Letting the hard right takeover

“Those who have the privilege of knowing have the duty to act.”

Albert Einstein

If you are going to follow politics, you will be invariably drawn into feeling some responsibility for outcomes - as miserable as they often are. Passivity is not an option - especially if one is sufficiently infuriated. And it's easy to be angry once one realizes that most of the havoc we witness daily is caused by real decisions by real people.  Compulsion to act, to participate on some level, sets in even if it is merely just to vote.

To some voting is wimpy and indirect as compared to 'direct action'. Furthermore, the candidates are often all bozos. Once politicized, the young often have no patience for the plodding, setback-ridden process of “formal democracy."  Especially when one realizes that large corporations and the very rich more or less control both political parties (but one a good deal more than the other.)  So they often opt for more direct activities and more radical political stances. However violent acts toward property while romantic and exciting (and fodder for the nighty news) usually play right into the hands of the powers that be – since they usually control all the institutions of authority: the main stream media, the courts, the cops and the military. Yet direct action through peaceful protest can be a powerful. tool. But it must jump the hurdle of attaining if not critical mass at least impressive numbers, which is difficult when most people won't even vote. And it is dependent on the media which has been known to ignore mass marches (i.e. the 2003 buildup to the Iraq invasion.)

In this last election there was such widespread apathy and cynicism that only 36.3% of eligible voters even bothered to vote.   And the Repubs triumphed in almost every race. While non-white minorities, blacks, Asians and Latinos, participated (and again well over 1/2 supported the Demos), younger voters, 18-24, voted in lesser numbers than in 2012 (also giving a slight majority to Demos.)  However white working class males, responsible gun loving "conservatives" as they like to think of themselves, and their brethren, the rabid Tea Party reactionaries, showed up in significant numbers.  Apparently the moderates who voted for Obama in 2012 stayed home. The midterms are always difficult for the party in power. Many people, the young especially, only vote in presidential elections. They naively see an incoming president as some kind of messiah. When he turns out to be just another pol who must scheme and back pedal just to survive, their callow interest in "politics" flags.

Public perception is often wrong. Obama's is not a failed presidency. As a centrist and deal maker with the devil - health insurance companies and big Pharma, the Affordable Care Act was a Republicanesqe creature (which they immediately disowned and unified to defeat.) But in it's own clumsy "free-market" friendly way "Obamacare" is working. And in terms of the economy under Obama it has recovered (look at the stock market and corporate profits.) It is not Obama's fault that once the jobs returned the pay was still flat-lined, at least not his fault in terms of his counter-cyclical policy. The (too small) stimulus worked. It's just that the average 'Joe six pack' didn't feel it.  There are more complicated forces at work here involving the evolution/devolution of global capitalism.
 

Yet even as the hard right dry washes its hands in gleeful anticipation of taking over the US Senate and re-enforcing its control over the US House of Representatives, other forces for positive change are emerging.

・ Identification by a respected by a non-Marxist orthodox economist, Thomas Piketty, backed by overwhelming empirical evidence, that global capitalism is in trouble at a very fundamental level (thus weakening its ever-lauded 'invisible hand' dynamic.) In short over its 250 year history capitalism has allowed too much wealth to concentrate in an elite class which now has inadequate incentive to either share it or invest it productively.

・ The litany of race based murders in which the whites 'walked', the most prominent recent ones being deaths of Travor Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner has finally tipped a scale in the besieged, hapless black communities which is now rising up like a sleeping giant to confront its amorphous adversary – institutionalized racism in America.

・ Centrist President Barack Obama with no “blue dog” Democrats to aid in re-election and two years to face down an always intransigent Congress can now afford to take chances politically – elimination of the embargo on Cuba, blocking XL pipeline (hopefully) and confronting global warming in general and (hopefully) a more assertive reigning in of corporate irresponsibility.

・ Center-right Democratic NY State Governor Mario Cuamo out of nowhere suddenly announces the banning of the highly profitable but environmentally hazardous practice of fracking for oil and natural gas in his state to the immense joy of tree-huggers everywhere.

