Tag: Republicans

Why I don’t claim to be a progressive

(crossposted at Voices on the Square)

Back in 2009 I wrote a diary over at Kos: Fundamental flaws in progressive ideology. The point was to show how the idea of being a “progressive” contained the idea of selling out within it. The actual record of “progressives” in this era speaks for itself — forty years of decreasing global growth, neoliberal economic policy, and so on.  We’re not really progressing toward anything — unless you count the future described by Gopal Balakrishnan:

We are entering into a period of inconclusive struggles between a weakened capitalism and dispersed agencies of opposition, within delegitimated and insolvent political orders. The end of history could be thought to begin when no project of global scope is left standing, and a new kind of ‘worldlessness’ and drift begins.

Against this background, progressivism appears as a sort of holdover from a previous era.

In the midst of all of this, in progressive blogs you have recognitions such as: Twilight of an Empire: More Than Just Bridges Are Crumbling In America. Eric Stetson recognizes that austerity planning is already hurting America, and will get worse in the future.  Here is his lament:

Schools, libraries, parks, advanced weather forecasting, and other features of great modern civilizations? Forget about it! All being cut to the bone.

So few jobs being created that labor force participation is the lowest since 1979 and food stamp eligibility is the highest ever?

Who cares! It sure isn’t the government’s responsibility to do anything

about unemployment, right? — the reaction from America’s politicians

on this score is as deafening as John Cage’s infamous symphony of silence.

Even spending money on disaster relief for American cities destroyed by a hurricane or a tornado is no longer

an automatic thing, but instead a political football. Our politicians

are so tight, the unreformed Ebenezer Scrooge would be proud.

Eric Stetson, however, simply does not imagine more in his conclusion than that America should “demand more of its leaders.” What makes Stetson think that America’s leaders are at any point going to pay attention to such a call to action?

Meanwhile, at the Atlantic, the complaint is now that we have Presidents who routinely break the law, and nobody really cares. Or rather, I suppose, nobody with a shred of power really cares. Our most progressive journalists are telling us: we can expose it, at least for now, but we can’t do anything about it.

And then you have climate change.  Climate change is going to be dreadful if we stick with capitalism, as there will be crop failures and famine, and it’s not going to be mitigated by any climate change bill written by the fossil fuel industries, nor will just a bill for a bill’s sake do.  While the progressives were applauding the EPA’s assertion of its right to regulate “carbon emissions,” what was strictly necessary, as James Hansen was telling us we had to get back to 350 parts per million in atmospheric content, was that we have some sort of phase-out of fossil fuel production so we can keep the grease in the ground.  While radical transformation is necessary, the progressives at DailyKos.com are arguing that “fixing the economy first is not the best way to pass a climate bill.”  How is a phase-out of fossil fuels not “fixing the economy”?

Let’s move, now, to FDL. Michelle Chen, a name I don’t see a lot at Firedoglake, tells us that we have “a budget that tightens belts by emptying stomachs.” Chen ends her lament about proposed cuts to the food stamp program with a pointed criticism of “free markets”:

So that’s the theme of this year’s budget debate: that millions of people can’t afford to eat is not a cause for alarm for politicians so much as a burdensome line item. And erasing public benefits make it easier to make the poor invisible in the public mind. After all, food stamps symbolize not only the failure of “free markets” but the power of social policy to reduce endemic human suffering.

Well, OK, social policy to reduce suffering is good. Is that what the progressives have gotten for us?

Well, not a whole lot of it, unless you’re counting a watered-down and inadequate stimulus (now being erased through sequester) or a Heritage Foundation-inspired health insurance bill. Generally speaking, what progressives do every election year is to retreat on all of their presumed off-season goals and to declare themselves firmly in favor of the Democrat and against the Republican, without any serious consideration of what the Democrat actually supports. This is how the progressive vote was delivered for Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama and for numerous lower-ups in Congress, and this is how said vote will be delivered for the next neoliberal austerians who plan to run for Federal-level offices in 2016.

