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?

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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?

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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

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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?

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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

The Darkest Hour Is Just Before Dawn

David Seaton's News Links

Between the civil war in Syria, for that is what it is, and the threat of an Israeli attack on Iran, which would set the region -- at the very least -- ablaze, and probably start off a chain of events that could tip the whole world into full-scale depression, we have plenty to worry about... things that could pull our attention decisively away from the saga of Jeremy Lin.

At the bottom of what most of us worriers worry about is the economic crisis. In a nutshell we are looking at the result of an increasingly "friction-less" world market.

Perhaps the core problem is that we are a consumer economy and our consumption, from designer tee-shirts  to the iPad and the iPhone, depends almost entirely on the slave wages and slave working conditions of millions upon millions of Chinese workers, who, without old age pensions and healthcare, save all their money and so do not consume what we produce. Our money goes there and it doesn't come back and our own workers are impoverished by this phenomenon and thus also consume less and less.

And if we managed to solve this problem and the Chinese workers earned enough to consume like we do, we the "breathing class" would suffocate in the ensuing pollution and if the enriched Chinese chose to eat cereal-fed, animal protein on the scale we do, mass starvation in the third (or not so third) world would result... without entering into the feedlot methane gas and water pollution issues that enough steers, swine and chickens to supply a billion Chinese with a diet like ours would produce.

The sheer contradiction and intractability enclosed in the scenario described means that inevitably our entire system is in question and our priorities must adjust to this new reality and adjust they will, even if it takes great wars and massive civil disturbance to bring the adjustments about.

In every established hierarchy, those who most benefit from the statu quo naturally write the rules and laws that best suit their interests and also do their best to create an intellectual and political climate that makes any real questioning of that situation "unthinkable".

Nobody describes this paradox better than the Slovenian philosophe à tout faire, Slavoj Zizek does:

In such a constellation, the very idea of a radical social transformation may appear as an impossible dream—yet the term ‘impossible’ should make us stop and think. Today, possible and impossible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into excess. On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, we are told that ‘nothing is impossible’: we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions, entire archives of music, films and tv series are available to download, space travel is available to everyone (at a price). There is the prospect of enhancing our physical and psychic abilities, of manipulating our basic properties through interventions into the genome; even the tech-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by transforming our identity into software that can be downloaded into one or another set of hardware.  On the other hand, in the domain of socio-economic relations, our era perceives itself as the age of maturity in which humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality—read: capitalist socio-economic reality—with all its impossibilities. The commandment you cannot is its mot d’ordre: you cannot engage in large collective acts, which necessarily end in totalitarian terror; you cannot cling to the old welfare state, it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis; you cannot isolate yourself from the global market, without falling prey to the spectre of North Korean juche.

Zizek concludes: "Today we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequence of non-action could be disastrous."

The disruption of existing relationships of power and authority, that the inevitable changes the situation will increasingly demand, goes a long way to explaining the polarization of much of politics today; especially where the world's power is still predominately brokered, the USA. And it is no surprise that the sound and the fury is mostly coming from the right, those who represent those who have much to lose if today's existing relationships of power and authority should ever change.

So that is the real bottom line: we have the privilege of living in a time of profound changes... a time of fear and a time of hope. As to hope, hopefully the metaphor that titles this post is apt, and the darkest hour does come just before dawn. DS

Meditations on America and the the Flight of the Oozlum Bird

David Seaton's News Links

Just the other day I saw a well-known documentary, "Food Inc", which shines a light on the physically and morally toxic American food industry. I found myself getting very depressed about all the young people, especially poor, young people developing diabetes. Fully half of minority children are set to develop this disease

Being a Celt, certain types of sadness are pleasurable for me in a way similar to the Portuguese "saudade," and so I tend to nurse melancholic feelings along to see what juice they have in them.... Melancholy is like the dear brother pig, all of whom, except for his death screams, is either useful or delicious.

