Critical Class Theory
~1100 words

There is no question in my mind that on the lands now called the United States of America people, broadly, have a bond and common interest and some common cultural sinew. They have been successful among nations because of a certain kind of Liberty they strove to have for themselves and their posterity. On reflection, it now may be more important—among the nations of the world—to be only reasonably strong but also wise, lest we ruin the planet completely and destroy the only home our species has in this remarkable universe.

America, the whole thing, was organized in the context of the latter part of the European Enlightenment, which according to Google was "a philosophical movement that dominated in Europe during the 18th century, and which was centered around the idea that reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and advocated such ideals as liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state." And that definition completely ignores all but one of the other 18th century ideas and institutions from which it sprang.

The foremost of those unmentioned things was mercantile economics, which was by then hundreds of years old. Imagine trying to create a country without some connection to economics. Well, of course, Adam Smith had codified the intellectual and moral conditions of an acceptable economy in his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in which he laid out the prerequisite behaviors and their undergirding morality, but he also asserted that there was within an economy an invisible "hand" (i.e., a natural law), if not Newtonian, then just as regular and dependable, guiding market economics to ever greater and greater wealth and economic righteousness. Yeah. Instead, however, the business cycle emerged and dashed the hopes of millions every so often, suggesting that this "rational" foundation for his more famous and extolled 1776 book The Wealth of Nations might well have been faulty.

So the British colonists, being heir to and fond of these ideas and sentiments woke up each morning subconsciously considering that mercantile economics was the essential engine of their proposed commonwealth. And, of course, they did not imagine that there would be dissent, although already there were murmurings of utopians like Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and others that the individualism so highly regarded by Adam Smith was inferior (and, by the way, less Christian) than the more cooperative forms of polity these so-called utopian socialists espoused.

So, the Framers, being a relatively small, but quite prominent, group within the one million or so colonists of the time were aware that the mercantile economy depended upon risks traders and certain kinds of entrepreneurs would take to function—and by extension and generalization these people formed a sector of society and the nation, which should be held to be exemplary and probably protected—that is, protected from other thinking like the utopian socialists and the anarchy of the rabble, thought inaccurately to be largely illiterate rabble, but which in any case had to be brought to heel as labor within the economic engine of which they believed themselves to be in charge.

Accordingly or inevitably, if you prefer (as I do), as the Greek word "oligo" means "the few," the Framers created a Constitution in which these few, the major stake-holders are protected, expressed as a democratic republic—meaning with power resting with the people, but only by representatives, not directly democratic—a system they thought they could control through the Electoral College and the US Senate, for two institutional examples. The USA, whatever else it has been, has been a barely visible, meaning barely acknowledged, sometimes benign oligopoly ever since.

As time wore on, and as technology and social understanding vastly expanded, the original oligopoly became the hostage of the most successful players in the economy--corporations of all kinds, but particularly of the technologies propelling the economy and its nation into leadership in the larger world. By then, one could sit in the chamber of the House of Representatives in Washington, DC, and observe on the walls either side of the Speaker's chair the ancient symbols, which we and the Romans called "fascia," bundles of sticks (corporations) bound top and bottom around an axe, clearly the symbol of a military-industrial complex. That's how very unacknowledged our system really is. We have been a budding then blooming Corporatist state since the so-called Gilded Era of the late 19th century, with pauses during the Great Depression and WWII.

And, by the way, all of this under the rules provided by the Constitution of 1787, ratified by June 21, 1788, but conducted under "norms" and "traditions" and "gentlemen's agreements" when—as you darned well know—the nation depended on wood and whale oil for its energy, did not understand the first thing about electricity, the circulation of blood in organic beings, much less the habits and customs and the basic humanity of many more millions of people who would inhabit this nation's cities and countryside!

So, we are frequently exhorted to preserve the Union! The union is the creature of a revered document—The Constitution—which even recently (The Great Recession, which decimated the lives of millions in the middle class and therefore launched the career of Donald J. Trump) has been shown to be recklessly incompetent at preserving even the oligopolistic democracy the Framers imagined.

Having said all that. We Americans are of a loose tradition that relies on the notion that we can fix anything that has recent evidence of operating. Whether any of that is true or not, we must have a constitutional convention! The kids from that high school in Florida, young Mr. Hogg and his fellow survivers-revolutionaries, people of colors from Black to White, people of inadequate means and a very few of the rich, but only those who show signs of conscience and humility, must gather to plan the discussion, then we must put it on television for at least two seasons, probably more, and then we all must vote DIRECTLY on perhaps 1,000 issues that arose during the convention's meetings.

This is one in a long line of my personal exhortations to a new constitutional convention, something Thomas Jefferson argued should happen at least every 19 years, because not doing so "... would be an act of force, not of right, on those who were not born at the time it was signed and agreed to." So, I think, we should incorporate that kind of thinking into our next constitution, providing a political-crowd-sourcing mechanism for constant review of the document, completely separate from the Court's self-serving Marbury v. Madison decision that the Supreme Court owns the final interpretations of the present Constitution.

JB

(Government)

11/21/21

Filibuster

The root meaning of "filibuster" is the idea of obstruction, sometimes brigandage, depending on how far back you want to research it. The filibuster rule in the US Senate is just that—a rule. There is nothing Constitutional about it, except that it is assumed that the Constitution does not prohibit the Senate (or the House of Representatives) from agreeing among themselves upon rules of procedure.

The current filibuster rule, however, has the direct and perhaps counter-Constitutional effect of redefining the idea of "majority" to mean 60% of the elected members, rather than 51%. It is interesting that the word "majority" does not appear in the Constitution until the deeply flawed XII Amendment, regarding the election of President and Vice President in the Electoral College and, if necessary, the House of Representatives. I think that tradition defines "majority" as 51% of the membership or 51% of members present, if so differentiated.

The instant effect of the filibuster is to obstruct a "bare" partisan majority from enacting legislation that the opposing "bare" minority does not like. Assumed is that a party with 60% of the membership of the Senate is sufficiently "mandated" to carryout whatever they wish.

Recently, the Senate filibuster rule has been declared to be inactive or unnecessary in the case of Senatorial "advise and consent" procedures for the appointment of judicial and executive branch appointments by the President.

The filibuster rule has also been abridged to deal with budgetary and perhaps monetary matters through a process called "budget reconciliation." A simple 51 votes majority of the membership is all that is required, acknowledging the vote in the case of ties by the Vice President to break the tie.

It is proposed also by members of Congress, and within the media, that a "reconciliation" rule be established for matters dealing with suffrage, the right to vote in political elections, including all processes relating to voting, including the decennial reapportionment and mapping of US Congressional Districts according to the results of the census. States also reapportion districts for state elections at this time.

It is an historical fact that the political party holding the Presidency and the majority in at least one house of Congress generally loses seats in one or both houses in the first election after taking the majority. Thus, the Biden Presidency and Democratic "control" of the Senate and the House is clearly faced with losing seats and perhaps control of either or both houses of Congress. It is a "pendulum effect" that seems to be impervious to much that is considered real and well done in the first years of an administration. It relies, it seems, on a "proverbial" distrust and chastening of those to whom power has been granted. This, of course, does not affect the Presidential veto power over Congress.

The proposed John Lewis Voting Rights Act Advancement Act of 2021, designed to restore and strengthen provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but gutted by the Supreme Court—particularly by the Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion—hangs in the balance of whether the Democrats in the Senate will "carve out" of the filibuster rule a simple majority rule for matters dealing with the vote, i.e., with democracy itself!

And thus the table is set for the question of whether to "carve-out" again or not, whether to abandon the filibuster completely or not, or to let the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act fail to pass in a Senate obstructed by the Republican Party, which has gerrymandered many states and recently imposed outlandish voter suppression rules (such as not allowing drinking water to be provided to voters waiting in hours long lines to vote.) I urge you to read Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, which anticipates a subversion or overthrow of representative democracy in any of the states, and guarantees to protect them from that.

Senator Manchen of West Virgina and others believe that the Democrats will probably lose the House and/or the Senate, and if the Senate, then the filibuster will protect against Republicans passing what Democrats consider terrible laws. Well, the Presidential veto will protect against that for at least the two more years of the Biden/Harris administration. "Advise and consent" matters will continue to be simple majority votes, so retaining the filibuster does not protect against Republican obstructionism there, though.

I think it is clear—for at least the three remaining years of the Biden/Harris administration— that abolishing the filibuster is not a suicide pact. In fact, I think that abolishing it would tell Democratic and Republican and particularly Independent voters that the Democrats are confident and resolute, and will carry out the agenda being proposed in the Build-Back-Better Act. That is—at last—, to repair, restore, and replenish the social safety net with the purpose of providing modern and realistic conditions for work and career and industry and commerce in our society and for our future, which will have a bewildering increase of emergency planetary and social conditions with which to deal, not to forget that the majority of our efforts to save our planet from a civilization-destroying heat death are in this Act.

The filibuster is anti-democratic. So is the Senate,(and so is the Electoral College,) but that is no excuse for doubling down on anti-democratic processes. It is clear to most people that to achieve the benefits of representative democracy, a republican form of government, the existing Constitution and many of the traditions handed down from a mottled and unhappy and cruel past must be rewritten. Let's begin with eliminating the Senate's filibuster.

JB

(Government)

Where is Merrick Garland? or Eliot Ness!

Dear Attorney General Garland—You were not permitted to sit on the Supreme Court because a Senator from Kentucky did not want you there. He betrayed his oath of office by violating the absolutely clear words and intent of the Constitution he swore to defend. And nothing happened. Do you think that either of those two things are acceptable? Do you realize that the pace of dishonesty and corruption in government has gone from an amble to a saunter to a trot while you were waiting? Do you see the effects of doing—or appearing to do—nothing is eroding the foundations of our democracy and constitutional government? The maxim "Justice Delayed is Justice Denied" is not just a homily or antiquated expression. The pace in this internet age of virtually immediate world-wide access to people and documents absolutely requires that you adjust your own and the DoJ pace accordingly. If you need a bigger budget, ask the President for more money!! He cannot refuse.

Meanwhile, I believe you should ask the Vice President of the United States for help. She ran the second largest department of justice in the country, she is honest, and you need help. It is completely obvious that you have personnel in DoJ and probably in the FBI that you cannot trust to begin or carry out justice. It is because some of them see the the new pace of things as a minefield in which Justice cannot be assured, so they remain oblivious to the slow pace of Kabuki Justice. But, and more importantly, some of them think our democracy should not be run as a multi-cultural democracy, but preferably by well-educated White Judeo-Christian Men (WJCM) (with token women) elites like themselves. They think that the really bad and corrupt Republicans are a passing phenomenon they can control "on the ground," as it were, at the ballot box. They have virtually NO EXPERINCE with this kind of politics and will fail utterly. The authoritarian fascists will take power, as they are doing today, and our country will not be a democracy for very much longer—days and weeks, not years!

We have WJCM killers and Fascists on the loose in our country and in our Congress. It is very obvious that DoJ has a lot of very big and controversial jobs to do. We need to clean house or else ... we will cease entirely to be or have even a pretext of democracy, and that will have planetary implications. I am certain that you need to clean house and when you do there will be literally thousands of well-meaning, reputable, experienced attorneys ready to step in for as long as it takes to right that ship. You will want to keep many of them. It is time to think outside the box. It is your fate to be the consequential person at this time in world history. It is not only scary for you; it is very scary for US.

Mr. Garland: It is not just the pace that must be adjusted. It is new vigor and resolve that must be instituted. Trump must be and will be arrested, tried, convicted, and incarcerated—probably for the remaining years of his hideous life. As you already know, the effect on the nation will be profound, a major inflection point in our storied history, and world history as well. Of course you want that whole operation to be seamless and perfect.

Have you met Donald Trump? It cannot and will not be seamless and perfect. It will be a frightening turbulence, some days chaos, others mere clamor. It will be the biggest thing ever since the Civil War. But, understand me, sir, it is to avoid a new Civil War that it must be done—and done with such competence and agility that his armed domestic terrorists will be astonished and chastened. The forces of evil have thrown down their gauntlet. The crisis is well over a year old already. The old ways will not suffice. Every passing day is another proof that extraordinary courage must power our fight for democracy.

Yes, of course, President Biden may have to declare Martial Law, and we are ready for the privations, embarrassment, and international confusion that will entail. But you have to stand up and be counted now. It is important that you understand that the nation is holding its breath, waiting for Justice to be done, waiting for public service and government at every level to be safe from domestic terror and fascist mobster intimidation.

JB

(Government)

10/21/21

The Senate

The Founding Fathers, Framers of the Constitution, were just about unanimous about "factions," They hated them and worried that factions—such as had arisen in Britain and caused civil war—might emerge here as well. Fearing factions they decided to not mention them in the constitution, and, therefore, did not provide for the development of political parties in the constitutional system. It was a feckless stance because already among the colonies there were significant and divisive disagreements about slavery, for one, and the nature of a democracy encompassing big thriving colonies and small ones likely to be ignored in a big nation. The 13 original states comprised 430,000 square miles with 2.5 million people, compared to Britain's 8 million people on 80,823 square miles and France' 26 million on 213,000 square miles. The enormity of the multi-cultural state they were creating in North America was not lost on the Framers, but this enormity created a spurious and illusory conservatism that we now live with.

Amid all the posturing about Enlightenment values imbuing the new constitution with ageless resilience was the decision to emulate the bi-cameral British Parliament, comprised of a House of Lords and a House of Commons, both of which at the time were by no means democratic, representative, or effective in the evolving a constitutional monarchy (in their case NO constitution, just a collection of old and new documents and opinions and historical events accepted as norms). We inherited the idea of goverance norms from them, too.

High school civic teachers used to tell us that the Senate, created under Article I Section 3 of the Constitution of 1787-1788, was meant to offset or counter the presumed volatility or unpredictability of the House of Representatives. The Framers expected the Senate to be composed of landed or otherwise vested, stake-holding gentlemen, mature and responsible, as opposed to what they imagined the House composition might be, namely, representatives of the barely literate rabble, probably literate but demogogic members of the rabble itself. In other words the founding fathers did expect the obvious class-based factions and assigned one to the House and the other to the Senate. Please notice that this cynical and ironic arrangement is very difficult to teach young Americans while proclaiming "We The People" and "All Men Are Created Equal."

Today, Senators and Representatives are generally educated persons with personalities and characters fairly closely resembling one another. Senators may be more seasoned politicians, but they are politicians, not magisterial conciliators. The Framers did create one major difference between them. Representatives spend about 60% of their time in office collecting funds (estimated to be $18,000 a day, every day, just to survive) to run for office every second year, whereas Senators serve for six year terms and are able to operate at a slower, more stately pace financially.

Okay, yes, there are outrageous personalities in Congress, even today, but they seem to be about evenly spread out in both houses of Congress.

Lawrence O'Donnell, host of a news-opinion show, The Last Word, on MSNBC, was once Chief of Staff for Senator Moynihan, who was the all-powerful chair of the Senate Finance Committee. In that sense O'Donnell was probably in the top five most powerful persons in the US Senate staff. He is disgusted with what the Senate has become, arguing that at best it "represents only land." Well, it actually represents each and all of the individual states, which are a good deal more than the just the land organized under their administration. But obviously with two senators for each state, the small and less populated states are over-represented by comparison to the large and densely populated ones. It is obvious that the Senate is a hang-over from the very class-conscious democracy-averse 18th century and is certainly undemocratic by design. I, and millions of others, believe it is a dead weight on our republic.

