 92.4%
female: 72% (2003 est.)

Sanitation facility access:
improved:
urban: 97% of population
rural: 96% of population
total: 97% of population
unimproved:
urban: 3% of population
rural: 4% of population
total: 3% of population (2008)

Physicians density:
1.9 physicians/1,000 population (2009)
......................................
CIA(the same stats for Iraq):
Children under the age of 5 years underweight:
7.1% (2006)
country comparison to the world: 72
Life expectancy at birth:
Field info displayed for all countries in alpha order.
total population: 70.55 years
country comparison to the world: 145
male: 69.15 years
female: 72.02 years (2011 est.)

Literacy:
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 74.1%
male: 84.1%
female: 64.2% (2000 est.)

Sanitation facility access:
improved:
urban: 76% of population
rural: 66% of population
total: 73% of population(2008)

Physicians density:
0.69 physicians/1,000 population (2009)

Operation Forever War

photo: realclearworld.com


Friday was the 10th anniversary of the launch of the war in Afghanistan, launched less than 30 days after the terrible events of September 11th, 2001. The war on the Taliban was originally called "Operation Infinite Justice" but was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom when somebody decided that "Infinite Justice" had a creepy fundamentalist tinge or something. Infinite Justice also suggests an operation never meant to end, and maybe the name change was meant to avoid that suggestion, although evidently it would have been more honest.

Why are we still in Afghanistan? Because we are needed? Because they want us there? This is pretty unlikely. When an American reporter goes to some rural village, surrounded by US soldiers and asks if they want us to be there, what are they going to say? "No, get lost, and take those gun-toting soldiers with you, they're really ticking us off!" I wonder what Americans think when they're told we're needed or wanted in Afghanistan.

Slate, Gen. McChrystal: "After 10 Years, Our Work in Afghanistan Is Only Halfway Done"


McChrystal: "Frighteningly simplistic" view of the country has crippled the war effort.
By Will Oremus | Posted Friday, Oct. 7, 2011, at 12:01 PM ET

Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, McChrystal said the United States had a “frighteningly simplistic” view of the country when it invaded, CBS News reports. Even today, McChrystal argued, the country lacks the understanding needed to complete the mission successfully.

“We didn't know enough and we still don't know enough,” he said. “Most of us — me included — had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years.”Knowledge isn’t the only problem, he added. President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was a costly diversion that has tarnished Muslims’ perception of the United States.
The most difficult task still ahead, he continued, is building a credible Afghan government that could rule the country peacefully once outside forces withdraw.

The celebrated personal difficulties between BHO and McChrystal notwithstanding, the language above, in which McC describes GWB's decision as a "costly diversion", suggests that he's 'on message' with the Obama administration in terms of delivering the right talking points. But whether it's McChrystal or Petraus, or Condoleezza Rice or Gates or Hilary Clinton delivering the speech, and whether it's 2005 or 2009 or 2011, the message is depressingly similar. A superficial understanding isn't the problem. They don't want us there, and will never want us there, at least not as occupiers imposing our will.

People like McChrystal must know this, even if they feel they also have to support doomed policies, apparently because it's expected of them. I don't know if this is sad or monstrous. I suppose it's both.

I wrote about the Af-Pak war at some length in the summer of 2009, here and here. While the US may have killed bin Laden since then, I fail to see what has otherwise changed, or even how killing him has changed the war. More people have needlessly died, on all sides, who were alive in 2009. What else?

Even the reliably hawkish Fred Kaplan acknowledges that the Af-Pak war is going badly:

As for Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who appeared alongside Mullen at Thursday's hearing, it is hard to tell whether his spin on recent events was evasive, delusional, naïve, or a combination of the three. The assault on the embassy, Panetta insisted, marks "a sign of weakness in the insurgency." Having been dealt a string of setbacks on the battlefield, the insurgents are now shifting tactics to go after "high-profile" targets, such as Afghan officials, peace negotiators, and the American embassy. This shift, Panetta said, will have no effect on the Taliban's "odds of military success."

Also here:

Hearts, Minds, and Murders: The killing of Hamid Karzai's brother means the war in Afghanistan is going worse than we thought

Two from Greg Scoblete, How Important is Af-Pak?

