Who Would Jesus Assassinate?

[FredP]

You're dead on, Flow. Our country has gone from being a place where people can flourish, to a place where corporations (i.e. shareholders) can flourish, mostly at the expense of people. (Not that I'm naively suggesting that all people have had the freedom to flourish in America, by any means, but people have had more legal footing than corporations until the late 1800's.) Marketing and media are turning our children into consumer robots before they're old enough to understand what that even means. You can't tell me that the cigarette companies, and the fast food companies, and the breakfast cereal companies, and ... aren't explicitly and consciously marketing to young children. The drama of poverty is established by our cultural priorities, and it's an awful lot of momentum to buck against.

[flowperson]

Thanks for the comebacks guys! I've been coerced into behaving like a conservative-corporate geek many times, but it has always been to my detriment. I even OWN stock in corporations! In the end we can't fight our natures and nurturing without making ourselves crazy.

But all that aside, it is necessary for everyone to declare sooner or later what they believe to be right or wrong from a big picture standpoint. And it seems to be clear from current goings on that the wrong things have been done to innocent people for quite some while now. I can only hope that this terrible disaster and it's aftereffects don't degenerate into a neverending political circus without any real benefits to ordinary people in the future. That would really warm the cockles of my heart

[AletheiaRivers]

 

The GOP Finds the Silver Lining in Death and Destruction

by Arianna Huffington

 

 

The GOP message machine has now moved into the latest stage of its Katrina response: gleeful opportunism.

 

First there was denial. The lowlights of this stage included Bush strumming his guitar, Condi taking in Spamalot, and Cheney shopping for luxury digs -- all while New Orleans flooded.

 

This was followed by the clueless stage, which will be best remembered by the president telling Michael Brown “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of job!”, his mother saying of Katrina’s victims, “This is working very well for them,” Tom DeLay asking young evacuees in the Astrodome, “Now tell me

the truth boys, is this kind of fun?”, and the president vowing to rebuild Trent Lott’s house, “I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch”.

 

Next came head-ducking. Repeat after me: “This is not a time for finger pointing,” “We are not going to play the blame game.”

 

But after staggering through those stages, Republicans have regained their footing and are now hard at work finding the silver lining within all the death and destruction – i.e. a chance to trot out their pet shibboleths and push for their pet projects.

 

‘The question is,” said Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski, commenting on the now-abandoned plan to issue $2,000 debit cards to Katrina victims, “how do you separate the needy from those who just want a $2,000 handout?” Actually, Governor, the question is, among hundreds of thousands of evacuees are there any who are not really “needy” -- but somehow managed to have their lives destroyed so they could score a $2,000 handout?

 

Then there was Fox News’ Tony Snow who crowed: “This would be a marvelous time to push in a serious way for school choice, dramatic regulatory reform…even more thoroughgoing tort reform, privatization of everything from the Department of Commerce to many FEMA duties, and so on.”

 

David Sirota lays out a few of the top opportunities the GOP sees arising from Katrina, including the suspension of the 74-year-old Davis-Bacon Act requiring federal contractors to pay workers “prevailing wages”, the chance to offer more giveaways (and fewer regulations) to oil companies, and -- proving that no issue is too tangential to link to Katrina -- the chance to try and get the president’s derailed attempt to privatize Social Security back on track.

 

But wait, there’s more. Pete Domenici is looking to ease environmental requirements on oil refineries, and George Allen wants to permanently repeal parts of the clean air act.

 

Two weeks in, Katrina has turned into an-all-you-can-eat-right-wing-policy buffet.

 

And, as is so often the case with these tireless champions of crony capitalism, the main course at this opportunistic smorgasbord is “privatization”. And the target du jour is FEMA. The subtext is that the Katrina debacle somehow proves that disaster relief is no business for the government and should be turned over to the Halliburtons of the world (after all, they’ve done such a great job supplying our troops and reconstructing Iraq, right?).

 

Of course, FEMA’s Katrina failures have far less to do with some inherent big government bugaboos than with the way Bush and the partisan hacks he installed there turned a successful, widely-praised cabinet level agency (one that then-Gov. George Bush took time to praise in a debate with Al Gore in 2000) into a denuded and incompetently managed after-thought.

