Egypt.... the coup ... The bill?

Up until now, President Mubarak has enjoyed the support of the armed forces. He was, after all, a career air force officer suddenly catapulted to the presidency when Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981. But if these protests continue and intensify there are bound to be senior voices within the military tempted to urge him to stand down. -  BBC News

David Seaton's News Links

Lieutenant colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who overthrew King Farouk, was an Egyptian army officer. Anwar El Sadat, who succeeded Nasser, was a military officer, who earlier had joined Nasser in overthrowing Farouk. Hosni Mubarak, an air force general, succeeded Sadat on his assassination.

Therefore it would be reasonable to suppose that Mubarak's successor will be a military officer too.

The question would be: what kind of a military officer, what rank?

As a general rule of thumb, the higher ranking the officer, the more conservative the coup.

Notice that Nasser was a Lt. Col, when he removed Farouk, so was Lybia's Muammar al-Gaddafi, when he took power from King Idris, and of course Venezuela's Hugo Chávez was a paratroop colonel, when he attempted his coup d'etat.  American backed generals tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Chávez, but were not supported by the lower ranking officers. Lower ranking officer's coups are nationalist revolutionaries, higher ranking officers like Chile's Pinochet tend to act under American supervision.

In the Egyptian case, the higher ranking officers are probably firmly in the US pocket, but among the colonels, majors and captains there may be men that are of the nationalistic mode of Nasser and that are chafing at Egypt's enabling Israel in league with American interests.

The key to this question may very well be something as simple as the wives of colonels and majors whose husbands are not making as good salaries as the husbands of their sisters working in the private sector. These are men who have direct command over the troops... the fat generals sit in their offices raking in the graft. Imagine the bedroom scenes after family dinners... many a coup d'etat has begun there.
 

Probably the first move to oust Mubarak would come from senior officers, eager to execute a Lampedusian, "change everything in order to change nothing" maneuver and thus keep American military aid in place. If this doesn't satisfy the masses in the street, than a group of younger officers, more in touch with popular feeling, might make their move. The question then would be if those younger officers would be interested in some sort of "national reconciliation" with the Muslim Brotherhood, in which case America's whole foreign policy in the Middle East gets flushed down the Nile.

The colonel becomes a general, the major becomes a colonel and their wives are happy, they are now the stars of the family dinners, the ones who can fix fat state contracts. They have to cut out wine and wear a hijab and pray five times a day? Paris vaut bien une messe. DS

The "Sputnik Moment": One nation with paranoia for all

 

David Seaton's News Links

I remember once reading an Indian guru, who said that if the water buffalo had a god, it would probably look like a very large water buffalo. He believed that there is only one god, formless and all pervading, but that he/she/it responds to intense worship by taking on the form that most pleases his/her/its devotees depending on their temperament and station in life.

I am beginning to think that the goddess of paranoia pursues a similar strategy: she appears to the crunchy granola/ruccola crowd as global warming and to the deep fried Mars Bar set as black helicopters.

To each of her myriad of devotees she appears in the form most guaranteed to seduce and charm them, but at bottom, there is no paranoia but paranoia and the media is her witness.

I was reminded of an incident from the darkest days of the Second World War, a time with millions of human beings freshly dead, or about to die, with European civilization ground to dust or burned to ashes, when there, deep in his bomb poof bunker, Winston Churchill sent a pudding back to the kitchen, complaining that it had "no theme".

That, I think is problem with America's free floating paranoia: like Winnie's dessert, the paranoia pudding that Americans are collectively pulling, has no "theme".

Sensing this themelessness and needing a theme himself, President Barack Obama turned this up in his State of the Union speech:

Grasping to sum up the country’s perilous position, the US president said the country was facing its “Sputnik moment”, a reference to the alarm felt in 1957 when the former Soviet Union launched the first orbiting satellite. “We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world,” he said. - Financial Times

The president is too young to have lived the first "Sputnik moment", but it was one of the turning points of my life and on hearing the word "Sputnik", the goddess of paranoia walked over my grave.

For any American child alive then who was principally interested in the humanities: art, literature, history, as I was, it was a terrible moment. The Soviet Union, may she rest in peace, put up the first hunk of the endless rubbish that now tirelessly circles our planet, something about the size of a grapefruit that sailed the heavens in earth orbit going "beep, beep, beep", soon to be followed by an unfortunate dog named Laika, the first warmblooded creature to die out there. From one day to the next, there was a political-ideological science hysteria that prioritized everything that I am not interested in: math, chemistry etc, to the detriment of everything I love. I think it was then that I vowed to myself that I would someday live in Europe, as far away as I could get from such barren, Sputnik induced, philistinism. Without the first "Sputnik moment" I might never have left.

But my private paranoia is just another face of the hydra-headed goddess of American paranoia. And the president would be kidding himself if he thought that America's decline is the mother of all our paranoia. He did touch briefly on what I do believe is the goddess's true form.

We are part of the American family. We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed; that the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different than those of our own children, and that they all deserve the chance to be fulfilled. That, too, is what sets us apart as a nation. - President Barack Obama

I disagree, I think the opposite is precisely the truth and that is what "sets us apart as a nation".... And I can prove it with a few simple graphs:

Actually this is exactly what  doesn't set us apart, here is the entire world's estimated distribution of wealth:

So as you can see, if anything sets us apart it is that the distribution of wealth in the USA is much more unequal than the world average.

The previous illustrations are examples of what is called the "Champagne Glass Graph", let's look at this simple pie-chart to get a clearer idea of what is going on.

So if there is one thing the American people are not is a  "family" with "common goals". One percent of the population controls thirty five percent of the net worth. Twenty percent of the population controls eighty five percent of that wealth. That leaves no less than eighty percent of the population to divide up the remaining fifteen percent of the wealth left over.

This is a reality that Americans don't face easily. Here is the reality contrasted with what people think that realty is and with what they think that reality should be:

How does that sort of wealth distribution play out in real life? Here is a reading of America's mood from Pew Research:

Hat to über-wonk Donal

The survey finds that a majority of the public (57%) says it is very difficult or difficult to afford things they really want. About the same percentage said this two years ago (55%). And for many Americans, affording basic necessities remains a struggle – 51% say it is difficult to afford health care, 48% say the same about their home heating and electric bills, and 29% say it is difficult to afford food. - Pew Research Center

In the richest country in world nearly thirty percent of the population have trouble earning enough money to eat. Fifty one percent say it is difficult to afford health care and another forty eight percent can't afford to heat their homes. 