Are we seeing the early stages of a sea change of the seemingly moribund left in the US (and globally) or are these just random outlier events in an otherwise death march toward a new 21^st Century global corpor-facism? Time will tell.

Election Eve

As the  mid terms approach the Democratic Party has pulled out all stops in hounding supporters for money.  Daily I open my email to find it overloaded with heart rending appeals for miniscule amounts of  money - like $5 (of course they would like to get much more.)   According to the Washington Post $2.4B will be spent on television advertising by both parties.  The Demos by appealing to the masses of registered Democrats for money in small amounts  are trying to match the massive gusher of cash from the Kochs and  Karl Rove affiliated PACs.  The hapless Democrats face a loss of their Senate majority. It seems the good  burghers of the US  have turned against Mr. 'Audacity of Hope.’  It’s probably more a general malaise than actual performance but you would never know it from the feedback loops of polls telling people how low his rating are, and therefore they go lower.

But the midterm candidates instead of educating the public in what  Obama has accomplished they run from him like he has Ebola.  That is very ugly and exposes the underlying fecklessness of the whole party.  Despite a heavy headwind Obama has accomplished at lot.  And I say that as a heavy critic of Obama.  Urgently needed health care reform was pushed through, albeit very health care insurance industry friendly. And counter-cyclical fiscal policy, although less robust than all called for, reversed the downward plunge of the Great Recession (look at any chart.) Also he has not yet approved the horribly ill-advised XL pipeline, and for the most part has resisted Republican scorched earth policy regarding FDR‘s safety net.   Yet democratic candidates everywhere are  trying to distance themselves from him.  Apparently the idea is to produce a Republican-lite appeal  while  imitating the horrendous  negative ads the Repubs and their “dark money” sponsored allies crank out.  

No wonder so many people turn away from the whole sorry spectacle and don't even vote.  
Political advertising is designed to ring bells of the gullible and uniformed, everyone else is either annoyed or repulsed. The Repubs are masters of the low road and have won many an election with a particularly effective political ad. Their expertise at deception is admirable. Even as they are the party of  the ownership class they have now become also the party of white lower middle class. With their extensive corporate media apparatus they are able to profusely pump out disinformation, lies  and racist 'dog whistling'.  But when Demos try to play the same game with scurrilous below-the-belt political ads they risk becoming interchangeable with their loathsome adversaries.

In  our faux democracy each election becomes a contest of which party can accumulate the biggest  arsenal of money.  Each with their respective bases more or less accounted for all this money is thrown at advertising at the elusive ‘uncommitted voter.’  In a real democracy informed citizens would consider candidates based on what they materially offered.  It should not be a contest of warring bullshit. This degrades all of us.  In a real democracy the media would be an honest broker and not be afraid of the truth even if it meant exposing actual lies of powerful interests.  But our media is not on the side refining and improving our so-called democracy, it is on the side of making money.  .

Since the economy never really recovered in terms of jobs partly due to Republican  recalcitrance (they didn’t really wanted it fixed on Obama‘s watch) and partly due to emerging serious structural problems with global capitalism in general, the Repubs have been able to disingenuously blame it all Obama and the Democrats - and it has stuck.  People want scapegoats, culprits. The stimulus (and it did work) was half as much as was urged by economists at the time. Furthermore it was undermined by useless tax-cuts as a bone thrown to the Repubs. Yet many Americans see it as a failure. They are losing ground and they know it.  Too much wealth is flowing to the top most tiers. The middle class is shrinking.  But the Democrats are in (the Presidency at least) while this happening and they are being blamed. Actually Americans lean more to the political left than they realize.  A  recent study shows a  majority of Americans favor redistribution of the wealth by taxing it back from the top tiers especially the top 1%.  They also favor an increase in the minimum wage  which would which push the entire wage structure upwards. Yet the fundamental dogma of the Repubs is the diametric opposite – further tax cuts for the rich and the corporations they own and no stinking increase in the minimum wage (“it will kill jobs“.) This even as the rich and the corporations already sit on vast reservoirs of  non productive wealth which funds massive global speculation in all sorts of (still very much legal) derivatives (futures, credit default swaps, etc.)

