7-21-10

You may know that in addition to posting my progressive liberal thoughts at The American Liberalism Project, which I co-founded many years ago, and at my own website Iron Mountain, which is dedicated, but not completed devoted to, exposing the military-industrial complex in America, I also post my essays at OpEdNews, a top 100 blog site among tens of thousands of blogs (according to Technorati, the blog measuring people). I do that because OpEdNews gets lots of hits. Essayists like me like to be "hit on," even though many, perhaps the majority of readers are poorly informed about national or world events and are even worse as expressing their own thoughts. Oh well, we learn to live for the occasional bright light or the opportunity to agree in part and to guide thinking away from logical inconsistencies and factual errors. It is a good life, but it doesn't pay anything! LOL

So, today I noticed that Rob Kall, the proprietor over at OpEdNews somehow got headlined with a diatribe against President Barack Obama, including within certain prognostications that are based on his own distemper with the White House. Since I have been asked to participate more over at OpEdNews I kicked myself around the block here, because had I taken him up on the offer, I might have dissuaded him from writing such a tendentious and (as I have alluded) distempered blog.

First, the notion that everything that goes wrong in the country is attributable to the President is juvenile thinking, perhaps infantile! Second, the list of "abuses and ignored opportunties" by Obama turn out to be extremely complex situations for which there are no (none whatsoever) easy answers in terms of national policy and national politics. The failure to close Guantanamo detention facility, for instance, leaves the President with the unsavory political choice of lodging the inmates domestically, say in an unused Illinois prison, a decision that would immediately bring in the press to ponder the likelihood of terrorism emanating from within the prison via whatever means they could manufacture in the editors's offices. Or, he could let the inmates go and be assured that they will (thanks to Cheney and Bush locking them up in the first place) go on in life to become major martyrs and terrorists in their own right.

But, Rob Kall in his tantrum forgets that what Barack Obama sees is not Rob Kall's agenda, but instead what his Chief of Staff calls a SHIT PIE inherited from the previous occupants of the West Wing ... and the East Wing, btw. It should not be lost in passing that the Chief of Staff is a large percentage of the problem and must go soon. It is alleged that this is already underway. Obama would do himself and the nation a huge favor by expediting the removal of Rahm Emanuel and his stultifying effect on the rest of the staff. Leo McGarry spins!

What is in the unsavory pie is an economic situation that cannot be described in full for the simple reason that if the White House were to do so, panic across the globe would surely ensue. Why panic, because the situation was (and continues to be) the most dangerous economic situation ever encountered by the United States. The economy of America is predicated on the U.S. currency being the "reserve currency" of the world. This gives the United States additional leverage (in the classical non-debt sense), additional cushions for domestic politics to make small errors, and additional responsibilities for guiding and assisting smaller economies. The United States is the largest economy in the world, despite challenges by the EU and China ... and India, Brazil, and combinations thereof. To put it simply, if the U.S. economy tanks ... and it very nearly did ... the world economy tanks and the misery will be endless. That's what's on Obama's plate, but you will see scant reference to it in Rob Kall's diatribe.

Then, of course, there are two political situations in Washington that impinge strongly and painfully on the White House. The Democratic leadership in the the Congress is not strong, certainly not of the calibre that the times demand. Nancy Pelosi is a savvy politician, but she is still very much a woman, and unable to play hardball with the jackasses within her own party and especially those in the Republican Party. The Republicans are the other factor, of course. They decided as a hedge against making any creative mistakes of their own, to object and obstruct everything the Democrats were elected to do. They have lied, cheated, lied, prevaricated, lied, and stood their stupid ground as if the American public were too stupid themselves to notice. With John Boehner appearing in the nightly news with various new shades of tan on his perplexed face, the Republicans have gotten a pass from newspapers and television critics alike, as if the "fair and balanced reporting" doctrine required the press to find something ... anything ... to say nice about a bunch of obstructionist morons! Give us a break!

The answer to Rob Kall is obvious. Democrats, whether they be conservative or progressive must understand that the President and his staff are not being deliberately aloof, nor are they thumbing their noses at bloggers scattered around the internet or the people who read these blogs and make their comments on them. The President is guiding the ship of state through extremely dangerous waters and, frankly, tempests in the teapots of the internet really go a short way toward making the situation worse. They are not important comments, but they set up a background of distrust and ill-will, that could just as easily have been a conscientious understanding of the big picture.

JB

6/21/10

One of the things that pundits do is write pretty much on a daily basis, whether there is real news or not. Of course, in Washington (and New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco) the columnists know how to start their own news upon which they comment in the ensuing days.

