Two items occupy the vast expanse of my empty head this morning. I am wading through Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, The Black Swan, and setting aside his massive ego, he is enjoyable and insightful. I particularly like the following, in which he comments on the ability to have regular income without sucking up to people. His company, First Boston, went belly-up, but he was left with what he called the equivalent of a fellowship.

This is sometimes called “f*** you money,” which, in spite of its coarseness, means that it allows you to act like a Victorian gentleman, free from slavery. It’s a psychological buffer: the capital is not so large as to make you spoiled-rich, but large enough to give you the freedom to choose a new occupation without excessive consideration of the financial rewards. It shields you from prostituting your mind and frees you from outside authority – any outside authority. … While not substantial by some standards, literally cured me of all financial ambition – it made me ashamed whenever I diverted time away from study for the pursuit of material wealth. Note that the designation f*** you corresponds to the exhilarating ability to that compact phrase before hanging up the phone.

I offer a corollary to his words: The number of times anonymous people say f*** you on the blogs corresponds exactly one-to-one with the inability to use those words in real life without serious consequences.

Here’s another tidbit: The Denver Post today reports on the most recent poll in our senatorial race: Ken Buck (R) 48%, Michael Bennet (D), 43%, Other, 8%, and undecided (1%). Bennet is toast, which is OK, as any man who has shat upon his base as much as Bennet has shat upon his deserves defeat. Send him back to investment banking, from whence he came!

The Post, in its entire long article citing “political observers” (?), ordinary street people and other polls – never once tells us who these “Others” are, even though they are determining the outcome of the election!

it’s as if, in 1992, the presidential election ended as follows: Clinton (43%), Bush (38%), Other (19%). Ross Perot gave us minority president Bill Clinton, and unnamed and anonymous “others” in Colorado will give us minority Senator Ken Buck.

My vote? “Other.” It is my vote, and I choose to spend it wisely.

It is interesting to watch American media reaction to events for which no cheering is allowed. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez won an impressive victory in the legislative elections, capturing 98 of 167 seats. American media outlets are looking for bad, and of course finding it. Here the Miami Herald, which must have known the news would not be good, warned us in advance that Chavez was “stacking the deck.”

Here’s why they say that the news is bad for Chavez: He did not achieve his two-thirds majority. Further, the vote was closer than the outcome – that is, many of the seats that his party one were by scant margins. Also, some outlying regions are disproportionately represented in the legislature, individuals there having in effect more bang for their vote that those from more populated regions.

Which is eerily similar to American elections with our first-past-the-post winners and senators from small population states who have disproportionate power.

Unlike the U.S. president, Hugo Chavez remains a popular fixture in his country’s politics.

This is all very difficult for our state planners, as the desire within the bowels of DC is to attack Venezuela. The usual propaganda is at work – Chavez is a dictator holding office by force, and a clown on the world stage. All false – Chavez is widely respected, and holds office by large mandate.

Nonetheless, there is a buildup of troops now in Colombia, where the U.S. is backing a thuggish government and where those who oppose those thugs are called “terrorists.” The threatened conflict will ostensibly be between Colombia and Venezuela, but much like the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980’s, will be suspiciously convenient for the U.S.

All that is needed is some Tonkin-like event to serve as a pretext to trigger the war.

What will follow? Hard to know. Augusto Pinochet is dead and buried, as is the Shah and Suharto. There’s never a shortage of murderous thugs, and all I am missing is the name of the next president of Venezuela. And remember please to speak American English: Venezuela, a free country, will not really be free until we destroy its freedom to elect its own government and install a thug to run it for us.

There’s a debate going on here, and here, and other places no doubt, about the worth of the Obama Administration. He hasn’t accomplished much of anything – mild credit card reform, bad health care and financial reform, and of course, the continuation of

foreign policy, running the wars, state secrets, Guantanamo, DADT, civil liberty abuses, spying, killing, renditions, etc., things that really piss off progressives, no matter who’s in power.

That’s from a comment at LITW.

What instantly comes to mind is a footnote in Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States in which he said that Harry Truman’s personal notes seemed to indicate that he thought Hiroshima was a military base. That would indicate that Truman did not decide to drop the bombs. Others did, and he was the conduit for the decision. Somebody buffaloed him.

