The Infamous Brad

My Response to Leon Cooperman

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 15:44:48 GMT

From:	J. Brad Hicks, ret.
To:	Leon Cooperman, CEO, Omega Advisors
Date:	October 1, 2012
Subject:	Re: Your Open Letter(s) to the President

Dear Mr. Cooperman, et al,

I have read with interest your open letter to President Obama regarding what is, in your opinion, the President's hostile tone towards success in a capitalist economy. As one of the now-famous 99%, and indeed, being a retiree, as one of the 47%, I am writing to correct one misconception you seem to be laboring under. We 47%, we 99%, do not resent your success, nor do we resent or covet your money. We fear what you can do with your money.

It may not be a popular opinion, but it is a fact: Citizens United v FEC, 558 US 310 (2010), was correctly decided. That sentence will shock many of my friends, who know that you can predict my position on a Constitutional issue, with 99% reliability, by asking Antonin Scalia his opinion and predicting that I will believe the exact opposite. But in this case, he is right; it is impossible to reconcile the First Amendment with the conduct of the authors of the First Amendment if you do not accept the historical fact that the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights fully intended it to mean that anybody in America is entitled to spend as much of their own money as they want on publishing anything they want to publish. Even later courts that disagreed with Hugo Black's famous "plain and simple" rule ("When the Constitution says 'no law,' I believe it means no law") have upheld that principle when it relates to political speech. Under our system of government, you and your fellow multi-billionaires are, and must be, legally entitled to spend as much of your money as you choose on attempting to influence your fellow voters.

But that's a problem. Because, as you must know as someone who made his fortune investing in companies that manufacture and sell consumer goods, influence works. As you are about to find out, there are limits to how much the voters can be swayed by the side that has a vastly greater advertising budget. But you have doubtless also, by now, observed the transparent relief among President Obama's supporters when George Soros finally "came off of the sidelines" and resumed funding advertisements for the incumbent President.

We are all Americans. We all honor success. We all believe that success should be rewarded. As David Wong recently pointed out, "go into the bedroom of any child in America ... you'll see posters of pro athletes and Disney pop stars and famous actors dressed as action heroes. Millionaires, all. That's because all of our ... heroes are millionaires."

But you know whose posters you won't see up there? The billionaires who use their money to exercise a veto over the nominating process for either political party, or both political parties. Both political parties in America now vet their candidates for statewide or federal office based on "elect-ability" which is defined, in no small part, by "fund raising success," that is to say, based on the extent to which they are acceptable to those of you in the top 1/10th of one percent of us by wealth who have so much money that you are the only people who can fund a successful advertising campaign for statewide or federal office. This reduces the remaining 311 million of us to the position of courtiers, trying to make our case to the Forbes 400, because we can't have anything unless we persuade a majority of you that it's acceptable.

Now, you can describe a political system in which the financial success of the wealthiest couple of dozen or couple hundred people is so honored that they are, in effect, a House of Lords that is above all other branches of government. But you cannot describe any country, so run, as either free or democratic. Nor, in the long run, can you even describe such a country as having a free market. Look at the lobbying behavior of your fellow rich people. Look at the mess they've made of (for example) financial regulation, US energy policy, of health care policy, of intellectual property law and tell me that you don't see what I see: the wealthiest couple of hundred people in the United States are not using the power that their wealth grants them to keep markets free for their potential competitors, they are using that power to make it impossible for potential competitors to succeed.

This, then, is the dilemma that we face: we can be a free, democratic, and free market society, or we can allow unlimited accumulation of wealth. We cannot do both.

(signed) J. Brad Hicks

P.S. I am given to understand, by various journalists who have interviewed you and those who have signed onto your cause, that much of this is less about what Obama has done than about your hurt feelings. According to reporters, you have in fact gone so far as to say that you personally would accept policies that are even less friendly to the wealth accumulation of the 0.1% as long as those campaigning for those policies did not do so by vilifying the 0.1%.

Turn that around, if you will. When President Obama proposed the exact policies that you've expressed support for (for example, your remarks to Mr. Gore suggest that you are okay with allowing the Bush tax cuts for the super-rich to expire), your supporters vilified him in terms far, far harsher than anything anyone has said about people like you, and in far less honest ways at that. If he has made intemperate remarks about (some of) the super-rich, do you think maybe that might be why?

There are a few cranky liberals out here (myself included, I admit, but by no means including the President, who is a self-identified pro-wealthy Blue Dog Democrat) who have expressed some doubt that any of you in the Forbes 400 earned your money entirely legally, and some anger at the two-tier legal system that lets those who stole their wealth or who obtained it by bribery or who obtained it by gaming the legal system rather than by honest competition to deliver affordable high quality services keep their ill-gotten goods (and their freedom). This hurts your feelings. You don't think that you're a crook, maybe it's even true that you're not. (I haven't researched your personal fortune, although your past affiliation with Goldman Sachs raises red flags given that firm's recent lawless history.) You feel tarred by association.

All right, examine those feelings. Now imagine if we cranky couple of hundred far-left liberals could afford to intrude into every hour of television and every hour of radio half a dozen times or so to repeat that accusation. How much angrier would you be? How besieged would you feel? How frightened would you be of that (possibly) unfair accusation becoming accepted as fact through sheer repetition? If President Obama is as angry towards rich people as you think he is, do you think maybe that's why?

Anti-Gun Idiots are Going to Cost Us Everything

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 22:54:55 GMT

Last night was book-club night for me, but my hosts and I watched the early results from Wisconsin's recall efforts before we got started. Very early results: huge turnout, which usually favors Democrats, and early exit poll results showing that it was a very Democratic crowd that was showing up the polls, with a 51 to 44 (I think? I may be off by one or two) presidential preference for Obama over Romney. Almost immediately thereafter by: networks call the race for Scott Walker.

About an hour in, the network I was calling said that while urban and suburban turnout were high, what drove the astronomical turnout percentage was that rural Wisconsin voters turned out to vote in all-time record numbers. And that instantly reminded me of something, so I asked, "Hey, wait, that sounds like a gun control vote. What's Tom Barrett's record on gun control?" Quick Google search on my phone confirms what few of the national media had pointed out: voted for the assault weapon ban, founding member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

Fuck. You think maybe Wisconsin Democratic voters should have paid some attention to how that was going to poll, outstate, when they were picking their candidate? Because I sure do.

When we think about the stolen 2000 election, most of us concentrate on illegal voter caging in Florida, the Bourgeois Riot in Florida's Dade County where paid Republican congressional staffers used threats of violence to intimidate election judges, and the nakedly partisan Supreme Court decision that stopped the state-wide recount that Florida law required. Not me. When I think about the stolen 2000 election, the first thing that I think of is that none of that would have mattered, none of that would have been sufficient, the Republicans could have even more cleverly and covertly stolen Florida outright and it wouldn't have put Bush the Younger over the top ... if it weren't for Handgun Control, Incorporated. You see, scant weeks before the election, HCI made a huge outside ad buy, buying radio ads in almost every radio market in America including rural areas encouraging people to vote for Al Gore because, unlike George Bush who was pro-NRA, Al Gore would do something about guns.

One, that was BS; there was no perceptible air gap between George Bush and Al Gore on gun policy. But more importantly, number two, what in the heck were they thinking?

Did they not look at those ad markets' demographics before they bought those ads? Because even HCI wasn't so insular, so caught up in their own closed-off reality bubble, that they didn't know that gun control polls terribly in rural areas. I haven't looked at the county-by-county numbers in other states closely enough, but I know my own state well enough to know for a fact that if that lying ad from our own side hadn't played in heavy rotation on downstate Springfield, Missouri radio, Al Gore would have carried Missouri, and that right there would have been enough to put him over the top even if the Republicans stole Florida, and the Iraq War and the Bush tax cuts would never have happened. Thanks, Handgun Control! No wonder you had to change your name. Idiots.

And there is no excuse, in 2012, for a Democratic politician or voter in Wisconsin not to know that the only, only, only reliable way to get about 10%, maybe 20% of rural registered voters to bother to vote is to threaten to take away their guns.

Look.

If you're that anti-gun, if you're so anti-gun (and know so little about guns, or about what the law actually said) that you think that the assault weapons ban was a smart piece of legislation, that is absolutely your right. And it is absolutely your right to vote for candidates who agree with you. But if you do, and if you win? You just plain need to accept the fact that for statewide office in almost every state, and for national office, you just handed the election to the other party.

I went into last night howling for Democratic Party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz's head on a platter for writing off the Wisconsin recall election, for refusing to put any national Democratic money into the race. Now, I don't blame her. No amount of money could have elected an anti-gun candidate as governor of Wisconsin. And the Wisconsin Democratic Party should have known that. And because they didn't, Scott Walker is going to get away with claiming that the race was actually about his economic policies, he's going to trumpet a statewide and, dare I say it, national mandate for less pensions, lower wages, no contract negotiating rights, fewer teachers, less independence for the teachers that remain, and more, more, always more tax breaks and cash handouts for the wealthy.

So, congratulations Wisconsin Democrats. Your idiotic decision to put an anti-gun candidate at the top of your statewide ticket may well have just cost us the entire US economy. I hope you're proud of yourselves.

Pillory Me, Too: I Don't Think Chris Hayes Went Far Enough

Wed, 30 May 2012 01:44:37 GMT

Those lucky few of you who care neither about the political blogosphere nor about cable TV news analysis probably don't know that Chris Hayes is getting pilloried, and may even lose his job, for stumbling over the same tripwire that cost Bill Maher his original TV show, "Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher." Over the weekend, in a panel discussion on the subject of Memorial Day, Hayes implied that not all American soldiers are heroes.

For this, he obviously must die. If you think so? Come and get me, then, too, or maybe even before you get around to him. He's a more visible target but I'll go farther than the did. I think that every American who volunteers, and then fights to protect their country, is a hero. But with a handful of possible exceptions, like the first wave of troops into Afghanistan at the end of 2001, I don't think that applies to any American since 1945.

I think those who served in peacetime aren't heroes. I think they're ordinary people who signed up for the only jobs program that Republicans and right-wing Democrats will let us have. (Look up "military Keyensianism.") That's nothing to be ashamed of; my own grandfather was, as I've famously said, a WPA alumnus. But at least the WPA built things that we can use; all our peacetime soldiers have done was stay alive at taxpayer expense. That's better than not doing so, but nothing to be especially proud of.

And those that served in Korea, preventing the Korean people from voting for the government they wanted to elect? Those who served in Vietnam, doing the same thing? Those who served up and down Latin America, defending a tiny rich white minority in those countries and their right to own the rest of the country as slaves? Those who went to the Balkans to put Islamists in power in Kosovo and neo-Nazis in power in Croatia? Those who screwed up the mission in Somalia, thus teaching bin Laden that Americans were pushovers? Those who went into Iraq to install what was supposed to be a pro-American regime, and ended up handing that country to Hezbollah? And all of that at the cost of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of civilian lives in those countries over the last sixty years? I don't think that makes them heroes. I think it makes them dupes at best, and willing accomplices to war crimes at worst. No, I'm not even vaguely proud of your service. No, I'm not even vaguely grateful for it. I am, depending on which atrocity you served in, to varying degrees ashamed of your service. I'm just generally too polite to say so to your face.

Come and get me.

Look, that wasn't even the point that Chris Hayes was making, and if you read or listen to the whole piece, it's not hard to tell that. Chris Hayes is making the entirely valid point that, frankly, the people who most aggressively police the boundaries of "heroism," the ones who most loudly bully the rest of us into calling all soldiers heroes, are, not coincidentally, usually, outright militarists. Frequently, they're worse than that, they're some kind of nativist white supremacist; a large, visible minority of militarists think that what makes you a hero when you sign up for American military service is precisely that you're keeping all those brown people under the white guy's thumb where they belong. Not a few of them wander right up to the border of fascism. And the chest-thumpers and the flag-wavers that come out every Memorial Day to bully the rest of us into cheering all troops think that those of us who oppose imperialism, who oppose militarization, are the problem, not the white supremacists and neo-Nazis in their own midst.

And, ashamed as he is to say it, even though he's a borderline militarist himself, Hayes is as uncomfortable with the imperialists and the white supremacists who are constantly cheerleading for more US wars so we can make more heroes by conquering more and more brown people and making them do what we want, as he is with people like me.

And if the right wing gets their way, expressing that discomfort in public is going to cost him his career. Because that's the kind of country we are, now: expressing discomfort with anything that you think looks like it might be a slide towards fascist militarism is just plain unacceptable for a public figure. We are still fighting the Spanish Civil War, here in America, and right now, here in America, Generalissimo Franco (and his backers) are winning.

Yet Another "Why Are You Depressed, Brad?" and "Why Do You Hate America?"