Even worse is the conceptual schemes progressives have had to invent in order to defend their political choices. The Democrats are better than the Republicans, stop whining and start working, you can’t have everything you want, and so on.  The result is stuff like this: we didn’t like it under Bush, but now we’ve changed our minds, say many progressives.

Now, the idea of calling liberals “progressives,” if I recall correctly, started out in the late 1980s as a result of the senior Bush’s campaign against “the L word.”  The idea, then, was to identify liberals with the promoters of what was once called the “Progressive movement” during what was once called the “Progressive Era” (fundamentally, from 1890 to 1920).

In general, the progressive critique of American society’s political dysfunction cannot bring itself to name, correctly, the design flaw operating in both politics and the economy.  The name of this design flaw is “capitalism,” and understanding it as an operating principle of the capitalist world-system is quite necessary to understanding why progressives may have had success in the Progressive Era, but cannot seem to find much of it (outside of legislation protecting gay rights, and a few initiatives here and there to legalize marijuana) today.

Progressives in the Progressive Era confronted a young, expanding capitalism that had not yet experienced two world wars, nor had it fully established the consumer economy of the golden age of capitalism (1948-1971).  This explains, more or less, their success in getting reforms enacted in that earlier era.  Their success was just beginning!

Progressives in this era, on the other hand, are being asked to defend a doctrine of incremental change leading to a better world, when nowadays declining rates of economic growth clash with increasing demands for corporate profit.  As the resultant neoliberal political economy facilitates the theft of everything that isn’t nailed down for the sake of meeting this demand for corporate profit, progressivism is increasingly being forced into either of two directions: 1) the general apparatus of apologetics with which the Democratic and Republican Parties (and other parties, elsewhere) defend reactionary legislation designed to privatize and deregulate the economy and subject it to fiscal austerity while the whole of society is militarized in anticipation of public dissent against the abolition of the middle class, or 2) a general sense of distressed spectatorship as the worlld gets worse, accompanied by a growing sense that something fantastic has to be proposed to cure the disease (such as what one sees in a recent diary of One Pissed Off Liberal).

An interesting discussion of the original Progressive Era in this light can be found in Cecelia Tichi’s collection of biographical sketches titled Civic Passions: Seven who Launched Progressive America (and What They Teach Us). In this regard, Tichi views the Progressive movement of 1890-1920 as a reaction to the “Gilded Age” of the 19th century, and regards our era as a new Gilded Age, one of corporate hegemony and political corruption. Tichi can find corruption in both eras, as well as muckrakers.

Reading history can be comforting, and engrossing, as Tichi’s book amply demonstrates.  The reformers Tichi depicts were able to “get the ball rolling” on concrete efforts to change living conditions for American society’s worst-off individuals, and to instill some humanity into America’s emerging consumer society.  In reading Tichi’s biographical sketches, one can’t help but want to duplicate their successes in today’s society.  One would, for instance, like to campaign much as Alice Hamilton did against unsafe conditions in lead mines, or as Florence Kelley did in organizing against child labor.  One would like to conduct the sort of worker-empowering social science that John R. Commons conducted in Pittsburgh, or pursue the same sort of pioneering efforts for social justice for Black people that Tichi depicts in her biographical sketch of Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Some of the activist strength Tichi extols may still be useful today — but we are no longer in the Progressive Era, and that the efforts of the original Progressive Era activists earned their successes through an emergent, felt need for a class compromise that circulated in the halls of the wealthy and powerful in that, adolescent, emergent stage of the expanding capitalist world-system.  The problems of child labor, horrific work conditions, and excessive poverty merited fresh efforts at reform in light of the increasing prosperity of the capitalist system at that time.  We are no longer in that era, and so if progressive efforts are to continue to have success, they need to be underwritten by some other way of thinking than progressive ideology.  In saying this, I am in solidarity with writers such as Aaron Schutz, whose book “Social Class, Social Action, and Education: The Failure of Progressive Democracy” described progressivism as a “middle class utopia,” (28) and Shelton Stromquist’s Reinventing “The People,” in which progressive reformers are said to pursue “an ideal of social harmony in which the interests of labor and capital would be reconciled.”  (23)  I also agree to a certain extent with Chris Hedges, whose Death of the Liberal Class complains of the resistance progressives no longer offer corporate elites.  Mild reformism was, without doubt, both effective and beneficial in an era in which the capitalist system required a “middle class utopia” if the crises which it generated were not to overwhelm the system as a whole.  Our era, on the other hand, is an era of a declining middle class, of deepening poverty for the multitudes, and increasing poverty amidst record profits for the super-rich.  The reconciliation of class interests is off the table. The consumer society no longer serves as the pretext for profits among the wealthiest when the wealthiest can just compel the government to print money for their enrichment.  The dire poverty of urban immigrant populations at the turn of the 20th century may not be part of our landscape today, but this fact itself forms a pretext for keeping present-day poverty off of legislative agendas, to the detriment of all of us.  What we need today are more movements such as the Zapatistas, or the various movements for ecological justice, or the MST.