Maybe the pessimistic (for Demos) poll numbers will scare enough formerly non-participants and independents with an inclination toward practicality and good sense, to vote. But I doubt it. People are uncommitted because they are ignorant, confused and under informed (and bamboozled.)  It probably doesn’t matter anyway because even if the Demos somehow miraculously retain a majority in the Senate, the Repubs still have the good old filibuster.     

A Strange Symmetry

Has anybody noticed the strange symmetry between the two events that are now dominating the news?  The eastern Ukraine and the Gaza/Israel situations have much in common.  In both cases tails are wagging dogs. In the case of the Ukraine Vladimir Putin, backed by the now firmly nationalistic Russian people would like to repossess some of  the vast lands that vodka inspired Boris Yelsen let slip away.  Of course the hapless idealistic Mikhail Gorbachev started the whole unraveling process. But greater Russia was still intact when  Gorbachev was forced out.  Now 20 years later the now fossil fuel extraction financed, gangster-capitalist run Russian state would like nothing better than to “reconstitute”  some if not all of the former Soviet Union. Of course the  provocative expansion of NATO into the former Soviet Union under Bill Clinton didn't help. NATO expansion along with cannibalization of the former fully socialist economy by the West and by former Soviet apparatchiks led to the rise of an ex-KGBer like Putin.  Recall the terrible collapse in living standards in Russia after the USSR imploded. Things were so bad many longed for a return to the old Stalinist order. Things are better now with rising oil prices such that the Russkies are now 'feeling their Wheaties.' 

But while the Crimea 'repossession' worked out well for Putin & Co, his support of pro Russian separatists  in eastern Ukraine is now becoming a huge embarrassment. The  Russians seem to have created an uncontrollable monster.  Of course the neo Nazi infested pro-West government in opposition  is not much better.  What could possible be gained  by shooting down a Malaysian airliner full of civilians mostly from the Netherlands?   As photos fill the news of  separatist types poking around in the grisly wreckage the stock of the separatist's adversaries, the corrupt chocolate billionaire led pro-West coup installed government in Kiev, suddenly shot up.  If you look at which side benefited politically, one would have to guess that the Kiev government shot it down and made it look like the separatists did it. But so far that doesn't seem like to be the case. Of course the Russkies prefer that explanation.

Then we turn to the never ending brutal misbehavior of the US client state, Israel, and the  US's unwitting involvement.  Of course our clueless AIPAC-funded Congress is overwhelming siding with Israel's war criminal Bibi Netanyahu and supporting the relentless bloodbath he is inflicting on the helpless trapped population of Gaza. With the Gaza's population penned up in essentially an open air prison, for Israel it is like shooting fish in a barrel - last count: 1839 Palestinians mostly civilians vs.  67 dead  Israelis mostly soldiers. Is this a war or some kind of mass martyrdom by the Gazans? By all accounts the  Gazans support the suicidal resistance by the military wing of Hamas. Remember they were essentially under siege already. And to make matters worse Obama & Co is now re-supplying Israel with more armaments since the IDF is running low.  Whereas  in the Ukraine 298 civilians were killed in the plane crash, Israel is now killing that many Palestinians sometimes daily. And how many more are wounded and maimed?  How the US  has increasingly chained  itself to militant Zionism which ironically has morphed into something close to what inspired the Zionist movement in the first place - the German Nazis.  Suffice to say the horror of the Nazi Holocaust has been overwhelming misused as an pretext for creating a racist apartheid state.   Furthermore Hamas is a creature of the Israel anti-Palestinian policies.  Recall the years of vilification of Yassar Arafat and the PLO, which was a totally secular resistance movement. In fact Israel encouraged the emergence of Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO.

Once the PLO was domesticated and co-opted (with US money) and turned into the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, serious Palestinian resistance activists were forced to turn to the more robust resistance led by radical Islamists such as Hamas.  All the while Israel has never let up in expanding into the West Bank making a Palestinian state ever more an impossibility.

