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

3/6/10

I was a Virginian for fifteen years. I grew up there and went to the University of Virgina and got my baccalaureate degree in Russian Studies there. I have relatives in Virginia still, and I keep close contact with the University as a proud alumnus. I contribute annually to the University, and in fact, partly because of alumni who contribute, the University of Virginia has attained and maintained superior status among universities, (currently ranked 2nd among public universities, but often tied with UC Berkeley for 1st), all this despite the dramatic funding cuts from Richmond.

These cuts are nothing new. During the Reagan years the percentage of the University's budget coming from the Commonwealth dropped into the low teens and hovered there for years ... never rising, but always being nibbled and then gobbled away as a perversely and ironically ignorant state population elected Republicans to keep house in the Old Dominion. But the percentage of state support for the University of Virginia has reached a new low this year, down to a mere seven percent of the total budget. It is all the more ridiculous then for the state's Attorney General to demand that all "public" universities in Virginia rescind their admission and conduct policies that extend protection to persons "without regard to their sexual preferences."

This is what you get when you elect ideological morons from the Right. The denizens of southern and southwestern Virginia are particularly responsible for this outrage. If the Board of Visitors at UVa actually complies with this bogus concept that only the state Assembly can identify classes of persons ... which is threadbare reasoning to begin with ... I will be visiting the Grounds Thomas Jefferson created and I will be quite vocal about removing the University from the ranks of public universities. Richmond telling Charlottesville how to conduct a university is like the guy who wipes down your car after a carwash telling you where you may drive.

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 went 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

2/27/10

In this article by Bill McKibben in TomDispatch this week we are given a tour through the deceptions that the disbelievers in anthropogenic global warming are practicing. They are doing an "OJ Defense" against scientists and their science. They are concentrating on the cracks that will appear in any human enterprise, and they are creating a haystack into which they have put "needles" of suspicion. Of course they are ignoring the more salient facts that glaciers are disappearing, the fabled Northwest Passage is opening, that weather is erratic on a world-wide basis. So why? Why are otherwise intelligent people lining up behind the banner of denial?

The reasons range from economic to religious. The economic reasons are obvious: Exxon Mobil does not want to become a footnote in the history of mankind. They want to dominate the economic landscape as they do now. Coal interests are similar. Automobile manufacturers, paper mills, and thousands of industries are affected. Politicians owned by these are easily understood; they are nothing but alternative means for expressing the greed of companies and institutions the activities of which have precipitated and accelerate anthropogenic global warming.

As for the common man who is wholeheartedly into the denial, his economic interest is to keep a system in place that provides him a job and his children jobs. The ironies begin to emerge when we bring up children, though. You should not be surprised that apocalypic views of human history are part of the denial process, part of the deferral of responsibility, accepting the idea that no matter what there will be an apocalypse and so nothing really matters.

In Genesis in the Old Testament you will find that Man has been given dominion over the animals and over the land. This is the root base of the religious view of anthropogenic global warming. One form of the denial is that God would not allow mankind to exercise his dominion to a disadvantage of the planet. Another form, the more prevalent, is that He is large, but we are small, so our activities will count for little on a planetary scale. In fact the psychology of this has been reduced to slogans that accuse those who face facts and accept responsibility of hubris! That they are so full of themselves that they believe individual activities have a global effect!

One of the things we know about human beings is that they do not really understand numbers. A billion people is fundamentally incomprehensible to the average man or woman. Actually, a thousand is about as far as most imaginations reach for making tangible an abstract number. So when there are 7 billion people on the planet and innumerable cattle munching way producing belches (yes, it happens more at that end of the cow than the other) of methane (which is 4 times as effective as a green house gas), the equation is too complicated for most people and they give up. More than that, they succumb to the idea that things must in fact be simpler, so complicated things must be wrong.

The politics of all of this is interesting. Obama playing the Middle Game is automatically subscribing to half or more of the irrational ideas people have. It is clearly a time for someone with spine to stand up and lead, but that person has not yet emerged ... much to our own discredit. To lead means to take an unaccustomed path and to make changes by sheer force of will that cannot be easily undone. That's what we need. Instead we get sleasy lawyers playing the OJ game with the public imagination!

JB

2/24/10

One might assume from the title of its article on the conclusions drawn by the Chicago brainiacs who think the Uforeign policy is tone-deaf to religions around the world that the Post thinks this is funny ... or absurd ... or something to drown with sarcasm as fast as possible. If so, I (for once) agree with the editors of that paper that our secular-but-respectful "hands off" policy regarding other nations' religions is not only reasonable and proper, it is absolutely necessary. The folks in Chicago (and elsewhere) have their heads buried in the sand and forget that Presidents visit the Vatican, attend religious rituals across the face of the planet, entertain Dalai Lamas knowing that the incident will rile China, etc., etc.

What the "God gap" people want is for the U.S. to take a religious position, of course, and that is, if not impossible, highly dangerous, because what position are they going to suggest the diplomats take? Southern Baptist? Orthodox Jewish? Buddhist? Episcopalian (which group ... the tolerant or the gay-bashers)? There is no end of trouble in this, and the Post is absolutely correct in equating our respectful posture to the fabricated missile gap of 50 years ago.

There is a point to be made beyond the obvious unAmerican-ness of a foreign policy predicated on sectarian metaphysics, however. The point that the zealots want to make is that America is a Judeo-Christian society and culture. The point that should be made is that the American culture is distinctly pluralist and that we respect (in theory and practice ... most of us) the religious rights of everyone. You see, then, that pluralism becomes and intolerable act of faithlessness to the zealots, who will have the whole cake, frosting, and candles or no one will have it.

I frankly trust the U.S. State Department to continue its low level and respectful acknowledgement of other's religious ideas, but I do not trust any part of the federal government to keep the zealots out. The U.S. Air Force (and parts of the U.S. Navy) have been captured by zealous Christian fundamentalists in the past. It is clearly wrong for anyone to use a federal government agency to promote its own religious doctrines ... but it happened and continues. This movement "towards closing the God gap" has to be thwarted, because it is a trojan horse.

JB

2/22/10

Nobelist economist Paul Krugman devotes his column this rainy (in Arizona) Monday to the Repuian strategy for dealing with what they find most obnoxious. Dr. Krugman lingers on the strategy and the inevitable consequences, but you did not hear it first from him ... or me ... several years ago, this so-called strategy has been party of a generation's view of the world, and like the animus that motivated the Wallace group from the deep south, the reason for the GOP strategy is pure Social Darwinist selfishness.