The House of Representatives apportions its membership by population—The People. Certainly therefore, the House de facto also represents the states and the land and the businesses which are nothing but abstractions without the People—actual people on the ground having families and making a living. The Senate is not representative, and moreover, does not add any value or substance to any legislative process, therefore ... along with the Electoral College—another of those archaic hedges against "the rabble"—both should be abolished as soon as possible.

Most of us believe there is no way to democratize the Senate, and most Americans and foreigners believe the Electoral College is a valueless democracy-distorting nuisance we can do without. The states are not nations participating in some sort of mutual defense pact. They are geographical and historical regional divisions designed to efficiently organize local (county and municiple) governing bodies. We want direct popular elections of our presidents and vice presidents. We believe that the Executive veto is a sufficient mechanism to check and balance a unicameral Legislative branch of government. (Please note that unicameral legislatures in Nebraska, France, Spain, and most other countries especially those not once part of the British empire do quite well without dividing the Legislature against itself.)

Of course that would be impossible right now, today. The Congress is deadlocked. We need a clear super majority in both houses and the same party in the White House. Right now we are in a slow motion (except for January 6th) constitutional crisis. Conservatives and Progressives will agree on that. Yes, I think everyone will agree that the least effective part of the American government is Congress. It seems incapable of addressing serious issues, and it is bogged down in its own morass of rules, none of which did We the People approve. Policy for the existential issue of our epoch—global climate change—is thwarted by the inefficient and corrupt practices of the Senate rules, principally the filibuster.

The Democratic Party is poised to modernize the Constitution. Joe Biden is probably not the one to lead it, but Kamala Harris might be. She sat in the Senate long enough to see the disfunction and the naked wielding of autocratic personal power by key leaders. The Republican party has devolved into a rude, chaotic, anti-democracy faction and terrorist mob-cult. It is untenable, and should be—will be—trounced as millions of sober citizens vote for a two-to-four year housecleaning.

But ... now is the time to prepare for the abolition of the Senate and the Electoral College. And, while we are planning amendments to the existing constitution, we should expand the Supreme Court to at least thirteen and making all federal judge terms of office nine years. Some say fifteen years, but at the pace and length of modern life, fifteen is too many!

We must prepare and that means getting our people into office. Contribute to your local, state, and federal representatives! Contribute if you can to out-of-state candidates who are trying to replace bad actors!

JB

(Government)

4/23/11

"Politics is the art of the possible." This is the trite version and G-rated version. Notice that it does not say politics is a science. Only in universities do you get that shine. The erstwhile status of science comes from the more prosaic of political analyses using statistics, as if that were sufficient to be labeled a science. It is not. Framing hypotheses and finding evidence to support them might be half of the battle, too, but without predictability political analyses are still way short of science. The reason of course is that we human beings are right in the middle of the experiment and cannot help but create self-fulfilling prophesies and untold trouble.

The American political conservative movement these days is not a movement, but an attitude, actually a set of attitudes. On the more radical side are a bunch of people who have publicly thrown up their hands in disgust at the dishonesty and outright corruption that has become the hallmark of service in the United States Congress. Conservatives have often used the homily that democracy will fail when the poor decide to vote themselves a free lunch. Conservatives then noticed that it was not the poor that voted, but the rich for programs that served their interests, but they had to invent a story to cover that activity while still leaving open the keyhole to the activities that benefit the poor. These self-same "business conservatives" have a decidedly different view of Congressional corruption. They need it to get their programs into the process. So, yes, they buy the services of scores and scores of Senators and Representatives. In other words part of the conservative attitude is to preserve the corrupt status quo and part of it is to sharply curtail government to at least limit the corruption. It is a nightmare.

Yes, the philosophy of the conservatives is self-contradictory and naive and fundamentally dishonest. You can see this in the remarks of Jon Ward at Huffington Post where he clearly describes the ironies and contradictions that abound in the conservative program. Given a reality check the TeaParty faction of the Republican Party is seen to be so far off the mark as to be a sincere threat to the Corporatist backbone of the Party.

It would be easy to sit back and enjoy the show until the actors all self-destruct, but (as I noted at the beginning) politics is infested with people, and they are fully capable of misreading the situation and acting out of lemming-like principle. Robert Reich, also in HuffPo, describes the general situation for the liberals and how they can misread the political balance while being battered with highly charged rhetoric from all directions. Democratic politicians simply do not have the wherewithal to mount an educational program in their home districts to explain government to the angered TeaParty members in their constituencies (or the CoffeeParty members, for that matter), an educational programs that would enable them to see that Reich's analysis puts them in the center already—now—without having to give away the store needlessly.

Politics is a wonderfully absurd sport—exasperating and really far more important that anyone can imagine in the heat of the moment. But, we will survive it ... in most cases ... and live on to fight battles of will and even battles of principle from time to time.

JB

4/18/11

You should read these two pieces from the New York Times. They need no introduction or interpretation or correction.

Paul Krugman: "Let's Not Be Civil"

NYT Editors: "The New Republican Landscape"

JB

4/12/11

The word "audience" begins with the root "to hear." Think of words like audio, audition, audit, and so forth. The "-ence" ending gives us the idea of process and doing. So an audience is an opportunity to speak and be heard, as in the expression "The king granted the knight an audience to plight his troth for the king's youngest daughter." But, audience is also the group of people who witness (process with their wits) an event or content such as a theatrical play, a concert, or a website. You are my audience.

In a brief discussion with my mentor and friend in New York City yesterday about the current state of affairs in the Democratic Party and the probably outcomes for the 2012 election, I said something that caught me by surprise. While I am a Progressive Liberal person committed to the use of the the commons for things that the commons does better and more honestly and efficaciously than do private individuals or companies, I have to notice that my president, an erstwhile Progressive Liberal is not acting like one, and I wrote to my friend my guess as to the reason why.

The president sees his audience as the entire nation, and that is probably appropriate in one sense, and it is an inexorable truth in the plain common sense that when the president speaks the whole country listens, not just the Progressive Liberals like us. In fact, the president is trapped by his own position into a role that has him constantly herding all of us cats into a place where we are likely to make individual decisions that improve the president's chances for getting a program of Progressive Liberalism accomplished.

But right now the problem is that we have been knocked off our feet and are trying to regain an upright posture and politicians are anxious about which way we will face when we do finally regain our feet. President Obama has to act pragmatically in this situation, even at the risk of not addressing the concerns of a significant part of his audience—you and me. Politics is the art of the possible, and everyone disagrees about what is possible until they get the gavel and realize that they cannot just pound on the desk incessantly.

So, the question of audience, though, goes beyond the president and what he says and what we see him doing. You are my audience for the moment, and I have a responsibility that forks in two directions depending on my intentions when I write to you here or at The American Liberalism Project. It is important for me to keep in mind that my audience is not President Obama and that I am not offering him advice about what to do and when. Nor, really, am I writing to his coterie of advisors, or my representatives in Congress, or any power elite group. I am writing to you, and so my purpose is different from what it would otherwise have been. I need to ask you to think about your audiences.

The 2012 election promises to be a rowdy affair in some sectors. President Obama is running, and so many Democrats who think they might be good at the job are not running. The Republicans are having a helluva time finding a candidate that will not be laughed or booed off the stage. They are a riven party that has exploited the fears (see SueZ's article preceding this one) so stridently that many are turning down the volume and looking for better answers than destroying government. Obama well may pick Hillary as a running mate, especially if the Republicans seem likely to pick a woman candidate for the Vice Presidency, and maybe regardless of what they do.

The point is that those of us who speak our minds to audiences, whether is is family, friends, or larger groups, need to direct the energies of our audiences to positions and actions that assure that President Obama will have a Congress with which he can work. We need to reverse the Recession backlash emotions of 2010, and we can. We just need to focus on us, not on Washington. They will notice and listen. There is proof aplenty of that recently.

JB

4/1/11

Yes, April First, spring struggling through the impermafrost of another long winter. Here in Tucson the temps will hit mid-nineties already, soon to relapse, though, into balmy high seventies and early eighties. Golf weather, although we play year 'round here. And, nothing to do with Santa Claus today at all, except that I have a vision of an eight-year old tip-toeing through the month of December deliberately not listening to the talk around his peer group, not wanting to know.

There is something about homo sapiens that is not very sapient, not very wise, not very reflective, although out of self-image preservation, most of us retain a strong dose of the illusion of wisdom and ability to self-appraise. That "something" in us may stem from defects of workmanship in our physical bodies, mental deficiencies like dyslexia or ADHD syndromes. Or, it may stem from abuse or malnutrition in our infancy or youth. Or, it may come from disabilities acquired by accident, disease, or random misfortune. Taken all together the chances of being handicapped in some way are pretty good, and so we begin to think of ourselves as participating in the "human condition." We see that we are imperfect, but misjudge all too often where that "fate" of being human molds us and when we are just being uncritical and unwise.

In the politics of every civilization there is an open question about what do to about the negative side of our human condition. With respect to criminals—those who transgress society's rules for their own selfish reasons—civil authority takes the cautious way toward a solution, namely, incarcertion, separation from the general society, but sometimes extinguishment when the crime is egregious. With respect to disability societies tend to be blind. They turn away from the misfortune and, if the person shows signs of heroic effort to overcome disability, societies pride themselves (literally) on being of assistance, but it is one of those things that is not well managed and basically is part of the deliberate blindness we see in people and groups. The other negative side of humanity that gets short shrift is in work and labor.

Long ago we discovered that providing for ourselves and our families requires work. You just cannot sit around and expect the world to provide food, shelter, and sex. You have to go out and get it, build it, or pursue it. The history of the division of labor is abundant, but the consequences of the division are usually glossed over for the same reasons that others of our negatives are. We are averse to dealing with the negative differences among us, and moreover, we are extremely reticent to deal with the causes of negative differences.

Part of the problem is us. We just do not like the notion that Johnny cannot read and yet we know what the consequences will be. John will be consigned to work that is menial and low-paid, unless he becomes a rock star, which is literally a one in 10 million chance. We know that some people are better workers than others, and we know that many people are in the wrong kind of work for their native talents, and we know that leaders among workers are not necessarily good people, yet we turn a blind eye to the frictions, trouble, and perpetuation of invidious distinctions among workers of all kinds. We particularly turn a blind eye to the completely expectable excesses of those who choose themselves to be leaders.

Karl Marx wrote about political economy joining well known (from observation) notions about governance with equally well-known ideas about labor and synthesized a theory of human history from it. Marx's "labor theory of value" lies at the heart of his philosophy, but it is probably a mistake to think that Marx had solved the problem of human misery and malfeasance and bad government from that almost simplistic theory. It is a huge step forward, however, and most capitalists and socialists understand it in their bones.

Well, the rest of Marx is about discontent. Sigmund Freud was not the only person interested in Civilization and Its Discontents in the 19th century. People know deep down below their threshold for open eyes that "things" are amiss. They just do not know what to do about it, because they feel isolated and powerless. If anything the internet has done well, it is to make possible the spread of discontent by example. The ability to show others like you or even less well off in their own private discontents has been hugely powerful throughout the Mohammedan nations. (I have learned this week that there is a difference between Muslim and Mohammedan, that being the former is about militancy and the latter about Belief.)

The other problem about coming to Consciousness about one's place in the "class struggle" is the ego problem we have when evidence points to the fact that we are in a lesser category of humanity than we think we are .. or deserve. So it is all important that essays like that published in Common Dreams, Thursday, be read widely. "A Primer on Class Struggle" is exactly the sort of thinking that disabuses us of our private psychology of willful blindness.

Class Struggle may have been popularized by Karl Marx, but the concept ante-dates him by centuries. The history of social uprisings in "western civilization" goes back millennia. In African civilizations the organization has remained tribal, so that class distinctions are hidden by the trappings of patriarchy. In India and the Far East the situations are equally replete with insurrections and the long arduous struggle of menial labor against feckless leadership.

The Arab Spring of 2011 is a trumpet to all people, not just those trapped in tribalist dictatorships. The time has come for some peoples of our planet to assert the best notions of themselves to define what it will be like for their children. Will we continue to ignore the weak and oppress them for our personal benefit, or will we understand ourselves as imperfect, but well-meant citizens, fully capable of abstract thought about law, reason, and economy? I think we can rise up and change it all. It is a study in temperate outrage.

JB

3/28/11

As the United States begins to recede into the background of the world intervention in the Libyan civil war, as Cheney's "war for oil and Saddam's scalp" recedes from the headlines and morphs into the on-going civil discord endemic to that ancient place, as the "war against harboring terrorists" continues without success or clear objectives in Afghanistan, as the TeaParty Republicans carry out their war against "the Beast", their notion of big government as the worst enemy of unfettered individual freedom ... except the military, which is the flywheel of the American economy, the everyday American citizen is becoming increasingly aware that the fundamental problems of our country are so deep-seated that almost nothing in the normal political cycle can be brought to bear to mend our national ways.

James Carroll, of the Boston Globe writes today an essay of almost unimaginable importance, a column about the very essence of the American way—the military solution to every problem foreign or domestic. Carroll's essay is balanced on a comparison of diplomatic versus brute strength military solutions, and he shows nicely that had we put as much effort into strong diplomacy we might have easily diverted some situations into peaceful evolutions.

I think Carroll mistakes the level of effort by the U.S. Department of State as inferior to the similar efforts of other nations. We put a corps of diplomats into the world at a level about the same, but much more richly endowed, than any other nation you can think of. Carroll's point, though, is that this sort of parity is ineffective, partly because the military solution is always available and we have invested so much in it, and partly because the level of diplomacy in inadequate to the tasks at hand.

When I was visiting Sydney, Australia years ago, I happened to be at the Consul General's home when he (the deputy Consul acting in the absence of the actual Consul General) was called out because some American movie star was threatening suicide at a downtown hotel. I mention this to give you an idea of the way diplomat's time is spent and to note that the organization of the Department of State is so archaic that the right tool for the job at hand is defined by a system that I would call ego-centric and patriarchal. State never gets things exactly right because most of what it deals with is human mistakes and disorderliness and obscure foreign politics. They just do not have the person or the brain power to deal with the historical situations on the ground. Carroll notes that the German recognition of Slovenian and Croatian independence set off a series of events that led to "ethnic cleansing" attempts by others of the Balkanized peoples of the region, the decaying invention we called Yugoslavia. Carroll thinks that if the U.S. State Department had had more and brighter people in Bonn or Berlin the Germans might have been persuaded to move more slowly.

Well, it is an hypothetical that we will never be able to prove one way or the other, but his point is well taken that in the hurly-burly of asserting ethnic identities in the region, military power came into its own quickly and surely, as if it were a natural human response ... and it is.

Carroll is not arguing elimination of our military, and neither am I. What he is arguing, though, is that the reflexive response to trouble is military, and that the vaingloriousness of this response obscures the failures of a weak diplomatic corps, or it draws the conclusion that State cannot manage any situation, so why bother!

There is a lot going on here. We could talk endlessly about the vigilantist streak in American culture or the rough and ready gun-toting ethos so ballyhooed as the Cold War thawed and then disappeared. We could talk about human nature in general, or about the sorry state of human civil evolution on this planet. But, we should talk about the integration of militarism into the general society and the economy, and that is what Iron Mountain is all about. The fact is that Carroll is spitting against the wind until our civilization finds a different kind of flywheel for our national economy(ies). It seems that from the time of the Pharaohs, Babylonians, the Hittites, Greeks and Romans, the progress of national civilizations has been toward militarism and then demise.

It is fairly clear that the U.S. is already musclebound and unable to assert itself successfully with its military. The simplest IED, a pipe, a cell phone, and some explosives will throw our military into a dither, meanwhile maiming both our military personnel and obliterating our national purpose. Carroll is right: the military is fundamentally ineffective as an instrument of national policy, and just marginally effective at persuading other nations and groups to behave ... even if we do not.

