The meaning of this year's election

This year's presidential election is one of the most important in America's entire history and the reason is simple to the point of stark. It is all about who is going to fill any vacancies in the Supreme Court in the next four years.

That simple.

The Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision making money "speech" and corporations "people" was a coup d'etat in everything but name.  America is now in the hands of its billionaires to dispose of as they wish.

If the Tea Party crazed Republicans win the White House in 2012 and get to choose the next justices of the court, this will mean that democracy as we know it in the USA will be finished and all that will be left of it is a shell.

Here is a shopping list of issues this will affect besides campaign financing;

The implications for such issues as abortion, same-sex marriage, the establishment of religion, affirmative action, the rights of women, voting rights, congressional authority, the death penalty, gun control, and criminal procedure are dramatic. Geoffrey R. Stone - Huffington Post

So that is the bottom line to end all bottom lines. If you live in a swing state that is up for grabs and you go fishing on election day and Romney wins... even your great grandchildren will have cause to curse you. DS

UK Students trash British Conservatives' HQ ... the children's crusade

Students have finally had enough. Fees were introduced in 1998 and we hardly heard a squeak; they were bumped up to over £3,000 in 2006 and no one revolted. But today students smashed their way into the Tory party campaign HQ in a show of anger against a political elite they believe have abandoned them. Patrick Smith - Guardian

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I am quite sure that the student protests in London are as significant as the recent student protests in France,  perhaps more so, and they represent what may quickly become a Europe-wide trend.

Up till now the children of the credit bubble have had little to rebel against, all the things that the 1968 generation fought for, especially sexual freedom, this generation have had in abundance. While they enjoyed their freedom or became bored with it they became proficient with computers, cell phone messaging and social nets, all valuable skills for potential agitators. Now as politicians like David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy are attacking their futures, their education and even their future pensions, they have something more challenging than "Grand Theft Auto" to test their skills against.  And perhaps they will be able to do something that the students of 1968 couldn't do in those times of prosperity and full employment, make common cause with working people and the older generations.

Now the battle is not just about personal freedom and imperialist wars as it was back them, it is about health, education and welfare: the basics.

I'm astounded at how oblivious Cameron and Sarkozy are to the danger they are running.

Regular readers of this blog know that one of my favorite hobby horses is criticizing the blockheadedness of post Cold War politicians who seem to have totally lost their fear of popular wrath.

Those who are cheerfully going about the work of dismantling the welfare state seem blissfully unaware that the welfare state was created by men as, or even more conservative then themselves, (Bismark, for example) in order to avoid revolutionary social movements which would destabilize and jeopardize the entire economic system and society itself. This was a strategy that was so eminently successful that it practically has destroyed revolutionary praxis. 

In my opinion dismantling the welfare state at this time is similar to a person who has successfully survived an operation for lung cancer and endured the ensuing chemotherapy and then, finding himself now in  remission, decides that it is ok for him to go back to smoking, the very thing that caused his cancer in the first place: idiotic.

It occurs to me that this tunnel vision, expressed in the obsession of  placating the financial markets,which  ignores popular anger, is the result of the rise and predominance of the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) economy and the diminishing influence of manufacturing and agriculture.

The financial sector works with platonic mathematical models: money in the abstract moves with the speed of light. Fortunes that buy admiration, sex and luxury are made by simply tapping the key of a computer in a cubicle or on a trading floor.  All very clean and a bit autistic.

Reality, unfortunately, in as much as it touches living organisms, is never that clean and neat.

Thus farmers and manufacturers understand how the world of living creatures works better than financiers do.

They understand better, because both farmers and manufacturers exploit living creatures for profit and, leaving ethical question aside, to do this they need to have what farmers call "stock sense": an understanding of the animal off of which they make their living.

Take pigs for example.

A pig lives on death row from the day he is born.

Few animals are as reviled as the pig, the very word "pig" is an insult... and yet, perhaps no other animal on earth is eaten with such relish as the pig. Thus there is money to be made in raising pigs

Very few of those who live off of pigs like them personally, however pig raisers make sure that their pigs get plenty to eat, clean water to drink and clean air to breathe and they make sure that their charges excrement is removed at timely intervals... They also provide them with free veterinary care. The farmers don't do this for love of the pig or from the goodness of their hearts, but simply because if pigs aren't treated like this, they wont get fat soon enough or their flesh pass health inspection after they are slaughtered.

Pigs are not alone.

The short time that chickens pass among the living is also accompanied by a careful attention to their health and diet, as commodity chickens are terribly vulnerable to contagious diseases: plagues that can wipe out a farmer's investment in only a few days or sometimes hours.