The word "pundit" is derived from the Hindu word "pandit," meaning "learned (and usually respected)." The current crop of practitioners, however, gets its etymology from the French, apparently. French "dire" is one of the Gallic ways to say "speak"; "dit" is a conjugation of "dire." And speak the pundits do, the Olbermann's and the Maddows's recently running out of real things to talk about, have jumped on the pronouncements of other voices and decided that this summer's barbecue will feature Barack Obama.

It would be disingenuous of me to suggest or lead you to believe that I am completely or even substantially happy with the way the Executive is behaving and talking these days. As you know I really dislike Rahm Emanuel and believe him to be a major part of the problem. (We have some reason to believe that his obscenities and abrasive personality will be otherwise employed shortly, however.) With that hopfully marvelous outcome we can be assured that relations with Capitol Hill and the press will change. But, we cannot wait for the ejection of Emanuel. It seems to me that the obligation of a Liberal columnist in an environment of distrust and rancorous division across the nation would be to consider the probable causes of his or her own distress and be a little "conservative" about ditching the President before there is any real reason to.

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, sometimes a frequent flyer on Olbermann's Countdown, opens up a volley of nonsense today about Liberals falling out of love with Obama. The very title indicates the foolishness of the idea: we were never in love with Barack Obama, nor he with us. It is politics, and love hardly ever mixes with politics successfully. We handed him our hopes for change and change there was as Ross Douhat in the New York Times astutely points out this morning, too.

The facts are and the truth is that Washington is a swamp of deceit and corruption that would boggle the "mind" of Beelzebub himself. Then when you figure that out, you have to consider that even reasonably fair-minded people disagree about fundamental issues, creating discord, cacophony, and eddys and whirlpools of chaos. Just for instance, take Dr. Paul Krugman on the current slide toward deficit panic in Washington and abroad and compare it to Jeffrey Sachs's peeing in his pants over at Scientific American. Of course huge deficits are scary, but how much scarier are stunting one or two entire generations of Americans and, indeed, human beings of all nations, by letting this Great Recession go into double dip for decade or two, squandering all the previous deficits and making the right choices nearly impossible?

How dangerous is it to beat up Obama when religious fanatics like Huckaby being touted as the GOP's best choice for a presidential run in 2012? It is extremely dangerous and the dog days of summer are no excuse at all for this mindless chattering. This itchy feeling we all have is that our hopes and dreams suppressed for e i g h t l o n g George W. Bush/Dick Cheney years are just not being instantly gratified!

Grow up Liberals! No one really cares that you were in a deep psychological depression for a decade. How smart are you, anyway? Can't you see the situation for what it is? It is hot, slow, and frustrating inside the Oval Office, and out here in the encroaching desert, where the signs are unmistakable that moronic anosognosia has afflicted the very people who could contribute materially to responsible attitudes and activities against anthropogenic global warming. A long hot summer of childish whining at Barack is not going to be helpful and probably will backfire in the worst ways and the worst times!

JB

6/13/10

Maureen Dowd fired one across the bow of President Obama today in her New York Times column. As a former Naval officer I can tell you that firing across a bow is intended to show that you have ammunition and are willing to use it to further your own aims ... and that your aim is good. Today Maureen Dowd missed hitting the bow by only a hair's breadth and threw up a column of water onto the decks of the still slightly questionable seaworthiness of the USS Obama. The skipper is doubtless not pleased, being soaking wet from the experience, and being not pleased will doubtless retreat further into that place that Ms. Dowd penned him.

Such is the power of the press to create self-fulfilling commentary. Or, is this just a bit of hubris on Dowd's part when she asserts that [even though]

Jon Stewart and bloggers mocked the journalists, suggesting they were too chummy with power ... the picnic was on the record, and good reporters can’t be co-opted by some cold French fries. Whenever you see politicians in a relaxed or stressful situation, beyond the usual teleprompter speeches and scripted photo ops, you learn something about those charged with making life and death decisions. You may even pick up some news.

Cold French fries, indeed! One gets the notion that journalists eat out of dumpsters with a passion and a cold French fry becomes a story about cooling Francophilia. No, I think Maureen is many times too self-righteous about the positive qualities of her profession. Still, (as I mentioned to someone today), the press corps is pretty much the same as it was in 1933 or 1956 or 1982 or yesterday. It has deadlines, a need to fill screens or pages for sale, and clearly each member and each publication has a prevailing point of view. In other words, it is not pristine, it is not beautiful, but it does incorporate a certain "free market of ideas and positions" that in time sift out into effective political journalism or ineffective fluff.