Why is that that ordinary men of limited ability and vision, like the Bush’s and Ronald Reagan, seem to be able to “accomplish” so much, while erudite men of letters, like Clinton and Obama just don’t seem to measure up, in fact, seem to be working for the other camp? The men of lesser ability make massive changes, and the men of great ability just can’t seem to get a grip on things.

I have long thought that the presidency is merely a conduit for power, and that the occupant of the office merely imparts a flavor to the culture of DC. Different people are brought into office and the power structure does shift from one wealthy sector to another, but there is very little change in policy. And the wealthy sector still rules.

The problem I have is that I cannot describe the mechanism. It is too big. It is “the oligarchy”, the thousands of wealthy people who share common interests and frame of mind. But that sounds like a conspiracy, and it is not, anymore than the fact that Britain is run by an aristocracy that only reluctantly shares some power via parliamentary government is a “conspiracy.” It is just how power plays itself out.

Obama happens to be a weak man, but if he were a strong man of principle who intended to use the power of the office to act on those principles, he would not be president. The oligarchy would not allow it. Candidates for office are vetted over a long period, and those who might not be manageable and predictable are, by various means (usually by media indifference), rejected for high office.

And again, I am left to describe how “the oligarchs” stop candidates from getting votes. They do. Most people don’t think their own thoughts, and follow the leaders. The idea of voting for a Dennis Kucinich, say, is considered laughable. Why? He’s certainly smarter than John McCain, and certainly braver than Obama. But a pall is cast on undesirable candidates, and they rarely rise to the stature of “viable” in the eyes of the electorate.

What is the mechanism? I have seen it at work. John Edwards, even though running even in the polls, was never mentioned as a “front runner.” Later, his sexual peccadilloes were exposed. Howard Dean pulled off an upset in Iowa, and the “I have a scream” hit the airwaves, eliminating Howard Dean from consideration.

I see that it works, I see how it plays out. But I do not know anything about how the upper crust, the corporate CEO’s and wealthy families exert their influence to make these things play out as they do.

Eisenhower warned us about the “military-industrial complex”, a nice turn of phrase, and another word for “oligarchy.” But it was too big, even in 1960, for him to describe in a way that would allow us to grasp its depth and breadth and power.

I only know this: If your vision of the office of president is of a man in charge, then your vision is wrong. If you think that George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq, cut taxes, set up a prison in Cuba and torture people, you’re wrong. If you think that LBJ decided to invade Vietnam and kill three million of them, you’re wrong. If you think that public opinion caused the government to pull out of Vietnam, think again. If you think that Obama decided to push in Afghanistan, you’re wrong. If you think that Clinton decided to bomb Serbia, you’re wrong.

The office has power, to be sure, but the power is not exerted by the man in office. The power is exerted through the man in office. Real power lies elsewhere.

I am not big on predictions, but I am going to make a couple anyway, because they illustrate larger points.

1) There will not be another event like 9/11. We were safe before that event, and are just as safe after. The event itself was so off-the-wall that it succeeded.

It is not new security measures that prevents re-occurrence of such an event. The reason I feel comfortable saying this is that mass killing of innocent people is very easy to do. People in other countries are very angry at us, so that it should have happened by now. But no matter how mad people may get at our government and our bombs and bombers and sociopaths, it is very rare for them to vent their anger by killing innocent people. There’s no satisfaction in that. That’s our shtick.

Here’s how easy it would be to do some real mayhem: All our elaborate airport security cannot prevent someone from carrying a bomb into an airport and detonating in the security screening area. Bombers don’t need people gathered on an airplane – they only need for people to be gathered at a single place. All of our elaborate security has merely shifted the gathering point.

As I have long known, and George Carlin reminded us, the whole point of airport security is to keep us in a state of fear. If someone wants to set off a bomb and kill innocent people, it is impossible to prevent.

So no more 9/11’s. Please relax, folks. You’re safe.

