Socialism: Oui Ou Non?
Consider this anomaly: The yahoos are giving themselves conniptions because Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are supposedly inflicting socialism on America. This despite the banks and brokerages full of fat cats willing to certify that their Dem buddies remain fully faithful to capitalism as a commandment.
Meanwhile, few in France worry that their country is heading for socialism. And that despite the fact that a coalition of actual socialists, communists, greens and other assorted leftists just won a solid 54 percent victory in regional elections.
Some Americans--i.e., stupid ones--would say France is already socialist. That would be laughed off by the capitalists who run France, not to mention the global rich who flock there to luxuriate amid its non pareil bourgeois refinements.
The difference is that socialism is merely a scare word to the ignorant tea-timers who fling it and/or are freaked by it. They might as well be damning the Dems for delivering us to mopery. In France, on the other hand, socialism remains a popular ideal, if no longer a practical destination. The word conjures up heroic yesterdays and better tomorrows. It’s also a threat of sorts. By voting for leftists, French workers are letting their bosses know that they will not not passively accept job losses, wage cuts and benefit reductions. With no electoral left and only a weak labor movement, ordinary Americans lack that muscle available to the French and are obliged to accept being screwed by any outfit with Inc. at the end of its name.
In fact, France had socialist governments back in the 1930s with Blum and again in the 1980s with Mitterand. The former built the foundation of France’s social welfare system, so that for the first time ever ordinary workers took paid vacations. After a brave start, the Mitterand government backed off its most radical reforms, heeding the threat by Wall Street to strangle the French economy.
What’s left of “socialism” today are generous (by American standards) social and civic benefits and a sense of solidarity that accepts frequent strikes and demos as necessary to maintain the decent living standards that French capitalists are forever chopping away at. As I’ve noted before, on this side of the Atlantic the workers are afraid of the bosses while over there the bosses are afraid of the workers.
It’s been like that for a long time, and, I hope, will remain so. Meanwhile, we can pity the poor Gauls, deprived of paying through the nez for health care and college tuition and forced to accept them as public benefits. If you’re out in Yosemite, the Tetons, Cape Cod or the Smokies this summer, you can feel sorry for them in person as they suffer the slavery of "socialism" on their mandatory month-long vacations.
God forbid it should ever happen here.

Travels With Hillary
I know you’re worried sick because you haven’t heard from me in ten days. I’m happy to report that my exciting mistress, the curvaceous and undulating city of San Francisco, is as sexy as ever. California may be broke, but at California and Polk the crab Louis and sourdough at the Swan Oyster Depot are still as rich as Rockefeller. And the R & G Lounge, where Chinatown meets the Financial District, remains the Heavenly Gate to my stomach.
Of course, I’m not the only one who’s been traveling. Hillary Clinton has been zipping around as well. Unfortunately for the empire, I’ve been getting more respect than she does. Today’s Times tells me that the Russkies gave her a goose nearly as uncomfortable as the barbed colonoscopy that the Israelis administered to Barack Obama via Joe Biden. Prime Minister Putin took the occasion of her visit to Moscow to announce that Russia was going ahead with construction of a nuclear reactor in Iran. This was yet another signal that Washington’s sisyphean efforts to rid the Persian Gulf of 5000 years of Persian influence was going nowhere at a comfortable pace. Previously, Beijing had made it known that it would not sanction Iran, one of its biggest trading partners, just because a deadbeat borrower was looking for a scrap. (More worrisome still, read James Petras’ vital piece about bigger trouble brewing between China and the U.S.) Here was yet another lesson to unschooled Americans that it’s hard to convince people who actually read history to start a gratuitous war against a country that hasn’t attacked anyone in 250 years, and also supplies them with the oil they need to keep warm and move around.
Also in that part of the world, Hillary and the Obama administration have even more Iraqi chickens returning to roost. The recent elections there strengthened the factions least likely to take meetings with the spooks and schemers toiling away at the billion dollar U.S. Embassy in the Green Zone.
Farther east, the war in Afghanistan looks to be on the same time line as the Mesozoic Era. That’s steady income for the Pentagon’s gun runners, but tiresome for the Europeans who, after centuries of playing the Great Game, have grown weary of commuting through the Khyber Pass. The Dutch government collapsed over its support of our Kabul caper. Soon the rest of NATO will be begging off as well.
Days earlier Hillary had been in Brazil, where disobedience, and even insolence, also reigned. Foreign Minister Celso Amorim patiently explained to her that his country was immense, populous and overflowing with resources. Therefore, it had not the slightest reason to take orders from anyone but its own people. Hillary could not comprehend such impertinence. How dare Brazil maintain friendly and profitable relations with such “rogue” nations as Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina and Iran against American “interests?” Hillary went home scratching her head and no doubt wishing that Brazil was as tiny and defenseless as Honduras, whose new CIA-installed death squad democracy stands as the Obummers' sole foreign policy success.
I don't envy Madame Secretary Clinton. She's becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of diplomacy.

