thoughtstreaming

Too Many Kinds

2012-01-27T21:34:00.000-08:00

I just heard Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel parrot the line "There are many different kinds of capitalism." A vast array of both liberal and conservative defenders of the profit system are using this tack and so I started compiling a (partial) list of the various "kinds". Here we go:
Anglo-Saxon, Mercantile, Industrial, financial, State Welfare, state guided, family,entrepreneurial,oligarchic,managerial/big firm, regional/national such as Chinese, Nordic, South Asian etc.., crony, vulture, hyper, mutated, raw, pure, corporate, neoliberal, new, conscious, natural, rogue, late. Whew.

The problem with these types of categories is taxonomic. There are not enough quantitative differences to become qualitative. Each "kind" bleeds into the other and as you add and add the difference goes from negligible to incoherent. Add a little state, subtract a little individualism, throw in a dash of democracy or corruption, stir. Still capitalism. They all breed with each other so they are all the same species and it is far more useful to talk about the traits they have in common than their comparatively petty differences. Unless you are just trying to muddy the water.

Speaking of muddy, Barry Lynn's piece Killing the Competition in the Feb. Harpers is an opaque paean to those "real", "open", markets you hear so much about but never actually see. "REAL MARKETS have equality between buyer and seller, perfect transparency and", I love this, " a tendency to deliver egalitarian outcomes."

Barry locates the Open Markets for us: "The revolutionary achievement of the American people two centuries ago was not merely to establish an independent republic. It was to prove that every citizen in that republic could be independent , economically as well as politically." Uh huh. Every "citizen". The "open markets proved to be as fundamental to our democracy as the ballot box." It's like being back in sixth grade.

Of course, "right from the beginning these markets proved hard to keep." You had the "lords of industry and the prophets of socialism joining hands to defend the "scientific" rationalization" but the people and Wilson fought them off and began "restoring some of the open markets we had lost". Unfortunately, "by the 1970's our open markets were once again under siege."

Even if you can get past the revisionism, the thing that jumps out is his lack of curiosity. He never asks WHY. How do you sell such complete bullshit to Harpers?

Trying To Stay Cool (through a Montana winter)

2012-01-25T09:36:00.000-08:00

A portion of Occupy Missoula met last night to discuss: Money in Politics, or Why the People Have No Voice. This follows the Move To Amend action/rally last week where Missoula turned out almost as many folk as Washington DC! As we went around the circle explaining our positions on the issue (and in some cases their whole life story and political philosophy or lack thereof) I found myself grinding my teeth, trying to remain patient and understanding, trying not to roll my eyes as liberal after liberal repeated the familiar mantras of that mundane, frozen, self-deceiving/perpetuating creed.

Because so many of these people fight the crazy conservative onslaught daily, from relatives and co-workers and internet comment threads, and feel as though their "progressive" backs are up against the wall, for me to challenge them from the Left in these settings seems almost cruel at times. But challenge I must.They search for positive actions around which to build unity but fail to reflect on the history or theoretical basis of their pre-suppositions. They believe in their hearts that Occupy is bringing new life to a populist revolt and so they demand their government be more accountable. With Rachael Maddow and Thom Hartman and Bill Moyers and Stephen Colbert on their side, they just know their anger can be translated into better policy.This time it will really happen. This time will be different. Somehow.

It was ironic to me that on the television below Barack Obama was delivering the quintessential Liberal Clarion Call, inveighing all the poll-tested catch phrases of "fair play" and "level playing fields" and "American values", acting as though he was honestly unaware that every President for fifty years had not stood on that same podium and used the same tired cliches and received the same elite applause.

I didn't do a very good job explaining the capitalist state or hegemony or the current crisis of democracy but at least people were receptive to the idea of asking for "what they really desire."To think a little bit more expansively, try using their utopian imagination, to be a bit more daring in this little free space we have carved out for Tuesday evenings.

Euro Trash Pres.

2012-01-22T20:25:00.000-08:00

In his acceptance speech Newt makes it clear he won't go for any Saul Alinsky Left Wing Euro-Trash Socialism. Even if it means abolishing the Fed! Their "football" is played by girls, for God's sake. And after he's elected,you won't see a lot of THOSE people driving around in Cadillacs cashing their food-stamps either (wink wink). And by shrinking the State he will make capitalisms troubles go away.

But what is this State apparatus, this government, this administrative bureaucracy everyone hates? A mystery.As Richard Seymour tries to unpack the British form:

"The mystery of the state would not go away, because the state would not go away. Far from retreating to the perimeters of the 'economic', guarding its boundaries but otherwise allowing 'civil society' to go about its business in laissez-faire fashion, it was everywhere, pro-actively formulating and implementing agendas and strategies, domestically and overseas. War, sanctions, special forces operations, internment, deportation and special rendition are only the most brute, mail-fisted manifestations of the state. What about the coordination of ideological agendas on 'Britishness', 'integration', 'culture' and so on? What about the coordination of bank bailouts, and subsequent austerity programmes? What about 'workfare' and privatization? In fact, it seemed increasingly apparent that whereas the capitalist class itself was constantly divided, constantly at its own throat, rarely capable of sustained class initiatives by itself, the state was always there doing something that in one way or another furthered the reproduction of capitalist relations in new ways. And insofar as it did this, it seemed to be not just a state but a capitalist state.

Part of the mystery dissolved there and then. It had been a mistake to try to penetrate the core of the state as a sui generis form. There can be no general theory of the state. The state is not an eternal form that recurs through successive ages, modes of production and social formations, and to read it as such tends to lead to a Hobbesian view of the state as an instrument for the suppression of 'anarchy' (social conflict). At most, one can have a general, descriptive outline of what distinguishes a state apparatus (special bodies of armed men, etc), or a genealogy of types of state, noting the factors that recur (though even these factors will have an entirely different content, and stand in different relations to one another, depending on the historical epoch in which they are embedded). But it is possible to have a theory of the capitalist state, and the best way to approach it seems to be confront the state in its setting, the social formation."

These election cycles often present windows into the social formation of the state. Each politician who wants to go to Washington declares his disgust with "Washington politicians". So there is the wanting to be the thing you despise (every manager gets to feel this at some point).There is the whole acting through something you know is a farce aspect, like negotiating with a used-car salesman.(Everyone hates negative ads but they are influenced by them)

Yes, as Steve Earl put it:"With an empty feeling in my chest, wondering what it means."

Noam Gets It Right

2012-01-19T20:51:00.000-08:00

"Any good capitalist democracy needs to keep the rabble in line. To make sure that they are atoms of consumption, obedient tools of production, isolated from one another, lacking any concept of a decent human life. They are to be spectators in a political system run by elites, blaming each other and themselves for what is wrong."

Noam Chomsky

"The Spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than it's desire for sleep."

Guy Debord

"As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than their rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them."

Adorno

"Fight for your mind!"

Ben Harper

Move To Amend

2012-01-18T20:12:00.000-08:00

Much of our local Occupy Missoula efforts are being directed into the nation-wide campaign to amend the Constitution so that corporate "person-hood" is abolished. Progressives believe that, especially since the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, elections, and by extension,politics more generally, are corrupted by the influence of corporate money. Because corporations are "persons" with first amendment rights to free speech and since money has been ruled to be speech yada yada..

What I personally find interesting here is the confused discourse about free agency and individual sovereignty or autonomy on display. If I insist that "citizens" minds are colonized by capitalist ideology so that the only choices they find rational are within that limited ideological range, I am told this is far too simplistic, that people are aware of ideology and besides, no one is in a position to make such judgements about others.(just my ideology speaking "through" me)

Yet it is accepted at face value that a barrage of simplistic corporate election advertising and "messaging" in fact determines peoples attitudes and beliefs and causes them to vote for one or the other candidate (irrationally).

So how aware are we of ideology? How susceptible? If Rick Perry spent 200 billion dollars on 24/7 advertising for five years would you HAVE to vote for him? (in a sort of hypnotic trance?). Obviously such persuasion, or the "manufacture of consent/desire" works or they wouldn't spend those huge sums on it.

Theodor Adorno famously said "All are free to dance and enjoy themselves...but freedom to choose an ideology- since ideology always reflects economic coercion- everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same." Going back to Chomsky, when he claims there is a "democracy deficit"(as evidenced by polling which runs counter to policy) is he not claiming people ARE rational agents, but that their representatives are simply unresponsive? Isn't this directly counter to the notion of "manufacturing consent"?

The fact is, capitalism doesn't need it's own SuperPac. It's ideology is disseminated 24/7 every day FOR FREE through each and every cultural exchange, through the education system, through kinship networks, at work, etc etc... A barrage of advertising might persuade Joe Sixpack to support either Venture or Vulture capitalism (though the difference will never truly be clear to him) but whether corporations are persons or whether they can spend unlimited amounts of money on elections doesn't really matter at all because Joe will always choose the same ideology.

Creative Destruction

2012-01-14T12:16:00.000-08:00

The process within capitalism whereby the old is replaced by the new has been called "creative destruction" since Marx coined the phrase. This is what Romney is actually defending without actually saying it in so many words. I doubt that Perry has heard of it. It is most commonly associated with economist Joseph Shumpeter but I like this description from Marshall Berman:

The truth of the matter, as Marx sees, is that everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down. "All that is solid" — from the clothes on our backs to the looms and mills that weave them, to the men and women who work the machines, to the houses and neighborhoods the workers live in, to the firms and corporations that exploit the workers, to the towns and cities and whole regions and even nations that embrace them all — all these are made to be broken tomorrow, smashed or shredded or pulverized or dissolved, so they can be recycled or replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms. The pathos of all bourgeois monuments is that their material strength and solidity actually count for nothing and carry no weight at all, that they are blown away like frail reeds by the very forces of capitalist development that they celebrate. Even the most beautiful and impressive bourgeois buildings and public works are disposable, capitalized for fast depreciation and planned to be obsolete, closer in their social functions to tents and encampments than to "Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals"

The "creative" part of the concept is a close cousin to the mystical "wisdom" of the Market or direction of a guiding "invisible hand"( Adam Smith) ,an ordering Cosmos in laissez- faire ideology as expressed by the Austrian school( von Mises), Hayeck and later Chicago School economists ( Friedman) and now market libertarians like Ron Paul. It is a Force, either of the social-Darwinian-natural-selection variety or of some Higher Power.

What is interesting is how little interested in all this the citizens of the little town in S.Carolina, home of the now-famous "vultured" factory, are. They are used to being blown about. First their slave-based agricultural economy is torn from them, then the textile mills shut and jobs shipped off. Now different manufacturing plants come and go and the suppliant workers just go with the tide. It helps that they are very religious and believe what they see on television.
But it's the only life they ( and our new friend Patrick) can now imagine, waiting to see what factory the Invisible Hand shuts down, which one It puts up, who buys a new pick-up, who gets food stamps, who gets cancer. Just wait and see.

Tanned, Rested and Ready

2012-01-12T20:53:00.000-08:00

Just back from a great vacation to the Occupied Territory of Hawai'i with sand in my hair, ears and other orifices. Lots of snorkeling ( or as my daughter coined it, dorkeling) with whales, turtles (including the rare hawk-billed!) and fishes, lots of hiking and boogie boarding and hot-tubbing in my never ending quest to relate to bourgeois culture.

So where are we these precious weeks later? See E. J. Dion's piece (link is screwed up) Deep in an intra-party debate over modern capitalism! Newt is joining Sarah P, decrying "crony capitalism where people pay each other off at the expense of the rest of the country." This is not "free enterprise" somehow. You hear this same nationalist-fake-populist rhetoric when talking drill-baby-drill, as if all the oil under "our" soil goes to good, hard working Americans.

Rick Perry has also jumped aboard, talking about a Bain Vultured company: "150 people lost their jobs there. And they made 20 million off of management fees."

Ron "We Are All Austrians Now" Paul sides with Mitt, saying: "I don't think they understand the Market." And of course the US Chamber of Commerce is also nervous, saying it is foolish for Republicans to attack Romney's record as a venture capitalist. Perry is a fool but Newt is shrewd and hopes to straddle the line between "understanding" and worshipping the Market. Joe Sixpack is just getting confused. Romney then gets to reach into his back pocket and beat them with the "class warfare" cudgel, saying: "The country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy."

Of course, Joe the Plumber is a LITTLE envious of the new pick-up his venture capitalist neighbor is driving but... feels guilty. Mitt's words beat at the back of his exhausted skull: " I believe in a merit nation, an opportunity nation, where people by virtue of their education and the hard work and the risk taking and their dreams, (here is where he does the little head tilting Mormon smile) maybe a little luck, could achieve great things. And by the way, as they were successful, they didn't make the rest of us poorer."

Luck means God's favor, of course, and maybe Joe, you're just not leading a righteous enough life. And wealth is not zero-sum, the rising tide even lifts Africans. Once they sign up.

Uniforms and Religion

2011-12-20T21:14:00.000-08:00

Watching the Egyptian "security forces", the Puerto Rican "security forces", the U.S.,Syrian Honduran, Yemenese, Colombian, etc, etc.. "security forces" and others around the globe unleash brutal retaliation at those who would challenge their authority, I start thinking about the bizarre hierarchy and the effect militaristic training and uniforms have on working class recruits. Young guys with the blood lust, clubs swinging, dragging women around by their hair...

It's true the US cops don't fire live ammunition into crowds of Occupy protesters (yet) but there is plenty of historical precedent. Yet even the pepper spray and billy clubbing demonstrates the psychological effect of Putting On The Uniform, joining the elite club of legal enforcers and carrying the capacity for raw power and force over your fellow citizens.

In Egypt, this brutality and circumventing of the revolutions democratic goals is facilitated by the deafening silence of the opportunist religionists. They now collaborate with the very regime that oppressed them for so long because they smell some advantage, basically bourgeois electoral dominance in a corrupt system. I am reminded how Christians hitch their boat to war mongering profiteers here in America when it suites them, when it promises to further their prurient social agenda.

The Pipe

2011-12-18T19:38:00.000-08:00

There is a serious showdown looming over the fate of the Keystone XL and I love it. It goes perfectly with the whole Victory In Iraq Moment, industrial energy needs and the logic of Empire bumping up against ecological catastrophe, white men bumping up against First Nations, desperate Workers bumping up against Populist Expand The Middle Class union buffoonery. This is gonna be interesting indeed!

I'm sure David Axlerod thinks he has this all handled but I believe History is outpacing his political calculations. If Obama smokes that Corporate Crack pipe all the residual hopey changey delusions go swirling down the electoral toilette. They will have to throw Jim Hanson and Bill Mc Kibben under the bus and face down an American Spring with riot police and tanker cars of tear gas. We got the G20 and NATO summits in Chicago ( Haymarket Square?) then the conventions in Tampa Bay and Charlotte. Forest fires and droughts and tornadoes Oh My!

The European Double-Dip contagion will make itself felt and the White House organic garden won't feed the growing food lines. The Durban protesters will have had time to talk to Bolivian piquetaros and Chiapan Zapatistas and Spanish Indignados.

"Well the gamblin man is rich
while the workin man is poor
and I ain't got no home in the world anymore." Woody Guthrie

This all means that there will be PLENTY to occupy. The Postal Service, coal fired power plants and train loads headed to China, the Veterans Administration (vets will be looking for work, perhaps camping out in D.C.?), ICE and the INS, not to mention Wall Street, Main Street and K Street. Penultimate Pipeline Percept?

Human Rights

2011-12-15T11:36:00.001-08:00

Obama's proclamation on the Declaration of Human Rights Day:

"All people should live free from the threat of extrajudicial killing, torture, oppression and discrimination, regardless of gender, race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, or physical or mental disability,"

Yesterday he ended the war in Iraq by saying We don't invade others for resources, "we do it because it is right."

American exceptionalism has become a key theme in the presidential campaign. Newt has made a movie and written a book about the shining beacon, city on a hill, more perfect union thing and Barack and the others must race to catch up. American hypocrisy, on the other hand, is the long acknowledged but never spoken (not since Carter's Malaise speech) thing and government approval ratings show this pretty clearly. Ron Paul was a courageous defender of foreign policy Reality in the last debate but his economics are in la la land. Some people have even read the history of US intervention in the Philippines.

And Christopher Hitchens, go ahead and rest in peace, we all make mistakes.

Poor Mitt Romney went on about how some of his business ventures failed (making him a better possible President?) and how luck is an important ingredient to success, seeming to counter his devotion to meritocracy. I doubt many conservatives noticed the contradictions. (not really their forte)

Gar Alpowitz had an interesting op-ed piece in the NY Times saying that the cooperative model is already affecting capitalism. Worker owned and managed enterprises are growing at an unprecedented rate and I wonder how this fits in with Hardt and Negri's assertions about the biopolitical subject and democracy coming from a new "commons" of the immaterial economy. I want to believe this is significant but also know emancipation won't come without a real fight over powers hold on resources. Labor and value are still real struggles exported to the periphery and the excluded grow every day.

Here in my little Montana valley, my neighbors are struggling to establish a re-cycling center but the capitalist ideologues in power are suspicious. At the latest hearing, County Commissioner Mat Kannewisher stated:

" the idea of a free market was important to him philosophically." He also noted that recycling was not a right and that the government's job was "not to provide everything we want." These same commissioners also hope to engage the Forest Service in something they call "coordination process" to re-create a timber industry here. It has something to do with county sovereignty and the tenth amendment and probably guns if I know these folks. "It's our forest,..it doesn't belong to the Forest Service. It belongs to us." said Bill Grasser. Ah yes. Us.

Clear Choice

2011-12-13T21:35:00.000-08:00

This is finally the debate I've been hoping for. From the Occupy Wall Street Journal we get one view:

"This is not about banks. This is a permanent CRISIS. daily, when the alarm rings, it comes over the kitchen table all the way to our work places and into the streets, right through our relationships and bodies, to our bank account, screaming for low wages, competition and mistrust. it works with our fears. this is the daily madness of competition, of capitalist culture. this is a permanent crisis. we won't pay for this crisis any more."

And from Bill Moyers from his article in the Nation we get another take:

"...(everyday citizens) laid down the markers of a civilized society: legally ordained minimum wages, child labor laws, workers safety and compensation laws..and rules that promote competitive markets over monopolies and cartels."

One believes it is "madness" to compete with his/her fellow Man over the abundance which lies before us and the other celebrates it. This is one of the prime divisions which exists within the "99%" and which so many hope to avoid indefinitely in order to go from a moment to a movement.

Some see the crisis as profound,"permanent", and solvable only by driving history forward into a new epoch. Others believe it is just another orbit in a cyclical universe so that the old answers of populism and a New Deal re-solve the crisis once again. Some see the entire legalistic/constitutional framework as not only inadequate but fatally flawed. Others believe them to be an eternal foundation upon which We The People may forever rest. Some look to a new culture, some worship the old.

Bourgeois populism and democracy (legal-political) have a huge advantage in this debate but I hope the "complex unity"of the Occupy Movement will at least allow it to play out and not come to blows. Competition is just a small part of the content struggling to fill such floating signifiers as equality and justice, there are plenty of others; merit, risk-reward, property, aptitude, competence, etc.. dangling just below the discursive surface. Time to meet liberalism and it's Protestant ethics head on. The unease of the West coast dock workers over the attempted blockade was just the opening gambit.

Progeny

2011-12-11T19:53:00.000-08:00

Light a cyber cigar friends and foes, old Troutsky is a grandfather once again. I was in dreary Portland all week helping my oldest so she could birth a beautiful daughter named Arya and so my efforts are re-doubled to end this corrupt carnival and get on with something more life affirming.

Speaking of carnivals, the Repub candidates were united in their sympathy for a "merit based society" last night, by which they must mean the thing which brought such stellar individuals such as themselves into the national limelight. Ah yes, merit, worthiness, dare we say it, superiority; an increasingly rare quality in this Age of Occupations and evil moral/cultural relativism.Lets just say you know it when you see it. If it's on a stage, behind a podium, you see it. Why,it's practically reflexive!

At it's core we have an insistence, a mantra even, going back to our Enlightenment Founders that "all are equal in rights but not in fact." Quantitatively, this is true, we do not all have equal AMOUNTS of each quality or attribute. For example, some people have far too much ambition, some people have an excess of work-ethic, some people are over-burdened with drive and so yes, they should be utilized. These people are "born" to toil and often seem to enjoy it so it is only right they should provide for those of us with better uses for our time. But qualitatively, we are all equal in worth and no one gets to judge lessors or betters. This is a question of value, to which Sartre replied: "Value haunts my being."

I wonder if someone should tell Newt that Americans are an "invented" people? Or that the free market all of the candidates proudly worship is a violent, barbaric invention? This is Curtis White's answer from his essay Take Back Your Emptiness:

"We are blind to how our freedom to believe actually masks the baseness of the way we live. To apply Tolstoy to our present condition, the principles by which we as a people live have far more to do with capitalism, with the freedom of the market, than with any ethical principles. But of course, capitalist principles ARE ethical principles. It is a moral system before it is an economic system. Unfortunately, these principles argue that violence is legitimate if one can benefit from it." (What is also called our "national interest")

Don't Vote

2011-11-29T13:14:00.000-08:00

Here come the liberals, tongues out, looking for door knockers:

"If Occupiers can run tent camps, organize food kitchens and clean-up brigades, run general assemblies and use social media, they can take over and run a significant part of the Democratic Party." George "Elephant" Lakoff

Only thing they ask in exchange for your own desk and clipboard is that you don't use controversial words like capitalism or imperialism, in fact stay away from any "isms". Talk about re-building the middle class or banking reform or maybe something nebulous like "public oversight of the economy" to bring in the Leftys. But remember your Funders!

Sorry Ducky, I'm throwing in the towel. I was prepared to vote for Cain but I have a feeling it's only a matter of time before they find the home porn videos he made and so instead, inspired by the Egyptian revolutionaries, I now call for Occupy Wall Street to endorse a boycott of the elections.

At it's most basic, the OWS message is that Wall Street and Washington are two sides of the same corrupt coin. The liberal fantasy of a neutral state has been shattered so why would we want to legitimize it? This would actually unite left and right and go beyond a populist "Throw The Bums Out" (tried ad nauseam) and really call the question. Sure, we will end up with Obama again (Newt's not crazy enough, Mitt is Mitt) but what a nice wake up call for liberals and those deluded ones who really think they are "Independent". Even including the radical vote the Republicans are just far too inept and incoherent to compete but hey, it was worth a shot.

What we do is follow the Spaniards and encourage voters to skip the middle man and place their ballots directly into bank machines. Or mark all the trash bins with big letters saying Ballot Box.

By then the Germans will be deciding whether to give their old allies a bail-out, Durbin will have shown the small countries our willingness to commit eco-cide and my tear gas stocks will be through the roof.

