The Mayor thinks I should be ashamed of myself for standing up for my civil rights. Murl Harpham could barely remember his own name but I misidentified the name of a cop and I was pure evil. I corrected that error before proceeding and dismissed my case against the misidentified individual by the way. They claimed we had no community support. Hundreds of people were coming to rallies at Occupy Eureka in October and November. It was police repression that shrank the crowds over time.When a segment of the population held a counter protest we out numbered them 3 to 1. The case has been, "Taken under advisement" and I will hear within the next 30 days. I don't care what the commissioner says in the end. We have already won. We have stood up to an evil repressive regime and said no more. You cannot treat us as serfs we are free people. We have stood together. More then 15 months after the fact people are still coming to support our actions and testify to the wrongs done by the city and by the criminal thieves and killers of the Eureka police department. I am honored to have taken part in the action at Occupy Eureka with comrades such as these. It is the Mayor and the Chief of Police that should hang their heads in shame.
We are not done. Not done fighting this evil regime or fighting for our rights in court. The morning of the 19th of February at 8:30 am Verbena will be proceeding with her civil rights cases. I look forward to seeing you all there.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
James Decker.
The Day before Tax Day and I am working on some remarks to fire up the crowd before we march on the banks. Here is what I am thinking.
We are here today to talk about equity in the tax system but what we need to fix those inequities is to create an equitable value system.
The fact that we tax labor at roughly twice the rate that we tax the manipulation of money is egregious but the fact that we would kill a million people to avoid riding the bus speaks to the level of moral bankruptcy in imperial America that we refuse to face. We justify these killings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, all of Africa and Latin America by spreading fear. Fear that we will lose our way of life, the American dream. If this is going to be our way of life the sooner it is lost the better.
The far right wants a so called “Fair Tax” but they exclude financial instruments from their national sales tax, the very items the rich buy. We have seen the failure of supply side economics and capitalism to meet the needs of society yet both political parties champion the same old shit.
We use the tax code to bribe the citizenry rather then create a society that values what is important. We are convinced that we need to hoard resources in a time of abundance. We convince the old to fear the young, the white to fear people of color and the middle class to fear the poor while we live in the greatest time of abundance in human history.
The 1% strives to have more even when they don’t know what that more is rather then ensuring that there is enough for everyone out of fear. We create a corrupt system that profits from war on the poor. We steal the resources of poor nations to build bombs to steal the resources of other poor peoples in lands we can’t even name.
We tax the poor to build prisons to lock their children in while we allow the local school to close in the name of austerity. We allow houses to rot rather than allow any Bankster to lose a penny and people can’t sleep on the street because it will lower the property values.
It doesn’t matter what the name on the door is or whether it has a D or an R after it. As long as they are selling us the same notion of exploitation and endless growth we will not solve what is crippling our future.
The media as usual has fixated on the shiny object, the anti-vaccination, and missed the bigger picture in the war on women. They would rather have their daughters die then have sex.
Bachman is anti science but you nave to be nuts not to acknowledge the success of the germ theory of disease and vaccinations. The HPV vaccine prevents a common type of cancer with very little risk. Because it is a sexually transmitted virus the wing nuts think it will cause their daughters to have sex if they get them vaccinated. I have never understood their connecting ignorance with protecting but it leads to lots of misery and in this case can lead to death. No rational person makes that choice. I know I am way outside the mainstream in my thought process on public policy but this I find disturbing. The anti government folks cheer when the government kills citizens some of which are most certainly innocent. I do understand the let him die sentiment screamed from the crowd but I have to call bullshit on the Ron Paul response. If the free market and god were doing such a spectacular job Why were Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon all able to find the need for the government to intervene.
The voice in the crowd is the true believer of the Objectivist philosophy. Only the strong should enjoy the fruits of society and the only role of the government is to enforce private property and contract rights. This position is repugnant to me but it is intellectually consistent. The freedom for others to die is an article of faith for these folks.
The Paul position is just ignoring the facts. It sucks to be poor but with the help of society it sucks less. The rising tide didn’t lift all boats and the most recent government bailouts only saved the financial sector. Nothing prevents churches and communities from paying for the uninsured now. They simply don’t do it. There are lots of charities and they do some good but they were not solving the problem. Government has not solved the problem either but it has done a measurably better job.
Paul’s complaint about the vaccine mandate from a freedom standpoint means nothing because he does not extend that body sovereignty to the individual but to the parent. Women are never to be granted sovereignty over their own bodies in the Ron Paul Libertarian Utopia.
The video is from the Cruzin Eureka car show. I chose the 3rd to calm the fear of crazy these folks instill in me.
I think it is hard to imagine for the young today the system shock from the riots and assassinations of the late 60’s. When the price of gas doubled in the oil shock and then you couldn’t have all you wanted even if you could afford it. That just freaked the counter culture right the fuck out. Want to know why the peace and love generation turned into the greedy selfish fucks that everyone loves to hate the baby boomers that is what made them that way.
Over the next couple of years I am afraid that same youth will get to experience something far worse. There are no jobs. The very wealthy are doing very well, they are buying lots of new toys. Apple pads, pods, phones and their numerous clones are flying off the shelves. The top quintile is now 60 million people and that is more than enough to sustain the top quintile. As long as they can quit paying for anything needed by the other 4/5ths. The 13 million long term unemployed are about to start running out of benefits. “The little depression” as Paul Krugman calls it is upon the rest of us and the safety net we spent the last seventy years building is about to be destroyed. The government is out of money when tax burdens are at the lowest in 60 years. No brainier to raise taxes in a normal world but in Randistan that is heresy. The co-operative government that created the highest material standard of living in the history of civilization was now evil, but that is another rant. Because of Austerity measures to combat a revenue problem unemployment will go up and poverty will become endemic in a manner not seen since the 1930’s
I look around my little town and it is dying a slow death. A high end clothing shop opening at the mall will not make up for the closing of schools and restaurants. And for the newly fired most wont even get 26 weeks unemployment let alone extended benefits. It is my opinion that we are at the breaking point. There are not enough cans to pick out of the trash for us all to survive and humans being what they are it will not be pretty. The tent cities are already full. There is now a block long Bushville in the warehouse district now. It wont be fair to call the Obamavilles until he passes his grand bargain then all bets are off. When the next wave of foreclosures hit there is no place for these folks to go.
