Why vote for Obama? Let me count the whys – 2

Obama must be doing something right

David Seaton's News Links

Look, American politics is like Woody Allen’s restaurant, you know the one with, “such bad food and such small portions”. The best you can realistically hope for as President of the United States is a kinder, gentler, mafia don. That is more or less what we have got.

Despite kowtowing to Wall Street, Netanyahu and the NRA and using drones to kill innocent children, Barack Obama makes the Tea Party people and assorted rednecks froth at the mouth; Commentary Magazine loathes him; Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and other assorted rogue billionaires are spending millions upon millions to remove him from power...  somehow all of these folks are lacking gratitude and you might wonder why they attack Barack Obama so savagely… why is this?  This is going to be the dirtiest campaign in history… Obama must be doing something right. Every time I open the Drudge Report my desire to see Obama stay in the White House grows. It's “tribal” I guess.

He is a war criminal?

Every US president in my lifetime (and I go back all the way to Truman, who dropped the atom bomb on helpless civilians) have been war criminals. So it’s safe to say that nobody that the starry eyed former Obamite would deign to vote for is ever going to inhabit the White House.

However, either Obama or Romney is going to live there in 2013, and frankly, with all his defects I think Obama is a better choice than Mitt. Back in 2008 Obama was an unknown quantity, we only had his own highly embroidered story to go on. But after four years in the White House, I think we know Obama pretty well and he is a vast improvement on his predecessor. Mitt Romney on the other hand has been in public life for a long time, but the more we see of him, the less we seem to know and frankly, I have no desire to know him any better. Compared to Bush junior, at least Obama speaks well and doesn’t look stupid. He has left Iraq and although he hasn’t ended Afghanistan, he as yet has not started any new wars of his own.

I am not trying to sell Obama now as any messiah.  Four years ago I was afraid he was a fraud, which at that time in a sense he was, now he has proven to be a reasonably competent president, during a very, very difficult period… Obama designed himself to harmlessly drain off the progressive energy that Bush created. But… anybody that really believed he would be anything different was naive. I took tremendous shit for pointing this out in 2008. The alternative today is Mitt Romney, who seems to me a caricature of himself.

You wont vote for Obama?

Enjoy Romney. I was not fooled by Obama in 2008 and I’m not fooled now, but John McCain is Abraham Lincoln compared to Mitt Romney, even Sarah Palin has a certain goofy consistency compared to Mitt.

Yeah, character counts, these turkeys have the atom bomb, open carry. I am not an Obama loyalist I wasn’t before and I’m not one now. He is however, no less than the President of the United States and I think with all his defects that he is vastly superior to Romney, who is the only realistic alternative.

You can vote for whomsoever you want to, but it’s either going to be Obama or Romney that fills the next vacancy on the Supreme Court… Chew on that for a while.   Again I repeat: there is going to be an election and either a Democrat or a Republican is going to win it. I think the Democrats would want to change the Supreme Court ruling, because without superpacs they have a distinct demographic advantage that the Republicans don’t have.  I think it is important that nobody influenced by the Tea Party get to choose any new Supremes for at least 16 years. Campaign financing and the “personhood” of corporations are the whole ballgame.

Anybody that thinks you can reform the US system from the top down, without several billion dollars to spend is (fill in adjective of choice). The only way it can be done is like MLK did it back then. Thousands upon thousands of totally committed people demonstrating, sitting in, writing talking, going to jail, getting their heads busted… The Civil Rights movement changed America radically: nobody who didn’t know America before it came along could ever know how much it changed America. The way to influence mainstream politics from the grassroots has been developed, no need to reinvent the wheel. That is the model, that’s how it’s done.  Study it and like the fella said, “Go ye and do likewise”.

It is not the same for a Martin Luther King to be pressuring an LBJ than to imagine him pressuring Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush... or president Romney.

It seems to me that the people who were starry eyed about Obama in 2008 and consider him some sort of antichrist today were dumb coming and are now dumb going.

The White House is an ugly place, where ugly things happen, but there still are important differences. The Republican Party is now in the hands of genuine fascists and should be kept out.

Really, there are no "fine points" in this election. The choices are not attractive. You can vote for Obama, who is a jive-ass, bullshit artist, but intelligent, prudent and lucid. Or you can vote for Romney, who is a joke without a punchline. Or you can vote for somebody who isn't going to win even one state or you can take your ballot and put it on a nail next to the toilet. That is all there is on the menu.

The bottom line is that one of the two men is going to be president and any democrat is going to be more beholding to the unions and to minorities than any Republican… and so it is, hold one’s nose and vote Democrat like my grandparents and my parents did. Tribal. DS

Why vote for Obama? Let me count the whys - 1

The Child is  Father to the Man

"To this day it troubles me. What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do."
-- Thomas Buford, who witnessed a Romney-led attack on a gay teenager

"It was vicious."
-- Philip Maxwell, another witness

"It was horrible. It's something I have thought about a lot since then."
-- John Lauber, the student who was attacked

"You know, I don't, I don't remember that particular incident."
-- Mitt Romney                                                             (Hat to Doonesbury)

Think about it: so soon after the reign of George W. Bush, do we and the world really need another rich-asshole-bully in the White House? DS

The Crisis: where are we headed?

David Seaton's News Links

Onward and Upward

I think almost all of us, progressive and otherwise, are conscious that we live in a strange and special era. "The best of times and the worst of times"... yada yada; not "evil" like the 1930s, but strange, dysfunctional, unstable, unpredictable and of a sinister syncopation.

How could we define it?

I would define this time we live in as "the end of the post-Cold-War", the end of one thing, without the new thing being yet apparent..

To understand this concept it helps to be rather old. I was 45 when the Berlin Wall went down in 1989 and the Cold War began when I was four years old. If you are in your twenties or early thirties it would be almost impossible for you really understand or even imagine how the Cold War structured our world and our lives, how all pervasive it was and how much intellectual capital it used up on both sides of the Iron Curtain. How its cold, dead, vapors infuse the way we still see the world. We are still in the process of clearing our heads and dear old reality is coming to our aid.

In the Cold War, ideology became an industry on both sides, a factory system as powerful and layered as the automobile industry, turning out the ideological marketing that goes by the loaded name of propaganda.

Thousands upon thousands, several generations, of the most talented and intellectually gifted communicators gained prestige, comfortable livings, scholarships, tenure and an infinity of perks in this decades long struggle to see who could tell the best and most convincing story. Actual thinking was of course as poorly rewarded as it always had been.

