Libertarian Chaos
from Peter Radford
There’s not much to say. After all the brinkmanship and game playing over the debt limit last year, and after being ridiculed by pretty much everyone, the Republicans are back at it. In an election year and with last year’s plunge in the polls as evidence that voters just don’t agree with their tactics.
What am I missing?
Apparently nothing.
The Republican extremist caucus in the House is setting its eyes on another confrontation with Obama over the debt ceiling. They want another deal. This after reneging on the last deal only a few days ago.
Are they kidding?
No they’re just extremists.
It is an ongoing shame, more a scandal, that our media doesn’t call this for what it is: a blatant effort at blackmail. This is not an attempt to negotiate in good faith. That deal busting effort to wiggle out of the cuts in defense spending are testimony to that stark fact that the Republicans in the house do not intend to stick to any deal they make. They simply want to batter their way through. They want to ignore the rules of democracy and ram through anti-social legislation.
By anti-social I mean they want to undo the entirety of the past seventy years of consensus driven policies that put in place a network of safety net, retirement and health legislation to protect the middle class and the poor from the vicissitudes of the marketplace. They want to defy history and plunge the vast majority of Americans back into a pre-Depression laissez-faire lifestyle. To do this they must overturn their own party’s contribution – the Republican mainstream for decades has accepted the presence of social programs and left them untouched. It took Reagan’s zealotry to start to crumble that bipartisan support of the welfare state.
It took the libertarian economic theories of people like Milton Friedman to give the attack intellectual heft. They were not the only enabler, but they played a vital part in igniting the fuse of the current explosion of extremism. Orthodox economists are disgraceful when they hide behind the convenient yet tattered veil of so-called positive economics. There was not a jot of positive thought. It was all pure ideology masquerading as science. The outcome of their models that supposedly “proved” the efficacy of free markets, and thus led to a torrent of ill-advised deregulation, was pre-ordained by their judicious choice of assumptions. The result was baked into the cake form the beginning. That’s not science. It’s scandal.
Why other economists are not more vocal about this collapse of ethics within their discipline I do not know. It is well known, and getting better known by the day, outside.
Let me be more clear about where I see the breakdown in ethics: it is not in holding to an ideology. That’s fair game in human affairs. The breakdown occurs in pretending to be proffering scientifically based advice and in avoiding to make clear the assumptions necessary to arrive at the conclusions upon which that advice was based. It is the lack of transparency that is stunning and deeply corrosive. It is a betrayal of confidence. It is a persistent duping of generations of students who believe that they have learned some solid insights, when, in fact, all they have learned is one side of a many sided argument.
This effort to mask the real agenda of orthodox theory – to undermine the social structures put in place over the past seventy years – and to re-make society in the image of the naive worlds within the models of orthodoxy is appalling. And has been incredibly successful.
The infection has spread across the social sciences. It has infected business schools. It manifests itself in the stock market. In banking. In business media. In think tanks. In large public institutions. In the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And in central banks most everywhere.
This hegemony of libertarian economics has been matched by a steady shift within the Republican party to the right. Sop far to the right that it now repudiates its own thinking and is trying to set out a new and wildly radical project to re-create an America long buried underneath the social, technological, and other advances of the past hundred years.
This radical libertarian vision threatens the foundation of modern society. This is because it denies modernity itself. Libertarianism at its core is based upon a few extraordinarily naive assumptions about human behavior and relationships. It harkens back to a simpler time before complex production, logistics, and management required equally complex regulatory structures. It tries to recapture a neo-agricultural lifestyle of rugged individuals, fiercely independent, unburdened by a central authority, and free to roam the landscape at will. It is a wistful throwback. Its intellectual forebears, many of whom hailed from central Europe, grew up at a time of great conflict and turmoil. They witnessed the collapse of the Austrian Empire and sought to explain the chaos around them. They never experienced the modernity of Britain, France, Germany, of the US at exactly that same moment. They crafted modern libertarianism as a response to the fusty, dying, and archaic regime of the Hapsburgs. They ignored the fact that other societies had already dealt with the issues in a less radical way.
The extremism they invented and justified sets itself as a dire opponent of central government. In the libertarian faith there is no democratic legitimacy to central government. It is always cast as an aggressive autocratic quasi-dictatorship that pillages and invades individual rights. This may have been true of Hapsburg Austria. It was not true of contemporary Britain nor the US.
