Category Archives: The American Experience

To today's GOP, only money matters.

It is widely believed that politics and economics are separate and largely unconnected; that individual freedom is a political problem and material welfare an economic problem; and that any kind of political arrangements can be combined with any kind of economic arrangements… The thesis of this chapter is that such a view is a delusion, that there is an intimate connection between economics and politics, that only certain arrangements are possible and that, in particular, a society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom.

…For most citizens of the country, however, if not for the intellectual, the direct importance of economic freedom is at least comparable in significance to the indirect importance of economic freedom as a means to political freedom.

…The citizen of the United States who is compelled by law to devote something like io per cent of his income to the purchase of a particular kind of retirement contract, administered by the government, is being deprived of a corresponding part of his personal freedom…. True, the number of citizens who regard compulsory old age insurance as a deprivation of freedom may be few, but the believer in freedom has never counted noses.

…A citizen of the United States who under the laws of various states is not free to follow the occupation of his own choosing unless he can get a license for it, is likewise being deprived of an essential part of his freedom.

— Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 1962, Chapter 1.

I had reason to re-typeset an old graduate school paper the other day, a necessity for filing my application to Hunter College’s Master’s in Education program online, as the 5-1/4″ disk the paper was originally on was going to be more trouble to revive than just typing the damn thing. It was a long review of then-recent trends in academic American history writing. More specifically, the paper asked, “What is ‘Marxist’ History?” as it applied to recent writing about the Civil War and Reconstruction, as this term was being widely bandied about, both as a pejorative, and more sympathetically as a means of describing historical methodologies deployed by some of the writers.

The most striking conclusion of the paper was that the contemporary historians that could best be described as “Marxist” were in fact exclusively those that described themselves as conservatives. In a nutshell, following loosely the gospel of Milton Friedman as roughly sketched above, these conservative historians believed that everything in American history follows from America’s economic structure, and that all freedom follows from economic freedom. Want democracy, they say, you must have capitalism. Want to understand the Civil War, you only need study the difference in cost between slave and free labor.

Crude Marxist sociological and historical writing of the 1930s and 1940s shared exactly this same premise: that everything in history is narrowly determined by the prevailing “means of production,” which is to say, the sociological structure of the economy. Germans are Germans and Russians are Russians, but give them capitalism, and they’ll all start to act the same way, and with the same self interest. Mainstream sociologists and historians tried to grapple with some of the absurdities of such a reductionist view of history. After World War II, those sympathetic to the legacy of “Marxist” or “Marxian” analysis found ways to incorporate political and cultural inputs and principles into their social theories, at the same time deriding the older tradition as mere “economic determinism” or “economism.”

Not so the conservatives. Like so much else in the modern conservative movement that arose from the sprinkler-salved deserts of Arizona and Orange County, conservative historians borrowed a first principle from an older, mostly left-wing critique of liberalism, and made it their own. It really is, and always will be, about the economy, stupid. Everything else is noise. The Civil War? It was about saving capitalism. World War II? It was about saving capitalism. The War on Terror? Well, that’s about saving “our freedoms,” of course. But as the sociological architect of modern conservatism, Milton Friedman points out, freedom is economic freedom. And despite the fact that it is patently obvious that, for instance, the idea that requiring a doctor to be licensed is an act of tyranny, is on its face as absurd a notion as anything that ever animated your Bolshevik man on the street, conservative historians and politicians keep promulgating this crude economistic nonsense. There are no morals, there are no politics, there are no reasonable limits to wealth. There is only fealty or treason to the Invisible Hand and the economic status quo.

It’s the great and only argument of today’s Grand Old Party. We can’t have health care because it would hurt the economy. We can’t have clean air or water because it would hurt the economy. We can’t have decent public schools because it would hurt the economy. The uber-wealthy can’t pay their fair share of taxes because it would hurt the economy. And anything that “hurts” the economy impairs our freedom. And if you don’t think the freedom to starve, the freedom to be poisoned by your food or water or air, the freedom to have the wrong limb operated on, the freedom to be denied care, the freedom of the truckdriver to drive drunk is freedom, then you don’t understand how the world works — you have not been blessed with the clarity of vision you would be granted if you just shared the ideological purity of today’s real Marxists, the new American conservative and his allies in the GOP. All taxation is tyranny, no matter how much you want the city to plow the snow from your streets, no matter how often you vote to have the government provide some basic service or protection that you know cannot logically be provided by the so-called “free market.”

Well, carry on, brave sons of the Marxist Right!You have nothing to lose but your automotive safety standards, your commuter rail service, your police force, your sewer cleaners, the army, air force and marines, your checks and credit cards or the brakes on your Toyota.

Have a nice day.

When Mike Bloomberg decided to run for a third term as New York City mayor, he derailed the mayoral ambitions of Rep. Anthony Wiener, Congressman from New York’s 9th District. Wiener, who was considered the leading candidate, seemed set on following the Ed Koch career path, and the zeitgesit pegged him as the leading Democratic candidate. Instead, he has reinvented himself as the most outspoken Congressional advocate for real health care reform and the public option.

Hat’s off to you Anthony! Keep up the good work!

If you too share my enthusiasm, why don’t you drop Rep. Wiener an email here.

Years after 9/11, Bush/Cheney responds to the question, “what was the biggest mistake you ever made?”

But Barack “the buck, ultimately, stops here” has to hear crap from Cheney every day about the penis bomber? Isn’t there some island where Cheeney and Rash can live happily ever after in wedded bliss? They could share endearing heart disease stories.

One of these is really a "weapon of mass destruction."

There has been a grotesque dumbing down, recently, of the definition of “weapon of mass destruction.” Once reserved for chemical, nuclear and biological weapons capable of killing millions, it has been revised, in the years starting with the passing of the USA PATRIOT ACT in late 2001, to include just about any and all weapons used against an American citizen. To wit:

TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 113B > § 2332a

(2) the term “weapon of mass destruction” means—

(A) any destructive device as defined in section 921 of this title;

(B) any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors;

(C) any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector (as those terms are defined in section 178 of this title); or

(D) any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life; …

(http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00002332—a000-.html)

 TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 44 > § 921

 (4) The term “destructive device” means—

(A) any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas—

(i) bomb,

(ii) grenade,

(iii) rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces,

(iv) missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce,

(v) mine, or

(vi) device similar to any of the devices described in the preceding clauses;

(B) any type of weapon (other than a shotgun or a shotgun shell which the Attorney General finds is generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes) by whatever name known which will, or which may be readily converted to, expel a projectile by the action of an explosive or other propellant, and which has any barrel with a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter; and

(C) any combination of parts either designed or intended for use in converting any device into any destructive device described in subparagraph (A) or (B) and from which a destructive device may be readily assembled.

(http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00000921—-000-.html)

The “destructive device” language is the product of legislation since 2001.

Whatever else one might think of them — and personally, I think they should rot in jail for the rest of their lives — the penis bomber and the Ft. Hood shooter have both been charged with the use of “weapons of mass destruction.” This is ridiculous, and has the potential to leave us naked, legally, if and when, g*d forbid, someone actually uses, or tries to use, a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon against the United States and its citizens. Let alone, the fact that the “destructive devices” described in Section 921 are commonly used by U.S. military and police forces, and it would be quite easy to find the legal tables turned on us. Note, for instance, that Section 921(a)(iv) simply descibes a common type of explosive bullet.

This continued insistence on rhetoric over common sense — especially as it continues to be codified in our laws — has more potential to seriously threaten our society than all the Al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia.

William Butler Yeats, by John Singer Sargent

 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

–The Second Coming (1919/1920), William Butler You-Know-Who

Recent days have heard a raft of criticism of Barack Obama for not responding with more passion to the threat posed by the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. This is a welcome sign, frankly. Compared to the supposedly heroic and “passionate” George W. Bush, Obama’s measured response is entirely appropriate to an incident that caused no casualties, and which doesn’t change a single fact about the scope or scale of the terrorist threat, or of the competencies (or lack thereof) of  those who wish us harm. The simple fact of the matter is that Islamic extremist terrorism, as awful and bothersome as it is, poses no real day-to-day threat to the average American, and only in the most long-term and improbable circumstances — China or Russia becoming full-bodied allies of Al Qaeda, thus changing the global military equation — will they ever pose such a threat. Al Qaeda blew its wad on September 11th, and most everything that follows will be a mop-up operation. The existence of the Al Qaeda threat has not tangibly changed anything about the daily lives of Americans, except maybe to add a bit of humiliation, at the hands of our own government mind you, at the airport check-in counter, the blow to our mutual self-esteem inherent in our willingness to expose our children to military personnel and unsheathed M-16s on our streets and at the regional railroad station.

For all the demagogic rhetoric of the Bush administration — for all the “bring it on’s” and “crusades” and “dead or alive’s” — Osama Bin Laden and his entourage are still at large; something that can’t be said of last week’s penis bomber. And buried by all the demagogic rhetoric and war-talk is the simple fact that throughout this era the Republicans have never stopped for one day quietly pursuing their Restoration reactionary agenda — eliminating the progressive income tax and the inheritance tax; substantially and permanently reducing the capital gains tax and effective corporate tax rates; guaranteeing that the President, the Vice President, their families and supporters would profit personally and maximally from our two-front “War on Terrorism”; stripping away the last vestiges of regulatory control of corporate entities; and making worker organization and unionization virtually illegal — all at a time when our spirits and our resources should supposedly have been mobilized to meet the great existential, military threat posed by six turbaned guys hiding in a tenement in Peshawar (or a cave, if you prefer; but that is so passé). 

These domestic affronts to the liberty and livelihood of the vast majority of Americans, which proceeded unabated while Junior and Darth Vader held the mike and prattled endlessly on about war, are the real threats inherited by the American People of 2010 — the things that really affect our daily lives today, as we suffer through massive loss of real income and 10% unemployment. And so it is, in my view, infinitely appropriate that our new President ratchet down the hysteria, and concentrate on fixing our broken home. Thank heaven for a real leader at last!

And for those liberal hawks — I’m thinking of you Chris Matthews — who have their panties all twisted about Abdul the Panty Bomber: get over it, baby. This guy can’t hurt America. Seriously. And if not adding to the panic costs the Democrats some seats at the mid-terms — well, so it goes. Better to be lead by real men for a short time than to succomb to the lies and panic that have brought us, altogether, to this ugly present.