American psychos

This has been percolating for a while now: A treatise on “free market” economics. If it takes more than 700 words, I have over-thought it.

Having read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, it is hard to dispute the things he says. It is all sensible. He tried to objectively describe the interactions of people in advanced pre-industrial societies where labor was specialized and people produced more goods than they needed. He extrapolated from this his theories on the origins of the wealth. His mind was pure, his reasoning rigorous. He lacked an agenda and was unprejudiced. His work is rightly considered a classic. Reagan and Bush should have read it. All conservatives should read it some time.

Agendas and prejudices are the modern failings of “free market” economics. Its advocates are the financiers and predators, its best proponents the intellectual class – those think-tankers and professors of economics at our finest universities, aka the “bought priesthood.””

The world that Smith described underlies all that we do. We engage in commerce, some more perceptive than others, some more diligent, most of us just plodding along selling our wares while unknowingly making more money for others than for ourselves. The priesthood says that we must allow this system to flourish on its own, that attempts to regulate it always end badly. Attempts to fine-tune the engine usually end up hindering its performance.

They’re wrong. It’s not an engine – it’s a fire. It can be our servant, it can rage out of control, and usually does if not strictly regulated. Witness … the present. Markets are wonderful and adaptable. If we regulate them, if we redirect their outcomes to better serve the whole of society, they continue to work well, and we have more equality of outcomes, happier people, and fewer predatrors and priests telling us to toughen up as they steal our earnings.

The class that the intellectuals serve are those whose sole purpose in life is to accumulate wealth. It’s a game, well-portrayed and pilloried in the Ellis book-made-movie “American Psycho.” (“Mergers and acquisitions” = “murders and executions.”) These people, these predators, are not the capitalists, the investors, the bankers of old who redirected our largess to its best use. They are rather thieves of the highest order, more like feudal lords or aristocrats than public servants. They are risk-averse, and seek security in collecting the wealth produced by others by whatever means currently available.

In Harlem, police routinely swoop down and make mass arrests of drug dealers in the black neighborhoods. Such a fell swoop is needed on Wall Street – so many of that Italian loafer set should be serving time with Bernie Madoff (whose only real crime was stealing money from the wrong people).

The mass of humanity are not go-getters – they are mere survivors. All those wonderful kids, so ill-served by our schools, will grow up to be very ordinary people who find slots to fill, some fulfilled, most not. Our society is a bushel basket under which many lights are hidden. People are trained to “get a job.” Later on those big mortgages and health insurance and student loans will keep them in place. They will work fifty weeks for two weeks of freedom, see their life’s work be devastated in the latest market scandal, and end up depending on Social Security, that dreaded and awful program, for a decent retirement.

This from a recent article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, “The Sure Thing“: (behind a subscription wall at present). It’s an article about the predator class.

…one of the undisputed finding[s] in all the research on entrepreneurs: people who work for themselves are far happier than the rest of us. [Economist Scott] Shane says that the average person would have to earn two and a half times as much to be as happy working for someone else as he would be working for himself.

That hits home. Why do I start each day with so much vigor and joy? I do not serve the predators, I bide my own time, I live free. If that is the free market, count me in. But what most people do in this country … well, they are many things. But they are not free.

(705 words with these five.)

Ah, those darned loveable silly progressives!

There are some truly ignorant ideas floating around Progressiveville. Keep in mind that I like these people – these are my people. These are the communitarians in a society that glorifies the ruthless acquisitors. They are always overmatched because they have not much more than a rudimentary understanding of politics, and none whatsoever of power.

Idea #1: Appoint Elizabeth Warren to head the Federal Reserve.

The folks who advance an idea like this (Joseph Stiglich for Treasury Secretary is another one) are suffering from two delusions at least: 1) Obama has made ill-considered appointments, and 2) placing a friendly force atop a raging bull will tame the bull. Obama has appointed the people he wants to positions of power – Gates to Defense is the most telling. He’s no fool. And, putting good people in positions of power, even if that was Obama’s wont, would not effectively deal with the power that the position theoretically controls.

