On the death of Hugo Chávez

A little old lady interviewed by El País in a mourning crowd of Venezuelans gave the most insightful analysis of Hugo Chávez and his probable legacy: "He gave us an identity!". 

Latin America is filled with people like that old lady, they are the overwhelming majority: poor, brown, left out and despised by the white, Criollo minority that has ruled the continent since colonial times. Chávez has given them an identity, an icon and marked a path. How attractive that identity, that Icon and that path are in South America can be judged by the reaction of Brazil's moderate president, Dilma Roussef, quoted in The Guardian, "The loss is irreparable. He was a great leader and friend of Brazil. President Chávez will live on in the empty space that he filled in the heart of history and the struggle of Latin America."

Paradoxically the conditions that brought forth Hugo Chávez in South America, obscene wealth and inequality in the midst of poverty, squalor and injustice, are being replicated right now in the developed world. Chávez's death coincides with the Dow Jones index hitting "all time highs", while, as John Gapper writes in the Financial Times, with unemployment hanging over their heads, the working poor and even university educated, middle class Americans are being encouraged to work longer hours at lower pay.... and in Europe? Much of its south is busy looking for their Hugo Chávez.

Hugo Chávez is/was not a freak accident, he is a leading indicator of the United State's loosening grip in the midst of the most important systemic crisis since the Great Depression. DS

Italy's elections and the Five Star Movement

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The "Grillini": this time the revolution won't be televised

The election that made Beppe Grillo, an anti-establishment blogger-comedian, leader of the largest parliamentary force in terms of votes cast was an election that passed a damning verdict on Italy’s corruption-infested political party system. The election that Europe hoped would reaffirm Italy’s commitment to the gruelling economic policies required to stabilise the eurozone was an election that, for the first time in the nation’s post-1945 history, produced a legislative majority disinclined to bow to Europe’s demands.(...) Corruption in politics, business and state administration feeds more poison into the system, clotting the arteries that might supply the blood of reform to the nation’s heart and brain. It was an election that exposed discontent with austerity but also illustrated that the road to economic salvation must pass through a decontamination and renovation of Italian politics. Financial Times

I wonder if the Italian political class (or Europe's or America's or the world's for that matter) have yet metabolized the message that Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement has sent them.... Which in demotic Italian is simply "vaffanculo".

They had better.

The Grillini have received 25% of the vote without external financing or the backing of any communications group... just with Internet, Twitter and the street.... While the traditional pols were on TV, the Grillini filled the piazzas and the streets... This is called "populism" which seems to be a dirty word when pronounced by "serious" people, however this is not some illiterate rabble, in fact, they are to a great extent, young, college educated and female.

Some commentators are comparing Grillo to Mussolini, but one of the best things you can say about the 5 star movement is that except for moving the masses, it doesn't resemble Mussolini's fascisti at all. It is not racist, xenophobic or ultra-nationalist. But, this is the first serious challenge to the "democratic deficit" anywhere... Will it dissolve in "left wing infantalism" or will it succeed in changing democratic politics in the age of Internet? Stay tuned.

Americans who view the rise of the Five Star Movement either wistfully or fearfully can despair or take comfort in knowing that our political system was deliberately designed by men of property, many of them slave owners, to make it impossible for any similar outcome to ever occur in the United States. In this they were eminently successful.

The only direct descendents of Thomas Jefferson, who penned the lines, "All Men are Created Equal" are also the descendents of the slaves that he exploited sexually. The entire story of democracy in America is the sometimes bloody and always herculean effort to breathe some life into those lines of Jefferson's and also the bit about "government by the people, of the people and for the people".

Today's America, with its revolving door, extractive lobbies is easily as corrupt as today's Italy, but the chances of anyone in the United States ever giving the "good and the great" such a fright as Signor Grillo is giving their Italian counterparts is practically nil. DS

Capitalism: is we is or is we aint?

David Seaton's News Links

Read carefully the two quotes below as if they were a Zen koan on the order of "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" or "does a dog have Buddha nature?", and see if you notice the cognitive dissonance they produce.