This wall to wall propaganda did have some very positive effects. Certainly the Berlin Wall would not have come down without it and I would submit that on the other hand, without the ubiquitous presence of Soviet propaganda the American Civil Rights Movement would never have succeeded. Jim Crow was America's Achilles heel in the battle for hearts and minds in the third world. The good and the great of the United States saw that eliminating "colored only" drinking fountains and letting a few more people vote, was a small price to pay to maintain access to the ever growing amount of the world's raw materials and strategic areas that were falling into the hands of dark skinned peoples. So the endless advertising campaign did have its positive side. The problem for us was not that people in the soviet block believed our propaganda, the problem for us is that we believed our propaganda. By 1990 those on the eastern side of the wall knew that their propaganda was all bullshit, however, we are just beginning to realize that our propaganda was all bullshit too.

Unfettered, capitalism would spread its powerful wings and fly, so our story went, which of course capitalism certainly did... and now it seems to have bashed its brains out like a light-blinded bird crashing into a glass door. 

So now we having discovered that just as "real existent socialism" didn't work, neither does "real existent capitalism".

So now, having discovered that the last 64 years or so were mostly a mirage, what comes next?

I would submit that becoming fully human is our most urgent task.

Here are a couple of texts that my intuition tells me point out the path to follow:

To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.  William Deresiewicz - New York Times

Humans, comprising the genus Homo, appeared between 1.5 and 2.5 million years ago, a time that roughly coincides with the start of the Pleistocene 1.8 million years ago. Because the Pleistocene ended a mere 12,000 years ago, most human adaptations either newly evolved during the Pleistocene, or were maintained by stabilizing selection during the Pleistocene./ Evolutionary psychology therefore proposes that the majority of human psychological mechanisms are adapted to reproductive problems frequently encountered in Pleistocene environments. In broad terms, these problems include those of growth, development, differentiation, maintenance, mating, parenting, and social relationships. (...) Our ancestors lived in smaller groups, had more cohesive cultures, and had more stable and rich contexts for identity and meaning. (...) Since hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian, the ancestral population may have been egalitarian as well.(...) Since an organism's adaptations were suited to its ancestral environment, a new and different environment can create a mismatch. (...) One example is the fact that although about 10,000 people are killed with guns in the US annually, whereas spiders and snakes kill only a handful, people nonetheless learn to fear spiders and snakes about as easily as they do a pointed gun, and more easily than an unpointed gun, rabbits or flowers. A potential explanation is that spiders and snakes were a threat to human ancestors throughout the Pleistocene, whereas guns (and rabbits and flowers) were not. There is thus a mismatch between our evolved fear-learning psychology and the modern environment  Evolutionary Psychology - Wikipedia

Evolutionary psychology is one of the most exciting fields today because it gives scientific weight to the idea of humanity's social, cooperative, empathetic "species nature". Really we can see that most of today's problems are not dependent on some "miraculous" scientific breakthrough or more economic growth, but rather on taking full cognizance and internalizing that species nature of ours and acting in consequence. Some of the examples of our failure to do this jump out at us from the media daily and are grotesque to the point of caricature.

As an example: millions of Americans are suffering from obesity to a degree that may eventually collapse our health system, while other millions of equally human beings are suffering severe malnutrition all over the third world. Hundreds of such examples have become mere cliches, they are so self evident. Assume a breakthrough in cancer research took place, what percentage of the world's population would have access to it? Knowing that there is more than enough food, shelter and medicine for all, why are there starving, homeless and untreated humans walking the earth?

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? Genesis 4:9

That is the crux of the problem. Answering Cain's question honestly; answering "who is this all for?", that  is the central challenge of our times. DS

Is American individualism a myth?

David Seaton's News Links

American icon: the lone cowboy

Here’s what Generation Y doesn’t want: formal living rooms, soaker bathtubs, dependence on a car.(...) They want to walk everywhere. Surveys show that 13% carpool to work, while 7% walk, (...) A whopping 88% want to be in an urban setting(...) Places to congregate are more important than a big apartment(...) Common space has migrated to “club rooms,”(...) where Gen-Y residents can host meals and hang out before heading to a common movie-screening room or rooftop swimming pool that they share with the building’s other tenants. The Great Recession and its effects on young people’s wages will affect how much home they can buy or rent for years to come.“Not too many college grads can afford a lot of space in the city,” he said. “Think lots of amenities with little tiny units—and a lot of them to keep (fees) down. …The things these places are doing is constantly coordinating activities. The residents get to know each other and it makes for a much livelier and friendlier environment.” Wall Street Journal

When reading this article in the Wall Street Journal -- a publication that would be hard to accuse of collectivist tendencies -- what was described reminded me very much of my girlfriend's "Young Red Guards" kibbutz where I spent weekends when I lived in Israel many years ago.

A typical kibbutz of the period, it was a group of highly educated people, living in tiny individual dwellings, sharing first class, one could say even luxurious, common facilities and operating a prosperous collective business, which financed this high standard of living. Not a whiff of Woodstock, hard work and a good life.

I wonder how long it will be before the GenYs, instead of paying rent to a landlord, form urban collectives so that they can raise their future children in this "lively and friendly" environment of small individual dwellings and first class common facilities. Following the kibbutz model, that would mean common kindergartens and play spaces, common health plans and even running a collective business, again in the kibbutz model.

The kibbutz is not the only example of a non-state collective and perhaps not the most successful one. That honor might fall to the Mondragon Corporation, in Spain's Basque country, which was founded by a Catholic priest. Worker owned and run, this multinational has 83,859 members and revenues of over €14,000,000,000.

So none of all of this is radically new, except finding mainstream young Americans drifting into a collective lifestyle, losing interest in owning and driving cars for hours everyday and in mowing lawns... All of this seems to have little or no ideological underpinning at all, simply a natural and practical response to a permanently changed economic environment. A cultural sea change. DS

Steve Jobs: the metaphor

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There is virtually no debate about the best treatment. “It has long been held that surgery can lead to very long-term survival,” says Kim. (...) Despite the expert consensus on the value of surgery, Jobs did not elect it right away. He reportedly spent nine months on “alternative therapies,” including what Fortune called “a special diet.”  Daily Beast

It occurs to me that Steve Jobs is not only the most admired American of his generation, he is also a perfect metaphor to describe the era we live in.

He is universally acknowledged to be the undisputed master of our epoch's dominating and defining skill, which is turning science into money. 

The creator of some of history's most seductive tools and toys.

