Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

RIP, victims of terrorism

Unfortunate positioning of Bush's book in a DC book store
From Progressive Review:

The number one threat to the United States is said to be international terrorism. So you’d think it would easy to find out exactly how big a threat. Unfortunately, Google will pretty much fail you on this, perhaps because, well, the numbers just aren’t all that exciting.

For example, the State Department, well buried in its annual report, was able to find just nine Americans worldwide who died in 2009 as a result of terrorism.

And Firedog Lake came up with this domestic calculation: “If you count the Ft. Hoot shooting as a terrorist attack, 16 people have died in the United States as result of terrorism in 2009. The other three deaths include the Little Rock military recruiting office shooting, the Holocaust Museum shooting, and Dr. George Tiller’s assassination, the last two coming at the hands of right-wing extremists.”*

Indeed, this is merely the power of propaganda, which (side note) doesn’t exist in this country. The government, or “military-industrial complex”, as Eisenhower sheepishly called it (and, as Chris Hedges reminds us, only when Ike was safely on his way out of office), has great plans for conquest of the Middle East and Central Asia. Fear is merely a mobilizing tool to keep us solidly behind their objectives.

TSA Monthly's "Miss November"
I have long known (since 1989, to be precise) that the United States is not threatened by any other country or group in any significant way. The ragtag group that somehow pulled off 9/11 was quickly dispatched in late 2001 (and bin Laden likely killed at that time). The only “threat” posed is to the unstated objectives of the MIC, conquest. Local populations are our true enemies. So it is no surprise that when we go on a terrorist rampage, the death tally is staggering.

So as we go on about our business of killing native Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Colombians, (and soon Iranians, if they would just give us pretext!)**, it is nice to know that even though they do not threaten us in any way, that domestic propaganda is so effective that merely saying as much in public will bring swift retribution. Neither wing of “The Party” speaks out at the absurdity of our fears or the underlying reality of our safety.

So on this Thanksgiving, 2010, let us remember the 19 who died in 2009 (including the two killed by right wingers), and of course forget the hundreds of thousands that we have dispatched abroad. May they all rest in peace as we here in the home of the brave live in cowardly fear and inexpressible ignorance.
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* I’m having a hard time recalling, but I think to date the number in 2010 is zero.
** And, as the Obama Administration desires, American citizens
(h/t: LB)

Political theater

Playing the part of Joe Lieberman in tonight's performance is ...
This gem from “Mr.Benson” at 4&20:

It’s true, I admit. Those damn Republicans, that idiot Ronald Reagan. If it had been up to the liberals, we’d have surrendered to the Soviet Union long ago and only one side would have warheads.

The subject at hand is the new START treaty, and the reduced number of warheads that the U.S. and Russia would be allowed to deploy. It’s in the process of being shot down. Senator John Kyl of Arizona appears to the point man for this affair.

There are 57 Democratic senators, and two independents who caucus with them in the lame duck session. To ratify a treaty would take all of them plus eight Republicans. John Kyl, prior to this time, has been reasonable on the subject, wanting only to make sure that we continue to spend untold billions on our warhead stock to keep it spit-polished. (Our nuclear stock is offensive in purpose, and the U.S. would never willingly give up an advantage.)

Dr.Sarah Palin from the 2010 movie "Foreign Policy Advisor", as played by Denise Richards
The assumption behind all writing I have seen on this subject is that all 59 in the Democratic caucus would support the treaty. But how do we know that? Since Obama took office in 2008, Democrats have allowed the Republicans to filibuster anything they want, using that as a convenient excuse for the Democrats’ amazing legislative failures.

Far more likely is mere politics – there are too many conservative Democrats to get anything worthwhile passed, and so they work with the Republican caucus in the back room. Republicans take heat for filibusters, and the Democratic base focuses on the Mean-Old-Other-Party, forgetting that they have the power with 59 and an ounce of cleverness to do anything they want.