When Words Wear Out
Any little kid knows that if you keep repeating a word as fast as you can it turns to gibberish. That applies to our public discourse as much as to the four-year-old driving you crazy by endlessly intoning “poopie.” I’m thinking of three political words at or nearing gibberish status here in America. “Socialism,” “anti-Semitism” and “anti-American” have long since escaped their standard definitions and flown off to fantasyland.
Socialism, according to the online Free Dictionary, is “Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy." An online conservative dictionary says “socialism is a political term applied to an economic system in which property is held in common and not individually, and relationships are governed by a political hierarchy.”
For the sentient, what we nowadays call socialism refers to the mixed economies (part public but mostly private) around the world where socialists or social democrats either hold power or form the main opposition. Germany and Scandinavia are the most typical examples. These countries are free, democratic, prosperous and peaceful. Their people enjoy among the highest living standards and best civic and social services on earth. What’s not to like about Denmark?
Uniquely among first world countries, the U.S. has never had a strong socialist, or even pro-labor, movement. Quite the opposite: America is among the most capitalist and conservative of countries, with both political parties agreeing that prosperity and well-being are best gained by encouraging private business. Public solutions to public problems, such as health care, meet fierce opposition. Even the few broad benefits we've won, such as Social Security and Medicare, remain highly controversial and in danger of dilution and even disappearance.
In this kind of reactionary atmosphere, just about anything that corporate types don’t like, including proposals to keep their books honest, get demonized. And the handy all-purpose pejorative to accomplish this is the word socialism. No matter that in the rest of the world socialism equates to bullet trains taking workers on month-long seashore vacations with the money they saved on not having to pay out of pocket for hospital bills or college tuition. Here in America, it means the devilish schemes of Democrats and bureaucrats to commit Godless evil on the citizenry. Thus the word socialism is so soiled that it can’t be used in polite company, let alone to suggest a policy alternative. Meanwhile, its use as a pejorative is crazily inaccurate, antically applied and wearing out. In a word, it’s become gibberish.
My Merriam-Webster describes anti-Semitism as “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.” There’s a much longer historical explication at Wikipedia, not to mention your public library. When I was a lad just after WW II, there was quite of bit of anti-Semitism abroad in the land (Check out the 1947 Gregory Peck flick Gentleman’s Agreement to get a sense of it). Typically, businesses, schools, neighborhoods and clubs discreetly or blatantly turned away Jews. For more and deeper reasons than I can explain here, that kind of discrimination happily died out. Where once Jews were obliged to keep to themselves, they have become so interwoven into American life that they worry now about cultural diminution by intermarriage.
Not that anti-Semitism has disappeared. There’s still plenty of it amongst the ranks of Rapture-ready Christians, who believe that Jews, foremost among the unsaved, are deserving candidates for horrible death comes the looming End Time. Weirdly, their particular doctrine holds that until then they must venerate the state of Israel. So they ardently, if temporarily, champion Israel, especially its hard right and expansionist elements. Even more weirdly, Israel and its partisans welcome that support, playing political kissy-face with the bible-thumpers and ignoring their base anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, the word anti-Semitism has taken on a new definition and usage that you won’t find in the dictionary. Instead of denoting hostility towards Jews, it’s become a dirt ball to throw at anyone who makes even a tepid criticism of the policies of Israel. C’est bizarre because Israelis are free to fault America and both Americans and Israelis are free to second-guess their own countries. It’s only when Americans are less than perfectly indulgent of Israel that the noxious tar of anti-Semitism gets flung at them.
Meanwhile, Israel’s penchant for war, expansionism and apartheid have been losing it friends and adding to its adversaries at an ever increasing rate. Thus ever more critics are being labeled anti-Semites, not a few of them within the pro-Israel ranks. With each new, more ludicrous charge, the pejorative loses weight. What was once serious has become cynical on its way to gibberish.
No doubt that there is an excess of enmity for our empire in the world. And civilized bourgeois nations disdain our mindless avidity and trash culture. So there is some actual anti-Americanism around. Maybe even lots of it. But here at home the phrase as used by pols and the media has little or nothing to do with America or Americans. When directed at other countries, as in “Bolivia is anti-American,” it simply means disobedient. And when aimed by yahoos at other Americans it means “Shut up, you’re not allowed to talk!” "Anti-American" is not quite gibberish yet, but it has entered the express elevator in the tower of Babel.