Dairy cows have a bit better time of it than most food producers, live longer lives and often get special treatment, as it has been shown that not only clean food and air and lack of stress improves the quantity and quality of the milk they produce, even playing classical music for the cows helps increase milk production. To get the most and the best milk from a cow a farmer will even play Mozart for her.

So, if not properly cared for hens don't lay, pigs don't get fat and cows don't give milk.

In short, farmers know that to make decent a profit from their animals they must treat them carefully and that signs such as wet noses, shiny fur, neat feathers, bright eyes and a good appetite and the quantity and quality of their droppings, all must be watched closely if a good business is to be made from them.

In manufacture everything we have said about pigs, chickens and cows goes in spades for people too.

Manufacturers know as much about the human beings  they exploit as farmers know about pigs, chickens and cows and for much the same reasons: their livelihood depends on getting as much work, both in quantity and quality that they can with the smallest cash outlay possible. 

As an example of how the techniques of animal husbandry can be advantageously applied to humans, soccer became the British working class passion par exellence, because 19th century factory owners encouraged their workers to play football in order to keep them healthy and productive in the miserable conditions of the industrial revolution.

Exploiting human animals is a dicey business however.

We are talking about a very bad monkey here, one who can sabotage a factory, go slow, work to rule, go on strike: an animal that to be most profitable requires much training and re-training and much "motivation".

Like farming, manufacture is a messy, hands-on affair, filled with the sort of intangible things that sentient beings produce that are difficult to quantify in  numbers. This makes farming and manufacture unattractive for most Masters of Business Administration.

People don't feel right spending all those years at Harvard or Stanford, just to have to get a recalcitrant assembly line up and running or to stand up to their knees in manure in the middle of a freezing night holding a lantern for a vet himself up to his elbows performing a breech delivery on a struggling milch cow.

To leave the farm, to leave the factory floor and then move to a quiet office to follow numbers that flit across a screen, and while doing it make millions of dollars more than ever would be possible in either the factory or on the farm is a no-brainer.

Managing filthy pigs or cantankerous people with grease on their hands is not an attractive career choice for a good student today. Pigs are a drag.  So are people.

Truly though, I can't imagine Walt Whitman celebrating these masters of the universe.

A curious thing: if nobody ate pigs or eggs or chickens or drank milk, there would be no cows, pigs or chickens: nobody keeps them for pets. That's the way things work.

Here is an example: right up until the 1970s Spain used to be filled with donkeys, an emblematic animal, Sancho Panza rode one, they had a million uses... now there are hardly any donkeys left... The modern world doesn't need donkeys and donkeys can't do anything about it.

In many developed countries it appears that what goes for donkeys goes for human beings too. Their messy needs and wants get in the way of the beautiful numbers. Let us then move all the messy things far away and leave ourselves to contemplate our  exquisite numbers as they shimmer and dance on the screen and fill our bank accounts.

And so in love are they with their platonic models and their markets, that they blithely assume that those whose lives they disrupt and futures they jeopardize will simply oblige them by just shriveling up and blowing away.

But, unlike donkeys, human beings, before they disappear, can do much nastier things than just bray and kick. That is what I think is beginning to happen in the streets of London and Paris. DS

Problems with moving on and turning the page

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I haven't blogged for several days, in great part because on one hand I have been curing a horrible flu-type cold and was reserving my energy, I must confess, for things I get paid for; and on the other hand because the Supreme Court decision that I have devoted my last posts to, depresses me so much.

Between the cold and the black dog. I haven't written anything at all.

"Turn the page", some will say, "move on", others will say and "suck it up" or "get a life", might also be typical pieces of advice in such circumstances. I would like to take that advice, but I'm having trouble doing so.

I can't stop thinking about it. The United States' policies and politics are not just an American problem, they are a world problem: read this little snippet:

Republicans already counting the seats they will pick up this fall should keep in mind Obama has a big card yet to play. Should the president declare he has gone the last mile for a negotiated end to Iran's nuclear program and impose the "crippling" sanctions he promised in 2008, America would be on an escalator to confrontation that could lead straight to war. And should war come, that would be the end of GOP dreams of adding three-dozen seats in the House and half a dozen in the Senate. Pat Buchanan

I chose that comment because of its "in a nutshell" brevity, but I could easily quote dozens of articles any day of the year from the left or the right that would illustrate the point as well if not as quickly. The American political process has a direct and immediate effect on the lives of  every living creature on the face of the earth. That process is in the hands of a very few men and women who get elected to that position in extraordinarily expensive campaigns.  The Supremes have just handed that process, lock, stock and barrel to the world's multinational corporations and their bottomless pockets. Who exactly are these people that will control public opinion and the lawmakers, even at a local level?