Jobs was a visionary in this area, shrewd, obsessive with detail and a master of integrated systems, strategy and communication. 

The lord of all he surveyed.

But as we can see from text quoted above, he was also a fool, sensu strictu. 

This combination of technical and commercial perfection combined with a lack of elementary common sense is what makes him the perfect metaphor for America today... with the rest of the world tagging along. DS

Obama vs. Romney: a message to would be leftists

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There are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing, and one of them is necessarily the principal contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions. Mao Tse Tung

To reject compromises “on principle,” to reject the permissibility of compromises in general, no matter of what kind, is childishness.  Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder

I separate the presidential elections from my own personal “druthers”. I would recommend to those who consider themselves “lefter than thou” that they read none other than Mao Tse Tung’s, “on contradiction"… (it’s about “priorities”).

Addressing this question, I begin with some simple facts.

1. There is going to be an election
2. The winner will either be a Republican or a Democrat
3. The winner will get to choose the person or persons to occupy any new vacancies in the Supreme Court, which in its present form, with its ruling on the “humanity” of corporations, has effected a de facto coup d’etat. Unless this ruling is changed,  democratic politics in America will be fatally and permanently corrupted. Democracy will have become a permanent contest among billionaires. At last count there were more ultra-conservative billionaires than progressive billionaires.
4. One could make an endless list, but they mostly look like number “3″. DS

There are still important differences between Republicans and Democrats

David Seaton's News Links

A Sample of Tea Party Humor

I'd like to reproduce a dialog between myself and a blogger I much respect, Wendy Davis, on a previous post of mine:

Seaton: I think that all of those who were so ecstatic about Obama in 2008 (I wasn’t) should “stand by their man” and realize that if he does what he does now, it is because he really has no alternative. But if there is still even a tiny fraction of the quality that they thought he had back then, it will only be visible when he will no longer ever have to run for office again.
And then… I think that after George W. Bush the Republicans shouldn’t be allowed in the White House in at least 20 years… and the Tea Party faction that calls the tunes now makes Bush look like a pinko.

Davis: Lord love a duck, David Seaton; what crappery.
“if he does what he does now”…it’s not IF, it’s simply a chronicle of who he’s assassinated without need, who he’s screwed (regular Americans), who he serves (Wall Street and multinational profiteers), which whistle-blowers he’s prosecuting, which Executive orders he pens, shredding the Rule of Law, which massive crimes he’s failed to investigate, let alone prosecute, which parts of the planet he decimates with energy extraction…all done with IMPUNITY. And you have the fucking gall to suggest, no claim: that he has no alternative?
And you haven’t been paying much attention to the Tea Party, neither the originals or the astro-turf ones; I won’t stop to correct your take.

Seaton: Presidents of the USA kill people and do many horrid things… even Abraham Lincoln… Personally I find it absurd for me, of all people, to try to defend Barack Obama… For me it is like what Victor Borge said about growing old, “It’s marvelous… especially when you think of the alternatives”.
I just can’t bear the idea of the Tea Party in the White House: (see "humor" topping this post)

Davis: Wow, David. A poster is proof-positive there.
Fail.
I’ll keep putting my energy into the Democracy movement, you keep campaignin’ for the evil son of a bitch.
Howzzat?

Seaton: You do what you want. I’m all for the Democracy movement, like the Civil Rights movement, it is essential to modify the behavior of whichever “evil son of a bitch” happens to be in the White House. But I think it does matter if the son of a bitch is a Democratic son of a bitch or a Republican son of a bitch. It is not the same for a Martin Luther King to be pressuring an LBJ than to imagine him pressuring Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.

The White House is an ugly place, where ugly things happen, but there still are important differences. The Republican Party is now in the hands of genuine fascists and should be kept out. It seems to me that the people who were starry eyed about Obama in 2008 and consider him some sort of antichrist today were dumb coming and are now dumb going.

Another good reason to vote for Obama

David Seaton's News Links

Mitt's friend, Bibi

The ties between Mr. Romney and Mr. Netanyahu stand out because there is little precedent for two politicians of their stature to have such a history together that predates their entry into government. And that history could well influence decision-making at a time when the United States may face crucial questions about whether to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities or support Israel in such an action. Mr. Romney has suggested that he would not make any significant policy decisions about Israel without consulting Mr. Netanyahu — a level of deference that could raise eyebrows given Mr. Netanyahu’s polarizing reputation, even as it appeals to the neoconservatives and evangelical Christians who are fiercely protective of Israel. In a telling exchange during a debate in December, Mr. Romney criticized Mr. Gingrich for making a disparaging remark about Palestinians, declaring: “Before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: ‘Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?’“ Martin S. Indyk, a United States ambassador to Israel in the Clinton administration, said that whether intentional or not, Mr. Romney’s statement implied that he would “subcontract Middle East policy to Israel.” “That, of course, would be inappropriate,” he added. Mr. Netanyahu insists that he is neutral in the presidential election, but he has at best a fraught relationship with President Obama. For years, the prime minister has skillfully mobilized many Jewish groups and Congressional Republicans to pressure the Obama administration into taking a more confrontational approach against Iran. “To the extent that their personal relationship would give Netanyahu entree to the Romney White House in a way that he doesn’t now have to the Obama White House,” Mr. Indyk said, “the prime minister would certainly consider that to be a significant advantage.” New York Times

Something I’ve been meaning to do — and still don’t have the time to do properly — is say something about Peter Beinart’s brave book The Crisis of Zionism. The truth is that like many liberal American Jews — and most American Jews are still liberal — I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going. It seems obvious from here that the narrow-minded policies of the current government are basically a gradual, long-run form of national suicide — and that’s bad for Jews everywhere, not to mention the world. But I have other battles to fight, and to say anything to that effect is to bring yourself under intense attack from organized groups that try to make any criticism of Israeli policies tantamount to anti-Semitism. But it’s only right to say something on behalf of Beinart, who has predictably run into that buzzsaw. As I said, a brave man, and he deserves better. Paul Krugman

Krugman’s unusually harsh critique of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is sure to elicit howls of protest from Israeli spokespersons and American Jewish organizations – more so, perhaps, as they come on the eve of Israel’s Independence Day. It is also sure to further inflame the continuously deteriorating relationship between the Israeli government and the New York Times, considered by many to be the most important newspaper in the world. Last December, Netanyahu declined an offer by the Times’ to pen an article for the paper’s opinion pages, citing the newspaper’s alleged anti-Israel bias. Haaretz

As you may have noticed the Middle East is on the boil, and how to stabilize the most important oil and gas producing region on earth is a  priority for everybody, everywhere, now, with the world economy teetering on the brink of a great depression. 