Consumer spending is not only the key to economic recovery in the short term; it’s also necessary for balanced growth in the long term. If our goal is to repair our damaged economy, we should bank on consumer culture — and that entails a redistribution of income away from profits toward wages, enabled by tax policy and enforced by government spending. James Livingston - New York Times

"For capitalism is abolished root and branch by the bare assumption that it is personal consumption and not enrichment that works as the compelling motive."
Karl Marx - Das Kapital - Vol. II, Ch. IV, p. 123

Meditating on the above, first, on the the need for carefree consumer spending in order to avoid an even deeper recession, and then on the essential capitalist virtues of thrift and capital accumulation, sound fiscal policies and solid currency, I began to get some understanding of where we are and the dangers we may be facing.

We are being urged to drastic cost cutting and thin-lipped austerity in order to manifest the capitalist virtues of thrift and the sacrifice of immediate gratification, with a view to accumulation, which when manifested will paradoxically lead to even greater economic hardship, certainly in the short term... and as Maynard Keynes said, "in the long run, we are all dead".

For some reason, known only to my neurons, the following simile occurred to me:

In cities such as Beirut and Cairo, a sophisticated middle class lives in a liberated, western style in the midst of a deeply conservative, Arab society, where all men, Christian and Muslim alike expect to marry virgins. In consequence, the best plastic surgeons in Europe are charging rich, young, Arab women high fees to perform Hymenorrhaphy or hymenoplasty, the surgical restoration of the hymen. This relatively simple operation is perfectly safe when performed by a skilled professional under hygienic conditions, and is, of course, performed with the patient under anesthetic.

What conservative economists are asking western consumers, the motor of the world's economies, to do right now, is to restore our capitalist "virginity"... but instead of being in the hands of competent surgeons, we are being asked to undergo surgery performed with dull knives by incompetent, butcher-quacks, with dirty hands (politicians etc)... and without anesthetic.

Once this ordeal has been undergone and our "virtue" restored, it is hoped that we, thus painfully re-cherry-ed, will soon return to our former libidinous lubricity.

The question would be: is this trip really necessary?

For many years, people have been getting jobs, owning a home, getting an education, paying their medical bills, all because of easy credit. Now, it seems to me, that having a job, owning a home, getting an education, paying medical bills, are basic human needs that almost all human beings rightfully aspire to, and rightfully demand. The system provided all those things, therefore the system was considered "good".

Now the credit has been shut off and humans no longer can get a job, own a home, get an education and pay the doctor, therefore the system is "no good" and should be changed so that people can return to owning a home, getting an education and paying the doctor.

But what was our system really? "Personal consumption" and not "enrichment" was the compelling motive that moved the economy, and that according to Karl Marx, who knew a thing or two about it, is not capitalism.

Droned if we do, etc

David Seaton's News Links

It’s insane how vulnerable we’ve made ourselves, like drunks failing to look around as they walk into traffic. Hackers could shut down the way we live, and if they hacked into drones or nuclear codes, determine the way we die. If you think it through, which most of us avoid, the prospect of Techmaggedon is terrifying. On Thursday, at John Brennan’s confirmation hearing to be C.I.A. director, some senators took a stab at thinking it through on the smart, sleek, robotic machine that dominates our political debate. (Drones, not Obama.) Maureen Dowd - New York Times

What a can of worms! Drone killings are one of those, "it seemed like such a good idea at the time", deals that comes back to haunt the people that dream them up.... like getting the Saudis to finance the war against the USSR in Afghanistan, for example.

Parking all moral considerations and constitutional guarantees for a minute, another major downside is that the technology involved isn't rocket science.... radio controlled airplanes and helicopters are even on sale in toy stores in developed countries.

Stop and think how easy it would be to use a toy helicopter, with an incendiary grenade attached to it, in as "target rich" an environment as the Isle of Manhattan. Then just think how disruptive it would be for normal life there if they had to jam all the junk-band radio frequencies used to operate RC models (and so many other devices) in order to prevent such an attack.

For a country as potentially vulnerable as the USA to use this technology as a primary weapon system is like telling children not to put beans up their noses: it is putting ideas in the heads of people without much technology or money to spend.

It is really time for a wide ranging discussion about how we got here and how to go in another direction, as difficult as that might be.

What bothers me a lot too, is that Obama is doing all this. With Bush, what you saw was what you got... But Obama is so opaque, so ambiguous, so mysterious... After four whole years I still don't feel I know who he is... Better than Romney would have been for sure, but having said that... What a can of worms! DS

What might a revolution look like?

