Loyal Opposition

The "Free" Market God

In the real world, faith in markets operates as a quasi-religious faith, with one caveat: all morality has been stripped away. So the market god is essentially an avaricious, greedy deity.

The right wing has been ascending since about 1980 (earlier if you think Carter was an aberation due to Watergate). During this period of increasing dominance in "free" markets, the USA has become brutalized. Look at:

• the per cent of our population that we imprison, compared to any other industrialized nation.


• the per cent of our population that has no health insurance, compared to any other industrialized nation.


• cost of college tuition, compared to any other industrialized nation.


• the insecurity of our middle class.


• levels of inequality and political and economic dominance by corporate and financial elites.


• the decline of class mobility and the rise of stratification.

With this as the background, we brutalized Iraq. For our (sick) fantasies, we destroyed a country. Iraq is the tragedy that demonstrates our sickness of mind and heart.

I am sick to death of the right wing. Thanks to you guys, I have learned to both hate and despair for my country. And a large part of your insanity is the 'Market God'.

Of course I hardly view hard core religious godliness as the antidote. Fundamentalists are among the most selfish and arrogant creatures on the planet: they will kill anyone and destroy anything if they can convince themselves that by doing so they get more 'heavenly brownie points'. I have noticed that while many neo cons and conservatives have examined their mistakes with anguish wrt Iraq, the fundamentalists have remained silent. No remorse, no reflection, no regret. They waded neck deep into a river of blood and they don't notice, let alone care.

Listen, market dummies: there are no short cuts. No short cuts to good judgement, good character, good policy. No short cuts to education. No short cuts to a clean environment. No short cuts to democracy. No short cuts to community values.

Grow up. Get real. The "free" market solution to these problems is easy and BOGUS. Haven't you done enough damage? When are you going to learn from your mistakes?

Lastly, I resent that you have absconded with the word "free". You have violated a beautiful word and concept.

End Globalization AND the Iraq War

I was an opponent of the Iraq war from the first. But I fail to see how ending this war will end the nausea of globalization (job loss, job insecurity, and falling income in particular) for America's middle class. I don't know of serious policy person who connects the end of the this war with an upsurge of fortune for America's working families. This is a certain blue sky charm in wishing it were so, but I suspect that doesn't pencil out.

National health care does not compensate for decent jobs.
Re-training funds don't either. Neither to R&D credits.

America's middle class enjoys the least security, the poorest benefits, and works harder than the middle class in any other developed country. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that not only are we getting less, we are working harder than ever.

Not only that, we've basically given the free traders and the corporatists everything they ever wanted, and then some. We gave them huge tax cuts to go with their free trade gravy train. We let them walk away from pensions and health benefits. Basically it was: anything you want that we can give you, you will get.

And the reason was, we were supposed to be in this together.

Under globalization, we're not.

After all the giveaways, the tax benefits and cuts and credits, the corporatists stampede for the exits, trashing communities and cities, individuals and families, in the process. That's globalization, the reality.

It's ugly. I'm sick of it. End it now. 

Why protectionism has appeal

China is a country pursuing it's own interests. We need to do the same. The first problem is not how to appease China, or how to appease Wall Street. The first problem is what are the most critical American interests?

We have allowed the corporatist and financial powers to offshore American productive capacity, because they made hundreds of billions off the global labor arbitrage, and damn the American worker.

Free-trade as a positive-sum game doesn't actually work if you are running a big and expanding current account deficit. We are losing our tradeables sector.

See http://interfluidity.powerblogs.com/posts/1163620201.shtml

(Steve Waldman):

I've done no study, but here's a conjecture: The countries where protectionism is becoming popular are those with both growing current account deficits and shrinking tradables sectors. A shrinking tradables sector is not the same as a declining industry. Declining industries are normal and good. Even the near extinction of manufactures as a whole is okay. But a shrinking tradables sector is not. A shrinking tradables sector means a decline in nation's capacity to produce goods or services of any sort that citizens of other countries want to buy, at competitive prices...

Ricardo is dead, and we live in a brave new world where, at least for a while, some countries are willing to trade persistently for debt not backed by expanding (if adjusting) tradables capacity on the part of the debtor. This is not a Ricardian paradise. This is economic terra incognito, and citizens are right to be spooked.

