From: Jake Berry (jakebridget@bellsouth.net)
[A response to Jack Random's "In Defense of William Ayers" posted on The National Free Press and reprinted below and "The Redemption of Colin Powell" posted on Buzzle.com.]
William Ayers activity with the Weathermen is merely a footnote in history. It only proves the Republicans are desperate. They can't win on the issues, so they attack with irrelevant, distracting, accusations. Even some in the corporate media say as much.
Colin Powell's endorsement seems clear enough. He's right. It is time for a transition and a transformation, a new generation, and Obama is equal to the task. It would be interesting to be able to compare Powell as Secretary of Defense under Obama as opposed to Secretary of State under Bush. That probably won't happen. There is still an election to win and the matter of whether or not Obama would want Powell as a member of the cabinet or Powell would be willing to serve. Outside of the disinformation campaign that cajoled the country into the invasion of Iraq his foreign policy seems similar enough to Obama's.
As for Rep. Bachmman, one wonders how these kinds of statements are possible a half-century after Joe McCarthy. What is anti-American? Other than an attempt to violently overthrow the government it seems to me impossible to be anti-American. After all, the election cycle theoretically allows us to make dramatic changes in the government every two years. The first amendment guarantees the freedom to dissent and say it out loud. If disagreement makes one anti-American then no one meets the measure. Everyone disagrees with someone about something in American politics at some time or other, even in an age of manufactured consent. If anyone is guilty of anti-American behavior it's Rep. Bachmman, who by her statements seems to want to erase the principles upon which the nation was founded. And replace them with what? Further descent into Corporate Fascism?
Considering the way the campaigns have been run it seems that perhaps that is our choice.
Do we want to close the door on the American experiment in representative government and replace it forever with government bought (and sold) by wealthy collectives? If so, then we have to do nothing at all. We can continue to spend money we do not have, pollute the environment and attempt to dominate the world by force. But if we want to attempt to turn the ship of state around, or at the very least alter course, we have to get up and vote for people who offer that possibility. Then we have to go back to buying only what we can afford, saving money in local, reliable banks, and investing in the local economy by doing what our grandparents did - buying land. Small scale capitalism. It worked for them. They truly believed in America as a free country and fought fascism in the trenches and totalitarian communism by containment. They were not the greatest generation. No generation can make that claim. But they taught us that in America anything was possible. The last 35 years almost seem calculated to destroy everything they believed in.
Ironic isn't it? The man we would have expected to build his campaign on those very principles has aligned himself with the vilest aspect of the electorate while a man whose face and name would seem foreign to our grandparents is promoting the qualities that made the 20th century what some call the American century. All he's asking is that we give someone new a chance. Under the circumstances that is what we must do.
Thanks for everything. Here we go in the rush to election day. And I'm still bringing a torch, just in case.
Peace,
Jake
[Jake Berry is the author of Brambu Drezi, Liminal Blue & Other Works of Originality.]
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.
IN DEFENSE OF WILLIAM AYERS:
Dissent and Freedom of Expression
By Jack Random
Once all the votes are cast and counted, it will be time to call a heart a heart and a spade a spade. When the scurrilous charges of guilt by association and character assassination lose the sting of a coming election, we will be able to assess the nature of this presidential campaign in a more objective light.
Perhaps then we will hear from Professor William Ayers. Until the election is over, however, silence is wisdom. By virtue of his participation in the political process, his associations with prominent Chicago politicians of all parties, he has been so vilified by the Republican right that anything he could say in the current climate would be twisted and distorted to dangerous proportions.
In the final stages of a desperate campaign with no other design than to distract the electorate from the most critical issues in modern history, the Rovian Republican machine has resorted to tactics that recall some of the most shameful chapters in American history.
It recalls the Alien and Sedition Acts signed into law in 1798 by President John Adams, which attempted to criminalize dissent and label his political opponents traitors to the nation. Three of four acts were repealed by succeeding President Thomas Jefferson in a critical re-affirmation of the principles of democratic governance.
It recalls the era of Jim Crow in the post-reconstruction South in which African Americans were systematically denied the right to vote by poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, threats, lynching and every conceivable form of intimidation.
Most of all it recalls the era of Joe McCarthy, the Republican Senator from Wisconsin, and the great Red Scare of the 1950’s in which citizens from every strata and facet of American life were subjected to loyalty oaths and labeled traitors to the nation for having the audacity to express dissenting views, for attending meetings or associating with the wrong crowd. Then the communists and socialists were the bogeyman, now it is the radicals and terrorists. Both then and now, it is the rightwing definition of Anti-American opinions and sentiments.
To those who naïvely thought we had reached something resembling universal condemnation of those disgraceful chapters, think again.
As one who was tempted to believe that America had grown sufficiently as a nation that we need not fear a return to the age of official intolerance and blacklisting on the basis of political or religious beliefs, it was with profound shock and awe that I witnessed an obscure congresswoman from Minnesota (the Honorable Michele Bachmann) call for a media-led investigation into the anti-American sentiments of members of congress.
Could it be that a representative in congress is so unaware of her nation’s history that she could invoke the House Un-American Activities Committee without even knowing it?
In the event that the worst happens, that the politics of fear and smear prevail, and we enter a new age of McCarthyism, let me state clearly: I am not now nor have I ever been a terrorist. Not enough? I am not now nor have I ever been an enemy of the nation. Still not enough?
I cannot in good conscience give you the lies that I believe you would require to certify my loyalty and patriotism though I consider myself both loyal and patriotic.
Does advocacy for Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Jean Bertrand Aristide of Haiti or Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain cast doubt? Does opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq place me under a cloud of suspicion? If I stood against the USA Patriot Act, will I fail the test of loyalty? Who is to judge?
My political beliefs and ideology were inspired by individuals who were without question dissidents and rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government. Their names were Jefferson, Paine and Franklin.
There have been occasions in my life when I considered the actions of my own government, from the carpet bombing in Vietnam to the killing of student protestors at Jackson and Kent State universities, nothing less than state sanctioned terrorism, yet there were moments (the withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson from the 1968 presidential race and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974) when I may have felt a twinge of empathy.
Even George W. Bush, as his administration unleashed aggressive wars against innocent peoples, unraveled the fabric of the constitution, undermined the electoral process and preached the politics of fear and intolerance without shame, has at times appeared a sympathetic character unable to comprehend the depths of the horrors and betrayals delivered under his authority.
By my own reckoning, should I be held accountable for sympathy with criminals and terrorists and betrayers of the American ideal?
I am an American and I claim the right to adopt any belief or system of beliefs that I choose so long as I do not infringe on the rights of others.
I do not advocate violent protest but there are times in history when violent resistance to unjust authorities was either understandable or necessary or both. Fundamentally, I believe that all Americans retain the right embodied in the second amendment to overthrow an unjust and tyrannical government.
By this account, though it pales by comparison to Jefferson’s, should I be considered a dangerous radical? Should I be censured, censored, my voice stricken from the public forum? Should every individual with whom I have associated be held accountable for my beliefs?
While I respect their sense of duty, their sacrifice and courage, I do not believe that the soldiers currently engaged in Bush’s wars are fighting to defend or uphold my rights. In fact the current wars have been used in a concerted effort to diminish my rights.
Does that make me un-American?
As an American I claim the right to attend any gathering and form any associations that I choose. I believe that anyone who asserts that I should be held accountable for every statement or belief expressed by my associates is attempting to deny my fundamental freedom.
I do not know Professor William Ayers but I do know there is no expression of remorse or rationalization that could alleviate the irrational fervor of his detractors in the current political climate. For myself, given the opportunity, I would not hesitate to attend one of his lectures or engage him in conversation concerning the state of affairs in America today.
Agree or disagree, Bill Ayers is an American too. Anyone who would denigrate him for his beliefs or impugn the character of his associates is fighting against the tide of democratic freedom.
The first amendment was not adopted to protect popular mainstream opinions. Such expressions require no protection. It was adopted to protect dissent. When dissent is suppressed by cheap political mudslinging campaigns it impoverishes our discourse and weakens our hold on the American democratic ideal.
Of course, even the expression of anti-democratic ideas is protected free speech. I would no more deny the right of a campaign to engage in the politics of smear than I would my own right to object.
The proper response of all loyal and responsible Americans, however, is to turn it on its head.
William Ayers is no more of a legitimate issue in this election than Joe the Plumber.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON NUMEROUS CITES OF THE WORLDWIDE WEB, INCLUDING THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.
Showing posts with label Jake's Word. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jake's Word. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Jake's Word Re: Consolidation of Wealth (Fascism, Racism & Oligarchy)
[Jake Berry's response to Jack Random's "Consolidation of Wealth" - posted on Pacific Free Press 10/14/08 and reprinted below.]
The past few days I've been turning current events over in my head. I kept to returning to Plato's description of oligarchy in The Republic. Plato's experience was with the city state so his description and analysis is based on that model, but the fundamentals remain. He had seen how Athens had slipped from democracy to tyranny to oligarchy and mixtures of all of these, accompanied by periods of chaos. He was not encouraged by what he witnessed in any of these forms.
Before I could put any of my thoughts down though I received your latest: "Consolidation of Wealth." It covers the territory better than I could have hoped and goes further, it offers solutions. Indeed we have been living under increasing levels of corporate fascism since the end of World War II. The military-industrial complex should have been disassembled after the war, along with many of the foreign entanglements. Instead the government went in the other direction and extended its integration with corporate culture into all levels of society. The situation now has been allowed to fester into a global malignancy. The so-called bailout is really just a matter of the corporate masters demanding a fee from the government they purchased. Unfortunately the middle class that buys from and thus enriches corporations also pays most of the taxes so it amounts to paying the same master twice. This kind of thievery inspired the war that severed the American colonies from England.
Add to that the rise in hatred we are witnessing at political rallies. It's an old hatred. The civil rights legislation of 1965 disenfranchised the bigotry and other forms of hatred that had been an integral part of southern statecraft for 100 years. That hatred found a welcoming embrace in the Republican party which had been up until that time the party of big money – a strange and horrible price to pay for taking a step toward equality for all citizens. Until now however the hatred has remained cloaked in various disguises and given names like social conservatism and Christian fundamentalism when in fact it is neither of these things. In reality nothing has changed. The other is always met with suspicion and ultimately despised merely because it is other. Even if that other is nothing more than skin pigmentation or a name it will not be tolerated.
This is a volatile combination - multi-national corporations and ethnic hatred. It is in fact the manifestation of the very thing many Americans say they fear in the Middle-East. It is always the secretly guilty that demand the harshest punishment for the guilty. Big money plus hatred. We saw what that produced in Germany under the Nazis. And no southerner of European ancestry with a conscience forgets for a second the joy some took in hearing the news of the assassination of MLK, Jr. We live with the stains of segregation, poll taxes, and lynchings. All enforced by a combination of wealthy elite and ethnic hatred.
The question before us now is do we want to continue in a direction in which this kind of morality, by whatever name, becomes the dominant feature of American society?
This election should have been about wars of aggression, economic stagnation and human rights and at least two alternative approaches to the resolution of those problems. Instead it has become a referendum on the power of massive amounts of money, debt, and hatred. It prevents the candidates from addressing the real problems and prevents the media from asking questions regarding those problems. Perhaps that is precisely what was intended by our masters. The same ones that brought us patriotic bankruptcy and self-righteous war.
I hope, deeply and sincerely, that we will have a chance to apply some of the solutions you recommend. I would love to see them in action. Are the American people capable of taking that course or will the descent continue? The results of the election alone will not be the answer, but they will indicate whether or not we are willing to even try.
Thanks so much for continuing to keep our eyes open and focused on the real issues at a time when the appearance of reality has been co-opted as a consumer object. Rave on.
Jake Berry - Author of Brambu Drezi, Liminal Blue and other works of extraordinary lucidity.
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.
CONSOLIDATION OF WEALTH:
LONGTERM SOLUTIONS TO THE ECONOMIC CRISIS
By Jack Random
There is always opportunity in catastrophic events. To financier J.P. Morgan, the stock market crash of 1907 was an opportunity to consolidate wealth and power, thus undermining the antitrust and monopoly busting policies of Theodore Roosevelt.
The market crash of 1927 leading to the Great Depression paved the way for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a legacy of responsible government regulation, social security, unemployment benefits, public works and labor rights, but it also served as an opportunity for further consolidation of corporate power and wealth.
The cataclysm of World War II exposed the dangers of imperial monarchy (Hirohito’s Japan), corporate fascism (Mussolini’s Italy) and the susceptibility of democracies to the politics of fear at a time of crisis (the rise of the Nazi Party in the German Republic), but it also gave rise to the powerful and corrupting force of the military-industrial complex.
Over the years leading to the current economic crisis we have forgotten altogether too many lessons of the past. We have forgotten that the innovations of the New Deal were not the temporary fixes of an ailing marketplace but systemic reforms designed to prevent the conglomeration of circumstance that inevitably resulted in past cataclysms from engulfing us again.
Instead of building on the foundation of the New Deal we have gradually allowed our corporate behemoths to tear it apart brick by brick until even Social Security and Medicare are openly challenged by politicians pretending to represent their voting constituents.
Meantime, the consolidation of wealth has marched on unabated and its power to dominate the political process has been zealously protected by both major political parties and the most anti-democratic Supreme Court in modern history – a court that has repeatedly struck down meaningful campaign finance reform on the specious constitutional grounds that corporate contributions are protected “free speech.” (This from justices who never tire condemning “legislating from the bench.”)
We would do well to recall that the ongoing federal bailout of private financial institutions began with those deemed “too big to fail”: Bear Stearns and American International Group. How sweet it must be for corporations to reach that lofty status without the stigma of a government sponsored enterprise – the designation that so offends John McCain and his Free Marketeer compadres when discussing mortgage giant Fannie Mae (originally a government agency created in the New Deal) and its cohort Freddie Mac.
Beneath the radar, while we were dazzled by the hundreds of billions floating away in the Treasury’s bailout package, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler were also awarded bailout funds for a bargain $25 billion – presumably too big to fail. Now GM is poised to gobble up Chrysler (if they don’t someone else will) and the Big Three will be down to two.
It was the Free Marketeers who cried out loudest against the bailout yet it was their philosophy (embraced by both major parties in an unrivaled if under-publicized era of bipartisan agreement) of corporate free reign and the dismantling of market regulation that led to the breakdown. The Marketeers made a great show of condemning what they like to call corporate socialism (they voted against it before they voted for it) but what is happening today is by no means socialistic (it’s a bailout, not a buyout); it is rather the deadly combination of runaway capitalism and corporate fascism.
What else can you call a system that allows corporate giants to reap unconscionable profits on a foundation of imaginary assets and when the time comes to pay the piper, they reach out their hands to go on the public dole: Too big to fail?
Few would deny that the system is rigged and that the government is controlled by corporate interests: That, ladies and gentlemen, is a textbook definition of Mussolini’s fascist state.
Despite the dramatic surge on Monday’s opening session, most Americans are coming to terms with the fact that we are only at the beginning stage of a great upheaval. The phenomenal rise in the marketplace may signal that the hemorrhaging has been abated but the crisis is not over.
It is a clear indication, however, that governments remain a powerful force in the global economy – even more powerful than the corporate conglomerates they are called upon to rescue. That power is fortified by the ability of nations to achieve international cooperation and coordination at a time of crisis.
It is critical in the days and years ahead that governments retain that power and achieve greater independence from corporate influence.
The crisis in the financial markets required a massive infusion of capital – an infusion so massive it could not be provided by any single nation. But the broader economic crisis goes much deeper than the housing bubble and mismanagement of the financial sector.
What led us to the edge of economic collapse were the policies of free market fundamentalism. It created ever-larger international corporations answerable to no one. It decimated government regulatory authority. It all but destroyed organized labor by allowing corporations to exploit work forces anywhere in the world where labor rights and living wages did not exist. In its zeal for ever-increasing profits, it created financial assets where none in fact existed. It created a pyramid Ponzi scheme where those at the top could escape with obscene profits before the inevitable implosion.
In its short-term, profit oriented vision it neglected to see the obvious: That by stealing wages and benefits from ordinary workers they were destroying the foundation of the real economy. They were destroying the middle class, the working people, the consumers of goods.
