The American Bear

› Terrorism and the Public Imagination | Hamilton Nolan

The shooting of nineteen innocent people, including two children, at a Mother’s Day celebration in New Orleans [Sunday] was an act of violence only gaudy enough to hold the nation’s attention momentarily. Shortly after the bodies were cleared, the FBI said they “have no indication the shooting was an act of terrorism. ‘It’s strictly an act of street violence in New Orleans.’” At that, we were free to let our attention drift. In America, all villainy is not created equal.

A couple of disaffected young men in search of meaning drift into radical Islam and become violent. A couple of disaffected young men in search of meaning drift into street crime and become violent. A crowd of innocent people attending the Boston marathon are maimed by flying shrapnel from homemade bombs. A crowd of innocent people attending a Mother’s Day celebration in New Orleans are maimed by flying bullets. Two public events. Two terrible tragedies. One act of violence becomes a huge news story, transfixing the media’s attention for months and drawing outraged proclamations from politicians and pundits. Another act of violence is dismissed as the normal way of the world and quickly forgotten. The victims bleeding on the ground may be forgiven for failing to see the distinction between the two acts. For those on the receiving end, violence is violence. For the rest of us, it is a rhetorical tool, to be deployed when it fits a narrative of American triumphalism. Otherwise it will be forgotten, by everyone except the victims. [++]

› Taxonomy of the Logical Fallacies

wow.

Handy.

› Running on Empty: Obama Omitted Details, Drones and His Best Chance at Dynamism | Mobutu Sese Seko

“While accepting his party’s nomination for President of the United States, Barack Obama defended his record of doing things and renewed his commitment to doing things in the future. If elected, we can be assured of four more years of things. He also has people killed. It was a good speech, but saying so damns with faint praise. We set the bar for good political speeches so low that a couple jokes, solid elocution, woodenness-avoidance and evidence of non-sociopathic affect suffices to elevate modern American oratory into the pantheon.”

[…] Aside from the now-requisite overweening tribute to the Platinum Citizens™ Club of U.S. veterans, Biden laid it on especially thickly when it came to talking about whacking Osama Bin Laden. To borrow a phrase from anotherwriter, “Some major organ is thoroughly rotten… if the one ‘big thing’ America can accomplish is the tawdry, soul-sapping killing of a dilettante porn-addicted rich killer.”

When it came to killing Bin Laden, Biden said, “Obama is our president because he always has the courage to make the tough decisions.” Of the kill order: “He said, do it—and justice was done!”

The joke here should be obvious: that the courageous decision, the tough decision, would have been Abby Carmichael getting Bin Laden’s ass remanded to Riker’s with a public defender, the Law & Order “doink doink” ringing out, and Jack McCoy’s turkey wattle and big beak shaking in outrage that he bought a pig in a poke that might blow up on the stand. Justice, in a nation ostensibly governed by the rule of law, comes equipped with an entire system. But Biden was just so thrilled to whip out the Democrats’ newly re-engorged War Boner and celebrate “justice” via a double-tap to the brain of a sclerotic masturbating whitehair and his family, in the dead of night, by trained killers. There’s no time to get irony when it’s time to get hard. At least he didn’t mention the war on whistleblowers or all them drones. The system worked!

With the numbers and the bloodlust down, Obama had an opportunity to lay out a substantial map for the future, and he didn’t. While he reframed the Democratic Party’s vision as one of a community of “citizens,” he came up short of Clinton in delineating policy and short of Elizabeth Warren in articulating the working of a social contract versus a Wall Street “rigged game.” Although he did mention American cars, which, spiritually and existentially, manifest as an anti-Bin Laden.

Obama echoed Clinton and Warren, crowed about Bin Laden again, and laid out a vision for the next four years that seemed at best a tug of war between the amorphous and the impossible. He will reform the tax code (he can’t), and reanimate our spirit of togetherness (whatever that means), one supposes via the bully pulpit (mostly ineffectual). What he won’t be able to do is control the House of Representatives, which will almost assuredly be dominated by Republicans, and which is the place where the money comes from.

What he especially couldn’t say is that he has shown a willingness to preemptively concede cuts to social programs before even beginning negotiations with Republicans, failed to prosecute anyone responsible for the Great Recession, staffed his cabinet and advisors with the same clowns who engineered the economy’s destruction, hugged the former president who repealed Glass-Steagall, prosecuted a war on whistleblowers that immunizes the executive branch from citizen outcry and accountability, vastly increased a drone war that now targets funerals and the first responders that try to aid its victims—and that, with GOP control of the House, we can look forward to four years of acrimony, wheel-spinning, gridlock and misery.