I think only aggressive posturing, threats, and a willingness to follow through will get anywhere with China. They need to stop mercantilist currency manipulation. If they don't, USA needs protectionism.

Kicking the middle class into the gutter

Easy bankruptcy laws represent a "moral hazard" for spendthrift Americans who don't save anything at all. I say, make them pay dearly for their profiligacy. ("Emanuel" comment here)

This is standard issue rightwing rhetoric. The reality, as any one who is paying attention knows, is that as the basics go up, the wages slowly shrink. The reality is that 75% or so of bankruptcies come from a combo of bad health and bad marriage.

So, the question that needs to be asked is, what does this attitude represent?

It's a telling example of 'Americans treat Americans like sh*t'. We're flushing our middle class into the sewer on the strength of a punitive rightwing moralism which isn't, in fact, moral at all: it's hatred dressed up as righteousness. It's the equivalent, in many cases, of kicking the crutches of the lame, of throwing a rock through the windows of a school.

Republican kiddie porn

Big scandal! Foley, a Republican congressman crusader against internet sexual predators on minors has turned out to be a such a predator himself. There is a smoking trail in the form of Instant Messages to adolescent boys (Congressional pages). An FBI dude on ABC sez this is solicitation of minors for sex and he'll get prison for it.

Needless to say, Foley resigned. But the fallout will be very significant.

Consider: the House leadership apparently knew about this situation for 10 or 11 months - at least.
Consider: the pages were warned as a group about Foley.
Consider: there are at least two pages involved.
Consider: one page has said it was difficult to raise this issue because Foley had so much power.
Consider: Foley is/was a member of the House leadership.

This is the Republican party, folks. These guys came to power with conservative sexual morality in their charter. It's a big chunk of what makes the rural poor folk swallow their crap. It makes the fundies froth for Bush.

It' was Republican pretensions to moral stature that fueled the whole get-Clinton-impeached fiasco. They went after him in high dudgeon. Now we see the arrogance, indifference, and abuse that was behind that carefully crafted facade - not just in Foley, but in that craven pack of enablers, the House leadership. 

Yanking the chain

I remember the death bed repentance of the God Father of conservative attack strategy, one of the first to put 'thug' in Republican, Lee Atwater. It made me want to vomit. After all he had been vomiting all over the American political landscape for years, and rolling in dough and increasing in influence as a result. Atwater planted the demon seeds that resulted in Karl Rove (who was a protege). Today's Bob Herbert in the NYTimes quoted a juicy bit from his playbook, from a 1981 interview:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger! By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

After he spent decades yanking the chain of working white Americans, creating racial polarization, undermining social programs, demonizing liberals, and spreading hatred and discontent, he hit a bump in the road: brain cancer. Really Bad Brain Cancer. And something changed for poor Lee: he felt the sting of conscience.

See Atwater wasn't just a dumb whitey frat boy. He certainly played one for political purposes but he had other interests. For example, he released an album called "Red, Hot And Blue" on Curb Records, featuring himself with Carla Thomas, Isaac Hayes, Sam Moore, Chuck Jackson, and, B.B. King, who got co-billing with Atwater. This was when he was the national chairman of the Thug (oops, Republican) party. He'd been playing R&B since high school & in fact he was pretty good.

So on some level he knew his political schtick, his stock-in-trade, his legacy, his whole professional identity was based on a moral corruption: racism. He was living a contradiction, and when he faced death, his frat boy immorality broke down.

Before he died he issued a number of public and written apologies to individuals whom he had attacked during his political career (including Dukakis - the famous Willie Horton smear had Atwater fingerprints). In a February 1991 article for Life Magazine, Atwater wrote:

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring -- acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

Atwater's Republican party has taken to heart the sinister lessons of his success and has pursued them into the nether regions of what I would call treason. This so-called 'conservative' party of religious extremists and corporate lobbyists combines hustling for favors from the wealthy with awarding virtue brownie points to the religiously insecure.

But that is normal politics. What is treasonous is the hijacking of public discourse for the purpose of initiating wars of choice, manipulating intelligence, and executing policy in a manner so incompetent as to be itself criminal.

What is treasonous is to undermine the checks and balances of the American system of government in order to concentrate power in the Commander In Chief like that of a dictator and not a president.

