"Divergent thinking ... it's the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question ... to see multiple answers, not one."

Another great video from RSA, featuring Ken Robinson:


We are all good divergent thinkers when young. What does politics do to this capacity?

"The anxiety caused by human inequality is unlike anything observed in the natural world."

Eric Michael Johnson (via Egypt for Winter Sunshine):

...humans are very different from macaques. We’re much worse. The anxiety caused by human inequality is unlike anything observed in the natural world. In order to emphasize this point, Robert Sapolsky put all kidding aside and was uncharacteristically grim when describing the affects of human poverty on the incidence of stress-related disease.

“When humans invented poverty,” Sapolsky wrote, “they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world.”

(h/t Bad Attitudes)

Julian Edney:

Digging through piles of data, John Lynch and his co-workers analyzed 282 US cities. They found if you add the ravages of poverty to the life-shortening effect of social inequality, the combination is “comparable to the combined loss of life from lung cancer, diabetes, motor vehicle crashes, HIV infections, suicides and homicides”. Is this a fact because sick people fall to the bottom of society, causing deeper inequality? No; analysis shows the reverse. The path is from inequality to bad health.

"The most effective way to control people is to control their assumptions about the world."

David Edwards (in ColdType):

The most effective way to control people is to control their assumptions about the world. The task of propaganda is to apply power-friendly labels and make them stick – it is the key to everything. The labelling factory par excellence – the machine that applies the right labels in the right way over and over again – is the mass media system.

Activists have lambasted governments, corporations, whole industries for decades, but they are swimming against a relentless tide. As has been demonstrated so clearly in Iraq, governments and businesses can do pretty much what they like just so long as the media factory is on hand to label it better: to label away the crimes, the lies, the outrage, the desperate need for change.

The media are, and always have been, the supreme obstacle to change. But you would not know it because all media corporations apply the same potent label to such a thought: ‘Unthinkable.’

[...]

Historian Howard Zinn made the point well:

“Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often led to accept, without much questioning, someone else’s version of what that reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be sceptical of someone else’s description of reality.” (The Zinn Reader, Seven Stories Press, 1997, p.338)

The great task of propaganda is to make dissent seem unrealistic, embarrassing, and absurd.

We cherish our freedom of speech. We should care as much about freedom of thought.

What's controlling you?

"They just wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Isn’t it time that you continue their journey?"

Middle class in decline, freedom in decline, country in decline. Manifest density has become our manifest destiny. Wouldn't life be better elsewhere?


From America: The Grim Truth:

I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.

Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance. And don’t believe for a second that rot about America having the world’s best medical care or the shortest waiting lists: I’ve been to hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, and Thailand, and every one was better than the “good” hospital I used to go to back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the doctors just as good.

[...]

America has the illusion of great wealth because there’s a lot of “stuff” around, but who really owns it? In real terms, the average American is poorer than the poorest ghetto dweller in Manila, because at least they have no debts. If they want to pack up and leave, they can; if you want to leave, you can’t, because you’ve got debts to pay.

All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.

And that’s just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don’t even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you’ve never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.

But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States. You are required under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you’re from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no choice in the matter: there is a socioeconomic draft system in the United States that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for the military.

If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn’t elect “freedom,” then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means.

[...]

I want to remind you of something: unless you are an American Indian or a descendant of slaves, at some point your ancestors chose to leave their homeland in search of a better life. They weren’t traitors and they weren’t bad people, they just wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Isn’t it time that you continue their journey?

"Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"

Robert Jensen:

In the United States, we hear constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who "settled" the country -- and about how crucial it is for children to learn these things.

But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value of history drops precipitously, and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"

This is the mark of a well-disciplined intellectual class -- one that can extol the importance of knowing history for contemporary citizenship and, at the same time, argue that we shouldn't spend too much time thinking about history.

This off-and-on engagement with history isn't of mere academic interest; as the dominant imperial power of the moment, U.S. elites have a clear stake in the contemporary propaganda value of that history. Obscuring bitter truths about historical crimes helps perpetuate the fantasy of American benevolence, which makes it easier to sell contemporary imperial adventures -- such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- as another benevolent action.

Any attempt to complicate this story guarantees hostility from mainstream culture. After raising the barbarism of America's much-revered founding fathers in a lecture, I was once accused of trying to "humble our proud nation" and "undermine young people's faith in our country."

Yes, of course -- that is exactly what I would hope to achieve. We should practice the virtue of humility and avoid the excessive pride that can, when combined with great power, lead to great abuses of power.

A decided opinion on the Decider's Decision Points - it SUCKS!

So sayeth George Packer in the New Yorker. George W. Bush can write all he wants, polishing his reputation to his heart's desire (intently focused on his beloved "one day", after he's dead, when future historians - you and I are not competent to judge - will be the real deciders but they don't matter either because George W. Bush won't care, he'll be dead), the thoughtless, tacky reprobate remains. Rejoice, taste triumphs over mediocrity. No makeover can make George W. Bush palatable.

Why did George W. Bush write “Decision Points” (Crown; $35)? He tells us on the first page. He wanted to make a contribution to the study of American history, but he also wanted to join the section of advice books featuring leadership tips from successful executives: “I write to give readers a perspective on decision making in a complex environment. Many of the decisions that reach the president’s desk are tough calls, with strong arguments on both sides. Throughout the book, I describe the options I weighed and the principles I followed. I hope this will give you a better sense of why I made the decisions I did. Perhaps it will even prove useful as you make choices in your own life.”

Here is a prediction: “Decision Points” will not endure. Its prose aims for tough-minded simplicity but keeps landing on simpleminded sententiousness. Though Bush credits no collaborator, his memoirs read as if they were written by an admiring sidekick who is familiar with every story Bush ever told but never got to know the President well enough to convey his inner life. Very few of its four hundred and ninety-three pages are not self-serving.

[...]

The structure of “Decision Points,” with each chapter centered on a key issue—stem-cell research, interrogation and wiretapping, the invasion of Iraq, the fight against AIDS in Africa, the surge, the “freedom agenda,” the financial crisis—reveals the essential qualities of the Decider. There are hardly any decision points at all. The path to each decision is so short and irresistible, more like an electric pulse than like a weighing of options, that the reader is hard-pressed to explain what happened. Suddenly, it’s over, and there’s no looking back. The decision to go to war “was an accretion,” Richard Haass, the director of policy-planning at the State Department until the invasion of Iraq, told me. “A decision was not made—a decision happened, and you can’t say when or how.”

"Here is a prediction: 'Decision Points' will not endure. ... The path to each decision is so short and irresistible, more like an electric pulse than like a weighing of options, that the reader is hard-pressed to explain what happened. Suddenly, it’s over, and there’s no looking back."
- George Packer

"Wall Street's president ... the fight that capital wants to see."