Black Friday and It's Discontents

2011-11-25T08:14:00.000-08:00

I know Black Friday is a Spectacular orgy one might hope to someday look back upon with incredulous contempt, but the fact is, for the beaten down working class, camping out in front of a mall to get a bargain on a product might not be something the left wants to mock. Maybe we should sympathize. From a position of privilege it is easy to say "You shouldn't buy a giant flat-screen TV" but this could be said about anything anyone of us owns. Adbusters, for whom I have a great deal of respect, focuses much of their critique on "consumer culture" and accumulation but I think this is the weakest part of their analysis.It's an action in search of a logic.

An action like Buy Nothing Day could have revolutionary potential, but not nearly as much as Don't Work Month or Don't Pay Your Bills Month. And the tactic of shaming Black Friday consumers runs into issues of coherence when we consider those just trying to afford something they need.Those struggling against a de-humanizing system should not be compared to zombies. The potential is only manifested when the anti-capitalist critique is well understood by everyone and the ones shamed are the profiteers.

This conscious-consumption ethic also drives much of the environmental movement and the Transition Town thing I am investigating. It is unavoidably ambiguous in it's attitude toward technology or modernity more generally, adopting a notion of provincial/pastoralism as a brake on the runaway locomotive of capitalism. Here, slowness becomes an ethic, slow-food, slow-production, slow-consumption. It is a hearkening back to a pre-literate orientation to time itself. "Quality" time, sensual time, less teleological time. A more dignified time.

In the end however, I think people do want the trains to run on clock time. We can adjust the pace of life and embrace a little " pasado manana" without romanticizing inefficiency or un-utilized capacity as the New Way Forward.

Smaller, Gentler Capitalism

2011-11-23T10:48:00.000-08:00

As one could easily have predicted, the major theoretical split in the Occupy Movement is what to do about this thing called ( insert your favorite adjective,ie late,crony,raw, neoliberal, etc... or not) capitalism. The progressive populists want to "move your money" and "end corporate person-hood" and "buy and grow local". All of these things have as a common denominator a downsizing in scale. Live in smaller tribes, start a local currency, all this Schumacher small-is-beautiful type stuff. "One pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small." Along with this is what I believe to be an "unexamined nostalgia" for small business and tight communities, a sentimentality that runs the gamut between conservative and liberal. Ideal Mom and pop stores, where everybody knows your name. According to Rob Hopkins' Transition Town handbook, "small scale responses...help show the way forward for governments, business and the rest of us."

None of this speaks to exploitation at the point of production. As Doug Henwood economist with the the Left Business Observer reminds us, small business can be far more ruthless than the post-industrial corporation. Money is still money even if it is in your local credit union. There are some tight reactionary communities around here that are incredibly resilient.

So as much as we would wish it away, it comes back to those dismal sciences of economics and sociology. We still have to debate reductionist anthropological or socio-biological assumptions about human nature. The universities still teach "schools" of thought with their marginal utility, pareto efficiency, theories of value, equilibrium and lump of labor fallacy. In the "new" economics we hear about no growth, steady state, smaller, gentler capitalism but all too often it is a mystification to avoid the huge knowledge gaps most people have about the system under which they now labor. But these critiques are part of the slow painful work of building a new,hegemonic discourse.

Then there is the split between people who insist it is not enough to be against something, you have to know and build consensus around what you are for. You have to establish concise definitions accepted by all and settle all tensions and only THEN can you move forward. Is it enough to be against injustice? Or must one first have a perfect definition of justice? (good luck on that)

Me, I'm investing in pepper spray and tear gas, a high growth sector exploding with potential in the coming years.

Another Manic Monday

2011-11-21T10:33:00.000-08:00

You just have to start with the Not-So-Super Committee, whose failure to compromise sent Congress' approval ratings to 0.001% for the first time ever. Not even their families will admit to knowing them. One might think the Tea Party would be rallying around this symbolic drowning of government in the bathtub but they remain eerily quiet. ( hint: all but the village idiot now recognize democracy isn't corrupted by government bureaucracy but by Corporate ownership. Obama isn't a socialist , he is a pawn) The Markets are reacting poorly and Max Baucus was charged a cleaning fee when he returned his cape. I personally think it is admirable both sides stuck to their guns ( I am that .001) and the ideology is now front and center instead of obscured. The choice is failed social democracy or failed laissez faire. That's not a real choice.

The demonstrations in Tahrir Square put Hillary and Barack in another awkward fix. It seems to be the excess democracy they don't like and cotton futures are down along with tourism. The Egyptian military is Wisconsin's Scott Walker, free marketeers who don't like unions and could exploit their coalition with religious fundamentalists.

The Spanish Socialist Party lost big in yesterday's elections, in part because they aren't socialists. Like the Chinese Communist party selling real-estate. The German left party Die Link has a coherent anti-capitalist platform but these others are like New Labour or SPD and deserve to lose. And while we are discussing Europe and Markets reacting poorly, it looks like Moody's is on the verge of down-grading France. Neither country is famous for embracing austerity measures.

Everyone wants Occupy to come up with "concrete actions" and pragmatic demands. I am going to go with theatrical, symbolic actions and demanding the impossible. Full employment and National wages and pensions for all. Just to get us started. A democratic economy with fossil free production. Anything I am missing? The point right now is to break the collective imagination out of it's Matrix-like cocoon and force people to choose a pill. That's a Real choice.

New Energy

2011-11-19T21:32:00.000-08:00

In that great tradition of Zeitgeist, Alex Jones, What the Bleep and countless other Grand Unifying Theories That Can Save The Planet, this new film Thrive takes crazy up a notch. Here we have a true code given to people centuries ago by space aliens that can provide boundless energy for free...EXCEPT for the powers that will stop at nothing to keep this code concealed:

"J.P. Morgan got Lorentz to cripple the Heaviside equations so that the new EE (electrical engineering) concepts being taught in the universities would not ever contain free energy and over unity systems. This deliberate mutilation and crippling of electrical engineering is the real and single cause of our dependence on oil and of much of the pollution of our biosphere…The “High Cabal” – Churchill’s name for the secret consortium of elite families and organization we loosely refer to as the “control groups.” – has been ruthlessly suppressing free energy inventors for a century, including by direct assassination. Having personally survived several such assassination attempts, I have experienced what I’m speaking of."
– Tom Bearden, Inventor, Author, Energy from the Vacuum

Basically, for all you scientist-types out there, what we got is a torus and a Vector Equilibrium and something Tesla was working on and a lot of cosmic in and out. But the financial elite (1% for you Occupiers), Rockefellers and Bilderbergers and New World Order Global Domination crowd wants to prevent a just and sustainable future so they use the Federal Reserve and Monsanto and chemtrails and GMO food to fuck the rest of us over. Basically, it's a mix of cold fusion, Van Jones and "natural capitalism".

There. Everything should be clear now. You're welcome.

Insanity or Cowardice?

2011-11-13T10:14:00.000-08:00

Here is Jeffrey Sachs' latest offering: "Twice before in American history, powerful corporate interests dominated Washington and brought America to a state of unacceptable inequality, instability and corruption. Both times a social and political movement arose..a third progressive era is likely to be in the making." This economic visionary prescribes "a fresh generation of candidates."

Third Times a Charm? Really? Doing the same thing and expecting a different result? Looking beyond the inane revisionism and missing definition of acceptable "inequality", he reminds me of Tony Judt arguing for "social democracy" as Tony Blair and Berlusconi get elected. Even if we get a New New New Deal, won't Hillary just de-regulate the whole fucking thing again? Or that "fresh generation" of Twitter candidates?

Here is a different historical narrative from Wolfgang Streek in his NLR 71 article, Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.( he has obviously been reading my blog). He traces a long arc back to the post-war settlement between capital and labor where workers accepted capitalist markets and property rights in exchange for political democracy (social security, pensions, raises, full employment, collective bargaining, etc) But when the war bump ends and global growth slows in the late 60's, inflation begins to rise rapidly. "inflation can be described as a monetary reflection of distributional conflict between a working class, demanding both employment security and a higher share in their countries income, and a capitalist class striving to maximize the return on it's capital. As the two sides act on mutually incompatible ideas of what is theirs by right, one emphasizing the entitlements of citizenship and the other those of property and market power, inflation may also be considered an expression of anomie in a society.."

Along comes Volker and Carter and an attack on inflation by raising interest rates. The unemployment was handled by the Reagan/Thatcher assault on unions (so much for the "settlement") but stagnation and economic disorder persisted. All the deferred wages, in the form of social entitlements, came due however, and we begin the era of public debt, borrowing once more into future productivity. Of course,"just like inflation the accumulation of public debt cannot go on forever" so under Clinton we enter the era of de-regulation and end of "welfare as we know it." The government was able to run a budget surplus by "giving citizens and firms unprecedented opportunities for indebtedness" and so public debt was replaced by private debt. We know how that story ends. It's public again and being passed around like a hot potato.

The beauty of the capitalist system is you can put off till tomorrow what you don't wish to deal with today. Shift the burden, cook the books, or better yet, simply pass the debt off to the next generation. War debt,financial bubble debt, climate debt, it never has to show up in the actual price of anything...till later.

Read It Here First

2011-11-10T05:27:00.000-08:00

About six months ago I mentioned Italian debt. Italy, like the U.S., is too big too fail and so, to avoid a Lehman Moment, it "managed a successful offering of debt securities" last night, bought by the European Central Bank. The problem is that the contagion is spread throughout Europe. France, even Germany (the wundereconomy) are leveraged like AIG was. Italy's bond yield is now way over 7%, the point at which Ireland and Greece had to start begging. According to Scott Simon at Economix,"..then all sovereign debt in Europe will need to be repriced downward." Sound familiar?

Which means Beaks favorite clown Berlosconi will have to be replaced and many are calling for a technocratic government of "experts" to step in and set things straight.But this begs the question; aren't we already really governed by experts? Aren't they called the G20? I think what these commentators are saying is we need some NEW experts, some who are more expert than the old experts.

It occurred to me this odd Occupy moment with everyone asking Who Are We and What Do We Want? is a problem of semiotics. We have learned in our post-modern world to live comfortably with all these floating and empty signifiers such as Democracy and Politics or The Left. I am ok with indeterminancy, but not with the lack of debate and discussion which has been the hallmark of the last 40 years. So now when a Moment or Event opens up, citizens have no consensus on what consensus means or what citizen means. They are all fill-in-the-blank questions and there is a great deal of talking past one another. The Right, being brain dead, doesn't have this problem,they just round up a posse for Liberty and ride out into the sunset.

The Left can begin by defining itself as anti-capitalist and working out from there.

Transition Towns

2011-11-04T09:20:00.000-07:00

A study group formed out of the Occupy Experience which has met twice now and discussed the Transition Town model as developed by Rob Hopkins. It takes as a basis the notion that an energy crisis is fast approaching, further exacerbating the global economic crisis and communities should transition towards something more resilient. He primarily advocates localizing food systems, which appeals to a lot of folks here on many levels. The concept of "peak oil" elicits many different responses and this one strives to be very scale oriented, "doable" and appealing to a mainstream but politically aware audience.

The literature and video presentations go out of their way not to critique capitalism as such or spend much time on asking why we are in this precarious situation. They just say it is coming and you best be prepared. It is political only in the least antagonistic sense of the word, hoping to actually incorporate local government and business in the guise of community building.

The first night the group basically built consensus around the nature of the problem (carbon based economy) and a commitment to learn more. Last night a critique was introduced and it was refreshing to see how well it was received, if not the specific arguments, at least the fact we can be critical without being divisive. (of course Beak didn't show up). To the consternation of some, the anti-capitalists pressed for a radical investigation of the crisis in all it's forms but it didn't degenerate into cries against infantile leftism. There is a legitimate argument around the use of language, around compromise and inclusiveness and hopefully we are mature enough to work it out ( I don't equate historical stages with human growth, btw). We don't have to advertise our project as Communist Transition Towns and we don't have to withhold divulging our personal politics during discussions. There should be a synthesis possible.

The most problematic parts of Hopkins' vision for me are notions of "social enterprises and entrepreneurship". For instance : "social enterprises often stem from one visionary, bold individual, an entrepreneur...the important point is not to fear business..not all businesses are in some way wicked." Me fears old Rob is one of these visionaries and is saying radicals need not apply.

He wants to "bring land into community ownership" but in "real existing capitalism" this means titles, taxes, insurance, and the State. Also problematic are foundations and trusts and non-profits as the guardians of the liberal status quo. They have money for this stuff, not poor working people. This thing is supposed to be open source so it will be interesting to see what Missoula morphs into.

Mr. Block

2011-10-30T22:13:00.000-07:00

So now a bunch of Pagan's buddies, clever fellows that they are, have started an "I'm the 53% tumblr" here htp://the53.tumblr. The Wobblies have a great name for these guys, named after a cartoon character created by Ernest Riebe in 1912 and immortalized in a Joe Hill song called Mr. Block.

"Mr. Block is legion," wrote Walker C. Smith in 1913. "He is representative of that host of slaves who think in terms of their masters. Mr. Block speaks from the standpoint of the millionaire, licks the hand that smites him and kisses the boot that kicks him." In a sense , it is a collective form of Stockholm Syndrome mixed with a little curmudgeon. Like my grandad telling me he had to walk five miles uphill( both ways!) to school every day and then milk the chickens and blah blah. A funny take on this pathology is portrayed in the Monty Python movie Life of Brian
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2TPQ0DEVaEk#!

"Block thinks he may- be President some day." Joe Hill. And he thinks he has a monopoly on virtue and American Spirit.

Maybe worse are the liberals. Here is Benjamin Barber in the latest Nation, trying hard to catch up to Occupy and sputtering nonsense like: "Toward a Fighting Liberalism" ( I shit you not)
"Liberalism's core values remain strong, persuasive and enduring. Their fighting vitality is apparent in the spreading youth-led protests on Wall Street and across the country." It's basically re-hashed "we gotta push Obama" bullshit.Because they lost their imagination decades ago.

A long over-due debate is taking place on a dozen web sites in the "progressive" media-sphere over liberalism. A great example is the comment threads over at Truthout.org where liberals are being criticized from the left and acting very hurt about it. They just can't fathom someone attacking Elizabeth Warren or Michael Moore or any of the other stars and in a big way, this is the divide finally being acknowledged by the Occupy movement as well. Charges of opportunism and Utopianism are flying around and I say it's about time! The tired liberals with their tired approach tried to co-opt the Occupy Montana event on Saturday and unless some youth do show up they will probably be successful.

We're All Sarah Now

2011-10-27T07:54:00.000-07:00

Here is Ian Fraser from Finance Magazine on the Occupy movement: "They want to replace crony capitalism with a saner version of capitalism."

And this is Nicholas Kristoff in today's NYT: "this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists."

There are other examples around the internets because the memo finally went out, Sarah Palin had it right. As readers have noticed, my beef isn't with conservatives, I wouldn't waste my breath arguing with people with so little aptitude. My problem is with these boot-licking liberals who are always ready to clean up the mess after capitalists go on a binge. It is classic enabling behavior, like the black-eyed wife protecting her abuser husband. ( see the rage underlying Pagan's rants)

This is the message from Eric Alterman and the Nation crowd, from Thom Hartman, Glen Greenwald and Rachael Maddow, from any liberal pundit ( Michael Moore is sending mixed messages) that sees an opportunity to serve the master and get a pat on the back. They all know the history. Like all the times in the past Capital, properly chastised, will apologize sweetly, promise never to do it again ( make-up sex?) and a week or a month or a year later...well, you know the pattern.

European banks take a fifty percent write down and the world is made right again. Confidence restored, capital will go get those trillions it has stashed and get back to the business of making widgets. Occupiers will leave their tents, shower,get shaves and haircuts, and go back to the widget factory. A chicken in every pot! Pagan will rest easy at night knowing decency has been restored. It's A Wonderful Life!

Mission Finally Accomplished

2011-10-23T04:53:00.000-07:00

You're welcome Iraqis. And listen, any time you need assistance don't be afraid to call. We're here to help!
Welcome home troops! Will there be a ticker-tape parade down Broadway? Does ticker-tape still exist? There is plenty of work up here in our own oil patch( eastern Mt, North Dakota, Wyoming) if nothing opens up in Kirkuk, where the Kurds may be the ones doing the hiring. There is a pipeline needing to be built through the Ogallala, a new rail line to get coal out of Otter Creek and through the tongue River valley, plenty of work if you know where to look.Or you can join the Innovation Economy, whatever.

Occupy Missoula took Thersite's advice and had it's General Assembly in the Public Library last night. Much warmer than the courthouse lawn. There may have been some "scumbag hipsters" there but it's hard for this old dirty hippie to tell.Are they the ones with tiny laptops? Noticeably absent are the students, but I believe there was an ultimate frisbee tournament going on at the same time. Besides, most UM graduates go right into the Drone industry, a perfect fit, if you know what I mean. In today's economy you don't have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than the slowest worker!

Watching those smirking white faces at the Republican debate one can almost hear the chant: Let Them Eat Cake! These porkers are practically begging for the guillotine! They cheer Perry's death count, they cheer Cain's Marie Antionette impersonation, maybe they should go outside and light their cigars with 100 dollar bills! Is there no insipid bootstrap pablum too ridiculous for them to embrace? They still worship at the alter of a crappy actor named Ronnie and were so seriously sucked into the housing bubble they may never sell the inventory. So, let the fatties smirk and have their Mary Matlin- Ann Coulter mud wrestling fantasies. The little people are tired of scraps.

Of course this is Nevada, home of the famous Sagebrush Rebellion! The Jarbidge Shovel Brigade! I still remember a two ton truck filled with shovels leaving our little valley, shovels of support for the anti-Fed rebels. Where are those shovels now?, I sometimes wonder.

And this for the climate-change deniers or skeptics. The Koch funded Richard Muller of UC Berkeley just published a paper admitting he has been wrong about the science. In the press release announcing the results, Muller said, "Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK." In other words, climate scientists know what they're doing after all.Of course you can still deny it is has anything to do with human activity but such denial has a price in human lives. Something you bear. (hat tip to Phronesisaical)

Went To A Cider Party

2011-10-17T10:28:00.000-07:00

Who remembers Ricky Nelson? Spent yesterday smashing apples into that sweet nectar (especially when mixed with vodka) with lots of old friends and new acquaintances. They would best be described collectively as progressives and many are actively involved in local Democratic "politics". Naturally most of the conversation centered on the Occupy movement and because I have been captured on TV, radio and video speaking out, I was asked my opinion of what it all means, portends, etc..

Many counter-culture types moved to this remote valley to escape modernity? civilization? over-crowding and alienation? (and I include myself) so some conversation is about impending doom, collapse, dystopia and sounds like naive hippie crap to me. Some is more nuanced (as is the latest thread on Kulturcritc's blog).Basically though, it reminds me of rightwing survivalist discourse. Growing gardens and making cider is a romanticized, privileged, nostalgic vision of what post-collapse life would look like.

On the other side were liberals who see no real crisis at all( just economic cycles), who feel slow and cautious is the way to go. One labor organizer told me "we will still be using gas in twenty years so the Tar Sands might be the best way to a sustainable energy future." ( he wants the Keystone pipeline jobs for his guys). Another wanted me to work in a coalition for incremental reforms. These are good folks, egalitarian, pluralist, humanists who still believe in the Third Way despite the overwhelming evidence of it's failure. Their utopian imagination has been crushed by the weight of pragmatic, bureaucratic, professional/managerial engineer-think.

All they got from me was nods and smiles as we turned the apple press and filled the jugs because I don't have to say a word. They have seen the news. The absurdity of their timid plea hangs in the air like a cloud of putrid gas. It is hard to realize you have turned into the old guard, that it is now you who is standing in the doorway and blocking the halls.

So-called conservatives, who have suddenly vanished from the discourse, are probably chuckling to themselves at the spectacle of Obama attacked from the left. But they are fools, so out of touch with reality and so vilified now that their mothers will soon act like they don't know them. The DOW is on a tear and it's a good time to get out. One lady in Chicago who had withdrawn her money was grabbed by undercover security and dragged BACK INTO the bank. Perfect metaphor for our time!

Pizza President

2011-10-13T08:57:00.000-07:00

I'm totally down with Ducky on this one, Don't Be Insane, Vote For Cain! I had high hopes for Bachmann but this is a tough field. Lotta heavy weights. What must the racists be thinking? One in the White House and another one his way? Get the ammo! Anyway, Americans need and deserve a little free market enema, a lesson they won't soon forget.You see, the problem was, Bush was too intelligent. Joe the Plumber just couldn't relate to all the big words he used. Bush is in British Columbia today, actually, speaking to.. get this..an economic forum! I have no idea if Hank Paulson is there but if it was me, I'd sneak over and fish the Kispiox or Bulkley.

Instead I'm at Occupy Missoula which is, as someone pointed out in the last thread, starting to get cold. The courthouse lawn is also where the alcoholics and homeless and mentally ill hang out. These are not so much the Indignant Ones as the Disposable Ones and the media has no way of distinguishing so they are getting some interesting interviews. I did a tv and a radio spot myself and I probably sound just as incoherent but what the hell. I pointed out to the GA my tactical concerns with focusing too exclusively on Evil Corporations and it was agreed to re-visit the issue. Hate to nit-pick but language is important.Most participants are progressives getting their first taste of anti-capitalism and they need time to think. We got a little time.

"The paper’s central premise is something I’ve been hearing from Alpert for more than a year now: this time, it really is different. What he and his co-authors mean by that is that the bursting of the debt bubble three years ago was not just a severe example of the ups and downs that are an inevitable part of American capitalism. Rather, it was the ultimate consequence of the modern global economy."

Joe Nocera NY Times describing an academic paper by a group of leading economists. What I liked was the word "inevitable". Lovely system that, where the periodic crushing of lives and dreams in inevitable. Which brings me to the "Free Trade" deals just passed by the capitalist state. In Columbia, the murder is constant and ongoing, not periodic. How cynical do you have to be to even use the term Free?

But as I wrote a year or two ago, they are playing us too close.

"This is about to get ugly and there is very little anyone can do about it." Kevin Giddis exec.managing director for fixed income capital at Morgan Kegg & Co. Read that either way.

Day 4

2011-10-11T11:07:00.000-07:00

Occupy Missoula has gotten a little soggier (rained all night) and a little more complicated. Which is only natural given a new social body is being invented day by day. I have noticed that a small band of core "facilitators" keep working the Assemblies, people with knowledge and experience which could all too easily turn into coordinator power.

The biggest issue has been messaging: What Are We and What Do We Want? If we were simple people like some I know we could just say : Kill All Rich People/Commies! But these gathered are generally thoughtful people who realize the world is complex. Trouble makers such as myself and Che Bob tried to introduce an anti-capitalist critique but most people wanted to follow New York's lead and single out Corporations.

This is problematic and no doubt a great relief to the ruling class that heard Zizek's speech on Sunday. (Liberals were critical as well, demonstrating which side they will choose when push comes to shove). But the problem with fighting corporatism is the end game. Do you wish to re-try Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific? (county where I was born, by the way) Do you want to re-try Dartmouth College vs Woodward and go after their person-hood? Interestingly, the guy who drafted our message statement is a lawyer. Does he want to argue this before the Supremes?

