Thursday, November 11, 2010

The Casino Corporate Economics Jig is Up

Huge problems, including building sustainable energy and transportation systems. Huge underutilized resources (unemployment). It looks to me like casino corporate economics (based on short term “casino” speculators and profit-seeking leviathons in an economy based on limited resource scalping and world-destroying externality dumping) has brought us to the precipice with inertia that looks unstoppable.
Looks to me like this jig is up. Start thinking in terms of command economics.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Deconstructing DeGraw

Like other pseudo-leftists, 9-11-conspiranoiacists, and Green Partiers, David DeGraw is a tool of the plutocracy who shouts useless and distracting ideas at his followers.

WRT 9-11, much evidence suggests that the Bush administration showed willful neglect of the impending and happening danger.  At best, they were not doing their primary job of protecting US citizens very well, and it appears that protecting citizens was not actually their highest priority.  Their highest priority, of course, was advancing the causes of the most regressive capitalists in the US, including their cronies.  IMO Bush and his administration should have been impeached immediately thereafter (and there would be many future crimes that would call for that even more).

But that is not the same as making the useless argument that planes did not or could not have taken down the towers.  The latter argument has been disproven by leading professional engineers with endorsement from the leading professional engineering societies.  By getting people to focus on and talk about the bogus argument, 9-11-conspiranoicists distract from the real argument and make it look to others like all the people who ask questions are nuts.  It is quite plausible to believe that 9-11-conspiranoicists were in some ways themselves backed by the plutocracy.  From personal experience, I found them worse than distracting in every political context I found them and all of my comrades had almost the exact same experience.  They were like an army of ants, and there was no way to argue with or work with them, they could only stick to their lines like talking dolls.

This is similar to the way it goes with all the pseudo-leftists.

Let's look at his recent post-election rant.

The Obama referendum came in and he got what he deserved.
 From the outset, you can see this is not about the working class, it is an attack on Obama-the-man and by extension all Democrats and ultimately democracy itself.  From the standpoint of the working class, we don't care if Obama got or didn't get what he personally deserves, or in what timeframe he gets it.  What we care about is our class interests.  Objectively Obama is a very poor representative of our interests.  But he is a much better representative of our interests than the President we had previously, and any other president we had any chance of electing.  Now that he is elected, we can expect he will bow down to the true center of power in capitalist society, and that is Finance Capital, the great virtual casino in which all capitalists play to gain even more power over everyone else.

But at the same time, Obama is playing both sides a little, and he can advance our interests a little if we can use him correctly.  By objective measures, Obama actually has brought us more positive reform in two years than we've had in quite awhile, going back, peculairly enough, to the Nixon administration who brought us the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered species protection, the EPA, and OSHA.  Now no one argues that Nixon was not mainly a tool of corporatocracy.  But he also brought us some serious reforms.  And that was primarily made possible by the continued (though by then quickly fading) existance of a strong New Deal Democratic Party.

You have to understand what makes reform possible.  It is a union between the most progressive elements of the business class and progressive movements represented by progressive organizations.  It can be no other way in a capitalist democracy.  They need us (progressive businesses don't hate regulation, they depend on it to keep unscrupulous competitors at bay) and we need then (there is no possibility of "overthrowing" capitalism in a positive way in the forseeable future; any kind of violent "revolution" now is far more likely to further empower the most regressive elements of the business class as represented by the thinking of Tea Partiers).

Monday, November 8, 2010

Principled Individualism does no good

In fact, it does great harm.  But it keeps grinding on, even after a huge setback like the 2010 elections.

The old my-green-party-or-the-highway set no longer commands the attention that it used to.  Most people rightly see Green Party types as useless elitists.  And they are.  And they cost Gore the election in 2000 but refuse to admit it.  In fact, principled elitists on the left, of which Green Partiers are but a tiny fragment now, are the proximate cause of all Republican victories.  They convince the people who suffer most from Republican policies stay home from elections so Republicans can get elected.

But now, covertly backed by plutocrats or not, and I believe they often are, Principled Individualists assume slightly modified voices to hide their continuing intentions to make democracy fail.  A good example is the rising radio star David DeGraw.  You can see the principled individualism in nearly every line he writes.

Democracy and voting is about coming together, trying to build an actual majority for your working class.  That means 51% or more.  In doing so, you must, you will have to abandon your principles temporarily.  Yes it stinks, like taking a shit, but you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO DO IT.

Meanwhile Principled Individualists say you might as well vote for Daffy Duck.

It's fine to send messages, all the messages you want, as long as they are good messages that will not dissuade people from doing the right thing.  Write letters to politicians, newspapers, bloggers, whoever.  Get out in the street and wave signs.

But it is not fine to dissuade people from voting their working class interest.  That is pure evil.  Even more evil than voting Republican.  More than just one vote may be at stake.

Voting for Daffy Duck is not evil, it is simply pointless and useless.  It is not sending a message to anyone.  Nobody reads or cares about those sorts of messages.  It is a waste of time.  But convincing other people not to vote their working class interest is worse than that, much worse.

Voting for the lefter leading candidate is not pointless and useless.  Even if our best (ugh!) candidate doesn't win, you will see your vote in every report of the election returns, and so will everyone else.  Yes, dammit, one of those was mine!

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Axing your job to spite your neighbor

That's what debt moralizing is really all about, says Krugman, and I agree.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/opinion/01krugman.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Blue Dogs, Not Progressives, took the Brunt

While a few high profile liberals like Russ Feingold lost, mainly it was Blue Dogs who lost, says Joshua Holland.  One of the best Antiwar Democrats in Congress, Lynn Woolsey, won very big.  The best representative from Texas, Sheila Jackson Lee won.  So this was not really a "throw the progressives out" election as the capitalist media may well claim, but a "throw the bums out" election because, mainly, the electorate is hopping mad about unemployment, low wages, and endless war, the same sentiments that have driven throw-the-bums-out elections since 2006 which previously decimated Republicans because they were in control.

http://www.alternet.org/story/148723/it%27s_not_the_end_of_the_world_--_7_things_progressives_need_to_keep_in_mind_about_last_night%27s_gop_%27wave%27/

Spiritual leader Rabbi Michael Lerner has some good thoughts too

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-michael-lerner/10-commandments-to-revive_b_777961.html

Monday, November 1, 2010

The Warshington Post

Today Brad DeLong is excoriating WaPo for two things.  Rosaline Helderman's claim on A-1 that since Robert McDonnel has not put Virginia in a ditch, having Repubs in charge nationally would not do that either.

The second, David Broder is calling for Obama to bomb Iran to get our economy going again.

Brad provides a link for the first, but not the second, so I looked it up myself.  Broder doesn't put it quite so bluntly, but close:



"Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve."


He also says, basically, the President can do nothing about the economy, except start a war, because, "the market will go where it is going to go."

I say we give up on "the market" to do anything much regarding meeting human needs and aspirations.  Markets may provide some useful choice in consumer goods and services, like chocolate.  But the fate of a nation or the whole world should not be left to them, that requires planning and collective action.  When Broder says "the market" what he really means is wealthy individuals, who dominate the markets because they own them.  Letting them make all the important decisions is not democracy.

Centrist Democrat DeLong is often too conservative for my taste, but he correctly labels Broder a "monster".

Just in case you thought WarPo was some kind of "liberal" newspaper.

By the way, over at the other warpaper, the NYTimes, Krugman (the best columnist in the mainstream media) is showing another take on what "the markets" exist for, mainly supplying cocaine and prostitutes to high flying traders:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/sex-and-drugs-and-markets-role/

Charles