In September 2001, after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, our president told us to go shopping and have faith that those in power would do the right thing. We now know how bad that advice was.
While we whipped out our credit cards as if it was an act of patriotism, our president committed us to perpetual war in two nations, neither of which had attacked us (no, Al Qaeda was not an agent of the Afghan government).
Whatever your opinion on the wars, that strategic decision left us weaker both politically and economically. The current crisis in the financial markets, however it is resolved in the short term, will also leave us weaker (by at least a trillion dollars and counting) and therefore less able to deal with the next crisis.
If we do not take the necessary measures to ensure it will not happen again, it inevitably will – and next time it will be much worse.
Rebuilding the government’s regulatory authority is necessary but it is not enough.
Public works (reconstructing bridges, roads, public buildings, dams, mass transit) to put the people to work is essential but it is not enough.
Tax relief and incentives for working people and small businesses, as well as extended unemployment benefits, is important but it is not enough.
Removing corporate control of the electoral process is critical but it too is not enough.
In order to affect the systemic changes that will enable us to avert a future and inevitable collapse, we must address the role of labor in the global economy and the consolidation of wealth that unwisely places too much responsibility in too few hands.
On the one hand, we must take the lead in asserting the fundamental rights of labor on a global scale. This will require the same kind of international agreement that we have seen come together to rescue financial institutions.
Of equal importance, we must re-assert the antitrust policies that characterized the Teddy Roosevelt era. International corporations with no inherent interest in the public good should never be allowed to grow so large that they cannot be allowed to fail. That is not how the free market is intended to function.
As this financial crisis plays out, the consolidation of wealth accelerates: Wells Fargo absorbs Wachovia, Bank of America absorbs Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Financial, JP Morgan absorbs Bear Stearns, GM absorbs Chrysler, on and on.
To appreciate the dangers of this consolidation (and the diminished competition that comes with it), imagine that a school decided to house all its students in a single large room: When one student catches the flu, the school shuts down.
To a large extent, that is what happened in this financial train wreck: They were all drinking from the same well, all breathing the same toxic air, all sharing the same house and they all caught the same disease.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON NUMEROUS CITES OF THE WORLDWIDE WEB, INCLUDING THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.
The past few days I've been turning current events over in my head. I kept to returning to Plato's description of oligarchy in The Republic. Plato's experience was with the city state so his description and analysis is based on that model, but the fundamentals remain. He had seen how Athens had slipped from democracy to tyranny to oligarchy and mixtures of all of these, accompanied by periods of chaos. He was not encouraged by what he witnessed in any of these forms.
Before I could put any of my thoughts down though I received your latest: "Consolidation of Wealth." It covers the territory better than I could have hoped and goes further, it offers solutions. Indeed we have been living under increasing levels of corporate fascism since the end of World War II. The military-industrial complex should have been disassembled after the war, along with many of the foreign entanglements. Instead the government went in the other direction and extended its integration with corporate culture into all levels of society. The situation now has been allowed to fester into a global malignancy. The so-called bailout is really just a matter of the corporate masters demanding a fee from the government they purchased. Unfortunately the middle class that buys from and thus enriches corporations also pays most of the taxes so it amounts to paying the same master twice. This kind of thievery inspired the war that severed the American colonies from England.
Add to that the rise in hatred we are witnessing at political rallies. It's an old hatred. The civil rights legislation of 1965 disenfranchised the bigotry and other forms of hatred that had been an integral part of southern statecraft for 100 years. That hatred found a welcoming embrace in the Republican party which had been up until that time the party of big money – a strange and horrible price to pay for taking a step toward equality for all citizens. Until now however the hatred has remained cloaked in various disguises and given names like social conservatism and Christian fundamentalism when in fact it is neither of these things. In reality nothing has changed. The other is always met with suspicion and ultimately despised merely because it is other. Even if that other is nothing more than skin pigmentation or a name it will not be tolerated.
This is a volatile combination - multi-national corporations and ethnic hatred. It is in fact the manifestation of the very thing many Americans say they fear in the Middle-East. It is always the secretly guilty that demand the harshest punishment for the guilty. Big money plus hatred. We saw what that produced in Germany under the Nazis. And no southerner of European ancestry with a conscience forgets for a second the joy some took in hearing the news of the assassination of MLK, Jr. We live with the stains of segregation, poll taxes, and lynchings. All enforced by a combination of wealthy elite and ethnic hatred.
The question before us now is do we want to continue in a direction in which this kind of morality, by whatever name, becomes the dominant feature of American society?
This election should have been about wars of aggression, economic stagnation and human rights and at least two alternative approaches to the resolution of those problems. Instead it has become a referendum on the power of massive amounts of money, debt, and hatred. It prevents the candidates from addressing the real problems and prevents the media from asking questions regarding those problems. Perhaps that is precisely what was intended by our masters. The same ones that brought us patriotic bankruptcy and self-righteous war.
I hope, deeply and sincerely, that we will have a chance to apply some of the solutions you recommend. I would love to see them in action. Are the American people capable of taking that course or will the descent continue? The results of the election alone will not be the answer, but they will indicate whether or not we are willing to even try.
Thanks so much for continuing to keep our eyes open and focused on the real issues at a time when the appearance of reality has been co-opted as a consumer object. Rave on.
Jake Berry - Author of Brambu Drezi, Liminal Blue and other works of extraordinary lucidity.
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.
CONSOLIDATION OF WEALTH:
LONGTERM SOLUTIONS TO THE ECONOMIC CRISIS
By Jack Random
There is always opportunity in catastrophic events. To financier J.P. Morgan, the stock market crash of 1907 was an opportunity to consolidate wealth and power, thus undermining the antitrust and monopoly busting policies of Theodore Roosevelt.
The market crash of 1927 leading to the Great Depression paved the way for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a legacy of responsible government regulation, social security, unemployment benefits, public works and labor rights, but it also served as an opportunity for further consolidation of corporate power and wealth.
The cataclysm of World War II exposed the dangers of imperial monarchy (Hirohito’s Japan), corporate fascism (Mussolini’s Italy) and the susceptibility of democracies to the politics of fear at a time of crisis (the rise of the Nazi Party in the German Republic), but it also gave rise to the powerful and corrupting force of the military-industrial complex.
Over the years leading to the current economic crisis we have forgotten altogether too many lessons of the past. We have forgotten that the innovations of the New Deal were not the temporary fixes of an ailing marketplace but systemic reforms designed to prevent the conglomeration of circumstance that inevitably resulted in past cataclysms from engulfing us again.
Instead of building on the foundation of the New Deal we have gradually allowed our corporate behemoths to tear it apart brick by brick until even Social Security and Medicare are openly challenged by politicians pretending to represent their voting constituents.
Meantime, the consolidation of wealth has marched on unabated and its power to dominate the political process has been zealously protected by both major political parties and the most anti-democratic Supreme Court in modern history – a court that has repeatedly struck down meaningful campaign finance reform on the specious constitutional grounds that corporate contributions are protected “free speech.” (This from justices who never tire condemning “legislating from the bench.”)
We would do well to recall that the ongoing federal bailout of private financial institutions began with those deemed “too big to fail”: Bear Stearns and American International Group. How sweet it must be for corporations to reach that lofty status without the stigma of a government sponsored enterprise – the designation that so offends John McCain and his Free Marketeer compadres when discussing mortgage giant Fannie Mae (originally a government agency created in the New Deal) and its cohort Freddie Mac.
Beneath the radar, while we were dazzled by the hundreds of billions floating away in the Treasury’s bailout package, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler were also awarded bailout funds for a bargain $25 billion – presumably too big to fail. Now GM is poised to gobble up Chrysler (if they don’t someone else will) and the Big Three will be down to two.
It was the Free Marketeers who cried out loudest against the bailout yet it was their philosophy (embraced by both major parties in an unrivaled if under-publicized era of bipartisan agreement) of corporate free reign and the dismantling of market regulation that led to the breakdown. The Marketeers made a great show of condemning what they like to call corporate socialism (they voted against it before they voted for it) but what is happening today is by no means socialistic (it’s a bailout, not a buyout); it is rather the deadly combination of runaway capitalism and corporate fascism.
What else can you call a system that allows corporate giants to reap unconscionable profits on a foundation of imaginary assets and when the time comes to pay the piper, they reach out their hands to go on the public dole: Too big to fail?
Few would deny that the system is rigged and that the government is controlled by corporate interests: That, ladies and gentlemen, is a textbook definition of Mussolini’s fascist state.
Despite the dramatic surge on Monday’s opening session, most Americans are coming to terms with the fact that we are only at the beginning stage of a great upheaval. The phenomenal rise in the marketplace may signal that the hemorrhaging has been abated but the crisis is not over.
It is a clear indication, however, that governments remain a powerful force in the global economy – even more powerful than the corporate conglomerates they are called upon to rescue. That power is fortified by the ability of nations to achieve international cooperation and coordination at a time of crisis.
It is critical in the days and years ahead that governments retain that power and achieve greater independence from corporate influence.
The crisis in the financial markets required a massive infusion of capital – an infusion so massive it could not be provided by any single nation. But the broader economic crisis goes much deeper than the housing bubble and mismanagement of the financial sector.
What led us to the edge of economic collapse were the policies of free market fundamentalism. It created ever-larger international corporations answerable to no one. It decimated government regulatory authority. It all but destroyed organized labor by allowing corporations to exploit work forces anywhere in the world where labor rights and living wages did not exist. In its zeal for ever-increasing profits, it created financial assets where none in fact existed. It created a pyramid Ponzi scheme where those at the top could escape with obscene profits before the inevitable implosion.
In its short-term, profit oriented vision it neglected to see the obvious: That by stealing wages and benefits from ordinary workers they were destroying the foundation of the real economy. They were destroying the middle class, the working people, the consumers of goods.
In September 2001, after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, our president told us to go shopping and have faith that those in power would do the right thing. We now know how bad that advice was.
While we whipped out our credit cards as if it was an act of patriotism, our president committed us to perpetual war in two nations, neither of which had attacked us (no, Al Qaeda was not an agent of the Afghan government).
Whatever your opinion on the wars, that strategic decision left us weaker both politically and economically. The current crisis in the financial markets, however it is resolved in the short term, will also leave us weaker (by at least a trillion dollars and counting) and therefore less able to deal with the next crisis.
If we do not take the necessary measures to ensure it will not happen again, it inevitably will – and next time it will be much worse.
Rebuilding the government’s regulatory authority is necessary but it is not enough.
Public works (reconstructing bridges, roads, public buildings, dams, mass transit) to put the people to work is essential but it is not enough.
Tax relief and incentives for working people and small businesses, as well as extended unemployment benefits, is important but it is not enough.
Removing corporate control of the electoral process is critical but it too is not enough.
In order to affect the systemic changes that will enable us to avert a future and inevitable collapse, we must address the role of labor in the global economy and the consolidation of wealth that unwisely places too much responsibility in too few hands.
On the one hand, we must take the lead in asserting the fundamental rights of labor on a global scale. This will require the same kind of international agreement that we have seen come together to rescue financial institutions.
Of equal importance, we must re-assert the antitrust policies that characterized the Teddy Roosevelt era. International corporations with no inherent interest in the public good should never be allowed to grow so large that they cannot be allowed to fail. That is not how the free market is intended to function.
As this financial crisis plays out, the consolidation of wealth accelerates: Wells Fargo absorbs Wachovia, Bank of America absorbs Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Financial, JP Morgan absorbs Bear Stearns, GM absorbs Chrysler, on and on.
To appreciate the dangers of this consolidation (and the diminished competition that comes with it), imagine that a school decided to house all its students in a single large room: When one student catches the flu, the school shuts down.
To a large extent, that is what happened in this financial train wreck: They were all drinking from the same well, all breathing the same toxic air, all sharing the same house and they all caught the same disease.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON NUMEROUS CITES OF THE WORLDWIDE WEB, INCLUDING THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Jake's Word: Brand America
As America continues to become a brand name citizens disappear, their
only value deriving from how much they are able to consume.
Mindlessness, Empty stimulation from a billion screens assaulting all
senses at all times everywhere. There is only noise where humans used
to be. Vacuity. Vanity of vanities. Every mouth is open. Every head is
empty. No one left alive can hear the scraping wind. Outside is gone
all to satellite waves and wires. No body but static.
only value deriving from how much they are able to consume.
Mindlessness, Empty stimulation from a billion screens assaulting all
senses at all times everywhere. There is only noise where humans used
to be. Vacuity. Vanity of vanities. Every mouth is open. Every head is
empty. No one left alive can hear the scraping wind. Outside is gone
all to satellite waves and wires. No body but static.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Jake's Word Re: A New Deal for the 21st Century
[Jake Berry's response to A Jazzman Chronicle, reprinted below.]
We were talking about clarity in explanation a few days ago. Your latest makes the issues as clear as they could possibly be. The situation is grim, the solution is a bitter pill and finally, we need some reason to hope that circumstances will improve.
FDR's great gift was the gift of hope. The New Deal did not end the depression, but it gave people hope. It gave people jobs who had given up on finding work. It gave the nation focus and determination to survive. My grandfather was in the Navy when word came of FDR's death. He said the whole base fell silent and everyone wept. Can you imagine that kind of response to the death of a politician now?
Indeed, Hoover has been on our mind's lately. A man as qualified for the presidency as any that ever held the office. Yet when he needed to apply his ample intelligence to governing he stood on the premise of the absence of governing while the economy and the hopes of a vibrant nation crumbled around him, fell into shanty towns, Hoovervilles.
The failures of the Bush administration are so numerous and near absolute that they inspire hopelessness on every level. However, we can point to two major mistakes that may become the Bush legacy. First, when the sympathy of the entire planet was with us, when virtually every nation supported our need to heal and recover, the Bush administration, openly and repeatedly lied in order to instigate a war of aggression. The failure here was one of bad government. Second, while the economy slid from stagnation to recession the administration did nothing. When it became obvious that even his corporate base was in trouble, again he did nothing. This was a failure of no government at all.
It's a matter of sound judgment. When to act and when to show restraint. George W. Bush has failed as miserably as president as he has failed at everything else he has attempted to do with the exception of drunken revelry. And John McCain has voted to support him 90% of the time. What does that say about McCain's judgment? And just to make sure we understood how lousy his judgment was he nominated a vice-presidential candidate that appears to be even less capable of grasping the complexities of the office than Bush.
Obama by comparison rose to national recognition because he was a great organizer. We certainly need a bit of that right now. Since the President's oath of office demands that he uphold the Constitution, who would know better how to do that than someone who taught constitutional law for more than a decade?
Democrats and Republicans alike hesitate before the urgent demands of Bush's Treasury Secretary. Who can blame them? Their constituents pay the price for listening to Bush's lies with the loss of their jobs, their homes and their very lives.
What we need now is hope. At one time it might have been audacious to suggest that hope was the medicine. Now it seems abundantly clear. It was clear to Barack Obama years ago. If this nation has any hope, we will have to pin it on him. Not to cure our problems, but to inspire us and offer pragmatic, reasoned leadership.
The electorate needs to exercise a bit of sound judgment.
Thanks for keeping the flame alive.
Best,
Jake
[Jake Berry, Poet and author of Brambu Drezi, Liminal Blue and other works...]
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.
A NEW DEAL FOR THE 21ST CENTURY:
HERBERT HOOVER VERSUS FDR
By Jack Random
The economy is in meltdown. Most of us have begun to recognize how serious the crisis is. Inaction – the dominant policy of the Bush administration – is no longer viable. The institutions of finance are one or two steps from wholesale implosion. Even the corporate cheerleading squad sometimes known as the mainstream media is using the D word: Depression.
We know how we got here: Runaway capitalism, dismantled government regulation, unbridled greed. Twenty years of conservative economic theory applied to the American economy. Twenty years ignoring the lessons of the Savings and Loan Crisis, the Enron scandal, the west coast energy crisis, the technology bust, on and on.
We know that the government is largely to blame. We know therefore that the government is unlikely to accept what must be done to right the balance and set our economy back on firm ground. They would prefer to write a check from the American taxpayers and pass the buck to future generations but the threat of systemic collapse will not go away so easily.