The Alluring, Enduring Myth of Energy Independence

and, A decade of war [via BDR]

...

Happy 103rd LBJ

image courtesy the LBJ library.



Today is LBJ's 103rd birthday. He was responsible for the Great Society programs, the war on poverty, and the escalation of the Vietnam war. Of course Kennedy started it ... but you already know that. LBJ was born in Stonewall, Texas in 1908.

20 July 2011

This is old, and the language is arguably a bit hyperbolic. All the same, I couldn't help but remember this essay when I heard of the "Gang of Six" and Obama's fondness for their plan, because it sounds like it could be discussing BHO as easily as it's about GWB:


Clear-cutting the middle class, By H.N. Arendt, 2003


The Gang of Six plan supposedly reforms the tax code by removing one or two token tax breaks intended for wealthy executive types, while it lowers the top tax rate from 35% to 29%, or even less, and does away with the AMT. And, oh yeah, it cuts social security. On the news on TV they're saying it will raise an extra trillion in revenue over 10 years.

This is garbage of course, as the raging deficit they've made so much fuss about will only get worse, under such a scheme and there will be less revenue, not more. But for the sake of a breezy narrative on a 30 minute nightly newscast with commercials, the networks just need to compare it to the "Cut, cap, and balance" plan to make it seem like they're covering the story fairly. One imagines at least some of the reporters realize this is a crock, and that both plans are designed to head the US towards a fate like Greece's. I wonder, because the human tendency to believe what you are compelled to promote is also strong.

(Some of these are from June; I'm catching up.)
Man Robs Bank for $1 To Get Health Care in Jail


Pelosi's wealth grows by 62 percent

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) saw her net worth rise 62 percent last year, cementing her status as one of the wealthiest members of Congress. Pelosi was worth at least $35.2 million in the 2010 calendar year, according to a financial disclosure report released Wednesday. She reported a minimum of $43.4 million in assets and about $8.2 milion in liabilities.

Euronews.net: Budget cuts leave UK ‘unable to hold Falklands’


Guardian: Secret US and Afghanistan talks could see troops stay for decades

Robert Bonomo, "Who's Afraid of Ron Paul?"


Ben Doherty, The Age, "Fasting becomes weapon of choice for the disaffected"

Apparently hunger strikes by dissidents are 'aggressive', and they upset Mr. Doherty, who writes:

Ninety years on, the realpolitik of hunger is forefront in India. Fasts are common practice. They are effective, they draw public attention and force opponents to act. But also, they leave governments paralysed. Affairs of state and social reform are held hostage to one person's caprice.

And,From earlier today: Ian Welsh asks, “will I crawl on my belly, will I fight, or will I try to make a separate peace?”

the emperor's bloody clothes

The editors of Slate reference this TPM post discussing GOP chairman Michael Steele's acknowledgement that the Afghan war is unwinnable, reducing it to political process. Some of the Slate commenters, filled with glee at a prominent republican apparently putting his foot in his mouth, are repellent in their myopic, doltish stupidity.


from Slate:

...the impulse to assign blame to the opposing party is apparently a bipartisan one. At a Republican fundraiser in Connecticut on Thursday, RNC Michael Steele tried to pin the war in Afghanistan—which started in 2001—on the current occupant of the Oval Office.

The gaffe-tastic chairman got on the subject when a audience member asked him a question about Gen. Stanley McChrystal's resignation. "The McChrystal incident, to me, was very comical. And I think it's a reflection of the frustration that a lot of our military leaders have with this Administration and their prosecution of the war in Afghanistan," said Steele. "Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in." Steele went on to say that the United States had started an unwinnable war in Afghanistan—and that it's Obama's fault. "It was the president who was trying to be cute by half flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan," Steele said. "Well, if he's such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan."

When TPM tried to ask some questions of an RNC spokesman (chief among them: "Didn't the war begin in 2001 under George W. Bush, in response to the 9/11 attacks?"), the response was a statement that begins, "The Chairman clearly supports our troops." Steele has weathered storms of his own making before, but this may be harder to survive than a little bondage-themed party. The Atlantic is calling this "the biggest Michael Steele gaffe of all," Repblicans operatives are calling it "the height of stupidity," and William Kristol is calling for his resignation.

