Short Shots

Whose your momma?

2009-12-10T06:48:00.000-08:00

So, who still thinks Obama is running the show? When he announced his Afghan escalation at West Point, Obama assured the nation we’d start withdrawing our forces by 2011.

Up to the mike steps Gen. Davy Petraeus who says, “Not so fast, baby! Them troops don’t leave ‘til I say they leave! Hell, you don’t mess with a viable profit center, so stop acting like a commander-in-chief.”

It seems it is now going to take years (at $10 billion per) before the Afghan police and army are able to take over responsibility for their own security. According to Thursday’s New York Times, Karzai says Afghanistan won’t be able to foot the bill for its security until 2024, if then.

Remember, that’s $10 billion a year just to beef up security in Afghanistan. That doesn’t include the expenses we incur for keeping our soon to be 100,000 troops on the ground.

All this just so we can control a wasteland.

Pointing out that the lunatics are running the asylum is a shop-worn cliché.

But, goddamn it…

Keep those presses rolling!

2009-12-09T03:04:00.000-08:00

I’m sure our oligarchs are thrilled with the Tiger Woods scandal. There’s nothing like a trivial headline grabber to keep the public diverted while the Beltway’s media mill pump out disinformation as fast as it can.

The latest shipment to be slipped by the public in the media brouhaha over Woods is Obama’s rationales for escalating the war in Afghanistan.

In his West Point speech, Obama tried to draw a distinction between Afghanistan and Vietnam by contending that we’d fought Vietnam all by ourselves. Paul Rosenberg points out that this is a bold-faced lie. Our allies in Vietnam included:

320,000 troops from South Korea
60,000 troops from Australia
10,450 troops from the Philippines
3,890 troops from New Zealand

If my math is correct, this is a lot more than the number of “allied” troops currently in Afghanistan.

Then Obama claimed that the Taliban refused to hand over Osama in the wake of 9/11. Robert Lopez shines some light on that one. The Taliban offered to hand over Bin Laden three times. The first two times, they asked for evidence of his involvement in 9/11. The Bushites refused, citing national security. The third time, the Taliban said they would forget about the evidence if Osama could be tried in a third country. Once again, we said no because we just had to have a war.

Fortunately, the public was too busy trying to sort our Tiger’s mistresses to notice.

Cultural Hubris and the Militarized Corporate State

2009-12-08T04:00:00.000-08:00

It is a misnomer to call it racism because the entire concept of race is a myth. Some may point to the slaughter and mayhem this myth has left in its wake as proof of its reality, but the sad truth is that myths of all sorts are always deadlier than reality. Just look at the brutality religious wars create.

Rather what we are seeing in the Beltway’s justification for the Afghan enterprise is a cultural hubris carried to the point of madness. It is the assumption that western, liberal democracy is the acme of social evolution and that its practitioners have a moral obligation to spread it to the far corners of the earth. (One wonders just how civilized the West is, given the millions killed in our wars and our death camps. However, if a culture believes itself on the side of “right” it can do no evil.

A corollary of this hubris is that all other cultures are mired in barbarity, superstition and ignorance, and it is the West’s duty to lift them out of this swamp. And we do this by converting savages into middleclass suits who talk like us and think like us, after we’ve bombed them into submission.

Consequently, we believe that everything outside of our cultural gated community constitutes a threat that must be neutralized.

In his West Point speech, Obama personified this mindset when he said, “This struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. Our efforts will involve disorderly regions and diffuse enemies.” “Violent extremism” is code for insurgent nationalism, a no-no for the West because it represents a rejection of our utopian mindset. (Only a died-in-the-wool cynic would suggest that the real reason for our Eternal War of the Empty Policy to justify our militarized corporate state.)

According to Mike Whitney, Obama’s remark was inspired by a report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) who said:

He [Obama] must make it clear that the ideological, demographic, governance, economic and other pressures that divide the Islamic world mean the world will face threats in many other nations that will endure indefinitely into the future. He should mention the risks in Yemen and Somalia, make it clear that the Iraq war is not over, and warn that we still face both a domestic threat and a combination of insurgency and terrorism that will continue to extend from Morocco to the Philippines, and from Central Asia deep into Africa, regardless of how well we do in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

That’s the trouble with a gated community; the very presence of a gate makes you feel threatened regardless of whether or not the threats are real. The first law of a militarized corporate state is that if there are no real threats out there, we’ve got to make some up. We need a worldwide conspiracy where none exists; we need phantoms and ghosts, monsters hiding in the closet, rabid natives, frothing fanatics and lots of off-white flesh begging for a benevolent blow from our velvet fist.

In his speech, Obama did more than escalate the Afghan war. He deftly replaced a moribund Communism with Islam as the new justification for a new Cold War. Only this one will be religious, which will make it even dicier.

