Let Bygones Be Obamagones
President Obama is actively attacking an addling array of issues. The economy, the empire the environment and education loom large--and that's just the e's. But whatever progress he makes on these, I’m getting the feeling that he will be remembered for solving an even more basic human concern. I think Barack Obama, a lawyer and constitutional scholar, will rid us of crime.
Imagine a world without need for cops, courts or confinement because criminality has become passe, yesterday’s concern!
Imposssible, you skepticize. How could one counselor, even a cool one with that LA Law look, put an end to felonies, misdemeanors, violations and even mere infractions? By the Obama Doctrine, say I.
What’s the worst crime in the book? Making aggressive war on another nation, say the world’s lawgivers. What comes close? Torturing people for any reason. Culprits get shot and shut away for doing such things? Why? Because they resort to individual, subjective defenses. But what if they had a common and unarguable defense?
That’s what President Obama has given them. He has said of aggressive war and torture that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”
But isn’t that the one and only job of every prosecutor, judge and jury member in the world? Hasn’t every murder, rape, embezzlement and overtime parking offense occurred in the past?
Obama is on to something humongous here. His doctrine is even more brash than the rash Bush Doctrine, which, unbeknownst to Sarah Palin, held that any country could attack any other country that it felt might do it dirt on some future occasion.
The Bush Doctrine merely trashed the modern nation-state system born in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended 30 years of gore between bloodthirty papists and murderous protestants. War weary princes and priests got together and agreed to respect each other’s sovereignty. It didn’t always work, to be sure, but it was a useful rule until Bush treated it as so much stool.
The Obama canon is aimed not at the mere law of nations but at law itself. I can envisage the Albanian churl confessing to the hetman, Yes, I stole the chicken, but it’s already eaten and what is to be gained by regurgitating it? Or I can see the Mafioso admitting to the rub-out and adding, Why make a big deal of it, judge, he’s already fish food.
For all of its magnanimity, the Obama Doctrine has been intoned in a modest manner by its author. Now the question is how soon can it be universally acclaimed and applied? Advise us, Mr. President, when will we mere citizens be as free of our bad old deeds as the good old boys in Washington?
Friday, April 17, 2009
Friday, April 3, 2009
Quotes Courtesy of Conservatives
Isms No Longer Fizzin'
A century ago, politicians got elected by warning us of the threat of thespianism and ever lurking heterosexualism. The danger of mopery was also much bruited.
Then when anarcho-syndicalism became the rage and desperate men started throwing bombs at kings and capitalists, our pols scared us with augurs of anarchy. When the Russians made a revolution in 1917, anxiety about anarchism was supplanted by the specter of Soviet socialism. In the thirties leftists warned us about fascism. Since conservative Americans were well-disposed towards this particular ideology, fear of it didn’t really catch on until we went to war with fascists in 1941.
After the war, communism crudesced as the consternation of choice, lasting the next half century. It was an amazing commercial success. Americans scarfed up any product that could even remotely be associated with anti-communism, from missiles that couldn’t fly to foreign puppet armies that couldn’t fight. When communism collapsed of its own brutal incompetence, we were left without what I call a pejorism for a few years.
9/11 added terrorism to our fright folio . It really didn’t make any sense since terrorism was not a country, an ideology or a movement, but merely a tactic as old as history. Since American public discourse has rarely been rational, making war on a trope wasn’t really a problem for us.
Then came the 2008 election in which word-wacky Reps threw the whole putrid pail of pejorisms at Barack Obama. He was, all at once, charged with being a terrorist, Islamist, Marxist, socialist, fascist, communist, and an atheist who had spent too much time in a Christian liberationist church when he wasn’t forging his birth certificate and conspiring with like-minded moperists to bring about the ruin of everything American in the cause of everything foreign and devilish. Not only that, he used a teleprompter and his wife occasionally bared her arms and nearly reignited the American Revolution by coming close to goosing the Queen of England. But hardly anyone was listening any longer.
To the yahoos’ dismay, it seems that isms are like replays of Gilligan’s Island or nostalgia for Kate Smith: they have run their course. Throw around the smear “socialist” and no one but a few Cold War crones have the foggiest. We have long since entered the age of Leno’s Jaywalkers when the ordinary man or woman in the street bubble their lips when asked who Washington, D.C. was named for.
Americans were never really comfortable with isms. Ignorant of ideology, they never really knew what they meant besides something nasty. Even our soldiers gave them up years ago. You notice that they now assign the simple rubric ”bad guys” to anyone anywhere they have been tasked to blow away.
Good Idea. It’s more in keeping with our character if we insult our adversaries as “bad guys," “jerks,” "A-holes" or, as Mencken might have said, “hebetudinous roperipes.”
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. --Henry L. Mencken
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind the government by furnishing it with the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet in retrospect these disasters seem never quite to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.” --General Douglas MacArthur
A century ago, politicians got elected by warning us of the threat of thespianism and ever lurking heterosexualism. The danger of mopery was also much bruited.
Then when anarcho-syndicalism became the rage and desperate men started throwing bombs at kings and capitalists, our pols scared us with augurs of anarchy. When the Russians made a revolution in 1917, anxiety about anarchism was supplanted by the specter of Soviet socialism. In the thirties leftists warned us about fascism. Since conservative Americans were well-disposed towards this particular ideology, fear of it didn’t really catch on until we went to war with fascists in 1941.
After the war, communism crudesced as the consternation of choice, lasting the next half century. It was an amazing commercial success. Americans scarfed up any product that could even remotely be associated with anti-communism, from missiles that couldn’t fly to foreign puppet armies that couldn’t fight. When communism collapsed of its own brutal incompetence, we were left without what I call a pejorism for a few years.
9/11 added terrorism to our fright folio . It really didn’t make any sense since terrorism was not a country, an ideology or a movement, but merely a tactic as old as history. Since American public discourse has rarely been rational, making war on a trope wasn’t really a problem for us.