The Bush administration shamelessly pimped the concept of home ownership to every working man and woman in America at a time when real wages were down and debt was rising. They enabled the markets to finance home mortgages through accounting tricks – apparently never thinking that the bills would come due on their watch. They replaced an economy that once produced real value with an Enron Ponzi Scheme.
The question becomes: Where do we go from here?
On the short term, an infusion of capital is required. We can all agree that the heart of the current collapse is the housing market. We can agree that millions of Americans were given loans that they could not afford and that should never have been given.
The short-term solution is to make those loans good by restructuring them and giving them the backing of the United States Treasury.
We have heard the same conservative ideologues who preached deregulation from every pulpit decry with rare venom the very thought of helping the foreclosed. Like Herbert Hoover in his direst hour, they plead with us never to forgive the individual who dared to believe that she or he could own a home.
There was a time in this country when you could trust the bank or the mortgage company to give you a fair deal. Why would any responsible institution offer a loan that could not be repaid? The answer is they would not; only a crook would conspire to steal your limited savings and leave you without a prayer.
If you are fortunate enough to have bought a home on a workingman’s wages, you know that you are dependent on the broker representing you. At the escrow signing, hundreds of papers in the foreign language of legalese are paraded before your dazzled eyes. You are asked to sign here, initial there and when it is over, you can only hope that the papers say what you think they say.
If anyone deserves to be forgiven it is the hapless individuals who reached for the dream the president the held out to them at every opportunity. Let them stay in their homes if they have not been foreclosed. If they have already lost their homes, let them find a new beginning with a roof over their heads and hope in their hearts.
In the parlance of those now promoting the great bailout, by helping them we are helping ourselves. We are even helping the unscrupulous lenders who almost broke the system but that is an unfortunate necessity.
Of course, what we do in the short term will make little difference if we do not restore balance in the system. The price of unfettered greed is rigorous regulation. We do not need a new bureaucracy to achieve this goal; we need a president dedicated to the cause.
Despite an apparent eleventh hour conversion, John McCain is not the man for the job. He has spent his entire career equating government regulation with socialism – a concept he holds beneath contempt. He is gambling that this is a temporary crisis. He will revert to his roots the moment he takes office.
Regulation is necessary but it is not sufficient. It will not restore balance for the working class will remain bridled by debt and unable to sustain a consumer-based economy.
We need new jobs. We need a green economy. We need a massive workforce to rebuild our aging infrastructure and, more importantly, to create a twenty first century infrastructure. In the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, we need public works. We need them more than ever because they provide jobs that cannot be outsourced and they are long overdue.
Beyond public works, we confront a monumental problem that FDR could never have imagined: the outsourcing of American jobs in a globalized economy. The obvious answer is fair trade. American workers can compete and win on a fair playing field but no one can compete with slave labor. The masterminds behind this new economy have built corporate profits by exploiting the cheapest possible labor overseas and simultaneously undermining labor in our own country.
That is why Americans are buried in debt. That is why we cannot sustain our standard of living. Only when labor standards and fair wages are built into the trade formula will this impoverishment of the working class end.
In 1932 the American people faced a clear choice: Herbert Hoover stood firm for individual responsibility. Translation: He would not lift a finger to help the people at the bottom of the chain, the people who had lost their homes, their jobs and their life savings. In recognition of the grave economic reality of the Great Depression, he was willing to help the banks but the people were on their own. It was a 20th century version of: Let them eat cake.
Franklin Roosevelt had a different approach: Lift up the people with public works, relief and social security. He understood that the only way to lift the nation out of its deep hole was to rebuild its foundation from the bottom up.
In this fundamental sense, the choice we now face is equally clear: McCain is Hoover and Obama is FDR.
In light of the economic crisis before us, I would like to see Barack Obama rename his cause for the final weeks of this campaign: A New Deal for the 21st Century.
That would make it clear who he is standing with, what he is fighting for, and the principles that will guide his actions as we move forward in these dark and troubled times.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). HE IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.
We were talking about clarity in explanation a few days ago. Your latest makes the issues as clear as they could possibly be. The situation is grim, the solution is a bitter pill and finally, we need some reason to hope that circumstances will improve.
FDR's great gift was the gift of hope. The New Deal did not end the depression, but it gave people hope. It gave people jobs who had given up on finding work. It gave the nation focus and determination to survive. My grandfather was in the Navy when word came of FDR's death. He said the whole base fell silent and everyone wept. Can you imagine that kind of response to the death of a politician now?
Indeed, Hoover has been on our mind's lately. A man as qualified for the presidency as any that ever held the office. Yet when he needed to apply his ample intelligence to governing he stood on the premise of the absence of governing while the economy and the hopes of a vibrant nation crumbled around him, fell into shanty towns, Hoovervilles.
The failures of the Bush administration are so numerous and near absolute that they inspire hopelessness on every level. However, we can point to two major mistakes that may become the Bush legacy. First, when the sympathy of the entire planet was with us, when virtually every nation supported our need to heal and recover, the Bush administration, openly and repeatedly lied in order to instigate a war of aggression. The failure here was one of bad government. Second, while the economy slid from stagnation to recession the administration did nothing. When it became obvious that even his corporate base was in trouble, again he did nothing. This was a failure of no government at all.
It's a matter of sound judgment. When to act and when to show restraint. George W. Bush has failed as miserably as president as he has failed at everything else he has attempted to do with the exception of drunken revelry. And John McCain has voted to support him 90% of the time. What does that say about McCain's judgment? And just to make sure we understood how lousy his judgment was he nominated a vice-presidential candidate that appears to be even less capable of grasping the complexities of the office than Bush.
Obama by comparison rose to national recognition because he was a great organizer. We certainly need a bit of that right now. Since the President's oath of office demands that he uphold the Constitution, who would know better how to do that than someone who taught constitutional law for more than a decade?
Democrats and Republicans alike hesitate before the urgent demands of Bush's Treasury Secretary. Who can blame them? Their constituents pay the price for listening to Bush's lies with the loss of their jobs, their homes and their very lives.
What we need now is hope. At one time it might have been audacious to suggest that hope was the medicine. Now it seems abundantly clear. It was clear to Barack Obama years ago. If this nation has any hope, we will have to pin it on him. Not to cure our problems, but to inspire us and offer pragmatic, reasoned leadership.
The electorate needs to exercise a bit of sound judgment.
Thanks for keeping the flame alive.
Best,
Jake
[Jake Berry, Poet and author of Brambu Drezi, Liminal Blue and other works...]
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.
A NEW DEAL FOR THE 21ST CENTURY:
HERBERT HOOVER VERSUS FDR
By Jack Random
The economy is in meltdown. Most of us have begun to recognize how serious the crisis is. Inaction – the dominant policy of the Bush administration – is no longer viable. The institutions of finance are one or two steps from wholesale implosion. Even the corporate cheerleading squad sometimes known as the mainstream media is using the D word: Depression.
We know how we got here: Runaway capitalism, dismantled government regulation, unbridled greed. Twenty years of conservative economic theory applied to the American economy. Twenty years ignoring the lessons of the Savings and Loan Crisis, the Enron scandal, the west coast energy crisis, the technology bust, on and on.
We know that the government is largely to blame. We know therefore that the government is unlikely to accept what must be done to right the balance and set our economy back on firm ground. They would prefer to write a check from the American taxpayers and pass the buck to future generations but the threat of systemic collapse will not go away so easily.
The Bush administration shamelessly pimped the concept of home ownership to every working man and woman in America at a time when real wages were down and debt was rising. They enabled the markets to finance home mortgages through accounting tricks – apparently never thinking that the bills would come due on their watch. They replaced an economy that once produced real value with an Enron Ponzi Scheme.
The question becomes: Where do we go from here?
On the short term, an infusion of capital is required. We can all agree that the heart of the current collapse is the housing market. We can agree that millions of Americans were given loans that they could not afford and that should never have been given.
The short-term solution is to make those loans good by restructuring them and giving them the backing of the United States Treasury.
We have heard the same conservative ideologues who preached deregulation from every pulpit decry with rare venom the very thought of helping the foreclosed. Like Herbert Hoover in his direst hour, they plead with us never to forgive the individual who dared to believe that she or he could own a home.
There was a time in this country when you could trust the bank or the mortgage company to give you a fair deal. Why would any responsible institution offer a loan that could not be repaid? The answer is they would not; only a crook would conspire to steal your limited savings and leave you without a prayer.
If you are fortunate enough to have bought a home on a workingman’s wages, you know that you are dependent on the broker representing you. At the escrow signing, hundreds of papers in the foreign language of legalese are paraded before your dazzled eyes. You are asked to sign here, initial there and when it is over, you can only hope that the papers say what you think they say.
If anyone deserves to be forgiven it is the hapless individuals who reached for the dream the president the held out to them at every opportunity. Let them stay in their homes if they have not been foreclosed. If they have already lost their homes, let them find a new beginning with a roof over their heads and hope in their hearts.
In the parlance of those now promoting the great bailout, by helping them we are helping ourselves. We are even helping the unscrupulous lenders who almost broke the system but that is an unfortunate necessity.
Of course, what we do in the short term will make little difference if we do not restore balance in the system. The price of unfettered greed is rigorous regulation. We do not need a new bureaucracy to achieve this goal; we need a president dedicated to the cause.
Despite an apparent eleventh hour conversion, John McCain is not the man for the job. He has spent his entire career equating government regulation with socialism – a concept he holds beneath contempt. He is gambling that this is a temporary crisis. He will revert to his roots the moment he takes office.
Regulation is necessary but it is not sufficient. It will not restore balance for the working class will remain bridled by debt and unable to sustain a consumer-based economy.
We need new jobs. We need a green economy. We need a massive workforce to rebuild our aging infrastructure and, more importantly, to create a twenty first century infrastructure. In the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, we need public works. We need them more than ever because they provide jobs that cannot be outsourced and they are long overdue.
Beyond public works, we confront a monumental problem that FDR could never have imagined: the outsourcing of American jobs in a globalized economy. The obvious answer is fair trade. American workers can compete and win on a fair playing field but no one can compete with slave labor. The masterminds behind this new economy have built corporate profits by exploiting the cheapest possible labor overseas and simultaneously undermining labor in our own country.
That is why Americans are buried in debt. That is why we cannot sustain our standard of living. Only when labor standards and fair wages are built into the trade formula will this impoverishment of the working class end.
In 1932 the American people faced a clear choice: Herbert Hoover stood firm for individual responsibility. Translation: He would not lift a finger to help the people at the bottom of the chain, the people who had lost their homes, their jobs and their life savings. In recognition of the grave economic reality of the Great Depression, he was willing to help the banks but the people were on their own. It was a 20th century version of: Let them eat cake.
Franklin Roosevelt had a different approach: Lift up the people with public works, relief and social security. He understood that the only way to lift the nation out of its deep hole was to rebuild its foundation from the bottom up.
In this fundamental sense, the choice we now face is equally clear: McCain is Hoover and Obama is FDR.
In light of the economic crisis before us, I would like to see Barack Obama rename his cause for the final weeks of this campaign: A New Deal for the 21st Century.
That would make it clear who he is standing with, what he is fighting for, and the principles that will guide his actions as we move forward in these dark and troubled times.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). HE IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Jake's Word re: The Blame Game, Part Two
(A response to Jack Random's The Blame Game - Part Two, The Trillion Dollar Gambit: Corporate Socialism. Reprinted below.)
If only one - one - a number that even George W. Bush can count in his sleep - if only one of the so-called pundits, experts and economists spoke or wrote with the clarity and precision that you employ the people of this nation might actually wake from their media induced stupor and take action.
The problem is that I don't think any of the experts can see the situation as clearly as you do. Or perhaps they are being paid too well to see beyond the veil of phony finances that have been the pillar of fat that has supported this fictional economy since it was sold lock, stock and barrel during the first oil crisis.
There are some of us that remember it all too well because just as we were learning to drive and getting our first cars we found ourselves in long lines waiting to pay double or triple what we would have paid only a few months before. Nixon, for his crimes, was trying to dodge the law by manipulating the justice system. He was pulling remedies for the economy out of his back pocket that only Stalin or Castro would have dreamed of before him. Price freezes. A free-market, anti-communist was making executive decisions in all directions like a dictator. Congress was reeling. This man after all had just been re-elected by a huge margin. Not until the evidence was so obvious that it had become common currency did they act. Too little and too late.
By the time he left office Nixon had cut a deal with Chairman Mao that opened the door to economic prosperity - for China. About that same time the standard of living in terms of real dollars and wages, genuine wealth, peaked for the middle class. The rich continued to get richer and the poor could continue to make do with the scraps, but for the majority the grand promise of post-war prosperity hit a wall. It has never recovered.
There was the boom of the 80s in which the national debt sky rocketed to pay the price of rockets and bombs for a cold war that could only become hot at the expense of the end of the world.
The taxpayers had to pony up for that one during the first Bush administration. Bush himself paid with the loss of the election. The neocons never forgot that lesson. They determined to invent a new set of lies for the New World Order.
Enter The Project for a New American Century where the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz laid plans for the invasion of Iraq, the domination of the Middle East by force and the extension of Pax Americana (the term is used in one of the articles at their website).
Meanwhile the Clinton administration witnessed the longest economic expansion in the nation's history. Never mind that it was financed by an explosion of cheap, and often worthless, imports and the wildest level of speculation that Wall Street had ever seen. Suddenly it seemed the budget was balanced and everybody wanted to take credit.
Credit is the key word because that was how the whole thing was financed. Internet companies were making billions of dollars based on what their profits would be in the future. Every new retirement plan added a 401(k) option. We'd become a nation of gamblers. When the Treasury Department informed the President that many of the CEOs salaries were based on this kind of speculation and that it was in fact illegal, Clinton chose not to enforce the law. Why rain on his own parade? Especially at a time when he was being impeached by a Republican congress for things that had nothing to do with government, the economy or anything else that would have effected the future of any family in the U.S. outside his own.
By the time the towers fell and revealed the staggering amount of corruption that fueled companies like Enron and MCI, the dim-witted son of the former president had seized the oval office on the backs of a cabal of his father's friends including those Pax America fellows.
Eight years on and we hear an ironically familiar song from that administration. This time they are warning us of a complete economic meltdown. Suddenly, the crisis is obvious. Even the opposition party is scrambling to get in line to vote in favor of the solution. No one wants to be left to blame when the world comes to an end - whether it be an immediate and inevitable assault by terrorists or the collapse of every financial institution in the country. Such is the price of deceit. The first time around we were told a lie and we, and the future generations, will pay at least a trillion dollars for it. Now they come from another direction asking for another trillion.
Should we believe them? Indeed as you make so clear, what happens if the Chinese government, the EU and the others who are financing this debt decide to collect the debt sooner than we are able to repay it?
A few years ago Gore Vidal said that one day the debt collectors would come for their money and the American Empire would be over.
Death always comes too soon. No matter what age, you'll always ask for another day. Not today, perhaps next month or next year, any time but now.
The corporate elite and the government they bought with our money are telling us today is the day unless we pay up. Why should we believe them? Simple. Just as before the question hangs over us - what if they are right? We won't know until the money has been committed, the election is over, and everyone at the top of the heap is once again raking in profits at historic levels. Whether those profits are here, in China, India, Europe or all over the world makes no difference to them.
Thanks again for yet another in a long, powerful string of essays that keep us on our toes with eyes wide open.
Peace,
Jake Berry
(Author of Brambu Drezi, Liminal Blue and other works of extraordinary insight.)
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.
The Blame Game – Part Two
THE TRILLION-DOLLAR GAMBIT:
CORPORATE SOCIALISM
By Jack Random
On September 19, 2008 the government announced what amounts to a trillion dollar bailout of the corporate empire. It was denounced in some quarters as corporate socialism.
Corporate socialism is an oxymoron. What kind of socialism nationalizes the debt of private enterprise without nationalizing the profits? What kind of socialism assumes liability without assuming assets?
Whatever this is it is not corporate socialism.
Overnight the national debt grew by a trillion dollars – from 9.6 to 10.6 trillion.
What happened?
