MF Blog

Obama's latest Republican oriented analysis: College costs

2012-01-29T19:18:00.000-08:00

President Obama has served notice to higher public education officials to become "more efficient" and threatens reduction in their federal aid if they don't control prices they charge students.

As the parent of a high school senior, that is superficially welcome news. But as usual for Obama, he has embraced a Republican narrative. I won't speak about public colleges outside California, but I know quite a bit about the UC system because my wife's cousin is a high ranking budget analyst there. I've seen the budget and analysis, and I can state with great confidence that the UCs are one of the most cost efficient administrations one can find anywhere. See here for a glance at its latest cost cutting moves, and its continued efficiency that I would defy other private entities to compare for themselves. These latest cuts were on top of other cuts that would have already crippled most institutions. See here.

The reason for the 50% increase in UC school tuition these past five years is straightforward: The state has significantly reduced its aid as part of UC's overall revenues.

The shortfall from state revenues had to be filled from somewhere else, and the obvious places are from the pockets of the students and the students' parents. And recruiting out of state students to pay higher tuition fees.

If Obama was the socialist Kenyan Muslim he is supposed to be, he'd ask:

Where are the tax rates of forty years ago when UCs charged next to nothing for tuition, and attracted the best professors and the best students?

How can we continue to allow more money to be spent on imprisoning people than educating them?

But no. Obama just threatens to cut federal aid and demands the UCs become more efficient, when neither he nor his hapless Education Department Secretary, Duncan, have the slightest clue about how the UCs actually operate. It is telling that late in the first linked article, it is left to Lamar Alexander (Republican-Tennessee) to recognize why Obama's statement is not merely cynical, but wrongheaded. And get this: Alexander says Obama is wrongly punishing students with the effect of Obama's proposal.

Obama is now to the right of Lamar Alexander when it comes to higher public education. Sheesh!

The UCs are the crown jewels of public higher education. We as citizens of California need to do more, starting as taxpayers, to support the UCs regardless of whether we have children, regardless of whether our children attend any UC. A UC college is, without a doubt, good for the economy of that area. I'd rather have a new UC or a new California State University than a Wal-Mart any day in my community. See here for CSUs and see here and here for UCs....Ethical alert: It is true that my son has applied to four UC campuses: Berkeley, Davis, Riverside and San Diego.

Notwithstanding the above, I must say I am deeply impressed--and knocked out--with the various private liberal arts schools to which my son has also applied. And the Ivys he's applied to, well...not much more to say there other than...Wow!

Overall, we simply as a nation cannot allow our higher eduction to fall from its status as the envy of the world. Our higher education drives the best and most useful aspects of our economy, and the scientific endeavors, from stem cell to neurobiology to physics and astronomy, are what gives us our sense of wonder in an otherwise cynical world.

(Edited)

Conservatives in corporate media attacking Gingrich to save Romney

2012-01-27T05:54:00.002-08:00

This article is fairly remarkable because it misleads people into thinking most of these conservative pundits and operatives have been "lukewarm" for Romney, when in fact they have been supporting Romney for months and months now. They know their marching orders from the donors who sustain them and nurture them: Romney is the elite Republican Party choice and they will follow that order.

These same Republican pundits and operatives in the corporate media are very happy that Santorum is fading away (no money equals no publicity for any candidate other than Ron Paul) so that it is just down to Gingrich and Romney--with Ron Paul a nerve-twitching irritant.

The question is whether Gingrich can in fact be stopped if he wins the upcoming Florida primary. If Gingrich wins in Florida, or it is a tight race with Romney barely winning, then Plan B, as I've talk about weeks ago, will swing fully and openly into operation. Favorite sons and daughters will suddenly appear on the ballots of any remaining primaries (and there are plenty of primaries), whether write ins or otherwise, talk of brokered convention will be in the air among these same pundits and operatives, and Jeb Bush (the favorite candidate of the brokered convention) will write, or have written for him, more articles in newspapers like this.

One more thing to ponder: The elites in both wings of the Property Party (Gore Vidal's phrase for the Democratic and Republican Parties) fear Ron Paul because he does not support the Empire. If Gingrich is defeated too early, then Ron Paul becomes the "last man standing" against Romney, and Paul is a perfect vehicle for many right wing populists to register their disdain against the elitist choice, i.e. Romney. That is a dangerous thing for the economic elite because Ron Paul will continue to critique the Empire, rail against excessive military and agribusiness spending as well as Social Security and well nearly anything the government spends money on, and his socially conservative positions on abortion and even gays will start to get a hearing.

(Edited)

Corporate media continues to push inevitability of Mitt narrative

2012-01-21T07:54:00.000-08:00

First, South Carolina was supposed to be so important. But let's watch this become the corporate media narrative if Mitt wins close against Newt, or Newt outright defeats Mitt in the primary election in that state today.

As I have posted before, the elite corporate media wants to create an inevitability of Mitt theme--but religious working class voters in the GOP are not buying it. They will forgive a cretinous grifter like Newt just to sock it to the even more rich guy, Mitt Romney, who has no clue about how they live.

The way Mitt has so poorly handled his refusal to release his taxes, the mantra of "Mitt is the only one who can beat Obama" is falling apart as an effective rationale for Republican voters. That undermines, perhaps fatally, the inevitability of Mitt narrative.

Mitt should win in Florida, as he gets the votes from Country Club Republicans, Well Off Retiree Republicans and the always interesting Republican Jewish vote. Watch for corporate media to say, "Gee, look at Florida! It's more diverse!" As if the Republican primary voters in Florida are really "America."

As Daffy Duck would say...

Powerful testimony about an abortion

2012-01-21T07:08:00.000-08:00

Every once in awhile, we see this sort of article. But this one is outstanding in its pathos, anger, fear and then helps us understand why public policy requires us to keep abortion legal.

I always say, "Look, I've seen ultrasound. It's a baby pretty early. But I'll be damned if I'm going to pass a law that forces a woman to bear a child against her will."

And when the anti-abortion person says, "Well, she should have thought of that before she got pregnant. She already made her choice..."

I respond: "So are you pro-life or pro-punishment? You see pregnancy as a punishment. That's your position: You are pro-punishment, not pro-life."

And being pro-punishment is too often the basis as to why people are anti-abortion. When such folks rant against abortion, they are ultimately ranting against women's autonomy over their bodies. And the fact that some women are anti-abortion does not change that point one bit. There were plenty of women in the 19th Century who thought women were too dumb to vote. That does not change the argument. It only shows us ironies within public policy disputes.

Plus, let's remember this: Most women who undergo abortion procedures do so in the first three to four months of pregnancy (less than 1% of abortions are performed after the fifth month). Therefore, the discussion about late term abortions is the right wing equivalent to the left wing stuff about "...You mean that politician is against abortion even after rape or incest?" (Also, about 1%)

Even if an abortion procedure is performed in the sixth, seventh or even the rare eighth months after pregnancy begins, we still need to look carefully as a society at the health and life of the mother to be. Compassion for the mother is our first consideration.

The Guttmacher Institute has a list of factual information regarding abortion in the USA.

As I said, read the initial article in this post. It tells us why we don't want to return to the days before Roe v. Wade, even as we know today that abortion is already effectively illegal in many parts of our nation--due at least in part to terrorist attacks against doctors and hospitals that provided abortion procedures.

Final note: Good for Obama in recognizing that abortion is not as much a cultural wedge issue for his political prospects as some think--and for once making a decision that benefits regular people, in this case, women facing an unwanted pregnancy.

(Edited)

Max Roach and Martin Luther King, Jr. on MLK, Jr. Day

2012-01-16T19:02:00.000-08:00

This has always been a favorite of mine ever since I heard it over thirty years ago.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Dick Cheney's inadvertent defense of the New Deal

2012-01-15T10:02:00.000-08:00

This brilliant article from the veteran and truly investigative reporter, Robert Parry, lays out what I have long said, which is that (1) the Republicans and conservatives and libertarians want "Pottersville"," and (2) how much they miss in their own personal narratives the proof of the superiority of New Deal policies.

Here, Parry shows how Dick Cheney misses the point that his family achieved economic stability through an activist government that actually helped people and communities.

Today, Queen Victoria would have written a children's book and had interviews with Oprah

2012-01-15T06:57:00.000-08:00

See here for Queen Victoria's lovely drawings. They really are wonderfully drawn.

The two charts that explain most of everything in public policy today

2012-01-14T07:14:00.000-08:00

Both charts come from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Here is the latest chart showing how government social spending is actually quite efficient in making sure most of the money goes directly to beneficiaries. It is ironically in the private sector, where there are large payouts to executives and advertising and other costs, where beneficiaries get less for every dollar they pay in. This is why insurance companies are really upset at the 85% threshold they must now meet for providing benefits to their insureds. They will have to either cut back executive salaries or lower marketing costs. I suppose, though, they'll just fire customer service reps...

Here is the chart showing where our federal deficits are coming from and will continue to come from. It is not on generous social welfare spending, as people are propagandized to assume.

These two charts upend and negate most of the assumptions behind the discourse of government is inefficient and government spending on the poor and middle class is the problem that must be faced or solved. As Jared Bernstein reminds us, people are entitled to their opinions, but not to the facts. And as Stephen Colbert recognized, early in his show's tenure, how "truthiness" works--and how "reality has a liberal bias"...and therefore must be rejected...:-)

Is getting old realizing people never learn?

2012-01-14T06:41:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald has posted a wonderful piece recognizing that the NY Times serves imperial power on a consistent basis, and is a dutiful stenographer of government officials when it comes to war making and imperial adventures. He has much derisive fun in his discussion of the hapless ombudsman editor at the Times who publicly asked readers whether NY Times reporters should challenge misstatement of facts from public officials.

That this generation of media leaders can't recognize the optimal role of media reporters is quite astonishing because, if they went to journalism school in the 1970s, they would have been taught by those who went through the 1950s Red Scare. Those teachers would have been the ones who realized too late that letting Joe McCarthy and his ilk (and there were plenty) call people Commies when they weren't, or assume that being a Commie meant being a traitor and a spy created the very atmosphere that undermined First Amendment rights and led to much despair in many quarters in the US.

I was privileged to know the late Edwin Bayley, who was Dean of the Journalism School at Berkeley from 1969 to 1985. I met him after his retirement in the late 1980s because I had found, read and devoured his outstanding book on Joseph McCarthy and the "press," entitled quite naturally, if not very excitingly, "Joe McCarthy and the Press." Bayley had been, during the 1950s, the lead political reporter for the largest-circulation newspaper in McCarthy's home state of Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Journal. Bayley's book consisted of an analysis of a variety of newspapers and their coverage of McCarthy through the period of the 1950s when the McCarthy Comet appeared, raged and burnt out. His conclusion was that reporters should have called McCarthy and others on their statements and made them accountable to prove their statements. The reporters should have quoted others and determined who was right or wrong. This failure, Bayley said, led to public officials misleading the populace and worse, polluted the discourse that kept us from discerning what was happening around us.

In our time, I often say that people should avoid the political cable and network shows (especially the Sunday morning shows), and most television and radio "news" in general. Such shows and "news" programs pollute any reasoned discourse and are often structured in a manner that works against the economic interests of most Americans. These shows and "news" are ridiculously venal to the worst elements of American ruling class power and promote the worst imperial policies our nation's leaders end up pursuing. Hey, but other than that, they are wonderful...:-)

Still, as I read Greenwald's post, I am left with an abiding sadness that our species does not learn from its past, even when it is painstakingly set forth in books and speeches, in schools and in mentors' experiences. It just doesn't seem to matter to the players who enter the top levels of our society, whether this be Barack Obama or Paul Brisbane or Jill Abramson. Pathetic, really.

PS: A funny story: I once had the privilege of meeting the legendary investigative reporter, Sy Hersh. I asked him about his label as investigative reporter, and before I could even finish the question, Hersh said: "Isn't it ridiculous that I'm called an investigative reporter? Shouldn't all reporters be investigating and informing people of what they investigate?" I laughed in agreement and said the reporters in the DC circuit are essentially stenographers, and he said he definitely agreed. He then signed a copy of his latest book, which I had handed him, and he was off...

ADDENDUM: I learned that the ombudsman, Brisbane, is actually the grandson of the famous (infamous?) editor of the NY Sun and then the Hearst chains around 100 years ago (Oh, look it up on Wikipedia...:-)). So here is a scion of the journalist world ruling class. And yet he asked that inane question. The way players play is a continued but morbid fascination...

Those who claim to love Israel should look carefully at this moment

2012-01-12T05:24:00.000-08:00

Read this article and begin to weep for the two state solution.

And note this video about the growing economic gap within Israel, showing that the "reforms" (deforms, really) of the 1990s are finally having the effect of undermining community values.

Years from now, many will look back at this moment and say that Israel had an opportunity to create a lasting peace with the Palestinians, but ignored it to its peril. Israeli politics is increasingly being controlled by yahoo fundamentalist elements, Jewish and indirectly Christian. Israeli governments continue to oppress Palestinians, while Palestinian leaders are afraid to completely renounce violence as a tactic for a Palestinian state. However, it remains quite clear that Palestinian leaders, including elements of Hamas, have, more from a temporary exhaustion, moved closer to a position where true negotiations can take place. See this December 29, 2011 editorial from Ha'aretz, for example.

Yet, the American-Jewish yahoo organizations--Israel Uber Alles groups, I call them--are more than ever caught up in promoting strife, not peace. Stand with Us is one such organization which has sprung up over the past decade. As a local temple president, I get missives from the local San Diego chapter of this group, constantly telling me to attend some rally that promises to protect Israel from its enemies. Most of the time, its rallies are poorly attended. However, its propaganda permeates throughout most temples and that propaganda from it and other Jewish-American organizations shuts down any true discussion that one may still find within Israeli media such as Ha'aretz or Yediot Achronot.

Simply put, the door to avoiding an all out war of survival among Jews and Palestinian Arabs is closing over the next decade unless there is a fundamental change in the mind set of Israeli leadership. Stand with Us, and their fundamentalist allies in the evangelical movement, may get their apocalyptic wishes, but as some wiser leftists have on occasion told some less wise leftists when the latter say, "The worse it gets, the better it gets":

"No. The worse it gets, the worse it gets."

Santorum's Communist past...

2012-01-11T07:07:00.001-08:00

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

This is funny. Can we vote for Santorum's grandfather?

Libertarian David Brin finds Marxist's video compelling...

2012-01-11T06:46:00.001-08:00

Good for Dr. Brin.

See his post and watch at least some of the linked video here.

I also posted a comment to the link this morning.

Now, off to work...

Are we sick or something?

2012-01-11T05:57:00.000-08:00

Another Iranian scientist in Iran has been killed, this time with a magnetic bomb attached to his car. And another person was in the car with the scientist.

I doubt I'm alone in saying these continued murders of Iranian scientists are sick, but I wonder what corporate media pundits are saying about this. I figure this must be the work of either the Israeli military (with US complicity and support) or the US military itself.

I've gone through the various stages of warmongering and grief about the Iranian nuclear program. I'm with Ron Paul on this issue overall. And I believe what we or the Israelis are doing is creating a terrible precedent. We are killing the smart people in Iran. We are killing their Oppenheimers and Fermis. Yes, they are building a nuclear bomb. But we are wrong to think the mullahs really want to use this for anything more than a balanced threat against Israeli or US aggression in the region (the old mutually assured destruction scenarios). I don't like that, either, but it's not worth creating a precedent where nations can go around killing scientists in other nations.

And if we read the second link above, we see the Iranians were saying last September that they would not retaliate, and instead sought international action. The Iranians are acting more responsibly in this single instance, while it is likely the Israelis and the US governments which are acting like terrorists and "rouge states."

Obama keeps making me want to explore third party options and these continued murders are an example...I may even vote...egad!...Libertarian if Gary Johnson is the nominee. At least he does not appear to have the anti-abortion, anti-gay and wacky Manichean views that come with Ron Paul (Though even Johnson has supported parental consent and partial birth abortion legislation...Sigh). It's gonna be a depressing vote I make on the presidential level, I am supposing.

ADDENDUM: Heck, even these people show more restraint when they attack property, not people.

John Lennon, Yoko Ono, New York City Is Your Friend

2012-01-10T21:12:00.001-08:00

I finally was able to find the song by David Peel that says NYC is the friend of John and Yoko on the Internet. Here it is (It's the Ballad of NYC).

Yes, there is an irony as to what happened on December 8, 1980.

But let's remember Mark David Chapman came from Hawaii and originally from Texas and then Georgia. New Yorkers tended to give space to John and Yoko, and Yoko continues to stay in New York City three decades later. New York City was truly their friend.

ADDENDUM: The song was on the album, "The Pope Smokes Dope" (1972). I have always been against drug abuse and found the antics of Peel uncomfortably trivial for the most part. Still, he and his band made me laugh beyond my discomfort back in the day...The song, though, is a gentle one, and again filled with a poignant irony as we hear it today.

(Edited)

The Official Story in Argentina

2012-01-10T21:05:00.001-08:00

This is chilling reminder of the sort of cruelty and deception our nation endorsed in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s.

This film, "The Official Story" (1985) had laid out the issue in a brilliant and dramatic manner. That most Americans did not get to see this film is not a surprise, but my wife and I were honored to see the film upon its release nearly 27 years ago. It is worth watching today. And will be tomorrow...and thereafter.

1972: Great album releases

2012-01-08T07:19:00.000-08:00

Forty years have gone by...Forty years, as The House of Freaks once sang...

The following music albums were released forty years ago this year, and I place the album titles in order of my favorites:

"Thick as a Brick"--Jethro Tull

("Brick" is one of the singular musical achievements of the 20th Century by any musical artist or composer in any genre and deserves its own place in the list provided here)

"Close to the Edge"--Yes*

"Foxtrot"--Genesis

"Grand Wazoo"--Frank Zappa

"Banco del Mutuo Soccorso"--Banco del Mutuo Socorso

"Storia di un minuto"--Premiata Forneria Marconi (affectionately called PFM)

"Islands"--King Crimson

"Three Friends"--Gentle Giant

"Prologue"--Renaissance (first album with the incomparable Annie Haslam)

"Trilogy"--Emerson Lake & Palmer

"School's Out"--Alice Cooper (Band, not simply the individual)

"Flash"--Flash (debut album of ex-Yes alumni)

"Eat a Peach"--The Allman Brothers Band

"Fifth"--Soft Machine

"Let's Make Up and Be Friendly"--Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band

All of these albums represent remarkable and amazing musical achievements. During the era from 1967 to 1975, there was something in the air with respect to music, musicianship and an overall creativity and innovation of sounds ("air" art or sculptures, as Frank Zappa called music). And that era has simply not been equaled since then. In fact, nearly every sound today in pop, rock, post-rock, jazz or even modern classical etc. owes a debt to this era, which, as more careful readers of this blog know, was destroyed as much by crass, commercially compromised radio programmers and the idiocy and cynicism of corporate news media rock critics as anything else.

In every of those years in that era, my friends and I, who were budding musicians or music theoreticians, would greet the new year with anticipation: What outstanding music will be released this year? Who will it be this time? Will the music always get better and better?

By the mid-1970s, as disco "music" and then later punk bands began to permeate the cultural landscape, we began to understand punctuated equilibrium and much later full house concepts that Stephen Jay Gould discerned, and then helped explain and popularize...I never made my peace with disco or its even more violent and delinquent child rap/hip-hop, but I did like punk from the start, mostly because it made disco seem lame to those who are slaves to corporate media inspired trends.

God Save the Queen, indeed.

* Yes also released the "Fragile" album in the US in February 1972, but the album was released in England and Europe in November 1971. There was a delay back then for reasons I never understood, though I have speculated that it had to do with tour scheduling.

The Conservative Mind...

2012-01-05T06:41:00.001-08:00

There is a major dust up over Corey Robin's book on the consistency of "conservatives" in supporting public policies and sometimes violent actions--whether revolutionary or counterrevolutionary--that favor economic elites. This is a welcome intellectual debate because, too often, it has been the province of American conservatives to paint the liberals and left with a broad brush. How often do we hear conservative commentators say, "Liberals are this..." "Liberals believe that..." "Liberals have always..."?

Here is Mark Lilla's review of Robin's book in the NY Review of Books and a smack down of Lilla's review from Alex Gourevitch that is as brilliant as I've read in some time.

Crooked Timber has two more posts on the subject showing more reviews and the subsequent response from Lilla to Gourevitch, which Crooked Timber sees as weak (as do I).

My brief take on this is as follows:

I wish all who participated in this discussion across the Internet had been more familiar with Daniel Bell's wonderful subdividing of the terms "liberal" and "conservative" into separate and then overlapping realms of political, economic and cultural. Had they done so, the NY Times reviewer, Sheri Berman (professor of political science at Barnard College), would see why she is wrong to criticize Robin for supposedly not recognizing Palin's attack on elites, which she says contradicts Robin's thesis. If she had recognized Bell's point, she would see that Palin's attack on elites is in the cultural realm, not the economic realm. The policies Palin proposes, despite her rhetoric, increase the power of the economic elite. That is Robin's point about the ultimate consistent stance over centuries by "the conservative" against economic progress or development of what some could quaintly call "the masses."

Robin is therefore essentially correct regarding the consistency of an economic conservatism. He is correct to look for the consistency amidst the twists and turns of particular circumstances, and how the form of the attack on those who seek economic progress for the masses or workers, serfs, etc. changes over time. Example: One era (particularly in the early 19th Century) will have conservatives attack the liberals and left for being sentimental; hence the term "Romantics" was turned against Shelley and Keats when they dared criticize the early capitalist accumulation and loss of the commons. Another era will have the conservatives attack the liberals and left for being cynical and traitors to sentiment and traditional values. Our modern cacophonous era contains a simultaneous attack by different sets of commentators. Whatever way, the point is the same: De-legitimize or demonize those who support economic progress or development for those who are not in the elite.

These different circumstances do not undermine Robin's thesis, as Robin himself seems aware of the particulars in a way that shows deep scholarship and ability--whether or not that may be fully expressed in a single book. Robin is saying the circumstances are merely masking the consistency.

