A few passing thoughts, #4

Rep. Louise Slaughter, we can be sure, is about to receive (in fact, already is receiving) the full-court "You! Must! Apologize!" press from the right-wing. Referring to the reactionaries' attacks on abortion rights and Planned Parenthood on Wednesday, she told a crowd of pro-choice advocates that

“I went through this as co-chair of the Arts Caucus. In 1994, people were elected simply to come here to kill the National Endowment for the Arts, Slaughter said, “now they’re here to kill women.”

To kill women by hindering their access to cancer screenings and similar preventive health care. To kill them by driving them to back-alley abortion mills. To kill them, that is, indirectly, silently, one at a time - the better for the right wing to avoid having to admit to the real-world effects of their fanaticism.

Which means that while Rep. Slaughter's statement may have been "inartfully expressed" in a more honest sense than that phrase is usually employed, her thrust - that the reactionaries want to enact policies that will result in women dying unnecessarily and prematurely - is true. She should not back down, she should not apologize, and if pressed to do so should reply "I will not apologize for speaking the truth."

One way in which the right-wing clearly outshines the left is in sheer stubbornness. It's about time we started to catch up.

A few passing thoughts, #3

Speaking of the internet and corporations,

House Republicans adamant that the government keep its hands off the Internet passed a bill Friday to repeal federal rules barring Internet service providers from blocking or interfering with traffic on their networks.

According to Rep. Greg Walden, sponsor of the bill, the internet "is open and innovative thanks to the government's hands-off approach."

In other words, the telcoms have convinced a bunch of technological troglodytes that the government has and has had nothing to do with the internet or its development and that the best way to keep the Net "open and innovative" is to enable a handful of giant corporations to effectively assume full control over what goes over the Net and how fast that data moves.

Part of the reason, of course, is that they can't imagine those corporations interfering with anything they would want to see. I wonder what the reaction would be if these GOPpers succeeded and one of the first things Verizon or Comcast or one of them did was block access to some Tea Party website.

Wait, never mind: We already know.

A few passing thoughts, #2

Invasions of privacy, loss of privacy, shrinking of the Fourth Amendment, they're all around us. For one example, the PHC* administration is criticizing industry-backed proposals to improve internet security and privacy. Those corporations are not being altruistic; they have thier own interests in mind: The relative lack of privacy protection for non-locally stored data hinders the developemnt and marketing of cloud-based services. Still, it means the White House is against improving online privacy because, they say, it'll make it harder on the cops to watch us.

On another front, moves to require drug tests as a condition for public assistance are being pushed in several states, including Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, and Tennessee. In Florida, Governor Voldemort has already made drug tests mandatory for all state employees.

However, there is class of citizens whose right to privacy must be maintained: gun owners.

The Illinois House passed a bill on Friday that would allow gun owners to have their identities shielded from public disclosure.

Although it was introduced by a GOPper, it passed by a wide margin with bipartisan support.

*PHC = President Hopey-Changey

A few passing thoughts, #1

It's hard to believe that ex-CIA agent and terrorist Luis Posada Carriles was so easily acquitted of perjury charges on Friday. This is a guy who should be charged with terrorism: Driven by his anti-communist fanaticism, he has been connected to the bombing of a civilian airliner, the bombing of two hotels in Havana, and a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. Instead, he walks on some by comparison lesser charge.

Meanwhile, the US refuses to extradite him to either Cuba or Venezuela, both of which want to try him on the airliner charge, on the grounds that he "might be tortured" - leading those nations (and some others) to mutter about how the empire protects its own and me to wonder where in hell the US gets off being so high and mighty about torture while (just to cite the obvious) Bradley Manning still sits alone in Quantico even as the smear campaign gets going.

As a footnote, Carriles' lead attorney said after the acquittal that "This trial was not a vindication of any kind of violence toward Cuba." This despite having arguned during the trial that he

should have been allowed to retire a hero ... for his service to the country during the cold war.

If he's a hero, the 9/11 hijackers were martyrs. If they weren't, then he isn't.

Rantin' about causing a budget

Okay, so Rep. Paul Rantin' has come out with his "It's not a budget, it's a cause" budget.

And after a day of fawning over how "courageous" he was, a few media outlets started taking a look at the figures and were gobsmacked by the fact that they just didn't add up. My gosh! Reactionaries with phony numbers? Whoda thunk?

So it's already being ripped apart factually and I have no quarrel whatsoever with the analysts and think tanks (e.g., the Center for American Progress, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Economic Policy Institute) who have gone after Rantin's rantings. That's what they're supposed to do; that's their job and they have done it well.

I do, however, have a quarrel with the various liberal slash progressive slash lefty commentators who made and still are making the bonehead mistake of treating Rantin's pantings as something to be approached and analyzed seriously, thereby actually serving the reactionaries' strategic interests. They are being idiots.

The thing is, the only real commentary that reached beyond the painfully obvious economic failings of the "cause" has been about the politics of it, almost all of which has come down to "It won't pass." Well, of course it won't pass. Even the most whacked-out wingnuts know it won't pass. They might hope it will pass the House, they might even think that it will, given the combination of TP extremism and the typical "Shut up and do as your told" authoritarian mentality in operation within the GOPper caucus there. But still they know - of course they know - that it won't pass the Senate.

They don't care!

Don't you get it? They don't care. They really don't. The idea of such a declaration - and that's what it is, not a budget so at least give Rantin' props for being upfront about that with his "it's a cause" description - the idea is not to get it passed in any foreseeable future but to make it the basis for debate. To make it the standard to which comparisons will be made. And bluntly, with the unwitting - not to say witless - cooperation of what passes for much of the left in this country, they have already succeeded in that.

Sure you can take a critical look at the numbers, sure you can cite the analyses. But what you don't do is stop there. What you don't do it take it seriously. You don't approach it as if it was a serious proposal that was sufficiently reasonable to deserve careful rebuttal. Instead, you seek to put it outside the range of acceptable discussion.

Denounce it. Decry it. Demonize it. Call it names. They're easy enough to come by because they're accurate. Don't even just say it would "end Medicare," say it's wild-eyed fanaticism that would destroy the basic fabric of American society. Say it would decimate (probably without using that particular high-falutin'-sounding word) our economy, ruin our environment, dismember our society. Say it proves their utter disregard for the welfare of American families. Call it a program "of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich" that would plunge us back into the worst days of the Robber Barons. Call it part of a plan - no, a plot - to undo more than a century of social and economic progress. Label it a fringe document created by and for a fringe element; a rejection of American principles of justice and fairness; beyond the pale, over the top, around the bend. Insist that it does not deserve the regard of decent people.

The attack should be unrelenting. One thing the right does at which the left too often fails is to be open about what it's after. Even if the ideas are unpopular, they will repeat them over and over and over, chipping away at the opposition, making what was unacceptably radical seem more reasonable if only because it has become more familiar, it seems less outrageous because it is no longer a surprise. It's a classic way of moving the Overton window: pushing ideas that are beyond the fringe to make current fringe ideas seem more acceptable. It is strategic thinking.

By contrast, the left seems incapable of such thinking, preferring to all but exclusively focus on the question of "What might pass this year?" and then call - more properly, ask - for that instead of for what the actual goal is. In the real world, in real politics, at the end of the day you will all but always end up with something less than you asked for - which means as long as instead of demanding what you want you ask for the most you think might pass, you will inevitably end up with even less than that. More importantly, what you want will remain off the table precisely because you don't push for it, turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. An example was the health insurance reform bill: Single-payer, much less a national health care system, was "off the table" even before the debate began because "it won't pass." The obvious - and quite predictable - result was that even a wimpy "public option" couldn't survive.

Which brings me back to the point: The reactionaries don't care if this so-called "budget" passes because, by Rantin's own admission, it isn't one. It's a "cause." And that cause is the undoing of The Commons, the undoing of any notion of common interests or mutual responsibilities between and among citizens, the undoing of the social contract between the public and the government. That is why this document must be attacked not as a "budget" with funny numbers but for what it is: part of an immoral cause born of selfishness, greed, and indifference to injustice experienced by others. And it is also why it is a terrible mistake that actually plays right into the reactionaries' hands to treat it any other way.

