A description of the current American civil war

This comes from over at Hullabaloo. It is a clear summary of the current American political situation.

Progressives must come to terms with the fact that the 35% or so of Americans who make up the conservative base have been radicalized far beyond the point of no return. They are activist class warriors on behalf of the top 1% of "producers." They are activist culture warriors against minority communities who will happily advance minority figureheads as exceptional standardbearers in order to prove their point.

We are now a nation hopelessly divided. On one side is a large faction of people who understand that the financial classes and the super-wealthy are mostly a parasitic class; that the middle class has much more in common with the poor than it does with the wealthy; that workers produce wealth, and that demand produces prosperity; that poor communities are disadvantaged not by the inherent failings of their people but by the oppressive nature of their circumstances; and that we humans and creatures of this earth are all in the same boat together.

On the other side is a large group of people who believe that over half of Americans are parasitic dead weight who should not be allowed to vote; that the interests of the middle class are aligned with the interests of hedge fund managers; that only a select few very wealthy people produce society's goods; that poor communities are poor through their own moral failings; and that the society's "producers" should behave however they please to people and creatures unfortunate enough to find themselves at their mercy.

And in the middle are about 20% of Americans paying too little attention to have much of an opinion either way.

This is the "Two Tribes" Digby has been writing about for the last decade. I am going to write more about these two tribes in the near future but until I do, I strongly recommend Francis Fukuyama's new book The Origins of Political Order.

Fukuyama writes of the shift from tribal government to the national state. The national state is based on bureaucracy, which is an impersonal rational organizational structure of the type which is required to achieve control over large populations and especially to field large professional armies. Once a state exists, then history has shown it becomes unified when the king provides justice to the population and protects them from the predatory behavior of the aristocracy. But this protection only occurs in a strong state. A weak state cannot provide as much protection and cannot afford to field large professional armies over long periods of time.

Fukuyama describes the characteristics of tribally governed organizations and compares those characteristics of nation states which are based on bureaucracies. But he also points out that historically nation states have broken down, and when they do the default form of governance is tribal. The aristocrats prefer tribal governance because they are predators and such tribal governance allows them to plunder the population.

The aristocrats of France from three centuries ago are today's moneyed elites. Keep in mind that the working classes create value. The modern moneyed elites do nothing but collect rent without adding value to the society. Their rent is based on their positions of power, not on their economic value. Since the Great Depression the federal government has protected the working population of America from the predatory behavior of the moneyed elites, but with the rise of Reaganism that protection has broken down. Today Wall Street banks, large monopolistic or oligopolistic businesses and inherited wealth all conspire to weaken the federal government so that they can plunder the working population.

They are far along on their effort, but the Occupy Wall Street movement has begun to react to their predations. It's time for America to regain control over the financial predators who are attacking us.

Are the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street very similar?

Trust Digby to get it right.

I suppose it was inevitable that the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement would be compared with the Tea Party, but the level of misunderstanding and myth surrounding the latter's "populist" bona fides is surprising to even the most cynical observer.

There may be surface similarities between the two uprisings, but they actually represent two opposing populist worldviews, whose only philosophical resemblance to one another is their belief that they speak for "the people" against the elites. While both movements are mainly concerned with economic issues, their beliefs about the causes and solutions they propose couldn't be more different.

One of the central myths about the Tea Party is that it came about as a reaction against the Wall Street bailouts. It's true that there were some scattered "Tea Parties" around the Ron Paul campaign in 2008, but virtually everyone agrees that the movement was really galvanised by a famous rant from CNBC anchor Rick Santelli from the trading floor of the Chicago commodities exchange.

Only one month into the Obama administration, Santelli called for a "new Tea Party" to be held on tax day, April 15, and it became an instant YouTube sensation and rallying cry for the right wing.

He was mad about bailouts alright, but not the Wall Street bailouts. What sparked his fury was the proposed plan to help average homeowners in trouble with their mortgages. Santelli raved: "Do we really want to subsidise the losers' mortgages? This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbour's mortgage? President Obama, are you listening? How about we all stop paying our mortgages! It's a moral hazard."

"Do we really want to subsidise the losers?"

- Rick Santelli, CNBC anchor

Here's how his colleague Lawrence Kudlow characterised the outburst: "Santelli called for a new Tea Party in support of capitalism. He's right."

Support for capitalism - and antipathy toward government interference in it - is the very essence of Tea Party populism. There wasn't much talk about the moral hazard of a "too big to fail" banking system but there was plenty of fulminating about government interference in "the market" and righteous anger about the stimulus plan and what they characterised as the "government takeover" of the healthcare system.

