They treat governing as a converyor belt or an ATM machine

Naomi Klein makes some excellent points in her interview with Amy Goodmand on DemocracyNow! criticizing Milton Freidman and the "Chicago School" of Economics.

So, I think all ideologies should be held accountable for the crimes committed in their names. I think it makes us better. Now, of course, there are still those on the far left who will insist that all of those crimes were just an aberration—Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot; reality is annoying—and they retreat into their sacred texts. We all know who I’m talking about.

But lately, particularly just in the past few months, I have noticed something similar happening on the far libertarian right, at places like the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation. It’s a kind of a panic, and it comes from the fact that the Bush administration adapted—adopted so much of their rhetoric, the fusing of free markets and free people, the championing of so many of their pet policies. But, of course, Bush is the worst thing that has ever happened to believers in this ideology, because while parroting the talking points of Friedmanism, he has overseen an explosion of crony capitalism, that they treat governing as a conveyor belt or an ATM machine, where private corporations make withdrawals of the government in the form of no-bid contracts and then pay back government in the form of campaign contributions. And we’re seeing this more and more. The Bush administration is a nightmare for these guys—the explosion of the debt and now, of course, these massive bailouts.

So, what we see from the ideologues of the far right—by far right, I mean the far economic right—frantically distancing themselves and retreating to their sacred texts: The Road to Serfdom, Capitalism and Freedom, Free to Choose. So that’s why I’ve taken to calling them right-wing Trotskyists, because they have this—and mostly because it annoys them, but also because they have the same sort of frozen-in-time quality. You know, it’s not, you know, 1917, but it’s definitely 1982. Now, the left-wing Trots don’t have very much money, as you know. They make their money selling newspapers outside of events like this. The right-wing Trots have a lot of money. They build think tanks in Washington, D.C., and they want to build a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago.

Now, this brings up an interesting point. It’s an interesting point about the think tanks, in general, which has to do with the fact that it does seem to take so much corporate welfare to keep these ideas alive, which would seem to be a contradiction of the core principle of free market ideology—I mean, and particularly now, in the context of the Milton Friedman Institute. I mean, I could see it in the ’90s, but now, is the world really clamoring for this? Is there really a demand that you are supplying here? Really?

I think this points to a larger issue, and this comes up—has come up for me again and again in talking about this ideology, this ideological campaign. You know, is it—is it really fueled by true belief, and—or is it just fueled by greed? Because it’s not—the thoughts are so very profitable. So they are distinctive in that way, distinctive from other ideologies. And, of course, you know, certainly we know that religion has been a great economic partner in imperialism. I mean, this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. But this is a question that comes up a lot. And I think it’s very difficult to answer, and it’s clear, certainly at this school, that much of it is fueled by belief, by true belief, by falling in love with those elegant systems.

But I think we also need to look particularly at this moment, who this ideology benefits directly economically, keeping it alive in this moment, and how, even in this moment, when everybody is saying, you know, this is the end of market fundamentalism, because we’re seeing this betrayal of the basic tenets of the non-interventionist government by the Bush administration—you know, I believe this is a myth and that the ideology has just gone dormant, because it’s ceased to be useful. But it will come roaring back

The screen has captured American children en masse

I missed this Tomgram report from Tom Engelheardt, In the Zone with G.I. Joe when it was first posted in December of 2004. In documenting the history of the GI Joe action figure, as well as the history of children playing with toys on the floor, Tom performs the tremendous service of documenting elements U.S. commercialism (perhaps to be confused with U.S. exceptionalism) and showing a disturbing connection from the games children play to the way our military and ever more militarized police forces have come to resemble video game characters.

Both right and left have been deeply disturbed by the way our commercial century, in the form of the screen and the ad in particular, has colonized every previously private or sacred space (home, school, church, the family, the bedroom, the body) and many have focused on the details -- the "violence" and mayhem of video games, the sight of Janet Jackson's pre-prepared nipple or Nicollette Sheridan's naked back. Neither the right, nor the left has, however, been particularly successful at coming to grips with the way consumerism has spent an American Century's worth of time breaking all boundaries of time, space, and desire.