Then came the 2008 election in which word-wacky Reps threw the whole putrid pail of pejorisms at Barack Obama. He was, all at once, charged with being a terrorist, Islamist, Marxist, socialist, fascist, communist, and an atheist who had spent too much time in a Christian liberationist church when he wasn’t forging his birth certificate and conspiring with like-minded moperists to bring about the ruin of everything American in the cause of everything foreign and devilish. Not only that, he used a teleprompter and his wife occasionally bared her arms and nearly reignited the American Revolution by coming close to goosing the Queen of England. But hardly anyone was listening any longer.
To the yahoos’ dismay, it seems that isms are like replays of Gilligan’s Island or nostalgia for Kate Smith: they have run their course. Throw around the smear “socialist” and no one but a few Cold War crones have the foggiest. We have long since entered the age of Leno’s Jaywalkers when the ordinary man or woman in the street bubble their lips when asked who Washington, D.C. was named for.
Americans were never really comfortable with isms. Ignorant of ideology, they never really knew what they meant besides something nasty. Even our soldiers gave them up years ago. You notice that they now assign the simple rubric ”bad guys” to anyone anywhere they have been tasked to blow away.
Good Idea. It’s more in keeping with our character if we insult our adversaries as “bad guys," “jerks,” "A-holes" or, as Mencken might have said, “hebetudinous roperipes.”
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Good News in Hard Times
Massive Demonstrations Sweep Nation
Outdoing the massive manifestations in Europe, tens of millions of ordinary Americans took to the streets today protesting the sinking economy that bails banksters while letting workers drown in debt and desperation.
The depth and discipline of the demonstrations indicated that a huge and highly organized movement of progressive-minded Americans was on the move, demanding jobs, economic justice, a decent health care system, an end to imperial wars, and a political system that reflected the will of a well-informed and civic-minded citizenry.
President Obama took time from the G20 meeting in London to salute the demonstrators back home. He called upon them to keep up pressure on congress to get his sweeping reform program enacted. He pointed out that in FDR’s time during the Great Depression, the president told his labor secretary that if she really wanted rights for workers, she would have to create the political will to make them irresistable so that he had no excuse not to support them.
Though hard times persisted in America, the mass demonstrations were peaceful and optimistic as if people were beginning to understand that with unity and knowledge they had the power to take over their own lives
April Fool’s!
Outdoing the massive manifestations in Europe, tens of millions of ordinary Americans took to the streets today protesting the sinking economy that bails banksters while letting workers drown in debt and desperation.
The depth and discipline of the demonstrations indicated that a huge and highly organized movement of progressive-minded Americans was on the move, demanding jobs, economic justice, a decent health care system, an end to imperial wars, and a political system that reflected the will of a well-informed and civic-minded citizenry.
President Obama took time from the G20 meeting in London to salute the demonstrators back home. He called upon them to keep up pressure on congress to get his sweeping reform program enacted. He pointed out that in FDR’s time during the Great Depression, the president told his labor secretary that if she really wanted rights for workers, she would have to create the political will to make them irresistable so that he had no excuse not to support them.
Though hard times persisted in America, the mass demonstrations were peaceful and optimistic as if people were beginning to understand that with unity and knowledge they had the power to take over their own lives
April Fool’s!
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Dad, can I borrow the picket sign?
Teenagers Gone Worldly
NPR’s Paris corespondent, Eleanor Beardsley, had a piece the other day about French high school kids joining the massive wave of protests against the government’s handling of the economic crisis. She reported that there are two national unions of high schoolers and that les étudiants were legendarily successful at shutting down their lycees and taking to the streets in enormous numbers when issues vexed them.
To explain this oddity to us apolitical Americans, she got the editor of a French student magazine to say that lots of kids went on strike simply to play hookey while others got into politics because French schools are all study (what a weird concept) so that students had no extracurricular sports and clubs to occupy their free time. That’s more or less like saying that I write a political blog because I don’t have a beer can collection to work on.
In fact, the French, unlike Americans, tend to be political. That means they’re open to taking public action on public problems, while we prefer private and profitable responses. As old Karl pointed out, classes in France, from poor to rich, tend to defend their own interests. The bottom is represented by the left, the top by the right, while the middle wavers between the two. Of course, it doesn’t always work out so neatly. But that framework remains useful for parsing the tidings from Gaul. It certainly helps to explain the tidal wave of protests now roiling the glorious landscape.
Because the French are political they are frequently on strike and because they often win strikes they enjoy a range of civic, social and workplace benefits unimaginable on this side of the Atlantic. This reinforces the notion that politics and strikes work. Such subversive ideas reside in the back of the head of even the most mindless French teenager who skips school more to draguer les filles than to protest the latest efforts by the Sarkozy regime to succor the rich and screw the poor.
In France, the rich and powerful have learned to respect the clout of workers and students. This has hardly harmed capitalism but has made their capitalists a tad less avaricious and arrogant than our plutocrats. You can see that in the current scandal over bonuses and stock options for corporate execs. Those in France, in the upper six and low seven figures, would be considered chump change here. Nevertheless, French masters of the universe have been tripping over each other to renounce and return them.
Even the New York Times is reluctantly admitting that its thick social safety net will mean far less recession hardship and hock in western Europe than it will here. In place and well-funded unemployment benefits are long-term and generous. No one has to worry that losing a job will lose them health care or free college for the kids. Debt levels are low because Europeans still prefer to pay for things with money they have. And if the bosses get too obstreperous, there’s always the option of effective mass protest, even by politically hip teeny boppers.
NPR’s Paris corespondent, Eleanor Beardsley, had a piece the other day about French high school kids joining the massive wave of protests against the government’s handling of the economic crisis. She reported that there are two national unions of high schoolers and that les étudiants were legendarily successful at shutting down their lycees and taking to the streets in enormous numbers when issues vexed them.