Thinking about Food Inc and ruminating on the sadness that the story of all the overweight, diabetic poor people dredges out of me, I remembered something that Felipe González, the former president of Spain, and an extremely intelligent and perceptive man, once said about Americans.

I'm quoting from memory, González said something like, "Americans are sad people, I find them touching" (me enternecen). My first reaction was to find his remark condescending and offensive, but after thinking about it at length, I decided he was right.

What is this sadness, where does it come from, what is it about?

Everybody, even Thomas Friedman, has read that bit in the Communist Manifesto, describing the action of capitalism on society that goes, "All that is solid melts into air" The full, famous paragraph goes like this:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It ... has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment” ... for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation ... Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (emphasis mine)

Taking that as my text, I would preach that as America is and always has been the absolute vanguard and the world's most enthusiastic advocate of capitalism, logically no other people have ever felt capitalism's effects half as directly or half as powerfully as Americans have. If we add to that the deracination of the process of immigration, then we also talking about people who have had all the defenses and the retarding effects of "feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations" already stripped from them when they arrived.

More than even the British who invented capitalism, Americans therefore stand naked before the forces that "melt all that is solid into air" with all that is holy profaned.

That leaves the American "at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind".

How to avoid that self-examination is the central task that Americans have set for themselves.

This has led to a frantic search for new "veils of religious and political illusions" to make all of this contemplation of "his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind" bearable.

This explains to some extent the obsession with entertainment, the idolatrous celebrity culture and growing religious eccentricity.

The man and his companion whose statue grace this post might be apt symbols of an industrial effort at distraction from the "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation" and the "uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation", as shown in "Food Inc", which make up the actual warp and woof of our lives.


The consolation would be that since American society has advanced far further on this road than any other, if capitalism is ever to take the path of the Oozlum Bird*, it will happen in America first. DS

*The Oozlum bird, also spelled Ouzelum, is a Legendary Creature found in Australian and British folk tales and legends. Some versions have it that, when startled, the bird will take off and fly around in ever-decreasing circles until it manages to fly up itself, disappearing completely, which adds to its rarity.

Homage to the people of Greece - Αφιέρωμα στους ανθρώπους της Ελλάδα

David Seaton's News Links

Wolfgang Schäuble, German finance minister, on Wednesday went so far as to suggest Greece might postpone its elections and install a technocratic government free of all political parties, similar to Italy, to ensure that the bail-out programme is implemented. Financial Times

A visibly angry President Karolos Papoulias singled out Schaeuble after he appeared to suggest Greece might go bankrupt, and also attacked critics of his country in the Netherlands and Finland. "I cannot accept Mr Schaeuble insulting my country," said Papoulias, an 82-year-old veteran of Greece's resistance struggle against the Nazi occupation of World War Two. "Who is Mr Schaeuble to insult Greece? Who are the Dutch? Who are the Finnish?" he said in a speech at the Defense Ministry. Reuters

No further comment needed. DS

A Valentine story

David Seaton's News Links

I thought something romantic and sad was required for Valentine's day and thinking about it, up popped the saddest love story I remember. A story that if it wasn't true would be pure schmaltz.

This all happened when I was a little kid.  My stepfather was a doctor of musicology with a masters in psychology and was a pioneer in using musical therapy in the treatment of the mentally ill. He worked at a huge Veteran's Administration hospital on Chicago's North Shore. Those were fat days in the USA and the hospital had a huge orchestra and choirs and a "big band", all of this was my stepfather's turf.... He was the musical director of an insane asylum.

In those days there were none of the marvelous drugs they have today, which make it possible for people with severe bi-polar disorders, epilepsy or schizophrenia to live "normal" lives without needing to be confined to a hospital. I've heard that the hospital where my stepfather worked no longer exists, but in those days it had hundreds of patients. Among them was a man,  named Don, who certainly wouldn't be hospitalized today, because his particular cross in life was acute gran mal epilepsy, contracted while in military service, and he often suffered several seizures a day. Today this sort of thing is treatable, but in those days he had to under constant care, impossible then for him to be outside on his own.