The skinny is that the future of the United States, the fate of its people and peace and welfare of the peoples of all the rest of world hinges on the opacity of American campaign financing and the falsifying of public opinion known as "AstroTurfing".

In a sense what is hanging in the balance is the mental health of the American public, subjected to an endless and Orwellian flood of spurious news, reports, rumors, slander and false issues that will make clear thinking and policy making next to impossible... if they aren't already.

Unless something happens to change this ruling every political decision that will be taken by the United States in the future will be molded by it. Nothing less than government: of the people, by the people, for the people will have perished in the United States, if, hopefully, not the earth.

I can't think of anything that represented such a defining, yet unnecessary, political moment since Weimar Germany's chancellor, Franz Von Papen empowered Adolph Hitler.

I'm sorry, but I find all the other news I'm reading these days just so much background static to this breathtaking ruling. The only other commentator that seems to have his knickers in as much of twist as I do is Michael Moore. The newspaper "opinion makers" appear to have "moved on".

The way I feel reminds me of something I wrote awhile back:

I remember once many years ago sitting on the terrace of a bar overlooking the rugged coast of Spain. I was nursing a drink and watching the tiny cars miles away as they zipped around the hairpin turns on the cliffhanging coastal highway... the others at the table were engrossed in conversation with their backs to the sea and I was the only one watching the distant road. My attention was drawn to a small Mini Cooper that was coming down the mountain, way too fast... my friends were all looking in my direction and talking as the tiny car, miles away, crashed through a guard rail and hurtled some 500 feet into the Mediterranean... I was the only one who saw them die... all my friends suddenly were staring at me as I vomited all over the table. I feel a bit like that now.

DS

Populism: the natives are restless

Populism: A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite.  American Heritage Dictionary

The state of the union is obstreperous. Dyspepsia is the new equilibrium. All the passion in American politics is oppositional. The American people know what they don't like, which is: everything.  Joel Achenbach - Washington Post
(...) I don't hate these guys because they're rich and went to fancy private schools. Hell, I'm rich and went to a fancy private school. I look at these people as my cultural peers and what angers me about them is that, with many coming from backgrounds similar to mine, these guys chose to go into a life of crime and did so in a way that is going to fuck things up for everyone, rich and poor, for a generation.  Matt Taibbi (hat to Mike Doyle)

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Before trying to hack away at any of the Gordian knots of American politics, I'd like to use the Haitian crisis as a horribly simple, reductio ad absurdum, metaphor for some of the mechanisms at play.

A country in a strategic location not far from Cuba and Venezuela has been devastated. The poorest people have lost their homes, there are no jobs, no money, there is little to eat, the government has disappeared. The natives are obviously restless. The ruling elite, lighter skinned than the poorer majority of the citizens, live in undamaged gated communities in the mountains surrounding the capital. The rich are afraid that the poor will climb the mountains to take their food. The United States has thrown a naval and aerial blockade around the island and taken over the airport, carefully controlling who and what can enter and leave. Despite the massive desire of American citizens to help,  the official criteria of strictly controlling who can enter and leave the island obviously takes priority over aiding the population. As an example of this priority, here is an excerpt from an interview Amy Goodman did with Michael Moore:

(...) And this situation with the National Nurses Union, they went out to their membership. Who would be willing to go to Haiti right now? Over 11,000, almost 12,000 nurses—12,000 nurses—around this country have signed up, who are willing to go right now to Haiti. I don’t know if I heard it on your show last week or someplace else. You know, essentially one nurse could provide help for dozens of people. So just imagine if we could get 12,000 nurses there, with the necessary supplies, how many people could have been helped. I mean, this offer was made days and days ago. AMY GOODMAN: To whom? MICHAEL MOORE: To the Obama administration from the executive director of the National Nurses Union. She contacted the administration. She got put off. She had no response. Then they sent her to some low-level person that had no authority to do anything. And then, finally, she’s contacting me. And she says, “Do you know any way to get a hold of President Obama?” And I’m going, “Well, this is pretty pathetic if you’re having to call me. I mean, you are the largest nurses union. You are, I believe, one of the vice presidents of the AFL-CIO, of the main board of the AFL-CIO, and you can’t get a call in to the White House to get 12,000 nurses down there?"

The mechanism that I am trying to illustrate is that power's first and most elemental interest is to not lose control. This takes precedence over everything else when a situation deteriorates dramatically.