If today you really wrote a landmark history of the last century, the conquerors would seize our time, communities, purses and emotional valences; the great battles would be for market share and property rights globally; the freedom-givers would offer that most modern of freedoms, the right to choose among many channels, catalogs, brands, and the shifting identities that go with them. Of course, the landmarks of the year 2004 aren't to be found in any book, but in the swooshes on our sneakers, the apples on our computers, the Mickey Mouses on our T-shirts, the golden arches that soar over our heads, and that "real American hero" on the child's floor. So ignore media arguments about what books should be read and what history should be taught and take a good long look from that floor to the screen in your house.

Out here, in the cyber-marketplace, all history has been superseded by a new kind of story-telling. On that child's floor and on the various screens of childhood are a set of "stories" for straight shooters, largely barren of historical context, reflecting mainly the stripped-down global-selling environment from which they arise; so insular (yet all-encompassing and well-armed) are they as to be both conquering heroes and nothing at all.

...
Our troops in Iraq represent the first video-game generation, kids who spent their teen years ramping up their weaponry in outer space as on Earth. Perhaps then it's not surprising that, trapped in Iraq, they now speak of the enemy familiarly as "the bad guys."

But as any video-game "Zone" will tell you, as [G.I.] Joe's own history indicates, that old world of "landmarks" is long gone -- and that would have been so even if the invasion of Iraq had been a success, even if Syria and Iran had fallen like ten pins, even if the world's oil supplies were secured for us for generations to come. What the culture wars and the history wars and all the rest of the angry buzz hardly touch, what George Bush has no way of saying, is that, for decades, our world has been continually dismantled and restructured in a way that spells a kind of defeat. Like Joe in the Vietnam years, our President has a hold on our nation, but you can't spend two hours in a toy palace and not think that he won't, in the end, go the way of the giant Joe.

The conclusion of this piece highlights a phenomenon evidenced at the Republican Party Nomination Convention in Minneapolis. The militarization of America continues unabated, taken as a given. But the locus of the enemy has gotten much closer to home. War protesters are really high upon the list of internal enemies.

...you can often catch sight of the New York Police Department's heavily-armed HERCULES teams, specially stationed at "landmarks" and tourist attractions, togged out in full tactical gear, including the sort of dark helmets and heavy body armor that might leave them at home anywhere in outer space or possibly as the bad guys in some near-future shadow-op scenario.

The military and our increasingly militarized police look ever more like something out of an off-Earth video game or a comic book. They and the toy and video-game companies grow ever closer. (The Army is reportedly even patterning a new, fast-loading assault rifle on Hasbro's popular Super Soaker Water Gun.) Perhaps it's not that history, in the form of the military, is returning to the child's world, but that the exotic look first developed in that world is about to seize history by the throat with mayhem in mind.

What would Molly Ivins Say?

When assessing what a political candidate will do once in office, dear Molly Ivins would say you need to do three things: Look at the record; look at the record; look at the record. Confirming this analysis, Steve Soto posts at the Left Coaster:

I would remind all of you that George W. Bush left Texas in far worse shape than he found it, and history is simply repeating itself. The man is a walking catastrophe, now with a sidekick where the both of them represent Disaster Squared.

Oh, read the whole post. A GWB cousin, was an executive at Lehmann Bros was warned:

Because Bush’s own cousin was a Lehman executive, who rejected any idea that corporate fiscal prudence outweigh an executive smash and grab on their way out the door.

Waxman said that in January, Fuld and his board were warned the company's "liquidity can disappear quite fast."

Despite that warning, he said, "Mr. Fuld depleted Lehman's capital reserves by over $10 billion through year-end bonuses, stock buybacks, and dividend payments."

I guess, it's just a family affair.

This gambit has turned out to be clever rather than smart

Writing for the Washington Post, Andrew Bacevich presents a compelling case that Bush's biggest gamble was not invading and occupying Iraq as a response to 9/11, but rather attempting to do so cheaply, without requiring financial sacrifice from the American people.

