Coup in Ecuador, in US?

Will Obama say 'No!' to Ecuador's generals? A coup is unfolding at this moment. In April last year, Obama said "I am absolutely opposed and condemn any efforts at violent overthrows of democratically elected governments," in the hemisphere. That was at an OAS meeting. However, in June last year, his State Department didn't condemn the coup in Honduras, so it went forward. The ousted elected President could not return, and the subsequent election was carefully controlled by the pro-business coup leaders.

Is this how big business will get rid of the surge of social democracy in Latin America? One coup at a time. My family in Venezuela would be happy at the prospect, but even there, Chavez has significantly reduced inequality; he's still popular.

Simultaneously, corporations are trying to buy US elections: funding groups like Rove's Crossroads, pumping millions into the tea party, or like the Koch brothers, directly funding tea party insurgents and radical conservative Republicans.

There is a common theme to these corporate-friendly actions: corporations and their owners want to eliminate regulations. They want to be able to pollute, without having to pay costs they impose on society. They want to gamble with free taxpayer money; they want to terrorize illegal aliens--and employees, more generally--so workers are desperate enough to work for near-subsistence wages. They also want to be free to ship jobs and processes overseas without having to pay the costs of their leaving. They even want to continue tax subsidies for doing so!

In places like Ecuador and Honduras, they want governments they can buy, not ones that try to serve their peoples' interests. As my Venezuelan uncle enjoyed pointing out: it's much more difficult to buy off a democratic government--the executive, the legislators, the judges--than a dictatorship, where you deal with one guy, or a small group.

Corporate interests, or pro-corporate conservatives have already gained electoral power in Britain, Canada, Germany and France. African and Asian countries are venues for conflict, over resources, not religion. China and India are major players, while Japan stagnates.

What also seems to be emerging is a bent toward authoritarianism. You see it in Russia and China. Developing countries emulate China. It isn't the "Communism" that's imitated: it's the authoritarian politics and the hybrid command/market economics China invented.

You see the same authoritarian leanings even in the US, even with Obama; he's continued Bush's Security State, and has barely held the military at bay on Afghanistan.

What will happen if the radical conservatives win? More severe economic crises yet, and even greater immiseration of most of the people: it makes them docile workers. Dictators would, too.

The few would be on their way to achieving the kind of dominance held by Roman Senators just before Rome's fall in 476.

This Age of Lunacy

$25.99 x 9,500=$246,905. Pretty good for a book that's just been published: that's the figure the publisher should take in from the Defense Department, which has bought all available copies of the first edition--to destroy them! The book: Operation Dark Heart, by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer.

As Col. Shaffer remarked: it's "ludicrous"--in this digital age--to think that the Defense Department, by buying 9500 copies, is going to eliminate all copies with questionable, supposedly classified information. The second printing does have many redactions, in some cases whole paragraphs, but meanwhile: at least one seller on eBay, claiming to have a first-edition printing, is asking nearly $2,000 for it. And you know, from Col. Shaffer's remark, that there are probably un-redacted copies flying around the Internet.

Oh, not to worry! DOD has money to burn, even if everyone else has to deal with slashed budgets. After all, after the Republicans get over their snit re Don't Ask Don't Tell, they'll probably want to raise the Defense Budget, and insure that we never withdraw from anywhere.

Of course, they'll complain that the government's deficit is going through the roof. Then, they'll say we've got to cut Social Security benefits--which are paid for through the payroll tax and the trust fund. Defense is paid through general revenue. And they'll say we've got to stop any stimulus spending, and any welfare spending: let the unemployed go jump off bridges! Let the poor (now on Medicaid) get sick and die!

So, we have 9.6% official unemployment, which is probably 17% when "discouraged workers" and involuntary part-time workers are counted. The right-wing seems to be saying: we can do nothing; we should be doing nothing. What's extraordinary is that their candidates still lead in the polls, especially, when Republicans insist that even the millionaires and billionaires should get tax cuts--and declare: everyone's taxes will rise unless the billionaires get tax cuts, too!