 

In truth, the piecemeal privatization of FEMA started soon after Bush took office -- and is one of the reasons it has stumbled so badly in Louisiana and Mississippi. Ezra Klein offers chapter and verse on this and on the chutzpah of the GOP attempt to use the Katrina fiasco to privatize FEMA: “The car broke because Bush slashed the tires and now his allies are trying to convince us that the real problem lies with the whole ‘car’ concept.”

 

David Brooks spent his last column attempting to make this very case. Let me distill its essence for you: Government sucks! According to Brooks, “the Army Corps of Engineers had plenty of money” -- so the problem wasn’t that Bush had slashed funding to fortify the levees, the problem was government. And according to Brooks, “there were ample troops nearby to maintain order” -- so the problem wasn’t that nearly 40% of Louisiana and Mississippi’s National Guard is deployed in Iraq, the problem was government. And the problem certainly wasn’t that Bush had filled five of the eight top slots at FEMA with incompetent political cronies… the problem was (all together now!) government.

 

In fact, dear David, the fault lies not in the Platonic idea of government but in the crummy reality of our leaders.

 

© 2005 Huffington Post

 

CommonDreams.org

[des]

Y'all haven't seen that sick Pat Buchannan (this time) argument? See it wasn't the Hurricane that devasted these people, it was... the.. tadah the so-called "Welfare State". They developed "learned helplessness" as a result fo the "Welfare state" and weren't able to "help themselves" as is usual in disasters (according to Pat and apparently some on Fox). Doesn't matter that the entire infrastructure was torn apart, gosh darn these Welfare state folks just couldn't do anything. YIKES. Talk about blaming the victim!!!

 

 

--des

[flowperson]

Des:

 

ALWAYS CONSIDER THE SOURCE!!! Remember that this flaming, gasbag, presidential wannabee wrote speeches for that late and highly revered president Richard Milhous (wanna buy a used car from this tricky guy) Nixon. End of statement........ oh....forgot something.......I hardly ever watch TV these days anyhow since most people on it are cartoon characters specially designed to honk me off!!!! Except , of course , for ELLEN.

I suggest abstinence from TV, but not sex. The first is certain to negatively affect your psyche, the second will make you joyful and relaxed, which is the antithesis of what the folks at FOX are ALWAYS trying to do to you.

 

 

I feel like I just created a duplicate copy of The Scream, you know that famous Norwegian painting that's always getting swiped.

Edited September 14, 2005 by flowperson

[des]

Uh, flowmaster, I heard this on PBS-- and yes I do consider the source. However, I also know that people (other people from me) hear this drek (as I think-- don't know as I never watch it) on Fox. Someone posted a long winded representation fo this. It was easily shot down by several people, one of whom lived not far outside of NO, had been there and knew for a fact that many of the stories of looting ,etc were way way overdone.

However, this person who posted this at least temporarily thought that this was very interesting and thought provoking, not even thinking of the mean spirited nature of it.

 

--des

[ArmadilloUCC]

Last time I checked, termites built really big hills. The San Antonio zoo even had fake termite mounds to make the lions feel more at home. (I don't know if the zoo still has them. This was when I was a kid.)

Pat knows about as much about termites as he does about other things.

[des]

I agree that Pat B. knows nothign about this (or many other topics he talks about), and so far I think the mean-spirited view doesn't carry much weight. Hopefully it stays that way. The trouble is, that though he doesn't know anything, some people may figure he does. Or that it is the easy way out. After all, way easier to blame victims. But perhaps the whole immensity of it all makes the arguments seem just plain wrong to a lot of decent people. They have seen weeks of raising water, people in huge "camps", etc. and the city of NO underwater. Hopefully that's what they see anyway.

 

--des

[FredP]

After all, way easier to blame victims.