Lenin's Tomb:

Obama's electoral coalition was built around the promise of amelioration, a better deal for workers and peace abroad, and neither has been delivered. Obama has been far more completely Wall Street's president than anyone expected. This also helps explain why the corporate media has felt it necessary to act as a mouthpiece and booster for a layer of corporate-funded middle class Poujadists. It is to pre-emptively colonise a political space that might otherwise be filled by the millions of working class Americans who are angry over wages, unemployment, the banks, repossessions, and the endless war. It is to drown out the rational concerns of more popular political constituencies with pageantry, noise and fury, irrational howling, and home-made bigotry. It is to stage the fight that capital wants to see - between ostensibly liberal, cosmopolitan, internationally-oriented, capital-intensive industry, and a parochial, nationalist, bigoted populace, often small business owners working in labour-intensive industries. And the viewer's role is to pick a side, and forget that neither represents their interests.

(h/t I Cite)

"O for a man who is a man..."

[source]

"O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through!"
- Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)

"We will take back our nation. You will hear a mighty roar. And we won’t be slaves to bankers in this world anymore."

Bankers
(by Carol Deppe; copyright 2010)

I’ve been busted down to nothing. Got no money. Lost my job.
I’ve been slammed into the gutter, just another broken sod.
My taxes saved the bankers, but they kicked me out the door.
And I don’t have a home in this world anymore.

Every banker owns a senator, a senator or two.
Every senator’s been bought, bought and paid for through and through.
So there’s bailouts for the bankers but there’s no jobs for the poor.
And I don’t have a job in this world anymore.

The credit card companies make the rules to break your back.
Then they change the rules and trick you, until you’re busted flat.
They’re evil and despicable, dishonest to the core.
And I don’t have any credit in this world anymore.

Goldman Sachs invented funny money and laughed when it went south.
Now the whole rest of the world is living hand to mouth.
Goldman Sachs gets even richer. It sure does make me sore.
And there isn’t any justice in this world anymore.

We’ve been pushed beyond endurance, and one day we will rebel.
We’ll grab those greedy bankers, and we’ll really give them hell.
We will take back our nation. You will hear a mighty roar.
And we won’t be slaves to bankers in this world anymore.

Carol, author of The Resilient Gardener, writes:

Upon learning of the mega-bankers’ multimillion-dollar bonuses they received for destroying the economy for the rest of us while absorbing billions in taxpayer bailouts, in a fit of serious irritation, I wrote some song lyrics. I had just listened to a documentary about Woody Guthrie, so my lyrics came out sung (roughly) to the tune of the Woody Guthrie song “I ain’t got no home.” This tune is roughly the same as A.P Carter’s song “Can’t feel at Home,” which is about the same as Albert E. Brumley’s song “This world is not my home,” all of which are essentially the same as a tune that appeared in print in a hymnal in 1909 and which is probably even older in oral tradition.

Fuck air travel

Seriously, if one's choice is between:

1) Being subjected to ionizing radiation,
2) Being groped and humiliated by a stranger, or
3) Paying a huge fine and being detained and/or investigated for refusing to submit to no. 1 or no. 2,

Who is going to want to step on an airplane anymore? I'm planning to do a lot less air travel in future, given the attitude of the TSA to my health, my privacy, and my civil rights.

A TPM reader:

I'm sick of it. I'll take planes for cross-continent or overseas travel, but it's gotten to the point that the TSA checkpoints cause more anxiety than the flight does to the point that I'd rather drive six hours than take a one hour flight. Because they're arbitrary, capricious, poorly trained, sometimes corrupt, and have attitudes that make the bouncers at your average strip club or dance club seem like milquetoasts.

"They who could inflict the greatest amount of injury, in pretended defence of life, honour, rights..."

[source]

"The almost universal opinion and practice of mankind has been on the side of resistance of injury with injury. It has been held justifiable and necessary, for individuals and nations to inflict any amount of injury which would effectually resist a supposed greater injury. The consequence has been universal suspicion, defiance, armament, violence, torture, and bloodshed. The earth has been rendered a vast slaughter-field—a theatre of reciprocal cruelty and vengeance — strewn with human skulls, reeking with human blood, resounding with human groans, and steeped with human tears. Men have become drunk with mutual revenge; and they who could inflict the greatest amount of injury, in pretended defence of life, honour, rights, property, institutions, and laws, have been idolized as the heroes and rightful sovereigns of the world."
- Adin Ballou, Christian Non-Resistance (1846)

"If ye love wealth better than liberty..."

[source]

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!”
- Samuel Adams

(h/t Wake-up Call)

"Resolve to serve no more..."

[source]

"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."
- Etienne de La Boétie
The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude

Check out BroadSnark

I love discovering new blogs. Do you know BroadSnark?

As an anarchist who believes it is possible to live in a world without rulers, I often write about abuses of power, hierarchy, oppression and social control.

Don’t be scared by the word anarchist. I believe in rules. What I don’t believe in is coercion. Cooperation is possible and preferable.

And I won’t be throwing molotov cocktails at you. In fact, I’m a pacifist. (There goes another one of those scary words.) Violence is the ultimate form of coercion and so, naturally, I’m against it. Not so scary really.

Now, perhaps, you think I’m naive. No. I go through the world with my eyes wide open. In fact, those who know me best say I’m quite cynical (a “cold dose of reality”).

I am a student of history and an observer of people, focused mostly on the Americas. I’ve spent many years learning about the darkest parts of our past and present – genocide, slavery, racism, criminalization, war, imperialism, and every other human rights abuse twisted human brains could think of. I often write about those things too.

Here comes another scary word – atheist. I don’t believe in god. It just isn’t rational. And I’m a rational girl. Religion is a topic of many blog posts. Religion is, after all, one of the ultimate forms of social control. I think religion does more harm than good, so I write about religious hypocrisy and abuse. But I also try to understand where religious people are coming from. I do, after all, believe in democracy (the direct kind) and religious people aren’t going to disappear.

And while I mostly spend my time pointing out what I think is wrong, sometimes I use my blog to ponder what could be or should be. Those are the posts that I especially love comments on. When you spend a lot of time focusing on bleak realities, you need to make a little time to think about what is possible.

Admit it, you are intrigued!

"By any ecological measure, Homo sapiens sapiens has exceeded its sustainable population size."

[source]

Center for Biological Diversity:

By any ecological measure, Homo sapiens sapiens has exceeded its sustainable population size. Just a single human waste product — greenhouse gas — has drastically altered the chemistry of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans, causing global warming and ocean acidification.