Irony is a trope, a figure of speech, in which the intent of the speaker is to say one thing and mean quite the opposite. In modern America the term has been invested with inanimate objects and public opinions, cultural values, and the like. So, Irony is complicated. But, at least we can agree that Irony is about value reversal and gestalt-like shifts from positive to negative or vice versa. Dowd is telling us that she has resisted the gestalt shift on Obama fiercely (not really!) until today, whereupon she has seen the emperor naked and not nearly as comely as she had hoped. Her dashed hopes are a bit more whiny than she intended, I think.

Synecdoche (sin ECK doh key) is also a trope, a figure of speech, one where the part is taken for the whole, the whole for the part, or the container for the thing contained, and vice versa. If you spend a lot of time nuzzling the semiotics of synecdoche you will find that it is a favorite of philosophers like Hegel who posit "organic" causal processes, who resist strenuously the descent into Irony implicit in all tropes. Maureen Dowd jumped straight toward Irony, but it interesting to me that she avoided the complicity of journalists in the "making of the President" or the "unmaking," as you will.

Complicity is the press corps problem. They get nothing without "befriending" someone they might better be criticizing. They need deep background all the time, so they become part of the problem, as it were, an organic part of the administration. They are, however, part of two worlds, the general culture which is their primary audience, and the local establishment which is their bread and butter that they dare not (usually) to scourge.

My colleagues disagree about whether Maureen scourged Barack Obama, but I think they are in tacit agreement that an unfunny-bone was struck sharply. Given that Dowd is writing to and about Obama, her propositional attitude seems to be a surrender to the imperatives of her professional class that coincides with a need to let us know that Obama is not what we (or at least she) believed he was. This is not new; but it is Dowd, a loud voice in the culture.

Personally, I added her hypothesis to the several I have about Barack Hussein Obama, some of these hypotheses overlapping and some not. This hypothesis struck me as a theory of Obama that he expected the "Liberal press" to give him a free trip to the next campaign. I think that is more true than not. I do not think Obama dislikes the press categorically or for any aesthetic or moral reasons, although I think that the crafty Dowd tries to infer that. I continue to believe that Obama is poorly staffed in the West Wing and that his loyalty to Rahm Emanuel, among others, is taking on the color of being hostage. Emanuel is out of his depth; he belongs in a much lesser job. My evidence is the year-long debacle over health care reform. Rahm botched his role completely. He did not do such a hot job fingering Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania, either.

Who the Press Secretary is is irrelevant, since Maureen's comments go around that factotum directly to The Man. So, perhaps the deficiency in the White House is that there are too many people with too little clout with the basic person who is President. But that is another essay.

JB

5/3/10

The Washington Post this Monday morning reports the falling of the other shoe. It is expected that the Chairman of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), which has been morally adrift for at least 30 years and which Slick Willie Clinton sold into corporate slavery during his pathetic tour of duty, will decline to regulate internet providers ... which means that safeguards FOR "net neutrality" will not be imposed, nor will the corporations who want to give faster access to their more profitable and less politically annoying customers be regulated.

This is a tragedy in the making, but one wonders why a Democratic administration would come down so flatly against the public good and for the corporations? The answer is that the Administration has an even more expansive target in mind, one which involves the corporations and their willingness to undertake the LEAST profitable sector of internet provision—inclusion of the rural and low-income populations to achieve 100% internet penetration.

This is a very bad bargain, a bargain in which the corporations will get federal assistance to extend the internet that last several miles and also get permission to treat the consumers at the end of the pipeline unequally. Not good! Worse yet for companies like Google that rely on natural "market forces" within the internet to provide information about internet use. No way to monitor a system that has artificial constraints on certain less profitable and more annoyingly political areas.

Chairman Genachowski should grow a pair and get on the right side of history, commerce, and freedom of speech immediately! Write him, email him, tell him how much this means to us!

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

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

12/4/09

Americans have been manipulating the news since well before the American Revolution. Other Americans are fairly used to the news being manipulated. Not that it is a tradition, of course, but Americans (and Europeans and people all over the world) have always suspected the bearers of tidings good and bad to embroider their stories to suit their own preferences, delivery styles (their songs, ballads, righteous propaganda, evangelism, proselytizing, monarchism, democratism, revolutionism, racism, and so forth). Today the number one issue in America is the economy, followed closely by our foreign policy. The key item in our economy, from the point of view of regular people, is employment. The significant factor in this area is unemployment, and the latest news is that the rate of unemployment has (momentarily) dropped by 0.2% amid wild cheering from people who should know better!