I was an officer in the U.S. Navy. I know the military to be what it is: an imperfect, but hugely expensive, organization of might against anyone who might transgress against our national policy, if we have one. The TeaParty in its zeal to reduce the footprint of national government in our lives, needs to understand that their efforts will come to naught, until they see the Department of Defense as the number One target of their aspirations. They have to learn this now!

JB

3/21/11

Once upon a time I held a very high security clearance. It was when I was in the Navy and billeted as Operations Officer on a large ship in the Vietnam combat zone. That was a long time ago, of course, and things have changed somewhat. Some things never change, and one of the verities of the U.S. classification system is that everyone in the chain of command has their ego out there when it comes to classified materiel. They get an ego boost for every level of secrecy they place on a document. Sometimes it is obvious that an enemy would gain an advantage if he knew what was in the document. Sometimes it is not so obvious. For instance, is it Secret classification for a naval message between admirals decided when they are going to meet to play golf? Clearly they think their hides are at stake and do not want to let everyone know that they are playing games while the rest of world works.

I cannot say that in my position I did much about the overclassification of Naval messages and Naval documents. I was brought up short once when a sailor told me he did not know what his duty station in case of collision was, and I discovered that he did not have the clearance to read the document that contained this information. And, I did change that malfunction of our system, but I had to extract the information and republish it, because someone said that the rest of the document contained information that could be useful to an enemy.

Clearly knowledge that an Admiral has horrible and painful hemorrhoids could be useful, but doesn't the lack of information about someone also point to something ... his importance, perhaps?

Well, as you know President Obama has issued an order to begin to clean up the secrecy side of our federal government. And guess what? The worst abusers are ignoring the order!" Treason? You know it is unlawful to simply ignore an order from competent authority, so what is going on?

The article by Steven Aftergood does not say so, but I think you will find that the secrecy system is so convoluted now that the people below those nominally in charge do not have permission to talk to the other people like themselves to begin the conversation to fix this mess! Eventually, you know, this becomes a real problem for democracy. You just cannot have a system that allows golf games to be classified Secret.

JB

2/19/11

There must be something in the water in Wisconsin that turns elected officials into assholes. The Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader thinks that sending state troopers after the truant Democrats will "send a signal" to them that the game is getting serious. Well, what does he think sending troopers will accomplish? Is Wisconsin now a police state? Are they going to coerce Democrats into violating the civil rights of state workers?

Yes, the budget situation in Madison is serious. No one doubts that, but union busting in Wisconsin is not the answer. Republicans should begin to understand that and soon. Meanwhile, state employees and everyone who understands the principles undergirding public employment should continue their civil disobedience. Shut down the legislature and bring the martinet, grandstanding, reactionaries back into a reasonable colloquy.

Oh, and by the way, denying the Wisconsin Senate a quorum is a perfectly good parliamentary ploy. It is in the tradition of Roberts Rules and the practices of most governmental systems, including the federal legislature. It is not different in cause or effect than the much discussed filibuster rule, another way for the minority to protect itself from ruthlessness in the majority.

Ruthlessness is the keyword here. The Wisconsin GOP is hoping to take advantage of the budget problem to roll back the twentieth century, just like their brethren elsewhere. Democrats in office and those of us out in the trenches are not going to let this happen. If the state imposes martial law, so be it! We know what kind of people they are.

JB

1/19/11

On Monday, the Washington Post ran an article about the independence of the Legislative Branch from the Executive and from the Judicial. It is a very interesting piece, which bring into sharper focus the inherent problem of an independent Congress, a very important element of the Enlightenment view of governance that the Framers of the Constitution deliberately created. It should be said at this point that when our Constitution was written and ratified never had these principles ever been put into practice, and moreover, the Framers may have (deliberately or not) installed remedies for the all too obvious problems that "an independen legislature" might bring.

The problem is corruption, a thought that was not far off the table in Philadelphia at any time during the creation of the Constitution. Impeachment of erring officials was given to the legislative branch, including impeachment of its own, but the process is unwieldy and used far less often than instances of bad behavior appear, largely because the moral principle involved is encrusted with daily emotional content that the Framers tended to ignore (despite the fact that they were emersed up to their eyelids in that very situation—regional affiliations, personal affiliations, principled positions, and all the reverses, too. The corruption the Framers plastered over was slavery, of course, and their "solution" of delaying the issue to a newer generation was clearly a big mistake that cost the nation 600,000 dead in four bitter years of Civil War.

The problem today is personal corruption in an environment flowing with money from sources unlikely and all-too-familiar. It is easy to decry the corruption, but doing something about it when the machinery of prosecution (Executive) and of weighing the evidence (Judiciary) are deliberately missing, puts the burden on people (People!) who are at least in theory best suited to legislative deliberations. But, that is not the essential problem of separation of powers. The essential problem as the Framers saw it was an Executive that would harass and unseat members of the Legislature or the Judiciary. They did not see the Judiciary running amok, nor the Legislature, although there were some minor worries.

This built-in safeguard against an overweaning Executive does not have a cure that does not already exist in the moral fiber of the legislators themselves. The most basic principle of a republican form of government—a representative democracy (as distinguished from a direct democracy)—is the notion that The People can find among themselves good, intelligent, and honest men and women to form their government. If this axiom is not true, the whole business is but a lingering tragedy. The built-in safeguard is now being exercised by the corrupt to hinder prosecution that they so richly deserve.

Never in the history of the Legislative Branch of our government have the divisions on matters of basic principles been so diverse and rancorous. Not even the questions of slavery or of the gold standard or of excise taxes levied on whiskey were as divisive as the question about the basic role of government in this new century. The notion that the least government is the best government does not comport with the goals of anyone, yet it is a battle cry that also threatens the delicate mechanisms of self-governance that division of powers entails. Hoping that the Congress will understand the solemn nature of this issue may not be enough. It clearly is time for moral leaders in Congress to understand the nature of the chasm that is open and ready to swallow the government whole.

JB

1/5/11

The other day in the New York Times there was an article about Alan Grayson, the well-spoken, junior, but nevertheless fearless leader for the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party. He was voted out of office in Florida by "values" voters in that riven state that ought to know better. A friend and I were talking about leaders for the future and after tossing around Howard Dean's name a bit and wondering whether the corporate press would be continuing their practice of feeding us ground glass sandwiches with Dean's effigy on both pieces of bread, the name of Alan Grayson came up.

Readers of ALP know that Grayson has outdone virtually every Democrat in Congress on standing up for what is right. He is a champion of everything Liberals and Progressives hope to stand for in their daily lives. But, more than that, Grayson is unabashed about his Liberalism.

Politics in the modern Democratic Party has been conducted on the principle that Left is often too far Left for the American public, and so Democrats have drifted, speechlessly of course, into the so-called Center, where when they say something they hope is intelligent, it comes out as Republican Lite, foolish, and more often than not has the finger-prints of corporate agendas on it. Not so with Grayson. He understands the corporate agenda and rightfully despises it. And, as I have said, he was voted out of office.

My friend and I believe this man has a long career in politics ahead of him, so this brief essay is simply to alert you to his name again and to urge you to keep an eye out and an ear cocked for Alan Grayson. We will do our part.

JB

12/27/10

The title of today's little essay is designed to make your blood pressure rise enough to get your attention. I am not trying to disable you, just get you to understand that the time has arrived to begin extraordinary measures to retrieve our democracy. I will let you define "extraordinary," but the idea is that we are now fighting an uphill battle that must be won.

The editors of the Washington Post, happy that the great Christmastime blizzard of 2010 has missed them, have written an indictment of the Republican Party so transparently negative that there can be no doubt that even the voice of the military-industrial complex is alarmed at the outright declarations of the fascist corporatists that now control the GOP.

The process is painstaking, and the outcome is uncertain. But progress is being made — and the House Republican leaders want none of that. Representative Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the next chairman of the House Financial Services Committee told The Birmingham News that “Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” He later said he meant regulators should set parameters, not micromanage banks, yet he seems to prefer the parameters that were in effect before the crisis when regulators did serve the banks. -- Washington Post

Notice the frame and point of view expressed in "“Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” Notice that "for the People" is missing! Now consider that "of the People" is missing as well. Bachus is from a small population state without the kind of political subscriptions among the constituency to fund a Senatorial candidate, so the candidate has sold his constituents' birthright and representation to a group of corporations that can afford to support him. This is the very definition of "corporatism."

Corporatism is a synonym for fascism (as broadly-defined; not specifically Germany's Nazism nor the Mussolini variety), which carries a somewhat-undeserved stigma. During the interwar years, fascism was widely recognized, even by Churchill and Roosevelt, as a bulwark against the spreading threat of marxism, and possibly as an effective economic strategy in countering the Great Depression. -- Wikipedia

The author(s) of the Wikipedia definition go on to show that "corporatism" is, indeed, the sort of system that emerged in both Germany and Italy as a result of the Great Depression of the 1930's. Bulwark against communism or not, corporatism is anti-democratic, effectively subverting the relationship between the electorate and the elected. Or, you could say that it substitutes corporate interests and support for electorate interests and support. In all cases, whether rising out of the financial ashes of a debacle like the Great Recession of 2007-2012 or arising in cold-war peacetime as the way to defeat a determined and entrench enemy and his system, the result is the same. The democracy is lost.

There is only one way to stop the Republicans from enacting their corporatist view of governance in America. That way is to defeat them at every turn between now and the next election. At the 2012 elections they must be consigned to the dustbin of history ... and then we take care of the corporatists in the Democratic Party, too.

JB

12/22/10

I saw "Tron: Legacy" yesterday in 3D. It is, from a technical point of view a tour de force movie, and despite the shallow tween-aged focus on virtual killing by violent means, the acting goes beyond the usual cardboard. It does not compare to anything in "The Matrix" series. It does begin to point out the trend in gaming computing, however, that being that more and more people are getting sucked deeper and deeper into "the grid."

In fact, "grids" are proliferating, providing rapid, graphic, human-like, and sensuous media for communication along the lines that most human beings are familiar. Grids like "Second Life" and "Blue Mars" will someday interconnect and people (users) will have the opportunity to establish identities that transcend the limitations of one commercial grid, according to "Elenia Llewelyn," founder of a grid called "InWorldz". This is pretty exciting stuff for USERS in any of these "worlds," but unlikely if the net neutrality regulations do not allow sufficient elbow room for entrepreneurs to compete profitably. That is half the story.

The other half is that entrepreneurs are the least likely people on this planet to worry about civil rights. They issue terms of service for USERS to accept or not (if not they don't get to use the service). The terms of service recitations are long, fine-print, legal documents that reserve most rights to the vendor and restrict the users to certain (usually mundane and reasonable) kinds of activities. But that is about grids. Not all things on the internet are about grids (yet).

A simple form of computing nowadays is a free-email account, say at Juno or hotmail. There are terms of service for using these systems for communicating with friends, but hardly anyone reads the ToS carefully, and will be surprised when they try to forward a big video clip of Britney Spears taking a bath to their old college buddies. It is easy to see why ToS limit the size of email attachments. They clog the internet with mindless stuff.

An even simpler form of internet usage is clicking on an icon that contains the URL (uniform resource locator, which means "internet address") and reading what is being posted at that website. You are doing that right now. This website is small potatoes compared to Macy's or BestBuy, so small accounts like ALP and Iron Mountain will be granted equal access to the broad internet, but only if they are propagated through cables, wires, and other physical means. So far, then, net neutrality is good.

What is bad about the new net neutrality regulations is that there are no regulations for internet propagated wirelessly, as for instance to that new Droid 4G device in your pocket that has a telephone service embedded in a nest of other electronic marvels, including access to everything on the internet including Google. Specifically, what is bad is that if you want to read my rantings wirelessly while riding to work in carpool, you may be out of luck. ALP and Iron Mountain may get pushed back in the router queues so far back that you give up trying.

Google is a good emblem of what goes on in the internet. Zillions of people a day ask Google questions about things they are interested to know more about. Google provides the answers lickity-split and, if you are "Googling" from Home Depot, you know almost instantly whether Lowe's has a better price on a particular bar-coded Ryobi drill set. Could save yourself tons of money over an extended shopping spree, you know! Well, Google also provides you with paid commercials when you ask it a question. Underlying that ploy is the question of whether Google is putting paid-for information at the top of the list of 23,202 "hits" on your subject. Net neutrality says that they should not do that.

Scale that question up a bit and consider that monopoly is not just a Parker Bros. game, but the holy grail of many high-end businesses. They know they will never achieve a real monopoly in their product or service line, but they hope to get as close as possible so they have more elbow room on pricing (aka "price gouging"). Net neutrality regulation cover this, if the service is wired, but not if wireless.

Then there is "the cloud." The "cloud" is computing services that you do not download, or only download a thin, lightweight interface for. Microsoft is in favor of cloud computing for Office, for instance, where you will pay a small fee for using Word or Excel or Powerpoint on their servers, which will have the latest up-to-date versions of the software, of course, thus eliminating all the hassle of propagating versions to a hungry world containing relic computers and high-end quad-core beasts that easily defeat the bad guys found in Matrix and Tron. There will be some applications in "the cloud" that are useful to mobile, wireless users. These will not be regulated.

So the big question is whether the Comcasts of the world have decided that they can get sufficiently rich from wireless apps, or whether they can mount pressure on the physical network regs from catbird seats in the wireless regime? In fact, as this article and its reference (be sure to read both) indicates, this situation is polarized along partisan lines and the GOP and large corporations are going for the jugular of the FCC.

Personally, I am satisfied that "net neutrality" has been recognized for what it is, a serious issue akin to the issues that resulted in the breaking-up of ATT a generation ago. ATT got too big for its britches and telecommunications suffered. Now, "land-line" telephones are produced by the billions by anyone who wants into that market and service has improved and broadened so that you can call anywhere in the world these days for a very nominal fee. Understand the ATT issues and you understand the Net Neutrality issues.

Of course, I despise the likes of Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) who will fight tooth and filthy finger nail to cripple the FCC. She believes in the power of corporations to progress, but she ignores human nature, the human condition, and human history in so doing.

JB

12/17/10

Paul Krugman this morning in the New York Times writes about the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission created by Congress to discover what went wrong, in what order, and why. As you will discover, the Commission failed utterly to carry out its task, split along partisan lines and, on the GOP side, committed to an Orwellian toeing of the corporate line. At least they were clear about it. Their lies and misrepresentations completely discrediting the work of the Commission, so we really do not have to worry about it taking on an authoritative aura.

Funny that Krugman did not write about the self-defeating nature of the Commission. Perhaps he thinks that the GOP in the new House of Representatives will try to use the GOP report as a focal point for their machinations against government. I hope that is not what happens. It is bad enough that we spent good money on this farce.

It brings up the point, though, that Sam Graham-Felson, formerly a techie in the Obama campaign, writes about Obama shifting his weight to compromise with the GOP. He thinks that Obama's shift amounts to an abandonment of the Liberals with an unspoken notion that he can somehow win the nomination of the Democrats in 2012 just because he is the sitting president and the election with the center returning to his fold.

Well, horse pucky! The Liberal and Progressive wing, also known as the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party, will not accept the hypothesis that the nation has gone over wholesale to Republican Fascist Corporatism. The evidence we see is that the center-leaning leadership of the Democrats is weak, mute, and spineless. Picture Evan Bayh dancing with Barack Obama.

The people of this country are sick to death of unemployment, fecklessness in Washington, corporate power over their own representatives, and outrageous waste of lives and treasure in useless wars that cannot be won by playing according to the rules of petty tribal and sectarian popinjays. They are sick of Obama's cave-in philosophy of compromise, his lip service to Liberal principles and Progressive programs. The vast majority of Americans want a strong, vital and humane country, freed of the criminal element in the private sector and the saboteur element that destroys government from within.