Anyway, here’s the deal with Warren: She’s a congressional appointee, and is only there because she is well-spoken enough to have reached the public from an obscure position. Obama and his troops likely want her to shut up and go away. She won’t be around long.

Idea #2: Sign an Internet petition. Such activities are useless to the exact degree that they are easy. Think of it this way: The wardens of a prison know that inmate opinion does not likely favor them. Inmates might want to join together and voice that opinion via an Internet petition. It would not matter. Unless the inmates are somehow organizing, their opinions mean nothing, and the wardens are playing very close attention to any organizing activities.

Internet petitions and emails to congressional members are useless because they require no effort. The Internet is nothing more than an information-spreading tool, and is not a substitute for organizing.

If I were a member of Congress, here is the order of priority I place on various expressions of opinion:

1: Large contributions from organized donors, e.g., “bundled” money from corporate executives.
2: Self-interested advice and influence -can this person help my career or give me a job when I’m out of office? Can he give my wife a job (Mrs. Evan Bayh)? Can he generate negative publicity and hurt me? Does he know stuff about me that can hurt me?
3: Large contributions from unorganized sources -i.e., Hollywood actors. Hollywood is odd in that it gives lots of money to Democrats, but does not demand anything in return except some ideological posturing. The money matters. The opinions require perception management techniques to assure future flow of money.
4: Focused public opinion – this is that rare occasion when a misdeed has been exposed and is affecting poll numbers – Conrad Burns and his Abramoff scandal, for example. The scandal has a focusing effect. Public opinion can come into focus for a number of reasons -economic collapse, scandal, unpopular wars, etc. Elected officials will pay attention when opinion is focused, and usually try to manipulate perceptions to control that opinion. Usually the remedy is to replace one allowable party with the other to carry forward with the unpopular policy. Devices such as wedge issues – abortion, gay marriage, gun control, usually suffice to deflect meaningful organization.
5. The actual need and worthiness of various initiatives and bills before congress. These people in office are not scoundrels – they are just, mostly, not very strong, and so public service ends up down the list.
6. Disorganized public opinion. It matters and can bite them, but is usually managed via perception devices – Portuguese Water Dogs and beautiful kids, charitable activities, etc.
7. Mail – people who take the trouble to write a letter are a concern, as for each one writing a letter, many more likely share the view. Office holders encourage letter-writing, as it is a useful means of cheaply monitoring public opinion. Letters are by themselves a weak organizing tool – they merely alert the office holder that he might have to deal with a problem.
8. The office holder’s personal proclivities and aspirations – legacy stuff. Put a man’s name on a building, and that building will employee cronies for decades. Name a wilderness area after him before he dies, he’ll be your servant. (Note: This is why I long ago advocated renaming the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, the “Burns-Baucus National Recreation Area,” with a stipulated requirement that each man spend one day a year there water skiing. )
…
43: Large public demonstrations that are over on Sunday evening.
…
57: Paper petitions. It’s our constitutional right, dammit. They have to accept them. There’s a room down by the furnace where they store them.
…
126: Form letters.
…
129: Emails.
…
311: Internet petitions.
…
516: Small public demonstrations – so small that they advertise weakness, and especially those where participants dress really goofy.

Nothing will ever replace on-the-ground organizing – education and activism designed to focus public opinion. Environmentalists, civil rights workers, labor union organizers, feminists, anti-nukers all did this grunt work, and had an impact. If people educate and organize, they can work their way up the list, and on rare occasion, even bump #1 down to #2.

Politicians and corporations hate organizers and have for years threatened, spied on, scorned, imprisoned, infiltrated and murdered them. Those in power would be much happier if we would just email one another and sign internet petitions.

So what? What’s different now?

Word is out that Obama is furious about the recent Supreme Court decision regarding campaign financing. He, along with the Congress, will be taking strong action.

In other news, Long Island four-year old Cory is reported to be furious at his parents’ refusal to allow him to have a TV in his room, and has vowed to take strong action.