Footnote the One: If you're of a religious mind, in denouncing the "cause" you might refer to Hillel's declaration that the "whole Torah" comes down to "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow." Or you might refer people to the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) and call Rantin's "budget" the work of the priest or the Levite who crossed the road and passed by the injured man.

Footnote the Two: "A plot to undo more than a century of social and economic progress?" Yup. And, again, the reactionaries made no secret of it. This is a letter I wrote to my local newspaper some 16 years ago about a George Will column for January 2, 1995:

To George Will goes the honor of being called an honest man. Cutting through the nonsense of Newt and company, he opens the heart of his cohorts’ agenda: “‘Back to 1900,’” he says, “is a serviceable summation of the conservatives’ goal.”

“Back to 1900.” Back to a time before legal labor unions or effective anti-monopoly laws, a time of child labor and twelve hour work days. Back to a time before consumer or environmental protection laws, before regulations requiring safe working conditions, a time when being killed at work was a major cause of death. A time before Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment or disability insurance.

“Back to 1900.” Back to when poor people were considered genetic defectives who deserved their condition. Back before civil or voting rights laws, when wives were chattel, blacks were either “good niggers” who got called “boy” or “uppity niggers” who risked being lynched, racism (against Irish, Italians, and others as well as blacks) was institutionalized, sexism the norm, and gays and lesbians, as far as “polite society” was concerned, didn’t exist.

Back, in short, to a time when the elite were in their mansions and the rest of us were expected to know our places, live lives of servitude without complaint, and then die without making a fuss. “Back to 1900" is indeed “a serviceable summation” of the right wing’s goal, which is to undo a century of progress toward economic and social justice in order to selfishly benefit their morally stunted lives.

And if anyone thinks I’m too harsh, remember that Will’s “summation” was offered as a moderate alternative to Christopher DeMuth of the American Enterprise Institute, who proposed we “go back to the Articles of Confederation and start over.” One wonders what, given the chance, they’d do with the Bill of Rights.

That's what they're after. They said it themselves. We should say it, too.

Yet another way to know they're not on your side

This is the headline on a Faux News story:

ACORN Pleads Guilty to Voter Registration Fraud in Nevada

Omigosh! It's true! Everything the reactionaries said about those damn left-wingers was true! OMG!

So to what did the group actually plead guilty?

The violation was for unlawfully providing compensation for registering voters based on the total number of people registered.

Um. that's it? That's what the screaming headline about FRAUD was about?

Yup, that's it. Paying per signature is illegal in Nevada, in fact it's a felony, I gather on the basis that it encourages phony registrations. It appears that ACORN was in fact guilty. But of what, by which I mean, to what effect? If the charge had been something about a massive conspiracy to enable ineligible people to vote or to vote more than once in order to manipulate elections, that would be one thing. But no, that wasn't it:

The original complaint filed in May of 2009, included 26 counts of compensation for registration of voters....

It was the pay-by-signature that was the entire issue from the beginning. But to the wingnuts, it doesn't matter that it was what frankly appears to me to be a technical violation, not when it gives them the change to scream FRAUD!

Here I have to ask: Who was really defrauded in this case? The article says that among the false registrations were names of members of the Dallas Cowboys, who, I think we can assume, were not going to show up at the polls. It seems to me that the real victim here is ACORN, which wound up paying people for "registrations" which were useless both for voting and for advancing ACORN's goals, which included getting more poor people registered to vote. No matter, not when the whack jobs can screech FRAUD!

One more bit of proof of the "they're not on your side" thesis. This is the last paragraph of the article:

ACORN has long faced criticism after dozens of its workers allegedly committed voter registration fraud during the 2008 election. The group dissolved amid falling revenues last year after conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute caught some of its workers offering tax advice to them.

They managed to find space to include both those hoary accusations but could find no room to note that the latter case has been more than thoroughly debunked and the former cases arose because most if not all states (quite properly) require the submission of all registration forms gathered, even the ones the gathering orgaqnization believed phony. (Indeed, in at least one case, state officials knew the registrations were phony because ACORN itself flagged them as such when they were submitted.) Nor did they find space to mention that there is not a shred of evidence anywhere that any illegal votes were cast as the result of anything ACORN did or tried to do.

But I imagine that's to be expected because, after all, the truth wouldn't scream FRAUD!

I don't want to say I told you so, but....

Updated When the health insurance "reform" was being debated, one of the arguments offered in support was that despite its obvious shortcomings, it was a "good start" on which we would build over time. In response, others - I was among them - noted that the same arguments were made 45 years earlier on behalf of Medicare and Medicaid: They, too, were "first steps" that were sure to be followed with others, others which never came.

Instead, those other voices declared (and again I was among them), future efforts would not go toward improving the system but to defending it, not toward expansion but merely against retraction and that the pressure for changes would not come from the advocates for better access to health care but from those whose goal is forever to move backwards. I was reminded of that by the news that

Congress is poised to send the White House its first rollback of last year's health care law, a bipartisan repeal of a burdensome tax reporting requirement that's widely unpopular with businesses. Even President Barack Obama is eager to see it gone.

Present tax law requires business to file 1099s with the IRS when they purchase more than $600 in services from a vendor in a year. Under the new provision, in 2012 that would be extended to include the purchase of goods. It was intended to ensure vendors pay their taxes and was expected to raise about $25 billion over the next decade to help pay for the costs of the health insurance reform system.

But we can't have that! It's "burdensome!" It'd create "a paperwork nightmare!" Businesses are "already swamped by government paperwork!" No, no, a thousand times no! A nice bipartisan expression of support for business.

And how is the revenue to be made up?

[B]y changing another part of the health care law, requiring more families to repay tax credits designed to help them cover insurance premiums, if their incomes increase beyond certain levels.

The new law says that starting in 2014, low- and middle-income families will be eligible for tax credits to help pay for health insurance if they don't get insurance through their employers. According to the NY Times' "You're the Boss" blog, the credits are paid in advance with the amount based on prior years' income tax returns. If a taxpayer earns more than expected and so gets a bigger credit than they were supposed to, they have to repay part of it. The bill which passed today would require more people to repay more of the credit, which is expected to make up the $25 billion lost by changing the reporting requirements for businesses.

So let's recap: Congress and PHC* are about to relieve businesses of a "burden" (any cost of which, let it be noted, is a tax-deductible business expense) and thereby enable vendors to continue to get away with underpaying their taxes to the tune of billions a year, openly and avowedly by shifting the cost - one which is apparently not considered a burden - on to the shoulders of the poor and the workers who have the temerity to somewhat improve their economic condition.

I doubt even Ezra Klein is going to be able to spin that into a victory for better health care.

Updated to clarify how the credit works.

*PHC = President Hopey-Changey

Another way you know they're not on your side

In covering the nationwide rallies by unions and union supporters today, AP had this to say:

Labor unions want to frame the debate as a civil rights issue, which could draw sympathy to public workers being blamed for busting state budgets with generous pensions.

Yeah, that's it: They're just trying to "frame the issue" in order to "draw sympathy." It's like, y'know, sneaky advertising 'n' stuff. So watch out for those unions! They're just trying to "draw sympathy" so you forget that they're "busting budgets" with their "generous pensions."

When was the last time you heard, say, a corporate CEO or some right-winger or some TPer described as trying to "frame the issue?" I wonder if you ever have. Because in the dreamworld of the media, they don't. Instead, they "make arguments." Indeed, the very same article demonstrates the point:

Walker has argued that collective bargaining is a budget issue. On Friday, he signed into law a bill the strips nearly all collective bargaining benefits from most public workers, arguing the move will give local governments flexibility in making budget cuts needed to close the state's $3.6 billion deficit.

See? Walkalloveryou doesn't try to "frame the issue." Oh, no, not him. Instead, he "makes arguments" about "budget issues" and "flexibility" and "the deficit" - all of which go unchallenged.

About the only thing on which Rush Limbaugh and I agree is that "words have meanings." And the things they imply can express as much as what they actually say.

Footnote A: Something else I found interesting is that both the AP and the New York Times referred to Walkalloveryou having "signed into law" the bill stripping away collective bargaining rights from most Wisconsin public employees without finding space to mention that its implementation has been blocked by court order and so won't go into effect for months, if ever.

