Excuses, Excuses
    First, an insincere apology for the cheap trick of teasing my reader with the word "sex" in my last blog without actually providing any prurience.  It's an old summer scheme of tabloid editors to keep circulation up over the dog days.

   Second, I’m running a couple of days, maybe even a week, late on the blog.  My excuse is perfectly explained in one of the two photos below I am supplying in lieu of words. Note the  trim young life guard  ready to rescue yours truly, the lord of the beach, from a chilled glass of rosè while he ponders his next rant and checks out the latest in bikini styles. The other is of my vassals at planting time in our extensive domaine. The patty pan squash are not doing so well. Once I clear up that problem, I'll be back at the blog. Stay cool.

     

Sex For Stupidos

Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservative--John Stuart Mill 

   What makes yahoos tick? How can rightwingers keep intoning trumpery like a dog that won't stop barking There are progressives (you’ll find them most readily on AlterNet) who are actually looking into the dark void of the conservative cranium to see how the flapdoodle gets cooked up and served.
   One notion, bruited by George Lakeoff, a word wizard at Berkeley, is that our tories tend to come from patriarchal families where pop bosses the brood and teaches right from far right. The result is said to be an exaggerated obeisance to authority and an absence of critical thought. This was summed up nicely back in Watergate days when a Congressman who retained his faith in Richard Nixon exclaimed, “Don’t confuse me with the facts!”
  Researchers also say that righties are successful at pushing their policies because they deliver them with moral and Manichean rhetoric. Indeed, they claim the diety as a dittohead.
   The problem with these premises is that the righties are very picky about the authority they respect and the morality they proclaim. So much so that I can’t think of a more brazen bunch of hypocrites now doing business in the USA. A perfect example is the right’s obsession with gayness, which the Ten Commandments ignore and the Bible abominates only in passing along with such sins as skipping the Sabbath and seducing your sister-in-law. Meanwhile, the good book is brimful of denunciations of usury. Jesus himself chased the money changers from the temple.
  At three score and twelve, I have yet to find the actual harm homosexuals (married or single) do to the social order. But I do know that high interest rip-offs are ruining countless families, while debt of all kind is wrecking our economy. Poor neighbs and the strip malls that ring military bases are chock-a-block with pay day sharks who lend bucks by the week at 300 percent a year. That reads like usury to me.
   You might think that God-fearing teabaggers would have greater concern about their soldier sons and daughters falling into hopeless hock than about whether Oscar and Henry should be allowed to emulate Ozzie and Harriet. I can’t peruse all the news, but I have yet to hear about an outraged congregation picketing the local shylock.
   To give them the benefit of the doubt, it might be that conservatives fret more about lust than lucre because the former doesn’t involve math. With their adoration of the avid, the only financial sin they ever acknowledge is letting a sucker keep his money.
   PS--There’s an inspiring Occupy-type movement in the UK protesting usury and, indeed, the whole credit swindle that has ripped off our economy. We should be building such a movement here.

Cafe Socializing: New York City above. Split, Croatia, below.

Note the difference.

Cafes Harbor Socialization Threat
The Congregational church cater-corner from our house in West Tisbury specializes in ice cream and strawberry socials. Surely, those are not the socializations stirring a storm this summer. The coalition of the ignorant and inane appear instead to have their pitchforks out for European socializing. You can’t surf past Fox News or saunter in the environs of a town hall meeting without hearing some yahoo warn that American politicians are secret agents of Euro socializing and that they plan to infect us with it.
What exactly is this menace? I decided to look into it--at some risk, I may add, to my waist line. Early in the summer I surveilled subversive socialization sites along the Adriatic. This is my report:
Euro socializing consists in the main of sitting in cafes and not worrying about doctor bills, college tuition or scuffling for silver in your golden years. Instead, you schmooze with your friends about soccer, sex and the stupidity of Americans. As in: “Juventus looks great this season, Monique has a new boy friend, and I get a kick out of those dumb Americans paying through the nose for health care so that their doctors can sail their gaudy yachts to Frejus and rent villas in Poggibonsi. Tee hee.”
Europeans are able to accomplish all of this socializing because they have vastly more outdoor tables and chairs under awnings and umbrellas than Americans do. In other words, there’s a cafe gap. Unlike the notorious missile gap from the 60’s, when American worried that they didn’t have enough rockets to blow up the world as many times as they wanted to, the cafe gap is real. And it’s not just patio furniture. Europe has an overwhelming lead in high-tech, multi-spigot expresso machines with awesome latte steaming capabilities.
Crewing these marvels are not just all-thumbs nerd grad students, but professional baristas versed in every trick in the book from infusions to spremutas. They’ve got your pastis coolly clouding on a coaster while their American counterparts are still asking, ‘”like what kind of drink is that, dude?”
It gets scarier. While America’s few socializing spots are relegated to malls or old neighbs turned trendy, the Euro ones have Roman ruins, castles, medieval plazas, and perfect seascapes providing the eye candy.
Can America breach the cafe curtain and deal with the terrace threat? It’s going to be hard. Socialization is anathema in many parts of our country. And cafe crawling is regarded by many as a waste of time more properly spent studying bankruptcy law or mortgage refinancing.
There may be hope. I was having a drink the other night with a right wing friend. As usual, he was damning government as the mother of all evil and praising private property as the father of all virtue. I was allowing that across the ocean in Christendom, government was regarded more as a comfortably off uncle who’s around to pick up the bills when mom gets sick or Hans heads off to college. He fumed that the welfare state was abomination. Then he thought a minute, perhaps recalling his last toke in Amsterdam or the taste of tomatoes in Taormina, and a small smile broke over his face as he offered, “Yeah, but I have to admit, those Euros know how to live.”