As James Kunstler says:

You kind of wonder here in the flash-frozen northeast if, a few days from now, scores of dead bodies will be found in unheated trailers across the county. The Weather Channel said 20-below-zero this morning in upstate New York. I know there are people so desperately poor out there because a couple of weeks ago I overheard a supermarket worker say she couldn't afford to buy propane. And she had a job!

Now having read that you wonder how Obama could say the following with a straight face:

We are part of the American family. We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people

So here is how the paranoia thing works:

The one percent  of the population that controls forty three percent of the financial wealth and the next four percent that controls twenty nine percent, plus those who control the next twenty one percent are justifiably paranoiac thinking what would happen if the eighty percent of the population left with only seven percent of the financial wealth ever woke up and decided to change the percentages around, if only by democratically using income taxes to redistribute that wealth. 

So the major cultural, legal and ideological industry of the USA is to keep that eighty percent, the peasantry,  from actually discovering who is making them so miserable and how they do it and then getting together and changing the situation... as has so often happened throughout history. With ninety three percent of America's money at their disposal there is no lack of funds for the one percenters to do the job.

 

And that boys and girls explains why so many Americans are worried about Islam and abortion and black helicopters and climate change and transgenic food and whether Barack Obama was born in the USA and polar bears. Anything but the 800 pound gorilla in the room... identifying the fucker and the fuckee.

Paranoia is what "binds us together as one people"... the paranoia of the haves, fearing that the have nots will someday dispossess them and the have nots with whatever paranoia du jour  that the media, owned by that one percent, chooses to feed them and that "suits their temperament and station in life". DS

Too bad Obama can't talk like Ricky Gervais

David Seaton's News Links

I wasn't really paying attention, but I read that there was this big hoohah about Ricky Gervais presentation of the 2011 Golden Globe awards, so out of idle curiosity I dialed it up on YouTube. I was ravished.

It was wonderful. All these fat egos of today's overbloated, more than mediocre Hollywood, sitting there, waiting to be worshiped, and Gervais just flailed them alive. Delicious! Reality invaded the Winter Palace like the Red Death in Poe's story.

Everything about it was perfect, beginning with Gervais's working class English accent, just made for taking the mickey out of a troop of jackasses... Wonderfully "inappropriate behavior".  The entire absurdity of  our star worship stripped naked. Perfectly savage!

When I was a young fellow, I went to school in England and I remember what a revelation it was for me how uncompromising and wildly funny their sense of humor was. Gervais brought it all back and what was best of all for me was the shocked reaction of all these princesses and princes of self-love.

I couldn't help thinking how great it would be if Obama could talk like that to the Republicans and the Tea Party. Perhaps that would be the only way to restore sanity to the Republic. Jon Stewart is much too tame.DS

Freedom in America: as plain as the nose on your face

Severe Concomitant Esotropia

David Seaton's News Links

The most obvious things are often the hardest to see: for example, without a mirror it is impossible to see the nose on your face... unless of course you suffer from severe concomitant esotropia, in which case you hardly see anything else but the nose on your face.  Much of American political discourse is victim to both mirrorlessness and mental esotropia.

Although the Tucson shooter had no known political affiliation, because a congresswoman was attacked, the Tucson massacre is being treated as a political act. In a sense I think it is it is one, but only for what it reveals about the contradictory pull of the American reality on the America's subconscious.

Some might say that, since the perpetrator of the massacre is insane, his act has no meaning in itself, simply the "tale told by an idiot". This would be missing the point. Insane people's acts do have meaning, but the meanings are private, dark, obscure and must be read as metaphors, as in the interpretation of dreams.  They live in their dream world and perhaps their dream world is not so different from ours, differing mostly in that we only visit that world in our sleep or under the influence of drugs and they spend their tortured lives inhabiting it.  Their life is a "daymare", so to speak. Perhaps we could learn about our own hidden darkness by studying his visible darkness. 

Violent fantasies spring from the frustration of powerlessness. 

Jared Loughner  dreamed of the power of a gun, he dreamed of killing, the ultimate power:  darkened living rooms and movie theaters all over America are filled with men, women and even children, who dream the same violent dreams, every day, for hours on end... The difference: Jared Loughner's dream came true.

As insane as Jared Loughner is, there are hundreds of people in Tucson even crazier than he is... the thousands of people who went to the "Cross Roads of the West" gun show in Tucson the Saturday after the massacre... business was brisk. That is what is unique... not the killings themselves.

The United States is not alone among developed nations in having an occasional citizen run amok with a gun. Just the other day in the Catalonian town of Olot, here in Spain,  we had such an incident.

An older man was about to lose his job and have the bank foreclose on him, (sound familiar?) So he took his rabbit gun, loaded it with buckshot, went into a cafe and shot his boss and his boss's adult son dead, then got into his car and drove to the bank, where he shot dead the bank manager and an employee that he found there, and then he calmly went to the police station and turned himself in. He will now be lodged and fed by the Spanish taxpayer. None of his neighbors ever considered the killer crazy, but all were in agreement that he had always been a mean and nasty son of a bitch... America has no monopoly of those.

What makes American gun violence rather unique is the type and free availability of the weapons we employ when we run amok and more unique than that is the wide public demand that military grade weapons be kept available to all, despite frequent massacres. 

It is hard to carry out a massacre on the order of Tucson or Virginia Tech with only a double barreled shotgun.  Glock  automatics and assault rifles are not freely available in Spain and  I don't think very many Spanish people would like them to be. They do not feel that their "freedom" is endangered by not being allowed to own automatic pistols and assault rifles. 

More than examining the fevered brain of Jared Loughner, I am interested in examining why so many Americans feel they need to carry such deadly weapons in order to be "free". Of what? From what? For what? Are they right to feel threatened?  If so, why?

Obviously they do feel their freedom is threatened and depending on how they define the word freedom, they may have reason to feel so.