The best part is: we'll borrow the money from the Chinese, to make up for the shortfall of $700 billion that millionaires and billionaires will use to invest in--"emerging markets," i.e. countries like China, which is "where the growth is."

Chinese workers are only beginning to organize to demand better wages and working conditions. Americans? We're watching football, or reality shows, or worrying whether Lindsey Lohan will really stop drinking. Whadda we know about what's going on?

In besieged ancient Cirta, the Roman governor feared that closing the coliseum's games would drive citizens to riot. So, they continued, even as the Vandals broke through the city's walls. Vandals killed or enslaved virtually all of Cirta's Roman citizens.

We have our own age of lunacy, but it does have ancient parallels.

A Global Disease?

It's not just the US that's going crazy. We have Tea Party extremists and anti-immigrant nastiness, but now even Sweden, moderate, neutral, social democratic, has elected an anti-immigrant party to parliament. There are strong anti-immigrant parties in Holland, Denmark and Norway, and similar parties in Central and Eastern Europe. France not only has the National Front, but President Sarkozy's Roma removals pander to anti-immigrant anger.

The Middle East is in turmoil, driven by extremist actions of fewer than 5000 militants leveraging millions.

China's phenomenal growth drives changes globally. Mexicans and Central Americans stream northward, not an invasion, but a flood of desperate people, choosing between privation--exacerbated by American trade policy--and a better life that can be won with hard work. They generate anger in America.

The tea party movement expresses anger, frustration and fear. It taps into the zeitgeist. Our lives are changing, and for ordinary Americans they are not getting better. The Tea Party movement exhibits the extremism of a majority fearful of losing dominance: "We want our country back!" they scream. The KKK was a response to similar changes in the Civil War's aftermath. Then and now, elites used white anxiety to blame victims and ignore the perp--the elites. It isn't just the imminent specter of a majority of minorities; that's only what drives tea party fury. The movement expresses the economic frustrations of the non-elite: it shouldn't be ignored or dismissed.

Progressives should harness that anger. The economic takeover engineered by corporate elites, rationalized by "conservative" think tanks, its funders now funding tea party extremism, is the real reason why wages have stagnated, not just this year, but since the 1970's. Productivity since has increased almost exponentially, but through the Reagan counter-revolution and after, the tiny, wealthy elite at the top has captured its rewards.

That's why unions have been savaged; that's why "free" trade has exported our manufacturing base and jobs; that's why the "recovery" isn't creating jobs now; it's cheaper and safer to drive your fearful workers harder--or export operations to China or Poland.

No wonder people are angry!

Don't sneer at Sharron Angle or Christine O'Donnell. Democrats need to counter with emotional content of their own. Rational argument may support the Democrats' case, but doesn't convince angry people. What could: emotional appeals. Against the greedy, who demand an extension of high income tax cuts: block them and demand taxing Wall Street's rip-offs; unveil a big jobs program, a 21st century WPA; campaign against unfair employers for workers' rights; and promote fair trade that protects America and its workers.

Economic issues can cut close to peoples' jugulars.

Are progressives so afraid of feelings?

In the 1930's, nations went two ways: following Nazi rant, or FDR's democratic alternative. Both made emotional appeals.

Which will it be?

Small Business's #1 Worry?

A survey of small businessmen by the National Federation of Independent Business found: it's not taxes, and it's not credit. It's no customers.

So, the political dialogue about taxes or credit is less relevant to them than anything that would increase demand, like accelerating job creation. So, here are Democrats saying middle income tax cuts ought to be preserved, and Republicans insisting tax cuts for the wealthy not only must be maintained, but made permanent--at a cost of $700-800 billion to the debt--because, they insist some are small business proprietors--though few are). In addition, Democrats (with one Republican) have just passed similar bills in House and Senate, providing tax cuts and extended loans to small businesses: to spur hiring. But they probably won't have much effect.

What no one, either in the administration, or in either party, or either chamber, seems to get is this: people need jobs; business needs employed people; but businesses aren't employing them. So, what's the problem? Has government never acted as temporary employer of last resort before?