Social Darwinism says that society is like an organism and that individuals within that society are like individual animals in a state of nature, that is, these individuals survive OR NOT depending on whether or not they are fit for the situation into which they are born. That is about as succinct a statement as you will find on this subject, and it is packed with associated meanings. First the idea that societies are organisms dates back at least to Hegel and his dialectic, which (as you will recall) tells us that human progress is the result of antagonistic forces (thesis and antithesis) struggling for survival and emerging as a new synthesis. If you read Hegal deeply you will discover that "antitheses" are not like anti-matter, something that will cause annihilation when one becomes involved with it. Anti-theses are "problems" and mental constructs, the emergence of which into one's life is accomplished by chance, design, devine intervention, and several other ultimate causes. Hegel is murky and so are his "syntheses" which are supposed to be new things or ideas in the world. Suffice it to say, though, that everything in Hegel remains, but gets reshuffled and mixed up together, much like organisms eating their way across a petri dish, a savannah, a city-scape, or a epoch.

Also the GOP idea of Social Darwinism then assumes that the chance of birth is one of the problems of the individual, not of the society. You can deconstruct Social Darwinism along this axis: is responsibility for chance happenings the dialectic problem of society or individuals. They put it on individuals and completely turn their societal back on the unfortunates that come to bat with two strikes on them. Liberals take precisely the opposite point of view.

So, after a lot of philosophizing and word-smithing you come to the idea that "starving the beast" so you can drown it in the bathtub is just a metaphor for drowning the unfortunate and misfortunate in society because they are just too much trouble ... and by the way ... helping them is a burden to folks who were to the manor born or scraped and grappled their way to wherever they think they are above the rest.

Krugman's essay leaves the idea that a socially intolerable situation is going to develop and that's what the GOP wants to happen ... their version of the drowning event. But, think about it. If the people who are closest to the fan finally realize that their butts are the next to be sacrificed, will they protect the fan or their own butts, or will they simply turn off the fan. Will they see government as the problem or not? The fact is that no one really knows, except you and I. We know that the history of revolutions ends with individuals watching all remnants of civilization and security and the good things of life disappear, and so they institute strong government to make things better. This happens always. It means that the social and political revolution the GOP thinks it wants will (if history and human nature are any guide at all) turn out to be more government not less, achieved through bloodshed, needless destruction of the civil infrastructure, and awful excesses directed at minority groups, women, and children.

JB

2/17/10

My colleague in NYC sends me articles from the Times and occasionally from the Post that he wants to be sure that I have read, maybe to comment on them publically (as today) and almost always privately between us. Like myself, he is rered, but unlike me he spent a lifetime in and around politics and public health programs. He says he got through one page of this article before throwing up his hands in despair. Jobs, education, and serious mental health care, he wrote. And, I cannot disagree with him. The "Tea Party" people are a tragedy in the making.

First thing that always comes to mind about the "revolution" that these people think they want is that they will be the first and bloodiest victims of any revolution. In fact they already are: they are the urban and suburban and exurban/rural blue collar middle class, and their station in life is evaporating before their very eyes. The squeeze on the middle class, especially the less well educated (but highly skilled, mind you) middle class strata has been intense. The economic squeeze has been relentless with "sticker shock" on everything reducing aspiring people to wondering how they can possibly maintain a semblance of the lifestyle their parents struggled for and finally seemed to achieve. But the psychological squeeze is the vise into which their lives have slipped and the inexorable pressure on their self-esteem goes back a generation or more.

The first moments of the Tea Party were the racist-populist politics of George Corley Wallace. With Wallace we first heard the expression of anger at the lifting up of American Blacks at the palpable expense (jobs lost were the worst of it, but welfare queens the most iconic) of the white blue collar middle strata. The racism was not the racism of hatred, but of fear, fear that Black people would ... with the boost given them by the Great Society programs ... rise higher than any of the whites could hope to achieve, given that they were deficient in book learning and especially critical thinking skills.

No one knows how deficient their critical thinking skills really are. They assume that what befalls them in life is chance, luck, kismet, and a variety of other exogenously stimulated factors, not their own "fault." The pseudo-Christian ethos of the United States quickly hones in on good v. evil and the consequent states of guilt and being at fault. The overburden of this psychology drives multitudes either into the arms of evangelistas (whose message is that "believe THIS and I can assure you that all of this is NOT your fault") or out of religion and into a wasteland of consumerist, popcorn and beer bargain basement hedonism.

Critical thinking is the antidote to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. But, critical thinking is in short supply and squeezed out of a society where economic pressures and white collar greed put a boot in the face of those struggling without a full toolbox of thinking skills. I have watched students in my classes struggle with concepts that are alien to them and their families and some—a precious few—break through, but most hold on with stubborn resistance to a schema that provides a "guarantee" of security of personality because it is familiar, if not exactly incisive and enabling. Americans in general do not know how to think very logically and intelligently, and so how can we expect them to have thoughts that make sense. The answer: Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh give them a vocabulary that through endless repetitions seems to become a coherent "philosophy" of life, politics, and society. But, it is not, it is emotional propaganda, full of anger and truly mindless seething rage at what befalls those who stumble at the threshold of life, formal schooling, and never quite get their balance again.

But, all this said, the Tea Party folks have a point, and that point is: "I am not sure what is wrong or why, but something is drastically wrong, and I am not going to put up with it any more."

Yes, indeedy, there is something wrong. Politics has been corrupted from top to bottom by money. Of course property interests should be heard in the din of human interests, but they should not have bought the system and should not be using it against the society in general. But they do. Corporations own Washington and everyone in that fetid place. And, education in America sucks. The reason is that the quanitity of students is the major concern, their huge numbers, their scores on measurement tests. The quality of education is dependent upon parents and teachers, but too few of either understand how critical their roles are ... and we pay them either nothing or very little to educate our successor generations. Well now, we have a successor generation and a large part of it believes that revolution will solve their problems. It will not.

The only cure for todays problems is for common citizens to beseige their elected representatives on a 24/7 basis, physically, and to tell them that "devil take the hindmost" they will be thrown out of office if they do not end the corruption, starting with the corruption within politics and our Constitutional organizations, principally the Congress. The first place to start is to publically fund all elections and to put limits on the amount that can be spent. Free air time on our public media. That's where to start.

JB

2/13/10A Fatal Flaw Rooted in Naivete

Charles M. Blow is one of the newer columnists at the New York Times. He is astute, and in this case—today's column—he absolutely nails an essential feature of the ineptitude and paralysis that President Obama cannot blame ... or we cannot blame ... on anyone else but Barack Hussein Obama, himself.

Read the article and know that Obama brings a lot of "community organizing" baggage into the White House, luggage the efficacy of which is problematic at best and toxic, as we have seen. You just do not set up shop in the White House like it was a glib store-front operation designed to boost the self-confidence of neighborhood people. Yes, of course, if you treat semi-rational people as if they had the capability of understanding and emulating, they will respond. Some of them, even, will turn a corner, but many will not. In Washington the semi-rational are different from the ghettos of Chicago. Ideology is their main problem and no amount of kissy coddling will change that.

The year is moving along rapidly. The Olympics will drain attention to the fetes and feats and soon it will be March and then April Tax Time. By then Obama should have understood that, like Mr. Blow says, he must change to accomplish Change. I will give him until the Ides of March to get a new methodology out into view, and I will give him until the federal tax deadline to have accomplished something. No accomplishments and I go to Dr. Howard Dean with a public open letter and ask him to stand up and be counted. There are many like me.