It's widely thought that the biggest gamble President Bush ever took was deciding to invade Iraq in 2003. It wasn't. His riskiest move was actually one made right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when he chose not to mobilize the country or summon his fellow citizens to any wartime economic sacrifice. Bush tried to remake the world on the cheap, and as the bill grew larger, he still refused to ask Americans to pay up. During this past week, that gamble collapsed, leaving the rest of us to sort through the wreckage.

To understand this link between today's financial crisis and Bush's wider national security decisions, we need to go back to 9/11 itself. From the very outset, the president described the "war on terror" as a vast undertaking of paramount importance. But he simultaneously urged Americans to carry on as if there were no war. "Get down to Disney World in Florida," he urged just over two weeks after 9/11. "Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." Bush certainly wanted citizens to support his war -- he just wasn't going to require them actually to do anything. The support he sought was not active but passive. It entailed not popular engagement but popular deference. Bush simply wanted citizens (and Congress) to go along without asking too many questions.

So his administration's policies reflected an oddly business-as-usual approach. Senior officials routinely described the war as global in scope and likely to last decades, but the administration made no effort to expand the armed forces. It sought no additional revenue to cover the costs of waging a protracted conflict. It left the nation's economic priorities unchanged. Instead of sacrifices, it offered tax cuts. So as the American soldier fought, the American consumer binged, encouraged by American banks offering easy credit.

From September 2001 until September 2008, this approach allowed Bush to enjoy nearly unfettered freedom of action. To fund the war on terror, Congress gave the administration all the money it wanted. Huge bipartisan majorities appropriated hundreds of billions of dollars, producing massive federal deficits and pushing the national debt from roughly $6 trillion in 2001 to just shy of $10 trillion today. Even many liberal Democrats who decried the war routinely voted to approve this spending, as did conservative Republicans who still trumpeted their principled commitment to fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets.

Bush seems to have calculated -- cynically but correctly -- that prolonging the credit-fueled consumer binge could help keep complaints about his performance as commander in chief from becoming more than a nuisance. Members of Congress calculated -- again correctly -- that their constituents were looking to Capitol Hill for largesse, not lessons in austerity. In this sense, recklessness on Main Street, on Wall Street and at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue proved mutually reinforcing.

For both the Bush administration and Congress, this gambit has turned out to be clever rather than smart. The ongoing crisis on Wall Street has now, in effect, ended the Bush presidency. Meanwhile, a month before elections, panic-stricken members of Congress are desperately trying to insulate Main Street from the effects of that crisis -- or at least to pass the blame onto someone else.

What Bacevich has written, to this point, offers an excellent historical summary. But his article continues, offering an ever more in depth perspective; a continued peeling of the onion, revealing even more layers of meaning, text and subtext.

Even today, the scope of those ambitions is not widely understood, in part due to the administration's own obfuscations. After September 2001, senior officials described U.S. objectives as merely defensive, designed to prevent further terrorist attacks. Or they wrapped America's purposes in the gauze of ideology, saying that our aim was to spread freedom and eliminate tyranny. But in reality, the Bush strategy conceived after 9/11 was expansionist, shaped above all by geopolitical considerations. The central purpose was to secure U.S. preeminence across the strategically critical and unstable greater Middle East. Securing preeminence didn't necessarily imply conquering and occupying this vast region, but it did require changing it -- comprehensively and irrevocably. This was not some fantasy nursed by neoconservatives at the Weekly Standard or the American Enterprise Institute. Rather, it was the central pillar of the misnamed enterprise that we persist in calling the "global war on terror."

At a Pentagon press conference on Sept. 18, 2001, then-defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld let the cat out of the bag: "We have a choice, either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live, and we chose the latter." This was not some slip of the tongue. The United States was now out to change the way "they" -- i.e., hundreds of millions of Muslims living in the Middle East -- live. Senior officials did not shrink from -- perhaps even relished -- the magnitude of the challenges that lay ahead. The idea, wrote chief Pentagon strategist Douglas J. Feith in a May 2004 memo, was to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally."

But if the administration's goals were grandiose, its means were modest. The administration's governing assumption was that the U.S. military, as constituted in late 2001, ought to suffice to transform the Middle East. Bush could afford to tell the American people to go on holiday and head back to the mall because the indomitable American soldier could be counted on to liberate (and thereby pacify) the Muslim world.