Or do you just want go after Limited Liability or Charters? I think this strategy is a dead-ender for movement building and that in fact, corporations are a straw man. My local barbershop is a corporation. They sell stock and retain the right to transfer ownership. You can become a corporation yourself for fifty bucks in most states. Do we just hate big corporations? How big? Just rich ones? How rich? This focus on corporations is the result of populists like Bill Moyers or Thom Hartman who believe capitalism can be reformed.

16,000 children will die today of causes related to malnutrition while tons of food is wasted or lies rotting. This is not because of corporations but because of capitalism.

I suggest instead we think of Wall Street or Corporations as symbolic of capitalisms propensity to hollow out democracy. It's not the money junkies themselves, but the structure they represent. Now is the time to re-claim the imagination the system has crushed (primarily speaking to progressives), to give up on the obscene Profit System and, to quote Zizek again, not be "afraid to want what you desire."

If Herman Cain calls you anti-American for being anti-capitalist all the better. He is a bigger moron than Rudy and Trump and Palin put together!

Occupy Missoula

2011-10-08T21:44:00.000-07:00

A damn fine showing in Zootown today and I didn't have to organize it! It actually grew pretty much organically, and was extremely diverse in terms of sex, age and class anyway. Beak was there representing the Rudy League though his speech about Chavez fell a little flat. In fact it cleared the park, so the folks took to the streets on an un-permitted march to the courthouse which they shared with a lovely wedding that was in progress. Probably the first wedding to be occupied in this nascent movement. The black-block kids and my wife insisted on blocking traffic but the cops stayed out of the way."Whose streets?, our streets! They chanted but I always feel a little sorry for the people with an appointment stuck in traffic. Robbies impassioned trashing of Obama and the Democrats was a highlight. Che Bob made it on local TV.

We organized the basic committees to maintain the little encampment and study groups so folks could discuss and learn about the different political philosophies floating about. Beak and an Alex Jones fan talked about patriotism to the homeless folks who use the park to drink and hang out.There is a large anti-capitalist sentiment and it will be interesting to see what sort of synthesis arises with the reform minded folks.

In fact the most profound analysis came from a guy who shouted out the window of his truck as he drove by: "There's winners and there's losers! That's capitalism." This is the strict social Darwinian approach which transfers the notion of financial success, through effort, skill, talent or sheer luck, to a judgement by Nature onto your very character. The man's truck allowed him a sense of superiority over those without, who he assumed were simply whining about their lot in life.He may actually have a disproportionate share of power (along with his wealth) or just be a red-neck whose mind had been colonized, either way he was alienated from his fellow citizens.This hierarchy rends the social fabric at all levels and I couldn't have asked for a more perfect display to answer the oft asked question: "What do you people want changed?"

This same kind of activity broke out in almost fifty cities today and the mainstream media still can't come up with a narrative.(unlike the right-wing press which has gone with the "unwashed" meme) If we aren't a Party running in an Election it is beyond their ken.

Workers Unite?

2011-10-05T08:06:00.000-07:00

It's great to see SEIU down at Zucotti Square but I hope someone asks them about California health care workers. Because their union is actively scabbing and trying to break a courageous strike. It is time for honest critique of EVERYTHING, just get it out in the open and talk.

That includes the Teamster support for the Keystone XL pipeline. Yes, it means quite a few good jobs (though not the 60,000 they are claiming) at a time of high unemployment. But the fact is Workers can always be blackmailed by a Capital strike and at some point they need to realize they have been on the wrong, accommodating, compromising track. Labor either grows a pair RIGHT NOW, or becomes totally irrelevant. It is a line in the sand and any hope for a BLUE GREEN COALITION depends on a radically new approach.

I hope somewhere in all these encampments and general assemblies people are talking about the difficult, essential element of class. What is it? How can it help/hinder a mobilization? What role does it have going forward? One thing the Obama presidency has excelled at is deferring that discussion but we need to have it out, right now,

As for discursive space more generally, I'm starting to feel more optimistic it could exist. There is a yearning that won't die. Look at the progression from the manufactured Health Care Town Halls to the Tea Party Rallys To John Stewart's Rally for Sanity to Madison Wis. to these General Assemblies springing up. People are finally getting sick of having their views "represented" by nit wit candidates or politicians or pundits. They want a voice. And while it won't be very articulate at first, or even coherent, we'll just have to be as patient as we can.

Wall Street : Symbol or Substance?

2011-10-02T04:56:00.000-07:00

Like it or not, every act of insurrection comes down to it's demands. Whether it is a protest or a strike or an all out revolt, unless some objective can emerge from the group dynamic/consensus at some point,it will only have been an exercise.

The objective need not be realized immediately, but I think it is important that it be articulated and circulated. This is why theatre is so powerful, it inserts itself by insisting that all imagination isn't dead (Yet), that symbols and metaphors still contain a power beyond the pull of the dominant ideology and institutions.

So is #Occupy Wall Street more important as theatre with symbolic objectives or a protest with concrete demands? If we look back at the occupation of the Republic Window and Door factory in Chicago or the occupation of the State capitol in Wisconsin, we see this modern dilemma play out.In both instances radical(symbolic) objectives such as: Workers Should Own the Means of Production were reduced in favor of objective demands: Workers Deserve Their Back Pay. A small victory was declared when the demand was (easily) met and the momentum for structural change was dissipated. In Wisconsin the more radical demands such as : Not Our Austerity or Fire the Bosses were reduced to recall elections and support for the Democratic Party. Again the momentum for deep, imaginative restructuring was dissipated and channelled into a form the capitalist state could easily manage.

The General Assembly in Liberty Park is faced with this decision as the weather gets colder and the media moves on to the Next Big Thing. Their Demand, which will probably boil down to: Tax The Rich, will be duly negotiated and considered by The Powers That Be. (who have already decided to do that anyway in order to save capitalism from itself again). Those Powers will be thinking "or else what?" but they will mostly be discreet enough not to say it out loud, instead congratulating the " sometimes messy democratic process".

But if there was no "demand", but instead a symbolic, theatrical, agreed upon suggestion or proposal: End the Capitalist System, it would actually give Wall Street and every other street (Main Street, K Street, Madison Ave., Pennsylvania Ave. etc) something to worry about. The Occupiers could say: Screw Your Reforms and call the action off on their own terms, vowing to show up again unannounced and better organized at some later (warmer) date.By saying : Wall Street is just a symbol of a whole brutal system which we want dismantled, they lose none of the energy and leave everybody hanging, suspended in a tension which Power hates more than anything.

Messaging

2011-09-28T09:39:00.000-07:00

The media is totally unsure how to deal with the Occupy Wall Street protests. Because their coverage of the Arab uprisings was so lame (al Jazeera just killed them) the mainstream media is trying to come up with a narrative that's flexible. CNN showed a sign that says : Capitalism Doesn't Work and then interviewed a gal using a computer with that condescending question about complicity with"the system". ( as if anti-capitalists have to live in caves and eat grubs to be "consistent".)

Even Amy Goodman, in good liberal fashion, decides to use Michael Moore as a spokesman for the action and he is happy to grab some limelight. (he is pretty clueless and inarticulate in my opinion). Chris Hedges did a better job in terms of critique but, like Tahrir Square or the Indignatos of Spain or the Israeli youth camped out now, there IS a problem with analysis and demands. Wisconsin was also a perfect example of organic, spontaneous organizing that failed to light a spark.

I understand the notion of "not taking power" but like a dog chasing a car there is the problem of what happens when you catch it? I know there are great discussions going on all the time in all these places and I'm sure lots of it centers around the question of reform or revolution? Ad Busters does a pretty good job articulating anti-capitalism and at some point someone will have to grab a reporters microphone and lay it out all nice and clear for them.

There was a great BBC interview of a trader explaining the way Markets work and his lack of moral-ethical concern for losers seemed to upset folks so much they accused him of being a Yes Man. In other words, no one knows what is real now (thanks in part to their work) which is a new phase of the Spectacle. Is Rick Perry a Yes Man? Thom Friedman? Flat Earth Boy was on Tavis Smiley saying Indeed He Was a Capitalist but "government needs to tame the brutal nature" of capitalism".

Meanwhile the stock market rockets up and down and Bibi makes Obama do another clown dance.Never a dull moment.

Election Time

2011-09-25T20:40:00.000-07:00

It always comes down to this for Democrats. Bitch and moan, hold your nose and choose the lesser of two evils so you can get back to bitching and moaning. Like a prostate exam, it only takes a few minutes. There's a great piece in Harpers on Mormon economics. They hate taxes but tithe 10%.

I just realized that Rick Perry is Fes Parker, the actor who portrayed Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, who I think died at the Alamo! Like Ronald Reagan, the imagery is far more important than any words they might try to speak.
So the liberal/progressives start the painful rationalizing and writing checks to campaigns because, hey, what else is there? Here is a perfect example from a thread over at Truthout:

YES, CROOKS AND LIARS in both parties....But Given the choices I'll stick with the few progressives in the democratic party. Is there any differance between the two? YES!!!

Take the new Trade Agreements with Columbia,Panama and Korea, (ALL BAD in my opinion) BUT with the Dems, At least the workers who will lose their jobs due to these treaties will be compensated!!!!! this may not be enough of a differance for ELITISTS... but If I am one of those workers it's better than NOTHING!
Which is what the Republicans will give them!

The Workers Will Be Compensated. Despite the ELITISTS. Holy shit.All too typical. California nurses could show this person the meaning of dignity, defying the scabrous SEIU and going on strike in a double-dip. Speaking of scabrous, did Netanhyahooo really think anybody was impressed with his punk ass performance the other night? He can clear a house quicker than Don Rickles. I fear Obama has a boot-licking fetish and Putin owns many pairs.

And I'm actually impressed by these freshman House conservatives, drawing yet another line in the sand and fuck the markets. So wonderfully naive, they believe they were elected to represent their constituents and, by God, that's what they are doing. What radicals could never achieve, exposing the State/Capital nexus and undermining the global system, they are doing unintentionally with that born-again fervor. It's a beautiful thing. I don't have to do a thing but watch them demonstrate that capitalism doesn't work. Compare that principled stand (pay as you go) with these pussy corporate liberals who just write bad checks.

Jews Jump Ship

2011-09-21T07:17:00.000-07:00

It being nearly impossible to out-bootlick Republicans, the Democrats are watching yet another constituency bail. Netanyahu awards a Cheshire smile to his fawning Millenialist brethren and the world squirms. Will Turkey still be our friend?

Meanwhile Troy Davis is murdered by "Democracy"; after all, "polls show a majority of Americans support the death penalty". The People have spoken! But if the People are blindfolded, how would they know if Lady Justice has removed hers?

The other "peace talks" (Afghanistan) run into a bit of a snag as the negotiators are blown to bits and Hillary turns to Bill for advice. Another typhoon roils Japan's Central Bank and Markets remain jittery. Is Italy Too Big To Fail?

And Sarah Palin comes out swinging against "corporate capitalism", joining John Nichols and progressives everywhere. What they want is a return to good old Small Business Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise like back when Father Knew Best and Opie was not a movie director. You know, the good old days! Would the Jewish lobby support a return to small banks and the gold standard?

Stay tuned for answers to these and even weirder questions.

Dinner With the Gov

2011-09-11T17:26:00.000-07:00

I had occasion to break bread with Montana's governor Brian Schweitzer last Thursday night. He and his entourage visited the lodge I work at for a day of fishing and so I got to see the supreme politician at work, up close and personal. I was introduced to him during "happy hour" as a member of the IWW- which took him aback- but only momentarily. It gave him the perfect opening to expound on his full fledged support of the public service union and how he provided them with "a much needed win". I just nodded in exchange for prime rib.

At dinner the conversation turned to the nations debt woes and the military-industrial complex which compels us into unnecessary and expensive war. All good, liberal sentiments expressed with moral rectitude. I didn't ask the Gov what Americans would do for employment without wars or the threat of wars. I wasn't invited to ask hard questions. Talk ranged from dog breeds to forest fires, the ineptitude of Republicans and arguments against Herman Cain's flat tax.

We never got to the environment, unfortunately, because Brian (I'm now on a first name basis) is the King of Coal and supports the XL pipeline carrying Tar sands Crude through Montana. Butte is a mining town and the locals, especially the unions, love their resource extraction. Local Democratic politicians have to love it too.

I did admire the Gov's courageous stance in favor of single-payer health care and he is a charismatic and charming actor. Larger than life and totally full of himself, he could crush Ron Paul or Romney or Palin in a debate. Watch for him in 2016. Maybe I can be the Presidential Fishing guide!

County Fair

2011-09-05T06:19:00.000-07:00

County fair, county fair, country feelin in the air, lot's of guns everywhere!

You can't help but notice the different emphasis. Go to the Democrats booth and they have cookies and lemonaid. Go to the Republican's and you are looking at The Judge (a stainless over under pistol with 410 shotgun on top, 45 cal under) and a Strategic Defence Weapon with laser, strobe, ten shot clip and other great attachments. A somewhat more muscular approach. You could win them both in the raffle ( Please God, let me win! RIP Kurt Vonnegut again)

So which Party is best suited to protect us from the Rabble pouring across our borders, the Terrorists from afar who hate our Freedom or the Commies within trying to undermine our Way Of Life? I did another shift at the Human Rights booth and debated the Constitutional scholar wanna-bees. Typical exchange. scholar: "I want freedom from ,not freedom to."
me: " Should citizens be free from want?"
scholar: walks away.

Or this one. scholar : "Do we have to equalize people down if they are special?"
me: "Equanimity means equal political power within democratic society. We are all equivalent in the social contract."
scholar : walks away.

The funny thing is ,I'm not crazy about "human rights" discourse and believe it will "wither away" along with the authoritarian State when we get rid of Market exchange.My colleagues are too busy fighting the Right Wing to pay attention to any of that.

There is a revival of Hate Jane Fonda bumper stickers around lately. Talk about a spectacular case of celebrity demonization! Another colleague, who claims he was an elite sniper in Nam, also claims he "came within twenty minutes of getting a shot at Jane Fonda." He says there was bounty out on her head and that he shot Viet Cong generals in the head at a thousand yards. Thing is, he will tell anyone about his near-murder knowing they will approve and be duly impressed.

The local Labor Council had a march on Friday they called A-Wake for the Working Class. The double entendre acknowledges the theoretical tension over class ( a good and necessary thing) but also a positive message of consciousness raising as the key to worker power.( I remain sceptical). The problem is one I have gone over before; the workers, now starved for jobs, are eager to build the Tar sands pipeline which will kill their children.(indirectly). With Capital on strike, the workers become scabs, crossing any and all picket lines in solidarity with their masters. Wisconsin was the perfect example. Trumpka says they will not "automatically give money to Democrats." They won't put it toward radical change either.

Well Intentioned Not Enough

2011-09-01T07:01:00.000-07:00

It's not just McKibben I come down on, all these progressives are leading us to a dead end at a time when we can't afford to be sidetracked. Tony Judt,(whose son Daniel has picked up the mantle) David Corn, Bill Moyers, our own George Oshenski, etc.etc..they all cling to the dream of capitalist social democracy despite all the evidence pointing towards it's demise.

This willfull blindness was perfectly demonstrated by Robert Kennedy Jr.in an interview with Tavis Smiley. As good a liberal environmentalist as there is, he is currently focused on mountain top removal coal extraction in W.Virginia and easily trotted out the familiar ills: regulatory capture, corruption, lack of transparency,yada yada. Big Bad Corporations, Big Bad Supreme Court, Big Bad Wall Street and lobbyists and... you know the litany; "corporations take over democracy/government" (as if they were the same thing!) "everything becomes a commodity", "media dependent on corporate money", wealth goes straight to Wall Street".

Much of this standard liberal protest is built around a revised historical account where a Trust Busting Teddy Roosevelt along with "courageous journalists" took our country back from the Trusts and Franklin created a new spirit of solidarity with the New Deal. Whatever. Even if that did happen it ain't happenin now folks.

Kennedy saves the ultimate cop-out for the end when he explains how " the domination of business by government is communism, the domination of government by business is fascism...our job is to walk that narrow trail in between and hold big business at bay with the right hand and big government at bay with the left..this narrow middle trail which is free market capitalism and democracy."

This is why these "progressives" are so dangerous, in their way more so than ideologues of the right. When push comes to shove they will side with the Market, Private Property, inherited wealth and the Constitution which guarantees all that "Freedom".

I, on the other had, swore allegiance over and over again to a "Republic.. with Liberty and Justice for all." Ain't seen that one yet and until we face the impossibility of democracy under late capitalism we won't.

Stepping It Up A Notch

2011-08-28T20:09:00.000-07:00

I have been a critic of Bill Mc Kibben and the timid approach of 350.org but with the DC protests and civil disobedience I think they are finally understanding the necessity of militancy and direct action more generally. This may lead to the critical radicalization of analysis and tactics which the "environmental movement" has been avoiding for far too long. The reason I pick on Bill is he actually came here to little old Hamilton Montana a few years back and he seems like the quintessential "progressive" environmentalist. If someone like him could be turned....

As usual, the enormous problem of the Tar Sands development has been confronted too late, after the 120 billion of private investment has gone into it. This means corporate interests and the governments which serve them are prepared to use lethal force to protect this outlay. Arresting a few protesters is child's play and the publicity will be easy to handle. What is crucial is the next step. The media/State complex can easily convince ideologues like Pagan that this is Commie Hippies Against American Jobs. The unions will join in, protecting their own turf. All the "experts" will crow about America's energy independence and security and how this can be done cleanly and safely and cheaply and again, Pagan will believe every word.

But those who operate from a less fear-based world view may begin to see the Munchausen syndrome-like quality of our collective relationship with the Market system. The more it tries to destroy us the more it wants us to believe it loves us.

I expect Obama to throw these environmentalists under the bus (as he did organized labor and every other "progressive" constituency) and approve the XL Pipeline.In fact he will back away from regulating carbon in any form, fracking for natural gas, offshore drilling, our own tar sands development in Utah, etc etc.. This will present Mc Kibben, Robert Kennedy Jr., Naomi Klien and company with an interesting dilemma.

Because I also expect hurricanes to keep getting worse.Meanwhile, those here in Missoula that "Stopped the Big Haul" will celebrate as the processing equipment is shipped silently to the north.

UPDATE: I just watched McKibben on Newshour and Democracy Now. He is trapped by his need to sound "reasonable" ie accepting of market logic. And you can see in his eyes that he knows it.Hard to watch.

Fatal Contamination

2011-08-27T13:51:00.000-07:00

From Mark Kingwell's review of The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama in Harpers Aug.25

"The reduction of all fines to prices and all obligations to tax burdens (for instance the requirement that all Australians must vote) shows just how comprehensive is the transactional contamination of democracy. If citizens are really consumers, forever negotiating the shoals of tax evasion, then it is rational to game the system. Smarter players will take the contest up a level and realize that you can game the system's DOMINANT MYTHS as well as it's materialist realities. From this vantage the American Dream is the biggest long con in the history of politics...."

Fukuyama has had trouble being taken seriously since his whole "End of History" bit and support for the Iraq invasion (he should run for president!) but now he wants to try small idea scholarship by writing big, serious books. Unfortunately he fails to notice the system is a political ECONOMY.

Again Kingwell's trenchant analysis: "An untenable system like democracy under capitalism colonizes aspects of our own desire and experience to stitch together a narrative of legitimation, even as it generates numerous incentives for citizen-consumers to game the system."

True believers buy the myths and narratives lock stock and barrel ( I won't mention any names) and so are not burdened by doubt. Those of us who see the veil and hope to develop more just incentives and outcomes have to answer for desire and envy and other Freudian layers. As I have been writing lately, democracy is not the magic key to the end of history and beginning of Nirvana. I just think it would be better than this carnival.

As for Libya, this also falls into the "not a perfect world" category but it is just as pathetic to see those on the left force themselves not to be happy as it is to see those on the right back away from support because it happened on Obama's watch. Yes it is a NATO intervention, yes it saved widespread death and destruction, yes it is an incomplete revolution. Just as I said months ago.

Same with Wisconsin. The recall was a bust. All radical momentum was crushed by the Democrats and the mainstream unions. Now Verizon strike is proving the final nail in the coffin of organized labor because they cling to the same myths and narratives. Just as I warned.

Even More Spectacular, if Volatile

2011-08-14T09:26:00.000-07:00

You read it here first: There will be an eventual run-off between Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman determined by a Galaxy Wide mud wrestling match. Monster Truck rally/ cage fighting preliminary with Randy Travis and Hucka bee doing the half-time show. I've got fifty bucks on sarah.

We anxiously await the Monday opening of the NY Stock Exchange. The Markets are despondent yet weary.Is there Zoloft for Markets? What if they go on a violent rampage, like those "feral" Brits? Can markets be kettled? Stay tuned for answers to these and other questions.

I guess the unions did not get the Senate majority they desired in the Wisconsin recall effort. They aren't getting much of anything they want. You read that here first as well. Like the Markets, I am getting weary of predicting disaster but what are the choices?

Meanwhile Southern Christian Americans pray, Mid-Western Christian Americans eat and us Montanans continue to fish and drink.Having been Welcomed to the Desert of the Real, I just don't feel like I fit in anymore, as if I am waking from a dream inside a dream, or as if that peyote lasted much much longer than it was supposed to.

Demos + cracy

2011-08-07T21:13:00.000-07:00

Truth In Advertising? Or: How We marketed Away Our Democracy

In order for a democratic culture to develop and function, there must be some degree of consensus on the meaning of language or at least some process to reach that consensus. That's not to suggest that there won't always be tension, but it is necessary for there to be agreement that at the very least, shared meaning is something positive, something to be striven for. I contend that in modern society both that agreement and that process have been shattered. Whether deliberately or inadvertently, the profit system has done to language what it has done to labor and goods, abstracted it beyond mere ambiguity into the realm of amphibology.
Since the time of Plato, humans have realized the power of language and the overt efforts for control; Caesar dominus est supra grammaticam: Caesar is lord over grammar says it well. In a modern warning, George Orwell told of a Big Brother convincing the people that 'War is Peace'. As capitalism matured and the “art” of salesmanship developed customers were told snake-oil would cure everything from depression to corns and when it actually did, the art turned to science, the conscious pitch converted to the subliminal or subconscious suggestion and a dangerous split occurred. Now a soft drink became The Real Thing; the lie became purposefully obvious and “Truth in Advertising” now came surrounded by scare quotes. Everything was done with a wink and a nod, the ironic twist and an acknowledged indeterminancy. What could that even mean; Real Thing? We knew consciously we would not be surrounded by beautiful friends simply by purchasing that fast car and yet... It was enough just to doubt, to think “perhaps..”
But of course the power of this form of marketing was not lost on those for whom social control was a goal. If a docile work force or gullible voters could be helpful in maintaining power, then the marketing of privitization as “liberty or of competitiveness as “freedom” was simply a matter of application. Suffrage could become Democracy. These floating signifiers could be pushed from corporate boardrooms , media outlets and the mouths of politicians like so many balloons; sent to drift about the now poisoned atmosphere, to grab new meaning like hydrogen molecules grab oxygen.