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I finished up my last post saying:

(...) simply by nationalizing Monsanto and Walmart we would have a perfect, planned economy… in other words we are all dressed up and waiting for Lenin.

And several people have since asked me what I meant by that.

It comes in two parts the "planned economy" part and the "Lenin" part.

I use the word "Lenin" very loosely, what I mean by it is a signifier for someone or more probably something, which changes everything. Used like this digital photography played "Lenin" to Kodak's Romanov. More about this later.

The idea of a nationalized Walmart being a “planned economy” is based on the idea that the new technologies, which the soviets never mastered, would make it possible.

The idea simply assumes that Russians are bumbling incompetents and that with “American know how” making it tick, and with the American genius for logistics once applied to it, the whole thing would work smoothly. The centralization is already there, the question is only of ownership, not execution.

One of the great paradoxes in all this is that who actually owns the great corporations of today is not very clear. For example a man named J.P. Morgan no longer owns JP Morgan, it is a publicly traded company and no one institution or individual owns more than 4.00% of this financial mastodon. More on this ownership question later.

Actually what it appears we have now is a sort of socialism of the rich. Losses are socialized and profits are privatized. We have a great centralization of economic power of unclear ownership tied by lobbies to political power enabling the corporate managers to craft laws to the benefit of all concerned: lobbyists, their clients and the politicians, but not to the benefit of the public (sanitized name for “The People”). If we look at the control that is accumulated in this system we see that we already have a “planned economy”, but not exactly planned for our benefit. There is even a "nomenklatura" of the previously mentioned, highly paid managers, who run everything, and often move from corporation to corporation and even from industry to industry or from public "service" to the "private" sector.

The idea, for the moment, merely amusing, is that by the state simply taking control of a few corporations, as might happen during a war, they would instantly possess a "ready to wear", planned, socialized (if not socialist) economy.

Where is the "Lenin" for all of this? Could there be a "revolution"?

Understand that for a steak on a grill being turned over to be cooked on its other side constitutes a revolution. In that sense yes, Virginia, revolution is possible... more on that later.

An American Pol-Pot leading the masses to take Capital Hill and liquidating the enemies of progress? Not very likely. In the case of the United States, because of its enormous size, ethnic diversity and institutional solidity (petrification?) I think that capitalism will just have to take its own sweet time to rot.

At bottom, Americans are practical people and if something doesn’t work, they either fix it or throw it out and get something new, preferably the second option.

I think that if the capitalist era is ever to end it will happen in the USA, because America is the vanguard of capitalism, its most complete expression. And I don’t see it happening violently, but in the same way Americans passed from horses to Model-T Fords, from Wang word processors to PCs and from cassette players to Walkmen to Iphones. America is just one revolution after another, if you think about it... and plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Revolution is part and parcel of the American way of life.

Americans are really famous all over the world for being practical and innovative and when and if the system spins off its wheels as old Karl predicted, I think that those qualities would surely come to the fore. But given how well the system is vertebrated, it would be traumatic or it wouldn't be.

What could cause our present system to spin off its wheels and self-destruct?

Thinking it over, I imagine if would have to be some sort of "black swan". A lot of people think immediately of a terrorist attack like a dirty bomb in New York, but I think that if something like that happened, God forbid, it would tend to solidify and petrify the system even further.

No, the easiest "revolutionary" black swan that I can imagine is a great worldwide pandemic like the "Spanish Influenza" at the end of World War One or even on the scale of the 14th century, "Black Death", which killed from 30 to 60 percent of Europe's population. With globalization and its disappearance of time and distance and the ensuing promiscuity of the sophisticated with the primitive, such a plague is perfectly possible and many experts think its arrival is only a matter of time.

Something like this would be terrible anywhere, but in countries with more ethnic and social homogeneity and simpler and easier logistics, less distance and less logistical and monopolistic agricultural centralization than the USA, the effects might not change the relations of the societies as profoundly as I think they might change America's.

We have talked about centralization, Walmart, corporate ownership and the nomenklatura. Let us look at what effect our black swan of a pandemic might have on the relation of these elements to each other.

Very few Americans eat food grown anywhere near them, it may come from almost anywhere in the world at the end of a wonderfully efficient and complex logistical system that depends in turn on enormous and usually remote farms owned by great corporations known as "agribusinesses" that depend in their turn on sophisticated machinery and techniques to produce masses of specialized produce. Imagine how a pandemic with 14th century death rates would disrupt all of that: beginning on the farm, then to the transport system, but most significantly to the nerve centers of corporate headquarters, concentrations of human beings that wise survivors among the nomenklatura would want to avoid like... the plague.