To explain this oddity to us apolitical Americans, she got the editor of a French student magazine to say that lots of kids went on strike simply to play hookey while others got into politics because French schools are all study (what a weird concept) so that students had no extracurricular sports and clubs to occupy their free time. That’s more or less like saying that I write a political blog because I don’t have a beer can collection to work on.
In fact, the French, unlike Americans, tend to be political. That means they’re open to taking public action on public problems, while we prefer private and profitable responses. As old Karl pointed out, classes in France, from poor to rich, tend to defend their own interests. The bottom is represented by the left, the top by the right, while the middle wavers between the two. Of course, it doesn’t always work out so neatly. But that framework remains useful for parsing the tidings from Gaul. It certainly helps to explain the tidal wave of protests now roiling the glorious landscape.
Because the French are political they are frequently on strike and because they often win strikes they enjoy a range of civic, social and workplace benefits unimaginable on this side of the Atlantic. This reinforces the notion that politics and strikes work. Such subversive ideas reside in the back of the head of even the most mindless French teenager who skips school more to draguer les filles than to protest the latest efforts by the Sarkozy regime to succor the rich and screw the poor.
In France, the rich and powerful have learned to respect the clout of workers and students. This has hardly harmed capitalism but has made their capitalists a tad less avaricious and arrogant than our plutocrats. You can see that in the current scandal over bonuses and stock options for corporate execs. Those in France, in the upper six and low seven figures, would be considered chump change here. Nevertheless, French masters of the universe have been tripping over each other to renounce and return them.
Even the New York Times is reluctantly admitting that its thick social safety net will mean far less recession hardship and hock in western Europe than it will here. In place and well-funded unemployment benefits are long-term and generous. No one has to worry that losing a job will lose them health care or free college for the kids. Debt levels are low because Europeans still prefer to pay for things with money they have. And if the bosses get too obstreperous, there’s always the option of effective mass protest, even by politically hip teeny boppers.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Zombie Jamboree
Crappy Anniversaries
Not so long ago in the salad days of our empire, it was the all-powerful combination of our economy and military that made the rest of the world buy or die.
It’s sheer coincidence that we mark the demise of both this week. On March 18th a year ago, the debt rattles of our financial system emanating from Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers became scary enough for the Fed to assign Wall Street to a ward halfway between intensive care and hospice.
Today, March 19 is the sixth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, which pitted the world’s most powerful military against what our leaders dismissed as a “very small minority of dead-enders and losers.” The inability of our best units to overcome this force after four years obliged the Bush administration to pay cash tributes to the “losers” for not attacking American troops. Meanwhile, our military was thoroughly privatized and transformed from a combat focus to a profit center.
So we are left in a condition on this March week of 2009 of having an economy that no longer impresses and a military less and less able to oppress.
Zombie is the word that’s come into style recently to describe our failed institutions. That’s because even though they look and smell like corpses, they still move among us doing the zombie version of their former live acts.
How other than zombie-ish can you describe Obama’s extension of our war on Afghanistan, a country renowned as the graveyard of empires? Or the administration’s increasingly ridiculous and self-destructive efforts to hide the enormity of Wall Street's arrearages and breath life into Citi morgue and Merrill lynched? It’s only been two months for our new prexy and it already looks like the honeymoon is over and the zombie jamboree is getting underway.
Not so long ago in the salad days of our empire, it was the all-powerful combination of our economy and military that made the rest of the world buy or die.
It’s sheer coincidence that we mark the demise of both this week. On March 18th a year ago, the debt rattles of our financial system emanating from Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers became scary enough for the Fed to assign Wall Street to a ward halfway between intensive care and hospice.
Today, March 19 is the sixth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, which pitted the world’s most powerful military against what our leaders dismissed as a “very small minority of dead-enders and losers.” The inability of our best units to overcome this force after four years obliged the Bush administration to pay cash tributes to the “losers” for not attacking American troops. Meanwhile, our military was thoroughly privatized and transformed from a combat focus to a profit center.
So we are left in a condition on this March week of 2009 of having an economy that no longer impresses and a military less and less able to oppress.
Zombie is the word that’s come into style recently to describe our failed institutions. That’s because even though they look and smell like corpses, they still move among us doing the zombie version of their former live acts.
How other than zombie-ish can you describe Obama’s extension of our war on Afghanistan, a country renowned as the graveyard of empires? Or the administration’s increasingly ridiculous and self-destructive efforts to hide the enormity of Wall Street's arrearages and breath life into Citi morgue and Merrill lynched? It’s only been two months for our new prexy and it already looks like the honeymoon is over and the zombie jamboree is getting underway.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Getting Sick Over Health Care
Dr. AIG Will See You Now
I watched a bit of Obama’s White House health care confab. It made me sick. The key subject seemed to be how to ensure cooperation between the private and public sectors to, as they say in Washington, contain costs. Yes, as everyone agrees, health care costs are spiraling out of sight. And that will take us broke.
Really?
In every other first world country health care is a public service like police or fire. People who get sick go to a doctor or a hospital. Their taxes pay for it. That’s it. Here in America when people get sick they have to check with a financial company that decides whether their treatment will unduly cut into its profits.
In those other countries the purpose of health care is to keep citizens hale and hearty at a reasonable cost to the nation. In the U.S., the health care system is designed to make money for those who invest in it. As the saying goes, those investors are not in business for their health, let alone ours.
The goal all private enterprises share is to grow larger and increase profits. The health industry has been amazingly successful at this. When I was born just before World War II in St. Clare's, a non-profit Catholic hospital in Hell’s Kitchen, health care amounted to a tiny two or three percent of our economy.