Gonna Study War Some More
There are two main ways of keeping the peace. One is the Johnny Cash method, or don’t bring your guns to town. Movies teach us that this was popular among pinko marshals like Wyatt Earp in the old west. The other is the NRA idea of selling everyone lots of guns so that any one can either scare off or plug troublemakers.
The problem with John and Wyatt's advice was that one was a singer and the other a law man so that they didn’t particularly care about the fortunes of Samuel Colt up here in Connecticut. On the other holster, the advantage of the NRA notion is that it makes lots of money whether or not it keeps the peace. And if America isn’t about making money, what is it about?
Obviously, Cash and Earp have few fans in Washington. The Pentagon, lavishly indulged by lopsided congressional majorities such as those enjoyed by dictatorships, has become mainly a weapons monger. Thanks to its efforts, U.S. corporations peddle more lethal hardware around the world year after year than any other death merchants. Pig heaven is selling to all sides in a conflict. There was a lot of that in Iraq, where huge shipments of arms vanished on arriving from the States, to show up later in the hands of our nominal enemies. Nothing new about that. The U.S. profitably armed both Iran and Iraq in their 1980-88 war that killed a reported million people.
It’s hardly surprising then that defense secretary Robert Gates, who’s there to remind us that when it comes to war there’s no difference between Bush and Obummer, has been trashing the Europeans for not doing enough arms shopping and sabre rattling. Consider this amazing quote from a speech he gave last week at the National Defense University, a Defense Department-financed graduate school for military officers and diplomats:
“The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.”
Gates went on to criticize the Europeans for spending only half as much of their GDP on the military as the U.S. does. He warned that “hostile powers”could be tempted into “aggression” by such puny war budgets.
My first thought on ingesting that inversion of logic and assault on decency is that politicians invoke 2001 and 9/11 to claim they 'changed everything'--in ways, coincidentally, that benefit those making the claim. But, as you and I have noticed, everything is pretty much the same. I didn’t transpose my sock and underwear drawers after 2001 and I didn’t fret more about Muslims with box cutters after 9/11 than I did about Soviets with H-bombs when that was the threat du jour.
Gates doesn’t tell us why peace was okay in the last century but has become dangerous in this one. Neither does he identify the “hostile powers” likely to attack Europe because it doesn’t permit its military-industrial sector to engorge itself as sickeningly as ours does.
My Rough Guide to Rogue Regimes hasn’t listed any new threats to Europe since the Berlin Wall came down. Of course, the Pentagon warns that Persian rockets could hit Luxembourg at any moment, but continentals consider that to be merely a sales promo for Northrup, Lockheed and Boeing.
There’s nothing new about Washington admonishing even historically tranquil states to become sufficiently terrified of whatever dangers the Pentagon invents so that they will purchase U.S. weapons and invite in our forces to protect them from foes foreign and domestic. Reagan’s ambassador to Austria in the 1980s ticked off the locals with suggestions that they abandon neutrality. We’re forever urging quiet little Costa Rica, which has no army, to get itself one--Pentagon outfitted, of course. We’ve made our annoyance clear at the anti-war clauses of the Japanese constitution. No doubt our diplos are working diligently to get the Swiss worrying that neighboring Liechtenstein is a secret aggressor state.
The other side of the coin is threatening perfectly peaceful countries with war so as to gin up profitable arms races. It’s now 31 years that Washington has been claiming Iran is developing nukes to annihilate just about everyone from Oman to Iceland. We’re currently stuffing even more weapons into the Persian Gulf because we say it’s threatened by the Persians, a people who have not attacked another country in 250 years. Venezuela has never invaded anyone or even fought a foreign war. That doesn’t stop Washington and its house media from charging it with scheming to devour Latin America, a fate that the continent can escape only by buying American weapons and accepting ever more U.S. bases on its soil.
The tired ploy of manufacturing crises like those cited above appears to be fading. The vagueness of Gate’s warning about putative "hostile powers" is another sign that our weapons and warfare state has become so natural to us that it's no longer necessary to frighten us with scare stories about evil enemies. Soon wars will be scheduled like tv listings:

• Somalia invasion set for next Tuesday.

• Bombing of Ecuador to be summer replacement for subversion of Bolivia.

Obama's Felonious Forum
It’s rare when the public gets to witness an illicit meeting by a criminal syndicate. That’s why this old police reporter was all eyes and ears at Barack Obama’s “Health Care Forum” on Thursday. Here, right on cable for all the world to eavesdrop, was a mob wrangling over territory and loot. But my fascination didn’t last long. For all their dark power, the attendees were a boring lot. Not one had the flash of John Gotti or the quiet authority of Frank Costello. I switched over to TCM and the far more scintillating Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races.
Criminal confab? Attended by the top leaders of our government! What is this nut ranting about? Well, the fact is that just about everywhere in the civilized world profiting on basic health care, as we do here in America, is unlawful, illegal and verboten, not to mention immoral and uneconomical. Thus, so would be meetings furthering this activity.
Non-profit health care? Perfectly OK. Government-provided health care? No problem. Private profit health care for ancillary items like dental, glasses, private rooms? Sure. But profit on treating illness, disease and trauma? No, not allowed. Period.
Those civilized nations see three big reasons for this rule. The first is that the state, any state, reserves to itself the right to take life, and then only by way of due process. Anything else is murder to one degree or another. Allowing private companies to deny health care to their customers simply on the basis of profitability gives them the power of life and death.
The second is that it is not possible to make a free market in health care. Just about everyone would surrender their last penny and go into lifetime hock to keep themselves and their loved ones alive and well. Under capitalism’s sacred law of supply and demand this means that providers of health care will charge whatever the traffic will bear, meaning taking that last penny and IOU from a sufferer. That’s not only immoral, but a formula for impoverishing millions of people.
The third is that, like all businesses, private health care providers expect to increase their market share and profit every year. Given the above mentioned imperative of survival, this means that they can easily grow from their present 17 percent share of our economy to 20 or 30 percent. While those civilized countries were prospering by producing goods and services, our economy would be increasingly based on treating each other for our ills. And there would be no incentive for offering preventive care or adopting healthy habits since they would slow the growth of the dominant sickness sector.
The real, but unspoken, issue at Obama’s felonious forum, was how to control the rapacious growth of health care so that it doesn’t swallow the rest of the economy. GM, for example, says it’s at a competitive disadvantage because every car it makes in the U.S. has an added $1,500 built into the price because of the health care benefits won by its union workers. That same car made in Ontario is $1,500 more profitable because Canadian taxpayers rather than GM bear that cost.
The ills of ordinary Americans have no part in the so-called health care debate of the Washington power players and their corporate pay masters. Sob stories about poor Aunt Thelma who was turned down for cancer treatment by Moneybags Health Insurance are for show. The fight is really about balancing the conflicting interests of different business sectors. Obama takes that very seriously, while the Reps, like nasty brats, think only of ways to screw him and the Dems, no matter the damage it does to the system they claim to revere.
What’s the solution? One is that you get active with one of the many groups promoting a single payer answer, like Health Care Now or Single Payer Action. Another was suggested back in the ‘70s by Gordon Lightfoot when he sang, “The skyline of Toronto is something you’ll get onto...”

