"This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany."

[source]

"So, there's an internal coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they're very self-confident, and they have an answer to everything—a crazy answer, but it's an answer."
- Noam Chomsky

A new and interesting Chomsky interview is available on ZNet.

When I go home tonight I'll have 15 letters today from mostly young kids who don't like what's going on and want to do something about it, and [they ask me] if I can give them some advice as to what they should do, or can I tell them what to read or something. It doesn't work like that. I mean, everything depends very much on who you are, what your values are, what your commitments are, what circumstances you live in and what options you're willing to undertake, and that determines what you ought to be doing. There are some very general ideas that people can keep in mind; they're kind of truisms. It's only worth mentioning them because they're always denied.

First of all, don't believe anything you hear from power systems. So if Obama or the boss or the newspapers or anyone else tells you they're doing this, that, or the other thing, dismiss it or assume the opposite is true, which it often is. You have to rely on yourself and your associates—gifts don't come from above; you're going to win them, or you won't have them, and you win by struggle, and that requires understanding and serious analysis of the options and the circumstances, and then you can do a lot. So take right now, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, "I've done everything right all my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted." And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don't care about you—they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.

Well, you know, the reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].

I mean, the liberal democrats aren't going to tell the average American, "Yeah, you're being shafted because of the policies that we've established over the years that we're maintaining now." That's not going to be an answer. And they're not getting answers from the left. So, there's an internal coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they're very self-confident, and they have an answer to everything—a crazy answer, but it's an answer. And it's our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done is don't ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer, like, "Take over your factories."

Castrate the Fed

End the boom, bust,
and bailout bullshit.

The House Financial Services Committee voted, 43-26, to approve a measure sponsored by Texas Republican Ron Paul, vociferously opposed by the Fed, that would direct the congressional Government Accountability Office to expand its audits of the Fed to include decisions about interest rates and lending to individual banks. The Fed says the provision threatens its ability to make monetary policy without political interference.

[...]

"Everybody would like to beat up on the Fed and make them the bad guy," said Rep. Melvin Watt (D., N.C.), who opposed Mr. Paul's measure. He said audits would "substantially castrate the Fed so it cannot do what it was set up to do." [source]

"Real change isn’t going to happen under Obama or under this Democratic Congress."

[source]

Ian Welsh:

None of this is rocket science. Those of us who predicted both the crisis and what the bungling of the crisis would cause, however, are precisely the people who are not listened to by those in power. Obama is having his jobs summit, and forget nobodies like me, he isn’t even inviting somebodies like Stiglitz and Krugman.

If you’ve been right down the line, then you are precisely the sort of person who isn’t “serious” and shouldn’t be listened to when it comes to what it takes to fix the problem.

Why? Because everyone knows that fixing the problem will end the gravy train for a lot of very rich people. A lot of very rich people who give a great deal of money to Democrats in general, and gave a lot of money to Obama in particular. If the cost of keeping that gravy train and the donations it enables going is tens of millions of unemployed people, well, so be it. Because serious people know that real change isn’t going to happen under Obama or under this Democratic Congress, so there’s no point in even talking to people who might suggest it.

Barry Crimmins is Back!

Barry Crimmins:

Needless wars rage at a huge cost to, among others, 47 million without health care in the USA. Nevertheless, many people will choose to piss away another day considering the merits (or lack thereof) of fucking FOX News. Even though letting your enemy describe the boundaries of a debate is to lose the debate before it begins, they just can't help themselves.

Vegetarians Don't Do This

Witness some of the suffering you caused for your bacon.


Mercy For Animals:

As consumers we can choose compassion over cruelty at every meal. Adopting a compassionate vegan diet is the most powerful action we can take to put an end to needless animal suffering and the conditions documented during this investigation.

"Class war? Is it really a war if only one side fights?"

A country without strong unions is a country where the majority is guaranteed to be screwed over by the rich.

Rustbelt Radical:

Banks fail through their own fault and billions from the public purse gets thrown into their laps. Apparently it worked pretty well for them since Wall Street is going on to record profits this year according to a new study. That’s right, in the midst of the recession the banks are set to make more than they did at the height of the bubble. While you are going to bed with a growling stomach Goldman Sachs is putting money into piles too big to count. The top six banks have set aside 112 billion for salaries and bonuses this year. Class war? Is it really a war if only one side fights? Yeah, we’re getting the shit kicked out of us big time and we better start kicking back or we’re going to be knocked unconscious.

A look at the state of the unions bodes poorly for such a fight back. A recent study by the Center for Economic Policy Research on the state of trade unions in the country should be required reading for leftists and trade unionists. In 1983 over 20% of all workers were in unions. Now that number is 12.4%. Unions in the private sector have fallen even more dramatically. The most disheartening number from the perspective of future struggle is that the lowest rates of unionization is among workers aged 16-24. There only 5.7% are in unions. With numbers like that we will continue to see hunger among millions along side the fat bellies of a handful of billionaires.