While I doubt that I share many of Michael Steele's views on things like business regulation or taxation, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard about his comments from Thursday declaring the Afghan war unwinnable. Although I don't care about the GOP's fortunes any more than I care about the well-being of the democratic party, it was pretty clear that he was trying to nudge the republicans towards relevancy, and maybe even sanity. I guess the bipartisan flurry of criticism he has since faced was inevitable. His subsequent backing away from his comments wasn't, although it really was too bad.

Steele had an opportunity, especially poignant on the eve of the 4th of July holiday, to make the case against empire and all the unnecessary butchery of our own and others, and to flesh out the distinction between supporting the well-being of the troops and supporting an imperial war. It seems no good deed, or hesitant attempt at such, goes unpunished.

Friday, 18 June 2010

above, Dean Baker on The Real News:"Decades of high unemployment likely"



Guernica Magazine,"Obama’s War"
by Tariq Ali, June 2010

I talk about “the surge” because this is something new. This was President Obama’s policy to differentiate himself from the Bush/Cheney Administration. The Iraq war was bad and we were going to pull out. That’s what we were told. But the pullout is not going to happen, in my opinion. They are going to be in Iraq now in these huge crusader-style fortresses for eternity, as they promise us, unless the Iraqis drive us out. The British did it in the forties and fifties and were finally driven out. So whether that happens, we’ll see. But that’s another story. There’s been no withdrawal from Iraq either, except a withdrawal from these towns to these big bases. But that was what was promised—withdrawal from Iraq but escalation in Afghanistan and religious language was used, citing the Cold War rhetoric of Reinhold Niebuhr, of fighting evil, “good versus evil,” that’s how it started. That’s what we are in Afghanistan for, to “fight evil” and of course we can’t leave. That is why we have to send more troops, to stabilize the situation so we can leave. If you want a particularly contorted defense of this position written, I hate to say this, but really written for idiots who know nothing about Afghanistan, I would recommend the article of the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband in the New York Review of Books. It is truly appalling, without understanding what’s going on in the country, bland, one cliché dripping onto the pages after another, but at least saying one thing which is of interest: that we can’t stay there.

Even General Eikenberry has said we can’t stay here forever because the big difference between the situation now and when the U.S. landed is that the occupation itself has made the country angry. You read between the lines or in the lines even, of what the people who go to Afghanistan from the United States say, intelligence, non-intelligence, intelligent journalists, unintelligent journalists, they all come back with one story that no one challenges: the bulk of the people don’t want us there; we have antagonized them. And that is why Eikenberry opposed the surge, because he said if you send in more troops, you kill more civilians, and if you kill more civilians, you antagonize whole new swathes of Pashtuns who join the insurgents and the resistance.

The emphases in red are mine. It's a longish article but well worth reading.[via John Emerson's facebook page.]

John Cole defends Obama from the likes of us; at Balloon Juice


via "Blckdgrd"


Sam Smith, "Liberals in denial"


Beverly Mann, "Oh, but Justice Souter, these days Judging is VERY easy"


via
Rdan at Angry Bear



Reason.com: "Feds: Fatty Meat Is Bad for You. Now Shut Up and Eat Your Government-Provided Fatty Meat"
via Charlie Davis.

[Tim the commenter: Thousands of years from now they will ponder how we constructed those idiotic food pyramids.]

Friday, 14 May 2010

photo: Eboni Knox USAF

Chris Hedges, "No One Cares":

"The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators.

They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families.

Our passivity has resulted, however, in much more than imperial adventurism and a permanent underclass. A slow-motion coup by a corporate state has cemented into place a neofeudalism in which there are only masters and serfs. And the process is one that cannot be reversed through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics."

and Michael Hudson, "Euro-Bankers Demand of Greece: the wealthy won’t pay their taxes, so labor must do so":

Riddle: How are the Greek rioters like America’s Tea Party movement?
Answer: Both reject government being taken over by the financial oligarchy to shift the tax burden onto labor.