Today it’s up to 17 percent and wants to grow even more. It has long since topped manufacturing and is now increasingly a component of FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate), our biggest and least stable economic sector. The exhorbitant premiums we pay to insurers don’t make us any healthier. They go to investments in derivatives and other exotic forms of debt and to pay ridiculous salaries to their execs (you may recall the controversial billion buck compensation package for William McGuire of United Health).
Inviting these companies to a White House conference on expanding health care and limiting its costs is like inviting Jeffrey Dahmer to a cookout.
People who claim belief in capitalist competition are oh so careful to avoid mentioning the fundamental supply and demand equation at the heart of health care. Let’s call it the Jack Benny calculus. For all but Benny, the demand to stay alive and healthy goes without question. Who would not give all to avoid death or debilitation? Thus, by capitalist logic and morality, those able to supply the demand for life and health by way of medical services are entitled to charge all the traffic will bear. And they do.
Society cannot meet such prices. The rest of the first world avoids them by taking health out of the market and making it a public responsibility. Here in America we learn to live with them. Since all but the wealthiest individuals can't afford them, our government and private employers pay the obscene amounts demanded by the financial companies and their confreres in the health business. When their stranglehold become unbearable, we try to reduce it through greater efficiencies such as those being touted by the White House. The prices and profits of the providers remain sacrosanct and untouchable. Indeed, we're now giving them even more billions to cover their bad debts.
The economic crisis has given Obama a magnificent opportunity to rationalize health care by eliminating the discredited financial parasites who feed off it. He has merely to ask Americans if they want the AIGs and United Healths to remain responsible for their life and death? He has merely to ask whether America should consider the time-tested, practical and money-saving example of every other first world country and remove health care from the commercial realm and turn it into a public service like police and fire?
But that remedy was not on the agenda at the White House meeting. Some of its proponents were invited to show Obama’s sense of inclusiveness, but went unheeded to affirm his loyalty to the FIRE flacks with which he has surrounded himself.
As I recounted in an earlier blog (The Heart of the Matter, June 18, 2008), I had a cardiac angiogram in Paris for which I was charged $1,300 by the French state. Had I been a citizen of that nation, I would not have paid a penny. That same procedure in the U.S., which I underwent on a half dozen occasions, was billed between $16,000 and $25,000, depending on whether a stent was inserted.
The difference between the amounts charged by the French and by Americans is the difference between a healthy society and a sick one. So far, Barack Obama, despite his splendid bedside manner, doesn’t seem much interested in narrowing that chasm. Tante pis.
Remember the old Jack Benny bit? A crook sticks a gun in Benny’s face and says,
“Your money or your life!” Jack mulls. “Well?” the crook prods. “I'm thinking,
I’m thinking,” says Jack.
“Your money or your life!” Jack mulls. “Well?” the crook prods. “I'm thinking,
I’m thinking,” says Jack.
I watched a bit of Obama’s White House health care confab. It made me sick. The key subject seemed to be how to ensure cooperation between the private and public sectors to, as they say in Washington, contain costs. Yes, as everyone agrees, health care costs are spiraling out of sight. And that will take us broke.
Really?
In every other first world country health care is a public service like police or fire. People who get sick go to a doctor or a hospital. Their taxes pay for it. That’s it. Here in America when people get sick they have to check with a financial company that decides whether their treatment will unduly cut into its profits.
In those other countries the purpose of health care is to keep citizens hale and hearty at a reasonable cost to the nation. In the U.S., the health care system is designed to make money for those who invest in it. As the saying goes, those investors are not in business for their health, let alone ours.
The goal all private enterprises share is to grow larger and increase profits. The health industry has been amazingly successful at this. When I was born just before World War II in St. Clare's, a non-profit Catholic hospital in Hell’s Kitchen, health care amounted to a tiny two or three percent of our economy.
Today it’s up to 17 percent and wants to grow even more. It has long since topped manufacturing and is now increasingly a component of FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate), our biggest and least stable economic sector. The exhorbitant premiums we pay to insurers don’t make us any healthier. They go to investments in derivatives and other exotic forms of debt and to pay ridiculous salaries to their execs (you may recall the controversial billion buck compensation package for William McGuire of United Health).
Inviting these companies to a White House conference on expanding health care and limiting its costs is like inviting Jeffrey Dahmer to a cookout.
People who claim belief in capitalist competition are oh so careful to avoid mentioning the fundamental supply and demand equation at the heart of health care. Let’s call it the Jack Benny calculus. For all but Benny, the demand to stay alive and healthy goes without question. Who would not give all to avoid death or debilitation? Thus, by capitalist logic and morality, those able to supply the demand for life and health by way of medical services are entitled to charge all the traffic will bear. And they do.
Society cannot meet such prices. The rest of the first world avoids them by taking health out of the market and making it a public responsibility. Here in America we learn to live with them. Since all but the wealthiest individuals can't afford them, our government and private employers pay the obscene amounts demanded by the financial companies and their confreres in the health business. When their stranglehold become unbearable, we try to reduce it through greater efficiencies such as those being touted by the White House. The prices and profits of the providers remain sacrosanct and untouchable. Indeed, we're now giving them even more billions to cover their bad debts.
The economic crisis has given Obama a magnificent opportunity to rationalize health care by eliminating the discredited financial parasites who feed off it. He has merely to ask Americans if they want the AIGs and United Healths to remain responsible for their life and death? He has merely to ask whether America should consider the time-tested, practical and money-saving example of every other first world country and remove health care from the commercial realm and turn it into a public service like police and fire?
But that remedy was not on the agenda at the White House meeting. Some of its proponents were invited to show Obama’s sense of inclusiveness, but went unheeded to affirm his loyalty to the FIRE flacks with which he has surrounded himself.
As I recounted in an earlier blog (The Heart of the Matter, June 18, 2008), I had a cardiac angiogram in Paris for which I was charged $1,300 by the French state. Had I been a citizen of that nation, I would not have paid a penny. That same procedure in the U.S., which I underwent on a half dozen occasions, was billed between $16,000 and $25,000, depending on whether a stent was inserted.