The Third Mouse

2009-12-07T03:54:00.000-08:00

Of the many fairy tales our oligarchs have sold the public on, one of the more pernicious is that the only permanence is change. One of their favorite clichés is, “Change is inevitable; growth is optional.” The implication is that your company doesn’t fire you; it liberates you. And in this state of liberation, you are free to move on to higher level of existence as you began collecting unemployment because anxiety builds character.

Some years ago, as corporations were making job security a thing of the past, a pamphlet was making the rounds titled “Where’s my cheese.” It told the tale of two laboratory mice who were made to run a maze at the end of which was there cheese. Once both mice mastered the maze, their cheese was moved to a new location.

One of the mice, when it got to the old location of the cheese, stayed put in expectation that the missing cheese would soon appear. Tragically, it wasted away and died.

The second mouse, being full of get-up-and-go, traversed the maze until it found the cheese’s new location.

The tale conveniently left out the third mouse, the mouse on steroids, that reduced the maze to kindling and beat the shit out of the researchers until they told him where the cheese was.

Whence Freedom?

2009-12-05T03:19:00.000-08:00

It’s an interesting question. Why is it that Euromericans remain so passive as their freedoms are eroded? There is no single answer. Paranoia and anxiety are factors. Our leaders are constantly coming up with new threats, both real and imagined, to keep us on edge. And there is no doubt we are distracted by our toys. As long as you plastic isn’t maxed out, you’re living the good life, because we all know that freedom is the freedom to chose from cornucopia of consumer goods.

All of the above play a role, but there is one other factor that is rarely considered. Freedom is messy, inefficient, contradictory, disorderly, sometimes brutish and violent, smelly, chaotic, unpredictable and raucous. This is why the corporate state cannot abide it.

Freedom fosters instability, and instability cuts into productivity. Look at how much was lost during the civil rights movement as cities were burned and sit-ins disrupted respectable businesses. Then there was the sex and drugs of the hippies and the disruptions caused by the peace movement.

The sixties taught our oligarchs a valuable lesson—freedom is counterproductive.

This is why freedom has been reduced to an artifact kept locked away, one that is only trotted out when there is a war to be justified.

The erosion of freedom is aided and abetted by the fact that we are raised to accept fastidiousness as the norm. The slightest disruption unnerves us. A dust mote on a dung pile is unnoticed; the same dust mote on the polished lens of a telescope screams for attention.

Freedom often dirties the fingernails, and we prefer to keep ours clean and manicured.

So it is that we dutifully remove our shoes at airport checkpoints and wipe down the handles of our shopping carts with the sanitary wipes our supermarkets supply us with.

Our philosophy is that it’s better to be neat than free.

Light Bulbs and Markets

2009-12-04T04:29:00.000-08:00

According to the Chicago School of economics, we have nothing to worry about. The market is a self-regulating organism that automatic cleans up the shit left by the financial retards who run it. So, let the boys have their fun; the invisible hand will pat them on their asses and send them on their way.

According to Raj Patel there is a joke making the rounds among economists:

Q: How many Chicago School economists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. If the light bulb were burnt out, the market would change it.

As Patel points out, “The great unwinding of the financial sector showed that the smartest mathematical minds on the planet, backed by some of the deepest pockets, had not built a sleek engine of permanent prosperity but a clown car of trades, swaps and double dares that, inevitably, fell to bits.

Actually, we can blame William Petty (1623-1687) for this. Petty is considered the father of “Political Arithmetik.” His philosophy is summed up in his decision to “discard comparative and superlative Words and to use only such reasoning as can be expressed in Terms of Number, Weight and Measure.”[1]

Thus was born the quantification of everything and the gradual rise of the wacky world of the value-free social sciences. (So seminal was Petty’s work that it influenced both Adam Smith and Karl Marx.)

The problem with both Petty and the Chicago School is the mistaken belief that they can impose a rational, linear matrix on the nonlinear chaos that is life. From this premises arises the fallacy that the market is driven by rational beings making rational decisions and that the price of a commodity or stock represents the sum total of all of the input from a given stock or commodity.

As Patel points out, “This is different from saying that the price actually does reflect its future performance—rather, the price reflects the current state of beliefs about the odds of that performance being good or bad.” In other words, the price reflects what the mob thinks.

Because economic theory is so shackled to numbers and formulae, it is unable to factor in greed, stupidity, ego and mob psychology, all of which have a greater influence on the market than rational decision making.

The result has been an economy that has reeled from bubble to bubble to such an extent that it views bubbles as the norm. As soon as one pops, the masters of the universe frantically work to inflate another.

It’s really not fair to blame Petty for the Chicago School. The man believed that a rational government was wise to minimize defense spending in favor of building an effective social welfare net.

But then, history shows us that the mission of disciples is to corrupt their masters' teachings. Look at what St. Paul did to Christ and what Stalin did to Marx.

Meanwhile, Obama still believes that the clowns who built the car can put it back together.

Good luck, babe.