Oh well. I have to get ready for work. I leave the reader to read the links and analyses. The fun of this, again, is that Robin has written a book designed to make conservatives defensive and to recognize that their motives can be easily "discerned" in the way conservatives have "discerned" liberals' motives over the past century...And really, anyone who exposes Bill Buckley as a precursor to Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin is fine with me. See my "depreciation" of Buckley upon his departure from this mortal coil. See also my post about how Buckley regurgitated conventional nostrums with little analysis, and how it was masked by philosophical syllogisms and debaters' tricks.

The Tragedy of Mitt Romney

2012-01-02T07:19:00.000-08:00

My political "what if" thought as we enter the year 2012:

What if Mitt Romney had switched parties in 2006 to 2008, and then ran in a Democratic Party primary challenge against Obama?

Had Romney done so, he would have been free to find his Inner George Romney, his Dad, whose economic views are now to the left of Obama. And even Ol' George knew the Vietnam War was something to stop--and stop quickly. Plus, George Romney was a "can do" businessman who saved American Motors and added jobs, unlike his financier son whose fortune was enhanced through laying off workers.

As for the Romneys' religious preference, let's just say that a secular oriented pro-science Mormon is still secular oriented and pro-science. It would not have bothered me in the least that he is nominally Mormon. Plus, on a personal level, I think I'd like Mitt Romney quite a bit.

The problem we have as a nation is that Mitt Romney is running as a Republican in a Republican Party that demands and receives an institutional fealty that, even if Romney was successful in winning the Republican Party nomination and then defeating Obama, would have him do things we Democrats would vehemently oppose. He would sign MORE legislation for income and corporate tax cuts disproportionately benefiting the top levels of our economic pyramid. He would NOT push for more infrastructure spending, but would foster more imperial wars. He would continue to curtail civil liberties as Bush II and Obama have done (and in the event of significant "domestic disturbances," use drone technology to attack cities or buildings on American soil). He would more affirmatively pull away economic ladders for poor and discriminated minority youth to ensure their continued serfdom. He might let some science money get spent on climate change, but much less than even Obama has so far.

But the biggest irony of all is that Mitt Romney is institutionally blocked from winning the Republican primary in the first place. The winner take all system is not sufficiently rigged in his favor since it requires 50% of the vote to trigger the winner takes all delegates in a particular state with such a system. Right now, poor Mitt is stuck at a seemingly permanent 15-30% support level that shows no current sign of increasing anywhere near 50%. When Republican Party primary voters start to look at clowns like Santorum, they are saying "Anyone But Romney. Anyone." The only saving grace for MItt Romney is that the elite in the Republican Party want him--and want him badly enough to lavish money for propaganda and to have Romney triple down on pandering to the irrational right wing that has come to dominate Republican Party primary voting patterns.

If Romney wins the nomination, it will be the most elite driven nomination in the Republican Party since Wendell Wilkie, Wall Street lawyer, surprised most observers at the time by winning that party's nomination in 1940. Romney, however, should realize this is not 1940 and the Republican elite cannot simply walk into a convention and crown a candidate. The delegate process is now much more open and hence sloppy. Should Romney win the Iowa Caucus, the immediate goal of the Republican elite would be to create an "inevitability of Romney" aura. This may work, but only with wealthier and less religiously driven Republicans. Longer term, meaning through this spring of 2012, REGARDLESS of whether Romney wins the Iowa Caucus, the Plan B goal of the Republican Party elite is "Nobody, Especially Ron Paul." This means spending money to keep at least three candidates in the race besides Mitt Romney and Ron Paul--which means three of the four remaining candidates, Perry, Gingrich, Bachmann or Santorum, have a chance to audition for that trio of the "Not Romneys and Not Pauls."

This is also why I keep saying Jeb Bush is the guy to watch this summer if no current candidate receives a majority of delegates through the primary.

Meanwhile, we who are economic New Dealers can only hope the Occupy movement continues to grow, and continues to indirectly and perhaps directly pressure Democratic Party leaders into finding their Inner FDR. Now that is a delusional wish if ever I've heard one...And what I mean by delusion is not that the Occupy movement can't grow. It can and likely will. What I mean is that the Democratic Party deserves to go the way of the Whig Party, and the Occupy movement has a better chance of fostering a new party than truly galvanizing Obama, Reid, Pelosi et al to be responsive to workers' interests. Fat chance either way, the way our national discourse is filtered through corporate owned media. So I sit in front of a computer this morning cobbling together this post...and now it is time to do some work for my boss.

(Edited)

Are some who saved Jews from the Holocaust more "righteous" than others?

2012-01-01T10:30:00.001-08:00

I guess if you're an Arab Muslim, you are not worthy of being called "righteous" when you save Jews from German Nazis in the middle of World War II.

This story constitutes a new disgrace from the official Holocaust memorial and reparations bureaucracies.

NDAA, not as bad as we think...but only because Obama claims he won't fully enforce the bad stuff

2012-01-01T06:56:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the new year, and let's all read the links at this short post from Marty Lederman at Balkinization. The links are definitely worth reading.

The short version of the new National Defense (War) Authorization Act is that the really draconian policies regarding infinite detention, continuing Guantamamo Bay practices, etc., contain a waiver that allows the president not to enforce those policies. Still, the president must be transparent about invoking the waivers, which allows jingos in and out of Congress to say the president is "weak" and "giving in to terrorism."

What it means is that the bad stuff has been put into place. And these bad provisions will be followed by each of the Republican candidates, sans Ron Paul (but let's not be so sure about Paul, shall we, when we consider his belief in Manichean conspiracies and his support of American government side propaganda during the Cold War; note the link buys into the propaganda too and is trying to say, "See, Ron hated the Commies and supported big military spending.").

We are left with the faint hope that the US Supreme Court will continue its jurisprudence of limiting the effects of the growing Star Chamber mentality that has been slowly engulfing our national legislature since the events of 9/11/2001.

The Alchemy of Culture

2011-12-30T05:39:00.000-08:00

When culture changes, it is often imperceptible to most people. How many of us thought pink and blue represented something deep in the culture when in fact it is largely a 20th Century phenomenon?

It is why I always say to younger women who claim they are not "feminists": Just try going back to the 1960s workplace and tell me you wouldn't be to the left of Gloria Steinem...

When studying history, culture is often the most difficult thing to grasp. Just think how our views about homosexuality have changed over the past 20 to 40 years, or how sexualized our culture is now when we see two women kiss each other on the cheek, or two men living together such as "The Odd Couple?"

It is also why I think that some people have such a difficult time imagining the 1960s political culture where we actually thought we could do something about poverty and other societal ills. I am not saying we can't, but it is striking how defeatist we have become over the decades.

Ron Paul's Six Minutes

2011-12-29T05:58:00.000-08:00

He doesn't even get 15 minutes because he is against the Empire. We will read, hear and see far more negative things about Ron Paul than positive things about Ron Paul.

Still, my sense of why Paul surged in Iowa is this:

Ron Paul’s appeal is less about libertarianism per se than (1) his Manichean or conspiracy laden view of the world and (2) his anti-war stance. One does not have to be libertarian to be anti-war, and Manichean views are sadly not limited to religious fundamentalists. So Paul’s appeal among certain strata of Iowan voters is not what the libertarians at Reason.org are really after. It is more of a populist fueled rage that animates that strata of Paul supporters.

Personally, I just eat popcorn while watching this particular inter mural political sporting event. I wish there was a Ralph Nader equivalent running to Gary Johnson as a Libertarian Party candidate. Johnson strikes me as being a better libertarian on some things without Paul’s baggage. It is rather depressing to see our choices for president next year boil down to a smart banker (Obama) and dumb bankers (the current crop of Republican candidates sans Paul, who then sounds more like a Goldline salesman when he gets rolling about returning to a currency based on precious metals).

What's really funny is the Santorum surge. It shows the desperate nature of the Republican electorate. Still, their electorate is trying to act. Our side is just sad, detached and only engaged in any sense when we contemplate the Republicans.

Very Serious Pandering to Republican Hackery and White Racism

2011-12-28T18:52:00.001-08:00

Read all about it here at Crooks & Liars.

If the Obama administration lawsuit does not succeed in invalidating the Voter ID law in question, then it is a clear undermining of the 15th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and 1982. To require people to pay to get the ID in order to vote is a poll tax.

Romney knows better. He is in full pander right now. And it is frankly disgusting.

The Clown Show May Produce a Winner After All...

2011-12-27T05:46:00.000-08:00

I simply did not know there were many Republican primary states with "winner-takes-all delegates" structures instead of proportionality structures. Since the former is the case, the Republicans may wind up facing a choice between Gingrich and Romney, with Ron Paul a potential kingmaker (Paul could end up winning Virginia as only he and Romney qualified for the primary and now also due to the continuing allegations of his support of racists through the 1990s. Among too many white voters in the Republican primary, a charge of white racism against blacks and other minorities is not a negative at all.).

The only way the Clown Show produces no winner overall before the convention is if folks like Bachmann, Santorum and Perry stay in the race and keep finding ways to get up 10% to 15% of the vote total. That may keep Romney or Gingrich from getting 50%. Republican voters may yet be that strategic, but the winner-takes-all structures in various Republican primary states may in fact produce a pre-convention winner or someone close enough to be pushed over the top at the first ballot.

If there is a deadlock at the convention, I still say watch for Jeb Bush to emerge from the shadows.

Official editorial of a moderate Israeli newspaper...too radical for American Jewish ears?

2011-12-26T22:06:00.001-08:00

This official editorial from the editors of Yediot Achronot says it is time for Israeli leadership to find a way to deal diplomatically with Hamas.

It is an editorial one is not likely to find in most American Jewish newspapers or magazines. And it is one more example that proves why Americans of all creeds who wish to understand Israeli affairs do better by reading Israeli newspapers such as Ha'aretz and Yediot Achronot than most American newspapers, and certainly most American broadcast media. If such an editorial was printed in an American newspaper, or stated orally in broadcast media, such an opinion would be vehemently denounced as "anti-Israel" and there would be whispers of "anti-Semitism" against the writer or speaker if the writer or speaker was not Jewish.

We Americans of the Jewish faith do well by Israel, by the US and by humanity to publicize this sort of editorial.

Idiots getting the scholarly treatment...

2011-12-24T07:22:00.000-08:00

So far and just this month, the NY Times Book Review (which I don't read much since the quota was instituted at the NY Times website) has given its valuable and limited space to reviewing books about or by idiots, I mean rock critics from the 1970s.

Here and here.

The rock critics of the 1970s were often drug addled, failed English majors who couldn't tell a diminished chord from a major chord, who had a politically correct sort of racism ("We will not criticize a black music artist") and wanted their rock and roll to remain stupid so they could try and find deep profundities lurking somewhere--though mostly their attempts at profundity were incoherent.

There's already been a book of Lester Bangs essays published, and Lester was the music critic's equivalent to Douglas Feith.

I'm surprised there is no Robert Christgau, Robert Hilburn or John Palmer retrospective coming, is there? These three guys did more damage to music as an art form than most critics, as Christgau came from ground zero in the counterculture, the Village Voice, and Hilburn and Palmer came from The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, respectively.

You want to know why corporate radio is so lame? There are two main sources and one follower: The two main sources are the radio programmers who are like the music executives Zappa spoke about here, and the rock critics, who championed the stupid and attacked the musically talented (Christgau once wrote that King Crimson was one of the 10 worst rock bands of all time. QED). My disagreement with Zappa about record companies is that the record companies at least signed Gentle Giant, for example. It was the radio stations that said, "Sorry, too complex. Not enough like the commercials we are stuffing into every half hour." GG ended up on three or four labels in the US in the ten years of their existence, most of them mainline labels. They tried to promote GG, but again the attacks or ignoring of the band by these critics combined with the radio programmers did in GG as far as the record companies were concerned.

Zappa once got off one line about rock critics that was pretty good, but he overshot himself with the general disdain Zappa sometimes had for everyone. He in fact liked Gentle Giant and many progressive rockers, knew they were very articulate and knew there were fans of his and the progs who understood basic music theory and appreciated complexity and creativity in the musical art form.

The bottom line is that the rock critics of the 1960s and 1970s were dumb or worse cynical about music as an art form, and legitimized the reduction of music to a commodity.

Oh well. Phish understood who Genesis was at least, even if Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep didn't (watch those two iconic actors' faces as the leader of Phish is trying to explain the musical brilliance of Genesis in its early days of the 1970s before they became a housewife band in the 1980s)...

ADDENDUM: I found on the Internet my 1996 article The Los Angeles Times published on progressive rock, and going after Robert Hilburn's drive by shooting review of a Rhino Records compilation of progressive rock. The first paragraph is the "bio" of me, and the article begins in the second paragraph. Backstory: The editor of the Calendar section had started a feature, Counterpunch, which was designed to let readers comment on matters artistic. He liked my rant letter and said he would like to publish it, saying, "I didn't really know about progressive rock, and the bands you talked about. But I think there is something unfair in how Robert (Hilburn) handled the review and the genre in general." Oh, and don't call that phone number at the end of the review as it is not good by a long shot any more.:-) In the pre-Internet and pre-email age, it was so difficult for people with like interests and abilities to speak with each other. I think that is one of the more amazing things about the times in which we live....

Underrated sentiment and nostalgia...

2011-12-22T21:08:00.000-08:00

Uriah Heep should have been around today to write the soundtracks to video games...

Here is "The Magician's Birthday" from 1972. It was what we used to call the title track.

Yes, I know there are more important things to comment on today, but I just felt like hearing that song...And it still sounds pretty powerful to me four decades on.

And if we want some holiday spirit, may I suggest the most underrated version of "A Christmas Carol" (all the songs are great!) or the wonderful little old film, The Shop Around the Corner?

I loved the theme song for The Adventures of Mr. Magoo, too...Nice to see YouTube finally has it up for all to hear. It was a very interesting show where the writers took on classic literature and historical figures with Mr. Magoo playing the lead. Could there be something like that today? Imagine SpongeBob playing Gandhi...:-)

Sue Halpern eloquently reviews Isaacson's Steve Jobs bio

2011-12-22T06:10:00.000-08:00

I said it at the time of the shallow Janet Maslin NY Times review that we await the NY Review of Books to publish a review on the Issacson bio of Steve Jobs.

Here it is.

After a too long introduction about how Isaacson came to write the book, Sue Halpern eloquently explains the rise of Apple, what Jobs is rightly famous for and what he did not invent. She also deftly tells us Jobs was pretty detestable, which is why I started but put down the biography, and she precisely describes, with just the right sense of moral outrage, the factories in China which Jobs promoted and frankly lied about in terms of safety for or treatment of the manufacturing and assembly workers in China.

Key paragraphs in this review are:

The other reason nominating Jobs to genius status is complicated has to do with the collaborative nature of corporate invention and the muddiness of technological authorship. Jobs did not invent the personal computer—personal computers predate the Apple I, which he did not in any case design. He didn’t invent the graphical interface—the icons we click on when we’re using our computers, for example—that came from engineers at Xerox. He didn’t invent computer animation—he bought into a company that, almost as an afterthought, housed the most creative digital animation pioneers in the world. He didn’t invent the cell phone, or even the smart phone; the first ones in circulation came from IBM and then Nokia. He didn’t invent tablet computers; Alan Kay designed the Dynabook in the 1960s. He didn’t invent the portable MP3 music device; the Listen Up Player won the innovations award at the 1997 Consumer Electronics Show, four years before Jobs introduced the iPod.

And this:

The coolness factor set Apple apart from the start. Jobs’s Zen aesthetic (he was a longtime student of Buddhism), his passion for design, his good fortune to hire Jony Ive, who must be the finest industrial designer working today, and his other guiding philosophy—that function should not dictate form but, rather, form and function are integral and symbiotic—resulted in unique-looking products that, almost without exception, worked more smoothly than anyone else’s. And just in case that was not enough incentive for consumers to part with their money, Jobs transformed the product launch into a theatrical production, building suspense in the months and weeks beforehand with leaks and rumors about “revolutionary” and “magical” features, and then renting out large auditoriums, orchestrating the event down to its smallest detail, and, on launch day, holding forth, typically on an empty stage, in his blue jeans and black turtleneck, using the words “revolutionary” and “magical” some more.

And this:

And so, in many ways, have most of us, and not just by buying what Steve Jobs was selling—the products and the feeling of being a better (smarter, hipper, more creative) person because of them. Through his enchanting theatrics, exquisite marketing, and seductive packaging, Jobs was able to convince millions of people all over the world that the provenance of Apple devices was magical, too. Machina ex deus. How else to explain their popularity despite the fact that they actually come from places that do not make us better people for owning them, the factories in China where more than a dozen young workers have committed suicide, some by jumping; where workers must now sign a pledge stating that they will not try to kill themselves but if they do, their families will not seek damages; where three people died and fifteen were injured when dust exploded; where 137 people exposed to a toxic chemical suffered nerve damage; where Apple offers injured workers no recompense; where workers, some as young as thirteen, according to an article in The New York Times, typically put in seventy-two-hour weeks, sometimes more, with minimal compensation, few breaks, and little food, to satisfy the overwhelming demand generated by the theatrics, the marketing, the packaging, the consummate engineering, and the herd instinct; and where, it goes without saying, the people who make all this cannot afford to buy it?

And throughout she neatly nails Jobs horrible personality, his ruthlessness, megalomania, meanness and rudeness--and even his poor personal hygiene in his days at Atari.

Sue Halpern is my new book reviewer hero. She read the book. She recognized the significant issues raised in Jobs' life story and how it matters to us as a society.

I knew there was a reason my son agreed with me that he should apply to Middlebury College in Vermont. Sue Halpern teaches there!

An ambigous legacy: Vaclav Havel: 1936-2011

2011-12-18T06:36:00.000-08:00

Havel's death comes as a surprise to me because I did not know he had finally become ill from the lifelong effects of his smoking and earlier physical abuse he underwent at the hands of Communist dictators.

Still, he leaves an ambiguous legacy because, while he stood very tall and brave against Communist dictators who used the most brutal physical methods of oppression, he strangely allowed Western bankers, led first by Secretary of State James Baker, to push him around using only threats of pressure.

Havel was one of the "willing" who supported the Iraq debacle, and his poetry and music left him defenseless in the face of an IMF-centric philosophy which his banker-picked economic advisers fed him.

This obituary in the NY Times talks about Havel's love for Frank Zappa, and it is someone ironic that Havel passed during Zappadan.

But the story Paul Berman tells in one of his essays first printed in the Village Voice around 1990, and then reprinted in "A Tale of Two Utopias," remains compelling as to how Havel became so compromised as a leader as time went on.

The story is not easily found the Internet and so I summarize it here (this is all from memory, which can be faulty in parts): As the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia was disintegrating, and the Velvet Revolution was underway, Havel somehow directly or indirectly contacted Frank Zappa, who Havel and his artist and musician friends long admired (see The Plastic People of the Universe, a jazz-rock group in Czechoslovakia which took part of its name from the opening track of Zappa's second album, Absolutely Free (1967)). Zappa, in one of those wild coincidences, arrived at the Prague airport just as the American ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Shirley Temple Black (yes, that Shirley Temple!), was at the airport to leave due in part to the political chaos brewing.

When Ambassador Black arrived, she saw a massive throng of people at the airport and she supposedly said to several people with her, "Is this for me? To see me off?" Suddenly, a man nearby in the crowd who spoke some English said, "Isn't it great! Frank Zappa's coming! FRANK ZAPPA!"

The Ambassador was now confused, and had no next to no idea who Frank Zappa was. The man who was from the crowd reacted with confusion. How could Shirley Temple, a former Hollywood icon-actress, not know--let alone not admire--Frank Zappa?

Once it was explained who Frank Zappa was, the Ambassador, fearful of being seen with such a person, hurriedly went to her plane.

The story was later told to Zappa and Havel, and even Havel was confused by the Ambassador's reaction. To those behind the Iron Curtain, American culture was all of a piece, and folks like Havel could not see the fissures and dissension in American culture between high-brow, low-brow, avant garde, commercial, etc.

But now the story goes from funny to...not so funny. And here we leave Berman and listen to Zappa's retelling of the story some time later. It goes like this: Havel now meets Zappa, and says to Zappa, We want you, Frank Zappa, to be our liaison to the American government and American business. We want you to be our economic adviser from America!

Zappa was shocked, and responded, and here I totally paraphrase, "Um, Vaclav, you may need to know a few things and expect some problems with that..." but still agreed to the position. Zappa then came up with ideas for redevelopment by saying, instead of re-wiring certain government buildings that are hundreds of years old, why not use the newly invented cell phones, and promote encryption to protect hacking? He also came up with other high-tech ideas for a nation that is frankly, intellectual and Bohemian (the original Bohemia was within Czechoslovakia's borders, by the way).

Suddenly, Havel received a previously unscheduled visit from James Baker, then Secretary of State under George Herbert Walker Bush (the later Bush's Dad). Baker, sounding both threatening and frustrated, said to Havel that if Havel knows what's good for him, Havel will immediately dismiss Frank Zappa and put in someone who is friendly to US companies and banks. Havel was shocked and now more confused. Why is the US Secretary of State so freaked out--pun intended, Zappa fans--over Zappa? Zappa, however, who knew how brutal American leaders can be to Third World nations in Latin America and Southeast Asia, said, "Vaclav, I will go. Don't fight these guys. They mean business, and it ain't pretty." (I totally paraphrase here for the fun of it, but the essence is true).

See this article from Jack Anderson, the old Washington insider but still somewhat independent journalist, which unfortunately only hints at the real pressure Baker brought to bear--and it was far more than simply Zappa having a fight with Baker's wife and other DC Villager wives over labels draped over records or CDs for "obscenity."

For us, as we look back, removing Zappa as Czechoslovakia's liaison for trade was the first step of a long series of compromises Havel undertook. I couldn't blame him, and neither did Zappa. However, one can blame Havel for pursuing pro-corporate economic policies and supporting the war against Iraq under Bush's son in 2003.

Nonetheless, Vaclav Havel was a towering figure in our literary world, and a truly heroic person who stood up to a more direct and physically oppressive power. It is striking, though, to consider how the people he most admired in the US were those who are ridiculed in our corporate media as "weird," starting with Frank Zappa.