The difference between the amounts charged by the French and by Americans is the difference between a healthy society and a sick one. So far, Barack Obama, despite his splendid bedside manner, doesn’t seem much interested in narrowing that chasm. Tante pis.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Indulge This
Not So Simple Simony
Among the attributes shared by Vegas and the Vatican are that both are built on hope and hot money. Vegas promises the chance of winning down here while the Vatican offers its payouts up there.
As countless Mafia movies have taught us, Vegas was originally realized by mob moolah, particularly the Cleveland crowd. Since then, of course, publicly traded corporations have taken over--if that’s any improvement. Apart from The Agony and the Ecstacy, there are not many films about how my one time neighborhood church of St. Peters got put up. Though few Catholics choose to linger over the fact, the holy truth is that St. Peter’s and the Vatican complex were largely financed by sinful samoleons, or as Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible dubs it, filthy lucre.
It was Pope Julius II who back in 1506 commissioned Bramante to design St. Peter’s and hired Raphael and Michelangelo to superintend the job. The money for the work, which went on for a century, came from the sale of indulgences, “thereby lighting the match that ignited the Protestant Reformation."*
An indulgence, according to a recent front page New York Times story is “a sort of amnesty from punishment in the afterlife.” By crossing your heart or certain palms you can procure pardon or parole from Purgatory, a place unmentioned in the bible that Catholics hold to be a sort of over-heated waiting room where the semi-sinful are temporarily relegated on the way to either paradise or perdition.
Back in the olden days, Rome marketed indulgences like reverse time shares. You could knock a day, a week, a year, etc., off your purgatorial detention by making the proper prayers, penances, pilgrimages and certified good works, such as quitting your “attachment to creatures” (presumably falling love with your livestock).
But business being business even in the late middle ages, the profitable possibilities of selling indulgences caught on big time. Lots of priests and princes paid popes for the privilege of peddling them. And from those tainted funds came the capital to construct St. Peters. The selling of indulgences and the corruption of the clergy was given a name: simony. This was after Simon Magus, who offered Jesus’ disciples some sugar for their horses if they would grant him power to impart the holy spirit to others.
At any event, all of this chicanery so enraged Martin Luther that he started a new religion, Protestantism, which eventually gave us mushy white bread, churches with neon marquees and NASCAR fans who’d like to share a beer with George W. Bush. In reaction, the Vatican did its best to massacre the Lutheran heretics in the Holy Wars and, when that failed, cleaned up its act a bit by outlawing pray for pay in 1567.
So, you may ask, with our economy evaporating and our empire expiring, why bring up this well toasted history after 400 years? It’s that story in the NY Times I mentioned above. It said that the Church of Rome is recrudescing indulgences in line with a general march back into medieval obscurantism decreed by the current pope, who, if you recall, was only a Hitler Youth, not a Nazi. The official reason for the return of indulgences is said to be the continued presence of sin in the world, which would seem to me to be an admission that after 2000 years the mother church has yet to get the job done .
I hate to be cynical (not), but it strikes me that the church’s finances are in a parlous state due to having to pay for all that priestly pedophilia for all those decades. They surely calculated that a revival of the discredited indulgence game will not help their bona fides but might bolster their bottom line.
It shouldn't be hard to revive such clerical cozening even though the passing of filthy lucre has been banned since 1567. Simony never really stopped but merely slowed. Indeed, its outstanding practitioner in the modern age was the late Mother Theresa, who counseled the poor to suffer in silence while swapping benedictions for bucks with the rich and reactionary (consult Christopher Hitchen’s factual and funny The Missionary Position for all the profane poop).
Not that I’m against all indulgences. I’ve long been a fan of San Francisco’s Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, whose good works include sponsorship of an annual Hunky Jesus competition in Dolores Park.
* Lives of the Popes by Richard P. McBrien, p. 272
Among the attributes shared by Vegas and the Vatican are that both are built on hope and hot money. Vegas promises the chance of winning down here while the Vatican offers its payouts up there.
As countless Mafia movies have taught us, Vegas was originally realized by mob moolah, particularly the Cleveland crowd. Since then, of course, publicly traded corporations have taken over--if that’s any improvement. Apart from The Agony and the Ecstacy, there are not many films about how my one time neighborhood church of St. Peters got put up. Though few Catholics choose to linger over the fact, the holy truth is that St. Peter’s and the Vatican complex were largely financed by sinful samoleons, or as Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible dubs it, filthy lucre.
It was Pope Julius II who back in 1506 commissioned Bramante to design St. Peter’s and hired Raphael and Michelangelo to superintend the job. The money for the work, which went on for a century, came from the sale of indulgences, “thereby lighting the match that ignited the Protestant Reformation."*
An indulgence, according to a recent front page New York Times story is “a sort of amnesty from punishment in the afterlife.” By crossing your heart or certain palms you can procure pardon or parole from Purgatory, a place unmentioned in the bible that Catholics hold to be a sort of over-heated waiting room where the semi-sinful are temporarily relegated on the way to either paradise or perdition.
Back in the olden days, Rome marketed indulgences like reverse time shares. You could knock a day, a week, a year, etc., off your purgatorial detention by making the proper prayers, penances, pilgrimages and certified good works, such as quitting your “attachment to creatures” (presumably falling love with your livestock).
But business being business even in the late middle ages, the profitable possibilities of selling indulgences caught on big time. Lots of priests and princes paid popes for the privilege of peddling them. And from those tainted funds came the capital to construct St. Peters. The selling of indulgences and the corruption of the clergy was given a name: simony. This was after Simon Magus, who offered Jesus’ disciples some sugar for their horses if they would grant him power to impart the holy spirit to others.