The ultimate dream of the Adam Smith Free Marketeers, an unconstrained and deregulated marketplace, ran us straight over a cliff. Rather than sit and watch tragedy unfold as their philosophy mandates, they have chosen to enact the largest government intervention since Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.
This time, instead of infusing the economy with capital from the ground up, they are robbing the victims (all of us) to save the Robber Barons.
All the economists agree it is necessary and there is no alternative. I would feel more secure if all the economists saw this crisis approaching.
What happens next?
Having transferred a trillion dollars of debt from private corporations to the government, it is the government that is now at risk. The implications are profound.
Our exploding debt is being financed by foreign nations including China, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia and the European Union.
For the first time in our history we have handed the fate of the nation to another country and we all know who it is: China. The same China that steals our jobs, depresses our wages and displays such a disturbing lack of government regulation that Chinese industries have sought to increase profits by adding a toxic chemical to baby formula and lead to the paint on toys for tots.
We cannot trust China to do what we have failed to do (regulate our industries) but we have no choice. They own us. It is unlikely for now that China will bite the hand that feeds them but if the debt continues to mount, they will have no choice. Nothing in China’s history suggests that they would hold on to a drowning man.
The markets soared on the news of the great government bailout – as well they should. We have removed risk from the marketplace. It is a phenomenon that violates the essential core of a free market economy. Suspending the practice of selling short (betting on a stock to go down) is also against the tenets of a free market. Installing brakes on sell orders during a fall (after a 1987 crash) is also antithesis to the free market ideal.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (enacted after the Bush infected Enron scandal) sought to bring transparency and accountability to corporate accounting. Applied to the current crisis, it actually might have helped but it was also against the free market mandate, which is why it was never enforced by the Bush regime.
So it seems the free market is not so sacrosanct after all. Wall Street likes a fixed market: Heads we win, tails you lose. We are all regulators now. Government intervention will be employed with reckless abandon whenever the corporate giants come calling.
It is an outrage that the American people must pay a second time for this trillion-dollar train wreck. We paid once with our homes, our home values, our defaults and our debt. (Is this what the president meant when he asked us to go shopping after 9-11? Remember the president’s Ownership Society?) Now we will pay again and the bills keep coming.
It was a failed strategy of the corporate elite that caused this crisis and it was never intended to benefit anyone but their own. This is the nastiest part of this nightmare scenario: The guilty party has been richly rewarded for grossly irresponsible behavior.
It seems the only guilty party we can hold responsible is the “free-trade-free-market” politicians. They too have profited from this disaster. Contributions came with the package.
This means you: John McCain.
If you have ever witnessed your local politicians swooning over “deregulation” or trumpeting the virtues of “free trade,” it is time to give them what we can only dream: early retirement.
We don’t know where it ends but we do know who got us here.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). HE IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM
If only one - one - a number that even George W. Bush can count in his sleep - if only one of the so-called pundits, experts and economists spoke or wrote with the clarity and precision that you employ the people of this nation might actually wake from their media induced stupor and take action.
The problem is that I don't think any of the experts can see the situation as clearly as you do. Or perhaps they are being paid too well to see beyond the veil of phony finances that have been the pillar of fat that has supported this fictional economy since it was sold lock, stock and barrel during the first oil crisis.
There are some of us that remember it all too well because just as we were learning to drive and getting our first cars we found ourselves in long lines waiting to pay double or triple what we would have paid only a few months before. Nixon, for his crimes, was trying to dodge the law by manipulating the justice system. He was pulling remedies for the economy out of his back pocket that only Stalin or Castro would have dreamed of before him. Price freezes. A free-market, anti-communist was making executive decisions in all directions like a dictator. Congress was reeling. This man after all had just been re-elected by a huge margin. Not until the evidence was so obvious that it had become common currency did they act. Too little and too late.
By the time he left office Nixon had cut a deal with Chairman Mao that opened the door to economic prosperity - for China. About that same time the standard of living in terms of real dollars and wages, genuine wealth, peaked for the middle class. The rich continued to get richer and the poor could continue to make do with the scraps, but for the majority the grand promise of post-war prosperity hit a wall. It has never recovered.
There was the boom of the 80s in which the national debt sky rocketed to pay the price of rockets and bombs for a cold war that could only become hot at the expense of the end of the world.
The taxpayers had to pony up for that one during the first Bush administration. Bush himself paid with the loss of the election. The neocons never forgot that lesson. They determined to invent a new set of lies for the New World Order.
Enter The Project for a New American Century where the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz laid plans for the invasion of Iraq, the domination of the Middle East by force and the extension of Pax Americana (the term is used in one of the articles at their website).
Meanwhile the Clinton administration witnessed the longest economic expansion in the nation's history. Never mind that it was financed by an explosion of cheap, and often worthless, imports and the wildest level of speculation that Wall Street had ever seen. Suddenly it seemed the budget was balanced and everybody wanted to take credit.
Credit is the key word because that was how the whole thing was financed. Internet companies were making billions of dollars based on what their profits would be in the future. Every new retirement plan added a 401(k) option. We'd become a nation of gamblers. When the Treasury Department informed the President that many of the CEOs salaries were based on this kind of speculation and that it was in fact illegal, Clinton chose not to enforce the law. Why rain on his own parade? Especially at a time when he was being impeached by a Republican congress for things that had nothing to do with government, the economy or anything else that would have effected the future of any family in the U.S. outside his own.
By the time the towers fell and revealed the staggering amount of corruption that fueled companies like Enron and MCI, the dim-witted son of the former president had seized the oval office on the backs of a cabal of his father's friends including those Pax America fellows.
Eight years on and we hear an ironically familiar song from that administration. This time they are warning us of a complete economic meltdown. Suddenly, the crisis is obvious. Even the opposition party is scrambling to get in line to vote in favor of the solution. No one wants to be left to blame when the world comes to an end - whether it be an immediate and inevitable assault by terrorists or the collapse of every financial institution in the country. Such is the price of deceit. The first time around we were told a lie and we, and the future generations, will pay at least a trillion dollars for it. Now they come from another direction asking for another trillion.
Should we believe them? Indeed as you make so clear, what happens if the Chinese government, the EU and the others who are financing this debt decide to collect the debt sooner than we are able to repay it?
A few years ago Gore Vidal said that one day the debt collectors would come for their money and the American Empire would be over.
Death always comes too soon. No matter what age, you'll always ask for another day. Not today, perhaps next month or next year, any time but now.
The corporate elite and the government they bought with our money are telling us today is the day unless we pay up. Why should we believe them? Simple. Just as before the question hangs over us - what if they are right? We won't know until the money has been committed, the election is over, and everyone at the top of the heap is once again raking in profits at historic levels. Whether those profits are here, in China, India, Europe or all over the world makes no difference to them.
Thanks again for yet another in a long, powerful string of essays that keep us on our toes with eyes wide open.
Peace,
Jake Berry
(Author of Brambu Drezi, Liminal Blue and other works of extraordinary insight.)
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.
The Blame Game – Part Two
THE TRILLION-DOLLAR GAMBIT:
CORPORATE SOCIALISM
By Jack Random
On September 19, 2008 the government announced what amounts to a trillion dollar bailout of the corporate empire. It was denounced in some quarters as corporate socialism.
Corporate socialism is an oxymoron. What kind of socialism nationalizes the debt of private enterprise without nationalizing the profits? What kind of socialism assumes liability without assuming assets?
Whatever this is it is not corporate socialism.
Overnight the national debt grew by a trillion dollars – from 9.6 to 10.6 trillion.
What happened?
The ultimate dream of the Adam Smith Free Marketeers, an unconstrained and deregulated marketplace, ran us straight over a cliff. Rather than sit and watch tragedy unfold as their philosophy mandates, they have chosen to enact the largest government intervention since Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.
This time, instead of infusing the economy with capital from the ground up, they are robbing the victims (all of us) to save the Robber Barons.
All the economists agree it is necessary and there is no alternative. I would feel more secure if all the economists saw this crisis approaching.
What happens next?
Having transferred a trillion dollars of debt from private corporations to the government, it is the government that is now at risk. The implications are profound.
Our exploding debt is being financed by foreign nations including China, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia and the European Union.
For the first time in our history we have handed the fate of the nation to another country and we all know who it is: China. The same China that steals our jobs, depresses our wages and displays such a disturbing lack of government regulation that Chinese industries have sought to increase profits by adding a toxic chemical to baby formula and lead to the paint on toys for tots.
We cannot trust China to do what we have failed to do (regulate our industries) but we have no choice. They own us. It is unlikely for now that China will bite the hand that feeds them but if the debt continues to mount, they will have no choice. Nothing in China’s history suggests that they would hold on to a drowning man.
The markets soared on the news of the great government bailout – as well they should. We have removed risk from the marketplace. It is a phenomenon that violates the essential core of a free market economy. Suspending the practice of selling short (betting on a stock to go down) is also against the tenets of a free market. Installing brakes on sell orders during a fall (after a 1987 crash) is also antithesis to the free market ideal.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (enacted after the Bush infected Enron scandal) sought to bring transparency and accountability to corporate accounting. Applied to the current crisis, it actually might have helped but it was also against the free market mandate, which is why it was never enforced by the Bush regime.
So it seems the free market is not so sacrosanct after all. Wall Street likes a fixed market: Heads we win, tails you lose. We are all regulators now. Government intervention will be employed with reckless abandon whenever the corporate giants come calling.
It is an outrage that the American people must pay a second time for this trillion-dollar train wreck. We paid once with our homes, our home values, our defaults and our debt. (Is this what the president meant when he asked us to go shopping after 9-11? Remember the president’s Ownership Society?) Now we will pay again and the bills keep coming.
It was a failed strategy of the corporate elite that caused this crisis and it was never intended to benefit anyone but their own. This is the nastiest part of this nightmare scenario: The guilty party has been richly rewarded for grossly irresponsible behavior.
It seems the only guilty party we can hold responsible is the “free-trade-free-market” politicians. They too have profited from this disaster. Contributions came with the package.
This means you: John McCain.
If you have ever witnessed your local politicians swooning over “deregulation” or trumpeting the virtues of “free trade,” it is time to give them what we can only dream: early retirement.
We don’t know where it ends but we do know who got us here.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). HE IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Jake's Word: No Country!
The following lines are from the narration of the opening scenes of No Country For Old Men I think they speak powerfully as a metaphor for the current state of the union:
The crime you see now, it's hard to even
take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid
of it.
I always knew you had to be willing to
die to even do this job - not to be
glorious. But I don't want to push my
chips forward and go out and meet some-
thing I don't understand.
You can say it's my job to fight it but
I don't know what it is anymore.
...More than that, I don't want to know. A
man would have to put his soul at hazard.
... He would have to say, okay, I'll be
part of this world.
The question before us is, do we want to be a part of this world? A world where enormous sums are squandered, tossed around like plastic chips, cast to the wind, along with the savings, homes and hopes of hard working, honest people. A world where violence, manipulation and double-dealing are the means most often used to get the country the resources it needs to continue at it's present rate of consumption.
I don't want to be a part of a world like that. Not because I'm a righteous man, but because I'm as evil as any other man and as susceptible to greed and selfishness. At some point you have to say, "Enough. I won't be a part of this. This is not my country and these are not my people."
I will live here because I was born here, but I will not participate in a spectacle that is a bald-faced lie, a bold charade the opposite of what it is supposed to be. This is the last election. Democracy's last chance in these states for as far as the eye can see. Should the people shirk democracy I do not want to bear witness to the consequences. I have seen enough already. There must be more to do with my time, my mind, my soul than engage this malevolence day in and day out. I'll make it my business to attend to my business and may God damn the poor m*therf*cker that stands in my way. That is the American way, right?
Election Day. See you there. Bring a torch.
Jake Berry (author of Brambu Drezi and Liminal Blue)
The crime you see now, it's hard to even
take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid
of it.
I always knew you had to be willing to
die to even do this job - not to be
glorious. But I don't want to push my
chips forward and go out and meet some-
thing I don't understand.
You can say it's my job to fight it but
I don't know what it is anymore.
...More than that, I don't want to know. A
man would have to put his soul at hazard.
... He would have to say, okay, I'll be
part of this world.
The question before us is, do we want to be a part of this world? A world where enormous sums are squandered, tossed around like plastic chips, cast to the wind, along with the savings, homes and hopes of hard working, honest people. A world where violence, manipulation and double-dealing are the means most often used to get the country the resources it needs to continue at it's present rate of consumption.
I don't want to be a part of a world like that. Not because I'm a righteous man, but because I'm as evil as any other man and as susceptible to greed and selfishness. At some point you have to say, "Enough. I won't be a part of this. This is not my country and these are not my people."
I will live here because I was born here, but I will not participate in a spectacle that is a bald-faced lie, a bold charade the opposite of what it is supposed to be. This is the last election. Democracy's last chance in these states for as far as the eye can see. Should the people shirk democracy I do not want to bear witness to the consequences. I have seen enough already. There must be more to do with my time, my mind, my soul than engage this malevolence day in and day out. I'll make it my business to attend to my business and may God damn the poor m*therf*cker that stands in my way. That is the American way, right?
Election Day. See you there. Bring a torch.
Jake Berry (author of Brambu Drezi and Liminal Blue)
Jake's Word: How much does it take?
Today two more banks crash and burn. How much does it take?
Obama is no savior, you don't get saviors out of elections. I'm not sure you get them at all. But his election at the very least would signify to the world that the voters in the U.S. have not gone completely insane. Polls outside the U.S. show a vast majority worldwide in favor of Obama, in favor of anything but a continuation of the last eight years, or worse. McCain's election would be yet another message to the rest of the world that the majority of registered voters in the U.S. are unconcerned about them. Not a good message to send when so few are consuming so much of the world's resources while many starve or die from disease or war that are a direct result of this nation's selfishness. How's that for family values?
I'm truly concerned that the only alternative come next year may be the outright rejection of all political institutions. The result may be a global revolt against all governments. The big problem with that is that revolutions are invariably followed by a reign of terror, tyrants, dictators and political homicide in the thousands or millions.
It's either that or a new dark age. One authority over all.
It's sad to think that a handful of people who normally pay little or no attention to politics will make a decision that seems casual to them, but will have such far reaching consequences.
In Alabama and California the race is over. It's like waiting to see the end. Or as Wayne says in his song "Old Pompey," "which day does Judgement Day fall on this year."
Jake Berry (author of Brambu Drezi and Liminal Blue)
Obama is no savior, you don't get saviors out of elections. I'm not sure you get them at all. But his election at the very least would signify to the world that the voters in the U.S. have not gone completely insane. Polls outside the U.S. show a vast majority worldwide in favor of Obama, in favor of anything but a continuation of the last eight years, or worse. McCain's election would be yet another message to the rest of the world that the majority of registered voters in the U.S. are unconcerned about them. Not a good message to send when so few are consuming so much of the world's resources while many starve or die from disease or war that are a direct result of this nation's selfishness. How's that for family values?
I'm truly concerned that the only alternative come next year may be the outright rejection of all political institutions. The result may be a global revolt against all governments. The big problem with that is that revolutions are invariably followed by a reign of terror, tyrants, dictators and political homicide in the thousands or millions.
It's either that or a new dark age. One authority over all.
It's sad to think that a handful of people who normally pay little or no attention to politics will make a decision that seems casual to them, but will have such far reaching consequences.
In Alabama and California the race is over. It's like waiting to see the end. Or as Wayne says in his song "Old Pompey," "which day does Judgement Day fall on this year."
Jake Berry (author of Brambu Drezi and Liminal Blue)
Monday, September 15, 2008
Jake's Word re: McCain 4 Change!
(Response to a Jazzman Chronicle: Notes from The Inner Circle - reprinted below.)
There is an old maxim among conservatives - kill the beast. The idea being, as Reagan said in his first inaugural address, that government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem. Most Americans did, and still do, agree with that. But the statement does not go nearly far enough. It is in fact a ruse. Most of those that heard Reagan utter those words believed him to be saying that he would lower taxes and remove the government's meddling in their lives - which were two of the campaign promises he had made. But that is only part of the story and therein lies the ruse. If you deprive the government of its powers and excesses you must also delete the other powers in the land. Namely, large corporations and other large concentrations of wealth. If you fail to do this then the people are left with no recourse at all, no means by which to express the redress of grievances that the Constitution guarantees. That is the open secret. Dismantle government, but leave the other powers in tact to act without restraint – the neoconservative doctrine.
