On Languid Indifference (Now With Update! And More!)

This is a day to return to our friends at Despair.com -- "Increasing Success by Lowering Expectations" -- for some Demotivators™

Back to the Oil Gusher in the Gulf, it seems. Since the weekend, there's been a somewhat hysterical sideshow, especially among the doombloggers, but not exclusively so, on the "Explosions" which have "collapsed" and/or "opened up" the geological formation in which BP's Devil Riser was placed. The hypothesis seems to be that the pressure of the escaping oil and gas has ruptured the rock all around the well, collapsed it in some places, and there are now several new oil spouts, injecting many more millions of barrels into the Gulf than previously.

Oh and BP is running their LiveCam on a loop. The same eel keeps showing up again and again, and the same little fishy. Over and over. Monkeyfister (whom I recall from quite a few years ago at the Bartcop forum as a very intense young man determined to bloody the Busheviks and their running dogs) and others witnessed the Event and live blogged it, though their conclusions about what happened vary widely.

If you do Windows Media Player, this link goes to a live feed. Well. They say it's live. Who knows. The view currently available on my screen shows a plume of oil and some piping and gizmos down at the bottom of what looks like a pretty deep large-diameter, rough-sided hole. The camera position may be on the rim, I don't know. At any rate, it doesn't look like the views that have been widely distributed in the past. The plume is coming from what appears to be a very narrow orifice at the bottom. It spreads wide quickly, as all of the oil plumes we've seen to date do.

As we know, the oil has come ashore on a 150 mile arc along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, and it has contaminated beaches, marshes and brown pelican nesting areas. Clean up has been, shall we say, spotty.

Last night there was a revolting report on the NewsHour from Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, where oil has been coming ashore for days, and nothing whatever is being done about it by BP or the Federal Government. The Parish Homeland Security Rep points out that numerous local people were trained by BP to serve as workers to handle the spill, but BP never hired anybody to do it. All kinds of control and containment equipment is stored in the Parish, but none of it has been touched as it belongs to BP and there are no BP personnel anywhere near. Frantic calls to BP and the various Federal officials in charge of oversight aren't picked up or returned, and the locals have pretty much decided that both BP and the Feds are worthless and so they are taking matters into their own hands.

Following that report, Coast Guard Admiral In Charge Thad Allen was semi-grilled about the difficulties people onshore were facing, and he acknowledged that everybody involved had to do a better job, no doubt about that, and command and communications had to get better and they were working on it just as hard as they could.

What about Jefferson Parish?

"Working just as hard as we can to stand up better command and communications."

You just want to go Medieval on these people's asses. WTF?!

Thad Allen had a Long Talk with BP over the weekend, and he's sure that things will come together and get better within a short time.

What about Jefferson Parish?

BP has deployed tens of thousands of workers and scientists, the best in the world, to handle the consequences of the spill. And we're all working just as hard as we can to stand up better command and communications.

WHAT ABOUT JEFFERSON PARISH, YOU NIMROD NUMBSKULL?

Everyone is working as hard as they can.

And so it goes.

Much blather masks utterly languid indifference.

A topic I have raised on this blog numerous times with regard to the Washington view of the ongoing unemployment calamity. They couldn't be more indifferent to the crushing plight of the long-term unemployed, despite their recent blather of "concern." They simply don't do anything about it.

Much as we see happening in the Gulf.

Long ago, I decided that Our Rulers' indifference to unemployment was Policy in Action; the point being that maintaining high unemployment figures over an extended period has the "positive" effect of lowering wages and benefits for all workers, which in turn bulks up bottom lines for employers, financiers, and investors. Win-win, in other words, for the Masters of the Universe, not so much for the rest of us, and it is devastating for the overall economy. High unemployment over extended periods forces more and more people into penury and poverty, and cuts in income that ripple through the land reduce the ability of consumers to... well, consume. Which in turn puts the Real Economy (as opposed to the Digital Bytes Finance Economy) into reverse. Keep it up long enough -- and this has been going on for years now -- and there is no returning to "prosperity" for the masses. Which seems to be the intent of the Policy.

The same sort of Indifference, combined with more and more meaningless blather, seems to be going on with regard to the Gulf Gusher, but what in Hell is the Policy?

So far as can be determined, BP is in complete control of the situation, and they are doing whatever will accrue to their corporate benefit. And for whatever reason, have done nothing at all, NOTHING, to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf. NOTHING. Instead, they have done everything they can think of to capture as much of the oil as they can, apparently for distribution and sale. They have made much show of Environmental Concern, yadda yadda, but when push comes to shove, they do nothing. Cf, the story in Jefferson Parish above. Talk about Potemkin Environmentalism. Well, there you are.

They talk extensively about this, that, or the other thing they might-could do to stop the flow of oil, but they don't do it. And they and their flacks keep saying "No one wants to stop this oil flow more than BP, no one!" but there's no evidence of it.

It's all just blather, while the Gulf fills up with oil and scientific studies are conducted on the "effects" all this oil is having on the Environment.

Science! YAY!

This utter indifference to the People (and plants and animals) affected by the constant streams of oil into the Gulf (except in the abstract, as scientific research) is in some ways worse than Chernobyl. At least the Soviet authorities were actually doing something (as tragically misguided as some of it was) to control and contain the contamination and they kept at it until they had done everything they could.

With this Gulf Thing, the Authority is the Corporation, and the Corporation's interest is in recovering as much of the gushing oil as they can for distribution and sale. Nothing matters to them so much as that. And it is obvious from their behavior to date that they will be focused on that objective until the end of the crisis. For its part, the Government refuses to intervene.

Instead, there is blather. Endless blather, and more blather. No action at all.

Though I think it is despicable, at least the Company's motivations are understandable. But what are the Policy motivations for letting them have their way? This is uncharted territory, and I can't tell what Policy matters are being formulated and implemented, except to ignore the public interest to every extent possible.

But to what object?

Anyone?

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UPDATE begun at 4:05pm 05/25/2010

I dunno. Maybe the hysteria is justified. I just checked the live feed from the link above, and the plume has massively, grossly, hideously changed. The view is the same; but the plume when I first saw it just now was much larger, brown instead of black, and seemed to be spewing from a much wider orifice next to the equipment. Then all of a sudden, all hell broke loose, an explosion of some sort, and it looked like a rent in the seafloor opened, spewing massive amounts of brown gunk through a long channel into the ocean. The camera position changed somewhat, apparently trying to take in what had happened, but the plume of engulfed it in a brown haze, looked a lot like smoke from a forest fire.

Scary.

It's hard for me to stay connected to the feed for more than about 30 seconds at a time, but from what I can tell, the camera is surrounded by floating debris and the scene is essentially nothing more than this debris scattering around in a cloud of brown haze. I don't see the plume at all. The debris is moving chaotically and there is quite a bit of it.

The scene has cleared slightly. There appears to be a black plume behind the equipment and a much larger brown plume in front of it. These plumes appear to be issuing from different orifi, but it's impossible to tell for sure. Now it appears to be all one plume, huge, a blowout of a blowout maybe. The camera hasn't moved.

Now the feed has gone dead. I can't reconnect. It's 4:24pm PDT, 05/25/2010

Was just able to reconnect (4:27pm). It's a different view now. There is an elaborate piece of brassy equipment on the end of the arms of a remote operated vehicle. There is a relative small black plume behind this equipment. It looks like an earlier view that was live yesterday. The title of the view is "Deepwater Response", so this is not the view of whatever just blew out. There was a time and date stamp on the prior view, and it was today's date and time. There is no time/date stamp on the current view.

Something happened.

That's for double damned sure.

Something happened. And they cut the feed. There's no two ways about it. As for what we're seeing now? I bet it was live yesterday and it's being replayed now.

I will now don a tinfoil hat.

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UPDATE AGAIN 5:15pm

The same sort of explosive event has been going on at the location of the current live view, assuming it is live. According to Monkeyfister, the device in the scene is used to control dispersant. According to posters over at the Oil Drum -- who have been watching the explosive events today (apparently there have been a number of them) -- what's going on are tests of the blowout preventer to determine whether it can withstand the "Top Kill" operation which has been repeatedly postponed. They are injecting mud to see what happens, and the explosive release of brown stuff is the mud being vomited back up.

Oddly, it seems perfectly rational. Of course whether it is true or not, who knows? If they hadn't a gone off lying about pretty much everything...

In Which Ché Pasa Channels Scott Horton

As should be clear by now, I consider denouncing and struggling against puerile "Libertarian" punks like Rand Paul to be just fine and dandy, whereas, more often than not, I will defend someone like Elena Kagan -- or even Arch She Demon Hillary Clinton -- when others are denouncing and struggling against them.

And the difference is....?

Bystander suggested I might be channeling TBogg. I'm sure TBogg would not be channeling my own self!

Meanwhile, there are far more important and fundamental issues before us than this or that individual getting wrung through the Wringer of Scrutiny on a blog post or on national teevee.