Sat, 26 May 2012 07:27:30 GMT

Read this. I don't give a fat fuck if you want to or not, read this: Sebastian Rotella, "Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala," Pro Publica, 5/25/12. Oscar Alfredo Ramirez Castaneda was raised to love and honor, as his father and as a beloved role model, the man who did this to his real family:

The commandos herded the men into a school and the women and children into a church. The violence began before dawn. One of the soldiers, César Ibañez, heard the screams of girls begging for help. Several soldiers watched as Lt. César Adán Rosales Batres raped a girl in front of her family. Following their superior officer, other commandos started raping girls and women. ...

The commandos brought the villagers one by one to the center of the hamlet, near a dry well about 40 feet deep. Favio Pinzón Jerez, the squad's cook, and other soldiers reassured the captives that everything would be all right. They were going to be vaccinated. It was a routine health precaution, nothing to worry about.

Commando Gilberto Jordán drew first blood. He carried a baby to the well and hurled it to its death. Jordán wept as he killed the infant. Yet he and another soldier, Manuel Pop Sun, kept throwing children down the well.

The commandos blindfolded the adults and made them kneel, one at a time. They interrogated them about the rifles, aliases, guerrilla leaders. When the villagers protested that they knew nothing, soldiers hit them on the head with a metal sledgehammer. Then they threw them into the well. ... By the end of the afternoon, the well overflowed with corpses.

As with everyone who actually read multiple news sources at the time, I knew about this while it was going on. I linked, a couple of years ago, to the video for Bruce Cockburn's 1984 song and music video, "If I Had a Rocket Launcher:" this is what that article is about. And I knew it at the time. Bruce Cockburn was only one of hundreds of reporters and aid workers who had, for years by that point, been coming out of Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Honduras, Nicaragua and telling us that this, right here, is what Ronald Reagan's direct report subordinates, CIA director Casey and NSC director North, were doing there. More kept doing so, month by month and year after year, until well into the first Bush administration.

I was alive at the time. I was working and paying taxes at the time. I was working at a god damned defense contractor at the time, not one that was directly supplying material to the US backed death squads that were raping little girls and murdering nuns and stealing children to raise as pets, but still, I drew my salary at the time from a Reagan-era defense contractor. I paid some of the taxes that paid for this. I did this. It was done in my name, supposedly to keep me safe from Communism. I tried to stop it at the time. God's honest truth, I tried. It wasn't enough. Did I do enough? Do you think I did everything I could have done? Because I never will. I keep saying, not just about this but about a lot of things, that you can't be held morally responsible for something that you were physically incapable of doing. But there were things I thought of trying. And I didn't try them. They would have been risky things. They might well have cost me my life. They probably wouldn't have worked. But I'll never know if I could have stopped the man who murdered his entire village from keeping him as a trophy. All right? I can never know that.

But I know this: after the Iran/Contra scandal, when incoming President Bush had to pardon everybody involved for fear of how much more would come out if they were tried? I thought we were at least ashamed enough of what we'd done that we wouldn't do it again.

If you think that this shit isn't going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and god only knows where else that your tax dollars are being used to save you from Islamist terrorism? You're ignorant, at best. Are you doing everything you can to stop it? Are you sure you are? Or are there things you've thought of trying that you don't have the confidence or the bravery to try? Maybe they wouldn't work. But you're not trying them. Which means that when you are confronted, decades from now, with the memories of what you didn't do to stop the War on Terror, after Iraq and Afghanistan veterans came home and told you what was going on? When you remember, then, how powerless you feel now, but also remember that there are things you've thought of trying but don't have the guts or the faith to try right now? Decades from now, you'll understand, then, how I feel now.

My comment about @tefpoe's "The People vs. Public Transit" on @rftmusic

Tue, 22 May 2012 04:10:30 GMT

Over on the St. Louis Riverfront Times' music blog, local rapper Tef Poe just posted a lovely, thoughtful article on what St. Louis's Metro mass transit system means to him as a St. Louisan, as a black man, and as a musician: "The People vs. Public Transportation" (RFT Music Blog, 5/21/12). Yes, it's long, but it's worth it: take the time to read this, even if you're not from St. Louis.

I got a little bit of praise, via Disqus, for what I wrote in reply; so, for the benefit of my regular readers, let me cross-post it here, because St. Louis Metro Transit is a subject I have strong opinions about -- some of you, my personal friends, have heard quite a few pieces of this over the years:

I'm an increasingly elderly white retiree on a small, fixed income. I depend on MetroLink and I agree with almost every single word of this. (My experience has been different in one small way: in a decade of riding trains and buses in this town, I've never been the victim of violence, and only been threatened once. But then, I'm also a faintly scary looking nearly 300 pound bald guy.)

I especially relate to his complaint about the sporting-event-only riders. There is no misery like being usually able to depend on making a certain transfer every night at 10, at the Civic Center station where everybody and I mean everybody who passes into or through downtown has to transfer, only to miss the last train out because either the Blues or the Cardinals or some tween-sensation pop concert has just gotten out, having to stand there, even if it's freezing drizzle, because the train you couldn't even get to because the bus hit a traffic jam has long gone and the next two trains are going to ship full. I can't blame Metro for that one; like you say, they need those people's money, and I'll add that it wouldn't make sense to design a system to handle peak loads like that if it would run 99% empty the rest of the time. But it's really, really frustrating.

I share the frustration about the fare increases, too, but seriously, I doubt there's anything Metro can do about that. I hear the same complaints about the price of gasoline from my friends who drive. Sadly, except for CEOs and Wall Street financiers, nobody in America's wages or pensions have kept up with inflation, not in decades, and there isn't anything Metro can do about that.

I'll say this for Metro St. Louis, even if Google deserves more credit than they do, they helped: the MetroLink and MetroBus system is a heck of a lot less frustrating now that almost everybody can get a low-end smartphone for free. Google Maps' integration with the Metro system is complete, and it's usually accurate, and it makes a huge difference. If you've got an Android phone in your pocket or purse (or, to a lesser extent, an iPhone, the mass-transit interface on its Maps app isn't as good) you can stand anywhere in the Metro area, ask for transit directions to anywhere else, and get good transfer-by-transfer and stop-by-stop directions. Those of you who've never tried it, try it some time!

But, I've got to say this: I've ridden the buses and trains in a lot of towns, and one thing is painfully clear to me: there is a huge difference between towns where the people who run the mass transit system are also riders themselves, versus towns where the people who run the mass transit system are people who drive. And we are clearly the latter.

It is driving me mad how much Metro depends on large buses that only run every 40 minutes or once an hour, when every transit expert in the world has found the same thing, that everybody who uses mass transit everywhere in the world judges their transit system almost entirely off of how often the buses run. If Metro would absorb the slightly higher labor costs and run smaller buses every 20 to 30 minutes, maybe they wouldn't have such a hard time getting tax increases passed!

But just as importantly, Metro St. Louis's management has a vision in their head of what the mass transit system is for. On my most cynical days, I describe it as a system that is designed to deliver low-cost domestic help to mansions in Ladue. Buses travel in a straight line with few stops through any majority-white area, then slow down to wiggle through majority-black areas in order to pick up any black woman who could conceivably have a job and deliver her to a job that doesn't pay enough for her to afford a car, at some mall or at some call center. If you aren't a 20-something or 30ish black woman trying to get to and from a call center or mall job on the first or second shift, you run into awkwardness at best: the system is just plain not designed for you.

Metro St. Louis's route designs assume that nobody wants to use the system for shopping or entertainment; they drop you off a long, hot (or cold) walk from any mall or cinema or theater, and some of the biggest concert venues, like Family Arena, can't be gotten to at all. Metro St. Louis's route designs assume that you are in bed by midnight; nobody works third shift, or attends any event that runs past 11pm, in the mind of whoever designed these routes. Metro St. Louis's management seems to take it for granted that nobody works Sundays, either, as if this were still the 1950s or something and we still had strong "blue laws." And, of course, whoever's fault it is, it's nothing less than intolerable that at no time of day or night can you get anywhere in St. Charles county, anywhere in Jefferson county, or anywhere that isn't within walking distance of a train station in Madison or St. Clair counties.

If Metro St. Louis's CEO and all of his or her direct reports were to spend one year traveling exclusively by mass transit, if they were to have to depend on their own transit system not just for their commute but for shopping and shows and socializing with friends? By the end of that year, we'd have an entirely different, much better transit system, one that met everybody's needs a lot better. Because, right now? I don't think they have any idea how frustrating their system is to use.

A Quick Thought While Watching the Chicago March

Sun, 20 May 2012 19:55:25 GMT

God knows how stupid this will sound, depending on how things turn out when the marchers reach McCormick Place, but I'm watching a little bit of the Chicago anti-war march provoked by the NATO summit there. Most of the police conduct looks like anything else you'd see at a routine, uneventful protest: lots of cops walking alongside the marchers, between them and the sidewalks, basic crowd-control, crowd-protection stuff. More of them are wearing helmets than I think makes any sense at this point, and even more of them are wearing visible armor vests, neither of which makes sense to me at this point, especially given the heat this weekend, but still pleasantly boring. Everybody looks miserably hot and exhausted on both sides.

But a little while ago, the protesters were being steered around a corner by the cops, presumably to make absolutely sure they didn't deviate from the approved parade route ... and at that corner, every single cop was in anti-riot helmets and, and here's the part that really caught my attention, every single one of them had their long anti-riot batons drawn and at the ready position.

If I'd been there, I would have wanted to stop at the barricade and ask one of them, at random, if he could spare a second to answer a question for me: "Officer, I'm not challenging your authority and I'm not going to cross this barricade. Can you help me with a question, though? In your personal opinion, not your supervisor's opinion, just your opinion, are the drawn, at the ready batons appropriate at this time? Do you, personally, think you need them, either to intimidate the crowd or because you think violence is imminent?" Either way, whether I got a "yes" or a "no" or a "no comment," I'd apologize for bothering him while he was working, thank him for his time, and move on. I wouldn't have been looking for an argument; I just really want to know?

So far, it's the only really weird-looking thing I've seen. Every protester and every other cop looks calm, if tired; that one squad looked like they were in a war zone. Everybody else looks, if anything, bored; they looked grimly terrified. I wonder what the hell they were thinking?

(This could all look either very stupid or very prescient in a couple of hours. It will pleasantly surprise me, and ever so slightly increase my faith in America, if there isn't a police riot when the protesters get to McCormick Place. This is an election year, peak "punch a hippy" season for Democrats.)

Are We Seriously Arguing About This? Yes, the Republicans are Social Darwinists

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 19:57:52 GMT

On some level, I'm startled that this argument is going on, but the news is full of Republican push-back against President Obama's speech, the other day, in which he compared Republican budget committee chairman Paul Ryan's annual budget proposals to Social Darwinism. Republicans and self-proclaimed centrists all over television, the print media, and the blogosphere are falling all over themselves to say that this insult is out of bounds, unfair. Several have drawn the comparison that saying that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are Social Darwinists is as unfair as saying that President Obama is a Muslim anti-colonialist Socialist.

Seriously?

Okay, let's take this seriously. I'll even take it seriously on their terms, and rather than give the whole history of the term and every example in which it's been cited, I'll do what the Cato Institute just did on their blog, and refer to Encyclopedia Britannica. As they quoted it it:

"According to the theory, which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the weak were diminished and their cultures delimited, while the strong grew in power and in cultural influence over the weak….The poor were the “unfit” and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success. At the societal level, social Darwinism was used as a philosophical rationalization for imperialist, colonialist, and racist policies..."

OK, you tell me: how is this an unfair comparison to the effect of the Ryan budget proposal that Mitt Romney is so thoroughly wedded to? It is, in fact, unambiguously Republican dogma, one of the few things that the whole party, that all factions of the party, agree upon, that the wealthy got there through superior virtue of some kind and deserve to keep all of their wealth. It is, in fact, unambiguously Republican dogma that people demonstrate their superior virtue and their right to that kind of wealth through all-against-all competition in which the losers are to be economically, if not literally, destroyed. And it is widespread Republican doctrine that if the policies of supporting winners over losers result in any imperialist conquest of other nations like it did in Iraq, or colonialist support of local dictators like it does in Nigeria, or racist policies like the mortgage industry's recent wholesale discrimination against black borrowers or the common police policy of only searching black male drivers for drugs has on black prison (and thus employment) rates, well, if what you want to do about that would in any way inconvenience society's winners, then that's unacceptable.

And those are the policies of the Ryan budget. It's short on details, but the only way to make the department-by-department, branch-by-branch numbers in it work is to further impoverish everybody who's currently impoverished, in order to preserve the most important prerogatives of Republican governance. In the Ryan budget proposals, there are only two legitimate government purposes that are so important that they cannot be cut. Billionaires in general and hedge fund and equity investors in particular don't give up any of their federal largesse, and in fact get more. And defense contractors and the large standing military, the things that give us the power to dictate terms to weaker countries, must be preserved and expanded. Literally everything else, from disease prevention to law enforcement to education to retiree pensions and healthcare, must be slashed to zero, if that's what it takes to protect the prerogatives of the powerful, the strong, the wealthy.