Obviously Haiti's suffering is starkly real and much of America's suffering is tinged with neurosis, but there is the similarity of people perceiving that the systems, institutions and the individuals that a society expects to guarantee the general welfare do not function. When this feeling is general, people lose respect for the power structure. Here is Thomas Wilson, chairman and CEO of Allstate Insurance Co. quoted by the  McClatcy Newspapers:

"Middle-class Americans just don't believe in the business community or the government, and they're pointing fingers at both of them. It's not just one of them. Half of the people don't trust corporations, unions or banks. If you ask them how do you think politicians are doing, 80 percent rank their politicians as fair or poor... I think that's a problem because in a free market and a democracy, you have to have people believing in institutions. This ought to be a wake-up call."

You might say, in referring to the American people, that in their case too, "the natives are restless".  When the power structure notices this sort of thing getting out of hand it tends to panic. A very graphic example of this is can be seen in the classic footage of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu's last speech on 21 December 1989. The look on his face when he sees that the people no longer fear him is one of the most uniquely powerful images of what losing the charisma of power really means. A few days after making this speech Ceaușescu was in front of a firing squad.

It is in this light that the Supreme Court of the United State's (SCOTUS) decision to remove all restraints and controls to corporate money's "investments" in American politics should be seen. I consider it nothing less than a coup d'etat. It is no longer "it can happen here" it is, "it has happened here".

In a short time terrified politicians will vote any law that domestic and foreign multinationals tell them to vote and however strange these laws may be SCOTUS will declare them perfectly constitutional and it will all be perfectly legal and democratic.

They are making this naked grab for power because they are afraid... The natives are restless.

The other day I read an article in the New Yorker about the Teabaggers. As the article paints it they appear to be a genuine movement of angry citizens, one which moneyed interests are trying to control for their own ends. This shouldn't be so difficult for us to understand as the same thing has happened to the movement that took Barack Obama to the White House. Up till now the only winner has been Wall Street.

Of course powerful interests are trying to get in front of the parade, but make no mistake, the people, both on the left and on the right, are genuinely pissed off.

As I see it both the disillusioned Obamites and the Teabaggers are chewing on the same problem from different angles. The left sees that the problems facing the nation: health, infrastructure, education, reviving the economy and protecting America's workers from having their jobs off-shored, will require government's massive intervention and that will require raising taxes, especially on the rich. The populist right, on the other want to reduce government's role to the minimum, cutting taxes to starve it into irrelevance because they see government as evil.

They are both right.

The only possible protection from the bottomless greed of the globalized multinationals, whose only reason to exist is to maximize profits, and who by doing so are destroying America's solid mass middle class way of life, is the state. And a state that it literally owned by those multinationals is worse than no state at all. So they are both right.

The United State's entire crisis in all its aspects; geopolitical, economic etc, comes out of the rot and corruption in the relation between America's behemoth corporations, which are in the control of a tiny minority of the population, and the political system accompanied by the media that facilitate this relationship. And my prediction, and it's an easy one, is that we are going to see some mighty curious things happening in the next few years. 'Curiouser and curiouser' as Alice said.

Without transparency and strict regulation in political financing, those of us who are politically active, both on  left and the right, are going to  be made fools of over and over again. Winning the campaign financing battle is the essential fight: until that war is won all the arguments between left and right are pure onanism and should be put aside till those reforms have been accomplished DS

The Supreme Court decision (continued)

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Many of the comments on the SCOTUS decision have centered on the technicalities of what constitutes a "corporation" and quite a few of them seem to be of the "how many angels can dance on the head of pin?" variety. I feel that this question should not get lost in a forest of technicalities, at heart there is an issue here that you could say transcends even the US Constitution, without, of course, contradicting its intentions.

At the bottom of this whole business is something very simple, something which we might consider the basis of our civilization, not just our democracy: protecting the many powerless from the oppression of the powerful few.

It is in the nature of things, that if left to themselves, without regulation or restriction, a few people finally control almost everything, in much the same way that in a troop of monkeys a few alpha-males monopolize all the females. Monopolies are the natural state of things in a world "red in tooth and claw". Anti-trust legislation, seats reserved for the physically challenged on public transport, even very ancient institutions such as monogamy and the keeping of the sabbath, all were designed to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.

Many are not aware that today's huge corporations that have outsourced so many of America's jobs, are actually controlled by a very small percentage of the total equity... all that power is in reality concentrated in a very few hands.