At any event, all of this chicanery so enraged Martin Luther that he started a new religion, Protestantism, which eventually gave us mushy white bread, churches with neon marquees and NASCAR fans who’d like to share a beer with George W. Bush. In reaction, the Vatican did its best to massacre the Lutheran heretics in the Holy Wars and, when that failed, cleaned up its act a bit by outlawing pray for pay in 1567.
So, you may ask, with our economy evaporating and our empire expiring, why bring up this well toasted history after 400 years? It’s that story in the NY Times I mentioned above. It said that the Church of Rome is recrudescing indulgences in line with a general march back into medieval obscurantism decreed by the current pope, who, if you recall, was only a Hitler Youth, not a Nazi. The official reason for the return of indulgences is said to be the continued presence of sin in the world, which would seem to me to be an admission that after 2000 years the mother church has yet to get the job done .
I hate to be cynical (not), but it strikes me that the church’s finances are in a parlous state due to having to pay for all that priestly pedophilia for all those decades. They surely calculated that a revival of the discredited indulgence game will not help their bona fides but might bolster their bottom line.
It shouldn't be hard to revive such clerical cozening even though the passing of filthy lucre has been banned since 1567. Simony never really stopped but merely slowed. Indeed, its outstanding practitioner in the modern age was the late Mother Theresa, who counseled the poor to suffer in silence while swapping benedictions for bucks with the rich and reactionary (consult Christopher Hitchen’s factual and funny The Missionary Position for all the profane poop).
Not that I’m against all indulgences. I’ve long been a fan of San Francisco’s Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, whose good works include sponsorship of an annual Hunky Jesus competition in Dolores Park.
* Lives of the Popes by Richard P. McBrien, p. 272
Friday, February 20, 2009
Barack's "Backyard" Isn't
Savior or Same Old Same Old?
For five murderous decades, Guatemala suffered a vicious succession of right wing dictators who butchered 200,000 of their own citizens suspected of being leftists, that meaning anything but medieval. Of course, these regimes were warm and close allies of Washington, which supplied them with the wherewithal for slaughter. Back in 1960-61, the U.S. used Guatemala as a staging base to mount its inept invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
In recent days, while the supposedly fresh-minded Barack Obama was repeating exactly the same dumb and damning things about Cuba as did ten other presidents from Eisenhower to Bush II, something amazing happened down in Havana. The democratically elected president of Guatemala, Alvaro Colom, made a state visit to the island and “officially asked Cuba for forgiveness” for allowing his country to be used by the U.S. to attack a brother Latin nation.
Hardly a day goes by that the newly free (from U.S. domination) nations of Latin America don’t announce yet another joint economic or diplomatic program aimed at achieving greater unity. Every country, without exception, accepts Cuba as an integral member of the hemisphere’s polity, and every one has demanded an end to the 50-year-old U.S. blockade and subversion of Cuba.
Meanwhile, President Lula of the huge economic powerhouse of Brazil, meets cordially and constantly with his hermano Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Indeed, the traffic of friendly Latin and world leaders in and out of Caracas make it look like the UN. Nevertheless, a clueless U.S. further isolates itself by its efforts to reverse the democratic trend in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, etc., as “dangerous to the continent” they comprise.
Washington’s client list in the region is down to Columbia, a death squad democracy where those in the political opposition are lucky to get a bullet behind the ear without being tortured beforehand. Obama, like Bush before him, can’t offer enough praise for Alvaro Uribe, the well-documented drug lord now endeavoring, without the opposition that our liberals and media heaped on Chavez, to gain the right to run for president indefinitely.
Barack Obama’s notion of change doesn’t appear to apply to Latin America. He sounds like Teddy Roosevelt a century ago, warning the natives that they had better do as Don Yanqui says or taste the bayonets of the US Marines.
Both his State Department and Obama himself, “in remarks that were unusually hostile and threatening even by the previous administration's standards,” accused Hugo Chávez of having "impeded progress in the region" and described his new policy as providing a "counterweight to governments like those currently in power in Venezuela and Bolivia which pursue policies which do not serve the interests of their people or the region.” This was equivalent to the U.S. telling Germany and France that it would oppose their influence in Europe. How out to lunch can you get?
With Bush or Barack, boom times or bust, it appears that America is not about to give up its unaffordable and self-destructive imperial pretensions. Washington cannot shake off the mindset that Latin America is “our back yard,” in other words a place we own where we can do whatever we want. Unable any longer to realize that assertion, we keep it nevertheless as a delusion, no less dangerous for being unreal. Unfortunately, the evidence shows that our government is still spending millions of taxpayer bucks trying--fortunately in vain--to undermine and overthrow disobedient countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and the others. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they were still sponsoring assassination plots against the nearly dead Fidel Castro. No doubt, they’ll attempt grave trashing after he’s gone. Meanwhile, the other 96 percent of the world treat our delusionary demarches as the fading moans of a moribund empire and goes about its own un-American business.
For five murderous decades, Guatemala suffered a vicious succession of right wing dictators who butchered 200,000 of their own citizens suspected of being leftists, that meaning anything but medieval. Of course, these regimes were warm and close allies of Washington, which supplied them with the wherewithal for slaughter. Back in 1960-61, the U.S. used Guatemala as a staging base to mount its inept invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
In recent days, while the supposedly fresh-minded Barack Obama was repeating exactly the same dumb and damning things about Cuba as did ten other presidents from Eisenhower to Bush II, something amazing happened down in Havana. The democratically elected president of Guatemala, Alvaro Colom, made a state visit to the island and “officially asked Cuba for forgiveness” for allowing his country to be used by the U.S. to attack a brother Latin nation.
Hardly a day goes by that the newly free (from U.S. domination) nations of Latin America don’t announce yet another joint economic or diplomatic program aimed at achieving greater unity. Every country, without exception, accepts Cuba as an integral member of the hemisphere’s polity, and every one has demanded an end to the 50-year-old U.S. blockade and subversion of Cuba.