After supporting tyrannical Arab regimes for decades, invading Iraq and botching up the occupation and never missing a chance to kowtow to the Israelis, America's credibility at present is as low as a snake's abdomen. Except for killing people and blowing things up, nobody is expecting much from the USA these days in the Middle East.

There is one thing that has worldwide support and universal approval,  something, which would at least give the USA a minimum of credibility and that something would be to finally "solve" the Palestinian problem and give them a state of their own... and the six and seventh year of a second term American president would make that something look doable

Now cynics among you will point out that all the versions of that proposed state that the USA has ever put forward added up to miserable little unarmed bantustans cut up by Israeli security roads, without control over the water under them and without sovereignty over the airspace above them... And I doubt if even the most "liberated" version of Barack Obama would ask for much more than that. And even something that mild and decaffeinated would probably justify his heretofore absurd Nobel Peace Prize and refurbish his tattered image as "The One".

Why should this be such a huge problem?

Because, even such a pitiful, Swiss cheese, scrap of a state would finally and unambiguously establish the frontiers of Israel and put paid to the dream of Eretz Yisrael Ha-Shlema  (greater Israel).

And in my humble opinion, it is the fear of that, and not the fear of a nuclear Holocaust that is behind Netanyahu's hysterical push toward war. He is trying to create a damned if you do and damned if you don't scenario for Barack Obama to see if he can derail his reelection and get himself another first term president to manipulate at will. 

From the point of anyone who influences politics by funding politician's election campaigns, first term presidents are to be greatly preferred to second term presidents who wont need any more funding. Obvious, right? 

All of this is as good reason as any not to vote for Mitt Romney and to give Barack Obama a second term. DS

From Rosa Parks to Barack Obama

David Seaton's News Links

One of the most significant political images in American history.

"It did, in fact, give me cause to celebrate that in my own lifetime I saw an African American elected to the presidency." Mike Huckabee

I just didn't want to let this photo go by without comment.

I was just a small boy when Rosa Parks made her famous ride, but I remember it well, it was a moment of awakening for me and for millions of others.

Personally, I find the photo of the first black President of the United States of America sitting in the same seat in the same bus very moving. Some may find it opportunistic, but I find it opportune.

I not only celebrate, like Huckabee, that I have lived to see this, but I also celebrate that Barack Obama has proven to be an extremely competent president. Except for the Norwegian "affirmative action" of his absurd Nobel Peace Prize, history has cut him no slack, nor has he demanded it.

He saved the American auto industry, killed Osama bin Laden and ended the war in Iraq: these are all solid achievements. True, some of his more starry eyed supporters of 2008, now see him as "evil" because of Guantanamo and the drones and other human rights failures, but being "evil" comes with his particular job. No president is ever going to change that evil... before the people themselves do...

That is the lesson of Rosa Parks.

It took a normal, ordinary, woman, filled with a citizen's dignity, to open the door for a black man to sit in that same bus decades later as President of the United States... No president gave her that seat, she gave it to him. DS

Is progressive change in America possible? A practical plan of action

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How is progressive change to be effected within the American political system?

First: are citizens asking the correct questions?

• Does anyone really believe that any topflight, professional, national politician, with what national campaigns cost these days, is ever going to confront or bring down a major source of funding like Wall Street?

• Does the deregulation of the financial sector that has brought about the present meltdown have anything to do with that sector's campaign contributions to both political parties?

• Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?

• Does anyone really believe that any professional American politician of national stature is ever going to apply enough pressure on Israel to insure compliance of UN-242? ...And speaking of Israel and American politicians: where is the little bird brave enough to push that cuckoo's egg out of America's nest?

Is there any solution to any of this?

Good news, bad news.

The good news? Yes there is.

The bad news?

It will take a long time... about twenty years, at least, if we start right now.

I believe the possible solution lies in local politics and in the US House of Representatives: politicians that are near to the actual people who vote for them and whose every move can be watched closely by local progressive activists interconnected nationally through countless Internet forums. Politicians whose campaigns would get cheaper as their local reputations grew.

Congresspersons in this movement should be politicians whose greatest ambition is to rise by seniority (that means getting reelected from their district many times)  to enable them to sit on and eventually chair the powerful key House committees. Here is power that could be truly controlled by the voters if they kept their elected representatives under a powerful magnifying glass. This movement could be independent of both the Republicans and the Democrats and a President or Senator of either party that defied these powerful Congresspersons would do so at his or her peril. In this way a practical progressive agenda could be pushed forward without submitting itself to the national corporate media circus.

To my mind a nationwide, grassroots movement, based on the House of Representatives, like the one that I have described, is probably the only way real, progressive change can ever occur within our present system. DS

Mitt Romney, severely stiff?

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The coming presidential election is very different from 2008... as then, one of the men is a known quantity and the other is an enigma. But yesterday's enigma is today's known quantity and although the other man has been around for years, the more he says and the more he does the less knowable he becomes.

Back then I was very skeptical of Obamamania, I couldn't really understand how someone who objectively had done little more than write a book about himself, could become a craze rivaling the hula hoop. I found it frightening and frivolous. People thought they were buying a Ferrari and for all they knew, they could have awakened to find they had bought a pair of roller skates.  But, with the ample road testing of the US presidency,  it turns out that if Barack Obama were an automobile, I can think of no better description of him than a four wheel drive, working vehicle: practical, sensible, reliable and not at all flashy, which also can  be used for taking the kids to their soccer games. Eisenhower with a suntan.

And today, some of Obama's greatest fans from back then in 2008 are still bitterly disappointed on finding that having ordered a Ferrari, they finally took delivery on a Toyota Land Cruiser.

Admittedly, those that thought that they were getting an Ivy League version of Martin Luther King have ample reason to be disappointed... And what with Guantanamo and the targeted assassinations, the drones and so forth, Obama has turned out to have a sinister side... but all presidents of the United States of America up to and including Abraham Lincoln have had a sinister side... Because, national myths to the contrary, the US is a rather sinister place... in case you hadn't noticed.

Although in these four years, Barack Obama hasn't turned out to be the great... er... hope, he was cracked up to be,  has he proven to be a rather good president during a very difficult period, certainly good enough to deserve those second term years, when a president is free to really seek his legacy. And certainly deserving of a second term when contemplating the alternatives.

Which brings us to Romney. Mr. Etch a Sketch.