Once the local Walmart had been looted, what would people eat? Obviously what remained of the government and armed forces would have to take all these systems in hand. MBAs might be drafted and forced to unlock the inventories and discover where food was stored and find ways of getting that and medicine to the survivors and to help them bury their dead. And as Katrina and Sandy have shown us, today's America doesn't do disasters particularly well, but such a struggle as I am imagining would call forth a solidarity which I am sure the survivors would look back on with nostalgia the rest of their days.

As we have seen the ownership of this very centralized system is spread out to the point of being gaseous and a dying off of the proportions I am talking of would make finding out who owned/owns what next to impossible, so when the pandemic remitted re-privatizing this orphaned, centralized system of uncertain parentage, might be impossible... think of all the dead lawyers.

So that is how I see a possible "revolution": the massive disruption of a highly centralized system of decentralized ownership leading to its nationalization in a climate of solidarity among survivors. DS

Monsanto and the banality of evil

A discussion about Monsanto arose in a private technology forum that I attend, which dredged up the following from me and that in turn I'd like to share with my regular readers. DS

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My great uncle was one of the original chemists of Monsanto... the boss had no money for the payroll and he paid them in shares... my great aunt had to work in a sweatshop for two years so that they could eat.... they all ended up rich. In those days there was a rotating board of directors, so every so often my relative, like the other original chemists, was chairman of the board...only in America, eh what? He was a lovely old guy, when I was a little kid.

I just mention this so you could understand how painful it is for me to know that Monsanto is one of the most villainous, monstrous, harmful corporations to ever have existed, which is causing thousands of Indian farmers to commit suicide (this is just a tiny sample). For me this is like discovering that my dear old, Horatio Alger of an uncle was Heinrich Himmler. Watching the wonderful "Food Inc." made my skin crawl and spoiled a hundred lovely, childhood memories for me.

There is a Spanish saying, "con las cosas de comer no se juega", which translates literally as "don't play with your food", but in Spanish "jugar", "play" also means to gamble.

The heart of our humanity in civilization is born in agriculture and naturally, being so fundamental to our deepest needs, physical, cultural and spiritual, it has a religious aspect... seen that way Monsanto is beyond blasphemy.

A few years back incensed by what I was reading about the old family "milch cow" and giving free rein to my dark journalistic arts, I used a social-hack to fool then WTO head Mike Moore into giving me the private email address of then Monsanto CEO, Bob Shapiro, the creator of the field to dinner plate "Roundup" concept. We carried on a civilized dialog for several years.

Shapiro is a very pleasant person to correspond with and I came to the conclusion, which I communicated to him, that he was an idiot-savant like the Dustin Hoffman character in "Rainman". A commercial genius, but completely tone deaf politically... When he got canned more or less for this defect, he was inclined to agree with my analysis.

He didn't seem to see the connection to his business model of thousands of Indian farmers, on losing their lands because of debt incurred by Roundup, committing suicide by drinking the stuff and that millions of other Indian country folk who have been forced by this agriculture to flee to cities with poor sanitation, where they defecate in the streets, threatening a worldwide 14th century style pandemic. He couldn't see what a storm this would raise.

My impression from my dialog with Bob Shapiro was that he saw his mission on earth solely to "create value for shareholders" and could see no other responsibility to humanity and mother earth than that... I am much reminded of Hannah Arendt's theory of the "banality of evil".

Finally I think if Monsanto could they would patent oxygen and charge us all to breathe. It's like something out of Kurt Vonnegut.

The irony of all this is that I have heard classic Marxists maintain that this is an inevitable stage in the completion of the capitalist cycle and that simply by nationalizing Monsanto and Walmart we would have a perfect, planned economy... in other words we are all dressed up and waiting for Lenin. DS

Is middle class renewal in any way based on cheap shale gas?

David Seaton's News Links

Fracking illustrated

It seems to me that the challenge of rebuilding the American middle class: bringing back the jobs, ensuring good public education, health care and decent pensions is now to a great extent predicated on a very controversial "energy revolution": the lowering the cost of energy by the method of hydraulic fracturing of gas and oil-bearing shale known as fracking.