Meanwhile, President Lula of the huge economic powerhouse of Brazil, meets cordially and constantly with his hermano Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Indeed, the traffic of friendly Latin and world leaders in and out of Caracas make it look like the UN. Nevertheless, a clueless U.S. further isolates itself by its efforts to reverse the democratic trend in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, etc., as “dangerous to the continent” they comprise.
Washington’s client list in the region is down to Columbia, a death squad democracy where those in the political opposition are lucky to get a bullet behind the ear without being tortured beforehand. Obama, like Bush before him, can’t offer enough praise for Alvaro Uribe, the well-documented drug lord now endeavoring, without the opposition that our liberals and media heaped on Chavez, to gain the right to run for president indefinitely.
Barack Obama’s notion of change doesn’t appear to apply to Latin America. He sounds like Teddy Roosevelt a century ago, warning the natives that they had better do as Don Yanqui says or taste the bayonets of the US Marines.
Both his State Department and Obama himself, “in remarks that were unusually hostile and threatening even by the previous administration's standards,” accused Hugo Chávez of having "impeded progress in the region" and described his new policy as providing a "counterweight to governments like those currently in power in Venezuela and Bolivia which pursue policies which do not serve the interests of their people or the region.” This was equivalent to the U.S. telling Germany and France that it would oppose their influence in Europe. How out to lunch can you get?
With Bush or Barack, boom times or bust, it appears that America is not about to give up its unaffordable and self-destructive imperial pretensions. Washington cannot shake off the mindset that Latin America is “our back yard,” in other words a place we own where we can do whatever we want. Unable any longer to realize that assertion, we keep it nevertheless as a delusion, no less dangerous for being unreal. Unfortunately, the evidence shows that our government is still spending millions of taxpayer bucks trying--fortunately in vain--to undermine and overthrow disobedient countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and the others. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they were still sponsoring assassination plots against the nearly dead Fidel Castro. No doubt, they’ll attempt grave trashing after he’s gone. Meanwhile, the other 96 percent of the world treat our delusionary demarches as the fading moans of a moribund empire and goes about its own un-American business.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Gullibles Travels...continued
Non Commercial Commercials
It’s not all gloom and doom out there, folks.
Confidence may be shattered, but gullibility remains intact. I was reminded of that when I turned on my local public radio station to find they were conducting their biweekly beggathon--surely, the most bromidic bore in all of broadcasting.
Some clerk was making the usual claim that public radio was non commercial. This was followed by a commercial for Pyjamagrams, delivered to your ever-loving in a de luxe hat box. Then there was another lying cadge followed by another commercial, this one for a dentist who claims to “cater to cowards.”
My local station is dominated by a plugola princess who hosts a food show where she blatantly barters mentions for manna. For instance, she advises listeners that they’ll be treated well on her food tours because she puffs the participating establishments on her program. Not only that, her life partner runs a flackery specializing in--what an amazing coincidence?--food and restaurants!
We couldn’t get away with that kind of cozen back on Hearst’s trashy and utterly corrupt New York Mirror, where I apprenticed in journalistic harlotry. There, if we published a wedding picture of the daughter of the Chevy dealer, we’d have to run it on a different page or day than the ads the dealer bought, lest our whoredom waxed obvious.
Today, the hustlers are in your face and the hustled appear happily clueless. When I point out to my more innocent friends that they regularly run commercials on commercial-free public radio, they’re always surprised and a bit resentful at the revelation. They likewise don’t enjoy contemplating that while commercial radio has only one source of revenue, namely selling spots, non-commercial radio has four: private grants, government funding, individual contributions, and selling spots. No wonder that the public broadcasting execs outshine their private counterparts when it comes to compensation packages.
Noam Chomsky wrote somewhere that it was the gullibility of the middle and educated classes that let our leaders get away with pillage propagandized as patriotism. The poor were either too ignorant or cynical to take it seriously, while the rich knew better since their agents were dispensing the horse hockey. No, it was the great washed and neatly garbed who were educated just enough to get the message but not enough to see through it.
We live in a country where a very large business consists of nothing more than telephoning strangers and bunking them out of their bucks. Another huge industry produces exactly the same products and then packages them at high prices for the impressionable and lower ones for the economical. The scam called public broadcasting is small change next to those. What’s more, its marks can easily afford the few bucks a year that signifies their gullibility. Like the old cons say, it’s a sin to let a sucker keep his money.
From the Horse's Mouth
What is an underwriter or a sponsor?
An underwriter or a sponsor is the term used for an individual or company whose monetary contribution goes to fund the station's programming or operation costs. In return for you dollars, you receive advertising and exposure via our multi-media network.
What is a credit or a spot?
Credit and spot are terms for a commercial. Because public broadcasting is noncommercial, we cannot call sponsor messages "commercials." Program underwriters legally need to be identified, and they deserve recognition for their contribution to the station.
Does public broadcasting only cater to the affluent or upper crust? CPBI prides itself on the variety of programming and outreach that touches many different people.
Source: http://www.cptv.org/membership/spon_myths.asp
It’s not all gloom and doom out there, folks.
Confidence may be shattered, but gullibility remains intact. I was reminded of that when I turned on my local public radio station to find they were conducting their biweekly beggathon--surely, the most bromidic bore in all of broadcasting.
Some clerk was making the usual claim that public radio was non commercial. This was followed by a commercial for Pyjamagrams, delivered to your ever-loving in a de luxe hat box. Then there was another lying cadge followed by another commercial, this one for a dentist who claims to “cater to cowards.”
My local station is dominated by a plugola princess who hosts a food show where she blatantly barters mentions for manna. For instance, she advises listeners that they’ll be treated well on her food tours because she puffs the participating establishments on her program. Not only that, her life partner runs a flackery specializing in--what an amazing coincidence?--food and restaurants!