Obama couldn’t say those things, of course, because his most effective trope, the heaven-high song that resonates fullest, is the confirmation of our optimism, our innate possibility, ourselves. Without the Clinonesque mastery of conversation, there is only the aria. The exigencies of procedure, of precedent—of the brutish cacophonies that are real history—quash it, leaving a stagebound mute, moving his mouth in such a way that he hopes you can divine the words it forms.

Instead, hope and change have given way to experience and lessons learned, with new synonyms for community and new generic ambitions without any plan to enact them. We got his most conventional speech to date, one that will be replicated ad nauseam in the coming two months—one that doesn’t substantially differ from the generic-ambition speech delivered by Mitt Romney the week before, except in one way.

Barack Obama’s speech lucked out and could only be delivered by Barack Obama. Mitt Romney’s speech was stuck with Mitt Romney, and there was no getting out of that.

› What Paul Ryan Has and Obama Wants | David Swanson

[Read] this from the New York Times: “The news media have played a crucial role in Mr. Obama’s career, helping to make him a national star not long after he had been an anonymous state legislator. As president, however, he has come to believe the news media have had a role in frustrating his ambitions to change the terms of the country’s political discussion. He particularly believes that Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security, while Republicans oppose almost any tax increase to reduce the deficit.”

So Obama too is willing to take the political risk of cutting the popular programs called Medicare and Social Security. In fact, what Obama wants is not to protect these programs from cuts, but rather to receive appropriate credit from the media corporations for his willingness to cut them. This, we are about to be told endlessly, is in stark contrast to Romney-Ryan’s willingness to cut Medicare and Social Security. But the biggest contrast seems to be that the media gives Romney and Ryan the credit that Obama covets.

Oh no, Obama supporters will reply, there’s a big difference. Romney wants to cut these programs, while Obama is willing to cut them. Romney is evil, while Obama is noble and gracious in his appeasing of evil. I’m sorry, but won’t the catfood that grandma lives on taste as bitter regardless of whether her income was removed maliciously or accommodatingly?

› Why Orwell Hated the Cliche

futurejournalismproject:

For what would have been George Orwell’s 99th 109th birthday, here are reflections on his relationship to writing and language from Lawrence Wright:

Orwell’s proposition is that modern English, especially written English, is so corrupted by bad habits that it has become impossible to think clearly. The main enemy, he believed, was insincerity, which hides behind the long words and empty phrases that stand between what is said and what is really meant.

A scrupulous writer, Orwell notes, will ask himself: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What fresh image will make it clearer? Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? The alternative is simply “throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you — concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.”…

…Orwell optimistically sets forward six simple rules to improve the state of the English language: guidelines that anyone, not just professional writers, can follow.

But I’m not going to tell you what they are. You’ll have to re-read [Politics and the English Language (PDF)] yourself. I’m only going to speak about Rule No. 1, which is never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.

For me, that’s the hardest rule and no doubt the reason that it’s No. 1. Cliches, like cockroaches in the cupboard, quickly infest a careless mind. I constantly struggle with the prefabricated phrases that substitute for simple, clear prose…

…”Political language,” Orwell reminds us, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits.”

NPR: Orwell on Writing: ‘Clarity Is the Remedy’

I can’t recommend reading Orwell’s essays enough, especially Politics and the English Language. You will begin to look at the media with a fresh set of eyes, something crucially important in this era of propaganda dressed as “news”.

› The Neoliberal Narcissism of Elite Democrats: Three Presidents and a Columnist | Paul Street

In this piece, Street slams (from the left where I live) the “third way” democrats - discussing the “centrist” positions of Carter, Clinton, Obama, and the NY Times’ imperial messenger, Thomas Friedman. This is a snip from the Obama section:

[Obama] has belonged to Wall Street and corporate America from the start. With its expansion of the monumental bailout of hyper-opulent financial overlords, its refusal to nationalize and cut down parasitic financial institutions, its passage of a health “reform” bill that only the big insurance and drug companies could love (consistent with Rahm Emmanuel’s advice to the president: “ignore the progressives”), its cutting of an auto bailout deal that raided union pension funds and rewarded capital flight, its undermining of global carbon emission reduction efforts at Copenhagen, its refusal to advance serious public works programs (green or otherwise), its green-lighting of escalated strip mining and hazardous deepwater oil drilling, its disregarding of promises to labor and other popular constituencies (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?), its freezing of federal wages and salaries, its appointment of a Deficit Reduction Commission “headed by avowed enemies of Social Security” (to quote left economist Michael Hudson), its cutting of a deficit reduction deal was that all about slashing social spending instead of raising taxes on the rich, its refusal to embrace the remarkable 2011 public worker rebellion against the epic union-busting efforts of Wisconsin’s hard right Governor Scott Walker, its role in coordinating the militarized police-state assault on Occupy Movements across the U.S. and much more too terrible to mention, Obama’s “change” and “hope” presidency epitomized the power of what the radical critics Edward S. Herman and David Peterson have called the nation’s “unelected dictatorship of money.” During the sleazy soap opera that was the reactionary, elite-manufactured “debt-ceiling crisis” last summer, it is worth recalling, the “progressive” Obama was ready to advance massive cuts in Medicate and Social Security that went beyond what the rightmost of the two dominant parties was seeking.