[1] Quoted in Peter Linebaugh’s, The London Hanged

God speaks!

2009-12-03T06:11:00.001-08:00

The New York State Senate has defeated a gay marriage bill, thus preserving the sanctity of domestic violence and divorce.

Obama Channels LBJ

2009-12-02T03:11:00.000-08:00

It was pure Bush Lite when Obama addressed cadets at West Point last night.

He’s mastered all of GWB’s buzz words. There was the appeal to “vital national interests,” and several references to the 9/11 logo, along with the allusion to al-Qaeda’s ability to “threaten America.” Then there was the old chestnut that “our security is at stake,” not to mention the “security of the world.” Last, but not least, Afghanistan is “an enduring test of our free society and the leadership of the world.”

It reminded me of Pete Seeger when he sang, “We were waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool said move on.”

Another thirty-thousand troops and another $30 billion even as California is going broke and New York’s Gov. David Patterson wants to cut funding to education and healthcare. People are being turned out of their houses, tent cities are going up all over the country, our children are going to bed hungry, our deficit is in the trillions, unemployment is up around 17%...

and the big fool said move on.

Our mission, he told us is to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” It is estimated that there are, maybe, 100 al Qaeda in Afghanistan at the present moment, but we are going to have a total of 100,000 troops to hunt them down. That’s about 1000 troops for each member of al Qaeda…

and the big fool said move on.

But rest assured, we are not occupying Afghanistan, we are entering into partnership with the country. Now, any country that hears the United States wants to “partner” with it would do well to cringe. Our partnerships are like the one a rapist forms with his victim.

And, of course, he reassured us that Afghanistan is not Vietnam because the additional troops are going to train the Afghan people to defend themselves so we can pull out in eighteen months, just like we did in Vietnam. If, however, the Afghan army proves as corrupt and incompetent and the South Vietnamese army, we might have to hang around a bit longer.

But, it’s not Vietnam.

Obama called for the nation to unite behind his dream, and we can. All we need do is think of the Big Muddy as a vacation spa.

The reason why

2009-12-01T02:42:00.000-08:00

Mothers are always telling their daughters that girls develop faster than boys. What they fail to mention is that the boys don’t catch up until their 50s or 60s, if then.

That’s one reason men are always starting wars.

The second is that we’re the poor bastards who have to get it up, and that requires a lost of posturing and bullshit, with an occasional war thrown in for good measure.

Remember that as Obama speaks at West Point, tonight.

Can they get any smarter?

2009-11-30T03:14:00.000-08:00

Tim Geithner personifies a new phenomenon that is sweeping the financial world: intellectual retardation. This is a condition in which an individual’s thinking becomes so sophisticated and so immersed in detail that it becomes incapable of functioning in a sensible manner.

Geithner gave a dazzling display of his brilliant dumbness when he justified paying AIG one-hundred cents on the dollar when the Treasury Department bailed them out after the firm found itself drowning in the credit default swaps (CDS) it couldn’t honor.

Geithner’s justification for this largess?

The government could not unilaterally impose haircuts on creditors, and it would not have been appropriate for the government to pressure counterparties to accept haircuts by threatening to retaliate in some way through its regulatory power.

Now, if a company is “too big to fail,” and if it gets its pecker in a wringer and if my tax dollars go to bailout a bunch of financial retards, then I want some oversight. It’s a simple proposition—if a firm accepts public money then the public sets the terms and conditions.

Another government official spoke of “sophisticated financial institutions.”

It now appears that sophisticated is just another word for stupid.

The only question, now, is who is more sophisticated, finance corporatism or the government. Or, are they so joined at the hip that they are indistinguishable.

Youthful Thinking

2009-11-29T04:04:00.000-08:00

Two events surfaced last week that reinforce my conviction that the Beltway is a sheltered workshop for arrested adolescents. The Obama administration announced it would not sign an international convention banning land mines, and it appears likely that Obama will ask for an additional 30,000 troops for his Afghan quagmire.

The treaty banning the production and use of antipersonnel landmines was signed in 1999 by 150 countries, including all of our NATO allies. The United States said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

The treaty was inked at a time when the millions of landmines scattered indiscriminately over the face of the earth (some dating back to WW II) were killing and maiming some 26,000 people a year. Because of the treaty, that number has dropped to 5,000 a year and some two million antipersonnel mines have been cleared.

The philosophy behind the antipersonnel mine is particularly onerous. The aim of the mine is to maim, not to kill. The thinking is that if an enemy combatant is killed, his buddies let him lstay where he fell. If, however, the mine maims, then two to four combatants will be tied up carrying him back to the nearest aid station.

The announcement that the administration would not sign the treaty was an exercise in adolescent thinking. The administration has promised to review the treaty with an eye to seeing if the United States would reverse itself and sign it.

State Department Ian Kelly said the review was completed and the decision made not to sign the treaty because Washington “would not be able to meet our national defense needs, nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we sign the [landmine] convention.”