Not only is this technique of breaking apart the shale with water mixed with chemicals supposed to lower the costs of energy for industry and reduce America's dependence on imported gas and oil, thus producing more taxable income for social programs, but also to allow the United States to reduce its armed "footprint", the billions of dollars in military resources with which we police the troubled areas of the world where much of the energy we now import comes from. The idea being that the money saved in this way would be the money used to pay off the national debt, while simultaneously guaranteeing entitlements, etc..

It may be just my fevered imagination, but since fracking appears to be extremely dangerous to both human health and the environment itself, we might be looking at a future train wreck between social democracy and green concerns. DS

The Israeli elections

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“This is a government that will not be able to make decisions on anything — on the peace process, on equal sharing of the burden or on budgetary matters,” Emmanuel Rosen, a prominent television analyst, said early Wednesday on Channel 10. “The next elections are already on the horizon.” New York Times

All the cliches about Israel come to mind here: two Israelis mean three opinions, or the land of a hundred ghettos. In fact what you have is one of the west's most unequal societies, a collective of people who range from what is left of the founding Zionist families, on through opportunistic Russian money launderers, to Yemenite and Moroccan sub-proletarians, none of them particularly religious, all seasoned with mostly American Haredim that "sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them"... nor serveth they in the Israeli armed forces, neither payeth they taxes either, by the way.

All of this mishmash directly connected to the masculine attributes of the US Congress.

I lived in Tel Aviv for a year and I loved the place, a sexy Mediterranean climate and beach filled with some of the world's most attractive women, all with the energy of New York. I had to go to Jerusalem almost every other day (I was a budding paparazzo)... horrible place, filled with priests and rabbis and soldiers with guns. And I came to the following conclusion: If the Arabs ever declared peace on the Israelis and left them strictly alone, with no external enemies, the country would tear itself apart in civil strife and probably disappear in a very short time. All that is holding them together are their enemies...

They would be crazy to want peace. DS

The Inauguration and the Speech

David Seaton's News Links

I found Obama’s message encouraging, but then again the president always speaks/reads well.

His speech was a direct attack on the Reagan revolution and made important social democratic points about solidarity and equality -- health and education -- being directly connected to economic prosperity. I think it was also important to connect gay rights to the Declaration of Independence: America is full of beautiful words, filling those words with meaning is America's perennial unfinished symphony.

Despite being black Obama isn't Doctor Martin Luther King and there doesn’t seem to be any MLK right now to pressure him. That is the American left's perennial unfinished symphony.

In his speech the president was obviously asking the people who voted for him to pressure Congress to support his agenda. I think that in many ways the ball is now in the court of America's progressives and they would be wise to play that ball as it lies. If there is even an ounce of sincerity in Barack Obama's message, this is the best opportunity that America's progressives have had since Reagan entered the White House, maybe the best since Johnson left it, ruined by Vietnam.

I think it is mistaken to criticize Obama for not being MLK, because, except for the color of their skins, there is no real similarity between Obama and King, Hawaii is a long way from Georgia and, except for the color of their skins, there are many similarities between Obama and LBJ, both being presidents of the USA and ex-senators.

Being dissatisfied is an essential ingredient in making a person progressive, but I think people on the left may be asking more of the US presidency than it can deliver. MLK, for example, was not LBJ: King produced the pressure, Johnson — who also did Vietnam — with that pressure, produced a wealth of legislation.What little we have of social democracy in America, in great part we owe to him.

Here is a sample of what LBJ did with an active society pushing him:

Johnson was a brilliant politician of uncommon intelligence and grand visions for improving the country's domestic life. His effectiveness as a presidential legislator translated into great advances, some of which had been bottled up in Congress for more than 60 years: health insurance for the elderly and the poor; federal aid to elementary, secondary and higher education; repeal of the 1924 National Origins Act giving favored treatment to Western European immigrants; environmental protections promising cleaner air and water; urban renewal under a Department of Housing and Urban Development; more effective and integrated means of national movement under a Department of Transportation; National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities; and national public television and radio. And most important, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965, respectively, ending Southern apartheid and fulfilling long-stymied constitutional promises of black freedom to vote. Robert Dallek - Los Angeles Times

The job of the left today is to create pressure, consciousness, just as King did… and be grateful that Romney didn’t win, because at least Obama finally talks like a liberal centrist in the Johnson tradition, maybe now he’ll walk like one… at least if there is enough pressure and support from the people who voted for him.