JB

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2/11/10

Last week we discussed the problem that Greece is posing to the EU, the probability of a prolonged default on its debt, its inability to square productivity with the benefits theeks want, and a subset of that, the disparities and antagonistic aims of the economic sectors within Greece, especially the agricultural sector. Greece is—and has been—a poor country by in large, despite the occasional Onassis. It's middle class is narrow and politically besieged by cultural values that no longer represent the aspirations of most Greeks.

But, the truth is that Greece is broke and a failure of the Greek government to come to grips with its budget has forced Germany of the "deep pockets" to take up the slack ... and perhaps the cudgel ... and certainly the fate of the EU.

One seeks perspective on something like this. Why all of a sudden are Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy (the southern tier) all hanging by a thread? The answer is not the climate. Southern Europe does, however, share a cultural value that does not predominate in the north. If you have spent a good deal of time in the Mediterrean area you know that "industriousness" is not the main feature of these cultures. This is not to say that Italians do not make great, fast, and beautiful cars, or the Greeks wonderful vacation experiences, or Spain, or Portugal, but they do not register on the "industry" scale like Sweden, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, or France. The difference goes way back and is set in a concrete of nostalgia and choices made about what is important in life ... and it is not back-breaking, pencil sharpening, money-grubbing industriousness.

So, the meltdown of the New York financial system had immediate repercussions around the world. Smaller economies depended on the U.S. and others to maintain the momentum and flow of credit. When that ended and froze, the countries that were subsisting on the eddies of the global economy began to drown in their own profligacy, their mismatch between resources and expectations. The White House understood this and has done what it could to put the top back on the house of Finance. But as with Main Street in America, the wobbly condition of the lesser economies threatens the entire structure again. Germany cannot do it alone.

Germany, I can guarantee you, is talking to Washington right now. The disquiet is being masked by deliberate silence. EU wants (and needs) to believe that it is a self-sustaining and organic entity. Maastricht is less than twenty years old, however, and the ties that bind the EU together are threads, not burly cables. EU could fail for lack of confidence as easily as for lack of economic solvency. Both are on Obama's plate ... and you will not hear much about it, but keep it in mind.

JB

2/10/10

The trouble with psychiatry and most of psychology is that it does not have a root metaphor, a way of understanding the mental activity of human beings, except by reference to behavior, which is a little like describing an automobile by the amount of dirt on the windshield or how fast it might be going at any given moment in time. The science of cognition, begun with the ancient Greeks, is actually in its infancy today with fMRiI equipment able to show where brain activity is taking place at a crude level, certainlyOctober and not at the granularity of the synapse. Even if it did, behavior is a very complex thing, certainly not the result of any specific neuron's failure or hyperactivity.

Part of the reason for the failure of psychological studies to produce much of value diagnostically is just this: we do not really know how the brain functions as a whole. Yes, we do understand certain biochemical processes, but what we want to know is not that "reductive." We want to know something ... anything ... about mass action and interaction, and we want to know how to relate that information to our vocabulary that includes notions of emotion separate from cognition, a vocabulary which is surely a mistake we have been making since the dawn of civilization.

On a very snowy day in Washington, D.C., the Post trots out an article designed to make people think twice before succumbing to "cabin fever." The APA's manual on psycholical disorders is about to be revised, but without regard for the consequences to a society that knows they really do not know what they are talking about. You have to read this article to get the gist of their nomenclature mongering, most of which is sponsored by Big Pharma, whose economic interests in keeping the full spectrum of human behavior available for chance encounters with drugs that seem to "fix" these behaviors cannot be underestimated.

I am told that the successor to PMS ... one of the so-called "disphorias" is real. Well, I contest that! What is the line between a "disphoria" (which literally means a condition outside of the container/box/norm) and a conscious decision to rebel or to act up or to commit a random act of kindness? See! Disphoria is pure unadulterated bullcrap. Restless leg syndrome? Well, there may be some who have uncontrollable pedaling in bed or while lounging in front of their TV, but I will be you $50 that if these people got some exercise their "affliction" would go away.

The real message, of course, is that the labels now and soon to be entered into the DSM will be used. Shrinks and regular medical personnel will use them and more or less innocent people will be stigmatized, their lives altered by labels that are concocted crap.

The fact is that psychiatry is fundamentally a scam, and its parent body modern clinical psychology not much advanced over the kind of stuff you would get from clergy and wise men (and women). Yes, of course, psychologist understand that some symptoms are frequently associated with other symptoms, but they don't really know why, and they don't really know what to do about these associations, short of explaining them to the afflicted individual and hoping they can somehow deal with it internally.

Conditions like schizophrenia are not really tractible by psychiatry or psychology. Some are moderated by drugs, but we are not complete sure why, because we don't know why the same drug does not work with every schizophrenic.

The condition of apathy or lethargy or sexual arousal or uncontrollable laughter are just as arcane to psychologists. They are keen on recognizing the behavior, but then what? Their understanding is effectively shamanistic and associative, not scientific and predictive in the sense of control. Doping a brain, especially that of a child or young adult whose brain is not yet finished is to my mind a last resort.

The DSM is, in fact, a very real concern to a free society, for very quickly people can do sidewalk diagnoses of enemies and change their lives through innuendo or, in the case of children, through legal means. I am glad that the Post got this article out ... now they need to republish it when their subscribers actually get their newspapers.

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

2/8/10

Last week ABC News—obviously not clear on the concept—promoted the idea that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made the internet the center of U.S. foreign policy! I hope the ABC News watching public understands that "the center" and "a centerpiece" are very distinctly different concepts. But make no mistake about this, Washington believes that the internet is crucial to modern American jingoism—the promotion of American values and our form of government (corrupt and otherwise ... certainly not the model of representative democracy that the Framers had in mind ... certainly the form that best suits a nation reduced to selling guns and peon-izing its citizens) across the breath and length of this planet.

There is more than just a cynical thread of truth in this notion of the importance of the internet, but Washington in its hubris misses the point that the internet, whatever its sources of funding, is essentially two things: it is democratic to a fair-the-well, and it is fragile.

I shudder when my computer crashes and I imagine millions of computers "crashed" because government has gotten control of the hubs and nodes and closes us down. Absolutist Control is a work in progress in China, of course, and that is the putative model for this notion that ABC has misunderstood. When the internet goes down for political reasons, there is no substitute for what we have evolved over these last twenty years. Commerce will plummet, in fact, there will be a depression, panic, and political upheaval. The internet is extremely important, but there is one thing that it is not.