Indeed, they are "closer now than ever to realizing [their] agenda." Even the military is being sold. As much as half of the foreign military presence in Iraq is in the hands of private companies. From the meals soldiers are being served to "security" forces like Blackwater, it's paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, but responsible to private companies and stockholders.
On the other hand when the banks that hold almost two-thirds of the mortgages in the country squander their resources through unscrupulous business practices and very nearly collapse, who saves them? Why, the government of course. This means that anyone who holds a mortgage with Fanny Mae or Freddy Mac faces the prospect of losing their home to the government should they have to default on loans that were tricky to navigate from the start and only became more so as interest rates rose and the economy continued to falter. Does a government with a lien on two-thirds of the mortgages in the U.S. sound like less government? Well, it's hard to say at a time when there is so little distinction between government and private corporations. Who owns what and who owes what to who and what happens if the payments can't be made?
The plot thickens. Take a look at the 401k you've been depositing money in since the heady 1990s. Your returns haven't been returns at all over the past seven years, they've been liabilities. You keep sending a portion of your hard earned dollars to a broad range of corporations that are taking your money and giving you less than nothing in return. Less than nothing. Take a look at the companies guilty of unscrupulous business and then take a look at the companies you are financing. You'll see many of the same names in both places. Let me make this as clear as mud. You send your money to companies who then steal the homes of their customers through subprime loans (to use the most reported issue as an an example). When the customers, and you may be one of them, are unable to pay, the companies grab the properties. But when enough homes go into foreclosure the company collapses and the government using taxpayers dollars picks up the tab. Do you see what is happening? We are paying thieves to rob us blind. Money keeps going out of your pocket into the pockets of people who are far richer than you. And this happens precisely because those people are unethical, even criminal.
Is there a solution? Can the tide be turned? What happens if you drop your 401k and therefore stop sending your hard earned dollars to these large corporations? The stocks will slip, the economy will continue to slide. What happens if you stop buying gasoline? The oil companies lose profit and begin to crumble. Will they adapt and offer a form of sustainable fuel? They say they would be unable to do that in the short term (meaning between now and 2020).
Did you believe in the American dream, the one they taught us about in school? Work hard, apply yourself and you will succeed. Make honesty, loyalty and fidelity your creed and you will be rewarded. How has that worked out for us? Look around. Look at the for sale signs in front of homes. Look at how much you are paying for health insurance compared to the service you are receiving. The money keeps flowing up, up, up.
Welcome to America. A brand name for a global corporation whose substance is as thin as the phony money and sub rosa contracts it is printed on. This is the world we all invested in. We paid to create these very conditions and we are still paying. Every time we buy anything, pay our mortgage, fill up our tanks we are investing in a con game that is raping the world, devouring resources faster than they can be produced, and making a small handful of people so powerful that not even they know the limits of that power.
Welcome to America. Welcome to twilight. It's difficult to discern one thing from another. Something is happening here, but we don't know what it is.
Is it too late already? I don't know. But two months into next year we'll be living with a new executive in charge of brand America and we'll find out if this is the twilight before dawn or descent into a long cold night.
Perhaps 2000 was the last election – the point at which representative government slipped away from us forever. Perhaps 2008 is the last election. One day soon we will know. I for one would like to be able to look back and say that at least I cried out against the night.
Jake Berry (Author of Brambu Drezi and Liminal Blue.)
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.
NOTES FROM THE INNER CIRCLE:
McCAIN-PALIN 2008!
By Jack Random
On the occasion of a successful Republican National Convention, it is an appropriate time to take stock of our progress as Americans dedicated to real and systemic change.
It is with cautious optimism that I declare: We are closer now than we ever have been to realizing the objectives for which we have worked so hard over the course of the last fifteen years.
When we set out on this venture, few could have imagined success would come so soon and with so little resistance. Indeed, we could not have anticipated the ease with which we have moved our hidden agenda along on its path to fruition.
After the utterly predictable failure of President Bill Clinton’s first one hundred days (universal health care and gays in the military – who were they kidding?), we sent in Dick Morris to turn the liberal Democrat around. To our astonishment, we found a chief executive not only willing but eager to sell out. Clinton’s sudden embrace of all things conservative was so convincing we did not have to worry about a second term. We made him a millionaire overnight and the president cherished his new role as a darling of the corporate elite.
Clinton became the perfect setup man on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts but we still needed a break to prevent Al Gore with his progressive economic and environmental agenda from delivering a setback (how great we will never know) in 2000. Monica Gate, lame politics (don’t campaign in Tennessee and don’t send Bill to Arkansas), Joe Lieberman (the fox in the hen house), a butterfly ballot, Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris and Warren Christopher in Florida sealed the deal.
The United States Supreme Court handed us our greatest victory. We knew we could count on George to steer the ship of state straight into the rocks: Corporate deregulation, unprecedented tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, runaway Free Trade, pimping the principle of home ownership, dismantling federal agencies: What could go wrong?
We knew our president would never change course no matter how disastrous his policies would prove. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
We had the vaunted Neocons in place (a brain trust so radical and out of touch that even Reagan would have nothing to do with them) and a compliant corporate media to paint them as the Knights of the Last Order – wise and infallible beyond reason.
Still, we needed a trigger – a catastrophic event that would ignite a chain of endless war to swallow our resources and bury us in insurmountable debt. Along came September 11, 2001.
Let the world know we were not the moving force behind that tragedy nor do we know who was yet it cannot be denied that it was the accelerator that pushed our mission into hyper drive. Thanks to the 9-11 Commission that like the Warren Commission in another time and space, we may never be able to determine the full extent of the crime or those complicit in its perpetration. What we know we can only surmise from a cost-benefit analysis: Like the old gumshoe detective said: Follow the money. It is however neither in our interest nor in the interest of our government to uncover the sordid truth.
It is ironic that our detractors so often accuse us of being godless and without faith. If there is a divinity overseeing human events, it is clearly on our side.
The feckless John Kerry was never truly a threat in 2004. With the Rove-Bush voter fraud and disenfranchisement machine fully operational, only a landslide would have put the result in question. The Massachusetts senator did everything he could to throw the election to his opponent. Was he working for us? We’ll never tell!
Of course, not everything has gone as we planned. We did not intend for the Democrats to gain control of Congress in the midterm elections. With a strong mandate to end the war and redirect our economic policies, we faced a potential threat. However, once Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that impeachment was off the table we realized that the Democrats would fall into line. They would settle for symbolic opposition and make an appeal for an even larger majority in the next election.
As long as we can keep forty-one members of the United States Senate in Republican hands (with Lieberman as a buffer), Congress will remain stymied and will ultimately go along with whatever the White House wants.
Everything now depends on the presidential race.
Six months ago none would have speculated that a Republican would stand the slightest chance of gaining four more years of the same policies that have brought the new American empire to the very brink of economic and military collapse.
But here we are: Less than two months before election day, the old warrior (whom rumor has it once displayed alarming bouts of independence) has pulled out every card in the Karl Rove deck and stands one tantalizing step away from realizing the ultimate ambition. Even better, if the old warrior should fall midterm, the young lady from Alaska (who knows less about economics and foreign policy than her mentor has forgotten) would rise to the highest power in all the land.
Either way, we can rest assured that all current trends will continue unabated. There will be wars and more wars. Military expenditures will double and quadruple even as the national infrastructure continues to crumble. Jobs will be exported at an accelerated rate, wages will continue to decline, prices will rise and home foreclosures will reach epidemic proportions.
As bank after bank fails and people line up on the streets for shelter and food, panic will take hold. Common working people with families to feed and care for will be living in public parks and police will bang heads. Soldiers will abandon their posts and angry mobs will surround the institutions of government.
Congress will finally act but it will be too late: A worldwide depression, global economic collapse, institutional failure and mass chaos.
The ultimate and final victory, that eternal blank slate that allows the world to begin again:
One hundred years of anarchy.
Dream it and make it so!
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.
There is an old maxim among conservatives - kill the beast. The idea being, as Reagan said in his first inaugural address, that government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem. Most Americans did, and still do, agree with that. But the statement does not go nearly far enough. It is in fact a ruse. Most of those that heard Reagan utter those words believed him to be saying that he would lower taxes and remove the government's meddling in their lives - which were two of the campaign promises he had made. But that is only part of the story and therein lies the ruse. If you deprive the government of its powers and excesses you must also delete the other powers in the land. Namely, large corporations and other large concentrations of wealth. If you fail to do this then the people are left with no recourse at all, no means by which to express the redress of grievances that the Constitution guarantees. That is the open secret. Dismantle government, but leave the other powers in tact to act without restraint – the neoconservative doctrine.
Indeed, they are "closer now than ever to realizing [their] agenda." Even the military is being sold. As much as half of the foreign military presence in Iraq is in the hands of private companies. From the meals soldiers are being served to "security" forces like Blackwater, it's paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, but responsible to private companies and stockholders.
On the other hand when the banks that hold almost two-thirds of the mortgages in the country squander their resources through unscrupulous business practices and very nearly collapse, who saves them? Why, the government of course. This means that anyone who holds a mortgage with Fanny Mae or Freddy Mac faces the prospect of losing their home to the government should they have to default on loans that were tricky to navigate from the start and only became more so as interest rates rose and the economy continued to falter. Does a government with a lien on two-thirds of the mortgages in the U.S. sound like less government? Well, it's hard to say at a time when there is so little distinction between government and private corporations. Who owns what and who owes what to who and what happens if the payments can't be made?
The plot thickens. Take a look at the 401k you've been depositing money in since the heady 1990s. Your returns haven't been returns at all over the past seven years, they've been liabilities. You keep sending a portion of your hard earned dollars to a broad range of corporations that are taking your money and giving you less than nothing in return. Less than nothing. Take a look at the companies guilty of unscrupulous business and then take a look at the companies you are financing. You'll see many of the same names in both places. Let me make this as clear as mud. You send your money to companies who then steal the homes of their customers through subprime loans (to use the most reported issue as an an example). When the customers, and you may be one of them, are unable to pay, the companies grab the properties. But when enough homes go into foreclosure the company collapses and the government using taxpayers dollars picks up the tab. Do you see what is happening? We are paying thieves to rob us blind. Money keeps going out of your pocket into the pockets of people who are far richer than you. And this happens precisely because those people are unethical, even criminal.
Is there a solution? Can the tide be turned? What happens if you drop your 401k and therefore stop sending your hard earned dollars to these large corporations? The stocks will slip, the economy will continue to slide. What happens if you stop buying gasoline? The oil companies lose profit and begin to crumble. Will they adapt and offer a form of sustainable fuel? They say they would be unable to do that in the short term (meaning between now and 2020).
Did you believe in the American dream, the one they taught us about in school? Work hard, apply yourself and you will succeed. Make honesty, loyalty and fidelity your creed and you will be rewarded. How has that worked out for us? Look around. Look at the for sale signs in front of homes. Look at how much you are paying for health insurance compared to the service you are receiving. The money keeps flowing up, up, up.
Welcome to America. A brand name for a global corporation whose substance is as thin as the phony money and sub rosa contracts it is printed on. This is the world we all invested in. We paid to create these very conditions and we are still paying. Every time we buy anything, pay our mortgage, fill up our tanks we are investing in a con game that is raping the world, devouring resources faster than they can be produced, and making a small handful of people so powerful that not even they know the limits of that power.
Welcome to America. Welcome to twilight. It's difficult to discern one thing from another. Something is happening here, but we don't know what it is.
Is it too late already? I don't know. But two months into next year we'll be living with a new executive in charge of brand America and we'll find out if this is the twilight before dawn or descent into a long cold night.
Perhaps 2000 was the last election – the point at which representative government slipped away from us forever. Perhaps 2008 is the last election. One day soon we will know. I for one would like to be able to look back and say that at least I cried out against the night.
Jake Berry (Author of Brambu Drezi and Liminal Blue.)
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.
NOTES FROM THE INNER CIRCLE:
McCAIN-PALIN 2008!
By Jack Random
On the occasion of a successful Republican National Convention, it is an appropriate time to take stock of our progress as Americans dedicated to real and systemic change.
It is with cautious optimism that I declare: We are closer now than we ever have been to realizing the objectives for which we have worked so hard over the course of the last fifteen years.
When we set out on this venture, few could have imagined success would come so soon and with so little resistance. Indeed, we could not have anticipated the ease with which we have moved our hidden agenda along on its path to fruition.
After the utterly predictable failure of President Bill Clinton’s first one hundred days (universal health care and gays in the military – who were they kidding?), we sent in Dick Morris to turn the liberal Democrat around. To our astonishment, we found a chief executive not only willing but eager to sell out. Clinton’s sudden embrace of all things conservative was so convincing we did not have to worry about a second term. We made him a millionaire overnight and the president cherished his new role as a darling of the corporate elite.
Clinton became the perfect setup man on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts but we still needed a break to prevent Al Gore with his progressive economic and environmental agenda from delivering a setback (how great we will never know) in 2000. Monica Gate, lame politics (don’t campaign in Tennessee and don’t send Bill to Arkansas), Joe Lieberman (the fox in the hen house), a butterfly ballot, Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris and Warren Christopher in Florida sealed the deal.
The United States Supreme Court handed us our greatest victory. We knew we could count on George to steer the ship of state straight into the rocks: Corporate deregulation, unprecedented tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, runaway Free Trade, pimping the principle of home ownership, dismantling federal agencies: What could go wrong?
We knew our president would never change course no matter how disastrous his policies would prove. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
We had the vaunted Neocons in place (a brain trust so radical and out of touch that even Reagan would have nothing to do with them) and a compliant corporate media to paint them as the Knights of the Last Order – wise and infallible beyond reason.
Still, we needed a trigger – a catastrophic event that would ignite a chain of endless war to swallow our resources and bury us in insurmountable debt. Along came September 11, 2001.
Let the world know we were not the moving force behind that tragedy nor do we know who was yet it cannot be denied that it was the accelerator that pushed our mission into hyper drive. Thanks to the 9-11 Commission that like the Warren Commission in another time and space, we may never be able to determine the full extent of the crime or those complicit in its perpetration. What we know we can only surmise from a cost-benefit analysis: Like the old gumshoe detective said: Follow the money. It is however neither in our interest nor in the interest of our government to uncover the sordid truth.
It is ironic that our detractors so often accuse us of being godless and without faith. If there is a divinity overseeing human events, it is clearly on our side.
The feckless John Kerry was never truly a threat in 2004. With the Rove-Bush voter fraud and disenfranchisement machine fully operational, only a landslide would have put the result in question. The Massachusetts senator did everything he could to throw the election to his opponent. Was he working for us? We’ll never tell!
Of course, not everything has gone as we planned. We did not intend for the Democrats to gain control of Congress in the midterm elections. With a strong mandate to end the war and redirect our economic policies, we faced a potential threat. However, once Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that impeachment was off the table we realized that the Democrats would fall into line. They would settle for symbolic opposition and make an appeal for an even larger majority in the next election.
As long as we can keep forty-one members of the United States Senate in Republican hands (with Lieberman as a buffer), Congress will remain stymied and will ultimately go along with whatever the White House wants.
Everything now depends on the presidential race.
Six months ago none would have speculated that a Republican would stand the slightest chance of gaining four more years of the same policies that have brought the new American empire to the very brink of economic and military collapse.
But here we are: Less than two months before election day, the old warrior (whom rumor has it once displayed alarming bouts of independence) has pulled out every card in the Karl Rove deck and stands one tantalizing step away from realizing the ultimate ambition. Even better, if the old warrior should fall midterm, the young lady from Alaska (who knows less about economics and foreign policy than her mentor has forgotten) would rise to the highest power in all the land.
Either way, we can rest assured that all current trends will continue unabated. There will be wars and more wars. Military expenditures will double and quadruple even as the national infrastructure continues to crumble. Jobs will be exported at an accelerated rate, wages will continue to decline, prices will rise and home foreclosures will reach epidemic proportions.