The inability of libertarianism to re-mold itself as a modern value system – it remains deeply in denial of the democratic legitimacy of social programs created by central government and supported by the public repeatedly at the ballot box – is now leading the US to ruin.
When coupled, in a strange and paradoxical pact, with fundamental religion – itself deeply separated from modernity – it has motivated that part of the electorate who feel estranged from the social programs that embody modernity. The much discussed malaise of our middle class has provided fertile ground for extremist republican views. It began with Reagan’s vicious attacks on welfare – don’t forget his most enduring images were all lies, yet resonant still today. And it continues with rising crescendo with the Tea Party and its successes in ousting every single moderate Republican left in Washington.
This rising tide of extremism festered because the middle ground in politics grew complacent and never articulated the social case properly. It also grew because of the intellectual energy provided buy orthodox economists – in both parties – who enabled the shift to the right.
They enabled the attack on the unions.
They enabled the attack on welfare.
They enabled the vilification of the unemployed.
They fostered the environment within which it is acceptable, to some, to bring the Federal government to a grinding halt, just to make a political point.
There is a straight and undeniable line from the scarcely disguised ideologically driven pontification of economists like Friedman and his ilk and the willingness of libertarians to splinter the US apart. His and his intellectual forbear’s inability to distinguish authoritarian or autocratically imposed policies from democratically supported policies is both stunning and tragic. It threatens to destroy our democracy altogether.
The rise of extremism in America is really the rise of the extreme right. There is no extreme left. Trying to conjure one in the name of supposed objectivity is merely facilitating the radical take over of our legislative process.
There is a revolution going on. A right wing revolution.
Asinine confrontations over the debt ceiling are merely manifestations of this revolution.
The extremists deny the legitimacy of “we the people”. They want to batter their way to control. They want to bend, lie, and cheat in order to impose their archaic and extreme worldview.
I wish “we the people” had a strong voice to rally our counter attack. But we don’t. We have the mainstream media, we have fractured and self absorbed intellectual class, we have an out of date and complacent political party, and we have Obama a failed centrist whip has allowed himself to be tarred as a leftist.
Why does all tis remind me of 1930′s Germany. I wish it didn’t.
I think you are missing this point, republicans are running cover for a democratic administration trampling the environment, democracy and civil rights while committing unmentionable crimes against humanity outside the US border.
Are you kidding. Have a serious public discourse.
See the arguments of the current administration supporting indefinite detention of US citizens based on secret evidence exposed here http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/11489-the-ndaas-coup-detat-foiled
I think the situation is even worse than Peter describes. True libertarians (I know some) are anti-military, anti-war, pro-immigration, as well as anti the modern “social democratic” model, even the thin American version.
What we have here is a true potential fascism. The book that leads me in that direction is Chris Hedges’ AMERICAN FASCISTS which sees the religious right as the shock troops for an American version of fascism.
Militarism, racism, big expenditures to put lots of people in jail, expensive efforts to “police” the border and get rid of “undesirable” so-called illegal aliens as well as keeping women in their place — these are NOT libertarian values. Neither is the marriage of religion to the state.
What the American ruling class seems to have decided is that they will try to use those shock troops just the way big business tried to use Hitler’s Nazi Party during the Great Depression. The American ruling class is, however, in for its own big shock because the kind of society created by this Tea Party dominated Republican Party (and we’ll see a real live “experiment” if Obama loses) is not going to be hospitable to a robust economic future for the businesses that the American ruling class depends on.
A sluggish decade of non-growth forced on the US economy by austerity, union-busting, lower real wages, etc. is hardly a recipe for success.
That’s why, unfortunately, I keep coming down on the side of alliance with ridiculously wishy-washy liberals in attempting to re-elect Obama — despite his horrible furtherance of the American empire and the American war machine.
The alternative is to suggest that things will get better only if they get a lot worse for ordinary Americans — I shudder to contemplate what things will be like while they are “getting worse” — For one thing, will the Romney folks pick a fight with Iran to provide another “splendid little war” to divert the rest of us??
Just asking.