I don’t know the fallout from the decision, nor can I predict unintended consequences. I do know that the intended consequences are that those who have larges sums of cash on hand will engage in propaganda to elect people they like to office. There will be little ability to counter it. But that’s the way we’ve been headed for years now, and the Federalist Society that dominates the court merely shut the gate behind them. They are firmly in power, and have been for years. We are no longer a constitutional republic in anything other than name. We are a plutonomy.

But I’m curious – corporate support of candidates is the air we breathe. Most of our office holders are corporate, few of them have the balls to challenge these people who own the networks and finance their campaigns. Is it different now that UnitedHealth and Wellpoint can openly proclaim their support of Obama? If they come out in the open and say “Hey – we are a large corporation that leaches on the health care system, and we want Barack Obama elected president”, is that better than Obama merely taking $20 million from them and running his own ads?

Only one thing is different: The open advertising is more honest. Obama never once mentioned all the support he was getting from Wall Street and AHIP.

Corporate personhood? Of course it’s absurd. Of course it is judicial activism at its worst. But I’m so used to this crazy country that it takes a whole lot more than that to surprise me or turn me cynical. We’re corporate now, and we’re finally open about it. If they just call off the elections, eliminating the formality of putting democratic lipstick on the corporate pig, we can all get on with our business.

Optimism of the spirit

I have to remind myself from time to time that things don’t really change except for the better over the long haul. For instance, in an interview I was reading this morning of Gilbert Achbar and Noam Chomsky by Stephen Shalom, they made the point that antisemitism in the United States, so prevalent up until the 1950’s, is virtually non-existent. Barack Obama is a pseudo-liberal and de facto right winger, but he is also a half-black president. That would have been unthinkable fifty years ago.

Yes, we have many problems, but we have always had many problems. Each generation has to deal with a complicated world, and what I have come to realize is the problem of the sociopath in public life. Sociopaths are always with us, and they generally manage to work themselves into positions of power, usually within the business world, but often enough too in politics and the military. The dumb ones go into crime. The solution to that problem is not to do away with them, as we cannot do that, but rather to contain them. In the wake of the Great Depression, by means of high marginal tax rates and progressive welfare policies, we did just that. But lessons don’t last forever, generations pass, and we have to re-learn them. It is painful, it takes time. We are a long way from out of this.

Sociopaths in power aside, our first and biggest problem is the Democratic Party, and what Harry Truman referred to as “Trojan Horse Democrats”. Listening to talk radio, as I so often do, I see there is an attitude out there that simply says that President Obama needs to get with the program, to bypass his advisers or replace them, to come out of his shell, to be himself. They don’t get it. This is him. He is a DLC Democrat, or a corporatist. He said what he had to say to get elected, but he did not mean a word of it. He lied. He had corporate and corporate media support throughout the campaign, and that is why. They allowed him a long leash to say progressive things knowing full well he would not implement anything.

Hillary Clinton would behave in exactly the same way. That’s why the two of them were considered the “viable” candidates, and why they were allowed to fight it out. The outcome didn’t matter to the power brokers. The game was rigged.

Both Clinton(s) and Obama are very smart people who intuitively understand the system. There’s no back room dealing necessary, though the campaigns they ran were plainly and painfully dishonest, manipulative and propagandistic. They are Trojan Horses. As Harry Truman reminded us below, we can always count on Republicans to be themselves and to self-destruct. Let them be. What we need are Democrats who are real progressives and liberals, who mean what they say, who fight for what they believe in.

Such Democrats exist. They are not many in number. In realistically assessing our position, progressives need to do an honest tally of how many are on their side in Congress. Eighty House members? Twenty senators? Fifteen? Not enough to filibuster, unfortunately. That’s why Democrats don’t use the filibuster. There are more than sixty votes available to push forward the right wing agenda. All that is going on right now is perception management, to make the right wing agenda look like a liberal agenda. That was done with health care, war, and Wall Street. Bill Clinton was good, and Obama apparently sucks.

That works in our favor. Massachusetts figured it out. Unfortunately, they were offered a Trojan Horse Democratic candidate in Coakely, a recipient of AHIP and PhRMA money, and so opted for the only reasonable alternative. I would have done the same.