In 1066 an event referred to as the Norman Conquest occurred in Europe. When it was over the victors decided to count the spoils resulting in the a document, Doomsday Book. Finished in 1085 it revealed the 1% fact. 1% of the population owned just about everything. There have been lots of attempts at redistribution of that wealth since then but in the end a thousand years later the 1% still own as much as the rest of us put together.
In an effort to get back to levels of the feudal days the plutocrats have decided we need to attack the New_Deal safety net programs that made life tolerable for those serfs tenacious enough to live to old age.
Previous presidents had done much to improve the lot of the "least of society“,Lincoln freed the slaves, Roosevelt broke the trusts, Wilson promised pensions to the vets of WWI. Generally these attempts were clawed back, Jim Crow,The gilded age, The unleashing of troops on the Bonus Army. Social security was the first to stick and was improved over the course of the next seventy years. Medical care was added and the system was expanded to include more workers and improved disability insurance. Unemployment insurance, cobra health insurance and food stamp programs also came along to protect the populace from the creative destruction of capitalism.
The success of these programs was on display when the latest bubble burst in housing and the great recession of 2007 came along. We had a contraction along the lines of the great depression but we didn’t get the horrible bread lines and displaced populations because we had these programs in place. Little comfort to the folks that lost their jobs and homes but better than the, “brother can you spare a dime”days of the 1930’s.
For some reason after the government bailout of the rich with TARP and trillions of dollars lent at zero interest by the Federal reserve worked to save the investment economy the 1% have decided it is time to destroy the folks at the bottom to avoid picking up the tab.
Enter the worst president in my lifetime and the “Shock Doctrine”. The debt ceiling, a nonsensical and possibly unconstitutional law, (See the 14th amendment)is being used to create an artificial crisis to justify cutting programs for the poor. A deficit that can be traced to illegal wars and huge tax cuts for the 1% will be balanced on the backs of the old, the poor and the disabled veterans.
We do not have a spending problem at the moment we have a revenue problem. It can be short term or we can make it permanent that is the decision we are about to make. Tax rates are at historic lows. Social Security Never contributed a dime to the deficit until the “Fierce Advocate” thought just one more tax cut and the confidence fairy will save us all. They already cut benefits with the last change in COLA this one will lower the standard of living for those at the bottom of the scale. There is no reason to capitulate on entitlements now. These programs are stable for at least a decade so the president can burn the village to save the village after the election if he thinks it is that important to make more elderly poor. Although with higher then 8% unemployment and having threatened the life of old people I think his re-election is now in serious doubt for the first time. If the economists that I tend to believe are correct this austerity fetish will probably result in another down turn and then even batshit crazywill beat him.
Rather then continue to increase poverty, 25% of the population at the moment, we need a different plan. No more failed Laffer curve discredited bullshit tax cuts as stimulus. Lower the retirement age to create jobs. Lower the cost of Medicare by lowering the age and expanding the pool with some people that consume a little less will extend the program life. Make the subsidy a sliding scale for Medicare if you need the elderly to pay more, raise the price for the richest. When unemployment has dropped to 4% or below then we can address cutting no defense discretionary spending. End all foreign wars and close 20% of overseas facilities immediately.
When much of your life is dark it is easy to go to the dark side emotionally. More like when you try to look at true emotions you tend to go bleak. I cannot claim any great art in my works. I have a good eye for photos but not the dedication to selling shit. I enjoyed the glass making but the hauling around and selling killed my back while we were doing it. That was not particularly fulfilling artistically anyway, grinding out trinkets for the crap collectors is in the end soul killing. The consumer society we have created is going to fail. Not in my lifetime but I am not going to be around that much longer, 20 years if I am extremely lucky. The two Americas is a reality that most folks don’t want to deal with. I have already failed financially so it doesn’t matter to me in the end. I am of a status that they cannot cut off completely as a veteran in the system. As long as I can stay out of prison the plutocrats are stuck with me. I am angry but not, “mad bomber” crazy so odds favor freedom for the long haul. It is that anger at the system that I am no longer going to indulge. I need to try and put some serious effort in to finishing one of my literary projects. I do not feel very well at the moment, lots of pain in the joints and short of breath do to being way too heavy. For the first time though I am free of other peoples problems. This is I feel a last shot. I have staved off homelessness for the short run and can ride and write for a while with a bit of security. So I am giving the political ranting up and making another run at disciplined work. This brings me back to the dark side of my emotions. The Socrates code is of a lighter mood and even though it is further along I feel that working on the Quantum Portrait project will bear more fruit. I find that the only way to get better is to write more and so if I beat the funk I may switch back. On the days that I can’t find the hole I have a travel project that I wish to work on. A photo diary of the Redwood National Parks trip. This is a test project of sorts. Can I generate a travel project that I can sell? Can I find an outlet to sell it through. The blog deal has eluded me. I had google ads but never made any money from it. When I was starting to generate hits they yanked my account and I never got a good explanation as to why but that is the new media. Slave labor under the guise of open source. The only people I know making money are selling naked pictures and they are for the most part scraping by on pretty thin margins.