Final thoughts: It is interesting that Havel and Hitchens have passed away around the same time, having each undermined their legacies with their support for the Iraq War II debacle. And they have died just as the American and Western part of that war is finally coming to an ignoble end. It is also ironic that I cite to Paul Berman, who I grew to despise for his mendacious attacks on the memory of I.F. Stone (long time readers of my blog know where to look for those links...:-)). Berman was, like Hitchens, one of those intellectuals of the "left" who wet their pants after the events of 9/11/2001 and hid their cowardice behind jingoistic bravado, which did make them more feted than before on the DC cocktail circuit. That they did not heed the warnings of Randolph Bourne is so obvious, it's painful.

Watch for this...The Republicans will nominate someone not currently running

2011-12-16T06:07:00.000-08:00

Jeb Bush is one strong possibility here.

See this posting from Crooks & Liars this morning.

Obama would be toast if Jeb Bush was the Republican Party nominee chosen at the convention. It's then a short sprint to election day 2012. And let's be clear: It will not matter if we liberal-lefties who are disenchanted with Obama all vote for Obama. The low information voter, the so-called independents, will put Jeb over the top.

For months, I've been saying to friends that Jeb is the likely candidate who could emerge from the shadows after a first ballot at the GOP convention does not produce a winner. He reunites the working class conservative cultural warriors and the Wall Street elite, and unites FoxNews with The Wall Street Journal and more than half the commentators on CNN and the major networks CBS, ABC and NBC.

This is why the primaries in the Republican Party are such a clown show. None appear able to secure enough votes to prevail in a first balloting at the Republican Party convention, and after that, the convention delegates are free to support someone else.

Chris Hitchens (1949-2011)

2011-12-16T05:00:00.000-08:00

Read a round up of appreciation here and the "official" NY Times obituary here.

I loved reading Hitchens in The Nation magazine in the 1980s and into the 1990s. He really was on his way to becoming as prolific and insightful an essayist as Gore Vidal. But somehow, Hitchens became derailed, unhitched as I often said, in the late 1990s about Muslim hordes and a jealously over Bill Clinton, his former classmate in England in the late 1960s. The events of 9/11/2001 really threw Hitchens into a cauldron of fear, as it did to several other prominent people of the liberal left.

Hitchens became a cheerleader for the Bush-Cheney drumbeat for war against Iraq, and suddenly went from person to avoid at DC cocktail parties to the toast of those parties. Funny how support of the Empire gets one a ticket to the elite "in" crowd while challenging the Empire makes one a person to belittle and often ignore. Just ask Ron Paul, who would find himself feted if he was only a libertarian on domestic economic issues and a statist in matters of Empire and military spending. To take another example, if Chomsky was a cheerleader for Empire, he'd probably have become Secretary of State (he is no more boring in his speaking style than Kissinger or Warren Christopher)....

It is perhaps fitting Hitchens exited life the day after our current president officially announced our nation's exit from a war Hitchens so supported. I figure, since Hitchens often reveled in the death of those he despised, he deserves the Hitchen treatment to that extent.

On the other hand, his voice will be missed. The elite perch did give him space to air his atheist views, and the world, currently in the grip of religious fundamentalism, is better for that. And some more alert readers were made aware of his devastating take down of Mother Teresa, to the point that elite corporate media no longer says that someone is "pure" of heart "like Mother Teresa." But the world is not better for his cheerleading for imperial wars. The world is not better for his near paranoiac fear of Muslim hordes. The world is not better for his endorsement of GW Bush in 2004.

Perhaps the saddest thing for all intellectuals to notice is that Hitchens didn't really count for all that much, a fate true for most intellectuals. As Chomsky first noted in one of his early essays during the 1960s, intellectuals are merely another species of mandarins in our society.

For those in the corporate media, it is sobering to recognize how fast most such mandarins fade from any public consciousness. One thinks of how ubiquitous a George Sokolsky was in the period of the 1930s through 1950s (Sokolsky once advised the journalist and writer, George Seldes, that his problem was that he was a "crook" for the left, which did not pay much. "Be a big crook," said Sokolsky, because that's where the "money" was).

Starting with his imperial cheerleading after the events of 9/11/2001, Hitchens became a combination of Sokolsky and Sidney Hook, the resident "Marxist" who could often be counted on to attack anything to the left of Eisenhower. It is Hitchens' last years as courtier by which historians will often mention him, and the Empire will find ways to obscure his earlier writings--as it already has.

I guess that's why I find myself re-reading Randolph Bourne these days, and John Jay Chapman...Both were highly praised at a time when there were media outlets not controlled by monied interests, but each has been nearly completely forgotten as corporate media strengthened its hold in our now corporatized culture. The Internet has been a great source of revitalizing Bourne to some extent, but this also explains why corporate media wants nothing more than to fence off the Internet to maintain its grip. Good thing the media owners can count on most people knowing more about Lindsay Lohan than even the sometimes ribald courtier Christopher Hitchens....

Republicans have their inspiration...

2011-12-12T06:54:00.000-08:00

See here.

Convicting a woman for sorcery and sending to jail would have been bad enough. But execution? Unthinkable in any nation that wants to call itself civilized.

Does it tell us anything about why the Bush family loves the Saudis so much? Not really, but the hypocrisy about "freedom" sure looks apparent.

In reading the article, there were 76 executions this year in Saudi Arabia. At this rate, it looks like the Saudis are going to pull ahead of Rick Perry in the execution sweepstakes....Someone alert the Republican debate audiences. They may find a new candidate in a Saudi Arabian. Of course, we just amend the Constitution again to let a "fer-rin-er" be president, as they floated about with regard to our state's not lamented former governor.

Bill Maher...What can I say? Just watch it.

2011-12-10T17:14:00.000-08:00

Yes, with Bill Maher, there's...ahem..."language"...

But man, this rant on economic inequality, delivered on March 12, 2011, was something to behold.

How did I miss that one?

No, you need more heart

2011-12-10T07:26:00.001-08:00

Christine Lagarde, the new head of the notorious International Monetary Fund (IMF), thinks finance needs more women.

No, Ms. Lagarde, you need more people who have a heart. You need more people who think like Michael Harrington.

What was amusing to read in the middle of the Slate.com article though, was Ms. Lagarde's phony regrets about being a player who neglected her children (I note her children are not going public with an "I want my Mommy" whine from a privileged perch, unlike Rebecca Walker). And of course the point about the social welfare state being more pro-feminist than nearly anything else, which I made in my rant against Rebecca White was proven when Ms. Lagarde said the following:

Lagarde rose quickly through the ranks, impressing everyone with her determination and competence. But within a few years, she encountered the classic female “juggle”: after marrying in her twenties (the marriage did not last) she had a son when she was 30, and then a second son two years later, just after being promoted to partner. “I am an old timer – in those days we [working women] just had to prove ourselves and get on and be brave,” she recalls. “I was working until the last minute for both of my pregnancies and my children were very clever to be born in May and June, so I was able to take the summer off and do the breastfeeding, and then go back to work after the summer.

“I would say that in general it is easier in France than in the US to be a working mother – there is not the same kindergarten system as in France,” she adds. “I am happy to say that at the Fund there is a crèche – if you come to the Fund early in the morning, you will see babies, lots of babies in the foyer, being brought in!”

(Bold added)

Ever so subtly, she is noting in France, companies have to pay their female and male workers who take two months off after a baby is born--unlike the USA. Also, there is an amazing state subsidized child care system for every family.

But what are Ms. Lagarde's solutions to the economic crisis in Europe? They are just like any other male banker: "austerity" and "debt reduction"--solutions which will undermine the social ladder that helped her in the first place. How Ebeneezer Scrooge-like of her. In another article from Vogue magazine, Ms. Lagarde described herself, as I'm sure old Ebeneezer did, as a disciple of Adam Smith and a "liberal" in that 19th Century sense, which in the USA means a corporate conservative, like our last several and now current presidents.*

As I said at the top of this post, where is someone at the top who believes in Michael Harrington's philosophy? If Ms. Lagarde wants an affirmative action program, she should promote a diversity of ideas, meaning adding to the IMF Board or Officers a few more Marxists perhaps, or at least someone who understands Harrington--and a Rothbardian or two. Heck, I'd settle for her taking a lunch meeting with Paul Krugman, who she knows, from the Vogue article interview, doesn't think too much of her. But no, Ms. Largarde just thinks the IMF needs some more humans with indoor plumbing instead of outdoor plumbing.

* I doubt she read much of Smith, and probably never read Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments," which Smith considered a necessary foundation in the world he was promoting in "The Wealth of Nations." Even in the latter treatise, Smith recognized, for example, that no combination of workers could ever do as much damage to a community as five businessmen plotting on a street corner (See: Chapter VII, "Of The Wages of Labour"). Also, if Ms. Lagarde was really diverse and deep in her thinking, which she is not, she would have at least perused Thurman Arnold's "The Folklore of Capitalism" (1937), which is a witty and charming answer to Adam Smith, using similar bromides and general statements that sound so authoritative, but are merely after all is said and done, opinions.

The Season of Deceit

2011-12-07T22:57:00.000-08:00

"Oh baby, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"

"Listen to me, baby, she means nothing to me. I love YOU!"

Yes, it is the season of deceit from our corporate drenched politicians, from Newt Gingrich to Obama. Gingrich is working hard to walk back his one season quickie with Nancy Pelosi on climate change and his longer, more torrid and meaningful affair with the individual health insurance mandate. More difficult for him, Gingrich has to convince the Republican electorate that he is just as batty as they are. Meanwhile, Obama has to walk back his multiple affairs with bankers' friends from Rubin to Geithner and his love affair with Dick Cheney's civil liberties policies in order to try and convince us that he really cares about regular folks and may even have an interest in saving the nation.

What was really funny to me was how, in 24 hours of each other, each of these deeply compromised politicians disinterred Theodore Roosevelt and proclaimed themselves the inheritor of his mantle. It brings to mind Chomsky's point in the 1990s that Gingrich and Clinton were essentially the same in their pursuit of the financial and corporate agenda.

Here is Gingrich talking with Glenn Beck:

GLENN: ...Let’s start with ‑‑ let’s start with a piece of audio here where you were talking about healthcare and you went down the progressive road with Theodore Roosevelt.

GINGRICH: And for government to not leave guarantees that you don’t have the ability to change, no private corporation has the purchasing power or the ability to reshape the health system, and in this sense I guess I’m a Theodore Roosevelt Republican. In fact, if I were going to characterize my ‑‑ on health where I come from, I’m a Theodore Roosevelt Republican and I believe government can lean in the regulatory leaning is okay.

GLENN: Regulation and the government scares the crap out of me and I think most Tea Party kind of leaning conservatives, and Theodore Roosevelt was the guy who started the Progressive Party. How would you characterize your relationship with the progressive ideals of Theodore Roosevelt?

GINGRICH: Well, that depends on which phase of Roosevelt you’re talking about. The 1912, he’s become a big government, centralized power advocate running an a third party candidate which, for example, Roosevelt advocated the Food and Drug Act after he was eating ‑‑ and this supposedly the story, after he was eating sausage and eggs while reading up to Sinclair’s The Jungle, which has a scene in which a man falls into a vat at the sausage factory and becomes part of the sausage. And if you go back to that era where people had ‑‑ dealing with the Chinese where the people had doctored food, they had put all sorts of junk in food, they ‑‑ you know, I as a child who lived in Europe and I always marveled at the fact that American water is drinkable virtually anywhere."

And here is Obama yesterday:

Theodore Roosevelt...was the Republican son of a wealthy family. He praised what the titans of industry had done to create jobs and grow the economy. He believed then what we know is true today: that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history. It’s led to a prosperity and standard of living unmatched by the rest of the world.

But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can. It only works when there are rules of the road to ensure that competition is fair, open, and honest. And so he busted up monopolies, forcing those companies to compete for customers with better services and better prices. And today, they still must. He fought to make sure businesses couldn’t profit by exploiting children, or selling food or medicine that wasn’t safe. And today, they still can’t.

In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt came here, to Osawatomie, and laid out his vision for what he called a New Nationalism. “Our country,” he said, “…means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy…of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”

For this, Roosevelt was called a radical, a socialist, even a communist. But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight hour work day and a minimum wage for women; insurance for the unemployed, the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax.

Don't we wish we could believe Obama? I do--but I don't. I wish he'd just stop this new season of lying to us and tell us how he really feels, which would sound like this:

"Folks, I believe in the slow death of America. My opponents, including Gingrich, Romney, Paul, Perry and the rest of them, they believe in a faster death of America. And they're so crazy, they want to let the whole planet burn, waters to rise and what not. And they want to make sure our hedge fund friends have to send their girlfriends to Sweden for an abortion when mistakes happen. That's the real difference between us next year. It is indeed 'make or break time' for the middle class. And we're--sorry! I mean they're breaking alright. Heck, I forgot. I am not middle class anymore. Not by a long shot. Anyway, with a few more trade treaties like the ones which a few sell out Democratic Party friends, plus the Republicans and I recently passed, we'll soon be winding up for that final knockout of everything Franklin Roosevelt tried to set up before most of us were born. If you re-elect me next year, I promise to redouble our efforts to truly put Social Security and Medicare on the road to ruin. We'll stay in Afghanistan for the rest of my time as president, wasting hundreds of billions more, and we'll try but make sure we fail to repeal rich people's tax breaks. And right now, I get to blame the slow death of the middle class on those dirty Republicans! Wink, wink, nod, nod. You may ask, Why are we so-called leaders doing this to our nation? Well, we're doin' it because we can. Yes, we can--suckers."

_______

If I were to re-write Donovan's "Season of the Witch," it would sound in part like this:

"Vegetarians tell us they love meat!
Oh no!
Must be the Season of Deceit, yeah!
Must be the Season of Deceit!"

Sure is strange. Very strange.

But don't worry, Democratic Party stalwarts. Next year, I'm likely voting for Obama-- but only because the Republican candidates are all crazy or trying to be crazy. We're in for a really dishonest cycle of populist rhetoric, but the election is just a choice between the smarter banker, Obama, and whatever dumb banker the Republicans vomit out of their convention next summer.

That's really it. There's no point in watching this latest clown show in the Republican primary.

For me, I can't wait for the NBA season to start.

Deanna Durbin at 90

2011-12-04T17:43:00.000-08:00

A heartfelt 90th birthday to a woman, Deanna Durbin, who, at a young age, turned her back on Hollywood and stardom. And lived to not tell about it.

Just ponder this: Judy Garland, who MGM held onto while they dropped Durbin in 1938, accepted the moguls' lure. Garland, sadly, has been dead for 42 years.

In her youth, Durbin was an accomplished singer and a decent actress. See here and here for her singing. And here she is emoting while singing in "Lady on a Train" (1945).

And here are Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin in 1936 in one of those old-style MGM shorts, "Every Sunday," and here, from 1939, "3 Smart Girls Grow Up."

Happy Birthday, Edna. Hope nobody bothers you today or this week...:-)

Happy Zappadan 2011

2011-12-04T09:16:00.001-08:00

The Zappa Estate loves taking down the recordings on YouTube, but we Zappa fans (who bought the albums and CDs, okay? :-)) persevere and evangelize...

Happy Zappadan (December 4 to 21), based upon the death and birth dates of the revered Francis Vincent Zappa.

Some Zappa for us all:

From the opening track from The Hot Rats album.

From the Apostrophe album.

From The Grand Wazoo album.

And Zappa's 1980s band having some fun with The Allman Brothers' Band's "Whippin' Post."

The history of how Zappa came to do the song in the 1980s was that, in the early to mid-1970s, the joke that went around prog rock audiences in the NYC area was to scream out loud at any concert, "Play 'Whippin' Post,' man!" It was said at concerts for Genesis, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Chick Corea's Return to Forever, you name it. And I recall during The Grand Wazoo Zappa tour in September 1972, someone yelled it out at the Felt Forum arena concert I attended as a mere 15 year old. Zappa suddenly stopped the concert, looked out, and said with mock seriousness, "We don't play 'Whipping Post'....any more." And then, back to the music we went.

Even in the video near the end, you see Zappa's bemused face as his keyboardist Robert Martin sings this white man's blues (the other keyboardist in the band, by the way, was the amazing Alan Zavod, who had earlier played with the equally amazing Maynard Ferguson Big Band; hear Zavod lead this cover of a Chick Corea song from an outstanding Maynard album, Chameleon).

The Zappa band during the 1980s was incredibly tight and sharp. And funny. They did a wonderful job with that classic Allman song, the original of which I provide here--so outstanding itself! And here is the full 24 minute live version from the Fillmore East in March 1971 that became instantly legendary and immediately led to the shout outs at so many other concerts. They don't make country bands like the Allmans anymore...:-(

Happy Zappadan to one and all, especially those who don't "get" Zappa.

Famous parents, whiny children...who write

2011-12-04T06:07:00.000-08:00

Here it is again. The child of a famous parent ripping the famous parent.

This time, it's Alice Walker who is the bad Mom. And this time, we get to hear from a privileged daughter of a feminist who decides the entire feminist project is to blame for her mother being emotionally distant, and women need to go back into the home and be homemakers making and caring for babies.

Throughout her screed, it never occurs to Rebecca Walker to compare her mother's actions with say, Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist crusader who talked about home and hearth, and yet, was on the road most days of every year for several decades. What happened in the relationship between Rebecca and Alice Walker is what happens with many famous people and their children. The successful parents are often distant from their own children, and are more "into" themselves than the children they are "supposed" to care for. Ever see how Ron and Nancy Reagan treated their children? Oy.

I started out reading the article thinking, well, Alice Walker is some piece of work. But by the time I was a quarter way through, I was retreating from that and started seeing how the daughter's narcissism resembled what she claimed to exist in her mother:

Instead, when I called her one morning in the spring of 2004, while I was at one of her homes housesitting, and told her my news (of being pregnant after getting married to a nice man) and that I'd never been happier, she went very quiet. All she could say was that she was shocked. Then she asked if I could check on her garden. I put the phone down and sobbed - she had deliberately withheld her approval with the intention of hurting me. What loving mother would do that?

Worse was to follow. My mother took umbrage at an interview in which I'd mentioned that my parents didn't protect or look out for me. She sent me an e-mail, threatening to undermine my reputation as a writer. I couldn't believe she could be so hurtful--particularly when I was pregnant.

(Bold and parenthesis added added)

So her mother is upset...because the daughter ripped her mother in a public interview. And we are to believe the mother should not respond harshly because the daughter is pregnant? Talk about non-sequiturs. The daughter was pregnant when she ripped her mother and that I guess is okay in Rebecca Walker's world. And isn't it funny how Rebecca was "housesitting" at one of her mother's homes shortly before this episode? Nice to be a wealthy daughter...My daughter would put up with a lot from me if I was rich, trust me on that. She'd be glad to find her way in the world and drop me a postcard sometimes.

I also love how, despite being a supposedly distant mother, when Rebecca became pregnant at age 14, and decided to have an abortion, this same supposedly distant mother supported her and even went to the abortion doctor with her. The daughter now implies she is angry for her mother not saying, "Oh no, dear, just have the baby." And if she did have the baby, what would have happened to the daughter's chances of getting into Yale University a few years later, which she says in the article she later did?

The daughter is revealed as someone who wanted to be taken care of by an earth mother. I understand that. My wife is an earth mother and my children love that both Mom and even Dad spend time with them and hang with them. But really, does Rebecca Walker ever wonder, even once, that maybe her mother's stone silence at her eventual pregnancy was "I wonder if this still young woman is ready for a baby?" I'm not really defending the narcissist player mother here, just asking for a little kindness from a daughter to her mother.

But the daughter is not satisfied with this personal attack on her mother. No, at the end of this whiny piece, we have to be insulted with this:

The ease with which people can get divorced these days doesn't take into account the toll on children. That's all part of the unfinished business of feminism.

Then there is the issue of not having children. Even now, I meet women in their 30s who are ambivalent about having a family. They say things like: 'I'd like a child. If it happens, it happens.' I tell them: 'Go home and get on with it because your window of opportunity is very small.' As I know only too well.

Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They've missed the opportunity and they're bereft.

Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women's movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them--as I have learned to my cost. I don't want to hurt my mother, but I cannot stay silent. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been paid, you need to make alterations.

This woman is so obsessed with herself she has obviously not read any of the sociological literature on (1) the subject of divorce, (2) deciding to have or not have children and (3) the often Hobbesean choices women face in a society that is still not women-friendly. She is completely ignorant regarding the economic factors in an American society that are anti-social and anti-family that have next to nothing to do with feminism and nearly everything to do with not having national health insurance and national child care programs. She would be enlightened--perhaps--if she spoke with a European or Canadian feminist, or even our nation's own Barbara Ehrenreich about structural economic issues and how these create more adverse effects on women than men.

I once saw a Bill Buckley show in the 1980s that debated the issue of feminism with Canadian feminists. Within the first five to seven minutes, the Canadian feminists said the social welfare state was as much a liberator for women as anything else in society. I have also noted over the years, especially when I read about how difficult it was to be a homemaker in the 19th Century, how important advances in technology, particularly washers, dryers and dishwashers, have been for women when dealing with the strong patriarchal cultural undercurrents that remain even in socialist oriented societies.

Yet, this daughter, this young, privileged narcissist, writes with the ignorance of an upper class homemaker who fails to see her status as stay-at-home Mom exists because she married well. This ungrateful daughter does not see that both her father's wealth and mother's success from an economic version of nothing provided her wealth and access to be able to meet someone who was able to let her play mother to a child in a safe, nurturing environment.

And yet, just as her mother was a scolding feminist saying get out of the home and hearth, she now scolds professional women to go home and have kids--as if there will always be a loving, supportive well-off man for each and every one of them.

I am not saying Rebecca Walker is completely wrong, but her policy prescription is classic late Sixties cultural liberalism meets modern conservatism: It is a policy that is profoundly--yes, profoundly--ignorant of the economic forces in our lives. It is a policy narrowly focused on the personal and not the societal (See this quote from Christopher Hitchens about "The personal is political").

And what we see in her article is a shallow policy prescription combined with the whine of the modern memoir writer. We also see the child of privilege who fails to connect the dots between the economic fortress with which she was provided and the tradeoff the successful parent makes to provide that economic fortress.

Could Alice Walker have been a more emotionally connected mother? Surely. But that first wave of modern feminists had a right to act as they did. They were coming from a culture that every modern woman, including the US educated college girls proudly wearing burkas, would find oppressive. As I always say these days to younger women who disdain being a "feminist": "If you went back to the workplace in 1962, in a week, you'd be considering getting a gun and telling Betty Friedan and even Gloria Steinhem to get out of the way for a revolution."