Look Here, Not There
     In dictatorships the government tells the media what and what not to say.  It’s different here where the media repeat what the government says and ignores what the government ignores.  In my three score and twelve years I scarce recall an instance in which our press didn’t dance to the official line with the definitude of Fred and Ginger.
    A current example of this precision duet is the unholy mess in Syria. The brutal Assad regime is battling an assortment of ruthless rebels (including the local branch of Al Qaeda). Though it is by no means the biggest or baddest blood bath on planet Earth, Syria’s been getting big-time daily media coverage here and in Europe.
    There's no pretense at objectivity despite the fact that we really don’t know diddely about what’s happening and who’s doing it.  Washington is openly calling for the removal of the Assad regime and McCain and other Reps are itching to jump into the fight. Anyone who doubts that our special forces, the Israelis, the Saudis and such are not already in the middle of it ought to go back to Sunday school.
    The stakes are big: Syria’s a serious country bordering on Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. It’s gotten away with disobeying the empire for decades. Installing a docile regime in Damascus in place of its willful one would be a major gain for Washington and Tel Aviv.
    I'd say fat chance!  Sects and sectarians from Morocco to Pakistan are scrambling for power--but what they all share is mistrust of the U.S. and hatred of Israel. Changes in government are not about to change that. Washington's puppets are simply no longer tractable. U.S. hegemony is fast fading in that part of the world, and as for the Israelis, I would buy their ten year bonds but not their 30 year ones. 
    Meanwhile, there’s a nearer nation in which a quarter million people have been killed and three to four million driven into internal and external exile. They are the victims of a longtime right-left civil war in which Washington arms and trains the rightists. The massacres there makes Syria look like Sweden. But those monstrous facts get minimal media hereabouts. The country where blood flows in torrents is instead portrayed as a democratic ally whose human rights record is steadily “improving.” 
    The culprit of course is Colombia, Washington’s leading satrap in Latin America and our numero uno supplier of cocaine. Columbia is too embarrassing for media to talk about.  Except for occasional chamber of commerce-type plugs for its putative economic advances (fancy malls in the cities distracting from the same old misery in the countryside), our media mostly ignore the place. 
    The reason is obvious: how, for example can they explain why hundreds of thousands of supposedly prospering and democratic-minded Colombians keep fleeing from U.S.-sponsored military death squads to supposedly suppressive Venezuela and Ecuador?  Acknowledgement of such facts would merely confuse Americans. So let's keep sympathizing with the Syrians and pretending that Colombia is no more than a seraglio for our Secret Service.