In the United States, which has the world’s third largest population after China and India, the fertility rate peaked in 2007 at its highest level since 1971 before dropping off slightly due to the recent economic recession. At 2.1 children per woman, the U.S. fertility rate remains the highest among developed nations, which average around 1.6. The current U.S. population exceeds 300 million and is projected to grow 50 percent by 2050.

"Huge concentrations of wealth corrode the soul of any nation."

Nicholas Kristof:

What kind of a country do we aspire to be? Would we really want to be the kind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent?

Oops! That’s already us. The top 1 percent of Americans owns 34 percent of America’s private net worth, according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The bottom 90 percent owns just 29 percent.

That also means that the top 10 percent controls more than 70 percent of Americans’ total net worth.

[...]

I’m appalled by our growing wealth gaps because in my travels I see what happens in dysfunctional countries where the rich just don’t care about those below the decks. The result is nations without a social fabric or sense of national unity. Huge concentrations of wealth corrode the soul of any nation.

After such inequality, the deluge.

"I am fearful that the American public and political system are at a treacherous and perhaps irreversible point in history."

I enjoyed this essay by Henry A. Giroux. Can we effectively channel our collective power to bring about meaningful political change? To do so, we must slow down, alter our political discourse and stop living in the amnesiac now of "corporate time with its construction of imposed forgetting." Under the sway of corporate time, those who repeat history - by tuning into the ad-saturated, vapid, permanent sameness of t.v. and talk radio - are doomed to forget it.

Enforced forgetting subordinates public time to corporate time and eliminates those public spheres that might challenge it. Corporate time demands that we never stop moving - it is time organized around increased production, the speeding up of labor time and it embodies a resistance to any space or mode of time that would allow us to think critically about how time might be reconfigured to expand and deepen a democratic polity. Against this notion of corporate time with its construction of imposed forgetting, we need a language that embraces what might be called public time - a mode of time and space that resists the rapid-fire demand to keep moving, keep buying and stop thinking. Public time is not driven by the necessity to consume or lose oneself in the never-ending spectacles of sound-byte driven talk shows, reality television and celebrity culture. On the contrary, it registers a different understanding of time, rooted in the necessity to provide conditions in which people can slow down enough to be thoughtful, exercise informed judgments and engage in social relations that affirm solidarity, the public good and the need to struggle collectively to implement the promise of a democratic society.

[...]

I am fearful that the American public and political system are at a treacherous and perhaps irreversible point in history. The oligarchies of power exhibit a deep disdain for democracy, and the public seems increasingly aware that their interests are being unmet and routinely dishonored. The disastrous effects of the choices made by the rich and powerful are painfully visible to the vast majority of people in the United States. Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers rake in huge bonuses and exhibit an arrogance matched only by a contempt for those suffering under the weight of the current economic crisis. The financial elite scorn the social costs of their actions; they focus on an unflagging desire to make a profit at any expense. The new global elite no longer has any allegiance to the nation state, its people or its cultures. Negative globalization has made local politics irrelevant as financial power now travels unhampered by the boundaries or obligations of nation states. The flight from political accountability and state regulation has been matched by the flight from moral, social and political responsibility on the part of the rich and powerful. If progressives, radical social movements, religious institutions and major unions don't address these issues as crucial pedagogical concerns and build the cultural apparatuses to challenge them, I fear that any vestige of democratic politics and knowledge will further disappear, while populist resentment will be almost completely harnessed to a pedagogical and political project that ironically restores class power to the mega-rich. With 17 million Americans unemployed, three million losing their homes and over 51 million without health insurance, people are desperate for jobs, mortgage relief and health care they can afford. Without the necessary formative culture that can provide Americans with a language that enables them to recognize the political, economic and social causes of their problems, a politics of despair, anger and dissatisfaction can easily be channeled into a politics of violence, vengeance and corruption, feeding far right-wing movements willing to trade in bigotry, thuggery and brutality. As the corporate state shreds all of the nation's social protections, it will take on the form of a punishing state and become more than willing to impose harsh disciplinary measures on those populations now considered disposable. The result will be a form of authoritarianism that brings about the utter collapse of democracy as a collective aspiration.

"If you ran for president, could you beat Barack Obama?" "I believe so," Palin said.

[source: Ted Rall, The Anti-American Manifesto]

TPM:

A new New York Times magazine profile of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin confirms the obvious: she's at least considering a 2012 presidential run.

Not only is she considering it, but Palin told Barbara Walters in an interview that will air in full on December 9 that she thinks she can win.

"If you ran for president, could you beat Barack Obama?" Walters asked.

"I believe so," Palin said.

Time to resuscitate Palin for Prez.

Ellsberg on Zinn's The Bomb

Wonderful (and scary) talk by Daniel Ellsberg on Howard Zinn at City Lights.

"He was the best example ... of what a human being could be."

"Most evil in the world ... has been done by people doing it with a good conscience."
- Daniel Ellsberg

(h/t Dialogic)

"So atomized that our concerns and fears barely reach the level of consumer complaints"

Dennis Perrin:

Americans are so atomized that our concerns and fears barely reach the level of consumer complaints. The idea of an organized, dare I say it, collective resistance to the widening police state seems more a science fiction/video game narrative than an actual political possibility. So we grumble and shuffle along, obedient, cowed. Personal films play in our heads as we try to avoid as much contact with other people as possible.

I won't be reviving the economy this holiday season. I'll be saving for retirement.

Firedoglake has a chart showing income and years to retirement and how much you need to save:

The average person needs to save at least $122.65 per month starting now to protect themselves from the Catfood Commission Co-Chairs' recommendations.

It's all being done so that the rich can continue to grow even more obscenely rich. Ho ho ho. Enjoy your holidays. The rest of us will be saving for retirement.

"The means for radical social change are already in existence."

Robert Paul Wolff:

There is one thing we on the left have going for us, and it is very important. The structure of social networking now being created on the internet makes it feasible to imagine that scores of millions of Americans could be united into a powerful political force without the expenditure of large amounts of money, and without the necessity of taking control of local governmental and political structures.

That said, real change can, I believe, only come through the exercising of electoral power. Neither violent revolutionary action nor spontaneous street theater is going to accomplish much, though at times the latter may have some news value.

Odd as it may seem, the means for radical social change are already in existence. The public opinion polls I have seen indicate that people with roughly a progressive orientation are actually in the majority. Now, it has always been extraordinarily difficult to mobilize people who share a point of view but lack passion about it. Perhaps, just perhaps, the Internet can serve as a medium for overcoming that problem.

Sounds a lot more promising than Jon Stewart's kinder, gentler anti-mob mob.

Bill Clinton, Cheering on the Housing Bubble

Bill Clinton in March 1998, speaking to the National Mortgage Bankers Association:

Now, we are seeing a remarkable increase in the circle of opportunity. In addition to reaching the highest level of homeownership in history, millions of Americans have been able to refinance their mortgages, which has amounted to billions and billions of dollars in tax cuts for families -- putting more money in their pockets, freeing up more for investment and savings. Access to capital has spread to minorities who for years have been locked out of the economy.

