British prime ministers have to appear once weekly before parliament for a grilling – an open Q&A where the questions are tough and where they are often subject to ridicule and jeering. Few American presidents would stand up under such questioning – Reagan never, the Bushes no way, maybe Bill Clinton, certainly JFK.

American presidents instead use a buffer to address the public – the press secretary. These are usually people who are quick-witted and deft at avoiding answering questions. Tony Snow was formidable in that role.

Snow worked for Fox News, that running gag on the American people masquerading as a serious news outlet. It was only natural that Bush look to Fox for a press secretary when Scott McClellen stepped down. And it was appropriate that Snow step out of the role as fake objective analyst and into that of frank apologist and protector of the president. There is no shame in that – he chose to make an open and honest living.

Mainstream American journalists are well-educated and often bring impressive credentials to their job. But if they are supposed to be attack dogs, well they’ve been trained on shock collars by political and corporate masters. They are indeed capable and dangerous, but present no threat to those in power. Most do well in servitude, and collect acclaim and sterling reputation for submissive behavior. But Snow was that odd duck – working for Fox News he could be openly ingratiating to the Bush Administration, and working directly for Bush, had no need to hide his political ideology. He had it good, and was likely the envy of his class.

He was quick and witty and formidable and a good and faithful servant to Bush, and deserves praise for all of that. He knew what his job was, and he did it well. He’ll be missed.

Before I forget, it’s time to say something nice about the late Jesse Helms, even though he was a dick. Isn’t that how we do things?

One guy didn’t get the message.

I had a somewhat interesting exchange at Carole Minjares’ Missoulapolis yesterday with a gentleman calling himself “Max Bucks”. It happens down in the comments. I note that

Minimum wage prevents sweatshops. Look down at your feet, check out the location of the manufacturer of your sneaker, and then check out Global Exchange to find out if that company uses sweatshops to produce the product. Usually they do.

That’s a result of free markets – that’s how they work. Slaves of old had food and shelter. That’s all sweatshop workers get. What’s different? A rose by any other name…

To which comes the reply:

…you say, “Minimum wage prevents sweatshops.” You have no proof of that. In fact, the term “sweatshop” has no absolute meaning whatsoever. It is just a buzzword you picked up somewhere.

It follows … if one believes that markets inevitably lead to better lives, one has to internalize contradictions when evidence doesn’t support the theory. Therefore it would make sense that a conservative would conclude either that sweatshops don’t exist, or that they lead to better lives. Max chooses the former route.

I didn’t have to look far to find the second assertion, that they actually make lives better. Here’s a piece, written by “Jimmie” at a blog called “The Sundries Shack” that spells it out pretty clearly:

The workers can actually sell their services, just like we do here all the time, to the companies that pay better and offer better conditions. Competition between companies is causing conditions to improve regularly. Without those sweatshops, workers have few other options.

Throw in a little garbled U.S. history, and the circle is complete:

Sweatshops exist in third-world countries just like they existed here. They will change just like they changed here, so long as we don’t interfere with the normal progress of the free market. We can help these countries a lot just by opening our markets to them.

The real world is a little uglier than that. If it were a perfect world (and it damn near is), manufacturers would be free to roam the globe looking for the ideal conditions in which to make their products. For instance, during the 1970’s, Nike had its shoes made in South Korea and Taiwan. But the climate changed, workers began to organize and wages began to go up. Nike moved on, to Indonesia, China, and Vietnam–countries where protective labor laws are poorly enforced and cheap labor is abundant. In China and Vietnam, trade unions are illegal.

Working conditions did not naturally improve in Taiwan and South Korea – workers rebelled, fought free market forces, and Nike fled – to places where government protects them from such natural uprisings. But hey – if labor organizing can be classified as a market force, then Jimmie has it right – things do get better. But conservatives uniformly hate unions, and support laws that make organization hard, if not impossible. They must hate market forces. They fight them in order to keep wages down.

Jimmie offers up more justification:

It’s not respectful to workers to force them into the streets as hookers or to take away the best and safest means they’ve ever seen seen to earn themselves a basic living.

This goes to the heart of right wing thought – people always pursue comparative advantage. They work in sweatshops because the alternatives are worse. Therefore, sweatshops offer a healthy comparative advantage. Therefore, sweatshops are a positive market force, and should be left alone.

Therefore, we progressives, in our efforts to curtail and eliminate sweatshops, are harming people.

Jimmie says that free markets in the U.S. eventually eliminated the sweatshop. Never mind that it still exists in our inner cities and produce fields, what progress we have had came about because people organized and fought for laws to curtail the free market and to protect workers.