You want a relationship with your mother, Rebecca Walker? How about apologizing to your mother, and acknowledging the economic support you received from her success? How about giving your mother some space to apologize, too, for not being as emotionally connected as she should have been? I'm sure Alice Walker, a smart, creative and ultimately empathetic woman, has some regrets. But when you publicly rip her in this petulant manner, and prescribe policy prescriptions that make us think you've taken Michelle Bachmann pills, you make it awfully hard to reconcile.

(Edited)

A sound, practical idea from two governors

2011-12-01T06:02:00.000-08:00

Two governors (from Washington State and Rhode Island) have asked the federal government to change the designation of marijuana from a Schedule I to Schedule II drug so that doctors may prescribe marijuana for medicinal purposes.

This is something I had proposed about five years ago when the Supreme Court upheld medically assisted suicide by noting that the difference between drugs used to kill people and marijuana was that the latter was a Schedule I drug that was completely prohibited, while the drugs used to assist in suicide were Schedule II drugs. See here.

It is time to move marijuana from a Schedule I to Schedule II drug. It makes sense. And it will have an extra salutary effect of preventing unnecessary incarceration of people for merely smoking marijuana. Personally, I don't drink alcohol and don't smoke anything. But I have come to the conclusion that the drug war has largely failed, and is counterproductive from a societal standpoint.

What are we supposed to eat then?

2011-11-29T05:25:00.000-08:00

Oh boy.

I've read about this for years, but this article seems to make it far more close to official: Plants have feelings. Plants have perceptions and memories.

Now what? Eat rocks or tin? Nope, says this article. They have feelings too.

As I said, Oh boy.

I knew it all the time, but thanks for the sourcing...

2011-11-29T05:07:00.000-08:00

Jared Bernstein points to a great study showing that lowering taxes on rich people leads to growth only in an unequal society. And further, raising taxes on rich people leads to economic growth.

Actually, I am a little surprised by the second proposition. I have long viewed raising or lowering marginal tax rates as having very little effect on economic growth either way. If we want economic growth, we need (1) unions that push for squeezing out profits from an enterprise that would normally go to executives and (2) tariffs to promote domestic industry and services. You know, what Alexander Hamilton liked to say--well, only the second. He never experienced labor unions, and only saw local guilds in his time.

Still, I really got a kick out of the economists saying that a nice marginal rate for the highest income persons or entities should be 83% total income taxes (state and federal combined). Yeah, that's some margin, and one we would like to see at the billionaire level, whether it be after the first billion for ExxonMobil or for Warren Buffett.

Dean Baker rips George Will while making a case for the USPS

2011-11-27T06:26:00.001-08:00

Read it here. (ADDENDUM 11/28/11: And I wrote about the Postal Service here).

Is it that George Will is an idiot or is he corrupt? So hard to tell after so many years and so many instances of this sort of foolishness on his part...I tend to lean toward corrupt, only because Will is a guy who used to rant against "judicial activism" when judicial liberalism was in its hey-day (see his "The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts" (1978)), but recently says "judicial activism" is the way to be now that we have a far more conservative oriented judiciary. Will is a guy who rants against government power, but supports wars of choice until they become inconvenient; eminent domain to keep a sports team from re-locating (see his columns from the 1970s when the Raiders left Oakland for Los Angeles); and government research into Down's Syndrome to help his Down's Syndrome child. And let's not forget Will's obscurantism with regard to climate change. That was almost an embarrassment for Will's enablers at the Washington Post, but he played the part of victim of activist harassment and survived to deliver more propaganda for a corporatist and GOP party political agenda.

Will is easy to ridicule when we deal with the specifics of particular issues because Will speaks and writes as if he is expounding on philosophical principle. He speaks in declarative sentences with a "just so" sensibility. It is, however, in the thicket of Will's particular policy prescriptions that one sees that the only principle Will has over the years is to support the ascendancy of the GOP and maintaining its power in the metropolitan corridor that leads to Washington DC, where Will is "made" villager. Even Will's change of opinion on the Iraq War II and growing concern over Afghanistan appears animated more by his concern for the GOP electoral prospects. His writing style, meaning the philosophy that he claims to invoke when discussing any particular issue, is what makes his columns so misleading.

Something to say when people rip professor salaries at universities as the cause of higher tuition

2011-11-27T05:26:00.000-08:00

This Felix Salmon article is must reading.

Some nice sounds for Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T14:28:00.000-08:00

I thought I had posted some Seekers before, but it did not show up in the index search. So here goes:

The Seekers were this wonderful, kind and charming folk group from Australia. In the midst of the chaos and strife that characterized aspects of the 1960s, they were an oasis of decency and hope. They might seem sentimental to some, but there is a genuineness to Judith Durham's voice with the male band mates' harmonies that is simply beautiful.

Here are "I'll Never Find Another You" and "World of Our Own." Tom Springfield, Dusty's brother, wrote both songs, by the way.

And recently, I fell in love with a composition and arrangement from Ralph Vaughan Williams that I had not heard before: Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus. This is so marvelous and, that word again, beautiful I find myself tearing up before it is over. I've written before about Vaughan Williams here. I also compared the outstanding Rachel Portman's soundtrack music to Williams here.

Today is a quiet Thanksgiving for my family and me. Our son has been ill all week, and hopefully getting better. I do love Thanksgiving for reasons I set forth early in this blog's history (here).

The Embarrassment of American Party Politics

2011-11-23T05:35:00.001-08:00

Bill Maher put it this way, "...(T)he Democrats moved to the right and the right has moved into a mental hospital."

Now, Republican speechwriter and former insider, David Frum, writes an essay in The New Yorker, asking "Where did my party go?"

Still, one wishes to say to Frum, let's not get too nostalgic for policies in the 1970s and 1980s. That was when and where Republicans supported a war against minorities in urban cities where they locked up minority men and threw away the keys, while leaving those cities to rot; sponsored terrorist attacks against peasants in Central American and Latin American countries; shot up the national debt between 1982 and 1989 that was equal to the amount of debt we accumulated as a nation between 1789 and 1980; gave the first modern tax cut parties for rich people who proceeded to buy Rolexes and spend their money building factories abroad; and thereby presided over the first wave of de-industrialization of our nation in favor of an ideology that owed more to the mean and selfish Ayn Rand than the frugal and yet fairly humane Herbert Stein.

But allow me to remind the Democratic Party stalwarts: The president who did the most to complete the Reagan Revolution was William Jefferson Clinton. He killed AFDC payments for welfare mothers. He shepherded the NAFTA and WTO through Congress on behalf of his financier backers (It was a cruel and sick joke that he ran on a platform of "Putting People First"; we just didn't know he only meant bankers and corporate executives), which codified the global trends of beggaring peasants and workers in favor of an emerging global economic elite. And Clinton, like his wife and now Obama, wouldn't recognize a labor union if they tripped over it.

And worst of all, when more money came into the federal government accounts than left it in those last years of the 1990s, Clinton squandered the political moment, where he could have called for a massive infrastructure rebuilding. Instead, we had to endure an impeachment because Clinton could not keep his zipper zipped. Worse, as the Old Leftist Alexander Cockburn and the libertarian Cato Institute are one of the few to point out, Clinton was not interested in infrastructure rebuilding had there been no impeachment. Had Clinton not had to defend himself from being removed from office by hypocritical, mendacious Republican Congress leaders, Clinton would have more likely promoted the privatization of Social Security (and we can bet he'd have taken a meat cleaver to Medicare right after).

Yikes!

So, rather than just pass the popcorn and relax as we read Frum's piece, let's remember that we landed in this mess through more than merely Republican recklessness, mendacity, corruption, murder and out and out craziness. We also landed here through a failure of nerve and deep corruption by Democratic Party leaders who continue to spend way too much time with investment bankers...whose idea of "liberal" means they have gay staff members with whom they are friends, and want to ensure their girlfriends and mistresses can get abortions when "mistakes" happen.

That's the definition of "liberal" for FoxNews pundits, too, and it's why New Deal ideas continue to simmer inside liberal think tanks, and have such a hard time finding traction in our political discourse.

Oh, and don't look for Maddow, O'Donnell, Schultz or Olbermann to blame the Democrats the way I just did. One or more of them will reference this Frum article, but only to discuss Frum's half the political equation. However, in a binary system, it takes two to tango.

(Whoa! That was a lot of mixed metaphors in just one blog post!)

Excellent take down of Gaddis' bio of Kennan

2011-11-17T22:00:00.000-08:00

I am no fan of John Gaddis. I find him to be a shallow cheerleader for the recklessness of the American Empire. He has little understanding of the pre-World War II era, and his perception of American and Russian motives post-World War II blindly gives succor to the reactionary elements in American foreign policy.

It is a pity that, in the late 1970s, George Kennan, smarting over some revisionist accounts of his actions at the dawn of the Cold War, chose Gaddis as his biographer. Frank Costigliola, a writer with whom I have been unfamiliar, has written a powerful smack down of Gaddis' bio of George Kennan. Costigliola provides multiple instances of Gaddis slighting his subject, treating Kennan's views from the late 1950s forward as if Kennan was a doddering naive fool.

I wish I had sent a copy of my novel to Kennan when he was still alive, as I think he may have liked most of my portrayal of him (Use the "Search Inside" mechanism at Amazon.com by citing "Kennan" for examples of what I mean). In the novel, I give voice to Kennan and his views from the late 1950s to the late 1960s in seeking a grand bargain with the Soviets that would culminate in a pullback from Eastern Europe, with us moving mostly out of Western Europe--and his testimony in the US Congress against the Vietnam War. I also show Kennan's consistency (which seems even to elude Costigliola), which is that the way to understand Kennan's seeming twists and turns is to run his views through a prism of elitism. Kennan consistently favored protecting elites, even when they had behaved very badly--and murderously. It is why Kennan was one of the main forces behind the post-World War II Operation Paperclip and other Nazi recruitment activities, and why he wanted to protect Soviet leaders as the Soviet Union was falling four decades later.

Costigliola is absolutely correct that the definitive biography of Kennan remains to be written. Should another biographer undertake such a project, he or she should recognize first and foremost that Kennan is more often a voice of caution, a voice of the diplomat and a voice for an elite sphere of influence. Kennan's sensibility is that of a man of the late 19th Century, a man who wishes to live in a world of facts, who claims to disdain demagoguery, but who nonetheless may engage in a touch of propaganda if it is necessary to protect elite power. For Kennan, democracy was something dangerous, requiring skillful maneuvers to avoid allowing the "rabble" to rule--which is why he found the Sixties student movement's emphasis on procedure and flatline leadership so detestable.

A definitive biography of Kennan must give Kennan his full due, even when the biographer disagrees with Kennan. Kennan is sufficiently important in the intellectual history of the 20th Century to deserve the benefit of the doubt. Gaddis, Cold War triumphalist he is, appears to have failed to follow such advice.

ADDENDUM 11/18/11: This article by Jim Sleeper in Dissent shows how Gaddis has tried, without the same level of success, to follow Henry Kissinger's trajectory. Kissinger appears to use Gaddis, and to perhaps ensure Gaddis only succeeds so far, but no further.

Stephen King's JFK book...

2011-11-10T21:23:00.000-08:00

THIS COMMENTARY CONTAINS SPOILERS GALORE! BE FOREWARNED!

King's book, 11-23-63, was released the other day. I finally had a chance to peruse it this evening.

1. Let's give King kudos for his understanding that saving JFK is not really the answer to our dreams. King is fairly convinced that JFK was, in actual fact, an ineffective president, who, if re-elected, would not accomplish what LBJ did with respect to Medicare, civil rights and anti-poverty programs. I won't speak for King about LBJ, but I have long concluded that LBJ skillfully used JFK's martyrdom, in addition to LBJ's own legendary legislative prowess ("I've got his pecker in my pocket") to get those laws passed.

2. In later alternative years, Stephen King's story is a bit nuclear bomb happy in its assumptions. However, there is some reason to believe King's choice to succeed JFK in 1969 could have happened, though that fella would likely have changed political parties first.

3. I like the way King messes with timelines and his book shows he clearly understands the butterfly effect. However, since King's book is nearly 850 pages, I wish he would have edited down some of the gooey, little folks story of love and loss, and given more space to the Twilight Zone sensibility that drives the ending. Still, who am I to give such advice to an author who sells more books than Hewlett-Packard sells personal computers?

4. Notwithstanding the above, King's research struck me as limited on the subject of the JFK assassination. It's like he wanted to believe Oswald acted alone so his character wouldn't have to worry about more powerful forces like the Mob or renegades from the anti-Castro movement. King lists his main sources on the subject of the assassination at the end of the book, but he fails to identify the granddaddy anti-Warren Report writer of them all: Harold Weisberg. That is a strange omission.

At page 845 of his book, King says that no reasonable person can deny Oswald acted alone. Sorry, Steve. Ask some still living people such as Dan Moldea, David Kaiser and G. Robert Blakey, former chief counsel for the House Assassinations Committee, and now a professor of law at Notre Dame Law School. They can tell you all about the Mob and the murder of JFK. Oswald was at best a patsy. And for those who think conspiracies are something that have to be rare, let's understand the legal definition of "conspiracy" is "two or more people engaged in an illegal act." In other words, conspiracies at some level happen every day, as any District Attorney can tell you.

5. From what I can see so far, though, King is in far better control of his material than Philip Roth was in his Lindbergh alternative history. Roth's book was weak for a few reasons, including: (1) Lindbergh was not going to run for president in 1940 as he hated politics as a vocation. His Dad, a former socialist oriented congressman, was hounded out of politics and he never forgot that; (2) Lindbergh was as much against financiers, despite his marrying into reactionary wealth, as against "Jews" (though even his degree of anti-Semitism was overstated by his critics) and (3) the ending to Roth's book, which consisted of trying to put back the regular time line and having Lindbergh go missing, was so weak as to be pathetic.

Overall, King's book strikes me as a better read than Roth's. His book seems almost jaunty in its prose. The story, in fact, seems more like "Back to the Future", a wonderful film in my not so humble opinion. There is also a Forrest Gumpian sensibility of nostalgia for the late 1950s and early 1960s America, which I admit makes me wince, as it over-glorifies the military warrior while denigrating the domestic dissenter.

In other words, the book is a winner for most of us Baby Boomers. The question will be how the younger age group--the group which grew up on wizards and vampires--sees it. I think the differences between King's novel and my "saving RFK" novel, which is supposed to be re-released by iBooks any day now, is that my novel is all about the alternative history. It is also not a love story, but an amalgamation of fiction and non-fiction that tackles public policy, history and culture.

Last thought: King proves what I had told my Dad as I began "A Disturbance of Fate." He asked, "Isn't it better to save JFK, since he was already president?" I replied, "Dad, saving Bobby is the way to go. Saving JFK does nothing for civil rights and the poor, and JFK stays on in Vietnam, no matter what Arthur Schlesinger thinks..." Whether King agrees with me that 1968 was the real focal point year, and that Bobby was the real force for positive change that year, is a whole other question...:-)

ADDENDUM 11/13/11: I meant to note something else of a literary matter: The alias name of the time traveler in the book is George T. Amberson. The name is from "The Magnificent Ambersons" by the great, but now mostly forgotten Booth Tarkington. The lead character's name in Tarkington's novel is George Amberson Minafer (his mother was an Amberson who married a guy named Minafer). So why the T. added? Because of Tarkington, I suppose. And where was Stephen King born? Per Wikipedia, King was born in Maine, but his father was born in Indiana. And who was born in and associated with Indiana, and most of whose books take place in Indiana? Tarkington. King has long been a careful reader of literature, and may well be a fan of Tarkington, as I am. I know King has had nice words for the most underrated writer of the late 20th Century, William Kotzwinkle, which again is interesting from an "inside baseball" (well, literature) perspective.

Maslin rips Vonnegut and we respond...

2011-11-04T16:50:00.000-07:00

Janet Maslin, last seen writing a shallow review of a book about the Baby Boomers' Henry Ford, is now attacking Kurt Vonnegut. But at least Maslin's writing showed some punch this time in her review of the new bio of Vonnegut.

Still, Maslin's views about Vonnegut and especially his "later" writing have all the earmarks of someone who hangs out at literary professors' cocktail hours, but who has not read as much as she lets on. I have reason to doubt Maslin ever read "Galapagos" or "Hocus Pocus," which perfected a literary narrative style Vonnegut first experimented with in "Slaughterhouse Five." That narrative style is to stretch and pull back time as if time was a rubber band, and allow space to overpower time. Also, it is quite obvious from her review she is deeply offended by Vonnegut's simple but brilliant insights about human cruelty and how hard it is for people to be kind to each other. For Maslin, as with denizens of the lit-crit cocktail party circuit, Vonnegut is damned for exhibiting that supposedly worst trait in literature: sentiment.

Still, give Maslin props for a clever put down of Vonnegut at the end of her review: "Twitter might have suited him perfectly if he were still here." So it goes indeed.

The most unseemly attack in her review is not even the drive-bys against Vonnegut's second wife, Jill Krementz, though that is bad enough (Maslin herself seems uncomfortable with the bio author's attacks on Krementz, but feels no need to find out anything for herself). No, the unseemly attack is her view that Vonnegut was just a hack who kept recycling his stories to make money. This is distasteful because "Gallapagos" and "Hocus Pocus" were among his last novels, and as more knowledgeable critics than Maslin saw, were fairly remarkable works. Vonnegut was already in his late sixties by 1990, when "Hocus Pocus" was published--and Vonnegut was entitled as any writer with more than ten published novels to rest on any laurels later hurled his way. If anything, we should give Vonnegut credit for no longer trying to write a novel after "Timequake" (1997) as he publicly admitted he was running out of ideas for novels. And note: Vonnegut published no novels between "Hocus Pocus" and "Timequake." He knew when to quit, which again is worth acknowledging.

The definitive biography of Vonnegut remains to be written, though Gore Vidal still has it right in saying the lives of most writers should be--and mostly are--less important than the work they created. With Vonnegut, that is definitely true, even when we are tempted to learn more than what is hinted at in his "memoir-collages" such as "Palm Sunday" or "Fates Worse Than Death".

PS: When Vonnegut died in 2007, this is what I wrote at the time. I should add that after he died, I finally decided to complete my reading of his novels, reading "Jailbird" and "Deadeye Dick." I found the latter to be his saddest novel, yet quite moving. Still, I adored "Jailbird" for its more humorous pathos.

Krugman exposes the dodges on the latest proof of deepening economic inequality

2011-11-04T07:01:00.000-07:00

Read it here.

That'll teach the financiers to rip off my blog name...

2011-11-02T06:41:00.000-07:00

I see MF Global has filed for bankruptcy.

I noted in the last year or so that it had created a blog it called "The MF Blog."

That'll teach those financiers to rip off the name of my blog, which has been around since May 2005....:-)

You've just entered...The Euro Zone and the Middle East Night Gallery

2011-11-01T22:37:00.000-07:00

I have watched the events in Europe concerning Greece's default with concern, coupled with mild contempt--and a touch of amusement.

When asked by friends or colleagues about the situation, I have consistently said: Europe essentially set up a federated economic republic with regard to the European Union. If a poorer nation in the Union suffers, the rest of Europe should step up and help through the main European Union government.

Instead, since the 2008 recession decimated Greece, Italy, Ireland and Portugal, we've seen the more powerful nations in the European Union dither and quack, and there has been too little too late in terms of help. That is not what the Greeks signed up for when they gave up their own currency for the Euro.

Therefore, when the European bankers and their conservative governments led by Great Britain, France and Germany, force feed austerity measures that are beyond the pale, it is just fine by me that the Greek government said, "Let's see what our people think of this idea of yours..."

Just as the US should help Mississippi when it gets into economic trouble, so too should the European Union help nations like Greece when the Greek government and society are in trouble. Otherwise, what's the point of the Union?

I see tonight that Bob Kuttner appears to agree with me. I must admit we generally agree on these things, so I am not really too surprised...:-)

And over in the Middle East, I see tonight the Israelis are showing they are still not interested in peace: More settlement building in the West Bank? Really?

I continue to say the Palestinians declaring themselves a state is a good thing because it strengthens the two state solution, regardless of what hardline Palestinians think. In fact, sober people ought to find it odd that Hamas and Iran are in agreement with Netanyahu in opposing Palestinian statehood as Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Authority, has proposed in the United Nations.

Of course, Israeli right wingers and Islamic fundamentalists may not be so strange bedfellows when we recall from history how Israeli intelligence services actively supported the development of Islamic fundamentalist groups against then Palestine Liberation Organization leader Arafat. Look up that story sometime if you want to shake your head in sadness...

A general strike in Oakland?

2011-10-27T22:28:00.000-07:00

Occupy Oakland, in response to some fairly abusive police action, has called for a general strike in Oakland next week, Wednesday, November 2, 2011 to be precise.

Nothing like a general strike to bring people together...

Oakland had a general strike back in 1946. See here.

Seattle had an interesting general strike--"interesting" in that alleged Chinese wisdom sorta way--back in 1919. See here. Or for those who want to read a great history book, see here (Harvey O'Connor's magnificent "Revolution in Seattle.").

As events move forward, we may wish to keep in mind what the often mild mannered union leader Samuel Gompers said in 1893:

What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails, more books and less arsenals, more learning and less vice, more constant work and less crime, more leisure and less greed, more justice and less revenge.

Yup.

As the Beach Boys would sing, "Wouldn't it be nice?" Or considering the Iron Heel of Capital, those at the epicenter of the strike are likely to get more than they bargained for, and not in a good way.

Still, it's time for some pushback against the Second Gilded Age, isn't it?

A Medicore Mind Reviews the New Jobs Bio in the NY Times

2011-10-22T08:07:00.001-07:00

Why did the NY Times rent the pedestrian mind of Janet Maslin to review this biography of the most important American inventor and innovator since Thomas Edison?

The review is workable, but mediocre, like Maslin herself. The review fails to express any depth regarding Jobs' sense of abandonment, nor does it find any space to even mention Jobs' biological father, who was himself an interesting guy who deserved better than Jobs treated him. Also, the review's drive-by about the irony of a high tech gee-whiz guy who scorned for too long the medical treatment versions of his products in favor of Luddite home remedies is inexcusable. And where is the discussion of the disconnect between the well paid executives and designers at Apple and Jobs' and Apple's refusal to build the innovative products in our nation, as opposed to China?