Footnote B: To be truly accurate, you have to say that words convey meanings. Words in and of themselves are meaningless; the meaning exists in the minds of the speaker and hearer. The words themselves are just collections of sounds (or, in the case of writing, shapes) that when spoken (or written) in certain patterns and sequences are used to symbolize certain mental concepts so the hearer can know what of those concepts are in the mind of the speaker. All of which I mention just for fun and as a flashback to my interest in clinical psychology and linguistics.

The Disconnect from Reality Award

Updated We have a winner! The other contestants, demonstrating that their own disconnect was not total, wisely withdrew in the face of this challenge.

About two weeks ago, radical fundamentalist idiot and all-around anti-Muslim bigot Terry Jones held a self-styled "trial" of the Qur'an. The "jury" was 12 members of his own church, and they found it

guilty of five “crimes against humanity,” including the promotion of terrorist acts and “the death, rape and torture of people worldwide whose only crime is not being of the Islamic faith.”

Has he even read the Old Testament? No matter, the condemned book was then burned, with Jones, dressed in a judicial robe, overseeing. (“That actually burned quite well,” Jones said.) Anger in Afghanistan boiled over, leading to riots in which a number of people, including some UN staff, were killed.

In his winning submission yesterday, Jones said "We don’t feel responsible for that" despite having

considered the possibility that burning the text might elicit a violent response and that innocent people might be killed.

While that infantile disconnect between one's action and another's reaction despite having predicted just that reaction could have been enough to win the award, he sealed it by demanding that the United States and United Nations take “immediate action” against Muslim nations in retaliation for the deaths of UN staff and insisting that the book-burning was not vindictive and that he took no pleasure in it at all but was "obligated" to do it because he supports the US court system.

That is champion-level disconnect. Congratulations, Mr. Jones.

Updated with a few additional details.

Uninentional Humor Dept.

Headline on a piece in the Wall Street Journal:

We've Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers

The author is Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial page, who I'm sure makes many things and takes nothing. Except, of course, sense and the cake.

The most important fact about Libya is not in Libya

I'm tired and have been struggling with a bad case of writer's block so I won't be surprised if on reviewing this tomorrow I find typos and garbled sentences. Don't you be, either.

Our war in Libya is now about two weeks old and the main thing that has come out of it so far is the conviction that Barack Obama, recently dubbed here as PHC, should henceforth be known as GHC - that is, instead of as President Hopey-Changey, as Generalissimo Hopey-Changey. He has apparently decided that the US military is his to use in any way he sees fit, any time he thinks appropriate, anywhere in the world he in his own personal, not-to-be-judged opinion thinks merited.

He has by both his actions and his words argued that he can send US military forces into combat - and don't give me any crap about "surgical strikes" or any of the rest of that bull; when you send your air force against people who can shoot back, that is combat - without even the pretense that there was a threat to the US, without even bothering to make a claim about about some danger to even a single US citizen. There was nothing - nothing except a reference to some vague, amorphous, overall "foreign policy interests." Foreign policy interests, that is, as he defines them.

He sought no approval from Congress; he did not even engage in the wimpy and meaningless charade of "consultation" - even though most of those who have commented on it have said they think that if he had asked for approval, he would have gotten it. So why not get it? Because he just goddamn didn't think it was necessary and wanted to make the point that it was not necessary. Asking for approval would imply Congress has a role in when and where the US military is to be employed - and that it precisely what he wanted to deny. "It's my air force and it'll go wherever and do whatever I want it to and I don't need your stinkin' approval. Bombs away."

Even Shrub didn't go that far: He at least claimed "getting the 9/11 attackers" as justification for his war on Afghanistan and some "imminent" (and yes, they did use that word at least twice) danger as justification for his war on Iraq. He at least went through the motions of Congressional authorization for attacking Afghanistan - which he then stretched beyond rationality to justify invading Iraq, but he at least pretended to have authorization. Not here, not any more. We have gone from a Constitutional principle that while the president, as the commander-in-chief, has ultimate authority over how military forces are deployed, Congress decides if and when they are deployed; to one where the president can respond to an immediate attack or threat before getting Congressional authorization; now to this Obama Doctrine where an attack or threat is no longer required and the whole idea of Congressional approval becomes a gray fog of "maybe at some point if it's not inconvenient for me."

You think that's overstated? It's not: During a classified briefing for members of the House on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton said the administration would simply ignore any moves by Congress to exercise its Constitutional powers. In the words of Rep. Brad Sherman,

She said they are certainly willing to send reports [to us] and if they issue a press release, they'll send that to us too.

In other words, "'Shut up,' she explained."

Barack Obama, the supposed Constitutional scholar, has shit on the Constitution and disgraced himself, the office of the presidency, and the best principles of the nation. And instead of the condemnation such arrogance, such centralization of power, deserves, it has in too many cases been ignored, downplayed, or worst cheered by people who damn well should know better but are just so happy to have a "liberal" war president ("We're not weak! We're not weak!") that they lose - or rather willingly abandon - the capacity for rational thought.

When George Bush raised the notion of "preemptive war," a policy of, as it was described, attacking real or imagined enemies before they became serious threats and so supposedly preventing such threats from arising, it was quite properly met with a chorus of condemnation from the left. But not this time. Not when PHC - excuse me, GHC - is in charge. Rather, a distressingly, depressingly, large number of ostensibly liberal or left voices have instead been a hallelujah chorus: "He's gone to the UN! He's working with NATO! That is just so totally different from Bush that it's just, just awesome! Thank you, sir, may I have another?"

Admittedly, a few of those heads have begun to clear: For one example, Rachel Maddow, who at the start of this was so awestruck by GHC's awesome awesomeness that his butt must have been wet for a week from the kissing she gave it, has lately been expressing a more hesitant tone of "Okay, now what - we got into this, how do we get out?"

Such doubts, while late, are welcome and certainly richly deserved. This war was founded (as most wars are) on platitudes and lies, so much so that even the flacks and hacks already can't make a good show of conviction in claiming it's all about "protecting civilians" like we were told at the start; indeed, it would be hard to find anyone who still makes that claim in more than the most perfunctory way. While that loss of conviction in original claims is also true of most wars, the fact that in this case it has become so obvious so quickly marks it as something special even in those blood-stained annals.

So yes, at first it was all about "protecting civilians," or so we were repeatedly told. That, it was said, required a "no-fly zone" over the eastern part of Libya which almost literally with the next breath became a no-fly zone over the whole country. The cruise missiles started flying even as the target list was being expanded from no-fly to no-planes as Libyan jets were destroyed as they sat on the ground. Then the excuse became to save Benghazi from a "massacre," the evidence for which consisted largely of blatant assertion but which was used to justify attacking Qaddafi's ground forces and his compound in Tripoli, the connection of the latter with the claimed mission going unexplained. Meanwhile, the area where "civilians need our protection" seemed to move west and east along with the rebels' advances and retreats: By last weekend the US had deployed AC-130 gunships and A-10 attack aircraft, which are designed for close air support, not for enforcing a "no-fly zone."

And now the idea of arming the rebels is being openly discussed (Obama: “I’m not ruling it out. But I’m also not ruling it in.") as it's revealed that CIA agents are and have been for some time on the ground in Libya, making contacts with the rebels and obtaining intelligence to coordinate air strikes.

Combined with the clear desire of Western (and some Arab) nations that this ultimately leads to Qaddafi being gone, all of it bears less the marks of humanitarian protection of non-combatants and more the marks of choosing sides in a civil war.

But that, despite what it means for GHC's power-grab, comes as a thrill to some, such as, for one prominent media example, Ed Schultz, whose giggling delight at seeing Libya bombed (something he has desired ever since PanAm 103 went down over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988) has become an embarrassment to at least some of us who have enjoyed his strong and long-standing pro-union, pro-worker opinions. He won't even accept calling the rebels "rebels." Oh no, he insists, they are "freedom fighters." Admittedly, part of that is him taking enjoyment in throwing the right wing's slogans back at them, but part is clearly a conviction born of his hatred of Qaddafi for having "killed Americans" (as if there were no non-Americans killed on that flight) that has lead him to the, if you will, faith-based conclusion that any opposition to Qaddafi is by definition "pro-freedom." It's a great example of truthiness, the quality of something being "true" simply because you want it to be.