With each word now abstracted, ironic or thoroughly polysemic, for instance, “equality” now in quotes and having a different meaning for each person, discourse could only be circular. All debate would now talk past itself. Politics itself became muffled abstractions in a roomful of gauze. Talking Heads pronounce the latest Talking Points but they only exist till that channel is switched where they twitter into cyberspace and are absorbed along with deoderant commercials and tabloid “news”.
It is within this aporia, these Strawberry Fields, that power finds the perfect vacuum,that de-politicization is veiled and the slowest, subtlest exploitation can proceed under the aegis of liberal democratic capitalism. With the worker now an “associate”, he/she gladly works overtime for free. She picks her “representative” as she would her toothpaste, based on the best commercials, the “feelings” he is able to produce.

Spare A Dime Time

2011-08-05T08:12:00.000-07:00

I wondered why my client kept looking at his Blackberry yesterday. Of course, we are being assured, the run to cash and Treasuries is "not another Lehman type sell off" but when the Gods, I mean the Markets, get angry, there is no telling where they will direct their scorn.

Conservatives call for austerity, liberals call for stimulating consumption, average people know it's just another one of capitalisms cyclical smack downs and that they are in for a world of hurt. Tighten the belt, cut back wherever we can, try to get through it once again. It is how we have been trained. After all, people don't have any control over their own destinies- they are subjected to the whims of forces larger than themselves. Normally you might call that tyranny but we call it democracy, even freedom! As Jacques Ranciere puts it: "The political struggle is also the struggle for the appropriation of words" but I fear Jacques fails to comprehend the degree of de-politicization which has already occurred.

And what if this is more than just another cyclical smack down? This is the dilemma for the radical, seeing the trend beyond the Event and presenting a reasoned analysis. CNN calls it "volatility" but I believe we are witnessing a capitalist strike. America's largest industries have 1.5 trillion dollars ( Canada's GDP) "under the mattress" but they are not going to invest until their demands are met. That is called power. They want the end of unionism. regulation, global justice or environmental activism, that is, any limits to their profit making ability.

I suspect a few of those capitalists, those with some vision, are starting to see the structural limits over which even they have no control. In the short run they have to decide whether to stick with neoliberalism and try to manage the social unrest. But the longer term is much, much fuzzier.

Debt-Cieling Crisis Update

2011-07-31T16:02:00.000-07:00

This just in: Charlie Sheen, Mad Money's Jim Cramer and Bruce Springsteen have stepped in at the last moment to broker a deal and avert a global financial crisis! Thank you Loord! Just when it seemed the full faith and credit of the United States (of America) was in question, when many were beginning to think our political process was "dysfunctional", order and common sense have returned and we can all rest easier knowing...something...or nothing...whatever.

The details of the deal ( Tea Party prefers the word covenant) remain sketchy at this hour but the crux of the resolution rests on having Oprah Winfrey take over as the Debt Czar, and possibly Prime Minister of Ideology, with exclusive power to sign checks, levy taxes and find out what exactly is the deeper reason so many people are troubled in our modern world.

Global financial markets, China and Bill Gates have all signed on so it appears our Democracy is safe and regular programming will not have to be diverted. Once again America has shown the world that where there is a will there is a way and it is widely expected that Greece and Spain will set up their own Debt Czars. The names of Tom Brokaw, Willie Nelson, and Sandra Day O'Conner are just a few that have been suggested.

Hey, whatever happened to the Arab Spring, anyway?

The Last Pig

2011-07-02T05:40:00.001-07:00

I hosted a dinner the other night with the ex-CEO of Carnival Cruise and an ex-executive officer of Merril Lynch. The conversation turned to gold, it's history and current use/exchange value. The arcane debates about currency and inflation seem circular and abstract but what intrigued me was when Carnival noted that he owned a great deal of gold as a hedge against catastrophic collapse.
His grandparents had got their way out of Poland during the war using gold and he thought that if/when worse came to worse, his gold would help him survive as well. Because it is so shiny he could trade it to me for some gasoline and I could then trade it for some apples.

Then he started talking about Italian debt as the next shoe about to drop. Merrill-Lynch looked around the table and said "We're all capitalists here." ( he doesn't know anything about my politics) "The sooner we get it over with the better."

I assume he was talking about the "creative destruction" which must occur eventually to clear out the toxic debt. The capitalists appeared tired of dragging this thing out, massaging numbers, bribing governments and tear-gassing people. It was time to be done with it. Because capitalism works, it's just a bit brutal. Those at the table will be hurt in terms of luxury consumption certainly. They may even have to break out the gold reserves. But it did not shake their faith in the system any more than a tornado turns a Christian against God.

It is unclear to me whether the European masses are ready to bring it all down or how many Tea Party folks on this side of the pond are ready. But all this brinkmanship is certainly a sign of things to come. And Italian debt is being discussed more and more in the mainstream news. Break out the ducats and Krugerrands.

Poor Young Thing

2011-06-29T05:52:00.000-07:00

A young gal who works for the Montana Human Rights Network came to our small town last night to see if there was support for more health care reform. She personally would like single-payer ( as would most of the twenty or so people who showed up) but thinks the best bet is to use the Super-waiver to set up a state system like Vermont's. She had lobbied for "progressive values" in the last legislative session and the scars and bruises were still visible. But she still had hope.

This young gal was incredibly bright and I wonder what she thought of us (average age in the audience was sixty) , what she thinks of her own generation, what she thinks of the world in general as she drives back to Helena, looking at the people in their cars.

Montana is not Vermont. We have a governor (for another year) who has expressed support for single payer but the population is generally willing to throw themselves at any corporation which promises jobs(especially insurance) and any demagogue who promises "freedom" from Big Government. In the small crowd were two people who tried to run for state office and were defeated by right-wing knuckleheads spouting the boilerplate lines about taxes and wolves and guns.

It is hard to see the way the whole Obama-care battle sapped the optimism out of the progressives, young and old, yet left them still clinging to their threadbare "democratic capitalism" like a leaky raft on the storm-tossed seas. Their old friend Max Baucus throws them bottles of salt water. They still believe health care is a "right" but can't make the link to food and housing and energy and education and everything else that is theirs to control if they had the courage to step up and take it.

They believe "better candidates" will win in the next election, they believe "common sense" will eventually prevail, they believe the uprising in Wisconsin signalled some profound change and that the Vermont model will provide a light through the tunnel. They believe in the Nation magazine and that capitalism can be reformed. I sat the whole two hours without saying a word.

Turn ,Turn , Turn

2011-06-10T06:54:00.000-07:00

Tis the season to get back on the river and away from this screen ( mostly). It's all about the money although being back on the Big Hole is it's own reward. I had a great winter, got some good work done on the books, but now it is time to get out under that Montana sun and greet the Montana mosquitos.

I have once again enjoyed many exchanges on this blog. Ducky and Renegade, Lichanos and the occasional Angry Anarchist, thanks for all the input, throughput, and your own output. Pagan, Beak and the posse, I'm not sure what you get out of this but whatever.

I just got back from a three week road trip to California, Oregon and a little Washington, working along one of the most spectacular coastlines in the world. Do I love my country? asks a local interlocutor. Sure. Who couldn't love what we got going on. Stupid question for stupid people.

I saw a lot of old chums, folks I shared time with forty, even fifty years ago. One who was in my kindergarten class! They have aged gracefully and found their own unique ways through the years but, in what I consider a sign of the times, they ( with some exceptions) seemed determinedly non-political. This is the post- post-modern vocation, find personal happiness, let the rest slide.

Not this boy, however. The Zootown Zapatistas will soon be publishing it's first issue of the new zine and it should be provocative. Please stay tuned.

Power Corrupts

2011-05-17T06:45:00.000-07:00

I won't rush to judgement on the IMF chief's legal guilt or innocence ( charged with sexual assault) but for the "socialist" to be staying in a $3000 dollar a night room requires a disconnect at the practical level. In an article by Steve Clemons (hat tip to Phronesisaical) we learn the Frenchman is respected because he has a genuine concern for "the people". Clemons leaves us with this:

"..the meaning of Straus-Kahn- is vital to a world that is still trying to sort out what form of capitalism it can live with."

There is currently all kinds of emphasis on "form", neoliberal,late,state,monopoly,conscious, green.etc.. The result of all this hyper-particularizing is obfuscation and is based on the false belief capitalisms contradictions can be isolated and neutralized. These are just different blends of tobacco, some light, some mentholated,filtered, smokeless.. "Socialist capitalism" is a Virginia Slim while Greenspans is a Camel straight but they are both poison.

Since everybody likes talking about candidates, it turns out the Newt is Not Nutty Enough. Newt told Meet The Press he supports mandatory health insurance and that Ryan's plan is "social engineering from the Right". How times have changed. Next thing you know he will be saying humans affect the climate! The Old Flamethrower knows he cannot possibly outflank on the Right any more, can't out-Bachman Bachman. Let's see where he comes down on tort reform, see if that 7th Amendment means anything to our Tea party Patriots.

It started when I picked up an eight page magazine published locally called The First Edition. The cover article was titled Class Warfare and described the way "Democrats use class warfare as a tool to hold onto political power." Written by the publisher/editor, a staunch Tea Party conservative who interjects himself forcefully into local politics, the articles logic devolves after that opening salvo but I still felt compelled to write a letter to the editor to covey my own critique of the Democrats from the far left. It started an interesting exchange.

The publisher phoned me upon receipt of my letter to ask "what is a libertarian socialist?" and after a long, civil chat, he sent me a three page reply and some further questions. The first one was: "Are you saying that private property is antithetical to democracy?" He then wonders where I got the idea that "upward mobility in America is mostly a myth." He then wanted to know if I am "under the impression that everyone should have the same amount of wealth?"

The fact is, class warfare as both a term and a program have pretty much been emptied of meaning. To the extend Democrats or progressives do bring it up, it is distorted into a Common Man vs The Banksters sort of narrative or The Workers vs The Bad Politicians as in Wisconsin recently. For some it becomes a way to describe vast inequities in wealth and income or to frame this whole Pay Your Share of Taxes movement. Some speak of the Ruling Class, some speak of the Owning Class. Nobody really calls themself a prole any more.

Identity is tricky and simple subjectivization is a thing of the past. Nobody even admits to being a worker and all these vague categorizations and groupings only serve to confuse the basic antagonism into oblivion. But this doesn't mean basic exploitation has suddenly vanished.

Clown King

2011-05-14T06:55:00.000-07:00

"Europe itself would do well not to be complacent about the Little Mussolini of Arcore. For many years now, it has focused on his cabaret-style behaviour at international summits, on the ridiculousness of his hair transplants and facelifts, on the wishful boasting of a third-rate Casanova, on the banality and vulgarity of his jokes. Since the personage is not serious, Europe thought it did not have to take seriously the democratic destruction being accomplished by "the clown of Europe"..But when a farcical character can amass enormous power.., the prank has become a calamity."

Paulo Flores d'Arcais' description of Berlusconi reminds me that the The Donald here in the US is part of a wider trend. Americans are perhaps to be congratulated for having largely rejected Trump but perhaps it was just circumstances. If Donald owned the kind of media Berlusconi controlled, if he was Murdoch-Meets-Koch Brothers for instance, perhaps we too would be as far down the rabbit hole as Italy. Of course the Catholic church has always played an important role in distorting Italian "democratic politics" as such, but I think capitalist corruption, in both it's particular and more general sense, is also a culprit.

As Flores points out: "Berlusconi is the paladin only of a shadow-freedom, in which only those with the most have the right to protection. The only freedom Berlusconi knows is that of the animal spirits of unregulated capitalism: a cannibal freedom, homo homini lupus.I

Though Flores uses the term "little Mussolini" he is careful not to call Berlusconi truly fascist ( supplanted armed gangs with clients) and I think what we see here in the US, sometimes labeled fascist, only uses some of the stylistic flourishes. It could certainly devolve in that direction as authoritarian hardness/meanness becomes the post-ironic signature for the media-entranced audience. Our own Evangelical tradition and nativist tendencies play into this as well.

Most of all, I am dreading the necrotic fascination of the up-coming election season, like watching a plane crash into a high-rise over and over. Like watching Rodney King being clubbed. Destruction porn. So hard to turn away, so hard to watch.Banality and vulgarity sells, what can you say?

On The Res

2011-05-08T06:46:00.000-07:00

A group of us white folk went up to the Flathead reservation yesterday to see a film called Idaho's Forgotten War and to listen to old Russell Means give a talk about "what is next for Indian activism". The so-called war occurred in the 1970s when a small band of Kootenai indians who had not signed the Hellgate Treaty found themselves starving in northern Idaho ( Means called it genocide) and made some demands on the US government by officially declaring war. They specified it was non-violent "war" to be fought with "pens and paper". After a giant over-reaction by Idaho State troopers, the Big White Father ended up giving the band a casino and a little land to build a tribal headquarters.They have grown from 67 to 140 or so.

Russell Means described the woman elders behind the movement (who were there being honored) as greater heroes than Ghandi, Mandela or MLKing. In fact everything he said was hyperbole delivered in over-dramatic style. In my view, Means mostly rambled incoherently about all the same old themes. His only advice about the future of Indian Activism was that young braves should become responsible fathers if they get women pregnant, sort of the Bill Cosby approach.And that language/culture must be preserved.

Interestingly, all of the liberal/leftists I went up there with thought he was nothing short of brilliant, mesmerized,in my view, by the persona and celebrity. If he still has a radical critique he didn't share it with that crowd but he did sell a lot of autobiographies about his AIM glory days. He glorified Evo Morales as well, obviously unaware of his administrations conflict with indigenous people over natural resource extraction.

The question which never was asked, much less answered, is: How does an American Indian movement( if there is such a thing) fit into a global struggle by indigenous peoples? What destructive practices are they resisting and how? And then somebody needs to ask: How does that indigenous resistance here, in Mexico and Latin America, in Hawaii and Australia and Canada, anywhere, fit into the even broader struggle for human liberation?

Environment

2011-05-07T08:14:00.000-07:00

It is dawning on most environmentalists that what would appear logically to be a high priority (maintaining life support systems) has in fact dropped to a third or fourth level crisis. This is George Monbiot facing his own angst about the subject:

"All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order."

This no doubt stems from a post-BP-oil-spill recognition that just as no birth certificate or picture of bin Laden is Real, no environmental crisis is Real either. The heart of "magical thinking" is the suspension of reality. Plus, Monbiot had high hopes nuclear power was going to help humanity buy time (nice phrase,that) till reason was restored. After Fukishima he has been in a funk. As Bill Mc Kibben and most thinking people should be.

The magical thinking he refers to is the radical back-to-the-land simplicity of certain primitivists but I think Mr. Mainstream Guru David Korten fits this bill as well:

"Like the biosphere, the living economies we seek will self-organize within a framework of market rules."

It appears even The Noam has fallen under the spell of "market rules", as demonstrated by this strange piece of historical interpretation:

"..throughout the whole period of very rapid and pretty egalitarian growth of the next couple of decades (50's and 60s) there were no financial crises because the regulatory mechanisms interfered with the market."

He means international mechanisms like Bretton-Woods as well as national structures like banking regulation but some degree of historicism would be a good thing here. This was a unique time and those same conditions no longer exist. The same prescriptions no longer work. Re-regulation will not save us now, even if some global consensus of elites could be resurrected. Davos shows us that now there is a final race on for the last energy reserves, no matter how costly or damaging they are. They have internalized Thatchers famous quote and retroactively made it true: There is no alternative.

Ding Dong

2011-05-02T22:11:00.000-07:00

Obama finally gets the news cycle of his dreams, calling The Donald and fellow birthers clowns, being a good Big Brother in the southern states whacked by tornadoes and now putting a bullet through bin Ladens head ( overshadowing the nasty bombing of Gaddafi's compound). Pretty good week (and the Dow is up again).

I'm glad the fucker is dead but not as glad as the revellers in Times Square! Wow, those folks (mostly college age according to reports) have been traumatized! If the shooter of Osama is halfway articulate and/or good looking he will soon have his own talk show or run for President, easily crushing Sarah who can only kill defenceless moose. I can only imagine the number of youngsters applying for the Navy Seals today. America needs heroes like our stomachs need bacteria.

Canada has just confirmed what I and others have been saying: Liberalism doesn't just smell bad, it is dead. (Apologies to Frank Zappa RIP) Right wing hegemony continues it's march, guided by fear and anti-intellectualism but ideological battle lines are at least clearer now and I hope it is a model for the USA. Let's have it out. Good riddance to the mealy mouthed, accommodating liberals who stood for Nothing.

In most discussions over social transformation someone will suggest that what is REALLY needed is spiritual change.I touched on this in the last post but have been thinking more about how problematic the whole discourse of Spirit is. At it's worst, the New Age approach suggests an evolutionary hierarchy wherein the Enlightened Ones enforce a unity around their privileged insight about Man's Relationship to Nature and Man's Fall into Civilization. These discourses have just as much totalitarian potential as the Nietzschean if left critically unchallenged. In the same way I never liked the slogan : The Ruling Class and the Working Class Have Nothing In Common , I don't like the slogan; Let The Spirit Guide You. They both suggest a false Unity based on a false dualism.

Far better to let the authentically political guide us. Proposals debated and decisions reached.No pretensions about Unity over the Good and Beautiful.

End of Angst

2011-04-28T11:43:00.001-07:00

Remember when people used to worry about the meaning of life? That whole Kerouac/ Herzog thing was eclipsed by the Age of Irony. We had Warhol, punk, Madonna and the travails of Real Life- such as -how to die with the most toys and win. With a wink and a nod people dismissed all things sublime, subliminal, or transubstantiated and learned to love the Simpsons and the suburbs.

Now we have entered the post Irony age where The Donald is proud to have forced up a birth certificate and in so doing tops the polls.If Jim is ironic, Dwight is post-ironic.(Office reference)
Swift Boat Veterans are post-ironic. Joe the Plumber is post-ironic. They look in the fun house mirror and don't make a joke about it, don't worry about it, they just accept exactly what they see. They make the most of being plugged in.

I think what Zizek calls cultural capitalism is post-ironic. A full page ad in Mother Jones invites us to the Lohas Forum at the St.Julien Spa in Boulder Co. which will focus on the "expansion of the $290 billion dollar Conscious Consumer marketplace" (Their capitals)
Topics include:

Conscious Capitalism
The Emerging Sheconomy
Social Entrepreneurship
Moving from Transaction to Transformation

There are pictures of really healthy people doing yoga and holding seedlings and looking at mountains. They are all smiling or seriously engaged. Because you can do good AND do well. Save the earth with every purchase.

Of course Boulder is ground zero for the whole spiritual hierarchy, the enlightened ones who are so much more special than the rest of us, but patient.( fortunately) They have come full circle to the post ironic sublime. Mostly through expensive workshops, smudge sticks, drum circles and fair trade sprouts. Hipster entrepreneurs who donate 1% of before-tax profit to Tibet are the worst counter-revolutionaries.

Ideology

2011-04-22T06:36:00.000-07:00

The basic operation of ideology is the dehistoricizing gesture of transforming an empirical obstacle into an eternal condition. For instance, the classic "because the communist ideal has devolved into totalitarianism in certain historical attempts, it is eternally and universally doomed as a project".

With this argument, the particular struggle is turned into a universal essential.To do this a number of obfuscating strategies are generally employed, especially the use of science. For instance, anthropology is enlisted to "prove" the defining characteristics of "human nature". Biology is brought into service to show genetic dispositions inherited from apes or lizard brains or cavemen.This sort of junk is bad enough ( and yes, Marx and Marxists have engaged in it) but then you get to the truly dismal science of economics with drivel like "animal spirits" and "invisible hands".

The problem with such universality is that it secretly privileges some particular content, while repressing or excluding another. Each account of the glories of entrepreneurial spirit privileges our species' competitive drive over the cooperative. Each account of moral hazard privileges a Christian "fallen", slothful Man over the innately creative, motivated being. Each account of the "rational actor" privileges capitalist logic of self-interest over the altruistic. Each account of the racial/cultural victor privileges innovation/ingenuity over raw power and savagery.

This is ideology at it's purest.

When it comes to modern production, the universalist turn is to describe it as participation in symbolic exchange (information age "conscious"capitalism bullshit) or modern "creative planning-programming" while repressing the actual, particular Third World sweatshop labor and misery. The universal "End of History" (liberal democratic capitalism) narrative obfuscates the particular,raw exploitation which is it's underbelly.

Of course universality is unavoidable as is the construction of ideology. The point is to be aware that it is a construction and develop the capability to discern its outlines. I'm not opposed to employing a little universality, such as global emancipation for instance, just as long as we keep in mind the impossible/necessary nature of the task.

Free Markets

2011-04-18T05:47:00.001-07:00

“For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand—that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive masterminding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people.”

This high minded account called I, Pencil by Leonard Reed is how elites have packaged "free market- invisible hand" ideology for gullible saps (without mentioning any names). It is in truth a theological account of how economic activity self-organizes through a mysterious and beautiful power and uses a wonderfully simplistic tautology- freedom= free people = freedom. Thinking people, on the other hand, understand that raw Power is inserted into each unmentioned crevice at every stage of the loop but if you kind of squint just right you can pretend it simply doesn't exist. And we live in a permanently squinting society chock full of saps. (one born every minute according to P. T.)

Things are deteriorating so rapidly even progressives are getting in on the act. This is John Nichols ( Nation magazine) who has been energized by Wisconsin and has written a new book titled How Socialists Built America; "America has always been and should continue to be informed by socialist ideals and a socialist critique of society."

Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, he qualifies it with: "The point here is not to defend socialism." Heavens no! He just likes those social ideals like equality and justice and solidarity.He has no intention of democratizing the economy in any radical sense. Still.

Another prominent liberal, E.J. Dionne, has just written this: "An enlightened ruling class understands that it can get richer and it's riches will be more secure if prosperity is broadly shared.." This is the Great Accommodation I have written about. He has never used the term "ruling class" before but he clearly senses the extreme nature of the historical moment as he goes on:

"The influence of the ruling class comes from it's position in the economy and it's ability to pay for the politicians campaigns" So far so good... "And I'd underscore that I am not using the term to argue for a Marxist economy."

Ohhh, dang. The liberal continues as though he reads Pagan's blog: "We need the market. We need incentives. We don't need our current levels of inequality." In other words, he is sensitive to EXTREME inequality.He just wants the rich to be more responsible and what could be more responsible, reasonable, rational than that? He just wants to rebuild the middle class and that's why he gets the Big Bucks. Liberals can only take baby steps but you can see a shift none the less.

Hegemony and Identity

2011-04-17T07:41:00.000-07:00

In his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel, Marx presents two seemingly opposed methods for emancipation. In the first he says:

"The proletariat is coming into being in Germany only as a result of the rising industrial development."

