A reply, with hat tips to Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Over at Best of the Blogs, a respondent to my cross-posted entry about Martin Wolf's piece in the Financial Times, timr, took issue with the "prematurity" of my criticism of the new President, so I thought I would elaborate. Please don't misunderstand me. I do hope that the president sees the urgency. Martin Wolf's piece jolted me, as I said, because he honed in on a problem that all leaders face in critical times.I'm not criticizing Obama as president. I am criticizing the weaknesses of an intellectual/political/plutocratic/privileged class to which he belongs.

This political class is incapable--with a few notable exceptions, like Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders and Russ Feingold, all of whom without fail are marginalized by the other members of their class--of understanding the dilemma of people in the "underclasses." I use the word carefully, I think, because at this point it is the only appropriate word to use. It includes people, for example, in the professional and technical classes and business classes whose combined incomes exceed even a quarter of a million dollars, because even they have seen a transfer of wealth to the tiny minority of the rich and super-rich who control--I might even say enforce their beliefs--in the vast majority of major decisions in the United States.

Most of these 90% of Americans in this underclass are indeed hard-working, pay their bills, grumble about but pay their taxes, lead honest and caring lives, and value the future of their children above all. I would also include in this group those aspiring residents of America who have been branded as "illegal aliens," yet who still contribute energy and vitality to our economy and society and who may even pay social security taxes for benefits which they will never receive.

It was no coincidence that I mentioned Iceland at the end of my piece--the citizens of that country have been well-satisfied and well off for many a year, dozing in their shared prosperity, but after the bottom fell out of the tub, they took to the streets day after day with pots and pans for almost 100% peaceful demonstrations that literally drove their government out of office, installed a caretaker left-leaning government, and forced new elections.

Max is right about how most Americans are unaware of what has taken place, and for many years now I have been saying to people that Mark Twain had the best analysis of their silence and ignorance. I can't remember his exact words, but he thought that Americans never wanted to resist the power of the rich because they so firmly believed that anyone could become rich through hard work. Even the poorest of the poor could never consider themselves as poor, only "temporarily embarrassed." But I think now, as with the Icelanders, the delusion is dissipating. There will always be those extraordinary few who become exceedingly rich, but for the most of us, a comfortable and secure and happy life will be the best aspiration we can resign ourselves to. This is such an American theme. It's F. Scott Fitzgerald: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." The very rich, not the rich.

However, now, it seems, most members of that 90% can see what has taken place over the past thirty years. They see the history of expropriation by the Very Rich and the massive transfer of wealth--that is still continuing in the TARP programs, I might add--in a number of things. They all have their own examples. These are mine:

First, notice the failure of ANY politician to refer to anything but "the middle class" as being hurt by the economic adversity; almost every politician is unable to talk about the "indigent,"" the working poor," the "working class."

Second, notice the sudden and recent silence about "class warfare." That has always traditionally been used to silence any claims for social justice or economic equality. The reason, I think, is that the plutocracy now understands that the stealthy class warfare going on for three decades under another name, has been won. However, one thing has changed. The underclass is finally beginning to see and understand that they are the Gazans in this class warfare, victims of high-tech swindling (repeal of Glass-Steagall, revision of the bankruptcy laws, high commissions and bonuses for shilling the derivatives) and collateral damage (job shopping in foreign countries, tax breaks and off shoring profits for corporations, the debt economy, the decline of manufacturing and its creation of real wealth, the necessity for two income families to work in order to make the ends meet, etc. )

The list goes on, and my anger rises the more I add to it. Some of them have even been burned by the economic versions of white phosphorus, the new DIME (dense inert metal explosive) weapons, or the economic cluster bombs that are still in wait out there disguised as Pepsi cans or Kentucky Fried chicken wings, or the water tables below Hanford, Washington, or diesel pollution near the Port of Long Beach. You know, the "externalities" that the good people of Eastern Connecticut don't have to put up with as they pack their bags for the corporate jet trip to Telluride.

You remember how the Republicans always framed their exploitative legislation in benign terms--Clear Skies Initiative, No Child Left Behind, Healthy Forests Initiative? In the same way they always framed any moves for social and economic justice as "class warfare."

Third, notice the continuing emphasis by the Republicans (and the acquiescence of most Democrats) on tax breaks. Do you really think that a tax break of $400 is going to stimulate the economy? Notice as well the Republicans' continuing insistence on eliminating the inheritance tax, which will benefit only the top 1/30th of the top 1%. That is to say, the Very Very Rich, the moneyed class that has been driving this transfer of wealth. In their insistence on tax cuts Republicans may think they have solid economic principles at work, but it really is the attempt even in this crisis of capitalism feeding on itself, to squeeze every last drop from the great udder of the financial debt and derivative structure.

They have driven this expropriation by lobbying, influence peddling, political contributions, class collusion, "knowing who to talk to" when they were doing something shady or "aggressive," and by the continuing and dominating use of the legal profession and the big accounting firms far more effectively than any "trial lawyers" or "regulators" did in return.

But to get back to President Obama. If I might, I'd like to make an analogy here, and one that the President is very fond of using these days, when he implicitly or explicitly compares himself to Abraham Lincoln.

President Obama's strong belief in the capitalist tenets and his ability not to rethink them and let go of them, is quite similar to the belief that Lincoln held for most of his life, that Negroes were in fact inferior to whites, so much so, that for the years leading up to emancipation, he still held to the idea of massive transfers of slaves to Liberia or South America or the Caribbean. It was a vision one can only call benign ethnic cleansing. Yet this was in parallel to his insistence that "all men are created equal" and that liberty should be extended to all. Lincoln eventually gave up that idea of transfer, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and enabled black men to fight in organized units for the Union, even though he feared that there would be a massive desertion of racist troops from the Union forces.