We couldn’t get away with that kind of cozen back on Hearst’s trashy and utterly corrupt New York Mirror, where I apprenticed in journalistic harlotry. There, if we published a wedding picture of the daughter of the Chevy dealer, we’d have to run it on a different page or day than the ads the dealer bought, lest our whoredom waxed obvious.
Today, the hustlers are in your face and the hustled appear happily clueless. When I point out to my more innocent friends that they regularly run commercials on commercial-free public radio, they’re always surprised and a bit resentful at the revelation. They likewise don’t enjoy contemplating that while commercial radio has only one source of revenue, namely selling spots, non-commercial radio has four: private grants, government funding, individual contributions, and selling spots. No wonder that the public broadcasting execs outshine their private counterparts when it comes to compensation packages.
Noam Chomsky wrote somewhere that it was the gullibility of the middle and educated classes that let our leaders get away with pillage propagandized as patriotism. The poor were either too ignorant or cynical to take it seriously, while the rich knew better since their agents were dispensing the horse hockey. No, it was the great washed and neatly garbed who were educated just enough to get the message but not enough to see through it.
We live in a country where a very large business consists of nothing more than telephoning strangers and bunking them out of their bucks. Another huge industry produces exactly the same products and then packages them at high prices for the impressionable and lower ones for the economical. The scam called public broadcasting is small change next to those. What’s more, its marks can easily afford the few bucks a year that signifies their gullibility. Like the old cons say, it’s a sin to let a sucker keep his money.
From the Horse's Mouth
What is an underwriter or a sponsor?
An underwriter or a sponsor is the term used for an individual or company whose monetary contribution goes to fund the station's programming or operation costs. In return for you dollars, you receive advertising and exposure via our multi-media network.
What is a credit or a spot?
Credit and spot are terms for a commercial. Because public broadcasting is noncommercial, we cannot call sponsor messages "commercials." Program underwriters legally need to be identified, and they deserve recognition for their contribution to the station.
Does public broadcasting only cater to the affluent or upper crust? CPBI prides itself on the variety of programming and outreach that touches many different people.
Source: http://www.cptv.org/membership/spon_myths.asp
Friday, January 23, 2009
Starting with the "Citi morgue"
Bury the Dead Banks
A couple of years back in my natal nabe of Hell’s Kitchen, just off Times Square, a professional inebriate joined the great majority, leaving behind an uncashed disability check. His buddies, ever in need of bucks for bottles, got the bright idea of sitting the corpse in a wheelchair and rolling it down to a money store. They pretended the recipient was merely napping and that they were doing him the service of securing his spondulicks. The clerk wasn’t buying any such nonsense and called in the law, who charged the miscreants with fraud, a breach intellectually beyond the public drunkeness and disorderly conduct violations that matched their talents.
Put those winos in bespoke suits and let them bloviate on the business channels and you will see the same scam, only a billion times bigger. Like the sodden stiff, American-style rip 'n run capitalism expired after a life of wretched excess. It happened back on the the drunk’s holiday of St. Patrick’s Day, 2008, when the Fed (meaning big, socialistic government) was obliged to replace an insolvent Wall Street as our national banker and broker.
Ever since, the money crowd has been pretending that the deceased is only dozing. The Reps, who had organized their existence around the credo that capitalism would piss on government’s grave, simply can’t accept that the unimaginable opposite has occurred. The Dems want to avoid their assigned task of disposing of the body. But the bankers, of course, are denying it for dollars. If they can maintain the fantasy that zombies like Citibank are merely comatose they can keep the cash transfusions flowing from Uncle Sam. Not only that, the scam helps to juice the stock market. Citi’s shares, for instance, swing wildly, plunging on revelations about its true condition and soaring on stories that additional fed handouts are forthcoming. Both the longs and the shorts get in their licks as the rest of us go bust.
If Obama’s serious about restoring the economy, the least he can do is to cancel this cozen asap. Check for pulses, listen for heartbeats, then bury the dead banks and nationalize the major survivors to ensure that they lend rather than hoard. It’s only a first shovelful in digging ourselves out of the hole, but it’s a vital one.
A couple of years back in my natal nabe of Hell’s Kitchen, just off Times Square, a professional inebriate joined the great majority, leaving behind an uncashed disability check. His buddies, ever in need of bucks for bottles, got the bright idea of sitting the corpse in a wheelchair and rolling it down to a money store. They pretended the recipient was merely napping and that they were doing him the service of securing his spondulicks. The clerk wasn’t buying any such nonsense and called in the law, who charged the miscreants with fraud, a breach intellectually beyond the public drunkeness and disorderly conduct violations that matched their talents.
Put those winos in bespoke suits and let them bloviate on the business channels and you will see the same scam, only a billion times bigger. Like the sodden stiff, American-style rip 'n run capitalism expired after a life of wretched excess. It happened back on the the drunk’s holiday of St. Patrick’s Day, 2008, when the Fed (meaning big, socialistic government) was obliged to replace an insolvent Wall Street as our national banker and broker.
Ever since, the money crowd has been pretending that the deceased is only dozing. The Reps, who had organized their existence around the credo that capitalism would piss on government’s grave, simply can’t accept that the unimaginable opposite has occurred. The Dems want to avoid their assigned task of disposing of the body. But the bankers, of course, are denying it for dollars. If they can maintain the fantasy that zombies like Citibank are merely comatose they can keep the cash transfusions flowing from Uncle Sam. Not only that, the scam helps to juice the stock market. Citi’s shares, for instance, swing wildly, plunging on revelations about its true condition and soaring on stories that additional fed handouts are forthcoming. Both the longs and the shorts get in their licks as the rest of us go bust.
If Obama’s serious about restoring the economy, the least he can do is to cancel this cozen asap. Check for pulses, listen for heartbeats, then bury the dead banks and nationalize the major survivors to ensure that they lend rather than hoard. It’s only a first shovelful in digging ourselves out of the hole, but it’s a vital one.
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