It’s the same old story: give a boy a toy and he’s loathe to give it up. Gotta strut your stuff, you know.

Well, all hell broke loose, so the next day, the selfsame Kelly, with a straight face, announced that, golly gee, the review was still ongoing.

Senator Patrick Leahy called the decision a “default of U.S. leadership.”

Hell! What cave have you been living in, Patrick? This is U.S. leadership at its finest. We are a militarized security state, and militarized security states leave all options on the table, no matter how many people they kill or maim.

And all options appear to be on the table when it comes to Afghanistan, said options being rumored to include an additional 30,000 troops to fight a war military experts agree cannot be won militarily.

Obama says it is a war we must win. Retired Army Col Andrew J. Bacevich says it’s a war we cannot win. “But for some reason, Obama views this remote, landlocked, primitive Central Asian country as a vital U.S. security interest.”

It’s the old Beltway philosophy that it is far better to lose than to cut your losses and withdraw.

Writer Ron Smith, who quoted Bacevich in his article, concludes that, “It seems insane, doesn’t it? We’re deep in a debt pit and digging our self even deeper, soothed by the conceit that America is too big to fail, even though all previous world hegemons have in the end failed. We think of ourselves as an exception to that historical record, but the chances are we’re not.”

True. How many adolescents have died doing something stupid?

America has to do something with her arrested adolescents, and the Beltway is as good a place as any to warehouse them. But someone should really take their toys away.

Perception Management

2009-11-28T04:07:00.000-08:00

There was a time when vampires personified evil. They were creatures of the night who stalked their victims under the cover of darkness and had a marked preference for the blood of innocent virgins. A cross or a string of garlic bulbs protected you and the only way to put an end to them was with a stake through the heart.

Vampires belonging to the Bela Lugosi school of acting were suave, debonair and well mannered, unless a virgin bared her neck. They always ended up with a stake through their hearts.

Apparently, the Vampire trade association must have inked a contract with the PR firm of Hills and Knowlton, because all of a sudden they have been welcomed into polite society. Now they live next door, date our daughters and have traded the white tie and tails for jeans and T-shirts.

Vampires have always been a metaphor for something. In the Victorian age, they were a metaphor for repressed sexuality. In the twenty-first century, they have become a metaphor for either investment bankers or imperialism (a metaphore so patently obvious it gorans), which makes one wonder about their new respectability.

Could this be Hollywood’s attempt to make greed, slaughter and exploitation respectable? Dick Cheney certainly legitimized the Dark Side, so it should come as no surprise that his children of the dark should step out of the shadows and move into the nearest burb.

The vampire as matinee idol hints at a normalization of evil. That which once appalled now entertains. Because we feel helpless in the face of evil, we embrace it and invite it over for dinner. Instead of screaming when the vampire begins sucking our blood, we orgasm.

Hopefully, this will turn out to be a brief affair, and the day will come when the mob realizes it has been had, grabs stakes and torches and goes after the creature that so successfully seduced and abused it.

O, the burens of leadership!

2009-11-27T03:48:00.000-08:00

Pity poor Nancy Pelosi. It’s hard work getting her spineless charges to vote against their principles. ‘Tis a task she describes as a “heavy lift.” But, by God, this true, blue liberal from San Francisco does her damndest to make sure House doves act like hawks whenever Pentagon brass come begging for more money to fund their Afghan enterprise.

Pelosi is who she is because she understands the key to acquiring power: follow the dictates of your handlers and contributors and not the dictates of your conscience. She even describes how this works:

You have to go to somebody who is totally, completely, entirely opposed to war funding, and you need to have them vote on it. And you don’t even want to vote for it yourself.”

O, the burdens of leadership! It’s hard work strong arming your underlings to violate their principles. But, Pelosi has always been a strong role model as she demonstrated when she informed the world that impeachment was off the table. In spite of this, the good liberals of San Francisco reelected her to another term in the House in a landslide victory.

It’s not many people who would be so willing to fight for a spineless stance. But Pelosi understands that the Democratic Party is basically a subsidiary of the Republican Party, which, in turn, is a subsidiary of K Street. And if K Street wants a war, there will be a war, and Congress’s battle cry will be, “Damn our principles! Full speed ahead.”

Rumor has it that Obama is going to ask for an additional 30,000 troops for Afghanistan. Senior aides say he will reassure the American people that the “end is in sight.” This is another way of saying he sees the light at the end of the tunnel, which he won’t say because to say it would be to stir up memories of the light at the end of the tunnel we saw in Vietnam just before we were booted out.

So, Pelosi will twist arms and make sure her underlings vote more money for another war we probably won’t win. But then, we must remember that the object of war is no longer victory. Rather, it is to continue to fund our corporate military machine because our economy is so addicted to military spending that it would go into a painful withdrawal were said spending to end. After all, we have to make up for the moribund consumer spending that once made up seventy percent of our GDP.