Our two political options at this time, politically, are real Democrats and third party candidates. It is hard to know who the real Democrats are, as so many of them lie about their positions when running for office. So it’s a matter of character judgment. For instance, Montana’s Max Baucus is obviously a man of low worth, and Jon Tester apparently so too. In Colorado, it is Michael Bennett who is the Trojan Horse. He will be replaced by Gale Norton this year.

Fair enough. Vote them out. There’s nothing to be gained by keeping them in. In fact, Trojan Horses impede progress. The “lesser evil” is in truth the greater evil.

But politics and organization are two different things. Too much energy goes in to politics, and not enough in organization. Far more than good Democrats, right now we need community organizers. If we get back to basics,and build from the ground up, and watch out for lying Trojan Horse Democrats, over the long run, things will improve, as they have in the past.

By the way, I don’t know that I’ve ever mentioned this, but Democrats are the problem. They don’t give us real alternatives, and absorb all of our organizational energy in the process. Have I said that before?

Anyway, here’s Harry Truman, and good day to you.

I’ve seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn’t believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don’t want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.

But when a Democratic candidate goes out and explains what the New Deal and fair Deal really are — when he stands up like a man and puts the issues before the people — then Democrats can win, even in places where they have never won before. It has been proven time and again.

We are getting a lot of suggestions to the effect that we ought to water down our platform and abandon parts of our program. These, my friends, are Trojan horse suggestions. I have been in politics for over 30 years, and I know what I am talking about, and I believe I know something about the business. One thing I am sure of: never, never throw away a winning program. This is so elementary that I suspect the people handing out this advice are not really well-wishers of the Democratic Party.

More than that, I don’t believe they have the best interests of the American people at heart. There is something more important involved in our program than simply the success of a political party.

The rights and the welfare of millions of Americans are involved in the pledges made in the Democratic platform…. And those rights and interests must not be betrayed.

These are some of the principles for which the Democratic Party stands…. We stand for better education, better health, greater opportunities for all. We stand for fair play and decency, for freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and the cherished principle that a man is innocent until he is proven guilty.

Taken together, these principles are the articles of the liberal faith. I am sure that the liberal faith is the political faith of the great majority of Americans. It sometimes happens that circumstances of time and place combine to deny its expression. But the faith is there, and the reactionaries can never hope to have any but temporary advantage in this country.

Playing chess with the Chutes and Ladders crowd

The Senate election in Massachusetts goes down today. I don’t know the outcome, and don’t much care. One of the candidates is interesting, the other as boring as Wonderbread. One is a radical right winger, the other a nothing. One will fight for the things he believes in, the other not. Massachusetts won’t long tolerate a right wing nutjob in office, and so if Scott Brown wins, he’ll he ousted in 2012. He’ll probably be replaced by another good-for-nothing Democrat. Where’s the upside here?

For a brief while I hoped that a Brown win would help defeat the corporate-written Senate “Health Care Reform” bill, which is meant to be the final version. But word has leaked out that if Brown indeed carries the state, as I hope he does, that the Democrats will abandon reconciliation of the House and Senate bills, and push the Senate bill through the House. This would negate the need for another vote in the Senate.

They can be clever. Democratic leadership, so often seen as weak and ineffective in fighting for progressive reform in health care, can make things happen. They can bring pressure on members of the House, they can force a majority, they do know how to make deals, they do know how to threaten and intimidate members. Obama will weigh in, he will use the hammer. Our last hope, the “Progressive Caucus”, will shrivel under the heat when it comes down to passage of that awful bill. The Democratic leadership is strong and resourceful, and effective. It is simply misunderstood. People think these people to be …liberals? Whatever. They are corporate, and that phrase encompasses hacks and poseurs of both parties.

Democratic hacks and poseurs are a little more dangerous, as they are supported by the rank and file of the party, who simply don’t understand corporate politics.

There are differences between Democrats and Republicans. Russ Feingold and Pat Leahy are different animals than Jim Inhofe and Jim DeMint. But the players in the health care debate, the appointed spearchuckers, have been people like Max Baucus, Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson. These men have played a skilled game of chess, and are not only effective, but managed to undermine reform efforts before they got off the ground. Each played a critical role in carrying forward the “reforms” sought by AHIP and PhRMA.