This is the formation of a class as a historically determined, revolutionary agent.As the result of capitalist logic, this subject is formed by a "drastic dissolution of society" and humanity is emancipated. All particularity is dissolved into a universality ( representative of the community). Contrast this with a passage further on in the essay:

"On what is a partial, a merely political revolution based? On the fact that part of civil society emancipates itself and gains general domination;..For the revolution of a nation and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to coincide, for one estate to be acknowledged as the state of the whole society, all the defects of society must conversely be concentrated in another class, a particular estate must be looked upon as the notorious crime of the whole of society, so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-liberation."

Again, in the first case, all power is dissolved through a totalizing, universal effect. In the second case, no such unmediated universality can be asserted. Writing at a time when it was clear that mature capitalism was not headed in the direction of class solidification, as predicted by Marx, but instead towards increasing class complexity, Antonio Gramsci looked toward the nature of that "mediation" and theorized that any revolutionary subject would be formed through hegemonic, political construction rather than some automatic, necessary movement of history. This construction would take place in the realm of civil society and would be ideological in nature.

Lets see if we can apply this to something as concrete as our own American revolution. First we see that a "particular estate", the Crown, becomes the site where "the notorious crime of the whole of society" becomes identified. From this antagonism an identity of "American" is formed in opposition, an identity able to incorporate landed elites, tenant farmers, petite burgeois, and even some laborers. They are united in a universalizing, abstract concept of Freedom so that their individual, particular demands form a chain of equivalences. This is the moment of hegemonic articulation. It is an ideological challenge at the political level but it does not eliminate the unevenness of power in the challenging group ( the landed elites do not relinquish power) nor involve a total unity of "the people". The elites, through displacement and representation ( sign becomes signifier) are able to present their particular aims as the ones which are compatible with the actual functioning of society. The landed gentry present their own partial emancipation as the emancipation of society as a whole (and embed this in a Constitution). Hegemony.

Currently the "ruling class" (always partial and politically constructed) has hegemonic power through the spread of a dominant ideology using the "Bureaucratic State- New World Order Elites" as the site where "all the defects of society" reside. As the guardians of private property, free markets, free will (Freedom), particular sectors ( workers, small businessmen, liberals, farmers, etc..) are temporarily (and partially) universalized into a hegemonic historical bloc. Of course the bloc is unravelling as people try to understand how Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump and Mitt Romney are part of Sarah Palin's Real America (state of the whole society)(?).

To be continued...

Help or Hinderance?

2011-04-13T07:07:00.000-07:00

The largest split on the left for some time has been between democratic socialists and social democrats. This remains true today in Europe according to Robert Taylor : "The current crisis of mainstream social democracy is in part due to the surprising tenacity and advance of more radical movements to it's left." He goes on to cite the success of Die Linke, the Norwegian Socialist Left Party,Dutch socialists, Danish Socialist Peoples party and the new Anti-Capitalist Party of France, all capitalizing on the failed compromises of Labor Parties while invigorating young activists and the disenchanted. These parties must negotiate in a parliamentary environment where coalition building is key so that anti-capitalist theory is coupled with defending the gains of social democracy from it's heyday such as health, education and pension systems.

Social democrats, on the other hand, often accuse their more idealistic brethren of undermining their goals by using off-putting anti-capitalist rhetoric. An example would be Sweden's Social Democratic party which insists the future lay THROUGH capitalism rather than BEYOND it. This would be the difference between figures like Karl Kautsky,and Michael Harrington on the one hand, and Eduard Bernstein or Norman Thomas, on the other. In starker terms this might be called the Reform or Revolution split. Social democrats insist capitalism does not face a "terminal crisis", that it is more resilient than Marx foretold, and that tangible gains for workers is the real task, an accommodation based on unions and populist parties with progressive agendas. All my progressive friends say using the "C" word only hinders their organizing efforts and the "S" word is totally discredited due to historic failures.

A couple of questions come to mind. First,does the social democrats claim that "the intransigence of radicals hurts their movement" hold any water?

Second, does the current crisis change this equation in any way?

I suppose a third consideration would be the differences between the European parliamentary system and the American two-party system. A party like Die Linke could reasonably claim that it's efforts toward reform is combined with a vision of radical structural transformation. This does not open them to being crushed by the right-wing. Of course Germans, unlike Americans, are a reasonably intelligent people who understand that saying capitalism has served it's purpose and must be transcended does not translate into Stalinism.

Coming back to America,my answer to the first question is No. This is a red herring. Progressives have lost because they don't understand the nature of power and believe the political, through the state, can check the economic. They don't understand the role of hegemony in cultural reproduction of capitalist ideology. And they don't understand how globalism has changed the terrain, that Roosevelt and Keynes are not coming back, not even war brings prosperity any more.

To the second question I say Yes. This crisis is a confluence of crises,forcing a confrontation with the stark limits capitalism has till now, but can no longer, shove off into the future. The crisis of sustainability, of inequality, of meaning, and of declining profits all fly in the face of social democratic assumptions. It is actually they who stand in the way of a brighter future with their false "pragmatism".

Un-Cut

2011-04-10T07:37:00.000-07:00

There are popular movements building to fight-back against austerity programs being imposed in Europe, here in the US and elsewhere. Greece and France have had general strikes, Britain has it's student movement and union led marches,(the last one brought out an estimated half million in London) and other EU countries are seeing protests over massive budget cuts and other attacks on the public sector. Icelanders just voted down a proposal forcing them to pay for their banks failures.

The US movement has had some successful actions, occupying banks and annoying various elites with their call: We won't pay for your crisis!" This chant was started by those resisting foreclosures, resisting bank bailouts (Michael Moores movie themes) and most recently those in Madison Wis. resisting the attack on public service employees and their union.

The question is this: Is a campaign based on a negative vision enough? Saying what you WON'T do only goes so far. At some point you have to articulate what you will do. "Not paying" means, by default, allowing the economy to collapse. Capitalism has only been preserved by the use of massive public expenditure (the bail-outs and the stimulus) and withdrawing those policies now causes the markets to implode. Those who say Re-distribute the Wealth of hedge-fund Managers, (greedy banksters, etc) must realize the short term nature of this fantasy solution. That is, it can never happen because people like Pagan will defend their masters with their lives. But even if it did, Capitalists would just go on strike as they have been threatening to do, bringing down the markets, governments and global financial collapse. Don't think they wouldn't.

This means an Anti-Cuts movement must be willing to call their bluff and say bring it on. Their vision must include deep structural change, far beyond electoral or legislative solutions. This is the gulf between progressives and radicals, one side accepts the fact of a debt crisis but wants others to pay, the other side refuses to accept this basic frame, insisting it is capitalism itself that is the crisis. Those who propose any kind of Popular Front must have some way of bridging this fundamental divide. "Anti-cut" must articulate pro-economic democracy and justice, pro-ecological sustainability and re-examination of the very notions of work, citizenship and politics.

Indefatigueable or What About Jeb?

2011-04-07T08:16:00.000-07:00

Most Democrats know at a deep level that each time they write their check out to The Party they are playing along in a cynical game which, like the naked Emperor, they can't never acknowledge without destroying the whole illusion which is their fragile, precariously constructed world view.

Republicans however seem to have limitless reserves of mindless faith. Like moths to a flame they return over and over and over to get burned because empirical evidence barely registers as a distraction to them. From Nixon on, the Party of Goldwater has looked to sociopaths for leadership and Lord knows there is never any shortage in that department. Where then is Jeb, the Final Bush? If Newt can be resurrected why not Jeb? Would the Donald ever be comfortable as a vice president to a woman, say Michelle ? Will the Mormons turn off Fox News and The Party now that Glen is banished?

Meanwhile Obama is on a role, supporting nuclear energy, tar sands development AND the Colombia free trade agreement. So that Richard "Chopped Liver"Trumpka has to once again come out all blustery about the "vanishing middle class". First tragedy, then farce, then spectacle. When Che Bob broke the news to the Catholics the other night they took it fairly well, almost relieved that somebody ( not them) had finally said it. Now they have to grieve a bit and transform the cynicism into joy that they don't have to carry the lie around.

In the RSA animate presentation Language as a Window into Human Nature, we are shown the pitfalls of all our veiled language habits, the games, strategies for getting what you want without having to say what you mean.

"We are over-loaded with critiques of the horrors of capitalism..what isn't questioned is the democratic-liberal framing of the fight against such excesses.The goal is to democratize capitalism...but the institutional set up of the (bourgeois) democratic state is never questioned." Zizek

Actually, the Bolivians seem to be questioning plenty, rejecting the Morales gas hike and the development model it rode in on.

Predictions

2011-04-04T13:33:00.000-07:00

Prognostication is a tricky deal which makes this, written in 1986, pretty impressive: "Firms will locate and relocate their production on a global scale...the employment prospects in each country will therefore depend on each nation-states ability to create attractive business climate; and the ability of any governing group to secure reelection will depend in important measure on the employment situation in the period preceding the election.

In this form of accommodation the democratic structure of the state is rendered vacuous...When economies are so thoroughly integrated in the world economic system that the supply of investment in any given economy is highly responsive to small differences in the expected rate of profit, the effective range of choices my be reduced to a single set of policies, a global equivalent to Henry Ford's "You can have any color car you want , as long as it is black."

The downward pressure on wages and intensification of work in the advanced capitalist countries, would probably foster a sense of unfairness and hostility toward the rules of the game.A heightened sense of conflict..enforcement costs would mount..an upward drift in the level of unemployment...uneven development of economic progress..world monetary and trading system..are prone to recurrent crises...toward a costly interventionist and militaristic foreign policy. It might prove difficult to mobilize nationalist sentiment on the part of the victims of the global liberal model in the service of making the world safe for multinational capital flight."

Samuel Bowels and Herbert Gintis Democracy and Capitalism

Written twenty five years ago! And of course they couldn't have predicted a Tea Party-FOX-Mega-church to put in exactly that kind of service.

Oh yeah, you have to listen to this Always on watch and WC April.01 broadcast with guest Midnight Rider. Everything you ever wanted to know about oil pricing and social security from people in the know! Without a touch of irony they go for half the show about how stupid other people are! Isn't Storm Watch an Aryan group by the way?

Bachman in 2012!

Truck and Barter

2011-04-02T18:47:00.000-07:00

Adam Smith held that it is our natural proclivity to "truck and barter" but of course there is no "natural" human. Instead, the connection between material flow and social relations is reciprocal. Trading makes traders.The economy produces people as well as goods. A constitutive theory of the economy must address not only the question of who gets what and why, it must also ask who gets to become what and why. I would also argue that the market arena of self-interested and anonymous interaction reduces not only the need for compassion, but the sentiment itself.Now if I could only figure out how capitalism destroys brain cells I could develop a full explanation of Michelle Bachman.

Speaking of ignorant, I saw the old Vietnam war documentary Hearts and Minds again the other night. From General Westmoreland to the farm boys who bought his racist bullshit, there were lots of Americans in that film with nothing but empty space between their ears. What happened to their minds? Domino theory? Really? I appreciated the college football and parade sequences mixed in with the mass graves and napalmed children but had to keep laughing to keep from crying.

It has been a little scary in the "intervention" debate over at Znet to see the acolytes and sycophants who couldn't form an opinion until Noam Chomsky weighed in. Not what you would call a ton of original thinking. Zizek said the best indicator of the lefts lack of trust in itself is it's fear of crisis. Everyone is trying to put the global order BACK TOGETHER! Ask Congress for war powers! Follow the UN resolution strictly! Respect state sovereignty! They so love the RULES.

'Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent!"

Black Bloc and Michael Moore

2011-03-28T21:18:00.000-07:00

I'm so tired of these macho, neurotic punks with their ski masks and spray paint. Sure I'm sorry they were raised by freaks and have some pathetic job bussing tables at a pizza joint but hey, couldn't they just join a bowling league to find acceptance? Why smash up big demonstrations with their black booted window kicking? "Anarchist" dude, if you want to be a "street fighting man" ( and it is a man thing), just go out after your shift and smash some bank windows or paint some big A's inside a red circle. Organize your own effort. Why show up to parties where you are never invited? It's just so lame and imposes your incoherent agenda on everyone. And guess what, your spiked hair is not smashing the state, it is selling cheeseburgers. Get over yourselves.

Whew! Glad I got that out of my system. So, Stephan Colbert just asked Michael Moore if he believed in the free market and Mr. Love Story said "...uh..what free market?" In other words, he desires a free market; like Rand Paul or von Mises or Ayn Rand, he just thinks the Market is distorted . Clearing those distortions is his solution to Detroit and the nations problems. Maybe he is right. We should have that debate.I just wish he could be out front about it and say what the hell his political philosophy IS.

And my how he went on about the unions. He who stood on the capitol steps in Madison and got a half hour face time on Democracy Now pleading for "real transformation". He still praises the AFL-CIO which squashed whatever transformational energy might have existed after the massive rallies. Next he will be telling us to vote for the latest incarnation of Hopey Change in 2012. He is as cowardly as the Black Blocers who wait for massive demos to do their absurd property damage. Really sticking it to the man!

On a final note, we saw an interesting German film called The Edukators. Check it out. It totally reminded me of Marx's warning in the 3rd thesis on Feuerbach: "It is essential to educate the educator himself."

Out On A Limb

2011-03-26T08:28:00.000-07:00

I have drawn the ire of just about everyone ( except Ashcar) at ZNet with my pro-intervention in Libya stance. First real debate I've ever seen there so I think it is worth it. Even if that hadn't been my position before, it would be after reading a George Ochenski piece in our local Independent.

A sanctimonious progressive and least original thinker alive, he lashes out at Obama for the hurt he has caused his base. In the article he says POTUS (who he glorified during the election) rushed to "lead the attack". He is outraged a la Kucinich that the Pres didn't first ask Congress for the power to do so. First of all, George, Obama and the whole defense and foreign policy establishment were drug kicking and screaming into this action. Second, Ochenski now trusts the very Congress he usually excoriates as corrupt, inept, sclerotic,etc..
In other words he can't make up his mind whether he loves the process and the players or hates them. Which is it George? Does liberal democratic capitalism work politically or doesn't it? Worse, he doesn't even sense this inconsistency.

His argument is that it is simply "a matter of internal strife". "We are to believe that Gadhaffi would have decimated his own population" he says doubtfully, as if it is beyond ridiculous, or like Patrick Cockburn, he has his own sources. Of course George was gung ho for the Jasmine Revolution when it was Tunesian and Egyptian "internal strife" and it didn't cost him anything to be a democrat. And does he wish to argue Gaddafi was not now butchering people and would not have decimated Benghazi? He won't say. He just bemoans the fact we have unleashed our war machine "on another hapless nation." Hapless.

He loved Tunesia and Egypt because they were "non-violent" ( bullshit narrative he accepts) and he is a pathological pacifist. He falls easily into the tropes of THIS IS IRAQ, or THIS IS ABOUT OIL or IT COSTS TOO MUCH TO PROTECT ARABS. The problem, he says, is "there is no guarantee Gadhaffi will lose this fight." So, he only wants to commit when the outcome is guaranteed?

First, this is not Iraq. Ghaddafi was our vicious buddy till the crazy got too obvious but regional forces trumped the Western global plan.For his oil argument George quotes a Halliburton exec from 2003. The world has moved on. There are totally new and unpredictable forces at work threatening the whole order and so much of the left shrinks back instinctively.

Gee whiz they say, we just wanted modest reform. This is scary and out of control. Well guess what. This ride has just begun. Everybody wants revolution. They just don't want A revolution.

People Power?

2011-03-24T10:08:00.000-07:00

Francis Fox Piven ( the anti-Christ according to Glen Beck) and Cornel West are organizing nationwide teach-ins for Apr. 5 whose theme is Fight Back! Gatherings are organized around college campuses and there will be one here in Missoula at the university( in the middle of the work day) While I respect these two and know their politics to be fairly radical, they have chosen to present our historical moment not as a crisis of capitalism but in the more progressive frame of a crisis of the American "middle class".
This is highly problematic and I look forward to exploiting the theoretical gaps in this approach.

They are naturally trying to build on whatever momentum still exists over class confrontation in Wisconsin.It hopes to focus on greed, debt and austerity as ways to explain income inequality, wealth transference, national and personal debt- and "think through how different sectors- state workers, students, homeowners- possess different points of institutional leverage."

Everywhere there are appeals to 'social' justice, to a rights discourse centered on an "independent judiciary" or responsive government or tighter regulations.From this liberal perspective the crisis is manufactured, bank bailouts were unnecessary, austerity is a myth and through reform of existing institutions- by "leverage"- the holy middle class can be expanded once again.

It is important to locate power in our current situation and ask if this "political" approach can be effective. The dominant narrative of liberal democratic capitalism is that power lies in the citizen, the state and the consumer. The citizen has the power of the vote, the state has the legitimate power of coercion/authority and the consumer has the power of the purse (vote with dollars). The citizen can petition the government or appeal to the courts, the consumer can boycott. What made Wisconsin dangerous was that it introduced, very briefly, the concept of worker and interrupted that narrative. For over a week some citizens realized their power might lie not with "rights" or legal appeals but in their ability to withhold their labor and interrupt production, profits and the circuits of capital. There were bold calls for a general strike. Michael Moore got excited/fearful about the conditions of possibility that briefly opened. Horace Cambell writes : "The scenes from Wisconsin have shown ordinary people the power they possess when organized and they take bold action."

Equally fearful were the Democratic Party and the Big Unions, who instantly reminded the workers they were citizens, and their energy should go to petitions, legislation, courts and elections.Focus on procedural irregularities. Not strikes. Even radicals with a structural critique such as Cambell argued: "The spreading of this movement around the country pose the necessity for a POLITICAL struggle against the capitalist system." Political, not economic.

What of the argument that capitalism is fine, it is only distribution that needs addressing? That the crisis is manufactured and austerity unnecessary? That it's all about greedy banksters?
This is a poisoned pill sugar coated for liberal consumption. It is no doubt reassuring ( especially to students entering the workforce with expensive degrees) to hear that we need only tweak things within existing institutions, processes, and ideologies, that the basic underlying structure is sound. But this requires wilfully ignoring the most obvious, profound signs compounding daily now.

To be continued..

Consensus At Last

2011-03-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

It took a black president to finally unite the American people around something: They ALL disapprove of the Libyan No Fly Zone on steroids. I have spent the last three days scanning sites from extreme right to extreme left and everything in between and virtually NO ONE supports the action without reservations. Which I guess leaves it to me. Screw it. I support it.

The Left is by far more vocal in it's opposition with the Dennis Kucinich "Another Iraq" faction calling for impeachment. They worry about money, and precedent and over-reach and violence and all. The Left-left worries about imperialism and blood for oil and quagmires etc..

The Right is interestingly quiet on the subject but where I can find brave voices they worry about the Islamists or other extreme elements we might be supporting and agree on the unconstitutional nature of war declaring these days. Those shrill voices calling for regime change in Iraq are eerily silent because Qaddafi and Saleh ,brutal as they are, were partners in the War On Terror.

Me? I just like uprisings, revolts, wrenches in the gears of Imperial Planning. And this wave sweeping the Arab states is totally out of control, totally un-forseen by the elite foreign policy wonks in their Think Tanks and has crushed their whole facade of analysis and expert hegemonic intelligence. RAND, Stratfor, Council on Foreign Relations, all sitting there with their thumbs up their butts because the order is breaking down. I am not so naive to think they are all democrats revolting for liberal freedoms and franchise but I really don't care. I know to some degree at least it is have-nots against haves. It is excluded against included. Marginalized against privileged. Voiceless against Corrupt bullshitters.

I also have no illusions about the humanitarian nature of this intervention. But this is what history does, decades of cynical strategy for "stability", oil and dominance "coming home to roost" , as Rev. Wright put it. The afflicted powers are scrambling to get ahead of events and I love to watch them scramble.

Flux Deluxe

2011-03-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

A veritable tsunami of concurrent crises make it more than a little difficult to get a grip on trends unfolding in real time. Add to that the many different lenses through which the whole conglomeration can be seen and it is little wonder massive incoherence rules the day.

Start with energy. Forty year old GE reactors melting down and a government/industry cabal that no one trusts as the information source. This follows right on the heels of the largest oil spill in history, where the public also was lied to,though has probably forgotten altogether. The technologists assure us the future belongs to them, that they will deliver us from this energy impasse with "innovation". How much longer will citizens put their faith in Expert Managers? Of course we are told it is either nukes or coal/oil/ natural gas and all fossil fuel based energy does the same thing radiation does, poison life on earth. Since our global economy needs abundant energy like an addict needs dope, this is what passes for choice.

Which brings us to economy. Europe is bleeding but wants a piece of Libya so it is willing to invest. Japan was hurting before the natural disaster and will now be deeper in the red. The Arab revolutionaries are also going to want a change from 15% unemployment and the growing inequality neo-liberal reforms have brought them but what is their 'comparative advantage', as they say in development circles? Markets are incredibly jittery and volatile and one wonders what lies around the corner?

As for the US, it is difficult to understand what lens the foreign policy establishment sees Libya and the greater revolution through. Oil, War on Terror, failed state vs stabilization, democratization ( Bahrain sort of puts the lie to that one), Israel? Iran? Wolf Blitzer thought Hillary might have been traumatized by watching Rawanda unfold. Somehow doubt it. The domestic politics are certainly interesting with zero consensus on left or right over intervention and virtually nobody predicted this would unfold the way it did.

Perhaps the ones who come out looking the silliest are Chavez and Morales as they cling to their outdated Che imagery but I think this Revolution is going to be complex and involve a lot more than people wanting to be franchised. And it's interesting how all these dictators have picked up on calling their enemies "terrorists", thinking they would then be free to do whatever they want to them. They absolutely get the logic of drones and the Israeli security forces.

More Creative Destruction?

2011-03-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

We should just let the free market sort things out at the Japanese nuclear reactors. If it blows up there is a rational solution, don't buy their power. This will discipline them to build better reactors in the future! Trying to regulate them will just create inefficiencies you see.I love it when life is so simple, so rational!

As I write this, investors are "heading for the exits" as CNN puts it,( DOW down another 125) but with the Japanese Central Bank pouring liquidity into the system, they are averting a global crash. But of course, Central Banks are evil, and Japan's economy should be allowed to implode to discipline them for being in the way of the tsunami.This is all free market 101. Suffering there will create opportunity for others in perfect equilibrium!

Update: DOW down 230 The moral hazards of interfering in the market can be weighed against the real hazard of evacuating Japan. Profit to be made now in transportation! In iodine tablets!

This brings up the question of whether the 50 workers in the melting nuclear plant should have collective bargaining rights? Shouldn't supply and demand determine their salary as individuals weighing the risks privately?

In oil markets we can see the Saudi "stabilization" plan is working in Bahrain, helping jittery markets with supply worries. Who will buy Gaddafi oil if he is so willing to hurt his own people? Why, everyone. Good thing he doesn't have WMD's or Colin Powell might have to take him out in front of the U.N. Clinton is in Egypt introducing her friends from Goldman-Sachs to the Twitter revolutionists and so freedom and the free market should be able to work their magic in cheaper cotton and durable goods.Unless those rampaging Jihadi Islamists take over as Pagan predicted.

