Bastards and Real Bastards

Qaddafi bombs his own unarmed people and destroys towns in order to retake them; in China, human rights activists just disappear: poof. In Attila, as Told to His Scribes, (Chapter Two to appear soon), Attila makes the case that the Romans were worse than he was: and besides, he learned the brutality from them.

Lying kills more than Qaddafi's bombs, only not so suddenly. The misrepresentation of reality perpetrated on Americans by the MSM will result in a lot more deaths than bombs, from diseases not treated, from air pollution, from unmitigated climate change, from car accidents due to poor road maintenance, even from hunger--so draconian are the cuts justified by these lies. Note: Canada permits no Fox-Canada, because it has a law against lying on air.

The biggest lie is that the deficit is the problem. It isn't; it's a short-term solution and needs to be even larger in the near-term--to overcome lagging demand. The secondary lies are that unions are corrupt, wield monopoly power over governments, and are the cause of the budget deficits that--take a deep breath--caused the recession--which is all Obama's fault, of course. Oh, also: seniors are greedy and Social Security will sink us.

Reality Check: Obama's stimulus did prevent us, and perhaps the world, from falling headlong into another Great Depression, but it was compromised away to death and was much too small to pull us out of recession. What we need now, is more spending for job creation, not draconian cuts. Social Security hasn't contributed to the deficits; its "locked box" has been looted for years by politicians, who borrowed the bonds amassed, and replaced them with IOU's. Now they have to be paid back. Slashing the military, or taxing the few who have ripped off everyone else, could pay off the IOU's: both are responsible for them, after all.

In the ongoing budget battle, Obama does know that the stimulus worked, if not enough, and he knows we need more of it. Yet, right off the bat, he freezes Federal workers' wages, and offers to cut Food Stamps, the program that has expanded exponentially--because people need it to get by.

Obama is a politician. When he saw the election results, he listed rightward--offering concessions like the Food Stamps cuts, because people were angry about spending (due to Fox/Limbaugh lies). But nothing he offers will be drastic enough, unless he accepts the whole GOP agenda. If he does that--

We'll need a new party; we'll nationalize the Wisconsin Movement.

It's either that, or capitulation to our new masters: corporations and billionaires, the epitome of Fifth Century Roman Senators. Less humane than their predecessors, however, corporations and billionaires assume no responsibility for their slaves and serfs, nor for the world they trash.

Angry, Not Just Tea Partiers

People are angry, and have good reason to be. But right-wing commentators and media like Fox are successfully diverting their ire. Meanwhile, would-be reformers find little support for substantive reform in policy areas in which there are substantial vested interests.

Health reform had to be limited to get past insurance company and provider interests, hence no "public option," and no negotiated Pharma prices.

Financial reform has to pass muster with banks, which are again riding roughshod over the economy: posting huge gambling profits, foreclosing on homeowners and ignoring mortgage re-negotiation programs, instituting new credit card fees, borrowing from the Fed at virtually no cost, and using the money to speculate, instead of loaning to businesses.

Republicans make the false claim that finance reform proposals will perpetuate public bailouts, so any reform must be killed. Meanwhile, Democrats are too craven to re-establish the needed boundaries between depositors and gamblers (like the repealed Glass-Steagall law), or to create a consumer protection agency that isn't answerable to the bankers first.

Why? Because banks and bankers have bought the GOP and enough of the Democrats to forestall meaningful reform.

Tea Party activists are angry, and others, too, but instead of venting their ire against the corporations exporting their jobs for profits, or against bankers, or AIG, they rant against "socialistic" Obama, Muslim, foreigner, against illegal aliens and against "those people" who don't pay income taxes (they pay as much in other taxes).

Noam Chomsky noted the similarities between the violent rhetoric of right-wing Americans and the Nazis before Hitler's takeover, and pointed out that the Nazis had only negligible support two years before they took control (through a democratic election).

The Weimar Republic was democratic, moderate and ineffectual; its reformers were pusillanimous. Nazis boasted they knew what to do. Germany's largest corporations supported them. The fascist system Nazis instituted, merged the power of the state with that of big business. The military in Nazi Germany was fused with both. Is that where we're headed?

Can moderate, centrist, half-reforms mollify enough of the people, stabilize the economy, prevent dangerous climate change, establish peace and maintain democracy? Given the violent response of the crazies, the power of the status quo institutions, and the military's interest in pursuing "the long war," it doesn't seem likely.

I take the Tea Party seriously. They may have all the facts wrong, they may be as ignorant as Sarah Palin, but they have energy. Faced with right-wing populists like Father Coughlin, FDR campaigned against "the economic royalists of our time." He won big for reform in 1936.

Our democracy needs an FDR, or Obama to become one, if it is to survive. Otherwise, we'll face the twilight of empire, like Diocletian's, more totalitarian than Hitler's, but declining nonetheless--before climate change destroys civilization as we know it.