My level of dissatisfaction with the executive branch of the current government is no secret. Once the O man signed on to the Bush war crimes I could never in good conscience vote for him again. That leaves me with a minor problem. I will vote for the inevitable obscure democrat that may make it to the primary ballot or try to pump up the Greens in June. The problem lies in the general as the alternative party has the batshit crazy competing with the pure evil. The campaign fund raising season has already arrived and the Far right are speaking to the hicks in Iowa. I actually know some folks that live in that state and they are nice enough. I just want to live in an actual free society one day governed by the rule of law and elected democratically. I know that is a delusion but we are closer than 60 years ago so continuing to work in that direction is not completely insane. George was right about the scraps that we get to fight over are just that, but they are also the difference between crappy jobs and serfdom. The god squad is dangerous to the health of society. Obama doubling the money for the faith clowns is another in a long list of poor policy decisions. That is nothing compared to the kind of crazy that eye of Newt is selling. As an adulterous piece of trash his only hope to get around the rubes is to go all super christy I have sinned but I believe in the forgiveness of Jebus. He may be a true believer, they shit all over everyone they can and then pray when they get caught. As they follow the one true god they are chosen and since the novel they follow is so archaic and poorly written they can twist pretty much any kind of bullshit they choose to out of it. Either way he is now pushing some new version of manifest destiny and the founding fathers were all about the god nonsense. That and only the religious and only a those that follow “true religion”, can be real Americans. It works on the lizard brains of the masses they say. The next group of dingbats vying for the Rethug mantle are the get rich running folks. Sarah Palin, Mike Huckleberry and Mitt Romney. All are running for the next reality show and to get rich. Michele Bachman is another member of this crowd but her actual position as an elected official limits her earning power if not her psychotic ravings. The BP disaster seems to have cooled out Jindal from the bayou. There are some other governors in the running Pawlenty or Kasich and Barbour but they have no charisma and thus no shot. In conclusion we can be ruled by the know nothings or sell out scum. Not a very appealing choice.
In the case of Ellsberg and Asange I see the need for exposing secrets of governments. It is never in the interest of the democratic electorate for the government to lie to the populace. They serve the public good by exposing those deceits. I do not see how the publishing of private medical records serves any public good. If you are doing this as an attempt to be a cool anarchist type you suck even more. Fuck with the corporations all you want but don’t pick on the vulnerable in society to demonstrate your awesome cleverness.
Went down to the courthouse today to show a little Solidarity with the Union folks. Move-on organized the rally and members of the nurses and teachers unions were there as well as the veterans for peace. The Move-on folks brought out some new faces as well as the usual lefties like myself. The rain was intermittent intense showers and wind but the stoic crowd didn't seem to mind. After a moment of silence to remember the people suffering in Japan a few speakers talked about a progressive agenda to combat the problem of the recession that is causing so much suffering in this country. The calls were for an end to the war on public sector workers. No more cuts to education or women's health care. Instead we want an end to the wars and higher taxes on the rich. Ending corporate person-hood and the investment in infrastructure required to provide good jobs for middle class Americans.
My left wing analysis of the voter initiatives on the California ballot November 2nd, 2010. The overriding theme of the ballot is that corporations want to use the ballot to create an oligarchy veto. 1/3 of the people controlling the state.
Prop 19 is a no-brainer Yes. The war on drugs is a disgrace, pot is already De-facto legal with prop 215 and it is good for you, unlike caffeine and alcohol. It is effective unlike the anti-depressants sold by Big Pharma and not destructively addictive like nicotine.
Prop 20 is a no vote. It provides an unelected minority with the control of congressional districts so the oligarchic powers only have to pay off 6 people instead of 100. Just the latest expression of the capitalist ethos infecting the body politic.
As one of those wacko environmentalists I am voting yes on 21. I am willing to pay an extra $18 a year to have state parks and wildlife refuges. Disclosure I only have a half interest in a vehicle so in truth my cost is only $9 and I already spend more than that in fees at the parks most years. I am voting No on 22. This seems a pointless law. Solve the budget crisis and this law has no use. Passing broad statutes to deal with temporary problems is bad government. An example of the disaster capitalism we are subjected to on a regular basis.
NO on 23 is obvious. The greatest crime that the current crop of oligarchs is committing is the refusal to deal with industrial contributions to global warming. The folks that make money selling dirty energy are unwilling to pay the cost of cleaning up the mess. In this case they are unwilling to lose future profit to green energy. When we have destroyed the water shed it will not matter that you saved a nickel a kilowatt hour on your power bill. In reality the solution is to remove all subsidies to fossil fuel and allow the market to work as poorly as it does. The true solution would be to nationalize all energy production and poor the profits into clean energy from wind and solar so we would eventually have free electricity for all. Once the windmill is paid for it continues to provide power. When you burn the coal it is gone, only the poisons persist in the environment.
Prop 25 is a yes on balance. It will restore a simple majority vote to part of the budget process. It has several idiotic gimmick things like docking the pay of legislators if the budget is late and it keeps the tax threshold at 2/3 which I do not like but the political reality is such that the oligarchs won on minority rule for taxes and they are not giving that up without a revolution.
No on Prop 26. This is an attempt to spread the minority veto to fees. No 2/3 vote for anything in a democracy.
Prop 27 is a yes for me. It repeals something the voters passed but has not taken effect yet. I do not favor unelected commissions doing redistricting. It only serves to reduce the cost of buying the outcome for the oligarchs. I am torn to some extent as I am in favor of democracy and the commission was passed by a majority vote. It is my hope that the electorate recognizes the mistake and this is corrective action but am not thrilled with the attempt to prevent the majority from trying something.
Prop 24 wins the prize for most deceptive bullshit proposition of the year. With Prop 25 coming in a close 2nd.
Apparently absolutely nothing. All of the executive branch economists say we are in a recovery. We are still not adding enough jobs to keep up with population growth so if you work for people you are still screwed. If you own a home you are still unable to sell it. You can however refinance at new low low rates and get back in the crap buying business but there is a catch. If you live in the 12% or higher unemployment states chances are your home has lost so much value you are under water.
The new concept is that pensions are some how evil. The same guy that thought it was a good idea to sell snake oil to unsuspecting desperate sick people rather than provide single payer national health insurance is now determined to make sure you work till you die. The only part of the US economy that is expanding for the unskilled is wiping ass for the baby boomers. Simpson wants to make sure that those jobs pay nothing so that his wealth is not dissipated by that evil wage inflation.