As for the leftists running NPR, they make sure to run the neutral commercials for Exxon-Mobile,General Electric, Morgan Stanley, etc etc.. at the beginning of each news report in the interest of full disclosure. Or as Zizek puts it:

"The ultimate show of power on the part of ruling ideology is to allow what appears to be powerful criticism."

You can fool some of the people most of the time.

Middle Class or No Class?

2011-03-14T09:24:00.000-07:00

The recent struggle over collective bargaining rights has harnessed a great deal of positive energy. People across the country understand this to be a defining issue of social justice and are struggling to locate it in the wider context of the global capitalist crisis. But in my opinion we only muddle the issue and prevent deeper understanding by constant reference to "building the middle class".

The current progressive/ populist/ labor conjuncture relies on a nostalgic, sentimental approach to the problems now facing workers. It harkens back to the New Deal and Roosevelt or Maynard Keynes for answers to problems fundamentally different from those of earlier times. This approach is doomed to fail because of certain crucial, false assumptions , because "progressive" leadership is wedded to the status quo, and because new voices are excluded from the dialogue.

Even if this crisis WERE the same as the depression of the 1930's, would the Left seek the same accommodation as it did then? In order to save capitalism from itself, the State intervened in a massive way with stimulus, tax policy and the extension of rights but even the turn from laissez faire to a social wage and welfare state policies did not create real economic growth. It is crucial to remember it took war-based expansion for that "middle class" to grow. At the same time this prosperous, manufacturing-industrial base grew, the energy towards building a truly democratic, just system was quashed. Suburbs spread across the landscape but the environment suffered and workers signed no-strike contracts and Taft-Hartley.

We are seeing that same type of reformist strategy now as capitalism is once more saved from itself. This time the calls for "austerity" are creating a backlash over particular budget items but workers accept the basic narrative that they are partners in a process to preserve The American Dream. Lacking a radical perspective, they are being lured by Big Labor and Old Guard Liberals away from any real fight and into yet another accommdation. Yet again they are being told to vote and legislate and regulate their way back to the "middle class" , and despite the treachery and utter corruption of the hollow charade called "politics" they seem willing to yet again follow rather than lead.

The brutal fact is; the worlds workers can not all live what we have called the "middle class" life. We must ask: is the consumption part of that American Dream sustainable? Now that Capital is global the worlds workers can no longer think of their issues in isolation. And it is time to recognize that the Social Democratic welfare state model has also failed. Now the reformed, kinder gentler capitalism of progressivism must be abandoned along with the limited struggle for mere accommodations. A broader, deeper struggle must begin, one informed by a much more radical critique.

The crisis is here. Recall petitions cannot save us now. "There is something going on here...but you don't know what it is.."

Recall or Strike?

2011-03-10T10:41:00.000-08:00

Angry protesters are back in the Madison state capital after a surprise maneuver and vote strips collective bargaining rights from public workers, despite the fact Democrats are still hiding out in Illinois. Crowds rushed in and started chanting and drumming but the slogans varied from "general strike" to " recall the Representatives". Lets consider this rather wide range of choices.

One is radical and addresses the question of power. It opens a can of worms because once workers see and feel this power it is very difficult to predict where it might lead. Some would demand transformative, structural change, wanting to get to the root of the inequity. This might include saying screw the budget, the deficit, austerity and the horse they rode in on. This is why mainstream union leaders fear it and have been happy with no-strike clauses in contracts and channeling issues of power into Spectacular "politics" such as Democrats, Obama, legislation, policy etc.

Which is what the "recall" chant is all about. More timid progressives want to work through legal process to recall elected officials. They buy into the dominant narrative that, as unfair as the economic downturn and the calls for austerity are, something first needs to be done about the budget deficit. As good workers they are willing to sacrifice more but they wish to cling to their "right" and a shred of dignity.

Michael Moore is fired up, calling for "class war" which to him means making the banksters and wealthy pay for the crisis they created. "We are not Broke" is his slogan, thinking that with enough people power the workers can reclaim a bigger share of the social product and re-create the middle class. This is as far as he can imagine going, at least at this point. I think it is totally inadequate but my job is to push, push, push.

The right-wing meanwhile, is challenging unionism with the charge it is undemocratic. Dues check off means money comes straight out of your check and often straight to the Democratic Party. A closed shop means you are forced to join the union. I agree these are undemocratic and coercive measures and that if unions ever wish to be viable again they need to demonstrate why they are valuable and trust that workers would come to them willingly. If somebody wants to "free-ride" on the members, he should be taught the error of this kind of thinking.

The Ideology of Small Business

2011-03-08T07:24:00.000-08:00

Owning your own small business is the gateway to the American dream and within the dominant narrative, the small businessman's stature is nothing less than heroic. Like becoming a farmer, anybody can join the productive property owning class with nothing more than a vision and a large loan. You will be celebrated as the backbone of our economy and a moral exemplar endowed with traits of diligence, frugality, efficiency and ambition. John Boehner will actually cry just thinking about you!

One wonders how many small businessmen or farmers were in that crowd cheering when Michael Moore called for taxing the rich? How about bailing out the banks? It's a tricky class position, described well by Samuel Bowels and Herbert Gintis in their book Democracy and Capitalism:

"The fact that most populists were themselves property owners perhaps immunized them to socialist appeals, but it made them no less radically opposed to the railroads and the banks."

They are talking about Reconstruction but the same social dynamics are still in play as we imagine each citizen can become an equal player by acquiring private property. Of course to Jefferson, looking out at a vast new continent inhabited by savages, this seemed perfectly reasonable, and his Virginia Constitution, in a socialist turn, advocated "Every person of full age..shall be entitled to an appropriation of 50 acres."

In our day and age you don't get an appropriation, you find a business for sale or come up with your own plan. You go down for a subsidized business loan and get tax incentives and capital gains breaks and some of Ayn Rands glow washes over you as you realize you are now a member. Perhaps you will not be invited to Davos right away, but you can dream. Michael Moore mocked that dream, noting it's illusory nature rather than it's inspirational qualities, and this is the tension within liberalism. He believes in the Dream, if only...banks and greedy people and heartless, corrupt politicians and corporations and bad judges and the military-industrial complex, etc, etc. would get out of the way.

Populist fervor is spreading and the incredible Naomi Klien got an hour on Democracy Now to relate this all to her Shock Doctrine. I shouldn't be such a spoiler since this is the first glimmer of revolt but I fear the stinking Democrats will co-opt all the energy.

Solidarity Forever

2011-03-06T21:42:00.000-08:00

You want to see an effective union, look no further than the US Chamber of Commerce. This is the true power of collective bargaining at work, unapologetically sumptuous banquets celebrating total victory over a fractious working class. If they have demands, they simply go on strike, hold back their capital until everyone cries uncle! That's a picket line you don't cross.

And organization, Holy Joe Hill! They got trade associations, conferences, Think Tanks, the two political parties, media and the courts pushing a unified agenda. An injury to one is an injury to all. You start whining about Big Banks, or threaten to indict a CEO and they won't build a factory in your town and ALLOW you to work for them. Golf Clubs, luxury vacation lodges, private schools, why it's all one big happy family sharing the good life they so amply deserve.

The good news this week? Job gains, the majority paying between $9.03 an hour to $12.91. Couple of those and you could almost make ends meet living in your minivan( except for spikes in gas and food ).At this rate an 11 to 13 year march back to 5% unemployment, unless old workers can't afford to retire or machines replace people or there is another bubble or other shit that always goes wrong is on schedule. Perhaps there is some way to free up the market OR,.. and this is why I can't believe I haven't been hired by the RAND Corporation... ally with the drug cartels and declare war on Mexico. Cheap oil, cheap labor, cheap drugs, nice beaches??

James Madison from The Federalist No.10:

"Those who hold property and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society...The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principle task of modern legislation."

Task complete.Call it democracy and split the pot.

Widening Split

2011-03-04T07:38:00.000-08:00

Louis Hartz, in his book The Liberal Tradition in America, wrote :

"In a society evolving along the American pattern...where virtually everyone, including the nascent industrial worker, had the mentality of an independent entrepreneur, two national impulses are bound to make themselves felt: the impulse towards democracy and the impulse towards capitalism."

He is opposing us Americans to Europe, where old class division disturbs the implied harmony.This kool-aid was drunk by the bucket but it ignores the clash of rights, personal versus property, that is never far from the surface in the land of E.Pluribus Unim.( think: we reserve the right to refuse service...)

Uncle Milty Friedman mixed up another batch when he wrote in his classic Capitalism and Freedom:

"Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself...economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom."

In each of these texts there is interesting language about the psychological component; Hartz's "mentality" and Friedman's "broadly understood", implying a hegemonic, intellectual logic which is the incubator for making the capitalism = freedom connection. This is the role of ideology and culture and if done properly, it disguises it's manipulation so effectively people think their belief systems are inherent or naturalistic, normative, perhaps "God given".The military calls it psy-ops, Madison Ave. calls it advertising, FOX calls it "news", John Stewart calls it comedy, schools call it history or economics class.

But of course the workplace, the family, the school,the segregated lunch counter, are also sites of formative culture ( where discussions happen) and the unavoidable antagonisms will eventually, at times, cause people to question the normative discourse.

"Wait a second, I'm not an 'entrepreneur' I'm an exploited wage slave!" or "Wait a second, working two jobs and still needing food stamps is NOT my idea of 'freedom'! I should be free from want!"or "Wait a second, how come I'm working AND doing all the cooking and cleaning!"

The harmony, as happens periodically, is dissolving and the fictions of the "end of ideology" or "the end of history" are being exposed. Signs saying Tax the Rich and FOX commentators bemoaning "class war" are signals. So is growing talk of a general strike.The question is: Will people both liberal and conservative see this for what it is, the clash of expanding individual rights against expanding property rights? What will the demands of the strike be? Both sides prefer to target nebulous elites or corporations or bankers or bureaucrats or special interests or whatever... rather than admitting the structural contradiction and the real struggle over democracy.

Convergence ?

2011-03-02T09:34:00.000-08:00

It is admittedly very hard to wrap ones head around the matrix of unstable forces at play both locally and globally at this juncture and come up with scenarios, possibilities, analysis or synthesis. There is LOTS going on. US media has totally given up; after Egypt I have seen no effort at contextualizing beyond the simplest frames. For example, here is Doyle McManus in LA Times:

"Here's a modest proposal; the administration and Congress should choose a country to turn into a real success story and make sure it gets all the help it needs."

Like choosing an Ethiopian poster child to adopt and "save", the US could unleash the Institute for Democracy and USAID and the New Chicago Boys and a few Mormon missionaries and create a model society! Conservatives rant just as idiotically about Caliphates and Islamic Socialists. Meanwhile one senses panic in foreign policy circles because the implications for not just Middle Eastern but wider, global revolt against "austerity" bumps up against the reality of a massive global economic slump. Capitalism has little MOJO at the moment and oil prices are running into municipal bond defaults and further lay-offs and rising food prices and on and on and on. Germany is balking at having to bail out the European periphery and the Saudis don't have nearly as much reserves as they have claimed."Perfect storm" is a bit of a cliche and yet..

Then there is Madison Wisconsin, the protests spreading to other states and the general hatefulness towards the working class and poor here in the home of the brave. That very Puritan "living within our means" when a penny saved is no longer a penny earned. Is this disgust at the status quo linked in any way to unrest around the globe? Michael Moore, Tea partiers, unionists, enviros and Middle Easterners all seem to be calling out for an as yet nebulous, idealized, but unformed notion of political democracy based somehow on rights and constitutions and greater equality and access and justice.... but still...It is all rhetoric with no real theory behind it. We aren't going back to FDR or Ronald Reagan, we are moving forward into the unknown. Scary, indeed. Flux. Fissures.

One thing we know is that history is suddenly on the move and the opportunity to widen the cracks in capitalism is increasing daily. This use of the battering ram can happen on two fronts I think, one, the active, "billion incessant stings" as Kalle Lasn describes it, relentless, bold criticism and loud displays of subjectivity. The other is a more passive encouragement of capitalisms debilitating death spiral, support for Orin Hatch's "Health Care Plan", support for all "Free Market Solutions" and Privitization of All Spheres, Bigger Wars, Bigger Tax Cuts, Ayn Rands head carved into Mount Rushmore, till our "political-economy" is such a reeking, ridiculous, pornographic mess Rand Paul will be forced to take Rupert Murdoch and Barak Obama on that long ride into the wilderness. Perhaps after that Death Drive we can park the car for awhile?

Musicality

2011-02-28T19:08:00.000-08:00

Ducky provided a great segue into the fact that I just got home from three days at the Portland Jazz Festival where I saw the amazing Joshua Redman in a killer quartet (Aaron Goldberg, Matt Penman and Eric Harland), the Three Cohens, the San Francisco Jazz Collective and some other impressive acts. Of course none of them sell as well as Hannah Montana so maybe they aren't that good? I don't really want to get into the whole high brow/ low brow pop culture thing but live jazz, at that level, is a treat and everyone should at least try it once. Same with classical; you need to be there to start to understand it. We get two hours every morning on public radio and some afternoon shows as well.

The theme of the festival centered on the bridges between the Jewish and the African-American communities in the world of jazz. I always think of Benny Goodman as a real pioneer but I'm sure collaborations went back farther than that. My personal collection is mostly be-bop but I also like the big bands and a little free jazz or Dixieland.

Which Side Are You On?

2011-02-24T08:02:00.000-08:00

"How do we change our position on budget and fiscal issues so we're not always looking like an impediment? We need an ideology based around working WITH employers...that message and approach can attract different people than the 'we need to stand up for the working class' approach. That approach is about conflict and a lot of people don't want conflict."
Andy Stern former head of SEIU and Change To Win

This Wisconsin fight-back is a difficult issue to unpack. Of course I support any resistance to the status quo that is equalizing, that's a given. But I also feel a radical critique is necessary in every case so that we don't head down dead ends, waste time and energy, or otherwise allow an emancipatory vision to be co-opted. Andy Stern pretty well sums up the problems moving forward.He thought everyone could just get along and share and boy was he wrong.

The Right has been successful in promoting a vision of unity (as a universal social Good) that is oppositional and loyal. This is what Carl Schmidt identified as the friend-enemy position but it is essentially reactionary, with fascist undertones.( Schmidt was a successful Nazi theorist) There is no positive program as such,( unless you buy the Fantasia of "free markets" and individualism) only WE ARE UNITED AGAINST THEM. This is what appeals to Pagan, united AGAINST. Contrary to what Andy Stern says, they do want conflict, as long as it against The Other. Labor got in bed with Capital in a Grand Bargain (see past post) and abandoned it's own positive, oppositional position of deep struggle to change the actual forces of production.

Yes, Wisconsin is helping to define the true antagonistic positions. The workers have already surrendered to the capitalist logic that they must pay for the crisis. They are so far back on their heels they are fighting for something won decades ago. (the right to organize) Just as women are fighting for something won decades ago. But these gains were never consolidated and those fights were never joined to the broader struggle for radical democracy.

I stand by my proscription that the challenge for the Left is to give Capital enough rope to hang itself. Stand aside and offer no resistance. They should be calling the Rights bluff on every occasion and propose even deeper cuts to all sectors. They should call for an end to all unions, corporate ownership of all sectors, the end of all NGO's and civil society, absolute rule by the Tea Party and it's minions. In other words hand it all over to them and watch the Free Market reign for awhile (a short while). This is the only way to get rid of them, as a serious opposition, once and for all.

Davey Downer

2011-02-18T22:09:00.000-08:00

I hope I'm not just turning into a total curmudgeon, but this exuberance over Madison Wisconsin seems a bit over the top. What it reminds me of is the rush so many on the labor left felt when workers took over the Chicago Doors and Windows factory last year. Progressive pundits, eager for some sign of resurgent militant activism, gushed over the solidarity of "the workers". Now I am hearing that the Madison state capital is the "new Tahir Square" but I'm sorry, I see too little too late. I hope I'm wrong. Hearing Obama praise the public sector unions I wanted to vomit. How stupid does he think we are? He hired Arnie Duncan, Vilsek. General Electric for fuck sake. What happened to the Employee Free Choice Act, Barak?

I caught a certain amount of flack on the home-front for advocating support for the most rabid right wingers in the last election cycle but I think we are seeing the fruits of that effort. In our local paper I read: "Republicans, buoyed by anti-government fervor and the mantra of job creation, seek unfettered natural resource extraction". They have introduced a number of bills which display their attitude towards the environment such as SB 233 which would "prohibit the consideration of regional, national or global impacts such as climate change.." or SJ 10 to "urge the US Congress to prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gasses".

A freshman Representative named, appropriately, Priest, is leading the charge. A self-described "free market advocate" he believes in climate change but wants to see "the costs and benefits" to the proposed solutions. Because as we all know, INFORMATION is key to the operation of the "free market". Who wishes to try a cost-benefit analysis?

Democrats believe this ideology as well but their INFORMATION is different from the Republicans INFORMATION. They believe the costs will be borne by others but insist there is no dichotomy between the environment and the economy. They want a "green economy" in the state which is the largest coal producer in the U.S.and also depends on natural gas and oil. (both the extraction and use of.)

Back to the Priest of Pure Capitalism : Jason has also drafted a handful of bills "seeking to remove incentives for energy efficiency" ( distorts the free market) and the Property Fairness Act which would require the government to pay a landowner any time the state diminishes the value of property by any amount." Based on good INFORMATION, of course. He also says "clearly if you have to mandate an activity, there's some question as to whether people value it..otherwise they'd be doing it." The fundamentalist argument against stop signs.

Why am I overjoyed about all this?
1. Montana survives on subsidies and incentives but the system is unsustainable.
2. My progressive friends refuse to recognize free market fundamentalism drives local conservatives. Time to wake up.
3. My progressive friends have always insisted the government is the public's bulwark against market tyranny. NGO's have spent billions and wasted years with this approach.
3. My progressive friends insist the legislative-regulatory-system works. Yeah, right. Lobby forth, my friends.

Hedging

2011-02-17T09:11:00.000-08:00

Everywhere progressives are trying to figure out terminology to critique the current economic system without calling for it's wholesale replacement. In our group the other night we read one of Derek Jensen's pieces calling for the end of "predatory corporate capitalism". There is always lots of talk about "corporatism" and "oligarchies" and once again David Korten weighs in with an essay called Beyond Capitalism and Communism: A Main Street Alternative. He identifies something called "Wall Street capitalism" which "distorts market theory beyond recognition".

So on the one hand we see someone(very influential) who is concerned about social justice but wishes to defend some ephemeral, pure ( undistorted?) market theory. On the other hand he is calling this pure theory "Beyond Capitalism" in the hopes of dragging along those growing legions who are beginning to understand capitalism has failed. The problem is, by inventing these new (incoherent) forms and terminology, the famous liberal author only further obfuscates and muddles a debate that is already difficult enough for most folks.

His solution to the age old question of "what is to be done?" is to suggest " a strong and intrusive government hand to limit the abuse." Can he really believe this old FDR dream? Does the author of a dozen books not understand the ways in which the world has changed? Even at the level of pure theory, does he have some system for distinguishing the Good Small Business from the Bad Big Businesses? Does he envision a world of friendly farmers markets for oil and tin and plywood? Who does he think we should vote for to bring about this heroic government that will save us from Bigness?

Intelligent, caring, informed liberals are now having to make some hard choices. Look at Madison Wisconsin. Red pill - blue pill? Which side are you on? This is where our energies must be concentrated. Conservatives are still looking for WMDs, hating the Other, totally lost in the Spectacle, and will have to be dealt with later. And that won't be a discursive battle.

There is a great piece in the latest Harpers called Homeless in Sacramento, written by William Vollman. It really captures the gritty, desperate jungle just outside our doors. Also a good essay in the New Left Review 66 called Golden State Adrift about how bad things have devolved in my home state since the all out assault by libertarians and vicious Central Valley right wing.

Kept in the Dark

2011-02-14T07:41:00.000-08:00

Pale and overwhelmed, my wife and I stumbled from the theatre after two full days and nights of the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. This is not for sissies. I've seen a lot of good film making and some very stimulating subjects but for now I will just highlight a couple.

The very first film, called Into Eternity, left a real impression. It concerns the efforts of the Finns to bury their nuclear waste 500 meters deep in a bedrock cavern they are now blasting out. The cinematography is very Kubrick- SpaceOdyssey as is the ethical question at the heart: What marker do we leave behind for a civilization 10,000 years from now that comes across the tunnels? How do we say; do not explore as we did, the mess we left behind is incredibly dangerous?

As someone writing a novel partially about the Palestinian immigrant experience, I found Corner Store an interesting exploration of the hot topic of multi-culturalism. It also made me a little homesick for San Francisco!

The Sea is a Harsh Mistress is a good meditation on something that came up in the last thread, utopianism. It turns out Milton Freidman's grandson wants to build a sovereign nation in the middle of the ocean somewhere, a nation where a pure free market would create a pure freedom. Every libertarian-Communitarian of every stripe should watch it.

Then I watched To Catch a Dollar:Muhammad Yanus Banks on America, about the Grameen Bank's attempt to adapt it's program to conditions in the US of A. This is another well meaning utopian vision, using capitalism to lift it's victims out of poverty and dependence. The film follows the struggles of dedicated activists to transplant this movement, so fraught with contradictions,and does a good job complexifying the issue.

Of course the film Cultures of Resistance filled the theatre. Missoulians pride themselves on their concern for "social justice", but unfortunately it was a tourist-eyed view that left you just as confused about "What is to be done?" as when you walked in. Peace, Love, and Unity T shirts sold like hot cakes but the opening scene, where a group of indigenous from the Amazon attacked a Brazilian energy Minister with machetes at a meeting shook the audience a bit. ( he escaped in his limo with one deep cut and a new understanding)

The last film was Hey Boo: Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird which I highly recommend, both for content and excellent film making. If you are only going to write one book, make it a doozy.

It is back again tonight for winners of the Doc Challenge (make a film in six days!) and a film about Harold Louis "Doc" Humes made by his daughter. We are lucky to have this excellent Festival here in the Mountain West.

Blink

2011-02-11T09:25:00.000-08:00

Mubarak bails and I suspect the military started losing the rank and file. There were reports of gunfire breaking out in another city (on AlJazeera) just before Suleiman came on TV. The 32nd anniversary of the Iranian revolution has become something more, something different. We are now getting a history lesson from James Woolsey ( former CIA director) on CNN and again I have been fascinated by the different narratives of the different channels as I switch around. I see exactly where Pagan gets his simple views and arrogance and as Ducky continuously reminds us, the media shapes "politics" as such, is the best signifier of the Spectacle.

The nature of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is the new Death Panels and having been proved wrong time after time after time will not make conservatives question their sources or analysis.

Immediately after the announcement FOX commentators started worrying about Israel and the DOW. They stress all the "terrible problems" which lie ahead and never once mention the role of unions. All very, very interesting. Can't wait to see how Glen Beck turns this ecstatic moment into a downer for his paranoid viewers. Will he stand with the Saudi royalty?