We must not forget that the whole jihadist movement is blowback from the Cold War. Remember the  inception was the CIA financing of Mujahideen in Afghanistan under Carter and Reagan in yet another proxy war with the USSR (which turned out to be USSR's “Viet Nam”.)  For years Israel  functioned as the West's neocolonial  nuclear armed “Fort Apache” outpost.  Now fast forward to 2014 and Israel has metamorphosed into an out of control nuke-armed fundamentalist ultra orthodox religion run state.

The primary problem is neocolonial Israel's perennial intransigence in dealing with its indigenous native population. Unlike the American colonialists the 'locals' couldn't just be genocidally removed although Israel seems to be trying.  The forever festering Israel/ Palestinian conflict has to be a prime factor in provoking ever more enlistments into groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, and in the spread of the worldwide militant Islamist movement in general.  This is especially the case in a time when many of the world's 2.08 billion Muslims get to witness via satellite television on a daily basis one-sided slaughter of  their fellow believers by the IDF (and on a lesser scale drones.)  Of course lots of other horror shows and misdeeds by warring factions within the Muslim world vie for their attention. See Iraq and Syria plus daily suicide bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and others.) How much of  that carnage results from the muddled policies of an imperial power losing its grip?

Imperiums in decline (the US) or ones longing for former glory (Russia) are dangerous. They have populations who enjoy or recall the status (and material well being) of an imperial citizenry and who have been spoon fed on visions of nationalistic glory and exceptionalism. This feeding process is known as “manufacturing consent” and it works especially well especially in the US where the population lives in a very ahistorical reality.

Doesn't it seems rather suspicious that once the 'specter of worldwide communism' dissipated it was soon replaced by the 'specter of worldwide jihadist terrorism?'  A conspiracy minded type might suspect that somewhere somehow covert intelligence agencies might be intentionally feeding energy into this whole miserable mess so we can continue to have endless war. Or is all of this it just ineptitude and stupidity by our own ruling class? Whatever it is, it is very ugly.

Rainbow Song

ALL IN PURPLES AND BLUES

DADDY MAKE ME A RAINBOW

SO I CAN CLIMB UP TO YOU.

SHE STOOD IN THE DOORWAY

FACE DRAWN WITH DESPAIR

TEARS SHONE ON HER CHEEKS

SMALL HANDS FOLDED IN PRAYER

MOMMY SAYS YOU’RE IN HEAVEN

YOU GOT HURT IN IRAQ

DADDY, I REALLY MISS YOU,

AND I JUST WANT YOU BACK.

ALL IN PURPLES AND BLUES

DADDY MAKE ME A RAINBOW

SO I CAN CLIMB UP TO YOU.

SHE RAN THROUGH THE DOORWAY

SMILES BROKE AT THE SIGHT

FOR GOD IN HIS WISDOM

SENT HER RAINBOW FIRST LIGHT

 

THE HOUSE IS CLOAKED IN DARKNESS

SHREDDED WREATH ON THE DOOR

ANOTHER CASUALTY OF WAR.

                                        WRITTEN BY MARY E. WRIGHT, 90 YEARS OLD

                            

Usually my blog postings are impassioned screeds on what I feel is a world besieged by a species that has evolved (and multiplied) but has never overcome its primal nature - the homo sapiens. Our  primal nature shows up in the ease in which we accept these endless savage confrontations called wars. We are a species that has refined our tool making capabilities, our evolutionary adaptation, to the degree that we now can't even utilize our most advanced  lethal creations - our chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The consequences of their use are simply too horrible even for us.  One would think that having devised something so awesomely horrible, so massive in scale, so doomsday-like as a thermonuclear weapon, that it would spell the end of the grand old game of war. But no, on any given day somewhere in the world (usually many places at once) armed bands, sometimes ordered into combat by their governments sometimes not, packs of young men are hard at work trying to kill each other with devices of lesser levels of magnitude by no less level of lethality. But what makes it so much worse is that innocent outsiders, non participants such as children, who have no idea what the fight is over, or simply members of the wrong tribe, religion or nationality who are caught in the crossfire.

The above poem is a step or two back from that long view. People like me who focus our rage at the malign political processes that produce wars often forget that the fundamental tragedy of war is at the personal level. The above poem hones in on that side of it – children who lose a parent in a war, seemingly inexplicably...