For some time I have been making the point that our so-called Justice system is grossly corrupt and politicized to the point of being merely the simulacrum of Justice, not the real thing at all, not even remotely so. And that the Federal system lost all credibility when the Supreme Court sacrificed its integrity to lawlessly decide the election of 2000.

It's been downhill ever since. And yes, I know there were many faults in the system prior to 2000. I know.

Well, Scott Horton has a post up at No Comment "Montesquieu—Tyranny in the Shadow of the Law" which I think encapsulates our overall dilemma when it comes to the very conception of Justice in this country today. It wears the mask of the Law, but it is under the control of certain powerful men and interests. It is, forthrightly, a tyranny, in service to tyranny.

Il n’y a point de plus cruelle tyrannie que celle que l’on exerce à l’ombre des lois et avec les couleurs de la justice...

Indeed.

Let us go now and ponder.
(h/t for the phrase -- which I haven't heard since high school -- to coram nobis over at Glenn's Place.)

Hassan Chop

A brilliant monologue on the... limitations... of Randian Libertarianism



Here's the whole "Hassan Chop" cartoon, for those so inclined.

"It's Mine! Ya unnerstan? Mine, all Mine!"

Puritan Utopia

Utopia was written by Sir Thomas More (whose tribulations have been the subject of several of the posts on this blog) in 1516. Utopia, in turn, was built on Plato's Republic from 4th Century BC Greece.

At the time Sir Thomas wrote, English Puritans were on not yet on the horizon as their fundamentalist sect hadn't jelled sufficiently to be either a political or religious force to be reckoned with. The Puritan sect arose, essentially fully formed, during the reign of Elizabeth I as a reactionary and purifying element in the (and eventually separate from) the Church of England, which itself had recently gone rogue from the Catholic Church as a consequence of Henry VIII's overweaning self-love and his erotic/dynastic desires.

The concepts of the ideal republic that were the touchstone of both Plato's Republic and Sir Thomas's Utopia would become central to radicals and reformists alike throughout the English speaking world and beyond. Some of that influence came to America with the Puritans of New England, and it spread from there. While Puritanism and Utopianism are not the foundation of the American move to Independence, there can be no doubt of their strong influence.

And today, Puritanism and Utopianism are once again arising as answers to what ails the faltering (or in some views, my own included, the extinct) American Republic. We see it in the widespread Fundamentalist Religious movements, and we're seeing it in the Libertarian/Propertarian public figures of Ron and Rand Paul and their ilk which have been so highly "scrutinized" since the Younger Paul's Republican Senate primary victory in Kentucky.

Libertarianism and its narrow-focused brother Propertarianism are Utopian and they are Puritan. They propose a narrowly defined ideal civil society based on theoretical constructs of human nature and what should be, ignoring what is or what has been experienced along Libertarian and Propertarian lines, in favor of constant adherence to and promotion of what the ideal would be and should be if only everyone applied it purely enough. That no one does apply the theoretical concepts of Libertarianism/Propertarianism -- at least not sufficiently for Ultimate Proof of the theories -- is a failing of ruling elites and ignorant masses, not -- at all -- a failing of the political, social, and economic concepts involved, and certainly not a failing of Utopian and Puritan vision. Which, by definition, cannot fail, they can only be failed by cowardly humans who deserve their own misery. So there.

They are Unredeemed. Perhaps Unredeemable. Oh well.

Ron Paul has long been the Voice of Libertarianism in the US Congress, where he has had the seat from Galveston, TX, off and on for many a long year. He claims to be a Constitutionalist, but like many such self-proclaimed Puritans, he is nothing of the kind. It is impossible for someone like Paul, who disputes essentially the entire history of self-government under the Constitution, warts and all, to be a Constitutionalist in any rational sense.

What I've said is that he is a Confederate. And so is his son.

The Constitution of the Confederate States of America (ie: Dixie, the Rebel South as it were) is similar to that of the United States of America, but for that fact that property (specifically and especially property in Negro slaves) has a much more important role in the purpose of Government. It is close to a Propertarian's dream, and because it is otherwise similar to the United States Constitution, so similar as to be identical word for word in many cases (somewhat like the US Bill of Rights is sometimes word for word similar to the English Bill of Rights of 1689, though the two had very different purposes), there might be something of a Constitutional Confusion in the minds of so-called Constitutionalists like the Pauls. Just what Constitution are they referring to? Hm?

Property is so central to the Libertarian/Propertarian Puritan Utopia that Ron and Rand Paul, in defending their "concerns" about the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and so on, essentially declared them "unconstitutional" insofar as they interfere with or regulate the use of private property by their private owners. An argument can be made -- and certainly was made by the property-obsessed Owners of the South (and elsewhere) back in the day -- that legal prohibitions on segregated public accommodations violate some sacred notion of private property. It is difficult, nay impossible, to find that sacredness in the US Constitution as amended, because it isn't there. It is, however, in the Confederate Constitution, and it is implied in the Articles of Confederation that preceded the adoption of the Constitution of the United States.

The struggle with the South -- and parts of the West -- has been over the primacy of private property rights ever since. Libertarians/Propertarians are as focused on the primacy of private property as any Georgia Cracker ever was.

And their claims of adoration of the Constitution of the United States ring hopelessly hollow. Securing, protecting and defending private property rights is not the prime objective of the United States Constitution; in fact, property rights barely enter into it at all.

However, those protections and defenses missing from the US Constitution are in the Confederate Constitution, and they are implied (through the primacy of States Rights) in the Articles of Confederation.

The Private Property Utopia was neither the intention nor the outcome of the adoption of the United States Constitution, but there have been many opportunities for individuals and groups to form Utopias within the United States -- based on pretty much anything they want. They haven't succeeded. There are and have been extraordinary opportunities within the United States to acquire, develop and prosper from private property, but always under some form of lawful taxation and restrictions. The absolutist notion of rights in property that are so fundamental to the the Libertarian/Propertarian world view (and achieving their Utopia) are simply not part of the framework of American law and governance.

Consequently the Puritan Utopia of Private Property -- which is fundamentally what Libertarianism and Propertarianism are all about -- is not American, as in the United States of America. It is, however, a principle of the Confederation and the Confederate States.


The Perfesser Chomsky explains it all for you:

Private Tyranny - the Libertarian Wet Dream and Utopia

The Ratchet Effect

I want to expand just a little bit on my closing thoughts in my previous post on the KY It-boy == about process with regard to "opening the discussion," whether it's a discussion about torture, restriction/elimination of civil liberties for accused terrorists, or the current ill-informed discussion about "re-visiting" public accommodations aspects of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the laws that have grown out of it.

Once these discussions have been "opened" the course of events only moves (easily) in one direction. And the direction it moves is typically that which those who open the discussion desire. It is the Ratchet Effect in action.

Torture was not open to "reasonable" discussion prior to Alan Dershowitz putting for this notorious notions on numerous television appearances shortly after the tragedy of 9/11. Widespread restrictions on basic civil liberties were not open to discussion prior to the "reasonable" discussion of doing so concomitant with the advent of the Patriot Act and all the hinking of due process and worse that went with it -- thanks to Joe Lieberman and Little Lindsey Graham. Non discrimination in public accommodations was not open to "reasonable" discussion prior to Rand Paul running his yap on NPR, Rachel Maddow and a raft of other places.

And now that these issues have been put in the Public Square, look! It's almost magical. Torture is accepted by the millions, civil liberties are considered quaint, and no doubt the public accommodations aspects of civil rights law will be found to have fallen into disfavor ("no longer needed," don't you know) and private businesses will once again be allowed to discriminate any way they see fit.

Which was the objective of opening the discussion in the first place.

Much as I mock and disparage him, I don't actually blame Rand Paul for this; I get the sense from him that he doesn't have any real grounding among the Peoples of the Earth, he's just a floating head, operating on automatic. No, the responsibility for this should be put where it belongs, with the factions of the Ruling Class who are and have long been intent on reversion -- or as they call it: Progress -- to a Liberated Utopia, for them.

They've been doing everything they can to throw off legal restraints on their behavior and profits for generations, and they are utterly focused and relentless. The "reasonable" discussion of workarounds for, repeal of, or ignoring the public accommodations provisions of civil rights law is just one more step down that path.

This comes out of the desires of the Ruling Class and their media enablers. It is not, solely, the responsibility of Li'l Rand.

It just isn't.

On the KY It-Boy, Nitwit (Now with Update!)

[Tedious little peckerhead (h/t gunnison @ FDL) Rand Paul, MD]

I've commentated about Li'l Paul, who I've dubbed the KY "It-Boy", in several fora, mostly lambasting him for his mind-numbing Propertarian clap-trap and general incoherent babbling, but it's looking more and more (at least for the moment) that he actually might represent a Problem for The Powers That Be.

He's supposed to be a part of the Establishment like his Daddy. Oh, his designated role within that Establishment is to be on the Farthest Right Propertarian Fringe and to get the Cracker Vote all riled up and to appeal to some of the younger elements in the Propertarian/Libertarian firmament.