In reality we are not talking about faceless corporations that represent objectively the interests of their shareholders. The percentage of the total shares that actually control the boards of these organizations usually is very small, often tiny. In fact we are talking about a very small group of men... in America and abroad that will make the decisions of whom to back in elections and, make no mistake, they are just as given to having strange ideas and caprices as the rest of us... perhaps more so, as their chance of living out their fantasies is much greater than ours. Their humors and their whims are in many ways what control our lives. With this ruling, more so. What the Supreme Court's decision has done is to convert the Congress and the Senate, in fact all elected institutions in the USA into a great smorgasbord for these men (mostly men).

There are some who think that this is how it should be: the "Darwinists", the followers of Ayn Rand like Alan Greenspan, the disciples of Milton Friedman and of course the former National Socialist Party of pre-war Germany. For all of the above, the weak exist to provide the strong with a living. What the Supreme Court decision has done is to further empower this philosophy.

You may well ask: "McCain-Feingold has only been in place since 2002, how did democracy survive before the law?"

How indeed.

It didn't.

You've put your finger right into the wound. Campaign finance is at the core of America's decadence.

That is the beauty of this SCOTUS decision, it makes people wake up and understand what the United States really is... (fill in blank).

McCain/Feingold was a trap for SCOTUS and they fell into it, for as Joni Mitchill sang:

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone

DS

When crazy meets money

Ah f'krisesake

America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable. Paul Krugman - New York Times

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So now we are being told that president Barack Obama is Adolph Hitler... just like Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad or (fill in name of whosoever the American right wants to bomb at the moment).

They want to talk about Hitler? Lets talk about Hitler.

According to John Tolund, who most experts consider Hitler's definitive biographer, as early as 1918 German army doctors had diagnosed Hitler as a "psychopath with hysterical symptoms".

How did someone literally insane go so far?

It happened because Germany's top industrial families were so terrified of the communists in the context of the then collapsing German economy that they thought that the the triumph of the weird and wacky Hitler, the failed watercolorist from Vienna with his campy brown shirts, would favor their interests.

You could say that their bet paid off: although Germany was burned to the ground in WWII and perhaps 8.5 million Germans died, most of the great German industrial fortunes of the 1930s are still great fortunes today. If the communists had carried the day in Weimar Germany, quite possibly today's Krupps and Thyssens might be bussing dishes on the Ku'damm and sleeping rough in the Tiergarten... an outcome they were naturally eager to avoid.

From Germany's industrial oligarchy's -- albeit minority -- point of view, backing Hitler and destroying Germany was a reasonable business decision.

Who knows, perhaps, America's "good and the great" may be taking similar decisions today in order to defend what they, quite correctly, see as their interests, which perhaps are not the same interests as those of most of the rest of us.

Is the "Obama = Hitler" really crazy stuff?

You betcha.

But the crazy part is not the real story because for historical reasons, due to its origins as a refuge for religious eccentrics, the United States has always had much more than its share of crazies. Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken had endless fun exposing America's deep vein of primitive weirdos. America treasures its crazies, they make us unique. Crazy is not the story.

The story is the money.

The question today is to determine who is paying for this particular campaign of organized insanity aimed at leaving America without a health plan.

Way back in May of 2007 I posted about the opening of a "Creationist Museum" in Kentucky that cost a cool $27,000,000, I entitled the post "High Rolling Holy Rollers with a Big Bank Roll". This snippet from my old post is relative to today's story:

One of the essential roots of American culture from the earliest days has been religious nonconformity and even religious manias. (...) What distinguishes today's holy rollers is the money they are finding to express themselves with. Traditionally these people, by definition uneducated refugees from a Flannery O'Connor short story, have always been dirt poor and outside the system. The $27m that this creationist museum cost is the real novelty here. Where is all the dough coming from for this "know-nothing Disneyland"?

For sure this campaign against health care is costing a lot more than the creationism museum and it is doubtful that it is being financed by the "widow's mite" of those whom Chris Rock so pungently described as "Broke-ass white people, livin’ in a trailer home, eatin’ mayonnaise sandwiches, fucking their sister, listening to John Cougar Mellencamp records…”

So here is the real job for America's investigative journalists and political junkies: cherchez l'argent... follow the money. History hinges on the money trail. DS

In the words of our beloved leader, "fool me once..."

God's country and how we blew it

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The United States has always been a dream country, with its easily defensible borders, its navigable rivers, its fertile agriculture, its natural resources of every kind, its large, energetic and relatively well educated population.... You name it. As Chuck Berry sang, "Anything you want, we got right here in the U.S.A.".

So, what's the problem?

The problem is political. The people themselves know what to do, but the system cannot do it. And the system cannot deliver because of the way politics is financed.