In this environment “progressivism” appears as a sales-pitch for the Third Way.  Progressives are now people who tell you to vote for the Democrat because she/ he is better than the Republican — it might still ring true, but it becomes less and less important with each passing election, with each issue that becomes vitally important everywhere but in Washington DC.  Once progressivism was robust; today it has reached a cul-de-sac.  If anything, today’s world needs a class struggle more than ever, and a vision of civilization free of capitalism and the crises it promotes with increasing frequency (see e.g. Greece, Spain, global warming, pollution in China, war in Africa) today.  When the capitalists, with their governments in tow, are forcibly undoing all of the good done by the progressives and social democrats around the world, while at the same time bringing Earth’s ecosystems into increasing crises, another compromise is not going to restore the world to stability.

***********

Indeed a recent Gallup poll tells us that the number of liberal Americans is growing.  But this poll result is itself the product of an impoverished political discourse both with the Gallup pollsters and with America as a whole.  So, for instance one can also read of polls that say that “young people are more likely to favor socialism than capitalism” as well.  What I’d like to suggest, here, is that an opposition to the 7% at the top (as their fortunes improve) will have to be made up not just of progressives, nor even (perhaps) mainly of progressives, but of people with a diversity of political beliefs (socialists, anarchists, post-capitalists and so on) outside of progressivism.  These people exist already — the leap forward is not that a non-progressive Left needs to be created from nothing, but rather from the mere discussion of theory to an engagement with the world.  Bhaskar Sunkara:

After all, the problem with the Left isn’t that it’s too austere and serious; it’s that it doesn’t take itself seriously enough to make the changes necessary for political practice. We can be rigorous and ideological – without being afraid of being heard outside our own circles. Mass exposure wouldn’t spell the end of a vibrant socialist critique.

The future of resistance is in the diversity of non-progressive Left approaches, and in making that diversity actionable, not in progressivism or liberalism.  Being a “progressive” or a “liberal” is easy, but obsolete.  I’d like to think I can do better, so at this point I don’t claim to be a progressive.

The Mountain That Was Benghazi

Cross Posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The Republicans have been screaming cover-up for months over the attack on the American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, in Libya on September 11, 2012 that took the lives of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. One of the accusations surrounded e-mails between the White House, the State Department and the CIA was that there was an intentional downplay of the motive for the September 11 attack.

Based on e-mails that were leaked, the Republicans claimed that the White House had changed the talking points to edit out “terrorism” in an effort to down play the attack just before the election. In an attempt to quell the GOP’s uproar, the White House released a 100 pages of e-mails to the public to disprove the cover-up allegations. Guess what, like true to from politicians trying to make a mountain out of a molehill, they fabricated the so-called quotes to create a scandal. The quotes that were cited by Republicans as accurate are far different than which is in the actual emails.

CBSNews‘ Major Garrett broke the story on its Evening News:

On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from (deputy national security adviser Ben) Rhodes: “We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.”

But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department.

It read: “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.”

Republicans also provided what they said was a quote from an email written by State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland.

The Republican version quotes Nuland discussing, “The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda’s presence and activities of al-Qaeda.”

The actual email from Nuland says: “The penultimate point could be abused by members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings.”