The problem of "silos"

When pressing issues that demand cooperative engagement are kept separate even as they are hopelessly intertwined we call that putting things in “silos.” A good example of that was a lead story last week in the NY Times on a the recent UN report on climate change.. This NY Times report like so many others before it tried to impart the gravity of the global warming crisis in their usual measured language. Interestingly in the same paper was another article entitled Was Marx Right? It was one of their panel discussions. The subject this time was on the wobbly state of the global economy and whether Karl Marx maybe got it right after all - that global capitalism will eventually self destruct.

The new UN report from the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) had the usual grim litany of impending disasters. There will be a disastrous sea rise that will flood coastal zones leading to mass population migrations (and lost expensive beach homes.) Unstoppable feed back loops will be set in motion especially involving methane gas. Frozen arctic tundra along along with massive chunks of frozen methane on the ocean floor will melt releasing large bursts of methane creating even more rapid warming as methane is many times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. As warming becomes ever more pronounced whole sheets of ice will slide off off Greenland warming and redirecting Atlantic ocean currents that have kept Europe out of another ice age. Doomsday stuff (we've even seen the movie.)

Already we have dying coral reefs, increasing ocean acidification and ever more erratic weather. Soon there will be mass extinctions, global food shortages and ever more political upheaval. It's all bad. Those already being affected are the long suffering “wretched of the earth.” people living on $2 a day or less, who never dreamed of buying any Ford F-250 or a Lincoln Navigator or flying to Cancun for spring break.

Then in the very same edition we have the Times reconsidering Karl Marx and his prognostication regarding the fate of capitalism. The Times invited a cross-spectrum mix (left,center, right) to proffer their views on the subject (however no eminent Marxists were included.) The discussion yielded a typical college history of economic theory course's acknowledgment of Marx's contributions to classic economic thought with the usual caveats – the shortcomings in his labor theory value, failures of working 'class consciousness' to properly evolve as their living standard rose and its composition evolved, and so forth. But always like a dark shadow looming, assumed but not explicitly mentioned, is the perceived failures of fully non-capitalist economies to date. Yet none of the participants could deny the Marxist view of the inherent instability of capitalism - its boom and bust nature and the social havoc that its so-called “creative destruction” produces.

But most importantly not one these worthy thinkers mentioned the relationship between the required need of capitalism for ever expansion and the impact that ceaseless growth has on a finite planet. In other words they all ignored the dynamic relationship between the natural world we rely on and the eed for the entire capitalist edifice to ever expand ("good") or shrink ("bad".) So no one on the panel mentioned the impending catastrophe of global warming. Therefore no one brought up the obvious observation that it was industrialization driven by capitalism that has both caused global warming and is preventing any effective mitigation. Their focus was myopic. Historically the 'free market' has allowed manufacturers to avoid the full cost of production. Manufacturers traditionally have been allowed from the onset of the industrial revolution to lower their costs and thus the commodity's selling price by off loading the useless byproducts of the production process, the waste, on to the land, into the lakes, rivers, the ocean and of course the atmosphere. Only in the last half century was that “externality”even recognized and somewhat addressed (and of course resisted.) But the final irony is the artificially high profits derived from fossil fuel extraction and energy sectors partially due to offloading the full cost of pollution now gives these industries the political and financial wherewith to fund a robust effort to resist addressing this grave problem in any comprehensive way. The world is wedded to a mode of production that not only is exploiting the planet's workers, it is killing the planet's very life support system.

What many have yet to recognize is that Marx had already been there. In the 1850s he was already concerned about what he called “the metabolic rift,” the drive of capitalism to sacrifice natural ecological relationships to the demands of industrialized production. (See Marx's Ecology by John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review Press.) Of course massive amounts of CO2 had not yet accumulated to dangerous levels in the atmosphere. But other mismatches between natural ecological relations and for profit mass production were already evident. For instance he observed that the natural fertilizers were so depleted in the agricultural sector that guano had to be imported from the tropics to artificially compensate. While at the same time sewage disposal was a serious problems in the growing cities where the former farming population had migrated and were now living in urban squalor. 