There are over 300M Americans living in a military juggernaut occupying a huge space that spans a continent: the world's most populated country after China and India.  This enormous collective is a grab bag of ethnic and religious origins and quite a few of the inhabitants are recent arrivals who have only a tenuous grasp of the official language.

However disagreeable this might seem,  when there are so many different people, impersonal rules and laws have to govern every aspect of the relations and conflicts between total strangers. Nothing can be left to chance. The larger and more heterogeneous the collective, the greater number of rules needed and the greater the severity needed to enforce them. I have talked to Spanish bankers who have been operating banks in the USA and they are amazed at the mind boggling quantities of rules and regulations and the armies of lawyers you need to do even the simplest things. The fear of litigation is always in the room.  Nothing can be taken as "understood",  everything has to be on paper.

Thinking this over, it occurred to me that the US was an extreme example of an enormous collective of unrelated strangers.  A natural candidate for being a micromanaged dictatorship. What seemed strange, when seen under this prism, was that at the same time this collective  maintains a stubborn fiction of great and untrammeled individualism and personal liberty.

I say "fiction", because the USA is a country where you can get sixteen years in jail for stealing a candy bar, where the prisons are full of people sent there for possessing small quantities of cannabis, where the death penalty still exists... you name it. Certainly the difference in punishment for those who caused the financial crisis and those who steal candy bars, seems more in keeping with a repressive and punitive kleptocracy then a land where supposedly "all men are created equal".

Of course if we look at that phrase, we have to remember that is was written by a man who owned African slaves and lived on land stolen from the Native-Americans, therefore it might be worth the trouble to subject it to a severe exegesis, because it is not truly clear what a person in Thomas Jefferson's position and time actually meant when he used the word, "men" or the word, "all" or the word "equal" or for that matter even what he meant when used the words "created" and "are".

Sometimes the ringing words of classic texts are less sonorous when rendered into the common speech of today. If for example, you compare a text from the King James Bible with the same text in the New American Standard Bible, you'll get an idea of what I  am talking about.  But, more than that, under the pressures of its immense size and diversity, American English seems to have deteriorated rapidly since the end of the Second World War, until many examples of contemporary American public speech are so filled with cryptic euphemisms that they seem products of a Google translation from the Japanese. I could write an entire rant about the newly coined euphemism, "inappropriate behavior", which appears to cover everything from picking your nose to child molesting.

Fortunately some Americans have not lost the ability to write simple, clear, declarative sentences. Here is how Paul Krugman describes the idea some Americans have of freedom:

One side of American politics (...) believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty. Paul Krugman

Using Krugman to help us translate the Declaration of Independence into contemporary right wing American English; the following phrase, written, signed and promulgated by slave holders, which reads, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", might be freely rendered in Tea Party speak as, "By God, everybody like me has certain privileges which cannot be taken away: you aren't allowed to kill us, we can do anything we want, and we are here to have a good time."

I believe their paranoia is justified. Reality is not on their side. DS

The shooting in Tucson: the sound and the fury

A 22-year-old man described as a social outcast with wild beliefs steeped in mistrust faces a federal court hearing Monday on charges he tried to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in a Tucson shooting rampage that left six people dead. - Associated Press

David Seaton's News Links

The obligatory theme for a political blogger this week has been the Tucson shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Wading through the papers, columns and the bloggers, everything I have read about is a stew of the same cliches that appear after every shooting of this kind. Among all the flood of cliches I found one, single, memorable quote from (as often happens) "Saint" Bob Herbert of the New York Times:

I remember having lunch with Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, a few days after the Virginia Tech tragedy. She shook her head at the senseless loss of so many students and teachers, then told me: “We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence. As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”

At the bottom of it all lies what is, in my opinion, the marker, the key, to all of America's present day political dysfunction:

Because of an amendment to a sclerotic 18th century document (a time when it took about a minute to muzzle-load a single-shot, flintlock pistol) a 21rst century, gibbering maniac can purchase, carry and fire a semi-automatic pistol with a 30 bullet clip.

Here is the tragic key:

I get the feeling that much of the entire document is about as relevant to contemporary American life as that treasured Second Amendment and with similar results in all fields touched by political organization.

The chance of any of this ever getting changed?

Practically nil.

Another doctoral thesis for my "future Chinese historians"?

Amidst the sadness and the sick feeling that senseless violence brings, I noticed something underneath, a feeling that was obscenely inappropriate to the tragedy of the occasion: boredom.

I find myself not wanting to write about American politics anymore. Political news from the US seems increasingly, to my ears at least, to be the Shakespearean, "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

I write about politics for two basic reasons: because people tell me that I have some understanding of it, but mostly because I have discovered late in life that I love to write...

I love the mere act of writing itself, the putting together of appropriate words in the appropriate order in such a rich and beautiful language as ours... and political commentary is vaccinated against the terror of writer's block. There is something to write about every day. But what is coming out of the States is so hopelessly repetitive and so locked and loaded in its ideological matryoshka that it produces for me a "Larsen effect" of stupefying dissonance.

The world's a big place and I am going to give more attention to other problems, in the words of Robby Krieger, "The time to hesitate is through/ No time to wallow in the mire"... I hope my regular readers will bear with me while I work this out.. DS

Without a "Golden Voice" or a "Golden Kidney".... The "Fickle Finger of Fate"

David Seaton's News Links

The story of a homeless beggar with a "golden voice" has caught the world's imagination. The man in question, Ted Williams, is charming and witty, with suffering written all over him, and it is impossible not to wish him well.  From one moment to the next, this poor man, who was sleeping in a makeshift tent behind a filling station and panhandling spare change beside the highway, is now appearing on national television and has many job offers... If the decompression and sudden attention doesn't destabilize him and cause him to fall back into the drugs and alcohol that ruined him in the first place, his celebrity and future prosperity are now assured.

I can't help wondering what would have become of Ted Williams if he were a former electrician or an ex Wal-Mart "associate" without any stunning talent like Ted has.  

For a rich, western, nation, Ted's story is a bit unique... and not just the "only in America" thing of becoming world famous overnight.

Let me tell you a little story from the far off world of the 1970s.

The father of friend of mine from those years was Spain's ambassador in Norway. In front of the Spanish embassy in Oslo was little park and living in that park, sleeping on a park bench, was a very shabby wino.