Ronald Reagan Is Smiling

We're the party that wants to see an America in which
people can still get rich--Ronald Reagan, May 4, 1982

Top-Earning U.S. Households
Averaged $345 million in ‘07
--NY Times, Feb. 18, 2010

Taking stock of us from his celestial saddle at Gipper’s Grove way out in Simi Valley, Reagan must be grinning. There’s never been a better or easier time to become ridiculously rich in America. Indeed, the planet has seldom seen such a piling of pelf. Bespoke-suited armies of traders, brokers and bankers have buried the myth that money comes from making stuff or doing things. They are instead proving daily that money can issue from nothing more than money. Or is it vice versa?
The stats on the concentration of wealth in America are mind-numbing. Rather than sending you instantly bye-bye by enumerating some of them, let me just observe that we are quickly approaching a time when the owners of the world can be comfortably entertained on the cocktail terrace of a Ritz Carlton Hotel--more likely one in Shanghai than in New York.
Our conservatives, who learned their economics from Monopoly where one player takes all and everyone else goes bust, see this concentration as the natural order of things. The rich should be rich, the poor poor and the middle class muddling. Anything else confuses the yahoos. So they treat any effort to bring up the penurious majority or restrain the profligate minority as “socialism.” It never occurs to them to ask why top-heavy economies tumble, or why more equitable ones enjoy peace and prosperity?
Not just Palinoids but lots of Americans have specific views on the in-gathering of gelt. Consider the following from the business section of the Feb. 19 NY Times on the decision by a fat cat health broker to raise rates in California by as much as 39 percent:
“But from a business perspective, Wellpoint, one of the nation’s largest insurers and the operator of commercial Blue Cross plans in more than a dozen states, may have few alternatives as a company accountable to shareholders demanding higher earnings” [i.e., higher than the $2.6 billion they raked in last year].
In decades past, business apologists invariably sketched shareholders as a pathetic huddle of widows and orphans dependent upon their paltry dividends for their daily crust of bread. Nowadays, of course, speed-of-light computer trading allows investors to buy and sell shares in fractions of a second--yes, a second. The days of Hettie Green are long past, and one sees few crones and waifs shivering at Broad and Wall. Still, the estimable Times tells us that the profits of these nanosec shareholders must and will come before the accident victim or the cancer sufferer.
If you linked to the Times story on the 400 highest earners you will also have noted, as April 15 approaches, that their average tax came to 16.6 percent. Would that bloggers be so favored

Conflict As Commodity

Welcome to the world of strategic analysis where we develop

weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist

--Pentagon planner Ivan Selin, 1966

Thanks to Romania, those of you haunted by vague fears might finally get a so-so night’s sleep. It was claimed on a recent day, purportedly in Bucharest, that Romania has agreed to help ward off unspecified threats to indeterminate countries by allowing unproven U.S. anti-missile systems on its territory. With the alleged news, something like a sigh of relief is rumored to have wafted across various lands.
The proposal that Romania stand athwart the moot menace came, it is said, from President Obama. He had previously nixed the installation of a grander but more problematic missile defense in Poland that would have been reliant on radars based in the Czech Republic. That system would have putatively protected northern Europe, including Iceland and the Faeroes, from improbable assault by incipient Iranian rockets.
In writing ads, as I once did, basic products like salt and sugar are classified as commodities, meaning one brand is as good as another, and therefore minimally promoted. War has become a commodity in America. It used to be heavily advertised, with scary images and copy warning us of specific threats from certain countries or ideologies supposedly out to get us.
Gen. MacArthur put this eloquently back in 1957: “Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear--kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor--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 it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet in retrospect these disasters seem never quite to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”
But that was many wars ago. By now the basing of troops and weapons at preposterous cost in remote parts of the world to meet nebulous threats has become quotidian. Resort to violence in yet another country unknown to most Americans is hardly noticed.
The Romanian deployment, relegated to the inside pages of the print press and all but ignored by the electronic media, is just one of such sallies. The Pentagon has established a new Africa Command to conduct “military operations as directed to promote a stable and secure African environment in support of U.S. foreign policy." It’s beefing up its presence in Latin America, patrolling the coasts with a revived Fourth Fleet, and adding bases in Colombia and Peru. The original message of purpose it sent to Congress contemplated “full spectrum operations” against “anti-U.S. (i.e., disobedient) regimes”.
All agree that the country is insolvent, but almost all also agree that pumping up the Pentagon budget, no matter our economic plight, has become like breathing. Endless scandals about botched and lost wars, incomprehensible incompetence, and revelations of vast corruption have as much effect on Americans as blowing spitballs at tanks.
Conservatives, who say they hate the government because it’s too big, bossy and bureaucratic, nevertheless adore and indulge the military, which happens to be the biggest, bossiest and most bureaucratic part of the government. Liberals worried about being branded “wimpy on defense,” likewise give the Pentagon carte blanche. Thus we vote war budgets with lopsided majorities typical of tinpot dictatorships.
Is it Iran that annoys us this week? Are the Russkies riling us? The Venezuelans vexing us? The Chinese challenging us? The names hardly matter anymore. Let's just say that the other 95 percent of the world is filled with disobedient ingrates who can only be stopped by stuffing the Pentagon's maw with money we don't have.