As soon as we get rid of unemployment insurance all those freeloaders will be down at the Del Taco to apply for those sweet night shift supervisor jobs. This is the promise of the GOP America. Since 1980 they have been trying to return to the Gilded age and they have succeeded beyond all reasonable expectations. Their greed was their undoing.
It really wasn’t until the speculators drove up the price of gas to the point that average people couldn’t drive to work and pay for their inflated mortgages that the economy collapsed. All of those subprime people living in their homes were okay until they lost two or three hundred dollars from their budgets. The adjustments due to energy costs haven’t taken this long since the Ron Recession in the 80’s.
The public is convinced that it is the union teacher that is the problem. They are the enemy of the living wage and they have already won.
I find myself in an odd an scary position in having to defend the wacko mother fucking book burners but we are not a banana republic where the generalissimo dictates behavior. Maybe I am delusional to expect the world to go “Whatever” when some ignorant dirt eating nimrod in Georgia does something rude.
The idea that some General is telling citizens to shut up, that is a much bigger issue. These are the same folks that claim that any linkage of American action with the terrorist attacks of the past is treason. Douche nozzle Ari was telling anyone that opposed their criminal wars they had better, “Shut It”.
Book burning is an ineloquent method of protest. It expresses the impotent rage of the burner while not elucidating their reasoning. These folks aren’t particularly interested in argument they are more proclamationist in their thinking. Their imaginary friend supplies them with the truth. The reason they are protesting is rather dickish. They don’t want a particular form of ignorance factory built in a place they don’t live and will never go. The only time they speak of the people that live in New York is to deride their gay, liberal, pervert lifestyle. They wish to have a religious war rather than a clash of civilization. They fight to establish the primacy of their ignorance rather than the elimination of superstition in general. That makes them wrong in their conclusion. Even people that are wrong do not lose their rights.
The crazy runs deep in the world these days. Fareed Zacharia opined on the overreaction to 9/11 in Newsweek, worth the read for a little perspective. The folks in Europe are making bold statements about Architecture and Artists and Healers are murdered. Vast numbers of people are out of work in the developed world just as vast numbers of people are having their crops destroyed by Global Weirding.These are the times when populations turn to tribal ties and opportunists like the Becks of the world flourish. These are the times when standing up for fundamental freedoms is most difficult and most important. There is a huge difference between the government stepping on the rights of men and the individuals offending other individuals.
If Alcohol an Tobacco taxes do not offset their social cost that is an argument for raising the taxes on Tobacco and Alcohol. It is not an argument for not taxing Marijuana. The folks making this argument also discount the social cost of prohibition propaganda.
Once it is proven you are willing to lie than everything you say is invalid unless you have proof. I am not so old that I cannot remember the change in world view that came with the realization that people would lie about things that didn’t matter. If you wanted to give me a quarter to make me feel better because my gum is sore where the tooth came out I am on board with that. We have one day a year when we all give each other stuff, sign me up. I don’t need a bullshit story about magic fat guys. Even if the magic fat guy story is not as creepy as the guy nailed to the wood fairytale we didn’t need the lies.
I do not have a spectacular memory but I remember thinking as a child. My thinking was not always very good but I did think. This is not much different than my thinking as an adult and that is kind of my point. The folks in the “Drugs are Bad” Mr. Mackeyverse seemed to have forgotten that.
Being a red headed child of the smart ass variety I was beaten a lot, perhaps that is why I became aware but I find that does not make me unique. There is plenty of evidence for the thinking child in the study of human development, the Piaget types and the like, so why do we ignore the idea when it comes to drugs.
The Tea baggers are missing the boat on their tyranny complaint. There was an election and the elected leaders making decisions you don’t like in a representative republic is not tyranny. They either do not understand or the do not care about the concept of equal protection under the law.
Ordering the killing of a citizen without trial, indefinite detention and torture; now that is tyranny. The right has found no problem with the police state that has emerged post 2001 but the evaporation of their 401k has them screaming. They are the right wing of the republican party and they determine every election they lose to be illegitimate.
They claim to want a return to the constitution but they abandon their first principles when they are scared. Private property and the right to do with it what you want without those meddlesome government busy bodies telling you what to do with it. They scream this till they are red in the face when they are not allowed to rip the tops off mountains. When the, “scary other” in the form of a Muslim cultural center can be used to gin up xenophobia with the complicity of our media I worry about us as a society. They love the idea of divided government yet hate the third branch.
I like the idea that anyone that is offended by a church can bitch about it and the church has to go away. If we want that to be the standard I favor it so that I can travel about and protest and stop ignorance factories would be cool. It would however not be very American, but one has to live in the times one is given and work within the system. That is if you actually believe in the rule of law.
My idea doesn’t violate the first amendment because I would treat all churches the same. It also had zero shot of happening because those folks have abandoned the notion of no state religion from the jump. They are the ones claiming that we are a christian nation. The fact that a state religion is specifically outlawed by the constitution again doesn’t bother these principled patriots. I am in an odd position with the mosque controversy but in the end I have no new solution that will work better than allowing all the ignorant to compete for the worst ideas and trying to educate the world that all superstition is equally evil. once you believe in magic ignorance is all you contribute to the culture.
I was reading a diary at the Daily Kos website that both disturbed and intrigued. You can read it here
The Diary itself was interesting but the comment thread was what got me to thinking.
The premise in short was that the top 1% have recovered and while the rest of society is still reeling from the great recession the rich are doing fine.
The comment thread shifted quickly to apocalyptic calls for overthrow hearkening back to the rise of fascism in Europe and the Bolshevik Stalinist revolution in Russia. The term tipping point came up a lot and the dominate sentiment was that all that stood between the rich and the “Terror was the populace's respect for the rule of law and that anarchy was just around the corner.
I do not think so. I look back to the great depression for my evidence that 70 % of the population is all that is necessary for society to continue apace. Even with the bonus wars, bread lines and migration of the, “Okies” civil order never broke down. People rightly fear the anarchy that an Authority represents.