Now you tell me: whether they call themselves that or not, how is it unfair to call that Social Darwinism?

The Backstory to "Stand Your Ground"

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 03:55:20 GMT

On February 26th, (entirely self-proclaimed) "neighborhood watch captain" George Zimmerman of Sanford, Florida spotted a lone black teenager walking in the rain, and concluded, on no other evidence, that this was the only plausible suspect in a recent string of neighborhood burglaries. He called 911 (as he had done dozens of times lately) and (once again) cops told him they would be there soon; they specifically also told him not to do anything on his own, not to even the follow the kid, let alone confront him. Zimmerman complained to the 911 dispatcher that "these assholes always get away" and disregarded this legal order, chased the kid down, and, as 17 year old Trayvon Martin, who was only walking back to his dad's house from the nearest convenience store, screamed for help loudly enough that four people in nearby houses could hear him screaming, Zimmerman gunned the kid down.

When the police arrived, all they could do was ask Zimmerman if he had felt afraid. Why? Because under the law in Florida and 22 other states, a law called "Stand Your Ground," you're entitled to kill anybody who scares you. No, really; I am only barely oversimplifying this and not exaggerating it at all. Since "Stand Your Ground" passed, two killers per week, on average, have gone free just in Florida alone.

How can this be? Actually, it's not all that incomprehensible, if you know the backstory to the "Stand Your Ground" law. It wasn't unimaginable or inconceivable, it was merely wrong.

The backstory to "Stand Your Ground" starts with this simple fact: a tiny minority of Americans believe that if more people were walking around carrying concealed weapons, then at least some criminals would be afraid to commit street crimes, and the crime rate would go down. This belief has been disproved repeatedly and extremely thoroughly; there is no correlation, neither a positive nor a negative one, between the number of people carrying guns and the crime rate. It's a completely discredited idea, among sociologists and historians and criminologists. But this doesn't change the fact that several percent of the American voting public still believes it. And that's an important couple of percent. For one thing, they're very, very well organized -- and relentlessly determined to get their way. They're also disproportionately important in American politics because they're one of several fringe constituencies that the Republicans have to motivate to show up at the polls if they have any hope of winning. So there's been a steady stream of Republican and gun-lobbyist propaganda in favor of more people carrying guns for self-defense, and for those people to use their guns when confronted by criminals.

But as more and more places tried this, they ran into a problem, even with the few anecdotal cases that, they claim, prove their point: it was still, for all practical purposes, illegal to brandish a gun at someone, let alone fire it. Before you object, note that I said "for all practical purposes." What that means is that if you fired your gun, or even if somebody else saw you brandishing it, the burden of proof was (and, in 27 states, still is) on you to prove that you were justified; otherwise, enough evidence existed to put you away (or at least fine you heavily) for anything from improper use of a firearm up to and including felony assault or aggravated homicide. If you drew a gun on a burglar to keep him from stealing the $100 in your wallet, you would end up spending $1500 to $3,000 in legal fees to stay out of jail yourself.

To the National Rifle Association and other gun rights activists, this was a completely intolerable state of affairs. So they went to right-wing think tank ALEC (yes, that ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the same think tank that has written most of the anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-Hispanic, and anti-union bills for every Republican-controlled state legislature in the country these last two years), and asked them to write a model statute that would shift the burden of proof back onto the cops. They intended that statute to make it legally safe to use a firearm in self-defense, to make it functionally impossible for the cops or for the assailant or for the late assailant's family to criminally prosecute you or sue you if you were the one who was attacked, and you were only defending yourself.

They called the resulting model legislation the "Stand Your Ground" Doctrine because, among its many other protections for the person using a gun to defend himself, it removed the prior presumption that shooting someone or threatening to shoot them, when outside the home, was only acceptable if there was no other way to keep them from hurting you or someone else. Before this bill, if someone tried to mug you or rape you and you shot them, one of the things you were going to be asked to prove to keep your own backside out of jail was that you couldn't have otherwise escaped. Not any more! Now you don't have to look for any other way to escape or disarm them, you can just shoot.

Except, of course, that law enforcement has spent the last year learning, the hard way, in every state where the Stand Your Ground bill has been signed into law, that in the absence of any other witnesses, any shooter can claim that he felt threatened. Even in cases as cut and dried as shooting a kid half your size and half your age in the back as he was running away. Heck, at this point, the mugger can shoot you, as long as there are no witnesses, lift your wallet and your cellphone before the police arrive, and if he can say with a straight face "I thought he was reaching for a weapon," that's your mugger's get out of jail free card. Clearly, as with most arguments about guns in American, they didn't think this one all the way through.

"Responsibility to Protect" in Civil War Zones

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:35:42 GMT

I continue to be convinced that, when it comes to anything even vaguely connected to war, military affairs, or coercive diplomacy, the most important fact of history is the ferocious bipartisan determination to prove Donald Rumsfeld right and Colin Powell wrong, no matter how often Colin Powell's predictions end up being the ones vindicated by the facts.

A quick refresher course:

While at the US Army War College, Colin Powell did a historical survey of every single war in history that any democracy fought on either side of, dividing them into two categories: wars that the democracy won, and wars that the democracy failed to win, either fought to a tie or lost. He wanted to know if he could come up with a clear military doctrine for democracies, and he found one. Unsurprisingly, it was little more than a slight improvement on previous military-science research, from Caspar Weinberger's work all the way back to Von Clausewitz: a list of 9 pre-requisites, every single one of which a democracy must meet before the first shot is fired, or else the democracy loses: do everything possible to avoid military force (#1 and #4); persuade your own voters and the voters in other democracies to want to fight (#7 and #8); and plan in advance the attack strategy, the objectives that will signify victory, and how you intend to get out (#s 2, 3, 5, and 6). And having done all that, weigh what you hope to achieve against the cost of the only military strategy that has ever worked -- if it's not worth the cost of raising taxes, mobilizing every healthy military-aged male, and taking them all into the target country for half a decade or longer, then accept that you can't win and abort (#8 and, informally, #9). TL;DR version: do what we did in World War II, the last war we unambiguously won.

On the other side is a bi-partisan agreement among politicians and pundits, almost none of whom ever fought for their country let alone studied military science, that while fighting a Powell Doctrine war works, it can't possibly be the only thing that works. Because if the Powell Doctrine is the only thing that works, then war has to be a once or twice in a lifetime affair, at most, because no democracy can afford to fight a Powell Doctrine war more often than that without wrecking their economy. Why is that such a bad thing? The reason, say the bi-partisan politicians and pundits, that that's unacceptable is that there are so many bad things out there in the world that diplomacy and economic sanctions alone can't stop. Surely, they argue, a nation that can put a man on the moon (or, at least, that used to be able to put a man on the moon) can find some way for the President of the world's last remaining super-power to project force, when diplomacy and sanctions fail, in order to get his way, without having to convert the whole country over to a war footing for years on end! And while there were ideas and trial balloons floated by Madeleine Albright and others during the Clinton administration, Colin Powell's opponents crystallized their planned alternative during George W. Bush's administration, and thus it's called the Rumsfeld Doctrine.

The Rumsfeld Doctrine hypothesized that given sufficiently advanced technology and best-of-the-best training for elite special operations forces, a superpower ought to be able to find, or else if need be recruit, disaffected elements in the targeted country, and incite them to civil war. As they will be a tiny rebel force, we can count on their government slaughtering them, and then, under the UN's "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine, we can use the fact that they're losing their civil war as diplomatic cover for providing them with satellite and computerized intel and precision drone and stealth-fighter air cover, and covert special operations force ground support. With those advantages over the national army, Rumsfeld and his fans argued, any group of rebels, no matter how small and how unpopular in their home country, ought to be able to seize and hold the capital indefinitely. With enough such special operations forces units and enough drone air strikes, the Rumsfeld Doctrine argues, we ought to be able to credibly threaten any country that doesn't bow to our diplomatic and economic sanctions, and, if that threat isn't enough, replace them with a grateful, and thus friendly, government. As cheap as those things are, we ought to be able to do those things as often as the President wants.

The Rumsfeld Doctrine was a disaster in Iraq. It was a disaster in Afghanistan. Oh, we can pretend that both cases were victories, because the Rumsfeld Doctrine is right in one narrow regard: a tiny America-backed rebel force can topple any third-world government. What they can't do, after that, is govern the country, not without popular support at home, near-universal diplomatic support, and millions of pairs of American boots on the ground to protect that government, and to protect and provision the country, during reconstruction. The net result, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, ended up being that even worse, even more anti-American, governments end up being the ones that seize power at the end of the civil war after the old regime falls. It turned out, in Afghanistan and Iraq, that "Gideon's band" can topple a government, but they can't build a new one.

I worry that the Obama administration considers Libya to be a Rumsfeld Doctrine success. In Libya, we did do it a little differently. We made one concession to Powell and put more effort into diplomacy and coalition building before we went in. (Neo-cons will never forgive Obama for that. Having to have allies who agree to take the lead? Strikes them as an unacceptable limitation on Presidential power, it limits the US to only using military force when somebody else says we can. And a tool that can only be used when somebody else lets us use it is barely better than not having the tool at all.) Our covert troops on the ground were even more covert. Obama was very, very proud when Tripoli fell and made only unconvincing tut-tut sounds when US-backed rebels killed Qaddafi in cold blood. But has Libya been a success for the Rumsfeld doctrine? The news out of Libya in the last couple of months hasn't been any better than the news out of Iraq in 2004: sectarian and tribal militias are slaughtering each other, and elements of the old regime are massing across the border biding their time.

And, although no US newspaper or TV station will tell you this, that is why Russia and China used their UN Security Council veto power to turn down the US-backed motion that we have a "Responsibility to Protect" anti-Alawite rebels in Homs and elsewhere in Syria. I don't think they're just being cynical when they observe that, while the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine was promulgated after a genocidal civil war in sub-Saharan Africa, somehow it only gets invoked against oil-exporting states that the US has diplomatic problems with, and the facts are clearly on their side when they argue that the death toll among civilians in Libya, after our "Responsibility to Protect" intervention on behalf of the people of Benghazi, Libya is rapidly closing in on as many people as if we'd just let Qaddafi win; it's at best a net-break-even on human life and suffering, and will certainly be a net loss by the time the resulting Libyan Civil War grinds to a halt, who knows how many years from now.

In the days immediately following 9/11, neo-cons crowed that this meant it was only a matter of time before they got the wars they wanted. Afghanistan, which actually attacked us, was never more than an unwanted distraction from the wars they really wanted: Rumsfeld-Doctrine colonial adventures to replace anti-US governments in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. And, as the US has openly said that they intend to find some way around that Security Council veto, it looks like they were right; it's only a matter of time before our Nobel Peace Prize winning President finishes George W. Bush's dream of launching at least one more colonial adventure in the Middle East.

(Oh, and have you heard? According to the New York Times, Iran is pursuing Weapons of Mass Destruction! And is in contact with Al Qaeda! If we don't act now, the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud!)

The "Responsibility to Protect" UN doctrine was, as I said, first promulgated by then-outgoing President Bill Clinton. He counts his failure to send US troops to stop the genocidal Tutsi/Hutu civil wars in Rwanda and Burundi as the biggest mistake of his two terms in office. He, and others, argued that no matter what the UN Treaty originally said about aggressive war, there must be something the UN can do, there must be something the world's superpowers can do, there must be something the US can do, to stop genocidal slaughter of civilians - that it's happening in a sovereign country that isn't at war with anybody else can't possibly mean that the rest of us have to stand by and do nothing, he argued, and many others have agreed. I stand by what I said at the time: if you do not have the ability, you do not have the responsibility. You cannot be held morally accountable for something you were incapable of doing. And Colin Powell keeps being proven right: no, we cannot overthrow every evil government in the world, because the only kind of war that's actually capable of doing it is one that we can only afford to use the one or two times per generation that we come under attack ourselves. Even if post-Rumsfeld generals find a way to topple governments that slaughter their own people, we cannot afford the manpower and the money it would cost to reconstruct those countries afterwards, and without that reconstruction, the slaughter only ends up worse, not better.

How Would SOPA/PIPA be Enforced?

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:13:14 GMT

It's taken me a long time to feel like I even needed to say anything about the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act bills that are floating through Congress, even knowing (thanks to Wikileaks' Cablegate) that the US State Department is threatening every other country on the globe with crippling trade sanctions if they don't pass their own version of this bill this year. It's a horrific bill, but one I couldn't take seriously at first because it is, in every version floating around, as flatly impossible to obey as King Canute's legendary law forbidding the tide from coming in. No matter how much lobbying money is thrown at an impossible idea, no matter how many campaign contributions were made, no matter how much of the US's remaining export economy depends on the industry backing an impossible idea, I had a hard time taking seriously the idea that Congress would really, when push come to shove, try to ban all user-created content on the Internet: no more email, no more Twitter, no more Facebook, no more YouTube, no more LOLcats, no more discussion forums, no more comment pages on articles, no more blogs.