Fundamentally, it comes down to this: the Democratic leadership does not know how to express the Liberal and Progressive ethos without falling prey to the radical rightwingnut rhetoric about galloping socialism. Here is the point: Liberalism sees public life as 50% competitive and 50% cooperative. Conservatism will not even mention cooperation. Liberalism will keep the balance, Conservatism will drive us off the cliff again and again until we finally learn not to believe their fairy stories that are designed to gull the innocent and stupid so that the economic elites can further insulate themselves from the commonweal.

JB

12/11/10

There was a book back in the early 1970's entitled The Report from Iron Mountain," written by Richard Lewin. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and that's how I happened to get my copy. I showed it to a professor of U.S. Diplomatic History, who it turns out had never seen it. He was amazed and converted and also not quite converted to the book's thesis that a military-industrial complex would have theoretical underpinnings going deep into the marrow of what industrial capitalism is in a representative democracy—a republic—like ours.

My own website: Iron Mountain is dedicated to the concept that Americans have lost sight of and understanding of the consequences to the democracy of having a military-industrial-Congressional complex. That is, the inevitable thing has happened: the military and industrialists have converted the Congress to their preferred system of capitalism right in front of our backs!

Dwight David Eisenhower is given credit for coining the term "military-industrial complex" and today we find out that the expression was debated hotly in the few days before the speech in which it appears. This article does include the fundamental reason why the M-I Complex has survived despite the huge financial cost and the damage it does to our democracy, namely, that with thermonuclear weapons there is no possibility of a slow build-up of arms to counter an attack. You have to be ready and vigilant always.

What the Americans have NOT done is take the necessary precautions for their form of government that such a change has entailed. We are completely a the mercy of the military-industrial-Congressional complex these days. Our thinking, as exemplified by Dick Cheney and PNAC proceeds along militaristic lines just as Eisenhower predicted. We proclaim from some quarters that America is an empire to succeed all past empires. Even so-called liberals decry the loss of empire in these battered days of Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of China. You won't find the word "empire" in the U.S. Constitution, by the way. And, if you are astute you will read the history of the founding of this country and note that standing armies were looked upon with a jaundiced eye even back then.

Well, the problem continues to exist. We must be ready. So, the safeguards against adventurism and empire mongering have to be found and institutionalized. Better get started on this, we are thinking at Iron Mountain.

JB

12/9/10

By now nearly everyone has spoken or written about the blockbuster announcement that President Obama has cut a deal with the GOP to extend ALL the Bush Tax Relief provisions for two years in exchange for 13 more months of long term unemployment insurance, a deal which is touted as being the necessary economic stimulus package the country needs by the very people who are ... at present ... ignoring the fact that it adds $900 billions dollars to the deficit.

Among the most vocal opponents of this "deal" are Progressives and Liberals who see the continuation of tax cuts for the top 3% as a humiliating defeat of Liberal and Progressive principles. In fact, though, the entire Liberal wing of the Democratic Party is aghast and vocally so.

I am, and I like what E.J. Dionne, Jr. of the Washington Post had to say about who will be supporting Barack Obama in 2012, if the Liberals and Progressives find a better candidate ... and how could they not find one!

My guess is that Barack Obama, having read the awful inside information on the economy he inherited from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, decided that his would probably be a one-term presidency because there was no way—even with both houses of Congress—to dig the domestic economy out and preserve the U.S. position of pre-eminence in the world in just two years, that is, before mid-term elections buried him in an untenable position. Having made such a technocratic decision he then determined that to show the GOP obstructionism for what it is ... cynical obstructionism ... would be too difficult. So, instead, following the Clinton voices in his administration and his own predeliction for avoiding a fight, he tried to guide the situation in a middle area where the GOP's campaigning for the 2012 elections would appear to be radical and wrong for the state of the nation.

I do think he failed to accomplish that because his path toward the center has been completely and forcefully derided by one and all in the press as naive, simplistic, misbegotten in the first place, and wrong-headed in the extreme. Obama, with his remarkable rhetorical abilities chose to shelve his best weapon and let the public figure out for themselves the real damage done by the Wall Street economy rapists. You could say that he was forced off the lectern by the ears of world opinion, given that the U.S. is way out of balance on trade and debt, ... and you would be right.

The thing is that world opinion is very much a fickle thing and I am quickly persuaded that he could have explained the bailout of Wall Street in terms that European and American publics would have understood as reasonable. He didn't. Moreover, he did not explain to the domestic public what a mess he inherited, and he could have without creating more fear, which obviously was his reason for not so doing.

He has no plausible aces up his sleeves, so he must be content with the idea of one-term. The appalling thing is that he seems not to care that the Democratic Party is going to take another shellacking because of his inability to deal with the fact that his plate was piled high with feces when he arrived. This is definitely "change" only he can believe in for most presidents know in their marrow that changing the face of the party is a matter of leadership, not of shaming or scolding. Moving the Democrats toward some center defined by the pundits or the opposition is clearly a betrayal of the votes that Progressives and Liberals cast for him in 2008. And there is no reason on earth, given the plate of crap he inherited, that he could not have moved the whole nation toward a better understanding of the balance between competition and cooperation that lies at the heart of Liberal thinking. But he didn't.

JB

13/5/10

There is a strain of thought in Americans, probably other nationalities as well, certainly the various peoples of the United Kingdom, Germany, France, The Netherlands, probably greater Scandinavia, Spain, Italy, a line of logic and belief which is essentially an illogical commitment to the idea that flaws of the personality can with diligence be overcome. We believe that drunks can get sober and stay that way. We believe that gossips can silence themselves. We believe all manner of annoying things about people can, with sufficient strength of purpose, be resolved into something we like better.

In a way the hypothesis that Frank Rich, of the New York Times, has today about the appalling lack of political leadership from Barack Obama is in that tradition of belief. Something is wrong, there is a reason for it, and once we get to that reason and show Obama the problems it is causing the rest of us, he will of his own volition decide to repair the problem that gives rise to his annoying behavior. The trouble is that Barack Obama is in a category of one (okay, five!) people who have been or are President of the United States. It is difficult to compare his/their behaviors with plumbers and stock brokers and short-order cooks.

In Sunday's Times Frank Rich unveils the "Stockholm Syndrome" hypothesis about Barack Obama's personality, a reach if ever there was one that managed, nevertheless, to shed some cold, hard light on a subject. I agree with Rich that Obama has a very wrong-headed idea about what his role is in the White House, and I suspect that Rich is correct in invoking the Stockholm hypothesis into the situation at hand, which is, of course, that we are hanging precariously over an enormous economic chasm, divided bitterly on what to do about it, heir to decades of foolishness and maleducation about issues like this, and simultaneously conducting at least two foreign wars (maybe four), and hostage to every crack-pot on the planet with infrastructures like airlines and other situations where human beings are unable to fend for themselves, the most poignant of which dangers are the many-times-increased threats on the lives of the President himself and his extended family.

In other words, there is ample evidence that Obama's deficient leadership is caused by a psychological process analogous to the process at work in the Stockholm Syndrome. What is not certain, and maybe never will be, is whether Obama brought any of this compromise is preferable to leadership behavior with him, and if he did how did so many millions of spectators, even Republicans, miss this crucial point?

In a democracy we have to take responsibility for our own behaviors as well as those of our elected officers. Our system for taking care of the elected provides only slow and painful processes, quadrennial elections or impeachment. The processes for understanding and accepting our own failed judgments is not nearly as formal and might best be described as something akin to wallpapering. We hardly ever take responsibility for our history because we hardly ever understand our democracy for what it is. We are more likely to wallpaper over the flaws in our logic and selection processes than to unearth the internal logic of them and accept the failure points, since of course, the failures are mass failures and lead inexorably to the conclusion that we are easily duped, easily blinded by our private and public hypotheses, and blinded by our ambitions for the country (and our own places in it).

Okay, now you know, either you made a mistake about Barack Obama beginning way back when he made the Keynote Speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and ever since, probably resting your weary case on his remarkably fresh and seemingly lucid rhetorical styl(ings). The process developed and you kept yourself from seeing the truth of Obama's weakness for collaboration with the "enemy." Finally, he was elected and the world seemed to turn upside down as a Black man in a White world took hold of the levers of planetary power. And, the world's economies shuddered under the inexorable and inevitable abuse they had received from their most intimate caretakers, in what has surely got be considered a rape!

You see, Frank Rich is beginning to sound more and more plausible. (It certainly suits my preference for not being labeled as a blind and foolish person for two long years of campaigning leading up to the 2008 election.) Rich's theory is that Obama has succumbed (in a way that the less imaginative of the previous presidents did not) to the awful pressures of the Office, pressures redoubled and made crystal clear by the obstructionism and foolhardy petty treasons of the GOP. And, if Rich is right, and if our notions about redemption and surcease are correct, then there is something we can do to save Obama and this situation, but what is it?

The first and quick answer is that the family of Democrats must congeal over the situation in what amounts to "an intervention," rather than doing what I and others are currently doing, namely un-congealing the Progressive Liberals by exhorting them to find a replacement for Obama as quickly as possible and to run with it. You see, then, that our optimism that "an intervention" would work is threadbare and our better bet is to go full throttle the other direction. This is abandonment of Obama to lick his own wounds and deal with his own "collaborationism" as best he can. And that does not sound right, either.

The best of all possible worlds would be for Obama to resign his office immediately. The outfall from that is obvious and full of mischief, but the gravity of a complete surrender of the office to someone, like Joe Biden, who could at least put up a good show against the petty treasons of the GOP and who could deal with the political sourness abroad in Washington would stun the GOP for the time necessary for the Democrats to regroup (recongeal) and find a candidate for 2012. There are plenty of aspirants, and there are some good ones among them. About this we ARE optimistic!

JB

12/3/10

You all know that I have abandoned hope that Barack Obama will rise to the occasion of his presidency. He appears to me and to others to be fundamentally incapable of doing that part of the president's job that we generally call political leadership. Yes, it has been easy for him to assume the talismanic prerogatives and "powers" of the job, but anyone who can knot a tie or smile at an adversary could exercise the talismanic effects of the office. What Obama lacks is a fundamental courage of his own convictions ... or at least those things of which he spoke for two years while running for the office. The extension of the Bush Tax Relief bill is a case in point. Obama has signaled that he is okay with the top 1% getting relief too. So, we know where his bread is buttered and we are more than just angry.

Along comes a Nobel Prize-winning Economist like Dr. Paul Krugman who is adept, actually razor-sharp, at discerning problems and announcing the battery of solutions down to those that, being-half solutions or worse, are necessarily going to cause more trouble than they solve. Krugman's analysis this time doesn't mince any words. He is in full accord with me and my associates who believe that Howard Dean must begin the process of finding a different leadership voice for the Democratic Party with the aim in mind of finding a credible and winning candidate for 2012. Howard himself might not be the one, but he is clever, astute, connected, and politically successful ... the fifty-state system that Dean invented is what put Obama in office, and believe me, it will put him out of office just as fast.

Look. I do not say these things lightly. I have waited until the very last moment to say them, but I truly believe that Obama has some fundamental flaws that prevent him from EVER rising to the occasion of his presidency. He is dangerous in office to every notion of governance that Progressive Liberals hold dear. For the middle of the road people, he is less than a triangulating windsock like Clinton, and more a puppet of the last strong voice he heard. It is a crying shame, and I am crying, but I refuse to lay down my principles to re-elect him.

JB

11/30/10

By now the whole world knows that Mr. Ansange of WikiLeaks has published thousands of classified documents from the U.S. Department of State, some of which, apparently, are embarrassing to their authors and to the persons mentioned or characterized. This column by Gene Robinson in the Washington Post gives you a decent perspective on what was revealed, what has not yet been revealed, and the importance (if any) of it all.

Having been involved decades ago in classified material and continuing my interest in the problems of classification in government, I am delighted that Ansange has lifted the curtain a little on some of the abuses of the classification system. My own experience was that senior personnel used the classification system to burnish their egos (sending invitations out to senior Naval officers to a cotillion via Confidential radio message), and to cover their asses when they made mistakes (usually by claiming some mythical "personal privilege" and hiking a Confidential message up to Secret level, just because some of the contents would bear on disciplinary proceedings if they were to occur.)

But the WikiLeaks revelations, as Robinson so nicely portrays, are about the general difficulty in being a super-power. Perhaps, Gene could have said the difficulty arises from the hubris that we have about being the last of the 20th century contestants standing (or wobbling around the ring)! There is no doubt that foreign service officers must report their human evaluations of the leadership of other nations. To characterize Sarkozy as thin-skinned and arrogant, however, does not belong in official communications; it is an abuse of official access and of the classification system. Were the classification system written properly, communications like the Sarkozy-gram would be automatically downgraded to unclassified status in a year or less. But, the geniuses who run this system do not understand the time-value of information is limited. They believe that it is eternal and has a meta-level which, if opened to scrutiny, would reveal the weaknesses and shallows of our diplomatic and military processes.

The good thing about the WikiLeaks is that they will have a chilling effect on abuses of the system. The bad part is that there will inevitably be an inflation of classification to cover the errors that take place. The solution is a top-down insistence that classification be used properly, giving reprimands for mis-classified communications ... on the spot!

JB

11/21/10

Frank Rich in the Sunday New York Times has opened a can of night crawlers that look like they might just make an escape. My colleagues and I don't normally advertise our disagreements, but in this case—the prospects for Sarah Palin in 2012—the disagreement is not serious, just a matter of perspective over time.

Read Rich now, please.

Okay, then; the issue we have here in the Liberalism corner is not whether Sarah is popular, whether she lies like a drunken sailor, whether she has a clue about constitutional government in a republic or a representative democracy, whether she would be a good person to hand off the nuclear football to (decidedly not!), or even whether she is being run by somebody else or a group of others who prefer to keep their heads down. No, our disagreement is basically on why Frank Rich, who from his catbird seat has much to write about, why he wrote this piece today? The answer is (contentiously viewed) that he felt he needed to.

Well, I am of the opinion that Sarah will be buried by the "powers that be" in the GOP long before the next nominating convention they put on. The corporate press will do to her what they did to the real threat of Howard Dean. They buried him with a faked and trumped up side-story about emotional outbursts (thus playing the domestic nuclear card) and good Howard was gone. They will do the same for Sarah, but right now, I maintain, Sarah is Queen for A Day and probably many months. She has a bully pulpit and is using it better than anyone of her adversaries either side of the aisle. In fact, aisle begins to make no sense when you are talking about Sarah.

Sarah is a "rim" candidate. She draws her strength from the much stronger sense of dismay among those out on the precarious edge of society (and it is all relative, folks, so people living next door in a well-heated, well-fed, and well-entertained family might think of themselves as disenfranchised and dismayed). Sarah knows that the rim averages out to the center in the final analysis, but there is no "energy" in the center, just tension. So, Sarah performs for the energy and to release tension, and people love her for it. If the presidential election were held on December 1st, she would beat Barack Obama with historic numbers. And, of course, our national canoe would run aground in about two weeks, leaving the world wondering what happened to the U.S.?

What happened is this: we have become a nation of hypocrites and pigs. We care, in the mass, nothing for truth or honesty, but only for sound bytes that resonate with our preconceptions, ideas that have been carefully nurtured by the corporate press for corporate ends. We are the come-uppance of a failed educational system, unable to distinguish or value truth from outrageous fiction. We have allowed our republic, our representative democracy, to become a corporatist state, where representation of the people is definitively secondary to representation of corporate interests in the financial world, the environment, and in the halls of government.