The marchers of the, "Bonus Army" in Washington never believed that MacArthur would have his troops open up on veterans but they were wrong and the Hoover Ville that they had built was burned to the ground as troops opened up on their comrades from the past. The Democracy movement in China experienced a similar miscalculation when the soldiers marched into Tienanmen square. In both instances the true account of the casualties is lost to history.
The status quo is such that inertia is tough to overcome and revolution is a messy business. The anarchists need to look at places like Yemen and Somalia to get an idea of what life is like when things break down.
The Tea bagger right is agitating for revolution as well but they seem to think it is the social safety net that is crashing the economy and if we could just get rid of those pesky bureaucrats life would be paradise. They are ignorant of history but Carlin explains that quite eloquently.
Then I listen to right wingers that want the ten commandments in every wall in the world outraged that some other group would dare to exercise their freedom of religion. The real owners are not going quietly and they are using all of the usual suspects. Racism, religious bigotry, fear of the other in all of its forms. The reptile calling to the lizard brain.
I would like to see the rational triumph and we accept government based on rational principals rather then superstition and ancestor worship but I am a privileged entity, white, male, American and while not in the club that bias colors my desire to avoid total destruction.
This is to give a historical perspective for My comments on the smearing and firing of Shirley Sherrod.
Segregation was fought in the fifties and sixties changing the laws. In the seventies forced integration was used by the courts to try to do what the forces of society would not and they achieved one of the desired results; young people today have lost the racial prejudice portion of their tribalism in vast numbers.
In the seventies the expansion of women into the work force as well as minorities effectively crushed the upward mobility of labor. The combination of loss of ego structure created a serious backlash in the eighties leading to Reagan being elected and the strange relationship of poor rural people voting for the interests of the rich against themselves in the vain hope that they would regain their superior position.
The nineties presented the one percent at the top with the unprecedented opportunity to pit third world labor against the American working class. As they had pitted the poor blacks against the poor whites. Further reducing the pie for the no longer rising working class now some what integrated.
Allowing the education system to erode was a factor in that ability to shift labor overseas. When the courts forced the schools to integrate in the south the whites fled to private schools. There were similar flights in the north but they created a different style of problem, the suburb. As a result the public school system in the south received inadequate funds as did the city schools in the north and the bottom half of the populace was left with effectively no education.
With the removal of trade protection in the free trade agreements and the ability of computer directed machines to simplify the work requiring one skilled programmer to supervise less and less skilled workers doing more complex tasks.
The speaker at an event for the NAACP, Shirley Sherrod was relating her experiences over this period to demonstrate the evolution of her thinking on economics. I personally find this type of speech a waste of time. I find anecdotes to be bullshit, give me the facts to make the general case. I am not part of the aggrieved class and I understand that lots of people need a narrative.
There is value for the aggrieved to tell their stories. It makes them feel better if nothing else. I think if your father is murdered and you don’t get justice you have the right to at least be heard honestly on the subject. . In this event she was simply abused by the powerful a second time.
The right wing desperately wants to roll back the civil rights movement. They feel that enforcement of the equal protection clause was the beginning of the end of limited government in the modern era. They may or may not be racist in their motivation they simply want all restrictions removed from private property. To that end they have persons that believe that, “the end justifies the means” and a propaganda piece was created to counter the accusation that there exists a racist element in the far right. The only counter the racist’s seem to be able to muster is that the Obama administration and black people are reverse racists.
I tweeted the other day about the Senator from Virginia and his fail on why blacks should just get over being treated like crap. His earlier works of misogyny were overlooked by many in the attempt to get to 60 votes but he is treading close to Mel Gibson land for my taste. When the propaganda is released this is the type of ignorant mind set that is predisposed to believe it. The Media seem to be predisposed to the same view as they accept this tripe at face value. The disturbing reaction is how afraid the White House and cabinet are of the reverse racism meme.
If you take seriously the idea that the NAACP is part of a wave of oppression washing over white people in America you are divorced from reality to an extent that it is pointless for me to respond. All the data shows that it sucks to be poor but to be nonwhite makes poverty more likely.
The ease with which all those involved accepted the lie points to the sad truth that still have a vast chasm to bridge on the path to equality for all.