Behind all of this is an “Obama” proposal to spend an additional $84.1 billion on the nuclear complex in the next ten years, out-Bushing the Bushies by 20%. [Note: He has since offered to pad this with an additional $4.1 billion.] There will easily be enough votes for that. So the result of all this maneuvering is no treaty and increased spending on nukes under Obama, with John Kyl the point-man for the theater of distraction. Clever, eh?

Dr. Christmas Jones in the 1999 movie "The World is Not Enough," as played by Denise Richards
Other interesting features of this debate: the nuclear threat from Iran, which is no threat at all, is prominently mentioned as a reason for continued build-up of the U.S. arsenal. That’s ludicrous, but it gets worse. This is from a Washington Post article:

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has told newly elected Republican lawmakers not to “listen to desperate politically motivated arguments about the need for hasty consideration” of the treaty.

Sarah Palin, a very stupid woman who doesn’t read and cannot think properly, is now advising lawmakers on foreign treaties. There are no words available in the language to describe this. Perhaps someone fluent in French or Spanish or Swahili can give me the appropriate phrase.

Profanity ensues, read at your own risk

Richard Mellon Scaife is one of the financiers of the right wing, one of the men behind organizations with impressive sounding names like Committee on the Present Danger and The Center for Strategic and International Studies. He, along with the Koch family and Joseph Coors, are responsible for much of the takeover of the intellectual culture and the media by right wing hacks. It all happened after the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when democratic movements flowered and popular power got out of hand. Pandora had to be put back in the box.

(People like William Kristol and his father Irving get [got] paid very large sums of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, by the likes of Scaife and Coors, to be right wing hacks. They are not prominent by accident. They are bought.)

(The Democratic manifestation of the right wing takeover is the Democratic Leadership Council, whose roots actually go back as far as 1972.)

I was just reading a piece by Alex Cockburn this AM from the 1990’s, the early Clinton years, about how the media was put back in its box after its supposed Watergate triumph. Scaife was one of the financiers. He was asked about his support for all those right wing outfits by Review’s Karen Rothmyer, and replied (turn away, children)

You fucking communist cunt, get out of here.

Of course, we’d have to update that if he were asked the same question today. He’d say “You fucking terrorist cunt,” using the agitprop-appropriate fear-engendering buzzwords of the current time. We are no longer scared of communists. We are scared of terrorists now.

Richard Mellon Scaife: July 3, 1932 …. death by natural causes – I wish no violence on him, but think the planet will be a much better place when this miserable cocksucker leaves. Unless, or course, he’s spawned.

A hack exposed

The above video is a panel discussion on the use of fear of terrorism in this country to quash civil liberties. It is over an hour long, and I would not put it up except for the exchange that takes place at 53:00 between Glenn Greenwald and a dumb-ass reporter from NPR, Dina Temple-Raston. She snaps at Greenwald, says she has seen things he hasn’t (but oddly doesn’t report on). She tells him that he “doesn’t do national security for a living.”

Greenwald disassembles her, and also says that actually, national security is what he does report on for a living. But the upshot is this: Temple-Raston is just another “journalist” being managed by the National Security State, fed information and told to report it as fact. Someone slips her a note, and she feels the part of the insider, and winks and carries on with her stenography, and calls it journalism, and calls herself a “national security reporter.”

The two-headed beast

I have been following politics for many years, and enthusiasm has ebbed and flowed. After 2008 I felt like Charlie Brown. I allowed myself to buy into the whole Ad Age Marketer of the Year. That is my fault, and not that of Obama and the Democrats. I should have known better.

Bertrand Russell talked about the advantages of democracy* – from his high perch. He said that it is a given that ordinary people are unqualified to make judgments on large matters. The only real advantage of such a system is that we change rulers on a regular basis. Further, the basis for choosing a new ruler is not that he or she has a royal lineage or a large fortune. Now and then ordinary people with exceptional gifts come to power.