The only way to actually enforce SOPA or PIPA as written would be to do just that. SOPA and PIPA give the US Attorney General the unilateral authority to order not just any tweet or email or web page or blog post, but the whole site that hosts it, permanently off of the Internet if even one link is found on it, anywhere, that "facilitates" copyright infringement. That's a term that's been interpreted so broadly, in some court cases, as to include "linked to a web site where, by clicking on this button, then this button, then this button, you could find a link to a specific page on a different website, where, if you clicked down three layers from that page, you could find infringing content." When the lawyer arguing this was asked if there was any limit to that, he said no. He was laughed out of court, because it was pointed out that this argument, if accepted, outlawed the whole Internet, as the whole point of the World Wide Web was that, given enough clicks, you can navigate from any non-dead-end site to any page on the web. But SOPA and PIPA won't end up in court, because they don't create any actual judicial review process, or allow any judicial appeal: if anybody asks the Attorney General to knock an entire site off of the Internet for just this reason, and he or she agrees, it goes down, period, end of story. So the only way that any website on the Internet could comply with SOPA and PIPA is to never, ever allow anything to be posted to their site that could in any way be, or be decrypted to suggest how to find, a link to a site that might have on it, anywhere, an equally vague and hard to find link to infringing content. The process for guaranteeing the safety of each 140 character tweet, each 100px by 100px user avatar icon, each link-shortened URL to a baby picture on a picture hosting site, each text caption embedded in a video of a cute kitten, didn't link to or describe how to find any site? Can't be done. Especially can't be done if you do allow supposedly non-infringing links, because let's say you review the URL today, and tomorrow something else is up at that URL? And how do you review the URL anyway; does somebody have to go read every comment on every review on every product at Amazon.com if I link to Amazon? Can't be done.

But the law's going to pass anyway. Or so they say. And the Internet is Made of Cats. Sociologists and political scientists studying the Arab Spring have accepted this as literal truth, in a way: governments being threatened by the Arab Spring could shut down any website that was only useful to the opposition, but if the opposition used Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, no matter how badly architected those websites were for safe use by an illegal opposition, the governments couldn't block them -- blocking grandparents from seeing their grandbabies on Twitter or Flicker, blocking everybody in the country from seeing Maru or Keyboard Cat on YouTube, caused more political blowback than letting the activists use them. So no, not even in the post-9/11 national security state, not even the United States is going to enforce SOPA or PIPA as written. No, really, I meant it when I said it: it can't be done. Which made it hard for me to take the proposed laws seriously ...

Until I realized the only way they could be enforced.

The MPAA and the RIAA, Sony and Bertelsmann and Disney, et al, wave aside all claims that SOPA or PIPA will be used to ban all user-originated content. They say that the law is written to be as draconian, and instantaneous, and without appeal as it is because no other plausible law, nothing short of that that's been tried, lets them take down obviously infringing sites like Pirate Bay and Torrent Freak without them being able to set up new, mirrored sites faster than DMCA takedowns can take them off the air. They want a broad law that gives one person, the Attorney General of the United States, the authority and the power and the responsibility to know a pirate site when he or she sees one, and trusts that person to never abuse that power, to only use it to protect America's last remaining profitable export industry from never being able to sell more than one copy of every movie or song ever again. They want the rest of us to have the same trust that they obviously have: that this power will never be abused.

No Democratic appointee will ever find a whistle-blower report on the Drudge Report or Fox News websites that they don't like, find (or fabricate, or just baldly dishonestly allege) that there is an infringing link in a comment thread on one of the news articles, and order that site knocked off the Internet. No Republican appointee will ever find an anti-war or an anti-oil-industry news story they don't like on Democracy Now or MSNBC and order those websites taken off the Internet, permanently, the same way. Why can we trust this? Is there something in the law that would protect those websites from that kind of abuse? No. Is there anything that would penalize the Attorney General for doing that? No. Is there anything to stop them from doing it as often as necessary to shut down all political opposition that would publicize the fact that they'd done this, going into the next election? No. So why are we supposed to trust that it will never happen? Just "because." Because we need it not to. Because we need this law, or the pirates will sink our economy, so we'll just half to hope that it never happens.

It took me until today to realize that the rule of law, not men, has fallen into such disrepute that this may actually pass.

Santarchy Follow-up

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 02:01:42 GMT

I did skip the candy cane/lumps of coal idea, from the last post. (Not only was it bad theater, it occurred to me that it was also one more damned thing to have to carry around all day). But I did go as "Occupy Elf," as people were calling me all day. Instead of painting up a big protest sign (see "one more damned thing to carry," above), I took a small-to-mid sized white board and red, green, and black markers, so I could change my protest sign over the course of the day.

And, gods love her, one of the other elfs came up with a way to improve on it: as all 40 or 50 of us crowded into yet another bar, she would yell, "ELF CHECK!" "ELF CHECK!" "ELF CHECK!" "ELF CHECK!" and then, after enough "elf checks" got the other elfs, and some of the Santas, into "people's mic" mode, hand it off to me to lead them in:

"We are Santa!" (WE ARE SANTA) "We see everything" (WE SEE EVERYTHING) "We do not forget." (WE DO NOT FORGET) "We do not forgive." (WE DO NOT FORGIVE) "Expect us!" (EXPECT US!)

That's part of the Santarchy magic: bring along a bit of interactive theater to do, and at some point in the event, you can probably get a couple of other people to play along. Every time I changed the protest sign and did a lap of the room, people loved it. So between that, and walking from bar to bar with two to five other people chanting with me "Whose holiday?" "OUR HOLIDAY!" and "Show me what the holiday looks like!" "THIS IS WHAT THE HOLIDAY LOOKS LIKE!" and "Santa got bailed out!" "ELVES GOT SOLD OUT!" I was having the time of my life.

(No I didn't crowd out other people's fun. There was also lots of other people's leading the group in various chants and carols. And I was discreetly quiet when we passed the real OccupySTL march against the NDAA going the other way.)

It also helped that all of the afternoon and early evening venues were smoke free. And the half dozen cranberry-and-vodkas and three rum-and-cokes didn't hurt.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Talk Me Out of This Horrible Idea #santarchy #ows

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:46:05 GMT

Having lost too much weight to be a convincing Santa Claus, I ordered an elf costume for St. Louis Santarchy this year, it should get here today. And now I have a terrible idea: I want to run up to Dollar or Wag's for some posterboard and paint, and make a sign to go with it:

The Naughtiest 1%
Get 42% of the Toys

#OccupyXmas

I may even have time to get a couple of dozen fake lumps of coal and a couple of candy canes. I can ask people, especially kids, if they are in the nice 99% or the naughty 1%? If they say 1%, I give them a candy cane. If they say naughty, I give them coal, and explain that it's "austerity." "We can't take away the naughtiest 1%'s toys, because they're called 'job creators,' so all that's left for you is coal."

This is a no good horrible idea. It drags politics into what's supposed to be a fun event, especially here in town where it's never been as confrontational as it was originally intended to be when the Cacophony Society invented it. It breaks at least one of the rules of Santarchy, "Don't ____ with kids." But if I don't talk myself out of this, I may do it anyway.

Help talk me out of this?

How I, Personally, Judge Sex Scandals (NSFW)

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 05:00:51 GMT

First, let me lie to you: these are my opinions, it's okay with me if you disagree, I won't judge you harshly for disagreeing. Why did I just call that a lie? Because intellectually, that is what I believe about my own beliefs. What makes me think that I'm lying to myself when I say that, though, and what makes me think I'd be lying if I said that to you without disclaimer, is just how angry I get when I see a politician get savaged in the media for days at a time over shit I just think is completely unfair, unreasonable, or even if it's just shit that I think is no big deal, and how angry I get when I see someone skate on something that really pisses me off personally. I don't want to be angry at anybody who disagrees with me on any of the following, and I absolutely will hear any reasoned or emotionally honest argument for principles that contradict mine. I just can't promise to be 100% calm and non-judgmental about your opinions, just as I find out that I don't even want to try, any more than anybody else does, to be completely non-judgmental about some of the scandals themselves.

First, some principles, then I'll cite a few famous examples:

One: I really, really, really, more than anything else, give a shit about consent. Any sex scandal that whiffs of physical force pisses me off. Any sex scandal that even faintly hints of abuse of wealth, privilege, or any other form of power over the other partner pisses me off even more. If the accused didn't wait for consent or ask for consent, I'm angry; if they "asked" for consent under circumstances where the person who was asked faced punishment for saying no, I'm even angrier.

Two: I give a shit about favoritism. Even if the accused didn't offer anybody else the opportunity to benefit from their authority, if I find out that someone is accused of abusing their position to grant favors to someone that they've had sex with, I get very angry on behalf of all of the other people in the office who were wondering, "who do I have to blow to get ahead here?" and who find out that they were right, who have been told that blowing the boss is how you get ahead in life.

Three: It's not a deal breaker for me, but it's a bad sign if someone is accused of being callous or indifferent to people they voluntarily assumed responsibility for. That especially means the kids; you volunteered to have those kids, they didn't volunteer to be parented by you. Cheating on the mother or father of your children is one thing, good or bad, but doing so in a way that humiliates the spouse or that ruins life for the kids makes you a bad person, in my eyes. I give partial credit for the attempt, here; you tried to protect the kids from it afterwards and failed is better than you didn't give a shit if your kids got hurt by it.

Four: I care about official corruption, and so in theory I care if you spend company money or (worse) public funds on things like travel, hotel rooms, or meals to be with the person you love, especially if where you're working or the position you hold doesn't officially grant liberal "you can bring a friend along on our dime" perqs. On the other hand, I've softened my stance on this over the years, as it's come home to me how many violations of this principle are about protecting the higher principle of discretion to protect others; if somebody can't travel without it being official travel, and that's the only way to see someone they love, or if it's the only way they can see someone they love without having to put it out in public where their spouse or kids will be humiliated by it? I disapprove, but only mildly.

Five: As long as it doesn't violate any of the rules above, I honestly don't give a shit about "traditional values of marriage" and I don't give much of a shit about "sacred oaths" that are traditional, that people didn't get any input into, that were thus less than entirely voluntarily given, as in "I have to stand up and say these magic words to get the person I love onto my health insurance." A promise made under coercion is not morally binding. Given how young and dumb most people are when they swear out their marriage vows, I give even more slack. As Mark Twain said, marriage is two people who, in the grip of the most fleeting and insupportable of passions, rush directly to the altar of God and swear to remain that way forever.

Six: Other than worn-down, mostly meaningless ceremonial oaths, I do give a shit if you break your word. But if you at least tried to keep your word, I only barely give a shit.

Seven: I do not give a shit if you are "on my side" or not. I don't make excuses for bad behavior by Democrats, not even fellow liberals or progressives; I don't hold Republicans or conservative Democrats to higher standards.

Eight: I only give a shit about hypocrisy if it's something you built your career on, if it's something you spend a lot of time going on about. Some random politician who mostly campaigns on tax and regulation and foreign policy issues, who checked off a box on some "family values" questionnaire about "protecting traditional values" who had an affair? *yawn* Someone whose whole career in politics has been about "traditional family values" or, worse, who hounded some other politician out of office over their affair, who gets caught in an affair? That one pisses me off. Although, even then, it doesn't have to be a total deal-breaker; I can show some sympathy for someone who agonizes over it. Life is complicated. I feel no compassion towards someone who says "it's different when I do it," though.

Nine: As you might imagine from this, I honestly don't give a shit if you tell me "they lied about it." Of course they did. It would be unreasonable to expect them to do otherwise. Tell me how that lie callously or indifferently hurt someone, and it falls under #3, above, but otherwise, what did you expect them to do? When you catch a little kid with his hand in the cookie jar and cookie crumbs all over his face, and you ask him, "Did you take a cookie?" the kid doesn't lie; he answers the question he hears, which is, "Are you volunteering to be punished?" Telling the truth about it when you're caught, even if you didn't have to, can make a slight favorable impression on me, but I don't hold it against people when they harmlessly lie.

Ten: I have an unreasonable bias, one I'd complain about in other people, towards people in consensual non-monogamous relationships or other non-traditional relationships. On the one hand, I think this is an unfair bias of mine, because when the supposedly naturally monogamous insist on judging others harshly for their lack of monogamy, it pisses me off; I sometimes justify my prejudice by hoping that someone who has been a victim of prejudice will have learned tolerance from it; I know that I'm lying to myself about this because I know that what a lot of victims or prejudice learn is the importance of being the one who gets to enforce their prejudices. So while I can't prevent my feelings about this, I try hard to question myself when I find myself looking favorably on someone for this reason.