The democracy of the internet is not a form of government. It is the democracy of three billion voices and ears and eyes. The internet is what we make of it, and sex is what we have made of it. This may speak more to the weird notions we have about the sexual nature of our species, but it is what happened. Sex and political propaganda, then commerce. The American ideal, if you are to read ABC News straightforwardly, is that people have the god-given right to access (and even contribute to) the array of sexual content, the political propaganda, and especially to buy stuff. ABC believes (and maybe Hillary does too) that the motives energizing the internet are "manageable" in the same way that television audiences are "managed" into bogus "reality shows" and news media that express corporate interests. ABC and Hillary may be right, for the facts are that the vast majority of people do not stop to question authority, assertions, or much less the psychology of presentation on TV. Why would they on the Internet?

We come to the conclusion that the "centerpiece" of American outreach to the rest of the world is for the rest of the world to emulate the American way of being docile and managed citizens. The hubris of this idea is astounding, and the possibility that it is accurate utterly horrifying.

JB

2/7/10

You will search high and low for news of Greece and her economic problems, her political problems, the precipice over which the Greeks stare in horror at this very moment. The press in the United States is oblivious. No, not oblivious, "managed."

Here is what is happeng in a nutshell. Greece has piled up a national debt equal to that of Germany, but without the productive capacity to resolve that debt within the frame of financial obligations. The result is that Greece was poised on the brink of defaulting to its European neighbors, who, when they got wind of the immediacy of the situation began to act like market managers always do—irrationally. Immediately, Portugal, Spain, and Italy began to survey their own situations and their financial connections reece. All at once, the horrid truth emerges that these countries, too, are very fragile and closer to the brink than generally reported, even in Europe.

Here is a reasonably good set of articles from the Guardian in the UK about Greece and her problems.

My colleague in Montreal, whose access to information and whose keen eye sees the situation for what it is, reported these matters to me yesterday and I was appalled ... primarily at the domestic U.S. press's obliviousness and collusion with Wall Street to keep this "greatest financial crisis in Europe since the meltdown two years ago" out of the imaginations and thoughts of snowbound Americans. Thank you, "Justina!"

Yes, the Euro is in danger, and yes, the problem affects the almighty dollar as well. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is trying to get involved, but the folks in Brussels, Belgium, the seat of the EU leadership has asked IMF to play a smaller role than IMF wants. So, the international repercussions will extend outward like low waves in deep water, but treatening tsunami when reaching the shallower waters of individual nations.

As "Justina" says, keep an eye on the Greece situation. There may be portents for the future here that threaten contemporary politics far more than Sarah Palin and her teapot revolution talk down in the bowels of Tennessee.

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 brancheerstanding 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

We are not going to the moon in my lifetime. By "we" I mean the U.S., and by "lifetime" I mean that I am old and the prospects are therefore dim for mounting and executing an effort to establish a permanent base on our moon that I will see. It is a sad thing, I think, despite the many reasons that have contributed to the decision.

The science and technology parts of a lunar base are daunting. The 239,000 miles between us and the moon are full of dangers. Cosmic rays, micrometeorites, solar flares, and zillions of opportunties for human errors of construction and commission. From a PR stand-point space and the moon are opportunities for harrowing disaster more than expansion of the world's peoples' imaginations and understanding. This is the fault of the press, the imaginations of which and whom are impoverished and ill-suited to narration of humanity's really big moments. I hate this part of the decision-making process, but it is real enough. NASA wants to do it, but cannot convince enough of the electorate and its representatives that it is a good idea. The press sits on its hands on its duff.

And so, the politics of space and "colonizing" the moon are impossible. Even the pols who represent Houston and Canaveral cannot muster the gumption to scream out the dire necessity for getting on with this. The U.S. will soon find itself without any means for getting into orbit, foreclosing all American efforts to be consequent in space travel and exploration, foreclosing even the obvious military advantage of the experience of civilian space programs. What utter myopia!!

We are in a deep recession and have deep and intractible socio-economic problems. States like California are completely without the resolve to fix their problems. The nation as a whole is deeply divided politically and economically. These matters are facts of life, but a rejuvenation of the space program and especially a commitment to establishing a PERMANENT base on the moon would actually contribute to the solutions of some of our political and economic problems. I am surprised that this is not obvious to President Obama ... I am not surprised that his staff misses the point.

JB

2/1/10

China is an ancient place, both more and less than a country or nation, in the sense of being more than a "birthplace." It is a "civilization" like Russia, human, eclectic, yet fundamentally unique. The Chinese themselves are not all the same, of course, the most important ethnicity is the Han, whose territorial history goes back to the dim recesses of written history. There are four other major groups: the Manchu, the Mongolians, the Tibetans, and a mixed assortment of Muslim peoples called the Hui, including Uighurs, Kazakhs, and several others. Ethologists believe there are about sixty distinct ethnicities w currently. In this sense, China is ... and has been for millennia ... an empire.

If you have Chinese associates or friends, you will know what I mean when I say that there is a distinct element of the Chinese personality that is shared, if not completely universally, then very widely among the Han. It is tough to put your finger on it, but if I had to put a one-word "western" label on it, it would the word "pragmatic." Quickly I would add the idea of "coldly pragmatic," leaving myself room to move towards "warmth." I have experienced both the cold and the warm, but would say that just from my own experience that, like Texans, the Han Chinese have a lore about themselves, a mythos, a marrow feel that transcends humility, dwells in an impoverished sort of hubris, and manifests itself, often crudely, as a long-suffering-but-recently-relieved humiliation for which some kind of redress is "obviously" appropriate and forthcoming. This is all fumbling around with delicate concepts, of course, but my experience derives from both males and females, older and younger, super-ordinate, collegial, neighbor, lover, and teacher. These Chinese were important in my life.

Each of these people were evoked as I read in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post about the noticable shift in the public attitudes expressed by the leaders of the People's Republic of China. The article is at a minimum a very interesting public notice given by the Post in what appears to be a deteriorating discourse between China and the rest of the world, particularly the Atlantic world. Further along that line of thought, the feeling is definitely of a foreboding. Having written recently about the Google assertion of principles and having received an earful from one Chinese-American and from a presumably Euro Sinophile, I am a little chastened to bring this up, but I will.

China recently reiterated the Ripley homily of Chinese marching four abreast forever past any point you might care to mention. They are seemingly endless, and their display at the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremonies made that point with some beauty and some pomp and quite a bit of lugubrious overkill ... that sort of "okay, now we're on our feet get the f**k off our lawn" type of attitude. The endlessness of China's population is an illusion, of course, but it is within the Chinese civilization a dominant illusion, very likely to frame and mold the Chinese government's policies on many things internally and in foreign affairs.

Internally, the neo-capitalists in the Chinese government are beginning to understand the huge power of people numbers when attached to money. Politically, they have always understood that the population can ... and if necessary should/could/would ... sustain grievous losses that would devastate smaller nations ... as the loss of a generation of young men did to post-WWI France. So, you can add "stoic" to the "pragmatic."

Externally, China believes that the rest of the world understands China's immensity and is or should be cowed by it. This is a big, big mistake on their part, over which they must get, the sooner the better.