For those who may think I am too harsh with regard to Maslin, consider how she misses the fundamental point that Jobs is the modern equivalent to Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. Instead, Maslin lamely compares Jobs to Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. And why? Because Walter Issacson, the author of the Jobs bio, wrote biographies of Franklin and Einstein. It's not like she really thought that up herself. The changes to American culture, and the immediate and direct effects on America's economy, which have resulted from Jobs' products, are barely understood by her. Maslin is the type of insular fiction book chatter who never reads anything like the works of Daniel Bell or Michael Harrington.

For those who may not know, Maslin began as a rock reviewer at the Times in the early 1970s, where she became infamous among progressive rock fans for her trashing of "A Passion Play" by Jethro Tull, where she completely misread the lyrics to the album as evidence that Tull band leader Ian Anderson was a Jesus freak--when in fact he was a heretic questioning religious dogma, not merely the deep hypocrisies that are often tied up within organized religion. And of course, her cramped English major mind failed to recognize, let alone discuss the innovative music and musicianship on that album.

In the 1980s, she was promoted to the NY Times Book Review section where she continues to haunt its corridors. In thirty years, I have yet to read any review of hers that went beyond the banality of an NPR segment on cooking pasta. She can't hold a candle to Martha Nussbaum or Barbara Ehrenreich, or the LA Times Susan Salter Reynolds, for example. And yet, the Times tasked the biography of the most important American Baby Boomer to Maslin. Yuk.

Oh well. Let's wait for the NY Review of Books' take on the Jobs biography, though I'll already have gotten half way through the book by the time it appears...

ADDENDUM: 10/26/11: Here is a review from Slate that is far better than Maslin's review.

Fascinating exchange between Cain and then President Bill Clinton

2011-10-21T07:20:00.000-07:00

This post from Matt Yglesias is outstanding. It shows the disconnect between business leaders driven by ideology, and rather shallow ideology at that, and an intelligent politician, which was Clinton (saying he is smart does not mean I liked his policies, either, which were so neo-liberal in economics, meaning not much different than a modern Republican). One may note how Cain starts lying about his labor costs once Clinton expertly demolishes Cain's first lines of attack against Clinton.

(Really, nobody in the Republican presidential field other than Romney and Cain himself would even follow that discussion between Clinton and Cain).

If only business folks like Cain would stop their solidarity with financiers and with those in the economic royalty of our nation--and realize that a tax based health insurance system with everyone in the same pool (Medicare for All) would rationalize their costs, ultimately lower their business costs and unleash entrepreneurial spirit in this nation by freeing those who work where they do in order to hold their group health insurance coverage.

The difference between Clinton and Obama, on the one hand, and Cain and Romney, on the other, is how each side responds to their base. Cain and Romney throw culturally conservative bones to their working class supporters, while Clinton and Obama do most of Cain's and Romney's bidding on economics, spit on the Democratic Party base and then say, "If you don't elect us, you're electing the Republicans who will add cultural conservative policies to our pro-banker policies."

And so the Second Gilded Age continues...

Meanwhile...the earth gets warmer after all

2011-10-21T07:03:00.000-07:00

I live in an area of the nation, northeast San Diego County, where most people don't "believe" in global warming and are not too sure about evolution, either.

This latest post from Kevin Drum on the study released from a Koch Brothers funded scientific organization ought to send chills down the spines of global warming skeptics. Yes, pun intended...:-)

What Martha says...

2011-10-16T18:29:00.000-07:00

Martha Nussbaum is one of those few transformative writers whose insight is worldview modifying, if not worldview changing. She sees levels of reality, and has a knowledge of antiquity and other nations' history that are both detailed and analytical in the best senses of those words.

Her essay in The Nation on the new Gandhi biography and modern India is an intellectually delicious and nutritious read.

She makes a point that Geoffrey Ward had made against Blanche Cook's bios of Eleanor Roosevelt, which is that flowery language is more erotic in our modern time than in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and that ER's letters of "love" to a lesbian journalist do not mean that ER was a lesbian--especially when the only evidence of a sexual relationship ER had outside her marriage is with a male driver for the Roosevelts.

Why does this article tap into my libertarian sensibility?

2011-10-16T08:39:00.000-07:00

There is something unseemly about people forcing people to follow a certain eating and exercise regimen to receive a basic right to life or employment.

Ezra sees the same point in speaking of this health expenditure cutting initiative at the Cleveland Clinic. I'd rather us start paying the executive class less...and then see where that goes.

Music for a Sunday morning...

2011-10-16T06:49:00.001-07:00

The Paul Winter Consort is a group I had not thought about for awhile, and the earlier post regarding the relative decline of human violence got me thinking about the song, "Icarus" and the Winter Consort sound.

One of the most innovative albums I have ever heard was "Common Ground," released in 1977. It revealed how nature sings in the key of D flat, and how animals sing. Winter wrote music around the singing of wolves, whales and other animals, and there were some wonderful songs to come out of that album as well.

Two of the experimental tracks are "Ocean Dream" and "Wolf Eyes." Too bad the more straightforward tracks, "Lay Down Your Burden" and "Common Ground" (title track) are not on YouTube.

Oh well. And if one is feeling particularly adventurous, and wants some harder electronic sounds that stand in awe of nature, there's always Refugee's "Grand Canyon Suite" (Parts 1 and 2) and Gojira's "Ocean Planet."

A time not to re-fight an old war...

2011-10-16T06:01:00.000-07:00

Chris Bertram wants to fight an old war with Steven Pinker, instead of embracing Pinker's embrace of Stephen Jay Gould and David Brin: At least Western Europe is getting less violent (even as riots descend onto Rome as we post), and maybe it is because of reason, science and human rights campaigns around the world. In other words, it is less genetics than societal, and therefore more nurturing than natural. The nod we should make to Pinker, but really Gould, is that this is not to say there is no natural cause, but merely that nature's influence is much more limited than say 20th Century eugenicists would have had us believe.

Peter Singer recognizes Pinker's change in this review from the NY Times last week.

If someone is interested in the older war, Gould's attacks on sociobiology, which descended into recriminations by Pinker and Wilson against Gould, and vice versa, are a good place to start. Wilson, who coined the term "sociobiology," backed off some of its more extravagant claims, and outsiders like me began to wonder just what was the need for any real dispute among smart guys like Pinker, Wilson, Gould and Lewontin anyway.

Brin, in my view, gets short shrift for his optimistic, yet very reasonable and insightful position regarding the relative decline in the level of human cruelty in the past few decades. This is partly what has driven his Uplift series of science fiction books.

This does not mean we are not in for a short term rough ride as economic populism gets much warmer and even hotter. But I am confident that a Hamiltonian-New Deal approach to public policy will illuminate the trend, and continued libertarian approaches will unleash the violent aspects of humanity....

Reporter Chris Hedges shames right wing media commentator...in Canada

2011-10-14T20:20:00.000-07:00

This exchange between Chris Hedges and a right wing commentator and his bubble headed co-host is astonishing television. Hedges shames the fellow in a way that was one of the best set of arguments I've seen on anything outside of The Daily Show, Colbert Report or Maher's show.

Note that the commentator is a software magnate and investment banker named Kevin O'Leary, who is the co-host of the program. O'Leary merely proves that an otherwise very smart manufacturing executive and wise financier can still be an ignorant jerk when it comes to discussing public policy issues. Hedges, a former NY Times reporter who tired of corporate-oriented journalism, verbally slammed O'Leary to the floor like an adult wrestler pinning a six year old. O'Leary is an embarrassment to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

GOP: Raise taxes on middle class and poor people

2011-10-13T07:13:00.001-07:00

That is the actual effect of solutions which Huntsman and Cain are pushing.

Read about it here.

Job killing trade deals pass Congress...and Obama will sign them

2011-10-12T22:31:00.001-07:00

The Republicans and "conservative" Democrats sure love those trade agreements, don't they?

The ones that codify the situation where our semi-skilled and unskilled workers must compete with their counterparts in other nations, which counterparts are literally under guns and even more exploited.

Lori Wallach, who was an early and then very lonely voice in the late 1980s and early 1990s against these deals, gives her take of today's vote here.

As Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) said on the floor of the House of Representatives today, how can we support open trading with a nation like Columbia, which leads the world in killing labor union leaders?

What is striking is that a majority of Tea Partiers are consistently against the trade agreements, but their candidates, almost to a man or woman, supported the deals today. It was more often "liberal" Democrats who have opposed the deals, and have for some years now. My district's Republican Congressman, Duncan Hunter, Jr., was one of the few right wingers or Republicans to oppose the deals today. And again, Obama will sign the trade agreements into law.

The corporate elite minority rule over the interests of the many is never more stark than when it comes to these trade agreements...

Top 1% and National Income and Wealth

2011-10-12T07:17:00.000-07:00

Here is a nice mainstream article from the Daily Ticker about some facts most progressive activist folks have known for awhile now...ADDENDUM: Here is another set of charts and discussion from the Business Insider.

And when you go from the top 1% to top 10%, there is already a big difference in the income received, but the top 10% are certainly better off than most other Americans. And when one includes the top 10%, the most startling fact is that 10% of the nation has the same amount of national income as the rest of the 90% COMBINED.

The right wing talking point is to focus on federal income taxes and show (as in the linked-to Heritage Foundation blog post) how most federal income taxes are paid for by that top 10%. But that looks at the telescope through the wrong end. The fact that the top 10% pay more of the federal income tax (as opposed to other federal taxes, state and local taxes, which include sales taxes) is merely a symptom of the vast income inequality that has arisen over the past thirty to forty years.

When one combines the significant and deep inequality that has developed, plus the fact that nobody in the financial industry has paid for what appear to be fraudulent and sometimes outright criminal behavior, but instead received the majority of government monies for bailouts (not merely TARP, but the way the Fed threw a trillion or two towards the investment and other bankers' direction), one can see how regular folks can have an idea that something is wrong in the USA. The youngsters at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are often squeezed by college debt, and see the promise of a good paying job has become largely an illusion. That is what emotionally animates many of them from what I can tell--and that is a valid concern and reason for a sense of betrayal.

So next time someone says, "What do these demonstrators stand for?" or otherwise say their message is unclear, then let 'em have it with the facts set forth in this post. Or let 'em watch the Alan Grayson clip where he schools the ignorant, petulant PJ O'Rourke, or read Todd Gitlin's piece in the NY Times.

Someone else gets it about the insularity of most modern American novelists

2011-10-04T06:25:00.000-07:00

This article in Salon.com is as close to spot on as I've read in a long time about the state of American literature: Insular and self-centered.

The article's author properly takes to task both Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth. The kindest thing to say about either writer is that they are emotive and competent, though even Roth is less than that. As I've said in other posts, Roth does not evoke Newark, NJ in the 1940s and 1950s with any of the depth of observation that Steinbeck brought to Salinas, CA.

The failure of Roth and Oates, as the author of the article notes, is that their literary lens is exceedingly narrow, and their insights are pedestrian. Neither compares favorably with Steinbeck or Sinclair Lewis, the two most known American writers of the 20th Century who received Nobel Prizes in Literature.

Heck, neither can rise even to the level of Pearl Buck, who also won a Nobel Prize (yes, the modern American literary academy generally sees Buck as a sort of sentimental female version of Kipling, but that misreads her in a most disgusting way). Anyone who disagrees with me ought to read Buck instead of making the assumption your literature professor likely uttered in some high school or college class. Buck understood and was both sympathetic and empathetic with respect to the colonized--more so than even a true favorite writer of mine, Graham Greene. Buck was anything but a Kipling (and I'll admit Kipling himself may not have been so imperialist and Euro-centric). Also, her prose sparkles in a most surprising way. I have recently been reading Buck's 1954 memoir, "My Several Worlds," after reading several of her novels. The memoir confirms my reading of her, and is itself a marvelous record of a very interesting and thoughtful person.

Let's see what the Nobel Prize brings this year. But one quibble with the Salon.com author: Is Don DeLillo really on the same sub-par level as Oates and Roth? I have tried to read DeLillo, unsuccessfully. However, DeLillo's lens tends to encompass the entire nation, not simply an insular neighborhood. On the other hand, I don't find that when I read DeLillo, I get any "eureka" moments. Nobel Prize winner? It would be a surprise, but better DeLillo than Oates or Roth.

Herman Cain channels a Lenny Bruce routine

2011-10-04T05:38:00.000-07:00

There is a Lenny Bruce routine called "Religions, Incorporated" (1958) from the late 1950s. In it, Lenny skewers various religious leaders and the general hypocrisy of the "organized" religions. One of the religious leaders skewered is Oral Roberts, a then famous faith healer. He has Oral saying at one point: "Maybe I'm not that smart...I don't know how much a whole lotta nines are...But if I don't, I've got some men on my staff who do."

I thought of that bit when I read this morning that Herman Cain unveiled his gimmicky 9-9-9 plan (9% flat income tax, 9% corporate tax and 9% federal sales tax). Cain is certainly showing he is a business executive Republican. They loves them sales taxes since they are so easy to pass off on their poor and middle class customers and keeps their income taxes low. But is it at least revenue neutral? Hardly. Deficits are not a concern when a Republican proposes something like starting a war or cutting taxes for their rich friends. Don't we know that already?

Number nine, number nine...Narf!

Good for Brian Schweitzer! Single pay may be coming to Montana!

2011-10-03T18:08:00.000-07:00

Governor Brian Schweitzer has long been a favorite of mine, though recently I was asking myself, "Why has he been so damned quiet with respect to what's happening around DC and this nation of ours?"

Well, the good Gov has unveiled a plan to cover all Montanans for medical insurance. He's modeling it on the first province in Canada that went to universal coverage back in the early 1960s.

Good for the Governor of Montana!

Labor joining Wall Street protestors is a big development

2011-10-02T07:43:00.001-07:00

The political importance of unions is they are the best vehicle to talk to workers about labor and capital issues, and can move the discussion back to a worker-centered perspective. For the past fifty years, we have lived in a corporate-centered perspective in our corporate owned media, and this has got to change if we're going to help save our nation.

Some unions, themselves on their backs and dying off, have joined in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. This is very welcome news, and those aristocratic wannabes on the balcony drinking champagne don't know what they are bringing on.

Even the aristocratic NY Times, which had earlier had its reporter poking condescending fun at the demonstrators, just sent her back with a more balanced and positive report.* And Nick Kristoff, a reporter whose cultural liberalism masks his economic elite corporatist perspective, is noticing that something is happening here...And what it is ain't exactly clear.

*Memo to NY Times news reporter Ginia Bellafante: When you start to talk about rich people as a ruling class, then maybe you can have some fun with a phrase like "left's ruling class." Until then, keep that last bit of snark for an op-ed or an Ayn Rand sort of novel. It has no place in a news report.

(Edited)

Troy Davis: Less than innocent, but an injustice occurred in executing him

2011-09-24T06:15:00.001-07:00

A friend at work suggested I read Charles Lane's column in the Washington Post on the topic of Troy Davis' guilt in the murder of Officer McPhail. I read the column, which helpfully linked to Judge Moore's 174 page decision denying Davis' petition to seek to avoid the death penalty assessed against him.

After reading Lane's column, and more importantly Judge Moore's decision, I concluded there is reason for people to have concluded that Troy Davis was guilty of murdering the off-duty police officer McPhail. However, I also concluded that Troy Davis' original trial was problematic in how evidence of another crime on the same night was used against Davis, and that Judge Moore's weakest argument was his belittling of the various witnesses' affidavit and live testimony that another person, Coles, was the shooter.

In my opinion, Judge Moore should have given Davis' lawyers time to rectify their failure to subpoena Coles. This hearing was not a low impact, soft tissue car accident case where a person who loses just loses some money. This was a case involving a man's life. So what that the lawyers for Davis failed to initially call Coles as a witness. Pushing the case back a week to let the lawyers subpoena Coles would not have prejudiced the prosecution, who also could have subpoenaed Coles in light of the expected testimony from other witnesses that Coles' "confessed" to the murder.

Judge Moore, at page 154, footnote 87, stated that if Coles testified, he'd have either admitted the truth of the hearsay statements offered by the other witnesses or disputed them. Judge Moore forgot about a third possibility: that Coles, if called to the witness stand, could have invoked the 5th Amendment and refused to testify (Under Georgia law, there is no statute of limitations for murder). If he did, Coles would have been deemed "unavailable" and Judge Moore would have had reason to give more weight, in this fairly unusual style of hearing, to all third party witness statements of Cole's "declaration against interest." For a "declaration against interest" is an exception to the hearsay rule, and could have allowed Judge Moore to take the statements more seriously than he did.

Reading this article from The Daily Report, a law oriented magazine from Georgia, which article reports on what was occurring in the hearing before Judge Moore before his ultimate ruling, Judge Moore was quite transparent that he was not interested in revisiting his ruling on the hearsay issue. That is what I found troubling.

Still, we need to keep in mind that Judge Moore's job was to determine if there was sufficient evidence to "clearly establish( ) petitioner's innocence..." In other words, it was not enough for Davis and his lawyers to prove there was doubt about his guilt. Davis and his lawyers needed to prove Davis was clearly innocent. That, folks, is one tough burden.

Judge Moore's 174 page decision is curious to me because I might well have started with the Coles-as-shooter evidence if I was not results oriented. For if one believes Coles is the shooter, that would surely be clear evidence of innocence. Yet, Judge Moore placed that discussion near end of his opinion, and was clearly looking for ways to minimize that evidence in a way that could lead a reasonable observer to analogize the situation to the constable who says "Nothing to see here..."--when there is something to see.

Judge Moore also wrote extensively about witnesses identifying Coles as wearing a yellow shirt--a tank top--and Davis wearing a white shirt--a t-shirt. But the witness testimony he cites finds them distinguishing on the basis of the shirts' colors, not whether one was a t-shirt and one was a tank top. Yet, Judge Moore never asked in his opinion, "Is it possible for people to mix yellow and white t-shirts at 11:30 at night?" Judge Moore never asked in his opinion "Why did the prosecution try to pin the earlier in the evening Cooper shooting on Davis? Was it because the prosecution knew it was prosecuting a young man, Davis, with no previous felony assault or shooting charges? Isn't there something to the fact that the fellow who shot Cooper was wearing a white 'Batman' shirt--and none of the witnesses who saw Davis at the scene of McPhail's murder said he had a white 'Batman' t-shirt?"

Judge Moore was definitely troubled by the weak ballistics evidence, and rightly denigrates the prosecution's lame attempt to cite to evidence not brought out in trial about supposedly bloody shorts worn by Davis. As Judge Moore noted, there was no testing to show (1) whether there was, in fact, blood on the shorts, (2) if there was blood, whose blood was on the shorts, or (3) how the blood, if it was blood, got there. Davis was present when McPhail was shot, after all, but is that evidence he was the shooter?

I say this because, if Judge Moore was troubled by the prosecution's very weak ballistics evidence, he should have been troubled as well about the prosecution using the Cooper shooting to taint Davis in front of the jury. This was already a highly charged case since the murder was of a police officer, even though he was off duty and acting as a private security officer. Nobody, black or white, likes people who shoot police officers, and you can count me in that sociological observation.

But once Judge Moore was admittedly troubled by those circumstances, it is difficult to support Judge Moore in his construction of his decision, where he relegates to the end of his decision the issue of Coles' confessions to various people--and deciding it was of little consequence. Again, much of Judge Moore's reasoning concerns reading Coles' mind in ways to exonerate Coles. If Judge Moore thought Coles' mind needed to be read, he should have continued the trial for another week to get Coles to the witness stand--and see if he invoked the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination.

Lane's column is important because, despite pronouncing Davis guilty, he recognizes the Georgia Board of Parole acted unjustly in not commuting the sentence to life without parole based upon the overall testimony of the various persons and that eyewitness, not objective, testimony formed the crux of the guilty finding.

Overall, Lane overstates the level of guilt of Troy Davis. But reading Judge Moore's decision, I am more convinced it would be wrong for anyone to say Troy Davis was innocent. He was probably guilty, which is a long way from clearly innocent. I write this blog post because I am now far less than impressed that Davis' case presented a situation where "7 out of 9 witnesses recanted." Sorry, the recanting evidence was far weaker than I expected, and Judge Moore's analysis of the allegedly recanting witnesses' testimonies is the most convincing aspect of his opinion.

I am now convinced, more than I was before, that Judge Moore owed Davis a week's continuance of his petition hearing to see if his lawyers could subpoena Coles to the stand. It would have been important to see if Coles tried to testify, or invoked the 5th Amendment. Had Coles testified, and was credible on his own behalf, it would have been the final reason to conclude Davis was the shooter and obviously guilty. If, however, he testified and was not credible, that would have, in turn, given more credibility to the witnesses who said Coles confessed to them. If Coles invoked the 5th Amendment, Judge Moore would have had a harder time denigrating the third party witness testimonies, both in affidavits and live testimony.

Judge Moore's failure to grant a short continuance, however, pales in comparison with the Georgia Board of Parole, which had the power (not the governor, at least in Georgia) to commute Davis' sentence to life without parole. If Coles, at the end of his life, comes forward and admits he was the killer, there will be shame on us all, but none more so than the Board of Parole, which should have exercised its discretion to commute Davis' sentence to life imprisonment or even life imprisonment without parole. The Board of Parole should have been a failsafe, but it failed.

Notwithstanding the conclusion regarding the Board of Parole, it is mistake for opponents of the death penalty or those opposed to Davis' execution to say Davis is innocent. Davis was already in the wrong place at the wrong time, and among people who were less than credible due to life's hard knocks. There is, however, something wrong with our death penalty system, and the older I get, the more I see its arbitrariness. I have always favored the death penalty as a general proposition (Think Manson, think Dahmer, think Bundy, etc.). But the exceptions to invoking the death penalty get wider in scope the more one sees DNA evidence exonerate people who were previously found guilty and sentenced to death. We can now add cases like this one, where a guy like Davis is likely guilty of murder, but we cannot be so sure that we ought to have executed him.

If only "The Twilight Zone" came to Georgia tonight...

2011-09-21T20:11:00.000-07:00

The State of Georgia must have learned from this "Twilight Zone" episode. Execute 'em at night.