The reason we will have a bad bill signed into law, why it will be shoved down our throats despite protestations of Massachusetts voters, is not because of Democrat weakness. It is because Democratic leadership knows how to manage its left wing, just as Republicans know how to manage their Christians. Progressives and liberal reformers, who thought they had a voice in the process, were actually steered to a predetermined outcome by some very cagey politicians.

Democratic leadership plays chess, and plays it well, while the Democratic followship is mired down in Chutes and Ladders.

There can be no reform of this system from within this system. Those who say we must join the Democratic Party to change it do not understand how the Democratic Party works. Non-corporate Democrats do not gain leadership positions, while progressives are routinely marginalized. Since Obama’s election, new Senators have been appointed in Colorado, Illinois, Delaware and New York. Rahm Emmanuel has worked hard behind the scenes to make sure that each new appointee had appropriate corporate credentials. No liberals were allowed. Only Roland Burris managed to sneak through in a comical in-your-face maneuver by then-Governor Blagojevich. But Burris has been given his walking papers, and the heir apparent, the corporate hack who was meant to fill that seat, Tammy Duckworth, will ascend.

How do you change so corrupt an organization from within? You don’t. Corporate paymasters own that party, and its leadership works closely with Republican leadership to orchestrate events – that’s how we get this bizarre phenomenon we now witness where legislation so extreme that Republicans could not possibly pass it will be rammed through by Democrats.

The problem is money. The rest is all show. Deal with the problem, and we might have progress. For so long as the parties are corporate, reform is impossible. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were each seen as dependable, and were consequently touted as the “front runners” by corporate media, all others ignored. There cannot be reform when corporate media effectively performs a coronation of the eventual winners before the vote. Think back to 2006 when Howard Dean had his character assassinated, his candidacy destroyed – not by his own actions, as his “I have a scream” speech was not in the slightest significant. The media torpedoed him. That told me that he was a worthwhile candidate, and he has since proven to be a good man. But he could not succeed as a Democrat.

It’s a long hard road, things have to get much worse. We need popular movements, dynamics that spring up by groundswell and lead to popular explosions. That is how it has worked throughout history.

If there is a groundswell, if popular movements do indeed form, they must by all means avoid the Democrats, who only mean to destroy them. That’s their role in our “two party” system.

The power of images …

Below are some pictures taken of the tragedy that is Haiti and the recent earthquake. The suffering is immense, and the outpouring of charity from the American people is, as usual, immense. It’s a question of logisitics and timing. Can we help them in time? It is not for lack of trying.

Images have power.

Tricked you. The last four images are casualties and damage inflicted by Americans on Iraq and its inhabitants. These are not about random violence. The man in the car was shot by Americans, the man salved with burn cream was the victim of attempted cremation – by Americans. It’s grotesque, and it would invoke outrage … if we were allowed to see it. The control of imagery is efficient, and unlike the 60’s and 70’s, where a compliant media nonetheless allowed truth to escape now and then, a whole country is kept in the dark.

We have the Internet. I can show these pictures. I am a guy in Boulder, Colorado. The Internet has vast reach, and yet, we do not not reach people. Our message is not musical, not about celebrities, and the images are too real for video games. We’re not even allowed to see this:

Ever so gingerly, they allowed this one image to escape. And then they clamped down again. Obama is Bush II.

It’s thought control. Face it.

Iranians destabilizing US elections?

This is a little unnerving, to say the least. Some investigative journalism (Annals of National Security) has uncovered a plot by Iranians to invest in internal activities in the country by so-called “dissidents” to disrupt our upcoming elections and to make it appear as though the Obama Administration is not a credible democratic regime. Rather, they want it to appear to outsiders that we suppress opposition forces, even resorting to violence.

The money, $4 quadrillion rials, or about $400 million in U.S. dollars, was appropriated by the Iranian People’s House and has been turned over in an “almost carte blanche” manner to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for use as he sees fit to achieve this purpose.