Sarah has very little to do with these things. She is a wild card and a demagogue. She is bucking the corporatist system in her own way, but notice that she is at the corporate trough along with the rest (both parties). So, yes, the plutocrats are running her now. They love her willful destruction of the faith in a government of, by, and for the People, and they know they can turn off her spigot any time they choose.

JB

11/20/10

Elizabeth Kolbert is a damned good writer—too good, perhaps. She ruined my day yesterday with this piece: "Uncomfortable Climate." I have been musing about it ever since, railing at the stupidity of our countrymen and -women for electing these bombastic know-nothings whose main intellectual accomplishment is the perfection of political mendacity and bullying.

Climate change is a little like your front lawn (if you have one ... I have rock and cactus). If you let it go, then your lawn-mower will not work properly in the long grass you let grow. It will be ineffective and force you into heroic measures you do not even know about today. And it will be expensive. And while the grass is long the vermin will begin to collect and soon enough they are in the basement (if you have one) or rattling around inside the walls. just for leaving the grass untended&mash;you've got a major situation and will need help.

Help for managing the climate comes from Mars. No, sorry, they packed up and left this system shortl before we crawled out of the ooze. There is no help. We understand the period of some of the sun's cycles, but we are no where near projecting the detonation of nearby stars that could send a (another) shock wave through our part of the branch off the Sagittarius Arm of our galaxy in which we live. Life is dreadfully contingent upon things we do not know, so it is all the more galling that these "professional conservative skeptics" think they have the answer.

Anyway, the point of bringing Elizabeth's essay to you is to underscore the point that the next two years (or probably more) are going to be terrible. The House will be a bee hive of obstructionism and glib told-you-so-ism, beguiling the really pathetically informed public with lies so bald that cueballs will run in terror. Gird your loins my friends, but stay out of airport security lines, too.

JB

10/15/10

I began this little series of essays with the comment that I thought there will be an explosion in America and soon. I put that under a title that suggested the outcome of that explosion will be a revolution. I deceived you. The outcome at worst will be a civil war and, more likely, an insurrection in the South, in Idaho and Arizona, in small places in other states, and accompanied by riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, and a few other well-known places where riots erupt.

If it gets out of hand we will have a civil war with conservatives of all stripes and creeds coalescing into a murderous army of anti-government, anti-Black, anti-Hispanic hot-heads who are armed right now to the teeth, and whose staying power will trip several alarms among those in the target minorities and among liberals. The "war" will last a few months and then, with the regular armed forces culled of fifth columnists, the national armed forces will suppress it, also with considerable bloodshed.

The 2nd Amendment will be re-read to exclude "militias" the operational purposes of which are not coordinated with national good order and discipline, i.e., those which would remove duly elected officials and destroy government because they believe them to be too corrupt for remedy. This re-reading will prolong the "war," but the president will have no choice but to call this an insurrection or rebellion ... like the last time.

More likely, though, there will be outbreaks of violence against government, large and small, spread out across the land where militias are already formed and their caches of arms are already secured. The internet that coordinates these groups will be taken down, the ring leaders will be rounded up, and some of them shot to death in the process. There will be other bloodshed among innocent people, and there will be enormous property damage, but the real effect will be to so chasten the general public that the far right, racist groups will be tarred and feathered by their own hand. What happens to the rest of the nation is the more important outcome.

I have said that America is not ready for a revolution, because there is not anything like an agreement on grievances or on goals. The right wants so much less government that it cannot possibily compromise with the center and left that want merely to repair or reorganize existing forms. The outcome of the promised insurrections (promised, by the way, not by me, but by them: Sipsy Street Irregulars among several nation-wide groups who also travel under the banner of the Three-Percenter organizations, the former of which has threatened my own life online and with emails directly to me) will be a chilling of civil rights and civil liberties in this country. The corporations will love that. A docile population is an ideal workforce!

There is nothing good that can possibly come from either civil war or insurrection in America today or in the next few years. On the contrary, we in academe have been talking about the relative and absolute declines in our nation's prospects vis-a-vis the emerging nations like China, Brazil, India, and in comparison with our own long-standing ideals. We in the academy effectively reached a conclusion, albeit tentative and extremely pessimistic, about the time of the Mogadishu debacle (Blackhawk Down), but based more on the outrageously scandalous behavior of Reagan Republicans urging behind President Carter's back that the Iranians not free the hostages until the presidential elections that year. Our conclusion then, which has been written with innocent blood here and abroad in the ensuing decades, is that elite corporate power is now so strong in America that the pretense of them lurking in the shadows of some bizarre Kabuki play is no longer required.

As my colleague Phil Rochstroh correctly pointed out recently, in addition to the more and more brazen exercise of power by the corporate elites, the average American searching and yearning for a "normal" life now tends to internalize the stresses and distortions of reality played out in the corporate press. Americans have now generally chosen to "confine themselves" to innocent blather about passing events, rather than to take a serious look at the real issue, that the locus of power in America is now firmly in the hands of a class of people whose first and foremost mission is to make a quarterly profit and to keep their own positions at the head of these behemoth corporations. They understand that somewhen during the 1950s a corporation was able to begin accumulating so much more money relative to the common man (just like what happened in the Gilded Age of the 1870-1890s period) that they live in a different universe where gravity is reversed ... or even better, is subject to their own whims.

Revolution is impossible in America now. That is my conclusion. Certainly any revolution that leads to a better republic, a cleaner government, and based on ideals shared among a strong majority and consent of the governed is impossible. It is true that in our colonial revolution against Great Britain there were those who remained loyal to the idea of a constitutional monarchy, who believed that a Parliament that taxed without regard to the wishes of those taxed was annoying, but not sufficiently annoying to throw off the transcendent principles that governed their political philosophy up to that point. The Tories were a minority, and they either had to go back to England or change their minds and accept new transcendent principles. Many did.

Today the revolutionists, those of us who are so angry we could answer a call to arms, are a tiny minority of a population that is effectively self-disciplined to avoid disruption of the status quo at all costs, even the costs of their own liberties, but, interestingly, not at the cost of their own pursuit of Happiness. Go figure!

JB

10/14/10

I am disappointed about what has happened to our country. Actually, on some days when the worst features of our system are more apparent, I am angry. As I have said, anger is irrational, and it feels good to be irrational once in a while. And, I notice you have the same progression of thoughts, at least that's what your behavior suggests. And, that is the crucial step. It isn't about me or about you, it is about "us," and so the question becomes, who are "we" that we seem to share the same kinds of emotions and thoughts?

Well, the easy answer is, we are We the People, and we subscribe to a set of transcendent principles, such as the absolute right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Ah, you say, that is what I'm talking about. But, a second later you notice that we have a whole range of ideas about life, including the death penalty, the conduct of offensive war, the pulling of plugs when there is a "do not resuscitate" order, traffic fatalities that are statistically going to involve 50,000 human beings a year in our country alone, and so on. WE have different ideas about Life.

Liberty, too, you notice, is fraught with all kinds of additional thoughts packed in like jewels in a bag being smuggled into a destitute land. And, happiness, a thought doubtless first conjured up by Ben Franklin, is a hazy idea that nevertheless has animated untold millions of Americans to pursue IT, whatever IT is. These concepts, that I must unpack to get to the revolution we are promising ourselves, all arise from a common understanding among us, also transcendent, that is absolute and not subject to shopping around for alternatives. That concept is about Equality, an assertion about the worth and standing of every human being on this planet now and forever.

Equality, indeed! We are not equal in height, weight, in age, or maturity. We are not equal in tennis or golf or skiing or swimming. We are not equal in business acumen or engineering design intelligence, nor in our understanding of machines and, especially these machines, our computers. We are not equally educated and we are not equally educable. Some of us are very healthy and some are ill, disfigured by accidents, crippled, blind, deaf, mute. Some of us were raised by two quarrelsome parents, some by loving couples. Some of us have no moral code and prey on others, and sometimes among these the person seems to be pursuing his or her own version of happiness

We are totally unequal, except that we subscribe to a notion that we are by definition "transcendently equal before the law." We believe various versions of this idea, most or many of them coming down to that moment of birth where a new person of equal moral worth appears, fresh, not quite a tabula rasa, unsullied by worldly affairs (except for pre-natal conditions that the mother might have avoided).

We cling to this idea of transcendent equality partly in recognition of systems that deliberately promote inequality, social ranks, kings, queens, and privileged classes of people born to their superior economic situations. We accept because of this that there is a necessity for some kind of pervasive Justice in the world such that when things are manifestly unequal the system itself has the machinery to make them more closely equal.

But, theory is one thing and practice quite another. We do not in theory give the captain of an industry an easy out because of her position in society. Under the law we are equal ... and that principle is not in theory subject to shopping for alternatives. But, much of our current anger stems from the sure knowledge that we are being lied to about equal application of our laws. We know the rich have better opportunities for education and health that almost no amount of government intervention can level out.

In fact, we know that this foundation of our ideas of economic, social, and political justice has been badly undermined by unscrupulous people, especially people teamed up against those of us whom they think are less equal ... by virtue of cognitive skills, economic success, or any other measure you want to name. We know that the transcendence has begun to evaporate, that the educational system has been perverted to deliberately avoid discussing these issues, that there are powerful forces in our culture who do not want people to understand fully the nature of the inequalities that transcendent equality would otherwise have the power to correct.

A theory of Justice exists that incorporates the ideals we have and the pragmatism that runs through our daily lives. In fact there are several. The United States was founded on English and French philosophers' ideas: Locke, Rousseau, Bentham, Adam Smith, to name just four important ones. We are a nation founded on Bentham's "utilitarianism" supported by Adam Smith's ideas about markets and their supposed self-correcting mechanisms, but obviously the foundational agreement is breaking down under the pressure of several important things: populaton, diversity, technology, and the scale of opportunities within the economy. I might add that amorality of corporate culture contributes strongly to the decay of our assumptions about ideals and even our pragmatism.

Our liberal and progressive assumptions about Justice are now evolved toward a system that understands that there will be failures, but steadfastly holds that old ideal of equality sacrosanct and demands that the table be leveled at every opportunity.

And,no. We are not all in agreement about this. Many of us are so battered by the mischances of life and by the presence of rules designed honestly to help disadvantaged, that they feel the system does not work for them, that their liberties have been weakened or destroyed, that their pursuit of happiness has been more or less permanently thwarted. So, remembering the triad of "Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness," and with Libery and Happiness on the ropes, they think that their lives are not respected, as well.

The sad part is that these frustrated people have been trained by agents of an entirely different system of government ... corporatism ... to believe that government is irresponsible and must curtailed, rather than reformed, in fact that it be reorganized if necessary by violence (including giving their own lives and yours) if necessary.

In point of fact, we are not fully ready for revolution in this country because there is no fundamental agreement on basic principles. This is what the far right corporatists have done. They have deliberately separated us from one another to make it impossible to agree on a new way forward. This was planned in advance by such groups as The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and News Corp. There scores of such organizations and people within them that long since decided that the United States as we thought we knew it is irrecoverably malfunctioning.

They have the resources of enormous funding from corporations. Corporations like America the way it is, although you hear them whining about the American People asking too much for their labor, an excuse they use to send jobs elsewhere for short term profit, forgetting that the internal market is the very reason for their existence. In science we call this cancer. In political philosophy we call it corporatism. In the 1930s and 1940s we called it Fascism.

Corporations have the imagination of the working man and woman, even though more jobs are created by small enterprises that use the name corporation but do not have the resources to buy and promote ideologies or to own a Congress and President. People think that corporations are the way human beings cooperate to pool resources, and surely they used to be that. But now, folks, corporations use the governments they buy to tax the ordinary citizens for their own profit, selling governments goods and services at outrageous prices, with outrageous defects, all for no particular benefit to the those taxed. No wonder corporations love this system!

To be continued

JB

10/13/10

There is going to be an explosion in America soon. I know this because one after another individual people are exploding with frustration like a long disjointed pack of lady-finger firecrackers. They hate the situation that Wall Street has gotten us in, that the corporations have contributed to, and that the government has not been able to get us out of. They have a say in government, of course, so they focus there, but if they had a say on Wall Street or down in Delaware (where a disproportionate number of corporations are home-ported because of the beneficial, more laissez faire rules governing corporations) angry people would be all over these financiers and moguls for sure.

Life is a struggle, they say. It truly is. We are born helpless and would not last a week were it not for our mothers, and mothers would not last if it were not for mates and families and communities that recognize need. Life is competitive, of course, we "struggle" for good grades in school, on the playground we tussle, behind the high school gym we fight, in the Army we kill, in business we compete as best we can for disposable income of the community and passers-by. But, as child rearing suggests, life is equally a matter of cooperation. Life is 50% competition and 50% cooperation. Never forget that.

But, people are angry at government not only for its failures, sometimes hugely expensive failures, sometimes dishonestly promoted and narrowly beneficial programs that fail most of us. People are angry at government because of the pervasive indifference to ethical codes (balances of competition and cooperation) the citizenry accepts and tries to live by. People are angry about politicians' arrogance and, yes, the gall they have to lie continuously about virtually everything we out here in the weeds hold dear. And, there is going to be a come-uppance based on this anger.

Anger is a freakish state of the emotions, a breakdown of the delicate balance we have within ourselves between our need to compete and our need for cooperation, and it is chemically induced, a relic or inheritance (take your pick) from days when we needed to shut down certain parts of our personality and moral codes and aesthetic senses to survive—just to survive the next minute! Anger does not employ higher cortical processes, although a slow burning anger, such as we experience with government (and parents when we are teenagers), seems to base itself on clear thinking. It doesn't. It feeds the fires of anger from a pipeline to the centers of fear, envy, and hubris. Fragments of thoughts are piped into these systems, basted, soaked, brined, and sent on down to the seat of anger where we just plain burn.

Still, anger has its uses, if we are able to harness our attavistic emotionality, to express ourselves rationally after a peak of loathing hatred and fear. Anger helps us associate with people who are, like us, angry and burning slowly. It helps us concentrate our inner forces, it teaches us that we are fundamentally not in control of the social environment or, even, our own bodies. Anger brought this country, the United States, into being and then sundered it ... and it is still repairing from that mighty blow it took in the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The anger we see today is the anger of wounded pride, lost illusions, a sense of terrible injustice, a feeling of betrayal, and of helplessness. We the People are sick and tired of being trampled down or ignored or used by people we elect to serve us. We know from 10th grade on that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Now we know that distant power believes itself to be socially distant and less responsible to the constituency. We know that money is the root of all evil, but we also know that huge amounts of money are involved in our political circuses. Do we wonder then that the evil money brings has infected and effectively destroyed the government we were taught we deserved?

You may have seen this circulating around the internet through emails and various websites.

Congressional Reform Act of 2010

1. Term Limits.

12 years only, one of the possible options below..

A. Two Six-year Senate terms

B. Six Two-year House terms

C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

2. No Tenure / No Pension.

A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.

4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

7. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

8. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.

Pretty good thinking, isn't it! I like it a lot and were I king or emperor here, I would implement these ideas tomorrow, October 14th! And, now that is the rub, isn't it. How do you get a corrupted government to reform itself? Does the system itself provide for this kind of massive reform based on decades, even centuries, of slow burn? Yes and no.

Yes, there is the amendment process, and huge gains have been made through this process. And, there is the lesser known part of the Constitution that provides, in Article V, for a convention ...

Article V

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

So, yes, we have a way, but Congress is still in the mix and, you know, this was deliberate. The Founding Fathers were not at all convinced that a democracy could actually function. The "rabble" in the streets was no more trusted then than now.