There are many areas where government could meet huge needs. The unemployed don't have to have jobs digging holes and filling them. We no longer allow heavy manual labor--we have machines for that, which costs more money and skills--but we could use clean up crews, teachers assistants, parking meter attendants, construction workers to repair and rebuild, and so on. Local governments could manage local projects.

If people are so concerned about illegal immigration, then they should go to work bringing in harvests, following crops northward; maybe the Feds could subsidize citizen workers.

The point is: what's holding up the recovery is a lack of jobs. Apparently, tinkering with loans, credits and taxes is not enough. Of course it isn't. Why would a business invest in higher output, by hiring more workers, or buying more machinery, when demand for the good or service they're trying to sell is so feeble and uncertain?

What are people thinking? The best and the brightest are pretty stupid.

When no one else creates jobs, government should be the employer of last resort. It can be. There are many things of lasting value that were built by the WPA, like the mural scenes in Post Offices, and the forest windbreaks planted by the CCC in the Great Plains; they stopped the dustbowl storms.

Yes, there would be a temporary hike to the deficit, but if there are no jobs, deficits will march off into the future--no jobs mean no taxes paid, and welfare or basic survival costs to pay for--or the costs of a repressive police state to keep down the growing, angry underclass, for whom there are no jobs.

The latter sounds a bit like the late Roman Empire: the wealthy got wealthier and enslaved everyone else, until the whole system collapsed in the face of the barbarians.

Man Threatens to Blow Up NY

When Paladino, endorsed by the Tea Party, and Sarah Palin, wins the Republican gubernatorial nomination in liberal New York State, this is definitely a national trend.

What's Carl Paladino for? He'd cut Medicaid by $20 billion, cut taxes by 10%, and state government spending by 20%. To deal with the looming deficits Governor Paterson has been warning against? He also calls for giving the new governor (if it's him) authoritarian powers to carry out his program.

Good luck on that. The State legislature, regardless of party control, will not give up its powers, especially since Paladino will have to run against almost all elected legislators. Not surprisingly, as a multimillionaire businessman, Paladino also calls for slashing regulations on business. Real revolutionary! Let the frackers drill, and ruin our water supply forever!

Paladino's signature slogan is "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" The issue upon which he gained most traction up to the primary was his opposition to the so-called "Ground-zero Mosque." More strident than Lazio, his Republican opponent, he also pointed an accusing finger at Democrat Cuomo's support for the right of Muslims to build there. He'd use eminent domain to seize the site (two long blocks from "ground zero") to prevent Muslim developers from building their community center--in respect for our warriors fighting for our freedom overseas, etc.

He's been caught sending racist jokes and porn to colleagues via email, but his defenders say that it's "political correctness" that has to go. On his website he points out that the last NY governor from Buffalo (Grover Cleveland) became US President: he has "higher" ambitions.

What is it about Carl Paladino that energizes conservative voters? He's willing to say almost anything; he's been running for office for several cycles, but has been unbesmirched by the far-reaching scandals of the NY legislature: he's never held public office. He was opposed by most Republican leaders, and got only 8% of the vote in the party convention, so he's the ultimate outsider. But he brandished striking rhetoric, like promising to “take a baseball bat to Albany,” to break up entrenched politicos. Further, he does have some valid points: New Yorkers pay almost the highest taxes in the nation--especially property taxes--its legislature is dysfunctional and its government is one of the most bureaucratized.

But it's also got Wall Street: neither Paladino, nor Cuomo are willing to talk about taxing its huge profits, nor about taxing multimillionaires like him more fairly.

Paladino is the ultimate Roman Senator: he owes his appeal to his own money (he outspent Lazio 3 to 2), his "white-hot rhetoric" and perhaps to his class arrogance: he wrote of turning prisons into dormitories where welfare recipients would be taught hygiene!

If New Yorkers elect him (anything's possible), State politics will be even more strident, confrontational and disastrous.