I mean, my God!, the “Vietnam syndrome” led to our wholesale slaughter of the people of Iraq. God knows what an “Afghanistan syndrome” would lead to.

Buy Nothing Day

2009-11-26T03:00:00.000-08:00

Just a reminder that tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day, a day when we turn our backs on the rampant consumerism that has devastated households and driven many deeply into debt. It is a day when we stop and remember that the good life means more than having a lot of stuff, that there is more to a country and a community than feral economic growth. Today’s toys are tomorrow’s landfill. Their manufacture fouls our air and pollutes our water.

So, give the earth a break and stay home, and while you are doing so, have a most enjoyable day. Let us pray that next Thanksgiving we will have more to be thankful for.

A quick thought

2009-11-25T05:10:00.000-08:00

America will not be free until the Pentagon is an indoor shopping mall and Goldman's CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, is sporting an orange jumpsuit.

The New Presidency

2009-11-24T03:01:00.000-08:00

Those who excruciate Barack Obama for his betrayal of the progressive platform upon which he campaigned fail understand the new dynamics of contemporary presidents of the United States.

Presidents are no longer presidents who actually run the country. The last president who tried to do that was Jimmy Carter, and they destroyed him. When a president campaigns on a platform of “change,” his definition of change is to tweak the status quo.

In truth, the president, today, is little more than a media event. His primary function is to act as a spokesman and shill for K Street, which is where the real power resides. Ronnie was little more than a pitchman for the corporate state. His silken voice was the K-Y Jelly that greased up the public’s anus so it could be properly reamed. Both Bush the First and Clinton wasted three terms kissing K Street’s ass, GWB vacationed while K Street ran the country, and Obama is proving to be one of the Street’s more articulate spokesman.

Thanks to their cooperation and subservience, K Street has managed to reduce the American flag to a corporate logo. This is why every wannabe politician wears one in the lapel of his tailored suit coat. The pin is a coded message to let K Street know that the politician will stay on message. This is why there was such a flap during the 08 campaign when Obama showed up at a rally without a pin. This was a show of independence K Street couldn’t abide. Obama dutifully sported a pin at his next appearance.

Nor is our Congress any longer a Congress. It is a K Street working group that rubberstamps legislation drawn up by K Street’s minions. K Street funds congressional campaigns and Congress funds K Street in return.

The people seem to like the arrangement even though it is shipping their jobs overseas and turning them out of their homes. It saves them the trouble of participating in the political process and the inconvenience of voting. And should they get testy, they will find themselves confronting militarized police forces.

The Beltway is a 24/7 theater in which nothing of substance happens because K Street is content. Real change will only happen when K Street is stirred to action, and we can rest assured that any systemic change will be to their benefit and not ours.

Ancient Thought, Safe Thought

2009-11-23T03:36:00.000-08:00

Ancient physicians had a lock on healing with a comprehensive theory that explained everything. The body was made up of four humors: yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood. The four humors matched the four seasons and the four elements that made up life—earth, air, fire and water.

When the humors were in balance, a person was healthy; when they were out of balance, a person was sick. There were four types of illness, each caused by a different humor. Illnesses caused by a surplus of black bile were cold and dry; illnesses of the blood were hot and moist; phlegm, cold and moist and yellow bile hot and dry.

It was a theory as elegant as it was comprehensive, until the physical scientists started messing with things. When these scientists first pointed out that germs might be the carrier of diseases, the physicians scoffed and refused to buy into this crackpot theory.

We have a similar situation today. Instead of ancient physicians, we have economists secure in their theories that explain everything, especially the theory that infinite growth is possible.

Once again, it is the physical scientists who are trying to upset their applecart. These Jeremiahs are suggesting that resource depletion will, at some point, make further economic growth impossible since the growth of the last two centuries has been propelled by an abundance of cheap oil. And as we drain more and more oil out of the earth, its extraction will become increasingly difficult and expensive.

Our economists scoff. The market will solve the problem, they argue. As oil becomes scarce net technologies will emerge to take its place. The scientists counter by pointing out that there is no technology that comes close to the energy efficiency of fossil fuels.

Besides, everyone knows that physical scientists are too hung up in the concrete and the real, both of which are difficult to manage. We are better off in the heady world of arcane theory, which is easily manipulated by spinning out a new set of mathematical formulae.

Corporate economies run on dreams, not reality. Just as the physicians of old, our economists are quite comfortable with their theories, thank you very much. Scientists should know better than to introduce the reality into the economists’ comfortable world.

Media America

2009-11-22T03:45:00.001-08:00

Some readers of this blog may get the impression that I hate America. Nothing could be further from the truth. I love this country in all of it flawed and contradictory complexity. The America I have issues with is what I call Media America, which consist of three thorns our mainstream media would have us believe is the True America.