This is some recent background to keep in mind as Obama jaunts across the nation on an epic and record-setting pace of elite fundraising events (some costing nearly $80,000 a plate) while claiming to rely on grassroots $3-5 contributions and to be a friend of everyday people in their struggle against the 1 percent.

Along with plutocratic records of Carter and Clinton, Obama’s service to the rich and powerful should be kept firmly in mind if and when Mitt Romney ascends to national power – a very distinct possibility given the current state of economic and campaign finance affairs in the U.S. With a Republican in the White House, liberals and progressives fall into the standard trap of thinking that the only thing wrong with the country is that “those insane evil Republicans are in charge” and that the cure to the nation’s ills is to bring back a Democrat. The real history of the nation’s last four neoliberal-narcissist Democratic Presidents and of the Democratic Party across the long neoliberal era (the mid-1970s to the present) suggests something very different. It reminds us of the wisdom behind [Howard] Zinn’s oft-repeated counsel that the most critical thing isn’t “who’s sitting in the White House” but rather “who is sitting in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories….who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating” and of Noam Chomsky’s repeated counsel on serious politics:

“The U.S. presidential race, impassioned almost to the point of hysteria, hardly represents healthy democratic impulses.”

“Americans are encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is yet another method of marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, “That’s politics.”  But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics…”

“The urgent task for those who want to shift policy in progressive direction – often in close conformity to majority opinion – is to grow and become strong enough so that that they can’t be ignored by centers of power. Forces for change that have come up from the grass roots and shaken the society to its foundations include the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement and others, cultivated by steady, dedicated work at all levels, everyday, not just once every four years…”

“So in the election, sensible choices have to be made. But they are secondary to serious political action. The main task is to create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome.”

Read the whole piece

› Beating China, Corporate Style | Hannah Gurman

The simple plea for a supposedly “level playing field” is a constant refrain of both Republicans and Democrats who stress the importance of cracking down on China’s unfair trade practices. But who are we leveling the playing field for, and in what direction? They’re talking about fairness for American corporations, not for American workers. This argument only makes sense if you believe that these are one in the same. […]

To the extent that it ever existed, the compact between U.S. corporations and U.S. labor is over. Especially in light of all that has transpired since 2008, why should anyone believe that catering to the interests of U.S. corporations located in or returning from China will make American workers any better off? As in the past, the nationalist focus on a foreign bogeyman is a dangerous distraction from the pervasive threat of corporate logic in American politics.

› Scott Walker's New Defense: Recalling Me Hurts Children & the Elderly

motherjones:

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday morning, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker trotted out a new talking point as he defends himself from a well-organized recall campaign hoping to oust him from office. In a nutshell, Walker said: Think of the children! Think of the seniors! 

How ironic. In his first budget, Walker slashed public education funding by $800 million to $900 million. Walker and his administration have also sought to cut Medicaid funding, in effect booting more than 50,000 low-income families from the program, better known as BadgerCare Plus. The $9 million price tag for his recall election pales in comparison to the cost-cutting now pinching some of Wisconsin’s students and some of its most vulnerable citizens.

Can’t make it up.

(Source: wisconsinforward)

› Decoding the Campaigns | Moyers & Company

BILL MOYERS: I don’t have the tape of this, but let me read you what Rick Santorum said in my home state of Texas the other day. Quote,

“When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left in the unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it.”

“What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we follow the path that President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are heading down that road.”

You can’t say it, but I can as a journalist. That has all the refrain of a hallucination.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: That is an example of the extremist language in which campaigning now takes place. The… on the Flackcheck.org site we have a whole block of attacks that we call Way Out of Whack Attacks, WOW Attacks, statements that don’t bear any relationship to their literal referent. This is just one set of examples. At the point at which you’re analogizing something to the French Revolution, in once case a Republican candidate analogized EPA regulations to a reign of terror.

If you’re calling the opposing individuals barbarians at the gates or a mob (alternative sides of the political aisle by the way use that language), if you’re on the floor of the House during the health care reform debate saying the other sides wants seniors to die (both Republicans and Democrats said that on the floor of the House), you now are existing in a world in which language is decoupled from anything that is reasonably a referent.