[...]

We do see increasing homeownership rates for minorities now and I hope it will continue.

Our capital markets are the strongest in the world, and clearly they have played a major role in helping us to do well in this new economy.

In March of 1988, the average price of a new home was $133,200. In March of 1993, the average price of a new home was $146,600. Not a gigantic increase over five years. In March of 1998, the average price had risen to $178,500. By March of 2003, it would be $231,100. The time bomb was ticking. A whole lot of people liked the sound of that ticking bomb.

"Cynicism is death."

Gonzalo Lira discusses the motivations of Ivy League "do gooders":

If you are encouraged to do certain highly visible “community service” and “volunteer work” for no other reason than to get something that you want—in other words, if you are encouraged to “do good” in order to get into a prestigious university—what does that teach you? What does that teach the youth of a country—especially the best and the brightest—the ones with the most promise?

We usually think of cynicism as an affliction of the world-weary and the jaded—a malady of people who have lived long enough, and seen enough enough, to be turned into cynics. They’re usually self-aware: They are men and women who have watched their innocence fall by the wayside, milled away over the years by the acts of selfish people—including their own—leaving them thinking that all is done for selfish, base reasons, no matter how seemingly pure the act.

To the cynic, no matter how selfless an action seems, at bottom, it is selfish and base. That’s why a cynic is such a sorry thing: He sees the world in the lonely monochrome of shades of selfishness. To a cynic, all surface hides retchedness and deceit. To a cynic, there is nothing good or decent or wholesome behind any act, no matter how seemingly noble or selfless. Neither love, nor goodness, nor beauty, nor insight can exist to such a worldview—to the cynic, all is selfishness. All is base and without honor or goodness. All is for sale.

One thing people don’t realize about cynics is, they are inherently conservative.

This is key: Cynics don’t believe in anything—nihilism is the nasty undertaste of the cynic’s bitterness. So since they don’t believe in anything, they don’t believe in changing things for the better. To the cynic, there is no “better”—there are only changes as to whose selfish benefit is being affirmed, and whose selfish benefit is being denied.

That’s the terrible worldview of the cynic—a perspective that leads to decay and death, nothing more, because to the cynic, there is nothing to aspire to.

And that is the education that Ivy League freshmen learned, in order to acceed to those ivy-covered towers—that lesson learned has become the necessary fee, to advance to the highest echelons of American society, and power: There is nothing noble and good to aspire to—it is all selfish and base.

Paul Foot expresses a similar sentiment about cynicism at the end of his excellent Shelley lecture (part 1, part 2), which I listened to again over the weekend while hand-mowing the lawn (thanks to Rustbelt Radical for reminding me of this excellent lecture). From part 2 (~36:30):

"The problem is is that there's a line drawn between scepticism and cyncism and that line is an extremely narrow line. It's very, very easy for the sceptic to topple over into being a cynic and the cynic can never be a revolutionary. Absolutely impossible to be a revolutionary for a cynic because they don't see the possibilities. They don't believe that's it's possible that working people can change their lives and change society."
- Paul Foot

The British Journalism Review quotes Foot's Words as Weapons:

“There's only one thing worse than believing people who are telling lies, and that is not believing people who are telling the truth. Scepticism may be the reporter's lifeline but cynicism is death.”

"Whence, thinkest thou, kings and parasites arose?"

"Whence, thinkest thou, kings and parasites arose?
Whence that unnatural line of drones who heap
Toil and unvanquishable penury
On those who build their palaces and bring
Their daily bread? -From vice, black loathsome vice;
From rapine, madness, treachery, and wrong;
From all that genders misery, and makes
Of earth this thorny wilderness; from lust,
Revenge, and murder. -And when reason’s voice,
Loud as the voice of Nature, shall have waked
The nations; and mankind perceive that vice
Is discord, war and misery; that virtue
Is peace and happiness and harmony;
When man’s maturer nature shall disdain
The playthings of its childhood; -kingly glare
Will lose its power to dazzle, its authority
Will silently pass by; the gorgeous throne
Shall stand unnoticed in the regal hall,
Fast falling to decay; whilst falsehood’s trade
Shall be as hateful and unprofitable
As that of truth is now."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab

A nation of robo-signers, not laws

CNBC:

When Congress comes back into session next week, it may consider measures intended to bolster the legal status of a controversial bank owned electronic mortgage registration system that contains three out of every five mortgages in the country.

Gee, I wonder how Obama will respond to this issue? Populist in word, elitist in deed? Again?

"Before the elections, I kept getting emails from moveon.org telling me that this would be the most important election in my lifetime."

Michael Yates:

Before the elections, I kept getting emails from moveon.org telling me that this would be the most important election in my lifetime. Those nasty Republicans, led by the crazy people in the Tea Party, were intent on overturning everything that the good Democrats had wrought.

[...]

Here is what I think. Thanks to government largesse, banks and other corporations are now awash in cash, and profits have soared to record levels. Yet, the banks are not making loans, and the corporations are not buying new equipment and opening new facilities. Despite gross misconduct, no top corporate officials have been prosecuted, and many of the very companies that put the economy in the ditch are as flush as ever. Were those nasty Republicans in power when this happened? No.

[...]

Has it been those nasty Republicans who are responsible for what the government has not done? No. It was the Democrats whose economic stimulus package was inadequate to the task at hand. It was Obama who thought that all was well and began to talk about deficit reduction long before this was necessary.

In fact, it was Obama who appointed a deficit reduction commission, whose preliminary recommendations include raising the social security retirement age to sixty-nine, cutting the federal workforce by 10 percent, and lowering the corporate income tax. These would each harm working people. Tens of millions of workers perform jobs that wreck their bodies and spirits long before age sixty-nine; to force them to work until then is unconscionable.

[..]

The corporate income tax is already low, and the share of federal tax revenues collected from corporations has been in decline for decades. The burden of this tax, according to most economists, is on stockholders, and given that stocks are disproportionately owned by the rich, it is a progressive tax, one that takes a larger share of income as income gets higher. Cutting this tax will, therefore, increase an already remarkable income inequality, which will harm us in myriad ways, not least of which is a further reduction in our already anemic political influence.

[...]

Did those nasty Republicans force Obama to direct murder and mayhem against the Afghans? Hardly. Obama promised as much during his campaign against Senator McCain.

The Obama administration has ballyhooed its reform of the horrid U.S. healthcare system. My friends at the United Electrical Workers union tell me, after careful study, that the new healthcare arrangements will be worse than what we have now. I don’t doubt it. The drug and insurance companies are drooling over all the money they’ll be making.