But there are serious reasons to question that belief, a belief that runs far ahead of the facts. One of the purposes of those CIA agents is to gather information on the identity and goals of the rebels because Western nations don't actually know a lot about them. Der Spiegel (Germany) asked the question directly:

For the international community, the intervention is[, or at least is presented as being,] about defending the fundamental values of freedom, human rights and self-determination. But the question is: Are all those who have a say in Benghazi just as interested in freedom, human rights and self-determination?

(The phrase in brackets is my addition.)

The available answers are not encouraging.

The BBC (UK) presents some of the leading figures in the rebel council as a mix of people with real human rights credibility and former members of Qaddafi's government, who may well be more interested in jockeying for power after Qaddafi goes down or Libya breaks in two. For example, two men it cites as being seen by many as possible leaders of the rebel army and perhaps of a divided Libya are Abdul Fatah Younis, Qaddafi's former interior minister and Khalifa Haftar, who had been head of the armed forces.

While Haftar broke with Qaddafi over 20 years ago, Younis had been in charge of Libya's special forces for the past 41 years. He had served Qaddafi ever since the 1969 coup that brought the dictator to power. Now he claims to be all-out for democracy. When asked what kind of democracy, he says, vaguely and basically irrelevantly to the question,

I dream of a genuine democracy in which we Libyans can lead a five-star life,

a democracy he quite weirdly says can be easily established precisely because, as Der Spiegel notes,

Libya is a political no man's land. There are no parties or unions, and the highest form of political organization are soccer clubs. The only thing this country can draw on is the ruling elite in the leadership circle surrounding Gadhafi and his children,

a ruling elite in which Younis was a central figure for more than four decades. (So maybe his notions about democracy are not so weird after all.) On the broader front,

after six weeks of revolution, the tone is no longer being set by the youths, lawyers and professors that were there at the beginning, but also an increasing number of defectors from the old regime. Most of these men, in their ironed shirts and ties, were ministers, ambassadors, military officers or businessmen, and many of them had ties to Saif al-Islam, one of Gadhafi's sons. They all had good lives under the Gadhafi regime, and now that want to salvage what's left. Since the air strikes began, it's been clear that the end is coming for Gadhafi. So they are pushing their way to the forefront. ...

[A] quasi-president and quasi-prime minister are in place, both jockeying for position. The new prime minister is Mahmoud Jibril, whose job it is to lead the new government that may or may not exist. ... The other man, the one people call "our new president" is Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, chairman of the National Council.

The one thing that unites these two men is that both were long-time supporters of the regime -- Jibril as an economic functionary and Abdel-Jalil as justice minister. ...

The sentences [Abdel-Jalil] speaks could have been lifted directly from a Soviet revolutionary handbook. "The National Council is legitimized by the local committees made up of revolutionaries in the liberated cities and villages," he declares.

That is, the rebel government is legitimate because it is supported by the rebels who support the rebel government. In light of that logic, I suppose this next bit wasn't surprising:

Asked when elections will be held, the president replies, "We're not concerned with these details."

Meanwhile, reports of rebels in Benghazi making mass arrests as armed gangs of young men roam the streets at night looking for suspected collaborators, of mistreatment of those taken prisoner, and of killings of regime supporters have been circulating for more than a week. (Sidebar: Are we now going to bomb the rebels to protect those non-combatants? Or does the protection only apply to those we endorse? Foolish question, I know.) The city is reported to be "descending into mistrust and fear" with people afraid to say anything either for or against the rebels or the Qaddafi regime, afraid to go out at night, afraid even to give out their telephone number. There are claims of death squads on both sides.

Benghazi's central hospital admits five, sometimes 10, patients each day with gunshot wounds. Two pick-up trucks outfitted with machine guns guard the hospital entrance and photos of missing people adorn the walls.

I have to say that if none of this sets off all kinds of alarm bells for you, if for you this adds up to "freedom fighters," then your definition of "freedom" is a hell of a lot different from mine.

If the bills still aren't ringing, consider the closing words of Der Spiegel's article:

The rebels' mood, exuberant and lighthearted in the beginning, has shifted. Their rhetoric is becoming increasingly tense and they dismiss any criticism as propaganda. One former air force commander -- now "spokesman for the revolutionary armed forces" -- says, "anyone who fights against our revolutionary army is fighting against the people and will be treated accordingly."

Another man [identified by the Los Angeles Times as Abdelhafed Ghoga], also a member of the National Council, talks about "enemies of the revolution" and declares that anyone who doesn't join the rebel side will get a taste of revolutionary justice: "We know where they are and we will find them."

These are the same threats, word for word, that Gadhafi uses to scare his opponents.

None of this, of course, means that Qaddafi doesn't deserve to be booted out and spend the rest of his miserable life in one of the dank, urine-stink cells in which so many of his opponents languished and died. Nor does it mean that the rebels will not force him out, although without a major Western military involvement, that possibility seems remote. But it does mean two things: One, talk of "freedom fighters," particularly of "freedom fighters" who should be armed by the US (or by France, which is by all accounts the NATO nation most willing to do just that) when so little about the rebels is known and what is known is so disturbing, is not only ignorant and foolish, it is downright frelling stupid.

And two, for us here at home the biggest legacy of this war will be the further erosion of Congressional Constitutional authority and the continued centralization of military authority in the hands of one person, the president. Another line will have been crossed. GHC insists that this war has not established some kind of "Obama Doctrine" to be applied "in cookie-cutter fashion" (as if such doctrines ever are) but what can't be denied is that this now stands as a precedent, one he or some future president can call on whenever they think it useful, one under which the president on their personal authority can order US forces into combat on whatever pretext or for whatever purpose, for however long, deemed to be in line with their foreign policy. Not only is no "imminent" threat required, there need be no threat at all - and Congress not only need not give approval either before or after the fact but can and should be ignored completely.

And if that notion, if the continuing move in that direction that this represents and establishes, does not disturb you, then not only is your understanding of freedom quite different from mine, your understanding of democracy and the nature of a free republic is as well.

Grrr

Yes, grrr. My second computer disaster in less than a year temporarily crippled my online existence. After much frustration and trying every damn thing I could think of and a few I didn't, I managed to resuscitate the computer, which was a Very Good Thing because no way in hell could I afford the cost of a replacement.

The cost, however, was still considerable in another way: It required a clean reninstall of the OS - which means everything else is gone. All my files, all my programs, everything. Other than a couple of email addresses, nothing was vital; all of that sort of stuff is either safely stored somewhere else or recoverable elsewhere. But what was lost - other than time - includes all the news clips and other background stuff I use for posting. All the .pdf files I could use for reference material. That sort of stuff, while not vital to either this blog or real life, is still a definite loss.

So here I am, in a sense back to square one after an enforced absence, hoping to rebuild an audience way back up to its previous anemic levels.

For a brief time I thought about not coming back at all; I was that frustrated and depressed both by the world at large and my own meaningless corner of it. There never really was a chance of that, I suppose: I still have delusions of grandeur, imagining that I am deserving of reaching the elevated heights of averaging a hundred hits a day and maybe 50 regular readers. To do that, I know I have to be more consistent about posting, which was a New Year's resolution that events of this month have made hard to keep (although I had been doing better) but then again, as it seems to me I said not that long ago, at the end of the day you might as well just carry on because what else is there to do?

So this is me, carrying on.

A sort of footnote to the preceding

In response to the previous post, commenter Graeme said, in part (i.e., this is edited):

When I was young I wanted nothing more than to be an American.

But after Vietnam and Nixon and Iran-Contra and a thousand other examples of a total misunderstanding of what life was all about, I began to doubt.

I have come to believe that America is the most dangerous nation in history and American arrogance will lead to our destruction.

Your common wisdom post is brilliant, heartfelt and utterly futile.

We are fucked.

(You can see the full, unedited, comment here.)

I started to write a response there but it started to get kinda long and it raised a point worth addressing, so I decided to make it a post.

I don't know if I necessarily would call the US "the most dangerous nation in history." As L. P. Hartley famously wrote (and historians have echoed), "The past is a foreign country" and as a friend once said to me, "history is a long time." Neither the Romans nor the Mongols, for two examples, were notable for either restraint of ambition or gentleness with enemies. However, if you're thinking in terms of the absolute, as opposed to the relative, destructive power available, the absolute total of the devastation that could be caused, coupled with the likelihood of it being used, then yes, the US is without doubt the most dangerous nation in history.