It should, by now, go without saying that the Obama administration is not interested in the plight of those peckish millions. No, their interest lies with the bloated bankers. It took no time at all for Obama to find the will to funnel billions to the fat cats and yet there is not even a hint of that same urgency to fight the food crisis. Of course not. And yet folks still seem to think that Obama is some sort of closet New Dealer who only needs to be pushed a little to unveil himself. He is not; nor is he a blank slate. This administration has proven, and some of us would like to say “we told you so”, that it is a firmly neo-liberal one. And neo-liberal in the face of the of the failure of neo-liberalism!

Higher Education in California Becomes Unaffordable

I am outraged by the fee increases being imposed on UC students.

[source]

L.A. Times Blog:

Amid loud student protests that roiled the UCLA campus, the UC Board of Regents this afternoon approved a 32% increase in student fees.

The fee hike of $2,500, or 32%, will come in two steps by next fall. That would bring the basic UC education fees to about $10,300, plus about another $1,000 for campus-based charges, for a total that would be about triple the UC cost a decade ago. Room, board and books can add another $16,000.

Russian Questions on Afghanistan

It costs $1,000,000 to send one pair of U.S. boots per year "over there". $26,000,000,000 could be saved by withdrawal. But if President General McChrystal's recommendation is followed, we will be "investing" $734,000,000,000 in Chaosistan.

Did she say that's more than the military budget of the Bush administration? That can't be!

Also Matt Hoh's description of Valley-istan is confirmed. But we can't mention falling morale, can we?

"The picture of the world in the mind of the average newspaper reader is ... that which suits the interests of capitalists."

Do you mostly read the news organs of the capitalist class? What effect does that reading have on your outlook? Do you take advantage of the alternatives to mainstream media available on the Internet? How alternative are your alternatives?

Enjoy a classic statement on the press and the capitalist class from Bertrand Russell's Proposed Roads to Freedom:

Since the running of a big newspaper requires a large capital, the proprietors of important organs necessarily belong to the capitalist class, and it will be a rare and exceptional event if they do not sympathize with their own class in opinion and outlook. They are able to decide what news the great mass of newspaper readers shall be allowed to have. They can actually falsify the news, or, without going so far as that, they can carefully select it, giving such items as will stimulate the passions which they desire to stimulate, and suppressing such items as would provide the antidote. In this way the picture of the world in the mind of the average newspaper reader is made to be not a true picture, but in the main that which suits the interests of capitalists. This is true in many directions, but above all in what concerns the relations between nations. The mass of the population of a country can be led to love or hate any other country at the will of the newspaper proprietors, which is often, directly or indirectly, influenced by the will of the great financiers. So long as enmity between England and Russia was desired, our newspapers were full of the cruel treatment meted out to Russian political prisoners, the oppression of Finland and Russian Poland, and other such topics. As soon as our foreign policy changed, these items disappeared from the more important newspapers, and we heard instead of the misdeeds of Germany. Most men are not sufficiently critical to be on their guard against such influences, and until they are, the power of the Press will remain.

Besides these two influences of capitalism in promoting war, there is another, much less emphasized by the critics of capitalism, but by no means less important: I mean the pugnacity which tends to be developed in men who have the habit of command. So long as capitalist society persists, an undue measure of power will be in the hands of those who have acquired wealth and influence through a great position in industry or finance. Such men are in the habit, in private life, of finding their will seldom questioned; they are surrounded by obsequious satellites and are not infrequently engaged in conflicts with Trade Unions. Among their friends and acquaintances are included those who hold high positions in government or administration, and these men equally are liable to become autocratic through the habit of giving orders. It used to be customary to speak of the "governing classes,'' but nominal democracy has caused this phrase to go out of fashion. Nevertheless, it still retains much truth; there are still in any capitalist community those who command and those who as a rule obey. The outlook of these two classes is very different, though in a modern society there is a continuous gradation from the extreme of the one to the extreme of the other. The man who is accustomed to find submission to his will becomes indignant on the occasions when he finds opposition. Instinctively he is convinced that opposition is wicked and must be crushed. He is therefore much more willing than the average citizen to resort to war against his rivals. Accordingly we find, though, of course, with very notable exceptions, that in the main those who have most power are most warlike, and those who have least power are least disposed to hatred of foreign nations. This is one of the evils inseparable from the concentration of power. It will only be cured by the abolition of capitalism if the new system is one which allows very much less power to single individuals. It will not be cured by a system which substitutes the power of Ministers or officials for the power of capitalists This is one reason, additional to those mentioned in the preceding chapter, for desiring to see a diminution in the authority of the State.

Inequality Continues Unabated Under Obama

"Where I come from, the description of a nation that leaves its children behind in hunger while showering its upper classes with lavish amounts of more luxury than they know what to do with evokes pictures of present-day Somalia or latter-day Rome and the let-them-eat-cake France of Marie Antoinette. Not of a socially and politically highly developed society of the 21st century."
- Automatic Earth

No sign yet that Obama will act to end the poverty and inequality that plagues our country.