William Pfaff, in the article below, gives the key; the problem is that the

"Supreme Court-imposed doctrine that money spent on television political advertising is constitutionally protected free speech, has created a presidential election industry concerned totally with profit and virtually nothing with principle."

As I like to say, future Chinese historians will find this fatal flaw a fascinating subject to study, a sure fire doctoral thesis, like learning that the Roman Empire collapsed because the lead pipe plumbing made the Roman matrons infertile and thus decimated the patrician class.

It reads a helluva lot better than it plays though. DS

William Pfaff: Dehumanizing America's Presidential Candidates
Abstract: Americans will soon near the end of the first year of the 2008 presidential campaign, which actually began before the congressional mid-term election of 2006. The candidates of both parties have already lost much if not most of their human recognizability and have increasingly come to resemble synthetic creatures uttering programmed opinions that relate to a virtual rather than real national and international society.(...) It is as if they might already be experiencing near-death out-of-body episodes, floating above the audiences or television studios and incredulously witnessing themselves answering the same meaningless questions for the millionth time, with a million more times to come before the campaign ends a year from November, and already near madness. The presidential campaign is an ordeal we should not inflict on sentient beings, even laboratory rats. It is a phenomenon of what Marx would not have recognized as post-modern capitalism, since this degree of dehumanization of individuals would have been unimaginable in a nineteenth century economic or political system. But today, the United States, under the Supreme Court-imposed doctrine that money spent on television political advertising is constitutionally protected free speech, has created a presidential election industry concerned totally with profit and virtually nothing with principle.(...) The process takes groups of originally diverse and intelligent individuals, imprudent or courageous enough to wish to become the Democratic candidate for the United States presidency (to take that party example), intending to represent an electorate that voted overwhelmingly in 2004 to end the Iraq war and withdrew from that country, and thereafter cease to meddle in the affairs of distant countries, and it remakes them. All these individuals at the start had individual convictions about how to accomplish such goals. The election industry with all but unvarying success turns them into people who say exactly the same things about everything,(...) On Iraq, each of those candidates whom the Washington press, and national editorialists, have (already) selected as electable, now says that the U.S. must stay in Iraq or the surrounding region with large military forces, not just after the 2008 election, but that of 2016 – beyond two more presidential terms – so as to “prevent chaos,” prevent Iraq from becoming “a terrorist hotbed and training ground,” foster democratic government, centralize (or decentralize) Iraq (the apparent disagreement on this is unimportant because it is a matter the Iraqis will eventually decide for themselves), foster the regional stability that the United States destroyed by invading Iraq, preserve America’s interests in Arab oil, and protect Israel from Iran, Syria, and perhaps eventually from the Palestinians. This is largely indistinguishable from the Bush administration program (probably leaving out the Bush people’s commitment to torture) because it is the consensus view of the American foreign policy community in Washington, and any deviation from this consensus is considered by the presidential election industry as disqualifying the candidate. The dissident will have revealed himself or herself as less than a strong leader, a policy irresponsible, and not presidential material. The problem in American foreign policy today is that an ideological orthodoxy has emerged within the intellectual and political community concerned with foreign relations, and this orthodoxy now is imposed upon everyone who wishes to shape national policy at the Washington political and media level. READ IT ALL

Democratic "kidney failure"

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The center of the problem that Mearsheimer and Walt describe in their book, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy ", is how politics is financed in the USA. Perhaps you remember this quote from M&W (taken from the Sunday Times):

They quote the experience of a Senate candidate who was invited to visit AIPAC early in his campaign for “discussions”. Harry Lonsdale described what followed as “an experience I will never forget. It wasn’t enough that I was pro-Israel. I was given a list of vital topics and quizzed (read grilled) for my specific opinion on each. Actually, I was told what my opinion must be . . . Shortly after that . . . I was sent a list of American supporters of Israel . . . that I was free to call for campaign contributions. I called; they gave from Florida to Alaska”.

That is really the nub of it, Lonsdale, who was running for the Senate in Oregon received donations from "Florida to Alaska". If people from all over the USA can contribute to local elections in other states, than that opens the door for special interest groups to control America's policies. Senators and congressmen are not representing the people they are said to represent... They can't, and they cannot reform the system either, because all the lobbies would gang together to save the system as it is.

This is a failure of the system and I think it is similar to kidney failure, the body poisons itself and all the other organs fail... and the patient dies.

