Sunday, October 28, 2012

Lincoln Addendum ... And A Wrinkle

We're all familiar with Lincoln's "You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."  Doubtless, its universal currency arises both from its rhetorical appeal as well as its reach.  I mean, it seems so comprehensive.  But is it?

Actually, no.  Turns out, that with every turn of the electoral wheel, which is to say whenever a plebiscite is on order, most of us more or less default to a rather fervently - if unconsciously - clutched belief that you can't even fool most of the people some of the time.  That is precisely the basis of our faith in democracy.  But we have learned over time, like the Church since Copernicus and Galileo through Darwin to an ever newer - if not braver- world, it pays to be flexible.  We seem to have made peace with the fact that sometimes most of the people are willing to fool themselves.

They kid themselves that they can satisfy their bigotry without sacrificing their own economic and social standing.  They have been doing this now ever since LBJ signed the historic Civil Rights legislation of the 1960's.  That is what provided the modern Republican Party with the racist foundation for arguing that anything so powerful that is can insure equal status under the law for all, regardless of race, is too damn powerful to be trusted to do anything right. 

Hence, white working class people have participated in and fueled the suicidal dismantlement of every institutional (Federal government) underpinning of the modern American middle class and the degradation of societal norms in general:  Social Security and Medicare, labor rights, public education , safe food and drugs (case in point: the current unregulated drug related national meningitis outbreak), environmental protection, Banking/Wall Street regulation, and even restraint over the out and out buying of the electoral process itself by home grown and foreign plutocrats and fascists.  What's next, the buying and selling of body parts?  Oh, wait, pretty sure that already goes on.  How long before we're back to buying and selling whole living bodies again? 

So, whereas even a rather shopworn Lincoln quotation can still provide a jumping off point for a current political observation, nothing seems more spiritually wanting than a miraculous Lincoln resurrection.





Saturday, October 27, 2012

Plutocrat's Pain

Chrystia Freeland is in pretty tight with the Plutocrats.  That doesn't mean she is simpatico with their world view or politics, but she has a lot of empathy for them.  She feels their pain.   She should, she has been making her living off of them as a professional financial reporter/editor for some time now.  She knows many, many of them personally.  And they often confess their personal feelings to her.  That tawdry, little gossipy fact, indeed appears to be the entire excuse for her most recent publication.

I have not yet read her new book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, but I've been in the audience when she has held forth at length on NPR,  Bill Moyers Journal,  and Real Time with Bill Maher.  She argues that our super-rich - richest ever on the planet - class of pampered scumbags have real feelings, which have been injured by Obama's constant insistence that they lack a sense of social responsibility.  Apparently they think Obama is either insensitive or insolent or something like it  for relentlessly reminding them and us that they are now paying the absolute lowest effective tax rate the rich have paid since the Great Depression. 

All the while, they cry and wail about budget deficits, begrudge the poor even the slimmest of life support sustenance, and rail against the aspirations of the majority for some semblance of a bourgeois middle-class life style.  They - the plutocrats - really think that their rigging the system and scamming it to pile up the biggest haul of loot in the history of class thievery is an act of civic duty.  They really believe that their obligation to the country lies in exploiting whatever strategy - however evil and dirty - may be available to enrich themselves.

Here's the thing.  There is not and never has been any moral or natural justification for allowing one tiny fraction of the actors in the economy, those at the point of transaction, negotiation, or administration to exercise confiscatory control over the revenue generated by the ensuing activity undertaken and conducted by an additional and indispensable multiplicity of players.  Hence, contrary to the accepted mythology of the system's apologists, like Freeland, this is not at all a question of redistribution.  It is - and always has been - a fight over the basic original distribution of the proceeds which flow from the dynamic of economic activity. 

What is needed, and really all that is needed, is a resurgence of economic democracy.  Strong unions, backed up by a civilized respect for the imperative of appropriate legal oversight of market activity, alone can insure fair labor compensation and a just society.

These are all old lessons, learned the hard way.  They remain as sure as the lift of a wink or the smell of sweat, yet are willfully forgotten by today's elites.  Shame on them.  Really, shame on them.

For we are not now suffering the want to somehow come up with a new or exotic formulation to address today's challenges to progressive political ideals, as Freeland and others of her ilk argue.  That is just so much lame bullshit.  We are suffering from the closing embrace of a lowering darkness and the lack of will.

