The "cliff"

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This is the perfect occasion to resurrect one of my favorite rants, that political paralysis in America is not a byproduct of ideological struggle but the principal objective of the billionaire front, that in the interest of economy I call, the "Tea-Fox-Koch-Murdoch-Beck-Limbaugh-Party".

Are they incredibly, devilishly smart to pull this? Not really.

You don't need to be very smart. You need to have a lot of money. There are people who are getting so much rent off their capital that the mere act of bending over to pick up a hundred dollar bill off the pavement would literally be a waste of their time.

With that kind of wealth comes freedom and the fear of losing it. They pay to create an environment that protects them, people are falling all over themselves to help them do it.

Brains are cheap when you have that kind of money, politicians are cheap, journalists are cheap, think tanks, etc. People are lining up to serve them, the crumbs from their table can buy a home, send kids to college. Things are often much simpler than they appear.... making them seem complicated costs a lot of money.

The good thing about this crisis is that more and more people can see who owns the world they live in.

There are people who can put $100,000 into the offshore account of a politician as easily as you or I can give a beggar 50 cents. They are the the 0.01%.

Since the fall of the USSR, these people have enjoyed a freedom and untrammeled power unknown since the post-Civil War period known as the "Gilded Age". They are trying to avoid losing any of that freedom and power at any cost to the rest of us.

The method is to create so much ideological "noise" that rational thought and dialog is impossible. That was what the Krupps and the Thyssens did in Germany to stop the communists from taking over in the 1920s. Their boy blamed all the country's troubles on the Jews and took the heat off the Krupps and the Thyssens, but the thing got out of hand and cost Germany several million dead and left the country in smoking ruins, but, hey, the Krupps and the Thyssens made money hand over fist all the way through the process from beginning to end, and are still today some of the richest families in Germany.

As Fitzgerald said to Hemingway, "the rich are different from us Ernest".

Action and reaction, just as in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the grotesque abuses of the system brought forth a muscular reform movement to tame the beasts of the Gilded Age, today the feeling is growing all over the world that this new Gilded Age must also be brought under some sort of rational control and regulation. As the center of the world economic system, any general reform and regulation of globalization logically must begin in the United States of America.

That is what the one-percent are afraid of and that is why they fund and promote the paralysis of the American political system.

Americans for Prosperity, the right wing campaign funded in part by the energy billionaires the Koch brothers, is working with the Tea Party movement to increase its impact through the use of new media and social networking. The Guardian

Rupert Murdoch has declared his dissatisfaction with Barack Obama and the Democratic party, saying that two $1m donations by News Corp were intended to encourage change in Washington. Financial Times

Shortly before leaving for the US to report on the midterm elections, a respected colleague told me that: “Obama’s problem is that he is trying to govern a nation where half the population is insane.” Gideon Rachman - Financial Times

This is done by way of "the big lie".

Lets look at the "big lie": the art of calling black white and white black and making it stick, how it works and why it works.

I will cut directly to the chase: to me it is obvious that the Tea Party has been evoked, like a political poltergeist, from the shadowy depths, of the American earth by people like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch in order to terrorize moderate Republicans and keep them from moving to the center and cooperating with president Obama in a time of national emergency.

In any one of a dozen national emergencies of the nature I suspect (or might not even dream of) that may be developing or might already be upon us, the natural reaction of the citizenry would be to demand, as in wartime, or any other great national emergency, that their elected representatives work together in a bipartisan fashion to clean up the mess and to put in place regulations and regulators to make sure it never happens again and to punish those responsible severely "pour encourager les autres".

And who knows, then,  perhaps in  the cheery glow of new found kameradschaft and moderate bi-partisanship, they might set themselves to reform campaign financing, the infrastructure and even work on climate change and fossil fuel energy dependence.

From a certain point of view this kind of constructive or reconstructive harmony must be avoided at all costs.

So we here we come to the big lie.

What I call the "Tea-Fox-Koch-Murdoch-Beck-Limbaugh-Party" are using classic techniques, nothing new here.

To get into the mood and to understand better what the Murdochs and the Kochs are up to and what  techniques they are using to achieve their ends, let us look at what the OSS had to say during WWII about the recognized master of the big lie:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. "Hitler as His Associates Know Him" - OSS report on Hitler, p.51

Sounds familiar doesn't it. Now let us hear the "master's voice" as he himself describes in some greater detail how the big lie works:

(...) In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.— Adolf Hitler , Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X

Let us move directly to a concrete example of how this "philosophy" is being put into practice today.

Why are the "Tea-Fox-Koch-Murdoch-Beck-Limbaugh-Party" so afraid of Barack Obama?