"But wasn't the President Obama supposed to bring the change?"

"I want to bang my head against the wall."

(h/t Firedoglake)

Naked Capitalism:

The Fed chair is so disengaged from reality it isn’t funny. This is the classic wealth effect argument, that if you goose asset values, people will feel richer and spend more. The problem is it was an abysmal failure the first it was put into effect as a policy idea, in Japan in the later 1980s. The result was rampant asset speculation followed by a twenty year bust.

Ha-Joon Chang: the Žižek of Economics

Neoliberalism unmasked!

The frivolity of the Catholic Church

N.Y. Times:

“Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference. “It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person.

“But it’s rare, it’s extraordinary, so the use of exorcism is also rare and extraordinary,” he said. “But we have to be prepared.”

I love it when the Catholic Church makes jokes with a straight face!

Screw Our Veterans' Day

This Can't Be Happening:

The original day was established to condemn war and to recall the horrors of a senseless military conflict that caused the deaths of over 20,000,000 people. As the Act stated, "...it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations."

[...]

We need to stop referring to November 11 as Veterans Day, and get it back to what it was originally and remains in many parts of the world--Remembrance Day--a day to contemplate the horror and futility of war.

The frivolity of John Conyers

Raw Story:

"We are a nation of laws, not men, and the domestic and international laws – including the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment – governing the use of torture are clear in their scope and application. There is no exception for the President or any other official and no lawyer’s opinion can provide immunity from these laws."

Funny guy!

Alms for the Rich, Austerity for the Rest

Cenk Uygur:

They propose to cut the top rate from 35% to 23% for the personal income tax, and the corporate tax rate would get cut from 35% to 26%. What an unbelievable joke. So, you have to cut Social Security and Medicare because you just had to give the rich one more gigantic tax cut? They'll claim they are getting rid of some tax exemptions and credits, but that doesn't come close to making up for the tax cuts they have proposed.

[...]

Through all of my frustrations with the president, I have never called for a primary opponent against him in 2012. And I don't know any other established progressive that has. If he pushes for this plan, he should definitely get a primary challenger. Because I couldn't vote for a guy who agreed to rob the middle class like this. This is definitely the last straw. If he does this, then he was never on our side to begin with.

"This is definitely the last straw. If he does this, then he was never on our side to begin with."
- Cenk Uygur

"Global temperature to rise 3.5 degrees C. by 2035: International Energy Agency"

Global warming is pretty much guaranteed to continue unabated. There's really no point in saying what follows the above title: "Unless governments cut subsidies for fossil fuels and adopt new policies to support renewable energy sources." [source]

Ain't gonna happen.

The frivolity of Dennis Kucinich

"If we have enough to wage war, we have enough to take care of our seniors."
- Dennis Kucinich

"The mood of energy and the mood of idleness"

William Morris:

IN considering the Aims of Art, that is, why men toilsomely cherish and practice Art, I find myself compelled to generalize from the only specimen of humanity of which I know anything; to wit, myself. Now, when I think of what it is that I desire, I find that I can give it no other name than happiness. I want to be happy while I live; for as for death, I find that, never having experienced it, I have no conception of what it means, and so cannot even bring my mind to bear upon it. I know what it is to live; I cannot even guess what it is to be dead. Well, then, I want to be happy, and even sometimes, say generally, to be merry; and I find it difficult to believe that that is not the universal desire: so that, whatever tends toward that end I cherish with all my best endeavor. Now, when I consider my life further, I find out, or seem to, that it is under the influence of two dominating moods, which for lack of better words I must call the mood of energy and the mood of idleness: these two moods are now one, now the other, always crying out in me to be satisfied. When the mood of energy is upon me, I must be doing something, or I become mopish and unhappy; when the mood of idleness is on me, I find it hard indeed if I cannot rest and let my mind wander over the various pictures, pleasant or terrible, which my own experience or my communing with the thoughts of other men, dead or alive, have fashioned in it; and if circumstances will not allow me to cultivate this mood of idleness, I find I must at the best pass through a period of pain till I can manage to stimulate my mood of energy to take its place and make me happy again. And if I have no means wherewith to rouse up that mood of energy to do its duty in making me happy, and I have to toil while the idle mood is upon me, then am I unhappy indeed, and almost wish myself dead, though I do not know what that means.

"The working class broke ranks during the Reagan years and now deserve everything they are getting"

Thoughtstreaming:

Here is my take. The working class broke ranks during the Reagan years and now deserve everything they are getting. Solidarity is a tactic for a REASON. Without it you are fucked and blue collar folk are jumping back and forth now like chickens on the proverbial road. They will find their way back but not before a long exile in the hurt locker.

KPFA torpedoes the Morning Show

KPFA Worker:

The Executive Director of Pacifica Radio today dismissed the entire staff of the KPFA Morning Show–Aimee Allison, Brian Edwards-Tiekert, Laura Prives, and Esther Manilla–and ordered tomorrow’s program to be taken off the air, according to the KPFA News.

Listen to the last show, featuring an interview with the woman who abruptly fired the entire Morning Show team.

The Morning Show - November 9, 2010 at 7:00am

Click to listen (or download)

George Warmonger Bush Redux

Once again, the President suggests that judgment of his presidency is best deferred to a far-off future, preferably after you, I, and the war criminal are long gone.

“I hope I’m judged a success, but I’m going to be dead, Matt, when they finally figure it out.” [source]

I think we've figured it out already, dipshit. The future is now. As I said in January 2009:

History will never revive your reputation. Historians tend to be responsible folks who care about facts. If anything, the verdict will get worse as the extent of your incompetence and the breadth of your crimes are further revealed. The anger and hostility will only grow. As you rot in that upscale Dallas suburb, I doubt that you will have the nerve to confront and digest the hatred that you spawned. Ignore it though you will, it's there to see on countless blogs, in countless newspaper and magazine accounts, and occasionally even on television. It's not going away. If you try to fight it with your propaganda machine, countless individuals will swarm out of the woodwork to pound you back down.

"Their primary goal is to give more money to the rich, which benefits them personally as well as their most wealthy donors."

Vagabond Scholar:

...the Bush tax cuts - just like the Reagan tax cuts - lost revenue. Both presidents gave massive tax cuts to the richest Americans and increased military spending. Reagan nearly tripled the national debt and Bush nearly doubled it. This isn't exactly secret information.

So what's the explanation for the GOP's magical thinking? As always, it's the stupid versus evil question, or the hack versus zealot question. Surely some conservative leaders know what they're peddling is complete bullshit. But some others seem to actually believe this crap. I think the best catch-all explanation is that they just don't give a damn whether what they're saying is true or not, making them classic bullshitters, or "callous" as opposed to clueless. Their primary goal is to give more money to the rich, which benefits them personally as well as their most wealthy donors. They simply don't care about any negative consequences of these policies, except perhaps as an afterthought. And what's to make them stop? The press won't fact-check them or call them out. The Democratic Party often doesn't even try. And middle class and poor conservative voters don't know or don't care that they're voting against their own interests.