For a while, that seemed to work: The Taliban fell quickly, with little need for the U.S. taxpayer to shell out for a larger military. But the Bush team turned quickly to Iraq, hoping to demonstrate on an even grander scale what the determined exercise of U.S. power could achieve. This proved a fatal miscalculation. After five and a half years of arduous effort, Iraq continues to drain U.S. resources on a colossal scale. Violence is down, but expenditures are not. An end to the U.S. commitment is nowhere in sight.

The achievements of Gen. David H. Petraeus notwithstanding, the primary lesson of the Iraq war remains this one: To imagine that the United States can easily and cheaply invade, occupy and redeem any country in the Muslim world is sheer folly. That holds true in Afghanistan, too, where the reinforcements that Gen. David D. McKiernan, the recently appointed U.S. commander, says he needs to turn things around will be unavailable until at least next spring.

Yet there is an economic lesson here too. "We have more will than wallet," the president's father said in 1989 during his own inaugural address. That is again painfully true today. The 2008 election finds the Pentagon cupboard bare, the U.S. Treasury depleted, the economy in disarray and the average American household feeling acute distress. Profligacy at home and profligacy abroad have combined to produce a grave crisis. This time around, telling Americans to head for Disney World won't work. The credit card's already maxed out, and the banks are refusing to pony up for new loans.

It's not surprising that people don't cotton to the idea of spending $700 billion to bail out Wall Street. Nor should they find it acceptable to spend as much as that, or more, to perpetuate a misguided and never-ending global war. But like it or not, the bill collector is pounding on the door. Bush's parting gift to the nation will be to let others figure out how to settle accounts.

Long invasions and occupations invariably cost LOTS of money. LOTS.

Yet in this article, most assuredly a condemnation of the policies of Cheney / Bush and the neocons, not one word about what the impacts are to the Iraqi people. One million plus dead, killed either directly or indirectly as a consequence of the decision to remake the middle east. Four million plus refugees. The squalor of daily life and living. The kidnappings. The lack of electricity. The tens of thousands of Iraqis jailed, tortured, abused. These are the horrors which WE the people permitted to be unleashed upon the Iraqis, and we are all culpable. Remember, GWB was re-elected. That signal event was sufficient to tell the world all that is needed to know about the American people.

There's no fines, no enforcement mechanisms

Tom Feran of the Cleveland Plain Dealer has written a fascinating article about the efficacy of lies in political advertising. The reason political ads lie, is because, LIES WORK!

Whatever the intent or term, false and negative ads often work very well, said Dr. Carolyn Lin, a communications professor at the University of Connecticut who formerly taught at Cleveland State University. "When it works, it works like a charm, and historically it has worked. That's why they do it.

"The unfortunate thing about political advertising," she added, "is that when you tell lies, these lies often stick, and the liars never receive any penalties.

West agreed. "Candidates aren't worried so much anymore about a media backlash, and McCain's campaign thinks the public is less likely to listen to reporters."

In fact, studies have shown that debunking falsehoods can have the backfire effect of reinforcing falsehoods by repeating them.

People screen out facts that run counter to broad narratives they accept, and they perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs, said science writer Farhad Manjoo, who writes about the phenomenon in his book "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society."

"You can go so far as to say we're now fighting over competing versions of reality. And it is more convenient than ever before for some of us to live in a world built out of our own facts," he said.

By rebutting untruths, meanwhile, a candidate departs from his own message and can risk being seen as weak or complaining.

Legally, candidates have a right to lie to voters just about as much as they want, said FactCheck.org's Jackson.

The Federal Communications Commission requires broadcasters to run ads uncensored, even if the broadcasters believe they are false. And the Federal Election Commission deals with finances, not ads.

"Ohio has the toughest truth in political advertising law in the nation, and it doesn't work," Jackson said. "There's no fines, no enforcement mechanism."

A little over 40 years ago the 20th century marketing genius Rod MacArthur oversaw the mail sales advertising campaign for one of the first Medicare Supplement policies. What most interested Rod was what induced people to buy, and thus the preliminary mailings were stratified into two types of advertising copy: "clean", or thorough disclosure, and "dirty", consisting of ... well, hyperbole. He discovered that more people were swayed by the hyperbole (selling the sizzle rather than the steak).