More on unemployment in a moment, but first a little reality check on foreign policy. If you read the left blogosphere (DailyKos, FireDogLake, OpEdNews, American Liberalism Project, TomDispatch and others) you will read about the great disappointment in President Obama and his decision to augment our troops in the AfPak War by some 30,000. To tell the truth, I was not happy about the decision, but, folks, that was the decision, and I understand it as far as it goes. Clearly President Obama, before being elected and since (prior to his December 1st speech at West Point), has seen the Afghanistan theater as an important step (real or perceived) against terrorism (for him, his administration, our country and others).

Why then do bloggers bother to write so stridently and foolishly about the latest decision, when in fact the die is obviously and widely cast and their better bet is to set up the frame for the next decision, to establish popular metrics for determining whether we are getting anywhere or not. Of course, we all understand that the current decision depends heavily (probably foolishly) on unreliable folks in west Asia (and President Obama should be given credit for understanding this) so with all that, what position should the bloggists take? Should they point out how unreliable Afghans and Pakistanis have been? No! What good does that do? They should point out opportunities won and lost in the coming eighteen months. How are they to know about these opportunities? Through the news, of course! But the news is manipulated. We don't know what CIA and Blackwater (Xe) are doing; we only know that they are doing it primarily (perhaps) in Pakistan in spite of the Islamabad government's protests. People who know how complex this "game" really is begin to relax their vigilance and just let it happen, taking note only when an AP reporter tells them that some prime minister somewhere has been carted off by the military and that nuclear arms are now safer.

Bloggers (and indeed the entire network of professional journalists) must dig deeper into Afghanistan and Pakistan and produce information that is relevant to the decision that will be made about 18 months hence. We must be all over the governments in Kabul and Islamabad, but more than that we must understand the people there and go deeper than the barely credible polls. Take Obama at his word, the policy in place now IS an exit policy.

Has anyone written about the relationship between our wars and our unemployment problems? Does anyone remember demobilization after WWII? Does anyone think that the contemporary U.S. economy could absorb 100,000 demobilized troops? ... 200,000? I was going to ask the former Marine Corps guy who came around yesterday advertizing his new window washing company. Does this man show up on Bureau of Labor Statistics radars?

The Bureau's stats for November are a delight for Xmas retailers. It appears that the newest millennium has arrived from the carefully scripted report. The first figure reported out by flash news services—165,000 jobs lost—is suddenly impossible to find online and now we read that only 11,000 net jobs have been lost in November. Recent month's historical data is revised to make the whole thing seem even less scary and more amenable to Xmas shopping sprees ... to buoy up the economy ... (of China)!

Take a look at the unemployment graph in the report linked to above. November shows a slight jog downward. But, look back at May 2009. Yes, there is another similar jog just before the whole thing began to climb at an alarming rate. Yes, clearly the recent three month's slope of the curve is less harrowing than that curve describing most of 2009, but please notice that the slope is still upward ... meaning that unemployment is still increasing. The best minds around predict a slump after Xmas ... principally because there is ALWAYS a slump after the Xmas retail sales. So, drawing a moderately bad slope on the unemployment curve is not naughty or unAmerican, it is simply straightening out the news ... and the record, because you sure do not want to risk your precious liquidity on BLS propaganda foisted off by a beleaguered administration and compliant media, do you!

JB

4/26/09

Just recently William Greider wrote in The Nation an interesting piece about "Obama and the Big Dogs," the canines who typically inhabit the top floor, two-corner offices on "Wall Street." I wouldn't have known about the article at all except CommonDreams aggregated it into their daily "must read" dozen under a grab-you title "Testicular Politics." The way "CommonDreams" presented it, you would have thought Greider was framing the trouble President Obama has bitten off as somehow linked to Barack's manhood. In fact, Greider does play the Alpha Dog routine for all it is worth in his brief essay, so the combined effect of the publisher and the aggregator is to frame the state of the Presidency today pretty much as a mano a mano combat situation, with just a tinge of pejorative sexual/racial overtones to lend contrast, just a suggestion of wimp, without having to take too much responsibility for the slur.

Greider says that Obama is doing a good deal less than Greider would like to see in making sure the canines of Wall Street understand who's boss—who is Alpha Dog. I don't doubt for a second that the big dogs think they run the world. I have friends who despise these plutocrats and oligarchs, but believe when the trump are counted, these big dogs will have most of them. In fact, the oligarchs have had their way with government for many years now, beginning with Nixon, but clearly expanding under Ron Reagan. For the best part of a half century Americans have been listening to the carrier wave of right wing politics which drones on and on about how government is the problem. So canny are these folk that they don't even mention an alternative—that big business is the problem with America.