"Is our economic priority the jobless, or is it zillionaires?"

Inequality is on everyone's mind. I imagine it's only going to get worse before it gets better.

Nicholas Kristof:

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

[...]

The richest 0.1 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut of $61,000 from President Obama. They would get $370,000 from Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. And that provides only a modest economic stimulus, because the rich are less likely to spend their tax savings.

At a time of 9.6 percent unemployment, wouldn’t it make more sense to finance a jobs program? For example, the money could be used to avoid laying off teachers and undermining American schools.

Sanity Rally Redux

To finish up my Saturday posting, Sarah Leonard (New Inquiry) makes some nice points about Stewart's October 30th Sanity Rally. Ancient history, right?

He was incensed by how much people on television yell when what we need is reasonable compromise. What he suggested over and over again by asking only for good manners, is that there is nothing important enough to really fight for. I prefer lattes, you prefer hunting; I prefer not launching preemptive wars that destroy thousands of lives, but hey, maybe you’re into that. I’m sure we can meet somewhere in the middle.

"Only part of us is sane..."

I've been fixating recently on this Rebecca West quotation. I think it's profoundly true. Along the same lines, Baudelaire wrote in his journal: "Il y a dans tout homme, à toute heure, deux postulations simultanées. l'une vers Dieu, l'autre vers Satan." There are in every man, at all times, two simultaneous tendencies, one toward God, the other toward Satan.

“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”

— Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

"With friendship in play as an alienated revenue stream, we must retreat even further into our private lives to find a haven from commercialization."

Nice article.

Rob Horning (at The New Inquiry):

...what has radically changed is the nature of friendship, which once upon a time was something intended specifically as a bulwark against depersonalization, against market logic. With Facebook, the consumerist allure of “more, faster” fuses with a closely related moral cowardice about rejecting people to drive us en masse to the platform, bring the efficiencies of commercialization right into the heart of our social lives. With friendship in play as an alienated revenue stream, we must retreat even further into our private lives to find a haven from commercialization, to preserve the disappearing self. Soon we’ll have to seek refuge in that evocation of the “blissful isolation of intra-uterine life” as Freud called it — the “total narcissism” of sleep, where our gadgets can’t reach us.

Cross-posted at no friends no followers no bullshit

“I am a Sansculotte!—And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.”

Joel A. Johnson recovers a radical Mark Twain:

In an 1887 letter to Howells discussing the French Revolution, Twain flatly declares “I am a Sansculotte!—And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.” In a later note to Howells regarding Connecticut Yankee, he writes:

I am glad you approve of what I say about the French Revolution. Few people will. It is odd that even to this day Americans still observe that immortal benefaction through English and other monarchical eyes, and have no shred of an opinion about it that they didn’t get at second-hand.

Twain would be disappointed to find that popular opinion regarding the French Revolution has not changed much in the intervening time. It would be still be just as surprising to see the following statement in print now, as it would have been in 1889:

Next to the 4th of July and its results, [the French Revolution] was the noblest and the holiest thing and the most precious that ever happened in this earth. And its gracious work is not done yet—not anywhere in the remote neighborhood of it. This is bracing stuff, assuming Twain is being genuine (and there seems to be no reason to read him otherwise).

"The alacrity with which this oppressed community had turned their cruel hands against their own class in the interest of the common oppressor."

Why do the oppressed identify with their oppressors? Or to put it as Thomas Frank did in 2004, "what's the matter with Kansas?" Mark Twain asked the same questions in 1889 in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

This is from chapter 30, "The Tragedy of the Manor-House":

The painful thing observable about all this business was the alacrity with which this oppressed community had turned their cruel hands against their own class in the interest of the common oppressor. This man and woman seemed to feel that in a quarrel between a person of their own class and his lord, it was the natural and proper and rightful thing for that poor devil's whole caste to side with the master and fight his battle for him, without ever stopping to inquire into the rights or wrongs of the matter. This man had been out helping to hang his neighbors, and had done his work with zeal, and yet was aware that there was nothing against them but a mere suspicion, with nothing back of it describable as evidence, still neither he nor his wife seemed to see anything horrible about it.

This was depressing -- to a man with the dream of a republic in his head. It reminded me of a time thirteen centuries away, when the "poor whites" of our South who were always despised and frequently insulted by the slave-lords around them, and who owed their base condition simply to the presence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with the slave-lords in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution which degraded them. And there was only one redeeming feature connected with that pitiful piece of history; and that was, that secretly the "poor white" did detest the slave-lord, and did feel his own shame. That feeling was not brought to the surface, but the fact that it was there and could have been brought out, under favoring circumstances, was something -- in fact, it was enough; for it showed that a man is at bottom a man, after all, even if it doesn't show on the outside.

"The 'poor whites' of our South who were always despised and frequently insulted by the slave-lords around them ... were yet pusillanimously ready to side with the slave-lords in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution which degraded them."
- Mark Twain

Cross-posted at no friends no followers no bullshit

Fight or be remembered as a mediocrity, Mr. President.

The writing is on the wall, Mr. President. Behave as you have, seeking compromise and bipartisanship, and you will sink further into the ranks of the mediocre presidents. Don't perpetuate your collapse by continuing to cave to the right. Be bold! Make Democrats proud. Stop catering to the Republican machine that wants to destroy you. Fight, goddamn you, fight!

"Will you, for the love of god, stand up and fight back already?"

"It is not parties that make or save countries or that build them to greatness--it is ... the masses."

Mark Twain in 1884:

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

ELMIRA, Sept. 17, '84.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Somehow I can't seem to rest quiet under the idea of your voting for Blaine. I believe you said something about the country and the party. Certainly allegiance to these is well; but as certainly a man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor--the party or the country come second to that, and never first. I don't ask you to vote at all--I only urge you to not soil yourself by voting for Blaine.

When you wrote before, you were able to say the charges against him were not proven. But you know now that they are proven, and it seems to me that that bars you and all other honest and honorable men (who are independently situated) from voting for him.

It is not necessary to vote for Cleveland; the only necessary thing to do, as I understand it, is that a man shall keep himself clean, (by withholding his vote for an improper man) even though the party and the country go to destruction in consequence. It is not parties that make or save countries or that build them to greatness--it is clean men, clean ordinary citizens, rank and file, the masses. Clean masses are not made by individuals standing back till the rest become clean.