Okay. So political advertising is dirty. Politics is dirty. What is a citizen's duty in such a context? I'd say it is to make ones self as well informed as possible, to avoid buying into the sizzle. To realize that advertising that reinforces one's world view just makes the sale that much easier.

And to get involved. This was Gore Vidal's advice:

Q: What can people do to energize democracy?

Vidal: The tactic would be to go after smaller offices, state by state, school board, sheriff, state legislatures. You can turn them around and that doesn’t take much of anything. Take back everything at the grassroots, starting with state legislatures. That’s what Madison always said.

The triumph of obnoxious, confident & dumb over timorous, insecure & dumb

I have no shame. Another Palin posting. This from the incomprable Digby:

Last night Palin appeared to have mastered the art of George W. Bush style gibberish --- obnoxious, confident and dumb. And the conservative elite are all relieved. They were afraid they had a real problem on their hands --- a candidate who was timorous, insecure and dumb and that is a sure loser.

I'm going to start referring to her as George W Palin. She has every one of the characteristics that people thought were so refreshingly "authentic" when he ran in 2000 and which led us to disaster. This arrogant, empty, anti-intellectual faux populism has just proved itself to be inadequate for the presidency and yet they've put up another one.

Over the past few weeks, I've had varying responses to this person. At first I thought she was a professional wingnut politician, well indoctrinated in conservative movement politics. It turns out she isn't that at all. She is exactly what she says she is, a socially conservative hockey mom, who fell into a job with a big title, but which is obviously done by her staff. She gets by on her folksy demeanor, her massive ego and her prodigious energy (the only thing she doesn't have in common with Bush.)

She isn't a politician at all. She's a caricature of a politician, as he is. They are both figureheads who represent something important to voters who believe that the biggest problem in the world is that pointy headed elites are incompetent because they lack comm on sense. And the funny thing is that it's the product of one of the harshest conservative criticisms of liberalism over the years ---- the self-esteem movement. Both George W. Bush and Sarah Palin are self-esteem symbols, put forth to prove to people who have been convinced that liberal elites are ruining everything, that the world would be better led by someone just like them. It's the ultimate social promotion. That people like David Brooks would celebrate Palin's mastery of its aggressive know nothingness, says that the conservative elites, even after Bush, are still committed to using this for their own cynical, Straussian ends.

The US has only one party, the party of property, of money, of big corporations

In the August 2006 edition of The Progressive, David Barsamian writes about his interview with Gore Vidal from April.

Distantly related to Jackie Kennedy, he does not romanticize JFK. “He was one of the most charming men I’ve ever known,” says Vidal. “He was also one of the very worst Presidents.”

...

He sees a certain continuity in U.S. foreign policy over the last fifty years. “The management, then and now, truly believes the United States is the master of the Earth and anyone who defies us will be napalmed or blockaded or covertly overthrown,” he says. “We are beyond law, which is not unusual for an empire; unfortunately, we are also beyond common sense.”

Vidal foresaw Bush's spiral descent from grace in 2002:

Q: In 2002, long before Bush’s current travails, you wrote, “Mark my words, he will leave office the most unpopular President in history.” How did you know that then?

Gore Vidal: I know these people. I don’t say that as though I know them personally. I know the types. I was brought up in Washington. When you are brought up in a zoo, you know what’s going on in the monkey house. You see a couple of monkeys loose and one is President and one is Vice President, you know it’s trouble. Monkeys make trouble.

Q: Bush’s ratings have been at personal lows. Cheney has had an 18 percent approval rating.

Vidal: Well, he deserves it.

Q: Yet the wars go on. It’s almost as if the people don’t matter.

Vidal: The people don’t matter to this gang. They pay no attention. They think in totalitarian terms. They’ve got the troops. They’ve got the army. They’ve got Congress. They’ve got the judiciary. Why should they worry? Let the chattering classes chatter. Bush is a thug. I think there is something really wrong with him.

He also predicted how the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq will end. This seems eerily prescient:

Q: Today the United States is fighting two wars, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, and is now threatening to launch a third one on Iran. What is it going to take to stop the Bush onslaught?