It was never about corporate greed, but was about the usual right wing resentment at the government spending their tax money on people they don't think have earned it. These are not billionaire bankers - they are the people on the lower rungs of the ladder. Unsurprisingly, this attitude turned out to be useful to corporate interests looking to allay any real populist impulses among the citizenry, and they soon moved in through various means to help the "movement" organise itself.

Contrary to various accounts surfacing lately ostensibly to warn the Occupy Wall Street supporters of the dangers of being similarly "co-opted" it was a very happy love match, not a marriage of convenience.

Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, while being endlessly harrangued by wags and pundits about its alleged lack of goals and lists of grievances, is actually focused pretty clearly on the same thing as the populists of the Gilded Age - those whom Teddy Roosevelt called the "malefactors of great wealth".

Their rallying cry is "we are the 99 per cent" which represents the huge number of those of us who have been treading water or losing ground over the past 30 years, while and the upper one per cent of the population swallows up more and more of the nation's wealth. This shocking income inequality is finally reaching a critical mass that is animating the OWS movement.

Indifference of the rich

This movement wasn't catalysed by a wealthy commentator issuing a cri de guerre on a stock market show on TV. There has been a growing anti-corporate populist critique on the left for nearly 20 years, first in the form of the anti-globalisation movement and more recently in the more mainstream response to a series of assaults on workers' rights, notably in Wisconsin and Ohio.

The arrogant indifference of the very rich to the carnage they left behind in the wake of their spectacular meltdown in 2008, and the apparent impotence of democratic institutions to hold them to account, has finally mobilised the masses.

Click Here to read the rest.

The prognosis for the Great Recession is not good.

What's wrong with the current government approach to holding off the Great Depression II? Digby quotes Krugman at length, then goes on to add further information provided by a financially knowledgeable friend of hers.

Here is a really important point made by Digby's friend. The Obama administration is aiming the rescue actions of government wrong. Instead of spending to create new jobs, they are spending to prop up already inflated asset prices.

Her friend discusses the article by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells:

They make an important point -- as just stated -- that its key to get jobs back and that deficits don't matter if they are producing jobs. But, Krugman/Wells simply gloss over this in their larger commentary about govt deficits.... they fail to note that 80 to 90% or more of govt commitments in this crisis have been to prop up assets, not produce jobs. The Fed has basically engaged in the same high leverage act as the financial sector --- and the price tag for that is that we're a hair trigger away from collapse while simultaneously have so over committed the govt -- all to prop up asset prices because we said "no" to the Swedish model (which was short, not long) -- that, in effect, we've shot our wad at asset prices and when folks say, jobs, jobs, jobs, the oligarchs cry: too much govt debt.

Krugman/Wells simply do not explain this -- and the article would have been far superior if they had.

My short take on these articles is that Krugman/Wells explain that financial collapses occur because of excessive borrowing - bank and government leverage to build financial assets.

Borrowing is not inherently wrong. Borrowing to create jobs builds the economy. It's borrowing to prop up asset prices, especially financial assets which do almost nothing for the real economy of goods and services that is dangerous. But the oligarchs who currently run American society depend on financial prices for the wealth that guarantees their position in society. This is because Wall Street has expanded in recent years to create over 40% of the profits in the American economy at the expense of outsourcing real jobs to third world countries.

The different point of view that Digby adds also makes many very important points. Read both the Digby article and the Krugman/Wells article.

The Krugman/Wells article can be read in the New York Review of Books.

Obama, Racism, Sexism, and the flap over Jerimiah Wright

This has been an interesting week in that a number of the imperfections of American society have been surfaced, a dialog begun, and the media has punted. Digby discusses it all at length.

There's not too much I can add to what Digby wrote. But the conservative use of Rev. Wright's sermon shows such a narrow-minded blind view of some mythical perfection of America that I am amazed. America is a fantastic experiment in how to make a society better. But it is yet an experiment, one with many flaws, surrounding the great American original sin of slavery and the racism that grew from that to the fear-based segregation - a fear-based solution which South Africa copied in 1948 when they passed their Apartheid Laws based on South Carolina's segregation laws.