Our wonderful democratic Senate candidate, Elizabeth Warren, is a hawk on Iran and supports a religious State for Israel. I supported her early and stopped upon discovering this. Honduras has been destroyed by Obama/Holder/Clinton; the democracy was overthrown by puppet Lobo, who Obama calls a “democracy healer,” now Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world. Who is murdered? The exact kind of people the new fascist NDAA laws are designed to sweep up and imprison indefinitely, without charges, using secret evidence for national security.
Wait for it. Hasnt the Iran war talk already started? If these now aggressive Americans spent half their military efforts investing in their own infrastructure (health, education, transport and industry etc) America might just get some of the respect it once had for being a responsible global citizen.
But has America since gone mad??? I can think of no other explanation.
Their treatment of the ordinary innocent people of Iraq in both the cruel extended sanctions and the unnecessary GW Bush war was utterly disgusting and raised the ire of the entire Arab world. Hardly great foreign relations.
Regarding “the libertarian economic theories of people like Milton Friedman,” I thought that Friedman was a monetarist who favored the central planning of money by the Fed, even if is based on a rule. In contrast, libertarians seek the abolition of central banking. Are you perhaps are referring to some later rejection of central banking by Friedman? Which is it, the Friedman rule-based anti-libertarian control of money by a central bank, or the libertarian free-market banking with no Fed, no government guarantees, and no branch banking restrictions? The Austrian schoolers advocate free banking, not the Chicago school monetarists? Did Friedman become a secret Austrian?
Greenspan was both a Randian and a gold-bugger at heart , but he transitioned smoothly in his position as Fed chair. He did his part to advance the common goals of the Right , of every stripe : deconstruct the New Deal , raise ( and collect ) the rents , and enslave the masses.
Libertarian vs. conservative is a distinction without a difference.
Increasingly , sadly , you can say the same about many “liberals”.
This discussion is at sea without sail or rudder.
How about providing a compass heading then? Mark the proper course to restart. Today’s congressional vote did provide cover by restating the need for indefinite detention on secret evidence as a congressional choice, though Obama defended it vigorously against legal challenge earlier this week.
Conservatives seek to conserve the traditional power structures and culture. Hence nationalism, big military, war on drugs. Libertarians seek to overthrow the status-quo power structures (state oppression) and reject cultural imperialism, e.g. they seek to legalize drugs, prostitution, public nudity, and gambling. The reason that “progressives” and welfare-state “liberals” think that conservativism and libertarianism are identical is that the “progressives” have zero understanding of the meaning of liberty. I know this from personal contact with “progressives” in the SF Bay Area. Conservatives usually want more taxes on the poor, less taxes on the rich. Libertarians believe that taxation is theft; show me one conservative who agrees.
And what is the libertarian view on US militarism Fred?
I notice after you free up drugs, crime and prostitution and gambling and nudity on the streets you may need comething more than a small government police force to deal with the (mess that creates) criminal activities?
OMG – I am going mad enough. Thank god Im not a libertarian as well.
Libertarian foreign policy is non-interventionist. We do believe that self-defense is legitimate, but it should be a police force only for crimes with victims, not to shut down medical marijuana clinics as the progressive liberal president is doing in California.
Here is a starting point don’t oppose the lesser of two evils and insure that the worse one triumphs. In Weimar Germany the Communist so hated the Socialists that they refused to cooperate with them and insured, thereby, that Field Marshal Hindenburg would be elected President of the Republic. He is the one who appointed Hitler Chancellor. If the Communists had support the Socialist candidate Hindenburg would have lost. Hitler in power outlawed the Communists and threw the socialists into jail. My point: Don’t oppose Obama when the result would be to bring the really bad guys nto power. That is a serious discussion.
That would be the worst possible advice. Selling your soul for a hollow victory — how stupid.
The gist here is to empower the Greek communists to remove their heads from the sands of totalitarian state corporatism and attend to modern concerns of their community, which is, at the moment, help young Greek progressives banish fascists to the far reaches of yesterday.
Communism has not failed anymore than socialism has failed; the failure has been authoritarian dictatorships which wear whatever popular term will fool the people. We see the same thing in large corporatist cultures talking up the free market banner and analyzing it with math from the late 1800′s and early 1900′s. A free market is actually just a place where free people do their marketing and equilibrium is a stupid concept used to obscure rather than enlighten.