In the eyes of the media, America consists of three components: Wall Street, the Pentagon and the Beltway. My argument is that not only do the three fail to represent America, but they constitute a real threat to our democratic republic.

If we picture them as three moving circles in a Venn diagram, we see that they are slowly converging and will continue to do so until the three are one in a Holy Trinity of the damned. (Granted, there is a celebrity circle, but that stands off by itself as a generator of the Bread and Circuses that keep the masses distracted.)

Whenever pundits wax eloquently about the “American character,” they are usually speaking of the one-percent that clawed their ways to the top of their respective circles. This overlooks the fact that the majority of the country is made up of decent people who simply want to get on with their lives under increasingly difficult circumstances.

Given the diverse complexity of our country, it is impossible to speak of an “American” anything. We are not a melting pot, we are a hodgepodge of nonlinear contradictions, currents and countercurrents and diverse opinions and beliefs. Unlike Media America, it is real.

Media America is bent on self destruction. It rolls on; driven by a malignant energy that is slowly moving it towards the abyss. It cares little about the destruction and destitution created by its movement over earth’s landscape. And as it moves, the media sings its praises loudly enough to drown out the moans of its victims.

It is all an exercise in perception management. Pancake makeup is slathered on the beast’s face, the gore is wiped from its lips and its foul breath is sweetened with PR mouthwash. The beast smiles and speaks in measured and soothing tones as it calms and reassures. Its rhetoric soars as the disenfranchised are crushed beneath its wingtips. Bright lights hide the toxic shadow it casts.

The American Way is the product of madmen and bears no relationship to the real America that struggles to make it from one day to the next while its masters party on. This is the America that never reaches the surface of our media swamp.

The new prosperity

2009-11-21T03:26:00.000-08:00

Let me see if I get this straight. Citibank is going to raise interest rates for all its credit cardholders. That’s the bad news.

But there’s a silver lining to this dark cloud. If a customer spends up to $750 per month (the amount varies according to the depth of the cardholder’s impoverishment) the bank will refund part, but not all, of the increase.

This is indeed good news for the household desparately trying to pay down its debt because its underwater mortgage is about to have its rates reset upward.

The bank figures this is a public service because not only are they helping their customers save money, but they’re stimulating our moribund economy by forcing its cardholders to plunge themselves further into debt.

Penury is the new prosperity.

Gosh, this sounds an awful lot like extortion.

But wait! Citibank is a too-big-to-fail bank. It, and its minions, are old pros at extortion. Look what they did to our treasury. It’s a basic law of the economy of scale that if you’re too big to fail, what would normally be considered a crime becomes a shrewd business practice.

It’s kind of like forcing an alcoholic to take another drink.

A Letter from Joe

2009-11-20T03:38:00.001-08:00

On Tuesday, Joe wrote Joe a letter. The recipient was Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus. The writer was an anonymous Joe whose wisdom and insight will never rise to the surface of our media swamp.

The writer was concerned about the rabidity of the antismoking campaign that first raised its head in the nineties. He saw it as a process of “denormalizing” of an act that had, up until then, been socially acceptable. A friend of his called it the “largest social engineering project in the history of the world.”

The bottom line is that social engineering has no place in a democracy. It is an exercise in social fastidiousness, and fastidiousness is the midwife of oppression.

As a member of a community, it is a given that I will see things I don’t want to see, hear things I don’t want to hear and smell things I don’t want to smell. If I scrub my life clean of these unpleasant things, I no long have a community; I have a sterile and gated place in which I live in dread of some impurity invading the sanctity of my isolation.

Now I hear the cry, “But, smoking kills!” Sorry folks, but the leading cause of death is birth. It is incorrect to say that the antismoking movement saves lives. It doesn’t! It simply delays the inevitable. For that matter, getting behind the wheel kills, but there is no movement to ban the automobile. The same is true of mountain climbing and skydiving.

The truth is that the most sacred thing we do is die, and it’s so goddamn sacred that we want nothing to do with it. But then, that’s true of everything that is sacred.

There are some historical factors behind the antismoking movement. Cigarette smoking has always been looked on as smacking of sin. In the twenties Lucky Strike cigarettes created a stir when it urged women to, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” Cigars and pipes were okay, capitalists and professors smoked them, but, as Joe pointed out, cigarettes were associated with loose women and the lower classes.

When prohibition went bust, the Puritans doffed their clerical robes and slipped into a white lab coat. Yesterday’s sin became today’s health problem.

A corporatized state seeks to condition its subjects. That is the purpose of social engineering. It normalizes behavior the state approves of and denormalizes behavior it doesn’t. The behavior isn’t important; the conditioning is. In time, its subjects become use to being conditioned; they even feel uncomfortable if they are forced to think for themselves.

If a free society a free citizen has the right to choose his or her death, whether it’s lighting up or packing a parachute.