I do not mean to suggest that China is not important in terrestrial affairs. Clearly any nation that large, with the obvious pride and industry and enterprise, is going to be consequent. And just as obviously the historical chip on their shoulder from the 19th c. depredations, the Opium Wars, the utter humiliations is something to take into consideration. But ... China is responsible for itself. A civilization twice or three times older than Europe has to recognize that China's woes are mostly of their own making. The Ch'ing (Manchu) Dynasty fell apart, sold out, and at no point was worthy of the task before it ... organizing and nurturing the better spirits of Chinese peoples.

And so, yes, we will get off your lawn, China, but we are not going to kiss your ring or pay you reparations or even apologize for events begun 200 years ago and long since forgotten by 95% of the remaining world's people. In other words: get over yourselves and join the community of nations as the proud, and resilient people you are. Get rid of the chip!

JB

1/31/10

Kim Komando, of Phoenix, AZ, has an interesting niche in the computer information business. Here is a very recent link to a TED video on the future of computing. You will be amazed!

JB

1/28/10

It was a great speech. It was delivered very, very well. At times during thevening that Barack Obama knew he was President of the United States and that every man and woman in that chamber understood it as well. He spoke as if he . Executive talking to the Legislature, not as king or prime minister or anything but the presiding officer of our government. I liked the speech very much, but I think that in this hyper divisive situation the GOP prefers as a political strategy, it will take a generation (if we have that much time) for the speech to be understood for what it really was.

It was, in my estimation, primarily a speech about divisiveness, and Obama called it out onto the table for the country to see. The Republicans in their autistic stupor played right into his hands. They sat on their hands when they should have been clapping for the meanings, if not the politics, of what Obama was saying. Instead they showed themselves to be incapable of serving the American people they represent (constituents of both parties, btw).

There was plenty of programatic content as well ... and I think the high point came when Obama said that $30billion recovered from resurrected financial institutions should be spent on community banks for the sole benefit of small businesses. Excellent idea!

The freeze for 2011 on government spending will be flensed before the start date, believe me. There will be cross the board strictures about up-grading to Windows 7 or travel restrictions or the sorts of things that are about working in government, but not about what government does for people. That would be suicidal ... and it just will not happen. Mark my words.

The "don't ask, don't tell" policy will become a football in an election year. The admirals and generals will balk, but Obama owns them now, so a coup is very unlikely on these grounds. I think we will get the reform and stop losing talented people we need in government. It will be ugly though.

I think that Obama came close to resonating with the populist mood across the nation. He is too cerebral and refined ... by nature ... to have gotten sweaty and hoarse about it, though. People will understand that saving the financial sector was important, although Obama left out the most important reason ... the international standing of our financial sector in the world ... still #1 ... but if it had become #2 or worse the situation inside our country would quickly have deteriorated into major trouble.

I think ... aside from their truculent unwillingness to participate constructively in government ... the GOP behaved as well as Lieberman behaved during the speech, that is, many got caught on camera making snide remarks with telling facial expressions ... Cantor was another. Thanks to all this, I think it was an important "win" for the White House and Democrats ... and I think they thought so too.

JB

1/27/10

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

1/25/10

The internet has been around since the 1970's, but certainly for most of us only since about 1990 when the WorldWideWeb quickly supplanted Gopher. I have been online since the last moments of Gopher and the first of the Web, and it has truly been a fantastic journey, a breathtaking revelation, and (even) an excellent lesson in human nature. If there is one point that the internet has made, it is that human beings are human. They have biological and personal urges and these express themselves quickly ... even on the internet.

Society through its various means of exerting controls over our appetites has been virtually (no pun intended) helpless as pornography and politics rapidly spread out across the cyberscape of the internet. Parents have been justifiably cautious (or horrified) about letting their children have unfettered access to the web because of the pornography ... and rightly so, for graphic displays of bestiality and subjugation of human beings for sexual purposes are all too available. But politics is a different matter. Politics is by definition public and argumentative and emotional, with emphasis on public and free.

I am incredibly proud of Google for standing up to the leaders of the People's Republic of China on this count. They have given a cold clear shot of courage and honor to our internet culture. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's unapologetic criticism of China is equally important, for it takes a baton and runs with it in areas that Sergei Brin and Larry Page cannot go. She rose in my estimation by hundreds of points, for coddling China has become an industry around the globe.

China is a giant, commercially, militarily, and politically. Its weight is felt wherever the Chinese government wants it felt. They are not altogether subtle about it either. The Chinese response to Clinton was predictable and clearly a very sore point within the ruling clique there. But, they are on the wrong side of history on this one. Confusing politics with pornography may seem like an apt analogy to people who cannot abide criticism, but as dirty as politics gets sometimes, it is not pornography and, instead, it is exactly the sort of thing that human beings need to understand.

China is not a communist country in any Marxian definition of the term. Their "flirtation" with capitalism to jump over the historic impediments to progress has long since become a way of life. China is a command economy with much of the means of production (or elements thereof) in government hands ... but not in the public trust or a commons! China is simply a dictatorship, a frightening and frightened dictatorship at the same time. It is no wonder that the leadership is afraid of criticism and variant political ideas. No dictatorship can long stand when freedom of speech and conscience are wide-spread.

Google and Clinton have made and then turned an important corner in the maturation of our global civilization. Both are to be commended, and as always is the case, every man and woman on the planet must see that they have an obligation to let China's people know that they are welcome into the community of humanity ... and that China's leaders are not.

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

1/21/10

About a week ago I got one of several calls I will get this year from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). I detest that organization, but I understand the party-political need for recruitment of good candidates, especially those (like Gavin Newsome of San Francisco) who without help from seasoned coaches and a fast course in how to take it on the chin and survive, ... would (like Gavin Newsome) not survive. But, the DSCC and its counterpart (equally corrupt) in the House have become "incumbency rackets" rather than recruitment organizations or miniature bootcamps for aspiring pols. I told the nice lady that I disagree almost all the time with what DSCC does, and lo! she admitted to me that they have made quite a few mistakes recently. The name Joe Lieberman came up. I told her I would never again contribute to the DSCC ... crossing my fingers ... and hoping that someone of the 65 Democrats begins to understand what the real purpose is. It is not prolonging incumbency!

So with that rolling around in mid-term memory in an exchange of emails with my colleague in Massachusetts I am told that the Coakley campaign was not Obama's fault. The Boston Globe says as much with quite a bit of detail, including Ms. Coakley's unfortunately timed Caribbean holiday.

I read the piece and noticed that there was a subtext. The White House is trying to get the burden of failure off Obama's back ... as you might easily suspect. And, there is the drift of the article to the conclusion that Coakley just was not ready for prime time, which the voters quickly understood, and so they acted accordingly. So much for running naked through the streets of Boston and the rest of a locked-down, stalwart Democratic state. Well, so much bullcrap!