Now, those principles being stated, I'll address specific sex scandals in the comments; if you have one you want to ask about that I didn't bring up, do so as a direct reply to this journal entry so it gets its own comment thread, please.

I Dreamed Joe Hill Tweeted Me Last Night #OWS

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 22:42:43 GMT

What's going to happen to the Occupy Wall Street movement? From what I know of history, here's how I game it out:

Will It Just Fade Away? That's what Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and pro-Wall-Street politicians like Chuck Schumer, are hoping. That's probably not a bad bet on their part:

There's no sign that their fanclub, either online or at the scattered "Occupy West Nowheresville" sites, are packing up to reinforce the OWSers. Police can, and will, trivially easily do to each of those what they've already started to do to some of them. A trivial campaign of low-level harassment arrests, plus gradual loss of enthusiasm when it becomes obvious that nothing good is going to happen soon, means that within at most a couple of weeks, each of the scattered "Occupy" sites will be down to a handful of homeless people with cardboard signs -- a sight that Americans have been conditioned to ignore since Reagan.
Nor am I seeing any evidence, online or in the news, that the various "Occupy Potterville" groups are doing the one thing they could be doing that could make some difference: using their events to raise money to pay for food and medical supplies, and replacement camping supplies eventually, for the people in New York who are actually doing something useful. Remember that the original, main force behind OWS was an alliance of convenience between Adbusters and Anonymous, a tiny (albeit influential) non-profit magazine and a splinter group of 4channers whose ability to fund-raise was seriously crippled by the US government after their action in support of Wikileaks. For reasons intuitively obvious to the most casual observer, there's not a lot of big corporate or Wall Street money behind the growing call for accountability for Wall Street and other big corporations for the last several financial panics. Nor are the left-wing's few billionaires likely to underwrite OWS: George Soros and Warren Buffett are, respectively, a hedge fund guy and a Wall Street guy was responsible for the mortage bubble through his fraudulent investment ratings agency. If OWS main camp gets the money it'll need to sustain itself through the fall and winter, it'll be by raising small sums of money ... from the unemployed and/or otherwise broke. Good luck with that. Wild Card: A couple of national unions have gotten involved. But their money is tied up in places like Ohio and Indiana and Wisconsin, where the public-sector unions are fighting for their lives in the statehouses. Will they see OWS as a good use of their money?
And, frankly? We're at most a couple of weeks from the first hard freeze. After each round of pepper-sprayings and nuisance arrests, each batch of bailed-out protesters is going to ask themselves how badly they want to go back to camping in the snow and eating off of the ever-declining supply of hand-outs. If they don't see a lot of in-person and financial support for their sacrifices to that point, then each time a lot more of them will give up and go home.

So if nothing really big happens in the next couple of weeks, OWS will be a Jeopardy trivia question about the 20-teens, vaguely remembered by the ever-fewer historians of the American Left as a tiny, ineffectual group of protesters who tried, unsuccessfully, to tug Obama to the left during his 2012 re-election campaign.

If It Doesn't Dwindle to Nothing, Somebody's Getting Hurt. One distinct possibility is that Bloomberg, or Governor Cuomo, or the Department of Homeland Security for that matter (Anonymous terrifies the DHS), will say "enough is enough!" sooner rather than later, and send in the head-cracker squads to clear out Zucotti Park and any overflow sites. I think that anybody who could give that order, though, knows why that would be a bad idea. Especially given the high likelihood that the movement will implode on its own before it can achieve anything, why risk that? But even if the black-body-armor squads hold off a good long time, if OWS does continue to grow? If all the Occupy Nothing That Matters groups start fund-raising for OWS's NYC operations? And if a significant number of the people arrested in Boston and St. Louis and elsewhere are radicalized by it instead of getting cowed or discouraged, if one by one they get on buses and go down to the real OWS site where they can have the numbers on their side and where the actual support will be concentrated? If, long shot here, the AFL-CIO were to call on all of its members, not just the ones in NYC but all over the country, to come down to Manhattan and Occupy Wall Street?

That would be huge. And volatile. Somebody, sooner or later, would get hurt. And when it does, when the American people see that on the news, that'll be a gut-check moment.

If It's Not the Protesters Who Get Hurt, We're Screwed. When the Greeks had their first round of riots, because the EU is doing to them what Wall Street is doing to us? A group of anarchists stormed a bank along the march route, murdered a bunch of the bank's branch employees, and set the building on fire. One columnist has already reported that several people in financial services upper management have called him and asked him if that's going to happen here. I don't think it will. But I'm uncomfortable about the fact that I can't rule it out. There is a lot of anger building over the fact that guys like Jamie Dimon and Len Blankenfein and Timothy Geithner can walk the streets without feeling any of the fear that their victims have felt; just the other day, the otherwise usually sane if wacky blog BoingBoing.com ran a tongue-in-cheek but eerily detailed call to kill every banker and broker in America and eat the corpses. For the gods' sake, people, even Operation Rescue's Army of God faction and the Aryan Nations don't endorse cannibalism! But that's how much anger has built up since the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble cost everybody everything.

People all over the country are saying, "I got robbed of everything I had saved up, who took it?" And the guy next to them says, "Don't look at me, I got robbed of everything I had saved and everything I had, I'm homeless now." And the next guy says, "Don't look at me, they took my savings, my house, my job, and my kid's insurance, and now my kid is dead." And the next guy says, "Don't look at me, my investments were wiped out, and I'm having to scrape by on $400,000 per year." That guy who's a few years from retirement with a wiped-out 401K, and the guy who's effectively homeless, and the guy with the dead kid are looking at that guy with narrowed brows, now; he should have shut his mouth before he ended up on WhiteWhine.com.

So (even though I think this is the least likely prospect!) let's consider the possibility that Angelo Mozilo pulls up alongside a crowd of tens of thousands, including homeless Iraq war vets with PTSD and pissed-off union workers, gets out of his car against his security detail's advice, and starts haranguing them about class warfare and politics of envy and calls them commie hippies and tells them to take a bath and get a job ... and they turn on him. Let's say the rally organizers are on the other side of the crowd, and some agitator for Breitbart (like the one at the National Air and Space Museum the other day) starts something he can't stop, and the crowd over-runs that guy's security detail, kills him and everybody with him, and drags the bodies down the street to be hung from a traffic light and burned. Everybody in America is going to see that, and over the next day and a half, one of two things happens. Most likely, everybody is revolted by it, condemns OWS as terrorists, anybody who hasn't fled by then gets Tienanmen'ed by tanks, and the American people cheer that they've been made safe ... and then we continue to slide into a banana republic. But what could happen, and would be even worse, is that a hundred million American victims of the banksters and the hedge funders looks at that smoldering corpse and goes, "hey, that looks really good." And it catches on. And America has its own Reign of Terror, and everybody with a clean shirt gets killed, and we slide into dictatorship in the aftermath. Let us sincerely hope, either way, that it is the protesters who get hurt.

Second-Most-Likely Outcome: It Gets Big, and THEN the Protesters Get Hurt. Even if they stay completely peaceful, government patience with a tens-of-thousands (or bigger!) protest site that shows no sign of shrinking will eventually run out. Just as Wisconsin governor Scott Walker eventually ordered his police and national guard to clear away the protesters (and was, thankfully, disobeyed), if this thing is still blocking traffic and scaring rich people and making a lot of noise by Thanksgiving at the latest, Bloomberg or the Department of Homeland Security is going to say enough is enough. But there aren't enough cops in the country to peacefully, professionally arrest a hundred thousand people. If it comes to that, they will disperse that crowd with something that looks a lot like military force: tear gas and freezing-water cannons and LRAD sonic blasters at the very least, barrages of stun grenades and automatic-fire rubber bullets and one holy heck of a lot of black-armor squads with truncheons and dogs as well in all likelihood. And I don't care how careful they try to be (and, as we've already seen in NYC, it won't always be all that careful), against a crowd that size, they're going to kill some of them. America will finally have a Rachel Corrie, a Furkan Dogan, on its own soil, quite possibly killed on live TV by American cops in defense of the banksters. Based on the history of such operations, I'd say the statistically most likely body count is around seven, including at least one highly-decorated war hero and at least one little kid.

Why a Dead War Hero, a Dead Kid, and Five or so Dead Hippies is the HAPPY Scenario: And then the protests are over, but then the politics really begins. Why do I say that? Because it's come to this before. Let me give you at least two examples:

Once upon a time, there was this thing in America that was, briefly, called the Bonus Army. For World War I combat veterans, the Great Depression started early; they faced the kind of discrimination some of you remember after the Vietnam War, and were mostly unemployed and homeless long before the stock market collapse that plunged the rest of the country into the mass unemployment. At one point, they had all been promised a deferred enlistment bonus, and it had never been paid. Eventually they were given it ... in the form of a savings bond that they couldn't cash. So the VFW, and other veterans' groups, called up an unarmed but uniformed group of 17,000 combat veterans, and 26,000 of their family members, to come to Washington and camp on the National Mall, within walking distance of the congressional office buildings so they could all lobby for the bonus, and from which they could march in uniformed parade protests. With Hoover in the White House, they were just plain never going to get that bonus. Eventually the US Attorney General and a US Army general took the decision out of the President's hands, and took it upon themselves to order the police and the 12th Cavalry to remove the Bonus Army from the Mall. Dozens were injured; two died. When Hoover ratified his underlings' decision, the Bonus Army retreated ... and within a year, the New Deal had passed. The American people's revulsion at what the Army and the cops did to the Bonus Army was, by most accounts, the deciding factor that put Roosevelt in the White House and that made Congressional opposition to the New Deal politically untenable.

But I can give you a better example.

They hardly ever mention this in any American history course, so hardly anybody remembers that until very recently, as such things go, it was illegal to strike in this country. Early in labor history, the American Federation of Labor tried lobbying politicians for some kind of compromise, some way for people who were trying to bargain collectively to apply some pressure to employers short of a strike but that might do some good; even that watered-down compromise was dead on arrival. The Congress of Industrial Organizations campaigned for pro-labor candidates in both parties' primaries, hoping to get enough pro-labor politicians elected to change the law; they were outspent on elections by the mining trusts and the banking trusts and lost basically every fight.

Enter Big Bill Hayworth of the radical anti-capitalist International Workers of the World: he got it done. How? The Wobblies, as they were called, realized that a couple of dozen, or even a couple of hundred, strikers were easily dispersed, but no company security force, no police force, not even most national guard forces, could arrest their way out of a strike by tens of thousands. So the Wobblies picked one strike at a time, and Big Bill Hayworth would call every Wobbly in America to hop a bus or a freight train and come to that strike; as fast as the bulls arrested them, the Wobblies could fill back in. Eventually the jails would be full of Wobblies, who would break out the song books written for them by master filksinger Joe Hill, who taught these jolly, lovely, and deeply radicalizing songs to every other prisoner in the jail. Every mass arrest doubled the Wobblies' numbers. The cops, and the corporate security forces, went into full panic mode; they had no idea what to do against an enemy that had no fear whatsoever of getting arrested.

(To this day, you can scare the heck out of the FBI by calling yourself a Wobbly. Anonymous are the new Wobblies, I think. I think that when a cop sees you in that Guy Fawkes mask, as far as he's concerned, you've shown up in an Official Terrorist Uniform. You might as well have handed him a signed, notarized release form giving him permission to gas you and beat the crap out of you.)

Eventually, the state of Utah "solved" the Wobbly problem the hard way: they framed Joe Hill, the most popular public figure the Wobblies had, for the murder of a cop. And executed him by firing squad. His last words to his fellow Wobblies were, "Don't mourn, organize!" but the Wobblies were over, not long after that. But, as the song written after his death says, "I never died, said he" -- the police over-reaction to the Wobblies' peaceful mass protests, and how that looked to the public, are why we have a legal right to strike.

So What's the Bottom Line? Unless the people cheering for OWS start making some actual sacrifices to sustain and grow the main rally site in Manhattan, probably nothing happens, we continue our slide into collapse, and over the next decade or so we become a backwater Third World kleptocracy like Mexico. Probably the same thing happens if there is massive police brutality and the public sides with the cops. If the cops do something really stupid and the American people side with the victims, the best we can hope for is a couple of years' worth of some of our neighborhoods going up in flames, like Detroit and L.A. did in the 60s, and gods help us all of it spreads beyond that. But if the people cheering for OWS do start showing some serious commitment, and the main rally gets so big it can't be ignored ... then as long as the protesters stay 100% peaceful, there is still a slight chance for real Americans to win against the plutocrats. Maybe. No guarantee, but it's the closest thing we do have left to HOPE for Change We Can Believe In.