Gone Wisconsin
     The name of the game here in America is capitalism.  Everyone grab what you can!  Did I say everyone? Not quite. We have unspoken but strict rules about who can access the grab bag.  It’s a class thing, just like in Britain only without the peerage and pomp.
    At the front of the line are big money and old money. Then comes new money and dirty money (but isn’t it all nowadays?). Showbiz and sports money follow along. These comprise the now notorious one percent. We, the 99 percent, scuffle for chump change, some neatly in office casual, others wearing sweat-stained company shirts and weary expressions. Ever more of us are dead broke.
    Our social order discourages questions about the rich. For example, it’s unimaginable to ask whether Warren Buffet, let alone any other zillionaire, has too much money. Nor should we ask why the banksters who peddle synthetic collateralized debt obligations make millions while teachers and nurses make thousands.  That smacks of class warfare, a no-no.  
       On the other hand, it’s perfectly okay, in fact, encouraged, for us in the lower 99 percent to hector each other about our means.  We are stoked to resent any benefits going to the poor, the dark, the infirm and the elderly, who, we are told, are undeserving even if the Bible says otherwise.  When it comes to sheer invidiousness, we vent on those workers who, like business people, have organized to advance their common interests.  Bankers clubs? Sure.  Unions, ugh! Unions for public employees, double ugh!
    There is an ongoing transfer of enormous wealth from the bottom and middle to the top in America. Politicians and pundits tell us to ignore it and fight amongst ourselves for the disappearing crumbs.  Admire those, they advise, who exported your job and looted your pension, for they are rugged individualists and job creators. Resent instead those in your communities who still have jobs with pensions. Blame them for the broke cities and insolvent states.            
    Over in the first world, living standards are livable because of something Americans would find weird.  It’s called solidarity. People (the human not the corporate ones) join together in unions to give themselves--and, by extension-- everyone else a boost up. The idea is that a broadly prosperous and generous society is a decent thing to have. It works very well: the advanced welfare states of Scandinavia and northern Europe are faring best in the current recession.
     But that’s apparently of no matter to the majority of Wisconsin voters. They have chosen indecency instead as their new lodestar. Goodbye to my occasional Leinenkugel.  I know it’s not your fault.  It’s just that Wisconsin now leaves a bitter taste.

The Unspoken Message

 For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath--Matthew 13:12

  In the 19th century, America was agricultural and most folks knew how to grow vegetables and raise chickens. In the 20th, America was industrial and countless shade tree mechanics tinkered with machines. Today, in the 21st century, America is financial--and people can barely reconcile their checkbooks, let alone wise up to what’s happening on Wall Street.
    Given our dismal knowledge of the dismal science, we are suckers for trash talk about economics. Politicians right and center and pundits corporate and conservative batter us daily with nonsense about the money and how it gets used and abused.               
    Though it all sounds confounding (confusion helps keep us docile), there is a constant but unspoken central message at work: the rich don’t have enough while the rest of us have too much.  This message cannot be openly proclaimed because it doesn’t sound right or proper. Willard Romney or Obama buddy Robert Wolf can’t just announce that they’re depending on the sacrifices of ordinary Americans to make them richer. At least, they can’t say it quite yet.
    Nevertheless, that goal is the main reason why Wall Street and its rented pols in Washington do what they do. Take any of the economic issues in the news: there’s debt (though only government debt is defined as a danger), there are bank bailouts, there’s the ongoing Fed gift of free money to big-time stock and bond players, there’s austerity, there’s ‘entitlement’ reform, there’s rewriting our tax system, and, as ever, there’s beefing up our military.         
    The CEOs, senators, tea baggers and such we hear raising alarms about this stuff like to affect an air of civic responsibility. They’re forever warning us about the awful price our kids and kids’ kids will pay for our profligacy unless we get our finances in order. Carefully unmentioned is that each of the items above is, in fact, designed to make our progeny poorer. For it turns out, on the even slightest examination, that they are nothing more than schemes to transfer wealth from the bottom, middle and top to the top of the top. 
    For instance, our debt will impoverish our kids only if they keep paying it off to wealthy creditors who keep producing ever more of it. For instance, our military burden will keep growing only if we keep playing the imperial game.
    Like our obesity epidemic, our economic situation is not complicated and has a simple solution. For the former, it’s eat less and better food and exercise more.  For the latter, it’s spread the wealth.
    Unfortunately, the simple solutions are often the hardest to do.

Pointless But Oh So Profitable

Washington — President Obama on Sunday will unveil a new package of NATO initiatives that includes the alliance purchasing a fleet of surveillance drones...

Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing--Vince Lombardi 

     Not anymore, Vince.
     Now its more like this: “American officials acknowledge privately that the bar has been significantly lowered on how success in Afghanistan is defined after 11 years of combat.”
    Vietnam, which ended 37 years ago, was our last war in which losing was controversial. Wars have since become about continuity rather than victory or defeat. It’s not how they end up but how long you can make them last. Likewise, our reasons for making war no longer require justification, let alone debate. Any soldier will tell you that there aren’t any ‘whys?’ anymore; it’s simply a matter of good guys (us) going after bad guys (anyone else). Nothing more needs to be said.
    Also, little disputed is that our president now has the self-granted powers of a potentate. Obama has claimed a prerogative to start wars without notifying Congress, let alone respecting its constitutional right to initiate hostilities (viz., Libya, Yemen, Honduras, etc.) And the president has demonstrated that our permanent state of undeclared and unjustified war allows him to kill anyone, even Americans, anywhere merely on his own word. Ghengis Khan or Joe Stalin couldn’t have asked for more.
    By and large, the nation has taken all of this in stride. Last week, a federal judge in New York ruled out some of the powers assumed by Obama. But no doubt the government will appeal that decision right up to a Supreme Court that’s at least as imperious as the president.
    What's this all about?  First and foremost is that people with power always want more power. War, by its nature, confers the greatest power. The history of western civilization is largely about limiting the lust for power and replacing it with laws. But history is also about the determination of power addicts to evade those constraints.  We are currently in a time of war and economic crisis that favors the power grabbers, and our president is taking full advantage of that.
    Second is what goes with power: wealth.  In 2001, Al Qaeda spent $500,000 (some say much less) to organize and carry out 9/11. Our subsequent universal war on terrorism has so far cost in the trillions. It should be obvious that those two facts have about as much to do with each other as a jack rabbit has to do with a herd of buffalo.  In other words, 9/11 was a handy excuse to escalate (remember that word?) us to a condition of endless war everywhere.
     Those trillions are monies taken from taxpayers and given to the corporations that comprise and command the war machine.  Every time a Pentagon drone launches a million dollar Predator missile against a ten dollar mud hut, those contractors make money, ridiculous and preposterous amounts of money. It’s that accretion rather than any aggression that keeps our wars going.
    It’s a general rule that whenever you commercialize an institution, be it a school, a church or an army, the original purpose of that institution, be it education, faith or fighting, becomes secondary to making money.  Our transition from discrete to constant wars has paralleled the transformation of our military from a fighting force to a profit center.  All that remains is for our wars to to be traded on the NYSE or Nasdaq with our 401K counselors advising us on how best to make a killing in killing.

Laughing While Crying--Yet Again 

It is by the fortune of God that in this country we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either--Mark Twain 
 
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in--H. L. Mencken

The main message from the current presidential circus is that our politics remain as inane as they were back in the days of the above quoted gents. Twain’s time was the Gilded Age and Mencken’s was the Roaring Twenties.  Both eras were characterized by the cruel concentration and shameless flaunting of wealth, with the swells inside their rococo palaces eating peacock off gold dishes and urchins outside in the alley picking through the garbage for table scraps.
    The rich owned just about everything, including the politicians. So what's new? In such periods, business takes over directly and the role and status of politicians diminish as they are seen correctly as little more than go-fers for the go-tos. Today that same drop in rank applies even to richies like Romney when they dive into retail politics. Their peers see them as posturing.  When you are already a master of the universe, what beside the pomp would make you stoop to the mere presidency of a country?
    On top of that, legislators hardly write legislation anymore. Laws are now more commonly drafted, down to the jots and tittles, by corporate lobbyists.  The pols are reduced to chaperoning them through Congress and to the president's desk. So what’s left for politician to do?  They have become our court jesters, making the most of the old line that politics is show business for ugly people.
    Regardless of who wins this November, it’s obvious that the Reps put on a better show for the money. That’s because they have better material. The Reps are a fount of spectacularly appalling ideas and atrocious initiatives.  You never know what horror they’ll come up with next.  With them it’s like rubber-necking at car wrecks. The poor Dems, by contrast, haven’t had any ideas, good or bad, in decades. I recently plowed my way through the official Democratic Party platform to see how it compares with the programme of the Front National, France’s fascist party (see Karman Turn for Apr 17). Written in a mixture of  bureaucratese, newspeak and hortatory cliches, the Dem declamation makes a soporific superior to the Philadelphia White Pages.
    The Dem campaign will get a tad livelier in the months to come. Obama's rhetorical skills will help pump things up, though not as much as back in 2008. Pathetically, he will be delivering the Dems' weakest and most hesistant ripostes to the Reps. After all, today's Dems don't want voters to think they’re extremists like FDR and Truman. Mencken and Twain are no doubt grinning in their graves. 

Bonus or Malus? 

 As you may know, I write a monthly satire column for the print edition of In These Times.  My editors at this excellent general news publication have allowed me to share it with my blog readers.  I begin with my April 2012 column.