Politicians are second-rate people. It can be no other way. They are drawn to power. The best leaders are those who do not want power, who by definition don’t seek office. Great leaders in history, such as the Roman General Cincinnatus or our own George Washington (and apparently, if he is honest, Nelson Mandela of South Africa) are people who only took power involuntarily, and then as quickly gave it up.

It appears to me that there are several important differences between what we call our “right” and “left” (we have no such thing, but let’s pretend). At the ground level on the right, there is base stupidity. Listen to their icons, their Sarah’s, Michelle’s, Rand’s and Santorum’s – these are not ordinary people. They are fanatics, and they are very stupid.

On the “left” we have timidity – when confronted with stupidity and fanaticism, they want to be fair. This is their major defect – they think that they must share the stage with fanatics and treat them as serious people, engaging them, negotiating and compromising with them.

That’s baseline politics, and will not change. The fanatics will take control, make a huge mess of things, and then we’ll let the timid ones back in and we’ll settle down again. (Given that they are all second-rate, money will always have disproportionate influence on them. Our best hope is to turn them out on a regular basis, hoping that we accidentally benefit during the time that they are being compromised. Our best senator, for example, would be one who served one six-year term and who was then permanently pastured on a government pension.)

But there is something more going on now in this country, in my view. We are in danger of loss of our republican form of government than ever before. There’s no ebb and flow. We had eight years on fanaticism, and when we settled down again in 2008, we got the same fanatics in different costumes. We did not change leaders. They punked us.

Maybe this too shall pass – I don’t know the future. But here is the danger: In a democracy we can vote fanatics out. In a totalitarian state we cannot. By their very nature, right wing fanatics want to keep and hold power, not for a few years, but for generations. Karl Rove called it the “permanent Republican majority.” I’m wondering now if his vision included compliant Democrats as a wing of the Republican Party.

We changed parties in 2008, but not leaders or philosophy. I don’t see a way of bringing about meaningful change in the future due to the fact that we are limited to two parties, and now more than ever before, both are the same people and philosophy.
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*I use the terms “democratic” and “republican” government interchangeably. In the modern sense, there is little distinction or difference.

We are the problem

As a Cincinnati Reds fan, I am familiar with defeat. It isn’t just defeat, but rather continuing and unrelenting humiliation with few prospects of future success … that wears a person down. Many times I turned have away from baseball, questioned why I am even a “fan,” and tried to ignore the game and the players. After reading Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, I even imagined I could switch loyalty to the Oakland A’s, and followed them for a day or two. It’s like changing hair tint. Can’t be done. The real color always returns.

Defeat is part of learning. The word should be reserved for special occasions, and otherwise not used. The Democrats were taught a lesson on Tuesday. The question is, are they teachable?

Apparently, not at the leadership level. Obama is now assuming a conciliatory posture towards the Republicans … you know, the one he started out with. He’s going to yield to them on critical issues. You know, like he was doing before.

There’s much to be learned from his behavior, as there is some predictability there if one changes assumptions about his beliefs. Could it be … he’s a double agent, one who sleeps with the enemy? Is such a thing even possible?

Twenty-two House seats that the Democrats lost were “Blue Dog” seats. From an ideological standpoint, those seats were never Democratic anyway. They have merely changed their tint. So 22/60, or slightly more than one-third of this is not even a loss.

Conservadems generated so little enthusiasm that they were either undone (or almost undone) by challengers that should have had no credibility at all. Michael Bennet and Harry Reid, were they men of conviction rather than just second-rate politicians, might well have sailed into office. Of course I cannot know that, but do rely on the axiom that when people have to choose between a Republican and a Democrat who sounds like one, they’ll usually go with the real thing. (The only real pain I felt on Tuesday night was the loss of Russ Feingold.)