Greider and the aggregator are irresponsible to put the battle between NY and DC down in terms of how macho Barack Obama might be. They are, in fact, reducing the problem to one which will never be resolved in those terms, and so it is a canard and cop-out. The way Greider sees it, the big dogs have been baiting Obama, but the explanation in terms of bluffing the bailout and peeing on Obama's tree goes nowhere to really explain his or their behaviors, which in fact can be described in much less provocative terms. Since Greider is writing from The Nation and not The New Republic we can assume that he has good wishes for President Obama, even though he can hardly use the word President next to Obama's name. He doesn't.

The "cojones frame" is what this is and it says more about Greider and editor vanden Heuvel than it says about our new administration. It is vicious under the cover of being just prosaically nasty and rude. What effrontery to accuse "the kid" as he calls President Obama of being thumped around by these megalomaniac tycoons, while the President and his inside guy, Geithner, try to save their sorry asses—and are showing signs of success! It takes "balls" to write this kind of crap and that somehow JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have saved themselves while accepting a bailout! The party that Greider and vanden Heuvel think they represent does not exist. It has not existed since Iowa, since the speech in Philadelphia, and not since November 2nd last year. Greider may be a seasoned journalist and may be used to the smells of corruption and wanton power-brokering, but he hasn't a clue about this new president. If he did, he would have begun to make the real case about Barack Obama that explains why we are so unnerved by his opening moves.

First, you have to give Barack Obama some credit for brains. He is not just a stump orator without a pot belly. He is a Constitutional scholar, a thinker, an activist who can see the world of hurt that some people begin to believe is their life's lot, and he can steer them past the rough edges of those worlds. He is an organized and disciplined man with a canny sense of the possibilities that others think are impossible. He is a change agent, but his idea of change is not that we will model ourselves on the sordid worlds of Bill Greider, but on a new set of relationships that will, frankly, tend to exclude Bill Greider. Greider is smart enough to see this coming in broad outlines, so he reacts.

The proof that Barack Obama is not clairvoyant is his selection of Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff. Rahm was to deliver strong and subtle messages to members of Congress, both sides of the aisle. Who knew that the Republicans would undertake a process of self-destruction that includes truculent no-ism? Rahm is completely ineffective at this point, but you can see his hesitating hyper-political influence in the question of what to do about torture. Rahm thinks he still has those motivate Congress duties. Fortunately, it has worked out differently, so Mr. Emanuel's caution about irritating the Health Care Base in the Democratic Party is so much froth on an empty beer can. I believe President Obama will have several Chiefs of Staff and that Mr. Emanuel will soon enough be back in Chicago running for the House seat he vacated to take on this work.

The proof that Barack Obama is not immune to pressure is his willingness to put out in the public the so-called "torture memos," knowing full well that once the chickens are allowed to go "free range" there will be endless trouble. Obama does not want to risk the recovery or health care or immigration or social security reform on torture show trials, and you don't want that either, so Obama has opened the door enough, for right now, to get the conversation going and to get the hotheads to identify and exhaust themselves. As a poker player, President Obama is as good as Greider has ever seen and much better than he understands.

But in poker there is a flinch factor. It is called "the tell." The cable television poker players wear wrap-around sunglasses, propeller hats, anything to take away the likelihood of an opposing player noticing his "tell." Every player has one (or many), so it is not a question of bearing down on one's disguise. It is a question of keeping the noise sufficiently loud that the "tell" is engulfed and virtually impossible to see amid the activity.

The activity is this: the administration is still forming and the principals are busy finding, cleaning, and testing the levers and strings, unearthing the Cheneyite "left-behinds." In a sense, President Obama (under the most intense scrutiny ever put on a President in his first three months) is temporizing until he can put his lieutenants out there with full confidence ... or sufficient body armor! You can "tell" this by the way Secretary Gates (a holdover and completely at ease in his own office) takes initiatives and speaks without President Obama there to prop him up. The rest, with the exception of Secretary Hillary Clinton, whose activities as ambassador plenipotentiary are deliberately personal and exceptionally unrelated to the organization beneath her, are biding their time and getting set to act.

So, what is Barack Obama's "tell?" It would not be good for me to say until you have your bets on the table, until you are committed to this hand, until you know who the big dog really is and where the bigger stacks of chips are. But, I will give you a muffled hint: Barack Obama is President. Think about it.

JB