The DSCC dropped the ball by not telling Coakley that she must win the election and that she should not take anything ... ANYTHING ... for granted. DSCC should have forwarded a copy of that message to DNC so that they could remind Coakley about the New Jersey and Virginia losses ... and that the public is angry ... very angry! They apparently did not, or if they made the effort they made very little impact. DNC needs help and quickly. Do not even think about Rahm as the leader of DNC!

The White House, being tacked toward the political center by Rahm, should have made it plain to DNC that Obama's agenda very much depends on the Senate being filibuster-proof. When the Massachusetts campaign began Rahm should have made double sure that DNC and DSCC were in cammies and conducting bootcamp for Coakley. Apparently, Mr. Emanuel did not see the underlying and obvious urgency. Mr. Emanuel is not the brightest guy in the White House, by the way. It is a shame that President Obama cannot see that everything that goes through Rahm's office becomes less. Obama knows that Emanuel is more conservative than himself, but with a good Chief of Staff, the message of the leader, not the stiff in the Chief of Staff's office, would be the message we hear. Apparently ... all too apparently ... this is not the case.

This is not to let Axelrod off the hook, either. He is a politically savvy guy and should have a reflexive interest in anything that threatens or threatens to threaten the power structure in Washington vis-à-vis his charge as chief political advisor. Apparently he does not see it that way or cannot get his voice heard.

The up-shot of the Massachusetts debacle is not that Coakley was arrogantly and publically advertising that she thought herself to be a "shoe in." The real conclusion is that the top leadership of the Democratic Party——beginning at the very top ... in the White House——is failing, flailing, and inept. President Obama should make changes to his staff, not his ... and our ... agenda!

JB

1/20/10

It is impossible not to write something about the loss of a U.S. Senate seat to a Republican in ... of all places ... Massachusetts. Everyone is writing something and most of it makes sense, except that all the reasons posed seem to contradict one another in the end. Coakley ran a lazy and "I've been chosen" campaign, and Brown—another pinhead from the teaparty branch—ran an aggressive, if sophomoronic, campaign. The White House assumed wrongly that Coakley could not lose. The DSCC continues its path of wandering in the desert. Etc. Etc. The truth is that the voters are fed up with Washington and particularly the failure of the Democrats to be Democrats ... and believe me Massachusetts understands what a Democrat is supposed to be and do.

My thesis is that voters absolutely hate Congress ... both sides of the aisle. They are faced with the paralyzing prospect of a binary choice among candidates who become immediately sold out to special interests ... most recently the heath care and pharmaceutical industries, both of which are fabulously wealthy and without conscience when it comes to purchasing a few key legislators. The paralysis is relieved by shoving it up the butt of bi-partisan demagogues. Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama, please take notice. You're next.

There is a strong sense abroad in the land these days that the federal government is beyond redemption. The parade of assinine pontificating during endless months of Health Care Reform legislating, the ugly display of whorish Senators cavorting with their sugar-daddy lobbyists, the lies and the lame excuses, they all add up to a revulsion that the Massachusetts voters displayed. They (and we, I maintain) are sick to death of this crap, and if it takes a complete transformation of the House and Senate ... a complete up-ending ... a term-by-term kicking of legislative asses both sides of the aisle, then that's what we are going to do.

The Senate has rules of procedure that are anti-democratic and they must change. The House is a little better, but jackasses like Murtha are much too burdensome to defend anymore. The White House has Rahm Emanuel and a clique of financier-ass-kissers, and they must all go too. Obama really needs to understand that the first Black American president is very likely to be the last for a good long time, if he doesn't get is own butt straightened out and f*****g remember who elected him—a coaltion of progressives and independents.

Yeah, I am mad. Let the morons in the Democratic Party understand this: January 19th, 2010 the Progressive movement becomes the Progressive Party ... and devil take the corrupt and feckless and heave them into the dustbin of history!

JB

1/19/10

At OpEdNews Rob Kall, the proprietor there, posted an article from CNN's "Politics Ticker" about Progressives digging in to unseat Rahm Emanuel from his job as Chief of Staff in the Obama White House. This is the best news I have heard in months! How long does it take Democrats to understand that the Obama we see is the result of heavy-handed manipulations by a person whose qualities of character are so negligible as to call into question the character of those who associate with him. Rahm Emanuel is bad for Obama, bad for Democrats, bad for America because he is an arrogant, slithering, cockroach of a politician, one whose chief claim to fame is that he can brow beat members of Congress both sides of the aisle.

Rahm works through fear. He is supposedly a centrist in an era where the center is where the media says it is, but not where the hearts and minds of the public are. The center is functionally sterile. This suits Rahm because he actually has no program or values other than himself.

Rahm demands obedience from everyone, cabinet secretaries included, and one wonders how he gets away with this. So, wonder. When you are finished wondering, you have to understand that Obama lets him.

Obama did not have control of his own government on day one. He still doesn't. He has a mighty rival in the military industrial apparatus, much of which is represented directly in Congress in both parties. He has Bush-era appointees still in office sprinkled "liberally" throughout the departments and agencies. He has appointments stalled in the U.S. Senate by Republicans whose game is simply to resist anything whatsoever that Obama might do. He has a press corps that cannot be trusted by him or public. And so, Obama, fully aware that his administration would be one of the most nitpicked in the history of human government, chose Emanuel to be his "whip." It was an awful decision, and it will surely spell the end of Obama politically if he does not do something about it and soon.

The issue is not actually or only a "progressive" one. It is an issue of attempting to come close to the Obama of the campaign, a persona that evaporated the moment Emanuel took office. There is no reason for this to have happened, except that Emanuel is totally unscrupulous and, in addition to being a foul-mouth of the first order, is a martinet. My personal feeling is that Obama is slightly afraid of Emanuel and has been "blackmailed" by references to "losing control" from Rahm. He is as one commenter on the CNN article said of his crooked character, '... should not be within 100 miles of Washington.'

We have all been trying to understand why President Obama is so different from Candidate Obama. Rahm Emanuel is the reason. He is the bottleneck and filter for everything that happens in the WestWing. He likes it that way, but Democrats inside and outside of Washington need to say otherwise. We do not like it that way!

What, I ask you people inside the beltway, do you know about Emanuel and why are you so afraid to speak up? Do you not understand that not only the fate of the Democratic Party, but clearly the fate of the nation hangs on you telling the truth about your fear of Emanuel?

It is time, waaay past time, to remove this cockroach from the White House. Speak up, join the chorus, understand that Rahm Emanuel is a cancer on this administration and must be removed.

JB

1/18/10

By now everyone with an eye for cybernews has read something about the Chinese attack on Google and Google's response. Several have noticed that Washington has made no comment, since the Chinese foray into American internet company core intellectual property comes at a time when we have delicate negotiations going with the Chinese government on a wide range of things, including Global Warming and monetary policy. But the issue goes far deeper than any quick list like that. China tries to pretend that there is a difference between hackers in China and the Chinese government all the while, however, maintaining control over everything that breathes in that country. You can have it one way or the other, but not both.