Man Threatens to Blow Up World

Man threatens to blow up the world, but backs down because he's wangled a stint on TV--that's all he wanted, anyway: attention.

That's a bit like "Doctor" Terry Jones agreeing not to burn those qur'ans, after: General Petraeus and the President mouthed off about it; Gates, Secretary of Defense, called him; a local Imam spoke to him about interceding with the "Ground Zero Mosque" organizer and all the channels were covering him as hot news.

So, this Terry Jones is a Doctor (presumably of Divinity), from an unaccredited school where he bought his degree online, preaches in a run-down church to about 50 parishioners and sells used furniture on ebay. He apparently doesn't hear what he doesn't want to: that the Imam had arranged an appointment with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is central to the disputed Muslim community center in lower Manhattan (it's not at Ground Zero), but had agreed to nothing, apparently not even the meeting.

This is how you gain notoriety. This nonentity is suddenly known round the world. And you know what, there will be more Terry Jones's. It's a way to become famous, almost instantaneously. We used to have famous outlaws--bank robbers, murderers--and now?

Note: outlaws would now be called criminals: notice the difference a word makes.

How do you get a book noticed? The same way: by doing or saying or writing something outrageous, or perhaps revealing state secrets--but just a little, like Anthony Shaffer. Shaffer's Afghan memoir, Operation Dark Heart, threatens security, some claim: Army reviewers didn't, but Defense Intelligence Agency reviewers did. Shaffer worked with DIA.

So how is Shaffer's book being noticed? He's in the news, because the Defense Department is going to buy up all 10,000 copies of his first edition, so that objectionable passages can be deleted. A good use for Pentagon money!

However, some review copies have--escaped!

Will Shaffer have a bestseller on his hands? The next printing will be considerably more than 10,000, I'm sure. And maybe, once the revised edition arrives, some reviewer will release the redacted passages to Wikileaks.

Some people achieve fame through luck and talent, others through stupidity, incompetence, or sheer nastiness.

Do you know the old-fashioned way to become famous? Come from a lofty family, think well of yourself, and play by the rules. A more modern variation is: get a good education, meet the right people, and work deals.

Fifth Century Rome was old-fashioned--until it collapsed. Senators' sons followed Senators; the right people knew the right people and spent a lot of money; new ideas were distrusted and literary style was most important. Meanwhile, the western Empire slipped out of their hands, and into the control of the Germanic tribes.

Some of their leaders were a bit like Sarah Palin!

Playing Cynical Politics

Politicians play politics as naturally as the Pope says Mass, but there is a difference between above-board and cynical politics. Now, both sides are playing both.

In above-board politics, a politician will push for what he's really for, whether it's tax-cuts or new taxes, more oil-drilling in the Gulf, or stopping it cold.

The dialog on tax cuts is fairly straightforward: the Republicans are for making the Bush tax cuts permanent, since they have enriched their primary constituency (and campaign funders), the very wealthy. The increase in holdings of the top 1% of income classes, and even the top 0.1% since Bush cut taxes is phenomenal.

Obama is also straightforward when he opposes the extension of tax-cuts for the wealthy: an extension would cost $700 billion in the next ten years; he needs those funds to bring down the deficits; extending tax cuts would raise them. The wealthy are sitting on their riches, not investing in jobs, so losing those tax cuts shouldn't hurt job growth.

But Republicans are also against anything Obama proposes, including tax breaks they have championed for years for corporations. Why? Cynical politics. They are against any policy proposed by Obama, or Congressional Democrats. It doesn't matter if they were for precisely that policy beforehand: if he's for it, they're against it. This is true of Obama's healthcare, too. Most of the elements of the new law are similar to Massachusetts' health care law, signed by Republican Governor Mitt Romney--who now advocates repealing the national legislation!

Up until now, it looked as if Obama was trying to promote compromise, by incorporating Republican elements (as in the health care bill) to gain bipartisan support, but now he's playing cynical politics, too. His economic proposals are not really short-term stimulus programs: they are dares. Making the R&D tax credit permanent, would not generate many new jobs, although Obama claims it would, but it does call the Republicans' bluff.