Well, Buchanan may be way off base on a great many things, but I'm not actually sure he's blaming the victims here. The term "Welfare State" doesn't refer to the victims, but the system which creates and sustains economic victimhood. Granted, a progressive vision of a just economic society differs significantly from that of Pat Squared, as far as what it will take to create economic self-determination across the whole demographic spectrum in America. The tragedy in New Orleans was more than just a natural disaster; it was a natural disaster befalling so many people without a basic safety net. Pat thinks that families and communities are responsible for creating and sustaining their own safety nets; progressives usually believe that state, federal, and world governments also have a significant role in preventing some of the gross inequities that inevitably crop up in a laissez-faire economy. Pat wants less government attention to poverty; progressives want a radically different kind of government attention to poverty. Minimally we agree that the current regime is fundamentally not working. And I think we may need as many allies as we can get our hands on.

 

Ironically, the far left and right, with very different agendas, are currently united against the big corporate political machine of the "middle" left and right, which has been running the country for 25 years. In 2000, Nader called Bush and Gore Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee. I'm pretty sure Bush was Tweedle-Dum, but the point was that there is little real economic difference between the high-profile Republicans and Democrats anymore. The media creates a convincing illusion of difference, that makes us feel that we are being presented with a genuine choice every four years. Personally, I think it's worthwhile to acquaint ourselves with all the alternatives to big money government, even Pat's. Who knows, you might find one or two interesting ideas lurking in there somewhere.

 

I can hardly wait for the fallout from this.

[flowperson]

I believe you're absolutely dead on Fred. We've needed alternatives for quite some time now. But the good ole' two party system just keeps flim-flamming us all into a future that is mostly based upon fear, intimidation, and loathing; and, that is very short on progress and hope.

 

Before the last election people asked me who I intended to vote for. I explained that I had voted for Perot, Perot, and Nader in the last three elections just because I believed that SOME sort of CHANGE was needed to kick the country in the chest and get it to begin breathing again. But then Ralphie began to sell-out to the right just to get his name on ballots, and I held my nose and voted for Kerry.

 

Any whisper of a third party possibility brings violent and abusive political reaction from both of the parties in power. They go to ANY lengths to make it impossible for folks to get their names on ballots if they are only perceived to be any sort of viable threat to the status quo, locally or nationally. So instead of true democracy where the wishes of even the minorities have some voice, one doesn't have a chance to be heard or noticed unless several gazillionaires are on your wagon.

 

Fred, let's just make you King for life. You're a very smart guy. You're fair and balanced. I'd kiss your ring, and if I had gazillions I'd even finance your rise to power. I'll bet you'd listen to personal petitioners with empathy and fairness, and I'm also sure that you wouldn't resort to cutting babies in half.

 

Benevolent dictatorships work. Isn't fantasy a so very satisfying thing?

[des]

re: blaming the victim

 

>Fred:

Well, Buchanan may be way off base on a great many things, but I'm not actually sure he's blaming the victims here. The term "Welfare State" doesn't refer to the victims, but the system which creates and sustains economic victimhood. Granted, a progressive vision of a

 

 

Yes, but... the idea of what he said was that the people themselves (due to their being economic victims of the Welfare system) somehow caused most of the chaos in NO.

It's crazy really. It's as if he doesn't grasp the enormity of Katrina.

 

>just economic society differs significantly from that of Pat Squared, as far as what it will take to create economic self-determination across the whole demographic spectrum in America. The tragedy in New Orleans was more than just a natural disaster; it was a natural disaster befalling so many people without a basic safety net. Pat thinks that families and communities are responsible for creating and sustaining their own safety nets; progressives usually believe that state, federal, and world governments also have a significant role in preventing some of the gross inequities that inevitably crop up in a laissez-faire economy. Pat wants less government attention to poverty; progressives want a radically different kind of government attention to poverty. Minimally we agree that the current regime is fundamentally not working. And I think we may need as many allies as we can get our hands on.

 

 

Yeah, but I find this "vision" so unbelievably screwy, I find trouble locating much I can agree with, except that the current system (and the current system is not really what Pat was talking about after all-- we have a very limited 'welfare state" at this point) doesn't work.

Ok, I'll agree with that much. But it isn't anything new he is saying.

 

>country for 25 years. In 2000, Nader called Bush and Gore Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee. I'm pretty sure Bush was Tweedle-Dum, but the point was that there is little real economic difference between the high-profile Republicans and Democrats anymore. The

 

Anybody really believe now that Bush isn't a LOT worse than Gore would have been?

Think in environmental terms alone. Then think Supreme Court.

(I mean that might agree with Nader). I am sympathetic to the view that the parties aren't very different from each other. I don't think third parties ever will really get anywhere. What they end up being is spoilers-- mostly getting us the worst choices.

 

Gosh I wish I could think of the guy I heard on BookTv. He was talking about wanting democracy in the US. What an idea huh. He also believes that the two party system is inherently bad and that a third party doesn't do much but the above. He says all mature democracies are parlimentary, but proposes ideas possible now like instant run off elections.

Maybe I can find the website. Here, I bookmarked it!

www.fairvote.org

 

 

>acquaint ourselves with all the alternatives to big money government, even Pat's. Who knows, you might find one or two interesting ideas lurking in there somewhere.

 

Strangely I find myself agreeing with Pat B. on trade.

 

>I can hardly wait for the fallout from this.

 

 

You got it.

 

 

--des

[FredP]

Gosh I wish I could think of the guy I heard on BookTv. He was talking about wanting democracy in the US. What an idea huh. He also believes that the two party system is inherently bad and that a third party doesn't do much but the above. He says all mature democracies are parlimentary, but proposes ideas possible now like instant run off elections.

/quote]

We DEFINITELY need instant run-off elections. Most people who might consider voting for a third party candidate don't do it because it's a waste of their vote. That's part of why (I think) Nader harps on how much the mainline two parties are exactly the same. Sure, he glosses over differences when he says that, and sure, I agree that Gore would have been less bad than Bush as President... but I think I have to agree with Ralph that in the long run, in terms of economic justice, in terms of empowering the people and not the corporations, the difference is pretty minimal. But hey, that's just me.

 

Flow, how do you figure Ralph "sold out to the right"? He's been on a crusade to get Bush impeached for the Iraq war since it started. Just because he's making mainline democrats angry by saying they've sold out to big money, doesn't make him a sell-out. Or maybe you're referring to something else. Oh, and I genuinely appreciate your eagerness to make me King. I'll let you know next time I have a major power trip.

[flowperson]

I am getting a bit doddering in my advanced years, my leige(sp?), but I recollect Ralph was having a heck of a time gettiing on the ballot in a lot of places when he left the umbrella of the Greens.

My recollection is that he went around to Republicrat bigwigs in various locations promising to soften his stance on this and that in order to meet the outrageous petition requirements designed and erected in most states to prevent election candidacies such as his. I guess I was just dismayed that he was "playing poliics" with them. But then it was unrealistic of me to look askance at what he was doing when it was certainly necessary for him to do it under the circumstances.

 

I listen to progressive newscasts fairly regularly, and that is my recollection. Otherwise I hold the Ralphster in the highest esteem as a commited social advocate and national police dog. Thanks for the comeback.

[FredP]

My recollection is that he went around to Republicrat bigwigs in various locations promising to soften his stance on this and that in order to meet the outrageous petition requirements designed and erected in most states to prevent election candidacies such as  his.

That's interesting; my dad made a comment to the same effect last year when we were talking about the race. I follow Ralph pretty closely, and what I do know is that it was ten times more difficult for him to get on the ballot in 2004, due to increased pressure from mainline Republicans and Democrats to bow out -- think Perot in '96. The bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates continues with each election to make it closer to impossible for someone outside the reigning two party system to participate in the debates, and therefore to garner enough visibility to get considered for the ballot. This is why Perot got almost 20% of the popular vote in 1992, but most of America didn't even realize he ran in 1996.

 

Anyway, I could understand why it would be in the interests of mainline Republicans and Democrats for us to believe Ralph had sold out: his opposition to the Democrats, as well as the Republicans, in 2004 was much more vocal than in 2000, because he saw the two parties essentially united on what he viewed as the most important political issue of the race -- the Iraq War. Who wants a "spoiler" like that in the race? The illusion of the great gulf between the Democrats and Republicans is part of American orthodoxy, and crucial to the smooth operation of the two-party system. What if everybody knew that both parties were actually for sale? IMO, Ralph's message was much more radical in 2004, criticizing both mainline parties with equal vigor, which is why he felt that he really had to go it on his own this time. Why would someone with as big an appetite for controversy as Michael Moore -- someone who has supported him so vocally in the past -- turn his back on him in '04 to endorse Kerry?

 

Ok, I'll stop preaching.

 

... Republicrat bigwigs ...

Thanks for that term of endearment! I'm stealing it!

 

Fred

[flowperson]

Fred

There's something wrong here since we seem to totally agree again on something. Seriously, what you wrote is totally accurate from my perspective.

 

Now to take the next great fearsome leap. There seems to be a sniff of desperation in all this control freak behavior on the part of the two major parties over the past two decades or so.

 

My intuition is that the powers that be know a lot that we do not know about what may happen if they lose the trust of the people (I believe that they're both well on the way to that goal). And further, what will happen if they lose the ability to effectively propagandize and spin their activities so that we continue to invest belief in what they tell us and sell to us about the future that they wish to come true. Electronic illusions can only fool some of the people some of the time. They both want to fool all of the people all of the time ( I know that this is blatant plagarism, but it so perfectly fits the situation).

 

To extend Eisenhower's famous warning to the citizens at the end of his presidency, it appears that there is a military-industrial-entertainment complex linkage of some kind that is dedicated to steer us in certain directions, whether we want to go there or not. Any many of us today intuit that where they're steering us is not likely such a good place.

 

Stability seems to be the only goal they now strive for together, but , while being admirable from an economic perspective, this alone will never create the spiritual will for people to progress into a more just and equitable future together. Indeed, all the numbers show that economic haves and have nots are becoming more separated, safety nets are dissolving, government is becoming less able to respond to public crises in the moment, despite falling major crime rates higher percentages of minorities are in prisons; and, despite the best of intentions, our leaders are too tied up in political considerations to effectively lead when that is required.

 

This is all impossible for peons like us to parse and synthesize because we do not have the necessary information. We see and read and hear about the waves and ripples and occasional storms that result from the interactions of the things that are hidden from us, but, to paraphrase a favorite line of mine from a Jack Nicholson film portrayal, we can't handle the truth. The possible and probable answers are likely lethal and that is why they have been so effectively compartmentalized since world war two. It's only costing us about $40 billion a year or so to keep this stuff in the black zone. A mere pittance when you consider the cost of the war in Iraq and the cost of rebuilding people's lives after "unforseen" natural disasters.

[FredP]

... military-industrial-entertainment complex ...

Yes! The media are essential to maintaining the polarization of ideas. If TV news isn't entertainment, then why does it need a snappy soundtrack? (Any Neil Postman-ites out there??)

 

Stability seems to be the only goal they now strive for together, but , while being admirable from an economic perspective, this alone will never create the spiritual will for people to progress into a more just and equitable future together.

Precisely. There is much to be commended about the mechanism of market capitalism, but as an ideology, if applied across the board, it reduces all media of exchange to consumer categories, thereby conditioning us (not necessarily purposefully) to view human development in merely economic terms -- we're growing as people if we're earning, investing, consuming, etc. But social, civic, and spiritual "goods" can't be reduced to economic ones, and so there's no way for a capitalist market to stimulate their "production." Indeed, it could be argued that the obsessive prioritization of economic goods actually hinders the development of these higher goods. One needn't be a socialist to believe that there exist social and civic forms of "wealth" that aren't reducible to economic forms of wealth, and that there might be creative ways for an economy to encourage their "production." We might consider once again requiring that corporations be responsible to the common good of their communities, and allowing their charters to be revoked if the people conclude that they are no longer providing a public good -- rather than allowing them to trample all over human rights, go wherever the labor is cheapest, and pay their CEO's 400 times what their workers make. We can start measuring our "wealth" as a society in terms of people's freedom to contribute in positive ways across the entire spectrum of "goods" -- including their time -- rather than just by how much more Citicorp's stockholders are pocketing this quarter.

 

Thanks for the good thoughts, Flow.