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Corporate Whining

Posted on October 5, 2011 by admin

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Old White People Who Think They Can Just Check Out Should Think Again

Posted on October 5, 2011 by admin

By Jim Schutze
Categories: Get Off My Lawn

So what is all this anger among the old white people really all about? Why are old white people wearing odd costumes and hating the president all the time?
We old white people all know exactly what it is. But nobody will say it out loud. It never comes out in the stories, even though it’s right there staring us in the face. When we were young, the world was white. Everybody in the neighborhood was white. Everybody downtown was white. Everybody at church was white. Everybody on television was white except Nat King Cole, and at least he sang white.

Now we look out at the world, and it’s different. It’s black and brown and foreign and lesbian and Muslim and vegan — all kinds of weird stuff. So old white people are pissed. They don’t want to pay for public school any more if the schools are going to be full of black lesbian Muslim kids. They don’t want to pay for healthcare reform if the money’s going to take care of brown foreign vegan people.

The old white people want out. They’re going to take their ball and go home. They no longer choose to be part of the national fabric.

Only problem with that? Without the national fabric they perish.

I ran across this theme in a story I have been working on about about Governor Rick Perry and the “Texas miracle.” It had to be cut for space, so I thought I would inflict it on you here instead.

On the presidential campaign trail, Perry touts the state’s strong economy as proof that he knows how to do things. My story, which runs in the newspaper tomorrow, says most of the good things about Texas are things he had little to do with creating. The bad thing is that he’s been busy tearing apart many of the good things in the last year.

As usual with a story like this, I got to learn a lot more good stuff than I could squeeze into the allotted space. There was one especially painful cut — an exchange with Rice University sociology professor Steve Murdock, the former official state demographer of Texas, who argues that Texas is now an important model for what the rest of the country should avoid, not emulate.

By starving public education, older conservative whites will find one day they have cut the ground from beneath themselves, Murdock says. “When you look at trends for 2040, most projections are for somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population of Texas being Anglo or non-Hispanic white,” he says. “About 8-10 percent will be African-Americans, somewhere between 52 and 59 percent will be Hispanic and the remainder will be primarily Asian.”

Listen, Gramps, just who do you think is going to pay for your Rascal scooter when the time comes?
The problem, he says, is that minorities in general and Hispanics in particular already have alarmingly low records of educational attainment in Texas. “If you look at Hispanics in Texas, 42 percent according to the most recent census data for 2009 have less than a high school level of education.”
Minority kids, especially Hispanic kids, he says, need more public education investment and more services, not fewer. Without that extra help, those kids won’t finish school, won’t be well educated and will not be well employed.

Under Perry, Murdock says, “We basically said to our schools, ‘We are going to take $500 to $700 per student per year away from you, and you’re going to have to absorb somewhere between 140,000 and 180,000 new students and not get a cent for that.”

He says older conservative whites miss an important point in all of this. Perry may call it a Ponzi scheme, but the way Social Security and Medicare actually are supposed to work is for each new generation of young workers to pay for the older retired generation’s safety net.

Murdock says there will not be a big enough population of young, private-schooled, well-paid white workers, if that’s what the old white people were counting on, to pay for the old white folks’ upkeep.

“What people sometimes miss, when they kind of say, ‘Well, we don’t have to worry about one group of people or the other,’ is that an economy and particularly a government run with a pooling of resources.

“My argument is that there are two basic populations in Texas and across the country. There is an aging population, literally off the end of the life cycle, of non-Hispanic whites who aren’t going to have a resurgence of growth. They’ve been below replacement fertility for 30 years.

“They need services like Social Security and Medicare. The other population is a young increasingly minority population. They need educational services. The older people need these younger people to get educated so they can help pay for services. The populations, younger and older, are obviously interdependent.”

It’s a pretty simple proposition. Old white people need young minority kids to do well and prosper so that they will be able to pay for the old folks’ safety net when the old folks need it. Of course, old people can always say, “No, please take away our Social Security, our Medicare and our Medicaid. We want to die outdoors living under bridges.”

But if the old white people want to collect Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, then they need to get busy making sure those minority and immigrant kids get really solid educations and have lots of help going on to college.

When I attended the University of Michigan, it was virtually free — almost free — to in-state students. I worked my way through with factory jobs. Last time I checked, in-state tuition and books at Michigan came to about eight grand a semester — $64K for a bachelor’s degree not counting living expenses. Even with a good factory job, I think it takes a very long time to save up $64,000. Of course, you can always mortgage yourself for the money.

The point is, today’s old white people benefited from enormous social subsidies in the post-war era, especially in education, or we’d all be in much tougher straits today. By pulling that same rug out from under today’s American children, we slit our own throats. On the plus side, maybe this way they won’t have to slit our throats for us when they grow up and realize what we did.

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And Hate Begat Hate

Posted on September 14, 2011 by admin

By Ahmed Rashid

September 13, 2011 “Today Online” — IN their shock after Sept. 11, 2001, Americans frequently asked, “Why do they hate us so much?” It wasn’t clear just who “they” were – Muslims, Arabs or simply anyone who was not American. The easy answer that many Americans found comforting was equally vague: That “they” were jealous of America’s wealth, opportunities, democracy and what have you.

But in this part of the world – in Pakistan, where I live, and in Afghanistan next door, from which the Sept. 11 attacks were directed – those who detested America were much more identifiable, and so were their reasons.

They were a small group of Islamic extremists who supported Al Qaeda; a larger group of students studying at madrasahs, which had expanded rapidly since the 1980s; and young militants who had been empowered by years of support from Pakistan’s military intelligence services to fight against India in Kashmir. They were a tiny minority of Pakistan’s 150 million people at the time. In their eyes, America was an imperial, oppressive, heathen power just like the Soviet Union, which they had defeated in Afghanistan.

Now, with the United States about to enter the 11th year of the longest war it has ever fought, far more of my neighbors in Pakistan have joined the list of America’s detractors. The wave of anti-Americanism is rising in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, even among many who once admired the United States, and the short reason for that is plain.

The common resentment is that American plans to bring peace and development to Afghanistan have failed, the killing is still going on, and to excuse their failures Americans have now expanded the war into Pakistan, evoking what they did in the 1960s when the Vietnam war moved into Laos and Cambodia. Moreover, while Pakistanis die for an American war, Washington has given favored deals to Pakistan’s archenemy, India. So goes the argument.

The more belligerent detractors of America will tell you that Americans are imperialists who hate Islam, and that Americans’ so-called civilizing instincts have nothing to do with democracy or human rights. A more politically attuned attitude is that the detractor doesn’t hate Americans, just the policies that American leaders pursue.

But both groups feel trapped: Afghanistan is still caught up in war, and my country is on the brink of meltdown. And so now there is something beyond just disliking America. We have begun to ask the question of 9/11 in reverse: Why do Americans hate us so much ?

Ten years is a long time to be at war, and to be faced with a daily threat of terrorist attacks. It is a long time spent in an unequal alliance in which the battle gets only more arduous and divisive, especially for the weaker partner on whose soil the battle is playing out.

Under such long strain, resentments about intrusions, miscalculations and feckless performance make a leap to an assumption: That Americans must hate Pakistanis because they would otherwise never treat them so carelessly, speak so badly of them, or distrust them so much.

Americans should not be particularly surprised by this. War diminishes everyone and all states, even the victors, and that is especially true if the war is characterised by broken promises and dashed hopes, perceptions of betrayal, and disappointment in an ally. For the people living in this theater of war, the litany of such disappointments is long.

MORE FAILED STATES

Perhaps the greatest promise made after Sept. 11 by President George W. Bush and the British prime minister, Tony Blair, was that the West would no longer tolerate failed and failing states or extremism. Today there are more failed states than ever; Al Qaeda’s message has spread to Europe, Africa and the American mainland; and every religion and culture is producing its own extremists, whether in sympathy with Islamism or in reaction to it (witness the recent massacre in Norway).

Famine, hunger, poverty and economic failure have increased beyond measure, at least in this corner of the world, where the Sept. 11 plans were hatched, while climate change has set off enormous floods and drought brings untold misery to millions in unexpected places. The latter is not the fault of Sept. 11, but in the minds of many the catastrophes we face stem from America’s wars and the diversion of America’s attention from truly universal problems. In this, America, too, is a victim of its wars and the global changes it has not addressed.

Of the two invasions – Iraq and Afghanistan – and the one state-salvaging operation, in Pakistan, that Americans embarked on in the past decade, America’s most glaring failure has been its inability to help rebuild the states and the nations where it has gone to war.

State-building is about setting up institutions and governance that may not have existed before, as in Afghanistan, or that have been in the hands of ruthless dictators, as in Iraq. Nation-building is all about helping countries develop national cohesion, as Iraq still struggles to do and as Pakistan has failed to do since its creation. That is done not by blunt force, but by developing the economy, civil society, education and skills.

Both state- and nation-building were dirty words in the Bush administration. They are less so in the Obama administration, but they are also no longer used to describe the Obama strategy in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Still, the much vaunted counterinsurgency strategy framed by Gen. David H. Petraeus for defeating Al Qaeda depends enormously on improving governance, rebuilding institutions like the local army and police force, and empowering people with a future – in other words, state- and nation-building.

Yet despite the billions of dollars spent on this strategy, America’s social agenda has been pared down and the overall policy left in the hands of the United States military and the CIA, for which counterinsurgency is essentially a military tool. In Afghanistan, night raids and targeted killings by American Special Operations forces and drone attacks by the CIA have replaced the B-52 bombers of post-Sept. 11 as the favored tools to deplete the Taliban. The targeting is more precise, but the cost in civilian deaths is still too high for the local population to bear.

Afghans now demonstrate in the streets every time a civilian is killed. In Pakistan, drone attacks have infuriated the entire population because nobody can quantify how successful they are in eliminating Al Qaeda or the Taliban. John O Brennan, President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, said in June that for a year “there hasn’t been a single collateral death” as a result of drone attacks.

So the CIA may claim that the drones have killed 600 militants and not a single civilian, but what Afghan or Pakistani can possibly believe that? Pakistan has asked for all drone strikes to cease, and the Afghans have asked for an end to night raids. But so far the Americans have not obliged. And anti-Americanism flourishes.

WARLORDS IN ARMANI

The United States invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq without even a plan as to how it would govern these countries. In both countries, policy was made on the hoof, and much of it was initially implemented in secret – a sure way to forsake civilian empowerment.

The former Afghan warlords, whom the Taliban got rid of in the 1990s, were re-employed by the CIA. They underwent metamorphoses, like caterpillars to butterflies, from warlords into businessmen, drug dealers, transport contractors, property magnates. But underneath the new Armani suit was the same warlord hated by the people. So Afghans blame the Americans for reviving their dormant tormentors.

Corruption is rampant, but not just because the rulers are kleptomaniacs. The United States must share a major part of the blame in giving huge contracts to the wrong people, forsaking accountability and transparency, and enriching only a few rather than building an economy. All of these failings – warlords, corruption, civilian casualties – have helped breed the new and vicious strain of anti-Americanism.

Meanwhile, American aid and economic development in Pakistan and Afghanistan have aimed at “quick impact projects,” which are intended to win hearts and minds, but which, like instant oatmeal, dissolve quickly. The real business of helping these states build an indigenous economy and creating jobs to replace opium growing and smuggling in the rural lands, where government authority is weakest, was left to chance.

Yes, the American military became an employer, but Afghanistan is about to enter an acute economic downturn when 100,000 American troops leave and tens of thousands of Afghans who work for them become jobless.

A recent Congressional report says the United States has wasted at least US$31 billion in the awarding of contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. And in Pakistan, people see no lasting economic benefit from the US$20 billion Washington has spent there since 2001. It has bought a lot of military equipment, but no dam or university or electric power plant.

The Pakistani military benefited from those purchases, but it thought it was never consulted sufficiently by the United States and was not considered a true ally. Acting on those assumptions, it created its own safeguards by backing both President Bush and the resurgent Taliban insurgency, and it continued in that vein after President Obama took over.

Throughout the war, it has feared that the United States was treating India as the real ally, so it maintained the extremists it had trained in the 1990s to fight its larger neighbor. But nothing stands still, and the military lost control as the extremists morphed into the Pakistani Taliban and began focusing on the state itself.

Pakistan, which is now the fourth largest nuclear armed state in the world, has been gravely destabilised by its involvement in wars in Afghanistan. This, at least, did not begin 10 years ago. It has spanned three decades.

The 1980s war against the Soviet Union was fueled by CIA operatives, Saudi money and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. Kalashnikovs, drugs, madrasas and sectarian divisions proliferated then, while Pakistan was ruled by an American-backed military dictatorship. Since Sept 11, Pakistan has again been destabilized by the insurgency in Afghanistan, and for most of that time it was again being ruled by an American-backed military dictatorship.

FALSE NARRATIVES

There is a flip side to this coin of anti-Americanism, of course. The leaders of both Afghanistan and Pakistan have found it convenient to play it for political survival or to explain away their own lapses.

Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, has become a master at spilling tears to describe the latest American perfidy, while failing to fight corruption or provide a modicum of good governance. Similarly, Pakistan’s army and intelligence directorate regularly brief the media and politicians on the long sequences of American betrayals, Washington’s love for India and how Pakistan was trapped in this relationship.

These are false narratives – dry tinder for the question “Why do Americans hate us?” – but they have now seeped into the national psyche, the media and the political debate, and countering them is not easy.

That is because the army’s national security objectives, which many Pakistanis still accept as a matter of national identity, are rooted in the last century, rather than in what is needed today. They decree that the army must maintain a permanent state of enmity with India; a controlling influence in Afghanistan and the deployment of Islamic extremists or non-state actors as a tool of foreign policy in the region; and that it must command a lion’s share of the national budget alongside its control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

American attempts to change this course with either carrots or sticks are rebuffed, while the civilian government cowers in the background, not wanting to get trampled by the two bull elephants of American and Pakistani military will. Meanwhile the voices of extremism translate anti-Americanism into denunciations of Americans’ own treasured ideals: Democracy, liberalism, tolerance and women’s rights. These days, all are pronounced Western or American concepts, and dismissed.

Pakistanis desperately need a new narrative – one that is honest about the mistakes their leaders have made and continue to make. But where is the leadership to tell this story as it should be told? The military gets away with its antiquated thinking because nobody is offering an alternative. And without one, nothing will improve for a long time, because the American and Pakistani governments are in a sense mirror images of each other. The Americans have allowed their military and CIA to dominate Washington’s policy-making on Afghanistan and Pakistan, just as the Pakistani military and ISI dominate decision making in Islamabad.

Since the death last year of Richard C. Holbrooke, who was devoted to creating a political strategy to underpin American policy-making, but whom President Obama seemed to ignore, there has been no American political strategy for Pakistan or Afghanistan.

After 10 years, it should be clear that the wars in this region cannot be won purely by military force, nor should policy making be left to the generals. The questions about who hates whom will become only more difficult to resolve until the warfare ends and national healing begins. THE NEW YORK TIMES

Ahmed Rashid is a journalist and the author of “Taliban” and “Descent into Chaos.”

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The Years of Shame

Posted on September 12, 2011 by admin

Paul Krugman
September 11, 2011, 8:41 AM

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

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How Little We Know About the Origins of 9/11

Posted on September 8, 2011 by admin

By Robert Scheer

For a decade, the main questions about 9/11 have gone unanswered while the alleged perpetrators who survived the attacks have never been publicly cross-examined as to their methods and motives. It is not conspiratorial but rather obviously plausible to suggest that they have been kept out of sight because legal due process, constitutionally guaranteed to even the most heinous of criminals, might provide information that our government would find embarrassing.

We remain in ignorance as to what drove religious zealots formerly allied with the United States to turn against us, and what was the role of our ally, Saudi Arabia, the country of origin for most of the hijackers and their financing. Why in the aftermath of the attack did the United States embrace Pakistan, which was one of only three governments (Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the others) to diplomatically recognize the Taliban and which turned out to be harboring the fugitive Osama bin Laden? And why did we instead invade Iraq, a nation known to be engaged in a deadly war with bin Laden and his al-Qaida?

How little we know about the origins of the Sept. 11 attacks is laid out in the disclaimer on Page 146 of the official 9/11 presidential commission report. A box on that page states clearly that the conventional narrative of how those portentous events unfolded is based largely on the interrogation under torture of key witnesses who have never been permitted a single moment in a publicly observed court of law.

As the bipartisan commissioners ruefully conceded, their examination of the motives, financing and actions of the alleged 9/11 perpetrators had to “rely heavily on information from captured al Qaeda members” that the commissioners, despite having been granted the highest security clearance, were never allowed to seriously vet:

“We submitted questions for use in the interrogations but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting. We were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process.”

That sensitive interrogation process included the waterboarding of the key witnesses, led by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was scheduled to go on public, civilian trial in Manhattan last spring, until the Obama administration caved in to hysterical Republican-led pressure and called off the trial.
The fear of a public trial is apparently that it will be an occasion to humanize the presumed perpetrators of barbaric acts, but by that standard no alleged murderer should ever be tried in civilian court. The counterargument is that we as a society have, from the drafting of our Constitution, been committed to due process of law. But an even more compelling objection to the present secrecy flows not from the inalienable rights of the accused to justice but rather from the need to fully inform the public as to the dangers faced by our society.

Major policy developments, including two undeclared wars, were conducted in the name of defeating the perpetrators of 9/11 without the pubic being made aware of the relevant facts. Surely a public trial would have revealed, to the deep embarrassment of the Bush administration, that there was no connection between the 9/11 hijackers and the government of Iraq that the United States overthrew.

At the very least, such testimony would have shed light on the cozy relationship between the U.S. government and the key leaders of al-Qaida, particularly the American-educated Mohammed, recruited by the CIA to join the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It certainly could also have proved embarrassing to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who, during the Bush administration, opposed public trials and managed last March to get President Barack Obama to reverse his pledge of civilian trials. Gates boasted in his 1996 memoir of his long history of working with Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, dating to his days in the Carter administration. As his book publisher bragged at the time, Gates exposed “Carter’s never-before revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen—six months before the Soviets invaded.”

Of course 9/11 changed everything; nations were invaded, trillions of dollars were wasted, hundreds of thousands of civilian and military lives were lost, torture became acceptable and the public has come to tolerate a daily governmental assault on privacy as normal. But for all of the high drama and cost of the U.S. response, when it comes to understanding the forces behind the attack, we still do not know what we are talking about.

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Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

Posted on September 8, 2011 by admin

Saturday 3 September 2011
by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis

Barbara Stanwyck: “We’re both rotten!”

Fred MacMurray: “Yeah – only you’re a little more rotten.” -”Double Indemnity” (1944)

Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten – how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats’ health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats’ rank capitulation to corporate interests – no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel – how prudent is that? – in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might – the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was “bring it on!”

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

In his “Manual of Parliamentary Practice,” Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a “high functioning” institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

“Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today’s Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery.”

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s – a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable “hard news” segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the “respectable” media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the “centrist cop-out.” “I joked long ago,” he says, “that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.’”

Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right in his Washington Post analysis of “winners and losers” in the debt ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined: “Lawmakers – bless their hearts – seem entirely unaware of just how bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their tremendous magnanimity.” Note how the pundit’s ironic deprecation falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He seems oblivious that one side – or a sizable faction of one side – has deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve its political objectives.

This constant drizzle of “there the two parties go again!” stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions – if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.

Undermining Americans’ belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove’s dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer’s New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.

This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don’t want those people voting.

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn’t look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama’s policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some “other,” who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink. During the disgraceful circus of the “birther” issue, Republican politicians subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal – “I take the president at his word” – while never unambiguously slapping down the myth. John Huntsman was the first major GOP figure forthrightly to refute the birther calumny – albeit after release of the birth certificate.

I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP. While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Republicans also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice fraudulently elected (well do I remember the elaborate conspiracy theories that Republicans traded among themselves). Had it been Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, who had been elected in 2008, I am certain we would now be hearing, in lieu of the birther myths, conspiracy theories about Vince Foster’s alleged murder.

The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class – without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.

What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style “centrist” Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3]

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations’ bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let’s build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it’s evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? – can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative “Obamacare” won out. Contrast that with the Republicans’ Patriot Act. You’re a patriot, aren’t you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn’t the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. “Entitlement” has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is “entitled” selfishly claims something he doesn’t really deserve. Why not call them “earned benefits,” which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don’t make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the “estate tax,” it is the “death tax.” Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors’ looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At “Washington spending” – which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade’s corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican tactics, rather than Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are important indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise and conciliation. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition.

As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America’s plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction – and even less spending reduction! – than Obama’s offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society’s overclass.

Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond of saying, “we won’t raise anyone’s taxes,” as if the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are “job creators.” US corporations have just had their most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?

Another smokescreen is the “small business” meme, since standing up for Mom’s and Pop’s corner store is politically more attractive than to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the wealthy will kill small business’ ability to hire; that is the GOP dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular, they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower. Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid zero.

When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to “prove” that the America’s fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don’t appreciate that fact. “Half of Americans don’t pay taxes” is a perennial meme. But what they leave out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are millions of people who don’t pay income taxes, but do contribute payroll taxes – among the most regressive forms of taxation. But according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don’t count. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust funds, they’re not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes apparently don’t count, although their effect on a poor person buying necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a millionaire.

All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another. More important politically, Republicans’ myths about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically downscale “values voters,” who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons (which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation as dogma.

And when misinformation isn’t enough to sustain popular support for the GOP’s agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation, including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says, “In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”

2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia – a nuclear-armed state – during the latter’s conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? – “we are all Georgians now,” a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading “defense experts,” who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year’s defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges’ formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.

A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm is no more complicated than the fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of bribery money around Capitol Hill. That is true, but there is more to it than that. It is not necessarily even the fact that members of Congress feel they are protecting constituents’ jobs. The wildly uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases nationally means that some areas, like Washington, DC, and San Diego, are heavily dependent on Department of Defense (DOD) spending. But there are many more areas of the country whose net balance is negative: the citizenry pays more in taxes to support the Pentagon than it receives back in local contracts.

And the economic justification for Pentagon spending is even more fallacious when one considers that the $700 billion annual DOD budget creates comparatively few jobs. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor. Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost research and development (from which the civilian economy benefits little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and out-and-out padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of political campaigns. A million dollars appropriated for highway construction would create two to three times as many jobs as a million dollars appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement, so the jobs argument is ultimately specious.

Take away the cash nexus and there still remains a psychological predisposition toward war and militarism on the part of the GOP. This undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness and dovetails perfectly with the belligerent tough-guy pose one constantly hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism springs from the same psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both foreign and domestic.

The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and the Democrats’ cowardly refusal to reverse it[4], have been disastrous both strategically and fiscally. It has made the United States less prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately, the militarism and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are only likely to abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened to the Dutch Republic and the British Empire.

3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines “low-information voter” – or, perhaps, “misinformation voter.”

The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to “share their feelings” about their “faith” in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor of the culture wars. But how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs – economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism – come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower Republicanism?

It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes – at least in the minds of followers – all three of the GOP’s main tenets.

Televangelists have long espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God’s favor. If not, too bad! But don’t forget to tithe in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.

The GOP’s fascination with war is also connected with the fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter – God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass – and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once writing that God is Pro-War.

It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? – we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord.

Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic perspectives separating the “business” wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case, those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums of money into Michele Bachman’s presidential campaign, so one ought not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.

Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following:

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)

It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce Bartlett.

I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country’s future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and “shareholder value,” the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP’s decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren’t after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté.[5] They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be “forced” to make “hard choices” – and that doesn’t mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.

During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP’s disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans’ own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency – a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined.

If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America’s status as the world’s leading power.

Footnotes:

[1] I am not exaggerating for effect. A law passed in 2010 by the Arizona legislature mandating arrest and incarceration of suspected illegal aliens was actually drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative business front group that drafts “model” legislation on behalf of its corporate sponsors. The draft legislation in question was written for the private prison lobby, which sensed a growth opportunity in imprisoning more people.

[2] I am not a supporter of Obama and object to a number of his foreign and domestic policies. But when he took office amid the greatest financial collapse in 80 years, I wanted him to succeed, so that the country I served did not fail. But already in 2009, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, declared that his greatest legislative priority was – jobs for Americans? Rescuing the financial system? Solving the housing collapse? – no, none of those things. His top priority was to ensure that Obama should be a one-term president. Evidently Senator McConnell hates Obama more than he loves his country. Note that the mainstream media have lately been hailing McConnell as “the adult in the room,” presumably because he is less visibly unstable than the Tea Party freshmen

[3] This is not a venue for immigrant bashing. It remains a fact that outsourcing jobs overseas, while insourcing sub-minimum wage immigrant labor, will exert downward pressure on US wages. The consequence will be popular anger, and failure to address that anger will result in a downward wage spiral and a breech of the social compact, not to mention a rise in nativism and other reactionary impulses. It does no good to claim that these economic consequences are an inevitable result of globalization; Germany has somehow managed to maintain a high-wage economy and a vigorous industrial base.

[4] The cowardice is not merely political. During the past ten years, I have observed that Democrats are actually growing afraid of Republicans. In a quirky and flawed, but insightful, little book, “Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred,” John Lukacs concludes that the left fears, the right hates.

[5] The GOP cult of Ayn Rand is both revealing and mystifying. On the one hand, Rand’s tough guy, every-man-for-himself posturing is a natural fit because it puts a philosophical gloss on the latent sociopathy so prevalent among the hard right. On the other, Rand exclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity. Apparently, the ignorance of most fundamentalist “values voters” means that GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction. And I imagine a Democratic officeholder would have a harder time explaining why he named his offspring “Marx” than a GOP incumbent would in rationalizing naming his kid “Rand.”

Posted in Class Warfare, Declining America, Politics | Tagged billionaire, deficit, economic sabotage, GOP, greed, jobs, politics, Tea Party, wealth | Comments Off

Why Did Capitalism Fail?

Posted on August 19, 2011 by admin

Bob Burnett
Berkeley writer, retired Silicon Valley executive

We live in interesting times. The global economy is splintering. U.S. voters hate all politicians and there’s political unrest throughout the world. The root cause of this turmoil is the failure of the dominant economic paradigm — global corporate capitalism.

The modern world is ruled by multinational corporations and governed by a capitalistic ideology that believes: Corporations are a special breed of people, motivated solely by self-interest. Corporations seek to maximize return on capital by leveraging productivity and paying the least possible amount for taxes and labor. Corporate executives pledge allegiance to their directors and shareholders. The dominant corporate perspective is short term, the current financial quarter, and the dominant corporate ethic is greed, doing whatever it takes to maximize profit.

Five factors are responsible for the failure of global corporate capitalism. First, global corporations are too big. We’re living in the age of corporate dinosaurs. (The largest multinational is JP Morgan Chase with assets of $2 Trillion, 240,000 employees, and offices in 100 countries.) The original dinosaurs perished because their huge bodies possessed tiny brains. Modern dinosaurs are failing because their massive bureaucracies possess miniscule hearts.

Since the Reagan era global corporations have followed the path of least resistance to profit; they’ve swallowed up their competitors and created monopolies, which have produced humongous bureaucracies. In the short-term, scale helps corporations grow profitable, but in the long-term it makes them inflexible and difficult to manage. Gigantism creates a culture where workers are encouraged to take enormous risks in order to create greater profits; it’s based upon the notion that the corporation is “too big to fail.”

Second, global corporations disdain civil society. They’ve created a culture of organizational narcissism, where workers pledge allegiance to the enterprise. Corporate employees live in a bubble, where they log obscene hours and then vacation with their co-workers. Multinationals develop their own code of ethics and worldview separate from that of any national state. Corporate executives don’t care about the success or failure of any particular country, only the growth and profitability of their global corporation. (Many large corporations pay no U.S. income tax; in 2009 Exxon Mobil actually got a $156 M rebate.)

Third, global corporations are modern outlaws, living outside the law. There is no invisible hand that regulates multinationals. In 1759 Philosopher Adam Smith argued that while wealthy individuals and corporations were motivated by self interest, an “invisible hand” was operating in the background ensuring that capitalist activities ultimately benefited society. In modern times this concept became the basis for the pronouncements of the Chicago School of Economics that markets were inherently self regulating. However, the last five years have demonstrated that there is no “invisible hand” — unregulated markets have spelled disaster for the average person. The “recovery” of 2009-10 ensured that “too big to fail” institutions would survive and the rich would continue to be rich. Meanwhile millions of good jobs were either eliminated or replaced by low-wage jobs with poor or no benefits.

Fourth, global corporations are ruining our natural capital. Four of the top 10 multinational corporations are energy companies, with Exxon Mobil leading the list. But there are many indications that our oil reserves are gone. Meanwhile, other forms of natural capital have been depleted — arable land, water, minerals, forests, fish, and so forth. Multinational corporations have treated the environment as a free resource. When the timberlands of North America began to be depleted, lumber corporations moved to South America and then Asia. Now, the “easy pickings” are gone. Global corporations have ravished the world and citizens of every nation live with the consequences: dirty air, foul water, and pollution of every sort.

Fifth, global corporations have angered the world community. The world GDP is $63 Trillion but multinational corporations garner a disproportionate share — with banks accounting for an estimated $4 trillion (bank assets are $100 trillion). Global black markets make $2 trillion — illegal drugs account for at least $300 billion. In many parts of the world, a worker is not able to earn a living wage, have a bank account or drive a car, but can always obtain drugs, sex, and weapons. And while the world may not be one big village in terms of lifestyle, it shares an image of “the good life” that’s proffered in movies, TV, and the Internet. That’s what teenagers in Afghanistan have in common with teenagers in England; they’ve been fed the same image of success in the global community and they know it’s inaccessible. They are angry and, ultimately, their anger has the same target — multinational corporations (and the governments that support them).

We live in interesting times. The good news is we’re witnessing the failure of global corporate capitalism. The bad news is we don’t know what will replace it.