Now, after some 800 years of Moorish occupation, the Spanish have been left with a few Islamic habits, such as their proverbial hospitality and also the Muslim custom of "al-zakat", the giving of alms to beggars in return for their blessing, "que Díos se lo pague", (may God pay you).

Spanish ladies are an especially soft touch.

So, very soon after arriving in Oslo, my friend's mother, on spotting the wino sleeping in front of the embassy, took him a bowl of hot soup and a few coins. She discovered to her astonishment that he was quite indignant, he not only refused the food and the alms, he took out his official government, "registered alcoholic" card and explained to her that that government employees picked him up once a week and took him for a medical check up, vitamin injections and a bath. I imagine that if he had the slightest interest in going on the water wagon there would have been psychologists and group therapy to help him. As far as the Norwegian state was concerned, the choice was his and they would help him either way. My friend's mother was quite impressed back then. Nowadays she wouldn't be that impressed, because today Spain has similar services. 

I am sharing this story with my American readers to give them an idea of how a civilized, rich, western country (Norway) and a civilized, if not quite so rich, western country, (Spain) handle a problem like the one Ted Williams had. I also imagine that if a Norwegian Ted Williams was able to dry out, that the state would have put him in vocational training courses and with his "golden voice", in the course of time, he would have found work in Norwegian radio without having to wait for the "fickle finger of fate" to turn him into a viral sensation on YouTube. Not so much fun for the rest of us, but probably easier on his nervous system.

The other story that impressed me in similar fashion this week is the story of the Scott sisters of Mississippi. Bob Herbert tells it so well, that I'll just quote him:

As insane as it may seem, Gladys and her sister, Jamie, are each serving consecutive life sentences in a state prison in Mississippi for their alleged role in a robbery in 1993 in which no one was hurt and $11 supposedly was taken.(...) The prison terms were suspended — not commuted — on the condition that Gladys donate a kidney to Jamie, who is seriously ill with diabetes and high blood pressure and receives dialysis at least three times a week.(...) Governor Barbour did not offer any expression of concern for Jamie’s health in his statement announcing the sentence suspension. He said of the sisters: “Their incarceration is no longer necessary for public safety or rehabilitation, and Jamie Scott’s medical condition creates a substantial cost to the state of Mississippi.” (...) What is likely to get lost in the story of the Scott sisters finally being freed is just how hideous and how outlandish their experience really was. How can it be possible for individuals with no prior criminal record to be sentenced to two consecutive life terms for a crime in which no one was hurt and $11 was taken? Who had it in for them, and why was that allowed to happen? Bob Herbert - NYT

In the case of the Scott sisters it is obvious that being black and in Mississippi was a huge component of their problem. The whole thing reminds me of a story from northern Georgia that my father told me way back in the 1960, when he worked there... and I wonder how much has changed? 

A Yankee salesman is driving very fast down a back road in Georgia in a terrible hurry to make it on time to an appointment in a nearby town. As he tears down the road,  two black men walk out from behind a tree and start to cross the road, the Yankee is going too fast to stop and he hits them. One of them is thrown twenty feet into a cotton field and the other crashes through the windshield into the car's front seat... both men are bleeding and unconscious. The horrified salesman manages to run to a nearby farmhouse and call the county sheriff. In a short time a siren is heard and a squad car pulls up light flashing. Out steps the sheriff, a full "Rod Steiger", Georgia sheriff: mirror sun glasses, thin lips with toothpick and a very fat gut. The frantic salesman runs up to the sheriff and says, "this is terrible sheriff, what will the charges be?". The sheriff  slowly surveys the scene and drawls, "Well, this n****r here in the front seat, we'll charge him with breaking and entering and that one over there we'll charge him with leaving the scene of an accident".

Reading about the Scott sisters, I wonder what is so "new" about the "New South"?

I also wonder, how much of a coincidence it is that the Scott sisters and Ted Williams are African-Americans. Certainly all three of them are/were horribly vulnerable and it is true that some of America's most vulnerable citizens are conveniently color-coded. But there are also many people of varying shades of pink and gray who are in situations of stark neglect that are just as obscene as that of Williams and the Scott sisters.

In the end I think that even more than racism, which, no matter how nasty it is, at least has some passion, some feeling in it; the story of Ted and the Scotts and of all the vulnerable people in America, is the story of the callousness indifference of the system. DS

Poor United States, so far from God and so close to... the USA

The lesson of the past few years: Watch out for things that can go massively wrong. What could go massively wrong in 2011? Let's start next door, with Mexico.  Mexico drug war a nightmare scenario - CNN

David Seaton's News Links

I put the quote above, one that I have taken at random from CNN, to avoid being accused of setting up a straw man -- the idea that no one in the USA is worried about the Mexican drug war. Plenty of people are very worried, and for all the right reasons. All I want to do here is add some more reasons of my own to be worried. 

Many people fear, and they have good reason to do so, that Mexico may be in danger of becoming a "failed state", or may already be one to some extent. I am not that optimistic, I think that the real danger may be that the United States of America is in danger of becoming a "failed state" or may already be one to some extent and that Mexico's dilemma is in great part only a symptom of America's own dilemma.

This is really not all that complicated:

What is happening in Mexico is because of unsolved problems in the USA.

Americans consume 60 percent of the world's illegal drugs. Quaker.org

Ye Quakers really hath got this one all figured out:

Drugs are the ultimate consumer product for people who want to feel good now without benefit of hard work, social interaction, or making a productive contribution to society. Drug dealers are living out the rags-to-riches American dream as private entrepreneurs desperately trying to become upwardly mobile. That is why we could not win the war on drugs. We are the enemy, and we cannot face that fact. So we launched a half-hearted, half-baked war against a menace that only mirrors ourselves. Quaker.org

So it turns out that the Americans have an insatiable appetite for drugs -- unmatched in all the world -- seemingly bottomless pockets to pay for the stuff, after which, the American banks launder the drug money, and then to top it off, the US gun dealers take this laundered money and sell the Mexican drug lords the military grade weapons to fight off the Mexican army and police and to murder some 30,000 people in the last four years. Really you'd have to ask yourself which of the two states failed first, Mexico or the USA?

But all of this is the easy part... when states fail to deliver reasonable governance to this degree, when a state is what I call "bath tub ready", what follows is difficult to predict beyond its messiness.