The difference is that the Tea Partiers have lost faith in government. This is just what the financial oligarchy wants, of course. Giving up hope of gaining electoral control to pursue a fair fiscal agenda, the Tea Partiers have abandoned the centuries-long fight for reform to make governments better by giving them the power to check predatory finance and wealth. Sliding to the right wing of the political spectrum and acting mainly out of frustration, they have succumbed to a utopian desire simply to shrink a government that they see acting adversely to their interests.

Financial lobbyists are using the Greek crisis as an object lesson to warn about the need to cut back public spending on Social Security and Medicare. This is the opposite of what the Greek demonstrators are demanding: to reverse the global tax shift off property and finance onto labor, and to give labor’s financial claims for retirement pensions priority over claims by the banks to get fully paid on hundreds of billions of dollars of recklessly bad loans recently reduced to junk status.

Bank lobbyists know that the financial game is over. They are playing for the short run. The financial sector’s aim is to take as much bailout money as it can and run, with large enough annual bonuses to lord it over the rest of society after the Clean Slate finally arrives. Less public spending on social programs will leave more bailout money to pay the banks for their exponentially rising bad debts that cannot possibly be paid in the end. It is inevitable that loans and bonds will default in the usual convulsion of bankruptcy.

via Xymphora and Ella2007k.

I don't entirely agree with Michael Hudson's assessment of the Tea-partiers having given up on government, although their demands on government are incoherent. Reduce taxes and pay down the deficit? And they're mostly middle-class whites, hence able to afford gated communities, at least for now.

For the next three weeks or so I have non-Horse things to attend to, but I will put up the expanded blogroll in the first week in June. In the meantime be nice to Rob n' Mimi n' Micah n' Bob, cause they're swell.

briefly, 23 April 2010

No, we haven't gone away. I guess we've just been hibernating. For my part I'm working on a post to go up this weekend. Don't know what Rob is doing- something mysterious and interesting, no doubt. However in the meantime I call attention to Arthur Silber, who has been posting again recently. If you're feeling generous with all that tax refund money burning a hole in your pocket, also consider sending him some dough.



April 12, 2010
"A Post I Already Regret"

April 20, 2010
"An Evil Monstrosity: Thoughts on the Death State"

April 22, 2010
"It's not the sex fraud. It's never the sex fraud"

Two Tribes

Another video from Russia Today- this time with nice crispy sound that syncs properly, but the video is somewhat washed out. C'est la vie, as Russians no doubt say.

Earlier today CNN posted a poll in which they stated that a majority(71 %) of respondents believe that Iran presently has nuclear weapons.(the poll also says that while a majority of the respondents are presently against military action, it also suggests great malleability in that opinion should the rhetoric heat up, and very little concern about adverse repercussions-- something I partly blame on a childishly jingoistic press. I wonder how many people put 2 and 2 together regarding the US de facto policy of destabilizing Pakistan, the one Islamic country that definitely does possess nuclear weapons and how people feel about that, or if they even give much thought to it.

Repercussions-- like what? Like another massive oil embargo, or the real unification of the Islamic world against the US, or a crumbling of America's capacity for international influence, when Russia and China AND even the EU finally decide that we're a nation of depraved nutballs who can't be trusted. And many thousands killed. Oh yeah, that.

Actually,I don't have a hard time accepting that a majority of Americans do in fact believe this regarding the supposed existence of Iranian nukes, even though the CIA itself apparently doesn't believe this. What I have a harder time understanding, and the poll doesn't address this, is why Americans tend to trust American elites so easily regarding the outside world. So that when a foreign country does something(or appears to do something) that American elites don't approve of and the usual American TV talking heads tell us that country X is defying us because they're irrational or crazy, they just accept this uncritically. And they just accept that country X cannot possibly have sane, legitimate reasons for those contrary policies that don't conform to US government wishes , whether said policies are hypothetical or real.

The thing is, people generally have no problem believing that our elites lie to us and screw us over in virtually all other areas, but apparently regarding foreign policy they just accept that these people who so frequently mislead and even just plain lie to us, nevertheless also know what's best and sincerely mean to protect us. I guess these are two separate questions. Exceptionalism again, at least for part of it. God gave Adam the right to give names to the animals, and to America to determine whether or not foreigners are crazy.