He must have come into the world with strange karma, because aside from his illness, he had movie star good looks and a voice of operatic quality, all the way from baritone to lyric tenor. I remember that he was very charming and very sad.

Among the volunteers who worked at the hospital was a girl named Jesse, also beautiful and also with an enormous soprano voice of operatic quality. She gave voice lessons at the hospital. She was confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down from an automobile accident.

Don and Jesse were hopelessly in love. "Hopelessly" was the operative word.

I was a little kid, so I have had to figure a lot of this out later, at the time though I was aware that they were in love and this was all very sad.

I knew them quite well and not from hearsay because every so often my stepfather would check Don out under his responsibility and bring him home for dinner and to spend the night at our house, a huge three story Victorian pile near the Northwestern campus. On the way home he would pick up Jesse too.

I remember that after dinner, they would sing duets, while my stepfather played the piano, Italian and German opera mostly, but occasionally an old chestnut like "Ah Sweet Mystery of Life at Last I've Found You", where at least I could understand the words. I still remember the tableaux, my stepfather at the piano, Jesse in her wheelchair, Don standing beside her. They used to look into each others eyes while they sang. 

Soon it was my bedtime and I had to go upstairs to my bedroom way up on the third floor, the beautiful, powerful, voices followed me all the way up there and sang me to sleep.

What Don and Jesse did after I went to sleep, nobody ever told me, but there were lots of spare bedrooms in our house and I hope they got to be happy for a while.

My Valentine's wish is that all my readers should have love as rich and beautiful as Don and Jesse's, but less complicated. DS

A poem for ex-Judge Baltasar Garzón

ex-judge, Baltasar Garzón

Terrible crimes were committed during and after Spain’s 1936-39 civil war that no court has yet examined or judged. No one knows how many people were taken away, tortured and murdered. Now, one of Spain’s top investigating magistrates, Baltasar Garzón, is on trial for daring to open an inquiry into those atrocities. Editorial - New York Times

Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s internationally renowned investigating magistrate, is being prosecuted on charges that could end his career. The case has the hallmarks of a politically motivated attempt to smear and disbar a courageous public official who has fought terrorists and state-sanctioned death squads, corruption and tyranny. It is without merit and reflects poorly on Spain’s increasingly politicised judicial system. Editorial - Financial Times

A Spanish judge famed for his investigations into international human rights abuses has been found guilty of ordering illegal wiretaps during a case involving corruption within the country’s ruling Popular party. Baltasar Garzón was on Thursday unanimously convicted of overstepping his jurisdiction and was barred from the bench for 11 years by a panel of seven judges of Spain’s Supreme Court – a ruling that, if upheld, would effectively bring an end to his career. Financial Times

Villages of bones (for ex-judge Baltasar Garzón)

Under the ditches, fields and highways of Spain, there are tiny villages of bones

Sinews, tendons, loves, ideas and dreams,

Simmered in the broth of earth

Nothing is left but the bones


In the villages of bones

The warm blood and the warm tears

Long since turned to thistles, flow no more

Nothing is left but the bones

DS

Santorum, Mitt and Newt... Decline and Fall... a rant

"Oppressed beneath the weight of their own corruption and of military violence, they for a long while preserved the sentiments, or at least the ideas of their free-born ancestors." Edward Gibbon, "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"

David Seaton's News Links

Under Richard Nixon's guidance the Republican party executed the "Southern Strategy" and took know-nothing, racist-populist America to its bosom and began to win majorities sufficient to implement policies that have led that same voter base of know-nothing, racist-populist Americans to even greater degradation.

Now the Republicans are trapped in a nut house of their own creation.

Just as an exercise of political science fiction, try to imagine Dwight D. Eisenhower in the midst of these Republican primaries, try to imagine him on Fox news. 

Impossible, right?

A century from now, the years between Eisenhower's and today's Republican party will seem a brief interlude and I'm sure that Chinese historians will puzzle over the swift deterioration of America and its institutions in that time frame. 