But he's journeyed off the reservation on the matter of the Civil Rights Act and apparently other things, and though he's apparently been provided with study material and the appropriate talking points -- "Moi? Why I support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its entirety; I can't imagine why you would think otherwise. Ha ha ha ha ha." -- I've got this sense about him that he may try to break free of his handlers, somewhat like Half-Term Sarah did, and go for something else again. Something even more populist... shall we say.

The fear of Rightist populism is completely justified given its blood-soaked history in the 20th Century -- and I'm not just talking about the Nazis.

Rightist populism has a long history in this country, too, not least in the South.

And this nitwit comes along and starts pumping it up again, after several decades of deflation.

"We've come to take the Government back." Not take the country back, you notice. That was Dr. Dean's theme, and some observers would say that Dean and the Deaniacs got pretty much what they wanted -- or at least what they were working for, whether they knew it or not -- with the capture of all three branches of Government by Democrats.

What a disappointment that's been. But that's another topic. One day I'll have to go into some of my experiences working on the Dean campaign, and how some of the same enthusiasm and personnel were transferred to the Obama campaign, as were some of the delusions. But not just yet.

"Take the Government back..." There's a lot of code-talk in the KY It-Boy's campaign designed to appeal to the fine upstanding Southern white boys who have felt their Government was taken from them by all these uppity darkies and wimmen, especially the darkie in the White House, but including dames like Mrs. Pelosi and the Always Arch She-Demon, Hillary.

So they're gonna send Ron Paul's nitwit son to sit in the Senate to git 'er done. Don't laugh. It could happen.

Nitwit though he may be, and with a birdsnest of curls on top of his very swelled head (h/t some commenter at FDL), Rand Paul strikes me as quite possibly the charismatic Rightwing Populist leader Half-term Sarah has been pretending to be on her road show. It's more than obvious that Half-term Sarah is in it for the money -- which she is making hand over fist -- just like Glenn Beck, the other potential RW Populist leader -- until the KY It-Boy came along.

Despite the fact that the Big Republican Leadership is trying to train up Li'l Paul to behave on the stump, it looks like this babbling boy is bucking the grownups and forging his own path. Half-term Sarah was apparently purchasable for hard cash, but I'm not at all sure Rand Paul can be bought. And if he can't be, Katie Bar the Door. He's got an immense ego, and he's already let his primary victory swell his curly haired head up so much he can't even get it through ordinary doors anymore.

If he continues to try to rally the reactionary Crackers -- which he's doing with every teevee appearance -- it's possible the Government will have (another) BIG problem on its hands.

The Arizona Thing was kind of a harbinger, along with the huge amount of public approval Arizona's pissant reactionary behavior is garnering.

We're going down a path we've been down before, and it's one that doesn't end happy.
----------------------
UPDATE:

Here's Rachel asking some questions of America:



But I think she's being somewhat disingenuous. The little Cracker twerp has backflipped and backtracked all over the place for the last 24/36 hours over the "Civil Rights" Thing -- scare quotes intentional -- and in the process has managed to convince a portion of the Big Media that the Controversy is meaningless, a tempest in a teapot, he's just a Normal Guy who wants to be Free, come on, anyway.

And of course plenty of his partisans and flacks, who believe as he does on the larger question of the Sacredness of Property Rights (as opposed to Human Rights), are styling him as Perfectly Normal as well. The "Civil Rights" Thing being long settled. You see.

Rachel touches on it toward the end of her soliloquy, but it is in a very arch and abstract way, laying out "questions" issue-by-issue, just barely relating them to the whole, ie: the Libertarian World View.

But it is really more fundamental than that.

Is it the Right to and in Private Property more important to Americans in the 21st Century than Human Rights?

Should interest in Property trump every other interest at all in the law?

Should the acquisition, holding, and defense of Property be the central focus of American society, law and custom?

Does the Constitution protect and defend Property at the expense of all other rights and interests?

When the questions are asked this way, the inherent dangers of Pauliac Propertarianism to all other rights and interests takes on focus. Its fundamental anti-Constitutionalism, and the impossibility of Constitutional Self-Government under Pauliac Propertarian law is revealed.

So long as the focus remains on the "Civil Rights" Thing, the danger that Propertarianism represents to all mankind is masked. ("Of course I believe in Civil Rights! Heh.") Of course. And if those civil rights -- and the concept of Human Rights -- are trumped by Property Rights... oh well!

-------------------

Furthermore: The process of "opening the discussion" of the Civil Rights Act and the Public Accommodations provisions reminds me a whole lot of the means by which the issue of torture was put in the Public Square when time was, and how, over the course of the "rational discussion" that ensued, and the careful weighing of the pros and cons, the ethical and moral "dilemmas", and all the practical considerations -- along with plenty of field practice -- it was determined that the public was actually split on the issue, and while the Obama White House promptly prohibited "torture" -- which wasn't going on anyway according to the Cheneys -- everyone expects it's still going on. And few care.

Transfer that same process to key civil rights issues, whether focused on accommodation or otherwise. We've already seen what's happened with the Arizona law requiring you to produce your papers. Americans by and large are all in favor. Well, if the civil rights and accommodation issues are "aired thoroughly" -- as they will be as long as people keep yapping about Rand Paul's outrageousness -- we'll find, surprisingly enough, that the Public is "split" on the issue.

And won't that enable justification for ignoring the laws?

Well?

A Note About "La Musica"

A couple of weeks ago I added a wiget to this site from Playlist.com that -- I'm sure is annoyingly apparent -- plays music upon landing here. The playlist is my selection, mostly (for now) Latin music that I happen to like for one reason or another, together with some older and newer country, western swing, bits of classical/opera and, of course, Piaf.

Much of it, obviously is not in English. As for me, I can get by (with lots of study, or some native-speaking help) in Spanish and French, can sort of stumble along in German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian, and if I have time to practice, I can cough up some phrases in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. I know some words in Cherokee and the Navajo language, and while I studied Irish, I am still a complete dunce both speaking and reading that impossible tongue. (In fact, I discovered that Irish Gaelic is not nearly as hard as it seems to be from trying to read it or make any kind of sense of its written form. I asked a man from Belfast once why written Irish was so difficult. He said, "Ah m'lad, it's so the British Bastards won't know what we're talkin' about." And he laughed. Honestly, he didn't know what I was talking about. To him, written Irish was perfectly clear... OK....)

From time to time, I expect I will add and remove selections from the playlist as it is not hard to do. Personally, I like to leave the playlist open while I surf other sites. I added it in part because from the outset of this blog I was including YouTube music videos that I either liked or that illustrated a point, but of course they scroll off or they're deleted from YouTube and are no longer available. So with the playlist, I can have some of the music I like easily accessible any time.

I know it can be very annoying, however, to have to listen to somebody else's musical selections. It's easy to turn it off: just press "pause."

It is set on "random selection" and jumps all over the list. If you see something on the list you want to hear, click on the title and it will start playing. The next one that plays will not be what's next on the list, it will be a random selection.

If you want a playlist of your own (and I am not being paid nor am I an agent) just go to Playlist.com, sign up and search for whatever suits your fancy. There are an immense number of tunes to choose from, all free, unless you want to pay 2.99 a month to have a player on your own site without ads. It can be a little tricky to add the player to your site, but the instructions are pretty clear.

And if you are really, really annoyed with the one here, let me know.

Change is good.

On the Gulf Oil Gusher

This is one of those classic fear-driven Doomsday Events, proto-Apocalyptic End-Times Revelations and so on that frequently just turn me off.

The media -- to the extent I've been aware of the coverage (recall, there is no cable "news" in my home, but I do look at the papers, read the Intertube reports and occasionally watch NewsHour and listen to NPR) -- seems to largely serve as a mask for what is really going on, has been that from the beginning when their Narrative was all about the Grand Romantic Heroes (of BP) that were Manfully Throwing Themselves into the breech.

Inaccurate reporting abounded, still does, and BP (and the Oil Industry) is always given the lead voice in any on-air discussion of the disaster. BP has been spinning like mad, simply not giving complete information, correct information, or useful information about the Gusher in the Gulf and what anyone is doing to staunch the flow of oil.

Because the fact of the matter is that nobody is doing a doG-damned thing to stop the oil flow, and they never have.

From all appearances, neither BP nor the Government have any interest in stopping it. The only efforts to date have focused on capturing the oil for later sale and distribution.

Over the next few months, another well may (or may not) be drilled to enable the shut-down of this one, but that's far in the future if it happens at all. They want the oil, pure and simple, and they are working tirelessly to figure out a way to capture it -- for sale and distribution.