Obama is about to call for a two-year corporate investment tax credit allowing 100% write offs on investments in plant and equipment. The R&D proposal would cost over $100 billion, the write offs could cost $300 billion.

But why would corporations invest in plant and equipment, when there is lagging demand for goods and services? So, they can lay off more workers, perhaps. Neither proposal would generate many jobs, but Republicans have advocated for both, yet will block both; they don't want Democrats to get the credit: (cynical politics).

Then, Obama could highlight their obstructionism and say; Republicans even block their own proposals to stimulate the economy. This is cynical politics: would Obama propose tax credits, if he thought they would pass?

Meanwhile, businesses squeeze profits from fewer workers and don't hire, while nearly 20% of the workforce isn't working.

Which cynical politics will work best?

Labor Day!

Back to work tomorrow, the summer officially over, the political campaign to begin in earnest. You mean, all those Tea Party protests weren't a political campaign?

Labor Day is supposed to celebrate workers. As Garrison Keiler remarked, everywhere else workers are celebrated on May Day. Everywhere else they must be Commies! Everywhere else in developed countries labor unions account for more than 7% of the private workforce, and corporations would love to gain the kind of rights they have here. Union-busting firms probably began here; they'll probably spread elsewhere.

And then, there's the unemployed: near 10% makes those with jobs afraid to ask for anything.

The American model is no longer the well-paid middle class worker belonging to a union. Time and a half for overtime or weekends is a distant memory for most of us. Forty-hour weeks are something that seems to have disappeared, too, for the majority. Either the boss demands that you work extra hours or weekends for the same pay, or if you're salaried, for no extra pay at all.

Unions created the weekend, and that still exists, although for millions it doesn't. A friend of mine lost his $60,000 a year programming job and after the maximum unemployment all he's been able to get is an $8.50/hour job in which he works a rotating schedule, off sometimes on the weekend, sometimes Friday and Saturday, sometimes Sunday and Monday, etc..

My son goes to work daily at about 9, but doesn't get off work until 7 or 8 . His partner works even longer hours. Both are salaried, so, they earn no extra for long hours.

This seems to be the new American model. It may also be why employers aren't hiring much; they can squeeze more and more work out of their current employees with little additional cost. It's also, why they enthusiastically fight unions, and why there are fewer and fewer unionized workers. Employers call it worker "flexibility."

Capital has won; Labor has lost. With the Citizens United court decision, the preponderance of capital over labor can only increase, because corporations can buy Congress, the Executive and the courts: their funds are almost unlimited, anyone else's are extremely limited. Democracy and the shiny worker model first enunciated by Henry Ford--workers paid well enough to buy his cars--is dying fast.

Americans already work longer hours, get less vacation, and fewer benefits than virtually any other developed country. Are we on course to become like Third World countries? American workers aren't competing with Germans and Japanese, but with the Chinese! We'll be competing against India and Brazil, too.

Empire? Yeah. We'll pay for that, but not to hire American workers, and not to pay them decently, either.

The future America will be corporate imperial fascism--until the corporations bankrupt us, or take over the world.

The Rich and 'Other People'

"The rich are better off with a smaller percentage of a fast-growing economy than a larger share of an economy that’s barely moving." So wrote Robert Reich on Thursday (NYT: 09/02/10).

In economic terms, this might be true, if the rich actually earn more money, but even if they do, more money might not be what motivates them. Consider David Koch, who is worth $17.5 billion. What's a few more billion, especially since his billions continue to grow, even if the unemployment rate remains at almost 10%, and the economy is mired in a stall?

Koch is funding Tea party candidates to drive the Republican Party far to the right, and the amount of money he's spending is astonishing. He isn't motivated to earn even more in a more egalitarian society. He's driven by a non-economic motive: power. He and his brother, Charles, have been funding right-wing "think-tanks" for almost a generation, but now they see their political chance: they've got boots on the ground.