There is no indications that the White House “fixed” the talking  points. This is a purely manufactured conspiracy by the Republicans to discredit, not just the White House, but the State Department and Hillary Rodham Clinton for political advantage.

This isn’t Watergate this is Whitewater. There nothing there, never was but that won’t stop the right wing lying smear machine from wasting millions of tax payer dollars digging more holes:

Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Republican House speaker John Boehner, made it clear that it will not be giving up the fight. “This release is long overdue and there are relevant documents the administration has still refused to produce. We hope, however, that this limited release of documents is a sign of more co-operation to come,” Buck said.

Never mind that they lied. Keep digging your own grave, guys.

h/t John Aravosis at Americablog

what happens tomorrow?

I am so tired of all the posturing on either side of the political divide. I am so tired of those taking sides, vomiting up, along with their bile, the inevitable “lesser of two evils” mantra. Obama, Boehner… whoever… I’m sick of them all.

Whether Republican or Democrat, really, haven’t we had enough of epically bad governance? No? No, apparently not… epically bad governance isn’t compelling enough. We still have to try to lessen the stupidity of one side by magnifying the screwball antics of the other.

keyrist. i am so tired of it.

 photo lU2KY.jpg

crossposted at dKos

The Three Budgets

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Like the tale of the three bears, the congressional budget battle has three budget proposals one from the House Republicans penned by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), chair of the House Budget Committee; another from the Senate Democrats that was worked out by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), chair of the Senate Budget Committee; and a third called the “Back to Work” budget presented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Each one has is proponents and opponents and, like that bear tale, it has one that’s too hard, one that’s too soft and one that’s just right.

Paul Ryan’s budget, which is getting the most press, the most negative reaction and is “dead on arrival” so to speak, is a rehash of his last two budgets only worse. The proposal would slash Medicare, Medicaid and repeals Obamacare, which even Fox News host Chris Wallace acknowledges, isn’t happening. It proposes balancing the federal budget with the usual draconian cuts to all non-defense spending and reduction of the already smaller federal work force by another 10%. The Ryan proposal would slash $4.6 trillion over 10 years. The budget plan includes no cuts in Social Security. Pres. Obama has suggested changing an inflation measurement to cut more than $100 billion from the program, which makes no sense since Social Security does not contribute to the debt or the deficit.

The there is the Senate Budget proposal which the Republican leadership insisted the Democrats produce even though, constitutionally, all budget and spending bills must originate in the House. That budget  would seek $975 billion in spending reductions over the next 10 years as well as $975 billion in new tax revenue, which Sen. Murray said would be raised by “closing loopholes and cutting unfair spending in the tax code for those who need it the least.” It includes a $100 billion in spending on infrastructure repair and educational improvements and the creation of a public-private infrastructure bank.

Then there is that third budget proposal from the House Progressive Caucus that is just right balance of spending, revenue increases and spending cuts. The basic plan is the put Americans back to work, by as Ezra Klein explains fixing the jobs crisis:

It begins with a stimulus program that makes the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act look tepid: $2.1 trillion in stimulus and investment from 2013-2015, including a $425 billion infrastructure program, a $340 billion middle-class tax cut, a $450 billion public-works initiative, and $179 billion in state and local aid. [..]

Investment on this scale will add trillions to the deficit. But the House Progressives have an answer for that: Higher taxes. About $4.2 trillion in higher taxes over the next decade, to be exact. The revenues come from raising marginal tax rates on high-income individuals and corporations, but also from closing a raft of deductions as well as adding a financial transactions tax and a carbon tax. They also set up a slew of super-high tax rates for the very rich, including a top rate of 49 percent on incomes over $1 billion.

But to the House Progressives, these taxes aren’t just about reducing the deficit – though they do set debt-to-GDP on a declining path. They’re also about reducing inequality and cutting carbon emissions and slowing down the financial sector. They’re not just raising revenues, but trying to solve other problems. But they might create other problems, too. Adding this many taxes to the economy all at once is likely to slow economic growth.

As for the spending side, there’s more than $900 billion in defense cuts, as well as a public option that can bargain down prices alongside Medicare. But this budget isn’t about cutting spending. Indeed, the House Progressives add far more spending than they cut.