 

Monday, October 22, 2012

1856*

This debate is going to be a humdinger.**  This is the last chance the Fascist right modern Republican Party has to win under the present presidential electoral system.  Angry white men are dying off, and the number of diverse ethnic young voters is on the rise.  As Bill Clinton might say, it's just arithmetic.

They have no choice, Romney and Co. have to go for the kill shot.  No telling what crazy bullshit will hit the airwaves tonight, but get ready, it will surely be without precedent.  Gonna be ugly and hilarious all at once.

And so I come to the point of this little post.  Just a thought I've not seen floated anywhere else, but I would take a flyer on adventure and speculate that should the plutocrats and their overpowering money falter and fail to win this time, look for a full-court press across the country to return to a presidential electoral system whereby the state electors are chosen by state legislatures, not popular vote within the states.  The last time any state selected its electors in that manner was in 1856 when South Carolina was still that backward.  And the constitution  allows states to adopt that method even today.  Just a thought.  I know, hilarious and ugly. 

*Clarification:  1856 was the last time any state granted its legislature the regular and continuing task of appointing the state's presidential electors.  South Carolina did it that way, just as it always had, up until its act of secession in 1860.  For isolated, nonrecurring reasons, three other states' legislatures last appointed electors in the same historical era:  In 1848, Massachusetts did so because a 50% majority requirement had not been met by any contesting party.  In 1864, Nevada was admitted to the union and did not have time to conduct a popular canvass.  Similarly, in 1868, Florida had only recently been readmitted to the union and had not time for a popular vote.

**Update:   Wow, that was a dud of a debate - at least when thought of as a potential humdinger.  So, it was also a dud of a prediction.  Someone once told me that if you want to make at least a few correct predictions, make a lot of them.  So, I'm not shy or embarrassed on that score.

What is worrying though is that Romney did not swing for the fences last night, and that should tell us he and his campaign are feeling confident enough to be playing "not to lose" rather than going all out for the win.  Obama was the only one who came in with a pre-packaged zinger to launch, the one about horses and bayonets.  His delivery still needs some work, but it was fairly effective.

Anyway, I stand by the warning that the fascist right sees this election, under the usual methodology, as key to implementing its final solution to the legacy of the both the New Deal and Great Society, i.e. total destruction of Social Security and Medicare.  They know that from this point forward the demographics will trump their money and thwart their schemes in anything remotely resembling a popular vote election.  And, by the way, that is all we have now, the semblance of one. 

But they also know that they can pretty easily control state legislatures with their power and influence, regardless of the individual state constituency make-up.  This inside dealing is even more secretive, opaque, and effective than it shows on the national stage.  Just look at Louisiana, for instance.  Perhaps a more extended analysis of this proposition in a future post.

For now we should be aggressively pursuing strategies which will accomplish the opposite goal.  That is to say the dismantlement  or disabling of the so-called electoral college.  Remember, as Scalia said in 2000 when he and the other fascists were busy stealing the presidential election, individual citizens do not have the constitutional right to vote for president.  As long as the electoral college is still functioning, we never will.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

LOL

I have no idea whether Obama will come to fight tonight or not.  I know he personally has the tools.  I know he has the most sacred human social agenda available to him, the defense and promotion of truth, justice and human dignity.  But I also know that the record clearly reflects that he doesn't fully comprehend the reality of the struggle over that agenda. 

For whatever complex tangle of reasons, be they generational, emotional, or intellectual, Obama is not, repeat not,  a genuine liberal.  He has more or less always said that very thing himself.  Just think of the last so-called debate when he mumbled something into the microphone to the effect that his and Romney's views on Social Security are probably not all that dissimilar.  God help us if he ever does have the opportunity to act on what I take him at his word is his real opinion.  We are all sunk.

Thank God that the modern Republican Party is so demonically driven to depths of depravity by its racist core base as to deny it sufficient maneuvering room to conspire with the clueless "liberal" pretender to kill one of the three great domestic achievements of the last century.

 And that century truly deserves to be remembered as the "American Century."  After all, this country in that century rescued the rest of the world from two great wars, led the way in overcoming the debacle of an unregulated capitalist system's great collapse, enshrined twin elements of a decent social safety net, at least for the elderly, and - to our everlasting credit - finally broke through and ended all of the legal structures of racial oppression. 