If only "The Twilight Zone" could have stopped Troy Davis' execution tonight...At least, in the "The Twilight Zone" episode, the guy admitted he killed the other guy.

Hit and Run Tuesday Night

2011-09-20T21:13:00.000-07:00

I bought this book at Costco--yes, Costco!--in Poway, CA this past weekend. I was so shocked to find it, I had to buy it almost sight unread. And lo and behold, I'm about 80 pages in and find it fascinating, informative and very well written. It is even exciting for me to read: The private lives of Jenny and Karl Marx. Who'da thought?

A largely positive review appears in Salon.com here. I will see whether I agree with the reviewer's ultimate view that the book is not warm enough. So far, I think it is plenty warm in a great way, and the author Mary Gabriel's analysis of Marx's writings is far above the norm, and, in a word, excellent. She does not cite Michael Harrington, but she grasps his insight that Marx was essentially democratic in a 19th Century radical's sense, a position that might even sound libertarian in some funky ways.

(I have completed the first seven chapters, and strangely enough, I find the summarized and quoted correspondence between Jenny and Karl Marx to resemble...Abigail and John Adams. It is an eerie feeling, and quite extraordinary...)

____

And for news that is ambiguously tragic, consider the case of Troy Davis. The State of Georgia is going to execute him tomorrow. 7 of 9 witnesses have recanted, and 1 of the 2 who have not may have been the actual killer. Lots of people, from right-winger turned libertarian, former Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA) and former FBI Director William Sessions think this fellow should not be executed. People like to ask in these situations? Is he guilty? The answer is, "Who knows?" The murder weapon was not found. There is no ballistic test strongly, let alone conclusively, tying him to the murder. There is no DNA testing that can be done to acquit or convict him.

I admit to not being a criminal prosecutor or defense lawyer, and so do not carry that level of expertise. Still, I wonder whether the Georgia Parole Board should have been a bit more lenient and commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and to see about investigating the other fella for murder in a more fruitful way. And if there is reason to commute further, do it then. If not, at least we spared someone's life who maybe possibly...did I say maybe...didn't kill the police officer after all. There is a slim chance President Obama can call for a federal investigation and slow down the process even further--it's gone on for nearly 20 years--and that's about it. The Governor of Georgia has no right to commute or pardon; it's only up to the Parole Board who have again ruled against Davis.

___

I also have to admit having some sense of "I told you so" when reading this NY Times account of Ron Suskind's new book about Obama. To say that Obama failed to show political saavy and leadership as president is something I've long said (though I am not alone in saying that, too). I also never thought I'd agree with the likes of political adviser, James Carville, who said Obama should be panicked about how he failed as a president thus far. Still, it does worry me that a right ward thinking libertarian, Steve Chapman, has written in the Chicago Tribune that Obama should not run for re-election...which readers of this blog and elsewhere note I have said for quite some time...

Are Obama's newest plans, both for some increased infrastructure spending and higher taxes on rich folks, a step in the correct direction? Yes, but it's still too little, too late. One can feel Obama gritting his teeth as he attempts to speak a language that is a faint echo of anything that would resemble a new New Deal. As people are figuring out in reading Suskind's new book, Obama simply does not believe in the New Deal. He passively accepts right-wing talking points spoon fed from the right side of Milton Friedman's spoon. That's still a failure of leadership because he allowed things to happen. He didn't make things happen. He was not transformative. He was simply reactive.

___

While I am pleased for the grocery store union workers in Southern California that they reached a deal with the grocery chain bosses, there is only one negative: We missed the opportunity to see a strike that might have given southern Californians a chance to openly side with fellow workers, and maybe even give Obama one more chance to stand with workers during a strike--something he has not done since the period just after his election and before he took office. In my wildest dreams, I'd love to have seen a general strike at least once during my lifetime. As I have Ralph Yarborough say in my novel, "Nothing brings a community together like a general strike..." It's a propagandistic tongue-in-cheek to some extent, but the statement does help us appreciate a perspective quite different from the propaganda which often emanates from corporate media.

It bears repeating that the executives at the big grocery store chains knew that a strike was bad for their bottom line. They learned from last time a strike happened. Steve Burd, CEO of Safeway, declared war on his grocery workers in 2003, saying he needed to save $130 million to compete against Wal-Mart. The strike he precipitated cost Safeway $325 million and his company lost 20% marketshare to Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and yes, Wal-Mart, among other places. Heckava bargain you made there, Steve. And of course, he kept his job as head of Safeway. Capitalism sure rewards efficiency and competence, eh?

Eclectic Carl Ogeslby, R.I.P.

2011-09-17T21:58:00.000-07:00

There remains intriguing about the worldview and writings of Carl Ogelsby, who died the other day at the too young age of 76.

He was a libertarian lefty who supported minimum wage laws, and recognized, as he became older, that one of his profound misunderstandings during his leadership of th student movement in the 1960s had been to attack the middle class life his father and his father's generation had fought for during the New Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s. See this interview from a PBS miniseries on the 1960s.

The best eulogies on Ogelsby are coming from libertarian fellows, starting with Jess Walker at Reason.com and Eric Garris at Antiwar.com. Bill Kauffman at Reason.com had interviewed Ogelsby in 2008 and it was a great interview, showing Ogelsby's interesting mind at work.

My view of Ogelsby is that he was more than a stopped clock--right twice a day--but not much more. His thesis of "Yankees and Cowboys" has some general appeal about the nature of regional elite politics, but it fails to explain the particulars and worse, descends into a Manichean conspiracy world view.

Contrary to Ogelsby, JFK was not going to avoid escalation of US military action against the people of Vietnam. See Chomsky's devastating attack on the so-called Newman Thesis, where Chomsky reveals the government memos in 1962 and 1963 that so impressed Newman provide JFK with more escape hatches for escalation than one can point a pencil at. See also my post from a few years ago on JFK and alternative history if JFK had not been assassinated.

Ogelsby never lost his hatred of LBJ as some sort of usurper, which weakens his analysis. Ogelsby never saw what Robert Dallek was one of the first historians of Ogelsby's generation correctly saw about LBJ: that LBJ was a hellava legislator who truly believed in New Deal domestic policy values, and truly believed in promoting civil rights for blacks and other "minorities" in American society. Ogelsby never recognized how LBJ skillfully used JFK's martyrdom to get enough support to pass legislation JFK never would have passed in three terms, let alone two. In foreign policy, however, LBJ was in fact a reluctant warrior and had strong doubts about escalating the Vietnam War. LBJ never acted on those doubts because he, like Nixon and JFK, came of political age during the "Who lost China?" debate that right-wing forces promoted in the early 1950s. No way was LBJ, Nixon or JFK going to stop that escalation (even assuming Nixon, not Kennedy became president in 1960).

Yes, there was a likely conspiracy with regard to JFK's assassination, but it was more narrow and was organized through the Mob, as I've noted in other blog posts (see this book by David Kaiser for what may be the most recent and best summary of that evidence).

Nixon's fall was the result of a combination of forces, and while some may have been the contempt for Nixon that existed in the elite press--where the feeling was mutual, and where Nixon continued attacking that press with "enemies' lists" and governmental abuses--it was finally the result of Nixon having begun to create his own secret government--something the elites throughout the nation could not abide.

Ogelsby's thesis also falls short when it comes to Reagan and Clinton. The Yankees embraced Reagan almost from the get-go, particularly as "Nancy Fancy," as the H.L. Mencken-successor Nicholas Von Hoffman called her at the time, purchased new dinnerware ("china") for the White House, and brought back elegant elite parties hosting both Yankee bankers and Cowboy oil bidness execs. It was such a relief for the permanent DC villagers after that horrid peanut farmer had slinked out of town. Yes, elements of the Yankee establishment never liked Bill Clinton (The NY Times did more to fan the flames of the phony "Whitewater scandal") but most of the Yankee elite rallied against the Cowboys--or was it the third element, the Southern Pig Farmers?--who should have embraced Clinton on that regional basis.

To make the general point against Ogelsby, the stakes were never so great between the Yankee and Cowboy elites as to support murder conspiracies or coups. They were mostly in general agreement with each other, and ultimately worked together to maintain the USA sponsored global Empire, and ensured American workers were reduced, decade by decade starting in the late 1940s, to sheepish consumerism with weak and disintegrating unions--and worked to politically further ensure there would never be another New Deal. These elites have worked so well together that even when Bill Gross of PIMCO and Warren Buffett call for some semblance of a new New Deal, the system developed over decades simply ignores them.

There are no "conspiracies" necessary in this view of modern American History. The way the system worked was simply to spend the money on the suitable candidates, control the scope of discourse in broadcast media and...well, what more did these elites really need?

My other critique, even more damning, of Ogelsby and too many 1960s radicals is their ultimately elite-based hatred of the middle class, which allowed them to sit in rooms with business execs and laugh derisively together about folks in the "flyover states" and metropolitan suburbs. No matter how many cops protected the eventually aging radicals in their suburban lives starting in the 1970s, such cultural lefties continued to speak condescendingly of the police. I was always a middle class guy, who never agreed with the cry of pampered white people who said "Drop the pig!" and such epithets against police officers. I knew various cops in our town growing up, and respected them for their willingness to lay down their lives for the rest of the community for pay that was a lot less than a business executive earns. I also learned as a teenager, when reading works of sociologists and reading portions of the Kerner Commission report, why a black or Latino person would have reason to despise the police, due to police brutality and abuse. And the same with those same white radicals who were protesting throughout much of the 1960s. But white folks living in the suburbs? Not so much, and often, not at all. I also never agreed with the counterculture's attack on civic pride and parades, and, unlike many in the counterculture of that time and into the 1970s, I saw quite clearly that the drug culture was destructive, not productive--even for artists. Frank Zappa understood this in real time, but not too many others.

Ogelsby dreamed of a Left-Libertarian alliance that I have always had a hard time with, due to most libertarians' hyperbolic hostility to government programs such as Social Security, unions and Medicare for all....Still, the anti-Empire stances of libertarians such as Rothbard and yes, Ogelsby are often more eloquent and salutary than most political figures on the liberal-left side. It's just a shame that, outside of Ron Paul (R-Texas), most Republican political figures are unable to even begin to recognize the legitimacy let alone the persuasiveness of the Rothbardian position in that regard. People like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann scream against Social Security, but they seem to like wars and torturing and executing people.

Despite the criticisms, Ogelsby remains an interesting American intellectual figure. His writings, compared to most modern corporate media pundits, move the debate forward to a level that promotes a deeper understanding of American culture, the American Empire and even the American economy.

Gershom Gorenberg agrees with me...

2011-09-17T19:20:00.001-07:00

See Gershom Gorenberg's latest article in The American Prospect regarding the upcoming UN vote for a Palestinian state.

See my post about two weeks ago...

Too bad the President will listen to neither of us and will order the US Ambassador to the UN to veto the resolution. Netanyahu shows once again he is more powerful than the president of the United States. Meanwhile, the US takes one more step toward irrelevance--and Israel misses yet another opportunity for peace it will later come to regret, and slip deeper into theocracy.

Gershom, this US president is neither wise nor clever. And Netanyahu is just an Israeli version of Rick Perry.

Oh well. We'll catch up...some other time.

Obama: The most moderate Republican in the rece

2011-09-17T06:55:00.000-07:00

This fellow's post (hat tip to Crooks & Liars) nails what ails the modern GOP. But the post backs into the reason a New Deal Democrat like me is so frustrated. For he leads us back to Obama being to the right of Eisenhower and even to the right of Hoover--and essentially no different than Reagan.

Oh, and Barack Hussein Obama, I know Abraham Lincoln. And sir, you are certainly no Abraham Lincoln. James Buchanan, maybe, in terms of not facing up to the American realities. But again no Lincoln.

Still, stalwarts of the Republican Party have a lot to answer for these days...

God bless "60 Minutes" on CBS tonight

2011-09-11T20:08:00.000-07:00

CBS' "60 Minutes" interviewed the Lebanese born US FBI interrogator of Al Queda operatives who blew open (once again) how non-torture methods of interrogation were at least as effective, and likely more effective, than the torture methods.

It also did a wonderfully uplifting, if still poignant interview with the first responders, and the doctor (Dr. Luft) who has treated them, and also let them tell their stories as first responders.

These were not wallowing reports tonight, but were instead focused on reminding us of the public policy issues which continue to be unresolved, whether they concern the use of torture or the failure to provide sufficient care for those who went into the dust and debris ten years ago today.

At the end of the interview with the former FBI interrogator, Ali Soufan, my wife and I simultaneously concluded that Soufan probably knows more than he is saying about what he and the FBI or CIA might have been able to do to have stopped the 9/11/2001 events from occurring. That may be why he is so haunted and emotional even today.

It was great television and an exception to what I saw earlier and in the days leading up to today.

9/11, Pearl Harbor and the Security Policy Issues We Largely Ignore

2011-09-11T06:28:00.000-07:00

The tenth anniversary of the most heinous foreign attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor is receiving a treatment from corporate media that is more akin to a death cult than a sober reflection, which unfortunately is not surprising.

For those who may think, "Well, the Japanese government's attack against Pearl Harbor probably received similar treatment in corporate media on December 7, 1951, right?"

Well, no. See UC Irvine and Nation contributor Jon Weiner's column on the subject of corporate media treatment of Pearl Harbor ten years on.

Weiner's article proves to us once again that when corporate media wants to downplay something, it simply downplays it and the discussion dies down and fades away. On the tenth anniversary of the Japanese government's attack at Pearl Harbor, our corporate media were propagating continued support for US involvement in the civil war in Korea, and propping up Japan as an American ally against the new supposed menace of International Communism. Corporate media saw no need for any religious symbolism and interviews with those who lost loved ones in that attack, nor any need to commemorate the event in any but a perfunctory manner. As Weiner notes, one media outlet expressly said it was time to move on.

Today, in contrast, our established leaders, and corporate media executives who follow their lead in matters of Empire and power over our fellow citizens, are propagating for the continued US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even though Bin Laden was captured, killed and disposed of at sea, corporate media continues its drumbeat for America to continue the war in Afghanistan. Even though Iraq was a dyslexic if not overtly fraudulent adventure undertaken in 2003 against a nation which had nothing to do with the attack against the US on 9/11/2001, we are still there, and young American soldiers continue to die there. And responsible and irresponsible media pundits agree that we must somehow and for some reason continue a "presence" in Iraq.

Since that awful day ten years ago, we have become a people who have traded some of our civil liberties for further security. Yes, our airports are safer for travel than they were ten years ago, and really, thank goodness for that. However, the more sober public policy question is whether we need the overall security apparatus that has developed and mushroomed these past ten years.

The ACLU has provided a comprehensive analysis that, regardless of whether we agree or disagree with each of its specifics and proposals, is a worthy starting point for a public policy discussion in this nation.

As we read the report, we should sober ourselves with the recognition that the US, Russia, England and to some extent France, vanquished Hitler and Mussolini and their Nazi and Fascist governments, and the US largely vanquished Japan and its war lord supported Emperor, in less than five years from the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is also a sobering thought that by 1951, we were then engaged in the type of war that everyone currently alive from age 80 on down to children now recognizes as a twilight war that was to last decades and be amorphous enough to be applied nearly anywhere around the globe. During that time, we accepted an increasing militarization in our society based upon a generalized ideological threat. Still, we should recognize the Russians never detonated any bombs in our land, as the terrorist organization Al Queda did, and some attacks have been thwarted against us since that time. That is why we need a sober assessment, not an ostrich like response of either "Let's trust the government in a 'time of war'" or "We will promote pure civil liberties for all."

As the ACLU notes early in its report:

Confronting the threat of transnational terrorism unquestionably involves both military and law-enforcement resources. Certainly no one advocated deploying the New York Police Department to Kandahar in 2001 to battle Al-Qaeda-trained militias; by the same token, no one (or almost no one) would advocate that Navy Seals conduct a night raid in Brooklyn to capture or kill a U.S.-citizen terrorism suspect. The question is not whether to employ a military or law-enforcement response, but rather where to draw the appropriate line between the two. And in the last decade, we have allowed the superficial rhetoric of a “war on terror” to solidify into a set of policies that have degraded the rule of law.

Thus was an American citizen seized by the military from a New York jail, branded by President Bush as an “enemy combatant,” and locked away in a Naval brig without charge or trial. Thus did President Bush, claiming war powers, secretly assert the authority to violate congressional prohibitions and ignore the need for judicial authorization in ordering the electronic surveillance of American citizens. Thus has President Obama claimed the unchecked authority to use lethal force against a United States citizen, far from any battlefield, on the basis of his own unilateral determination that the citizen poses a threat to the nation. And thus has Congress passed laws intended to detain prisoners at Guantanamo indefinitely, even though the prison is a blight on our nation’s conscience and history and a recruiting tool for our enemies.

The report is worth reading, particularly for those of us who value our cell phones, and do not realize how the phone companies are compromised by federal, state and local governments' demand to track our minute by minute movements when those governments wish to do so. David Brin's transparency credo and analysis of watching the watchers may be our best hope as we continue to have no true discourse in US corporate media to stop the data mining that is continuing under a president who promised he would be a bulwark against the Bush Jr. administration's encroachment of our civil liberties. One cannot read the report without being reminded once again how Obama continued most of Bush Jr.'s anti-civil liberties policies, and in some cases, expanded the reach of those policies. If there is a Republican president next time around, we in the progressive community who did not stand taller against this Democratic Party president will rue that failure.

I wish the report contained specific policy proposals in bullet points, the way a business oriented report would do. Still, it is a jumpboard for such policy proposals to be made. Glenn Greenwald provided a nice summary of the report and quoted a 34 year veteran CIA official and lawyer, John Rizzo who said Obama changed virtually nothing, and "most [Bush] policies remain core elements of our national security strategy today."

One thing in the report I found terribly distressing was that our European allies are not cooperating as much as we would hope--because they recognize the change in our security policies that undermine civil liberties. The ACLU report states:

Our indefinite and overbroad military detention policy and our use of discredited military commissions are already obstacles to our allies’ willingness to cooperate with us. Abiding by their own international and domestic law obligations, key allies have refused to extradite suspected terrorists to the United States for military detention or military prosecution, and require assurances that prosecution will take place only in our federal criminal justice system. (footnote omitted)Some countries even refuse to provide intelligence information or other evidence if it will result in military detention or prosecution of a suspected terrorist already in U.S. custody. (Footnote omitted) In Afghanistan, where the Obama administration has continued the Bush administration’s policy of detaining individuals for years without charge or trial based on secret evidence and without access to a lawyer, our NATO allies refuse to transfer captives to U.S. custody. If Congress makes military detention and trials mandatory for terrorism suspects, extraditions of those suspects to America for trial, and our allies’ willingness to provide us intelligence information, may come to a halt."

It was a sad moment in American journalism that when Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, had initially sought civilian trials for some terrorist suspects, the corporate media more often re-enforced the hysterical response from the petty political motivations of poison talk radio and television pundits. Compare again, for example, the way corporate media told us to move on ten years after Pearl Harbor to the current way it promotes emotional responses on the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the Twin Towers. How are we to have a policy discussion regarding security in such a media-generated environment?

Instead of a sober analysis of public policy, corporate media, as it has for the past two weeks, will likely spend most of its time today interviewing survivors of the events of that day, people who lost loved ones and again treating the day as if it was some sort of religious commemoration--which, ironically, we may be certain followers of Bin Laden will view this anniversary. The acts on 9/11/2001 that were perpetrated against American citizens and on American soil were a terrorist crime of international proportions. They should not, from our nation's perspective, be seen through a lens of religion and religious-tinged symbolism. Just because Bin Laden saw it as "jihad" does not mean we should. We should remind everyone that he was wrong. It was a monstrous crime that was horribly based on a distortion of religiosity.

Instead, ten years after those horrific criminal events, we need to re-evaluate whether our nation should continue the wars begun in the aftermath of that attack. We need to re-evaluate the security apparatuses our nation's leaders have enacted. We then need to begin to discuss and pursue policies that promote our better values to the rest of the world.

We won't, though, and we know it. And we won't because we continue to accept the status quo as non-changing, when things do change with the appropriate leadership. What future historians will see, as they sift through the wreckage that continues seep deeper into our society, is a failure of will among the elites to protect American society, our economy and our physical land--the latter not just in terms of security, but of its environmental sustainability and yes, its grandeur.

(Edited)

I wish he'd just say he was not running for re-election...

2011-09-08T22:43:00.000-07:00

I was still deeply disappointed in the president tonight. More tax cuts than anything else, and the only real promise he will follow through on is to further dismantle and undermine Social Security and Medicare. He provided a little more rah-rah in his tone, and of course the professional chattering class on television confused that tone with substance.

I admit I was amused to hear the president use the word "thread" to discuss a historical pattern. I wonder if one of his speechwriters read my novel, which has RFK delivering his first inaugural address in January 1969 on the "threads of history..." and talking about the Founders, the Civil War and its threads through RFK's time.

Oh well. Limited time tonight on the Internet...Another night is here, another day has passed....

Obama will never learn...

2011-09-07T06:42:00.000-07:00

So I read all over the Internet that Obama is going to propose a $300 billion plan to help the jobless. Then, we get the fine print:

According to people familiar with the White House deliberations, two of the biggest measures in the president's proposals for 2012 are expected to be a one-year extension of a payroll tax cut for workers and an extension of expiring jobless benefits. Together those two would total about $170 billion.

Thus, more than half the plan will consist of (1) tax cuts that are meaningless to employers faced with lack of demand for their goods and services and (2) extending job loss benefits to help people merely tread in the water of unemployment and despair while they wait for the confidence fairy to wave a magic wand for a private sector job to appear.

This is the same nonsense Obama has believed all along. He will never learn.

And anyone who does not support a primary against this guy is being naive in thinking Obama's election prospects in 2012 are anything other than a weak maybe and probable loss--even to the likes of Perry, Bachmann, and especially Romney.

Today, Professor Julian Lewis delivers a lecture...

2011-09-06T06:39:00.001-07:00

When I wrote my alternative history novel back in the period of 1998-2002, mostly in 1998-2001, and some editing after 9/11/01 and into 2002, I had the appendix be a speech from a fictitious professor, Julian Lewis, explaining that what had just occurred during the RFK timeline--where RFK survives and becomes president--was all inevitable and mostly expected. When our time's historian Kevin Starr read that speech at the end of the manuscript, he called it one of the best attacks on historiography he'd ever read. "Devastating," was how he termed it. "Contingency does rule, is what you are saying."