On Sunday’s Up w/ Chris Hayes, host Chris Hayes discussed the various budget proposals released by Republicans and Democrats in Congress this week with his guests Representative Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ); Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY); Sam Seder, host of The Majority Report, co-host of Ring of Fire; and Heidi Moore, economics and finance editor for The Guardian newspaper.

GOP Is Still the Party of Stupid

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

In his speech to Republican Party official in Charlotte, NC, Gov. Bobby Jindal said that

the GOP must stop being the party of stupid.” The problem there is that actions, including Gov. Jindal’s, just reinforce how stupid the GOP is, especially when it comes to the economy.

Bad news for Jindal: Florida, Texas rely heavily on property and biz taxes

by Tyler Bridges, The Lens

As he seeks to eliminate the state’s income tax, Gov. Bobby Jindal has cast a covetous eye both west and east. The tax systems in Florida and Texas should serve as a model for Louisiana’s, the governor believes.

Neither state has an income tax, he notes, and both have reputations as hospitable to business investment.

But to make Louisiana look more like Florida and Texas, Jindal’s plan would have to include two significant elements that he dislikes: taxes on business and higher property taxes. [..]

“Most states have a three-legged stool for raising revenue,” said Jim Richardson, a Louisiana State University economist who co-chaired PAR’s tax study. “Texas and Florida have two legs – sales and property – since they don’t have an income tax.” Under the Jindal plan, “Louisiana would have a one-and-a-half-legged stool – sales taxes and some local property taxes.” [..]

In an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman said it would raise the taxes on every tax dollar the poor make going against “the Republican argument that high marginal tax rates discourage work“.

“In our system, the highest marginal tax rates — the biggest disincentives to work in our system — are not for the rich. They are for lower-income workers who are in that range where if you earn a little bit more you start to lose benefits, you start to lose Medicaid, you lose housing subsidies,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist said. “This is going to raise taxes precisely on the people who actually have the biggest disincentives to work. So it’s actually, even from that old supply-side incentive thing, this is going in the wrong direction.”

In his Monday New York Times column, Prof. Krugman called the Republicans “Makers, Takers, Fakers

Like the new acknowledgment that the perception of being the party of the rich is a problem, this represents a departure for the G.O.P. – but in the opposite direction. In the past, Republicans would justify tax cuts for the rich either by claiming that they would pay for themselves or by claiming that they could make up for lost revenue by cutting wasteful spending. But what we’re seeing now is open, explicit reverse Robin Hoodism: taking from ordinary families and giving to the rich. That is, even as Republicans look for a way to sound more sympathetic and less extreme, their actual policies are taking another sharp right turn.

Despite the lessons of the 2012 election, the Republicans, in states that are not checked by Democrats, are pushing tax policies that punish the poor and the middle class and benefit the wealthy.

Republicans Hate the Disabled

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Citing everything from home schooling to abortion, 38 Republican senators block the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities. The negotiations for the convention were completed by the administration of Pres. George W. Bush in 2006 and it was signed by Pres. Barack Obama in 2009. But somehow, according to these right wing conspiracy theorists, the disabilities convention, which is entirely based on the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, would even threaten the “sovereignty of the United States.”

The treaty, already signed by 155 nations and ratified by 126 countries, including Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia, states that nations should strive to assure that the disabled enjoy the same rights and fundamental freedoms as their fellow citizens. Republicans objected to taking up a treaty during the lame-duck session of the Congress and warned that the treaty could pose a threat to U.S. national sovereignty.

“I do not support the cumbersome regulations and potentially overzealous international organizations with anti-American biases that infringe upon American society,” said Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.

Say what!? Protecting the rights of disabled Americans abroad is now “anti-American?” The irrational hatred of the United Nations by the radical Republicans has twisted their minds. Sen. Inhofe has allies in Tea Party favorites freshman Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), along with anti-feminist conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly:

At an event with former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) late last month, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) announced that 36 Republicans had signed a letter pledging to vote against the treaty.