As bank after bank fails and people line up on the streets for shelter and food, panic will take hold. Common working people with families to feed and care for will be living in public parks and police will bang heads. Soldiers will abandon their posts and angry mobs will surround the institutions of government.
Congress will finally act but it will be too late: A worldwide depression, global economic collapse, institutional failure and mass chaos.
The ultimate and final victory, that eternal blank slate that allows the world to begin again:
One hundred years of anarchy.
Dream it and make it so!
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.
Sunday, September 07, 2008
RE: McCain: Where's the Beef?
[Jake Berry's response to "The Search for Policy in McCain's Appeal" by Jack Random. Reprinted Below.]
Essay after essay you keep nailing it! The neo-cons are completely transparent in their quest for permanent rule. If they can slip McCain in and he can last for a few years, maybe a full term or more then electing the vapid beauty queen will be easy. The are working for an additional 12-16 years in control of the executive and therefore judicial branches. If they can manage that and keep the people divided among themselves enough to keep the legislative in check or completely submissive they will be able to complete their agenda: the dismantling of the government in favor of a figurehead government that enacts the will of the ruling class. Welcome to the new dark ages.
Regardless of Obama's politics, he is not McCain. This means he is not the chosen vehicle of the powers that be. The skinny kid with the funny name is all that stands between the U.S. and the ascent of a new type of American fascism. There has been a tendency toward this kind of oligarchy since the beginning (the anti-sedition laws under Adams and Wilson, for example). We are perilously close to the end of daylight. The only thing that would awaken the populace in large enough numbers should this election go to McCain would be a great depression.
Only a few thousand people in two or three states will likely make that decision for us. How can anyone remain undecided at this point? It makes you wonder whether or not the majority really wants representative government. Perhaps they prefer a strong central authority accompanied by HDTV and all the amusements they can consume.
I hope that this is cynicism. I fear that it is realism.
Jake Berry (jakebridget@bellsouth.net)
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.
THE SEARCH FOR POLICY IN McCAIN’S APPEAL:
NOT A PENNY’S WORTH OF DIFFERENCE
By Jack Random
Stand up for the wealthy and the ruling elite!
Stand up and fight for lower corporate tax rates!
Stand up for the policies that have placed the nation at the precipice of disaster!
Stand up and fight for oil and coal!
Stand up for labor exploitation!
Stand and fight for the right to work at lower wages!
Stand up for nuclear waste!
Stand up for privatization of Medicare and Social Security!
Stand up and fight to put my finger on the trigger of nuclear extinction!
Listening to John McCain at the Republican National Convention, you would have thought he was opposing eight years of catastrophic Democratic rule. His call to arms should be answered in kind:
Where is the beef?
John McCain says he is his own man. He says he marches to his own beat. He says he stands up to corporate interests. He says he is a different kind of Republican.
He says a lot of things that the Bush-Rove-McCain team believes will win him votes but if we look at his policies, there’s not a dime, not a nickel, not a thin copper penny’s worth of difference between John McCain and George W. Bush.
Those who have been searching McCain’s slogans for real policy reform have consistently come up empty. After his much ballyhooed speech, the search goes on.
TAX POLICY: RENEW BUSH CUTS, CUT CORPORATE TAX RATE.
McCain’s advocacy of making the most inequitable tax reform in history permanent – the Bush tax cuts that have contributed so much to our current economic crisis – is at once hypocritical (he opposed them as recently as three years ago) and an obvious pander to the corporate elite. His proposal to cut the corporate tax rate by ten percent seems reasonable enough until you look under the hood.
As McCain so often pontificates, America has the second highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. What he does not say is that our internationally based corporations rarely if ever pay them.
“You may have heard: U.S. corporations face one of the highest income tax rates in the world…so that what comes through is the assertion that corporations pay too much in taxes. This is simply untrue if your basis for comparison is the developed world. The truth is that while the 35% corporate income tax rate is high indeed, the creativity and global reach of U.S. corporations make them among the most lightly levied. Between 2000 and 2005, U.S. corporate taxes amounted to 2.2% of the GDP. The average for the 30 mostly rich member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development was 3.4%.”
(Igor Greenwald, “The Invisible Hand: High Corporate Tax Rate Is Misleading.” Smart Money, January 25, 2008.)
So the reform in McCain’s tax cut policy is nothing more than a slight of hand – the same old Bush-Rove tactic of “Let’s not and say we did.” Corporations are not clamoring for lower tax rates because they don’t pay them. Still, it’s nice for them to know McCain cares.
ENERGY POLICY: OIL DRILLING, NUKES, COAL.
As an afterthought to McCain’s energy policies, he promises to increase spending on solar and wind power. This is one of the Bush-Rove favored tactics. It is the nature of a growing nation combined with the inflationary trend of currency that if we do nothing at all spending will grow. This is why Bush can claim to have spent more money on [fill in the blank] than any president in history.
The truth is: Like Bush, McCain will give tax incentives for renewable energy research to oil companies who will spend a large chunk of it on television commercials.
The cry of “Drill Now!” at the RNC is nothing more than a propaganda campaign. Unless we have found a way to economically steal Canadian and Russian oil reserves from the North Slope of Alaska (we have not) there is not an expert in the world who will claim that drilling will have any significant impact on energy dependence or the cost of gas.
The idea of safe nuclear energy is a myth that has tragically been embraced by both major parties and they ought to know better. Watch the unfolding events in France as they struggle with dying rivers, toxic land and poisoned drinking water. The million-year problem of nuclear waste will not go away. How long will it be acceptable to bury our poisons in other people’s back yards before we accept that nuclear energy is not the answer?
The same holds for the myth of “clean” coal. To the extent that sequestration is possible, it would be so expensive that hamsters generating power on a spinning wheel would be more viable.
The Bush-McCain-Rove people know these realities but they do not care. When push comes to shove, they will scrap the adjective and give us all the dirty coal our lungs can suffer.
Pollution? Climate change? Let’s not and say we did.
EDUCATION REFORM: CHOICE = PRIVATIZATION.
Of all the lies the Bush-Rove-McCain team promotes, this may be the most insidious. Under the draconian measures of No Child Left Behind, public schools are beginning to resemble assembly lines. Test scores are up but inspiration, creativity and adaptability are lost.
It is a losing game. The idea is and always has been to transfer public funds to private schools where the righteous can teach young minds the virtues of Republican values. Why is it no one ever asks why private schools are not subjected to the same rigorous testing standards as the public schools? Private schools bolster their results the same way Bush did in Texas: By removing students who hurt the bottom line.
As for the idea that education is the answer to our economic troubles, that is a down and dirty lie. Tell us what jobs we can prepare for that will not be subject to the exportation of labor under the mandates of global free trade?
TRADE POLICY: FREE TRADE.
Recently, Dell Computers announced they were closing down their manufacturing centers, laying off thousands of workers, with the intent of contracting out their manufacturing operation. Translation: They will export those jobs to other countries where workers have little or no rights and are paid slave wages. The stock went up on a down day.
That is free trade in a nutshell: It ought to be called a corporate free ride. The global economy has been used to institutionalize labor exploitation in underdeveloped nations. The cost is born by workers in developed nations in the form of lower wages, loss of labor standards and cutting unions out of the process.
Where does John McCain stand on trade and labor rights? Somewhere to the right of J.P. Morgan. He has never voted against a Free Trade agreement.
“I'm the biggest free marketer and free trader that you will ever see.” (Republican Presidential Debate, December 12, 2007.)
McCain has vehemently embraced “right to work” laws that are nothing but a scheme to outlaw union organization in the workplace. Even in the hard times we are now facing, he voted against raising minimum wage and against extending unemployment benefits.
HEALTH CARE: PRIVATIZATION.
When you peel back the rhetoric and strip away the phony compassion, the Bush-McCain-Rove policies always come down to privatization. If they had their way, they would privatize Social Security, education and Medicare. McCain supported Bush’s failed initiative to begin a privatization plan for Social Security. He voted to cut Medicare funding and opposed reauthorization and funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
His proposal for health care reform would reclassify health care premiums as taxable income. Is that really the kind of reform America wants? Reminiscent of the gas tax holiday, he would hand out tokens in the form of tax breaks while giving a free hand to private insurance companies.
Anyone who believes that the party of rugged individualism, the party that is fundamentally opposed to social services, the party that still believes the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a communist conspiracy, will reform Medicare to the benefit of the people is delusional.
If it were in their power, they would scrap all domestic programs and let the chips fall.
BALANCING THE BUDGET: EARMARKS.
Another of the tricks exploited by the McCain-Bush-Rove machine is that they will speak of small matters in a manner that makes them seem important. McCain has claimed that he could save $100 billion overnight by eliminating the add-on expenditures known as “earmarks.” When pressed, the McCain campaign had to admit they invented the figure.
(Michael Dobbs, The Fact Checker: “McCain’s Fantasy War on Earmarks,” Washington Post, 5/23/08).
If McCain is serious about eliminating this congressional tradition – one that is often used in legislative negotiations – then he is dreaming. If not, he is posturing.
When you examine McCain’s reputation as a Maverick, it is 90% fluff. He postures a lot but when it comes down to action, he generally goes along for the ride.
The most moving part of McCain’s convention speech was the telling of his experience as a Prisoner of War in Vietnam. It was moving to hear a proud man admit that the enemy pushed him until he broke. It is sadder still when you realize that the party he represents in this race for the White House has done the same: They pushed him until he broke. No longer will he speak out for compromise on immigration policy or tolerance for gays and lesbians. No longer will he oppose a tax cut policy favoring the elite at a time of war. No longer will he stand strong against torture and for the Geneva Conventions. The new John McCain knows his limitations and plays his part.
What McCain sacrificed to become his party’s nominee for president was whatever remained of his integrity and individuality.
The Maverick, if he ever truly existed, is long dead. What remains is the typical Bush-Rove politician.
Why mess with a winning formula?
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.
Essay after essay you keep nailing it! The neo-cons are completely transparent in their quest for permanent rule. If they can slip McCain in and he can last for a few years, maybe a full term or more then electing the vapid beauty queen will be easy. The are working for an additional 12-16 years in control of the executive and therefore judicial branches. If they can manage that and keep the people divided among themselves enough to keep the legislative in check or completely submissive they will be able to complete their agenda: the dismantling of the government in favor of a figurehead government that enacts the will of the ruling class. Welcome to the new dark ages.
Regardless of Obama's politics, he is not McCain. This means he is not the chosen vehicle of the powers that be. The skinny kid with the funny name is all that stands between the U.S. and the ascent of a new type of American fascism. There has been a tendency toward this kind of oligarchy since the beginning (the anti-sedition laws under Adams and Wilson, for example). We are perilously close to the end of daylight. The only thing that would awaken the populace in large enough numbers should this election go to McCain would be a great depression.
Only a few thousand people in two or three states will likely make that decision for us. How can anyone remain undecided at this point? It makes you wonder whether or not the majority really wants representative government. Perhaps they prefer a strong central authority accompanied by HDTV and all the amusements they can consume.
I hope that this is cynicism. I fear that it is realism.
Jake Berry (jakebridget@bellsouth.net)
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.
THE SEARCH FOR POLICY IN McCAIN’S APPEAL:
NOT A PENNY’S WORTH OF DIFFERENCE
By Jack Random
Stand up for the wealthy and the ruling elite!
Stand up and fight for lower corporate tax rates!
Stand up for the policies that have placed the nation at the precipice of disaster!
Stand up and fight for oil and coal!
Stand up for labor exploitation!
Stand and fight for the right to work at lower wages!
Stand up for nuclear waste!
Stand up for privatization of Medicare and Social Security!
Stand up and fight to put my finger on the trigger of nuclear extinction!
Listening to John McCain at the Republican National Convention, you would have thought he was opposing eight years of catastrophic Democratic rule. His call to arms should be answered in kind:
Where is the beef?
John McCain says he is his own man. He says he marches to his own beat. He says he stands up to corporate interests. He says he is a different kind of Republican.
He says a lot of things that the Bush-Rove-McCain team believes will win him votes but if we look at his policies, there’s not a dime, not a nickel, not a thin copper penny’s worth of difference between John McCain and George W. Bush.
Those who have been searching McCain’s slogans for real policy reform have consistently come up empty. After his much ballyhooed speech, the search goes on.
TAX POLICY: RENEW BUSH CUTS, CUT CORPORATE TAX RATE.
McCain’s advocacy of making the most inequitable tax reform in history permanent – the Bush tax cuts that have contributed so much to our current economic crisis – is at once hypocritical (he opposed them as recently as three years ago) and an obvious pander to the corporate elite. His proposal to cut the corporate tax rate by ten percent seems reasonable enough until you look under the hood.
As McCain so often pontificates, America has the second highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. What he does not say is that our internationally based corporations rarely if ever pay them.
“You may have heard: U.S. corporations face one of the highest income tax rates in the world…so that what comes through is the assertion that corporations pay too much in taxes. This is simply untrue if your basis for comparison is the developed world. The truth is that while the 35% corporate income tax rate is high indeed, the creativity and global reach of U.S. corporations make them among the most lightly levied. Between 2000 and 2005, U.S. corporate taxes amounted to 2.2% of the GDP. The average for the 30 mostly rich member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development was 3.4%.”
(Igor Greenwald, “The Invisible Hand: High Corporate Tax Rate Is Misleading.” Smart Money, January 25, 2008.)
So the reform in McCain’s tax cut policy is nothing more than a slight of hand – the same old Bush-Rove tactic of “Let’s not and say we did.” Corporations are not clamoring for lower tax rates because they don’t pay them. Still, it’s nice for them to know McCain cares.
ENERGY POLICY: OIL DRILLING, NUKES, COAL.
As an afterthought to McCain’s energy policies, he promises to increase spending on solar and wind power. This is one of the Bush-Rove favored tactics. It is the nature of a growing nation combined with the inflationary trend of currency that if we do nothing at all spending will grow. This is why Bush can claim to have spent more money on [fill in the blank] than any president in history.
The truth is: Like Bush, McCain will give tax incentives for renewable energy research to oil companies who will spend a large chunk of it on television commercials.
The cry of “Drill Now!” at the RNC is nothing more than a propaganda campaign. Unless we have found a way to economically steal Canadian and Russian oil reserves from the North Slope of Alaska (we have not) there is not an expert in the world who will claim that drilling will have any significant impact on energy dependence or the cost of gas.
The idea of safe nuclear energy is a myth that has tragically been embraced by both major parties and they ought to know better. Watch the unfolding events in France as they struggle with dying rivers, toxic land and poisoned drinking water. The million-year problem of nuclear waste will not go away. How long will it be acceptable to bury our poisons in other people’s back yards before we accept that nuclear energy is not the answer?
The same holds for the myth of “clean” coal. To the extent that sequestration is possible, it would be so expensive that hamsters generating power on a spinning wheel would be more viable.
The Bush-McCain-Rove people know these realities but they do not care. When push comes to shove, they will scrap the adjective and give us all the dirty coal our lungs can suffer.
Pollution? Climate change? Let’s not and say we did.
EDUCATION REFORM: CHOICE = PRIVATIZATION.
Of all the lies the Bush-Rove-McCain team promotes, this may be the most insidious. Under the draconian measures of No Child Left Behind, public schools are beginning to resemble assembly lines. Test scores are up but inspiration, creativity and adaptability are lost.
It is a losing game. The idea is and always has been to transfer public funds to private schools where the righteous can teach young minds the virtues of Republican values. Why is it no one ever asks why private schools are not subjected to the same rigorous testing standards as the public schools? Private schools bolster their results the same way Bush did in Texas: By removing students who hurt the bottom line.
As for the idea that education is the answer to our economic troubles, that is a down and dirty lie. Tell us what jobs we can prepare for that will not be subject to the exportation of labor under the mandates of global free trade?
TRADE POLICY: FREE TRADE.
Recently, Dell Computers announced they were closing down their manufacturing centers, laying off thousands of workers, with the intent of contracting out their manufacturing operation. Translation: They will export those jobs to other countries where workers have little or no rights and are paid slave wages. The stock went up on a down day.
That is free trade in a nutshell: It ought to be called a corporate free ride. The global economy has been used to institutionalize labor exploitation in underdeveloped nations. The cost is born by workers in developed nations in the form of lower wages, loss of labor standards and cutting unions out of the process.