From the speech also I gather that president Obama has learned the most important lesson that Johnson can teach any progressively inclined president: you can't have guns and butter; foreign wars and social progress are inimical.

Living in Spain as I do and having become familiar with its history I have learned that Spain's decline and decadence came from spending its riches on foreign wars, dynastic and religious, and neglecting the development of its own land and people. This is the lesson that Americans may be learning. 

The Cold War is over and no matter how hard the neocons try to invent one, there is no ideological enemy facing the United States trying to undermine its "way of life"... the far away Islamic movement is one of anti-imperialist reaction to foreign interference in their societies. Finally, if and when they take power, they will have to feed their people and their people cannot eat oil, so they will have to sell it. Cost effective intelligence and immoral and unethical drones will have to keep them at bay till they are ready to deal, not expensive aircraft carrier battle groups, supersonic jets, heavy armored divisions and boots on the ground that drain America's social net of resources.

Where America does have to keep a credible military presence is Asia, but that doesn't mean getting caught in armed conflict, on the contrary, in Asia, America's navy and air force are a stabilizing influence, but the USA would be foolish to allow itself to be drawn into all the frictions produced by a newly powerful China flexing its muscles. For example, the Senkaku-Diaoyu islands. If the Japanese want to pick a fight with China, one could only wish them the best of luck, but the USA should never go to war with China to defend Japan. I wouldn't cut one school lunch or old age pension to pay for that, much less sacrifice American lives for such a cause.

That is the bottom line, keeping out of other people's fights, rebuilding America's infrastructure, social net and middle class. Let us hope that Barack Obama can deliver that. The role of progressives now is to hold Obama's feet to the fire and hold his words up to him. DS

Lance Armstrong: price versus value

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"Any given accumulation of commercial wealth may be indicative, on the one hand, of faithful industries, progressive energies, and productive ingenuities: or, on the other, it may be indicative of mortal luxury, merciless tyranny, ruinous chicanery." John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900)

Trying to find any kernel of wisdom following the news media is a little like trying to get to the nectar of Jesus Christ by reading Sinclair Lewis's "Elmer Gantry" or studying the Vatican's account books. Difficult, rare, but sometimes it happens: suddenly, lo and behold, someone as unlikely as Lance Armstrong comes along to teach us how to distinguish price from value.

Lance Armstrong

With Lance, we might even be looking at a good teaching illustration of Marx's "use value" versus "exchange value" or especially "commodity fetishism". 

There are certainly plenty of people around who have stolen -- are stealing -- more than Lance, have lied -- are lying -- more than Lance, bullied the vulnerable more than Lance, but few provide such a clear and simple story of lying, bullying, cheating, defrauding and stealing as Lance does. It is a simple story and unlike Wall Street, it's easy to understand and follow and Americans just love stories.

Lance has made a lot of money... and not only for himself... ask Nike and Anheuser-Busch or ask any kid that bought an overpriced jersey, shoes or a helmet just because Lance wore them.

His victories have been declared officially valueless, but he can still make a lot of money for himself and you can still make money by chasing his wheels up the shit-hill where he now reigns... just ask Oprah.

There is a book here and probably a film to be made from it... Who will play Lance?

Really, nothing could be simpler than Lance himself, the world is filled with mean, hard faced, sociopathic assholes like him, they only differ from him in that they can't go up a hill as fast, even doped... it is the rest of us and our reactions to Lance Armstrong's story that are complicated. DS

Democracy in an age of "unhappy capitalism": signal and noise

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They say that only the good die young.  In the short time he lived, it was given to Aaron Swartz to define the principal problem facing public life in the United States of America:

If it was conventional wisdom that a bunch of unelected bankers looking out for rich people were the reason everyone was out of work, politicians would be forced to explain to angry voters why we had this crazy system and might actually consider doing something about it. The late Aaron Swartz

This post is entitled, "democracy in an age of 'unhappy capitalism'". What do I mean by that, and what, if anything, does "happy capitalism" mean?

To explain how it works, here is a graph straight from the great vampire squid itself:

As you can see in the squid's graph between 1960 and 1990, wages were up, while at the same time America's corporations were making good money: I call that "happy capitalism", because most of the working citizenry were reasonably content and investors were too.