Lee told Senators on Tuesday that the treaty “threatens the right of parents to raise their children with the constant looming threat of state interference.” [..]

Writing for World Net Daily on Monday, Santorum said the treaty had “darker and more troubling implications” and suggested that it would have meant the forced abortion his daughter because she has a rare genetic disorder. [..]

Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly also warned in November that proponents were “using this treaty as an opportunity to promote their abortion agenda.”

Even with the support of former Republican presidential candidates and disable veterans, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-KS), present and looking frail and in a wheelchair, the convention failed to garner the necessary two third vote.

The Daily Show host Jon Stewart put it quite succinctly, “It’s official. Republicans hate the United Nations more than they like helping people in wheelchairs.” I just wish I could tell him that this is rock bottom for the Republicans:

Post Election Redux: What Republicans Have Not Learned from Losing

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

While Republicans at the federal level appear to understand that they have a huge demographics problem with Latino and women voters, the lesson of the loss has failed to reach the Republicans at the state level. As Rachel Maddow explains in states where Republicans control the legislature and governorship, they are taking further steps to pass legislation that cracks down on undocumented immigrants, gay rights and women’s access to abortion and reproductive health care:

But where Republicans are really in control of government, as in Kansas for example, Maddow said the party is taking steps to “crack down on immigrants who want to go to college.” She also said that the Republican leadership in Indiana is moving to add a constitutional ban on gay marriage to the state constitution-in a state where gay marriage is already illegal. In Ohio, Maddow said, one of the first things the state government did after the November election was hold a hearing on defunding Planned Parenthood. [..]

Maddow added that Republicans at the state level are still “waging wars” on issues like immigration, abortion, and gay marriage, even though members of the party seem to be saying otherwise on a national level. Speaking of the differences between Republican messages, Maddow said, “Somebody should tell the Beltway, or maybe it’s funnier if we don’t.”

Keep in mind some of these same Republican governors, like Wisconsin’s union and women hating Scott Walker and Louisiana’s creationist Bobby Jindal, are considered top contenders for the 2016 presidential ticket. And you thought they couldn’t do worse that Mitt Romney.  

Republican Conversation With Latina

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), the highest ranked House Republican woman, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Republicans need to become more “modern” but not “moderate.”

“I don’t think it’s about the Republican Party needing to become more moderate; I really believe it’s the Republican Party becoming more modern,” she said. “And whether it’s Hispanics, whether it’s women, whether it’s young people, the Republican Party has to make it a priority to take our values, to take our vision to every corner of this country.”

“I think it’s more about the messenger and who’s communicating our values to every corner of this country.”

http://livewire.talkingpointsm…

I can see it all now:

Cathy Rodgers to young Latina: ¿Cómo te va, señorita? Estoy aprendiendo español y no lo habla bien. ¿Le gustaría convertirse en un republicano?

Senorita: Hueles mal, perra. Váyase.

Ms. Rodgers:  Gracias.  I am sure Sen. Rubio will be happy to translate for me.  Some of the words don’t seem to be in my Republican Spanish Dictionary.

My unauthorized translation of senorita: [You stink, bitch. Go away.]

I suspect a Mormon missionary would have better luck with that conversion thing.

Best,  Terry

“You’ll never see a squirrel trapped by a syllogism.”

Mr. Smiff is a genuine kick in the pants.  Dude’s worth listening to.

The fact that he got Buffalo Bill-ed by our psychopatho-genic society simply gives him more time to kick me in the pants, which is fine by me, as I appear to be a more-than-fashionably-late political bloomer.  If only he had gotten to me sooner.  I wish him the best in a long, wave-lapped retirement.

However, my eyebrows torqued when he claimed that [unlike humans], “You’ll never see a squirrel trapped by a syllogism,” while continuing his discussion on the “lesser evil” problem presented by Democrats, i.e., the neurotic yowling between advocates of lesser evilism (logic-trapped squirrels) and the “fuck all y’all and the horse you rode in on” camp (my people).