Yes.

Anyway, the date of Professor Lewis' speech or lecture was September 6, 2011. One of the things he said was happening in his time was the completion of the merging of the phone, television and computer, which is almost but not quite upon us in terms of how people are generally using those instruments. Funny that...

On the other hand, I consciously made him a "triumphalist" for the RFK liberal-left, made sure he was wrong in some fundamentals and particulars and was also showing how the winners write history more often than not, even when they are wrong in their suppositions, wrong in their analyses and sometimes just plain wrong factually. This way, a more conservative reader, and even a pro-RFK reader, may recognize how a Chomsky feels when he reads a mainstream corporate media writer, historian or politician talk about the fall of Communism, Ronald Reagan, etc.

One reader called it a Zen moment, where the entire premise of the book is shaken, which was also intended. I mean, it is called "A Disturbance of Fate," after all. And I wanted fate to be disturbed even in the RFK timeline.

Also, there is admittedly an Ayn Randian element to the book, but I wanted my novel to be more ironic, more willing to hear a different perspective and more willing to recognize there are very few essential truths for all time. The professor is not stupid, and is allowed some profound statements. It is just that he is blinded by the fact that he basks inside the political ideology which has "won" as opposed to the ideology which has "lost." And that makes him, well, more flabby in his thinking than if he was on the outside looking in.

Well, today is the day he delivers his lecture. Would that we could see it...

About 1/7th of "Stimulus" went to infrastructure rebuilding

2011-09-05T07:47:00.000-07:00

Krugman has a blog post today on the stimulus, which he had correctly foreseen would be too small to help the American economy.

Still, Krugman doesn't give us enough understanding of just how small the stimulus was with reference to rebuilding and building new infrastructure. See this Wikipedia entry which breaks down the stimulus package actually passed. Note that the stimulus package was approximately $787 billion (not a trillion). Tax cuts were nearly $300 billion, or nearly 40% of the sum. Infrastructure rebuilding was $105 billion, with another $11 billion to build health care facilities for the military and the National Institute for Health (NIH), and maybe another $3 billion elsewhere, for a true total of $119 billion. Think about that: $3 in tax cuts for every $1 in infrastructure spending. Worse, the infrastructure spending hardly got off the ground before Republicans took over the House in 2011 because Obama did not know how to call state and local officials or even his federal officials to get past any delays in starting projects. As the NY Times admitted in an article on June 18, 2010:

For all the talk of “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects when the stimulus first passed, construction projects made up a comparatively small slice of the package, and many required considerable administrative spade work — planning, permitting and contracting — before actual dirt could be turned. The stimulus initially injected money into the economy mainly through tax cuts and aid to states and individuals.

Also, corporate centrist economist Mark Zandi (Moody's Chief Economist at the time) said when Obama signed the stimulus bill into law, the stimulus package would halt the slide, but not solve any problems and would have to be revisited...

So, let's not assume Keynesian economics failed here. What failed again was the scheme that says tax cuts significantly stimulate the economy. Tax cuts might significantly stimulate the economy if we were lowering the income tax and capital gains rates from 90% to 70% on the margin and there was nearly full employment under most economic metrics, but not at the tax rate levels we have lived with for the past three decades, nor where unemployment is as significant as it's been for the past few years.

Happy labor day to those unemployed and want to work

2011-09-05T07:18:00.000-07:00

We know it's tough out there. We've been there, too, and we wish all working folks the best.If anyone feels down, they may have good reason to feel down, especially when having to compete for a job with those who want to go from part-time to full time work, those who have been out of the labor market and want to get back in, and those who already have jobs, but want a different job. See this article which shows why again our president has not done right by those unemployed, and why we should realize too that Republican politicians are worse...

Woody Allen once said that life is divided between the miserable and the horrible. And as The Smiths sang, "Heaven Nows I'm Miserable Now."

Personally, I don't even feel miserable these days. I feel lucky I'm working and that I am personally valued at my work. On the other hand, I have to drive a heck of a lot and for a lot less pay than four or five years ago. My book is finally being re-released after many years, by a publisher in New York, who is releasing a new edition we prepared for ereaders and in soft cover. But unless it's promoted, there is no thought of quitting the day job to get past the second chapter in my second book...:-) My health has improved greatly, and the medications I am on are working better than in many years. While I'm on my son to get his college applications going, I'm proud of him in many ways as he starts senior year in high school. My daughter is starting her last year of middle school with a much better attitude than she had for most of last year, and my wife's employment situation at the new school she is working at as an aide is working out well for her. Heck, the dog seems content, too. So, we're lucky.

I think it's something akin to survivor syndrome that I have such anger at the president's refusal to promote a New Deal set of policies. My sister remains unemployed as does a dear cousin of mine. And a set of neighbors who I greatly respect have seen their small business, largely connected to the real estate construction industry, essentially fail. All employees have been laid off and it's just them trying to survive. Not a month goes by when I hear of people with whom I am acquainted losing a job, taking jobs for much less pay and sometimes with no benefits.

It's a Republican world, I say, and we just try to survive in it. And when I see great bargains for products, I call it "America' s Going out of Business Sale." For we don't produce very much as a nation anymore. Too often, we're a bunch of financiers, lawyers, hairdressers and delivery service people.

Last night, my wife and I watched "Executive Suite", for a sort of Labor Day weekend film night. I love the speeches at the end of the film. The film, released in 1954, nails the issue of what has now happened in our society, when our business leaders became more obsessed with finance than producing things. Obama believes the rhetoric of the controller (Frederic March), while those of us who are New Dealers understand deeply what William Holden's and Walter Pidgeon's characters are talking about. While a pro-labor person would still be in tough negotiations on a contract renewal with Holden's or Pidgeon's characters, we can at least understand the pride Holden and Pidgeon are describing. My wife and I were also struck, as we watched the film, how many jobs have been lost to automation after all, and how there is a sense of foreboding on the factory floor even before that automation has kicked in.

Ernest Lehman's (probably somehow related to the Lehman brother's families) screenplay is a great adaptation of Cameron Hawley's outstanding novel, I should add. I read one of Hawley's other novels, too, "The Lincoln Lords," that is also a knock-out (The book also has an interesting sub-plot about the lingering anti-Semitism in the corporate and even banking worlds). Hawley reveals the drama in the business world, at an even more sophisticated level than my general literary hero, Sinclair Lewis. Hawley is not for everyone, as his books probably appear too dry for most literature readers. There's hardly any sex in the books, and it's all "off camera," while there is a sharp, fast dialogue that does not spoon feed people about business operations.

A Happy Labor Day to everyone, and to my sister and cousin, and others with employment challenges, please try to keep faith...

Get out the pitchforks, hammers and maybe a sickle...or maybe try Hamilton's Federalist Paper no. 11?

2011-09-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

Pharyngula, a science oriented blog, explains (citing another link from here) that if Apple hired American workers to assemble the iPhone here in the US, and paid $10 an hour, it would still make a 50% profit on its phones. Pay $20 an hour, and it would make 20% profits (more overhead for benefits I figure).

That's still enough profit for one company, isn't it?

While I am a big Steve Jobs fan, for the reason of the beautiful architecture and design of his products, and for starting Pixar, the greatest single animation studio of the past sixty years, there is something deeply disturbing and Nikean (my word of the day) about Apple's profits, especially when we can put in tariffs to incentivize Apple to build assembly plants right here in the good ol' USA.

Something to think about this Labor Day when we hear Americans "can't do manufacturing" anymore...

Responding to Obama-bots like former Obama administrator (and Republican) Keith Humphreys

2011-09-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychiatry professor, has become a defender of Obama even though earlier in some posts of his, he admitted he was a Republican. Good for him to support a Republican oriented leader like Obama. However, he makes the fatal mistake of thinking it is ridiculous that those of us who are New Deal Democrats are not actively defending and supporting Obama at this point in his administration.

First, Humphreys posted a particularly initially nasty personal attack on those who have come to oppose Obama from inside the Democratic Party (see here). My response in the comments to him, and to the ridiculous Jonathan Alter was as follows:

Here is what I wrote to Mr. Alter, who obviously doesn’t understand American history or how leaders actually lead (which is why his short book on FDR was so pedestrian). And sadly, neither do you, Keith:

Obama promised to be transformative. He is reactive. He continued Bush II’s policies in Iraq, expanded Bush II’s policies in Afghanistan, continued Bush II’s policies of rendition and far away torture, kept open Guantanamo, kept Gates, Bernanke, Patreus. Pushed through a stimulus that was mostly tax credits and bailouts for financiers, his true campaign donor base since he entered national politics. And kept the Bush II tax cuts for the rich going, while undermining Social Security/Medicare with payroll tax cuts (you can’t claim, as he does, that the Soc Sec/Medicare systems don’t have enough revenue, and then cut revenue further…:-().

He never even tried to get “card check” passed. He dropped the ball, willingly, on the public option. He never showed up at a labor strike. He had the audacity to say we couldn’t do more infrastructure reinvestment and rebuilding because they were not “shovel ready”–as if he couldn’t call some local government officials to expedite some things to make things shovel ready.

He is a failure the way Hoover, Carter and Buchanan were failures. They accepted from the start that whatever was in around them at the time, that is the way it is and always will be. The interesting thing is that the president that followed each of those failures was transformative: FDR, Reagan and Lincoln.

If Obama had any guts, he’d announce on television, as did LBJ, that he is not running for a second term. We need a Democratic Party candidate who believes in the New Deal and makes it happen. The nation is ready, despite you wine sipping Beltway herd members making fun of it. Since Obama doesn’t have the guts to protect his party and nation from further failure, and the catastrophe of a Republican (other than possibly Romney) winning in 2012, then there should be someone in the Democratic Party with some guts to take this failure on and push him to the side of the road where he belongs.

And boy did the fur fly at the comments at Alter's column--far more than at the Humphreys' site, which he shares with some other academics like Mark Kleiman and Jonathan Zasloff. At the comments section for Alter's column, I ripped right back at the Obamabots, who were reduced to FoxNews type of attacks against me, all the while proclaiming it was me who had attacked those individuals first...It was a pathetic performance from the Obama-bots and it shows how sad they've become.

Humphreys then tried another line of attack, by citing neo-liberals like Jonathan Chait of The (Often Odious) New Republic, Ezra Klein and, again, Jonathan Alter who say, "The Republicans are too strong, and there is no way things could have been better performed. Let's clap our hands for Obama!" As if those fellas are going to impress folks like me with such an argument...

So of course, I demurred. In the comments section to Humphreys' more reasoned post, I was still not done with the attack the elitist Humphreys made against those of us who lack his income level, his ability to consume wine and brie, and live a stable and secure, and cushy life at an elite university. I stated:

Poor Keith, sitting there eating brie, drinking wine in his ivory tower (inside joke for Keith), wondering why we poor benighted lefties can’t see there is no bully pulpit, at least when liberals come to town. In mid-December 2000, Republican House Speaker Denny Haestert (now there’s a trivia question for ya) publicly said that Bush Jr should not push for federal income tax cuts because there is simply no enthusiasm on Capitol Hill, especially in light of the way Bush Jr “won” the 2000 election. Suddenly, the president-elect and others in the incoming administration started to lay out a case. Then, the most harsh version was put forward, debated strongly and well, well, well…there you go. Federal income tax cuts galore for the upper brackets of income.

Obama had the wind at his back in the beginning of 2009. He could have seized the moment, looked Republicans in the eye, and said, “I’ll seek a Grand Bargain, but let’s have a Grand Public Debate since these guys still don’t get it.” He should have directly challenged Boehner or any of these other yahoos for a public debate on the way we must move forward. Heck, call out Limbaugh for a debate if the Republican leadership cowered, and hung Limbaugh right around their necks by noting how often they genuflected to Limbaugh. The message was ready and built for him: Big. Government. Spending. Infrastructure. Get. America. Back. To. Work. And as for the Democratic Senator Nervous Nellies, like Blanche Lincoln and the Nelson Boys (NE- and FL-), a meeting with them that said, “You want a primary, you’ll get one,” and shaming them by coming to their town with rallies that say, We Want Jobs Now. The primary threat is exactly FDR did to Gore Vidal’s Grandfather, Senator Thomas P. Gore (D-OK), for not supporting the initial New Deal. And it is what LBJ said to various Southern Senators and Congressman, where enough listened.

Keith, honestly, have you ever lead anything? Ever led any civic organization that was in trouble, and needed a new direction? I know it sounds arrogant and naive to you, but really, Obama has failed the leadership test. And he really needs to get out of the way before further disaster strikes.

Final note: I’ve been re-reading the 1962 reissue of the 1942 book by Stanford historian, David Potter, about Lincoln, the Republicans and the secession crisis of 1860-1861. It is fascinating reading, and it revealed once again how Lincoln began to draw lines in the sand in the weeks after his winning the plurality election of November 1860. Lincoln, unlike some in his own party, saw the significance of the Southern leadership’s plans to expand slavery by extending the American Empire south into Mexico, Cuba and the Latin American continent. It is why he rejected extending the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific Ocean and why he rejected the Crittenden “Compromise” as no compromise at all. He simply wanted a status quo agreement of no extension of slavery into other territories, and later only compromised by giving the South the territory of the now State of New Mexico, which failed to pass Congress.

Lincoln’s only failure was to grasp how militaristic the Southern leadership had become, and hoped there were enough Unionist supporters in the South who would realize the need for something closer to the status quo. But he knew how not to give in–compared to NY Senator Seward, who was a firebreather for the North, but wanted to get along with his Southern colleagues in the Senate. Lincoln, a trial lawyer (not a law professor), knew where the pieces were on the chess board, and moved them as well as any American leader before or since. He was not afraid of a war in the face of the military actions the South was taking, even though he was up against far more serious odds than Obama faced in 2009. The South was not withdrawing from the Union in 2009, despite Perry’s bombast, and if Obama brought jobs to the South, he’d have gotten far more wind at his back than he had at the start of his administration.

If anything, Obama resembles my beloved John Qunicy Adams and his administration (1825-1829), whose naive belief in post-partisanship made his one term presidency a failure. JQA delivered one of the greatest programmatic inaugurals ever, but the Southern Democrats, and Jackson supporters in the West, and a few in the North (led by future Jackson VP, Van Buren), openly stymied Adams’ initiatives. They did so even when they otherwise agreed with the policies before Adams started to push for them. And Adams, poor guy, never stopped trying to appease the Jacksonians, as if they would eventually compromise. They didn’t, and then ran against a do-nothing Adams administration, and walked into the White House in 1829. Does this sound somewhat familiar? Adams went on to become a fiery Congressman, where he was admittedly driven in part by a sense of vengeance. And there, he became well respected and sometimes feared as the years went on.

History does repeat itself in various, though not exact ways…There are patterns to American history, and we are foolish if we stick with a guy who resembles Hoover in the refusal to believe in transformative leadership, who resembles Adams without Adams’ clear vision.

Keith is not happy with such comments (I think he deleted a more pointed response to yet another post, but who knows?). He never once engaged the facts and historical analysis I offered--though he was not averse to responding to others in the comments sections in his posts. Reading his impressive resume at Stanford, he is definitely a "made guy"--but I doubt he's truly ever led any organization, and certainly not one in crisis. And, ya know, it would have been nice of Dr. Keith to remind his readers that he served in the Obama administration on drug policy for at least a year.

This is a critical time in our nation's history. There is a void of leadership at the elite level. And people like Keith Humphreys are truly a part of the problem. They are as weak as Neville Chamberlains and Weimar Republic officials. And they are not acting to arrest and reverse the decay and decline of our society and our national government (Unlike Keith, I'm not a "made guy" in the elite corridors of American society.). Instead, in a style more attuned to FoxNews, they attack as naive and fantasists those of us who dare set forth more aggressive and more politically attuned alternative. Humphreys writes as if he thinks folks like me don't know the facts on the ground and that Obama is likely to still be the Democratic Party's nominee in the summer of 2012. I know that, but dammit, we need to at least engage the topic and push for an alternative in the early fall of 2011. We should not simply wring our hands and say there's nothing we can ever say or do to change things. It's what blogs are for, at the least.

Some great labor day reading about income inequality

2011-09-04T07:58:00.001-07:00

See Frank Pasquale's excellent and link-laden (in a great way!) post at Balkinization, a normally lawyers' oriented blog.

He refers to Lasch's "Revolt of the Elites" (1996), which is a great book (read the reviews for a better understanding of the book). However, Bob Kuttner's "Revolt of the Haves" (1980) is even better--but it is rare and out of print. Kuttner lays out at the dawn of income tax cut mania, what the end game was for those pushing it. And man, it is prescient as to what we are seeing nowadays...

Did he or didn't he?

2011-09-04T07:33:00.001-07:00

Some obviously blinded scholars are trying to blame Thomas Jefferson's brother Randolph for having sex with and fathering children from Thomas Jefferson's slave, Sally Hemmings.

What the article fails to note is a very important reason why it far more likely to have been Thomas, not his brother, Randolph, and it's a reason fraught with poignancy and sympathy for Tom and Sally: Sally was most likely the half-sister of Tom's beloved and deceased wife, Martha (born Martha Wayles).* There are those who say there was enough of a resemblance to the two women that one could see how Jefferson was attracted to somewhat light-skinned Sally. Regardless, Sally was a house slave member of the Wayles family before arriving at Monticello with Martha when she married Thomas.

That Thomas would allow his brother Randolph such free reign over his beloved wife's slave, who was herself caring for Thomas' children, is more difficult to believe than to simply conclude Thomas is the father of a few of Sally's later children.

* There's been no DNA testing on Sally Hemmings or TJ's father-in-law John Wayles, and there is some evidence that initially one of Sally's children said her father was a white English sea captain.

Labor Day Weekend September 2011

2011-09-04T07:03:00.000-07:00

As we approach tomorrow's Labor Day, we see that labor union leaders have realized that Obama does not care about labor or workers, and are acting accordingly. No support for the House of Labor, Mr. President? Then, no money from that house, sir. You want money for re-election? Get it from your financier friends who you serve so faithfully and well.

It remains a paradigmatic example of the fecklessness of this president that he can travel pretty much anywhere, everywhere he pleases. But he's never stood at the "ground zero" where there is a strike or where labor unions are under attack. Never.

And when Obama says there are no "shovel ready" projects and never were, this blog post from WYNC (sent to me thanks to a cousin from NJ) proves there were and definitely are shovel ready projects. And if there were or are any bottlenecks from local officials, in terms of environmental regulations to follow, then you make some calls, put more engineers on the project, and you move past the bottlenecks. And if we have to set aside or waive an environmental regulation or two, then do that, but most of the time, it's more about getting an economic incentive to the contractor or adding contractors or employees. It's not about needing to hurt further the environment most of the time.

You want flair? You want leadership? If there is a particularly recalcitrant local official who won't expedite projects in his or her jurisdiction, you take the entourage, get out there, and with a bull horn and a shovel at your side, and the large crowd that will come out with you, you yell, "Let's get this work started now! Repeat after me! Let's get this work started now!"

And you think that local official won't be shamed into acting? And you think "independent" voters won't be impressed with you?

Obama campaigned on "Yes, we can." He governs like "No, we can't--and you people who thought bold? Well, just shut up."

No, we won't shut up. And you, Mr. President, need to get out of the way. You don't know how to lead. And you have no vision. If we have to vote for a "Weimar Republic" or "Herbert Hoover" Democratic Party incumbent like Obama next year, because the Republicans nominate Perry or Bachmann, we may likely do so. But it is ridiculous, on Labor Day weekend, 2011, not to try and rouse people and some other leaders in or near the Democratic Party to run a primary against Obama.

And so the Palestinians declare themselves a state...and?

2011-09-03T23:51:00.000-07:00

There is so much apprehension in official Washington and among the American-Jewish political organizations that the UN will recognize a Palestinian state in a couple of weeks.

For the past couple of months, I have scratched my head, and with derisive laughter have been saying to anyone who buys into that official fear, "So you're saying you're not for a two state solution?"

And they invariably respond, "Huh?"

"What are the practical borders of this soon-to-be-declared Palestinian State?" I ask.

"Well..." they stammer.

"No matter what the Palestinians say, it looks like something close to what a final agreement will likely end up being...though not necessarily the Palestinian dream of regaining East Jerusalem..." is what I reply to the stammer.

And as they stammer again, I add, "And if there's a State, then the Palestinians are now in a homeland, and the refugee question starts to fade, doesn't it?"

And then I smile. Because really, this initiative is in many ways long overdue for anyone who truly believes in a two-state solution.

What's really funny is that there are now competing legal opinions starting to emerge on the Palestinian side where they are feeling like they are in a "Twilight Zone" episode where the people get what they want, but it is not what they expected--well, they get some of what they expected, but with a bigger surprise of the unexpected.

Too bad the people who are the true believers on both sides are strapping the instruments of war to themselves. That is the only continuing danger, but it still should not change the policy that needs to be pursued, which is jump starting serious peace talks--now. And if the UN declares Palestine a State, keep talking. The UN will support both sides continuing to talk about contouring the borders of each of the two States, and if Hamas wants Gaza as a separate State, maybe a three-state solution. Two snarling Palestinian States may be an advantage to Israel during the interregnum between the temporary and permanent peace among Arabs and Jews in a land that is supposed to be "holy."

United the working class: Rich Trumka for President

2011-09-02T06:35:00.000-07:00

It is one of the canards that those of us who have called on Barack Hoover Obama to not run for re-election that we are somehow part of the wine and brie crowd. The people who that description fits are those who say, "Oh, I'm a social liberal, but fiscal conservative."

Rich Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, lays out a new New Deal here.

See here and here for some background of Trumka. And this book by Thomas Georgehegan provides some added background of a guy who grew up as a miner's son, and started his work life in the mines to become a lawyer, and then work his way up the miner's union to the head of the AFL-CIO.

Once Trumka started speaking around the country, once people got a look at him, it would be really hard to convince workers that he was some elitist. People are ready to re-learn the value of a union as we slowly catch on to living in the Second Gilded Age. Corporate media pundits and news readers would finally reveal their fangs against workers in a way that would finally reveal the bias that is corporate--as opposed to defining "liberal" and "conservative" first and foremost by symbols and sex issues. And that would do more to arrest this slow, steady decline of our discourse than anything else...