I think it would be boring to try to plumb all of Romney's inconsistencies as they double back upon one another endlessly, tediously, suffice to say that one of the principal lines of the Romney-led, Republican attack against the administration is turning out to be an intent to repeal the "Obama Care" health plan, a plan which is a failed imitation of the same one Romney himself introduced in Massachusetts, when he was governor of that state and which is probably his only distinguished achievement in political life until now.

Back in 2008 the Obamites were quick to accuse anyone who dared criticize "The One" as racist, but now in 2012, I truly think that the only reason that anyone could prefer Mitt Romney to Barack Obama, would be the color of his skin. That is a path that McCain firmly refused to take, but by now, nothing Romney could do or say to get elected would surprise me. I predict that we are about to witness the filthiest presidential campaign in US history. DS

Thoughts at Easter: Once I built a tower and now it is done…

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"We are so made that we can sustain our existence only in group life. Love is the essence of humanity, love needs something to bestow itself upon; human beings must live together in order to live a life of mutual love." D. T. Suzuki

"I sincerely believe that if you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem. My motto: Fuck Hope!" George Carlin

Between the two quotes above there is certainly some space and variance of tone, but they are by no means contradictory and Suzuki would have been the last person to deny George Carlin's Zen.

Carlin was certainly right when he saw "no solution" and "no hope". However, it is useful before even thinking about solutions, to identify the "problem".

In my opinion, the distance between the reality we experience in our daily lives and Suzuki's deceptively simple analysis of our species, (which could, in great part, apply to the troop of baboons in the picture), is humanity's "problem".

In fact the distance is so great that many might dismiss Suzuki's analysis as treacly and sentimental when he says, "we are so made that we can sustain our existence only in group life (...) human beings must live together in order to live a life of mutual love", which, in fact, applies as accurately to any isolated human being as it would to any isolated baboon. A social animal being a social animal.

Over millions of years, our species evolved, like our cousins the baboons, to roam the savannas of Africa in extended families, sharing whatever food we found and curling up together at night to keep warm. Over most of our history that was our life, only of late have we taken a sinister detour. That wandering togetherness is what our brains, inhabiting spirits and digestive tract are built for and look where we are now.

Over a relatively few millennia we have woven ourselves into hell.

Certainly, unless we can recreate the essence of our cooperative origins on a mass scale within our present technological development, there seems to be no solution in sight to this hell we have created.

Perhaps, it will be global warming that finally returns our remaining descendents to paradise. DS

Conservatives or neo-fascists?

David Seaton's News Links

I would think it important to separate this new "conservatism" from the traditional variety. Remember the American vice is to use language to hide meaning. I’ll quote myself from an earlier post:

One of the most disturbing things about America is the incoherence of American language, the endless euphemism-laden double talk. American terminology is confusing and perhaps the confusion is deliberate.

Examples? There are many.

For example, everywhere but in the USA, “red” is the color of the left, but in America, the term, “red state”, means one that is right-wing and “blue”, which is a color that in most countries is associated with the right, to ultra-right, in the US is used to label what Americans call “liberal”, which in the USA means the left, but which everywhere else is used to label the economic right-wing… These examples are just the tip of a semantic iceberg.

This brings us to the word, “conservative”.

The new conservative is, in plain English, in fact, a neo-fascist and the personality traits we observe on the American right these days are those of a fascist.

What is the difference

If a person is born into a well to do, stable family, where the parents respect and perhaps even love each other and treat the child kindly and his/her exposure to traditional religion is benign. He/she is likely to accept the family’s traditions and values unquestioningly.

From that point his/her attitude will be one of prudence, of not spoiling  (for him/her and his/her family) a good thing… and his/her attitude toward the less fortunate than himself/herself may even be benevolent and paternalistic and be expressed in contributions to charity and other good works.

What we are seeing in the Republicans now, has little or nothing to do with that kind of conservatism. We are looking at exasperated, paranoiac, xenophobic, racist nastiness, in short a fascistic mentality of crippled personalities in reaction to changing mores and a failing economy. DS

Why are the Republicans so weird?

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This blog post, by the excellent Thomas Edsall, makes some very interesting points about the make-up of the Republican electorate. In the GOP’s South Carolina primary, 98% of those who voted were white: this in a state where nearly 28% of the population is black. Republican voters are also relatively old: 72% in South Carolina were over the age of 45. Could it be that some of the panic and anger among Republican voters is because they fear that “their” country is slipping away from them. Gideon Rachman - Financial Times

For someone who came to consciousness of the difference between Democrats and Republicans in the age of Eisenhower, the current metamorphosis of the GOP into the party of cranks and grinches and Gingriches is dismaying.

When I was a boy the Republicans that lived around me were mostly pallid, though vigorous, high church Episcopalians, solid, smug types who struggled mightily with golf and sedately clipped stock coupons. As to the younger ones, crew cuts and white bucks, energetically embalmed in stifling, Pat Booney squareness come immediately to mind.

Certainly a Mormon, no matter how enamored of money, and conventional in every other way, would have been an outlier in the extremely Republican, Chicago North Shore of my youth... Not to imagine the likes of the indescribably corrupt and lewd Newt Gingrich or a Rick Santorum that would have Joseph Ratzinger vetting the US Constitution.

I cannot think of a better bellwether of America's malaise then that of the party of the formerly priggish, self-contented, self-righteous, self-satisfied, conventional and sensible becoming the party of the paranoiac, the exasperated and the kooky. DS

Mohammed Merah, the monster of Toulouse

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The  question we must ask is; was Mohammed Merah really a trained terrorist or simply a nut?

We know practically nothing about Mohammed Merah. As far as we can see he acted totally alone, with only a handgun: nothing complicated like explosives was involved.

Right now, Merah's whole modus operandi is identical to that of the typical American shooting spree, only dressed up in jihadi rhetoric.

He said that he is affiliated with Al Qaeda, but, this could be the simple grandiosity of a nutcase, because, so far, Al Qaeda has not claimed him as their own. As far as we know, this entire affair could easily be only the fevered percolations of a diseased mind.

I think that all these questions should be answered before we attach any more significance to this than the tragedy of the victims themselves.

I am still waiting for some sort of communique from Al Qaeda to make this "official". Certainly killing the paratroopers of magrebi origin muddies the ordinary "antisemitic" narrative.

When I say that, I am not trying to minimize the monstrosity of murdering children in cold blood... However in this particular ongoing battle between Muslims and Jews, many children have been killed on both sides, and all of them, Arab and Jew alike were Semites and I think it would be obscene to say that one group's children's lives are more to be valued than the other group's. DS

When is a conservative not a conservative?