So far as we can tell from the paucity of information available, the Predicted Environmental Catastrophe due to the Gusher in the Gulf hasn't materialized, and possibly it won't. At least not the way the breast beaters and garment renders have speculated it would. On the other hand, it may ultimately be worse than anyone imagined. We don't know. This appears to be due to the nature of the oil itself: it is not the heavy crude that fouled the Santa Barbara beaches in 1969 and that leaked out of the Exxon Valdez in 1989. Instead, it is much lighter and apparently contains lots of volatiles that evaporate quickly at the surface. So far as we know, little of the oil has reached shore, and what has was relatively easily and efficiently cleaned up. There has been little -- known -- impact on larger animals and birds, though fisheries are shut down.

It seems, from reports, that the Catastrophe is Not So Bad, and that the Powers That Be are doing the necessary work to contain, if not actually control, the Gusher and any damage it might cause.

But we don't know.

Which, quite naturally, I think, leads to some comparisons with Chernobyl. The Soviets seemed to be relatively forthcoming -- certainly compared to past performances in Calamities -- about the Chernobyl disaster and what was being done about it. But in fact we now know that the Chernobyl reactor disaster was far worse than reports or even speculation would have it at the time, and that as "forthcoming" as the Soviets appeared to be, they weren't, certainly not with regard to the consequences for the Ukraine or Russia or Europe. Radiation exposure levels were far higher than was acknowledged, many more lives were lost in trying to deal with the Catastrophe or as a consequence of environmental degradation, many, many more people were displaced than was indicated at first and so on. We saw at the time that the Authorities didn't know what to do, and what they came up with, The Sarcophagus to enclose the ruined reactor, was almost impossible to accomplish, and didn't work initially. It had to be built over, and what I understand is that it has deteriorated so much, it's going to have to be rebuilt again.

In other words, as bad as the Chernobyl Disaster was reported to be, it was actually far worse. And more than 20 years later the area has not recovered. Nor is it in some ways ever expected to recover.

The Chernobyl Disaster happened at the penultimate moment for the Soviet Union and to my mind it sealed the fate of the Soviet Authority and Empire. It was the Death Knell, something that some people understood at the time. It would take a few more years, but shortly, the Soviet Union would dispose of its Imperial possessions and internally collapse -- from weariness, among other things. Weariness that so much promise had been abused and frittered away. That so many grand plans had never been realized, and that so much that had been built by the Workers' State was so shoddy and ultimately dangerous to life and limb and the Future.

The Soviet Union was on life support by the time the Chernobyl reactor went critical. And the Soviet Union finally expired. With nary a peep and hardly any bloodshed. The End of the Soviet Union was, like its beginning, one of the most remarkable political and social transformations in world history, but the beginning of it has had far more attention paid by historians than its end. It's almost as if the collapse of the Soviet Union hasn't really settled in to conscious understanding yet. Not only does what happened remain veiled (even though much, much information is in the Public Record) the actual reasons for it and lessons learned remain a Mystery.

As if no one really wants to deal with it.

It was, after all, an earth-shaking event the consequences of which have been global and not necessarily positive -- if you're not in the Upper One Percent.

Certainly the consequences for Russia and its former Imperial possession have been economically and socially catastrophic for the millions -- but wonderfully rewarding for the few. It's not all that different in much of the rest of the world, including the United States, which is trending more in the direction of Soviet-style Imperialism and Authoritarianism (but not Totalitarianism) every day, while exploiting the masses with glee and abandon.

I don't know whether the Gulf Oil Gusher is the penultimate event of Our Own Imperial Selves. It's too soon to tell, but it certainly has the potential to be a worse physical, economic and social disaster than Chernobyl was for the Soviet Union.

Oh my yes.

Chris Floyd Explains It All For You (Again...)

Just go read it. It's brilliant. Creeping Terror: The New American Way of War


In sum:

.... That's the American way of war. Creep, sneak, kill, run, lie – repeat. Sure, it only makes things worse, creates more enemies, keeps the wars going. But isn't that the point? Check it out, baby: they're piling an extra $33.5 billion of prime war pork on top of the mountain of Terror War funding already laid out for this year! And you need a whole lot of blood to wash down that meat – and a whole lot of new enemies to make sure the feast never ends.

I'd just add that the entire Anglo-American Warfighting effort these days seems to be based on a dirtier, more technologically adept version of Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, and the direct rather than indirect application of terror campaigns against civilian targets, including torture and massacres, based on the Central American Bloodbath of the Reagan years.

Sweet.

Freedom! Fuck yeah!

"Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn! They took the offer! Shi!t!"

[Seen above, Anglo-American-Israeli Fever Dream of Annihilating Tehran]


So I was half-watching the NewsHour last night. It's one of the very few programs on the teevee I ever watch, and generally speaking, I tune out and do other things whenever Gwen Ifill or Judy Woodruff do their comedy stylings as hostesses. Ifill is such a suck-up to Power (as she conceives of it) and Woodruff is a Right Wing Freak (though she tones it down on PBS), but I digress.

The topic was Iran's acceptance of the deal that it was offered last fall to transfer its low enriched uranium stockpiles out of the country in order to delay or avoid some sanctions.

Iran "blinked" as it were.

You would think the US of A -- and the media -- would be high-stepping and twirling their batons like mad and the Obama Administration would be sending out Hillary or Rahm or Axelrod to do all the shows and crow Triumph.

But no.

Oh, far from it.

Instead, Judy had a couple of neo-con drones on to bemoan the fact that the deal Iran accepted (with the considerable help and encouragement of Brazil and Turkey) should have been taken off the table a long time ago, and this is just terrible. We're doomed!

Isn't that special.

Judy's question to the drones: "What's going on here? What -- what is this deal about Turkey and Brasil [her lips curled with distaste] working out an arrangement with Iran? What do they get -- what does each side get -- out of this?"

Of course they go into a mutual tailspin, rending their garments and covering themselves with ashes, because...

What?

Well, so far as I can parse it, this deal was worked out behind the scenes between the high contracting parties: Brazil, Turkey, and Iran, without the help and assistance of the Big Powers, US, EU and Russia. Although apparently Brazil and Turkey were authorized by the Big Powers, through the UN, to do just what they did, they did what they did without the direct participation of the US State Department, and they concluded the agreement without the knowledge of State or any other Stakeholder -- and that's what all the pissing and moaning in Washington is about.

That and the fact that Everyone Who Matters is utterly convinced of Iran's Nuclear Perfidy and wants desperately to nuke Tehran and Isfahan to teach those Wogs a lesson they will never forget and cow the Muslim masses into ultimate submission to their Anglo-American-Israeli and EuroWeenie masters.

It's a revenge fantasy they won't let go of.

Setting aside the Israeli need to exact revenge on the Iranians (for what, it's not exactly clear since Israel and Iran have frequently collaborated on Mischief and Perfidy), the American government's grudge against Iran is obvious enough: revenge for the humiliation of 1979. Why anybody else would need revenge against Iran is one of the Great Mysteries.

The loud and persistent drumbeat of War against Iran is apparently grounded in the fantasy or the fear that Iran is trying to gain the capability to make nuclear weapons!!!! Iran is trying to make... the Bomb!!!! Maybe so, but there is not a shred of concrete evidence of it, and yet Israel and the United States consistently behave as if it is Proven Fact, and not just their mutual hysteria.

It's Cheney's One Percent Doctrine still ruling the roost in DeeCee.

What's up with that?

My objection to the segment on the NewsHour, apart from my crabbiness at Woodward on principle, was that it was so skewed to neo-conism, without the slightest acknowledgment that there is any other point of view. It was propaganda, pure and simple.

"No contribution for you, PBS!" But then, I haven't contributed to them for many years.

Watch the NewsHour segment:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/international/jan-june10/iran_05-17.html


Then take a look at Russia Today's news report below. World of difference, eh?

And This Is All I'll Have To Say About That (Yeah, right...)

The Kagan Thing has got the whole Lefty Blogosphere into a frenzy, some of it -- well, a good deal of it -- stirred up by "Glennzilla". Elena Kagan has been ritualistically smeared on the premise that she is such an unknown quantity that she will move the Supreme Court to the Right, which will be disastrous for the Nation (and the Blessed Constitution) for thirty or forty years to come (she's only 50 after all, and SCOTUS justices live forever, don't they?) and we can't have that.

So the so-called Left on the Intertubes has been denouncing and struggling against her and all her slim volume of works, vying with one another to come up with the most outrageous accusation against her short but sturdy self.

(Side note, and digression: I made an offhand comment at one point in the Kagan Struggles about short, aggressive women I have known and how they have demonstrated their brass gonads.