Racism is not a thing of the past in America. It has only changed, and been removed from written law, and yes, reduced somewhat. But it is hard to look at statistics that show de facto segregation still exists and further statistics that show that altough Blacks, who represent only 11% of the American population and are only 20% more likely to use illegal drugs, they for some strange reason represent nearly half of America's excessive prison population. Racism causes that? Sure. And the racism is based on fear. As Digby points out regarding racism: "...the single most powerful lingering vestige of racism is an irrational fear of an angry black mob --- led by an angry black man." The continuous loop of Rev. Jeramiah Wright's sermon demonstrates that fear perfectly. That loop is on the news because he is Black and seems angry. The Rev. Pat Robertson called for assassinating Hugo Chavez, and Rev. Hagee calles for speeding up the war that will end the human race and destroy all Jews, but do those get endless media loops? Of course not. Those two guys are White, so they don't threaten White conservatives.

The upcoming Presidential election is becoming really complicated. I had originally thought that it would be a battle over the obvious idiocy of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The recent economic events clearly demonstrate that the three decade experiment with conservative free market - no government economics has led to economic disaster as we enter what even Alan Greenspan, one of the key architects of the economic disaster agrees is the worst economic downturn since the Depression of the thirties. But apparently that's not all.

We are also going into an election that has also surfaced the blatant misogyny that runs through America, and with the half-White, half Black Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee for President, the conservatives are grasping the only competitive weapon they have that might win the Presidency for them - Fear of the Angry Black Man.

Compared to that, the heavy strain of fear of Muslims is really a minor note in the overall symphony of fear that is the basis of John McCain's Presidential campaign.

As I say, this is becoming a complicated Presidential election and it still has over seven months left to run.

Go read Digby. She's right and I don't have time at the moment to explain why, even assuming that I could match her for clarity and expressiveness.

Digby - "Huckabee has always been a hater with a smile"

Digby provides more evidence that Huckabee is not suited to become President. Here is her final paragraph:

Wingnuts do not vote on creationism and blastocyst worship alone. Huck knows that to close the deal he's got to publicly get some hate on for somebody. Going after the gays is so 2004. This year's designated Republican hate object is teh Mexicans. They just need a little more reassurance that he's one of them. This should do it.

Huckabee may fool the Press flunkies, but a bit of research shows that the man behind the charm and the smile is as nasty as they come.

Of course, as both Huckabee and Giuliani know that is exactly what the Republicans, especially the religious right Republicans, really wants.

Is 'disaster capitalism' motivated by greed instead of big ideas?

Digby channels Naomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine", Alan Greenspan "The Age of Turbulence", Ayn Rand "Atlas Shrugged", and Milton Friedman to explain the motivations of the free market radical conservative and Libertarian Republicans.

It starts with a quotation from Naomi Klein:

When hard-right political leaders and their advisers apply brutal economic shock therapy, do they honestly believe the trickle-down effects will build equitable societies--or are they just deliberately creating the conditions for yet another corporate feeding frenzy? Put bluntly, Has the world been transformed over the past three decades by lofty ideology or by lowly greed?

Then Digby does an excellent job of answering the question.

We already know that they are happy to rob widows and children, cut back on health care and education and start unnecessary wars just so they can frighten people into adopting the methods that they control and that makes them even more wealthy and powerful. But why? It is the ideas?

Nope. As we all suspected, the answer is mere greed. The so-called ideas they spout are excuses to explain why acting as greedheads does not mean that they are really rotten human beings. The ideas just let them sleep at night.

Crime and punishment. Poor Clarence

Digby discusses the continued blind anger displayed by Clarence Thomas in his new book and shows that his greatest impact on America will not be his Black conservatism, but his exposure of how very widespread sexual harassment was in the workplace.

This arch conservative, anti-feminist unwittingly and against his will may have done more to advance the cause of women's rights in the workplace than anyone else on the Supreme Court today. His greatest legacy will be that his inappropriate behavior woke up the nation to the issue of sexual harassment. And perhaps that explains why he is still so bitter and angry. That's the last legacy he would have ever chosen.

Digby's right.

Before the Thomas hearings I was vaguely aware of the nastiness of what we now call 'sexual harassment.' I didn't participate, but I didn't do anything to stop it, either. It was just something that 'was,' and always had been that way. But the Thomas hearings were like 9/11. They changed everything. Sexual harassment in the workplace became high profile and has remained so ever since.

The only thing I had gotten out of Clarence Thomas' book was that Thomas is a sad, sick, twisted human being who was angry before the hearings, felt that he was being treated badly during the hearings, has no clue what really was going on in the hearings (since he can't see any one's pain or discomfort except his own) and is unable to learn from what happened to him.

Oh, and like all conservatives, Thomas does not now and never has had a bit of empathy for any other person.