David Seaton's News Links

At a Tea Party rally in Troy, Michigan, the GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum said this: "President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob!" To rapturous applause, Santorum went on: "There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate him." And then, the kicker: "I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image." The audience, mostly older folks in working-class garb, laughed with Santorum. Rolling Stone

The decline in marriage rates has been steepest for the least educated, especially men, and smallest for college graduates, especially women. College graduates, the highest earners, are more likely today to be married than are Americans with less education — 69% for adults with a college degree versus 56% for those who are not a college graduate. Pew Research Center

Several studies suggest that while college-educated dual-earner families have high marital quality, lower-income dual-earner couples have been experiencing heightened marital distress. Infidelity, drug abuse, depression, and domestic violence can happen anywhere, but they are especially common among couples facing economic distress. More than two-thirds of the low-income mothers studied by Duke University's Linda Burton and her research team, for example, had been victims of serious domestic violence and sexual abuse.(...) Strengthening people's economic prospects and developing more living-wage jobs is essential to reducing the economic instability that exacerbates relationship problems, and doing that would probably increase marriage rates among low-income and low-education individuals. Stephanie Coontz

One of the most disturbing things about America is the incoherence of American language, the endless euphemism-laden double talk. American terminology is confusing and perhaps the confusion is deliberate. 

Examples? There are many.

For example, everywhere but in the USA, "red" is the color of the left, but in America, the term, "red state", means one that is right-wing and "blue", which is a color that in most countries is associated with the right, to ultra-right, in the US is used to label what Americans call "liberal", which in the USA means the left, but which everywhere else is used to label the economic right-wing... These examples are just the tip of a semantic iceberg.

This brings us to the word, "conservative".

Like most conservatives the world over, American conservatives are very strong in the defense of "family values": marriage, two-parent families, with mothers as care-givers, "standing by their man". For a traditional conservative the family is the core of all social relations, the keystone of individual and national life.

However, as we can see from the snippets that top this page, there is a powerful contradiction between low taxes for the rich, deregulated globalization and the possibility for people with only high school education, or less, to raise children in a stable environment... even with both parents working at two jobs... if they can find work.

To give just one small example: such measures as the deregulation of store-opening hours, where many parents, single parents or married couples, gay or straight,  have to work late into the night or on weekends, even Sundays, leaving many children alone after school or in their free time, with no one to help them with their homework, cook them a hot meal or give them a cuddle when they are sad, tuck them at bedtime and listen to their prayers or instill "values" conservative or otherwise in them. And this is not a minority we are talking about, for as Thomas Geoghegan wrote in The Nation, "only 27 percent of adults have a bachelor's degree, and there are not enough jobs for them".

So, obviously it is our über-capitalist economy, the one American conservatives wish to further deregulate, that is literally destroying the American family, not gay marriage or abortion.

Again, this toxic mixture of social intolerance and destructive deregulation is not a universal "conservative" phenomenon. In Germany,  both the German Catholic and Protestant churches join with the labor unions to keep most businesses closed on most evenings and shut totally on Sundays. Progressives and traditional conservatives overlap harmoniously on this issue there. 

At bottom America's biggest problem is that it doesn't make sense anymore. DS

China: capitalism, democracy and sovereignty

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China is an authoritarian state, run in Leninist fashion by a communist party and at the same time a vital player, perhaps, alongside the United States, the key player in the international capitalist system.

We wish it were more democratic.

Perhaps we should be careful what we wish for.

Many who know China feel that the Chinese Communist Party is a moderating force on Chinese nationalism. That if China had something like a US system, they would be the plaything of fascist demagogues... It seems that reading their blog traffic etc, bears this out.

Let us take then, as given, that across the political spectrum, the Chinese are nationalist-chauvinist-revanchist. Then let us consider the situation they faced when the Soviet Union began to implode and it was no longer possible to play two superpowers off against each other.

China, a poor country, was left standing alone against what is commonly considered the greatest, most powerful, military, economic and cultural hegemon in the history of the world.

To use Maoist terminology the "primary contradiction" of the PCC was to maintain China's sovereignty at all costs: other priorities such as "building socialism" (whatever that might be) would have to be postponed in the greatest national emergency since the Japanese invasion, but facing the USA, open war would be suicidal.

What has happened in the past twenty years?

The best battle, Sun Tzu says, is the battle that is won without being fought.

After only two decades the United States economy and her currency are entirely dependent on China, that is to say, in many ways firmly in the grasp of the Chinese Communist Party. And now it seems entirely possible the Chinese People's Army's cyber-warfare capabilities could paralyze American infrastructure, again without firing a shot.

Let us assume that China's situation is that of a nation at war for its survival as a sovereign state... again, Sun Tzu:

"For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."

People with a deep understanding of China have said that is a very fruitful exercise to study how Taoist thought (Sun Tzu is the greatest "applied" Taoist) found the dialectical thought of Hegel (as against Kant or Plato) the most congenial and useful of western philosophies and that Hegel led them directly to Marx.

If you take Marx as lucid analyst of the weaknesses of the capitalist system, especially the system's bottomless greed, and then knowing those weaknesses you take advantage of them in the manner of Sun Tzu, you might have a workmanlike description of what the Chinese have done.

If this is seen as a war, as a "national liberation struggle", which the Chinese are winning without firing a shot, then the sacrifices of the Chinese people in today's struggle are nothing compared to what they suffered to rid themselves of the Japanese, and instead of the smoking ruins that battle left behind it, today they have high speed trains.

And as for us, who think that by "converting" the Chinese to capitalism, we have won a famous victory. The famous Spanish mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila, said that there are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.

Again, perhaps we should be more careful what we wish for. DS

Netanyahu's target is Obama, not Iran

David Seaton's News Links

It cannot be denied that the Holocaust theme has served Netanyahu well politically. As many commentators have pointed out, Netanyahu has succeeded in reframing political discourse on the Middle East: this visit to the U.S. was the first in a long time in which the Palestinian issue was completely off the table. Nobody even raised the question of settlement construction or the old question how to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiation table. Instead of being on the defensive on the Palestinian issue, Netanyahu is now on the offensive on Iran. By invoking the allied power’s failure to disrupt the Nazis sending millions to concentration camps in 1944, he is reminding the Free World of a horrible mistake, and demanding that this mistake not be repeated. Carlo Strenger - Haaretz

Observing Netanyahu's continuous invocation of the Holocaust and the imminent threat of Iran annihilating the Jewish people, it is passing curious to note that much of the most qualified Israeli military and intelligence community is openly against attacking Iran and neither are most Israelis.