Because he is a radical socialist-communist-extremist, right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

They are afraid of him for precisely the reason he "disappoints" his progressive base:

They are terrified of him because he is a born centrist, reaching out eagerly for members of the Republican opposition in order to "cut a deal" or "split the difference".

That has been his message from the beginning. To refresh your memory:

I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.  Senator Barack Obama - Keynote speech, Democratic convention - 2004

Despite all of President Obama's unearthly and unbearable lightness of being, that speech still has them terrified. The more he appears manifestly mild mannered and generally ineffectual, the louder they cry "Marxist!" and "radical!"... and worse.

That idea of inclusiveness, the mildness, the desire to negotiate and split the difference, not radical, leftist, extremism, is what has Murdoch and the Kochs frantic and frothing at the mouth.

Why?

Because, under the new rules of globalization, much of the world's economic power and especially the cash, has escaped from state control, regulation and supervision. As the recent euro crisis showed, elected officials of powerful and wealthy countries found themselves suddenly at the mercy of the "markets" and the rating agencies, themselves made up of human beings, whose power, unlike the law makers of a democratic states, is in no way derived from the consent of the governed... and there are people... not many people, but very, very rich people, who are extremely comfortable with that.. and why shouldn't they be?

Now it happens that there is only one state in the whole world that is still, for the moment at least, potentially powerful enough to be able to bring this situation under some sort of control at home and abroad, and this state is in theory a democracy that is elected by its citizens to serve them.

That state is, of course, the United States of America.

Now, for the state apparatus of the United States of America to bring the situation under control in America and to a great extent around the world, all the branches of the state, executive, legislative and judiciary would have to be in nearly total alignment, as they were during World War Two.

Keeping that from happening, paralyzing the political system so that unity is entirely unthinkable except around "supporting our troops" to defend the "homeland" against the threat of "terrorism" is what the Tea Party movement and every move of Fox and Kochs is about.

The acceptance of policies that counteract our interests is the pervasive mystery of the 21st century. In the US blue-collar workers angrily demand that they be left without healthcare, and insist that millionaires pay less tax.  George Monbiot - Guardian

I think we have just solved George Monbiot's mystery.

As I said at the beginning of this piece,  the Tea Party has been created in order to terrorize moderate Republicans and keep any of them from moving to the center and cooperating with president Obama in a time of national emergency.

Just to see how effective this strategy is, lets look at the following old quote from certainly the best known and perhaps the once most respected of Republican moderates, John McCain,

“People want us to do what we’ve forgotten, which is put aside philosophical differences, which are important, and legislate and get things done.”

What happened since then? This from Vanity Fair:

“The senator owes his victory to the pressure he received from conservatives and Tea Partiers,” the conservative guru Richard Viguerie declared after the primary. “To receive that support, he had to give up his maverick positions that have sometimes given aid and comfort to the liberals. I’m sure Senator McCain knows very well that he would not have won if he had continued his reputation as the Democrats’ favorite Republican.”

So that is what it is really all about: it is about not legislating and not getting things done... to paralyze the government of the United States of America at a critical time in its history. To prevent the system from flushing itself out and regenerating itself. To cut the wires of the burglar alarms to be able to sack the house in peace.DS

The Spanish Economic Crisis Explained

David Seaton's News Links

In case you are interested, this hour long documentary from the BBC gives a very workmanlike breakdown of how it all happened.

Spain is the canary in the coal mine for the world's top economies, because of its large size and its fragility. The story carries lessons for everyone, everywhere. What happens in Spain first can happen later in more robust economies.

Well made and clearly explained, in one hour with this video, you'll be up to speed. DS

The Sandy Hook school massacre

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I have little to add to everything written about this horrible massacre. I find myself especially moved by the heroism of the school teachers that died trying to protect the children in their care. There should be a statue of them in Washington and a wreath laid at its base on every anniversary of their sacrifice, perhaps a national holiday should be declared in their honor and in the honor of all the men and women who teach children.

When you think of what those teachers take home pay was and what the chairman of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein's take home pay is and the respective value of what they do or did and that such different human beings can inhabit the same country, you have all the hope and despair of America in one package.

With all the pressure of public opinion, will anything be done to regulate firearms now?

The good news is that there is going to be gun control legislation, the bad news is that the gun lobby will only allow restrictions for "crazy" people. People will think that makes sense as all these massacres have been perpetrated by people with mental health issues.

That will be the only compromise possible with the powerful NRA and Democrats in Congress will think that getting that would be better than nothing.

That will of necessity mean some sort of standard test as to who is nuts and who is not, just like who is blind and who is deaf in order to get a driver's license, but nationwide.

This will entail a very objective measurement of what is sane and what isn't, something that in a democracy is quite a slippery slope.