But today, we find ourselves teetering towards the abyss.  We are stumblingly led by a man with outstanding academic credentials, but no real education.  The lack of education part is not his fault, it is generational.  At the time he went through college, the economic lessons learned during the Great Depression were almost totally written out of the curriculum, and replaced by the bogus conservative nonsense peddled by the likes of Milton Friedman and others.  Such largely explains why Obama is not a true liberal, he was taught a bunch of  conservative economic claptrap, and hasn't yet fully overcome that disability, even in the face of this modern day financial "downpression."  And he is in no sense alone.  Most new age Democrats - from Clinton forward - are likewise ill-equipped to meet the enemy head-on.

Overlay that complex dynamic, one which has whittled down and weakened the determination of a once proud and progressive Democratic Party, with the ascendancy of the modern Republican fascistic edifice, and understand that tonight everything is at risk. 

Let's hope Obama shows he is starting to get it.



Sunday, October 14, 2012

Generations Or Choices ... Take Your Pick

So, David Brooks is at his very best in the New York Times this morning.  That means he is almost all wrong, which is as good as he gets.  Usually, like all conservatives, he is simply stupid.

He claims the Biden/Ryan debate was generationally driven.  That is maybe ten percent right.  But then he goes on to claim that Ryan did well, which is a total crock.  All of us who watched the thing know as well as we know our own names that that is bullshit.  Biden wiped ... the bottom of things with the Charmin (Ryan). That is all.

To be sure, Brooks is correct in saying that Ryan is - more than anything else - into himself; that is to say, self-obsessed.  Ryan spends all of his spare time (which for Republican, i.e. conservative, elected officials means most of the day) in the work-out room or gym.  Biden, on the other hand, is the product of far more serious times.  Well, excuse me for thinking the obvious: Biden is of strong stuff and real substance; Ryan is a developmentally arrested, narcissistic, shallow punk. 

Speaking of which, then comes Stephen Colbert on one of the Sunday morning talking head programs and admits that satire without a point is at bottom "skszoid."  For once, I totally agree with the mentally unhinged, rootless, pointless, unlettered, unread, and ignorant, modern satirists like Colbert and Stewart.  They are every bit as much a part of the social illness we confront as is Rush Limbaugh.

To the extent that this whole argument can be generationally divided - which is a very small, but noticeable amount - the irony is that the Biden generation cares a whole hell of a lot more for the Colbert/Stewart generation than those kids have the balls to care for themselves. 

For example, I am about to head out for the Greater New Orleans Labor Day Picnic, which was postponed to this date because of Hurricane Isaac.  Others will be attending second line parades in Central City or the annual Seafood Festival.  I love all three events, as both my social calendar and personal diary reflects.  But, on certain days, one makes this or that choice.  If there is any generational component, well, I am happy to stand my actions against those taken or not taken by others.









Saturday, October 13, 2012

Don't Cry For Joe Biden, America

When you're on your game and pounds-the-best the class of any contest, you know it.  Never once do you look at the scoreboard, during or after the event; it is but small ornamentation.   You not only own the victory, you are the victory. 

When you've turned back and laid waste every strategy of the opponent, when you've dominated in every way, when you've borne high the standard of accomplishment and truth, when you've frustrated the misdirection and trampled the lies of frauds and fakers, the ultimate deed is done.  Yet again, the real has been shown to exist and matter in the world.

When the engagement has ended, the real people are lifted up, united in purpose, and positioned to meet whatever challenges life may offer; to not merely persevere, but overcome.  When you've fulfilled a vital assignment in such an event, no one can help you feel it more, or steal it away.   And if you've delivered all this with honest gusto, style and savoir-fare, remember Joe Biden and smile your Sunday best.

It is a sweeping and grand human accomplishment.  And it is not despite the fact that the con men and connivers will return for another run against the real, but precisely because we know they will.  Then will it be well to look to Biden's example.  Then on that day, and we should hope many days to come, perhaps Obama will be inspired to give us Henry V, not Hamlet.   

For those battles, come they will; relentlessly.  Here's why: we live not in an age of miracles and wonders, as Paul Simon once sang, but in a very dark day of cynicism, characterized by a virtual doctrinal pointlessness embraced by many of the young, and a consciously willful dishonesty abroad within the organs of communication and institutions of community that once were reliably sincere, even when mistaken or misguided.  In concert, they attempt a sort of genetic decoding of the truth and reality, not to better understand the world, but to disdain the notion that there is actually anything out there to understand.  It amounts to nothing less than a denial of the value and dignity and meaningfulness of human life; a death wish.