Michel Chossudovsky, above, says that the US has nuclear warheads in Turkey and in Europe that are aimed at Iran. Additionally, most experts agree that Israel has nuclear weapons, even if this is a mostly forbidden topic for discussion in the popular US media. My point is, although I don't think any country that doesn't presently have nukes should decide to get them, it's hardly insane or unreasonable for Iran's elites to want to have nuclear weapons. Given how actively belligerent both the US and Israel have been to various middle eastern and other Islamic countries, it strikes me as pretty understandable that the Iranians should want nukes.

I also question whether the US would in fact be threatened by the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons arsenal, assuming we left them alone. Israel might possibly be threatened-- but even that I'm skeptical of. If anything, the likely net effect of a secure Iranian nuclear weapons arsenal might well be a better behaved Israel, one that doesn't threaten her neighbors so readily and is more likely to want to make legitimate concessions towards a real peace with the Palistinians, or-- at the very least-- stops launching so many "you kill one, we kill 500" military operations against her neighbors.

The problem of course, is that it be a secure nuclear arsenal. But who is likely to subvert Iranian nuclear security, besides Israel and the US?

Again, I'm not suggesting that for Iran to acquire nukes is a preferred outcome. As I've said before in comments here and elsewhere, I have often puzzled about why Ahmedinejad has never publicly suggested a linkage between greater co-operation in allowing IAEA oversight, and negotiating to account for and reduce(or even eliminate*) Israel's nukes. Also to clarify, when I say "nukes" I am specifically referring to nuclear weapons, and not simply powerplants, which after all they, along with the Israelis, are allowed by international law.


(*The "eliminate" is probably dreaming, hence in parentheses. Still there's no question to me that for neither Israel nor Iran to have nuclear weapons would be the ideal situation, and I don't see how a US military operation against Iran can do anything but kill more people and make that contingency even less likely to ever happen.)

Fascism USA: 2009, 2010...

The audio sync is absolutely horrible here, and I apologize for that, as I've found no better copy of this anywhere. All the same this interview with Gerald Celente on Russia Today is fascinating.

(note: Although I came across this fairly recently, it's not exactly current, but was recorded in April 2009. I suppose I should say misrecorded, given the sound quality. I don't get why they have these horrible technical difficulties, presumably operating with more resources than their occasional correspondent Lori Harfenist(aka "the resident"), whose man-in-the-street interviews I've periodically embedded here before. She doesn't have any of these problems with her videos.)

Having said that, even though a lot of what he says strikes me as relevant, I think Celente is wrong about the likelihood of revolution. (Actually it's not entirely clear if he's forecasting one or advocating for one. Presumably the former.) If we're headed towards a right-wing truly fascist government, which I'll admit seems increasingly likely, the two-party system with its multiple security-state water-carriers seem like they're strongly enough ensconced to prevent that.

I'm thinking of Even Bayh's comments upon announcing his retirement yesterday, about how he wants democrats to compromise more(!), as if the gridlock in D.C. is substantially the fault of those no-good liberals. Bayh's comments come to mind just because they are recent, but there are many, many other examples.

[a revision: the two links to Bayh's retirement announcement above don't make it clear; but I was referring to his comments in a Yahoo News/AP story which I haven't found reproduced in full elsewhere, which is odd. I hate linking to Yahoo News stories because they tend to disappear from online after 21-30 days:

"Disillusioned Bayh advocates electoral “shock” to broken system"

as, no doubt, this one will too.]



Avedon Carol[2007][more recently] and a couple of regular commenters at ATR frequently talk about the Overton window, a theoretical concept that's increasingly useful in understanding the rhetoric out of Washington. But as far as I can see, the window doesn't just apply to republicans and other right wing types pushing it rightward, but phoney-baloney democrats like Bayh and Rahm Emmanuel and our pal Obama validating and reinforcing right-wing tropes. I'm just waiting for BHO to speak after the 2010 mid-terms and apologize for being a socialist.

"tenebroust", below, is somewhat overheated in his presentational style, but I think the broader picture he sketches of the dynamic between the two-parties is essentially correct:

"A piece of rhetorical deception..."