Oh, and once Obama realizes he will have a harder primary fight than the one he endured in 2008, he'll finally see the wisdom of following LBJ's lead in March 1968.

So come on, Rich. It is time for a presidential candidate who is from the heart of the working class. Haven't seen that in a long, long time...

Yes, President Gore would likely have gone to war against Iraq

2011-08-30T21:16:00.000-07:00

People often ask me, the so-called "alternative history" guy, "What would have happened in the US and world if Gore had actually become president after the 2000 election?"

I often respond that there are a few different scenarios about whether the events of September 11, 2001 would have occurred. I think not because Gore would have listened to Richard Clarke and John O'Neill, based upon Gore's previous trajectory and the fact that even Clinton found them compelling after the Al Queda attack on the USS Cole in December 2000. Gore would certainly have hardened the airport security around the nation, as European governments did in the summer of 2001. And Gore would certainly have reacted affirmatively to the National Intelligence Estimate of August 2001 that said Bin Laden was "determined" to act against the US inside the US. Therefore, the events of 9/11 would have likely been avoided and the Al Queda guys largely caught or foiled.

However, had Gore been as negligent as Bush Jr. in not listening to Clarke/O'Neill, not hardening airport security and not listening to the NIE, the Republican Congress would have impeached Gore and possibly Lieberman, though Lieberman would have likely turned on Gore early in those proceedings. Dramatic, yes? But the first Jewish president, President Lieberman, is definitely within the realm of possibility. That's doubly funny because Lieberman was the first to push Gore to concede the race against Bush, and would not give up his Senate seat in Connecticut to run hedge-free with Gore.

Anyway, and either way, though, President Gore more likely than not invades Iraq in 2002 or 2003. Why, you scream? He opposed that war. Yes, the Gore who was bearded, bloated, depressed-and-thinking-about-Dad's idealism and anti-war stances, did oppose that war. But the Gore who becomes president keeps hanging with and listening to hawks in official DC, who were bloodlusting to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Marty Peretz as a Gore adviser, and again...Lieberman and people like Woolsey and other neo-cons. Gore was an original neo-con in terms of foreign policy, going back to the 1980s and all through the 1990s.

Some differences with Bush, though: I think Gore would have fought off and eventually agreed to lower tax cuts, and maybe more targeted tax cuts for the top 2% of income earners. With lower deficits, and less accumulated debt during most of his years as president, he would have better protected Social Security--kept that institution in the much ridiculed "lockbox" he talked about during the 2000 campaign. He would not have crafted or sold the Medicare Part B debacle. That is another thing that would avoid lots of government red ink, though the Iraq War is a giant sucking cost.

President Gore would announce support for more environmental regulation, but would not fight for it any harder than he did during his Vice Presidency years under Clinton--where fuel efficiency in motor vehicles went down for the first time since the enactment of such laws in the early 1970s.

Remember, under President Gore, the Republicans maintain control of Congress. Even in 2006. For Gore had learned to be a Clintonian triangulator, running as much against his own base and Democrats in Congress, as Republicans. And that means, "Well, the Republicans keep me from doing good things, so you'll just have to vote for me compared to those other guys..." We know the drill, Mr. President, we would say with our eyebrows etched in a face full of sarcasm.

The housing bubble would continue unabated because the financial industry will have its hooks deep into Gore, the way they have it into Obama, Hillary, Biden, you name 'em, they got 'em. And Greenspan would remain the Federal Reserve Board Chairman, so that means not much structural change in terms of our economy.

I decided to blog about this because of this new article in Salon.com where the author agrees with me about President Gore likely invading Iraq. He notes the same names, starting with Lieberman and Peretz, though he could have added Woolsey, who would quickly ingratiate himself with President Gore in most any scenario.

In short, President Gore would have been an improvement over Bush Jr. in terms of basic bankers' oriented stewardship of our nation. And we should give President Gore kudos for stopping the 9/11 hijackers, even as Republicans would continue their drive for Arab-American votes that had begun in earnest in the late 1990s--so they would have been screaming about the innocence of the guys arrested in the multiple plots scheduled for September 11...You know, the way the Republicans in the Congress sounded like Chomsky when attacking Clinton for bombing Serbia and Kosovo in 1998.:-)

This is a fun exercise, but it has less portent than analyzing alternative scenarios for the focal point year of 1968 and with as charismatic and transformational a guy as RFK...

Deliberately provocative article concerning libertarian (and conservative) hostility to political democratic values

2011-08-30T21:01:00.000-07:00

Michael Lind writes a deliberately provocative article delegitimizing leading libertarians, conservatives and lesser recent libertarians for choosing economic freedom over political freedom. It is the sort of formulation and style we who identify with liberals and lefties have to deal with every day in corporate broadcast media. You know the drill, "Liberals are..." "Leftwingers are..." and "Liberals hate democracy" "Leftwingers hate America..." etc. And "Oh? Izzy Stone? Wasn't he a Stalinist?" Oy.

On a personal level, I guess it's nice to see libertarians getting that treatment, just so they can begin to understand how we feel about provocative articles.* Let's also see how they come to the rescue of Hayek and von Mises for profession of these libertarian heroes' love for fascists. That ought to be fun...Get your popcorn popping and fun munching...

* Though Lind does note some libertarians who stand a bit taller. Also, I think Lind is deliberately misconstruing Patri Friedman's comments about electoral prospects and strategies for libertarians into an attack on democratic values--when I think Patri Friedman is saying, "Think small" for electoral strategies.

My kind of guy!

2011-08-28T21:57:00.000-07:00

Fresno School District's superintendent decided that maybe he was taking too much out of the public purse. Would that some of the greed mongers in the private sector would follow this example and give back to their companies, and maybe even demand some better pay for those employees at the bottom of the hierarchy at the companies...

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, but I saw this new information today...

2011-08-27T19:04:00.000-07:00

Is Joe Hill innocent once and for all time? So says a new book on Hill, and it sure makes a fairly compelling case.

Even I had thought there might have been a struggle between the grocer, his son and Hill that led to the grocer and son being killed nearly a century ago. This was after reading Philip Foner's excellent book on the events that led up to and include Hill's execution after a less than fair trial, where Foner was actually trying to make the case Hill was innocent of the killing. See however Wallace Stegner's biographical novel, Joe Hill, that had caused many, even in the left-labor community, to wonder about Hill's innocence.

The new book's findings do make sense that culturally speaking, a wandering working man, 100 years ago, would sacrifice himself to protect a young woman's romantic or even sexual relations outside of marriage. This fact, when added to Hill's own sense (that did not disappoint) that the capitalist dominated justice system would never give him an even break, helps explain why Hill refused to bother to take the stand and directly defend himself at the trial. Still, the letter from the woman confirming Hill's initial alibi was over thirty years after the fact, which could be reason to doubt its accuracy--though again she may have had strong cultural and even immediate family reasons to stay quiet all those years.

A history of debt, coinage and credit

2011-08-26T06:10:00.000-07:00

This interview with anthropologist David Graeber is outstanding. It is a great example of how philosophy integrated with factual analysis is far better than the usual nonsense of "thought experiments" of certain other philosophers who shall remain nameless...

John Mikhail on the Necessary and Proper clauses

2011-08-24T21:04:00.000-07:00

Last week, I posted about a law professor who had an intriguing analysis of the "necessary and proper" clauses in the US Constitution. John Mikhail has now written his first detailed analysis of the portion of the clauses which were well understood by the Founders' generation, but no longer very well among modern jurists who may lack the deep historical knowledge Mikhail brings to his discussion.

Interestingly, though, Mikhail appears to assume the "enumerated" powers should only include the powers identified starting the second paragraph of Article I, Section 8. That made me say, "Whoa, pardner!" Let's look at the Section 8 in its entirety with the first paragraph bolded before we surrender to that point:

Section. 8.

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

To establish Post Offices and post Roads;

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;--And

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

(Bold added)

Here is my not so rhetorical question: Why isn't the first paragraph as much an "enumerated" power of Congress as those powers discussed in the second through sixteenth paragraphs? Enumeration is a listing. It can be specific or general in each part of the list. The first enumeration says Congress can lay and collect taxes. The first enumeration also says Congress can pay debts. It further says Congress can provide for the "common defence." It says Congress may promote "the general welfare," which in those days meant far more than giving tax money to poor women with children.

Yes, yes, I know what Madison said in Federalist Paper no. 41 (link corrected) , in the last five paragraphs. But Madison is still begging the question of whether the powers identified in paragraphs 2-16 of Section 8 are the only powers of Congress. The other powers may be more specific than the more general statement of "common defence and general welfare." But did Madison mean to say the other paragraphs are exhaustive? Look carefully at what Madison says in the second of the last five paragraphs in Federalist Paper no. 41:

Had no other enumeration or definition of the powers of the Congress been found in the Constitution, than the general expressions just cited, the authors of the objection might have had some color for it; though it would have been difficult to find a reason for so awkward a form of describing an authority to legislate in all possible cases. (Bold added)

The first paragraph in Article I, Section 8 is therefore, to Madison, itself an enumeration just like the "other" enumerations in paragraphs 2-16. Madison goes on to say, though:

But what color can the objection have, when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows, and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon? If the different parts of the same instrument ought to be so expounded, as to give meaning to every part which will bear it, shall one part of the same sentence be excluded altogether from a share in the meaning; and shall the more doubtful and indefinite terms be retained in their full extent, and the clear and precise expressions be denied any signification whatsoever? For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity, which, as we are reduced to the dilemma of charging either on the authors of the objection or on the authors of the Constitution, we must take the liberty of supposing, had not its origin with the latter.

Here, Madison is saying the others define more particularly what the first paragraph says in Section 8. Still, he does not go so far as to say it is completely exhaustive. He knows better than to be that explicit, because Madison had already said, in Federalist Paper no. 37 that the Constitution was itself a document that is vague and built on compromise where even the framers may not have been unanimous or even close to it in what was meant by each phrase or sentence.

Alexander Hamilton, in his Report on Manufactures, 1791, in the first two paragraphs definitely saw the first paragraph in Section 8 as an enumerated power that was expansionary. He wrote in pertinent part of the Report, again in 1791:

...The terms "general Welfare" were doubtless intended to signify more than was expressed or imported in those which Preceded; otherwise numerous exigencies incident to the affairs of a Nation would have been left without a provision. The phrase is as comprehensive as any that could have been used; because it was not fit that the constitutional authority of the Union, to appropriate its revenues shou'd have been restricted within narrower limits than the "General Welfare" and because this necessarily embraces a vast variety of particulars, which are susceptible neither of specification nor of definition.

It is therefore of necessity left to the discretion of the National Legislature, to pronounce, upon the objects, which concern the general Welfare, and for which under that description, an appropriation of money is requisite and proper...

Thus, it would be wrong to reject the point Hamilton was making just as the US government was taking its first steps in practical policy-making. The first paragraph of Section 8 is not limited by what follows in the second through sixteenth paragraphs. Instead, the first paragraph is a general enumeration of powers followed by more specific examples that are not exhaustive.

For those who say, "Oh Freedman, you're wrong. The second through sixteenth are the only things the Congress can do," as if the second through sixteenth paragraphs exhaust the possibilities. Those making that argument, however, have to then say Chief Justice Marshall was wrong in M'Culloch to conclude that the first paragraph of Section 8 is as much a part of Congress' "enumerated powers" as the remaining paragraphs of Section 8 before one reaches the "necessary and proper" clauses.

Marshall explicitly wrote at 17 US at 406 of the unanimous opinion in M'Culloch:

Among the enumerated powers, we do not find that of establishing a bank or creating a corporation. But there is no phrase in the instrument which, like the articles of confederation, excludes incidental or implied powers; and which requires that everything granted shall be expressly and minutely described. Even the 10th amendment, which was framed for the purpose of quieting the excessive jealousies which had been excited, omits the word 'expressly,' and declares only, that the powers 'not delegated to the United States, nor prohibited to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people;' thus leaving the question, whether the particular power which may become the subject of contest, has been delegated to the one government, or prohibited to the other, to depend on a fair construction of the whole instrument.

(Bold added)

Marshall then added at page 415 of the opinion:

...The subject is the execution of those great powers on which the welfare of a nation essentially depends. It must have been the intention of those who gave these powers, to insure, so far as human prudence could insure, their beneficial execution. This could not be done, by confiding the choice of means to such narrow limits as not to leave it in the power of congress to adopt any which might be appropriate, and which were conducive to the end. This provision is made in a constitution, intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs. To have prescribed the means by which government should, in all future time, execute its powers, would have been to change, entirely, the character of the instrument, and give it the properties of a legal code. It would have been an unwise attempt to provide, by immutable rules, for exigencies which, if foreseen at all, must have been seen dimly, and which can be best provided for as they occur. To have declared, that the best means shall not be used, but those alone, without which the power given would be nugatory, would have been to deprive the legislature of the capacity to avail itself of experience, to exercise its reason, and to accommodate its legislation to circumstances.

Marshall is explicitly saying paragraphs 2-16 of Section 8 are not and cannot be exhaustive examples of the first paragraph's enumeration of powers. Again, if one notices, law professor Randy Barnett and his pals are now attacking Marshall and M'Culloch, and really, they have to, don't they? And they have to attack Hamilton in the Report on Manufactures. And they have to avoid admitting Madison's statements in Federalist Paper no. 41 (especially in context with Federalist Paper no. 37) are less than clear. They even have to deny how crafty Madison was in trying to get the Constitution passed as if he was not engaged in some double talk in various Papers (Note: Madison was particularly crafty in his phrasing for the Second Amendment, as Garry Wills pointed out near the end of Wills' famous essay in the NY Review of Books over 15 years ago.)

I found it interesting that before the formal opinion in M'Culloch, there are statements in the summary of the briefing or arguments setting forth a strong belief that the first paragraph in Section 8 is as much an enumeration as the succeeding paragraphs. Note the language at 17 US at 353, 354 in M'Culloch:

We contend, that it was necessary and proper to carry into execution several of the enumerated powers, such as the powers of levying and collecting taxes throughout this widely-extended empire; of paying the public debts, both in the United States and in foreign countries; of borrowing money, at home and abroad; of regulating commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states; of raising and supporting armies and a navy; and of carrying on war.

(Bold added)

Now, isn't that interesting that the power to levy and collect taxes and pay the public debts are "enumerated powers." This point appears again later in the discussion at 17 US at 381:

All the objects of the government are national objects, and the means are, and must be, fitted to accomplish them. These objects are enumerated in the constitution, and have no limits but the constitution itself. A more perfect union is to be formed; justice to be established; domestic tranquillity insured; the common defence provided for; the general welfare promoted; the blessings of liberty secured to the present generation, and to posterity.

(Bold added)

The attorneys supporting the bank are explicitly stating that common defence and general welfare are themselves enumerations of Congressional power. The enumeration may be general, but they are part of a list (Note the definition of "enumerated" does use the word "specify" in the definition, but it is in the context of listing, not meaning that the words be narrowly stated.)

Therefore, let us continue to argue about the scope of Congressional power in particular areas, but let us not, at the same time, give too much credence to any argument that denies a broad power to Congress, including both expressed and implied powers. For such an argument does go against the larger intent of many people in the Constitution's framers' generation, and against the early Supreme Court jurisprudence, which includes not merely M'Culloch--as well as Gibbons v. Ogden and other early case law. It remains my point that Wickard v. Filburn, decided in 1942, is a restoration of Marshall's jurisprudence, not a departure from the founders' so-called "original intent."

We're number...um...We're the great--er, um, Hey, did you see that ugly outfit some actress is wearing?

2011-08-21T13:25:00.000-07:00

Read here and wonder about the decline of America's standing in so many categories of life and lifestyle indicators...if we don't weep first.

The Solutions Journal, where that article is from, also published a discussion about Thomas Geoghgean's last book which compared lifestyles of and for regular working folks in the US and Europe. We did not fare so well...

Rockin' but wistful music holding tenuously onto hope...

2011-08-21T07:31:00.000-07:00

I was bouncing around on YouTube to find songs for the title theme, and strangely I kept coming back to X and the Wonderstuff...

X: The World's a Mess, It's In My Kiss (Here is the song live...)

X: Fourth of July

Wonderstuff: Don't Let Me Down, Gently

Wonderstuff: Welcome to the Cheap Seats

And then of course, there is Chumbawumba's improbable hit of the mid-1990s, "Tubthumping aka I Get Knocked Down."

Urban folk music. That's what these songs really are. If we sing these songs accompanied by an acoustic guitar, we immediately feel and see that it is not punk, not pop, but folk music electrified and sped up.

The urban folksingers tell us there is no reason for hope, but also say our faith tells us that somehow, somewhere someone's gonna help us pull through. That a movement will arise based upon our best values, not our basest values. And yet, we pray that we don't get fooled again.

On the other hand, as another urban folk band, Bad Religion, tells us, faith alone won't sustain us no more...

Suggested reading: "The Politics at God's Funeral" by the late Michael Harrington. Harrington said in this book that when it comes to matters of the spirit, a desire for scientific learning, combined with uncertainty and humility, is the true faith. And in societal matters, let's take better care of each other, okay?

Corporate media still looking through the wrong end of the telescope concerning Social Security

2011-08-21T06:47:00.001-07:00

Yes the Social Security Disability program is showing significant signs of strain. But this is the result of no public policy to re-develop our nation and increase demand while doing so. Social Security, or its disability program, is not what is causing our government's and nation's problem.

As I have long stated, the economy is in trouble, not Social Security. The article says the disability program is hurting because of looser regulations in the 1980s--thirty years ago! Then, it admits, oh yeah, it's because of the recent "recession," which is getting closer to a longer depression by the day.

And maybe the payroll tax cuts this past year haven't helped?

It's really not that complicated if one is outside the Beltway Cocktail Party: If government revenues fall, and the cost of government services go up--not because the government is charging more for the services, but more people need the services because of the recession--then government deficits will accumulate, especially in those programs designed to help people in economic need. Why is this a surprise? The only really sad surprise is the tone deafness of Barack Hoover Obama, and his reactive, passive approach to governance.

Worse, Obama has pushed for, and Republicans are now (cynically) accepting, a continued payroll tax cut, which will further lower revenue coming into the Social Security Disability program.

With Obama, there has been no audacity of hope, only the passivity of reaction. That is why he needs to announce he is not running for re-election. Unfortunately, he won't because that too takes guts he so evidently lacks.

So, his pathetic re-election campaign continues and, as of now, we see no prominent liberal, progressive person rising up to challenge Obama the way Eugene McCarthy (then a Democratic Senator from Minnesota) did against LBJ in 1967 and early 1968. If things don't change, and let's hope they will (McCarthy did not enter the race until November 1967), we will be faced in 2012 with a choice of a Weimar-ish Democratic Party backed incumbent against one or more howling banshees in the Republican Party who, if elected, will likely enact policies that will only hasten the decline of our beautiful nation....

How's your Sunday, by the way? I'll try to find something more soothing, as even I am now sad!

Great idea: Tax capital gains at ordinary tax rates

2011-08-21T06:38:00.000-07:00

Jared Bernstein takes Warren Buffett's point and raises it more fully: Let's tax capital gains at the same rates as regularly received wages for work.

I have long decried taxing one's investment at lower tax rates than a wage earner. It makes no more sense to give a break to someone playing with investments (and most are in fact playing) than someone who is digging trenches all day, or waiting on tables or washing dishes all day, and getting a wage taxed at ordinary tax rates.

If we really want a balanced governmental budget, or at least cutting some of the recently accumulated deficits or debt, let's start with taxing capital gains at ordinary income tax rates. The analysis Bernstein does shows me that if we pushed forward with a policy of re-development, the investment rate would go up even as we raised the capital gains tax as follows: 15% at bottom, and then progressively rising consistent with the ordinary tax rate.

My overall view is an even broader version of Bernstein's: Changes in tax rates at the margins--as opposed to drastic changes--do not significantly alter economic behavior. What more significantly alters or affects economic behavior are public policies of broader scope, such as cutting programs that would otherwise put money in the hands of the poor and lower-working classes, subsidizing business development, re-developing the nation's infrastructure, starting a war, etc.

ADDENDUM: I wish I did not have to add this but I will: I do NOT advocate starting any war. I am just listing what are public policies of broader scope that do affect economic behavior. :-)

More worker unrest in the USA...

2011-08-20T08:28:00.001-07:00

The workers at a Hershey factory, who were foreign citizens, decided they had enough.

Note in the article how Hershey has built in two levels of other companies to attempt to avoid legal responsibility...

ADDENDUM: And close to my home, the grocery store workers are gearing up for a strike for the first time in almost a decade. Good for them, and let's hope their fellow worker-citizens are even more supportive than they were last time around.

Peter Singer on animal language

2011-08-18T20:18:00.001-07:00

Peter Singer has a fascinating and emotionally moving blog post at the NY Review of Books about the new documentary regarding an experiment in teaching language to an chimp. I am not certain if Chomsky is as doctrinaire on the subject of whether animals can learn a language as Singer states or implies, but the post is nonetheless brilliantly argued.

I happen to believe that apes and perhaps even dogs can learn to understand words and perhaps even complex tasks formed with words. I also believe animals in general have far more complex feelings than we humans give them credit for--and perhaps I am influenced by one of the great novels of the past several decades, "Dr. Rat."

I am most proud of my son for maintaining his vegetarian stance since age 4 (he's now approaching 18), while I, being a lazy sap, continue to be a carnivore who lives off fast food and such. Yet, like liberals of yore, I do feeling guilty about it...:-)

The strike at Verizon, and an AWOL president

2011-08-16T22:52:00.000-07:00

Read a nice primer on the strike here at In These Times magazine.

And yes, it is striking...pun intended...that the president won't join the picket line, even as the company lies about Obamacare to make its argument for workers' concessions. A president who truly cared about the middle class should have been finding picket lines all over the USA for the past two years to join in solidarity with those workers. Instead, Obama hangs with insiders and financiers, bankers and corporate CEOs.

And Obama thinks a bus tour is gonna fool significant numbers of Democrats who have been screaming for a new New Deal? Pathetic.