But that danger arises less because of our arrogance than because of our - and I will have to explain the word immediately after I use it - innocence. By that I mean our national social conviction, i.e., our cultural mythology, that we really are a good, moral, gentle, people who always act with the purest of motives and the highest of ideals and the multitude of examples to the contrary are individual aberrations, the exceptions that prove the rule - in much the same way that the right wing dismisses every reactionary scumball who guns down some leftist or government official as a "lone wacko" whose actions say nothing at all about the right's rhetoric and ideology, with the exception that in the case of our national mythology, it is something in which many many Americans genuinely believe even if they never think of it so directly.

Indeed, I have referred to this mythology of "American innocence" as the most dangerous of our national mythologies (yes, plural; every culture will have several) because it enables us to undertake and pursue the greatest follies, the greatest inanities, the greatest cruelties, the greatest acts of greed, selfishness, bigotry, and imperialism all the while telling ourselves we are doing a good or at least the least bad thing, which makes it more likely you will be prepared to undertake those follies and cruelties. (Parenthetically, I recognize that this sort of extreme self-confidence in your own purity can be considered a form of arrogance but I persist in regarding it as a matter less of consciously looking down on other nations and peoples and more one of being genuinely puzzled as to why they don't think more highly of us than they do.) Yes, it is a delusion, but it is one shared to at least a small degree by most of us as it is part of what defines being "an American."

What all this means is that we may well be fucked, we may well be headed for an ultimate destruction that will take a lot of others down with us, it's just that the reason isn't a national arrogance but the power of some who have learned how to manipulate our national myths for their own selfish short-term benefit. I certainly have said so myself more than once: I have, for example, used some variation of the phrase "We are so screwed" in no less than 35 posts and yes, I counted.

But having said that, then what? Sometimes, especially when the darkness moves across me, the world I see coming is likewise one of gray shadows and chilly drizzle: It's a world of vanishing personal privacy coupled with increasing government secrecy; a world of diminished political freedoms; a world suffering massive environmental degradation driven by global warming, leading to bloody wars as tens, no, scores of millions of environmental refugees spark fights over shares of diminished resources; and here at home, an economic structure resembling the days of Hell's Kitchen and Five Points and Robber Barons with aid programs and worker rights to match. I have more than once said that I am sometimes glad that I will not live to see that world I see coming.

So in light of all that, in light of the apparent, to adopt Graeme's word, utter futility of it all, why am I still here in this lonely corner of the blogosphere? Why do I still write letters, go to meetings, sign petitions, turn out on the streets when the opportunity arises? What, dammit, is the point?

The point, I suppose, is to "not go gentle into that good night" because, as I reflected once before, even when all that's left is the fall, still how you fall, how you fail, matters both for the future and for your own honor.

It is a frequent but rarely noted truth that even the harshest cynics among us quite often actually are, in their hearts, unregenerate romantics whose sharp words are honed on the irrational, inexplicable, unsupportable, but still unshakeable conviction that things not only should be but can be better than they are, a conviction that makes the too-obvious failings that much harder to take, their bitter taste upon entering the mouth generating the bile that comes out of it.

I count myself among those people, those, if you will, romantic cynics (or cynical romantics), those who despair, who predict doom, but who never quite give up hope. A while back I came to the conclusion that the only thing that keeps me going, the only thing that sustains that eternal flicker of hope, is the realization that while I can't guarantee that anything I do will do a damn bit of good, I can't guarantee that anything I do will help, I can guarantee that doing nothing, won't.

So I say "we're fucked, we're screwed, I despair at the present and fear for the future" and I keep saying how it's a dark time - but I do use the word "surviving" and so at some point I shrug and carry on as best as I can. Because, at the end of it all, what else is there to do?

It's common wisdom

Updated I haven't posted anything for a week now, but not for lack of trying. I have worked on this post literally for hours, rewriting it, reconstructing it, re-focusing it, each time finding it did not say what I meant or said what I meant but in such a garbled way as to be unintelligible, or it did not flow or it was too broad or too narrow or too something.

It's thus a good example of why I haven't written much lately: Every time I try I find myself at risk of being consumed by an inchoate rage that corrodes my self-control and leaves me quite literally wanting to scream out loud in frustrated fury. When I write I try, even when I am in full rant mode I try, to maintain a certain control, a certain rationality, a certain coherence, the better, I think, to give the words more power simply by virtue of a certain degree of rigor which that very control suggests.

Now, lord knows there is enough wrong with this country and its heritage - but dammit, there are some good things in that heritage, too. We have done much evil as a nation, but we have also done some good. There are ideals that we fail to live up to, fail on a daily basis, but they at least are there to strive for. There are rights and freedoms, the privileges and immunities of citizenship, that too often have been violated and transgressed, but they have survived and even in some ways - although it can be hard to see it at times - have been expanded over the course of our history.

But every day now, those ideals are under attack, those rights and freedoms are being shrunk and circumscribed, those privileges and immunities are being stripped away, shredded, discarded by people more interested in their personal perks and positions and their private power trips than in what we as a society are supposed to be, what we like to tell ourselves we are as a people and as a nation.

So right now I find that rigor, that control, hard to come by. Right now all I want to do is to screech and wail out a string of the vilest invectives I know, all directed at the foul, sleazy, lying, sub-human, grasping, cruel, utterly despicable, fascistic, goat-fuckers that surround us.

What we are seeing every day is sometimes done consciously and sometimes unconsciously (in the sense of being useful idiots), but still what we are seeing is a conspiracy against every notion of equality under the law. Against every notion of community responsibility. Against every notion of justice. Against every notion of decency and fairness.

What we are seeing, that is, is an unfolding pattern of betrayal of - no, that's not strong enough - we are seeing an unfolding pattern of treason against every decent part of our heritage as Americans.

The most obvious example because it's gotten the most attention, is Wisconsin, where Governor Walkalloveryou's assault on the rights of workers has generated mass opposition. But that's far from the only place such attacks are occurring. Writing in The Nation, Jane McAlevey notes that regressive, anti-worker (my description, not hers) so-called "right to work" laws already exist in 22 states and bills to create them have been filed in 12 more. A law essentially barring unions from being involved in election campaigns already exists in Alabama; bills to do the same have been introduced in four states and union organizers expect there will be a dozen more. Fifteen states are expected to see bills revoking prevailing wage laws.

An even more extreme measure - which, oddly to me, has gotten less attention - is Michigan Governor Rick Snidley's bill for "financial martial law," under which any municipality in the state, in the event of a "fiscal crisis" with a definition so vague that even healthy communities could be found to be in such a "crisis," can be put under the control of an "emergency financial manager" appointed by the governor who could on their own authority cancel contracts (including labor contracts), slash services, fire city employees, and even dismiss elected officials. Such a manager would, in effect, be the lord of the manor.

These drives against labor and against democracy itself are of a piece with the moves, now so common as to almost be a cliché, of cuts in both state and federal taxes on the rich and corporations matched with cuts in services for, and increased taxes on, everyone else, both being justified as economic necessities, the former for "growth," the latter for "reducing deficits." But it's important, indeed I think it's vital, to realize that this is not really about unions per se or about cutting aid to the poor per se. It goes far beyond that. It is, as I said last week, about power. But while that is the why of the attack, what I want to raise here is the what.

That what, the something that is under attack, is sometimes called The Commons. I'm using the term here in a somewhat broader sense than its more usual economic understanding of referring to shared resources; rather, I'm thinking of a philosophical Commons, a social Commons, of the idea of a public sphere wherein all can participate, all have a stake, all have a part - and all have some responsibility. That space of socially shared and mutual duty, of what is or at least by rights should be equally available to all.

It's true that that sense of The Commons has always been under attack from the elites of our society; indeed, that is likely true of the elites of any society, who tend to care neither for the idea of all having a stake nor for the idea of they themselves having responsibilities to others other than those self-imposed ones of noblesse oblige, the true purpose of which is to demonstrate that elite's superiority. But the intensity and range of the attack we are seeing now is nearly if not totally unprecedented here.