Yes, today the problem is fascism and the president of the US, for example, is by all academic definitions, running a fascist administration; staffed by Monsanto, Goldman Sachs and etc, for corporations. Democrats prefer the lesser fascist evil of their candidate and, though he may be a less bad bad guy, he has not helped promote rather than stop the rise of fascism in the US.
sorry for the “not” at the end. Obama has helped promote fascism in the US.
Please don’t use the word “stupif” to describe a policy that would reject furthering the aims of a greater evil. Think! Cuting off you nose to spite your face is not a good moral action.
don’t oppose obama…
don’t oppose using drones and missiles to assassinate people – known or unknown, enemy or just someone who happens to be there
don’t oppose building more nuclear power plants, while the country is being irradiated by the catastrophe in fukushime
don’t oppose escalating wars in yemen, central america, africa and south america over natural resources
don’t oppose poisoning the u.s. groundwater through hydrofracking
don’t oppose subsidizing arms sales to mexican drug cartels
i got a message for you and your type, pal – NO amount of evil is tolerable, so don’t give us this crap.
anyone who believes in voting at this point is a fool and a coward who only wants everything to stay just like it is. fucking contented cows! don’t look to those of us who are willing to fight for something REAL and JUST and BEAUTIFUL with our lives to rescue you from the cattle trucks when you get shipped off to the death camps. you’re a waste of energy and resources.
gaian, you are wonderfully and refreshingly very close to almost over the top. We have an emergency on our hands, yes? I say occupy democracy, it is ours, we need it, it is in our genes.
i do not wish to die at the hands of police or military forces who are fighting to maintain the illusion of “choice” for the few people who are comfortable enough in their lives that they will be sheltered from such violence, and only read about it.
right now, that looks inevitable.
None are sheltered from reality, those who believe they are safe in gated communities will soon wake up and discover their guards are too busy surviving to come to work. Democracy is organic to humans, it is how we focus the information we carry. Dodo brains who only know how to destroy are running the show and have occupied our democracy, survival and our place in the cosmos demand we take it back; though the way we do it cannot yet been seen, the inevitable attempt to create information-age democracy will succeed or dictatorship of the corporatists will lead to extinction of all mammals and most of everything else. It’s do or die, create a fully functional information-age democracy that includes the economy or die along with most of Earth’s other creatures, all of whom are worth fighting for.
Don’t oppose Obama if it means Romney will win. Yes, don’t.
Don’t oppose atomic generated energy if you have nothing to put in its place. Do you want to freeze to death in winter. Or choke on coal fuel power.
Don’t oppose escalating war in yemen, central america, africa andsouth america over natural resources. A one-dimensional argument if I everr heard one that doesn’t come to grips with anything.
Dont oppose opposing hdrofracking. Of course oppose it, but we have an energy problem, How would you solve it. Ignore it and just oppose.
And don’t call me Pal. I’ve been farther to the left of you for much longer than you have lived. But I’ve watched “radicaals” fail at almost every enterprise because of very low brain power.
That actually is a serious discussion robert. Obama may be kneecapped when it comes to getting the big end of town’s fingers out of politics but to invite back those who opened their doors to the big end of town and fawned all over them…could just push the US into a disaster situation. Inequality and general unhappiness and lack of employment (to be further worsened by the poor policies of the bad bunch) will drive them all nuts.
Its a choice between kneecapped and bad Im afraid and I cant see anyone in their leader ranks with the courage, the power, the support and the resolve to do anything about the impasse.
A paradigm shift in economic understanding is the next step for human evolution.
It has been obvious for quite some time that capitalism is simply an organized form of thievery backed by police and military violence and that we have evolved to an intellectual need to erase the capitalist’s two favorite bogeymen; concerned community communists and sincere scientific socialists.
Greek communists failed to live up to their duty and join with victorious and progressive Syriza because they were afraid the information-age generation would compromise with capitalists once the rush to austerity is halted. Totalitarian State corporatism acting as puritanical communism during the 1900s remains a cold shadow over communists, to this day. Greek Communists will stride proudly into the light of day, join with Syriza and evolve to a modern labor theory of value and information-age democracy or become totally obsolete, forever.
The highest ideal of communism is modern mathematical and scientific principles applied through focused human intellect to define problems, establish solutions for social injustice and create a vital civilization that generates huge but untouchable social profits. The ideals of scientific socialism are presented by communists concerned with civilization, noble humans who stand in stark contrast to the base immorality of piracy wearing fine clothes and jewelry. Mathematics and science have grown and so too must communism, socialism and all political-economic human manifestations.