Bad Democrat!
But it is not as simple as pandering. Bennet and Reid do not pander, in my view. They are not weak and conciliatory. They simply lack Democratic convictions, which is why they attract financial backing from Republican-centric wealth, and have electoral success. And that is the underlying problem of Democrats – the “viable” candidates rely on the same funding source as Republicans. Therefore, they are essentially the same people in different uniforms.

A dog cannot bite his master and hope to stay well-fed.

Americans seem to want to reduce politics to voting. That’s where all our energy goes – political campaigns. They are the beginning and the end of our involvement. “Politically active” people are those who work for various candidates at election time. Others – the environmentalists, peace activists, champions of the underclasses – have all been marginalized since the 1960’s. We’ve been re-purposed in our thinking.


(The photo above is a demonstration in France. “Lutte Ouvrière” means “Workers’ Struggle” – democracy is alive in France. All politicians of all parties must take heed of organized power.)

But underlying reality has not changed. Politicians are by and large second-rate people attracted to power, maybe even suffering a touch of narcissism. They can as easily mislead as lead, and will always adapt their behavior to the wishes of those who can affect their careers. They will always bend to money.

I have been hard on Democrats since the first day we started this blog, and that will not stop. I have repeatedly said that “Democrats are the problem.” That needs to be refined a bit – it is not so much Democrats, but rather the idea that Democrats are the solution that is the problem. They cannot solve anything so long as they need lots of money to succeed.

We are the solution, as always, and for so long as we see Democrats as the answer, then we are the problem.
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P.S. Here in Colorado, even though we are stuck with six years of Senator Bennet and four of Governor Hickenlooper, we also overwhelmingly rejected initiatives to limit the ability of government to levy tax and collect revenue, borrow money, and one to define an embryo a legal person. These campaigns, which drew no corporate support in opposition, were defeated by 60%+ margins. There is some clarity of purpose there even if candidate-driven politics is hopelessly muddled.

When opportunity looks like defeat

Prediction is a fool’s game, as we don’t know the real intentions of those who won the elections. But it is safe to say that they money behind them has more sway than the shallow appeals to popular issues they indulge in while campaigning. So when it comes to fighting for issues of importance, we are in for more of the same – strong Republicans and weak Democrats. It’s toxic.

When Democrats took control of the House and Senate in 2006, George Bush simply vetoed anything he did not like. He was strong. Barack Obama will not do that. (He is indeed weak, but that’s not his real issue.) When Democrats had a large majority from 2008 forward, Republicans merely filibustered everything in sight, and Democrats allowed it to happen. Going forward, Democrats will not use the filibuster.

The natural impression to draw from this is that one party is strong but an obstacle to progress, while the other is weak and unable to get its act together. But if each party has a role to fill in service of wealth, then it is the Democrats who are strongest, as they thwart popular will at every juncture where there is a chance for real progress. This is what they did to us, 2008 forward. They took our great opportunity, and rubbed our face in it. Democrats had as massive a victory as American electoral politics allows, and nothing changed.

The conclusions drawn from that are that we have to redouble our efforts now to elect good Democrats. But that is wrong, in my view. Think of the two parties as parts of a large sausage grinder – no matter the input, the output is the same. The Democratic Party can only serve us if they are swept out of office and replaced en masse by populists and progressives. Incremental additions to the progressive minority are mere distraction. And such a massive change in leadership cannot happen in a climate where the public is uneducated and distracted, financing is done in secret, money buys advertising, and advertising buys elections.

In our money-centric two-party system, elections and voting are the least functional outlets for reform.

The only answer, as always, is on-the-ground organizing, outside the two parties and around issues. Health care was an organizing opportunity in 2008, but instead we ran it through the Democrats, and it became sausage.

But there is no other answer. It has to happen outside the parties. Daunting as that is, it is the only reason FDR is seen as a reformer, while Nixon and Ford are perceived as contradictions – conservatives who signed into law progressive legislation. FDR was backed by massive popular movements, and Nixon and Ford were confronted with them. Power came from below.