I am neither Chinese nor a historian and I am puzzled as hell. I was a kid when Ike was president and I am an old man now... Blessed with an extremely good memory, I have trouble associating the America I was born into and the America that withers before my eyes today, as if it were being struck down by a wasting disease. DS

Iran... is a trap being set?

If the United States and/or Israel finally do attack Iran, as it now appears inevitable, they may end up falling into a trap laid by Russia and China.

"Garden Airplane Trap"
Max Ernst - Art Institute of Chicago

The Americans know Iran did not bring the RQ-170 down because their intelligence agencies discovered the culprits were a Chinese cyber warfare team which seized control of the drone; Iran was given the passive role of being told where and when to hold out their arms to catch it. The Obama administration is keeping this information to itself so as not to compromise US economic relations with China, especially in a presidential election year. Debka

Iran tested its passive radar system and electronic warfare equipment in the latest aerial drills aimed at maintaining readiness of a nationwide radar network, local satellite Press TV reported on Sunday. Colonel Abolfazl Sepehri, spokesman for the four-day military exercises, said that Iran's armed forces deployed the country's most up-to-date passive radar system and hardware for electronic warfare on Saturday, according to the report, which did not elaborate on the system. Xinhua - 2011-11-20

For the modern armed forces of any large, militarily advanced country, which might find itself hypothetically facing the United States armed forces in battle -- probably only Russia and China  fit this description -- the problem of defending themselves (or more probably a client state) against an American offensive is above all about winning an anti-aircraft battle. Finding ways of raising the cost of an air attack, beyond what Americans would be prepared to pay, is surely one the most important, if not the most important, field of study for their staff officers.

In any hypothetical conflict, (which is what general staffs spend their lives preparing for) American ground forces could only enter China or Russia -- or their clients -- vital space if they could first destroy their air defenses and then follow it up with a "turkey shoot" in the same way they did to Saddam Hussein in both Gulf wars or to Serbia in the Kosovo conflict.This is the major problem to be solved and you may be sure that much treasure and grey matter are being spent on solving it.

Iran might prove to be an ideal place to "bench test" Russia and China's antiaircraft systems and perhaps deal a heavy blow to Washington and Israel's idea of cost-free gunboat diplomacy.

It is obvious that a large modern army with an adequate antiaircraft defense, which would also mean effective electronic and cyber countermeasures, would have little to fear from American ground forces, which have been turned into a "lean and mean" counter-insurgency force, but one which has not been able to emerge victorious from any counter-insurgency scenarios, either in Iraq or Afghanistan... or even clearly define what such a victory would be. This reduced ground capability would be totally inadequate for any "boots on the ground" activity in a terrain as large and rugged as Iran's, unless complete mastery of the airspace were insured.

Everything in American military thinking revolves around overwhelming air superiority in the face of a helpless and prostrate enemy. To be able to defang that air superiority from the ground, would entirely change the world's military balance of power. Therefore it is surely a primary objective of all states that feel themselves threatened by American power and any military-industrial complex that could develop such capabilities would be assured of brisk sales.

The US Navy's aircraft carrier battle groups, would also be extremely vulnerable to the same electronic and cyber counter measures and missile systems the that the USAF would be. The central challenge in resisting American power then is to stymy and neutralize its air and sea power from the ground.  The same in even a greater degree would apply to Israel. The Americans and the Israelis depend entirely on their technological superiority to attack others at little or no human cost to themselves. Much of America's foreign policy is predicated on this relative invulnerability of its forces, Israel's almost entirely so.

The escalating situation in Iran is providing both Russians and the Chinese with an ideal laboratory for bench testing and developing effective countermeasures against American air, cyber and electronic superiority. Something similar occurred in miniature in 1999, during the Kosovo conflict, but enormous Iran is an infinitely more interesting antiaircraft "laboratory" than tiny Serbia ever could have been.

The attack on Iran is now being treated as something inevitable, something which is sure to occur this spring... it could end up being a disaster on the scale of Spain's "Invincible Armada". DS

PS. This video is a very interesting addition to the conversation: