As election day nears, many Democrats are chiding liberals for their "pox on both houses" attitude.
They should read this:
http://www.propublica.org/article/new-democrat-coalition
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
When Dirt Is Dug Up, Muddy the Waters
Julian Assange is what he is because the American media are not what they should be.
Rather than cleaning up their own act, however, American journalists have become willing accomplices in the establishment's predictable response to Assange's WikiLeaks revelations. They are attacking his character.
CNN arranged an interview with Assange ostensibly to talk about the content of the thousands of secret documents WikiLeaks acquired and made public about the Iraq war. But the questioning prompted Assange to ask, "Do you want to talk about deaths of 104,000 people or my personal life?" When the personal questions persisted, he walked out of the interview. This act, declared Howard Kurtz, the media's foremost apologist from his pulpits at the Washington Post and CNN, proved that Assange is "delusional."
Indeed, "delusional" seems to be the adjective of choice in the orchestrated attacks on Assange. John Burns, a darling of the Pentagon, gave it a workout in his hatchet job on Assange that the New York Times felt compelled to give equal prominence with its report on the actual content of the leaked documents. This is what the media today call "balance."
I worked with the Times's late Tad Szulc when he obtained a series of secret documents revealing illegal arms shipments by the U.S. government to countries to which such shipments were banned by law. The newspaper did not feel compelled at that time to publish side-by-side with Tad's disclosures an innuendo-packed account of his sex life or his racetrack associates.
Gene Roberts, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, hailed his multiple Pulitzer Prize winning reporters, Don Barlett and Jim Steele, as "document reporters." Their work was never accompanied, with equal prominence, by sidebars quoting unnamed sources about shady allegations of Barlett's personal life in Akron or Steele's college romances.
I don't know if Assange was set up by his enemies for the rape allegations against him that are still under investigation in Sweden, but I do know that such tactics are almost as old as the sex act itself. More than half a century ago an upstart coach in another state snatched three prized football recruits from Ohio, where the imperious Woodrow Wilson Hayes was the supreme dictator of the Ohio State University football program. Not only that, but the upstart coach, with all three of his Ohio recruits playing prime roles, upset a heavily favored Ohio State team. The very next year, three of the upstart's best players were suspended on charges of rape and sexual assault brought by two young women. Only later was it revealed -- by a "document reporter" -- that the women who filed the charges had themselves been accused of prostitution in, of all places, Columbus, OH, home of the Buckeyes.
The last really big release of war documents the government didn't want us to see was the Pentagon Papers, given to my friend and colleague Neil Sheehan by the whistle-blower, Dan Ellsberg. Neil made the Nixon enemies list; Nixon sent the plumbers after Ellsberg, raiding his psychiatrists' office to dig up dirt. Ellsberg offered the documents to Sheehan not because of Neil's exemplary personal life, but because he had demonstrated the highest integrity in his reporting from Vietnam. Would that, say, Burns had demonstrated such independence from the generals' handouts in his reporting on Iraq.
I know of no law that requires a digger after important documents to be a candidate for canonization. In fact, one of the first, best "document reporters" I ever worked with would have had great difficulty trying to defend his personal life in light of the conventional mores of those times. But his documents were real and their disclosure put some criminals in jail.
The important side issue about Julian Assange isn't who went to bed with him, under what circumstances, or whether he's a pleasant fellow to work with. The main issue is the content of the documents he makes public; the important side issue is why in the hell the media aren't digging them up themselves.
These things are documents, not delusions.
Rather than cleaning up their own act, however, American journalists have become willing accomplices in the establishment's predictable response to Assange's WikiLeaks revelations. They are attacking his character.
CNN arranged an interview with Assange ostensibly to talk about the content of the thousands of secret documents WikiLeaks acquired and made public about the Iraq war. But the questioning prompted Assange to ask, "Do you want to talk about deaths of 104,000 people or my personal life?" When the personal questions persisted, he walked out of the interview. This act, declared Howard Kurtz, the media's foremost apologist from his pulpits at the Washington Post and CNN, proved that Assange is "delusional."
Indeed, "delusional" seems to be the adjective of choice in the orchestrated attacks on Assange. John Burns, a darling of the Pentagon, gave it a workout in his hatchet job on Assange that the New York Times felt compelled to give equal prominence with its report on the actual content of the leaked documents. This is what the media today call "balance."
I worked with the Times's late Tad Szulc when he obtained a series of secret documents revealing illegal arms shipments by the U.S. government to countries to which such shipments were banned by law. The newspaper did not feel compelled at that time to publish side-by-side with Tad's disclosures an innuendo-packed account of his sex life or his racetrack associates.
Gene Roberts, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, hailed his multiple Pulitzer Prize winning reporters, Don Barlett and Jim Steele, as "document reporters." Their work was never accompanied, with equal prominence, by sidebars quoting unnamed sources about shady allegations of Barlett's personal life in Akron or Steele's college romances.
I don't know if Assange was set up by his enemies for the rape allegations against him that are still under investigation in Sweden, but I do know that such tactics are almost as old as the sex act itself. More than half a century ago an upstart coach in another state snatched three prized football recruits from Ohio, where the imperious Woodrow Wilson Hayes was the supreme dictator of the Ohio State University football program. Not only that, but the upstart coach, with all three of his Ohio recruits playing prime roles, upset a heavily favored Ohio State team. The very next year, three of the upstart's best players were suspended on charges of rape and sexual assault brought by two young women. Only later was it revealed -- by a "document reporter" -- that the women who filed the charges had themselves been accused of prostitution in, of all places, Columbus, OH, home of the Buckeyes.
The last really big release of war documents the government didn't want us to see was the Pentagon Papers, given to my friend and colleague Neil Sheehan by the whistle-blower, Dan Ellsberg. Neil made the Nixon enemies list; Nixon sent the plumbers after Ellsberg, raiding his psychiatrists' office to dig up dirt. Ellsberg offered the documents to Sheehan not because of Neil's exemplary personal life, but because he had demonstrated the highest integrity in his reporting from Vietnam. Would that, say, Burns had demonstrated such independence from the generals' handouts in his reporting on Iraq.
I know of no law that requires a digger after important documents to be a candidate for canonization. In fact, one of the first, best "document reporters" I ever worked with would have had great difficulty trying to defend his personal life in light of the conventional mores of those times. But his documents were real and their disclosure put some criminals in jail.
The important side issue about Julian Assange isn't who went to bed with him, under what circumstances, or whether he's a pleasant fellow to work with. The main issue is the content of the documents he makes public; the important side issue is why in the hell the media aren't digging them up themselves.
These things are documents, not delusions.
Walking Slowly Among All the False Gods
IN A CANYON IN SOUTHERN UTAH -- A massive storm system that washed out unpaved roads extends our camping vacation here longer than we intended. But satellites fly even above these desolate and ruggedly beautiful places, so that our electronic umbilical to the real world remains intact.
We who spent our working lifetimes collecting and purveying news tend to develop an addiction to it. Our new age enablers, the cybergods, sate our ravenous needs. Little has changed Out There. The fragile vestiges of the Great American Experiment continue to unravel. Can a democratic republic formed of the people, by the people and for the people actually work, can it endure, can it thrive? Two hundred thirty-four years after the experiment began, the answer is becoming clear: Nope.
Round up the usual suspects: greed, corruption, ignorance, hubris . . . the entire dark side of human nature. Round and round we go, down and down we go. But then, what else is madness but to repeat the same actions over and over and expect different results?
Many of us -- yet far too few to sustain a semblance of democracy -- will go to the polls in about three weeks to perform our duty as citizens, to vote. We repeat this process of electing leaders periodically, irrationally thinking that this time we will actually put someone into office somewhere who will effectively serve the needs of The People.
The corporate overlords, the war makers and the oligarchs of Wall Street have already decided the election -- $14 million here, $10 million there, small fortunes from foreign billionaires with a financial stake in our lives through the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The candidates they have purchased and will put into office know what they are expected to do -- speed up the erasure of the last vestiges of democracy -- and they will do so even as they prattle tribute to the great American "values."
In most of the election contests for which we will cast our meaningless votes, we have but two choices: a corporate-owned Democrat or a corporate-owned Republican. The candidates with the most lavish corporate financial support will almost invariably win. The propagandists of the corporate media tell us that the pollsters expect a net gain of up to 50 seats in the House of representatives for the Republicans.
Not much has changed since we camped out here in the semi-wilderness. We are nested on a hillock from which we can gaze miles in any direction without seeing a fellow human. Our nest is in one of the diminishing number of places in this country that are not "owned" by anyone, because they are owned by everyone. Public land. Protected by the government on behalf of all the people because of its esthetic, cultural or historical significance.
We come to such places as often as we can because we know they will not always be here. Corporations covet the riches to be made by destroying them to extract their minerals, or trees, or what lies beneath their surface, or on it. Whatever can serve their gods of greed.
Gods are everywhere around us: the cybergods who bring us the news we crave even if it's bad, the gods of greed who covet whatever wealth this land promises, the gods of power derived from wealth who are our real government. So too are the gods of the ancient ones who once occupied this land. Images of their gods can still be found carved on cliff faces and rock outcroppings a short walk from our campsite. Their gods were powerless against famine, drought and the guns of the pale invaders who drove them out -- to extract wealth from their homeland.
Nothing changes.
There is a dark side to human nature. There always will be.
It is almost time to go back and live with it again.
We who spent our working lifetimes collecting and purveying news tend to develop an addiction to it. Our new age enablers, the cybergods, sate our ravenous needs. Little has changed Out There. The fragile vestiges of the Great American Experiment continue to unravel. Can a democratic republic formed of the people, by the people and for the people actually work, can it endure, can it thrive? Two hundred thirty-four years after the experiment began, the answer is becoming clear: Nope.
Round up the usual suspects: greed, corruption, ignorance, hubris . . . the entire dark side of human nature. Round and round we go, down and down we go. But then, what else is madness but to repeat the same actions over and over and expect different results?
Many of us -- yet far too few to sustain a semblance of democracy -- will go to the polls in about three weeks to perform our duty as citizens, to vote. We repeat this process of electing leaders periodically, irrationally thinking that this time we will actually put someone into office somewhere who will effectively serve the needs of The People.
The corporate overlords, the war makers and the oligarchs of Wall Street have already decided the election -- $14 million here, $10 million there, small fortunes from foreign billionaires with a financial stake in our lives through the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The candidates they have purchased and will put into office know what they are expected to do -- speed up the erasure of the last vestiges of democracy -- and they will do so even as they prattle tribute to the great American "values."
In most of the election contests for which we will cast our meaningless votes, we have but two choices: a corporate-owned Democrat or a corporate-owned Republican. The candidates with the most lavish corporate financial support will almost invariably win. The propagandists of the corporate media tell us that the pollsters expect a net gain of up to 50 seats in the House of representatives for the Republicans.
Not much has changed since we camped out here in the semi-wilderness. We are nested on a hillock from which we can gaze miles in any direction without seeing a fellow human. Our nest is in one of the diminishing number of places in this country that are not "owned" by anyone, because they are owned by everyone. Public land. Protected by the government on behalf of all the people because of its esthetic, cultural or historical significance.
We come to such places as often as we can because we know they will not always be here. Corporations covet the riches to be made by destroying them to extract their minerals, or trees, or what lies beneath their surface, or on it. Whatever can serve their gods of greed.
Gods are everywhere around us: the cybergods who bring us the news we crave even if it's bad, the gods of greed who covet whatever wealth this land promises, the gods of power derived from wealth who are our real government. So too are the gods of the ancient ones who once occupied this land. Images of their gods can still be found carved on cliff faces and rock outcroppings a short walk from our campsite. Their gods were powerless against famine, drought and the guns of the pale invaders who drove them out -- to extract wealth from their homeland.
Nothing changes.
There is a dark side to human nature. There always will be.
It is almost time to go back and live with it again.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
The World Has Become a Satire of Itself
I miss Art Buchwald. Not just because he was the only man whose tennis fantasies were wilder than mine. (He imagined himself playing against Andre Agassi -- who couldn't handle his serve!)
I miss him because he understood that even though he was paid handsomely to satirize politics and government, "You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it.”
He understood this back when there were still one or two sane people to be found in government, even in Washington. Now that the last vestige of sanity has vanished from our public affairs, we need Art more than ever.
Consider:
--Virginia Thomas, whose husband is a justice of the Supreme Court, recently called Anita Hill, who is a professor at Brandeis, leaving a message that Prof. Hill should "pray about" and apologize for her testimony at the confirmation hearings for Justice Thomas -- nearly 20 years ago. Hill told the Senate under oath that Thomas had sexually harassed her. She said she wouldn't apologize now for testifying truthfully then.
--A memo recently surfaced about the days in June when hell must have been empty, and all the devils were at a meeting called by the Koch brothers, whose wealth probably exceeds the combined wealth of the entire Third World and whose goal is to repeal all laws that inhibit the "culture of prosperity." The 210 attendees included Glenn Beck, David Chavern, No. 2 guy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Fred Malek, Karl Rove's master of mischief, and a gaggle of top executives from health insurance companies, oil companies, Wall Street and big time real estate developers. They discussed ways to use money to make certain that all the right people won the 2010 elections.
--San Francisco police arrested an armed man who intended to kill a bunch of liberals. He said he got the "evidence" against his intended victims from the aforementioned Mr. Beck.
--Sharron Angle, who wants to be elected U.S. Senator from Nevada, told a bunch of Latina students that she couldn't possibly be an anti-Mexican racist because the kids in her audience all "looked like Asians."
--A republican legislator in Florida introduced an anti-immigration bill patterned after Arizona's -- except that it exempts white immigrants from its harsh provisions. The Republican candidate for governor immediately supported it.
--Christine O'Donnell, who is not a witch but the Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat from Delaware, was shocked, shocked to learn (from her opponent, during a debate) that the First Amendment prohibits "an establishment of religion" in the United States.
Alaska. (Stop laughing already.) Joe Miller, the Republican and Tea Party candidate for the United States Senate held a town hall meeting recently. When a reporter pressed for answers to questions Miller didn't like, private security guards hired by his campaign - two of whom were moonlighting, active duty military - seized the journalist, placed him under citizen's arrest and handcuffed him, then threatened to do the same to two other reporters who were taking pictures and asking what was going on.
Buchwald nailed it. You couldn't possibly make this stuff up.
I miss him because he understood that even though he was paid handsomely to satirize politics and government, "You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it.”
He understood this back when there were still one or two sane people to be found in government, even in Washington. Now that the last vestige of sanity has vanished from our public affairs, we need Art more than ever.
Consider:
--Virginia Thomas, whose husband is a justice of the Supreme Court, recently called Anita Hill, who is a professor at Brandeis, leaving a message that Prof. Hill should "pray about" and apologize for her testimony at the confirmation hearings for Justice Thomas -- nearly 20 years ago. Hill told the Senate under oath that Thomas had sexually harassed her. She said she wouldn't apologize now for testifying truthfully then.
--A memo recently surfaced about the days in June when hell must have been empty, and all the devils were at a meeting called by the Koch brothers, whose wealth probably exceeds the combined wealth of the entire Third World and whose goal is to repeal all laws that inhibit the "culture of prosperity." The 210 attendees included Glenn Beck, David Chavern, No. 2 guy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Fred Malek, Karl Rove's master of mischief, and a gaggle of top executives from health insurance companies, oil companies, Wall Street and big time real estate developers. They discussed ways to use money to make certain that all the right people won the 2010 elections.
--San Francisco police arrested an armed man who intended to kill a bunch of liberals. He said he got the "evidence" against his intended victims from the aforementioned Mr. Beck.
--Sharron Angle, who wants to be elected U.S. Senator from Nevada, told a bunch of Latina students that she couldn't possibly be an anti-Mexican racist because the kids in her audience all "looked like Asians."
--A republican legislator in Florida introduced an anti-immigration bill patterned after Arizona's -- except that it exempts white immigrants from its harsh provisions. The Republican candidate for governor immediately supported it.
--Christine O'Donnell, who is not a witch but the Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat from Delaware, was shocked, shocked to learn (from her opponent, during a debate) that the First Amendment prohibits "an establishment of religion" in the United States.
Alaska. (Stop laughing already.) Joe Miller, the Republican and Tea Party candidate for the United States Senate held a town hall meeting recently. When a reporter pressed for answers to questions Miller didn't like, private security guards hired by his campaign - two of whom were moonlighting, active duty military - seized the journalist, placed him under citizen's arrest and handcuffed him, then threatened to do the same to two other reporters who were taking pictures and asking what was going on.
Buchwald nailed it. You couldn't possibly make this stuff up.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
A Timeless Highway, an Old Campsite, a New Adventure
ON THE BANKS OF THE SAN JUAN -- Before there were wagon roads or cattle trails, the rivers were super highways for indigenous people. The San Juan was one. An enormous history of its early users is inscribed on a cliff face not far from our campsite, if only we could translate it.
Many of our fellow campers are travelers on the early Americans' water highway, river rafters setting out from Sand Island to explore what's left of Glen Canyon on the way to Lake Powell. A visitor from Oregon is fishing but catching nothing. It is a leisurely, lazy Fall day, even for the trout.
Higher up on Boulder Mountain, the aspen have already turned golden. Now, along the river, the cottonwoods are beginning to follow.
To me, the most striking petroglyph on the nearby cliff is the top to bottom squiggle depicting Comb Ridge, our destination for today. This saw-toothed, 80-mile-long, north-south monocline is one of the most dominant and mystical landmarks in the southwest.
As we study the terrain from an overlook on Butler Wash, an Arizona man and his two sons join us. "We want to climb to the top of the ridge," he tells us. "But it's been years since I've been here and I've forgotten the route across Butler Wash."
"I think there are several," I answer. "You just have to scout 'em out."
It is, I tell myself, a forgivable evasion. I know that we are not far from a long-ago campsite, from which we crossed the big wash to a slickrock plateau, which we traversed in the hope of finding one of the many ancient Anasazi ruins in this canyon-entwined wilderness. The Anasazi, whose cultural center was Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, were superb builders with rock, and many of their structures still stand not only at Chaco and Mesa Verde but in countless outposts in the canyons of southeast Utah, northeast Arizona, southwest Colorado and northwest New Mexico -- the Four Corners region.
Today we mean to explore our slickrock plateau in another direction, looking for side canyons that promise to divulge another ruin like the one whose discovery thrilled us many years ago. We don't want company; the stillness and serenity are the primary rewards of braving this rough country. (I'm still being defensive about my evasiveness with the Arizonan.)
Never mind. As we crest one escarpment, we can see for miles around us; the Arizonans' SUV is parking near our truck. They will find our "secret" route across the wash, and make way for the ridge. Their path will be far enough south of ours to preserve our tranquility. It's a big place. I hope they reach the top of the ridge. It would be a fine experience for a man and his two sons.
We find a promising side canyon. During a water and trail-mix break, we study it through the binoculars. We think we see a ruin in an alcove half a mile up-canyon. Even with the binoculars, we can't be certain. Natural rock and the shadows of the Autumn-angled sun can deceive you into thinking you're seeing a ruin, because you so want to see one. We'll explore further another time.
We haven't taken a GPS device on our little walk, so we can't record coordinates, but we mark the approximate site on a topo map. We'll come back another day and walk up this canyon from Butler Wash road. Perhaps we'll be rewarded by finding a ruin. Perhaps not. There are other rewards for coming to this place, spiritual ones, if you will: you can feel the sacredness of its antiquity and its rugged beauty.
We will come back another day. We must come back another day.
Many of our fellow campers are travelers on the early Americans' water highway, river rafters setting out from Sand Island to explore what's left of Glen Canyon on the way to Lake Powell. A visitor from Oregon is fishing but catching nothing. It is a leisurely, lazy Fall day, even for the trout.
Higher up on Boulder Mountain, the aspen have already turned golden. Now, along the river, the cottonwoods are beginning to follow.
To me, the most striking petroglyph on the nearby cliff is the top to bottom squiggle depicting Comb Ridge, our destination for today. This saw-toothed, 80-mile-long, north-south monocline is one of the most dominant and mystical landmarks in the southwest.
As we study the terrain from an overlook on Butler Wash, an Arizona man and his two sons join us. "We want to climb to the top of the ridge," he tells us. "But it's been years since I've been here and I've forgotten the route across Butler Wash."
"I think there are several," I answer. "You just have to scout 'em out."
It is, I tell myself, a forgivable evasion. I know that we are not far from a long-ago campsite, from which we crossed the big wash to a slickrock plateau, which we traversed in the hope of finding one of the many ancient Anasazi ruins in this canyon-entwined wilderness. The Anasazi, whose cultural center was Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, were superb builders with rock, and many of their structures still stand not only at Chaco and Mesa Verde but in countless outposts in the canyons of southeast Utah, northeast Arizona, southwest Colorado and northwest New Mexico -- the Four Corners region.
Today we mean to explore our slickrock plateau in another direction, looking for side canyons that promise to divulge another ruin like the one whose discovery thrilled us many years ago. We don't want company; the stillness and serenity are the primary rewards of braving this rough country. (I'm still being defensive about my evasiveness with the Arizonan.)
Never mind. As we crest one escarpment, we can see for miles around us; the Arizonans' SUV is parking near our truck. They will find our "secret" route across the wash, and make way for the ridge. Their path will be far enough south of ours to preserve our tranquility. It's a big place. I hope they reach the top of the ridge. It would be a fine experience for a man and his two sons.
We find a promising side canyon. During a water and trail-mix break, we study it through the binoculars. We think we see a ruin in an alcove half a mile up-canyon. Even with the binoculars, we can't be certain. Natural rock and the shadows of the Autumn-angled sun can deceive you into thinking you're seeing a ruin, because you so want to see one. We'll explore further another time.
We haven't taken a GPS device on our little walk, so we can't record coordinates, but we mark the approximate site on a topo map. We'll come back another day and walk up this canyon from Butler Wash road. Perhaps we'll be rewarded by finding a ruin. Perhaps not. There are other rewards for coming to this place, spiritual ones, if you will: you can feel the sacredness of its antiquity and its rugged beauty.
We will come back another day. We must come back another day.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Don't Look! Don't Touch! These are for You!
Not for nothing did cynical employees of the BLM give it the nickname, "Bureau of Lousy Management."
Foremost among the not-so-wonderful agencies managing our federal public lands, the BLM tends to meet its multi-use mandate through addled non-logic.
It preserves antiquities for us by hiding them from us. Now this bizarre policy has struck close to home.
For years, a dedicated group of conservationists, apolitical and indefatigable, have fought to protect a special place in the Robledo Mountains outside Las Cruces, NM. It is a lovely place to hike and explore. One day more than 20 years ago, a hiker and explorer named Jerry McDonald, a graduate student at New Mexico State University. made a discovery that he instinctively knew was important, even though he was not a geologist or archeologist.
Animal footprints, made hundreds of thousands of years before dinosaurs existed, had been preserved by an accident of nature in red sandstone layers of the rock that formed the Robledos next to what once was a primeval sea. McDonald's instinctive appreciation of their value soon was at odds with the politics, petty jealousies and intense competition for funding among the esoteric sciences.
While museum curators, academics and politicians prattled, vandals and off-road terrorists savaged the initial site. Flash floods added to the damage. A nearby quarry scooped up some of the priceless footprints and their fragments wound up in tile floors, chimneys and garden walls of the Mesilla Valley.
McDonald persisted and so did the conservationists. Finally the pols got the message and passed legislation creating the Prehistoric Trackways National Monument. The 5,280-acre monument was established, according to the BLM website, "to conserve, protect, and enhance the unique and nationally important paleontological, scientific, educational, scenic, and recreational resources and values."
And how, pray, does the BLM "protect" the area's most spectacular "paleontological, scientific, educational and scenic" resource, the paleozoic trackways themselves? By excavating them and carting them off to a museum 200 miles away in Albuquerque, where they are kept under lock and key, to be viewed only by those whose applications for a reservation are approved by the bureaucracy!
Many of us who rallied behind McDonald and the friends of the Paleozoic trackways assumed (wrongly) that national monument status would require the BLM to preserve these resources in situ. They didn't pack up Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl (did they?) and truck it off to a locked warehouse in Denver, leaving Chaco Canyon to serve as a race track for ORV cowboys.
For years, it has been a ritual in our family that visitors would join us on the hike up a nearby arroyo to the "discovery site" where McDonald first found animal footprints. We would scavenge the vandalized site for hours, shrieking with delight when we found a single print, or an exotic marine fossil. Without exception, our visitors experienced a special joy in making contact with creatures that had walked the very land under their feet millions of years ago. However fine the samples hidden away in Albuquerque might be, viewing them there pales beside the adventure of finding them in situ.
Those of us who enjoy walking the beautiful canyons of the American southwest in search of the legacy of the Anasazi, Mogollan, Freemont and other early American builders and artisans have long become accustomed to the BLM's ethic of protecting antiquities for us by hiding them from us. Cliff house ruins aren't on the maps. There are no signs pointing to them. But at least the rock houses, potsherds, arrowheads, petroglyphs and climbing niches remain where their creators put them. If you're lucky enough to find one, you can appreciate how those first inhabitants of the west lived and learned and manifested their knowledge of their world. You don't have to request a reservation at some far away museum to see them.
Last time my son and I set out to walk up the arroyo to Jerry McDonald's "discovery site," the access was closed off. No signs identified the national monument; it could just as well have been another piece of trash-littered southwestern desert. We decided to drive on out to Broad Canyon, to look for petroglyphs. We didn't know that behind the locked gate they were taking away the very reasons for having a national monument in the first place, and stashing them in a crypt in Albuquerque, far from the eyes of those who battled to preserve them.
Foremost among the not-so-wonderful agencies managing our federal public lands, the BLM tends to meet its multi-use mandate through addled non-logic.
It preserves antiquities for us by hiding them from us. Now this bizarre policy has struck close to home.
For years, a dedicated group of conservationists, apolitical and indefatigable, have fought to protect a special place in the Robledo Mountains outside Las Cruces, NM. It is a lovely place to hike and explore. One day more than 20 years ago, a hiker and explorer named Jerry McDonald, a graduate student at New Mexico State University. made a discovery that he instinctively knew was important, even though he was not a geologist or archeologist.
Animal footprints, made hundreds of thousands of years before dinosaurs existed, had been preserved by an accident of nature in red sandstone layers of the rock that formed the Robledos next to what once was a primeval sea. McDonald's instinctive appreciation of their value soon was at odds with the politics, petty jealousies and intense competition for funding among the esoteric sciences.
While museum curators, academics and politicians prattled, vandals and off-road terrorists savaged the initial site. Flash floods added to the damage. A nearby quarry scooped up some of the priceless footprints and their fragments wound up in tile floors, chimneys and garden walls of the Mesilla Valley.
McDonald persisted and so did the conservationists. Finally the pols got the message and passed legislation creating the Prehistoric Trackways National Monument. The 5,280-acre monument was established, according to the BLM website, "to conserve, protect, and enhance the unique and nationally important paleontological, scientific, educational, scenic, and recreational resources and values."
And how, pray, does the BLM "protect" the area's most spectacular "paleontological, scientific, educational and scenic" resource, the paleozoic trackways themselves? By excavating them and carting them off to a museum 200 miles away in Albuquerque, where they are kept under lock and key, to be viewed only by those whose applications for a reservation are approved by the bureaucracy!
Many of us who rallied behind McDonald and the friends of the Paleozoic trackways assumed (wrongly) that national monument status would require the BLM to preserve these resources in situ. They didn't pack up Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl (did they?) and truck it off to a locked warehouse in Denver, leaving Chaco Canyon to serve as a race track for ORV cowboys.
For years, it has been a ritual in our family that visitors would join us on the hike up a nearby arroyo to the "discovery site" where McDonald first found animal footprints. We would scavenge the vandalized site for hours, shrieking with delight when we found a single print, or an exotic marine fossil. Without exception, our visitors experienced a special joy in making contact with creatures that had walked the very land under their feet millions of years ago. However fine the samples hidden away in Albuquerque might be, viewing them there pales beside the adventure of finding them in situ.
Those of us who enjoy walking the beautiful canyons of the American southwest in search of the legacy of the Anasazi, Mogollan, Freemont and other early American builders and artisans have long become accustomed to the BLM's ethic of protecting antiquities for us by hiding them from us. Cliff house ruins aren't on the maps. There are no signs pointing to them. But at least the rock houses, potsherds, arrowheads, petroglyphs and climbing niches remain where their creators put them. If you're lucky enough to find one, you can appreciate how those first inhabitants of the west lived and learned and manifested their knowledge of their world. You don't have to request a reservation at some far away museum to see them.
Last time my son and I set out to walk up the arroyo to Jerry McDonald's "discovery site," the access was closed off. No signs identified the national monument; it could just as well have been another piece of trash-littered southwestern desert. We decided to drive on out to Broad Canyon, to look for petroglyphs. We didn't know that behind the locked gate they were taking away the very reasons for having a national monument in the first place, and stashing them in a crypt in Albuquerque, far from the eyes of those who battled to preserve them.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Who Has 'No Access' to What???
Why must there always be bad news with the good?
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal headlined the good news: we're getting rid of Larry Summers, co-architect of the great recession and of the recovery efforts that rewarded rich and incompetent CEOs while failing to provide jobs for millions of unemployed working men and women.
Tucked within the article was the bad news: unnamed sources have told the Journal that Dr. Kidglove is going to appoint a CEO -- yes, a corporate CEO! -- to replace Summers. Such an appointment, the article said, would assuage concerns that corporations don't have access to the White House. The article gave no source of the "concerns" other than the author's own fantasies, or his Murdoch editor's, or the minds of the two remaining corporate CEOs who have not yet been given the opportunity to write economic or social legislation for the entire country. Like the Journal's sources, the two CEOs asked not to be named because of the embarrassment of not having set foot in the White House except for social occasions in more than two years.
Like snowballs, gobs of bovine excrement roll downhill. By today, the media consensus is that the administration must assuage "concerns" about corporate access to the White House by appointing a CEO to succeed Summers.
As Art Buchwald used to say, you couldn't make this stuff up.
No corporate access?
Who in the hell crammed into the Oval office to accept Dr. Kidglove's sellout of the public option in the health care bill? If those weren't the top people from pharmaceutical manufacturing corporations, then Labron James isn't in Heat.
Who the hell wrote the loopholes in the health care act that the insurers have already begun using to raise rates to intolerable levels, refuse coverage to children with prior illnesses and put unrealistically low limits on lifetime coverage for major health problems? It wasn't any of the now 50 million Americans with no health care plans. It wasn't any of the young cancer victims I know through my work in cancer survivors' organizations. It wasn't Dennis Kucinich. It was insurance c--o-r-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n-s.
Who the hell fueled the bizarre thought process that persuaded the Gang of Five on the Supreme Court to give corporations a license for unlimited spending to buy candidates for every elected office in the land? Mother Theresa?
Who the hell bamboozled the Oval Office into botching the BP oil spill! Who the hell bulldozed Dr. Kidglove into backing away from a really tough climate and energy bill? Hint: look up the richest billionaires in the energy industry. They run c-o-r-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n-s.
Who the hell do you think has intimidated Dr. Kidglove to endorse the mindless but oh, so profitable policy of endless war? It couldn't possibly have been the defense industry c-o-r-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n-s and the Pentagon, also known as the military-industrial complex, could it? Nah. Had to be Islam.
Once upon a time a president with gonads fired a big-ego general who defied him, reminding Dugout Doug that the Constitution made the president the commander-in-chief. Today, Gen. Petraeus defies Dr. Kidglove and says he'll keep troops in Afghanistan as long as he damned well pleases. No contrary word has been heard fro you-know-who.
He is, after all, Corporate Amnerica's general. Ain't no power on earth stronger than that.
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal headlined the good news: we're getting rid of Larry Summers, co-architect of the great recession and of the recovery efforts that rewarded rich and incompetent CEOs while failing to provide jobs for millions of unemployed working men and women.
Tucked within the article was the bad news: unnamed sources have told the Journal that Dr. Kidglove is going to appoint a CEO -- yes, a corporate CEO! -- to replace Summers. Such an appointment, the article said, would assuage concerns that corporations don't have access to the White House. The article gave no source of the "concerns" other than the author's own fantasies, or his Murdoch editor's, or the minds of the two remaining corporate CEOs who have not yet been given the opportunity to write economic or social legislation for the entire country. Like the Journal's sources, the two CEOs asked not to be named because of the embarrassment of not having set foot in the White House except for social occasions in more than two years.
Like snowballs, gobs of bovine excrement roll downhill. By today, the media consensus is that the administration must assuage "concerns" about corporate access to the White House by appointing a CEO to succeed Summers.
As Art Buchwald used to say, you couldn't make this stuff up.
No corporate access?
Who in the hell crammed into the Oval office to accept Dr. Kidglove's sellout of the public option in the health care bill? If those weren't the top people from pharmaceutical manufacturing corporations, then Labron James isn't in Heat.
Who the hell wrote the loopholes in the health care act that the insurers have already begun using to raise rates to intolerable levels, refuse coverage to children with prior illnesses and put unrealistically low limits on lifetime coverage for major health problems? It wasn't any of the now 50 million Americans with no health care plans. It wasn't any of the young cancer victims I know through my work in cancer survivors' organizations. It wasn't Dennis Kucinich. It was insurance c--o-r-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n-s.
Who the hell fueled the bizarre thought process that persuaded the Gang of Five on the Supreme Court to give corporations a license for unlimited spending to buy candidates for every elected office in the land? Mother Theresa?
Who the hell bamboozled the Oval Office into botching the BP oil spill! Who the hell bulldozed Dr. Kidglove into backing away from a really tough climate and energy bill? Hint: look up the richest billionaires in the energy industry. They run c-o-r-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n-s.
Who the hell do you think has intimidated Dr. Kidglove to endorse the mindless but oh, so profitable policy of endless war? It couldn't possibly have been the defense industry c-o-r-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n-s and the Pentagon, also known as the military-industrial complex, could it? Nah. Had to be Islam.
Once upon a time a president with gonads fired a big-ego general who defied him, reminding Dugout Doug that the Constitution made the president the commander-in-chief. Today, Gen. Petraeus defies Dr. Kidglove and says he'll keep troops in Afghanistan as long as he damned well pleases. No contrary word has been heard fro you-know-who.
He is, after all, Corporate Amnerica's general. Ain't no power on earth stronger than that.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
An Accurate Portrait of Rightward America
Even a casual reading of the local daily is enlightening. Not because it manifests any of the traditional journalistic virtues -- it doesn't -- but because its picture of this corner of the American southwest lays naked the truths that underlie the country's drift rightward.
A recent edition displayed on Page One a photograph of a billboard that read: "More Mosques. Less Jobs. Vote Democratic?"
The grammatical barbarism, "less" where "fewer" is required, represents the mass ignorance of an American electorate that was downright proud to have twice voted into the Oval Office a man who got through college on unearned C's bestowed because of his family's political and financial clout.
The first phrase, "More Mosques," depicts the overt hatred and implicit fear that motivates our voting class. Fear and hatred of "them" drives the engine of American politics: American citizens of German extraction in World War I, of Japanese extraction in World War II, of Asian extraction during the Korean and Vietnam wars, of Arab extraction and Muslim beliefs today. Do you believe that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion applies to American citizens who worship in mosques? You're a traitor who supports terrorism.
The second phrase, about jobs, implies that Democrats caused the record unemployment that actually resulted from eight years of Bush economic insanity. This is representative of another factor in America's drift rightward: voters' willingness to believe any lie, deception, innuendo, rumor or misleading statement that is repeated often enough on TV.
You can't pick up a copy of the local daily without being assailed with reasons to fear. Our proximity to the Mexican border makes us particularly vulnerable. "They" sneak across from Mexico and trash our beautiful desert and sell drugs to our innocent youth and take guns back in the other direction that are used to kill our ranchers and travelers and rape our women.
Recently the paper reported on a radio debate between our two candidates for Congress. The incumbent, a Democrat who has been right on most of the important issues, wavered when asked if he supported much-needed legislation to protect our public lands from development, vehicular degradation and other misuse. He said he feared that having wilderness on the border would give haven to drug smugglers, human traffickers and deadly assassins. In fact, the legislation would enhance border security by providing a broader zone for law enforcement patrols than exists now. Never mind. The fear frenzy has been whipped up by the Tea Party crowd, and not even a good man is strong enough to stand up against it.
A local columnist commented the other day on a commission, appointed by the governor, tasked with a broad range of responsibilities on energy policy. This is an area where the lie-mongers have succeeded in planting a desperate fear of "Cap 'n' Trade" among voters, most of whom haven't the foggiest notion what's really at stake in the effort to control carbon emissions that are killing the planet. He took no sides on the core issue, but lamented that it would be decided by an appointed commission. Such things should be decided, he wrote, by elected officials who are "accountable to the voters."
As long as reasonable people continue to delude themselves that elected officials are accountable to anyone other than corporations and a handful of obscenely wealthy Americans, social justice, civil liberties, public health and welfare and the noblest ideals of the Founding Fathers will continue to wither and die.
When we finally realize who's running things -- if we ever figure it out -- it will require one hell of a revolution to restore democracy.
A recent edition displayed on Page One a photograph of a billboard that read: "More Mosques. Less Jobs. Vote Democratic?"
The grammatical barbarism, "less" where "fewer" is required, represents the mass ignorance of an American electorate that was downright proud to have twice voted into the Oval Office a man who got through college on unearned C's bestowed because of his family's political and financial clout.
The first phrase, "More Mosques," depicts the overt hatred and implicit fear that motivates our voting class. Fear and hatred of "them" drives the engine of American politics: American citizens of German extraction in World War I, of Japanese extraction in World War II, of Asian extraction during the Korean and Vietnam wars, of Arab extraction and Muslim beliefs today. Do you believe that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion applies to American citizens who worship in mosques? You're a traitor who supports terrorism.
The second phrase, about jobs, implies that Democrats caused the record unemployment that actually resulted from eight years of Bush economic insanity. This is representative of another factor in America's drift rightward: voters' willingness to believe any lie, deception, innuendo, rumor or misleading statement that is repeated often enough on TV.
You can't pick up a copy of the local daily without being assailed with reasons to fear. Our proximity to the Mexican border makes us particularly vulnerable. "They" sneak across from Mexico and trash our beautiful desert and sell drugs to our innocent youth and take guns back in the other direction that are used to kill our ranchers and travelers and rape our women.
Recently the paper reported on a radio debate between our two candidates for Congress. The incumbent, a Democrat who has been right on most of the important issues, wavered when asked if he supported much-needed legislation to protect our public lands from development, vehicular degradation and other misuse. He said he feared that having wilderness on the border would give haven to drug smugglers, human traffickers and deadly assassins. In fact, the legislation would enhance border security by providing a broader zone for law enforcement patrols than exists now. Never mind. The fear frenzy has been whipped up by the Tea Party crowd, and not even a good man is strong enough to stand up against it.
A local columnist commented the other day on a commission, appointed by the governor, tasked with a broad range of responsibilities on energy policy. This is an area where the lie-mongers have succeeded in planting a desperate fear of "Cap 'n' Trade" among voters, most of whom haven't the foggiest notion what's really at stake in the effort to control carbon emissions that are killing the planet. He took no sides on the core issue, but lamented that it would be decided by an appointed commission. Such things should be decided, he wrote, by elected officials who are "accountable to the voters."
As long as reasonable people continue to delude themselves that elected officials are accountable to anyone other than corporations and a handful of obscenely wealthy Americans, social justice, civil liberties, public health and welfare and the noblest ideals of the Founding Fathers will continue to wither and die.
When we finally realize who's running things -- if we ever figure it out -- it will require one hell of a revolution to restore democracy.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Think the Glass is Half Empty? You Got a Attytood Problem!
I remember when real Democrats walked the land, and when their candidates threw their hats into the ring on Labor Day, in Cadillac Square, in sweat-stained Detroit.
Today, most Democrats are really Republicans in cheap suits. The other night a "Democratic" president preened before $30,000 a plate fat cats in plutocratic Greenwich, Conn. "back country," and derided Democrats who "just congenitally see the glass as half empty."
Honest Injun. That's what Barack Obama said. The fat cats thought it was hilarious.
While Dr. Kidglove was entertaining the super-rich with his disdain for the poor folks, the number of Americans without health insurance rose by 4.3 million to a record 50.7 million people. Silly fools probably think their glasses are half empty. Ha ha.
For forty per cent of American families, the 30 grand Kidglove's fat cats paid per plate to hear him gabble would represent an increase in annual income. Yep, two out of every five Americans take home less than the cost of one plate of food at the Democratic fund raiser. Damn idiots probably think their glasses are less than half full. Ha ha.
Official Labor Department statistics place the unemployment rate in this country at 9.6 per cent, representing almost 15 million people. A nationwide unemployment study by a non-profit, independent academic group estimated that the government statistics dramatically understate the real amount of joblessness in this country. They put the probable unemployment rate above 12 per cent, representing nearly 22 million unemployed working-age Americans. Those demented asses probably think their glasses are half empty. Ha ha.
As Dr. Kidglove regaled his rich supporters, 3.8 million more Americans joined the official poverty pool as determined by government income standards. One in seven Americans now lives in "official" poverty. These misguided souls probably consider their glasses to be more than half empty. Hidey ha hee haw.
Thirty-thousand dollars to eat peas and chicken with the First Fabricator.
I know a small-businessman who couldn't get a $30,000 loan to save his business, at the same time that Dr. Kidglove was committing trillions to save the Wall Street crowd that caused the worst recession in the U.S. since the 1930s. It put his 27 employees out of jobs and his family into the poverty-income bracket.
I know a young man who worked two jobs, stayed up all night studying, and still found time to work to elect Barack Obama president while he was taking on heavy debt to get a college degree. He got his degree, but is still without a job. The Wall Street crowd is collecting record bonuses. The top paid CEOs in the United States are the ones who have laid off the most workers.
None of this seems right to me. But then, I just congenitally see the glass as half empty. Ain't that hilarious?
Today, most Democrats are really Republicans in cheap suits. The other night a "Democratic" president preened before $30,000 a plate fat cats in plutocratic Greenwich, Conn. "back country," and derided Democrats who "just congenitally see the glass as half empty."
Honest Injun. That's what Barack Obama said. The fat cats thought it was hilarious.
While Dr. Kidglove was entertaining the super-rich with his disdain for the poor folks, the number of Americans without health insurance rose by 4.3 million to a record 50.7 million people. Silly fools probably think their glasses are half empty. Ha ha.
For forty per cent of American families, the 30 grand Kidglove's fat cats paid per plate to hear him gabble would represent an increase in annual income. Yep, two out of every five Americans take home less than the cost of one plate of food at the Democratic fund raiser. Damn idiots probably think their glasses are less than half full. Ha ha.
Official Labor Department statistics place the unemployment rate in this country at 9.6 per cent, representing almost 15 million people. A nationwide unemployment study by a non-profit, independent academic group estimated that the government statistics dramatically understate the real amount of joblessness in this country. They put the probable unemployment rate above 12 per cent, representing nearly 22 million unemployed working-age Americans. Those demented asses probably think their glasses are half empty. Ha ha.
As Dr. Kidglove regaled his rich supporters, 3.8 million more Americans joined the official poverty pool as determined by government income standards. One in seven Americans now lives in "official" poverty. These misguided souls probably consider their glasses to be more than half empty. Hidey ha hee haw.
Thirty-thousand dollars to eat peas and chicken with the First Fabricator.
I know a small-businessman who couldn't get a $30,000 loan to save his business, at the same time that Dr. Kidglove was committing trillions to save the Wall Street crowd that caused the worst recession in the U.S. since the 1930s. It put his 27 employees out of jobs and his family into the poverty-income bracket.
I know a young man who worked two jobs, stayed up all night studying, and still found time to work to elect Barack Obama president while he was taking on heavy debt to get a college degree. He got his degree, but is still without a job. The Wall Street crowd is collecting record bonuses. The top paid CEOs in the United States are the ones who have laid off the most workers.
None of this seems right to me. But then, I just congenitally see the glass as half empty. Ain't that hilarious?
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Sorry. We Can't Get There from Here
"Change," John Steinbeck wrote, "comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass."
The stealthy change that has transformed our country into a corporate kakistocracy has been more akin to a snake in the grass than wildflowers. Chris Hedges, the distinguished former journalist and scholar, referred to it recently as "a coup d'etat in slow motion by corporations."
"Barack Obama is a brand," Hedges told the blogger Rob Kall. "Barack Obama serves the interest of the corporate state and the permanent war economy as assiduously as George W. Bush.
"I think we have to begin to understand that corporations have won and we've lost. And then we have to begin to build resistance movements based on that knowledge. And we're not there yet."
The great question is, will we ever "get there?"
Recently I reconnected with an old friend, a quasi-retired college professor who has always shared many of my political views. Somewhat to my surprise, he opened our conversation by defending the Obama record: "Considering what he inherited," my friend said, "Obama has done about all that could be expected. I grade him 95 per cent positive."
Yet as our conversation was ending, my friend sighed and said, "the country we knew as younger men no longer exists. And we may never get it back."
Naomi Klein, Nation columnist and author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, says,"We have to build that independent left. It has to be so strong and so radical and so militant and so powerful that it becomes irresistible."
I agree, and have written often that if we do not or cannot form a strong Progressive third party in this country, democracy is doomed.
Now, I fear, it's too late for Hedges's resistance movements or Klein's vigorous new left. The battle is lost.
Some of the ugliest, bitterest, least qualified and most radically far right people ever to hold office in this country will be elected to Congress in November. The corporate kakistocracy that did so much damage in the Bush years, and that Obama failed to stifle, will become a runaway freight train.
In their book 13 Bankers, the brilliant economist Simon Johnson and his associate, James Kwaak,argued that the key forces behind the transformation of the financial sector and the resulting financial crisis were political, not simply economic.
"Business interests in all sectors organized a takeover of political power," Kwaak explains. "(It) pushed organized labor and other groups protecting middle-class interests to the sidelines and made possible decades of policies that have enriched the super-rich at the expense of everyone else, including the merely affluent. Finance was simply the biggest and most profitable of these sectors–and, we would emphasize, the one best able to hold the government hostage in a financial and economic crisis."
Kwaak agrees with economists who have written that the turning point in the corporatization of the United States ocurred in the 1970s.
"The Nixon presidency saw the high-water market of the regulatory state," Kwaak writes. "The demise of traditional liberalism occurred during the Carter administration, despite Democratic control of Washington, when highly organized business interests were able to torpedo the Democratic agenda and begin the era of cutting taxes for the rich that apparently has not yet ended today."
The Tea Party kooks and the blathering fools on the TV networks would have us believe that all of this was propelled by a profound shift in public opinion. But in Winner-Take-All Politics, the authors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson demolish the myth. Most of the public, they demonstrate, still resents economic inequality and believes in taxing the rich to help the less advantaged. But in Congress, where money talks and the politicians obey, the concerns of men and women in the street back home don't matter. “When well-off people strongly supported a policy change," they write, "it had almost three times the chance of becoming law as when they strongly opposed it. When median-income people strongly supported a policy change, it had hardly any greater chance of becoming law than when they strongly opposed it."
After November, things will only get worse. The country we knew as young men has vanished. We will never get it back.
The stealthy change that has transformed our country into a corporate kakistocracy has been more akin to a snake in the grass than wildflowers. Chris Hedges, the distinguished former journalist and scholar, referred to it recently as "a coup d'etat in slow motion by corporations."
"Barack Obama is a brand," Hedges told the blogger Rob Kall. "Barack Obama serves the interest of the corporate state and the permanent war economy as assiduously as George W. Bush.
"I think we have to begin to understand that corporations have won and we've lost. And then we have to begin to build resistance movements based on that knowledge. And we're not there yet."
The great question is, will we ever "get there?"
Recently I reconnected with an old friend, a quasi-retired college professor who has always shared many of my political views. Somewhat to my surprise, he opened our conversation by defending the Obama record: "Considering what he inherited," my friend said, "Obama has done about all that could be expected. I grade him 95 per cent positive."
Yet as our conversation was ending, my friend sighed and said, "the country we knew as younger men no longer exists. And we may never get it back."
Naomi Klein, Nation columnist and author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, says,"We have to build that independent left. It has to be so strong and so radical and so militant and so powerful that it becomes irresistible."
I agree, and have written often that if we do not or cannot form a strong Progressive third party in this country, democracy is doomed.
Now, I fear, it's too late for Hedges's resistance movements or Klein's vigorous new left. The battle is lost.
Some of the ugliest, bitterest, least qualified and most radically far right people ever to hold office in this country will be elected to Congress in November. The corporate kakistocracy that did so much damage in the Bush years, and that Obama failed to stifle, will become a runaway freight train.
In their book 13 Bankers, the brilliant economist Simon Johnson and his associate, James Kwaak,argued that the key forces behind the transformation of the financial sector and the resulting financial crisis were political, not simply economic.
"Business interests in all sectors organized a takeover of political power," Kwaak explains. "(It) pushed organized labor and other groups protecting middle-class interests to the sidelines and made possible decades of policies that have enriched the super-rich at the expense of everyone else, including the merely affluent. Finance was simply the biggest and most profitable of these sectors–and, we would emphasize, the one best able to hold the government hostage in a financial and economic crisis."
Kwaak agrees with economists who have written that the turning point in the corporatization of the United States ocurred in the 1970s.
"The Nixon presidency saw the high-water market of the regulatory state," Kwaak writes. "The demise of traditional liberalism occurred during the Carter administration, despite Democratic control of Washington, when highly organized business interests were able to torpedo the Democratic agenda and begin the era of cutting taxes for the rich that apparently has not yet ended today."
The Tea Party kooks and the blathering fools on the TV networks would have us believe that all of this was propelled by a profound shift in public opinion. But in Winner-Take-All Politics, the authors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson demolish the myth. Most of the public, they demonstrate, still resents economic inequality and believes in taxing the rich to help the less advantaged. But in Congress, where money talks and the politicians obey, the concerns of men and women in the street back home don't matter. “When well-off people strongly supported a policy change," they write, "it had almost three times the chance of becoming law as when they strongly opposed it. When median-income people strongly supported a policy change, it had hardly any greater chance of becoming law than when they strongly opposed it."
After November, things will only get worse. The country we knew as young men has vanished. We will never get it back.
Monday, September 6, 2010
To the Barricades! The Geezer Revolution is Coming!
When the new American revolution comes -- as inevitably it will -- it will probably be geezers who are first to the barricades.
While we slept, Dr. Kidglove's deficit reduction commission colluded with corporations and Congress to hack away at Social Security benefits.
"Oh," we shrugged, re-checking the iffy status of our 401(k) and other dwindling savings, "they'll never touch Social Security."
They've done touched it, folks, and ain't a thang we can do about it now. Get used to it: cheap dog food kind of tastes like, oh, Spam if you load it with ketchup.
While the lap dogs of the media kept us busy fretting over celebrity divorces, phonied-up videos of a black USDA official speaking to the NAACP, and manufactured controversy about whether the First Amendment applies to Islamic American citizens, that deficit commission was meeting in absolute secrecy.
We still haven't figured out that the moment anything happens behind closed doors in Washington, John Q. Public is going to suffer for it. When the something that's happening involves a whole gaggle of outspoken enemies of Social Security and all other aspects of the social safety net, the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
Now, these dudes who had made up their minds even before they began meeting in secret to agree with one another, will make their official report in December -- right after the Tea Party kooks, Republican extremists and other whores of corporate America have swept control of Congress.
So when Alan Simpson, Pete Peterson and the rest of the gang tell Congress that the geezers have sucked too long and too hard at the public teats, you can bet that Congress will rubber stamp it tout de suite.
The vote is rigged anyway because the House has already passed a resolution calling for an up-or-down/no-amendments vote on the Commission's recommendations, a procedure that assures the enactment of the commission's recommendations.
Every significant aspect of corporate government is rigged against We the People who formed this more perfect union.
Once, ten per cent return on investment was considered a fair and decent profit for an American business. Then Wall Street and the big investment banks -- yes, the outfits we had to bail out with our tax dollars a couple of years ago -- decided that ten per cent was peanuts, wouldn't pay the big bonuses CEOs were entitled to.
So they bought a few more congressmen and began to work away at the American labor movement, which created the middle class. In secrecy and shady deals, American labor was so neutered that American jobs, particularly in manufacturing, went "Poof" and reappeared overseas. And corporate profit margins soared -- 20 per cent, 25, 30. . . .Exxon Mobil!
It isn't coincidence that trillions went to save corporations and a few dimes went to create jobs for the millions of unemployed Americans.
Perhaps the jobless will join the geezers on the barricades when revolution comes. Who do you imagaine discovered that dog food tastes like Spam if you load it with ketchup?
It wasn't the fat cats in corporate suites and boardrooms.
While we slept, Dr. Kidglove's deficit reduction commission colluded with corporations and Congress to hack away at Social Security benefits.
"Oh," we shrugged, re-checking the iffy status of our 401(k) and other dwindling savings, "they'll never touch Social Security."
They've done touched it, folks, and ain't a thang we can do about it now. Get used to it: cheap dog food kind of tastes like, oh, Spam if you load it with ketchup.
While the lap dogs of the media kept us busy fretting over celebrity divorces, phonied-up videos of a black USDA official speaking to the NAACP, and manufactured controversy about whether the First Amendment applies to Islamic American citizens, that deficit commission was meeting in absolute secrecy.
We still haven't figured out that the moment anything happens behind closed doors in Washington, John Q. Public is going to suffer for it. When the something that's happening involves a whole gaggle of outspoken enemies of Social Security and all other aspects of the social safety net, the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
Now, these dudes who had made up their minds even before they began meeting in secret to agree with one another, will make their official report in December -- right after the Tea Party kooks, Republican extremists and other whores of corporate America have swept control of Congress.
So when Alan Simpson, Pete Peterson and the rest of the gang tell Congress that the geezers have sucked too long and too hard at the public teats, you can bet that Congress will rubber stamp it tout de suite.
The vote is rigged anyway because the House has already passed a resolution calling for an up-or-down/no-amendments vote on the Commission's recommendations, a procedure that assures the enactment of the commission's recommendations.
Every significant aspect of corporate government is rigged against We the People who formed this more perfect union.
Once, ten per cent return on investment was considered a fair and decent profit for an American business. Then Wall Street and the big investment banks -- yes, the outfits we had to bail out with our tax dollars a couple of years ago -- decided that ten per cent was peanuts, wouldn't pay the big bonuses CEOs were entitled to.
So they bought a few more congressmen and began to work away at the American labor movement, which created the middle class. In secrecy and shady deals, American labor was so neutered that American jobs, particularly in manufacturing, went "Poof" and reappeared overseas. And corporate profit margins soared -- 20 per cent, 25, 30. . . .Exxon Mobil!
It isn't coincidence that trillions went to save corporations and a few dimes went to create jobs for the millions of unemployed Americans.
Perhaps the jobless will join the geezers on the barricades when revolution comes. Who do you imagaine discovered that dog food tastes like Spam if you load it with ketchup?
It wasn't the fat cats in corporate suites and boardrooms.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
See the Pig Fly! Watch the Cow Jump Over the Moon!
The great national orgy of self-deceit goes on.
Tonight, our Commander in Chief will speak to us about "the end of the war in Iraq."
Haven't we seen this movie before? Didn't the spoiled rich kid dress up in a smartly tailored Sojer Suit and declare "Mission Accomplished?"
How many times can one war "end" but still continue to kill American servicemen and women? We're laaving 50,000 of them over there with targets on their chests, but the "war is over?"
Why do we buy this bovine excrement? Why do we trust the media that repeat it? Do we enjoy being gulled? Gulling ourselves?
In November we will stage a general election. We will tell one another that we are participating in the democratic process.
Nonsense. A handful of billionaires, multimillionaires and the corporations they control will buy a majority of the House of Representative and half the Senate. The "elected" members of Congress will do the bidding of the most powerful among the richest one percent of Americans.
It will be ugly. Venal clones of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and their ilk will be governing us. Our yoke as citizens will be the legislation of Hate. Non-Christians, persons of color, liberals and others on the hate list will live in fear of the gun-toting, bible-quoting bigots giddy on power.
Dr. Kidglove? He has already rendered himself irrelevant by his foredoomed efforts to compromise with the devil. Some say that when the devil rules Washington, Dr. Kidglove will be impeached.
Maybe so. Will it matter? Will it matter if irrational, corrupt politicians oust a weak, inept leader on spurious grounds? Our once-proud nation has become a vast political cesspool; whatever emanates from Washington, regardless of the party of origin, stinks.
But we think we're the moral compass of the world! We tell ourselves that the rest of the world is jealous because we're free! We ignore the suspension of our civil rights that is ironically acronymed THE USA PATRIOT ACT. Over childishly absurd opposition by a witless minority, our elected whores manage to pass health care legislation that increases the power of insurers and corporations to withhold health care or make it excessively expensive for the poorest and most needy among us. And we call it "reform."
We tune our televisions to a manufacturer of falsehoods, fear, lies and innuendo and tell ourselves that we're watching "news."
We will dial up our HDTVs tonight and listen to the "leader of the free world, the head of the richest, most powerful nation on earth," as he declares once again the end of war in Iraq.
And we will believe. We will bless the troops. We will wave flags. We will sing patriotic songs.
We will be Americans. But we will still be at war in Iraq, where we never should have gone in the first place.
Tonight, our Commander in Chief will speak to us about "the end of the war in Iraq."
Haven't we seen this movie before? Didn't the spoiled rich kid dress up in a smartly tailored Sojer Suit and declare "Mission Accomplished?"
How many times can one war "end" but still continue to kill American servicemen and women? We're laaving 50,000 of them over there with targets on their chests, but the "war is over?"
Why do we buy this bovine excrement? Why do we trust the media that repeat it? Do we enjoy being gulled? Gulling ourselves?
In November we will stage a general election. We will tell one another that we are participating in the democratic process.
Nonsense. A handful of billionaires, multimillionaires and the corporations they control will buy a majority of the House of Representative and half the Senate. The "elected" members of Congress will do the bidding of the most powerful among the richest one percent of Americans.
It will be ugly. Venal clones of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and their ilk will be governing us. Our yoke as citizens will be the legislation of Hate. Non-Christians, persons of color, liberals and others on the hate list will live in fear of the gun-toting, bible-quoting bigots giddy on power.
Dr. Kidglove? He has already rendered himself irrelevant by his foredoomed efforts to compromise with the devil. Some say that when the devil rules Washington, Dr. Kidglove will be impeached.
Maybe so. Will it matter? Will it matter if irrational, corrupt politicians oust a weak, inept leader on spurious grounds? Our once-proud nation has become a vast political cesspool; whatever emanates from Washington, regardless of the party of origin, stinks.
But we think we're the moral compass of the world! We tell ourselves that the rest of the world is jealous because we're free! We ignore the suspension of our civil rights that is ironically acronymed THE USA PATRIOT ACT. Over childishly absurd opposition by a witless minority, our elected whores manage to pass health care legislation that increases the power of insurers and corporations to withhold health care or make it excessively expensive for the poorest and most needy among us. And we call it "reform."
We tune our televisions to a manufacturer of falsehoods, fear, lies and innuendo and tell ourselves that we're watching "news."
We will dial up our HDTVs tonight and listen to the "leader of the free world, the head of the richest, most powerful nation on earth," as he declares once again the end of war in Iraq.
And we will believe. We will bless the troops. We will wave flags. We will sing patriotic songs.
We will be Americans. But we will still be at war in Iraq, where we never should have gone in the first place.
* * *
UPDATE: See "End the wine wars" on our Blog Cousin, "The Ironist's Tool Box." http://ironitool.blogspot.com/
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