The conundrum the right wing faces with sweatshops takes a fine lick of self-serving logic to overcome, but overcome it they do thanks to free market logic. Free markets are always good >> free markets give us sweatshops >> sweatshops are a good thing.

So we must live with sweatshops. End of right wing econ 101. Thanks for the lesson, Jimmie, and Max.

Craig, who writes mtpolitics.net, has always seemed to me to be in a perpetual bad mood. He makes light of things in a most offensive way, and reacts angrily when his bits of wisdom are not received well from his targets. He’s kind of tedious.

Anyway, he has shut off the comment section of his blog. One less source of tedium.

This is the latest cover of Rolling Stone Magazine. There’s no writing on it – just the name of the magazine. It’s stark contrast to their usual practice of promoting several featured articles on the cover of the magazine. The tone is almost reverential. Look at Obama’s expression – he’s smiling, looking down. It’s a messiah-like posture. He’s a jubilant savior. We are the children.

Inside are two articles on Barack Obama – one an interview with the candidate, the other a report on the people running his campaign.

The interview is mostly pointless – publisher Jann Wenner did it himself, rather than delegating it to his usual political writers. It’s full of softball questions, leaving Barack the opportunity to ingratiate himself to the RS audience by connecting via music. Obama has an Ipod, you see, and as befits any politician who wants to reach out to a wide cross section of voters, he has on it Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Charlie Parker and Coltrane, Sheryl Crow, Howlin’ Wolf, Yo-Yo Man and Jay-Z. That list was probably crafted by his very agile campaign staff. It touches everyone except senior citizens, and no doubt had he gone on we would have learned he has some Lawrence Welk and big band on that Ipod too.

Interview sample:

Bruce [Springsteen] issued a pretty eloquent endorsement of you. What do you think of him and his work?

Not only do I love Bruce’s music, but I just love him as a person. He’s a guy who has never lost track of his roots, who knows who he is, who has never put on a front. When you think about authenticity, you think about Bruce Springsteen, and that’s how he comes across personally. We haven’t actually met in person.

That’s a bit telling – I guess, as with George W. Bush and Vladimar Putin, Obama was able to get a sense of Springsteen’s soul by means of a fleeting impression. It’s an unintended glance into Obama’s soul. I take from it that the man is not authentic, that he is putting on a front. He knows what he is doing. But that’s just my fleeting impression.

One line grabbed me. Speaking of globalization, Obama says

The American people are, I think, congenitally optimistic. Right now, they’re not feeling particularly optimistic about Washington – they’re genuinely concerned about the direction the country is moving in, they’re anxious about globalization and whether we’re going to be able to compete.

(Oh no, I’ve said too much?) Joe Schmeau, auto assembly line worker for GM who has a good wage and health care and retirement benefits, cannot compete with José Schmeauez, Mexican auto assembly line worker who has no health care or pension and barely supports his family. Obama here gives us insight into the insider’s view of globalization. It’s not about making life better for people, but rather about adapting to change, which is defined as a race to the bottom. When Joe and José compete, José always comes out on top down there on the bottom.

Can we compete? Only if we give up what we have. Can we instead help ourselves, protect ourselves? Apparently Obama, like McCain and Bush and Clinton before him, is not about giving us that choice.

It’s a fifty minute interview, has very little substance, and one insight worth gleaning onto – Barack Obama is not different in the matter of free trade and globalization than any of his opponents.

The article on Obama’s staff is also telling, if only in giving us the roots of the Obama phenomenon. Pete Rouse, Chief of Staff, is a long-time Washington insider and comes from the staff of South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle. Campaign Operative Daschle himself was “endeared” to the Obama campaign because Obama contributed $85,000 to his failed reelection bid in 2004. David Axelrod, Bob Schrum’s replacement, has worked for Democratic candidates going back to Illinois Senator Paul Simon. Pete Giangreco, direct mail consultant, is a veteran of six Democratic presidential campaigns. Campaign manager David Plouffe has come from Tom Harkin and Dick Gephardt roots. Alter-ego Valerie Jarrett is a long time associate of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

Obama’s campaign is staffed by old-time liberals. It should come as no surprise that Obama is playing for the center and ditching the left, just as Gore and Kerry did. It should come as no surprise because he is staffed by liberal retreads. We are getting a standard liberal campaign. Even if Obama does somehow pull off a miracle and wins in November, he will arrive in Washington without a constituent base, and like Bill Clinton, will be at ease among Republicans and uneasy with progressives.

As Bill Becker, president of the AFL-CIO in Arkansas, said of Clinton, he’ll pat us on the back as he pisses down our leg. He’s already done some of that, and liberals are doing their usual mating dance, accepting betrayal, internalizing contradictions. They’re good at that.