Clarence Thomas must be really, really irritated, even angered, to find that he made a major contribution to freeing women from sexual harassment in the workplace . His irritation and anger is strange justice. It is his just punishment for being an angry self-centered conservative with no empathy for anyone outside himself. If he were a decent person, the exact same outcome of his behavior could by considered a real accomplishment and contribution to the betterment of others.

The punishment truly fits the crime, and it is playing out on a national stage in front of everyone which must make it much worse. Only Clarence Thomas' flaws as a human being make it a punishment, and for him to learn from it, grow and become a better person would free him from it.

Where are the funny Republicans?

Digby reports the demise of FNC's Half Hour News Hour.

Lesson: If someone is funny, he or she is NOT Republican.

Who or what do the participants at the Yearly Kos represent?

Digby is in attendance and provides the definitive answer:

The netroots as a whole don't normally organize ourselves around the normal social signifiers or political alliances. We can't. Online identity is a strange and amorphous thing anyway, and the desire to participate in politics doing it cannot be easily analyzed by the usual human shorthand. We just don't know enough about why and how people really use this thing to make sweeping judgments about what we really "mean," certainly not based upon a conference that only a very small segment of the netroots attended, (many of whom are paid political professionals of one kind or another.)

That conference, fun as it might be, is a tiny, tiny corner of the netroots universe and I don't think should be used as a proxy for anything in the larger movement. The only way I can see that the netroots really organize at this point, is around a common world view. It's not policy or personality or even party. It's about how we see our role as citizens and how we think our society and government should work. Wonk work is necessary to sort all that out into coherent programs and political agendas, of course. Real life organizing is required to turn this energy into votes. Communicating ideas and critiquing the political scene is necessary to educate and learn. But none of those things defines what's going on here in any precise way. The best I can do is say that it is (for most people outside the professional political sphere anyway) an empowering, social and political movement that has the potential to rearrange the way we normally build coalitions. (Not exactly a bumper sticker, is it?)

So what or who is represented by the group of individuals who are attending yearly Kos? The Press is using it almost as a Rorschach Test. It means whatever the observer wants to read into it.

That's not surprising. It is a brand new phenomenon, and no one has yet offered an evaluation that everyone recognizes is so accurate that it must be the true one. I suspect that Digby's idea that it is a bunch of people who all have a similar world view will ultimately be a part of the answer. But at this time I think that if anyone does try to apply a single label to what yearly Kos means will simply prove the truth of the General Semantics concept that labels do not change, even when the phenomenon to which the label is applied undergoes radical change.

To use Hayakawa's "The map is not the Territory" analogy, people tend to continue to use the old, comfortable map even after the mapped river has changed courses. Ask any Mississippi riverboat pilot. The nature of the netroots changes at least as rapidly as the course of the Mississippi River does. [*]

An answer, but not really "the definitive" answer, right? That's because there isn't any.

[*] Since conservatives, by their own admission, demand certainty, a lack of change, and a maximum of control, it is obvious that conservatives can never use the netroots approach successfully themselves. Since it will be a source of power that they cannot use, they will find it necessary to control it.

That's why right-wing websites almost never permit comments, especially uncontrolled comments, and it is why they will attempt to regulate the netroots in harsh ways. Bill O'Reilly is attempting to do so by demonizing Daily Kos and the yearly Kos convention as extremists. There will also be efforts to pass laws controlling websites and their content, and those effort will steadily become more draconian as they repeatedly fail to control the threat to the right wind world views.

---

I can't pass this up without comment on the extremism with which Bill O'Reilly has attempted to apply very negative labels to both yearly Kos and to Marcos's site, Daily Kos. Bill's over-the-top rhetoric simply point out how much he feels that this group of people threaten him and his lofty and powerful perch on FOX network.

O'Reilly is right to feel threatened. The world view of the yearly Kos participants is one that is growing rapidly, and it leaves no room for the mixture of lies, propaganda and manipulation that has been his stock in trade. The growth of the Kossite world view will soon relegate him to a backroom where he will reside, a sad, sick, forgotten old man angry that his glory has been taken away.

Good riddance.

Who are the Progressive Netroots? Wellstone, Ivins, and Digby can all tell you.

Here is the speech given by Digby at the "Take back America" dinner in Washington, D.C.

Being retired, I don't have a lot of money to spend on political campaigns. However, the only blogger that I send any money at all to is Digby. Her writing (and that of Tristero) are worth it.

This speech shows why. And why voices like hers are important.