Here is a possible scenario of political "science fiction":

Over the last few years, the drug gangs of Mexico have developed into very sophisticated paramilitary organizations with expertize in counter-surveillance, counter-intelligence, recruiting and corrupting public officials, confronting conventional military power, money laundering, clandestine transnational movement of men and materiel, financial engineering and communications of  all kinds, not just their primary skill set of torturing and killing people and blowing things up.

A large number of poor young Mexicans, both men and women, without a great deal to look forward to in life, are joining these organizations, where they are being exposed to and being trained in the above mentioned skills to a high degree. This might be the proper place to point out that these are the typical organizational and operating capabilities of a national liberation movement. It would appear that developed countries' addiction to illegal recreational drugs is the natural way to finance revolutionary activity in the underdeveloped countries that produce or transport those drugs... That is how the Taliban finance their long running war against the United States, by the way. Here might also be a good place to point out that traditional South American revolutionary movements such as Colombia's FARC and Peru's "Shining Path" already finance themselves by catering to American's love of cocaine and that neither Colombia nor Peru share Mexico's vibrant revolutionary traditions.

So it might be logical to postulate that if a contemporary Emiliano Zapata were to appear among the poor of  Mexico, he or she would almost certainly spring from the ranks of the young people who are being armed and trained by the Mexican drug lords. Many commentators accuse the FARC and the Shining Path guerrillas of being nothing more than drug gangs disguised as revolutionaries... perhaps to win the sympathy of Mexican poor, the Mexican drug lords might consider donning such a disguise themselves. Or perhaps one of their number might have a genuinely patriotic epiphany... Who knows? But the temptation would be great. As we know in the United States, wrapping oneself in the flag is... why continue?

But however such a development took place it would lead to outcomes much worse than anything that the Middle East or South West Asia could ever dish up. Nothing that Al Qaida or any Islamic organization could execute would ever destabilize life in the USA even a fraction of what a well funded, well armed and sophisticated revolutionary movement in Mexico could. 

Imagine what sort of nativist paranoia and racist hysteria would result if only one single Mexican woman ever blew herself up in a crowded shopping center in Los Angeles. Impossible you say, suicide bombers are always Muslim fanatics going for the 72 virgins in Islamic paradise... Sorry, but the exploding vest, the most effective terrorist weapon ever developed was the invention of Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, a secular, nationalist liberation movement. Globalization means the free movement of ideas, remember?

In the 1990s as the Russians lost control of their traditional spheres of influence; the world witnessed the seemingly magic disintegration of the czarist empire that Russia had maintained through world wars and revolution since the 17th century. The similarities to the deflation of US power in Latin America are striking. If anything defines the times we are living through it is that the unthinkable and the unbelievable not only can happen, they are almost sure to happen, just as sheep are cloned and the New York skyline is fractured.

But remember, what happens in Mexico is financed by the American hunger for chemical release from their daily lives and armed by the greed of American arm dealers, who are unrestrained because the American political system is paralyzed by special interest lobbies. 

The United States is the world's richest, most powerful country, only the United States can defeat or destroy the United States... "Heck of  job Uncle Sam!" DS

Ending the First Decade of the 21rst Century

David Seaton's News Links

Sometimes after writing a long, rather ponderous piece like my last one, I like to follow it with a shorter and lighter version of more or less the same thing. This is some sort of a parallel text that grows out of its predecessor.

We are at the end of the first decade of a new millennia, something that doesn't happen every day. I've chosen two images to describe the decade we are leaving behind us. I imagine most people who wished to portray these years, would use the Twin Towers in flames, the idea being that "everything changed" when Al Qaida busted up New York. I don't think so. I think that "everything changed" when people began to see that even by running faster they weren't getting anywhere.

The first picture at the top of this piece is of Bernie Madoff, disguised as an Obama poster. By this I don't wish to insinuate that Obama is a crook like Madoff, I am more interested in illustrating disillusionment. Those who hoped that Bernie would  make them rich without their doing a lick of work were bitterly disappointed as were those who thought that by simply casting their vote, when Obama arrived in Washington the waters of  the Potomac would part and Pharaoh's hosts would be engulfed: they too have felt similarly short changed. Since Obama chose to take upon himself the mantle or the  brand, of "Hope", he has also been stuck with the dregs of "Hopelessness", when he  turned out to be such a damp squib. With  Madoff as the "Audacity of Hope" poster boy, I wished to create a poetic image of the wise folk saying that, "hope is not a plan".

The decade we leave behind us was the story of the disasters brought on by the money changers in the temples of Wall Street and by the paralysis of the American political system as it is being dragged helplessly toward Grover Norquist's bathtub.

So Bernie symbolizes the malodorous financial sector and President Obama symbolizes the starved and frozen political system and the poster symbolizes the marketing involved in making some  people think that Bernie Madoff possessed the secret of endlessly multiplying wealth,  while other people thought that Barack Obama had the secret of healing all of  America's defects and disasters and making the lion lie down with the lamb,  all the while feeding the multitude on five loaves and two fishes. When the guy who can do that finally shows up, no poster will be needed to illustrate, that as Bob Marley put it, "There ain't no hiding place from the Father of Creation"....  We have not gotten that far yet... I hope, I hope, I am still amazed that so many people thought we had.

As far removed as from each other the intentions of both men surely must be, those who gave  Madoff their money and those who gave their votes to Obama, would all probably  rather not be reminded of what a distance there is between what they expected, waited and hoped for and what they finally received.

The next image is simply is graph that illustrates the leitmotif of most working  people's lives today: that even by running faster, they aren't making progress,  that the brass ring is no longer within their grasp no matter how fast the merry-go-round spins. That middle class life is turning out to be  just another Ponzi scheme, like Bernie's.

Hat to: Jon Taplin

There are lot of wonderful graphs around, but I can't think of another that describes the middle class mood so well as this one does. I would like to see some further information to confirm my hunch that, as child labor is still illegal, the slight rise in household median income, while real hourly wages first declined then stagnated, is mostly due to all the housewives and mothers joining the work force.

The next ten years will be colored by the bad taste of so much disillusionment and there will be no lack of demagogues eager to poison the system further. 

Hope? Been there, done that.