                                 click on image to enlarge

The Secret of Their Success

The countries that are doing very well in Europe are the Scandinavian countries....they all have strong social protection and they are all growing. The argument that the response to the current crisis has to be a lessening of social protection is really an argument by the one percent to say: “We have to grab a bigger share of the pie.” – Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner and former chief economist of the World Bank

Since Argentina defaulted on $95 billion of international debt nine years ago and blew off the International Monetary Fund, the economy has done remarkably well.--Mark Weisbrot--Co-founder, Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)

    Lean in close to your computer because I have to whisper this: the most closely guarded secret of this global economic meltdown is that some countries are actually prospering even though they are not supposed to.        
    It’s a secret because they are countries that have given the middle finger salute to the banksters and bond traders by rejecting austerity, budget balancing and the like and concentrating instead on providing jobs and benefits for their people.
    The biggest secret of them all is Argentina. A decade ago, it welshed on its nearly $100 billion debt to the International Monetary Fund. The Argentine is a good-sized country (double the population of Greece and Portugal put together) with a developed economy. Do you recall the pandemonium  and panic when it defaulted?  Of course not. You probably didn’t even know that Argentina had gone belly up big-time. Who pays attention to such stuff besides Wall Streeters? 
    Previous to its remissness, Argentina had been an obedient servant of our empire and its bond mavens. The ‘pro western’ succession of governments down there not only took all of Washington’s best advice on running their economy, they even adopted the dollar as their currency.  The result was years of misfortune, misery and stagnation for the many and fat profits for the few. 
    The locals got sick of being poor and made a peaceful revolution (bet you didn’t hear about that either). They took to the streets and even occupied factories. They went through four presidents in quick succession before they found one who had some cojones. In the nine years since,  the bad eco indicators have gone down and the good ones have gone up. Poverty has been greatly reduced, which is more important to my mind than transferring the country's wealth to speculators in the name of solvency. The current president was just reelected with such a strong majority as to give pause to Obama’s coup-making gremlins.
     We are now being deluged with scare stories from Greece.  The dread is that Athens will make like Buenos Aires and walk away from its arrears. Oh my God, this may collapse the Euro and even harm us over here! Hell will be unleashed!
      Not so much. All that’s likely to happen is that outrageously rich people who trade sovereign bonds might drop a notch to indecently rich. Indeed, if they’ve shorted Greece, they’ll get even richer.
    The real fear of our economic betters is that ordinary people are waking up.  Not only Argentina, but Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, etc., not to mention the Scandinavian countries, are prospering by doing exactly the opposite of what conservatives preach and Washington practices.
    Our leaders try to make economics a hard study so as to discourage the hoi polloi from figuring out how the system screws them.  That works in prosperous times, but in hard times, that kick in your empty stomach gets painful enough for you to start asking where it came from.

Forget Iran, Next Stop Sinai?

There is no security, there is only opportunity--Gen. Douglas MacArthur

    It looks like the 33-year-old but still serviceable Iran nuke threat is being switched from panic mode back to standby mode. In recent weeks, a minyan of top Israeli soldiers and spooks have started downplaying the ever handy danger, while Obama, our Mars in residence, has tempered the tough talk. Having repeatedly declared that he’s taking no options off the table, the president has perhaps discovered that the table is shy a leg or two.
    At the height of the scare in March, we were beset with dire warnings that the mad Persians were once again just nano seconds away from deploying and dropping the big one. The two other possibilities, that Iran already had or didn’t want a bomb, were never bruited since they offered no opportunity for power and/or profit.
     If Tehran was already packing nuclear heat, that meant it was, as a practical matter, intimidation proof. The empire couldn’t treat it like, say, Honduras.  And if the Iranians were really telling the truth, so help them Allah, that they didn’t want and didn’t have nukes, that just made the Israelis and Americans look like lying war mongers.
    There was another problem with rolling out the specter of a mullah bomb yet again: both Middle East politics and the global economy were too shaky to tolerate a war of bluff let alone a real shooting match.
    Washington’s economic blockade of Iran (an act of war in itself) was seriously screwing up the world’s energy trade. Iran was one of the top five oil and gas producers, and its longterm customers were suddenly faced with having to scramble for new sources simply to please the Pentagon.  With an election looming in November, Obama didn’t want to explain to the voters why, without a war, they were now paying $8 a gallon to protect themselves from the uncertain weapons of a country that had not attacked anyone in 273 years.
    Besides, Israel, the war monger par excellence in this drama, found itself with new problems--and possibilities--in the Sinai.  That part of Eretz Israel (Genesis 15:18) that it had reluctantly returned to Egypt in 1982 in exchange for an alliance with Cairo was again restive. With the Arab Awakening, the local Bedouin tribes started acting up, the Israel-Egypt gas pipeline was under constant attack, and the Gaza strip in which the Israelis had imprisoned a million Palestinians suddenly had an open back door.
    I would hazard that at the moment, Israel’s high military circles are more worried--and tempted--by the Sinai than they are concerned about Iran.  It’s got lots of oil and empty space. Should the new Egyptian government give up on ex-dictator Mabarak’s cozy cahoots with Israel, we could well see Merkava tanks rolling back into the Sinai.  You heard it here first.