There are two spurious arguments trotted out by the antismoking crowd. One is that smoking increases the cost of healthcare. Hell, life is expensive; dying is expensive. There’s no getting around that fact. If cigarettes don’t kill us, something else will. If the health care costs were a real concern, we’d ban the automobile.

Then there’s the second-hand smoke canard. Yea, if someone is locked in a sealed with a smoker eight hours a day, seven days a week, it could be an individual’s health. However, incidental exposure is unlikely to be a problem.

If the state wants its subjects to live in a state of constant anxiety, it needs real and imagined threats, and second-hand smoke works will do as well as anyother.

Freedom involves the acceptance of risk. If we make a fetish of avoiding it we are no longer free.

Fictive Egos

2009-11-19T04:31:00.001-08:00

When you get right down to it, the ego is simply the fiction we tell ourselves. It is an equal mixture of memories, emotions, dreams, aspirations and phobias. There is a certain utility to it in that it gives us a degree of continuity from day to day, but it is no more than a tiny boat that floats on the surface of our souls.

It is from the soul that the deeper emotions—grief, euphoria, terror—come. Emotions coming from the soul move; emotions coming from the ego flap in the breeze of the superficial.

When someone proclaims that they are going to “reinvent” themselves, they are committing an ontological fallacy, for a subject cannot be its own object, so whatever change is effected is shallow. Real change is possible, but that comes from the outside whenever trauma produces a fundamental change in our fiction.

The ego becomes problematic when it is given a reality it doesn’t deserve. Once the ego is reified it begins to erect thick walls with which to protect itself. The walls are especially thick because the ego is aware of just how ethereal it is. Everything outside the walls is seen as a threat to its fictive existence, so it is quick to lash out and inflict pain. It is an ego that clings to labels, both the labels it hangs on itself and those it hangs on the Other that it sees as a threat.

Reified egos thrive best in individuals with no core but the Self, where the soul has been lost down a nihilistic sinkhole. The Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani[1] points out that if we deconstruct everything except the ego, we are left with a crypto nihilism that can only be filled with noise and toys.

If the individual ego is problematic, the collective ego can be downright deadly. The collective ego is a product of the group. Nation states choke on them. The walls they construct are not only thick, they are armed as well. Most groups find it challenging to operate at an eighth-grade level. The nation feels more comfortable at a fourth or fifth grade level.

The deadliest national ego of them all is one that believes its ego is at the top of the food chain and that it has a moral obligation to convert all other national egos to its particular fiction. The most disruptive force on the face of the earth is national ego with a mission. Lesser egos are given a simple choice: convert or face the consequences, consequences that range from marginalization to death.

National egos produce toxic policies. The deadliest emerge from a roomful of old men (old refers not to age but to the strength of the steel in which the ego is trapped). Blood flows when the old men believe that this collective ego would be irreversibly damaged should it lose its “credibility” or appear “weak.” So, sabers are rattled, drones are put in the air and the fanged god of destruction stalks the earth.

All for a fiction.

[1] Religion and Nothingness

Deep Thought

2009-11-18T03:19:00.000-08:00

We like to believe that as a civilization, we are too advanced to buy into fairy tales and myths, that we are simply too intelligent to believe there is a place where there are mountains made of pickled kielbasa and hardboiled eggs down which torrents of draft beer pour to the music of naked nymphs dancing on dew drops.

Or so we think.

Yet, there is one myth our oligarchs cling to that is taking us down the tubes, and that is an irrational belief in the existence of a free market where rational players make decisions based on rational self interest and in doing so benefit not only themselves but society in general.

Mob psychology is not rational. And that is what rules the market, not rational self interest. The current economic debacle came about because of the irrational belief that computers and arcane mathematical formulae had neutralized the boom and bust of the marketplace.

Then there was the merger and acquisition mania in which companies plunged into debt to buy other companies in the belief that by tweaking the numbers on a computer screen it could turn their red ink into black.

Of course, we must not forget the dot.com bubble. That was back when it was gospel that online shopping marked the end of the brick and mortar store, a belief that overlooked the fact that brick and mortar stores had survived the introduction of catalog shopping quite well.

But, it’s more than mob psychology. It’s also a matter of dysfunctional interpersonal relationships. If a boss tells an underling to do something totally irrational and counterintuitive, the very same supervisor who controls the underling's promotion and pay, then it is likely the underling will find a way to rationalize the bosses irrationality.

Idiocy, once it has passed through the underling’s matrix, becomes rational policy, especially if it can be quantified.

In all fairness, this is not a phenomenon found only in the corporate world. We see the same phenomenon at work in Afghanistan and Congress.

Then there is the ultimate madness found in the shadow of an emerging bubble, and that is the death-dealing four words, “It’s different this time.”

Personally, I prefer naked nymphs dancing on dew drops.

up and down, down and up

2009-11-17T03:46:00.000-08:00

There was a time when the circle ruled life. Life was a cycle of seasons, of birth, growth and death in which life was returned to Mother Earth’s womb only to be born again.