Wish I could write the way she does. Go read her blog and kick in a few dollars every so often. It's worth a lot more than NPR or PBS. And a whole lot more that CBS News, as my rather disgusted posts about Katie Couric should demonstrate.

Brady Keisling - an American hero

I hate it when I overlook an outstanding Digby post. They aren't rare, but that is a good reason to double check repeatedly so as to not miss one. But I missed this one.

Brady Keisling is "the career diplomat in Greece who dramatically resigned in 2003 rather than continue to support the Bush/Iraq war." But that is just the beginning. Go read what Digby has to say about him.

Then buy Keisling's book, Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower - and send Digby a few dollars to keep up the good work while you are at it. I do, and I really can't afford it.

Republicans reduce Democratic vote by claims of vote fraud

Here's another story that the mainstream press doesn't want to report. The frequent accusations of "Vote Fraud" by Republicans is a cover for actually depressing the overall vote and convincing mostly Democratic voters not to vote. McClatchy has the story.

Then Digby builds on the McClatchy story.

Digby lists the anti-democratic actions of Republicans

This is an excellent post by Digby. My favorite line in his post is

since I first started writing on-line, one of my recurring themes is that the modern Republican party has become fundamentally hostile to democracy.(And we already knew they were crooks.)

But his entire post makes it quite clear why he (and I) think this of the Republican Party.

Where next in Iraq? Ask Pat Buchanan.

Digby points us to the recent McLaughlin Report:

Pat Buchanan said something quite bracing on the McLaughlin Report this week-end:

What this tells you John is that we are coming out of Iraq. This is the first resolution and it's non-binding, others are coming down the road. There will be no more surges into Iraq, the president has said we are not winning the war with the troops we have, we are coming out. So we had better prepare ourselves for the consequences, not of a defeat for American arms, but a defeat for American policy in Iraq, the potential loss of Iraq. And frankly John, the situation's not looking all that good in Afghanistan either, where the NATO allies are not doing their bit. So we are at a historic turning point, I think, for the United States in the middle east.

We aren't going to be leaving Iraq while George W. Bush is in the white house. But, I think he's got the rest of it right. We certainly have a policy failure in Iraq. Big time.

Politically it is as clear as the fact that the sun rises in the East that the right-wing noise machine will immediately begin the "Who lost Iraq" blame-game to try to claim that the Democrats lost the war. Initially that will be a hard sell, but conservatives do not look at real history. They look at the history they want to create for the past to avoid blaming themselves.

The way to counter this will involve deep and honest investigation of the Cheney/Bush administration and exposure of all of its failures. Iran-Contra was swept under the rug because too many politicians were afraid for their careers if it became well known, and it was clear that Reagan was senile by then anyway. Exposure of all that would have somehow "disrupted" our nation. It was "smoother" (not really better) to just walk off and ignore it. Ignoring Iran-Contra has given us the Cheney/Bush administration and the worst President ever by several orders of magnitude.

We must not let this happen again. The Iraq War must be deeply investigated. [I'd really like to see a Reconciliation Commission, similar to the one in South Africa. But that's another article.]

The next issue is going to be the problems of both "Peak Oil" and the greater competition for the remaining oil. It will cause conflicts that are likely to expand to more war.

Wars over oil will be extremely shortsighted. The energy from oil that is being used for transportation must be replaced, either sooner or later. We can spend a lot of money and lives on wars to control existing oil (with very uncertain likelihood of success), or spend a lot less money on basic research and demonstration projects to develop the required replacement energy sources as soon as possible. Not only is the latter more likely to be successful than war, it is going to have to happen sooner or later anyway!

In either case, the newly clear overriding problem for all the world is global warming. Global warming is going to require something like the Manhattan Project, but it needs to be worldwide. Like the development of the atomic bomb, the many problems caused by global warming are problems for which a massive project fueled by throwing money at them is the best possible solution. The problem of replacing oil as energy for transportation should be considered a part of that massive Global Warming Project.

It is an appropriate role for America. Since replacing oil energy for transportatin will have the side effect of making the American automotive industry competitive again it should have major positive effects on the American export balance of manufactured items. It will NOT be likely to help much in employment of industrial workers, however, since the increased productivity will continue to come from automating production.

What's this have to do with what's next in Iraq? This demonstrates the two paths available to America. We can continue to attempt the Cheney/Bush coercive military methods to force the rest of the world to do things our way, or we can gather the forces of this great productive nation to make the shortage of oil world wide into a problem so miniscule that it is irrelevant. The choice of which of the two paths we take will start with how we disengage from Iraq.