We now know that there will always be friendly young people who will grow to discover new talents within themselves, talents which even they will find surprising. Some of these young people will also grow to become very wealthy. This is a wonderful aspect of creative humans expressing individual blooms in the vast cosmic meadow, it is not a problem for modern communists.
We also now know that free citizens can be forced to become part of a mob when they walk through the door of a large corporation at the start of their work day, this is a proper concern for modern communists. Fellow citizens yanked from their community and harnessed to the nefarious purposes of immortal corporate monsters unconstrained by democratic principles should be a concern of all progressive and clear thinkers.
These proper concerns relate to modern scientific socialism via the ancient ideas of Greek Democracy, ideas that have lived in every human heart as an organic expression of our specie since we sat around the fire in front of our caves deciding together what we would do tomorrow. Though social and economic organization has grown to new frontiers, we remain the same beautiful cosmic flower. Today’s brilliant scientists and mathematicians tell us our molecules are waves formed in the hearts of stars and that we are surfing Big Bang, at life speed. We are made up of atomic waves that add together to become individuals and add again to become the collective wonder of an information-age civilization that we collectively breath into life. This is the new foundation of scientific socialism.
Dull witted corporatists and their capitalist economists are telling us that we must follow rigid rules of imposed austerity in a quest for equilibrium between the price of creation and the supplies they see fit to dole out, for our good, so they can grow our economy and we can have jobs, working for them. Our scientists and mathematicians tell us life speed may well be far faster than the speed of light, and accelerating. Capitalist economists, backed by Nobel prizes that aren’t really Nobel prizes, promote economic theories as a tool to impose equilibrium via austerity enforced by debt funded police power on a civilization blasting through the cosmos at life speed, such a goal is as illusory as a deranged ego attempting to own infinity. The foible of capitalism unrestrained by the wisdom of democratic civilization is slavery to faster and faster material growth forever, to infinity, on one small and beautiful planet.
Democracy has triumphed against the dark forces of austerity in Greece and all communists will behave as scientific socialists if they listen to the will of the people and work with Syriza to step into the unknowns of tomorrow with excitement and willingness to evolve now, immediately, for the good of all humanity on earth.
Information-age democracy includes an economy that grows qualitatively while healing the planet with human rights. Universal health care, fresh water, sanitation, shelter, adequate diet, and education lead to a gradual decline in population and a return to natural earth abundance for less people and all life. The world is rapidly changing and now we are waiting to see what Greece has to offer.
¡ Viva la Evolución !
This is an admirable credo, Garrett. And I probably subscribed to much of it when I was a young man. But a lot has happened since then and probably the greatest disappointment has not been capitalism, I never had much faith in it, but the failure of socialism. It was the last best hope of enlightened man and it was led into extinction by the new class that Trotsky and Dijlias warned us about. Where do we go from here. Start by stopping the bad guys from undoing social welfare, for which people fought so hard in the 20th century.They are circling for the kill.
agree Robert – we need a decade of socialism to fix things…or something uglier will fix things
Comunism isnt the answer. It has failed but what we are dealing with is corporatism and that isnt communism and it isnt even capitalism and it has more in common with fascism,
we don’t need a socialist economy…we need to abolish economics. as far as i’m concerned, economics is just another form of white supremacy.
This opposing is a lot more fun when it’s a don’t oppose, like; I don’t oppose Obama, I abhor the barbaric violence he has rained down on the heads of the gentle people of Honduras and I am repulsed by him inviting the kidnaper of democratically elected President Manual Zelaya into the White House and desecrating US honor by referring to him, Pepe Lobo, as a “democracy healer.” This list is too long so,
gaia : Although 99% of economists are thrashing around applying 17th and 18th century physics equations to biological humanity and spicing the recipe with middle 1900′s mathematics involving game or chaos theory, and winning Nobel prizes for their wizardry, there is a remaining one percent, and it is valuable to us for them for them to ponder actual economics. To you I propose that civilization is a living entity, and that past generations of socialist and communist thinkers had not come to see this as scientific fact based in the evolution of matter starting with Big Bang. You are right that we don’t need a socialist economy only if you look through the eyes of yesterday. I suggest that Obama and all the other plutocrats in and outside politics are consciously attempting to privatize parts of a living being for personal enrichment and thus are pushing a modern version of slavery made even more sinful by willingness to commit ecocide.