Putting together an omnibus post on the political spectrum to serve as my rant for a while. Then I am going to dive back into fiction. I have one new concept and the Socrates code project that have long term potential. If I spend my time screaming at the corporatists to get off my lawn and shaking my fist it eats up too much of my energy. I will continue to throw the occasional metaphorical brick but this is my parting shot for a while. I have given my view on theism. I have distilled my view down as simply as my limited language skills allow. Belief in that for which there is no evidence is destructive in all of the forms it takes. This includes pseudo science as well as religion. There are lots of implications from the mathematics of quantum mechanics. One gets many worlds and string theories with 11 dimensions or is it 13. In the hands of well grounded theorists these ideas lead to things like quantum computers and the discovery of dark energy and all kinds of cool things that may or may not pan out in their exact format but that does not excuse the charlatan that hides in the ambiguities. The existence of “Entanglement” does not mean we are all part of a spiritual realm. We all exist as conscious entities and that consciousness is a function of a physical brain conducting chemical processes. In all of the work we have done studying the brain we have seen no evidence for a soul that exists beyond the life of the functioning brain. When you have something get back to us. Being a rational human requires one to come to grips with the fact that some questions have no answer. That does not mean that anything you make up is possible. We will not be able to tell folks with absolute certainty how the chemical soup that was available to the primordial environment turned into life. That data is simply unavailable. Plate tectonics has recycled that data beyond retrieval. That does not alter the fact that Humans evolved from earlier species through the process broadly known as natural selection. I prefer the term descent with modification as it does less to imply purpose than the other. There is no reasonable, and by that I mean fitting with basic physics, theory for the existence of the universe that requires any god. By definition the universe formed from a singularity in big bang theory. There for we will never be able to know what happened before that event. We may some day figure out the most likely precursors to life and recreate it from scratch in an update of the Miller experiment. We may even have the opportunity to observe a planet while it is evolving new life over a few million years on another world. We could turn out to be wrong about the singularity and find out something from before the beginning it is just that those chances are infinitesimally small. At a very minimum the idea that there exists an intercessional god is beyond ludicrous as portrayed in any of the sacred texts that reveal all to the snake oil salesman. As thinking creatures we have the ability to create meaning even if is an artificial construct. I broke my rule in the middle of thinking about this piece and have begun to ramble. As long as your construct allows for others to pursue their construct fine. By definition the dogmatic faiths cannot do this. The word has been revealed and you must remain ignorant of all future developments to remain true to the faith. To Admit that the ravings in Leviticus are not valid is to admit it is all invalid. Either it is all the word of god or none of it is. If you refuse to show us the gold plates or accept the results when your shroud is proven false beyond all reasonable doubt then I say fuck you and your ignorance. I have no time to waste on your ignorant superstition. I will ridicule it at will but not one second of deference or respect. There isn’t anything else I can do but beat the dead idiot and there are already folks making a living at that task. The course politically is set for the next cycle so I am not going to expend any more efforts in that direction. The centrist has sold us out to oil and pharma interests. The climate bill will be inadequate, the energy bill will include off shore drilling and nuclear energy both disasters. The drift toward a police state will continue as this group is now trying to eliminate rights for citizens while continuing to show contempt for human life around the globe. I won’t vote republican and see little point in continuing to support the rush to compromise of principles that is this failed system. There will be a slaughter in November and then we will get nothing but screwed until 2012 when the right wing will take power once again. This was the best shot at some actual progressive changes to government for the 8 year cycle with the utter destruction of everything the right had been saying and the gutless piece of god wad that won sold us out. I see no point in continuing to point out the obvious for the next two years. It will just serve to make me appear shrill. Enjoy the break.
If you build it, it will break. Get used to it there is nothing ever built with a 100% success rate. Even NASA with all of their technical expertise has about a 2% death rate per astronaut flight and those failures have been spectacular. When president Obama was speaking on April 2nd as he was signing on to the drill baby drill mantra and opening up the east coast to off shore drilling he claimed that oil wells don’t leak. He claimed that the leaks in the Gulf of Mexico after every hurricane are from refineries not from wells. Here is a transcript link,I am looking for the video they used but it is not up on the ABC site yet. I will put my plug in here for the disqualifying defect of being under the God Delusion. If you believe in that for which there is no evidence, if you conduct conversations with your imaginary friend and think that he is going to act in some way you are unfit to make any decisions for anyone other than yourself. Faith as a virtue is a destructive meme. It results in the best case scenario being adopted by the risk management folks as the worst case scenario. I cannot speak for other nations but the American Exceptionalism that is hammered into children in the US with a religious fervor doesn’t help. Manifest destiny is a myth used to justify genocide. There is at present a horrible example of this being sold to a whole new generation on the history channel as slavery was just an unfortunate externality of the booming cotton trade that American ingenuity created with the cotton gin. It wasn’t desperate people fleeing exhausted farm land that came west but adventure seeking entrepreneurs. They completely ignore the propaganda that was spread to get folks to go just as they ignore the fraud conducted by everyone of their business people talking heads. Why am I surprised that the network that has the “The Nostradumbass Effect,” as a serious program gives a crap about reality. They are selling a narrative that has always been a lie from the time they said George could never tell one. Back to my point and I do have one, there are no failure proof systems. When some one tells you that their widget can’t break they are lying. When the President goes in front of the cameras as he did on April 2nd 2010 and tells you that oil wells never leak anymore in hurricanes he is lying his ass off. Just another in the long list of acts that put him up there with the worst presidents in my lifetime. (Bush, Nixon, Reagan) the order is determined by the number of innocent people they murdered in unjust wars. Saint Ron the traitor had a much larger negative effect than the others as his “gospel of government bad” is still propelling the ignorance of sister Sarah on us today. Escalating unjust wars Spying on citizens without warrants and ordering their murder without due process. Murdering civilians with drone strikes in violation of law without a declaration of war. Then having the poor taste to joke about it. Failing to prosecute torture and crimes against humanity. Continuing to commit said torture and crimes against humanity at military installations around the world. This is not the change I voted for.
Watching Bill Moyer’s last dance tonight and I have to say it aggravated me no end. Phony folksy types like Hightower make me want to puke with their false equivalences and their total silence when their true friends the Republicans are in power. These farmers screaming about bank bailouts while any attempt to cut their welfare subsidies is met with shrieks about the family farm. Ethanol is an economic disaster and is awful for the environment. It requires more energy to produce than you get out of it so it makes no sense but because the family farm is some how sacred we piss away tons of money on it. The reason for this waste is the archaic political system that was created to perpetuate slavery and has succeeded for 230 years. You have no right to cry about fair market prices when you demand a huge subsidy. They simply do not understand that the capitalism they are nostalgic for never existed. They are as delusional as their tea bagging counterparts on the farther right. And make no mistake their positions are right wing in nature. They want the other guy regulated but pay a minimum wage like any other business? No they are special and living wages are for land owners not migrant workers. There was something special that led their ancestors to come to America for a better life but now we have all these illegal aliens running around. The solution is not to scream in impotent rage at the bankers greed while resisting fundamental reform. The rich getting everything they can is capitalism. Read their bible, Atlas Shrugged. That is the system Europeans have been fighting since the day they stole the place from the folks that came here from Asia. These are the same populists that elected Raygun because he made them feel good about America by tearing the Solar panels off the White House. The fact that he was looting the treasury with his defense contractor masters was not important. It was just another pesky fact that the folks in flyover country want no part of. It is God and country with those folks and when their Saint Ron broke the unions they cheered. They believe teacher’s unions are the problem with education just as they believe Jesus loves them. They can produce no evidence of either but they know it to be true. Now that they are on the same side unions are now A OK. It is very hard for me to get behind a group that feels a living wage isn’t their responsibility as an employer. The populist notion that we are all in this together is not compatible with capitalism. They are not wrong when they rail at the bankers, the financialization of America has been a disaster for all but the very few at the very top. The idea was that we would pass free trade agreements that let capital flee to the lowest least regulated areas. This has had a huge redistribution effect and raised about a billion people out of abject poverty. The fallacy was that higher productivity of an educated work force would compete for the more sophisticated jobs and higher productivity would keep the country competitive. This has proved to be a myth much like the rational market. The hot flat and crowded retread of Malthus set was partly correct in that American workers are now competing against children in China. The reason I despair is that we never seem to learn anything. In the late 1960’s off the California coast they were using all the latest technology to safely drill for oil. They screwed up and devastated the coast around Santa Barbra. We decided that the small amount of energy to be extracted was not worth the economic loss of the spill. Fast forward fifty years and We are again told that it is safe to drill and we again find that they were not telling the truth and the Gulf Coast will now be devastated and the economic losses will be massive. The problem is that there is no one speaking for the other side.