Organizing is power. Electoral politics is a distraction.

There is no other answer, friends. In the last two years Democrats could easily have handed us many victories, but allowed Republicans to block them. This is because too many Democrats are merely closet Republicans, including Max Baucus, Harry Reid, Michael Bennet … and Barack Obama. And you cannot tell who is who at election time, as they lie. Elections are a crap shoot and we’re in a casino. The house usually wins.

Enough of electoral politics! It’s fun, but useless.

Election day predictions

Many people who were predicted to win their elections will indeed win. Some will lose. We don’t really know about that. But pundits will have an explanation for everything – they will explain the “public mind” as if the majority of that mind thought uniformly and was “sending a message.”

Consequently, “messages” that are sent by the electorate will tend to tell those who win to do what they intended to do no matter what the message was, even if there was a message.

Republicans will make either huge, large, significant, modest, or no gains.

The ads will stop, people will go on about their business, and the elected officials will go on about theirs. Never will the essential message penetrate the public mind: People who appear to be in opposition to one another during campaigns often do not have significant differences with one another.

A lot of this is just theater. These people who run for office really want to win, and try to say the right thing to catch voters’ attention, but after getting elected will either voluntarily cooperate with or buckle under to the influence of money and power. Few can resist.

I hope voting validates you. But of all our duties as citizens, it is probably the least important.

Saner times – the sixties

I watched this video with a sense of wonder at the recovered memories it contains. It is not that Martin Luther King does not know what is in store for him, while we do. It is not that he is speaking out against the Vietnam War, and not much about civil rights. Most people who know history but are not historians know that King was a vocal opponent of that war.

These three men – King, Mike Douglas and singer Tony Martin, are talking about some of the most heated and controversial issues of their day. There were riots in the streets, people at each others’ throats. The Pentagon and FBI were following King and keeping a file on anyone who participated in any demonstration. Emotions were at a high pitch, people were on edge.

And yet, listen to the tone of the conversation. King is flanked by two men to deeply disagree with him and his activities, and who are especially concerned about his opposition to the war. Yet they are respectful, allowing him to think and respond in complete statements. Their questions are thoughtful and reflective, even Martin’s, though he is merely an entertainer. King has time to think, to form a sentence, before he responds.

Take King and transport him to 2010, change the interviewers from Douglas and Martin to say, Bill O’Reilly or Chris Mathews, and to an entertainer like Stephen Colbert (the caricature, and not the real man, who is reflective). No longer are they respectful, no longer can they think before they speak. They would snap at one another, as the game over the years has changed from exchange of views to rat-a-tat brush sniping and talk-over. (Also, there would be a couple of commercial cuts, after which whatever was said before the rat-a-tat ads would be forgotten. That’s an oddity about modern television interviews – views are presented in small and quickly forgotten thought capsules.)

How did this happen? The right wing did this to us, starting with Rush Limbaugh in 1987. There is plenty of blame to go around, but not among various factions – all blame is on the right. Limbaugh hijacked the dialogue, aided by the Reagan boys who opened the radio airwaves to monopolization by one faction by shutting down the fairness doctrine.

No matter where we travel in this land, if we turn on our radios we are harangued by local and national righties. On the TV, there is the ubiquitous Fox, with an MSNBC-whispered response. (“Mainstream” media is, as always, subservient to power, but softer in tone.) Worse yet, even those who can expose themselves to other views do not. We are polarized.

This is not about content. It is tone. There is a name for what Rush and Sean and Bill and all the others are doing – “agitation propaganda”, or agitprop. It is not accidental, and not without purpose. It has made us what we are – mindless screamers. These people, knowingly or not, act with purpose to inflame our emotions and to shut out reasonable voices. They eliminate reflection and self-reflection.

Godwin forgive me, there is historical precedent for this, though history does not repeat. But there is methodological precedent.

Chris Mathews, you are not worthy to kiss Tony Martin’s shoes.