So, how do we reform Congress by imposing these changes on it. And, more importantly, do we need to reform the Judiciary and the Executive as well? I think that History (the narratives written, including the opinions of people like myself who are formally educated in history, but inevitably have points of view,) tells that there is a certain inertia in the organizations we build, including government, and that those on the inside will fight those of us on the outside because we are threatening their livelihoods ...if nothing else.

So the question soon becomes a question of who will light the match and how bloody will be this next revolution, if evolution is not the answer? The answer to that question lies in the temperament of the nation, and the certain knowledge that those who lead may not survive. It is often the case. Wars are fought primarily by the service and commitment of the "unclasses" of their nations, people who do not really fit in anywhere else, generally. Are we to put our faith in these people to press our cause, our need to clean up our government? Can you clean up your livingroom with the mop that cleans the garage or the rake for the garden? The plot thickens, doesn't it!

(to be continued)

JB

10/1/10

Yes, I am elated. Rahm Emanuel is O U T and the new guy is a "fixer." Believe me he has a lot to fix.

The most striking comment in the Washington Post article this morning is "...reducing staff members to tears..." said of Emanuel the profane, the bully, the complete jackass. As noted, I have been against Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff since, say, week three of this administration. I knew of the troubles caused directly and avoidably by Rahm Emanuel early on and I am more than regretful that Barack Obama did not have the moral courage to stand up to Emanuel's crassness and blunt boorishness.

The New York Times still dodges the truth of the era of Emanuel, and I wonder why (or if) they think that Emanuel is a facet of Barack Obama's personality and management style. I think nothing could be further from the truth. I believe Obama hid behind the gruff and gnarly Emanuel on purpose, precisely because he does not possess that rangy, puerile, sense of bullyhood, yet felt it necessary to "protect" himself from the jackals that inhabit the capital city. In that single sense Barack Obama is an abject failure as a president, because he just did not have the moxey to deal with jerks like Mitch and suntan-Boehner and Cantor on his own. Emanuel set the tone of the White House and the press knuckled to it, "growing a pair" if necessary, but accepting the vulgar as currency they could exchange for value elsewhere. So, the press has been utterly complicit in this terrible two years.

I wish Mr. Rouse all the luck and hope for success in the world. His president needs a do-over, and I hope with Axelrod skinnying out of town (with his tail between his legs, some pundits say) and Larry Summers, the other jackass at the economy end of the table also winding down, that Barack Obama himself can rise above the daily pelting of national security threats that seem to have him walking on egg shells and to be that man we saw in the long primary, eloquent, thoughtful, grounded in the real emotion of the people.

JB

9/28/10

We are all about war. It seems sort of hard to believe most of the day, but nearly 60% of our federal budget goes to the Department of Defense and other external focuses of departments like Homeland Security and State. Still, DoD is the grand-daddy of budget consumption, and we are, whether you want to admit it or not, very much a military-industrial complex. And, if you stop to think about that fact for a moment you will realize that things military in the mid- and long-term require war. So that's what we have: a decade of war in Afghanistan, which we are losing, an occupation force (called a security and training force) in Iraq after six plus years of fighting, a war building in Yemen, where Islamist militants are alternately harbored or pursued, a seething problem with North Korea that diverts the attention of the the Seventh Fleet, the Marines, the Army and Air Force in their occupation (called Support Forces) in both South Korea and Japan's Okinawa and Yokosuka. I have left out Israel, the recipient of the greatest chunk of foreign aid from the U.S. with which they constantly find themselves military purposes and short-lived excitement that feeds their righteous paranoia and much else.

We are a military-industrial complex despite Ike Eisenhower's warning. The meaning of this term is obscured by the tradition of leaving off the name of Congress from the label. But, this all happens because of the pork value of military installations, bases, camps, forts, ports, and hospitals. The pork absolutely sustains some economies—mine for instance. We have a huge Air Force Base in our region and just to the south an eerie educational center and training camp for those who will go out and track Taliban and drug lords and shieks' sons and the special forces of other nations and non-sovereign groups, like al Qaeda.

But Congress is not entirely to blame. The Executive is very much in play here, the White House with its policy concerns making real life choices for the country based on academics' opinions (Kissinger) and military advisors' reflexive readiness to fight. Then there is DoD itself and all its manifestations, some of which we hear about now from Mr. Bernstein's new book.

The military is huge and in Washington it is more huge. The entire culture of Washington, northern Virginia (where I grew up), and suburban Maryland is dominated by military agencies and their physical structures, rentals, camps, halls, and forts. We see from Bernstein's book that they are over whelming and that our president is very much a captive of the military mind and the public mind that reveres the military and the echo-chamber of pundits who cannot imagine an America that does not use its might to fix the world.

I got this link to a set of photographs of the Vietnam era today in my email. I was reluctant to open the link, not because I was already late for breakfast, but because—being a Vietnam combat vet myself—I have not quite yet resolved my conscience on that distasterous war. So, friend, give them a try. Thumb through these fragments of our history and our commitment to the insanity of war. I think you will read the next link with more meaning than otherwise.

The next link also appeared this morning and although it has none of the historical vividness that the photographs have, it has poignant meaning, and I present it to you as much as reassurance as outright information. There is a way out of hell, Gandi is supposed to have said. There is a way out of being a military-industrial complex, too. Michael Nagler writes one opinion about how to do it for CommonDreams Website in his "Replace the War System" essay. You do have to understand that it will not fall all by itself. the MIComplex needs our concerted and continuous attention and our understanding of the awful trade-offs for our civic life and opportunities that the MIComplex swallows whole ... like Goya's depiction of "Saturn Eating His Son."

We have better things to do with our public resources than to be the arms dealer and user to the world. We are the nation that went to the moon, and now we are the nation that does not even have the initiative or resolve or funds remaining to build modern railroads or solutions to the energy budget or effective educational systems or viable corrections for those who break the law. We have an agenda longer than DoD's, yet they have the dollars, the story and mythology, the venue, the men and women on the ground committed to the preservation of millions of MIComplex jobs. When you are voting in just about a month, think about what the vote means in terms of the MIComplex. Think about taking strong and resolute action to begin the climb down from our catbird seat on the engine of planetary destruction.

JB

7/8/10

The San Jose Mercury reports this Thursday morning that the honchos at the federally bailed-out Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are worried about a new program that will reduce the up-front costs of greening one's private residence, such things as solar energy recovery, solar water heating, low volume flushes, etc. These geniuses have stopped the program dead in its tracks!

F&F are worried about "green liens" that would be paid off before F&F mortgages. It is almost as simple as that.

Well, two things, homeowners are not obliged to consult with Freddy or Fanny before engaging any other contractors whose rights are already firmly established in the "mechanic's lien" concept of law. So, on the face of it, F&F are yipping and snarling about something that is really nothing new at all and with which they will have to deal whether this new program is inaugurated or not. So, why are they doing this?

Some nervous Nellie "rising star" in these unbelievably poorly managed agencies saw that the government was going to stimulate a program that would, inevitably, lead to a a number of "mechanic's liens" being placed on F&F mortgaged properties and thought—without thinking—that this was the government shooting itself in the foot. Ah, an opportunity to channel Proxmire he/she "thought!" Some other smartie saw an opening for F&F to be bailed out of the unenviable position of being second to "mechanic's liens" all over the country. They decided to run some figures and doubtless the total came to an impressive number. They did not provide the White House or Treasury with the percentage, you can bet!

F&F are not going to stop this bill. They are just looking for ways to reduce their risks. But, they are looking in the wrong places and holding up progress on a very important program. The "risk" of a mechanic's lien being placed ahead of mortgager recourse is deliberate and part of Main Street's protection. F&F should be quietly told to back F&F off and shut up!

JB

7/6/10

The New York Times this Tuesday morning writes about the appalling attempt by the drug lords of Mexico to have their way with the elections in that "country." Their "way" is to disrupt and terrorize in order to destroy Mexicans' sense of citizenship, to further enserf them under and into the exceedingly wealthy and well-armed cocaine baronies. The Times was kind to the concept of there still being a Mexican polity, but two-thirds of the way up the eastern seaboard provides less perspective than you would hope. It is more like anesthesia!

Were the Times published in Arizona or Texas or New Mexico ... not just printed, but actually published with the immediacy of the situation in its face ... the kind comments about how Mexicans voted despite the bodies hanging from bridges might have taken a different slant, an understanding that the voters's votes will be for officials whose very lives depend on doing the business of the drug cartels.

The tipping point from a rule of law to one of outright criminality and feudal narcokleptocracy was passed years ago. Mexico is a petri dish of the brazen and toxic. The failed state below our borders is not confined to its national territory, however, it exports drugs and hideous crimes over the borders with impunity. In days of yore we would have long since sent a General Pershing across the border after these latter-day Pancho Villa wannabes, but Pershing was unsuccessful at last, and times change.

Instead, Arizona and about 20% of the rest of the states are moving toward filling the vacuum of executive responsibility created by a series of feckless Congresses and paralyzed Presidents. Rather than chasing Pancho all over northern Mexico, Arizona is saying, "ola, mister/señor, you sure act like you are here illegally, let's see if you are muling drugs into our country to feed the music industry and high schools across the length and breadth of the land."

Whoops! Now everyone thinks that every Hispanic looking person in Arizona will be harassed out of their minds by profiling police bent on instigating a guerra del la raza, as if they had nothing better to do and people to do it with in a state with more debt per capita than almost any.

Washington is saying, well Phoenix, Tucson, Nogales, Yuma, Casa Grande, yes, you are being invaded. We can see that. But, you all know, the Army and the National Guard is busy right now. You should take the burden gratefully, because we are winning in Iraq and Afghanistan. No?

No! The feds are not saying that out loud. They are saying: okay Arizona you have stepped over the line and are doing what we feds are supposed to do but are deliberately not doing. We are not defending Americans on American soil against incursions from foreign countries, because we do not want to. And, accordingly, we are going to sue you Arizonans on what the Washington Post describes as "constitutional" grounds that our failure to perform is no defense of your willingness to take up the slack.

Actually, Hillary and Barack, embarrassed to death that the kids of illegal drug-bearing immigrants might not eventually vote Democratic, if they are hassled as illegals as a matter of national policy. They are also afraid that Mexican-Americans who cannot afford to sponsor family members and relatives for legal entry into the U.S. will revolt against the Democrats and choose—of all things—the political party of agribusiness that hires migrant Mexican workers at subsistence wages, including children in the fields against other U.S. laws that are also not being adequately enforced.

Down here in Arizona we are more than a little suspicious of the motivations in Washington that keep open a cheap safety valve on dissent within Mexico, a safety valve that provides an opportunity in the U.S. for the poorest and most oppressed where, without that safety valve, the Mexicans would realize their own responsibility to overthrow the "plantation" economy of Mexico. Of course that would create an embarrassing political instability where now we have merely social, legal, and criminal instability to contend with along and deep inside our borders!

The court case against Arizona will be a pyrrhic victory for the plantation-class in Washington. The grounds for the suit is "the locus of responsibility." If won on those grounds they must finally at last take the responsibility. But, to relieve Arizona of the responsibility to assist (as the Arizona law plainly states) in the apprehension of federal fugitives, federal criminals, federally illegal immigrants is nonsensical and utterly moronic.

Frankly, I don't see Obama standing up to all of this issue, and as I have already written, Hillary has committed political suicide over it. The court would be wise to give equal notice to the causes of the disagreement and for just one moment consider what the opposite of a people defending themselves might be!

JB

6/18/10

There was some hope for Hilary Clinton, what with Barack Obama channeling the old Jerry Brown's Zen-like trance over the BP oil debacle in the Gulf and failing to make a political point from it. Yeah, we know, keeping one's temper and all that, but Americans expect the White House to try to lead public opinion or at least follow it closely enough to be seen as part of the outrage. Obama is correct that the debacle is a risk the government took on our behalf that panned out poorly. Obama is incorrect in thinking that the American public gives a shit about cool calm calculations on why and how. Like all good masses Americans are emotional about their own failures and completely respectable in their denial state and in their SUVs. So, what about Hilary?

Clinton is going to sue the State of Arizona for its law enabling peace officers to question people with suspicious behaviors about their citizenship status. She is going to do this because the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Homeland Security, and the whole apparatus of physical coersion in this country are not able to stanch the flow of illegals across the border ... to the tune of 600,000 per year in AZ alone.

Perhaps Mrs. Clinton did not notice that the Arizona law is being considered in at least twelve other states, that a national poll suggests that over 50% of Americans like the idea of having a secure border and detaining-then-ejecting those who manage to get through anyway. Did she not notice the outrage over the feckless attitude in Washington about laws more strict than the Arizona law, but lying on the political cutting room floor? Does she think that she is endearing herself to the voting public by holding hands with Obama on this issue.

If Hilary had any courage at all, she would have stood up and said that she agrees in principle with Arizona, but believes it is a Federal issue. When she hypothetically did that, Arizona would ask for billions of dollars to support its public agencies that bear the brunt of the illegals, the police, hospitals, schools, etc. So, of course, you see why she demurred on the responsibility point.

A political suicide ... and you were there watching from the driver's seat of your SUV.

JB

6/16/10

Provided for you at the link below, the essay by Tom Englehardt underscores the very essence of the reason why my website, Iron Mountain, exists.

Tom, as usual, does not deal with the nagging details of life in the 21st century, the real problem of continued attempts to "terrorize" the American public and other countries as well. But, in his essay, he does craft a very good picture of the historical meaning of prolonged militarism and remaining hostage to a colossal military-industrial complex. The decisions have been made and the outcomes are anybody's guess, but the trendline for the American Republic is toward moral and economic bankrupcy. Tom is correct, and although he does not offer any real advice on how to proceed from here, his strong implication is that continuing the same path is actually suicidal.

Washington Drunk on War

JB

5/4/10

Just a couple thoughts about the attempted bombing and the rightwing "take" on the unsuccessful Times Square SUV bomb incident.

My rightwing sources tell me this morning that the principal suspect in this case, a naturalized American immigrant from Pakistan, probably lied about his intentions as a future American citizen when he immigrated. Immediately, the rightwing morons say that our government is not doing enough to screen potential terrorists from among the peaceful immigrants! Now I ask you, how could the INS tell whether the suspect was lying or not? Give me a break. If someone who is clean in their native country comes here and asks for citizenship, they are treated at face value.

Second, although the early reports were that the suspect acted alone, subsequently two others have been identified, one of whom is a Pakistani who visited the suspect after he became a U.S. citizen. This is important news.

First thing is that the INS and other agencies are keeping track of people whose country of origin is subject to "multiple interpretations" of honesty and intention. The arrival of the 2nd Pakistani set off a legitimately raised eyebrow.

Second, we do not know whether the visitor brought plans or blackmail or threats against the first suspect's family. So, we should keep our consciences clear by understanding that everyone who comes to America, visitor, immigrant, or just tourist is vulnerable in many ways to coercion. We just don't know at this point. Our suspect could have been a long-range "plant" or he could have been "turned" by the visitor by several means.

Finally, the suspect did precious little to cover his tracks. Perhaps he thought he could escape the country before being fingered and wanted to leave a trail leading to himself, so that a declaration of "jihad" would have credibility. Perhaps, on the other hand, this event was meant not to kill or maim, but only to show the vulnerability we have all the time to persons with malevolent intentions. Or, perhaps the suspect deliberately botched the job because he did not want to hurt anyone, but only wanted to free himself of the coercion he (or his family) was (perhaps) enduring.

Everyone is writing about this, but, in my opinion, few are thinking clearly about it. Take a breath and see what develops.

JB

5/3/10

Ross Douhat, a relatively new columnist for the New York Times whom unfortunately I have read sporadically and quoted less,(a condition that will change as of now) has nailed the immigration issue quite well today. Hyperbolic screams of anguish from people carrying political grudges and agendas about "desert fascism" in Arizona are, as Douhat says, way off the mark and divert attention from the real problem .. which we identified long ago ... Washington simply does not have the courage to enforce its own laws.