U.S officials are watching closely. Said one source, “We take democratic governance very seriously in this country, and the Iranian activities are an affront to our way of life. We look at this matter with serious concern.”

A gaffe

For those who come here to hear their favorite themes repeated, you picked the right day.

Harry Reid committed a “gaffe,” that is, he slipped and said something in public that was actually true. Such behavior usually creates a flurry of criticism.

It is true that Barack Obama is more white than black. If he had thicker lips, a flatter nose, darker skin, and had gotten his degree from Grambling; if he spoke in a dialect; if his family were not beautiful in a tasteful white kind of way, he’d likely be on a city council somewhere. Maybe even a community organizer.

It is also true that Harry Reid will be forgiven for this gaffe, and that had a Republican said the same thing, the Republican would not be forgiven and might have to leave office and go to work in a high-paid position in the drug or defense industry or banking. Such a dark fate awaited Reid save for his party selection.

Is this a double standard? Absolutely. At this point, I doff my cap two our only two allowable parties, and offer my sincere appreciation for the mere double standard. The normal triple and quadruple standards are set aside for this moment of candor. In the matter of race relations, they literally reek of an integrity that they show in no other area.

The curious case of the men who “return to battle” who were never even in battle in the first place …

Steve made a bold prediction a short while back, saying that media reports of released Guantanamo prisoners being behind the curious case of the explosive Christmas Day unperpants were likely “bullshit.” (Here, and here). Now Dan Froomkin, a serious man with a critical eye (and therefore marginalized by the Washington Post), says the same thing. (“Media being fooled over and over again“, Huffington Post.)

First, let’s deal with absurdity. Meet me on camera three.

[Pssst! Folks, there’s no danger! There’s no “Al Qaeda”, just a ragtag group of dissidents unable to pull off meaningful revenge for the things that are happening to them. Even the name itself, “Al Qaeda,” is an American invention. They take these isolated incidents of attempted revenge, and make it out to be a huge conspiracy with evil dark-skinned bearded people wanting to blow up our darling blond children.

Remember Sean Connery as Jim Malone in the Untouchables?

They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That’s* the *Chicago* way! And that’s how you get Capone.

It could be rewritten for the current script:

We drop a bomb, they set a shoe on fire. We send a million of them to the morgue, they set their underpants on fire. *That’s* the *Al Qaeda* way. And that’s how you get the Great Satan.

Please, Americans, get a grip. These people fight back now and then, but look at where they come from! It’s always place that we are attacking and/or occupying. Just sayin’.]

Now, about the American media and its tendency to uncritically repeat Pentagon lies and then fail to follow up when the truth becomes available: It’s not a recent phenomenon. It transcends wars, decades and centuries. The press, owned by the Warbucks corporations that finance the politicians as well, is fulfilling a function: it is advancing the story line. It’s a play put on to keep us in fear and off balance, never giving us time to reflect on what is really happening.

In the Italian loafer world of the media hierarchy, this is probably understood, though these people are most likely focused on earnings per share. They are not about journalism. But in the lower levels, where our eyes meet theirs, we are dealing with the clueless. That’s why they have a job, these pretty people who give us our news, while the Washington Post set Dan Froomkin adrift.

It’s propaganda. It’s the air we breathe. These gray little men and women are unimaginative cogs in the big machine. These supposed “journalists” are dreary wretches. They uncritically repeat Pentagon lies because they have no souls.

At least the people at the Pentagon who write the lies have to come up with fresh ideas, but those whose job it is to repeat these lies and never think critically have no life force within them. They are nothing.

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Jim – he’s worse than dead. His brain is gone!

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PS: I pass on an observation by one Thom Hartmann, a radio host and run-on talker. He’s an introvert. He says that most radio hosts are that way. On the other hand, he says most TV personalities are extroverts. I tend to prefer introverts, as they tend to be a little more thoughtful, taking gratification from internal resources, where the exxies have to get it from outside sources.

I am often harshly critical of the profession of journalism, but mostly when I write that stuff I am thinking about the pretty TV people who are the primary source of news for the American public.