Indeed, among the most vital component of this generation, it seems like everything serious is to be ridiculed.  Nothing gets past being some kind of existential satire, a parody of  virtue and integrity.  I give you Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert - Beavis and Butthead come to life.

Meanwhile, formerly reputable social entities and institutions, especially among news reporting organizations - but certainly not excluding many others like businesses, universities, religions, etc., appear to have no higher purpose (let alone purpose at all), beyond expanding a hold on the popular imagination or the people's pocketbook.  Hence, we find ourselves presented with a shallow, spoiled, childishly ignorant ideologue, Paul Ryan, propped-up by false media proclamations of substance and courage, draped in bogus bona-fides, and sent out with a straight face to stand for the second highest office in the land. Of course, Biden laughed him off the stage.

What is in no way funny, however, is that the same dishonest media which invented the Ryan myth, continues to push the lie.  It invested so much of its reputation in misrepresenting a weirdly narcissistic, emotionally arrested, overage adolescent, whose guiding light in life and "intellectual" North Star was an equally warped personality of no real accomplishment, Ayn Rand, that it cannot now afford to allow even an obvious truth to interrupt its corrupt narrative.  It just can't bring itself to fully comprehend or admit Biden's total triumph. 

But don't cry for Joe Biden, America.  Joe knows, and he knows you know.  He laughed the whole way through it, and he's still laughing.  Save your tears.  They could still be needed, should we ultimately let him and ourselves down.











Thursday, October 11, 2012

Unnatural Natural Enemies ... Or ... You Got A Problem!

The human animal is different.  Thank God there are no more like us ... most others would surely agree.  And if we were truly smart, we would try to be a much different animal in a much better way.

We are the only animal on the planet which pushes other animals to the edge of existence or to absolute extinction for reasons other than nutritional need, competition for territorial range, or fear of predation.  We do it not out of natural instinct and need, but because of the bullshit which otherwise goes on in our heads.

We imagine the most ridiculous crap.  It may be aphrodisiac related or connected to some other silly super-human bio-enhancement delusion.  Worse, it may just be because we want to try it in some new chic restaurant culinary preparation.  Shame.

Oh ..... you want to affect the effete skeptic's pose of the modern clueless period, do you?  Tell it to the scores of  Elephants, Rhinoceroses, Tigers, Sharks, Chimpanzees and legions of other bush animals pushed to the end of life or extinction by ironically self-destructive human appetites and gluttonous, greedy grasping.

We also imagine ridiculous grounds for harboring murderous opinions of other humans. It's all part of the same capacity that makes us the only delusional and most dangerous animal on the planet. 

Think about these things:  It's only 50 years since the enlightening of Vatican II, and reaction now has another dark and firm grip on the Catholic Church, about the same amount of time has passed since LBJ finally forged national legal freedom for all in this country and the reaction is running at flood stage, finally, FDR has not much longer absented the political stage and the Reagan "Welfare Queen" stooges are in the flood lights.  I predict, though, that Joe Biden, a true, and truly good, human being, will expose this punk.  Ryan is toast.



 

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Such A Very Good Thing

Some more explicit thoughts on our fair city's current newspaper saga, which was discussed in the previous post. Here are the most important features of the transition to daily home delivery and local focus by the brand-spanking-new Daily New Orleans Edition of the The Advocate.  This is what makes the incredibly brutal, ugly and crass attempt by the Times-Picayune to insult and push us around, sully our good name, and demote us to second-rate status such a very good thing.

First of all, the Times-Picayune's gambit has failed, utterly.  In fact, it has backfired, devastatingly.  The Picayune, instead of being able to cut overhead to the bone, pare back service to only three days a week home delivery without consequence, and generate higher profits at our and their former employees' expense, has effectively committed suicide; good riddance.

Best of all, that is in no way owing to any campaign or effort on the part of any of the know-it-all-entrepreneurial newbies, all come to town since Katrina to instruct us about all the things we've gotten wrong in the last 300 years, the slacker and eccentric indulgences we call a culture, and overall want of civic virtue.  No, all this group of clueless kids have done is foster a wholesale wreckage of any semblance of public education or effective health care for the poor and, along with it, the strongest medical training anywhere in the country, through its willingess to support coloring-book childish conservative leadership like Stacy Head here and Bobby Jindal in the state capitol.  They can't even unstick their eyeballs from their electronic light-up toys long enough to do the laundry.