Vidal: Economic collapse. We are too deeply in debt. We can’t service the debt, or so my financial friends tell me, that’s paying the interest on the Treasury bonds, particularly to the foreign countries that have been financing us. I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That’s the end of our wars.

He offers an extremely harsh (and fully deserved) evaluation of the Cheney administration:

...I would suggest Canada or New Zealand as a possible place to go until we are rid of our warmongers. We’ve never had a government like this. The United States has done wicked things in the past to other countries but never on such a scale and never in such an existentialist way. It’s as though we are evil. We strike first. We’ll destroy you. This is an eternal war against terrorism. It’s like a war against dandruff. There’s no such thing as a war against terrorism. It’s idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It’s advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.,

And Vidal lays much of the blame on "our media" and "the press."

But our media has collapsed. They’ve questioned no one. One of the reasons Bush and Cheney are so daring is that they know there’s nobody to stop them. Nobody is going to write a story that says this is not a war, only Congress can declare war. And you can only have a war with another country. You can’t have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids. Nothing makes any sense, and the people are getting very confused. The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.

Q: You’ve called the country “The United States of Amnesia.” Is this something in our genes?

Vidal: No, it’s something in our rulers. They don’t want us to know anything. When you’ve got a press like we have, you no longer have an informed citizenry.

...
Q: When were the media better?

Vidal: They’ve never been much good. They belong to the people who own them. But they were better, the level was higher. There used to be foreign correspondents in other countries. There’s nobody abroad now. The New York Times gave up being anything except a kind of shadow of The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post is the court circular. What has the emperor done today? And who will be the under-assistant of the secretary of agriculture? As though these things mattered.

Vidal, like several other of the bloggers / writers I repeatedly quote here, does NOT believe this country has a two-party system but rather one party with two wings.

Q: Talk about the role of the opposition party, the Democrats.

Vidal: It isn’t an opposition party. I have been saying for the last thousand years that the United States has only one party—the property party. It’s the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.

But he does NOT see the situation as hopeless, hapless, nor helpless, and offers as an antidote the same strategy developed by the "religious right" in its takeover of the republican party in Texas:

Q: What can people do to energize democracy?

Vidal: The tactic would be to go after smaller offices, state by state, school board, sheriff, state legislatures. You can turn them around and that doesn’t take much of anything. Take back everything at the grassroots, starting with state legislatures.

Falling into the trap set by the campaign spinmeisters and talking points pimps

Here are some Professor Juan Cole's scathing comments on this evening's vice presidential candidates "debate."

She mugged for the camera, winked like a bar fly, and just went on talking and talking and talking, oblivious to whatever anyone else said. Not only did she ignore most of Gwen Ifill's questions,she paid no attention to what Joe Biden said. When he choked up over the loss of his family, she did not have the decency to express any kind of condolences. It is almost as though she is autistic and unable to connect with human beings.

Not only was it not a debate and not only did Palin answer virtually none of the questions put to her, but the whole idea of such an event was ridiculous.

Joe Biden has been either the chairman or the ranking minority member on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee for many years, and is one of our foremost foreign affairs experts and legislators. His acumen and expertise are wide-ranging.

Palin has revealed her real self in the Gibson and Couric interviews, and clearly knows nothing and offers only rubbery expressions and glib repetition, for all the world like a rasping myna bird, of a stream of memorized slogans that sound as though they were disinterred from a time capsule originally buried in William F. Buckley Jr.'s back yard several decades ago.

It was not a debate, and pretending that it was and judging "performance" is to fall into the trap set by the campaign spinmeisters and talking point pimps.

Without having to acknowledge their perversions of the institutions

Forty years or so ago I bought the LP The Begatting of the President by Orson Welles which chronicled the rise, demise and re-rise of Richard Nixon with JFK and LBJ in between. In a thundering baritone, Welles invoked old testament phraseology of then topical political issues. Wonderful, evocative stuff, the punch line to Nixon's 1968 election being, "And so I say unto you, my brethren, let us pray."