Pique in (and at) Peiping

Too Big To Boss

A small debt produces a debtor, a large one an enemy
--Publilius Syrus, 1st century Roman aphorist

It’s good, I guess, that one place where the free market is still thriving is the deadbeat sector of our economy. Tune into commercial radio and you’ll be hosed by an infinite assortment of boiler room bandits promising to relieve your debt load. Whether you owe ten large to the IRS or your viscera to Visa, they promise to use their “special” and “secret” programs to lift you out of the hole and make you whole. Just dial the 800 number and you’ll soon be sauntering down Solvency street.
Our government, the biggest deadbeat of all, doesn’t have an 800 number it can call to escape penury. All it can do is to keep borrowing more bucks to cover the vig on those it already owes. This means importuning yet another handout from the Han.
Among ordinary mortals, debtors are afraid of sharks. They worry about being able to walk again after missing a payment. Certainly, they avoid antagonizing their creditors. Things are different at the highest reaches of power. While our treasury department is busy mooching from China, our Pentagon is using that money to muscle it. It’s as if I borrowed bucks from you to buy a gun to stick in your face.
The Chinese are ticked about Obama selling $6 billion in arms to Taiwan, the anomalous island entity that Washington recognizes as a de jure but not de facto province of China. Back in the Cold War, the U.S assumed a security role there analogous to, say, China protecting Hawaii from us.
Pundits see this gun-running to Taiwan as payback by Barack for Peiping’s “unhelpfulness” and “recalcitrance” on issues from Iran to trade and climate change. (Washington uses such terms, along with several others, including the always evocative “anti-American,” as euphemisms for disobedience. In other words, the Chinese are not doing as they’re told.)
The question is what the U.S can do about a willful China--apart from engorging its own military contractors? The answers range from nothing much to nothing at all.
It became obvious from early in George II’s reign that our empire was looking as enfeebled as Dracula confronted with a crucifix. The imperium’s great power was based on the three M’s of manufacturing, money and the military. But its glory days have long passed. Manufacturing has shrunk to 11 percent of the economy as foreign producers expand and domestic companies ship factories and jobs overseas. The mighty U.S. dollar plummets (but not this week) as Americans go into hock to buy stuff no longer made in the States. More concerned with contracts than combat, our bloated military is debilitated by corruption. Its incompetence has left Iraq a bloody mess. After nearly a decade it has yet to best a bunch of feudal cave dwellers in Afghanistan.
All of this is quite obvious to our Cathay creditors. So is the belt of military bases that the Pentagon is endeavoring to wrap around China’s girth. You’ve got to wonder if the Forbidden City honchos are amused or irked at their money being used to intimidate them? Are they’re anticipating the day when Chinese bases will encircle the U.S?
The sliver of the American media that pays attention to events beyond Tiger Woods’ libido has apparently received guidance from on high and has begun covering the new coolness between the colossi. They are discomfited by China’s insolence. They fear a trade war. A few even foresee eventual military confrontation. Others say it’s a teapot tempest that has to calm down because both sides have too much to lose.
The smarter ones, of course, are studying Mandarin.