Posted in Class Warfare, Declining America, Politics | Tagged billionaire, deficit, greed, politics, Tea Party, wealth | Comments Off

Why I’m Starting the No Bullshit Party and Running for President

Posted on August 19, 2011 by admin

Jeff WaldCEO,
ARIA Multimedia Entertainment

After watching the so-called first Republican debate the other night in Iowa, I wanted to imitate Peter Finch in Network and open my window and scream that “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!”

My only alternative is to announce today that I am running for president and creating a new party to combat the people who pretend to be all about freedom but who are the very ones threatening our freedoms.

My party’s called the No Bullshit Party and like Grover Norquist with his “no new taxes pledge,” I am asking anyone who joins our party to sign a pledge to accept “no more bullshit” in politics.

In the interest of the No Bullshit Pledge, I am asking Roger Ailes to rename Fox News Channel to Fox Bullshit Channel. Here’s some easy-to-spot bullshit to get us started:

Rupert Murdoch’s employees hacking phones in the UK, and Murdoch denying any knowledge. Who created that cultural climate if not he?

All the bullshit talk about the deficit. We need sound fiscal policy, but not by hijacking the debt rating of the United States and holding it hostage. Also, when you won’t raise taxes on those who can not only afford them, but who end up paying less than the poor folks, you gut your income stream. We all know what happens when you spend more than you bring in. Just ask Main Street Americans who’ve suffered through the financial community’s rape of America these past three years.

Clinton did not raise the debt limit once in his eight years in office. He left us a balanced budget and a surplus. While the Republican’s messiah, Ronald Reagan, raised it 11 times!

Like a bull in a china shop, Bush jr. put us in two wars that we cannot win and that have cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives. Yeah, you break it, you bought it, but we should have learned our lessons in Vietnam about not being able to win an insurgency war far from home. And if that is too far back in our collective memories, how about learning from the Russian failure after nine years of trying to win a war in Afghanistan. What is it? Our turn?

We were not at war with anyone during the Clinton years.

The War on Drugs is bullshit of the highest order. It’s less successful than Prohibition, which was repealed. We have spent over a trillion dollars, not including the cost of 74% of our over two million prisoners are in jail for non-violent drug related offenses. The ‘War on Drugs’ isn’t even reducing traffic congestion. I’d pay for that.

It costs us over $50,000 per year to incarcerate someone, while we spend only about $8,500 per year average per student nationally. Oh, and “Just say ‘NO’” to drugs, as well as cautions against premarital sex, have almost no effect. While my thirteen-year-old daughter is not having sex or doing drugs, the word “NO” with no honest explanation is like a red cape to a bull. Especially when the bull knows that the person saying NO probably got high whenever they could afford it, and still did well enough to send the kids to private school.

It’s bullshit that so many of us didn’t protest or push our elected representatives when Clinton’s presidency was diminished and marginalized by a blow job. Would you elect someone stupid enough to admit it? Presidents lie as a matter of course. Some worse than others. Blow jobs are high on the list of getting, but on the list of lying, not so much.

Some of our bullshit representatives allowed a fringe group to spend $41,000,000 on the Whitewater investigation with the result that Susan McDougal was jailed for contempt of court.

Now, we spend federal money trying Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens for reportedly lying about steroids when in fact they were not banned at that time of their supposed use. What did the Feds, who shouldn’t have been looking into this in the first place, think these guys were going to say: “Yeah, I did it. Would you like some?”

Why aren’t we using those investigating dollars checking on how banks and credit card companies are ripping us off on a daily basis. Oh, that’s right: the banks and financial institutions are sitting on all that money, not loaning it, not helping to create jobs, not getting America going again. Short term gain, maybe, but they’re eroding their own foundations and the foreclosed homes will soon come crashing down.

I have credit cards with a 12% interest rate and cards with a 29% interest rate. The rates get raised if you are even one day late after paying on time — and in full — for thirty years. The credit card companies charge the highest rates to those that can least afford it.

The tax code is bullshit. Let’s have a flat tax. 17% for all individuals and corporations, no deductions, no exceptions. People who earn less than $40,000 per year pay nothing. In the spirit of compromise, I’ll even go as high as 18%. Then it’s ice cream for everyone.

Full disclosure, I am a registered Democrat who has voted for Republicans on occasion.

The first President Bush knew how to wage war correctly. He put together a coalition of 20 countries, had a defined goal to get Iraq out of Kuwait, and destroyed the Iraqi army. He explained why he didn’t want to go to Baghdad and take out Saddam, but his son must have been getting high that day. Hmm.

Maybe the ‘War on Drugs’ isn’t such a bad idea. Nah. Like most sons, GWB just didn’t like listening to daddy.

By the way, I supported that war (my first) and co-executive produced with producer David Foster a TV special and song supporting our troops.

I supported it so much I had all three of my wives (2 exes) in that video. It’s bullshit in this day and age that Jane Fonda gets dropped from QVC for her political beliefs. She was right about the Vietnam war where 54,000 Americans gave their lives, only to have the last flight out be in a helicopter on top of our embassy. We still pay the price for that war with many of the returning soldiers maimed and not able to adjust to the return.

It is happening again.