Needed more space than twitter provides for this response. The time has come for the democrats in congress to man up. People are making the argument that BHO. is no FDR. Nate over at 538.com tries to defend Obama but his numbers do not add up. FDR. had 64% of a senate requiring 67% for cloture. BHO. began with 59% of a senate requiring 60% and Nate is claiming advantage FDR. BHO got his 60th vote long before FDR got his 67th. This defense doesn’t hold water. FDR moved his agenda by writing the bill and sending it to congress. BHO. Has decided to let the legislature legislate. This has proven to be a horrible approach to this point. President Obama has a few months left in which to present an agenda and get it passed before the next election cycle is too far gone to get anything done. When the midterms bring losses this will be interpreted as anti BHO. By the media and we will have a one term president with a failed economy. The window is closing. The question remains are we going to get “Change we can believe in” or hands across the aisle?
I gave my prespeech perspective here is my post speech wrap up. Needless to say by my last line you will be sure that I remain unconvinced.
My analysis of the program. The President is planning to increase troop strength by approximately 1/3 in the hopes of reversing the trend in return to Taliban control. 18 months from now having stabilized the situation we will begin to pull out in Jul 2011. We will have trained the Afghan security forces to replace us at providing protection for the local population from said Taliban. We will increase our efforts at creating an economy based on something other than narcotics and root out the corruption in the central government. We will then get completely out of Afghanistan in terms of combat operations at some future date dependent on conditions on the ground. This I am sure in his opinion is the best of a bad lot of options. He used the usual fear tactics and military props to sell it and he gave a pretty lackluster speech to roll it out. I will leave it for the Daily Show and Jon Stewart to put together the side by side comparison of Bush selling us the Iraq surge with the same rhetoric. He tried to tell us this wasn’t the next Vietnam while trying to fight it like Iraq, another place it is not. Always fighting the last war isn’t that the problem?
I will begin with point 1. Afghanistan and its’ citizens did not attack us on 9/11. The hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. The mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohamed was born in Kuwaiti of Pakistani refugee parents. Osama bin Laden the leader of this criminal band was another Saudi. In case you are not seeing the pattern here there are no Afghans on that list. The history of The United States drawing all these criminal men to Afghanistan to fight against the Russians and then leaving them trained and heavily armed to prey on the populace should be well known Perhaps that is why the President left it out of his history narrative. I am only bringing it up to give the proper time horizon. Afghanistan has not had a functioning educational system in all that time. They have a 20% literacy rate, very bad but the bulk of the reading is taught at religious schools that instill fundamentalism, even worse. Looking at the president's claim that a false reading of history leads to the Vietnam analogy. I contend that all analogies to past wars are pointless as no two situations are ever the same but the lessons learned still apply. Then he sets out points that are themselves a false reading of history. We had the entire west bloc from the cold war with us on the Vietnam war when it came to votes in the UN and world opinion. Our partners in the Vietnam war contributed huge numbers of troops. South Korea provided 320,000 troops to the war effort, more than all the contribution of the coalition of the willing in Afghanistan. We are sending 30,000 troops at a cost of roughly 60 billion dollars total, assuming you meet your withdrawal target. The Brits are sending an additional 500 while the Canadians are doing the smart thing and leaving. Half truths when it comes to war are inexcusable. The belief that soviet style communism posed a threat to the world unparalleled in the history of civilization prevailed in the world at the time so again the distinction does not exist. The South Vietnamese government was deemed illegitimate by the world after the murder of Diem. Who did what isn’t the point so much as now the whole world knows that The current Afghan government is illegitimate. They stole the election and we went along with the Vietnam Coup. Waving the bloody shirt of 9/11 rings false to me for the reasons I have already stated above but there is again an untruth in the Presidents statement. We had been viciously attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. Of course that turned out not to be factually accurate as well. The war lords and the Taliban have been fighting over the area for 30 plus years so the home grown insurgency argument may hold up the best of any of his points. The hero status of Ho Chi Minh among his followers remained intact throughout the war. The terrorism took much of the luster off the freedom fighter image of bin Laden. The war lords were horrible when they were in charge. The Taliban was religious horrible leading to the degradation of women and unbelievers. After 9/11 we hired the warlords as mercenaries and put them back into power. Now we have the war lords losing power once again because they are horribly corrupt and the people hate them again. The possibility exists that can win the people in Afghanistan there was no way in Vietnam. Now as to why it isn’t like Iraq and Surge 2.0 Af/Pak is the last war. Iraq was a fully functioning nation with lots of educated urban people. The level of entrepreneurship and innovation was much higher even though they operated under a pretty brutal dictatorship. The countries economy weakened by years of sanctions was still much stronger than Afghanistan and with the oil fields able to raise cash rapidly after they were stabilized. The parts of Afghanistan we need to recruit the police forces and security forces from are the least educated portions of a horribly uneducated land. In 8 years we have still been unable to build an effective security force in Iraq, We still do not have all of our combat troops out. How can you expect to have anything like a functioning force in 18 months? The myth that the Surge worked. The violence that occurred in Iraq post, "mission accomplished" was mostly ethnic cleansing. The once integrated sections segregated over time through violence against a foreground of terrorist Al Qaeda types fighting our troops. They unleashed the pent up hatred of the suppressed majority on the oppressors and unlike South Africa in Iraq we got Liberia. The violence had already begun to decline before the new troops arrived in