Paul Jay of The Real News talks to William Engdahl, author of Full Spectrum Dominance.

War Crimes=bad

Hillary Clinton demands accountability for war crimes The American secretary of state warns Kenyans of the dangers of a "culture of impunity" Glenn Greenwald [2009-08-05]

Naturally, YOU were concerned she wouldn't warn them. Typical.

Day of Empire-Amy chua

Empires, race and power: Yale prof Amy Chua on "strategic tolerance"

from the UC Berkley youtube channel.

cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

ex-Innocents Abroad

from Helena Cobban, earlier today:

He[Avigdor Lieberman, who was recently appointed foreign minister-JV] also told Haaretz's Barak Ravid, "You won't get any 'Israbluff' with me."

He said he considered Israel was still bound by the Road Map provisions from 2003-- but stated very clearly that the Palestinians must fulfill their side of the Road Map before Israel needed to do anything.

Regarding Syria, he told Ravid: "we have already said that we will not agree to withdraw from the Golan Heights. Peace will only be in exchange for peace."

The positions articulated by Lieberman are very familiar-- they are in line not only with his own previous rhetoric but also with the positions articulated and pursued by B. Netanyahu's earlier government in Israel, 1996-99. No-one should be surprised, therefore, that Netanyahu has done nothing so far to disavow Lieberman's most recent statements.

The foreign ministry statements were made at a ceremony in which Lieberman took over power from Tzipi Livni, who as head of Kadima will now be in opposition to the Netanyahu government. Many senior members of Israel's diplomatic corps were there. Some were reported as visibly shaken when they heard the new line they will have to go out to the world to sell.

I have to say it does clarify matters to have Lieberman speaking with such apparent frankness about what Israel's real policy towards it neighbors will be. In one of the news reports--I forget which-- he was quoted as saying that actually his policy will be the same as that followed on the ground by the preceding government, despite its formal adherence to Annapolis. "How many settlements did they dismantle? How many roadblocks?" he asked.

Very good questions.

So now, what he is promising is a change from the policy of "pursue the colonization and control project on the ground while hiding it by participating in all kinds of meaningless negotiations", by ripping off all the camouflage of the 'negotiations'.

"No more 'Israbluff'", indeed

But on TV it's all Obama and the Missus wowing them at the G20 in Europe, the (chintzy) gift of an Ipod to the Queen, and how Obama supposedly took Hu and Sarkozy aside and made them "listen to reason". On the CBS news Bob Simon and Katie Couric described the G20 as world leaders "setting aside their personal differences"(!?!) and coming together, as if serious policy disputes are just a cover for those churlish Europeans and their unwillingness to quit their fussin' n' feudin'. During a speech Obama compared the G20 meeting of 20 nations to the days of FDR and Churchill getting together and hashing things out, suggesting that it was a lot simpler then, which of course it was, if you look back with US-patented pretendo-vision® and Stalin wasn't part of the picture.

All the same, I couldn't help but think that with his odd metaphor Obama stumbled on another, unintentional meaning-- that when Roosevelt and Churchill met it was the meeting of the superpower on the wane with the new, emerging superpower, and that even though Obama strains mightily to persuade people to compare him to FDR, in this case he's playing, well...let's just say you know Hu's playing him.


cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

Samantha Power 2.0

I saved this screenshot of Samantha Power nearly exactly one year ago, meaning to make some childishly silly yet trenchant point about her, and by extension about US foreign policy, at around the time she resigned from being an official Obama campaign advisor because of something or other. I don't remember what, but it which was covered pretty extensively at the time by Jonathan Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution and Dennis Perrin.


I remember thinking, "man, if I was a bigshot blogger I could have a caption contest. Sure seems like a shame I'm not, what with me having this screenshot which doesn't belong to me, of Sam Power making some kind of point, talking to an unseen audience member." (she was talking to Henry Kissinger.*)

Why do I mention this now? Because Jon Schwarz at ATR just posted about her again(last week), wondering if she'll resign again if Obama ends up waffling regarding his previous denunciation of the Armenian Genocide. I also left a stupid comment at ATR, based on confusing two Asia theater US airbases.(I threw that "Asia Theater" thing in there to sound smart, but you guessed that.)