I for example believe I am hurt physically and spiritually when Obama gladly accepts and carries the baton of the gross CIA failure in Chili and pushes the Chicago school privatization model on the US and Honduras. Civilization is stunted by Obama’s servitude to privatization of anything from the public realm; especially universal free education, health care, shelter, sanitation, transportation, water and an adequate diet, all of which help create evolving civilization by clear thinking members of society interested in the strength of their communities, comrades who are thus sometimes wearing the hats of socialism and communism and always part of an evolving democracy that struggles against ruthless pirates to include the economy in democracy.
i have difficulty blaming obama for the reagan revolution, but have no sense of him being a “lesser” evil. evil is evil. and money IS the root of all evil. there are no more necessary evils. why would people allow evil into their lives?
Problem with this theory is all the poor white people out there. Poor is poor and it isn’t confined to one race, anymore than the top 1% of the well-to-do is one race..
So my friends bring back Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfield in the guise of Romney. Then you’ll be so happy because you got rid of Obama. This is the silliest discussion.
How about sad rather than silly ? I voted for Obama and knew something was rotten when he did not immediately ground Bush’s then newly established anti-wolf air force.
This conversation hasn’t anything to do with Obama. It’s about the principles upon which decision-making and action are based. I’m a historian. When I studied 19th century France there was a party on the Extreme Right that hated the moderate Monarchists. They practiced the Politique du pire, meaning that they so hated the Orleanist moderate monarchists that they cooperated with the Left wing Republicans to defeat moderate monarchists and got — a Republic. (See my French Legitimists and the Politics of Moral Order in the Early Third Republic, Princeton UP, 1974) A serious assault is beng made now on what little we have of a welfare state in America. (See my Confronting Managerialism, 2011 and my Management from Hell: How financial investor logic hijacked firm govenance, ebook 2012) Do you want through your dislike or hatred of Obama to insure people take over our government that will destroy our welfare state. I’m sure you hated Johnson for the Vietnam War, but Johnson gave us Medicare and the Civil Rights legislation. You would never have gotten that from Goldwater. He advocated using the a-bomb. Wake up your country needs you..
What is at stake is elections. Both sides have been “captured” by lage and destructive business interests.
There is no democracy. US politics is destined to only get worse before it gets better and the process of getting better is a while off but may be ugly.
There isnt anyone on either side who can stop it.
It may never get better, meaning if we thiink it gets bad before it gets good then it probably only gets bad and badder. Sorry Alice, I left the country long ago and think the change has to come frrom outside the US, That is what I say in the closing pages of Confronting Managerrialism. Within a US context, however, Obama is the best bet.
Ah, Robert, I see now how you can be razor sharp intelligent and clear on historical parallels but be somehow out of tune with Obama, you aren’t here in the US to experience the flow of horror from the drone slaughters and the smiling Obama assurances that “this thing is on a short leash.” In the meantime, we who are not numb before sitcom TV see pictures of broken toddlers reduced to dust covered meat.
Let me point out a historical point for your brilliance : Goldwater never urged atom bombing of Vietnam; what he said was, “If we are going to commit our nation to a land war in Asia, then it is important to recognize we will need to use the atom bomb in Vietnam.”
Regarding Lyndon Johnson, although he flat out lied and said, “No American boys will die fighting for the freedom of Asian boys,” I did not hate him. I felt sorry for his long, sad face that wanted guns and butter and had to malign and discredit the character of Martin Luther King to support the war effort. I respected LBJ for the positive things he did, even Nixon, who signed the clean air and clean water acts.
I do not hate Obama, yet I do not feel sorry for him like I did LBJ; he has done nothing that can be seen to advance anything that is positive to life on earth, and his administration is largely staffed from Monsanto and Goldman Sachs.
Regarding power, the US can easily cut back on energy enough to shut down the Nukes. Solar, wind and wave power can pick up the slack. If mathematical economists were not such falsifying wimps, they would step forward and clearly show that touted efficiency measurements do not even measure the proper efficiency points, and, thus, US energy plans are as absurd as national quotas in the old USSR.