JB

Claims and counter-claims about AZ's new law. The fact is that the federal government is in charge and, being in charge, is not discharging its duties to protect its citizens. Yesterday I called Mexico a "failed state." Today, I am going to tattoo that on Uncle Sam. What do you think TeaParty and CoffeeParty are all about. It is that the feds are seemingly hopelessly muscle-bound and cannot tie even their own shoes.

(I titled yesterday's piece "Norwegian Grandmothers" because George Will, to whom I linked and from whom I drew a sense of balance on the immigration issue, used the term. If you did not read George Will you would not understand. The links I put into my pieces are meant to be read.) (Also, I have at least one grandmother in my family tree with a Scandinavian name, although I cannot be sure it was Norse. Coulda been Danish.)

Today in the New York Times comes a variety of articles and this article about Arizona's dramatic step. Just to clear the air a bit, here it is.

ON Friday, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed a law — SB 1070 — that prohibits the harboring of illegal aliens and makes it a state crime for an alien to commit certain federal immigration crimes. It also requires police officers who, in the course of a traffic stop or other law-enforcement action, come to a “reasonable suspicion” that a person is an illegal alien verify the person’s immigration status with the federal government.

Predictably, groups that favor relaxed enforcement of immigration laws, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, insist the law is unconstitutional. Less predictably, President Obama declared it “misguided” and said the Justice Department would take a look.

Presumably, the government lawyers who do so will actually read the law, something its critics don’t seem to have done. The arguments we’ve heard against it either misrepresent its text or are otherwise inaccurate. As someone who helped draft the statute, I will rebut the major criticisms individually:

It is unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them. It is true that the Arizona law makes it a misdemeanor for an alien to fail to carry certain documents. “Now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers ... you’re going to be harassed,” the president said. “That’s not the right way to go.” But since 1940, it has been a federal crime for aliens to fail to keep such registration documents with them. The Arizona law simply adds a state penalty to what was already a federal crime. Moreover, as anyone who has traveled abroad knows, other nations have similar documentation requirements.

“Reasonable suspicion” is a meaningless term that will permit police misconduct. Over the past four decades, federal courts have issued hundreds of opinions defining those two words. The Arizona law didn’t invent the concept: Precedents list the factors that can contribute to reasonable suspicion; when several are combined, the “totality of circumstances” that results may create reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.

For example, the Arizona law is most likely to come into play after a traffic stop. A police officer pulls a minivan over for speeding. A dozen passengers are crammed in. None has identification. The highway is a known alien-smuggling corridor. The driver is acting evasively. Those factors combine to create reasonable suspicion that the occupants are not in the country legally.

The law will allow police to engage in racial profiling. Actually, Section 2 provides that a law enforcement official “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” in making any stops or determining immigration status. In addition, all normal Fourth Amendment protections against profiling will continue to apply. In fact, the Arizona law actually reduces the likelihood of race-based harassment by compelling police officers to contact the federal government as soon as is practicable when they suspect a person is an illegal alien, as opposed to letting them make arrests on their own assessment.

It is unfair to demand that people carry a driver’s license. Arizona’s law does not require anyone, alien or otherwise, to carry a driver’s license. Rather, it gives any alien with a license a free pass if his immigration status is in doubt. Because Arizona allows only lawful residents to obtain licenses, an officer must presume that someone who produces one is legally in the country.

State governments aren’t allowed to get involved in immigration, which is a federal matter. While it is true that Washington holds primary authority in immigration, the Supreme Court since 1976 has recognized that states may enact laws to discourage illegal immigration without being pre-empted by federal law. As long as Congress hasn’t expressly forbidden the state law in question, the statute doesn’t conflict with federal law and Congress has not displaced all state laws from the field, it is permitted. That’s why Arizona’s 2007 law making it illegal to knowingly employ unauthorized aliens was sustained by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

In sum, the Arizona law hardly creates a police state. It takes a measured, reasonable step to give Arizona police officers another tool when they come into contact with illegal aliens during their normal law enforcement duties.

And it’s very necessary: Arizona is the ground zero of illegal immigration. Phoenix is the hub of human smuggling and the kidnapping capital of America, with more than 240 incidents reported in 2008. It’s no surprise that Arizona’s police associations favored the bill, along with 70 percent of Arizonans.

President Obama and the Beltway crowd feel these problems can be taken care of with “comprehensive immigration reform” — meaning amnesty and a few other new laws. But we already have plenty of federal immigration laws on the books, and the typical illegal alien is guilty of breaking many of them. What we need is for the executive branch to enforce the laws that we already have.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has scaled back work-site enforcement and otherwise shown it does not consider immigration laws to be a high priority. It is any wonder the Arizona Legislature, at the front line of the immigration issue, sees things differently?

Kris W. Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, was Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief adviser on immigration law and border security from 2001 to 2003.

JB

4/28/10

I live in Arizona. Just this one state, Arizona, has just short of half a million illegal aliens to contend with, most of them from Mexico, which if you live here close to the border you know to be a "failed state" in the classic meaning of the term—a political entity unable to exercise the fundamental powers of a sovereign, that is, to protect its honest citizens from the illegal acts of its dishonest ones. You might also add that Mexico fails at providing an economic environment hospitable to a reasonable standard of living for well over half of its people. I utterly detest Mexico. It is not quaint; it is squalid.

On the other hand, I have liked virtually every Mexican-American I have ever met. I don't care for their carry-over culture much, but Cinco de Maio and excessive preoccupation with Death on Halloween are minor things compared to what we gringos concoct within the confines of our "culture"—reality television, Sarah Palin, vulgar rap, tea party anarchism, incivility from every corner, OCD athletics, Donald Trump and the rest of the plutocrats in NYC and Connecticut, to name just a few. Mexican-Americans are Americans whose forebears immigrated legally to make a better life for themselves. Many have done just that. Most have settled in to a life many, many times more civilized and comfortable than ever they could have realized in Mexico.

So Arizona now has a law that irritates the ACLU and which George Will, the venerable rightwing dose of salts columnist thinks is just about right. The question at hand boils down to this: does enforcing the law of the land require that we tie both hands behind our backs, blindfold ourselves, and put a gag-ball into our mouths? Is there not some reasonable use of our brains and consciences that gives us the leeway to look for illegal aliens where they are more likely to be found so that we can eject them from our country?

It is easy to see that fingering people because they are of a certain skin color ... and not fingering other people because of their skin color ... can lead to abuses. It already has. Red-headed Irish, dark Portuguese, Japanese and other Asians, and Black people have experienced the reign of terror from Klan-mentality police and mobs and individuals simply because they are dark skinned or have a "look." Mexican Americans have a less striking dissimilarity from northern European racial stock, but they are nevertheless "browner," as my colleague notes. So the question boils down to this: are the abuses of our immigration laws, of our hospitality, our emergency rooms, our citizenship, and all the other impositions that illegal aliens put on our communities EQUAL or LESS THAN the duty we have to defend our rights against unreasonable searches and seizures and arrests without warrants? In Arizona we have said that the sum of all the abuses done by ILLEGAL aliens outweighs the threat to our civil rights. It is really as simple as that on the face of it.

Behind the face of it nationally is the federal government run by political parties both of which are afraid to stir up controversy among the relatives of the illegal aliens, that is, the co-cultural persons already here legally and voting. You see then that where the rubber hits the road, the most awful kind of racial stereotyping and profiling is taking place. Washington needs to get out among the Hispanic community and hear how angry they are with being put in jeopardy by illegals. They don't want them here illegally either ... BUT, as long as the federal government is unwilling to stand up to its own laws, like any sane group of people they are telling their relatives in Mexico to get in while the getting is "good." Yes, this is duplicitous, but it is real and what you can expect, and the effect is to accelerate illegal immigration and to confuse the self-righteous in Washington ... but not in Phoenix, however!

There are suits already to stop implementation of the Arizona anti-illegal alien law. One or more of them will succeed in muddying the waters or, perhaps, declaring the law to be unconstitutional. In the meantime, however, the American civilization must understand that there has to be a rule of reason in this and that Arizona has, as George Will correctly points out, simply called Washington's bluff and taken the first necessary step to get control of its border with Mexico.

JB

4/28/10

I live in Arizona. Just this one state, Arizona, has just short of half a million illegal aliens to contend with, most of them from Mexico, which if you live here close to the border you know to be a "failed state" in the classic meaning of the term—a political entity unable to exercise the fundamental powers of a sovereign, that is, to protect its honest citizens from the illegal acts of its dishonest ones. You might also add that Mexico fails at providing an economic environment hospitable to a reasonable standard of living for well over half of its people. I utterly detest Mexico. It is not quaint; it is squalid.

On the other hand, I have liked virtually every Mexican-American I have ever met. I don't care for their carry-over culture much, but Cinco de Maio and excessive preoccupation with Death on Halloween are minor things compared to what we gringos concoct within the confines of our "culture"—reality television, Sarah Palin, vulgar rap, tea party anarchism, incivility from every corner, OCD athletics, Donald Trump and the rest of the plutocrats in NYC and Connecticut, to name just a few. Mexican-Americans are Americans whose forebears immigrated legally to make a better life for themselves. Many have done just that. Most have settled in to a life many, many times more civilized and comfortable than ever they could have realized in Mexico.

So Arizona now has a law that irritates the ACLU and which George Will, the venerable rightwing dose of salts columnist thinks is just about right. The question at hand boils down to this: does enforcing the law of the land require that we tie both hands behind our backs, blindfold ourselves, and put a gag-ball into our mouths? Is there not some reasonable use of our brains and consciences that gives us the leeway to look for illegal aliens where they are more likely to be found so that we can eject them from our country?

It is easy to see that fingering people because they are of a certain skin color ... and not fingering other people because of their skin color ... can lead to abuses. It already has. Red-headed Irish, dark Portuguese, Japanese and other Asians, and Black people have experienced the reign of terror from Klan-mentality police and mobs and individuals simply because they are dark skinned or have a "look." Mexican Americans have a less striking dissimilarity from northern European racial stock, but they are nevertheless "browner," as my colleague notes. So the question boils down to this: are the abuses of our immigration laws, of our hospitality, our emergency rooms, our citizenship, and all the other impositions that illegal aliens put on our communities EQUAL or LESS THAN the duty we have to defend our rights against unreasonable searches and seizures and arrests without warrants? In Arizona we have said that the sum of all the abuses done by ILLEGAL aliens outweighs the threat to our civil rights. It is really as simple as that on the face of it.

Behind the face of it nationally is the federal government run by political parties both of which are afraid to stir up controversy among the relatives of the illegal aliens, that is, the co-cultural persons already here legally and voting. You see then that where the rubber hits the road, the most awful kind of racial stereotyping and profiling is taking place. Washington needs to get out among the Hispanic community and hear how angry they are with being put in jeopardy by illegals. They don't want them here illegally either ... BUT, as long as the federal government is unwilling to stand up to its own laws, like any sane group of people they are telling their relatives in Mexico to get in while the getting is "good." Yes, this is duplicitous, but it is real and what you can expect, and the effect is to accelerate illegal immigration and to confuse the self-righteous in Washington ... but not in Phoenix, however!

There are suits already to stop implementation of the Arizona anti-illegal alien law. One or more of them will succeed in muddying the waters or, perhaps, declaring the law to be unconstitutional. In the meantime, however, the American civilization must understand that there has to be a rule of reason in this and that Arizona has, as George Will correctly points out, simply called Washington's bluff and taken the first necessary step to get control of its border with Mexico.

JB

4/15/10

On Monday, in the Boston Globe, James Carroll wrote an important piece about paying our taxes, making the important point that the rebellion of the colonists against the Stamp Act and other misdemeanors perpetrated by George III's government in London was not so much about the tax, but the lack of representation in the government.

Today we have TeaParty folk, madder than hell about nearly everything, throwing a tantrum about Obama and his policies and about Congress for being corrupt and bought and sold to special corporate interests. It is unlikely that any TeaParty person will have read Carroll, but it is important that you do, to understand the nature of protest, its real direction and its real meaning.

Most Americans get a real bargain for their taxes. When you consider how much the Army's ammunition costs, the average American family contributes less than a minute's worth of small arms fire in Iraq or in Afghanistan. We pay much less for school systems, state universities, roads, police and firemen. Taxes are a real bargain, probably the reason we get used to the value and are so outraged when government wastes a lot of money on pure crap.

Today, if you haven't already, is the day to pay up, make an estimated contribution for next year, and to stand proudly ... for a moment ... in a country where your taxes are the result of a democratic decision making process, however flawed.

JB

3/7/10

The "peanut gallery" has been more or less silent about David Axelrod, President Obama's chief political advisor and successful campaign manager. This commentator, yours truly, fingered Rahm Emanuel early on and mentioned Axelrod but once in eight months' worth of deconstructing the West Wing to the purpose of finding what ASIDE FROM OBAMA HIMSELF is causing the political ineptitude emanating (if leadership seeping slowly can be described as "emanating") from the Administration. In the Sunday edition of the New York Times we finally have an interesting article about Axelrod, and yes, it seems as if he has an attitude problem, too.

Happily, there is an excellent article in the Washington Post about the problems Toyota Motor Corporation has in finding the problems with its products, which up to now have dominated the automobile market on account of their high quality. It is an instructive essay because it very nicely points out that diagnosis is a tricky business in engineering and in medicine … and now with a good analogy … in politics. We cannot just rely on deconstruction of individual personalities, but must view the whole thing in action, then on the laboratory bench, then in terms of exogenous conditions, that is, the response of the organism to its environment. Key to the analysis is the notion that an "emergent" condition occurs, absent with any individual, but crucial (perhaps fatal) when the whole mechanism (or organism) is assembled. This, I believe, is the overarching problem with the Obama administration.

Let's take those scenarios one by one. The environment is hostile in Washington, and even in the best of times partisanship muddies the waters. Nowadays the environment provides sewage and slander, outrageous lies and complete, alternative realities. The response of the White House has been, predictably, to see the nattering voices of negativism as enemies, and the first reaction is to gain some kind of perspective on them by reducing their voices to "peanut gallery" status. This is unhealthy, contagious, indiscriminant, and the combination of West Wing voices amplifies the isolation that this produces.

The laboratory bench scenario is hard to replicate, but given the analogy the problem seems to be that the Obama team has given the testing of draft policy to a Congress-owned "company" that is dysfunctional in its own right. It reveals an administration that seems not to have the courage (or wherewithal) to do its own diagnoses. Or, even more likely, it seems to be jumping from one prefabricated conclusion to the next … with bi-partisanship being the common thread that infects each decision. Again courage may be the problem … or a misguided… terribly misguided … understanding of the Republican strategy.

Obama and Axelrod and Emanuel, huddled together with a huge crisis on their plates, see themselves as harried and yet unappreciated. They turn to personal loyalty as a defense, but ignore the problems that unexamined loyalty instantly creates. They have no internal criticism mechanism that challenges the wisdom of one another.

Finally, the road tests of the Obama administration are pretty ugly. The parts break down and no amount of swearing at the vehicle seems to fix the problem. We could have told you that over a year ago. In fact, we did. Swearing seems to let off steam, but it really is nothing more than an admission of failure to perceive an efficacious way of working through a problem. Rahm is the main culprit here, it seems, and with no progress toward using his brain rather than his gutter vocabulary, he needs to be gone. Now Axelrod seems to be picking up the torch from Emanuel, and perhaps it would be better if Obama surrounded himself not with profane and seriously underprepared operatives from Chicago, but professionals from around the country, people with a sense of the impending doom that the first year's incompetence has wrought.