This "democratic kidney failure" is why Americans are not only joined to Israel at the hip, it is why they have no universal health coverage and it is why the nation is awash is pistols and assault rifles... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Except for a massive, grassroots citizen's movement to reform campaign financing we are literally and without exaggeration looking at multiorganic failure and the death of American democracy. DS

Mystified by the world? Cherchez le porc

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Perhaps we are being misled by what we consider reality, perhaps the deaths, the suffering, the destruction of cities, either by bombs or by storms, cloud our minds. Perhaps these tragedies are simply incidents, static in the narration of the true story.

There are two articles, one by Paul Krugman and the other by Gideon Rachman, which if read side by side, indicate the true state of the world.

What we consider "democracy" is in fact an elaborate charade, run for the benefit of a very few. This is nothing new, but it was never called "democracy" before.

Until political parties are micro-financed from the base up, on the principal of "the widow's mite" this state of affairs will only get worse. As far as I know the only one taking any practical steps in this direction is Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean. If he is successful he will have executed a true coup d' etat. Much ridicule is heaped upon his head. DS

Hillary and the dogs of war

David Seaton's News Links

Now, if you read this article from last week's, The Forward you will understand immediately why despite all the best advice of civilian and military experts the future war with Iran is still very much on the cards. And if you read the aforementioned article and you still think Hillary Clinton's your favorite for the presidency of the United States of America and the commander and chief of its mastodontic armed forces, that is to say, "the decider", well... (words fail).

Facing such an organized campaign to take the country to war, seeing the class of spineless, careerist politicians that are pushing themselves forward to "lead" us all and how they prostitute their votes, what can be done?

The answer is in an article in this week's Forward (here is the link). Here is a short quote:

While Jewish communal leaders focus most of their current lobbying efforts on pressing the United States to take a tough line against Iran and its nuclear program, some are privately voicing fears that they will be accused of driving America into a war with the regime in Tehran.

Jimmy Carter,Wesley Clark and professors Mearsheimer and Walt have with great risk and sacrifice, broken the taboo and made the Zionist Lobby's role in dragging the US into war, finally a topic of "polite" conversation and that is just what we have to do. Talk about it, politely... a lot. A lot, politely, but a lot. DS

Hillary the Favorite in Race for Jewish Donations - The Forward (hat to Phil Weiss)
Abstract: New York’s junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is expected to snare the lion’s share of the Jewish community’s substantial political donations in the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Democratic activists and operatives said Clinton will pull in large quantities of cash among Jewish donors not only because of what they described as her strong positions on Israel and domestic matters of interest to Jews, but also because of longtime ties with these activists dating back to her husband’s administration.(...) The haul is important: Strategists say that serious candidates will need to raise at least $50 million — and probably more like $100 million — by the end of the year. They say that money from Jewish donors constitutes about half the donations given to national Democratic candidates (an extremely large pot of gelt long coveted by the GOP). Clinton will get most of the Jewish community’s money, “first, because she’s going to receive the lion’s share of all [Democratic] political money, and second, because she and her husband are enormously popular with the Jewish community,” said Democratic strategist Steve Rabinowitz, a Clinton supporter.(...) Among the top Jewish fundraisers who political hands expect to line up with Clinton’s campaign is New Jersey lawyer Lionel Kaplan, a former president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who raised money for the former first lady’s 2006 Senate race. Also expected to turn up in Clinton’s camp is Massachusetts businessman Steve Grossman, another former Aipac president who chaired the Democratic National Committee in the late 1990s. Grossman told the Forward that he’s “not formally committed,” but he added that “everyone knows I’m close to the Clintons.”
(there's lots more - READ IT ALL)

Notes of a Bushophobe - 1

David Seaton's News Links
As time wears on and nerves wear thin, the question keeps repeating like a cucumber salad: "how did it happen, why is Bush where he is"? To me it is the biggest question of his presidency and its answers could be potentially some of the most revealing x-ray shots of twentyfirst century America, its society and politics. I just have to get started chewing on this theme. The following is just a series of notes and in no way a finished product. As the ideas work up into shape, I will continue to post more "Notes of a Bushophobe" with their appropriate number added on. I would be happy and indeed grateful if readers tore apart my arguments or helped me to support them with their information and links. I promise to publish all comments that aren't obscene (unless they are very funny) or personally abusive. Perhaps the way I reason will reveal more about me than about my subject, but here is a rough outline of my unfolding bushology or metabushology. None of this is terribly original, but I just have to have some method developed to make sense of such a bizarre use of the US presidency. I can't continue to just content myself with ad hoc and ad hominem attacks, pleasurable as they are.

To begin with, the question is why George W. Bush?