What is treasonous is to attack democracy and the rule of law, to try to prevent voters from voting, as in Ohio and Florida.

What is treasonous is to suppress scientific reports from government agencies which might be contrary to the interests of Thug party funders, for example global warming reports and oil companies.

What is treasonous is to give the Thug In Chief, oops the President, the power to torture and detain anyone (including native born citizens!) without recourse to the protections of the American legal system on nothing but the say-so of the Thug in Chief.

The Republican party has much to be ashamed of. It is a party of betrayal. After being entrusted with leadership, they have betrayed their country. The verdict of history will be harsh.

Republicanism & Whiteness

The rise of Bush I thought of at first as a terrible mistake (imagine a chorus of Screeching Supremes) but I have come to see his flaws of character as reflecting flaws in American culture and politics: 'Bush R' Us'. Racism is a central factor.

We are divided by status, class, history, identity, privilege and education. And race is a determinant in all of those. I believe that Americans have a weak belief in equality and a weak sense of community, and racism is an important factor.

The problem with having a weak sense of equality is that in leads to an idealization of and infatuation with wealth and privilege for its own sake. Bush and Ms. Paris Hilton waltz on the same cultural stage. It leads to a tolerance for treating our own people badly.

18,000 Americans die every year only because they lack health insurance, and that is a factor in the deaths of many more. 40 million lack health insurance. Prisons incarcerate armies of poor. The cost of college increasingly burdens the working and middle class. The wages of college educated 25-34 year olds has fallen 8% in only 5 years.

I think the strong reacton to 9-11 was related to symbolism: some of ours were killed by them. If we kill our own people through policies the rest of the developed world rejects, it's okay. It's like an abusive family: I'll beat up my own kids, but don't you try it, or I'll kick your a*s.

There are guys in my family who have such a fantasy identification with Bush as a dude they can 'relate to' that they don't seem to notice or care that they have no prospects, no pension, no insurance, etc. White voters look at the white power structure and see themselves. It's a mythology for suckers.

This fantasy allows a reality I call "Americans Treat Americans Like Shit." One of the divisions it rests on is that whites are unwilling to let their tax money be spent on people of color. They don't believe people of color are equal, that developing their talents will benefit America as a whole. This leads to a nation where community is in decline, infrastructure is decaying, and the middle class is shrinking.

The Democratic party has been unable to offer leadership in this area.  I think the effort of trianguating whites and people of color in an uneasy coalition has exhausted their ability to find a principle and stand for it.

But that is not the only problem: Democratic leaders must make peace with an ever more predatory and short sighted American capitalism, which has taken to abandoning the American worker at every opportunity. Dems have not offered a vision of community to our racially divided nation because such a vision is of no interest to lobbyists and funders with real money.

I will be addressing these issues when I write about how the Democrats can wrestle patriotism away from the Republicans, redefining it in the process. But here is an interesting take on these issues in the Guardian. The writer is discussing various theories as to why whites vote Republican:

There is a reason why we are only talking about white working-class voters: black people, regardless of income, overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Indeed, were it not for black people, the Democrats would have won the presidency only once, in 1964. That was the year President Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights act, turned to an aide and said: "We have lost the south for a generation." We are well into the second generation now, and the racialised politics of the south seem to be influencing the rest of the country rather than the other way round.

In other words there is a clear racial attachment that white voters have to the Republican party that does not override income but certainly qualifies it. No understanding of why so many of them vote Republican can examine class as though it is distinct from race.

Second, they assume a greater class attachment to the Democrats than the party deserves. Unlike the Republicans, who openly lobby for the class interests of their supporters and deliver on them, Democrats do not promise substantial changes to the lives of ordinary working people in America and rarely deliver even on the symbolic ones.

Which brings us to the final problem. The strongest correlation between income and voting is not whom you vote for but if you vote at all. The more you earn, the more likely you are to turn out. According to the census, 81.3% of those who earned $100,000 or more turned out in 2004; the figure for those who earned less than $20,000 was 48%.

That's because the rich have something to vote for. They have two parties; the poor here have none. Ultimately, the question of what's the matter with Kansas or any other state must in no small part be answered by yet another one: what's the matter with Democrats?

Democratic Spine Wanted

What is this, that only Republicans spoke out against Bush's Freedom To Torture bill?