Loss of the welfare state will mean zilch as we watch our children suffer through ecological collapse. Obama has done nothing to cure our ailing Earth and he has done zero to control the US military, which is the world’s biggest polluter, using borrowed money. It’s true that a republican president will probably be even more cruel to humanity but destruction of the planet is the main problem and it is difficult to see how destruction can be sped up much more than it already is.
Things don’t look too good, yet I continue urging people on to a new kind of democracy that includes the economy. Sadly, Washington, DC is a negative influence on life and civilization at this time in human history.
agree unhappily
my unhappy agreement was with Roberts comment
“That is what I say in the closing pages of Confronting Managerrialism. Within a US context, however, Obama is the best bet.”
The best of two bad bets
It’s the totalitarian arrest on secret evidence and indefinite detention that is most bothersome. Don’t see anything that could be much worse this side of blankity blank (censored) http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/26
O.K. I don’ see any reason to keep on arguing with people I essentiallty agree with.. I just suggest you remember that Lincoln was attacked for making people sign loyalty oaths. Loyalty oaths are an old story in America. I was born in 1932, and my pafents were part of fhe Joad family’s California trek — the Grapes of Wrath. What little that generation and their children got in form of welfare, people are now trying to take back. Don’t be cavalier about that. It is something important.
Indeed it is. They will have more trouble for trying to take welfare back in the US and kick the poor than from leaving well enough alone and trying to create the jobs to make people productively employed (and not welfare dependent) after 30 years of libertarian dreams letting their entrepeneurs and producers loose with no controls, toleave the US leave to produce in 3rd world countries for cheap exploitataive labour rates, put nothing in to those countries except a road or two you may find behind a barbed wire factory compound, and pay no tax anywhere.
Libertarin dreams turned into nightmares for many.
The libertarian dream is the abolition of taxes, free trade with all, and no criminalization of victimless acts. If that is the reality, I have been fooled into paying taxes when no taxes are required. Whom do I sue for this fraud? Al;so, why is there a federal reserve building in SF when there is no Fed?
I dont think the right-wings are urging a revolution, i rather think they are fighting for their survival. I mean, Obama really has the potential to be the Anti-Reagan, to really start a new era of mindset and economic policies. An era where the republican extremists would have no place. But only if Obama proves to be successful, so the top priority of those extremists became to make Obama unsuccessful, and its really sad how successful they’ve been with that.
But Babylon, Did you read the front page New york Times today? Obama can sleep at night because he defines anyone who he bombs is a terrorist. He believes it’s okay and necessary for him to be able to kill anyone anywhere at any time based on secret evidence to ensure US security. Who could possibly be a more terrible murdering monster than this? Caligula?
Plus, today, Hillary jetted off to Sweden, presumably to work out the lock up of Julian Lasange. Sadly, these are very bad people; a cabal bent on murder, torture and indefinite imprisonment of anyone who reveals their actions, without a trial.
Try Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and dozens of others who murdered millions indiscrfiminately. Get real, Presifent Obama has a problem he inherited. Security. Remember how much Bush and Rice were attacked for not reading the terrorist signs before 9/11. One bomb smuggled in — and the results would be you know what. Or do you believe that there are no terrorist out there wishing to kill Americans. Just move to a foreign country and have the locals paint a Hackenkreuz on your house door and you’ll shed such illusions. You opt to believe that there is just some lunatic, sadist, called Obama, in the White House who, for no reason that you can rationally exlain, is out to kill innocent people. Americans engage in hyperbole and react hysterically to almost everything. Your post is an example of it.
“The people in the countries we target know what we must remember. We are their occupiers, their invaders, the powerful supporters for decades of their own brutal tyrants. We’re in their backyard, which more than any other impetus spawned al-Qaeda in the first place.” … Ralph Nader
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/31
The quote from Nadar is correct — but it does not reduce the monstrous criminality of Al Qaeda — The Treaty of Versailles and the enormous reparations debt imposed on Germany after WW I helped create Hitler — That didn’t mean all efforts should not have been made to defeat him in World War II. — which required among other things the suspension of the class struggle here at home and the dampening down of nationalist anti-capitalist activity in countries allied with the Soviet Union during that war.
Right now, despite Obama’s support for American imperialism and militarism, he is no fascist — Imagine President Romney with this bunch of yahoos in Congress imposing the Ryan budget and “unleashing” Israel against Iran ….
Garrett Connelly, if you know an efficient and humanist way to deal with terrorists than please share your knowledge with the american government.