Lucidity is the only thing that will save us now. DS

New Year's 2011... singing in Grover Norquist's bathtub

Singing in the bathtub
Happy once again
Watching all my troubles
Go swinging down the drain

Singing through the soap suds
Life is full of hope
You can sing with feeling
While feeling for the soap.
"Singing in the Bathtub"

David Seaton's News Links

It's New Year's; this is when we are supposed to look over the past and think about the future. With the USA the situation is pretty simple: a large percentage of Americans are batshit crazy and the state itself is in tatters.

Simple concept, but how it might play out could get complicated

Many observers in America, and around the world, are asking themselves "Why are so many Americans so crazy?" and "Why is nothing done about it?". The answer to the first question is that living in a cloud of misinformation, they are being driven insane.

Over half of surveyed Republicans said they believe that the president is a socialist Muslim who wants to take away gun rights and turn over U.S. sovereignty to the U.N. What’s deeper, though, is the vitriol of those beliefs, with a substantial number of Republicans believing that Obama resents America's heritage (47 percent), is the "domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitution speaks of" (45 percent), wants to use an economic or terrorist event as an excuse to take dictatorial powers (41 percent), is doing some of the same stuff that Hitler did (38 percent), and may, in fact, be the Anti-Christ (24 percent). Daily Beast    

There is always the temptation to see certain people as reasonable when they aren't. "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. Isaiah 1:18", was the favorite bible passage of Lyndon Baines Johnson and it describes the basic attitude of all successful negotiators. The lesson learned from the epic battle to pass a more than tame and mediocre health bill is that it is impossible to negotiate with whipped up insanity.

Before going further it is essential to understand that a racism as ingrained as America's is about much more than the color of a person's skin. It is a traditional element of social control and is much more about controlling the white people than about controlling the black people.

All of this insanity, from tea party to Antichrist is about using racism to distract people from seeing clearly what is right in front of their faces: the American Dream has run out of road. The ideal of upward social mobility for anyone willing to work hard is only a memory.

The idea is very simple, classic really. The system is in crisis, social inequality is widening and hardening, so stimulating paranoia and racism is a simple and effective way of keeping people from thinking about things like taxing the rich in order to get good public schools, affordable health care and other such Bolshevik twaddle.

Essentially what we have is Rupert Murdoch in the role of Joseph Goebbels,  with Beck and company playing post-modern George Wallace, nightly on Fox.

To understand this craziness we have to turn it inside out. The first thing about it that catches my attention in the Harris and similar polls is that a significant portion of the American population is totally paranoid and extremely suggestible. If we discount genetics and/or some hallucinogen that has been added to the water, we would have to look at objective factors to account for this vulnerability.

To begin with America's cult of competition, of dividing people from childhood into "winners" and "losers", has created an entire nation within the nation of losers: an enormous mass of people who feel terrible about themselves.

The American Dream is based on social mobility, but a great many Americans have not "moved" up since they arrived, even many who arrived during colonial times. At this moment many are on an express elevator moving down.

Since colonial times the subjugation and humiliation of African-Americans has provided a valuable tool in defusing social tensions in the rest of the population.

It all goes back that far.

Probably the most valuable service to domestic peace that slaves provided even, or especially, for those who didn't own them, was the role of being someone even the most miserable white person could feel superior to.

The most grievous problem encased in American racism is not the racism in itself, the problem is a society or a culture that divides human beings into "winners" and "losers" and punishes the losers so mercilessly. These unfortunates simply cannot survive psychologically without their "whipping boy". Racism is a tool of social control. The classic "divide and rule".

That is the dirty little family secret of American capitalism: keeping the races at each others throats prevents the social democracy that exists in practically every other country of similar economic development.

God knows that America is full of desperately miserable white people. Not all of them are poor, not by long shot. The Tea Party is living proof of that.

For losing and feeling miserable in America is not just economic, a study of marketing messages will give you an idea of the infinite ways that an American can be a "loser".

The entire American consumer economy, which is 70% of the total, is based on making people feel bad about themselves, making them feel poor, ugly, sick, helpless, stupid, inadequate and then offering to sell them something to relieve the pain of rejection and failure. A person of color might blame all the frustrations of life on race prejudice and he or she would probably be right in most cases. The white loser, and they are legion, hasn't ever had even that safety valve.

Those whites who fear they might be "losers" themselves, and if we look at the economic and psychological facts of life in today's American, that might include most American whites, desperately need someone to look down upon as a psychological safety valve and of course, since time immemorial African-Americans, even the lightest skinned among them, have served that purpose. Their status as loser was even pleasing to the abolitionists that wanted to "uplift" them.

For literally hundreds of years, besides this role as the official ultimate-loser, no other role beyond entertaining or lifting heavy loads was permitted them.

In 1952 an African-American author, Ralph Ellison published a ground breaking novel, “The Invisible Man”, whose title many critics feel defined the experience of people of African descent in America: that of being invisible and voiceless. In the years that followed, the people of color in the United States raised their voices and became visible, to the great and continuing discomfort of many whites. The white people of the US south who once voted solidly Democratic have punished that party’s leadership of the civil rights movement by voting solidly Republican ever since… the key to the victories of Nixon, Reagan and Bush. The “Conservative Revolution”, that only favors the rich, is based on the resentment of poor whites and gives the wealthy the necessary numbers to win elections. It was discovered that the poor whites of the American south (and not just the south), in desperate need of good public schools and socialized medicine hated black people more than they loved their own children or themselves. Talk about tragic.

With Barack Obama much of this resentment is coming to head.

Up till now, American "identity" politics was always played with surrogates: WASP or "waspable" white men wearing masks.

Thus Bill Clinton was "America's first black president". The whatever WASP whose turn it was to woo Latinos, would eat tacos and say "juntos podemos" with an atrocious accent etc, etc. Candidates would attempt to show that they were "sensitive" to the feminist agenda and so on. Absolutely de rigueur for all white, male and protestant presidentiables was a photo at Yad Vashem sporting a yomulka. This all came with the turf like kissing babies. It was all a game.

The problems start when the Democrats decided to use "originals" instead of the traditional, "ballo in maschera". The whole charade begins to fall apart without the WASP surrogates.