Meanwhile another evolutionary process is underway. While China slowly sheds the primitive agrarian communism of Mao, finding it convenient to steal what they can to catch up (and their window for catching up in this technological environment is closing inexorably), back in the U.S.A. Microsoft, The Giant, the gargantuan, showing significant signs of being related to the dinosaurs, is strapped to its own unhappy past and perhaps fatally. The fact is that Internet Explorer, still used by 65% of all internetizens for browsing the web, is a classic case of "ontology recapitulating philogeny," namely, that to ease the transitions between stages of evolution of their Windows operating system and their browser, Microsoft has chosen the path that incorporates into each stage mortal flaws from father to son. It seemed like a good and reasonable choice at the time, given that the physical environment of computing was also changing so rapidly, but the flaws accumulate like genetic drift, and today we have a rival exploiting those flaws to hopefully leapfrog into the present.

Joe Wilcox, a veteran reporter on these issues, says that you should at last dump MSIE at once. Read his article. It is not dense with jargon. The simple fact is that MSIE is like those "loose lips that sunk ships" during WWII. It is a constant menace to the rest of us. Yes, of course, we know you are not a target, but you who continue with MSIE are now providing aid and comfort by having a computer they can use to batter at the door. Put another way, are you absolutely positive that you have done everything reasonable to prevent your computer from being taken over by hostiles and being used to mount denial of service attacks on friendlies? Of course you are not. If the German government recommends to an entire nation that they get off MSIE, listen!

If you doubt that Google's experience was significant, do not doubt that Google's response will be. Denying China access to our hard-won expertise is part of a global struggle for supremacy. Right now, in the throes of the Great Recession, the U.S. position in the world financial and monetary sectors is as perilous as it ever has been among the current player nations. The stakes could not be higher. China has its masses, as it proudly and somewhat ominously displayed at the beginning of the Olympics; it believes in itself and in the social and industrial momentum it can create using capitalist tools for non-democratic ends.

In other words, this is a serious and important situation in which, for a change, you can make a difference. Download Google Chrome (I am currently using it) or Firefox 3.5 (with 3.6 coming soon) or Opera (the European favorite because it has a small footprint that fits aging home machines nicely). The hardest part of the transition from one browser to another is bookmarks and the newer, better, faster, browsers make even this easy. Do it!

JB

1/17/10

This morning's Sunday New York Times has an article about the distractions we encounter with new technology, like the cell phone, and how dangerous it can be just walking across the street with your cell on your ear listening to a list of grocery items you need to remember to pick up on the way home this evening. Drivers, too, of course. They have much more mass in their hands and their inattentiveness will cause grievous damage when they lose their focus. We used to laugh at people who tripped over their own shadows when chewing gum, but are any of us so different about much bigger things—like the alarms about our prostrate economy.

No. We are not better. Hardly anyone is talking about the continued increase in unemployment. Sixty-five thousand more jobs were lost in December! That amounts to about a quarter million people directly affected in their families. What about this? Should we be worried, angst-ridden, taking to the streets, pulling up the cobblestones and erecting barriers behind which we can stage our revolution? Perhaps not, but we should not be letting Congress and the White House off the hook either. There are things that the federal government can do and is currently not doing to ameliorate the hardship and pain and disaster that visits on the unemployed.

So the latest warning in the news ... also no one talking about it ... is that inflation is not moving up, not moving down, but just sitting there, sort of waiting for something else to happen. Something did ... something negative. Did you read in the news the other day that December retail sales were DOWN? Yep! Down and this is the season when many retailers make or break their year.

Here in the southwest where I am currently living the malls are eerily quiet and many stores are just gone, leaving empty spaces between those hanging on for dear life. Of course this leads to fewer shoppers and the survivors soon enough find they cannot survive. It is like the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere setting of thaws in the permafrost which releases methane with its quadrupling effect on greenhousing our atmosphere. One thing leads to another ... yet we choose to remain oblivious, distracted, in harm's way.

JB

1/15/10

Here is the URL for making donations to help Haitians without fear of scams.

This is an unprecedented disaster for this tiny and poor country. They will never recover without help ... and even then it is going to be an awful experience. Give!

JB

1/14/10

Among progressives there is a fair amount of angst these days. Rahm Emanuel has convinced Barack Obama that the left progressive wing of the Democratic Party can be essentially ignored ... mostly because they have no place to go. Rahm is wrong ... again ... of course. Obama announced this before the inauguration, by saying that he would "govern from the center."

We all understand that governing a diverse nation should take into account the dispositions of the many, but it is pure hogwash to believe that the center is any one place, especially in routine politics in Washington, and moreover, with Republicans taking a trenchant and often mindless approach to the Obama administration that results in 100% non-cooperation on any detail whatsoever, politically "center" is meaningless. Obama still does not think so, so we have a problem Houston!

Here is the essential agenda for 2010 for progressives and classical liberals, you know, the educated elite from universities and the left media and literary circles and so forth. The agenda is to quietly pick a successor to Obama and being to place this person (say, Howard Dean, for instance) into conversations where Dean looks and sounds like he knows what is going on by comparison to the current White House. I say that this must be done quietly and deftly so as not to tip off the far right, which will begin to hurl insults, lies, crap of all descriptions at the successor. We don't want that, of course. Campaigns are long enough as it is without shifting the successor's moves toward a campaign in second, third, or high too soon.

But it can ... and must ... be done. We need to be able in November if the news is really bad to tell Obama straight out that he must fire Rahm and Summers and Geithner immediately or else. Believe me, it will be "or else" because Rahm has Obama captive and Obama wouldn't believe it if you rubbed his arrogant face in it. Meanwhile as we are selecting several and then one standard-bearer who is a realistic candidate for 2012, we are waiting and listening intently to the White House for signs of their magical cure for plummeting popularity polls. Democrats in the House and Senate are going to demand that ... and Rahm knows it.

What Rahm's idea of a magic potion to save the election and come close to satisfying progressives and liberals will, probably, not be enough. He is a moderate along the lines of a foul-mouth, Capone-era lawyer with some Evan Bayh in there for the ladies. Obama will fail to turn the election the way of the Democrats and, I believe, only a disaster of some sort that galvanizes the imagination of voters in the fall ... that is well-handled by the White House ... will do the trick. I think they will not handle it any better than they handled the Christmas terror incident, i.e., there will be off-hand things said and done that the rightpress will blow out of proportion and, yet, dominate the coverage.

This is a very disturbing situation. Rahm is the root of it and the proof is that Obama was considerable a different personality and presence before Rahm became his chief of staff. The "before" and "after" pictures are starkly different. Yes, of course, he became President, too, but you don't see this kind of change very often. It is the image of a powerful and malign personality at work.

Our agenda is flexible and based on evidence and keen observation. It is a workable plan to keep the GOP out of the Executive as long as possible. There are some keys to observation that I will detail in coming essays.