› What Is Cultural Terrorism? | Maya Mikdashi

We have been told there are cultures of life, cultures of death, cultures of misogyny, cultures of intolerance, and finally, cultural terrorists. In the age of the war on terror, culture is causative. Well, some cultures anyways. After all, culture is never blamed for the fact that every nine seconds a woman in the United states is assaulted and/or beaten. The prevalence of Islamophobia in the Republican primary race is never attributed to American culture, and neither is racism against African-Americans or the continued oppression of the continent’s indigenous peoples.

Within the war on terror, culture is something that other people have and are immersed in. The United States is posited as post-cultural, just as during the cold war it was posited as the post-ideological alternative to the dangerously ideological Soviet Union. For those who have “culture,” in fact culture seems to have them. Everything they do can be explained and/or predicted by culture.

Thus when Guantanamo Bay inmates committed suicide in 2006, a military official explained their actions using these words: “They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us.” Within this framework, even the suicide of a person who has been detained and tortured seemingly without end is something that is done to the United States. Detainees can not be driven to suicide by US policies, because they were raised within (and programmed by) a culture of death where one does not care about life, even one’s own. A culture of death is one that produces people that are so radically other that the only way to beat them in a war is to eradicate them while simultaneously draining the “cultural swamps” that produce their way of life-a life of death.

While the war on terror is strangely absent from public discourse in the United States today, it still colors daily life in the Muslim and Arab worlds, said to be the “target” of that war. This should not be surprising, as the United States has made a habit of starting wars that continue to fester abroad as the American public moves on to the next war soundbite.

read whole →

› The Silence of the Technocrats | Thomas Frank

It is easy to understand how Democrats evolved into this tongue-tied, expert-worshipping species. Their traditional Democratic solutions might well have solved our problems, but the ideology behind those solutions — as well as the solutions themselves, in many cases — are totally unacceptable to the people who increasingly fund Democratic campaigns. Instead, the Democrats try to have it both ways: to deliver the occasional liberal measure here and there while studiously avoiding traditional liberal rhetoric. President Obama tries to stay on the good side of companies like Goldman Sachs and BP even as he desperately drives his hook-and-ladder around a world they have set on fire.

The bailouts, the stimulus, the health-care debate: with each of these issues, the path of expertise led the Obama administration toward compromise with the power of wealth. And by the thinking of Washington, that is entirely as it should have been.

The nation, meanwhile, wanted to know: How did the Crash of 2008 happen? How did government miss the warning signs? What are our responsibilities to our neighbors in hard times? In response, Democrats offered technical explanations. They simply could not talk about the disasters in a way that was resonant or compelling. Only the idealists of the Right did that. What the Democrats held out to an outraged nation was a fastidiously detailed flowchart for how things might be reorganized.

No one among them seems to have wondered if bailouts might be done in a different way, or foreseen that Republicans might not play by the debt-ceiling rules. They try what Clinton tried; they are astonished to see it fail. And so they try it again. The Washington Democrats will no more acknowledge the possibilities of other tactics than they will abandon Georgetown and move en masse to some burned-out quarter of Baltimore. Instead they deride their liberal critics as impossible dreamers — or as “fucking retarded,” in Rahm Emanuel’s famous phrase — and try what worked for Clinton one more sorry time.

Read the whole thing →

› The Geithner mystery solved | Glenn Greenwald

Reviewing “Confidence Men” — Ron Suskind’s new book critically examining President Obama’s management of the financial crisis — The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani ponders this mystery raised by Suskind:

[] Mr. Suskind suggests that the administration’s problems in dealing with the fiscal crisis began with the president’s choice of his economic team. He wonders why Mr. Obama turned away from the advisers who had seen him through the campaign (including more progressive thinkers like Mr. Stiglitz, Robert Reich and Austan Goolsbee), and relied instead on two men associated with the deregulatory policies of the past, Mr. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, and Mr. Summers, the chief economic adviser. Both men had served in the Clinton administration (with Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, who would later join Citigroup as a senior adviser and board member); their actions, Mr. Suskind contends, “had contributed to the very financial disaster they were hired to solve.”

Of course, one might ask the same of Obama’s penchant for filling the most important positions in his administration — including his Vice President, Secretary of State, and Defense Secretary — with supporters of the Iraq War.  But about Geithner, Suskind unwittingly solved the mystery he raised: Kakutani notes that “one top banker quoted in these pages refers to [Geithner] as ‘our man in Washington’ for helping avert more systemic changes affecting Wall Street.”

Geithner wasn’t chosen and hasn’t remained despite being ”associated with the deregulatory policies of the past” and despite being the bankers’ “man in Washington.”  He is empowered precisely because of those facts, as was pointed out even before Obama’s inauguration.  That Geithner and Summers were empowered after enabling the financial crisis through Wall Street subservience isn’t a mystery; it’s the explanation.