There have been several, but I was thinking of one in particular when I wrote that. Her name was Linda, and she and I worked together (many) years ago in New York and Florida. She was just under five feet tall, sturdy, with a round open face much like Kagan's, and when I first heard Kagan talk, she sounded just like Linda. Linda was known for her forcefulness, and for her refusal to take shit from anyone, most especially not from anyone who professed to claim authority when they were in the wrong. She was known for vicious putdowns, delivered not only with a smile, but sometimes with a sly veil of politeness that their victim wouldn't recognize as a put down at all for days -- though everyone else knew. Linda made friends very easily, knew her own business very well, she was kind and generous to a fault, and she was loyal without compromising her own principles. She was very ambitious, and for the most part very successful. I lost touch with her when I decided I'd had enough of the gypsy life I'd been living, much of it east of the Mississippi, and returned to California. [Digression on the digression: I Googled Linda up a little while ago to see what she's up to, and well. How very interesting. Last I knew, she'd just taken a job at Boston University, was preparing to move from her Brooklyn flat, very excited and all. Some 20+ years ago. Now she's apparently at the University of Chicago (!), in a completely different though arguably tangential field, got her doctorate, and she is pimping her research into the arcana of a very narrow aspect of computer animation. She has hundreds of papers and research projects she's completed, alone and with others, and I'm just stunned. My doG, what has she become? Good going, Linda!] But I never forgot her, and if Kagan is anything like her, I have no doubt she'll have a considerable and potentially very positive impact on the Court, if only by not yielding to the bullshit put out by those like Scalia and Thomas... [/digression])

What I saw happening reminded me of other episodes on the Internets, for example, when Barbara Boxer expressed her support for Lieberman in the Connecticut Senate primary all those years ago, FDL exploded with denunciations, the most original of them being that Boxer "is a cloth-coat Republican!" for supporting Lieberman. Oh. Kay. Indeed, the attacks on Boxer were so over the top, and such an anti-Boxer mob was formed over there, that I spoke out against it, in my most Atticus Finch mode, and got my tit run through the wringer more than a couple of times for my trouble. My point was that Boxer was one of the very few actual Progressives in the Senate, and smearing her -- because of her expressed support for her colleague Senator Lieberman -- while ignoring her contributions, indeed often denouncing her Progressive contributions, was simply stupid and was not going to advance The Supposed Progressive Cause that FDL was ostensibly promoting. Many people at FDL took offense and some still harbor grudges about it. I was accused of trying to "deny them the right" to denounce whoever they wanted for whatever reason they thought appropriate. Um. Sure.

It's not about the "right" to do this or that -- or to get as crazy as you want to. It's about critical thinking. And understanding the difference between allies and enemies. It's about listening. It's about rational consideration. And it's about respect.

I defended Hillary when anti-Hillary-mobs were cruising the Internets denouncing her and accusing her of all manner of perfidy during the 2008 primaries, digging up every conceivable accusation from the Clinton White House Era, and making up some new ones, and parading it all around as Gospel Truth Revealed. I pointed out that Hillary was actually running to the Left of Obama, for one thing, and that he was even more of a corporate, imperialist warmonger than they were accusing her of being. So I was (hilariously) accused of being a "Hillarybot, a shill! Burrrrn him!"

There have been other, similar, incidents. And when I saw the same sort of outrageous mob action to smear Kagan forming at Glenn's instigation, I made some remarks about it. To say the least.

I don't buy the premise that Kagan will "move" the Court to the Right, for the simple reason that it is already far, far to the Right. She can't "move" it rightwards, any more than Stevens could move it Left. The notion is absurd on its face. The Court IS a Rightist, corrupt abomination. She can join it. She can't move it.

So right out of the gate, the initial premise for attacking her is simply false.

Along that line, to my somewhat jaundiced way of looking at things, Kagan simply cannot make much of a difference at all in how this Court functions nor in its Rightist rulings on behalf of Power and Money. She can dissent if she wants, she can concur. It won't make a difference. The majority will still be a Rightist, corrupt cabal, quite possibly religiously insane, for whom the concept of Justice is alien. And they will continue to rule in their accustomed manner. Regardless.

And then there is this: 12/12/2000.

That's the date the Supreme Court of the United States, after a long period of decline, gave up any pretense of institutional integrity, by its lawless interference and decision in the election. Bush v Gore marked the end of the Court's institutional standing as upholder of the law and the Constitution. The Court has made many errors in its long history, but this one was fundamental, as serious a category error as it is possible for the Court to make. And that gross error was promptly compounded by a series of errors -- Al Gore's concession, the Senate going along with the Court's ruling, and Bush accepting the Presidency.

It was not a "slow-motion coup." It was very fast, and from the moment the Court rendered its Bush v Gore decision, the Court's legitimacy collapsed. That would be followed by the collapse of the legitimacy of Congress which accepted the ruling. Al Gore's political legitimacy faltered when he conceded the election based on the Supreme Court's ruling, and he lost it completely when he told the Congressional Black Caucus to -- in essence -- sit down and shut up and stop objecting. And then the Presidency lost its legitimacy when Bush bustled into the office without a backward glance at how he had got there.

We've been living amid the wreckage of a now defunct Constitutional Republic ever since, while the Governing Class (Our Rulers, as it were) have been busy putting together an anti-Constitutional Imperial State, getting closer and closer to arbitrary rule by Decree from the Throne every day. Kagan's presence or absence from the Court will make not a bit of difference in that enterprise, but she wouldn't have been chosen if she had any serious objection to it. Nor would Obama been able to ascend to the Throne if HE had any serious objection. And so on.

Given that context, all this anti-Kagan crap is so much bullshit, more rearranging of the deck chairs, if you will.

Lots of people are still holding on to the shreds and tatters of What Used to Be, of course. It's human nature. I do it myself. But the fact is, we don't have a "legitimate government" in a Constitutional sense, we haven't had one for a decade, and it's not coming back. That game's been over for quite a while now.

What we're playing now is the Mitigation Game. For example, by putting a Good Emperor on the Throne, things are supposed to be "better." Yet we see the Imperium doesn't change back into a Republic; if anything, consolidation of the Imperial State is accelerated. Yet by being less crazy than McPalin, of course the Obama Reign is "better." It's self evident, yes?

Congress has shown itself to be a hopelessly corrupt body, essentially unable to function on behalf of the People it is supposed to represent. And the courts and the so-called "Justice" Department as a whole are just as corrupt and anti-Constitutional as the Imperial Executive, and for all intents and purposes, the most critical outrages of the Bush/Cheney Regime abide unmolested.

So what do you do? Work yourself into a spit-spewing frenzy over... Elena Kagan?

Please.

The Problem is so much greater than her. Really.

Hard Concepts

The other day Ezra The Tool (but they say he puts out, so there is that) ran an interview on his WaPo blog with Jamie Galbraith, iconoclast economist.

And the so-called Lefty-blogosphere exploded with denunciations and ad hominems at both Galbraith, who denies the validity of Economic Orthodoxy, and at Ezra The Tool for daring to run an interview with The Heretic as well as your general Anti-Ezra animus.

Every time these sorts of things happen, especially in the so-called Lefty blogosphere, I am intrigued and sometimes alarmed. What is really going on? And in the case of the extended and often completely outrageous denunciations of Galbraith (from so-called Lefties), is it ignorance or... something else?

As a rule, I tend to have little faith in economists of any stripe; they are almost all inclined to declare Ultimate Truths that upon examination prove to be Crocks of Shit. They serve economic and political agendas, their own personal careerist ones, or the agendas of Corporate Masters and/or their Government Hirelings. By and large, and as a profession (so-called), they have no interest whatever in and little knowledge of the "micro-economy" of individuals and communities, and are oblivious to the consequences for the masses of following their advice (if it is even comprehensible enough to follow). To say they "don't care" about anything but the private accumulation of as much more wealth as humanly possible by those who already have more wealth than they can count is to be charitable.

They and lawyers should be first against the wall when the Revolution comes.

But that's unlikely to happen in my lifetime, so I tend to be attracted to what little economic theory there is that actually pays attention to those consequences for the masses that are so often ignored or dismissed.

(As a side note, in order to understand Obama's extraordinary level of economic fealty to American and global corporate and financial interests, and to help comprehend the astonishing level of White House indifference to the economic plight of the masses, it might be wise to remember that Obama's grandmother -- who was his primary caregiver growing up -- was a banker, and his father -- who essentially abandoned him -- was an Kenyan economist who got his undergraduate degree at the University of Hawaii and his masters at Harvard in the early 1960's. The Hooverite economic policies coming out of the White House are no accident. And don't doubt for a moment that his ascent to the Throne wasn't smoothed by billionaires and finaciers who saw that Obama had their interests at heart.)

Galbraith is one of the economists I pay at least glancing attention to. I am not a devotee of his or of any other Alternative Economist, nor do I subscribe to any particular Economic School or Theory. All I know is that current fashionable economic theory is based on unfettered plunder and rapine of the "weak" by the "strong."

Galbraith denies the validity of the Peterson-and-The-Billionaires' Deficit Hysteria, and I tend to agree with him. In his interview with Ezra, he points out -- accurately, in my view -- that the deficits the government is running right now have essentially "zero" danger. If anything, he advocates even larger deficits in order to put people back to work and get money flowing more freely through the economy. He rigorously disputes the analogy of government debt and household debt. If anything, he seems to believe that government debt should be used to help clear household debt rather than being handed over to the banking institutions to prop up their make-believe solvency and to keep those bubbles (and bonuses) coming.