The on-going, decades-long, and largely successful campaign to turn "government" and "taxes" into words to be spat out with unrestrained contempt is being broadened into an attack on the very concept of a public, that is, a whole-community, economic sphere. Put another way, what is being rejected is the very idea, the very root idea, of an economic Commons where there exists, at least philosophically, at least hypothetically, a notion that society as a whole and every member therein is required to have some measure of concern to see to it not only that none are left utterly destitute but that none may be bereft of the means to improve their economic condition.

Just consider as a simple example to illustrate the point: How long ago was it that someone dismissing public school teachers as just overpaid part-timers whose workday ends at 2pm and who are just ripping off taxpayers would have been greeted with hoots of derision? But now such deliberately demonizing denunciations are common currency even as teacher tenure is under attack in five states and laws to allow for, in effect, the privatization of public schools have been filed in eleven. That latter fact in particular reveals what is important here, the true underlying objection here, the unspoken desire here: The problem for those making the attacks lies not in the word "school" or the word "teachers" but in the word "public." The problem lies in the fact that it is done through government, that it's nature is that of a whole-community undertaking.

It's hard to underestimate the importance, the potential impact, of this broadened target yet at the same time it's hard to make crystal clear what the change is. This is perhaps the best I can do right now: This goes beyond the idea of "limited" or "small" government, beyond the notion of arguing if government involvement in this or that is a good thing or not, beyond even arguing if government properly should be involved in this or that, to being an attack on the very legitimacy of the idea of government as existing to serve the commonweal, the very legitimacy of the idea of a government "of, by, and for the people," the very legitimacy of the concept of government as an instrument of "We the People." Indeed, on the very concept of "We the People" itself.

It is the farthest reaches of libertarian daydreaming, souped up and mainstreamed by the powerful voices that stand to gain while simultaneously stripped of the comforting classic libertarian fantasy that voluntary private charity will deal with all the have-nots, stripped of it because even that implies some sort of social responsibility on the part of the haves - and it is that concept of responsibility that is being denied.

That idea, that denial of an economic Commons, is marching in lockstep with a denial of a political Commons, with moves being undertaken to restrict participation in the political life to the nation, even to restrictions on the franchise itself, even to calls to alter the 14th Amendment to change the understanding of just who is a citizen. On that latter point, historian Glenn LaFantasie declared in Salon on Sunday that concern over this is misplaced, citing the difficulty of amending the Constitution. While it would be comforting to dismiss the talk of changing or even rescinding the 14th as just empty rhetoric "in the political heat of an election year," as LaFantasie says, it would be unwise: He himself reminds us that Mitch "Fishface" McConnell promised hearings on the matter and opened his piece by saying

I never once contemplated that I would ever hear any American ... suggest that the 14th Amendment should be rescinded.

Which is really the point here: It's not that such dreams will be immediately fulfilled, it's that what not long ago would have been thought proof of madness is now considered to be within the bounds of reasonable discussion. The baseline concept of who is a citizen is coming under fire. That fire may not be - may it never be - withering, but that doesn't change the fact that it's there.

In the case of attacks on the franchise, i.e., voting rights, I'm thinking here not so much of things like voter caging, which are often illegal and always sleazy, but rather on the increasing demands for increasingly specific forms of identification in order to be allowed to register and to vote. Some 27 states now require voters to present ID in order to cast a vote. (I do not regard casting a "provisional" ballot, which often winds up uncounted, as being able to vote.) In eight of those states, a photo ID is required. When the Supreme Court upheld Indiana's photo ID law in April 2008, it did so after oral arguments during which the Justices studiously avoided the 800-pound gorilla which Appeals Court had been forced to acknowledge, that "most people who don't have photo ID are low on the economic ladder" and the law would disproportionately affect the poor, the elderly, and the disabled.

Another group whose ability to vote is betting attacked is college students.

According to research by the Fair Elections Legal Network (FELN) and Campus Progress, in the past six years, seven states have enacted laws that disenfranchise students or make it more difficult for them to vote. This year, 18 additional states are considering similar laws....

In proposing a law to "tighten up the definition of a New Hampshire resident" in January, New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien decried what he claimed were "kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience.”

There is a clear and obvious immediate partisan interest behind these moves, as most of the groups most affected by such changes - the poor, minorities, youth - tend to skew Democratic, as even the Appeals Court openly acknowledged in the Indiana case. However, there is a broader point as well: While most notice of O'Brien's remark has focused on the "voting liberal" part, he also referred to "no life experience." Put another way, he was insisting that college students are just too young, too "inexperienced," to be trusted with the vote. It's not just that they vote "liberal," it's that they're young - and so, well, they just shouldn't vote. That type of voter should be discouraged, even hindered, from voting. More generally, there are certain types of people for who voting rights just aren't, in the eyes of the elite, as important as they are for others.

Writing at the Huffington Post last fall, Glenn Smith got it right. He was talking in partisan terms of attempts to influence elections by deterring certain voters, but he expressed the broader point:

In their narrow views, the right to vote belongs only to the "right" people -- that is, people that look like them, live in gated communities like they do, go to the same churches they do and follow whatever arbitrary and authoritarian rules are demanded of them.

And those people, those types of people, who can't be trusted to serve the will of the elites simply should not be allowed to vote at all. So it doesn't really matter if they are effectively disenfranchised by ID laws, because, the majority of the Appeal Court in the Indiana case found, for them the "benefits" of voting "are elusive." They just aren't important enough for concern.

At this point I have to note something extremely important, so pay close attention. While the attack on our economic Commons and these parts of our political Commons have been more - although by no means exclusively - connected with the right wing and the Republican Party than otherwise, we must always bear in mind the eternal fact that elites are not a matter of left and right but a matter of up and down. And another part of our political Commons is under unprecedented attack from those too many naively viewed as saviors.

To be specific, the Obama administration is, in the words of Mark Benjamin, writing in Time magazine about 10 days ago,

rapidly establishing a record as the most aggressive prosecutor of alleged government leakers in U.S. history. ...

If the Obama Administration were to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, it would be the sixth time the Administration has pressed charges against defendants suspected of leaking classified information. The government has only ever filed similar charges three times over the last 40 years.

This White House, which came into office pledging a new spirit of openness, has instead demonstrated that it is as egregiously obsessive about secrecy as any administration in memory, one that brooks no public disagreements. The O gang has aggressively and repeatedly employed the bogus "state secrets privilege" to shield government and in some cases corporate wrongdoing from prosecution and even just scrutiny. Despite some improvements from its first year, it still has a worse record on FOIA requests than any previous administration except - possibly - that of George Bush The Younger. Even in areas where the Obama administration can claim to be an improvement on openness, it came as the result of outside pressure and often came reluctantly after months or more of resistance and foot-dragging.

To make this clear, this is not to say that overall on "transparency" the Obama White House is worse than previous administrations - although in at least one way, pursuing whistleblowers, it clearly is - but that it is no better, that the prevailing pattern of, the trend toward a gradual increase in, over-classification, closed-door meetings, and "message control" that really means information control, continues.

So even as on the one hand our ability to act as part of the political Commons is being assaulted, on the other our ability to know, to obtain the information we need to act in the Commons, is likewise being restricted.

There is so much more to say on this, so much more to explore, but this is already much too long so I will make myself stop with two final, brief bits. One is to reiterate in a sentence what I have said here: What we are, what we have been, what we at our best can be, can become, as a people is under attack even as we are being stripped of the means to fight back, our economic and political Commons are being enclosed. It is, I confess it seems to me that yes it is, a dark time.

But the other bit is that still, somehow, I don't want to end on quite so baleful a note. Instead, I want to emphasize that while, again, the breadth of the attack on The Commons is perhaps unprecedented, the idea of such an attack is certainly not new - which is more encouraging than it sounds if you just bear in mind that we have made it through before and, I say again, have in some ways improved over the years. So yes, it is still a dark time - but we have seen such times and worse before (the Civil War, the days of child factory labor, the Palmer Raids, the Depression, McCarthyism, just to name those that immediately spring to mind) and we can survive and if we, to put a twist on Dylan Thomas, "rage, rage, against the dying of the light," we may yet find dawn rather than close of day. Don't give up and don't you dare let me make you give up. My woeful words are just not that important.