As I said before, I think a man's first duty is to his own honor; not to his country and not to his party. Don't be offended; I mean no offence. I am not so concerned about the rest of the nation, but--well, good-bye.

Ys Ever
MARK.

"When all the bricklayers, and all the machinists, and all the miners, and blacksmiths, and printers, and hod-carriers, and stevedores, and house-painters, and brakemen, and engineers, and conductors, and factory hands, and horse-car drivers, and all the shop-girls, and all the sewing-women, and all the telegraph operators; in a word all the myriads of toilers in whom is slumbering the reality of that thing which you call Power...when these rise, call the vast spectacle by any deluding name that will please your ear, but the fact remains a Nation has risen."
- Mark Twain, The New Dynasty (1886)

If you cut or privatize my Social Security, you will never get my vote again.

This I pledge to the Democrats. Just as the rich feel entitled to their tax cuts, I feel entitled to Social Security. I will not stand for its destruction or take the "cushioned" blow of "reform" as anything other than a complete betrayal by the Democrats.

Obama's ex-budget director:

Social Security is not the nation’s key long-term fiscal problem — health care is. (A column in Thursday’s Times will discuss health care.) But Social Security does face a long-term deficit, and a variety of reasonable reform plans (including one I wrote with Peter Diamond, a winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics) have been proposed to address that deficit.

The left, though, seems adamantly opposed to restoring actuarial balance to Social Security now. I have trouble understanding this reluctance for several reasons: the key issue progressives had been concerned about — individual accounts within Social Security — has been definitively won in their favor (for now); they have a president from their party in office, which will not always be the case; acting now would allow changes to take effect more gradually, cushioning the blow; and establishing some credibility on out-year fiscal problems by enacting Social Security reform could open up (admittedly limited) running room to pass necessary additional stimulus legislation in the short run.

Given the left’s strident opposition to any serious discussion of Social Security reform, the issue will provide a key early indicator of the administration’s response to the election results.

"We need the iron march of labor"

Visit www.democracyandsocialism.com, a great site, to learn about Anna Louise Strong.

"We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country. A move that will lead no one knows where. We do not need hysteria. We do not need fear. WE NEED THE IRON MARCH OF LABOR, for labor will feed the people, care for the babies and the sick, and preserve order. Not the withdrawal of labor power but the power of the workers to manage will win this strike."
- Anna Louise Strong

"It goes on one at a time, it starts when you care ... it starts when you say We and know who you mean."

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organisation. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.
- Marge Piercy

"Replace conservative news outlets with The New York Times, NPR, Washingtonpost.com and network newscasts, and it’s just another dreamscape."

David Sirota (August 10, 2010):

The conservative media dreamland, for instance, ensconces its audience in an impregnable bubble — you eat breakfast with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, you drive to the office with right-wing radio, you flit between Breitbart and Drudge at work, you come home to Fox News. The ideas bouncing around in this world — say, ideas about the Obama administration allegedly favoring blacks — don’t seem like propaganda to those inside the bubble. With heavily edited videos of screaming pastors and prejudice-sounding USDA officials, these ideas are cloaked in the veneer of unchallenged fact, leaving the audience to assume its bigoted conclusions are completely self-directed and incontrovertible.

Same thing for those living in the closed-loop of the “traditional” media. Replace conservative news outlets with The New York Times, NPR, Washingtonpost.com and network newscasts, and it’s just another dreamscape promulgating certain synthetic ideas (for instance, militarism and market fundamentalism), excluding other ideas (say, antiwar opinions and critiques of the free market) and bringing audiences to seemingly self-conceived and rational judgments — judgments that are tragically misguided.

Bill Moyers. October 29th. Boston University. Howard Zinn Lecture Series. What could be better?

You're right! Nothing! Enjoy. I do miss Howard Zinn.

Embed is disabled. You'll have to click through to BUniverse to watch.



The speech can be read on AlterNet (or better yet, at the Socialist Worker):

We learned long ago that power and privilege never give up anything without a struggle. Money fights hard, and it fights dirty. Think Rove. The Chamber. The Kochs. We may lose. It all may be impossible. But it's OK if it's impossible. Hear the former farmworker and labor organizer Baldema Valesquez on this. The members of his Farm Labor Organizing Committee are a long way from the world of K Street lobbyists. But they took on the Campbell Soup Company - and won. They took on North Carolina growers - and won, using transnational organizing tacts that helped win Valasquez a "genius" award from the MacArthur Foundation. And now they're taking on no less than R. J. Reynolds Tobacco and one of its principal financial sponsors, JPMorgan-Chase. Some people question the wisdom of taking on such powerful interests, but here's what Valasquez says: "It's OK if it's impossible; it's OK! Now I'm going to speak to you as organizers. Listen carefully. The object is not to win. That's not the objective. The object is to do the right and good thing. If you decide not to do anything, because it's too hard or too impossible, then nothing will be done, and when you're on your death bed, you're gonna say, "I wish I had done something. But if you go and do the right thing NOW, and you do it long enough "good things will happen-something's gonna happen."

"If you have a financial system that allows people making $15,000 a year to take out $400,000 mortgages ... it’s the fault of the financial system."

James Kwak:

“Middle class wages have been declining for ten years and stagnant for thirty years, and if you have a financial system that allows people making $15,000 a year to take out $400,000 mortgages, I don’t think that’s the fault of the guy making $15,000. I think it’s the fault of the financial system.

“But, let’s say I’m a guy who makes $15,000 a year. I realize, wow, I can get a $400,000 mortgage and I can live in this house for a few years, and if housing prices go up, I can flip it and I can actually make a couple hundred thousand dollars. And let’s say I’m really clever, and I say, if housing prices go down, I’ll just walk away and I will have gotten to live in a really nice house for three years at no cost to myself. I mean, that’s the worst, most cynical spin you can put on it, right? But this is exactly what people on Wall Street do. The person who is criticizing the janitor for doing this is the same person who thinks that businesses should exploit every legal opportunity to make profits. So even if you attribute the worst possible state of mind to the guy making $15,000, he’s still just doing what any businessman should do under the circumstances. But our national ideology somehow doesn’t allow us to think about it in those terms.”

Take a Cindy Sheehan Soapbox break from today's politics

Cindy Sheehan interviewed Helen Thomas not too long ago. It's a nice interview. Enjoy!

October 31, 2010(SOAPBOX #78) - Cindy speaks for herself: "Dear Friends, As a path finding journalist that covered every president since JFK, Helen Thomas ended every presidential press conference with her trademark: "Thank you, Mr. President," (except for during the Bush years, when she was relegated to the back row). This Sunday, we say: "Thank you, Helen Thomas," as I chat with her about her life that has been intertwined with our history for the last five decades. She is characteristically straightforward in this interview that will first air on October 31st at 2pm Pacific at the website.

