Liberals Have Become Complacent

Liberals remain silent...

 

By Clancy Sigal

There is an astonishing lack of anger among liberals, progressives and radicals who have abandoned emotion to the right. Our role model continues to be not FDR, still less Malcolm X, but our "bipartisan" and apparently tone-deaf President Obama.

In this second or third year of a devastating depression, not just recession, that has inflicted an epidemic of suffering on the lower half of the American nation, Obama is very busy being fluent and civil while being essentially untouched by the rage felt by so many of us.

Our world, as we have known it, is being annihilated, and nobody in power shows signs of giving a damn.

The real anger is all on the right, kidnapped – or authentically voiced – by the all-white Tea Partiers, Palinites, Oath Keepers and "armed and dangerous" patriot groups, some but not all of whom are native-fascistic but also include pissed-off libertarians and the disappointed and dispossessed at the bottom of the pile.

Look at the mess. Evictions – I'm a child of Great Depression furniture-thrown-on-the-street – are skyrocketing. Mortgage holders are in a feeding frenzy on their hapless fellow citizens.

Michelle Obama lectures us on obesity while one in eight Americans (and one in four children) are on federal food stamps.

The human toll of long term, more-or-less permanent unemployment is yet to be counted as millions of Americans are pushed out of the middle class and become the "new poor" queueing up at food banks for the first time in their lives.

Those who do vent and get angry are put down as crackpots, which they sometimes are. But the so-called left seems to have joined the mainstream (and even the radical) media in under- or mis- or never-reporting what's actually happening in the lives of so many of us.

Like Obama, Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic party establishment we've forfeited real gut language in favor of policy abstractions, the "issues" syndrome, that so easily hide an open wound.

Joe Stack, who rammed his Piper Cherokee into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, murdering an IRS worker and injuring many, was one maladjusted injustice collector.

But his online 3000-word suicide note, a long-repressed scream of protest, has the virtue of unminced words we are never likely to hear from anyone in Washington or a state capitol. "When the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die."

Where and when did we lefties lose this vital part of our social language? Was it in pre-school where we're urged as toddlers to use sweet reasonableness to resolve disputes?

Or have we grown so stiffly respectable that we're afraid of being loud and vulgar?

Or that – horrors! – we'll get too closely identified with the Great Unwashed like Joe Stack, Amy Bishop (the professor who shot her Alabama colleagues), crazy bikers, teenage gangs and "poor white trash" who tend to express their anger mainly against each other?

Whatever the reason, the suppression of sane, liberal anger has been around at least half a century, certainly since the sociologist C Wright Mills in his influential book The Power Elite deplored the loss of capacity by the public to experience outrage as contrasted with earlier periods in American history.

The last time I remember collective anger as legitimate was in the 1960s. Ever since there's been a gradual slide into sterile politeness.

Recently, I attended a meeting of my local school board where a mild, hardly-above-a-whisper grumble from a parent prompted his expulsion enforced by armed police.

Who knows what might have happened if any of us in the audience had stood up and actually spoken out as in that famous Norman Rockwell painting of a town hall meeting?

Why should full-throated emotion be the monopoly of the so-called "populists" who seem to be the only people around unafraid to shout, yell, stomp and scream?

I grew up in a boisterous, immigrant, loud neighborhood where everyone had an opinion and voiced it full throttle.

Somewhere along the line, maybe when I shifted from working class to middle class, I lost my rough, grating, empowered, assertive voice – and maybe the anger that had fuelled it. If so, that's a pity.

Socalist Japan makes Capitalists Uneasy

Attack of the Socialist Toyota!

By Mike Whitney

This isn't about auto accidents or "safety regulations". It's about politics - bare-knuckle Machiavellian politics. An attack on Toyota is an attack on Japan's leading export. It is an act of war. And. as always, the US media hammer home the message.

Does anyone really believe that Toyota is being pilloried in the media for a few highway fatalities?

Nonsense. If Congress is so worried about innocent people getting killed, then why haven't they indicted US commander Stanley McChrystal for blowing up another 27 Afghan civilians on Sunday?

But this isn't about auto accidents and it's certainly not about "safety regulations". It's about politics - bare-knuckle Machiavellian politics.

An attack on Toyota is an attack on Japan's leading export. It is an act of war. Here's a excerpt from the New York Times which explains what is really going on:

"The Japanese economy has emerged from its worst recession since World War II, but is still reeling. Japan must do more to lift its economy out of deflation and boost long-term growth, S.&P. said.

“The outlook change reflects our view that the Japanese government’s diminishing economic policy flexibility may lead to a downgrade unless measures can be taken to stem fiscal and deflationary pressures.

“The policies of the new Democratic Party of Japan government point to a slower pace of fiscal consolidation than we had previously expected.”

President Barack Obama is expected to address similar worries in the United States on Wednesday, with a call for a freeze in spending on many domestic programs, a move he hopes will quell perceptions that government spending is out of control.

Fiscal problems in Greece and Ireland have also helped put the spotlight on the issue of national debt."

Japan's new liberal government is fighting deflation using the traditional methodology, by lowering interest rates and increasing fiscal stimulus. But that's not what Washington wants.

Neoliberal policymakers and their buddies in the right-wing think tanks want "fiscal consolidation" which means harsh austerity measures that will deepen the recession, increase unemployment, and trigger a wave of defaults and bankruptcies.

This is how western corporatists and bank tycoons keep their thumb on the developing world and thrust their economies into perennial crisis.

It's the "shock doctrine" and it's been the IMF's modus operandi for over 20 years. Japan is being stuffed into a fiscal straight-jacket by supporters of the Washington consensus whose goal is to weaken government and accelerate the privatization of public assets and services.

The ratings agencies are being used in the same way as the media; to wage an economic/guerrilla war on Japan and force the administration to rethink their economic policies.

Note: There is no chance that Japan will default on its debt because it pays its debts in its own currency and has large foreign exchange reserves of over $1 trillion.

The attacks on Toyota are a way of showing Tokyo what happens to countries that fail to obey Washington's orders.

Here's a clip from the New York Times which sums up the problem in a nutshell:

"The government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has "bolstered spending on social programs aimed at helping households......

"The powerful lower house of parliament approved a supplementary budget for the fiscal year that ends in March worth ¥7.2 trillion, or $80.3 billion, to help shore up the economy...

"And next year, government spending will grow further with a record trillion-dollar budget including ambitious welfare outlays."

Western elites will not tolerate economic policies which raise the standard of living for the average working slob. "Social programs" or "welfare outlays" are anathema to their trickle down, Voodoo capitalist orthodoxy.

What they want is upward redistribution and class warfare. Regrettably, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has put himself at odds with US powerbrokers and is feeling the full measure of their wrath.

His public approval ratings have plummeted to 37 percent and are headed downward still. The message is simple: Cross Washington and you're a goner.

Do not be political.

Do not be political, and do not bring politics into the relationships you have with those around you. Political strife divides and isolates. A political relationship blinds two people from seeing each other, rather they see a wall of political views held, campaigns donated too, and politicians voted for; never seeing the heart.

The answer is not to comment on the way things ought to be according to your own opinion. The answer is humility.





I know, I fail at my own advice.

Sex the cause of sexism? Better off without?

So in Biblical studies class, there's been some talk, inevitably, about sex. Namely, that the only virtuous women are virgins (though that doesn't hold true all across the board). Some of the women in my class take offense to this, which I can understand. Basically it's telling them that because they don't desire virginity above everything else in this world (some of them might even desire...marriage! Gasp!), they're not valuable. But I think the statement runs deeper than that, and you can easily see it in a different light.

If all were as it ought to be, there would be no division amongst the sexes. All throughout history, sexism has been one of the most dominant forms of discrimination. It persists, even in modern society. I think the philosophers of the ancient world might have been longing for a world without sexism. But how do you get that? How do you eliminate sexism? Even if you take out the sex, people still see women as being delicate, easy to faint, prone to every illness in the galaxy...etc.

At any rate, I believe it's possible that they saw the essential driving factor in all this sexism to be stemming from sex itself. In the male world, sex and power-play are inextricably linked. You cannot have one without the other. Perhaps this is what philosophers of the ancient world thought. So it would make sense then, if you wanted to strive towards a perfectly egalitarian society, to eliminate sex. Which, certainly at that time, probably gave freedom to a lot of women. They could do other things with their lives than be some man's property, raise his children, run his house. The option of being a nun was probably liberating for them, it was something else they could do...and as a nun, a women probably had greater freedom than she did otherwise.

And I must admit this view is damn interesting. What if people really did stop having sex? All over the world? What if? What would happen with sexism? Would it go away? Would people still get married? Really if you think about it, the only thing barred to a non married couple in conservative society is...sex (and a bit of foreplay as well). So...would people still get married?

I think it would be interesting to see. To see a society where men and women lived together with absolutely no sex at all, in any form whatsoever. What would that be like?

Work was awful!

Had an awful day at work today. I'm just so glad I get paid to do it. I haven't slept hardly at all over the past two days. Last night I only managed to fit in about 4 or so hours of sleep. The lack of sleep an the resulting crankiness (although I gotta say I think I do pretty good at keeping the cranky under-wraps), boosts stress and tension, infuriating my OCD. I hear dream land calling me. Man I am so exhausted.