Updated just to say that if you read the earlier version, you might want to start from the beginning anyway because some things have been added, some paragraphs moved around, so forth and so on.

It ain't over 'til it's over, Part Three

Many both online and off have said that the scummy actions of the Wisconsin legislature and Governor Walkalloveryou have now proven, as if proof was necessary, that this was never about the budget. Rather, it was always about breaking the unions.

But that last part is not quite right or more exactly, it is too narrow: This is not, strictly speaking, about breaking unions. That is merely the current expression, the present focus, of what this is about. Which some have recognized, arguing that the real purpose of attacking unions is to undermine financial support for the Democratic party, an assertion given considerable credence by the fact that Wisconsin State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald told Faux News this:

If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin.

But even that is too narrow. That still fits in the realm of tactics. When you cut through the tangle of stratagems, when you hack away the underbrush of claims that often contradict other claims depending on what is useful at the moment, when you chop and saw and dig until you get to the root, you find that this whole fight is not, ultimately, about unions. And it's not, ultimately, about Democrats because in the longer run unions are more dangerous to the real purpose than Democrats are. Rather, this is about what such fights are always about: power. Power and control and domination and the power to continue controlling and dominating.

This is about the on-going, the never-ending, the sometimes-retreating but sometimes-advancing (as now), drive by the elites in society to protect, maintain, and whenever possible expand their control.

It's vital to realize that this is not new. It extends back to and even before the existence of our nation and anything that could be called US society. The names and faces have of course changed over time and even a more exacting (more properly, less vague) conception of what is embraced in the term "elite" has not been a constant; specifically, while wealth has always been a factor, the degree to which "wealthy" and "elite" have been synonymous has varied.

But the idea, the basic idea, the driving idea, the central conviction among some that they are powerful because they are supposed to be powerful, that they are privileged because they are supposed to be privileged, that they truly are better than the lesser sorts such as the rest of us and their dominion over us is theirs by right, even by natural law, has been a constant, a constant whose culture-distorting effect has subsumed the thoughts even of those members of that elite who have thought themselves free of it.

On July 29, 1877, Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous preacher of the latter 1800s and a reformer who endorsed women's suffrage and Darwin's theory of evolution and had been an abolitionist, responded to the just-crushed Great Railroad Strike by attacking the workers as acting contrary to religion, to God's dominion, because they did not know their place: "God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little" and "Man cannot live by bread alone but the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live." A week later he declared that if workers were being forced into poverty, they should just accept it - and then left for a two-month European vacation.

Almost exactly 100 years later, in July 1977, after a blackout in New York City sparked rioting and looting, then-President Jimmy Carter dismissed those who referred to poverty in explaining the outburst: “Life,” he said, “is unfair.” This sentiment, addressed to the poor blacks whose frustration drove them beyond the bounds of restraint, was not applied to the merchants and business people who clamored for - and got - federal relief for their losses.

Words spoken a century apart but expressing the same conviction: In the minds of our elite, it’s only the have-nots, never the haves, who are to quietly acquiesce in the “unfairness” of their condition.

Power and control. That's what it's about. That's what it always about. That's what we - all of us - are educated in, what we - all of us - are steeped in, what we - all of us - are socially trained to believe, its what we as a people are even as we vociferously deny it: a class-oriented society where wealth equals power and power justifies more wealth. That's why it can be said with a straight face that a teacher making 50k a year is an overpaid featherbedder ripping off taxpayers with a part-time job while a Wall Street greedhead making 10 times that much would be shockingly underpaid. That's why Bank of America is still open for business, why a whole gaggle of corporate CEOs are not in prison, why the foreclosure mills have not been shuttered by the sheer volume of public outrage, while some poor loser caught with an ounce of crack cocaine gets a minimum of five years in the slammer. (And that's the improvement: A year ago, less than one-fifth that amount got that minimum sentence.)

And until we learn to think of it in those terms, until we learn to think of it in terms of the desire, the drive, for power and control on the part of those who truly if bizarrely believe in their own inherent, God-given superiority, until we learn to think radically even as we design social strategies for applying political tactics, until we learn to keep our eyes on the prize even as it's a single step at a time, "left foot, peg foot, travelling on," we will forever be fighting as if wearing blinders in a boxing match, always thinking about the last punch to hit us rather than the one coming and with limited view of where the opponent is: We may win some rounds that way but we'll never put the other down for the count. And a knockout is exactly what we need if justice is to be ultimately won.

Footnote: Beecher's line about "the great" and "the little" comes from The Myth of American Religious Freedom by David Sehat.

It ain't over 'til it's over, Part Two

News coverage surrounding this whole issue has been poor. For an obvious example, reports on the bill's "passage" referred to the GOPpers "breaking the stalemate," to Walkalloveryou's "victory," to, in a particularly hyperventilating description, labor's "epic defeat." Overwhelmingly, mass media treated it as if the issue was now concluded and all that was worth discussing related to it was future election campaigns. It was hard to find a single reference to the potential court challenge or to the movement for recalls. (This is one of the few I found and that covered each issue in one sentence in the 10th graph). References to the possibility of a public worker strike or even a more general strike were rarer than reporters at press conferences calling the governor a liar.

An equally grave failing on the part of the media was allowing the reactionaries and their allies to frame the debate as "a battle over the pay and benefits of government workers compared with those in industry." Which, of course, is exactly the ground the rightwingers wanted to fight on. They knew stripping away rights was unpopular, so their only option was to demonize public workers by trying to sow jealousy among members of the general public, which they set about doing. Even worse, the media often assisted them to that end, quoting the claim that public workers make higher pay while generally ignoring all the necessary caveats about qualifications and responsibilities.

Even when they did address some of those qualifiers, they screwed it up because of their underlying assumptions. Case in point is a New York Times sidebar titled "Are State and Local Government Employees Paid Too Much?" The answer it gives, in short, is "it depends." Depends, that is, on just what comparisons you make, what the basis of comparison is.

Yeah, fine, whatever. "It depends." It reminds me of the old joke about narrowing all the world's wisdom into a single word, which turned out to be "maybe." What really got me about the whole exercise, though, what really brought the failings into focus, was the section titled "Public workers quit less often and are fired less often," which contained this paragraph:

But there are other issues. The rate at which state and local workers voluntarily quit is very low. Some economists argue that this confirms that they are overpaid and that private workers leave for better pay.

Note first that that is the entire discussion of that particular point. Then leave aside - no, really, just put it down and step away - the typical, squishy, "some say" argument. Note, rather, how the conclusion, the only conclusion offered, does not follow from the evidence. Public workers staying at their jobs longer "confirms" that they are overpaid? What the hell? That same fact could be taken as "confirming" that public employees are dedicated to their jobs and feel what they do is important. It could also be taken as explaining at least some of the supposedly better pay and benefits public employees get: By staying in their jobs longer, they accrue more seniority and seniority tends to result in improved pay and bennies.

But here's the kicker: It "confirms" that public workers are "overpaid?" Why in the goddam flaming hell doesn't it instead prove that private industry workers are underpaid? I refer back to the quote from David Sirota I cited about two weeks ago. He said, comparing the demonization of public employees to the failed attempt to limit CEO pay as part of the bailout of the bankers, that in the corporatist-government view,

$500,000 isn't nearly enough taxpayer cash to retain government-funded bankers, but $48,000 ... is too much to pay educators.

Why, why why? Why is it that whenever the media talks about the rich, the powerful, the privileged, why is it that whenever the prerogatives of the plutocrats come up for discussion, attention revolves around "are they getting enough" but when it comes to the middle class, especially when it comes to unionized workers, and especially especially when it comes to the poor, it's always about "are they getting too much?" Why? Why is the question here "Are state employees getting paid too much?" rather than "Are private industry employees getting paid too little?" Why at a time when for those private industry workers pensions are disappearing, real pay is stagnating, benefits are declining, all as the rich are getting richer, why isn't "private industry workers are underpaid" the real story here?

Back during the Reagan years, when the reactionary calls for cutting taxes on the rich and cutting services for the poor and middle class were gaining traction, John Kenneth Galbraith sliced the logical pretenses of their program to shreds in one line: "Their argument," he said as nearly as I can quote from memory, "is that the poor don't work because they have too much and the rich don't work because they have too little."