Since the US Constitution in its Second Amendment still guarantees the citizens the "right to bear arms", those who don't pass the standard sanity test (don't have any friends, talk to themselves etc) will become officially second class citizens. This then will mean that owning guns will be automatic proof that officially you are not crazy and then everybody will not only want to own a gun, anybody who doesn't do an "open carry" will appear an oddball.

Result: more people owning and carrying guns... you'd be crazy not to. DS

Global Civics: The ideas the Tea Party fears most of all

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In my last post I wrote how the fear of a new wave of reform propelled by the problems and abuses arising from globalization.

Global Civics is the idea-force that would make reform possible if it spread, not only possible, but inevitable. Any collective global action would require adopting the ideas expressed here. These ideas, the consciousness of the practical, unavoidable, reality of the unity of humanity are the starting point for any change.

Therefore it is obvious that any interest groups that would feel threatened by this idea-force, would marshal its resources to discredit anything or anyone who in anyway embodied these ideas.

Watch the video and then try to run it through the filter of Fox, Glenn Beck or the Tea Party. Try to imagine how the mentality espoused in the video would affect the lives and wealth of the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson and then the behavior of the American right begins to make some sense. Their survival is at stake. DS

What the Tea Party billionaires are really afraid of

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Before starting off on the Tea Party's craziness, I would like you to examine some images from two nearly identical tragedies that occurred over a hundred years and several thousand miles apart. Later in the post I hope to make a connection between these twin horrors and the strange metamorphosis of the American right. Please bear with me.

Tazreen Fashions Fire, Bangladesh - 2012

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, New York - 1911

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, New York - 1911

The great mystery of American politics, a mystery which no one in the world can fathom, not even most Americans, is why so much money, hot air and spittle is being spent on literally paralyzing the American political system and making it impossible, not just to negotiate solutions, but to even have an intelligent conversation about solving the problems facing everyone, everywhere today. For that is what the Tea Party is really about: making first thought, then negotiation, and finally action impossible.

What is all this sound and fury covering up?

In my opinion it has much to do with where contemporary globalization is leading, the forces that it is setting in motion, which for historically minded Americans could elicit a bit of dèjá vu.

It seems to me that the globalization of today is in many ways similar on a world scale to the explosion of growth, power and sophistication of the US economy in the period after the Civil War, commonly called "The Gilded Age". This was the period of the "robber barons" and viewed nostalgically by many of the American right as a paradise of anarcho-capitalism. This was a period of immense growth and innovation, but also one of enormous inequality, suffering and exploitation and financial crisis, all of it interpenetrated by an ubiquitous political corruption as the enormous new wealth so recently created set about purchasing and deforming to its benefit the institutions of American government: federal, state and local.

The excesses of the Gilded Age gave birth to a mass reform movement in the United States called, "Progressivism". This movement, in a titanic struggle, bridging decades, among other things brought into effect: the regulation of interstate commerce, the breaking up of the monopolies known as "trusts", laws regulating the purity of food and drugs, the rise of labor unions, laws eliminating child labor and in 1913, even progressive income tax, something which still causes intense indignation on the American ultra-right.

I would maintain that today the "Gilded Age" is happening on a global scale. The same viral growth and innovation; the same inequality, suffering and exploitation and financial crisis and similar corruption as rootless, multinational corporations evade much needed tax money and corrupt the political systems where they find themselves, world wide. And today we can add the more recent concerns for climate change and renewable energy.

Action and reaction, just as in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the grotesque abuses of the system brought forth a muscular reform movement to tame the beasts of the Gilded Age, today the feeling is growing all over the world that this new Gilded Age must also be brought under some sort of rational control and regulation. As the center of the world economic system, any general reform and regulation of globalization logically must begin in the United States of America.

That is what the one-percent are afraid of and that is why they fund and promote the paralysis of the American political system.

Just to show you the symmetry between the urge to reform one hundred years ago and to reform today, I'd ask you to take the trouble to read two texts, they are like the tiny samples taken to analyze DNA.

I'm sure you have heard about the terrible fire in a garment factory in Bangladesh a few days ago,which took the lives of over a hundred workers trapped in the blaze, (the color photo at the top of the page shows the aftermath) so the first text I'd like you to read, is about that tragedy:

(...) On the third floor, where firefighters later recovered 69 bodies, Ms. Pakhi was stitching sweater jackets for C&A, a European chain. On the fifth floor, workers were making Faded Glory shorts for Walmart. Ten bodies were recovered there. On the sixth floor, a man named Hashinur Rahman put down his work making True Desire lingerie for Sears and eventually helped save scores of others. Inside one factory office, labor activists found order forms and drawings for a licensee of the United States Marine Corps that makes commercial apparel with the Marines’ logo. In all, 112 workers were killed in a blaze last month that has exposed a glaring disconnect among global clothing brands, the monitoring system used to protect workers and the factories actually filling the orders. After the fire, Walmart, Sears and other retailers made the same startling admission: They say they did not know that Tazreen Fashions was making their clothing.(...) David Hasanat, the chairman of the Viyellatex Group, one of the country’s most highly regarded garment manufacturers, pointed out that global apparel retailers often depend on hundreds of factories to fill orders. Given the scale of work, retailers frequently place orders through suppliers and other middlemen who, in turn, steer work to factories that deliver low costs — a practice he said is hardly unknown to Western retailers and clothing brands. The order for Walmart’s Faded Glory shorts, documents show, was subcontracted from Simco Bangladesh Ltd., a local garment maker. “It is an open secret to allow factories to do that,” Mr. Hasanat said. “End of the day, for them it is the price that matters.” New York Times

A little over a hundred years ago something almost identical happened in the USA. You probably know about it, but read the following text to refresh your memory and to compare it with the Bangladesh tragedy:

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York and resulted in the fourth highest loss of life from an industrial accident in U.S. history. It was also the second deadliest disaster in New York City – after the burning of the General Slocum on June 15, 1904 – until the destruction of the World Trade Center 90 years later. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women aged sixteen to twenty-three; of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was Providenza Panno at 43, and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and "Sara" Rosaria Maltese. Because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits – a common practice at the time to prevent pilferage and unauthorized breaks – many of the workers who could not escape the burning building jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors to the streets below. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers. (emphasis mine)Wikipedia

The only real difference between the two fires is that today the money is not bringing poor immigrant women to America to do the sewing, they are sending the sewing out to poor women in their home countries.

The text I put into bold type, the reforms the Triangle fire produced, is the key, the symbol, to explain the energy and funds behind the Tea Party's mostly successful struggle against rational thought in the USA today.

It is easy to imagine that we will be seeing more and more incidents like these sweatshop fires, some of them may cause thousands of deaths, pollute the atmosphere or spread disease in much the same way that the financial crisis that began in the USA has spread around the world. Today, unless the world cooperates to regulate, what goes around, comes around.

Now it happens that there is only one state in the whole world that is still, for the moment at least, potentially powerful enough to be able to bring this situation under some sort of control at home and abroad, and this state is in theory a democracy that is elected by its citizens to serve them.

That state is, of course, the United States of America.

Now, for the state apparatus of the United States of America to bring the situation under control in America and to a great extent around the world, all the branches of the state, executive, legislative and judiciary would have to be in nearly total alignment, as they were during World War Two.

Keeping that from happening, paralyzing the political system, with racism and paranoia so that unity is entirely unthinkable except around "supporting our troops" to defend the "homeland" against the threat of "terrorism" is what the Tea Party movement and every move of Fox and Kochs is about.

So that is what it is really all about: it is about not legislating and not getting things done... to paralyze the government of the United States of America at a critical time in its history and the history of the world at large. To prevent the system from flushing itself out and regenerating itself. To cut the wires of the burglar alarms so they can sack the house, the house of everyone in the world, in peace. Their peace. DS

Susan Rice

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In diplomacy the core question is often this: What do I want to get and what do I have to give to get it? Certitudes and bluntness get you only so far. It is less a question of what you know than how curious you are about what you do not." Roger Cohen on Susan Rice - NYT

What I want to make clear from the start is that I think Susan Rice is a very talented high achiever, with total access to the President of the United States. For me it is also clear that her being a woman and an African-American are both pluses in representing the United States in a world where the majority of human beings are neither white nor male. And at least she is not contemplating running for president in 2016, with all the pandering that something like that entails (Cuba, Israel, etc).

My objection to Susan Rice as Secretary of State has nothing to do with the Benghazi incident, for example, and I think she may be well qualified for many things, but simply not qualified for diplomacy.

The problem for me is that she appears not to have the basic temperament needed for a diplomat, which is to be "diplomatic". For, whatever its color, American diplomacy's face should be a friendly face and Susan Rice's face is anything but friendly. "Diplomacy" is the old word for international "public relations" and this is not likely to be carried out efficiently by anybody whose primary facial expression appears to be that of a flamenco dancer with hemorrhoids.

One of the first qualities of a diplomat is apparent friendliness and charm, which, more often than not, may very well be a disguise for harsh realpolitik and cynical "truthiness", but charm is essential. The last thing the USA needs is to be seen as a "strict governess" and Susan Rice seems totally humorless, self-righteous and authoritarian in manner, which is always a bad sign in anyone charged with managing human foibles and convincing people to do things they might prefer not to do.

If she becomes Secretary of State, her presence will be provocative and counterproductive. In short, despite her many merits, she doesn't fit the job description, like a midget for a basketball team or a fat lady for synchronized swimming. DS