By Way of Clarification: Chickenhawkery

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 16:56:16 GMT

The nation you are a citizen of is, or was, at war, and you are, or were, between the ages of 18 and 35 at the time and eligible to enlist:

	Fought or Tried to Fight	Intentionally Avoided the Fight
Opposed the War	Willing war criminal. Not the lowest form of life, but still, wtf? I have it on good authority that, especially in Redneckistani America, "honor" requires you serve whether you agree that the war is legal and desirable or not, and you obey every order you're given, whether that order is legal and moral or not. So I can retain some tiny modicum of respect for standing up for, and risking your life for, that value, however twisted that I think that value system is. And I do, in fact, think that that value system is pretty twisted.	Earns my highest respect. Even when I disagree.
Supported the War	Earns my highest respect, if I agree. If I think the war was itself a crime, I can still try to keep my mouth shut and respect those who "honor your service," but I still personally think you're a bad person.	Lowest form of life on earth. Utterly and completely beneath my contempt. Not someone I would trust to hold my wallet while I was watching them, let alone in any position of authority over others or responsibility for other people's lives.

You may disagree, but this is how I feel.

The Fifth Stage of Grief for the Middle Class Way of Life

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 08:42:59 GMT

Denial: Yes, I know that they're breaking the unions, and laying people off left and right. But we're the strongest, smartest, most productive people on earth! Our way of life will survive, it has to! Anger: They can't get away with this! Take to the streets! Bargaining: Maybe if we adopt some of their proposals, create something called New Labor, or become Third Way Democrats, they'll let us keep our middle class way of life? Despair: Oh, god, no, they won't, not after the bankers successfully blackmailed us into covering 100% of their losses, and certainly not after Citizens United. And Obama keeps selling us out. I'm so depressed, I can't even watch the news any more.

Those were all natural stages of the grieving process for the way of life that the G.I. Generation, the Greatest Generation, intended to leave to us as their legacy. The time period from roughly 1946 to 1972, in America and in the UK and in Japan and in parts of western Europe, was one of the rare times in human history where people -- in this case, the people who lived through the Roaring 20s, the horrors of Prohibition gangsterism, the further horrors of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the even further horrors of World War II -- set out to build for us a world where nobody was so poor that they had nothing left to lose, and where nobody was so rich that they were above the law.

It was a beautiful world. It was a dream worth fighting for, and they fought for it. It was better than what we have to day. But it's been hit by one hammer blow after another since the OPEC oil crisis of 1973. And now, that dream is dead. You've had your time of denial in the 1980s and 90s, and your time of anger during the second Bush administration, and you spent the whole 2008 election cycle and the almost three years since then bargaining. Which is why most of you have already reached despair. And that's good. It was necessary to your healing process. But now, maybe, it is time to move on to the final stage of grief for that lost egalitarian dream: Acceptance.

The winners, the right wing Democrats and the Republicans, New Labor and the Tories, have said it out loud, and repeatedly: they consider the "middle class" to be people between the 85th and 95th percentile of income, and everybody below that to be poor. And as several of them have said lately, they deeply resent the generosity with which they allow poor people, in America and elsewhere, to cling to unnecessary luxuries ... like air conditioning. And a telephone. And a refrigerator. They resent that they let you keep those luxuries, which means if you're not in the 85th percentile of income for your country, you better take it for granted: those luxuries are going away. Period. In the post-Citizens United world, a world where the people who fund the only candidates who can win in either party's primaries are universally convinced that any resources that are going into lifting the bottom 85% of society out of poverty are wasted resources, where that's taken for granted by vast voting majorities of the elected representatives of both parties no matter what else they quibble about? In that world, no amount of denial, or anger, or bargaining, nor despair; neither angry violence nor peaceful protest; neither inspirational speeches nor cynical compromise, is going to change that.

It's a done deal. Maybe it's been a done deal, as some people warned us at the time, since Reagan dissolved the Professional Air Traffic Controllers' Organization, but whether or not it was then, it certainly is after Citizens United. And the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can get on with what's really important. Maybe, for you, that's still a life in politics, if what you care about are other issues, like women's rights, or the environment, or whatever. If not ... and for me, if we can't get that right, it's mostly not ... if not, for the rest of you who are like me? It is time for us to get on with planning for what our new lives are going to be like once the changes are done.

Welcome to the rest of your life. Specifically, welcome to this: Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh's 2006 book, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. If you haven't done so yet, you need to read this book. I don't know how many of you read the last book I begged you all to read, Nick Taylor's American Made. I get the sense it was maybe a quarter of you. But if you want to know what your life is going to be like if you aren't already in the 85th percentile of American life or up, you cannot do better than to read this book, and I'll tell you why.

Sudhir Venkatesh is a sociologist with some training in economics who dedicated eight years of research (1995-2003), most of it embedded with his subjects living and working alongside them, to trying to understand better than has ever been understood before how it is, exactly, that people survive in an urban ghetto: what do they do all day, where does the food that feeds them come from, how do they survive the brutal winters and the summers, how do they deal with crime in a neighborhood where, at most, the cops come every 20th or so time you call them, and never stay longer than an hour or two before going back to some neighborhood that actually has property values left to protect? What he found surprised him; if you haven't lived that life, it'll probably surprise you several times, too. But more about that later; here's why it's important to you:

The older people in this south Chicago neighborhood, a couple of blocks from where Cabrini Green used to be, reminded him that they remembered a time when, due to harsh segregation both of housing and economics, south Chicago had black poor people, a thriving black middle class, and a modest group of wealthy blacks. When housing desegregation came, those middle class and rich people left that neighborhood, commuting back in to their old family churches but otherwise never seen again ... and that was in the 1960s. The neighborhood he studied is one that is almost entirely literally post-economic, in exactly the way that your life is going to be: a place with few honest imports, and few honest exports, a world down to its last couple of people living anything that you or I would recognize as a middle class way of life. A world where only 4% of the population has the luxury of never doing business with people who are, at least technically, criminals ... not coincidentally, the 4% of the population who have jobs nowhere near the neighborhood and who don't socialize with anybody near where they live. A world where technically 20% of the population was unemployed even before the 2007 financial collapse, and where 40% were unemployed by the broader (U-6) measure of unemployment. But on the other hand, it's also a world where almost literally everybody works, actually works, at least an 8 hour day, frequently a 10 to 16 hour day ... just, mostly, off the books, getting paid 25¢ to $2.00 a day plus barter.

And yet, they live. They, and their parents, and in some cases their grandparents, have lived without anything you would recognize as a middle class standard of living for longer than most of you have been alive. One that goes almost entirely without reliable health care, and certainly goes without anything resembling honest law enforcement. A life that includes bouts of sleeping in abandoned buildings or basements or alleys for nearly everybody, at least a couple of times in their lives, lives that are shorter than you were lead to expect and you're not going to get now. They come to the bus stop after the last bus has left, or hang out on stoops of abandoned buildings during the day, or make out with each other on thown-away alley couches because, crammed 20 or 30 people per house, that time outdoors is the only privacy they get. (If you think Facebook is eroding your privacy, wait until you find out what poverty will do to it.) And the ghetto is a horrifically awful place for children, and they know that; even the prostitutes and the drug dealers struggle with how can they better provide for their children with no more resources than they have and no more help than they're going to get, without sacrificing what little income the community has that feeds those children?

It is not a life that you would want, although if you're a majority voter in the 85th percentile of income and up, it is a life you think is entirely fair for people who deserve less than the truly deserving do, the 15% of us you consider to be the only productive members of society. And it is, as that majority of the upper-middle-class and the wealthy will certainly argue, a life that is humanly possible, and one that has love in it, and even occasional moments of happiness, for almost everybody. And if you're not in the 85th percentile by income or above already, and you don't know how you, personally, will live, when the people you think of as "middle class" and that your rulers think of as "the poor" or "the working class" are reduced to ghetto levels of poverty and scarcity and danger? This is the best book that I've found, yet, to get you started about asking yourself this question: when it comes to that, which of these people do I want to be like? How will I live?

Will you be like one of the three truly powerful women he got to know, in the neighborhood -- women who owned big but run-down houses free and clear, who operated off-the-books boarding houses to the hustlers and prostitutes? Or will you be one of the prostitutes, or will one of your family members be one of the prostitutes who bring home the money so that once in a rare while the family can afford some fenced black-market penicillin or the occasional tooth extraction? Will you be one of the three or four shade tree mechanics per neighborhood, undercutting the above-board garages while paying a couple of bucks a day in protection money to the local street gang so you can work unmolested in an alley, giving the corrupt cops deep discounts on their oil changes so they don't run you in? Will you be the woman who runs an illegal unlicensed catering business, selling $2 lunches to the construction workers around town who work on the rich peoples' houses and office buildings, or one of the army of street hustlers getting paid $2 a day plus lunch to hand-deliver those meals for her? Will you be one of the hustlers who interviews and vets homeless people, getting paid a small commission by the property owners of the empty properties, to find reliable homeless people willing to get paid $1 to $2 per week plus free rent to sleep in the basements of those properties to ward off the copper thieves? Or will you be one of those homeless people? Or will you be one of the less reliable homeless people, who get paid $1 a week or less and the bartered right to use a store's bathroom, store your stuff in its storeroom, sleep under cardboard in the alley behind it, and sleep indoors on the stockroom floor during (and only during!) the worst couple of nights of the year, in exchange for a promise to be there, in that alley, from sundown to sunup to call the police or the fire department or the street gang if needed? Will you join the gang, and provide contract negotiation services between hustlers and their clients, and security that sometimes does extend beyond the protection racket to the trying-to-be-above-board stores? Will you own one of those stores? Or will you be the guy selling (probably shoplifted) socks and underwear for $2 as you walk down the street or in the park? (Or, to pick an example I see every time I take the train, the guy selling pirated DVDs of newly released movies for the same price?) Will you be one of the storefront pastors who try to keep peace in the neighborhood, and try to provide for the children, even though most of your salary and all of your church's rent are covered by the $2000 per gangland funeral you collect?

Unless you are already in the 85th percentile or above, you need to read about these people's lives, and ask yourself which of their niches you will fit into when the ghetto comes to you. Because only when you find one or two that you could be comfortable in can you start to plan, and only once you start to plan can you begin to be prepared, and only when you're prepared can you put your mind at rest. Only then will you be ready to get on with the rest of your life in what reduced standard of life, like the reduced standard of life after any loss, will pass for happiness. Only then will you be ready for acceptance.

Will They Vote to Abolish St. Louis?

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 05:36:07 GMT

In a couple of hours, polls open on a local election, one forced on the city of St. Louis, against its will, by rural voters, in a campaign funded by a rural investment multi-millionaire. Because rural state voters outnumbered city voters by a wide margin, the cities of St. Louis, Missouri and Kansas City, Missouri, must hold regular elections on this question: will the city commit suicide, yes or no?

The issue in question is the local earnings tax. People who live inside the city limits love it, for the same reason people all over America love hotel and motel taxes: it's a tax that they mostly don't pay, one paid mostly by people who don't get to vote on it. That's less true, though, of the earnings tax; unlike tourism taxes, most of the people who pay the earnings tax are people who live in the city. But it has always grated on people who live out in Whiteflightville and Rural Redneckistan that, if they commute into St. Louis or Kansas City for their job, the city gets to charge them income tax. The amount involved is tiny, 1%. And I don't see how anybody in their right mind can argue that the people who are paying that tax don't benefit, to that tiny amount, from the existence of the cities, if only because they have jobs, jobs that wouldn't exist if the city itself didn't exist. So no, no matter how many redneck millionaires and white flight exurbanites whine and cry about it, I don't think it's an unreasonable tax. Don't want to pay a 1% payroll tax on your job at some high rise corporate headquarters? Go to work for some high rise corporate headquarters that's out there in Redneckistan -- oh, wait, there aren't any. Because those kinds of businesses need cities. Which cost money. Deal with it.

If we're only talking about a 1% payroll tax, why am I calling this a suicide pact for the city if they fail to renew it? Because that tiny 1% payroll tax accounts for one third of all city government revenues. If it goes away, the city will face two choices: raise all other taxes and fees by 50%, from parking meter fees and garbage collection fees to property taxes and sales taxes, or else eliminate 1/3rd of everything, no exceptions. Every third police station, closed. Every third police car on patrol, sold off. Every third fire station, closed; every third fire truck, sold off. Every third pothole, permanently unpatched. Every third school, permanently closed; every third teacher, permanently laid off. And I do mean permanently, too: thanks to that obnoxious state constitutional amendment, no city may ever impose a new earnings tax; if it fails once, it fails forever unless Missouri voters, state wide, vote again to amend the constitution to take it back.

If you think that everything east of Skinker should look like Kinloch looks after the airport took away its tax base, vote to repeal the earnings tax. If you think that the city of St. Louis needs to be as empty of jobs, bombed out, full of sick people, horrifically illiterate and over-run by armed thugs as East St. Louis became after the Illinois state legislature took away their entire tax base, vote to repeal the earnings tax. It's your suicide, city voters: you get to decide whether you live or die, today.