After 1990 (neatly coinciding with the collapse of the USSR?) the relationship wages/profit becomes erratic and in the last two years corporate profits have shot up and wages have fallen dramatically.

What does this mean?

It means that you can make a lot of money without paying even skilled people very much. People are no longer used to make you rich, only to serve you in low paying jobs once you are rich. Most of the jobs being created now are low-paying service jobs.

That could be a problem because in a democracy "unused" and underpaid people can still vote and if they understood the mechanisms impoverishing them, this could cause problems for the "users" because as Aaron Swartz said, "politicians would be forced to explain to angry voters why we had this crazy system and might actually consider doing something about it".

"Unhappy capitalism" then, is when articulate, educated, middle class people like Aaron Swartz, begin to question the system. In this way the "conventional wisdom" that Swartz talks about is created: in a national "conversation" of a great number of articulate, educated voters. Topic of the day: something has gone wrong, let's all get together and fix it.

Making that conversation difficult, hopefully impossible, is a major objective of the users facing the formerly used.

Signal and noise

Über forecaster, Nate Silver's success in predicting everything from baseball games to presidential elections is based on his methodical ability to separate the significant datum known as the "signal", from the masses of meaningless, confusing, data known as "noise".  If we take the rising of profits and the lowering of wages as the signal, then the way to distract attention from that signal and prevent a calm and intelligent conversation about the problem leading to practical, actionable solutions, is to create increasing quantities of noise that drowns out the signal.

The strategy couldn't be simpler: the money is out to activate, empower, monetize and mobilize every paranoiac, son of the wild jackass, that they can flush from America's ample underbrush. Here is a tiny sample of what is crawling out of the woodwork, taken at random from Matt Drudge's zoo:

GROUP TO BUILD ARMED NEIGHBORHOOD FORTRESS...

Charlie Daniels: 'They Want Your Guns... Don't Just Wait And See'...

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Armed vigilante groups policing Mexican towns...

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Surveillance Drones to be Launched in Orlando Skies...

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RADIO WAVES:

Hannity: States could leave union if feds continue 'radicalized, abusive' pattern...

Levin: 'I Can Barely Contain My Fury At What Is Going On'...

Michael Savage: 'Nationalist' third party to challenge Republicans.

The United States of America is a very complex country with many diverging interests and points of view; never has serene, constructive, result-oriented dialog been more necessary and probably since the Civil War itself has it been so conspicuously missing. Until this is changed the country is drifting toward disaster. More than going off a cliff, it is like going over a waterfall. This is something that must be addressed.... immediately.

When you organize your day's activities, you might make a "to do" list and put the items in order of importance.  It seems obvious to me that keeping the serious and serene political conversation audible above the insane noise produced and paid for by the extreme right, for the express purpose of paralyzing the political system, should be the primary objective of every sensible, politically aware person, whatever their location on the political spectrum from moderate conservative to the left. There are many problems to be solved and it isn't getting done.

Therefore, if America's domestic "primary contradiction", number one on the national "to do list", is cleaning corporate money from the channels of America's national "conversation" thereby making it possible to identify and solve the real problems that the American people are facing, then all elements who are willing to engage in that conversation, looking for actionable solutions, from centrist and moderates to the hard left should put away their difference for the time being and concentrate on reversing the "Citizen's United" verdict and supporting strict campaign finance reform, upending gerrymandering and ending voter suppression.

Once all that calm has been achieved, the merits of each faction's case can be assayed and allowed to stand or fall on its own merits in a free and civilized environment and we could reasonably hope, again quoting Swartz, that "politicians would be forced to explain to angry voters why we had this crazy system and might actually consider doing something about it." DS

Whither Obama

David Seaton's News Links

The demographic shift evident in the last election and the growing estrangement of the aspirational middle class from the super rich and a general disenchantment with the "conservative revolution" is offering the president-elect some interesting opportunities. However it is still going to be a hard slog, lowdown and dirty. The question now is, can Obama fight?