In the October 2, 2008 edition of The Black Commentator, guest commentator Wesley E. Profit writes along similar lines in criticizing the present plans to bail out Wall Street. Profit's prose cuts quickly to the hypocrisy of them that's got.

...[C]onservatives, neo-conservatives, free-market capitalists, and their ilk toast the values of capitalism - no government interference with the market, let the market regulate itself, etc. - as long as it works for them. And when it doesn’t work for them, as is now the case, with a wink of their eyes, they become corporate communitarians marching under the banner “From the government according to its ability to us according to our failures.” Theirs is the logic of a modern Animal Farm: “Corporate capitalism profits good; failed corporate capitalism profits better.”

In truth, it is kind of a religion whose illogic must be taken as an article of faith. “And on the fifth day, Manna made the banks and the mortgage companies and all manner of financial instruments did it make and it told them to go forth and multiply so that your progeny may cover the earth and all the international markets as well. And on the sixth day, Manna made capitalism and it saw that capitalism was alone and from the rib of capitalism it made the government to be a helpmate of the capitalist. And on the seventh day, Manna bailed out.”

And from that day to this and ever since, capitalists have celebrated the “bailout.” In the “bailout”, capitalists give thanks to Manna without having to acknowledge that they have perverted the institutions that Manna created. The bailout is a ritual for anesthetizing failure without resort to blame. It is the golden bull of hypocrisy worshiped whenever capitalists fear that the gods of the true free market may abandon them.

VP Debate

Sarah Palin didn't "say" anything. She recited talking points and apparently eruditely. She didn't stutter, didn't mumble. She talked at a brisk pace. Repeat: she didn't say a damn thing. "Is it okay to call you Joe?" "Yes." She never did. Call it "perky." Kind of like a cheer leader. We've already had one of those. One last time. She didn't say a thing - but she did it well. She faked it. Unless you tried to make sense out of her words, she sounded good and looked confident. So what. She didn't say a thing.

Joe Biden demonstrated more depth, more knowledge, more insight. Was better informed. More passionate.

This was no contest.

Biden is supremely more qualified for the office of President of the United States, and thus, far more qualified to be the Vice President.

Cassandra

After all, she's only a woman. What could she possibly know? From Spiegel Online:

During the G-8 economic summit in Heiligendamm more than a year ago, for example, Chancellor Angela Merkel tried to convince her state guests of the need for tighter controls on the financial markets. But President Bush and then British Prime Minister Tony Blair gave the chancellor the cold shoulder.

The long-humiliated have lost their fear

Spiegel Online offers a succinct eight paragraph historical overview of the Bush administration, the march of the neo-cons and the meteoric rise and perhaps stratospheric fall of the paper mache ponzi scam perpetrated by the "shadow banking system" upon itself and investors of the world.

The failed leadership of President Bush, whose departure most of his counterparts from other countries are now looking forward to more and more openly, is not solely to blame. Nor are his two risky wars: the one in Iraq, which he launched frivolously in the vain hope of converting the entire region to the American way of life, and the other in Afghanistan, in which Bush now risks the world's most powerful defense alliance, NATO, suffering its first defeat.

But it's hard to forget how this president's mentors celebrated the power to shape world affairs the United States acquired in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the East-West conflict. There was talk of a "unipolar moment," of "America's moment," even of an "end of history," now that all other countries apparently had no other choice but to become smaller versions of America: liberal, democratic and buoyed by an unshakeable confidence in the free market economy.

The Bush administration wanted to cement forever this unique moment in history, in which the United States was undoubtedly the strongest power on earth. It wanted to use it to clean house in chronic crisis zones around the world, especially the Middle East. Far from relying on the classic, cumbersome and often unsuccessful tools of multilateral diplomacy, the Bush warriors were always quick to threaten military intervention -- just as quick as they were to make good on this threat.

The strategists of this immoderately self-confident administration formulated these principles in the "Bush doctrine" and claimed, for themselves and their actions, the right to "preemptive" military intervention -- with little concern for the rules of alliances or international organizations.

The superpower even claimed privileges over its allies, even offending some of its best friends during Bush's first term. Bush withdrew the American signature from a treaty to establish the International Criminal Court, he refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to combat climate change and he withdrew from an agreement with the Russians to limit the number of missile defense systems.