All of this resentful white anger has been directed heretofore against surrogates: the Jimmy Carters, the Ted Kennedys, the Walter Mondales, the Dukakises, the Gores and the Kerrys; and all the racism was disguised in euphemisms like "state's rights" or "liberal" or "elitist" or "un-American".

Now for the first time the American white ultra-right have got the chance to actually organize and march against a real black man who incarnates all the euphemisms, instead of a surrogate.

Even a "JFK meets Sydney Poitier" figure like president Barack Obama, or especially like Obama, is an unbearable provocation -- a lifetime membership card in the "loser" club -- for millions of American white people.

Here is about the shortest and sweetest description possible of how tragic that is

The deeper point--the ones the tea partiers haven’t courage nor the brains to see--is that our technological age has laid bare a core fact of American life: that our corporatist state uses white men and women just like it uses black, brown and yellow ones--as cannon fodder. There is little “upward mobility.” Your children probably won’t live as well as you, much less better. Your 2nd and 3rd mortgages made them billions and then they bankrupted you. They stole your future itself. Leonce Gaiter

The ideas expressed by Leonce Gaiter here are not very complicated, they would be practically self-evident if so much time and media effort plus financial fiction had not been expended in clouding all these realities. Gaiter makes clear that many people are finally finding themselves to be much less "middle class" then their advertising created fantasies led them to believe. Their treasured self-image is well tarnished and they are discovering that, as Gaiter says, "our corporatist state uses white men and women just like it uses black, brown and yellow ones--as cannon fodder." So in this crisis any person who lives from his salary and whose only patrimony is/was the house he lives/lived in, is, in the words of Marx and Engels, "at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind".  Alas, few are equipped either by temperament or by training to face with "sober senses" either the "real conditions" of their lives or the "relations with their kind". This lack makes them easy prey for movements like the Tea Party that fill the paths to truth with the traditional red herrings of American racism disguised as libertarianism. This nauseating and supremely effective tactic is being trotted out once again. The day when Americans in similar economic straits cease to see skin color and see clearly and soberly what they all have in common, in the same way  that the wealthy and powerful minority always have: on that day will the battle for social justice in the United States be more than half won. Keeping them from doing so has always been a growth industry.

Perhaps the joker in the right's deck, the spanner in the works, is the growing Hispanic vote. This is a vote that is in many ways socially conservative: family values etc, but very offended by racism directed toward them. A party of angry "white" people has very little attraction for this otherwise quite heterogeneous (Dominicans are very different from Mexicans) group. I certainly think it would be nearly impossible for a Tea Partied Republican Party to take and hold this, America's fastest growing, demographic niche.

Supposing we ever got racism licked, then we get to the really hard part.

If somehow this intrumentalized racism were neutralized, if white, brown and black could see their common needs and pull together to get what they need... what would be the instrument to use?

The term, "Welfare State" might give you the idea that the "state" is place to start... and the directing force of the state is the "government".  The desire to "fare" or "go" well using the "state" as the instrument.

What, then, is the "state of the government" or "state of the state" at this moment?

"Reagan’s view of government as the problem is increasingly at odds with a nation whose system of health care relies on large for-profit entities designed to make money rather than improve health; whose economy is dependent on global capital and on global corporations and financial institutions with no particular loyalty to America; and much of whose fuel comes from unstable and dangerous areas of the world. Under these conditions, government is the only entity that can look out for our interests." Robert Reich

The shortest and anything but the sweetest description of the philosophy of government that has dominated American thinking since the 80s, is the following famous quote:

"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."  - Grover Norquist

Norquist doesn't really need a bathtub anymore, a simple washbasin might get it... government was already sending up bubbles in the floods of Katrina. You might say that today's politicians are rubber ducks in Norquist's bathtub.

For me this is the most disquieting thought of all... that even if the American people desired a welfare state, as many well may do, there might no longer be an instrument capable of executing that desire.

Here is a small sample of some of the nuts and bolts of this Norquist-bathtub government:

More than 100 American cities could go bust next year as the debt crisis that has taken down banks and countries threatens next to spark a municipal meltdown, a leading analyst has warned.(...)  US states have spent nearly half a trillion dollars more than they have collected in taxes, and face a $1tn hole in their pension funds, said the CBS programme, apocalyptically titled The Day of Reckoning. Detroit is cutting police, lighting, road repairs and cleaning services affecting as much as 20% of the population. The city, which has been on the skids for almost two decades with the decline of the US auto industry, does not generate enough wealth to maintain services for its 900,000 inhabitants. The nearby state of Illinois has spent twice as much money as it has collected and is about six months behind on creditor payments. The University of Illinois alone is owed $400m, the CBS programme said. The state has a 21% chances of default, more than any other, according to CMA Datavision, a derivatives information provider. California has raised state university tuition fees by 32%. Arizona has sold its state capitol and supreme court buildings to investors, and leases them back. - Guardian

Our friend Norquist is cool with states going bathtub, er, bankrupt:

Some critics allege that a state bankruptcy code would be used as a tool to “smash unions.” On the contrary, government employee unions and their dogged defense of the status quo are, in fact, smashing budgets and credit ratings in California, Illinois, New York and other states where they are dominant and have outsized influence in the state capitol.  Though it is true that the bond market might not be happy with a state filing for bankruptcy, as Skeel noted, the market is already beginning to take the possibility of default in certain states into account. California, for example, put $10 billion in revenue anticipation notes on the market in November — yet was only able to sell $6 billion worth. Advocacy for permitting state bankruptcy should not be confused with a desire for states to go bankrupt. In fact, simply having bankruptcy as a tool at states’ disposal is likely to be a boon to lawmakers trying to rectify their unsustainable financial plight.  The mere “threat of bankruptcy,” as Michael Barone recently noted in National Review Online, “would put a powerful weapon in the hands of governors and legislatures: They can tell their unions that they have to accept cuts now or face a much more dire fate in bankruptcy court.” - Grover Norquist

This is getting to be painfully obvious:

Congressional Republicans appear to be quietly but methodically executing a plan that would a) avoid a federal bailout of spendthrift states and b) cripple public employee unions by pushing cash-strapped states such as California and Illinois to declare bankruptcy. This may be the biggest political battle in Washington, my Capitol Hill sources tell me, of 2011. That’s why the most intriguing aspect of President Barack Obama’s tax deal with Republicans is what the compromise fails to include — a provision to continue the Build America Bonds program.  BABs now account for more than 20 percent of new debt sold by states and local governments thanks to a federal rebate equal to 35 percent of interest costs on the bonds. The subsidy program ends on Dec. 31.  And my Reuters colleagues report that a GOP congressional aide said Republicans “have a very firm line on BABS — we are not going to allow them to be included.” James Pethokoukis - Reuters

There seems to be no arrow left in the systems quiver to stop this, certainly not in Barack Obama's quiver.