It’s bullshit that our schools and educational programs are so poor across the board that we can’t compete in the 21st century world economy. Another reason to pay some taxes. I want to see our schools revamped from top to bottom. And by that I don’t mean the Texas school board taking Thomas Jefferson out of history books because they don’t like his opinions.

Here are some excerpts from the No Bullshit Party platform. There will be more to come, and it will be easy to understand so that even the people who have been convinced to vote against their own interests can see how they have been conned and lied to.

I am a capitalist who is outraged that Exxon pays no taxes and gets a subsidy from the government.

If you want less government then keep the lawmakers out of the bedroom and out of women’s reproductive rights. Let’s keep male circumcision off the ballot box and in the family where it belongs. I’m hopeful about the latter since the initiate was cut from the ballot in San Francisco.

During World War Two, a German said — and I paraphrase: When they came for the Communists, I was not a Communist so I said nothing. When they came for the Socialists I was not a Socialist so I said nothing. I was not a unionist, a Jew or a Catholic so I said nothing.

When they came for me there was no one left to say anything.

Conservative and Liberal are labels we are given to divide us. Let’s just be Americans and remind the Governor Perry’ of the world that we are not a “Christian” nation and the founding fathers were very clear about the separation of Church and State. Even JFK knew that.

I am an American who believes in equality for all in both education and opportunity. I believe in a fair and transparent tax system. I believe in shooting drunk drivers who kill while driving, when it’s their second offense.

I believe in releasing non-violent offenders from jail so that they can live in halfway houses and work to fix our infrastructure. Let’s pay them a living wage so that they contribute to society instead of being a drain.

I would like to show the idiots in the Republican debate what being a real American means. Presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush the elder knew. The current crop of debaters would have them turning over in their graves — not that I wish Bush I an early end. Maybe he can still talk some sense into those idiots.

Posted in Class Warfare, Declining America, Politics | Tagged billionaire, deficit, economic sabotage, greed, politics, wealth | Comments Off

Find WALL-E

Posted on August 19, 2011 by admin

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Critters moving away from global warming faster

Posted on August 19, 2011 by admin

By SETH BORENSTEIN – AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Animals across the world are fleeing global warming by heading north much faster than they were less than a decade ago, a new study says.
About 2,000 species examined are moving away from the equator at an average rate of more than 15 feet per day, about a mile per year, according to new research published Thursday in the journal Science which analyzed previous studies. Species are also moving up mountains to escape the heat, but more slowly, averaging about 4 feet a year.
The species — mostly from the Northern Hemisphere and including plants — moved in fits and starts, but over several decades it averages to about 8 inches an hour away from the equator.
“The speed is an important issue,” said study main author Chris Thomas of the University of York. “It is faster than we thought.”
Included in the analysis was a 2003 study that found species moving north at a rate of just more than a third of a mile per year and up at a rate of 2 feet a year. Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas, who conducted that study, said the new research makes sense because her data ended around the late 1990s and the 2000s were far hotter.
Federal weather data show the last decade was the hottest on record, and 2010 tied with 2005 for the hottest year on record. Gases from the burning of fossil fuel, especially carbon dioxide, are trapping heat in the atmosphere, warming the Earth and changing the climate in several ways, according to the overwhelming majority of scientists and the world’s top scientific organizations.
As the temperatures soared in the 2000s, the species studied moved faster to cooler places, Parmesan said. She pointed specifically to the city copper butterfly in Europe and the purple emperor butterfly in Sweden. The comma butterfly in Great Britain has moved more than 135 miles in 21 years, Thomas said.
It’s “independent confirmation that the climate is changing,” Parmesan said.
One of the faster moving species is the British spider silometopus, Thomas said. In 25 years, the small spider has moved its home range more than 200 miles north, averaging 8 miles a year, he said.
Stanford University biologist Terry Root, who wasn’t part of this study but praised it as clever and conservative, points to another species, the American pika, a rabbitlike creature that has been studied in Yellowstone National Park for more than a century. The pika didn’t go higher than 7,800 feet in 1900, but in 2004 they were seen at 9,500 feet, she said.
For Thomas, this is something he notices every time he returns to his childhood home in southern England. The 51-year-old biologist didn’t see the egret, a rather warm climate bird, in the Cuckmere Valley while growing up. But now, he said, “All the ditches have little egrets. It was just a bizarre sight.”
Thomas plotted the movement of the species and compared it to how much they would move based on temperature changes. It was a near perfect match, showing that temperature changes explain what’s happening to the critters and plants, Thomas said. The match wasn’t quite as exact with the movement up mountains and Thomas thinks that’s because species went north instead or they were blocked from going up.
Thomas found that the further north the species live, the faster they moved their home base. That makes sense because in general northern regions are warming more than those closer to the equator..
Conservation biologist Mike Dombeck, a former U.S. Forest Service chief, said changes in where species live — especially movements up mountains — is a problem for many threatened species.
Thomas said what he’s studied isn’t about some far off problem.
“It’s already affected the entire planet’s wildlife,” Thomas said in a phone interview. “It’s not a matter that might happen in the lifetime of our children and our grandchildren. If you look in your garden you can see the effects of climate change already.”
___
Online:
Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

Posted in Global Warming, Science | Tagged climate | Comments Off

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