2): The Bush tax cuts will be preserved. The only reason that they are set to expire is that they were passed via reconciliation, something that Democrats told us was so too obtuse and complicated to be useful. Bills that increase the deficit that are passed via reconciliation are automatically sunsetted after ten years. Otherwise, the tax cuts would have been permanent and hard-wired. It is now up to Obama to perform that task.

Obama is employing the same strategy with tax cuts as he did with the public option in health care. He is candidate Obama again, our progressive friend. It’s triangulation. At an appropriate time after the election we are going to learn that Obama will ‘accede’ to ‘pressure’ from the Republicans to preserve the cuts.

For right now, due to public opinion, the Democratic leadership had to forestall any action on the tax cuts until after the election. That part is done.

The worst part will be that Obama will apply a little Vaseline, offering up a little morsel here and there, as he did with health care, to convince Democrats that they got something meaningful in return for capitulation.

And they will eat it up. The politics I understand, but this constant capitulation I do not. Where is the validation in losing, losing, losing? How can Democrats live like that?

All of my adult life I have been a company man, only dimly aware of the extent to which institutional loyalties induce myopia. Asserting independence required first recognizing the extent to which I had been socialized to accept certain things as unimpeachable. Here then were the preliminary steps essential to making education accessible. Over a period of years, a considerable store of debris had piled up. Now, it all had to go. Belatedly, I learned that more often than not what passes for conventional wisdom is simply wrong. Adopting fashionable attitudes to demonstrate one’s trustworthiness – the world of politics is flush with such people hoping thereby to qualify for inclusion in some inner circle – is akin to engaging in prostitution in exchange for promissory notes. It is not only demeaning but downright foolhardy. (Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War)

As I read the above words with a sad realization: Bacevich, widely cited, has appeared in many respectable venues, in addition to less desirable places like The Nation and Democracy Now. Soon only the latter will be available to him. His words are a cry of angst that will move him to the margins of acceptable thought.

The book had a familiar feel and color to it, and so I dug out an old Noam Chomsky book that had the same texture, and sure enough, the same publisher: Metropolitan Books. How far you have fallen, Mr. Bacevich. How many turned you down?

You are toast, Mr. Bacevich. You might as well move to France.

Bacevich is writing above about his Eureka! decade – not a sudden realization, but a painful slow epiphany during which he realized that the Cold War was fought without a viable enemy. The Russians were never a threat to us. This led him to other realizations … that our permanent state of war has as much to do with military Keynesianism as any capitalist ideology; that our current aggressive wars are criminal endeavors, and that there was never a call or need for us to “lead” the rest of the world. But here is the worst: Military Keynesianism doesn’t work anymore, doesn’t give us the needed high. And cold turkey might kill us.

After World War II, and passage of the National Security Act of 1948, the Department of War became the Department of Defense. We’ve been at war ever since. The science/art of propaganda had been abandoned, but was resurrected to scare the population into supporting a permanent war machine. The Soviet Union (with China sideboard), was set up as an evil empire and used to justify every military endeavor we undertook. When they collapsed, we used the Microsoft Word “find/replace” command to insert the word “terrorism” everywhere that “Communism” appeared, and carried on as if nothing had changed.

Americans are scared now, so much so that there isn’t much left of our intellectual culture, which is why Bacevich will never be invited to another party in Georgetown. He doesn’t fit. His realization is counter-cultural. His books will not be reviewed in the Times and NY Review of Books. He will cease to exist.

Republicans recently came up with a new version of their 1994 “Contract with America,” called the “Pledge to America.” In it, they promise to cut spending and taxes and balance the budget … but not to touch military spending. They are sure the formula will work, as the idea that unnecessary military spending is necessary is sacrosanct. There is only one possible outcome: Cutbacks in social spending.

And that is the objective. The guns have won the propaganda battle, and butter is losing. All of our social programs, including Medicare and Social Security, are threatened now (as always), but with right wing Democrats in office, more so than ever before.

Here’s some wisdom from the margins: We are not at war with anyone, except by choice. We are safe. We are threatened by runaway population and environmental degradation. We can make our lives better by investing in health care, alternative energy, infrastructure, science and education.

Our war machine, our Pentagon, our military-industrial complex, threatens all of that.