From the way the anti-Post-Keynesian rabble attack Galbraith for stating the obvious, I suspect they are terrified of Galbraith and his economic heresy. It doesn't look like a rational fear at all, because on the face of it, if Galbraith's Modern Monetary Theory were practiced, the wealth and status of the Ruling Class would be assured in perpetuity -- through the happy agency of building up the economic wherewithal and security of the Lower Orders, instead of practicing the plunder and rapine and the repetitious finance bubbles the Ruling Class currently engages in.

But people who have invested plenty in the current economic system of bubbles, plunder and rapine, and who have grown fat and happy betting that the whole thing will crash and burn -- and are therefore eager to see it happen -- fear any change that would jeopardize their wagers.

I don't think, however, that includes a whole lot of non-elite Lefties.

So it is quite something to see the explosion of rage at Galbraith (and Ezra for interviewing him) at sites like Crooks and Liars, where the Galbraith comment thread is full of denunciations much like the comments on Ezra's interview.

What's up with that?

What are they so very afraid of?

Watch Galbraith on Moyers for more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwGn_H0LUZg

Note especially that though the interview with Moyers was recorded in November of 2009, here we are many months later and the outlook for Americans hasn't improved for the most part at all.

Apparently these Galbraithian Heresies are really Hard Concepts for those who are steeped in predatory economics.

No wonder Galbraith's pen is sometimes sharp:

Leading active members of today's economics profession, the generation presently in their 40s and 50s, have joined together into a kind of politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule — as one might expect from a gentleman's club — this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen. They offer a "rape is like the weather" fatalism about an "inevitable" problem (pay inequality) that then starts to recede. They oppose the most basic, decent, and sensible reforms, while offering placebos instead. They are always surprised when something untoward (like a recession) actually occurs. And when finally they sense that some position cannot be sustained, they do not re-examine their ideas. Instead, they simply change the subject. -- from How the Economists Got It Wrong, American Prospect, November 30, 2002

In Real News

From The Real News Network

This story is really the central issue throughout the Western world. "Billionaires for Social Insecurity" as the folks over at Campaign for America's Future put it.

In the United States, right now, as we speak, millions of Americans are being forced into poverty by the demands of the banksters and looters of Wall Street and Our Ruling Class -- some of whom are featured in the videos above. Vampires like Alan Greenspan, Bob Rubin, and of course the Devil Himself, Peter G. Peterson.

Millions of Americans are being forced out of work, and many of them will never hold a job again. They won't pay into Social Security, and even without the Billionaires' ministrations, their benefits, if they receive any at all, will be substantially lower than if they were able to keep working. Millions are forced into bankruptcy every year, but in many cases they still have to pay off their credit card debts, which, thanks to Joe Biden's "bankruptcy reform act" is a protected form of debt which can be collected essentially in perpetuity.

And here we see our Billionaires quite openly conspiring to cut Social Security and Medicare further for one very simple reason: they don't want to have to pay taxes to make up for the shortfalls in the funds that have resulted from their various forms of corporate and finance sector welfare and their astonishing levels of tax cuts over the years.

In essence, they are openly refusing to be taxed, and they are daring anybody to do anything about it. They will, however, be delighted to consider taxing the lower orders sufficiently to pay for their ever expanding need for wars of aggression.

It's not just happening in Washington, it's happening all over the Western world -- and in many other places as well.

The recently announced bailout of the EuroZone is a plan to pay off the EuroCreditors at 100% of loan value, at the full expense of the People of Europe. They will suffer, as the billionaires think they should, for being profligate and complacent. The banksters who are demanding payment -- extortion, really -- will lose nothing, in fact they will be rewarded for their efforts to loot the treasuries of all of Europe.

And while all this and more is going on, we see continuing focus on Elena Kagan and her inadequacy.

It's sad, really. There are some people on the left-er side of the alternative media who are actually paying attention to this robbery in plain sight. Digby has been covering it extensively for years; it -- like the proliferation of Tasers in this country -- is her own private bailiwick. The mainstream media will only cover it to the extent that they are able to reinforce the faulty premises that underlie the crusade to cut already minimal benefits for millions. Most of the mainstream media is fully behind the Peterson crusade, and they cannot imagine that anyone would disagree.

But the sad thing is that much of the alternative media seems to agree with the deficit scolds and can't figure out that maybe the Petersons and the other billionaires who are pushing this line are wrong. Even if they did figure it out, they wouldn't know what to do about it.

The fact that the Obama White House and Congress apparently agree with Peterson, and practically the entire ruling class of Europe agrees as well -- in the face, of course, of having their own credit restricted -- is a tough nut to crack for many people who might otherwise be bold. The fact that the masses in Europe, but not here, are informed enough about the fraud, the pillage, and the sleight of hand that's being performed to rise up and protest is a hopeful sign.

But there is still no organized resistance.

We have fallen far down the cliff-face; many have already reached the bottom.

What will it take for Americans to say, "Enough!"

On the Leadership of Teh Left

This is funny.

Over the past few months, Jane and Glenn have been maneuvering to take over the leadership of the so-called Left by becoming outspoken TeeVee and radio personalities as well as big important bloggers, former entertainment moguls (in Jane's case) and best selling authors (in Glenn's) -- who are characterized as "lefties" by the TeeVee (and radio) bookers.

Markos and Arianna must be annoyed with them. If they aren't, they should be.

Of course none of these people -- Markos, Arianna, Jane or Glenn -- are "leftists" in any rational world. They do not speak for the Left and never have, they have little or no understanding of what "Leftist" means, and in Markos's and Arianna's cases, they were Republicans who got religion when they found they could make money (lots of it if they wanted) as Lefties rather than the Reagan Republicans they used to be.

All of them are entrepreneurs running businesses, and their products, in addition to their own sweet selves, are their "communities." These communities are sometimes left-leaning, but they are generally left-leaning in the sense of being libertarians with something of a social conscious. That's about as far as they will go.

Since the anti-Kagan hysteria started in the lefty blogs, Glenn's profile in the media has grown substantially. Jane became a media fixture during the Health Care donnybrook, whereas Markos (who always looks and sounds like he's 14) is an old hand at speaking for the "left," and Arianna has been around since dirt was new and was opining and commentating on the air just as often years ago when she was still a Republican.

While Markos may be just as happy to turn over his "Lefty" mantle to somebody else, cause he's got other things to do, and Arianna will probably be on the air until Doomsday, Jane and Glenn are still fairly fresh faces and voices on the shows, and their hostility toward Obama and the Dems is quite the tonic for the bookers compared to the heavy-footed-ness of the Dem and White House spinners.

Gee, who'd a thunk it? Teh Left doesn't like Obama any more than Teh Right does. Hm. Wonders never cease.

The only problem is that Jane and Glenn (let alone Markos and Arianna) are NOT LEFTISTS.


To the extent they are ideological at all, they are libertarians, in Glenn's case, an extreme civil libertarian (a badge he wears proudly). Socialism, social democracy, social justice -- all characteristics of the Left in any rational world -- are all but irrelevant to them. They have very narrow, and frankly from all appearances, a very self-interested, political stance, and the panoply of Leftist interests and causes, political scut work and the rest of it, doesn't interest them.

Yet they are coming to be hailed as the Voices of the Left, and they are nothing of the kind.

However, they saw a vacant space, "unclaimed territory" as it were, and being clever and bold, they moved in. Why not?

There has been a vacuum in the leadership of the Left in this country for many years.

Democrats have never really been a Leftist party, and given the way our political and governmental systems work, they can't ever be. Power (and money) in the United States is very highly concentrated, becoming more so all the time, and both of the political parties serve power (and money) first and foremost. Neither is truly ideological, but each serves as a home-place for different kinds of people who are skilled at or like to wield power. The Republican Party tends to be the home-place for predators. The Democratic Party tends to be the home-place for managers and technocrats.

Social justice only enters the picture of either party to the extent it is seen to smooth the paths of predator-Republicans or technocrat-Democrats.

From a libertarian point of view, social justice is an oxymoron. It simply can't exist. "Justice" isn't "social." It's formal. Following the law -- as written -- is perforce Justice by definition. Anything else is fraud and cant.

But somehow libertarianism and particularly civil libertarianism became conflated with Teh Left in the minds of the TeeVee and radio bookers, and the Progressive mantle fell by default on up and coming libertarians.

Of course given the fact that Democrats aren't themselves Leftists, and they are largely inarticulate as hell, bumbling and stumbling and falling all over the furniture in public appearances where they have to speak, the default to Glenn and Jane (who are both usually very articulate) as spokespeople (and putative Leaders) for Teh Left might make sense if their critiques and public policy positions (I won't say ideology because I don't think either one has an ideology) weren't frequently indistinguishable from those of Republicans.