Most Israelis believe that if the United States does not attack Iran's nuclear facilities, Israel must no try to do so alone, according to a Haaretz poll.

This lack of enthusiasm by informed Israelis and the Israeli street at such a moment of declared existential threat,  makes me suspect that Iran is not really Bibi's true objective, that is to say, this hysterical lead up to war is merely a tactical "feint" to distract world attention from his true strategic objective.

I believe that the prime strategic objective of Netanyahu, and the hard Israeli right wing that he represents, is to prevent, at any cost, the  final delimitation of Israel's borders. Because any "two state" solution of the Palestinian problem, however modest and fudged it might be, would create a Palestinian state in "Judea" and "Samaria", whose boundaries would be sanctioned by the United Nations. This would mean kissing goodbye, or putting on ice, any hope of finally creating the ultra-right dream of "Greater Israel".

What is Greater Israel? Lets look at this map from Wikipedia Commons:

"Greater Israel" - Wikipedia Commons

As you can see from the map or from the Wikipedia article, we are talking here about "Biblical" Israel.

The Bible contains three geographical definitions of the Land of Israel. The first, found in Genesis 15:18-21, is vague. It describes a large territory, "from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates", comprising all of modern-day Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Lebanon, as well as large parts of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. The proportion of current Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey included in this territory is debatable. The other two definitions are found in Numbers 34:1-15 and Ezekiel 47:13-20 and describe a smaller territory

Now, polls usually show that most Israelis would accept, perhaps welcome, a two state solution, based on the 1967 frontiers, with "minor adjustments"(the devil being in the details). That being so, it isn't difficult to see that a lot of the pressure to keep a settlement of the Palestinian problem from being solved is coming from outside Israel. In fact, much of the sound and fury is coming from right wing, American, Jewish people, who are doubly adamant supporters, having, as many Israelis note, no actual skin in the game. This reminds me of how rich Irish-Americans used to raise money to finance and arm the IRA.

A prime example of this group of "more Zionist than thou" Americans would be casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who someone no less than George W. Bush, described as a "crazy Jewish billionaire". Adelson, the third richest man in the USA, who according to The New Yorker, "is fiercely opposed to a two-state solution", is bankrolling the campaign of Newt Gingrich to the tune of millions upon millions of dollars, in order to have him describe the Palestinians as an "invented people". Gingrich is not going to be the Republican candidate, but he is setting the tone: no Republican would like to appear less pro-Israel than Newt Gingrich in an election year, all of them are accusing Obama of selling out Israel. With Netanyahu feeding the hysteria these attacks and calls for war with Iran, will become even more shrill.

Well, obviously the President of the United States, today Barack Obama, is going to come into any issue touching foreign affairs, but why would the Israel Lobby and Netanyahu have any beef with such a malleable pragmatist as Barack Obama, someone who is easily as adept as any other American politician in swearing eternal fealty to Israel?

The first reason is that he is on track to win a second and final term as president.

The first two years of any US president's second term of office is famously/notoriously the only time when he is free to lead, or get anything important done. In his first term, he spends four years running for reelection and during the last two years of a hypothetical second term he is considered a "lame duck" who becomes daily more irrelevant as the excruciatingly, interminable American presidential cycle kicks in once more and begins to dilute and drain out his power and relevance. The sixth and seventh year of a US presidency are the dangerous years, this is when a president might actually do something in the genuine public interest. Some of these people even begin to think about their "legacy", like an aging lady of the evening who begins going to church, presidents suddenly aspire to virtue... Very dangerous that legacy stuff.

So from the point of anyone who influences politics by funding politician's election campaigns, first term presidents are to be greatly preferred to second term presidents. Obvious, right? So Obama, despite all his professed love for Israel, has that against him from get-go this year.

This takes us back to the Middle East and the second reason for trying to derail Obama.

As you may have noticed the Middle East is on the boil, and how to stabilize the most important oil and gas producing region on earth is a  priority for everybody, everywhere, now, with the world economy teetering on the brink of a great depression. 

After, supporting tyrannical Arab regimes for decades, invading Iraq and botching up the occupation and never missing a chance to kowtow to the Israelis, America's credibility at present is as low as a snake's abdomen. Except for killing people and blowing things up, nobody is expecting much from the USA these days in the Middle East.

There is one thing that has worldwide support and universal approval,  something, which would at least give the USA a minimum of credibility and that something would be to finally "solve" the Palestinian problem and give them a state of their own... and the six and seventh year of a second term American president would make that something look doable

Now cynics among you will point out that all the versions of that proposed state that the USA has ever put forward added up to miserable little unarmed bantustans cut up by Israeli security roads, without control over the water under them and without sovereignty over the airspace above them... And I doubt if even the most "liberated" version of Barack Obama would ask for much more than that. And even something that mild and decaffeinated would probably justify his heretofore absurd Nobel Peace Prize and refurbish his tattered image as "The One".

Why should this be such a huge problem?

Because, even such a pitiful, Swiss cheese, scrap of a state would finally and unambiguously establish the frontiers of Israel and put paid to the dream of Eretz Yisrael Ha-Shlema  (greater Israel).

And in my humble opinion, it is the fear of that, and not the fear of a nuclear Holocaust that is behind Netanyahu's hysterical push toward war. He is trying to create a damned if you do and damned if you don't scenario for Barack Obama to see if he can derail his reelection and get himself another first term president to manipulate at will. DS

What has the Republican Party come to? - III

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Observing the pantagruelian expense and listening to and reading about the nauseating, sociopathic babble of the seemingly endless Republican primaries in the United States; people all over the world are questioning the democratic process and wondering if China's authoritarian system might be superior.

In my opinion, this is not a problem of systems, democracy is not an end in itself, it is simply a means to an end. The object in democracy is the same as in any system, be it an authoritarian or even a totalitarian, tyrannical regime: governance.

Democracy, by allowing a fuller expression of the people who practice it, logically expresses more faithfully the nature of that people then any other system possibly could. If the society practicing democracy is decadent and corrupt, so their democratic expression will reflect that decadence and corruption.

In the United States, quoting today's The Guardian, 

"Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year."

The financial crisis we are suffering now, worldwide, is simply the result of a faithful following over decades of the psychopathic philosophy of Ayn Rand by the United States of America, which happens to be the world's most powerful country... The disaster that follows cannot be laid at the feet of democracy... just like with computers, in democracy GIGO applies: "garbage in, garbage out".