I gave Obama until the Ides of March to demonstrate a change of course. Frank Rich seems to think that something is afoot, but like him, I think it is not enough ... yet .. and unlike him, I do not see 11/2/10 as the deadline. I continue to give Obama until Tax Day to remove Rahm. Now, I think it is important and necessary to re-locate Axelrod as well.

JB

3/2/10

Those of you who read these essays regularly know that I have been very displeased with the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff. He's no Leo McGary, that's for sure. He is not even a Dick Cheney, whose work for Gerald Ford was bent toward the accretion of power to a fumbling President. Rahm is a hot head and a profane ... not just profane, but actively and forcefully profane ... person. The smooth functioning of the Obama White House is his responsibility. Now you tell me: is the Obama White House functioning ... let alone smoothly?

Now comes the Washington Post with a long article about how perhaps the problems with this inglorious adminstration are that Rahm Emanuel is not listened to by Barack Obama. Horsefeathers! First, even if it were true that Emanuel is being ignored by the President (and believe me there are lots of reasons a hothead loses credibility), why would Obama keep him around at all? Rahm is an insult to the rest of the Executive staff, a martinet, a verbal abuser, and not smart enough to realize that he is at the pinnacle of power on this planet and due for a vocabulary and attitude make-over!

I think the article is the first in a developing story that Rahm Emanuel is on his way out. In other words, I read this article as a negative, not as a print. The people who think Rahm is being ignored are precisely the people who we do not want to lead. They are claiming that Obama is missing the art of the possible by being too wedded to his illusions. Well, bipartisanship is the only place where I see Obama completely deluded ... and listen! ... Rahm Emanuel was brought in to facilitate that process precisely because of his reputation as Majority Whip in bringing votes in the House to closure. Rahm has been stunningly inept at this with both the House and Senate from his perch in the West Wing. Not just stunningly inept. He has failed every test!

Maybe it is wishful thinking on my part. Maybe Rahm does have something to say besides "F*** YOU" to the denizens of D.C., but if he is not smart enough to have gotten the ear and the imagination of his boss, nor has he accomplished simple tasks like getting holds on appointments out of the pockets of Republican pranksters and ideologues, he does not deserve the job. You name it, Rahm has failed. The article has to be the overture to his swan song.

Obama will treat him well, I am sure. Perhaps he should be Ambassador to Israel.

JB

2/9/10

The question posed in the title, above, is one that has been nettling me and other observers for the past six to eight months. Finally, the punditocracy of Washington is asking, too. This article appeared yesterday and you should read it, if you are wondering where Change is and why it is lost in the bushes.

I think that the hold the Chicago "team" has on the White House is a national emergency, but I am equally sure that Obama does not ... in fact cannot ... see it. He probably believes himself helpless without these people. Well, he is helpless with them.

Now that the cat is finally out of the bag, it is time for some statesmen on the Hill to tell Obama how to be President!

JB

2/5/10

Steven Pearlstein, a columnist for the Business Section of the Washington Post defies gravity today in his article about the impending lockjaw or log jam in the U.S. Senate now that the Democrats are down to 59 potential votes. I say this because the forces that have created this mess in Washington are not the least unlike the pervasiveness and irreducibility of physical gravity. Ubiquitous and inexorable are these forces and the cure is not for Vice President Biden to become CEO of the Senate and get himself impeached or worse. The problem is also way deeper than newly sworn-in Senator Brown, although he does seem to resemble a talisman of the problem.

The problem in Washington is partly the deliberately inherent clash of forces envisioned by the Framers as a bulwark against tyranny of the Legislature or the other two branches. Understanding that representatives have split personalities ... if not the mental wherewithall to carry that off ... they are tossed by the need to teach and listen at home, on the one hand, and to rise above their petty concerns towards the "statesmanship" required for legislating in the 3rd most populace nation on earth.

Then, with statesmanship in the tool box, ideology must give way occasionally to pragmatism. The Republicans' idea of pragmatism currently is to understand that thwarting anything Obama tries to accomplish will accrue to their general benefit, that is, a program completely devoid of the substance of ideology and purely obstructionist. Joe Biden cannot fix that with the slender powers given him by the Constitution!

The failure in Washington, as always, is one of leadership. Nancy Pelosi and her team seem to have the House in some kind of herded cats order, but dear old Harry Reid and the rest of the pompinjays on the Democratic side in the Senate are utterly bereft of statesmanlike leadership. True, Harry can make a deal, but equally those deals fall apart the moment Harry leaves the room. He just does not have clout ... and the White House cannot give it to him, especially a White House "run" by Rahm Emanuel, whose cachet is rampant vulgarity, childish temper tantrums, and ineffective persuasion. Rahm has not accomplished anything in Congress, and I defy anyone to point out a single instance of success. Just one!

Pearlstein is right about one thing. We are nearly at a state of paralysis from this misbegotten sloganeering about bipartisanship. Obama is completely deluded if he thinks that the center will hold for him if he plays these games. There is no way that the center holds; it is a fiction and a state of mind based in indecision and clearly not statesmanship. Obama must change, Emanuel must leave or be tossed out on his ass, and the Senate must look elsewhere than Nevada for Majority leadership. Joe Biden can work with these folks, but his titular Presidency of the Senate is another of those buckets of warm spit.

JB

The Sunday, January 24th, edition of the New York Times "Book Review" section contains a very interesting article by Walter Isaacson on the views of "war powers" in the U.S. federal government, the notorious John Yoo of Bolt Hall (U.C. Berkeley and recently the U.S. Department of Justice) on the executive powers side and with Gary Wills on the other side, reading the Constitution literally and noticing formally that Congress has the (reserved?) authority to declare war. Wills's side of the argument is not the one that history favors, of course, and Yoo's side has been the focus of much anguished attention here and throughout the liberal blogosphere and press and media.

The interesting thing about the article is the search for authority conducted by Yoo and by Wills, going back to the earliest moments of the republic. Yoo notes that President Washington, presumably having had his fill of the fiscal conservatism chatter in the Congress, asserted his executive powers to quell an Indian disturbance, effectively putting the new country at war with the native inhabitants without so much as a formal nod to Congress.

Having been a naval officer in my younger days and fully aware of the nature of modern warfare, I am convinced that a nation defending itself and its interests must act very much like an individual, not like a committee. (That is one "loaded" sentence, btw.) Defending ourselves against marauding Indians is one thing, but acting during a 15 minute window before all hell rains down in a nuclear weapons attack is quite another. (But, having written that sentence,) it becomes clearer that response time is not just trigger-pulling, but also the time for fact-finding and effective target-selection. The excuses for leaving Congress out of the equation become poorer and poorer, even in the nuclear context where retaliatory nuclear strikes can be envisioned, scripted, double-scripted, and fail-safes implemented ... by Congress or under some review by Congress.

The big question ... packed into my "loaded" sentence ... is what constitutes a U.S. "interest" beyond the life, limb, and property within the 50 states and territories? WWI was fought for "national interests" that clearly went way beyond the loss of U.S. ships and of foreign ships with U.S. passengers. Congress declared that war, but only "resolved" to ask the President to respond to the undoubtedly (in hind-sight) contrived event in Tonkin Gulf some fifty years later.

The question of "interests" then doubles back upon itself when you take into the discussion the emergence of the U.S. (in President Eisenhower's terms) as a nation-state characterized as "a military-industrial complex." You have to consider that Congress is bought and paid for by the very elements of the industrial sector committed to armaments. And, needless to say, both the legislative and executive branches of government prosper in times of war, both in accretion of power and personally financially.

This line of thought goes directly to the questions raised by the "Special Study Group" that concocted the "Report from Iron Mountain," which this website takes as its ironical point of departure. In other words, Isaacson's piece in the Times makes me think anew about the M-I complex, which I had been dating only back to Eisenhower, but clearly has roots in 18th c. America. I am confronted with the idea that the U.S. was potentially a military-industrial complex from the very beginning, lacking only the pervasiveness of the complexity, the thorough-going development of industry, and the thorough undermining of the moral commitments we see between the lines in the Constitution. Idealism fails in the heat of a sordid reality. All the more reason to keep vigilant and demand shared responsibility.

JB

1/22/10

Benito Mussolini, the most notorious exponent of Fascism (who used the "fasces" as the symbol of his political party in the 1930's and 1940's) said that the philosophy of Fascism would be better described as "corporatism," that is, a melding of the corporate interests of the productive sectors of the nation with the government of the nation, in other words a merger of corporations with government. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that corporations may not have their spending on political campaign restricted, because that is an infringement on their civil rights ... reiterating the 1870's ruling that corporations are "individuals" with classical civil rights!

The ruling 140 years ago, made during the so-called Gilded Age when robber barons and financier plutocrats ran the federal government, was wrong, of course, and now this Supreme Court has doubled-down on that fallacious argument and brought our fragile democracy to the gallows.

This ruling, in my opinion, is no less partisan and ill-considered than the ruling in Gore v. Bush, where without reference to any real ... not supposed ... thread of jurisprudence or philosophy the Court misruled. But the point is that it is partisan and unworthy of the Court, a travesty, and a clear and present danger to the republic, worthy certainly of impeachment, would that anyone in Congress had the cojones to do that.

The only relief from this horrible act of ideological treachery is for Congress to swiftly pass restrictions that go to the essential question of equal protection of the law in an environment where equal financial resources are an ugly joke. They must do this immediately and tell the Court that it has ruled badly and without consideration for the balance of voices in our society. The Court will likely rule against any such legislation, but it will take time to bring such a case to the Court. This time we must overturn the 1870's ruling that corporations—which clearly are NOT INDIVIDUALS and therefore have no civil rights—and end this threat to our democracy.

JB

1/4/10

The other day as we were cleaning up after a festive, delicious, but slightly sloppy meal, I produced the Pledge™ to eradicate some spots on the pub table. She quickly responded that I should not be using this s**t, because it is full of chemicals ... dangerous chemicals. The producer counters this allegation in its commercials on television by emphasizing that the company is "family owned" for a couple of generations, a feel-good bit of information that is entirely irrelevant to the chemical products industry. After all, The Family in NJ is just as likely to kill you off as not. Why should the makers of Endust™ or any other chemical concoction that we breath in on a ... er ... weekly basis be bad for us. And, more to the point, how will we know whether products are made out of atomized honey or trinitrotoluene?

Enter Lyndsey Layton, a writer for the Washington Post, with an apt article about an appalling law protecting producers from even telling us what is in the products we use. I am hoping that Layton's article sparks a general rumble throughout the country and that this b.s. law is repealed forthwith.

JB

12/28/09

I think that most of us are astounded and deeply disappointed to the point of utter disgust and, frankly, apprehension, that the vaunted anti-terrorism apparatus of the United States has been proved to be porous, leaky, and INEPT! I will not go so far as to say that I agree with Republicans on this issue, but I will say that the failure of the "system" (State, Homeland Security, FBI, whatever) to understand the gravity of a situation in which a Muslim father fingers his own son is incomprehensible.

The ever-defensive of Washington foibles Washington Post ascribes the failure to detect and detain the Nigerian Abdulmutallab, who intended to blow up a Northwest Airlines over Detroit to "noise." Yes, of course, there is noise in any intelligence gathering system. But, the cultural tone-deafness of the "system" in this case requires some answers. How could it be that our personnel do not understand the gravity of reporting one's own son to the authorities? Do these people live such technocratic lives that the personal flagwaving of a distraught father go unnoticed, unweighed, unmeasured? It is an unacceptable situation!

The American public should demand that heads roll on this one. Someone hired to be awake at the switch was asleep, despite the Post's hope that we will be all satisfied that there is just too much information. Everyone who goes through the hell of modern commercial air transportation understands that there is too much information AND that they—the "system"—is wasting its resources being "democratic" and "even-handed" about evidence gathering. Enough! Profile! There is nothing in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights that says profiling is illegal. It could be misused, but so could a slavish, stupid, adherence to false privacy doctrines as well ... as the Detroit/Northwest incident proves!

Obama, get your people to understand that zero defects is possible and mandatory! Fire the jackass who made the decision to bury the Abdulmutalllab intel under "noise." If this happens again, you can kiss off your majorities in Congress and a second term. And woe betide us when that happens!

JB

12/18/09

Originally, the United States Senate was conceived as a counter-balance to the perils of democracy as posed by the United States House of Representatives. Also, originally, the Senate was elected by state legislatures, often from among their own number, thus replacing "representative democracy" with the opportunity to establish an old men's club responsible only to a good-old-boy network and whomever it was that contributed most to their campaigns. Flash forward to the present day and only one thing has changed. We now elect Senators directly, instead of having our state senators and assemblymen do it for us.

I have been trying to think of one thing, just one, that the Senate has done well since I was born. My criteria are that the Senate must have saved us from some exuberance of the House, provided otherwise unavailable wisdom in our national legislature and national polical discourse, or actually hatched a really good idea from among its 100 members and brought that good idea all the way to fruition benefitting the public in such a way as we might most of us understand that we "owe it all" to the Senate.

I cannot.

Just to refresh your memory, the Senate does not originate taxation or other revenue producing bills; the Constitution gives this honor to the House

Section 7.
All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other Bills.

In fact the Senate is more of a judicial body of supposedly wise solons who act as the court in the case of the House impeaching a federal officer, or by reviewing the qualifications of persons nominated to fill important federal government positions, including the Supreme Court. The Senate also approves or disapproves treaties ... in at least one case removing the U.S. from an international organization that might have avoided WWII (and much else both before and after) had we been a member and counter-acted the short-sightedness of some of the participants.

Lately, the U.S. Senate has become embroiled in a contest between factions which for various reasons do or do not want the federal government to insert itself (further) into the national health care quagmire. Among those who favor legislation that will wrest control of medical care from the insurance companies whose first interest is financial profit are progressives and liberals who noticed that while we were sitting around on our hands the rest of the industrialized world had provided their populations with health care systems that actually work, hold down costs, keep insurance companies at bay, and stimulate private citizens to take responsibility for healthy living.

Those against Health Care Reform either believe that the government should not compete with private industry no matter how poorly private enterprise is doing, or they are owned lock, stock, and barrel by insurance or other medical corporations. This last issue obtains most often in poorer and less populace states where the high cost of getting and staying elected cannot be borne by the citizens of the state, but must be augmented and subvened (and owned) by large donations from corporate donors.

The Senate this week is showing how much further removed it is from its role as wise council in the legislature that the Framers envisioned. Owing to its own rules of engagement and parliamentary procedure, the individual Senators are making a mockery of the few vestiges of democracy intended for that body. The vote of Republicans is being disciplined by the iron laws of blood politics, that is, Republicans are refusing, en masse, to cooperate in any fashion that could later be used to flatter or support the Democratic administration or Democratic majority in Congress. The votes of individual Democrats reveal the depth of servitude these men and women have to their owners and managers in the corporate world, and to a lesser degree the depth of servitude these folks have to obsolete and outdated ideologies.

Nevertheless, economists like Paul Krugman believe that the majority (everyone but the corrupt and the Republicans, who may be seen as ideologically incapable and corrupt) have produced a response to the bill passed by the House that in and of itself provides needed reform ... as bad as it is having left out so many things that a responsible Senate could have produced. Krugman says the rules in the Senate must change, but first pass this bill. I agree. The Senate must reorganize or else. The "else" will be a political revolution through the ballot box or at the point of bayonets. The fact is that we no longer need a Senate as provided for in the Constitution. All they need do is continue to abuse their position and responsibilities further and we, the people, will disabuse them of their chamber, their fatcat sinecures, and their salaries, pensions, and other perquisites of "office." Enough is enough.

JB