The slow implosion of the Republican Party — along with the growing strength of a Democratic coalition dominated by low-to-middle-income voters — threatens the power of the corporate establishment and will force big business to find new ways to reassert control of the policy-making process.(...) Although the stars are lined up in favor of the anti-corporate left, American business, when its back is to the wall, has historically proved to be extraordinarily resourceful. Thomas B. Edsall - New York Times

There is a new playing field... Will the real Obama (if there is one) please stand up? In the next few months we are going to discover whether Obama is one the longest headed, devious, cold blooded politicians to ever sit in the White House or just an empty suit. Everything he has done in politics appears to have been programed to peak at this very moment.

It seems to me that since getting elected in 2008 Obama simply tried to do everything he could to get reelected and do nothing that might prevent him from getting reelected. That defines his first four years.

He followed the plan he describes in his biography, one he developed as a lone young black man surrounded by white people, which was to "be courteous, smile a lot and don't make any sudden moves"... It worked.

Whatever Obama may really be we will see from now on.

Taking on the gun lobby will be the real test of his mettle, if he dares to go to the mat with that monster and wins, we will be looking at a serious president, and that could be extrapolated to other areas. All other adversaries will be intimidated if he humbles the NRA. If he fudges on that he will begin to look vulnerable, even a bit lame duckish. This is to be or not to be.

What does he want to do?

It seems to me that by nominating Kerry and especially Hagel, that he wants to downsize America's military micromanagement of the world's affairs, which should have been done when the USSR collapsed (perhaps sooner) and use the resources thus saved on strengthening America's infrastructure and welfare state.

I think he will continue to be a huge disappointment on human rights. It seems impossible to close Guantanamo Bay prison since there is no place to send its inmates. Obama's solution seems to have been to simply take no more prisoners and kill all of them directly where they live. So I imagine he will continue with the drones because they are a very cost effective way of intimidating faraway poor people without putting boots on the ground and dispatching carrier battle groups. That simple, that cold.

If he wants to be remembered for anything besides having been the first African-American president though, he is going to have to hit the ground running. DS

New Year's Re(v)olutions

POTUS sits in Rosa Park's seat

"It would be a good idea"

Mahatma Gandhi, when asked his opinion of western civilization.

Putting content into fine words would be the greatest of revolutions, now and always. 

Cynics today might be forgiven for thinking that the words of Jesus are often only used as a cover for serial child abuse, but who could doubt that if only all those with four grandparent that called themselves Christians, practiced only the following Christian precepts: to love their neighbors as themselves, to do unto others as they would have others do unto them, to never cast the first stone and then  forgive others their trespasses, then most of the world that even today considers itself civilized would instantly be like heaven on earth. However hypocritical Christians abound and we are as we are.

I cannot imagine that anybody would call Jesus himself a hypocrite, he certainly walked the walk, no space between his words and his actions, however hypocrites can often say memorable things too.

An example: perhaps the greatest hypocrite in America's history, Thomas Jefferson, a brutal slave owner, a sexual exploiter of his slaves, wrote the most powerful words in the American canon, words that rival the Bible in their grandeur and echo: Jefferson wrote that line, "All men are created equal"...

Despite Jefferson's hypocrisy, citizens trying to fill those words with some meaning brought about a revolution in my lifetime.

How hypocritical were Jefferson's words in America's mouth?

An example. In the segregated South, during World War Two, during America's war against fascism, African-American GIs, wearing the uniform of the United States army, often found themselves riding in the back of public buses while German POW trustees rode up front with the local white people.

How is that for hypocrisy?

The Civil Rights movement changed that. Today, with all the endless caveats you can apply, a black man is the president of the United States. He is the Chief of State of the most powerful country in the world, sitting in the White House, the tenant of a building where during most of America's history the only black people ever seen there were butlers and waiters.

People got lynched, went to jail, marched and sang for the photo that tops this post. J. Edgar Hoover would spin in his grave if he saw it. There are people still spinning when they see it.

So, if enough people make their minds up to change, to change themselves, then to change the world, then change is doable.

I would say that during the coming year, the next set of fine noble, words that need to be reconsecrated, refurbished and refilled with meaning are Abraham Lincoln's from his Gettysburg Address:

"Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth".

To do that the Citizen's United verdict needs to be overturned and campaign financing needs to be regulated. Any meaningful change begins there.

The goal is clear, now the question is, who is going to bell the cat?

Happy New Year!

DS

The "cliff"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we here we come to the big lie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happened since then? This from Vanity Fair:

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

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

The Spanish Economic Crisis Explained

David Seaton's News Links

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

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

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