Bush tried to conquer whole countries, which not only was not efficient, but also expensive and led to humanitarian catastrophes in these countries. Plus it killed thousands of american soldiers.
Obama is going a new way with these drone wars, and so far they have proven to be the best strategy, since its very efficient and the financial and humanitarian costs are relatively low.
Nader is the last man I want to hear from. His monster ego saddled Bush and Cheney on America in 2000. In fact Nader’s behavior in 2000 is the best example of how fostering the greater evil over the lesser is ruining the country.
I’ve heard many versions of this from democrats who think progressives are party property. Democrats believe clear thinkers who do not vote democrat because they are helping establish a new party are the cause of democratic party losses, by voting for say, Ralph Nader, who is defiled as an egoist for defection of progressives from hewing to the party line.
The pathetic falsity of this reasoning is clearly demonstrated by my mother, a retired California school teacher who probably never voted for a republican in her life. She became so peeved at democrats attempting to own her soul and damn her if she voted for Ralph that she voted in protest for Bush.
When she told me she why she voted for Bush I asked why she didn’t go ahead and vote Green instead, she didn’t have a ready answer and went silent; I let the conversation drop.
There wasn’t anything progressive about voting Nader, thereby, contributing to the defeat of Gore and the election of Bush-Cheney. Nor is there any “clear thinking” iinvolved, only confused thinking. Sometimes Nader made sense, somethiings not, in the 2000 elections he did not. Because of the skimpiness of information about individuals and our inability to predict individual behavior accurately, it is usually better to vote party than individuals.
Al Gore might have won if he had been smart enough to choose Winona LaDuke as his running mate, instead, he revealed a darker side with the war-like, anti health care lobbyist, Joe Lieberman.
Another view is that Gore did win but didn’t stand up and fight a corrupt supreme court for his own victory.
One more comment about the subject I’m talking about. It’s politics and the art of the possible. This isn’t something I dreamed up. In the 19th century the French called it la politique du pire; its hard to translate but it means, in a political situation you choose the worst possible option to further your cause. I gave three examples of this sort of behavior: How the Extreme Right Monarchists in France, united with Republicans to oppose moderate Monarchists and ended up with a Republic. Of Communists opposing the Socialist candidate for President of Weimar Republic, thereby assuring the election of Field Marshal von Hindenburg, a monarchists, who eventually made Hitler Chancellor, who destroyed the Communists and the Socialists. Of Nadar, refusing to throw his support to Gore, thereby helping Bush get elected, with results for our nation that any really clearsighted man with Nadar’s views would hardly think Gore’s election would have produced. La poliitque du pire is the misguided political decision-making I’m trying to discuss, not the French Right, Hindenburg, Nadar, or Obama. Most who engage in la politique du pire do so out of a hatred that clouds the mind (Communists of Socialists, Extreme Right Monarchists of Moderate Monarchists, Nadar of Gore democrats). .
You are correct, but you failed to add that because the average “citizen” has been so brainwashed and propagandized, over a couple of generations now, he(she, it) is becoming downright IGNORANT of fact and is too arrogant to learn beyond a VERY BASIC understanding of “how the world works.” (according to his favorite pundits).
NOTE some of the comments to see what I mean.
The right has manufactured a hisotry that NEVER exisited and they have used “the gospel of prosperity” to enforce this “devil’s agreement.”
This nation is done. Until you recognize the true nature of the problem(s), and HONESTLY attempt to fix it(them), you (not you personally) remain mired in continued denial and a fantasy world based on limited comprehension (thanks to the modality of an antiquated “moral” system).
This country is done. As long as morons and charlatans would venture to even attgempt to argue with what you have said, then the nation is so corrupted by its own “sense of importance,” then it becomes a festering bag of puss and filth, ready to explode.
It is coming–to late to philosophize.
We are witnessing a leadership failure in the United States. All democracies are run by elites, the successful ones stay in power because they provide access into their ranks for people in the lower orders, thereby dampening discontent against them; the elites that fail do so because they do not provide such access. There are many signs of leadership faiure in the US, e. g., the increasing gap between the rich and the poor and the closing of educational opportunities for the middle classes. The irrationality of the leadership’s discourse that augments when rhetoric departs from reality has been growing at a frightening pace over the past three decades. .