Iraq so the idea that they caused the reduction is in question. We have been paying off vast numbers of the players all along in the Afghan operation. In Iraq we began paying them to not fight as a change in strategy. At first we made every effort to ensure that no American monies went to anyone that had fought against our troops. It was not until that policy was changed that we began to have some success. The promise of jobs with the police and security forces. We are running out of patience for paying them off and they are not getting the promised jobs in the Iraq government and violence is ticking back up. In Afghanistan we have been paying bribes to build bases bribes to drive on roads, bribes for information and bribes for safe conduct of our supplies since the very beginning. The development money has been sucked up by corruption much the same as in Iraq but as it was a significantly smaller number the amount that trickled down to the population was correspondingly small. I have no way to verify all of the rumors about The CIA and their paying off of President Karzai’s brother and how much of the 15 billion we bribed the Pakistani’s with went to the other side so we have no non corrupt partner in the region. I Give the President some credit for at least trying to put forth arguments and justifications for his plan as opposed to The Bush pattern of the lies about babies being thrown from incubators as Bush 41 did or Lies about Uranium yellow cake and mushroom clouds as Bush 43 did. He failed to answer what went wrong with his last escalation. He has deployed 31,000 troops to Afghanistan already in his short presidency. Why did that escalation fail and what changed that that makes you think doubling down will work now? It is important at this point to look at the goal of the other side here. They want to cause us to spend so much money that our system collapses. They believe that this is what they did to the Soviet Empire. I would submit another misreading of history. There were vague statements about paying for the war. No commitment to pay for it. With this President if it is not explicitly spelled out he will not honor his pledge. Even when it is explicit he will not necessarily honor it as in the case of FISA immunity. The General in charge has been proven to lie to the nation as a propagandist so he cannot be trusted, Google Pat Tillman cover up. It was Gates that was Secretary of Defense when the requested troops were not sent. Rumsfeld had been replaced with the man you kept when McKiernan's requests were denied. You cannot use half truths to lie us further into war you must tell the whole truth. As in Vietnam we will get more people killed and the end result will be the same failed stalemate we could have gotten 3 years earlier. The other alternative is that we continue to fail at securing the country and three years from now we are force to throw more blood and treasure into a failed enterprise. I will leave you with this question. Hey, Hey LBJ How many Kids will Obama Kill Today?
This was a great old tune by a guy named Barry McGuire
It seemed apropos to today as another Barry is about to give us his decision on pouring more lives down the rat hole of war. The leaked number is 30,000 more troops. I have no reason to believe that number and the actual number is not that important in the long run. The cost of 30,000 troops will be an additional 30 billion dollars. That is thirty billion dollars every year for as long as they are there. In February of this year the President already escalated the war to a total of 34,000 troops. Combat troops with their support units.This was done in a deceptive manner in my opinion but I have made no bones about my opinion of this administration and the truth. Charlie Gibbs and Dana Perino lie with equal alacrity and as Dana’s lying netted her a cushy job in government why not? I have been working on writing fiction in a furious and frenzied attempt to write a novel in a month and so I may tend to ramble but to the topic at hand. The Graveyard of Empires that is Afghanistan and A deeper issue, what as a nation do we value? Last year we spent 130 billion on hot wars along with another 750 billion on the military industrial complex. Another 30 billion on top of that seems like chicken feed. It does until you consider that 160 billion is twice what the estimated cost of health care reform will be. 840 billion over ten years. This does not take into account the fact that we are financing the enemy as well we have to bribe the Taliban to let our convoys through to resupply our soldiers. For a frame of reference The gross domestic product of Afghanistan in 2008 was 11.7 billion dollars. The escalation of our part in this war not including the money and men contributed by NATO is three times the entire countries economy.
Much like In Iraq no one is counting the number of civilians we are killing on a regular basis. We may never no how many people are dying to keep a corrupt government in charge of a failed nation. We have no more right to murder the citizens of Afghanistan and Pakistan then the terrorists conducting their attacks on 9/11. We could have done it right but we hired the awful scum that were so terrible to their own people that welcomed the Taliban with open arms to get rid of them and are shocked when they screw everything up. We have the same criminal crony capitalists in charge of the money supply that destroyed our economy impoverishing only those at the bottom. The Rich are doing quite nicely in the same old story. Now the Same criminals that tortured and lied under Bush are Torturing and Lying under Obama, Gates and McChrystal. We were told during the campaign that it was foolish to trust those that drove us into the ditch to get us out, Of course we were also told that the guys that screwed up the Financial system and lost all the poor folks money were the only ones that could save us. The scientific approach of a god waddder that thinks prayer will solve everything. Since you are evidently not the smartest man on the planet I will say it slowly for you. There are no good wars. Your are murdering people everyday in these wars and in our own country by wasting resources on the continued American love of killing brown folks. You are about to do your usual half assed compromise crap and lose politically as well as get a shitload of people killed for no good reason. You are going to get creamed by the right for not giving the Generals all the tools to win and when you lose it will be your fault. You cant win with the left without ending the war. You lied about federal wiretaps you lied about Guantanamo you let the war criminals walk with impunity and now you will kill thousands more before you fail again. Hey, hey LBJ how many kids did Obama kill today? Do I think this screw-up will be the end of the world? Probably not but the folks in the Kremlin probably didn’t think it would destroy their country either.