Mr. Smiff’s main point, to my mind, is that you can’t fucking tell Republicans & Democrats apart!  It takes such a fine-tuned sense of discrimination to reveal the iota, the remaining quantal unit of distinction, and even that discrete packet is suspect, that it drives one fucking nuts, neurotic, pissing oneself, snarling, hunkering in dark corners, clawing at the handlers, and falling down, sprawling and panting.  Be more squirrel-like, and reject the choice itself.

I am not claiming that my admiration for squirrels is any less or more than Mr. Smiff’s  (some of my best friends in Golden Gate Park are squirrels!), but mine is different, in that I think squirrels and humans have more in common than Herr Smiff thinks obtains.  To phrase my view in Clintonesque Obamanisms, there’s nothing right with our squirrels that can’t be fucked by what’s wrong with humans.

My good buddy and comrade, Ivan Pavlov — who was probably dead wrong when he apocryphally warned his underlings that “The revolution is not out there; it is in here, in this lab!” —  provided some relevant experimental evidence on conditioned conflict behavior in dogs, which he referred to as “experimental neurosis.”

Pavlov was toying with the borderline between competing conditioned responses, using a discrimination task (circles v. ovals as signals) to train responses, and then inducing conflict by making the discrimination ever more difficult.  

In experimental canine terms, the syllogism is expressed as:

IF circle, THEN respond (orient to the circle, and get food reward.)

IF oval, WITHHOLD response (do not orient to oval, or else!  Zappo! Electric shock.).

After training both competing response elements, the un-American commie bastard then proceeded to present increasingly oval-shaped circles, and increasingly circle-shaped ovals. The dogs, unable to tell the difference between reward and punishment, became progressively unhinged, and unmanageable (Yay, dogs!).  The same has been shown in cats.  Democrats and Republicans have merely demonstrated that such frustrating breakdowns in discrimination also occur in humans.  If that finding, “experimental neurosis,” does not also hold true in squirrels, I’ll eat my straw hat loaded with nasty brick dust.

My point is this: it is precisely the current non-difference between our formerly distinct expectancies of Republicans and Democrats (ovals and circles) that evokes our conflicted animal phenotypes.  The formulation, “You’ll never see a squirrel…” only works until you present the squirrel with a choice between Republicans and Democrats.

The confused frustration expressed under such confused signaling conditions in all mammals tested to date already indicates that the answer is “none of the above.”

Next week we’ll discuss flesh-ripping weasels.

Should We Vote for Democrats in a Post-Constitutional Country?

The contrast, stylistically, of the two Party Conventions stuck me very powerfully. The Democratic Convention had each evening main speakers offered one brilliant speech after another. These speeches were well-put together, well-delivered and proved to me that the Democratic Paty (DP) is fit to rule the Empire. Here are people with skillz–compared to the lame-ola speeches the Republican Party (RP) trotted out that could only appeal to the very stupid or the very greedy. The contest should be over right here right now but it isn’t. Why? Because we live in an authoritarian society that is in danger of devolving into tribalism and this seems to be the historical trend.

The contrast was clear. Exclusivity and tribalism on the right, inclusion and a constant plea for unity and civilized behavior on the “left.” Yes, I believe much of what the Dems were saying was clear bullshit but it was bullshit based on some facts even if they were cherry-picked. The Republicans had no argument to convince anyone to vote for them unless you were one of “them.” The Dems offered good reasons (even if most of those reason hid deep corruption) why any of us should vote for Obama and the Dems and this coming from someone that genuinely mainly revulsion for the DP.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt – until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.

Gore Vidal

What Vidal describes has been the case for much of our post-WWII history. But quite honestly, I think the quote no longer quite works for today’s Republican Party (RP) has changed dramatically since Vidal wrote the above though the essential political arrangements are the same-both are part of the Property Party and very specifically the Property Party of the very, very rich, not any of the rest of us who happen to won a little property. The Property Party is the only political party and will always be the political party barring environmental disaster of the worst kind with galloping positive feedback loops which is possible.