The Power of Babble
These are frightening times in Washington. Despite his brave talk in the State of the Union, Obama and the Dems have been terrified into backing off their health care and other initiatives. No matter how much they concede to the Reps, they get only the back of John Boehner’s unnaturally bronzed mitt in reply. What’s the ominous threat that has them gasping in their Guccis?
Filibuster, that’s what! The scary spector of Republicans endlessly bullshitting on the floor of the Senate. Will they have to dam Capital Hill to protect against this torrent of verbal diarrhea? Will Harry Reid have to buy ear plugs? Will Jim Lehrer doze off ? Oh, the horror!
Let’s face it, our president had to surrender. Otherwise it would have meant Mitch McConnell droning through the Louisville phone book. If that doesn’t petrify you, how about James Imhofe babbling on about his grand kids?
It’s a turkey and egg question: Do our politicians feed us such preposterous nonsense because they’re contemptuous of us or stupid themselves?
Maybe it’s just that I was younger and more gullible, but I seem to recall that back in the day the solons fed us far more plausible lies. They scared us silly about Russia and China. But those were the two biggest countries on earth with real armies and nukes pointed our way. Now Washington gets our fear factor boiling by endlessly warning us of a few hundred medieval cave dwellers who gained their deadliest success at terrorism armed with no more than box cutters.
More stupid examples:
--The Pentagon says we have to spend billions to protect Iceland from a possible missile attack by Iran.
--The president says we’re taking all of our ‘combat’ troops out of Iraq by this summer. Since Blackwater, KBR and their ilk have profitably taken on just about all of the non-combat stuff in the military, what will our non-combat forces be doing?
--Obama also tells us we’re going to save zillions on health care and cut the deficit by making people buy insurance from financial companies whose only goal is to make more money this year than last year.
--The current and former treasury secretaries testify that it was necessary to save the system not by sending the banksters who wrecked it to jail but rather by making them richer than they were before.
Harry Truman warned us to never kick a fresh turd on a hot day. Would that our present pile of politicians even come close to that sort of simple and honest advisory.

###

A Serious Moment--I just heard that Howard Zinn died in California at 87. He spent his life telling us the truth about ourselves. If you have yet to read A People's History of the United States, do it. If you have kids, make sure they read it. He was a writer and a fighter. We lost one of our best.

Sarah's Sighing

Scott’s Personality Parade
Start out with a people globally renowned for knowing little and caring less about the world--except that they should run it. Limit them to a narrow choice of politics consisting of conservatives who seriously believe in a bunch of selfish and self-destructive nonsense, as opposed to weak-willie liberals who long ago gave up the politics of the greater good for those of the lesser evil.
Make sure they learn little in the way of history and critical thinking so that they can keep making the same mistakes forever. See to it that they remain ignorant of economics and consumer savvy so that they can keep being conned and rolled forever. Amuse them with a mercenary media that specializes in treating the trivial importantly and the important trivially. Then never stop telling them that their country is the greatest--even if they’re too dumb to find it on a map.
What you end up with is the American voter. The right can pull up polls showing that the electorate hate the government and want it shriveled to insignificance. The left’s polls indicate, au contraire, that Medicare, Social Security and other government programs are highly popular. Take your pick.
In parliamentary democracies, people vote for parties, meaning policies. Ignorant of ideology, Americans vote for personalities. They see no problem in revering both liberal Dem FDR and rightwing Rep Reagan. Or with going from Teddy Kennedy to his political opposite, Scott Brown. All four had big personalities that counted for more than what they believed about boring stuff like the empire and the economy. Forgetting that basic truism, the arrogant Mass Dems put up a dud to oppose a stud. Game, set and match.
Dems, Reps and the media are blowing smoke about the significance of Brown being the 41st vote necessary to block the Obama health insurance giveaway in the senate. Let it waft on the winds. As prestigious pundit Jon Stewart noted, George W and the GOP got everything they every dreamed of out of the Senate on straight 51 to 49 majority votes. It was the Dems who invented the myth of filibuster-proof 60-vote majority to pre-excuse the failure of their wishy-washy initiatives. Thusly, I have a hunch that the White House and the Dem congressional leadership are not that upset about the Brown upset. It gives them that much more cover for colluding with the Reps.
I can, however, imagine who is pissed as heck: Sarah Palin! She’s going to have pose nekked to catch up with the hunky Brown in the presidential beauty parade that he just joined.