This has been painfully apparent in the hysteria over Elena Kagan's appointment to the Supreme Court. There are plenty of issues that could be raised about her appointment, but the real issue isn't her, it's the institutional rot that made her appointment "inevitable." Rather than deal with the rot and corruption that is at the root of the problem, nearly all the hysterical antagonism toward Kagan (from Teh Left) is focused on her "inadequacy" for the job, and this focus is identical to -- though far more furious than -- that of the Republicans.

And the hostility from Glenn, who is absolutely obsessed with Kagan, looks for all the world like any Republican smear-job of any Democratic nominee over the last half century. He's toned it down somewhat in the last few days after being called on his obsessiveness, conflations, and falsehoods, and how Republican it all seemed, but still. The issue is not her. It is the institutional rot and corruption from top to bottom that made her appointment inevitable.

For Jane's part, she's been pretty much declared "nuts," and only her fiercest loyalists (of which there are quite a few, to be sure) have been able to accept her joining up with the TeaBaggers and Grover Norquist. She has crossed a bridge too far for many liberals and progressives to follow so she is routinely denounced and struggled against. Glenn is getting very close to the same point. Markos and Arianna haven't gone there, not quite, but much of their Lefty cred, such as it is, leaves aside the economic aspects of anything that can rationally be called Leftism.

It would of course be better for actual Leftists to have a higher profile than they do, but their problem is that they're not "new."

I posted part of a manifesto on the Greek mess from the International Committee of the Fourth International, and for all its correct economic and political insight and fulminating demands, it comes across as something highly anachronistic. It is Real Leftism, though, from the source -- or one of them -- and it's almost a wonder that anyone can still think that way. Few Americans ever did.

So the libertarians get the Leftist mantle by default, because the Real Left is too alien and obscure? Or is it something else?

I guess we're just lucky the LaRouchians weren't selected by the media to be the mouthpieces for Teh Left.

Whew! That was close.

How the Real Left Sees the Greek (and Euro) Crisis

As we all know, there is no political "Left" in this country to speak of, and what little remains of what once were vibrant Leftist policy and economic criticism is rigorously excluded from the Public Square. You never, ever hear a real Leftist or Socialist argument in the popular press and media, and you hardly ever see it in alternative media, either. It's as if it never was...

In Europe, the situation is somewhat different in that the governments in Europe are nearly all some version of Social Democracy, even when the ruling party is Conservative. However, the Greek crisis has exposed the strains those governments are under, especially given the stranglehold the European Central Bank and through it the Vampire Squids of Global Finance have over the Euro, and thus over the nations of the European Union.

The Greek People rise up -- as have many Europeans -- against the swindlers, but they find, more and more, that their governments, their supposedly liberal, socialist, leftist governments, align themselves with the Vampires and not with the People, and this is happening everywhere in Europe. Just like here, the working class, the masses, are to be forced into poverty to pay off the gambling debts of the banksters, and any opposition is to be met with state violence.

The International Committee for the Fourth International has produced a manifesto regarding this situation that is a startling critique given the general centrist/rightist blather we see and hear all the time. I will append just the final portion of it here, but the whole thing is worth taking a look at and pondering well. Not only does the Committee examine what is really happening and why, they propose concrete actions to thwart and ultimately overcome the Vampires in our midst.

What a concept.

Here's the end of the manifesto. But read it all...

For a socialist program

7. Finance capital and social democracy ram through cuts not because of their strength, but due to the absence of working class parties. Popular opposition is perplexed and paralyzed by the lies of the trade unions and the ex-left. The struggle against the bourgeoisie’s plans to impoverish Europe entails a break with all forms of Stalinism and opportunism.

The ex-left has created a fog of lies around socialism, in an attempt to isolate the workers from an understanding of their own political heritage. To lay out positions around which workers can develop a socialist opposition to social cuts, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) makes the following demands:

• No sackings or loss of purchasing power

Claims by finance capital and its agents in the social democracy and ex-left that there is no money are lies. The money has been plundered from the working class through decades of austerity and deindustrialization. Funds must go not to the profit interests of capital, but to the social needs of the workers.

• Nationalize the banks

The most elementary defense of working class interests requires public control of the banks. In private hands, the banks ruin countries at will, hold up lending to create high interest rates according to their political needs, starve industry of funds, and supervise a universal downward spiral in living standards in the name of “competitiveness.” To fulfill its function—providing funds to develop production and trade—the financial industry must be taken out of the hands of private interests and placed at the disposal of the workers.

• No confidence in the ex-left. For revolutionary socialism

The obsolescence of the principle of private property in the commanding centers of the economy shows the necessity of socialism. However, workers will be bound hand and foot to the diktat of the banks so long as they do not break with social democracy, the unions, and their ex-left apologists. There is no alternative to building revolutionary socialist parties to struggle for power. The nationalization of the banks and large industry will serve the interests of the masses only if state power is in the hands of the working class. Workers can have no more confidence in a government of the financial oligarchy than in individual oligarchs.

• For the United Socialist States of Europe

Rising tensions inside Europe and discussions of a possible breakup of the euro underline the bankruptcy of the EU project. They threaten a disastrous Balkanization of Europe, which would lay the basis for trade war between European economic blocs and ultimately for war itself. European workers must respond with an international struggle for a united European government of workers’ states, as a step towards establishing world socialism.

• Not a penny for war

Foreign wars, such as the NATO war in Afghanistan, foment a toxic political atmosphere, dividing the workers with far-right nationalism and anti-immigrant hatred. In addition to producing repeated atrocities, these wars drain desperately needed social resources. Opposing them is essential to establishing the unity of the European working class and its political solidarity with workers of Islamic countries and the United States.
Build the International Committee of the Fourth International

8. The political and economic situation in Europe places in stark relief the depth of the crisis of leadership in the working class. In every country, the fate of the workers is in the hands of reactionary petty-bourgeois organizations acting consciously in the interests of the financial aristocracy. Regardless of their demagogic rhetoric, every one of the old organizations—led by ex-Stalinists, ex-socialists, ex-Marxists, ex-radicals, and even ex-reformists—function politically as agents of the corporations, the banks and the bourgeois state. Not one of them is independent of the bourgeois state. PASOK, Syriza, the various socialist parties, and practitioners of pseudo-left theatrics like the NPA in France are politically corrupt to the bone. To call them “opportunist” would be almost a compliment, for that term—signifying the subordination of long-term revolutionary interests to short-term reformist objectives—belongs to another historical period. Characteristic of these present-day organizations is not only the rejection of a revolutionary program, but even any defense of the most elemental needs of the working class. As long as the working class remains under the political control of these petty-bourgeois organizations, which function as nothing other than the “left” flank of the capitalist political establishment, it will suffer defeat after defeat.

Therefore, the most urgent task confronting the working class—in Greece, in Europe and throughout the world—is the building of a new revolutionary political party, based on the principles of international socialism. The International Committee of the Fourth International is the only political organization that seeks to organize and unify the working class in the struggle against capitalist exploitation, poverty and war. Notwithstanding all the difficult problems that confront the modern working class, it remains the essential and decisive revolutionary force on the planet. The present world crisis will compel ever greater masses of workers, in every part of the globe, to enter into struggle against capitalism. The ICFI is convinced that a new period of revolutionary struggles is now beginning. It has created the World Socialist Web Site as a political organ to report on, unify and provide political leadership to the struggles of the working class. The International Committee embodies a colossal political experience, derived from its many decades of struggle in defense of Marxist and Trotskyist principles.

The ICFI calls on the most politically conscious workers, intellectuals and youth to fight for the perspective elaborated in this statement and to join the ICFI.

March 17, 2010

The History of the Internationale Pt 1


The History of the Internationale Pt 2


Alistair Hulett's version of The Internationale as interpreted by Alex Thiel:

The Blowout (now with Updates!!); The Fizzle; and The Swindle

First the Blowout: It appears, and I could be wrong, that the blowout of the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, bad as it is, isn't quite as bad as the Doomsayers would have you believe.

It is not -- yet -- the end of the world as we know it, and apparently, for all its many faults, BP is actually behaving like a Corporate Citizen to clean up the mess, close the hole, and get things back to "normal" as quickly as possible. They have done some reprehensible things to be sure -- such a coercing the survivors of the explosion to sign papers assuring all and sundry they weren't injured and that they are satisfied with a maximum claim against the company of $5,000, etc. Also they apparently were not aware of or lied about the amount of oil coming out of the well into the Gulf initially. Their CEO is quite a piece of work.

The White House is being criticized by the likes of Karl Rove and the entire hate radio brigade for their languidity in the early days of the disaster, turning the tables on the critics who continue to lambaste the Bush Regime for its utter indifference to the sufferings in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast in the first few days after Hurricane Katrina. "This will be Obama's 'Katrina!'" thunders Rove. Yeah, right. Like the Health Care was Obama's Waterloo. Whatever.

In fact, the Administration appears to have been on the ball from the get-go, and where they failed was in relying so heavily on BP for their information and not surveying the situation more fully themselves. This is clearly one of the inherent problems of deregulation: when your only source of information is the entity responsible for the disaster, it's only natural that you won't have the full picture.