“Bashing Democrats”

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

On numerous of occasions I have been accused of “bashing Democrats,” “hating Obama,” as well as, some outrageously, vile charges that won’t be repeated here. The accusations have been in response to criticism of President Barack Obama’s policies which have been not just disappointing for a Democratic administration but, in some instances, worse than any neo-con Republican. It’s baffling that the Republican party is bothering to oppose his reelection, he’s done most everything they would have done short of starting another war unless one considers the expansion of the “war on terror” to Yemen and Africa. My guess would be that the Republicans are jealous that Obama isn’t a member of the GOP.

I was asked the other day by my former precinct captain why I don’t criticize Republicans. My answer was that I do. It’s just that today they are called Democrats. On that note, I give you the Black Agenda Report‘s managing editor, Bruce Dixon, who says it quite succinctly:

[..] The fact is that 120% evil Republicans offer the only justification for our support of 100% evil Democrats. And with the dissolution of what used to be the black consensus for equality, civil liberties, full funding for public education, and opposing war spending and corporate privilege, Obama-era Democrats continue to flee rightward toward war, privatization and austerity.

This deformed puzzle is not the political logic of free and responsible people. It’s the cramped and twisted reasoning of someone trapped in a box urgently trying to convince himself that it’s not really a box, that pragmatic acceptance of the box as the whole of the great and free universe is really all that can be hoped, struggled and strived for. It’s not. Only a beaten, cowed and enslaved people can imagine their forbears sacrificed and struggled for them to choose among greater and lesser, but both still monstrous evils.

We at Black Agenda Report spend more time denouncing Democrats because they act like and enable Republicans. We don’t spend as much time denouncing the party of white supremacy because Republicans rarely bother to pretend to be anything else. African Americans haven’t voted Republican in 50 years. But we’re more unemployed than we’ve been in seventy years, and more imprisoned than we’ve ever been.

That’s what choosing “lesser evils” has earned us. It’s time to chuck the fake choice between evil Republicans and slightly less evil Democrats. It’s time not just to think, but to climb outside the two-party, lesser-evil box, to breathe the free air and get ready for something new.

What Bruce said applies to all Americans regardless of race, gender, religion or national origin.

Actor and activist, John Cusack, in his conversation with Constitutional law professor, Jonathan Turley, questions where are the “lines” that the “progressive left” will not cross and what it means in terms of voting for Obama.

Now that the Republican primary circus is over, I started to think about what it would mean to vote for Obama…

Since mostly we hear from the daily hypocrisies of Mitt and friends, I thought we should examine “our guy” on a few issues with a bit more scrutiny than we hear from the “progressive left”, which seems to be little or none at all.

Instead of scrutiny, the usual arguments in favor of another Obama presidency are made: We must stop fanatics;-he’s the last line of defense from the corporate barbarians-and of course the Supreme Court. It all makes a terrible kind of sense and I agree completely with Garry Wills who described the Republican primaries as ” a revolting combination of con men and fanatics…the current primary race has become a demonstration that the Republican party does not deserve serious consideration for public office.”

True enough.

But yet…

… there are certain Rubicon lines, as constitutional law professor Jon Turley calls them, that Obama has crossed.

All political questions are not equal no matter how much you pivot. When people die or lose their physical freedom to feed certain economic sectors or ideologies, it becomes a zero sum game for me.

This is not an exercise in bemoaning regrettable policy choices or cheering favorable ones but to ask fundamentally: Who are we? What are we voting for? And what does it mean? [..]

The entire transcript of the conversation was posted in this article by poligirl. It’s quite long but quite thought provoking assessment of Barack Obama’s presidency and how many of our principles of law and the constitution the “progressive left” has compromised and abandoned supporting him.

The line for me was Obama’s vote, as Senator, to renew FISA with all its unconstitutional provisions, after saying that he would filibuster if it were not fixed. I knew then that the “we’ll fix it later” line was the grand lie to a tired, desperate electorate that was in need of relief from years of war and economic stress.

Along with Bruce Dixon, John Cusack, Jonathan Turley and others, I will continue to criticize Democrats for pushing a right wing agenda. I’m still not ready to make nice.

I Am You and You Are Me

It’s hard to say where it went wrong,

Decades before me and this song,

Through the banksters and the wars,

I just can’t take it anymore . . .

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