Steve, who has a little corner of the teapot tempest called “Rabid Sanity”, wrote about Barack Obama’s Social Security plan. As often happens in our haste to write stuff while also leading normal lives, Steve misinterpreted the Obama plan, asserting that he wants to eliminate the Social Security tax for anyone making less than $250,000. In fact, Obama wants to create a donut hole, taxing incomes up to $102,000, then applying no tax between $120,000 and $250,000. It’s a horse designed by a committee, but that’s what politics does to logic.

Steve also goes on to make some larger statements that do well to point out basic difference in right and left-wing outlooks.

For instance, in asserting that those making over $250,000 shouldn’t pay a FICA tax, Steve gives us the trickle-down litany:

Besides, what are they going to do with that approximately $75k anyway? Sure, they might not buy a new car this year causing unemployment in the auto industry, or they may not construct a new house causing further contraction in the construction industry. Or they may not invest it in a company preventing further enhancements to keep the company competitive, allowing all of that business to be speedily and orderly transferred to China. No, the rich won’t miss that money. But we will.

This is the essence of disagreement between left and right economic outlook – those on the right tend to think that the wealthy create wealth and incidentally bestow it upon us as they pursue more wealth for themselves. That’s why conservatives and libertarians lay prostrate before the wealthy classes.

We of the left attribute wealth creation to the sweat of one’s brow, and see it harvested by clever accumulators who have no particular interest in greater good and want only to accumulate more, no matter the cost to their fellow humans.

Another problem with this proposal: Does it change the basic social contract? For instance, at the moment everyone who works pays into the Social Security trust fund and expect to receive money back when they retire. The more you make, the more you are able to draw in retirement. But all workers would receive something more than just the equivalent of Social Security Supplemental Income [SSI], otherwise known as “federal welfare.”

I had trouble just parsing this. But it’s the logic of illogic – Steve is saying that since workers won’t be taxed under $250,000, Social Security becomes a welfare program, which is what the SSI program is. But that’s a step in the right direction – he tacitly admits that Social Security, as structured, is an insurance program. I’ll take what I can get.

This rending of the social fabric that would turn once proud workers into welfare recipients strikes me as appalling. I can only hope that Obama’s comments on his plan carry the same weight as support for Rev. Wright, or NAFTA, or clean campaigning, or campaign finance reform, or . . . well, you get the drift.

Well, that’s it. That’s all he wrote. I didn’t realize on first and second reading how little there there was there. But he exposes a lot of right wing thought. Their basic impulse is to scoff at any program that works in the general welfare. They misunderestimate us – they think we are all individualists who want nothing more what is good for ourselves, no matter the cost to others. This is the ethos of wealth accumulation and why we find this virus rampant among the wealthy.

People change as they grow wealthy – they become protective of their wealth, suspicious of their fellow humans. Because wealth is power, the wealthy often end up in control of government, and find themselves at war with ordinary people. In other countries this has translated into open warfare, torture, death squads, disappearances and imprisonment. In the United States, where our progressive forebears have given us strong laws to protect ordinary people, we have more power. The process is more subtle. Crafty politicians and their servile economists lure us into seductive reasoning to disown us of our best impulses to care for one another. They’ve given us trickle-down, anti-unionism, and anti-welfare. They fight any collectivist impulse among us. If they were honest, they would openly say that they hate unions, Medicare, Medicaid, and of course, Social Security. “Hate” is not too strong a word.

Steve doesn’t go that far. He’s not openly hostile to Social Security, though he is a fellow traveler of the right and does despair of an collectivist impulse. But in fact, people try to fit in larger communities, and we generally try to care for each other. In larger society, this basic familial instinct translates into welfare for the indigent, and health care for all, and a decent retirement for the elderly. These things cost money, and at are odds with instincts of the accumulators among us.

That’s what the right hates about the left. Conservatives want to remake us into self-serving beasts who are indifferent to one another, who let accumulators accumulate, who are at war with our good instincts. It should come as no surprise that people naturally reject right wing individualist philosophy and tend towards the ethos of greater good. It should also be no surprise that the right wing, in the end, backs authoritarian regimes, oppression and torture. They are ridding us of the disease of collectivism, and the iron fist is the cure. They want to remake us, by force if necessary.

Words and phrases that ought to be stricken from politics (I might add to this list and please feel free to add your own):

Locally, we should not be allowed to talk about “Montana values”.

Test your candidate: Without these words, does this person have anything left to talk about? Remove some of those words from the following ad, and what are we left with?

Vodpod videos no longer available.