I shall not beat around the bush (giggle). It seems to me that the prime mover in bushology is the family's unmatched skill at raising money. None of them, beginning with George H.W. Bush, right down to Jeb, is at all charismatic or even attractive, none of them speak very well or even deliver their writer's material very well. but they always show up with a lot of other people's money when campaigning starts. They have a huge network of "rangers" and "pioneers" who work very hard to raise money for them. Why do they do this? As you may have observed on intense introspection or from what the email universities call "life experience", very few people part with money without hoping for something in return... even noble charities would probably wither if they were not also tax shelters.

Let us look, then, at "exhibit-A", at what I consider one of the most, if not the most revealing thing that George W. Bush ever said in public. It was during the 2000 campaign, long before Osama bin Laden added the flavor of tragedy to American life that makes the Clinton years look in retrospect like the "Roaring Twenties"... partying before the great depression. Bush was speaking at the "Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner" on October 20th 2000. Here is the quote from CBS News:

Bush gazed around the diamond-studded $800-a-plate crowd and commented on the wealth on display. "This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores," quipped the GOP standard-bearer. "Some people call you the elites; I call you my base."

If we test everything that Bush has ever done since then against that remark, it all falls into place. With this remark in hand let us imagine what the Rangers and the Pioneers expect in return for their money? Here are some easy items:

• Lower the taxes of the super-rich
  
• Destroy expensive entitlements
• Degrade the federal government
• Eliminate inheritance tax
  
• Tort reform
  

He hasn't managed all of it, but he has never flagged in his efforts to get as much of it done as he could and I imagine that the Rangers and the Pioneers feel they have gotten their money's worth. One of the most interesting examples to support my theory or "bushology" is that when he won the 2004 election against the hapless John F. Kerry and with a war going on he decided that he had "political capital" that he was going to "spend" on... trashing Social Security. His answer to war of course, was to lower those taxes for his Rangers.

If you look at him like that, as a faithful servant of wealth (especially inherited) his is in no way a "failed" presidency. When he finally leaves office I think his "legacy" will be secure among those he moves and cherishes. Even though most of humanity will consider him the worst president of the US to ever have held that office, among the one per-cent of America's people who are his true base, he will remain forever a revered icon; the anti Franklin Delano (that man) Roosevelt.

So how did he get into the war in Iraq?

They say his father, George H.W. Bush always maintains that pressuring Israel cost him his second term. The "Lobby" did him. For Dubya to escape that fate and get his real agenda completed, I believe that he and Karl Rove decided that instead of James Baker's hostile (fuck the Jews) attitude, that Bush 43 would give the Israelis everything they wanted. For a Republican satisfying the American Jewish community is not as easy as it might seem. American Jewish people are very liberal, they are not against entitlements or unions, they are concerned about poverty and racism and are not totally adverse to big government or even paying the taxes it costs to get it. As Baker also observed to complete his famous quote, "they don't vote for us". And of course among their number are some of America's most efficient and distinguished trial lawyers. Bush's real agenda, then, is not all that attractive for America's Jewish people. The only way to keep them busy and out his hair was to pander to the Jewish community's Achilles heel, Israel.

Israel is a huge subject unto itself that I often cover at length and this is not the place to go into detail. So lets treat it here with analogy and metaphor. Israel has painted itself into a terrible corner, its political life has been degraded and corrupted out of all recognition, it is moving swiftly toward pariah nation status. Keeping Israel's international reputation afloat is like flying a lead balloon and its very existence is threatened by the Islamic renaissance taking place all over the world. For many, perhaps most, American Jews, this is troubling. For some this problem is like a huge toothache, the kind of toothache that doesn't let a person think straight. Bush simply avoids problems by giving the Israelis all they want when they want it. In return they tell American Jews to "go easy" on Bush. And in support, neocon publicists have given him some of the "vision thing" his father lacked. This has been vital in confusing public opinion. Bush and those around him are desperately inarticulate. The Weekly Standard crowd has given him stirring lines to speak.

In short, the game plan is: give the Israelis Iraq/Iran and thus get the American Jewish community out of Bush's hair in order for him to complete his real program and at the same time dress up his administration's limp rhetoric. If this is really in Israel's or the American Jewish community's true interest, Bush could care less. He is like some pill dispensing, "doctor feel-good", the patient's health is not the true object of his practice. He doesn't care about the Middle East's tragedy, the death and destruction or the final fate of Israel. He keeps his eye on the ball and someday that small but hardy band of billionaires will whisper in his ear, "Thanks a million brother, for a job well done!" And he will be happy with that, he doesn't care what the rest of humanity does or feels.

Well that is the rough start of trying to build a theory of George W. Bush. Thank you for bearing with me, as I struggle to make some sense of it all. DS