Side Effects

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 22:06:26 GMT

I read a fascinating book, a while back, called When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store by Elaine Abelson. Here's the story it tells, and what (I think) it may have to do with the Tea Partiers' refusal to back down on their rhetoric even after the assassination attempt on Gabrielle Giffords.

At the dawn of the industrial age, factories started churning out products for the home that had been previously hand-made by wives and their servants, in the home, and the problem arose of how to persuade wives to come in and see that the factory-made products were better than the ones they were making at home, more uniform in quality than the ones they were making at home, and actually cheaper than the materials cost, alone, of the products they were making at home. And what they developed was the Department Store: a brilliantly lit, fantastically delightful gigantic building, made as pleasant to visit and to hang out in as it could be made to be, where women could come and see the newest factory goods, try them out, and be persuaded to buy them. Then they had to staff them with enough people to handle the customers, including both salespeople and what we now euphemistically call "loss-prevention specialists."

It worked at getting the merchandise into the womens' hands, but it had a glaring drawback: operating the stores themselves was insanely expensive. And as long as women could comparison shop, they could force the department stores to bid against each other in a destructive race to the bottom, until the goods were selling for less than was necessary to pay the upkeep and the payroll for the store. So the stores eventually invented "impulsing selling:" make the store as hypnotic as possible, make it a total sensory overload environment, advertise "loss leaders" to bring women in, sell the loss leaders at the back of the store, and on the way back to the door, hard-sell products at a high enough mark-up to cover the store's expenses.

This worked at making the stores profitable, but it also had a glaring drawback: store detectives found that fewer and fewer of their shoplifters were the semi-professional criminals who had made up the shoplifting class before. Now, the vast majority of their shoplifters were respectable middle-class women, upper-middle-class women, even wealthy women. These women had regular accounts at the stores they were stealing from. They bought things from those stores all the time. They had frequently just bought three items, on the same visit, for every item that they stole. They almost all had more than enough money on them to buy the items they'd just stolen. So they put the best detectives and the best psychologists they could hire on the job of finding out what the heck the women were thinking when they risked their position in society and risked their husbands' reputations over trifles, and finally had to conclude that the women weren't lying when they said: they hadn't consciously stolen those goods. They weren't thinking of anything when they did it; they weren't thinking, period, not at all. They were in a trance when they did it.

The stores tried toning down the level of trance-inducing sensory overload ... and found that the impulse purchases dried up. Finally they cranked the sensory overload back up, and adopted a "harm reduction" type strategy: when particular upper-class and middle-class women could be confirmed to have stolen certain items, simply mail a bill for the items to the womens' houses; the vast majority of them could be easily embarrassed into paying. (Although even then, it occasionally fell to the people in charge of those departments to persuade the women to search their own pockets -- no, you really did take this, yes, it really is in your pocket. They were in that much of a trance when they did it.) What the Victorian department stores had learned, to their chagrin, was that any sales technique that left customers with enough intact free will to prevent rampant theft left them with enough intact free will to resist high pressure sales.

Fascinating, no? Now, here's what I think this has to do with the Tea Party.

When Holy Saint Ronald Wilson Reagan the Infallible and Great, Savior of the Free World and Conqueror of the Communists, Blessed Patron Saint of the God's Own Almighty American Dollar, was sworn into office in January of 1981, it was his holy and sacred promise that cutting taxes on the wealthy and deregulating business would eliminate all of the problems in America: newly freed businesses and investors would hire us all to make products for each other, and we would all be happy, healthy, safe, and free. But in the wake of a whole series of back-to-back gigantic nation-wide Ponzi schemes, suddenly Saint Ronald doesn't look so infallible. People were starting to wake up to the fact that when freed from all taxation and regulation, the nation's wealthy have exactly zero inclination to hire us all to make goods for each other. What they do with that freedom is to trick us, over and over again, into piling all of the nation's wealth into a dozen or so piles, and then play a rigged game of musical chairs: at the end of each game, a dozen or so people, at least half of them the previously wealthy, own everything and the rest of us lose our entire life's savings.

Saint Ronald's ideas were so popular in the 1980s and 1990s that they became the ruling ideology of not just the Republican Party, but of the post-Clinton Democratic Party as well ... and now they have been discredited. Which leaves the people who were enjoying those global Ponzi schemes, who enjoyed that hypomanic game of musical chairs, with a problem: how do they get people to keep voting for an ideology that has been entirely and thoroughly discredited? And their first attempts were pretty pathetic, and failed utterly in 2006 and in 2008. But now they've got one technique that works: fear. Deploy a multi-billion dollar campaign, funded by the dozen or so wealthy guys who won the last couple of rounds of musical chairs over all the world's wealth, in the world's greatest propaganda campaign, to persuade as many people as possible that the Death Panels are coming.

Sure, Republican ideals have failed; they poll horribly and only a tiny handful of the most clueless and elderly Republican and right-wing Democratic elected officials are still talking about them, still trying to make the case for that failed ideology. What all of the prominent spokespeople are saying, instead, is, never mind our failures, never mind our laughable ideology, just remember this: if you don't put us back in power, the Death Panels will kill your babies, the Death Panels will kill your parents and grandparents, and the first time you get old or get sick, the Death Panels will kill you, too.

It's not actually possible to persuade sane Americans that this is literally true. But it turns out to be possible to persuade a working majority of Americans to be uncomfortable with the idea that it might be true, to doubt their own confidence that it isn't true, to vote Republican just in case the Republicans are right that the Death Panels are coming. However, this solution comes with a drawback: there are people out there who are so crazy, so suggestible, or so already inclined to fear Government Death Panels for their own reasons, that it is possible to persuade them that the Government Death Panels really are coming, no really, no doubt about it. And those people, as soon as the Death Panels nonsense started, behaved the way you, frankly, would behave if you really believed that the Death Panels were coming for your mother, for your baby: you would form a resistance movement and start assassinating the pro-Death-Panel government officials.

The Tea Party spokespeople and candidates have painted themselves into this corner: they have discovered that no line of rhetoric they can devise is powerful enough to persuade enough people to keep voting for Reaganomics, unless it's also powerful enough to persuade dozens of lone crazies to run around assassinating Democrats. This leaves the rest of us in the awkward position of having to persuade them to voluntarily give up their only chance of winning, for conscience's sake. You may quite accurately guess, I suspect, how likely I think it is that they will volunteer to lose in order to save however many dozens (or more) of the lives of people they disagree with.

Right Wing Terrorism: It Works.

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 06:13:49 GMT

Supreme Court rules that women have a right to 1st and 2nd trimester abortions with no more restrictions than are necessary to make the procedure safe, and to 3rd trimester abortions when medically necessary.
Right wing politicians, pastors, and commentators describe abortion as murder, as killing of babies. They warn that America will be destroyed and all Christians will die if Something Isn't Done. They announce that the political process has failed.
"Lone crazies" start showing up at anti-abortion rallies carrying guns.
Right wing politicians, pastors, and commentators insist that this is the lone crazies' 2nd Amendment right.
Repeat step 2.
"Lone crazies" start blowing up abortion clinics.
Right wing politicians, pastors, and commentators look the other way, and/or point out that nobody has been hurt yet, and/or dishonestly insist that liberals are engaging in similar tactics, and/or insist that liberals are over-reacting.
Repeat step 2.
"Lone crazies" start assassinating abortion doctors.
Right wing politicians, pastors, and commentators insist that this isn't their fault, that inciting violence is their 1st Amendment right, that nothing they've said was meant to be interpreted as a call for violence, that they've done nothing wrong.
Repeat step 2.
Bombings continue. Assassinations continue.
Medical students stop signing up for classes in abortion procedures. Abortion ceases to be available in almost all counties in the United States.

Despite premature celebration of "permanent Republican majority," Democrats win Congress in 2006 and White House in 2008.
Right wing politicians, pastors, and commentators describe Democrats as radicals, communists, fascists, murderers, terrorists. They warn that if Democrats remain in office, your children will be murdered by the government. They warn that if Democrats remain in office, your mother will be murdered by the government. They warn that if Democrats remain in office, all surviving Americans will be enslaved if Something Isn't Done. They announce that the political process has failed.
"Lone crazies" start showing up at anti-Obama rallies carrying guns.
Right wing politicians, pastors, and commentators insist that this is the lone crazies' 2nd Amendment right.
Repeat step 2.
"Lone crazies" start vandalizing and firing shots into Democratic politicians' local headquarters.
Right wing politicians, pastors, and commentators look the other way, and/or point out that nobody has been hurt yet, and/or dishonestly insist that liberals are engaging in similar tactics, and/or insist that liberals are over-reacting.
Repeat step 2.
"Lone crazies" assassinate Democratic politicians.
Right wing politicians, pastors, and commentators insist that this isn't their fault, that inciting violence is their 1st Amendment right, that nothing they've said was meant to be interpreted as a call for violence, that they've done nothing wrong.
?

We know how this story ends, don't we? They're not going to stop, because they learned over the course of the abortion wars to date that this tactic works. They have an endless supply of deniable schizophrenic assassins, they will never be brought to any kind of justice for what they're doing, and if they keep winding up deniable schizophrenic assassins, they eventually get everything they want.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: April 2009's "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment" has been as prophetic and accurate as August 2001's "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US."

The Early Political Causes of Robert Heinlein

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 16:53:29 GMT

I know I can't have been the only person who was desperate to read Patterson's book, which I mentioned yesterday, to find out which of Heinlein's characters' politics the author himself agreed with. As a very political person myself, after reading the book, here's my take-away:

Americanism. Heinlein's position on this can be best summed up by a remark he made to a friend that his love of America and what it stands for is the closest thing he ever had in his life to a religion. That America is the greatest country in the world, in the whole history of the world, and that it needs to be defended was something that Heinlein himself admitted was a logically indefensible, emotionally held, unquestioned article of faith.

Economic Justice. The real reason the Navy wouldn't take Lt. Heinlein back during WW II wasn't the tuberculosis; they could have found him a non-shipboard posting and he fully expected them to do so. The real reason was that the Secretary of the Navy considered Heinlein to be a communist sympathizer because of a letter to the editor that he wrote, bitterly satirizing police who beat up leftist college-kid immigrant-rights protesters in front of him. When Heinlein did go into politics, it was as an enthusiastic and hard-working volunteer for Sinclair Lewis's attempted liberal Progressive takeover of the Democratic Party. Heinlein was a New Deal liberal before there was a New Deal. Back when FDR was still a right-wing Democrat, Heinlein was campaigning for things like Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, long before any of those programs had their current names.

Anti-Fascism. Perhaps I should have listed this one second, not first, because it was his life's cause after pro-Americanism, and he was nothing less than fanatic about it, long before anti-fascism was popular in America. And after World War II, Heinlein went so far as to cut off a close friend altogether, to refuse to see him or correspond with him, because he accepted a job working for Wernher von Braun.

Anti-Communism. The combination of those two causes, economic justice and anti-fascism, gave him endless grief all through the 30s and early 40s, because before the liberation of the camps, "everybody knew" (certainly everybody in Hollywood, where he was living, "knew") that the only really fervent anti-fascist, anti-Nazi people in America, the only people who thought that opposition to fascism was important, were all in the American Communist Party; that Heinlein had a history of standing up for economic justice and was a noted fan of Fabian socialist H.G. Wells was merely the icing on the cake of the "proof," to Republicans that he knew, that he was a Communist.

On the contrary. Heinlein had a semi-famous gafiation later in life that isn't covered in volume 1 of the Patterson book, but there was a lesser known earlier Getting Away From It All (of all of science fiction fandom, that is to say) before World War II. Heinlein had helped found science fiction fandom, and was known by insiders to be three of the five most popular, best-selling writers in the science fiction pulps. At the time, most of organized science fiction fandom was controlled or at least influenced by two powerful cliques: the Futurians, who considered themselves the literary and historical heirs of the Fabian socialists and who were mostly all enthusiastic Marxist Leninists, and the Technocracy advocates, who were nearly all enthusiastic pro-Mussolini fascists to varying degrees of openness. Fans of the time were eager to claim Heinlein as one of their own: to the fascists, his pro-military bias and pro-America bias showed that he was obviously one of them, and to the communists, his economic justice stance and public anti-Naziism proved that he was really of them.

(If this seems odd to you, I should point out that to intellectuals of a certain time, the Spanish Civil War and other crises of the early 20th century had "proved" that democratic capitalism had no future, that the only even minimally plausible political systems of the future, the ones that the war for control of the 21st century and beyond would be between, were communism, fascism, theocracy, and gangsterism. Heinlein did not accept this. But I suspect, based on the fact that he got his first break in life from Boss Prendergast and wouldn't have survived the Great Depression if he hadn't gone to work for the Prendergast Machine, and that he continued to defend the Prendergast Machine, if tepidly and only intermittently, to the end of his life, that if it had been proved somehow to Heinlein that he had to pick one of those four, he would have chosen gangsterism. But we'll never know.)