When Robert Reich speaks of health care saying that America's "economy is dependent on global capital and on global corporations and financial institutions with no particular loyalty to America", he is underlining one of the principal facts of our world today, i.e. non-state actors, like multinational corporations, effectively controlled by a few individuals, a small percentage of the share holders and/or a management elite, are often more powerful than elected governments. This means, as Reich points out, that empowering government, which we elect, is the only defense we have against these unelected, non-state actors, who are indifferent to our welfare, whose only motive is profit.

Lets compare for a moment  the competence and seriousness of Robert Reich's corporate America to Norquist's "bathtub ready" US government. Try to imagine for a moment the  secret formula for Coca Cola in the hands of someone like  Pfc Bradley Manning... Impossible, isn't it... The management at Coca Cola are serious  folks. But the US Army allows an enormous mass of extraordinarily sensitive cables that could adversely affect US foreign policy in unimaginable ways in such hands as those of 23 year old "Bradass".

After a bout of intense introspection and self-criticism, I think that my strong desire to see the Wikileaks data-dump as the work of a foreign espionage network is in great part a reaction of denial from another, simpler but much more disturbing conclusion. One that literally fills me with horror. Remember that when politicians and thinktankers talk about cutting expenses, they are always talking about things like teacher's salaries or pensions and other "entitlements", never about "defense" spending. America's armed forces have always had preference of place at the trough. We might therefore assume that they of all American institutions would be immune from the "heck of a job-ism" of the rest of the stone broke and sorry-assed res publica.
 

Well, no, it seems the Army is just as incompetent as the rest of the system. If the secrets entrusted to the US Army are as vulnerable as Enron's emails... then the last one out, please turn off the lights.

In my opinion, it is no exageration to say that there is less difference between libertarians of the left, such as Assange, and those of the right, such as Norquist, than between either of them and those like myself that believe in big, well-funded government that is able to provide its citizens with good infrastucture, good regulations, good education and good health services and that has the power and the legitimacy to collect the necessary taxes to pay for those things. Make no mistake, the Assanges and the Norquists are executing a pincer movement.

When people riff about the impact of Wikileaks, you typically hear how it’s forever changed diplomacy or intelligence-gathering. The more ambitious accounts will mention the implications for journalism, too. All of that’s true and vaguely relevant. But it also misses the deeper point. The Wikileaks revolution isn’t only about airing secrets and transacting information. It’s about dismantling large organizations—from corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction.(...) All of a sudden, the very same things that made it more efficient to work with your colleagues—the fact that everyone had a detailed understanding of the mission and methodology—become enormous liabilities. In a Wikileaks world, the greater the number of people who intimately understand your organization, the more candidates there are for revealing that information to millions of voyeurs. Wikileaks is, in effect, a huge tax on internal coordination. And, as any economist will tell you, the way to get less of something is to tax it. As a practical matter, that means the days of bureaucracies in the tens of thousands of employees are probably numbered. In a decade or two, we may not only see USAID spun off from the State Department. We may see dozens of mini-State Departments servicing separate regions of the world. Or hundreds of micro-State Departments—one for every country on the planet. Don’t like the stranglehold that a handful of megabanks have on the financial sector? Don’t worry! Twenty years from now there won’t be such a thing as megabanks, because the cost of employing 100,000 potential leakers will be prohibitive.(...) I’d guess that most organizations a generation from now will be pretty small by contemporary standards, with highly convoluted cell-like structures. Large numbers of people within the organization may not even know one another’s name, much less what colleagues spend their days doing, or the information they see on a regular basis. There will be redundant layers of security and activity, so that the loss of any one node can’t disable the whole network. Which is to say, thanks to Wikileaks, the organizations of the future will look a lot like …  Wikileaks. -  Noam Scheiber - The New Republic

I am almost sure that Mr. Assange and Mr. Norquist would be horrified to know that they are brothers in arms in the war to destroy the state, but in fact they are... at the very least their efforts are overlapping and complimentary: Assange  by facilitating such endless kibitzing, as to make the cooperation by a large number of state employees in any great project, even those beneficial to society, well nigh impossible and Norquist by depriving those state employees of the funds with which to act, supposing they could.

Both Assange and Norquist would surely justify their words and actions as a defense of freedom.

I think it might be in order then to examine the practical meaning of the word "freedom".

A very workmanlike definition might be FDR's "Four Freedoms", they are as follows:

1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of worship
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

I for one, am in complete agreement with the contents of this list, however I think that for them to be realistically applicable to all of humanity, without exception, their order should be reversed.

It seems to me that a person who is hungry or/and afraid and without access to adequate medical care for herself and her children, has little time or even need for the other freedoms and that a person without an opportunity for decent schooling will have trouble expressing his needs, no matter how much freedom to express them that he is given. It might also be useful to note that many regimes that skimp on freedoms one, three and four, often encourage their subjects to worship; as fear and want are often great stimulants to prayer.

It would seem to me that both Messrs Assange and Norquist, each in his way, are having success in dragging the state into the bathroom and drowning it in the name of point one, the freedom of speech and expression.

At this moment millions of Americans are losing their homes, millions of American don't get enough to eat, American life expectancy is going down, millions of American children go to substandard schools, millions of Americans don't have access to good health care, America's infant mortality rate is simply obscene and wealth distribution in America is even more unequal than in India. Freedom? Adding insult to injury more like it.

My affirmation is that without a strong state serving its people, freedoms three and four, will only be enjoyed by the wealthy and that to ensure that such a strong state exists and that it defends the welfare of its people, those who call themselves progressives should use freedom one vigorously and then with the aid of freedom two and a long-handled spoon, go and drain Mr. Norquists bathtub. DS