Nor did the whining and polite letter-writing efforts of  big-ass wallets like Tom Benson and the uptown society page clubby swells have any effect.

No, Baton Rouge Advocate publisher, David Manship, stepped-in, stepped-up and invested in a New Orleans daily version of the Advocate for home delivery here because we are who we are, nothing more.  He has raided the remnants of the Picayune's offices, made off with the T-P Loving Cup chalice awarded annually to some goody-two-shoe local aristocrat, and used it to christen this wonderful new publication.  And it has all happened simply because, as I pointed out previously, we are who we are: a people, a culture, and a city.  -30-.







 

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Requiem For A Paperweight

Don't let the title fool you, this is a feel good story.  And we deserve it. 

We are a people.  We are a culture.  We are a city. 

And more, we are a champion.  Events have proven that.  Take a victory lap.

Better yet, take another sip of your CDM, Mimosa, or Bloody Mary, light one if you wish, sit back and relax with the paper today and tomorrow.

For unlike the protagonist of Rod Serling's classic Requiem for a Heavyweight, Mountain Rivera, who never threw a fight, the late Times-Picayune took an intentional dive in an elaborately staged imaginary duel between print and digital news delivery, yet hoped to remain the bully of New Orleans.  But, the curtain has dropped.  They are gone.  We are still here.

Cheers!!  In order for sure.  But like any print worth the ink, this should be clipped and cut to the true skinny. 

Today is the 7th day of home delivery of the New Orleans Edition of  The Advocate.

Like many others who consider themselves lifelong New Orleanians, I lived some four years in the Baton Rouge area.  It was many years ago.  And during those years, I read The Morning Advocate daily.  Note the word "Morning" in the masthead; no doubt an artifact of even earlier times when Baton Rouge, too, had an evening paper.  I'm certain I haven't read more than ten to twenty Advocate issues in the last thirty plus years. 

I always thought it a quality publication.  Still, I don't know how to say this more politely, so here goes:  In my experience it has always been stupidly conservative, editorially.  But it was also pretty damn good at covering its beat.  And that is what counts. Over the long haul, institutional outlook can, and often does, change; and, where it really matters, outlook is up to you, dear reader.  If the assigned duty is secured, that is all that counts.  So I will leave the rest of this to the publisher of The Advocate, David Manship.

This from Manship in the Monday, October 1, 2012 New Orleans Edition of The Advocate:

 
"We understand that people make decisions about how they consume news on an individual basis, and our products are available in many formats, including online and an E-edition, but we also have The Advocate Daily New Orleans edition for Crescent City readers who want a printed daily newspaper delivered to their home or workplace.
 
We know the daily paper has an important role in the community, especially New Orleans, and with your support, we will meet your demands for quality reporting of the news of the day in and around New Orleans.
 
A few months ago, New Orleans was in the  national spotlight because it seemed slated to become the largest American city without a daily newspaper.
 
That was supposed to happen today, Oct. 1.
 
But, it hasn't happened.
 
At The Advocate, we think New Orleans and its citizens deserve a quality newspaper printed each and every day, and we intend to provide one."
 














Thursday, October 4, 2012

The Return Of Zero

Just when you thought it was safe to hold a presidential election again, look who showed up to throw the debate to the plutocrat last night.  You gotta love him, I guess; he's all we've got now.  But would anyone care to tell me why you ever thought zerObama would be better than Hillary or even, oh my, that little bastard maker, John Edwards.

Just when he's daily gaining lead distance in the polls by channeling FDR, he climbs back into his new age, yuppie-fied, new Democrat, third way, lame and blind mindset, and reverses course.  Face it, in his heart he's really not an economic liberal, the only kind there is by the way.  He's never been for steadfast and bold Keynesian economics, absolute defense of Social Security and Medicare, or unions.

Just when you were becoming comfortable that he would battle to the death for the middle-class, he once again reveals his inner sweet surrender to the empty-headed, let's all pretend class differences don't matter in society or politics zeitgeist.  In other words:  "Simpson-Bowles, marry me.  Working people,  plan to work until you drop, and get fucked the whole way from the birth canal to the last sinkhole."


Oh, yeah, we're coming back soon as well.  And not a minute too soon.  Stay tuned or on-line or whatever the proper term of art may be.