Interesting that the media narrative went into a kind of hyper-romantic "Quest-mode" in reporting about the "hundred ton cap" to be assembled and put over the leak and other efforts to control the oil. Practically every bit of reporting became a bodice-ripping novel of derring-do and bravery in the face of adversity, and love for the men in Oil, yadda, yadda, which should have been embarrassing to any journalists still out there, because the real stories were either absent altogether or were buried by this Romance. I'm always fascinated to see narratives developed and then go universal so quickly and thoroughly. Finding out what actually happened, how to fix it, and how to prevent it from happening again will probably have to wait until the book is published.

But it appears that there has been a mobilization all along the Gulf to contain the oil, clean up what they can, and to preserve as much of the ecology and environment of the Gulf as humanly possible. That, to me, is the real story. The one that needs to be told in detail and hammered home constantly. Unfortunately, our media has chosen an alternate reality in which BP is the Big-Muscled hero of the piece and the clean up crews are greedy proles exploiting the situation to feather their own nests. (Have you heard, for example, that the fishermen are being paid $48 an hour for clean up chores??! I mean really!!! They don't deserve that!)

Thankfully (I guess), the oil is light-sweet crude, not the tarry gunk that comes up off the California coast, so the damage, while substantial, is not nearly as horrific as it might otherwise be, nor as bad as it would be if a similar event happened off California.

Meanwhile, the question is how do we get off oil? That's the problem right there. So far, there is no answer -- except for individuals who can and choose to take their leave from the oil-driven economy. As oil-derived products become more and more expensive, though, the ("greedy") proles are finding it impossible to keep up. Their continued impoverishment is assured by the facts on the ground while the Plutocrats revel in ever increasing revenues from other sources (expanding economies in India and China for example.) Wherever they can extract revenue, so the Plutocrats go.

Time to rethink that picture, but Our Rulers simply have no will to.

UPDATE: With the failure of the containment dome due to the presence of hydrate crystals and other consequences of depth and cold, it is looking like this incident will turn into something like Chernobyl, with perhaps, somewhat less environmental damage (let's hope.) While the Government will be blamed, in this case, it is the essentially unregulated oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico that is to blame. The question is whether, finally, the People will take charge and rein in the wilding private sector, through the agency of their Government.

UPDATE II: Seems I'm not the only one to see the Chernobyl parallel. This piece at dKos by Stranded Wind takes the metaphor considerably farther than I have and provides a number of people's action and education items. Worth the read.


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The Fizzle in Times Square may turn into an instructive tale yet. I'm assuming the guy who was arrested did it and it wasn't a Black Op -- big assumptions, I know, but one has to start somewhere. The idea apparently, executed poorly, was to cause a big explosion in Times Square, killing/injuring a substantial number of oblivious tourists and random New Yorkers for the purpose of... revenge?

That seems to be the case. The man in custody was apparently outraged by the continuing extermination by Predator drones of random Pakistanis -- some of whom apparently were killed while he was on his most recent visit to Pakistan where he was born and where his father was a high ranking military officer before his retirement. I've written about the Death From Above cult before, and I've tried to give some idea of what it must seem like to the people on the ground, who, for all intents and purposes are chosen for Death randomly and are exterminated by the dozens as the spirit moves the pilots of the Death Machines flying constantly over their heads.

Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen, apparently took it upon himself to Do Something about this upon his return to the US. He bought an old SUV, filled it with incendiary and explosive materials, set it alight and got out of there. An alert street vendor, a Muslim as it happens, noticed the illegal parking of the vehicle in Times Square, noticed the smoke, alerted others and so the area was cleared, no bombs went off, and eventually a culprit was captured.

Karl Rove and ilk are pathetically trying to politicize this event, too, using every trick they can think of to "blame" it on Obama -- except for pointing out that the drone attacks in Pakistan may have had something to do with it. They are absolutely livid that he was read his rights. "Terrorists have no rights!" they scream. Strangely, you'll note, the Cheneys have been lying low and haven't been parading around spitting their venom and hurling their accusations the way they used to, but I expect them to pop up if Shahzad actually does go to trial. We'll see. But maybe they're spent as it were. We should only be so lucky.

I'd just point out that Rove's efforts (and before him, the Cheneys') to politicize this event (as well as others) in many ways mirrors the criticisms leveled at the Bush Regime from the (so-called) Left during its many years of disastrous rule. Disasters and terrorists triggered huge amounts of criticism then as they do now. And it is basically tribal.

If Rove's efforts (which look more and more pathetic, and that may be why the Cheneys have backed off for the time being) help to demonstrate just how ridiculous political tribalism can be, then all to the good. But once people divide into tribal entities, it's very hard to overcome it. Americans have a long way to go to get out of their current tribalist morass, and I for one am not convinced Americans can do it. I actually am toying with the notion that tribalism has some excellent points in its favor...
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And let's consider Greece for a moment. I am so proud of the Greek masses for rising up against the banksters and their government lackeys who have swindled them and now seek to make them suffer as much as possible for their trouble. They actually rose up -- something Americans will not do, seem incapable of even considering. Of course, the uprising is -- at least for now -- ineffective. Mother Merkel over in Germany (which is funding much of the bailout, so-called, that will result in so much misery for the Greek masses) is displeased with her wayward Greek children, and makes no bones about it. (The linkages between Greece and Germany go back a long way, but are very little known in this country.) But the point is that the Greek masses are being made to suffer extensive hardship in order to pay off the banksters. In this case it is the European Central Banks, but they in turn are in debt to the same scoundrels and thieves who have been conducting an unprecedented campaign of looting and impoverishment of the masses throughout the world for years, the same banksters who continue to preen on Wall Street.

I say it is unprecendented, but the pattern was set and model was created and put in motion by Enron and those who followed its lead more than a decade ago. That kind of economic predation and looting has become the New Normal, and it has got to stop. We see that governments feign powerlessness to do anything about it, and we saw in California when Gray Davis actually tried to do something about it, his skinny white ass was booted out of office and he was replaced with a cartoon super-hero. Jeebus.

At any rate, the only way to stop it is to refuse, and that takes some preparation and some sleight of hand. It's widely assumed that Greece is going to default on its debts to the banksters, there is no way around it, no matter what Mother Merkel says. And if Greece defaults, it is widely assumed that Spain, Portugal, Ireland and possibly Italy will too. Which, apparently, will collapse the Euro, which will do... what? Nobody knows. But the trick is to refuse to pay off the banksters' gambling debts, and it's got to start somewhere. Greece will do.

Hopefully, it will start the global economy on a new, and better, path. But it's only the beginning.

The Doomsayers are claiming that by August or November at the latest, we will be living in A Different World. Hm. Could be. Rejoice!

The Plan

Hm. Seems to me that a handful of folks are catching on that the way things are, especially the grotesquely high unemployment rates and the ripple effect throughout society of so much unemployment, is just the way Our Rulers have planned it.

Years ago -- remember? -- the now Endless Recession got under way, and remarkably, as unemployment figures rose higher and higher, "month over month," there was no effort, whatsoever to put people back to work. The "stimulus" was hailed as this Big Jobs Program when it obviously was not; none of the shovel ready programs the stimulus would eventually fund (maybe in Year Two?) provided more than very, very modest employment anywhere in the country. A project might be hailed as providing 300 jobs in an area where 30,000 had been lost.

Here we are, years into this Endless Recession, and there are still no Jobs Programs, no serious effort to put people back to work whatsoever. This Hooverite disinterest in the plight of the unemployed should have been alarming years ago.

It is only now being noticed to a very limited extent because of a study done by Rutgers entitled "No End In Sight: The Agony of Prolonged Unemployment." (pdf link)

Yes. Well. Glad they noticed. Finally.

But will Our Rulers? Why should they? As far as they are concerned, the astronomical levels of unemployment in this country can essentially be permanent. The American Plutocracy simply doesn't need all those workers, and there is no way in hell they will re-employ them. Furthermore, there is no way in hell the Plutocracy will allow the Government to become the Employer of Last Resort.

But worst of all, there is no way in hell that Americans will rise up in protest against this appalling situation.

None.

The White House economic team has been rigorous in maintaining its utter indifference to the fact that millions upon millions of Americans are annually being shoved into poverty. That millions upon millions have lost their jobs and will never be employed again. That millions upon millions of Americans continue to lose their homes to foreclosure, their savings to bankruptcy, their future to the Masters of the Universe.

Not even Hoover and his team were this indifferent. They couldn't afford to be because the People would and to some extent did rise up in protest.

Now? (Almost) Nothing.

As I said over at Digby's Place, Reagan must be chortling in his grave, Baroness Thatcher tickling his corpse. The idea of an uprising on behalf of one's own interests and those of his and her compatriots is almost alien to modern Americans. Instead, such uprising as there is is almost entirely confined to the right wing stooges of capitalists and their running dogs.