CNN:

The number of Americans that have trouble putting food on the table shot up last year in an unprecedented spike to a record 17 million households, the government reported on Monday.

The Department of Agriculture report, which has been released annually since 1995, said the number of Americans that were hungry rose to 14.6%. In 2007, 13 million households or 11.1% of Americans had trouble getting enough food.

When your priority is propping up insurance companies and banks, the least among us are going to suffer.

As he faces the worst recession in U.S. history, Obama's looking more like Herbert Hoover than F.D.R.

Hoover gave us the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which loaned money to railroads, banks, financial institutions, and insurance companies.

Roosevelt gave us regulation of the stock market, refinancing of home mortgages, the Banking Act of 1933, and relief programs. Roosevelt was despised by the wealthy elites for doing these things.

We all know Obama hates to be despised.

Kevin Baker:

Hoover’s every decision in fighting the Great Depression mirrored the sentiments of 1920s “business progressivism,” even as he understood intellectually that something more was required. Farsighted as he was compared with almost everyone else in public life, believing as much as he did in activist government, he still could not convince himself to take the next step and accept that the basic economic tenets he had believed in all his life were discredited; that something wholly new was required.

[...]

Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past—without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like Hoover, he is bound to fail.

Automatic Earth:

...back in 2008 49.1 million US citizens had trouble finding enough food to eat. That probably means 15-20 million children. And don't forget that if they could have fed themselves, much of the food would have been of an inferior quality, since in most poor areas of the country, there's a hell of a lot more cheap burgers available than vegetables. Perhaps luckily for them, they couldn't even afford no high-fructosed whoppers.

But that was last year. In 2009, how many more hungry children did we add to the tally? Whatever their number, Obama and his administration chose and choose to ignore them. For Washington, saving Wall Street institutions is much more important. First you save the banks, and if there's anything left afterwards, you may -or may not, depending on what the polls say- look at the 30-some million unemployed and the 20-odd million undernourished children.

Zombie Capitalism

[source]

From a review of Chris Harman's Zombie Capitalism from the Socialist Review:

Lenin once wrote of politics, "There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." For people around the world, rich and poor, young and old, this statement could rarely have rung more true than late in 2008 when the economic orthodoxy came down to earth with an almighty bump.

From Margaret Thatcher's insistence that "there is no alternative" to neoliberal capitalism to George Bush Senior's talk of a "new world order" our rulers had insisted that the untrammelled free market represented the best, indeed the only, way of creating a prosperous society for a generation.

These illusions were decisively shattered in 2008. Nationalisations, bailouts and enormous collapses heralded the biggest economic crisis in 80 years. Commentators from left and right were paralysed by confusion. Talk of the end of capitalism as we know it was rife. If this was the death of capitalism, however, its supporters were not prepared to let it go without a fight.

In the wake of these massive upheavals, Chris Harman's new book Zombie Capitalism is both timely and hugely valuable. Following Harman's 1984 book, Explaining the Crisis, as well as the numerous articles he has written for the International Socialism journal, it is a book that succeeds in analysing the incredibly dynamic, shifting forms that capitalism and its relationship to the state takes.

[...]

Like the wild-eyed Dr Frankenstein channelling electricity through his creation to give it life, our rulers have ploughed untold billions of dollars into the global economy to keep it afloat, leaving us with lumbering, unstable and dangerous "zombie capitalism", threatening not only crises and war but the environmental destruction of the planet.

Sounds like something I should read!

P.S. Harman died on November 7th of cardiac arrest.

From an obituary:

He was untempted by academe or celebrity. It was always a regret and an irritation to me why newspaper and TV debates about wars or the state of global capitalism did not call on him. That was a loss – and to hear that it is a permanent loss is deeply sad. Yet he leaves behind a terrific body of work that challenges received opinion.

Here is Harman speaking in July, 2009:

Communist Manifestoon

Americans are irrationally terrified of communism. Maybe a cartoon version of the Communist Manifesto can help change that!



(h/t Louis Proyect)

How to induce brain rot

Do not go gentle into that good night,
"Go rogue," have faith in God Six-Pack's might;
Milk, milk the morons on the right.

The N.Y. Times has reviewed Sarah Six-Pack's newest effort to bring attention to her stupidity:

Ms. Palin suggests that she and her husband, Todd, are ideally qualified to represent the Joe Six-Packs of the world because they are Joe Six-Packs themselves. “We know what it’s like to be on a tight budget and wonder how we’re going to pay for our own health care, let alone college tuition,” she writes in “Going Rogue.” “We know what it’s like to work union jobs, to be blue-collar, white-collar, to have our kids in public schools. We felt our very normalcy, our status as ordinary Americans, could be a much-needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington, D.C.”

[...]

Elsewhere in this volume she talks about creationism, saying she “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” In everything that happens to her, from meeting Todd to her selection by Mr. McCain for the Republican ticket, she sees the hand of God: “My life is in His hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years ago, invite Him in to take over.”