JB

1/12/10

From my friend at The American Liberalism Project (which I founded) comes this summary of the intrinsic unreliability and moral bankruptcy of the domestic (and much of the foreign) press. It is worth your while to read this short piece.

I am certain that there is a movement afoot which will within months (perhaps 18, if the midterm elections go as I think they will ... more on this later) result in something that feels, looks, and smells like revolution. Yes. Revolution. Unsettling, isn't it. Better to be safe? I don't think so. Revolutions carry the innocent on their horns.

JB

1/12/10

From a friend in the UK comes this magnificent demonstration of the power of individual people ... like you. Iron Mountain was founded on the principles that a military-industrial state supporting an elite (including the central finance sector) cannot survive without brain-washing its population. See what you can do ... at home ... at work ... wherever your voice can be heard.

JB

1/11/10

The epigram in the title of today's essay suggests that god manifests him/herself through the people ... as a whole. It is an interesting concept which often is turned around to suggest that deity is us. No matter really, the problem in all of this is us. And, the problems we have are quickly manifested in politics and culture generally. Today's subject is mental health and the decline of it in recent years.

When I read this article about mental disorders increasing in teenagers and young adults that was forwarded to me by a colleague in Boston, a couple things leapt into my mind: the irresilience of the human mind and the consequences for democracy where significant numbers of people are not completely "sane."

What I mean by irresilience is that given any number of people there will be a percentage who cannot accommodate themselves readily or easily to change, especially significant change like a Great Recession or rapidly evolving technostructures or revolutions in social mores. I do not mean that all people have significant irresilience, but I do mean that all people have some and some people have a lot and it shows on little studies as blips in the overall percentages. In other words, sometimes things change too fast for some people, and they become disoriented, anxiety ridden, and to one degree or another incompetent.

The consequences for democracy are pretty clear. The more people who are acting and behaving out of unhealthy mental states the less likely the country is to be making good decisions about the commonwealth and our need to pass along a stable society to our progeny. It raises the awful question of whether democracy is the right way to handle statecraft.

The answer to that question is that democracy finds a home where people demand it, and otherwise the forces of elites tend to fill in the vacuums created by distracted and disorient mental health. We are in such a situation now with finance elites basically calling the shots from their own self-perceived Olympus. The flaw in their reasoning, of course, is that any group of human beings is susceptible to bad mental health and bad decision-making.

To put this all in tangible terms, it appears that the White House is suffering from a hubristic elitism that accepts the notion that Finance has its hands on the toggles and switches, so ipso facto they must know what is going on. How the White House comes this conclusion is that their view of the general society is full of misgivings, particularly as the rant from the right suggests ever increasing "insanity." It gets to you after a while ... and the White House is no exception.

JB

1/9/10

You will want to read Charle M. Blow, columnist in the NYTimes, this morning, partly for the rhetorical stylishness and partly for his prognostications about the GOP.

Then you should try to figure out what is going on with U.S. unemployment, remembering that the workforce in December was "artificially" ramped up for holiday buying and selling. I agree that this is truly an ominous portent, and fully expected given the one-thing-at-a-time attitude of the White House and Congress.

The editors of the Times see the good that might come from this nasty unemployment report, but you have ask why the leadership, especially in the White House, was so insensitive to all the evidence that this would be the case.

JB

1/6/10

Every once in a while Mark Morford, who (btw) is clinging to his job at the San Francisco Chronicle by a thread as paper media flash into dust everywhere, ... every once in a while Mark puts a spin on things that is truly brilliant. This is one of them, one of the best. If you are not a smorgasbord devotee of your religion, i.e., if you are hunkered down in the "literal truth," then you might not like this, but you should probably read it anyway.

JB

1/5/10

As every school child knows, it was in the year 1492 that Cristoforo Columbo took three tiny wooden ships across the Atlantic Ocean and inadvertently discovered (for southern Europeans, anyway) a new world. Few American school kids know that 1492 was also the year that the Muslim Moors were driven out of Spain and the year the Spanish Inquisition was begun to rout out Muslim infidel ... and, btw, Jews. Still, for most of us the iconic value of 1492 is the discovery of a brave new world with strange creatures in it.

A century and more passed before English and Dutch settlers came, and meanwhile the Spanish "bulemicized" the Inca and Aztec gold and sent their home economies into three hundred year tailspins. The response of Europe to the news was slow to form, but with a few key technological improvements in chronology and shipwrighting and the political and economic wherewithall assembled they came.

In your newspapers and media news programs today comes good news that our new orbiting telescope, Kepler, has already discovered nearly a dozen new planets, bizarre planets to be sure, but nevertheless planets. Back when our friend Carl Sagan was attempting the calculation of whether we might encounter extraterrestrial life, the question of whether planet formation was common was very undecided. Now with the news today and from the trickle of "sightings" begun at San Francisco State University fifteen years ago, we can be sure that planet formation is normal, even if the planets formed do not (yet) meet our specifications.

This is the point, of course. Finding planets upon which we might thrive, if it were only possible to get there ... and so far that is improbable. We learned last month that even our radio and television signals, formerly thought to be forming an ever expanding sphere of evidence of our existence, are dissipating rapidly into mindless noise (some begun that way, of course!) Our problem as a life form is that all our eggs are in one basket, one solar system, one location in the galaxy, prey to any vagary or happenstance that might come along ... including disasters of our own making.

So, we have learned a good lesson by discovering many planets and that puts the heat on those who will conceive of ways of getting there someday .... Kind of wistful, isn't it!

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

1/3/10

It is not without purpose that we begin this new year (and the last year of the first decade of the 21st century ... please) with an article about nuclear weapons. I mean this as something of a wake-up call. President Obama understands the unreality of the policies undergirding the present nuclear strategy, and so the question is whether he will have the moxie and clout to actually make a serious change to those policies ... with so many macho generals and admirals defending the status quo ... for lack of imagination or for too vivid imaginations.

The Boston Globe has a good, interesting article on this in the Sunday edition. I am amazed, for instance, to learn that our planet-destroying capability is still aimed at Russia. I do not doubt for a moment that theirs is aimed at us and China ... and clearly this sort of thing MUST change.

When you took stock of the world the other night, as 2009 was passing into oblivion and history, did you notice any place on the planet that really needs to be bombed by us with nuclear weapons? ... especially if we adopt a new policy of "No First Use" from here on out? Yes, one thinks of deep underground Iranian nuclear facilities and perhaps a situation developing in Pakistan that we just cannot tolerate, but seriously nuclear weapons are for 99.99% of all military situations just way too much muscle and way too much political fallout.

Now to tell the Air Force generals that their mission is not what they though it was and to tell the Navy admirals that they need to pare down the boomers by at least half. This could get sweaty!

JB

12/31/09

12/29/09

This interesting experiment reveals an issue that really cries for more investigation, since the flaw in our perception has serious implications for our ability to conduct ourselves "rationally" in a democracy. Of course, the same flaw is relevant to narrower power elite groups and individuals in other forms of government and society.

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

12/26/09

JB