Finally, Heinlein privately told off the leaders of both cliques. He wrote to them that as far as he was concerned, there was no important difference between fascism and communism, that they were rival denominations of the same church that he hated, totalitarianism. He berated them for failing to notice that any time a political argument started in fandom, about the virtues of fascism or communism, he left the room. He gave them an ultimatum: stop trying to drag him into their pro-totalitarian cliques or he would quit science fiction fandom. And when they didn't, he did, at great personal cost to himself.

Anti-Nuclear Weapons. This is the one that came as the biggest surprise to me. The nuclear bomb itself came as no surprise to Heinlein; like most science fiction writers of the time, he had expected it and feared it long before World War II. But after a long hiatus from politics, after the war Heinlein dropped most of his writing projects and jumped back into politics, hard. He spent roughly three years calling in every favor and presuming on every acquaintance he had to get the ears of everybody in high military command, as many people as he could reach in Congress, and everybody he knew in nuclear physics or rocketry, to promote one cause for which he is not famous: the US urgently needed to, in his opinion, immediately and unilaterally disarm before the Soviet Union could get their own bomb, as a matter of life and death survival.

Heinlein dedicated every waking hour of several years to making the following case, which seemed inescapable to him: the idea of one and only one nation having nuclear weapons was unsustainable, the world would never tolerate it. Within 5 years, he predicted, the Soviet Union would have bombs of their own. Once they did, China would have to, and so would Japan, and so would all of Europe; once Europe had them, all of Africa and the Middle East would have to; once Japan had the bomb, all of southeast Asia would need their own bombs. And once everybody had the bomb, it was absolutely 100% inevitable that sooner or later, by accident or malice, one of those bombs would be launched. And once it was, everybody in range would have to fear a pre-emptive strike aimed at them, and would have no choice but to launch all of their weapons at once for fear of losing them, and the human race would die. As far as he could see, the only way that fate could be prevented would be if, before the Soviet Union could demonstrate their first bomb, the US turned its entire nuclear arsenal over to the United Nations, and rammed a treaty down the throats of every nation in the world that the UN would use its nukes to prevent any individual country from deploying their own nuclear weapons.

(Patterson's first book ends when Heinlein lost, and consequently gave up all hope of the survival of the human race, when the Soviets detonated their first nuclear device. We know from Heinlein's later non-fiction that he never considered it even vaguely minimally plausible that the Soviets would ever honor a treaty commitment to disarmament, and considered the idea of unilateral disarmament on the part of the United States to be a form of suicidal surrender to totalitarianism.)

If DADT Repeal Passed? Then What Was the Defense Filibuster About?

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 20:54:43 GMT

What? the? F__?!? The Senate filibuster of the bill to repeal Don't Ask/Don't Tell just failed by 5 votes.

Less than a week ago, the defense authorization bill was successfully filibustered, solely over DADT repeal, by 3 votes.

Nothing else changed, so far as I can tell: the only difference between the bill that was successfully filibustered (57 to 40) versus the bill that passed (65 to 31) is that DADT repeal was changed from an amendment to the military funding bill to a stand-alone bill.

I sincerely hope that SOME time in the next week, someone can explain to me how that one absolutely and completely irrelevant change, plus the passage of 5 working days, flipped 8 senators' votes?

Quote of the Day: Humanitarian Aid as "War Catering"

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 23:54:56 GMT

"In case after case, a persuasive case can be made that, overall, humanitarian aid did as much or even more harm than good. The godfather of modern humanitarianism was a Swiss businessman named Henri Dunant, who founded the International Committee of the Red Cross. Humanitarianism also had a godmother named Florence Nightingale, who rejected the idea of the Red Cross from the outset. By easing the burden on war ministries, Nightingale argued, volunteer efforts could simply make waging war more attractive, and more probable. Polman has come back from fifteen years of reporting in the places where aid workers ply their trade to tell us that Nightingale was right. The scenes of suffering that we tend to call humanitarian crises are almost always symptoms of political circumstances and there’s no apolitical way of responding to them – no way to act without having a political effect. At the very least, the role of the officially neutral, apolitical aid worker in most contemporary conflicts is, as Nightingale forewarned, that of a caterer: humanitarianism relieves the warring parties of many of the burdens (administrative and financial) of waging war, diminishing the demands of governing while fighting, cutting the cost of taking casualties, and supplying food, medicine, and logistical support that keep armies going."

- Philip Gourevitch, "A Critic at Large: Alms Dealers: Can You Provide Humanitarian Aid Without Facilitating Conflicts?" New Yorker, 10/11/10, p102 et seq, reviewing Linda Polman, The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?

Quote of the Day (One More from Geoghegan)

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 07:14:59 GMT

"At the SPD headquarters, I met people on the left, the best and the brightest, who can at least think in this framework. They grasp what their job is: to protect the way of life of a largely high school-educated middle class. That way of life is what constitutes the crown jewels. The protection of the crown jewels is a fiduciary responsibility. I hate to say so, but Democrats and Kennedy School-types (with honorable exceptions) -- certainly Democratic politicians -- really do not think seriously about how, in a practical way, to raise the standard of living of non-college grad population, who happen to be, well, 73 percent of the adult population. Look, I like Larry Summers in some ways: at least he is wiling to blush about the shameful number of people we have locked up in prison. But he would never be in the SPD. He could never relate to the striking kids under twenty-seven rapping in German on YouTube. If I ask most Democrats and their think-tank minions how to help the middle class, they have no real answer except to tell them to go to college. But for most Americans that's no answer, so essentially we Democrats are telling them to pound sand. If they didn't go to college, their lives are over. ¶ And it is symptomatic that, when they look at Germany, everything that holds up the German middle-class way of life, the U.S. Democrats would tear down."

Thomas Geoghegan, Were You Born on the Wrong Content? How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life. New York: The New Press, 2010. From chapter 6: "After the Krise"

"Story of Stuff" vs "Citizens United"

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:07:39 GMT

Via the Story of Stuff's Facebook feed, I got a request to blow 40 minutes of my (admittedly copious) free time watching a selection of YouTube videos that came out after the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that legislated from the bench that corporations have a First Amendment guaranteed right to spend as much money as they want on political campaign advertising at all times, including in the last few days before an election. I had nothing better to do, so I figured what the heck, as much value as Anne Leonard has donated to my life, I can spare her 40 minutes.

As I start to write this, I'm about halfway through ... and I feel my brain liquefying and running out of my ears.

And I'll tell you why: here are about a dozen or more supposed experts on the subject, both in favor of and against the Citizens United decision, and after almost half an hour of talking nobody's talking about the real issue here. They're talking about straw men like censorship, or alleged buying of votes in exchange for campaign donations, and they're not talking about the only vote that has been bought by corporations:

Yours.

The elephant in the living room that nobody wants to talk about is the fact that the second most powerful decider of every election that's been held in this country since I was a child in the early 1960s is the 15 second broadcast television advertisement. And the most powerful decider (the basic likability of the candidate, their ability to seem like nice people when in public) is not one that's at stake here.

Now, if you're reading this blog entry, the odds are that you're not actually one of the people I'm talking about. On the other hand, if you're actually reading this blog entry, the odds are just as good that you feel like you have little or no voice in our elections, that you've been frustrated for your entire life by the fact that the voters who matter, the voters who decide the election, seem to be making their decision as to who to vote for in total ignorance of even the basic facts about the parties, about the candidates, about the policies being advocated. And you're right. In every statewide or federal election since the 1960s, the most reliable predictor of which candidate will win is which candidate was able to place the largest number of 15 second television advertisements. Period.

Sure, some ads do more harm than good, and some candidates have a hard time looking good in their ads, and some can never get it right. And once or twice per decade, somewhere in America, there have been gifted politicians who've won the old fashioned way, without depending on saturation bombing campaigns of TV ads. But probably in excess of 90% of the people who show up at the polling places on election day based their entire collective impression of each candidate off of nothing but 15 second campaign TV ads. As long as that remains true, then running campaign television ads is like taking swings at a pinata full of ill-informed voters to see who can knock the most of them out of it. Only the tiny handful of candidates who are so inept at swinging at the pinata that no matter how many swings they take they can't hit it, and only the even tinier handful of candidates who are so good at swinging at the pinata that they only need one swing, are exempt from this basic math: the person who gets the most swings at the pinata is the one who'll get the candy.

The result is not a Congress or a statehouse or a White House that can be bought. The result is 50 statehouses, a Congress, and a White House who don't need to be bought, because all of the candidates who were even willing to consider occasionally voting against the interests of the Fortune 500 and the Forbes 400* were massively out-spent on 15-second broadcast television advertisements. Out of any given pool of candidates, the one or two that the wealthiest individuals and the wealthiest corporations in the world personally trust to see the world their way will be given 9 or 10 chances to puff themselves up, 9 or 10 chances to smear mud on the other guy, for every 1 chance that any of the less-reliably pro-corporation candidates get, and study after study has shown that with enough repetition, you can convince almost anybody of almost anything.

By the time I got to the end of this essay, the videos were done, and still, nobody had said word one about this simple fact: almost the only form of political activity that has mattered since the 1960s is the running of 15-second broadcast television political campaign advertisements, and those are (a) prohibitively expensive and (b) to some extent, auctioned.

I love Anne Leonard's videos to date, and I wish everybody in America would watch them. But I can't get past this fact: before she made "The Story of Stuff" and its sequels like "The Story of Bottled Water" and "The Story of Cap and Trade" and "The Story of Cosmetics," she spent her entire adult lifetime to date studying the materials economy. By comparison, she's spent mere months studying American electoral politics; I don't really have a whole lot of confidence that when her next video comes out, it'll reflect the same level of insight as what she brought to the extraction to production to sale to consumption to disposal economy.

* P.S. It was in the news, yesterday, that over 40 million Americans are now living in poverty. There are only 400 people on the Forbes 400 list. Even with one hundred thousand poor people's votes for every one ultra-rich person's vote, the ultra-rich people's preferred candidates win every election. As my old friend the_geoffrey used to say, "Coincidence? Or ancient astronauts?"

Robin Carnahan Just Lost My Vote

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:36:11 GMT

I was never terribly likely to vote for Robin Carnahan for Senate, if only because of her last name: specifically, if only because "my dad was a popular governor" is her main credential, and I am (apparently, unlike the majority of the party apparatus in both parties here in Missouri) deathly allergic to hereditary aristocracy. No, I've never voted for Lacy Clay, either, and never will. I was already inclined to cast a blank ballot in the race for US Senate from Missouri. But this article from Wednesday, which I only just got around to reading, confirms it for me: Jo Mannies, "Carnahan clarifies stance on Bush tax cuts, hears strong support from NEA," St. Louis Beacon, 8/25/10. Says Mannies (who is a regional treasure and I don't know what we'd do without her, and that they fired her is on the list of reasons I no longer read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch):

"Carnahan had told reporters last winter that she didn't think the nation could afford to keep the cuts in place for wealthier Americans, at a time of budget deficits and rising national debt. ¶ Carnahan said Tuesday that she changed her mind because 'we've been continuing down a very dark path economically for the last six months." ... ¶ She backs at least a temporary extension for higher-income Americans because 'with a recession as long and difficult to get out of as it is ... I don't think this is the time to raise taxes' on anyone."

Do not bother telling me how much worse Roy Blunt is. I know that, and I don't care.

Do not bother reminding me that Roy Blunt is, like Carnahan, a hereditary candidate himself. Who the Republicans nominate and what positions they take is not my responsibility.

Do not bother pointing out to me that one more lost Democratic seat in the Senate could be critical, I don't care. Nothing I care about is going to pass with Obama either bargaining it away before the Republicans even make their first demand (or worse, threatening to veto it if the House manages to sneak it into a bill during reconciliation); nothing I fear is going to pass the Senate or the House over an Obama veto ... except, of course, the parts that I fear and know will pass no matter what happens in November, because of the choke-hold that pro-corporate welfare, pro-plutocracy, pro-kleptocracy think tanks have on the leadership of both parties. That'll pass just fine, and I agree with Arianna Huffington that the inevitable result of those policies is Third World America. Roy Blunt isn't going to make that any worse than Robin Carnahan will; Obama can Hooverize this economy just as easily with either of them in that seat.

I know all the arguments for why the Democratic Party should be able to nominate anybody they want, however awful, and I should vote for them. Four years ago, I would have made that same argument myself. Right now, I don't care.

If a Democrat can't see that we desperately need to return taxes on the wealthiest Americans to levels that would still be below what they were during the Reagan administration, and use that money to pay down the debt that Bush ran up pointlessly invading Iraq, if they aren't at least willing to continue to make that case, then screw 'em. If after we've had two bubbles burst in the space of less than ten years the Democrats aren't willing to stand up and make the case for Democratic economic policies, or if they're so blindered by Randroid propaganda that they are still drinking the supply side Flavor-Ade, they deserve to lose.

If the Democrats want this Democrat's vote, they have to nominate an actual Democrat.