What do the Koch's and other right-wingers want? They want to be able to push everyone else around; they want to control the government, rather than pay the multi-million dollar fines (for pollution) that the EPA has levied on the Koch's; they want to undo unionization; they want to reduce even seniors to servitude, by abolishing Social Security and Medicare.

It's a class thing. David went to Deerfield Academy and MIT. He knows that 'other people' just aren't of his high quality. After all, he started rich and has gotten much richer. Being part of a growing, vital economy, growing with it, that's not part of his persona; that would include all those (shudder) 'other people.'

The Roman Senators did something similar in the Fifth Century. They cornered all the gold and land, refusing to pay taxes that would have maintained the Roman roads, or funded defense against the Barbarians. They also reduced everyone else to serfdom. The only escape for peasants and the middle class from having everything taken from them by the impoverished state was for someone to protect them. Senators only protected them if they became their serfs or slaves.

Roman Senators would have been wealthier--and safer from the Barbarians--if they had paid taxes, and contributed towards other peoples' prosperity. But to do so, they would have lost their privileges and power.

They did lose them anyway, when the Barbarians took over in 476.

So, it's not economic rationalism that drives the money behind the right-wing movement, just as it isn't rational for its followers; for the latter it's emotional, even cathartic. For people like the Koch's, it's restoring their class to the driver's seat--where it belongs, you see.

Then, they can rip off the whole country, and no one will say boo. Hell, as our imperial adventures demonstrate, they can rip off the whole world!

America's Legacy in Iraq

So, we've removed all but 50,000 of our troops from Iraq. That's the good news. The bad news: it's not over. The American legacy in Iraq is a shaky Shiite government. Nothing is resolved.

About the only improvement over Saddam Hussein, is that there is no dictator enforcing arbitrary power. Instead, there are warring factions, a caretaker government because of the dissension, bombings--more Iraqis are being killed now, than were killed by, or under Saddam Hussein--corruption and war-profiteering, and still less than half the services, like electricity and water, available during Saddam's despotic rule. The US destroyed Iraq's utilities in the first phase of the war but it never adequately rebuilt them.

American servicemen and women served extraordinarily well, given the awful conditions. But we should also remember: Americans were ordered to kill civilians, encouraged to humiliate and torture Iraqi prisoners, and did both.

I was struck by the TV commentariat's treatment of President Obama's speech, either deriding his remarks on the economic effects of the war, or completely ignoring them. Yet we have squandered almost a trillion dollars, lost 4,400 American lives, ruined the lives of 100,000's more through injuries, especially psychological ones, killed 100,000's of Iraqis, displaced millions--and what have we bought for all this?

The American oil companies are in a minority among the firms who won contracts to "service" Iraqi oil fields, so Americans didn't even get the oil. We didn't create a functioning democracy; we didn't create a prosperous, safe Iraq. There is also no guarantee that the Iraqi government will be our friend. The political consequence of America's temporary dominance is the empowerment of the Shiite majority, but its leaders are very closely tied to our greatest competitor in the Mideast: Iran.

Further, in Iraq, majority rule does not mean democracy: it could mean majority tyranny. Iraq's leaders don't seem to understand that a minority should participate, and have rights. They didn't learn politics from Americans; they learned from the Baath Party, which dominated on behalf of the Sunnis, the minority favored by Saddam and Iraqi governments before him. The US invasion enabled a revolution favoring Iran's mullahs.

Obama restated his commitment to the Afghan war, but our effect upon Afghanistan, may be even worse than in Iraq. Afghanistan's government is more corrupt and dysfunctional; we can't avoid civilian casualties and resulting anger. We drive Afghans into the arms of the Taliban and strengthen al Qaeda--no matter how many leaders we kill with drones. Al Qaeda has already spread to Pakistan, a nuclear state, as well as Somalia and Yemen. US popular anger at all Muslims (expressed in the "ground zero mosque" controversy) will simply strengthen both even further.

Perhaps, Muslim extremists are comparable to Rome's barbarians, but we will bankrupt ourselves before they could ever take over--as the barbarians did in 476.