 

These two pieces may or may not have been intentionally run same day. But it was left to the citizens in the Comments section to each article to make the connection - not the experts. A basic problem with so many issues is that professionals feel locked into their area of specialization and are reluctant to make connections 'outside their silo.' Of course ordinary schmucks have no such reservations. So a good number brought up the direct relationship between climate change and capitalism's need to ever expand. It's too bad the economists, left, right and center, didn't. It is true of so many things. We zero in on one concern at a time in isolation whereas everything is interconnected. And time is running out.

60 Minutes misses the point

Every winter when it gets especially cold the same pack of inane yappers sitting around on couches on Fox start yucking it up over what an obvious hoax Global Warming is because, damn it, it's cold outside. It would be so cool if they were right (no pun intended.) In fact I deeply hope that they are right, that this whole “global warming thing” is a huge hoax, just a hobby horse for “green” liberals and lefties and a rich source of government grants for bunch of pencil neck academics. Yet even if these Greenie Cassandras are just a bunch of “the sky is falling Chicken Littles," all this effort for renewable energy will not be for naught. It will still give us some more energy options, some of them even may be cheaper. What's wrong with that? Also what's wrong with not having oil tankers periodically split in half in the open ocean or deep sea oil rigs suddenly explode and kill millions of fish, birds and mollusks along with some hapless workers?  Plus name one country that depends on oil as its major source of revenue that is a functioning stable democracy? Also what's wrong with not having our water tables polluted with secret patented chemicals or triggering seismic actions by wholesale fracking of each and every geological formation that may contain oil or gas?

Yet, sadly, one would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to be aware of the mounting evidence from just a degree or two of warming that has already occurred – and we haven't seen anything yet. Ocean acidification, rising sea levels and methane release feedback loops have yet to really kick in. So it pained me to see a recent segment of 60 Minutes regretfully inform us that non-renewable energy is not making it in the market place. Hey, we don't mind spending $600B annually on military gadgets and weapons that are never subjected to any market based calculations, and often don't work. It's not about whether non-renewables are the next big investment opportunity (even if the Chinese have the patience to wait to see if it is.) Fracked natural gas and oil are certainly making a big splash on Wall Street. Put your money there.

But the tragedy is on a far deeper level than some CBS television show. Our so-called” leaders” (read: politicians with self-serving agendas) of all nations are letting us down. They can't resist the usual geo political distractions – keeping the rickety capitalist edifice running, petty turf battles (read: jockeying for imperialistic influence) and now bloody religious wars (Sunnites vs Shites vs Judaic extremists.) But we are running out of time.

Obama could have turned the tide. Instead of trying to reform our badly dysfunctional health care system first (which did need attention), he should have engaged in a full court press to confront this emerging global world historical catastrophe. Why not use the compelling need to phase out fossil fuels as a creative way to massively stimulate the economy which was acutely in trouble at the time – two birds with one stone. But instead of a FDR we got a Herbert Hoover. The Great Depression was not really ended until there was a massive, no-holds-barred deficit spending program to arm for WWII. 

 

Properly framed the American public could have been brought on board and given a crash course on the science behind this world war level crisis. Obama should have made such an effort. He could have confronted the troglodytes in the GOP head on. He had the credibility then. He had the wind at his back. He could have presented an ambitious, appealing (would provide many jobs), path breaking. paradigm-busting revitalization of the entire economy based on building a spanking new 21^st Century "green" infrastructure. FDR changed the conversation with the New Deal. Obama could have done it with a Green New Deal. With a really robust stimulus (urged by many economists at the time) it would have reversed the Great Recession (which we still have lingering effects of) and presented the United States as a global model for moving against this rift in the metabolism of entire planet's life support system. Instead he let the opportunity slip away.

So fast forward to now. With a meaningful confrontation of the global warming crisis seemingly in perpetual hiatus, why does 60 Minutes have to pile on and bring up the the whole sordid Solyndra affair again?   Moreover, other sources are saying that 60 Minutes got it wrong – there is actually a 97% success with these loans. Anyway enuf said. The producers of 60 Minutes seem to have decided to provide more typical mainstream media corporate "newspeak" fodder. Just like I did CNN I may have to check them off my list.