Anyway, if you want to treat this as a caption contest you can, and you can even specify a different audience member, like Thomas Friedman or Dennis Perrin or Chaka Khan if that helps you to respond creatively. The prize is whatever I offered last time.

cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

Various items

Foreign Policy, March 2009, "The Worst Kind of Stimulus: why a global weapons boom is the last thing we need" by
Travis Sharp

from Fora TV[video]: Does the US Spend Too Much on Foreign Aid? - Peter Singer(longer version here).

??AIDS and Germ warfare [video]

Two items from 2007; I never posted them and they merit being noted:

Gary Farber discusses the reputation of Gregg Easterbrook, which he deems inflated.

CNN's Arwa Damon on prostitution in Iraq

finally, from Slate, Feb. 2003: "who's for the war, who's against it"

Joe Bageant, Obama, and the days and years ahead

I hadn't visited Joe Bageant's digs in a while, and I was curious to see if he had any thoughts about the Obama inauguration. Joe's new essay is here:
"North Toward Home: from here in Central America, you can't see America's "shining city on the hill," but you can smell the dead in Gaza."

Also, I chanced upon an earlier, really exceptional, essay I hadn't seen before, from April of 2008, "The Audacity of Depression." Written in the midst of the HRC-Obama scrap, in which Joe makes it pretty clear that he sees Obama's appeals to hope for what they are, without therefore suggesting Hillary is a better alternative. I've saved it to my del.icio.us account under "the fall", which is the name I give for this category of writings, not quite a genre, which I see more and more of, discussing forebodings of US decline. From the 2008 essay:

Lately though, I don't hear so much outrage. In fact, the readers seem to be suffering from what someone aptly called "rage fatigue." Which is another way of saying the bastards have simply worn us out. And it's true.

I am not kidding when I say rage fatigue victims have fallen into an ongoing mid-level depression. (Looks to me like the whole country has, but then I'm no mental health expert.) The less depressed victims can be found lurking near the edges of the Obama cult, consoling themselves that a soothing and/or charismatic orator is better than nothing.
[...]
like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the "American lifestyle," is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely "the entertainment branch of industry."

Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there was one. At least it has the word Audacity in it, something millions of folks are having trouble conjuring up the least shred of these days. And there is good old fashioned "Hope" of course -- that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will reverse the national condition -- will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then economically and ecologically: Collapse.

cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

Here Comes the New Boss

Stelios Varias,Reuters

A friend who knows my political views asked me: "you're not looking forward to tomorrow, are you?" Referring of course to the ascent of Obama to the presidential throne. Now to be honest, I don't know how I feel about Obama, expressed on a simple level of positive/negative, good/bad, what have you. Unlike Rob Payne, I'm willing to acknowledge that between Obama and McCain, Obama might be marginally preferable, notwithstanding the embarrassment evoked by the contingent who insist on treating him like he can part the sea and persuade the sun to shine.

That's not the same as saying I think he was a desirable choice for president per se, or even for the democratic nomination-- but I'll get to that. This April Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens will turn 89, later this year Ruth Bader Ginsberg will be 76, and in fact the youngest of the liberal members of the court, Stephen Breyer, will turn 70 in 2009. I would have preferred somebody like Dennis Kucinich or even John Edwards had been the president to appoint Stevens's and Ginsberg's replacements, but that was not to be. I note this because it's pretty likely they will retire soon, and with a certain unease I'll nevertheless assert that I prefer Obama rather than McCain(or Palin) be the person to appoint their replacements.

In spite of what I see as the broader reality of Obama's nature as a corporatist quisling, I imagine some modest benefits will emerge from Obama being president rather than McCain. Federal policy on stem-cell research may become sane again, and (possibly) his environmental policies will be better than McCain's would have been. But as far as foreign and economic policy go, I doubt we'll see anything that represents "hope" or "change", with or without ironic quotation marks.