It is the United States and its values that have been hollowed out and debased, not democracy. DS

What has the Republican Party come to? - II

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"Melancholy"
Domenico Feti

We are living in quite special times. The crisis in the system hasn’t been this evident to “everyman” since the 1930s. The United States is rather special in one respect in facing the crisis. The idea of personal responsibility for everything that happens to us, that you have cancer because you are not thinking “positively” and not because some corporation has poisoned the air or the water.

This means that instead of wanting to face the stagnant economy collectively and solve it by all pulling together… our culture wants everybody to “just suck it up” individually. This in turn means that we have millions of people who are angry (at themselves) and disappointed (with themselves). They have to unload this misery somewhere,  and this makes them a perfect target for the passing demagogue. We have seen a nearly endless stream of nut jobs auditioning for the role of commander of the miserable.

The Republicans, in search of some sort of non-country club majority, from which to protect their interests, have chosen to pander to this unhappiness… and many of the clearer heads among them already regret it. I doubt if even a major defeat would change this trend... only curing the unhappiness would and I wonder if any political party has it in its power to do that. DS

What has the Republican Party come to?

David Seaton's News Links

If Mitt Romney takes the nomination and then loses to Obama, the extremists who’ve taken over the party will surely say the problem was Romney’s lack of ideological purity.  Joe Nocera - New York Times

Here’s what I think may happen. Romney gets the nomination and is defeated. Republicans decide they are sick of nominating “moderates” and next time they go haywire. Then the party gets really crushed and sanity returns. David Brooks - New York Times

I think people are making a mistake if they treat the Republican primaries as serious politics. They obviously aren't, but at the same time it seems to me that they are a more than serious symptom of levels of unhappiness, frustration and confusion among the citizenry that border and frequently cross the border of collective insanity.

All the unhappiness and frustration are searching for moral absolutes. Moral absolutes are what allow people to kill each other... if only in their imagination. All this hateful speech and dippy ideas are pregnant with death, they could give birth to a monster, but the Republicans would only be the midwives... They are helpless in the face of the spirits they have invoked from the country's inner darkness. It is that darkness that should worry us, something very, very nasty is cooking in it. DS

Are we looking at a possible intellectual and economic "ecological" disaster?

Bank concentration: Graph - Mother Jones, (click though to view)

Low genetic variation can make a species less resilient to changes in its environment, and place it at increased risk of extinction. BBC News

Ecologists say that when the gene-pool of a species is reduced beyond a certain point that species is in danger of extinction because it may not have enough alternative genes to recover from a negative event such as a plague etc.

Could this concept be applied to our new globalized economy and even to our educational resources?

When I saw the documentary "Food Inc", I was surprised to learn that less than half a dozen corporations control almost all of American agriculture and food production.

I was talking to someone on the far left the other day who said that economic power has become so concentrated in the USA that if you nationalized some 20 corporations, then, in one blow, you would have created a de facto, ad hoc, "real existent socialism". He gave Walmart as an example of a perfect "planned economy".  Maybe he is on to something.

Most economists today don’t ask who rules the global economy, visualizing it as a decentralized competitive market that cannot be ruled. Yet new evidence suggests that global economic clout is highly concentrated among large interlocking transnational companies. Three Swiss experts on complex network analysis have recently examined the architecture of international ownership, analyzing a large database of transnational corporations. They concluded that a large portion of control resides with a relatively small core of financial institutions, with about 147 tightly knit companies controlling about 40 percent of the total wealth in the network. Their analysis draws heavily on network topology, a methodology that biologists use to good effect. An article in the British magazine New Scientist describes the research as evidence of a global financial oligarchy. The technical details of economic network analysis are daunting, but the metaphors evoke a “Star Trek” episode: the network is described as a bow-tie shaped “super entity” of concentrated corporate ownership. One cannot help but worry about threats to the safety of the starship Enterprise. In recent years, research on industrial organization has focused more on corporate strategy than on social consequences. A recent article in the socialist journal Monthly Review, by John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney and R. Jamil Janna, criticizes both mainstream and left-wing economists for their lack of attention to monopoly power. Focusing on the United States, they note that the percentage of manufacturing industries in which the largest four companies account for at least 50 percent of shipping value has increased to almost 40 percent, up from about 25 percent in 1987. Nancy Folbre- New York Times

Increasingly top management has been educated worldwide in practically identical MBA programs so that their responses to any new problems tend to be identical. This too responds to the metaphor of gene-pool depletion.

Universities themselves instead of being citadels of intellectual integrity, are increasingly becoming mere training camps for this corporate concentration:

Most universities before 1945, and even before 1970, were state institutions. The one significant exception was the United States, which had a large number of non-state institutions, most of which had evolved from religiously-based institutions. But even in these U.S. private institutions, the universities were run as non-profit structures.  What privatization began to mean throughout the world was several things: One, there began to be institutions of higher education that were established as businesses for profit. Two, public institutions began to seek and obtain money from corporate donors, which began to intrude in the internal governance of the universities. And three, universities began to seek patents for work that researchers at the university had discovered or invented, and thereupon entered as operators in the economy, that is, as businesses.  In a situation in which money was scarce, or at least seemed scarce, universities began to transform themselves into more business-like institutions. This could be seen in two major ways. The top administrative positions of universities and their faculties, which had traditionally been occupied by academics, now began to be occupied by persons whose background was in business and not university life. They raised the money, but they also began to set the criteria of allocation of the money.  There began to be evaluations of whole universities and of departments within universities in terms of their output for the money invested. This might be measured by how many students wished to pursue particular studies, or how esteemed was the research output of given universities or departments. Intellectual life was being judged by pseudo-market criteria. Even student recruitment was being measured by how much money was brought in via alternative methods of recruitment. Immanuel Wallerstein

Maybe we are fooling ourselves and the rest of the world when we think we live in a democratic, free market economy. In reality we may be immersed in some sort of Mussolini cum Disney corporate statism.

Or maybe the world economic power has conveniently gathered itself together in a sort of virtual "Winter Palace" that could be taken over in one bold revolutionary movement.

Or both.

Whether seen from the point of view of someone who believes in the connection between democracy and the free market or a disciple of Lenin who sees a world of unlimited future opportunities to make a revolution... Whatever it might be, such a power concentration, with its attendant group-think and its economic and intellectual "gene depletion" carries with it very special dangers, dangers which we will all face together, rich and poor alike. DS