Where does John McCain stand on trade and labor rights? Somewhere to the right of J.P. Morgan. He has never voted against a Free Trade agreement.
“I'm the biggest free marketer and free trader that you will ever see.” (Republican Presidential Debate, December 12, 2007.)
McCain has vehemently embraced “right to work” laws that are nothing but a scheme to outlaw union organization in the workplace. Even in the hard times we are now facing, he voted against raising minimum wage and against extending unemployment benefits.
HEALTH CARE: PRIVATIZATION.
When you peel back the rhetoric and strip away the phony compassion, the Bush-McCain-Rove policies always come down to privatization. If they had their way, they would privatize Social Security, education and Medicare. McCain supported Bush’s failed initiative to begin a privatization plan for Social Security. He voted to cut Medicare funding and opposed reauthorization and funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
His proposal for health care reform would reclassify health care premiums as taxable income. Is that really the kind of reform America wants? Reminiscent of the gas tax holiday, he would hand out tokens in the form of tax breaks while giving a free hand to private insurance companies.
Anyone who believes that the party of rugged individualism, the party that is fundamentally opposed to social services, the party that still believes the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a communist conspiracy, will reform Medicare to the benefit of the people is delusional.
If it were in their power, they would scrap all domestic programs and let the chips fall.
BALANCING THE BUDGET: EARMARKS.
Another of the tricks exploited by the McCain-Bush-Rove machine is that they will speak of small matters in a manner that makes them seem important. McCain has claimed that he could save $100 billion overnight by eliminating the add-on expenditures known as “earmarks.” When pressed, the McCain campaign had to admit they invented the figure.
(Michael Dobbs, The Fact Checker: “McCain’s Fantasy War on Earmarks,” Washington Post, 5/23/08).
If McCain is serious about eliminating this congressional tradition – one that is often used in legislative negotiations – then he is dreaming. If not, he is posturing.
When you examine McCain’s reputation as a Maverick, it is 90% fluff. He postures a lot but when it comes down to action, he generally goes along for the ride.
The most moving part of McCain’s convention speech was the telling of his experience as a Prisoner of War in Vietnam. It was moving to hear a proud man admit that the enemy pushed him until he broke. It is sadder still when you realize that the party he represents in this race for the White House has done the same: They pushed him until he broke. No longer will he speak out for compromise on immigration policy or tolerance for gays and lesbians. No longer will he oppose a tax cut policy favoring the elite at a time of war. No longer will he stand strong against torture and for the Geneva Conventions. The new John McCain knows his limitations and plays his part.
What McCain sacrificed to become his party’s nominee for president was whatever remained of his integrity and individuality.
The Maverick, if he ever truly existed, is long dead. What remains is the typical Bush-Rove politician.
Why mess with a winning formula?
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Jake's Word re: The Devil Down in Georgia
[Response to Jack Random's "The Devil Down in Georgia" (below).]
Absolutely. This is the best possible circumstance for the neocons. The war against terrorism is difficult to perpetuate endlessly because the public grows tired of fighting a vague, invisible, uncertain enemy. But the majority of the U.S. public remembers the Cold War very well and that makes it easier to sell. It involves certainties. Russia, drunk with new wealth and a new epoch of Czars, has recovered from its experiment with liberal democracy and reasserts itself as a superpower once again. The neocons must be ecstatic. This is the global politics they trained in and understand so well. It is the philosophical heart of the Project for a New American Century. Both the leadership in Moscow and Washington are well aware the game is back on and they settle in for the deep freeze behind mountains of wealth.
Indeed, what could Saakashvili have been thinking? I find it hard to believe he could be so ignorant of history, of the crimes of the Bush administration or the eagerness of Russia to reassert itself. Perhaps he is deeply invested in the military-industrial complex. Perhaps he is willing to sacrifice the safety of his own citizens in order to be part of the new front line - an egomaniacal delusion in which he is a heroic political soldier for democracy.
As usual, the bottom line is the bottom line and the price is paid in human blood. Human sacrifice by any other name is still barbarous and the 21st century barbarians could not be more obvious.
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.
THE DEVIL DOWN IN GEORGIA:
Resurrecting the Cold War
By Jack Random
“In the 21st century nations do not invade other nations.”
Senator John McCain, August 13, 2008
It is inconceivable that a major candidate for president of the United States of America should be unaware that the government he wishes to lead began the 21st century with a foreign policy of aggressive war and military domination christened by the invasions of two sovereign nations.
When that candidate is a long-standing political front man for the Neoconservative brain trust that authored the policy (Project for a New American Century), it strains the last fibers of credulity. For a man who considers himself a foreign policy expert, Senator John McCain has taken his place alongside our brash lame duck president as an embarrassment to the nation.
Is he demented? Does he consider our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq incursions, diplomatic overtures or simply humanitarian assistance?
As Vladimir Putin might say: If Iraq is an incursion then Russia’s actions in neighboring Georgia are little more than a firm handshake.
Not to be outdone, our president took a respite between vacations to issue a warning reminiscent of a former era but it played more like a bullied child: If you don’t stop now, I’m not going to be your friend any more!
One of the more fascinating aspects of the American response has been substituting references to Georgia with Iraq and Russia with America. Consider transcriptions of these gems from the mouth of our clueless leader:
“[Iraq’s] sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected. [Washington] must live up to its commitment to withdraw its invading forces from all [Iraqi] territory.”
This one does not require transcription:
“Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.”
Are John McCain and little George reading from the same script?
What is most puzzling in this conflict is the behavior of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili who triggered the Russian response by taking military action in South Ossetia. The reaction was as predictable as the salivation of Pavlov’s dogs but Saakashvili seems perplexed that America and her allies have not rushed to his government’s defense.
Is the man insane? Did he really think that America, with its forces bogged down in two major occupations, was eager to start another war with Russia on the Russian border?
If he is not a madman then someone made promises they had no intention of honoring.
If Saakashvili has not yet awakened to the fact that he and his nation are sacrificial pawns in this game of international chess, he soon will. His mentor-ally in the United States wasted no time pushing through a missile defense agreement with Poland – a move that every objective observer knows is not directed at Iran or “rogue states” but at Moscow.
Not content with the damage they have already done to America’s standing in the world, the neoconservative horror factory still in charge of our foreign policy (along with their profiteering allies in the military industrial complex) have used the waning days of the Bush White House to put in place the necessary elements for a return to the Cold War – a war that was never cold and cost millions of innocent lives culminating in Vietnam.
Are we safer now, Mr. President?
Pay no attention to the ravings of John McCain. He is not president and his ignorance in critical matters of foreign policy is so profound it numbs the mind. We are not going to war on the Russian border. We will not severe the primary source of Europe’s energy supply. We will not risk a military confrontation between nuclear powers to bolster the government of Mikheil Saakashvili.
We are not completely insane.
We will however return to the insanity of an arms race – nuclear and otherwise – pitting us against the Russians with the Chinese content for now to sit this one out.
If the policies of intimidation and confrontation continue, there will be wars with nations such as Georgia and Ukraine serving as our proxies.
There will be blood and there will be blood money for corporate mercenaries and arms dealers.
The devil has come to Georgia but he is not Vladimir Putin. Russia is only acting as we would act if a major foreign power came to our border – as we would have if the Soviets had not backed down when they attempted to plant missiles in Cuba circa 1962.
No. The devil down in Georgia wears the familiar mask of the Neocon. The names behind the mask are Wolfowitz, Perle, Bolton, Abrams, Kristol, Khalilzad, Bush, Cheney and McCain.
They have bankrupted the nation, morally and economically, but they have profited perversely from the effort. They have never lost hold of the dream that is the world’s nightmare.
They will not stop pushing until we reach the endgame of world domination or mass annihilation or both.
Rest assured, if we allow the Project for a New American Century to move forward, the world will awaken, all but a few of our allies will peel away, and America will stand and fall alone.
Jazz.
[See “John McCain and the Project for a New American Century” by Joseph A. Palermo, The Huffington Post, June 18, 2008.]
Absolutely. This is the best possible circumstance for the neocons. The war against terrorism is difficult to perpetuate endlessly because the public grows tired of fighting a vague, invisible, uncertain enemy. But the majority of the U.S. public remembers the Cold War very well and that makes it easier to sell. It involves certainties. Russia, drunk with new wealth and a new epoch of Czars, has recovered from its experiment with liberal democracy and reasserts itself as a superpower once again. The neocons must be ecstatic. This is the global politics they trained in and understand so well. It is the philosophical heart of the Project for a New American Century. Both the leadership in Moscow and Washington are well aware the game is back on and they settle in for the deep freeze behind mountains of wealth.
Indeed, what could Saakashvili have been thinking? I find it hard to believe he could be so ignorant of history, of the crimes of the Bush administration or the eagerness of Russia to reassert itself. Perhaps he is deeply invested in the military-industrial complex. Perhaps he is willing to sacrifice the safety of his own citizens in order to be part of the new front line - an egomaniacal delusion in which he is a heroic political soldier for democracy.
As usual, the bottom line is the bottom line and the price is paid in human blood. Human sacrifice by any other name is still barbarous and the 21st century barbarians could not be more obvious.
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.
THE DEVIL DOWN IN GEORGIA:
Resurrecting the Cold War
By Jack Random
“In the 21st century nations do not invade other nations.”
Senator John McCain, August 13, 2008
It is inconceivable that a major candidate for president of the United States of America should be unaware that the government he wishes to lead began the 21st century with a foreign policy of aggressive war and military domination christened by the invasions of two sovereign nations.
When that candidate is a long-standing political front man for the Neoconservative brain trust that authored the policy (Project for a New American Century), it strains the last fibers of credulity. For a man who considers himself a foreign policy expert, Senator John McCain has taken his place alongside our brash lame duck president as an embarrassment to the nation.
Is he demented? Does he consider our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq incursions, diplomatic overtures or simply humanitarian assistance?
As Vladimir Putin might say: If Iraq is an incursion then Russia’s actions in neighboring Georgia are little more than a firm handshake.
Not to be outdone, our president took a respite between vacations to issue a warning reminiscent of a former era but it played more like a bullied child: If you don’t stop now, I’m not going to be your friend any more!
One of the more fascinating aspects of the American response has been substituting references to Georgia with Iraq and Russia with America. Consider transcriptions of these gems from the mouth of our clueless leader:
“[Iraq’s] sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected. [Washington] must live up to its commitment to withdraw its invading forces from all [Iraqi] territory.”
This one does not require transcription:
“Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.”
Are John McCain and little George reading from the same script?
What is most puzzling in this conflict is the behavior of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili who triggered the Russian response by taking military action in South Ossetia. The reaction was as predictable as the salivation of Pavlov’s dogs but Saakashvili seems perplexed that America and her allies have not rushed to his government’s defense.
Is the man insane? Did he really think that America, with its forces bogged down in two major occupations, was eager to start another war with Russia on the Russian border?
If he is not a madman then someone made promises they had no intention of honoring.
If Saakashvili has not yet awakened to the fact that he and his nation are sacrificial pawns in this game of international chess, he soon will. His mentor-ally in the United States wasted no time pushing through a missile defense agreement with Poland – a move that every objective observer knows is not directed at Iran or “rogue states” but at Moscow.
Not content with the damage they have already done to America’s standing in the world, the neoconservative horror factory still in charge of our foreign policy (along with their profiteering allies in the military industrial complex) have used the waning days of the Bush White House to put in place the necessary elements for a return to the Cold War – a war that was never cold and cost millions of innocent lives culminating in Vietnam.
Are we safer now, Mr. President?
Pay no attention to the ravings of John McCain. He is not president and his ignorance in critical matters of foreign policy is so profound it numbs the mind. We are not going to war on the Russian border. We will not severe the primary source of Europe’s energy supply. We will not risk a military confrontation between nuclear powers to bolster the government of Mikheil Saakashvili.
We are not completely insane.
We will however return to the insanity of an arms race – nuclear and otherwise – pitting us against the Russians with the Chinese content for now to sit this one out.
If the policies of intimidation and confrontation continue, there will be wars with nations such as Georgia and Ukraine serving as our proxies.
There will be blood and there will be blood money for corporate mercenaries and arms dealers.
The devil has come to Georgia but he is not Vladimir Putin. Russia is only acting as we would act if a major foreign power came to our border – as we would have if the Soviets had not backed down when they attempted to plant missiles in Cuba circa 1962.
No. The devil down in Georgia wears the familiar mask of the Neocon. The names behind the mask are Wolfowitz, Perle, Bolton, Abrams, Kristol, Khalilzad, Bush, Cheney and McCain.
They have bankrupted the nation, morally and economically, but they have profited perversely from the effort. They have never lost hold of the dream that is the world’s nightmare.
They will not stop pushing until we reach the endgame of world domination or mass annihilation or both.
Rest assured, if we allow the Project for a New American Century to move forward, the world will awaken, all but a few of our allies will peel away, and America will stand and fall alone.
Jazz.
[See “John McCain and the Project for a New American Century” by Joseph A. Palermo, The Huffington Post, June 18, 2008.]
Friday, August 15, 2008
Jake's Word: The Case for Impeachment
[In response to "The Case for Impeachment" by Jack Random. Posted 8/15/08 by Newsdaily Canada and Buzzle.com.]
Beautifully, persuasively stated as always. If we only had representatives in government who possessed such talents, and such conviction.
Instead the show business of news goes on. The Edwards affair totally irrelevant yet there it is with more coverage than the war in Georgia, or yet another glaring crime by this ridiculous administration. Does nothing inspire the wrath of the American people anymore? Or are those crumbling towers so fixed in our memory as an inspiration for hatred of the "other" that nothing else makes an impression?
This afternoon I saw John McCain addressing the issue of the war in Georgia. I'm sure you saw it as well. His position was completely predictable of course, but one statement stunned me. He actually said these words, "In the 21st century one nation cannot invade another." The level of doublethink required to make such a statement requires a degree of denial that beggars the term. It made all the more obvious that McCain will continue and possibly intensify the policies of the most criminal administration in U.S. history.
On the other hand, Obama can make that very same statement and not contradict himself. He has opposed the Iraq war all along.
There is also the issue that Iraq has a $70 billion surplus while the U.S. sinks in debt in no small part due to that war. If the Iraqi people and government want the U.S. to leave, if they are financially prospering, what rationale would possibly serve as an excuse to stay?
I do not know what kind of president Barak Obama would be, but one thing is clear, he would not be the same president as John McCain and a continuation of the ongoing criminal enterprise in the nation's highest office. If the citizens of the U.S. cannot see this by now then they are truly living in a state of delusion from which they are unlikely to awake until the U.S. is no more.
Jake Berry
Newsdaily Canada: http://Newsdaily.ca.
Buzzle.com: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/the-case-for-impeachment-the-crimes-of-george-bush.html
Beautifully, persuasively stated as always. If we only had representatives in government who possessed such talents, and such conviction.
Instead the show business of news goes on. The Edwards affair totally irrelevant yet there it is with more coverage than the war in Georgia, or yet another glaring crime by this ridiculous administration. Does nothing inspire the wrath of the American people anymore? Or are those crumbling towers so fixed in our memory as an inspiration for hatred of the "other" that nothing else makes an impression?
This afternoon I saw John McCain addressing the issue of the war in Georgia. I'm sure you saw it as well. His position was completely predictable of course, but one statement stunned me. He actually said these words, "In the 21st century one nation cannot invade another." The level of doublethink required to make such a statement requires a degree of denial that beggars the term. It made all the more obvious that McCain will continue and possibly intensify the policies of the most criminal administration in U.S. history.
On the other hand, Obama can make that very same statement and not contradict himself. He has opposed the Iraq war all along.
There is also the issue that Iraq has a $70 billion surplus while the U.S. sinks in debt in no small part due to that war. If the Iraqi people and government want the U.S. to leave, if they are financially prospering, what rationale would possibly serve as an excuse to stay?
I do not know what kind of president Barak Obama would be, but one thing is clear, he would not be the same president as John McCain and a continuation of the ongoing criminal enterprise in the nation's highest office. If the citizens of the U.S. cannot see this by now then they are truly living in a state of delusion from which they are unlikely to awake until the U.S. is no more.