Another worry is the US sending in it's "Democracy Promotion troops, NDI, NRI, USAID etc In the name of Development the Chicago Shock Troops will soon be on the scene.

The "Realists" get to expose their cynicism and fear in the midst of hope and jubilation. We will learn what "stability" means. Will Americans begin to set up their own Liberation Squares?

Here We Go

2011-02-10T11:31:00.000-08:00

Pre-speech:

I am switching back and forth between FOX , CNN and al Jazeera and it is a fascinating window into narrative. Fox stresses the "worry of Israel" interviewing Judith Miller and former ambassador Dan Gellerman who focus on the "existential" threat. They love authority and "stability" saying "Thank God the army is in charge!"

CNN is just a confused jumble of fear and weird speculative uncertainty but the one thing neither channel mentions is the effect of the massive strikes of the last two days. Egyptian State TV went from saying the protesters are foreign agents eating Kentucky Fried Chicken to showing protesters hugging soldiers with patriotic music in the background.

The generals showed a meeting they were holding where Mubarak was noticeably absent and announced "they would continue meeting". No one on mainstream TV has said the word neoliberalism.

Post speech:

Sclerotic is the best word I can think of. Fareed Zacharia used "delusional". It seems to me Mubarak has taken the Israeli line, "stability" and "foreign agents" and obfuscating rhetoric. His first words really said it all when he addressed the people as "my children". Now he opens the door for increased violence and he will end up with his bank accounts froze, living in Saudi Arabia to avoid the Hague. His choice I guess. First as Tragedy, then as Farce.

A few minutes later: Now I'm actually listening to Glen Beck try to wrap his head around Egypt. It's not pretty. "Arch Duke Ferdinand moment" " beginning of the New World Order". As I mentioned, there is no way for him to fit this into his frame ( logically, coherently) but that doesn't keep him from trying.

Responsibility and Obligation

2011-02-09T11:05:00.000-08:00

Going back to Obama's speech at the National Chamber of Commerce we see that his appeal is to their ethical sense. "Business has a responsibility to America" he claims in a sincere sounding plea that they free up some of that investment cash. But to what economic theory does he refer? Goinf back to the Grand Bargain I wrote about last week, that historical example teaches us exactly that Business has (and feels) no such "responsibility". He knows it, they know it. All Kubuki made for our consumption.

Can the same be said of AFL-CIO head Richard Trumpka? He sounds convinced when he tells those executives "You have an obligation" on Laura Flanders' show this morning. He says we need to get back to "net exports" (haven't seen that in twenty years!) and profits "would have to be shared". Really? Mimicking Obama he says "American companies haven't been thinking about this country." Kum bay ya, brother. For proof of how government can regulate capital he says "We just re-regulated the financial economy". He must be in on the Kubuki. After all, the AFL_CIO pushed hard for the Free Trade deal with Peru which has proved so disastrous.

Looks like some Egyptian pop star thought he could get away with switching horses in mid-stream and almost got his ass kicked. With strikes around the country the revolution is deepening, showing that my call for the protesters to accept concessions was premature. Tricky business this revolution stuff and it's far from over.Also far from clear how a transition to quick elections would work exactly.There is a good discussion at Leninology about the nature of self organization. As far as the stand-off, I'm sure Mubarak would gladly see the economy ruined to save face so it now rests on the Army and the bourgeoisie. The business class if forced to decide: violent crackdown or oust the President.

Smiley Face

2011-02-08T08:37:00.000-08:00

In a discussion the other night it was noted that much disagreement centers on differing views of human nature, often the old Hobbes vs Rousseau debate. I just ran across this essay by James Quinney over at New Left Project:

"In essence, the Hobbesian position has proved popular not because of it's scientific rigour- which as we have examined is at the very least highly contested- but precisely because it rationalizes and perpetuates an inequality in social power that is integral to capitalist societies."

Quinney, an anthropologist,cites much research on cooperative indigenous societies and makes a good case. Meanwhile ,Chantel Mouffe, in her book Return of the Political, is willing to "acknowledge that the 'state of nature' in it's Hobbesian dimension can never be completely eradicated but only controlled..." She sees antagonism as a good thing, to be channeled into political struggle lest it devolve into ethnic, nationalist or religious conflict where ones adversary to contend with becomes ones enemy to destroy.

"Far from being the necessary result of a moral evolution of humankind, democracy is something uncertain and improbable..It is an always fragile conquest that needs to be defended as well as deepened. There is no threshold of democracy that once reached will guarantee its continued existence. Democracy is in peril not only when there is insufficient consensus and allegiance to the values it embodies, but also when it's agonistic dynamic is hindered by an APPARENT EXCESS of consensus..."

So when Obama goes to the Chamber of Commerce and says he wants everyone to just get along, labor, capital, government,all one big happy family, he is proposing just this very EXCESS of consensus. It is false and debilitating and continues hollowing out the last vestige of democracy. Obama knows full well the inherent antagonism and he knows exactly which side he is on.

Health Issue

2011-02-07T09:51:00.000-08:00

This past weekend a symposium was held locally called Turning the Tide: Reclaiming Human Health by Restoring the Planet. With panels on such things as A Spiritual Response to a Planet in Crisis, Learning From Libby:Calamity in a Company town, Ecological Food Choices, Chemical Policy, Green and Clean at Home, etc.. it is a sort of uniquely Missoula expert/technologist/ spiritualist approach at understanding the ongoing, deepening crisis.

It closes with a discussion tomorrow night entitled: Montana to the Tar Sands: The True Cost of Oil, because we have found our local communities serendipitously caught in the middle of this serious energy issue. Our group has been vocally participating in community discussions lately, interjecting an uncomfortable ( for liberal Missoulians) anti-capitalist critique. This is what I will say tomorrow night.

"Many of you here are medical professionals trained to look holistically at symptoms of a sick patient and diagnose the underlying disease. So when we are discussing the health of a planet, it seems you would want to look beyond symptoms as well, the ecological damage, the hollowed out politics unable to arrange policy solutions, the "eco-despair" as you put it. And yet surprisingly, we hear no discussion on the most fundamental determinant of the destruction,the underlying political economy, or this thing we call liberal democratic capitalism.

Seen in this light, Libby was the victim of market forces, the profit system, in the same way as Bhopal. Butte or countless communities across the globe. Using this deeper, broader frame we can see that the Canadian Tar Sands are the result of profit driven energy development to which any so-called "policy" is held absolutely hostage. Using this holistic approach, the conclusion that all the issues you have been discussing - from cancer rates, to hormone disruption, to climate change to food choices- are related to the structures and institutions of capitalism is inescapable. And all attempts at mitigating these problems, these symptoms, without acknowledging the disease, is simply green washing. It seems to me very much like giving a patient with a brain cancer an aspirin for the headaches and leaving the tumor intact.

As you look to "Restoring the Planet", do you believe this can be accomplished within the framework of so-called democratic capitalism?"

Practically every night in this town there is a panel or a speaker or a gathering of and by mostly liberals putting forward the same, tired, failed ideas. They get access to all the platforms and pulpits. It is time for them to be challenged at every turn, consistently, relentlessly.

Left Behind

2011-02-04T08:05:00.000-08:00

Finally a crisis that allows clear distinctions between the authoritarian Right and small d democrats. Cruising the Sphere of Ignorance ( Fox news, Gateway Pundit, right wing blogs, etc) we see, as in the torture debate, the clear love for Our Beloved Father The Authority. This is actually what Egypt's new Vice President Suleiman called Mubarak in an interview yesterday. On one side we see support for Israel and irrational fear of Muslim Brotherhood peeling conservatives away from their Tea Party pretensions and rhetoric about Liberty. Authority loving liberals like Obama-Clinton-Kerry also struggle to find a position where the hypocrisy doesn't just drip from their every word. Nicholas Kristoff, who was down on the square, will not join Joe Biden in subservient humiliation. Juan Cole over at Informed Consent has also drawn a forceful line. Meanwhile John Mc Cain warns against a "spreading virus". Father brings Stability.

I personally think the protesters may have to accept Obama's craven, cowardly proposal to let Suleiman take over. It still is an amazing victory sending signals world wide. Suleiman and the Administrations which knew of his activities will become the focus of intense scrutiny. And it will give the pro-democracy forces a chance to develop a positive political program moving forward. I do not envy whoever takes over because the problems are enormous but at least they can roll back the disastrous neoliberal "reforms" which have been imposed. The society is divided and counter-reform forces will plague any new leadership.The military is a big unknown.

Here is a sampling of comments from Gateway Pundit, linked to on Pagan's blog:

"I hope they slip some pork in their burgers"
"They will get enforcement of Sharia law."
"It's nothin personal, I'm sure there are some nice looking Nefertiti's" ( speaking to the attractiveness of the women on TV)
"The mean IQ in Egypt is 83."
"The essential philosophical architecture for supporting a democracy simply does not exist in primitive belief systems (Islam) of this type."( resident intellectual)
"Obama is setting off a wave of anti-semitic violance (sp) by supporting this Islamo-facist rebellion."

Goebbels would be proud. I'm sure Rupert Murdoch is.

Not that the left is always coherent. This is Ted Rall from Common Dreams: "Global revolution is immanent...set off by unpredictable events, as the result of spontaneous passion rather than organized mobilizations. There is no need to organize or plan. Scheming won't make any difference. Just get ready to RECOGNIZE REVOLUTION when it occurs. then drop what you are doing and THEN organize."

Pride and Power

2011-02-02T13:06:00.000-08:00

The old dictator couldn't leave without lashing out one last time and the protesters learned something about the military mindset: you can hand out flowers but they won't necessarily choose you when push comes to shove. Some pro-Mubarak types are nervous bourgeois, watching their dreams fade as when Chavez was elected. Others see him as a father figure, a strong authority bringing stability. Some are just thugs, class traitors who will do anything for a few bucks.

Part of the problem was articulated by one gal I saw interviewed, who when asked what she desired simply said "not Mubarak". Unfortunately this is not a platform. Commentators from the anarchist left and certain liberals ( afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood) have been giddy that the revolution is "leaderless" and organic but we see some of the problems that can arise in terms of negotiating and defence.This is part of the anxiety I was trying to express about the Act in the last post and that leap. Women and children were in that crowd and there is risk and responsibility to camping out in a square with a loose, loose coalition. (April 28ers, MB,

There is also the issue of moving forward when the new coalition does take power.The country is wracked with economic woes with no quick fixes ( unless we, the rest of the world,overthrow capitalism!) ( probably not going to happen). We know democracy is much more than just voting, look at Afghanistan, Haiti or the U.S. There will be lines for bread to deal with and a blood thirsty, reactionary, ruling class used to getting it's own way.

The good news is like Wikileaks, which played it's own part in this historical drama, the unfolding events are exposing the dark, slimy, underbelly of real-politic: the more people like Rupert Murdoch, Tony Blair, Netanyahu and AIPAC open their pie-holes, the deeper they get.
Not to mention U.S. policy supporting the old torturing tyrant. To his credit, CNN's Anderson Cooper was quick to call the thugs government plants. Lots of worry about Islamists but I think we should keep our eye on Christian and Jewish states breaking out.

Lichanos: "tip toe Death Mask" was purple prose for the deep socketed John Kerry. You really must read Freidman's column today in NYTimes BE- AE Before Egypt, After Egypt. Unbelievable.

Hoping for the Best

2011-01-31T07:41:00.000-08:00

From the NY Times, an article describing the class conflict lying just below the surface of the Egyptian uprising. Hat tip to Che Bob. A wealthy beneficiary of the Mubarak regime and policies says from behind the wall of his upscale gated "community":

"I wish we could be like the United States with a democracy, but we cannot. We have to have a ruler with an iron hand."

Implicit in this statement is the persons admiration of a system which has so perfected the illusion of liberal, neutral "democracy" to mask the kind of inequality he enjoys. It is so much more Western and sophisticated to convince your citizens they are free, to make them complicit in their own oppression! This iron hand is so crude, so 1980's.

Am I saying a "bourgeois democracy" is no better than a dictatorship? No. I am saying it is all contingent.An Egyptian elite with his yacht and mansion looks at the minority American rotting in prison on a drug possession charge. I'm free to write my ignored revolutionary manifestos and if capitalist democracy is allowed to flourish in Egypt they may elect their own Ronald Reagan or Silvio Berlusconi in a few years.

Dr.Ahmed Zewail believes "a constitutional assembly of wise men should be assembled to draft a new constitution, based on liberty, human rights and the orderly transition of power."
There you go, some Founding Fathers with large land holdings and superior educations perhaps?
They could inscribe the freedom of private property, capital and markets along with the liberty to pass dynastic wealth from one generation to the next and start to really BE somebody! I believe you could get Hillary behind that one.

I saw two amazing interviews yesterday. Both John Kerry and Tom Friedman were in Davos and were asked their reactions to what was going on in Egypt. The tip toe, Death Mask blathering about "flat earth" and " stability" and "rights" was priceless. The doubling of oil prices may have some effect on "stability" however and I know Ehud Barak is in a tizzy. The one thing they all share is a deep distrust of democracy.

The Act

2011-01-27T18:55:00.000-08:00

"An Act always involves a radical risk, what Derrida, following Kierkegaard, called the MADNESS of a decision: it is a step into the open, with no guarantee about the final outcome- why? Because an Act retroactively changes the very coordinates into which it intervenes. This lack of guarantee is what critics cannot tolerate:they want an Act without risk- not without empirical risks, but without the much more radical 'transcendental' risk that the Act will not only simply fail, but radically misfire...It is here that one can see how an Act proper cannot be contained within the limits of democracy (conceived as a positive system of legitimizing power through free elections). The Act occurs in an emergency when one has to take the risk and act without legitimization, engaging oneself in a kind of Pascalean wager that the Act itself will create the conditions of it's retroactive legitimization."

Slajov Zizek from his book Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Our group has been talking lately about leaps into the unknown (un-knowable). My problem with Zizek's approach is: how does one recognize such an "emergency"? George Bush sensed such an emergency and invaded Iraq and Afghanistan wagering the acts would later be legitimized.Hitler, Stalin, PolPot, Franco, The Symbionese Liberation Army, they all felt their moment to be an "emergency" and that history would later absolve them.

This is where the inner liberal comes out in me, the one who senses something in the warnings of Isaiah Berlin, Popper and Arendt at the same time he rejects their anti-utopian arguments. Since we can never KNOW the true moment of emergency, I would rather put my lot in with some degree of popular will, knowing full well it can be quite wrong. At least we must stop and ask if we are acting purely as a vanguard or it we are listening as well.

What about those in Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Western Sahara, soon probably Iran? These movements certainly argue for the Act as does any uprising in the past for justice. So how might we discern the necessity for an Act? Which side of history we are on when we decide to stop talking and start doing?

In his book Picture Imperfect Russell Jacoby makes a case for Utopianism which confronts much the same dilemma. He says beware the "blueprint utopian" who "more often betray a will for domination than for freedom; they prescribe how free men and women should act..". Jacoby argues for "iconoclastic utopians" who "did not surrender to the drumbeat of everyday emergencies" . Still, the "everyday" unfolds before us and presents Moments when one must choose whether to Act or not. Perhaps there is no trustworthy guide, only imagination and will.

Unrest and Winning the Future

2011-01-27T17:14:00.000-08:00

I have heard only peripherally the degree to which rising food prices contributes to the revolts and unrest spreading like wildfire around the Middle East and North Africa. Tomorrow the Muslim Brotherhood joins the protests in Egypt and I know one country in the region that is going to start feeling very isolated and alone. The "Palestinian papers" don't help matters. As an aside, this whole self-immolation thing seems a little over the top. I remember the Buddhist monks doing it in Viet Nam. It is also favored by women in India who are desperate.

As for Obama's speech, these competitive references, "race to the top", "winning the future" might pump up the team but has he really watched the team sprint around the track lately? People no longer ask what their country can do for them OR what they can do for their country. Now they ask : Would you like fries with that? or Could you supersize that?

Pagan has Sarah Palins facebook response on his blog which is: let the private sector fix the roads, bridges,infra-structure etc. and do all the educating, research and innovation.Let Wall Street handle your retirement and someone other than "Big Business" get us all plenty of carbon based energy.I personally liked Michelle Bachman over the other little dude.

The Utah State Senate is considering a bill just passed in the house to make a Browning the State Gun. Montana doesn't have a state gun but we can now kill animals with blunt objects (HB 161) I listened to the State of the State delivered by Gov.Brian Schwietzer last night and the biggest applause line came (from Democrats and Republicans) when he announced the worlds largest coal company was starting to dig what will be millions of tons of especially dirty coal out of a pristine river valley. Also big revenue out of the oil patch and the biggest wheat crop ever.Everythings comin up roses!

Cabal

2011-01-25T06:55:00.000-08:00

It always cracks me up that local right-wingers and "inside job" type lefties come together on the fear that a shadowy cabal of elitists exists "somewhere out there." Hello people, ever hear of Davos, Switzerland? The ruling class makes a huge show about their little get together, splashing it across the front of all the papers. It's on again for next week and they may still have some tickets left.

It's openly called the World Economic Forum.Google is going to throw a party estimated to cost $250,000. Sulley Sullenberger is a featured speaker. A Strategic Partnership costs $622.000 but you still have to pay the $3,400 from Zurich and back for helicopter service.( there is a free bus for those "worried about their environmental footprint") I imagine that riding the bus gives you the same kind of cred as getting tear gassed in Seattle does for Anti-globalistas.

There are doubts creeping into the champagne and caviar however.The founder and executive chairman is expressing his own "concern that governments and international organizations can no longer cope with the capacity and fast pace of this new reality" (capitalist crisis) A CEO said "You always feel like you are in the wrong place. like the real Davos is happening in secret." Even those in the cabal think there is a cabal! Because the "cabal" isn't people, it is a logic.It's everywhere but you can't really touch it.

From the Merrill Lynch Cap Gemini World Wealth Report: The total liquid wealth of the rich in 2009, 39 trillion, was 2/3 of WORLD GDP. A year when global unemployment grew by 14.4%. High Net Worth Individuals (1 million) grew by 17% but Ultra- HNWI's outpaced them. There are only 36,300 of them (.0005% of population) but they now have 35.5% of the worlds wealth ( 14 trillion)

So as U.S. luxury spending rebounds, the Economix blog at the NY Times writes : The Moral Heart of Economics. "There is a deep moral tenet, a belief in the value of human freedom- at the core of our discipline."

Local Follies

2011-01-23T07:06:00.000-08:00

Our local Human Rights Alliance brought in a speaker for the annual MLK Day gathering. He talked about Tea Party ties to hate groups, militia groups, Koch brothers, John Birch etc and he showed some demographics, survey results, and other data in yet another liberal attempt to understand these wacky neighbors.His starting point was established at the beginning when he stressed "This is not a populist movement" over and over again.

It is important for liberals to avoid discussions and analysis which is in any way economic because it could lead to nasty questions about their beloved market system. (In fact the progressive who received the award that night spent almost five minutes of his speech pre-emptively defending democratic capitalism as imperfect but reformable)

Their job is made easier by actual haters, like whoever placed the bomb on the Spokane parade route, and the knuckleheads who now oversee our legislature here in Montana. Their latest victory was a bill to make it legal to hunt animals with a blunt object.I'm serious here.Now they want to use the Federal data base (which they hate) to find illegal aliens applying for drivers licenses. They also dominated local races such as our county commission and the City Council in Big Timber which is dismantling a city park because they see it as an ominous sign of the U.N "Agenda 21", which calls on governments to adopt national strategies for sustainable development.

Yes, actual racism and homophobia and xenophobia need to be confronted.Hate groups should be challenged. But the deeper analysis would see their rise associated with economic uncertainty and then ask what is wrong with this economic model? Why does "sustainable development" cut into our pocket book? Knuckleheads will take care of themselves as they find governing with no money forces them farther and farther down the rabbit hole. Our local commissioners can wear their guns now but will find this freedom doesn't stop the suffering and misery associated with social breakdown.

The REAL challenge is for these liberals to admit their failures,open themselves up to something new and try moving into that tension filled, uncertain space where you have to listen instead of talking all the time. If they listened to their neighbors they would hear their own suppressed fears expressed. This Isn't Working. Problems are Not Being Addressed. The Future is Bleak for Our Children. Why Are Leaders Always Corrupt? Do I really Want to Pay More Taxes to a War Machine?

"But Malcolm X got what was coming. He got what he asked for this time.
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal."
Phil Ochs

Finding Common Ground

2011-01-20T07:04:00.000-08:00

Obama has mastered the language of compromise and pragmatism and after being disciplined in this last election he has his priorities straight. The Nobel Peace Prize recipient answers his fellow recipient (languishing in a Chinese jail) with a commitment to "fair trade". By selling more things to the Chinese people he advances the cause of "human rights" on both sides, as he and his corporate underwriters understand "rights".

The uncomfortable fact that One Party capitalism is doing so well in China is glossed over in many ways. General Electric, which has been in China for over a hundred years, is no doubt recommending the U.S. political model: Get as many televisions into as many homes as quickly as possible and then invent two Spectacular Parties ( call them the Dragons versus the Carp, for instance) who can "debate the issues". They could quickly get their own Glen Beck installed and a Teddy Kennedy and point to this lively exchange as "dialogue". They can figure out their own version of half-time at the Super Bowl and Tavis Smiley Show.

As for events in Tunisia and Ducky's fear that leftist voices will not be heard in a re-formation, I don't have much to go on. There are pieces on Renegade Eye and Leninology that explain some of the history and balance of forces. If the revolution goes the way of total constitutional overhaul, I think the U.S. and other protectors of neoliberalism will get involved in stopping any contagion.

As it stands now, I think the powerful unions of Tunisia do have a class analysis and the Islamists are moderate enough that a coalition is possible ( though full of tensions) And once again U.S. commentators are in that tricky position of having to explain just why we have backed certain autocratic regimes and not others.

Two of the biggest mysteries to me are Yodoods position on Ayn Rand and Lichanos on man's contribution to global climate change.

Back to the Garden

2011-01-13T05:43:00.000-08:00

I'm involved in a number of interesting discussions right now (and I'll include this blog) but one is an investigation into John Holloway's notion of "cracks" in capitalism.He would have us believe this seemingly sturdy monolith can be brought down by various fissures uniting (one of his metaphors is a block of ice), sometimes re-freezing, always running off in different directions, etc

Much referential value is given to the movement known as Zapatismo, resistance by the mostly indigenous peoples of Chiapas, in the form of demands for autonomy.One of Holloway's cracks is "the creation of a territorial base for developing different social relations,be it in the Lacondon Jungle...or a social center in Milan."

It reminds this old hippy of the calls for creating "intentional community" back when we rejected our parents soul sapping suburban life and were forming a "Woodstock nation" that was seeking ways to get itself "back to the Garden." It was a deep premonition that alienation from nature was a problem for our species as were rigid subjectivities. ( lose the suit, become a "freak"). Holloway also has a critique of identity:

"Identification or reification is an enormously destructive force in everyday struggle..we enclose ourselves within limits."