"I am Governor Jerry Brown ... I will command all of you ... Mellow out or you will pay."

California Über Alles!

And so the evening ends on an okay note. Jerry Brown - no friend to unions - deserves a polite smattering of applause for defeating the nightmare that would have been Governor Christine Whitman. May she spend her next 140 million on worthwhile causes.

The Last Decent Democratic Senator Goes Down

[source]

So long, Russ.

That's it!
There's no one left.

"Those who argue that we should somehow defer to the President are wrong."
- Russ Feingold

"The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation."
- Russ Feingold

“Congress needs to formally condemn the President and members of the administration for misconduct before and during the Iraq war, and for undermining the rule of law at home."
- Russ Feingold

"I am not convinced that he possesses the abiding respect for the rule of law that our country needs in these difficult times in its Attorney General."
- Russ Feingold

“My hope is that I can cooperate with Republicans.”

Obama said that today. It pretty much sums up his philosophy of governance.

He'll have lots more of them to cooperate with tomorrow. It will be that much easier to sell out to the other side, which is Obama's forte.

After the 2008 election, CBS declared:

"Democrat Barack Obama will be the first black president after a large electoral victory, shifting America's political landscape away from the Republican party."

Turns out Obama wasn't interested in shifting the landscape. He wanted the landscape to stay pretty much the same.

"Democrats deserve these losses. ... You reap what you sow, folks."

Ian Welsh:

Democrats deserve these losses. That’s not to say that every Dem does (Feingold, if he loses, for example), but they abandoned their own base, bailed out bankers and didn’t fix the economy.

You reap what you sow, folks.

I feel the same way.

Angelic Troublemakers

A Peace of the Anarchy: Ammon Hennacy and Other Angelic Troublemakers
Check the Google video page if video does not start.

Watching this, one realizes that Jon Stewart doesn't know shit about activism or radicalism or the left.

True sanity: The Verso Book of Dissent

[source]

"This 'happy middle' is a utopian illusion ... and plays right into the hands of the status quo and those who have power."

[source]

Thoughtstreaming:

Stewart and Colbert's rally was, at best, painful to watch. I only made it about 50 minutes. Apart from the issue of double equivalence, covered well by Helmut over at Phronesisaical, there is the larger issue of running to the middle, which means to the right, for liberals and progressives looking for "sanity". This "happy middle" is a utopian illusion in any society but especially in a capitalist one. And it is an illusion which plays right into the hands of the status quo and those who have power.

Helmut:

Let's say it again... yes, there do exist distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad, better and worse.

But figuring that out requires constant critical thinking and truly critical thought is hard. This knee-jerk moral equivalence - "we're all just the same," "let's agree to disagree," "they're all just as bad" - is a kind of red herring, however sweet it seems, to the arduous and endless but essential task of critical thought about what things are indeed good and right.

Trish Kahle:

By claiming that “the light at the end of the tunnel isn't the promised land, it's just New Jersey,” you are telling the people to settle for health care “reform” that increased insurance profits but neglected to establish access to health care across the board. We cannot all rest in your quiet sphere of middle class liberalism—some of us must do more than casually hope for things to get better. Our lives depend on it. We aren’t “amplifying” our voices just to add to the corporate media din. We have to scream so loudly because the ruling class tries so hard to ignore, works so vigorously to evade our power and dismiss our demands.

[...]

We will hold you accountable for your rightward swing. Taking turns driving through a tunnel is not anywhere close to the dynamic of two capitalist parties running a country. You know that. You know these parties aren’t moving forward together towards “the light.” Instead, they’re holding us in the tunnel. They’re robbing, raping, and murdering us in that tunnel without any sense of conscience and we’re going to fight back. You better believe it.

Dennis Perrin:

Jon Stewart's Sanity show was one of the oddest, at times dumbest events I've seen. I'm not sure what it actually was or what its organizers hoped to accomplish, but American reality is no saner today than it was before the weekend.

In essence, the rally served as a three-hour Comedy Central commercial, with a "play nice" sermon attached. Even by tame American satirical standards, Stewart's laugh-in was a dud. It reminded us how utterly empty the present culture is, and how subservient countless Americans remain. At least Woodstock '99 had Rage Against The Machine. Sadly, Rage would've been profoundly out of place on Stewart's stage. Too angry. Too political. Too partisan. Eeek!

"We have to scream so loudly because the ruling class tries so hard to ignore, works so vigorously to evade our power and dismiss our demands."
- Trish Kahle

"The futures that we imagined for ourselves and for our families are fast becoming far flung fantasies."

Dan Weintraub (via Automatic Earth):

I recently purchased 13 acres of wooded land in far Northern Vermont for $4,000. My plan is to find a used mobile home or camper to place on the property. I will grow some vegetables. In today's economic environment, in which the Scylla and Charybdis of cost inflation (food and energy costs in particular) and lack of access to money (cash and/or credit) puts the squeeze on the middle class, modest monthly paychecks do not go far. Housing costs, food costs, energy costs---it all adds up quickly. This summer my son will come to the woods of Northern Vermont with me. There he will learn how to wash his clothes by hand and how to dry those clothes on a line. He will learn how to plant and harvest carrots and zucchini and radishes. He will not go to camp. We can no longer afford camp. Instead he will come with me to the farmer's market, and he will watch me barter our vegetables for meat and eggs and cheese.

Don’t get me wrong. While it may sound like it, I’m not complaining. Perhaps I will find such a lifestyle comfortable and fitting. The thing is, I didn’t choose this path. And neither are millions upon millions of middle class citizens who are watching their future plans disintegrate before their eyes. I didn’t plan upon living in a trailer in the woods of Northern Vermont. I didn’t expect my job prospects to evaporate in a haze of financial fraud and government duplicity. But my experience is in no way unique. We who comprise the American middle and working classes are getting poorer by the day, and the futures that we imagined for ourselves and for our families are fast becoming far flung fantasies.

"The fringe is getting pretty big, isn't it?"

When confronted with a corporate comedian pleading for "sanity," I retreat to a comedian of a different stripe. Here's Barry Crimmins at a 1990 anti-war rally. Take a walk on the wild side.

"The real enemy is the self-satisfied fat cat, for whom the status quo is just fine, who tells us that we're on the fringe if we so much as suggest that this country needs more than just a little fine tuning to bring it into focus."

- Barry Crimmins

"I'm tired of being called a radical. I don't think I'm radical. I don't think you're radical. I don't think we're radical. What's so radical about what we want? We want peace. We want economic justice. We want civil rights. We want jobs. We want hope. We want public transportation. I'm a radical? No, I'm not a radical. I don't have 400,000 troops assembled in a desert wearing scuba-diving suits to bring me more oil ... that's radical."
- Barry Crimmins