Jake Berry
Newsdaily Canada: http://Newsdaily.ca.
Buzzle.com: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/the-case-for-impeachment-the-crimes-of-george-bush.html
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Jake's Word: Election Analysis
In 2008 our votes in the primaries will be more important than in the general election.
The level of complicity, intentional or not, between the current Bush war policy and the insurgency is disturbing. Perhaps the various factions have decided to restrain themselves in order to wait out the change of government in the U.S. or may return to frequent attacks next year in order to try to shape the US election. They may also be using the time to work out new coalitions against the current Iraqi government and then attempt a political coup rather than a violent one. We aren't likely to get solid information from any of the major news sources. Journalism in Iraq seems to be whatever is delivered by runners to journalists bunkered in relatively safe hotels. It seems quite certain though that nothing has been resolved.
The Republicans want to diminish Iraq as a campaign issue. If the economy doesn't slide into recession that might be enough to get a Republican candidate elected since Clinton only represents Republican lite. Absent a raging war or a recession Gulianni or Romney may appear to be a better choice to a thin majority. Either way, the American people lose. Its just a matter of which flavor of defeat you prefer.
Perhaps a strong tug to the left by voting for Kucinich in the primaries would remind Clinton that she will need those voters to win and to govern. That seems to be the best we can do at the moment.
Jake Berry
The level of complicity, intentional or not, between the current Bush war policy and the insurgency is disturbing. Perhaps the various factions have decided to restrain themselves in order to wait out the change of government in the U.S. or may return to frequent attacks next year in order to try to shape the US election. They may also be using the time to work out new coalitions against the current Iraqi government and then attempt a political coup rather than a violent one. We aren't likely to get solid information from any of the major news sources. Journalism in Iraq seems to be whatever is delivered by runners to journalists bunkered in relatively safe hotels. It seems quite certain though that nothing has been resolved.
The Republicans want to diminish Iraq as a campaign issue. If the economy doesn't slide into recession that might be enough to get a Republican candidate elected since Clinton only represents Republican lite. Absent a raging war or a recession Gulianni or Romney may appear to be a better choice to a thin majority. Either way, the American people lose. Its just a matter of which flavor of defeat you prefer.
Perhaps a strong tug to the left by voting for Kucinich in the primaries would remind Clinton that she will need those voters to win and to govern. That seems to be the best we can do at the moment.
Jake Berry
Monday, July 23, 2007
Jake's Word: Deport Dobbs
[RE: Jazzman Chronicle: Deport Lou Dobbs -- Why CNN is Worse than Fox]
Another timely, important piece. We're all sick of Lou Dobbs, for any number of reasons, but primarily because he won't leave the immigration issue alone, or even give other, equally important issues the same air time.
Something else I've noticed in the news generally is that where once politicians and media (is there any difference?) once spoke of the poor, now they speak of the middle class. When John Edwards recently spent a day or two talking about the poor FOX News promptly asked the question that was on the mind of every conservative in the county - Is discussion of issues regarding the poor socialist? By labeling any concern for the poor as socialist they dismissed the poor from the agenda entirely. The poor were already of little concern because most of them don't vote, those that do vote are divided, and none of them contribute significant amounts of money to political campaigns. Welcome back to the gilded age when things were right with America. Corporations and their ultra-wealthy owners ran the government, the poor had no rights and certainly no assistance from the government, and all good Americans were supposed to get rich or die trying. In light of all this it's important to recognize the new poor, namely, the middle class. It's PC to lament the fate of the middle class, but this is only the corporate media's way of bidding them a fond farewell while assuaging their own consciences. In a world where wealth is the only, true moral value, those with the most wealth are the noblest citizens. Those with little or no wealth are a weight to the system and should be discarded from the concerns of the nation, and too bad they can't all be deported for failing to succeed.
Another timely, important piece. We're all sick of Lou Dobbs, for any number of reasons, but primarily because he won't leave the immigration issue alone, or even give other, equally important issues the same air time.
Something else I've noticed in the news generally is that where once politicians and media (is there any difference?) once spoke of the poor, now they speak of the middle class. When John Edwards recently spent a day or two talking about the poor FOX News promptly asked the question that was on the mind of every conservative in the county - Is discussion of issues regarding the poor socialist? By labeling any concern for the poor as socialist they dismissed the poor from the agenda entirely. The poor were already of little concern because most of them don't vote, those that do vote are divided, and none of them contribute significant amounts of money to political campaigns. Welcome back to the gilded age when things were right with America. Corporations and their ultra-wealthy owners ran the government, the poor had no rights and certainly no assistance from the government, and all good Americans were supposed to get rich or die trying. In light of all this it's important to recognize the new poor, namely, the middle class. It's PC to lament the fate of the middle class, but this is only the corporate media's way of bidding them a fond farewell while assuaging their own consciences. In a world where wealth is the only, true moral value, those with the most wealth are the noblest citizens. Those with little or no wealth are a weight to the system and should be discarded from the concerns of the nation, and too bad they can't all be deported for failing to succeed.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Jake's Word RE: Bloomberg
[a response to the Jazzman Chronicle "Bloomberg: Wrong Man, Right Idea"]
Absolutely, literally, on the money!
The nation-state is dissolving and being replaced by corporate feudalism. This is pretty much the future that Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and William Burroughs envisioned. At the time they wrote it seemed dystopic, dark, but still romantic fiction - a possible future. Turns out they were prophets with stunning accuracy. The solutions they suggested were not democratic, but anarchic. I am hoping that there is still a chance for democratic change, but that would require that the populace awake from the deep video dream. Only great discomfort on a massive scale would wake them. The feudal lords aren't likely to allow that to happen. That volume of Emma Goldman on my shelf looks increasingly attractive.
Rave on,
Jake
(Jake Berry is the author of Brambu Drezi and other works of contemporary genius)
Absolutely, literally, on the money!
The nation-state is dissolving and being replaced by corporate feudalism. This is pretty much the future that Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and William Burroughs envisioned. At the time they wrote it seemed dystopic, dark, but still romantic fiction - a possible future. Turns out they were prophets with stunning accuracy. The solutions they suggested were not democratic, but anarchic. I am hoping that there is still a chance for democratic change, but that would require that the populace awake from the deep video dream. Only great discomfort on a massive scale would wake them. The feudal lords aren't likely to allow that to happen. That volume of Emma Goldman on my shelf looks increasingly attractive.
Rave on,
Jake
(Jake Berry is the author of Brambu Drezi and other works of contemporary genius)
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Jake's Word: Delusional Presidency
I keep trying to think back and research to find a president that was more delusional than this one. With the possible exception of the last months of the Nixon presidency I'm hard pressed to find anything close. There is a long record of incompetence in the office, but nothing approaching this kind of belligerence and nothing with this kind of consequence. One must look at the last days of the Tsars or the Brits at the end of WWI to find so much power in the hands of people simply incapable of dealing with the responsibilities of the job.
Peace, inside and out,
Jake Berry (Author of Brambu Drezi)
Peace, inside and out,
Jake Berry (Author of Brambu Drezi)
Friday, November 24, 2006
Jake's Word: Hamilton Rising
x
Claustrophobia sets in.
She muscles out of the dirt.
Can she really summon the determination
to shed the wasted dollars?
smells more of bread than meat.
Too clever to read the odor’s intent,
but followed, begging
ruined sap
low and hot
growling – The wolves came
nuzzled your crotch
talking backward
until the old stairs fell
around the red maple
grown through the floor.
Take your passage then,
wallow all day in bed and
speak when summoned,
feet on cold wet floor
remembered, clutched the post
and spoke remembering –
The moths in the old stone church
glad to be done
with the Paraclete’s bickering.
Silent, finished,
roaming her legs again for grace.
Still, the mourners in a line proceed,
scarfheaded and faking it
in digital clicks
like teeth broken in
bread not meat.
Welcome to quicklime and virus
and the coming green.
Jake Berry 11.6.06
Claustrophobia sets in.
She muscles out of the dirt.
Can she really summon the determination
to shed the wasted dollars?
smells more of bread than meat.
Too clever to read the odor’s intent,
but followed, begging
ruined sap
low and hot
growling – The wolves came
nuzzled your crotch
talking backward
until the old stairs fell
around the red maple
grown through the floor.
Take your passage then,
wallow all day in bed and
speak when summoned,
feet on cold wet floor
remembered, clutched the post
and spoke remembering –
The moths in the old stone church
glad to be done
with the Paraclete’s bickering.
Silent, finished,
roaming her legs again for grace.
Still, the mourners in a line proceed,
scarfheaded and faking it
in digital clicks
like teeth broken in
bread not meat.
Welcome to quicklime and virus
and the coming green.
Jake Berry 11.6.06
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Jefferson in Hell by Jake Berry
Cough.
Flagellation.
Requiem.
We have seen the process heaving.
He can’t suffer it again,
another cold alabaster mannequin
disrobed
& trailed in gray debris.
Trapped inside her petticoats
Venus sneezes, barks and wheezes.
Who’d believe if she confessed
a low rebellion in Storyville.
The fishmonger sold his grave
to Marie Laveau
who rolled the dice to thieve
him grace.
The feast of crescent
deadlight Ramadan –
16 chaingang
republicans bleached
in Plato’s toilet
if you can bear the newsprint stench.
Come down to mama
Come down to mama
Come on down to your bone sad mama
and drink the good Lord’s tit.
Jake Berry 10.5.06 7:40 am
Flagellation.
Requiem.
We have seen the process heaving.
He can’t suffer it again,
another cold alabaster mannequin
disrobed
& trailed in gray debris.
Trapped inside her petticoats
Venus sneezes, barks and wheezes.
Who’d believe if she confessed
a low rebellion in Storyville.
The fishmonger sold his grave
to Marie Laveau
who rolled the dice to thieve
him grace.
The feast of crescent
deadlight Ramadan –
16 chaingang
republicans bleached
in Plato’s toilet
if you can bear the newsprint stench.
Come down to mama
Come down to mama
Come on down to your bone sad mama
and drink the good Lord’s tit.
Jake Berry 10.5.06 7:40 am
Sunday, August 13, 2006
War Poem 7 by Jake Berry
Wasp in amber.
Christ's palms in formaldehyde.
The scribes are weeping
in the ruins of their broken vocabulary.
Comes a witch in Canaan
can speak in pure image.
The ground crawls with
maggots when she speaks.
Soldiers and
mortar gun trucks
raid the laboratories
and take the parameter.
They are figures
in a book of prayer
locked in a virus.
Her left hand clutches
the broach of Minerva –
The sea swells
and swallows them all
and the prophets with them.
The grain gone sour
in the monastery stores,
even hallucination
takes its meat and
breathes into the cameras
and satellites
Heaven is empty now
except these leeches
pocked in gravity's curve
falling toward the Capitol
collecting the populace
like teeth.
Christ's palms in formaldehyde.
The scribes are weeping
in the ruins of their broken vocabulary.
Comes a witch in Canaan
can speak in pure image.
The ground crawls with
maggots when she speaks.
Soldiers and
mortar gun trucks
raid the laboratories
and take the parameter.
They are figures
in a book of prayer
locked in a virus.
Her left hand clutches
the broach of Minerva –
The sea swells
and swallows them all
and the prophets with them.
The grain gone sour
in the monastery stores,
even hallucination
takes its meat and
breathes into the cameras
and satellites
Heaven is empty now
except these leeches
pocked in gravity's curve
falling toward the Capitol
collecting the populace
like teeth.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Jake's Word: The West Virginia Mining Disaster
[Jake Berry's response to "Surrealistic Pillow: The West Virginia Mining Disaster" posted on Dissident Voice 1/7/06.]
Yet another vigilant and enlightened piece. I'm glad you brought up Ace In The Hole. I thought of it, too, when I saw the media descend upon the Sago mines. I couldn't remember the name of the movie, but it's a impossible film to forget because it so accurately depicts the excess of media as they transmute freedom of speech into freedom to exploit. And there was handsome Anderson Cooper, son of Gloria Vanderbilt, just like handsome Kirk Douglas, informing us of all the latest developments, speaking so emphatically that you can actually hear him draw a breath between sentences.
Democracy is in trouble indeed. The Abramoff turn suggests that there may yet be something to save and a way to save it, but its like stepping into a nest of vipers - will they wriggle away before the light hits them or will they bite you and inject you with the same poison that has saved them in the past? And there's the Bush spying scandal that was so deftly turned on its head to become a search for the guy who ratted him out - and the media followed. It is as you say. They do not report the news, they deliver sensation. They do not inform, they stimulate. I remarked to my wife a couple of weeks ago that the media seem to seek out the stories that will stimulate the fight or flight mechanism. You're either scared or angry - it doesn't matter to them. What they want is your attention. That's money to them, and money is the game.
It's always about resources. Too little or too much and how to resolve the excess or deficit. Either way, someone is bound to get hurt, usually at the business end of military weaponry.
We're close, very close, maybe eleven months close to the final test of democracy in America. Will people respond and use the vote to overturn the tables and send the thieves running, or will they be driven, by fear or anger, one last time into propping the status quo. If they choose the latter we will have to look elsewhere for any support for individual freedoms, civil liberties, or anything resembling a government of, by, and for the people.
How intoxicated are we? How long will the adrenal glands survive this continual manipulation before they collapse and take the body politic down with them? We shall see.
Ezra Pound, great poet, arrogant bigot and fool, was often wrong, but in his cantos he writes, "Fear God and the ignorance of the populace." As usual he was only half right. We have nothing to fear from God, regardless of the reality (or not) of his existence, but an ignorant populace is a dangerous animal - the most dangerous on the planet. As Jimmy wZ said, "Mass consciousness is dangerous."
We're dancing in the lion's jaws, brother (quoting Bruce Cockburn now), by the time of the next winter solstice we'll find out if there's anything left to save.
Jake Berry - Author of Brambu Drezi
[See Jake's blog: 9thstlab.blogspot.com]
Yet another vigilant and enlightened piece. I'm glad you brought up Ace In The Hole. I thought of it, too, when I saw the media descend upon the Sago mines. I couldn't remember the name of the movie, but it's a impossible film to forget because it so accurately depicts the excess of media as they transmute freedom of speech into freedom to exploit. And there was handsome Anderson Cooper, son of Gloria Vanderbilt, just like handsome Kirk Douglas, informing us of all the latest developments, speaking so emphatically that you can actually hear him draw a breath between sentences.
Democracy is in trouble indeed. The Abramoff turn suggests that there may yet be something to save and a way to save it, but its like stepping into a nest of vipers - will they wriggle away before the light hits them or will they bite you and inject you with the same poison that has saved them in the past? And there's the Bush spying scandal that was so deftly turned on its head to become a search for the guy who ratted him out - and the media followed. It is as you say. They do not report the news, they deliver sensation. They do not inform, they stimulate. I remarked to my wife a couple of weeks ago that the media seem to seek out the stories that will stimulate the fight or flight mechanism. You're either scared or angry - it doesn't matter to them. What they want is your attention. That's money to them, and money is the game.
It's always about resources. Too little or too much and how to resolve the excess or deficit. Either way, someone is bound to get hurt, usually at the business end of military weaponry.
We're close, very close, maybe eleven months close to the final test of democracy in America. Will people respond and use the vote to overturn the tables and send the thieves running, or will they be driven, by fear or anger, one last time into propping the status quo. If they choose the latter we will have to look elsewhere for any support for individual freedoms, civil liberties, or anything resembling a government of, by, and for the people.
How intoxicated are we? How long will the adrenal glands survive this continual manipulation before they collapse and take the body politic down with them? We shall see.
Ezra Pound, great poet, arrogant bigot and fool, was often wrong, but in his cantos he writes, "Fear God and the ignorance of the populace." As usual he was only half right. We have nothing to fear from God, regardless of the reality (or not) of his existence, but an ignorant populace is a dangerous animal - the most dangerous on the planet. As Jimmy wZ said, "Mass consciousness is dangerous."
We're dancing in the lion's jaws, brother (quoting Bruce Cockburn now), by the time of the next winter solstice we'll find out if there's anything left to save.
Jake Berry - Author of Brambu Drezi
[See Jake's blog: 9thstlab.blogspot.com]
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