I suppose the thing I find so maddening about the ascendancy of Obama is it comes along at precisely the moment that the broader public was probably readier than they have been in decades for a real liberal reformer in the white house, what with the many missteps of the second George Bush and his cronies. And instead we get Barack Obama, who seems intent on repackaging soak-the-poor and destroy-the-welfare-state politics as the new, new liberalism, the variety you didn't know you wanted until he came along and cleared things up. It seems so abundantly clear to me that he's a fraud, a speaker of pretty words that flatter the ill-informed, and that his bipartisan, "post-ideological" ethos is really just craven opportunism, the positioning of a product-- which in this case is also a person-- in the marketplace of politics so it looks its best in the available light.

And yet, on one side of our screwy political culture we have the Obamazoids who want to flash a victory sign and cheer their new messiah so they can stop thinking and just groove on a warm feeling, and on the other the talk-radio cretins who insist that he's a socialist(?!), possibly because he doesn't want to bomb Ahmedinejad without talking to him first, or because he's never hunted moose from an airplane. Or because he's black.

About that. Although the historical significance of our first black president has been over-sold, I think even people understandably leery of the hype and the cult of Obama need to allow that his election is a sign of social progress, even if you have to qualify it by also recognizing how strenuously Obama bent over backwards to reassure middle America that he was the nice, non-threatening type of black guy, the one that Hollywood leads us to believe will absolve us of our sins in the great shopping mall in the sky.

Another friend tells me to "give him a chance," as if my attitude makes the least bit of difference. While I don't think my attitude towards Obama is remotely relevant, I'm guessing my attitude towards his flock does matter. It's probably vanity to hope to personally change the political landscape for the better, at least in terms of measurable individual effort. But collective effort is the sum of the individuals who try to achieve.....thing x, whatever that thing is, whether it's through the march of a million people or the raising of a hundred million dollars for a cause.

When I saw a news story in October about the Obama organization raising 150 million dollars in 30 days, roughly concurrent with the demise of Cursor, I couldn't help but think about that, about how the flesh is willing, the collective progressive impulse is there, but the collective mind is weak, misdirected by personality-oriented politics. The people at Cursor said all they need is about 75 grand to run for a year,a sum Obama could raise in less than half an hour. And Cursor did more to wake people up to the issues of the day than a hundred celebrity-penned Huffington Post op-eds. Not in terms of audience size, unfortunately, but in terms of the quality and relevance of the content.

But-- also unfortunately-- that clearly isn't enough. I thought about that ironic disconnect again today, when I saw the images of over one million-- and possibly close to two million-- people converging at the mall in D.C. to see Obama become president-- of how the collective progressive impulse is there, but that, functionally, Obama is an agent of (the co-option of) change.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people," or so the old saying goes. It may well be true, but making fun of those millions who believe in Obama the savior of America rather than reaching out to them is willful and vain and stupid. Large numbers of them, black and white and otherwise, will experience a letdown when Obama emerges as just another politician, and to borrow from Barack himself, that will be a "teachable moment."

Remind yourself of 2003, and how unlikely George Bush's days with lower ratings than Nixon seemed when he was prancing around on that aircraft carrier. Obama undoubtedly has more sense than Bush Junior, at least as far as permitting himself such an unrestrained display of hubris, but even he has to realize that you can't get an 80 percent approval rating just for being the president-elect without an inevitable falling action being in store. And how much of his current approval is mere approval for his not-George-Bush quality? Even you and I and the cashier at Quiznos possess that same quality, and as far as I know nobody voted for us.

I could say, "naturally I hope I'm wrong about Obama...." largely out of a desire to seem like a reasonable person. Well sure, I do hope I'm wrong, but I think such a hope is insufficient, and the afore-mentioned letdown is coming. And I repeat: simply making fun of the millions who believe in him is unwise, insofar as large numbers of them WILL decide he isn't what they hoped he would be. And then what? Some of them are-- will be-- reachable.

(If anything, I'd guess that a lot of the newly politicized Obamazoids are among the more reachable, because their brains aren't as full of the accomodationist bullshit that so many regular rank-and-file democrats have crammed their craniums with, the kind of folks that Dennis Perrin regularly warns us about.)

In the meantime, liberalism is bleeding in the gutter where it was left by Reagan, and the Clintons, and Fox news, and by the democratic party leadership, and the faux-liberal putative left who eagerly swallow one "third way" capitulation after another, and by the rest of the news networks... and Obama.


cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.