Democrats need to understand that if they can't stand up for their values, they will never win against Republicans on the issue of national security. How can voters trust them with national security, when they can't fight back against Republicans?!

Radical Christians may well be more of a danger to the world than Radical Islam

Rosie O'Donnell has been getting flamed because in this Christian nation of ours she had the nerve to compare radical Christianity to radical Islam. I think she has a point.

Radical Christians are the most loyal constituency of Bush. Bush has chased war like a crack addict chases the pipe: with a willingness to spend everything he's got, with lies, with manipulation, with irrational destructive behaviors, with a total lack of concern wrt how his war addiction is impacting other people.

I know Christians who believe, after tens of thousands have died in Iraq, that Bush is a "good man." If you can be a "good man" after you are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, how many more will it take before you are not a "good man" anymore? Millions?

There are credible reports that this Administration is contemplating a first nuclear strike in Iran. Bush may get his chance to be the "good" killer of millions. What a grand prospect for our democracy. If you think I exaggerate about the casualties, see this.

The Scarborough show took a turn tongue-lashing Rosie. Watch it. You will see an absolute inability to reckon with the reality that as a result of our actions, tens of thousands of innocent people are dead. To the Christian supporters of Bush I say: Don't look now, but your hands are red with blood. You're not killers exactly - more like killers-lite.

Insanity is Making the Same Mistake and Expecting Different Results

I started my first blog Ich Bin Ein Iraqi because of the distress I felt at the incipient war in Iraq - I had to do something. The same factor drives me to start a this new blog today. I feel we are heading for war with Iran. The insanity of this course, and the qualms of the military, are as nothing to the fevered dreams of  Bush and Cheney.

I doubt that most Americans fully grasp what we are doing in Iraq: we are the precipitator of a civil conflict killing tens of thousands of people. Probably we are biased against the foreign, the distant, the muslim. We don't grant Iraqis a full measure of humanity. And so we kill, and kill, and kill.

Of course we don't have the troops. But the 'solution' to the problem of not enough butter (army) to cover that much bread (Iran) is clear to the mad men: nuclear weapons. Matthew Yglesias has more:

Fred Kaplan wonders if the "prepare to deploy" order that's "been sent out to U.S. Navy submarines, an Aegis-class cruiser, two minesweepers, and two mine-hunting ships" means we're going to war with Iran. Sam Gardiner, former US Air Force Colonel, concludes that we are in a new report (availble in PDF) for the Century Foundation. Gardiner says the preparations for war "will not be a major CNN event." Instead, they "will involve the quiet deployment of Air Force tankers to staging bases" and "additional Navy assets moved to the region." Gardiner makes the point that while nobody's talking about a land invasion of Iran, significant elements in the government do have more ambitious goals than simple surgical strikes at Iranian nuclear facilities. Such strikes are very unlikely to actually resolve the perceived Iran issue, and there are administration figures who've convinced themselves that a sufficiently wide air target set will prompt regime change in Iran. One should note that the curious thing about air power is that the professionals involved in managing it have a longstanding, cross-national, and incredibly pernicious habit of massively and systematically overstating its efficacy in accomplishing all sorts of implausible things.

At this point, I think I need to bring up what one might call the Craziest Goddamn Thing I've Heard In a Long Time. This story came to me last week from an anonymous individual who I would say is in a position to know about such things. According to this person, the DOD has (naturally) been doing some analysis on airstrikes against Iran. The upshot of the analysis was that conventional bombardment would degrade the Iranian nuclear program by about 50 percent. By contrast, if the arsenal included small nuclear weapons, we could get up to about 80 percent destroying. In response to this, persons inside the Office of the Vice President took the view that we could use the nukes -- in other words, launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike against Iran -- and then simply deny that we'd done so. Detectable radiation in the area of the bombed sites would be attributed to the fact that they were, after all, nuclear facilities we'd just hit.

The other night I got a call from a polling outfit trying to rank which issues were the most important to voters: Iraq, terrorism, health care, the economy. None of those, I said. My most important issue is NOT STARTING A WAR WITH IRAN.

The Democrats are always whining in shock as the Republicans use fear against them. Well here's a chance for the Dems: nationalize the upcoming election by alarming the voters that Republican victories mean another insane, incompetent, and morally catastrophic war.