It's still true. It's still true. That is exactly the argument being bandied about now, that is exactly what underlies the claims and charges, and it is exactly what underlies the New York Times' arguments about public employees. It is the filthy underbelly of the entire enterprise: The assumption, the unspoken conviction in the media, that whenever there is a difference between one part of the middle class and another part, even when those differences are utterly dwarfed by the difference between any of them and their economic overlords, just 400 of who have more wealth than not just half but 60% of US households combined, whenever such differences among the middle class are addressed, it is never because one of those middle-class parties has too little, it's always because the other has "too much." Is "overpaid." Is a "featherbedder." The people who try to teach your brats something worth knowing, the people who run into the burning buildings everyone else is running to get out of because some asshole was smoking in bed, the people who clean up the shit you throw out, all lazy bums who don't deserve whatever it is that they are getting.

Or so you are supposed to think. And to a very important degree, so the elite does think.

Which brings me to that final point and part three of this.

Footnote: The Galbraith quote always brings to mind another favorite quote whose author I do not recall: "The problem with welfare is not that welfare pays too much, it's that working pays too little."

It ain't over 'til it's over, Part One

So Governor Walkalloveryou has gotten what he wanted - for the moment, anyway, it's important to note. In a surprise and quite possibly illegal maneuver, the Wisconsin GOPpers rammed through a bill stripping virtually all collective bargaining rights from state employee unions, along with hampering their ability to collect dues and subjecting them to yearly re-certification elections. There are a whole bunch of different things I want to say in response. As usual, the one that I think is the most important will come last.

The first thing to say is that the illegality I mentioned is one part of why I say "for the moment." What the GOPpers did was to take the "budget" bill, strip out everything except the parts aimed at crippling unions and cutting benefits, and pass it at a conference committee meeting called on two hours notice - calling the roll even as state Assemblyman Peter Braca was still speaking. The problem for the GOPers is that there simply is no question but that the meeting violated the state's open meetings law, which requires at least 24 hours notice. This, bluntly, is open and shut: The meeting broke the law. There is no rational argument to the contrary. Which should mean that any action taken there was likewise illegal and thus invalid. Which should in turn mean that any court willing to apply what is clearly the law should be ready to issue an at least preliminary injunction barring the invalid "kill the unions" law from going into effect. Such a legal challenge appears to be a certainty and it's hard to see what a legal justification for rejecting it would be.

The problem, of course, is that it remains to be seen if the courts are as prepared to ignore the law as the GOPpers were.

Another thing I thought worthy of comment was Walkalloveryou saying he applauded what the legislature did. It's odd - not surprising in this case but still odd - to see a governor applauding a blatant violation of law, but never mind. Rather, I wanted to describe a fantasy I had of someone during his presser asking this question: "Governor, I need you to help me understand something. This bill stripping away bargaining rights either is budget-related, in which case the Senate could not have passed it because it didn't have a quorum, or it's not budget-related, in which case you were lying for weeks when you insisted it was. There is no third option here. So which is it? Did the Senate act illegally or a you a liar?" Of course, a fantasy because no one in the press corps was going to ask that, being either brainwashed or gutless. Or brainwashed into being gutless.

Which in turn serves to point up yet again again again how poorly served we are by our news media, especially our national news media. That will be part two of this.

Footnote: There are two other questions I'd like to see Walkalloveryou asked but which he won't be. One is, "If these givebacks and rights-strippings are so necessary because of a budget crisis, why did you exempt police and firefighter unions, which have among the highest pay and benefits? What is the connection between that exemption and the fact that those unions were the ones that endorsed you in the election?"

The other is, "Um, Governor, the argument is that this bill could be passed by the state Senate because all the budget-related items had been stripped out. If that's true, why are you still calling it 'the budget repair bill' as you just did in your statement?"

Yeah, yeah, I know

Okay, already. So the weekend turned into the week. BFD. Nobody reads this anyway. I just keep it up to let out my frustrations until I'm in a position to do something more constructive.

Let's just say it's been a hard week and leave it at that, okay?

Weekend

More or less. (I always liked the calendars I saw in the UK where rather than the week being displayed from Sunday to Saturday, as is common in the US, it was from Monday to Sunday, thus making Saturday and Sunday literally the weekend.)

For these past two days I have been taking a mental vacation, one in which the whole goddam fucking world can go fuck itself in its own fucking ass and just leave me the fuck alone. I have read no news, read no blogs, paid no attention. I got all the news I needed on the weather report. And I damn well will not and do not feel the least bit guilty about it.

Back late tonight or maybe tomorrow.

Reuters is no DFH

I've mentioned before that one of the ways Western mass media news outlets prove that they are not DFH's is by demonizing Hugo Chavez, the eternal "becoming-an-authoritarian" president of Venezuela even though he somehow never actually gets there. A dispatch for March 3 proves that Reuters knows how to play the game.

Here, for example, is the very first sentence:

Venezuela pushed a vague peace plan for Libya on Thursday, saying President Hugo Chavez's friend Muammar Gaddafi was in favor of foreign mediation.

Okay. First, in such news coverage, pro-US governments always present the "ouline" of a plan or the "principles" of a plan. Chavez, however, presents a "vague" plan, one, we are told further down, has "few concrete details." Now, that may well be true, but when such "vague" - excuse me, "outlined" - proposals come from pro-US governments, the attitude is "let's see what develops" rather than the dismissive "analysts are skeptical."

Beyond that and more importantly, again in the very first sentence we get "Chavez's friend Muammar Gaddafi," the adjective being a wholly irrelevant reference but a damning one for most Americans. Just out of curiousity, can anyone point me to a Reuters article (or an AP article, a CNN report, whatever) which opened with a reference to George Bush's "friends and former business associates," the royal family of Saudi Arabia? Or merely even to Bush's (and Obama's) "friend" Tony Blair as if that was a central issue?

There are several more irrelevant-except-to-be-damning references, such as referring to Chavez's "mentor, Fidel Castro of Cuba" and the assertion that Chavez "has won plaudits in the Arab world for his condemnation of Israel." It also referred to "fellow left-wingers" and described the ALBA bloc of Latin American nations as "left-wing." How many times have you seen pro-US governments, no matter their policies or practices, anywhere in the world called "right-wing" in major media? How many times have you seen any American government official so described?

All of this was in the space of a little over 500 words.

Chavez is no angel and I have previously questioned whether he is able to separate himself from the causes he promotes, that is, if he can envision those causes continuing to be advanced if Hugo Chavez is no longer on the scene. Both he and his supporters must be able to do that in both philosophical and practical ways; it is the failure to do so, it is the identification of the benefit of a particular individual with the benefit of cause as a whole, that has lead, as I wrote a good number of years ago, to "so many sets of high hopes being shot down by so many 'New Orders.'" Again as I have said before, Venezuela is not at that point by any means but the possibility is not over the horizon.

Hugo Chavez is not beyond criticism - but his continued, almost routine now, demonization is more likely than anything else to lead to that increasing identification of him with, even as, the cause and all the dangers that entails. I'm not a conspiracist, really I'm not, but that premise, that conviction that constant demonization most often leads to repression, not liberty, that idea is so obvious and so well-documented over the course of history that I can't help but wonder if at least some of the demonizers intend precisely that result, the better to discredit any moves toward socialist answers to the woes created by capitalism.

Footnote: Another quote was

"Chavez's credibility does not fly very high," said Olivier Jakob of think-tank Petromatrix.

I was going to ask when was the last time you heard the credibility of any US official being dismissed without rebuttal or counter-claim in mainstream media - but then I realized you can hear it frequently, provided it's some right-winger dismssing someone anywhere to their left. Which does tend to confirm the overall thesis.

Oh, and by the way, Jakob added that "the only value of such a proposal is if it offers some honorable way out for the Gaddafi clan." That is, if it provided a way for Qaddafi to back out without looking like he's backing down, and for that reason more likely to be accepted. Other than a potential feather in Chavez's cap, that would be a bad thing precisely how?

Another Footnote: Reuters had a sidebar article entitled "Analyst View: How serious is the Chavez Libya peace plan?" It turns out that all of them were analysts for the energy industry. Among that truncated grouping was Olivier Jakob, whose connection to industry was not mentioned in the main article.