I see two different problems here: one is the tension between moving forward and looking backward. Those in the Lacondon Jungle believe there is an ancient knowledge/wisdom within ( cosmovision), embedded, which must be somehow retrieved. This was part of tribal hippiness as well.The other pull is forward, saying lose all that, re-analyze everything and look for an entirely new form. a "new man" as Adorno put it, thinking dialectically that nothing stays the same. According to Foucault : "...we cannot use the same concepts.."

The other problem is that for Holloway, it is enough to just crack capitalism, as an anarchist he doesn't want to pre-figure anything that might " convert it into a positive concept that might give it a deadening fixity." This reminds me of the faith capitalists place in "the invisible hand".

I have always felt subjectivity can't be voluntarily abandoned but that all identity ( gay, worker, Zapotec, etc) must be consciously prioritized so that "worker", that is your identity within the relations of production, becomes primary. If a "relentless criticism" of "the capitalist system, from 'top to bottom'",as Joel Kovel puts it, is combined with worker identity, capital can be attacked at the place it is most vulnerable, the "crack" can be focused and concentrated through organization (no waiting for magical forces).

There are better ways to live and we all want to escape the "Desert of the Real" as Zizek calls it and find something real. These discussions were unimaginable in our community just a few short years ago and I see an oasis off in the distance.

Out With The Old

2011-01-09T17:17:00.001-08:00

in with the old. Obama's pick of Gene Sperling for president of the National Economic Council should convince the last looney holdout that he is no socialist. ( of course it won't) No friend of the working man, old Gene, although he is presented as a "progressive", the least informative term since Gen X. This is some of Gene's "progressive" thinking from his 2007 book Rising Tide Economics:

"For Americans, shared prosperity, an opportunity for upward mobility, and economic outcomes determined more by merit than the accident of birth are fundamental to who we are as a nation..."

Pagan, somebody, help me out here. Isn't "merit", that is, cognitive skills, talent, health, physical strength,coordination, determined at least in part by "the accident of birth"? How about luck? Opportunities dropping from heaven, right place right time? How much do we reward those with less aversion to risk? Is that meritorious? What might the "moral hazard" be in rewarding lucky gamblers with the most power and wealth?

As for his (and Jack Kennedy's) Rising Tide lifting all boats, has he not looked at the Gini co-efficient lately? Many sink, a few still tread water and a select few ride away on the yacht.He proposes no taxes ( it will drive off investment!), no public works programs, (bureaucratic) and plenty of public investment in university research. ( let the public pay and business profit) He suggests bringing back call-center jobs for working class. So he is no Austrian, perhaps, but "progressive"?

Sperling actively promoted the over-valuation of the dollar during the Clinton years, pushing down manufacturing wages and eliminating many jobs ( outsourced). The massive trade (not budget) deficits were the result of this strong dollar, deficits which in turn led to shortfalls in demand, filled by bubble generated growth. The kind we are experiencing right now.

They won't have a TARP to throw over the next crisis of capitalism and Gene Sperling will be lucky to find a call center job.

The Grand Bargain

2011-01-04T20:36:00.000-08:00

At some point after World War II a bargain was tacitly struck, here in the United States, between labor, capital, and government. It was a deal that would facilitate economic growth, limit social unrest and let the country take full advantage of it's superior position in terms of global economics.Each party to the deal recognized how it's own interests would be served.

Basically, labor said it would limit disruptive direct action and adopt a more cooperative attitude toward management. It would no longer agitate ( certainly not the way it had) as a force to structurally change society as long as a big enough share of profit was steered their way. This is the period when the much touted "middle class" grew at an unprecedented rate, a pension system was formed and "collective bargaining" was institutionalized along with a National Labor Board for mediation.Capital was happy with the arrangement because the U.S. dominated every sector, including manufacturing. Wall Street didn't need risky speculation to make money, profit was everywhere. Three chickens in every pot!

For it's part, government taxed the wealthy and broke monopolies but also invested heavily in economic "partnerships" with business, doing research, educating a workforce and hiring lots of "defence contractors" spread out throughout the country. While Ike warned us about the Military Industrial Complex the working class became more fixated on those evil Soviets and Castro.Proxy resource wars as well as wars of good old ideology made sure there would be plenty of work building bombs.

The Bargain unravelled slowly at first. The post war countries we helped rebuild devised social systems which gave them competitive advantage and their factories were modernized. The U.S. kept getting into those expensive wars which the working class supported and paid for, reducing their purchasing power for other goods. Luckily there were suddenly credit cards! In the 70's, Big Business realized loyalty to America was absurd, natural resources were easier to get AND the value could be added in foreign lands ( by bribery or installing governments if need be) and investment began to flee. With the election of Reagan "greedy unions" became the perfect scapegoat for our lack of competitiveness and The Grand Bargain was shredded by Capital and the Government it controlled. This left workers betrayed but with no recourse.

The documentary film The Red Tail shows the post-Bargain landscape, what is now called globalisation, in painful detail. It focuses on the 444 day strike by North Western Airlines mechanics in 2005. The company said it needed to lay off 53 % of it's workforce and outsource the jobs to Asia to stay "competitive". They had no trouble finding temp workers, that is scabs, and eventually the AFL-CIO itself crossed the line. Solidarity was effectively destroyed.

The Bargain turns out to have been a con.The "middle class" by it's very definition means there will be an upper and a lower class but high wage workers chose self-interest over changing society. Now unions are busted along with the country and they must pay the price along with the rest of us.

Eco-localism

2011-01-02T21:22:00.000-08:00

One of the main projects adopted by progressive, anti-corporate, anti-globalization, environmentalist-type- folks is building local food systems. Around here it has expanded into local currency/ barter systems, farmers markets, community gardens and cooperatives. Because it is a very rural area (western Montana) there are lots of folks who make efforts to get "off the grid", raise their own food, and try to be both self-sufficient and leave as small an ecological footprint as possible.Small is Beautiful.

In terms of politics, most of these folks seem to support the notion of "green capitalism", that is, they are fine with private ownership of productive property, fine with "regulated" markets and willing to put their energy into pro-Kyoto, pro -cap and trade type campaigns. They recycle and drive hybrids.

This essay by a guy named Albo ( hat tip to Che Bob) provides a thorough critique of these tendencies. Even Bookchin's Social Ecology, with it's attention to property relations, gets swiped at as a reformist, anarchist evasion of true social transformation.

Not that Albo is an all or nothing type revolutionary, he sees the usefulness of local action, he just wants it embedded in a wider, Marxist analysis. Think nested, concentric orders of power and agency. Like a dartboard or target, with local in the bulls eye.

We know the problems of so-called no-growth or "steady state" green capitalism. It would take a powerful political movement to create a strong enough central state structure to regulate it, to incentivise or green tax your way past externalities. Who wants such a state, even if it were possible? At a more basic level, can we really rely on prices to transmit perfect information about ecologically sustainable outcomes? Hasn't happened so far.Eternal optimists believe in "technological and organizational transformation", you know, Meet the Jetsons, but capitalist development is too uneven to be just. Just is!

Eco-localism has value as a model, as a way to start organizing, but it is not a movement for justice, democracy or emancipation unless it is accompanied by an explicit anti-capitalist critique. It avoids the tricky questions of politics: how does one locality negotiate with another? With the watershed? The outside world? Antagonism isn't going away just because we are small. And the autonomy is just an illusion, capital can crush it whenever it gets tired of the game.

"Liberated ecological and political spaces can only be defended to the extent that the scale and scope of capitalist market logic is reduced and democracy extended."

The whole idea of local resources for local needs makes California or anywhere around the 30th Parallel a pretty nice location but Montanans would be back to venison, bitterroots and pickled cabbage.

Imagining Alternatives

2010-12-31T10:25:00.000-08:00

"It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism."

Frederic Jameson

Certain readers of this blog will argue that they imagine either as equally preposterous but his point concerns the state of imagination more generally. It is about what John Lennon wrote his famous song about: I wonder if you can?

Those few with imagination propose alternatives in defiance of those who claim none exist. I give you this pamphletby the Organization for a Free Society as an example of work by those unwilling to succumb, work we should all be doing ( I include myself).

On Revolution: We stopped at an I Hop on the way to Oregon where a sign asked us to "Join the Pancake Revolution/ Pancakes to the People! seriously.

In the latest Mother Jones is a review of Revolution:The year I fell in love and went to Join the War- about Deb Unferth's time spent in Nicaragua in 87. "She didn't become a revolutionary" says the reviewer "but she did become a grown-up."
Two pages away we find an interview with rocker Eugene Hutz who fled Kiev in 86. "I have no agenda.I know what I love to do and that's my religion. I think political revolution discredited itself ONCE AND FOR ALL TIME.." I would rather read The Economist or Wall Street Journal.

National Geographic is doing a series on population, noting the earth is nearing the 7 billion human mark. They begin by taking a swipe at modern Malthusian Paul Ehrlich for stating in his 1968 book The Population Bomb that "hundreds of millions..are going to starve to death" in the 1970's. The authors state "the bomb was a dud.The green revolution...was under way.Today many people are undernourished but mass starvation is rare."

Actually, almost 130 million did die of causes related to malnutrition throughout that decade.They still die every day which seems like mass starvation to me.
They then state: "In Kerala, on the south west coast,investments in health and education helped fertility to fall to 1.7.The key, demographers there say, is the female literacy rate.." They seem uninterested, however, in WHY Kerala is advanced in these areas compared to the rest of India. Anyone know?

The article ends with: "How many of us there will be and how we will live-depend on CHOICES WE HAVE YET TO MAKE..."

Will "we" all have equal say? Will some choose to be poor and starve? This is a familiar capitalist narrative, that "we" all have agency and power, yada yada, but of course we know such choices never show up on a ballot or in a Market. Perhaps the February issue will tell us about the role of economic structures in reproducing inequality and the ideology around it, especially when it comes to impact and ecological footprint. Right.

Enablers

2010-12-25T08:34:00.000-08:00

" Capitalism is only kept going by this army of anti-capitalists who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially, compensate for it's destructiveness."

Rebecca Solnit

In a long essay the intelligent Ms. Solnit points out how those in the non-profit world and those doing "social" work ( "daycare, nursing home aid workers" etc) as well as an "army of the unpaid" (working as volunteers in soup kitchens, food pantries, etc) make it possible for capitalism to do it's dirty work while avoiding social unrest. The disturbing thing is ,nowhere does she call for abolishing this gross system. Instead she calls for ever more volunteers. She wouldn't abolish slavery but she would like to see the slaves treated better.

You only have to look at her choice of words. For instance, "compensate". Who actually receives any compensation within this system she promotes? Capitalists of course.( although altruists get to feel joy,peace,less guilt as well) And notice as well that the compensation is only partial, meaning tens of thousands still starve to death each day and so the "army" will be required to do more and more (endlessly).

I will agree here with Glen Beck when he includes George Soros and the other give-with-one-hand-take-with-the other "socialists" in this milieu. They could be forgiven for thinking this new form of capitalism, where the slaves lock themselves up every night, is indeed the "end of history". It is far beyond mere co-dependency, it is Stockholm Syndrome on crack and yet Ms. Solnit ( who I pick on mercilessly though she is but one such left intellectual among hundreds)offers hope in the form of innate goodness in human nature.

For example she cites the facts that "polar bears got some protection". In other words, "another world isn't just possible, it's here." Even on Christmas morning I can't buy such glass-half-full, rose colored sentimentality because it ignores such a crucial point, displaying either a terrifying blindness or simple human weakness (along with intellectual laziness).

Those pantry workers, volunteer bird scrubbers, trash picker uppers, etc. do not themselves possess an anti-capitalist critique. They have no coherent philosophical system to explain history. They can not articulate an alternative vision in part because these leftist intellectuals are condescending, comfortable and afraid to use their own stunted imaginations.

Classified Information

2010-12-22T13:56:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me a while back that with all the talk now about classified information I really had little idea what that term actually meant, how many classifications there might be, how they were determined or what kind of oversight of the process might exist.

I posed these questions to Cheryl Rofer over at Phronesisaical who had some personal knowledge ( she is a scientist at the margins of policy making) and was kind enough to hunt down some reference materials.

Much of what I wondered about is contained in Executive Order 13526 and there is a good summary here. I found this part of the definition interesting:

EO 13526 limits classification to information that pertains to scientific, technological or ECONOMIC matters relating to national security.

It occurs to me how easy it would be to conflate economic prosperity with economic security, making any action which results in profit classifiable, and anyone who exposes corporate malfeasance guilty of undermining the country. Unpatriotic and criminal. Hopefully the next batch of leaked cables point to this form of complicity between our government and U.S. business against foreign governments and foreign workers.

This is the alliance which makes it so hard for mainstream U.S. unions to declare any kind of international solidarity with workers in other parts of the world. Globalization has made this murkier but there is still a whole " Made in America" , get our economy moving and " re-build the middle class" meme out there. The problem is that if the new global middle class manufactures and consumes like America if the 50's and 60's it will mean the end of our ecosystem.

It is also against the rules to classify something just to "prevent embarrassment" or to"conceal violations of law, inefficiency or administrative error". I think that is who we need to be prosecuting, those who classified memos just to avoid embarrassment.

Wrong again

2010-12-15T08:23:00.000-08:00

I must own up to totally missing this one. When Wikileaks posted Iraq war logs I wrote this:

"Surely they (Wa Po) understand that the public is more interested in Juan Williams...and that in a week the leaks will have disappeared." Oct. 26

I guess I didn't know how the leaks would just keep coming, how well Assange would orchestrate the whole thing, and how idiotically the government and it's media would play into his hands. By turning it into a spectacle they missed their chance to have the "event" meld into The Spectacle.Now they have Bianca Jagger and Sarah Palin jumping in and it is totally dominating the "News" cycle. I have been afraid to turn on FOX but I can only imagine the rage.

I rarely venture into Liberal land either but found this Trojan horse on Huff Post by Sam Mc Phee:

"That WikiLeaks censors anything at all shows a basic agreement with the United States position..now we have an unelected, unaccountable entity making these decisions."

In one breath he casts aspersion because Wiki tries not to kill people and in the next shows his faith in representative "democracy".Sam would prefer someone accountable in the CIA or maybe Mitch Mc Connel? If they have a "basic agreement" would they really have everyone from the President to John Waynes corpse denouncing him?

He goes on: "If I don't like (Gen) Petraeus's conduct there are plenty of elected representatives I can beef to. Yes, the odds are astronomical against my affecting change.So what? That's life in a representative democracy."

I'm not making this up. He worships at the alter of his fifth grade civics lesson, admits it's a joke in the next breath and then laughs the dissociation off.

To top it off: "Operation Payback (hackers) is an...attack..on the rule of law." Wow.Law.Gee whiz.

I found another Liberal at the same site using the same Spectacular logic to defend his vote in favor of tax cuts for billionaires: Al Franken. He said his Minnesota constituents wanted their unemployment benefits extended.I guess he didn't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good! I'd rather drink Clorox than be so absolutely, pathetically craven.But that's just me.

Of course the Conservatives really got it goin on, calling for Assange's murder and yesterday:

"Government should be censoring the American news media.." Rep. Elect Allen West (R) Fla.

By the way, I WAS correct about the Superman movie,crappy propaganda, too long and nobody bought it other than a few FOX watchers who apparently don't want to live in Finland?

War on Schools

2010-12-12T22:20:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow we are going in to town to see Waiting for Superman, a propaganda piece for privatized education. There will be a panel discussion afterward but I have no idea who organized it. This is another of our "social democrat" ( according to Pagan) president's ideas, masterminded by Arnie Duncan and supported by a lot of Big Money Republicrats. ( helping my argument that there is no substantial difference). Would Bernie Sanders really pick Tim Gietner, Larry Summers and Bill Gates?

The film is made by a guy named Guggenheim who also did Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth and a film company involved with liberal blockbusters like Syriana and Food Inc. Lot's of big Digital-Tech type moguls support this version of education reform because entrepreneurialism is their religion and they have made common cause with right-wing union haters, a match made in heaven.But they also believe they are doing GOOD and that you can do GOOD and do WELL.

The movie itself is full of lies and distortions ( shocker) but I'm surprised these guys ( the ones who aren't just being philanthropic) think they can make money at the education "industry". I mean prisons sure, mercenaries sure, but school kids are genetically engineered to fuck with you. And the government is broke. I would get into nursing homes personally, where you can starve people and take all their savings and they won't fight back. But what do I know?

This all supports Zizek's position on cultural capitalism.The old model of charity you have a George Soros or Bill Gates, taking with one hand and giving with the other. For the new form he uses Starbucks for an example, where with your coffee you are also buying fair trade beans and investment into sustainable farming and on and on ( as he puts it) All these products we buy that say they are donating part of their profits to such and such. Google providing catered lunches and suanas for it's work force. It's a new form of charity which begs the question:

Who is crueller? The slave owner who treats his slaves well or the one who treats them badly?

Desperation

2010-12-10T07:42:00.000-08:00

Desiring at least one score Obama drives down the court and dunks it. In the wrong basket. Again and again. Unfortunately, the Republicans don't want him on their team, and act a little embarrassed at the pathetic, craven display.

I think we need a Huey P Newton for President. This is from Bobby Seal's book Seize the Time:

Huey put his hand around his M-1 rifle and continued, "We have a constitutional right to carry the guns, anyway, I don't want to hear it."
The pigs backed up a couple of steps and Huey was coming out of his car...When he came out of the car he dropped a round off into the chamber right away, clack clup.
The pig said "What are you going to do with that gun?"
"What are you going to do with your gun?" Huey said. "Because if you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun from me, I'm going to shoot back at you ,swine."

That's how you deal with racist pinheads if you actually have some dignity and want respect.You don't go all boot licker. Of course, being a black revolutionary organization, the Panthers were all murdered and dispersed, so it is not a model for movement building but for ATTITUDE. They thought they understood the white power structure but they read a little too much Fanon and not enough Debord.

Back to Obama.Bibi Netanyahu treated him like a doormat. The Senate just shot down his "don't ask don't tell"deal and his Dream Act ( or Fill The Military with Brown People Act) . After climate negotiations crumble in Cancun any part of the world that didn't hate us after the Wikileaks will now. Bill Mc Kibben still won't use the word capitalism but he looked as pathetic as Obama when he talked about 350.org. Oh yeah, then there is the capitulation on the Afghanistan withdrawal date.

Here on the sidelines it is easy to quarterback ( like these sports metaphors?) but there isn't much else to do but wait. I was just down in Palm Springs California last week and the chi chi art galleries, jewelry stores and boutiques are hurting, empty shop windows all down Paseo Drive. So that tax break comes just in the nick of time. And while it drives the last nail in the coffin for Social Security, you won't have to worry about any death taxes or death panels.

The Worm Turns

2010-12-09T08:24:00.000-08:00

From the Dec.7 Missoulian: "History professor Richard Drake asked if the growing state of environmental degradation in the name of markets and profits might be reason to re-examine why Americans are so attached to capitalism."

The good professor, who is no radical, asked this at a lecture filled with mostly liberal alumni and progressive community folk who had come to hear an author speak about the moral cause of "Saving the Earth". It is remarkable only because, as in the classes at this university (where the lecture was given) , when these intellectually serious folks gather to learn about the world around them the word capitalism is almost never uttered. But lately,Certain Radicals have been injecting the economic critique into public discussions at many junctures and perhaps it is having an effect after all.

The article goes on: "Moore (the lecturer) responded that she wondered if it was the idea of capitalism or the actions of corporations that was the problem."

This is the standard trope of liberal environmentalists and was no doubt well received by the audience. Fearful that her ethical stance be misconstrued as an attack on capitalism, she prefers to blame "bad" corporations, "bad"regulators, "bad" CEO's, etc. This way they can keep their moral high ground but not upset the status quo or take any real risks, physically or intellectually. She could never cede the fact that the "idea of capitalism" is antithetical to sustainability.

The next paragraph is illustrative: "But physics-astronomy professor David Andrews questioned whether that blame could be laid at capitalistic corporations feet. He observed that the communist regimes of the former Soviet Union and present day China are creating equally disastrous ecological legacies."

So while the worm may very slowly be turning we can see that idiotic responses by supposedly educated individuals still rule the day. This simplistic, Fox-news-type "observation" sounds like something Pagan would say. It instantly equates any critique of capitalism with totalitarian Communist Party rule. It also somehow ignores the fact China has very much embraced markets. These are standardized mantras hegemonically reproduced for mass consumption.

This is exactly why Pagan emphasizes that "Health care is a labyrinth of Byzantine proportions" in the last thread. The intellectual sounding metaphor disguises a trope so worn out and unoriginal,( and so beneficial to capital) that one is stunned it is taken seriously by so many.Such is the power of repetition.

A health care system could be designed by any 11 year old. It is only profit which makes it "Byzantine".

Truth Will Out Part 3

2010-11-29T22:25:00.000-08:00

More leaks and this time, FOR SURE, it is the end of life as we know it. Still no word on where those WMD's are hiding. All this new information is going to be hard for Joe The Plumber to ingest, he still hasn't heard about our occupation of the Philippines in 1899. Still, it is nice to see the Great Game bastards scrambling. Welcome to the desert of the Real, boys.

The worlds governments and NGO's and global summit hoppers have gathered in sunny Cancun to straighten out this whole climate thing. Not a moment too soon either. Hardly a peep out of Bill Mc Kibben or Al Gore or James Hanson but I'm sure Pachamama is in good hands.Bureaucrats are all about getin er done.

I just got home from a the first ( this round) meeting of the Missoula Blue/ Green Alliance.Of course all I did was kvetch, criticizing (in my engaging style) both the Union guys and the enviros who showed up. This is the third such attempt in a dozen years but they always fizzle out.

EVER STOP TO WONDER WHY? Nah, just start up a new one. Same format, same frame, same paradigm.

The union guys are so desperate they would build nuclear concentration camps right now. Only forty percent of their members are working and there ain't much in the pipeline. Speaking of which, these guys would be happy to build one of those too and so all our talk of stopping the Alberta Coal Sands Project fell on deaf ears. They offered to put scrubbers on the coal fired plants they were building so that's pretty green , eh? They seemed like sincere guys but they are totally lost and compass-less in the Spectacular Post-Post Industrial World.

I also am with a union but fortunately we have almost no members and half of us are bums.( truth will out)

As for the environmentalists, they agreed that government is corrupt and broken and run by corporations ( what unites liberals and Tea Partiers) but they want to pass legislation and use regulatory provisions to stop the Project. When I suggested we could skip all that rig-a-ma-role and just end capitalism I received a room full of blank stares. They were looking for a more incremental approach.

There is no Blue Green Alliance. In the Market System this is a structural antagonism which capital exploits to preserve the status quo. If environmentalists had adopted an anti-capitalist critique fifty years ago we wouldn't be in this mess today ( to quote Dave Mason) And unless they wake up now, there won't be much left to argue over fifty years from now.