So I think that the President has a similar dilemma of belief--he understands the inequities in this economic system, what I have called "Americanism" in my post, but he still can't give it up. (The belief in American exceptionalism that drives his foreign policy is related to this as well, so well discussed by Andrew Bacevich in his last book, The Limits of Power: the End of American Exceptionalism.) President Obama may be forced to give it up, eventually, and the sooner he does, the better for all of us--the overwhelming majority of Americans--with the understanding, of course, that it will also be to the detriment of the moneyed class that is still in charge, conceptually, politically and economically.

I just think that by drumming this dilemma home to him, by beating our pots and pans, we may just make him understand that we really have entered a crisis, as Tom Paine would call it, a "time that tries mens' [and women's] souls."

[originally posted at Best of the Blogs]

Intelligent Responses to the Propaganda Campaign

"Every person is entitled to his own opinion. He is not entitled to his own facts, " said Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Great quote, great notion to hold to.

Have you been watching the media blitz supporting War with Iran? It will be continuing. A war hawk, Reuel Marc Gerecht, from the American Enterprise Institute in Newsweek; a Washington Post editorial attacking Mohammed el Baradei as if he were in league with the Iranians against the United States rather than a man trying to establish a rational alternative to another war of aggression; a few "expert" interviews on NPR.

(The people NPR calls upon for commentary on foreign affairs these days are so supportive of administration policy, almost all of them from the more conservative side of the spectrum. I don't see what the right wingers are so concerned about these days. NPR hath capitulated. The one exception was Terri Gross's interview with Charlie Savage about his new book on how the Bush administration has usurped the Constitution and re-created an "Imperial Presidency." You will remember that phrase. It was used during Nixon's era--I can remember he once had personally approved--or may even personally have designed some uniforms for the marines who guarded the White House--his own Eastern European braided and beribboned "palace guard." Or was it a design for the Washington, DC police? Funny what you remember and what you don't.)

So with Charlie Savage putting the usurpation in context, it is also good to have solid facts and common sense to go against the grain of the propaganda. Thus, I recommend that you read these, even go so far as to print them out, and make your own talking points against the supporters of the invasion of Iran--those who have had their consent manufactured by the Main Stream Media ("MSM" as I learned to call it in Memphis back in January).

First, some common sense about the Iranian (and Syrian threats) from Michael Scheuer, ex CIA analyst who is no defender of terrorism but is smart enough to see fanaticism when it appears in Washington, DC: read his article "Syria and Iran: The Threats that aren't" at Antiwar.com. It's worth a few excerpts:

And then there is Iran. How does one explain the U.S. governing elite's fear of Iran? Here we have a country that admittedly is led by one of the world's more histrionic politicians, but one that also is ringed by U.S. military bases and surrounded by an overwhelmingly more numerous Sunni world that hates Shi'ites far more than it hates Westerners. Iran‘s Islamic regime, moreover, is helplessly watching the final stages of the march of its energy resources toward oblivion, and preparing for the impoverishment and resulting internal political instability that event will usher in.

And his analysis of the real threat to the United States:

So where in this portrait is the threat to the United States? While Iran is a threat to Israel, there is surely no threat to America in Iran's less-than-impressive military forces, nuclear development program, or unattractive public diplomacy. No, the threat to the United States comes from two sources. First, the relentless "Iran is the new Nazi Germany" propaganda pushed by Israel and the American citizen Israel-firsters, and, second, the multi-decade failure of the U.S. Congress to seriously address the national-security issues of energy, borders, and immigration.

Second, another great riposte by Paul Craig Roberts, "Who Are the Fanatics?" defining further the real enemies in this conflict, the warmongers who refuse to pay attention to reality:

If Americans did rely on reason, tolerance and deliberation, they might free their minds of shrill propaganda long enough to consider the "Muslim threat." Muslims are disunited. Their disunity makes them a threat to one another, not to the West. . . .There is no such thing as Islamofascism. This is a coined propaganda word used to inflame the ignorant. There is no factual basis for the hatred that neoconservative Islamophobes instill in Americans. God did not tell America to destroy the Muslims for the Israelis. . . .In America today, blind ignorant hate against Muslims has been brought to a boiling point. The fear and loathing is so great that the American public and its elected representatives in Congress offer scant opposition to the Bush administration's plan to make Iran the third Middle East victim of American aggression in the 21st century.

Third, if any of your friends tries to adopt Bush's idiotic comparison of Iraq to Vietnam, here's ammunition from Andrew Bacevich, a man who actually fought in Vietnam, rather than hanging out in a National Guard unit based in Texas after Daddy pulled some strings in order to avoid getting sent to fly combat missions--a soldier who was a real conservative and supporter of the military until he began to study US Imperialism. And, sadly, a man who just this year, lost his officer son in the Iraq War. The man knows what he is about, and his thoughts can be heard on Antiwar radio, interviewed by Charles Goyette, the wonderful conservative voice of conscience down in Phoenix.

And finally, some more ammunition from Barnet Rubin, the Middle East scholar who I first referred to a few days back talking about how the propaganda machine was cranking up. His latest piece appears in the "Informed Comment Global Affairs" blog entry for Wednesday, September 5, 2007: "Theses on Policy toward Iran." Rubin talks about "regime change" as the motivating factor for any attack on Iran, posits some results that might come from an attack, and suggests two strategies Congress might adopt in order to avoid a conflagration. (Don't hold your breath.)

Armed with the facts and some common sense thinking, you are now ready to face the bizarre fantasies of the warmongers. Go and be gratified.