Washington sought to divide the world into good and evil -- and did so as it saw fit.

Now, in the wake of the crash on Wall Street, the debate in the UN reveals that the long-humiliated have lost their fear of the giant in world politics. Even a political dwarf like Bolivian President Evo Morales is now talking big. "There is an uprising against an economic model, a capitalistic system that is the worst enemy of humanity," Morales told the UN General Assembly.

The financial crisis has uncovered the world power's true weakness. The more the highly indebted United States has to spend to stabilize its own economic system, the more trouble it has performing its self-imposed duties as the world's policeman.

Those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end

Speigle on line reports on George Bush's recent appearance before the United Nations, noting:

The US president gave a speech similar to the ones he gave in 2004 and 2007, mentioning the word "terror" 32 times in 22 minutes. At the 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations, George W. Bush was the only one still talking about terror and not about the topic that currently has the rest of the world's attention.

In the same article, Speigel editorializes:

Gone are the days when the US could go into debt with abandon, without considering who would end up footing the bill. And gone are the days when it could impose its economic rules of engagement on the rest of the world, rules that emphasized profit above all else -- without ever considering that such returns cannot be achieved by doing business in a respectable way.

With its rule of three of cheap money, free markets and double-digit profit margins, American turbo-capitalism has set economic standards worldwide for the past quarter century. Now it is proving to be nothing but a giant snowball system, upsetting the US's global political status as it comes crashing down. Every bank that US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is currently forced to bail out with American government funds damages America's reputation around the world.

Vying only to determine which can drink more from the poisoned well of hurbris

William S. Lind's On War Column #274: Why Obama is Wrong discusses that presidential candidate's states positions on "the wars" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. His stunning conclusion (with which I agree) is this:

Here we see the central reality of American politics shining through the smoke and mirrors. America has a one-party system. That party is the Establishment Party, and its internal disagreements are minor. Both McCain and Obama are Establishment Party candidates. They agree America must be a world-controlling empire. Both men are Wilsonians, believing we must re-make other countries and cultures in our own image. Neither man conceives any real limits, political, financial, military or moral, on American power. McCain and Obama vie only in determining which can drink more deeply from the poisoned well of hubris, around which, unremarked, lie the bones of every previous world power.

Terrorists use chemical weapons in attack on religious service on US soil

In a cowardly, venal attack, terrorists sprayed a chemical irritant into the eyes of a 10-year old girl watching over younger children at an evening worship service gathering in Dayton Ohio.


Police, firefighters and hazardous material personnel arrived on the scene at 9:48 p.m., Friday, September 26, 2008.


The terrorist attack occurred during a prayer service attended by about 300 people.


In a proclamation defying all logic, Dayton police Chief Richard Biehl proclaimed that "There was nothing left at the scene or anything that makes us believe this is a biased crime."


The police Chief asks us to believe that this terrorist attack made upon Muslims on the holiest day of the Islamic week, during Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic year, in an Islamic mosque did not occur because of the Islamic faith of the Muslims gathered therein has no credibility.


The Dayton Daily News reports further that a police detective would be assigned to the case on Tuesday, September 30, since the crime occurred over the weekend and that the detective is to determine if a crime was committed.


Determine if a crime was committed? Spraying a chemical into through an open window into the eyes of a 10-year old girl? A chemical whose after affects included an irritated throat ten or more hours after it was originally sprayed? An act that inflicted tearing, coughing and shortness of breath upon people inside the building?

Determine if a crime was committed?

Is it because the Hazmat team was unable to identify the chemical?

"Whatever chemical was released it dissipated too quickly for us to determine what it was," [Hazmat team coordinator Denny] Bristow said. "We can test for about 130 to 140 chemicals, including pepper spray, and all our tests came back negative."

A review of crime statistics for Dayton shows an overall crime index about twice the national average, a violent crime index about twice the national average, and a property crime index slightly less than twice the national average. Perhaps the Dayton police are busy, too busy to handle this situation?

It most certainly looks like a hate crime to me. The mosque was targeted because of the religious faith of the Muslims. That is the simplest explanation. This terrorist attack was a hate crime, and should be treated as such.