Now, life is reduced to the straight line, the linear progression moved by the energy of its own momentum. At one time the line was called progress, and it was believed it was carrying us towards the heavens.

However, one can only have a destiny if one has a past. But, the further we move along the line, the more the past fades into the mist of oblivion. Life is reduced to a tiny laser dot whose linear movement lacks both a past and a future.

We mistake this movement for progress and believe that all change is good no matter how much destruction it leaves in its wake. As it moves, the dot believes that it is ascending when, in fact, it is descending.

Rather than a linear ascent, all historical and cultural movements inscribe a Bell curve, with an ascent, an apogee and a descent. Technological progress is no different, and we could well be riding the descent segment of the curve.

Initially, technology contributed to civilization, making life easier and more comfortable, conquering disease and lifting us out of the morass of superstition. But as with all other historical phenomena, technology peaked. Once this happened, technological innovation became destructive with the costs far outweighing the benefits. One could argue that we passed over the apogee with the splitting of the atom.

Many technologies that were benign at their inception have soured and threaten our quality of life. The internal combustion engine was great at first. Now it generates pollution and, instead of motoring pleasure, it is generating resource wars. Our dependency of plastics consumes too much oil. Petroleum based fertilizers have seen the rise of monoculture and the gradual depletion of our top soil.

Technology was a booster rocket that lifted us out of the quagmire of primitivism. But once spent, it becomes deadweight that must be jettisoned. Failure to do so will have us plunging back into the quagmire.

One could argue that the profound technological progress, the progress that made a real difference in our lives, happened between 1820 (railroads) and the 1940s (splitting the atom). Everything since then is simply the combining of existing technologies. A computer is simply a typewriter, a calculator and a television hooked up together.

New technologies do effect change, but the change is increasingly superficial. Will the fact that I can play videos on my cell phone really improve the quality of my life, especially if, thanks to the same cell phone, my boss has me on an electronic chain 24/7? Finding my way with a GPS instead of a map may be easier, but does it really contribute to my quality of life? No matter how many improvements are made to the television set, the content remains as bland as ever.

In the grand scheme of things, our technology will barely register as a cosmic fart.

Language

2009-11-16T03:57:00.001-08:00

Language is a whore willing to sell her services to the highest bidder. And like a whore, she stalks the corridors of power looking for well-heeled Johns. She is welcome there because the corridors of power have much to hide.

There, language glorifies violence, concealing the gore-drenched blade with the velvet prose of God, freedom and glory. She gives evil and corruption a moral veneer. She sees the glory of destiny in the running sores of society.

In her delicate fingers slime becomes a silver thread, evil becomes sophistication and stupidity becomes down-home earthiness.

Language is the duct tape that muffles the goddess; she is the venal methane that fills the air when policy farts.

But like any whore, language will be just as quick to slit power’s throat as to fuck it. Allow language to slip the collar of “That’s the way things are,” and she becomes a threat to the status quo. She creates manifestos that inflame the masses. She can loosen the tongue of the goddess and spread the contagion of love and compassion.

She can cast her burning spotlight on the suffering of strangers. Socrates knew what he was doing when he condemned poets and singers for they can destabilize a “just” society.

This is the subversive language that is marginalized and buried beneath the inarticulate shrieks of indy rock racket confined to sweaty clubs where the walls shake as they keep the music’s subversion confined and isolated from the masses less the masses join the shriek in a chorus of dissent and protest.

Outside the club there is only the silence of acquiescence. And it is in this silence that the power’s language sings her seductive song.

Unchanging Change

2009-11-15T11:01:00.000-08:00

All is well in the kingdom. The nation’s CEOs, CFOs, defense contractors, homeland security contractors, hedge fund managers, investment bankers, developers, pharmaceuticals, lobbyists, big oil and all of the other pathologically driven power brokers riding America earthward need not fear.

Obama is turning out to be the Petri dish in which the toxins that are draining America of its vitality are cultured.

The triangulating centerism that believes in nothing and stands for nothing will continue in all its humdrum glory. Jobs will continue to be shipped overseas, unions will continue to be broken, the middleclass will continue to shrink, America will continue as the world’s only rogue state, the poor will be kept off the welfare rolls and capital will continue its upward movement towards the apex of the pyramid.

Best of all, the Beltway will continue to be a sewage processing plant as open trenches pump raw effluvia from the country’s power centers to the K Street processing plant where it is recycled into the sanitized campaign contributions that oil the corrupted gears and wheels of a government that is little more than a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Corporatist State.

Sure, we got our hopes up when Obama started preaching his Gospel of Hope during the campaign. For a brief moment it looked as if the fresh air of change was wafting over the country. Fortunately, there is an iron rule that governs politics: Bullshit’s stench trumps fresh air every time.

Now the stench is so pervasive that our media has the public convinced it is smelling perfume.