It seems inevitable when I get into a conversation with a fellow American about political issues that the other party seeks to frame our discussion in terms of left and right, conservative or liberal, republican or democrat. I attempt over and over again to convince people that the so-called two party system that ravages our country serves one primary purpose: to give the illusion of democracy. We are told by pundits “on the left” and “on the right” that if only their side had control of government we could actually solve our problems, despite all historic evidence to the contrary. Like professional sports, politics is a venue for the public to vent its frustration and to divert our intellects away from the issues that really matter.

In making these points, I find that people tend to think I am encouraging apoliticism, i.e. encouraging people to disengage from the political process. This is not the case at all. The point that I am trying to make is that voting is simply the least you can do.  I mean this in the most pejorative sense possible.  Voting, particularly voting in an uninformed manner along party lines, is lazy and ineffective.  I don’t mean that you shouldn’t vote, I mean that voting is not enough.  Our nation is rapidly declining and in the interests of our own survival, comfort, and reputation in the world, we need to break out of the mental ghettos we have constructed for ourselves.

Consider deficit reduction.  The national discussion on deficit reduction is an incoherent rambling mess, and that’s not an accident.  It’s an incoherent rambling mess because the parties who profit and benefit from the subjugation of the working class (this is generally called the destruction of the middle class in the mainstream media) are very adept at keeping the discussion incoherent.   Our two party system, and the attempt to use binary terms to describe complex multidimensional systems is a very successful divide and conquer strategy.  So people “on the left” discuss about whether or not we should worry about deficits, while “people on the right” talk about the ruinous nature of the deficits and use it as an excuse to attack important social programs.  One people on the lunatic fringes are actually talking about the real issues.

First of all, deficit spending during a recession in not necessarily a bad thing, and there’s plenty of historic evidence to back that up.  On the other hand, the American national debt is a catastrophe waiting to happen, and everyone, regardless of your political ideology should be deeply concerned about it.  But we aren’t approaching insolvency because of programs like medicaire, medicaid and social security.  We are hopelessly in debt because of our insane and destructive empire.  Among the political classes and intellectual elites, this empire is typically referred to as “American Hegemony”, and is taken by default as a good thing.  There is little discussion about the desirability or ethics of American hegemony.  In the mainstream media American hegemony isn’t discussed at all.  When our military industrial complex and adventurism around the world is discussed, it is framed in terms of “national defense” which requires increasing grand levels of cognitive dissonance to maintain.

How much do we actually spend on empire?  It’s not so easy to know , because much of the budget is hidden.  Robert Higgs has broken down the outlays for fiscal year 2006 (under Republican guidance).  For 2010 (under Democrat guidance) the figures are bigger.  Spending on empire gets bigger and bigger regardless of whether we voted in a Democrat or a Republican.  Here’s a breakdown by Robert Higgs of the Independant Institute (I’ve cut and pasted it here from an excellent article by Chalmers Johnson which you can find here).

Department of Defense: $499.4
Department of Energy (atomic weapons): $16.6
Department of State (foreign military aid): $25.3
Department of Veterans Affairs (treatment of wounded soldiers): $69.8
Department of Homeland Security (actual defense): $69.1
Department of Justice (1/3rd for the FBI): $1.9
Department of the Treasury (military retirements): $38.5
NASA (satellite launches): $7.6
Interest on war debts, 1916-present: $206.7

Grand total:  934.9, about a trillion dollars a year for American hegemony.

There are several important things to realize about  “defense” spending.  First of all, very little of it is really defensive.  Most of it extremely agressive.  When was the last time America used its military for defensive purposes (i.e. responding to an attack, or genuine threat of an attack)?  I’m guessing WWII.   Rather than spinning military spending by calling it defence spending, we would be better served by accurately characterising our spending as spending on empire, and defence spending (so Homeland security could legitimately be called defence spending, while budgets for stealth bombers could not).  Empire spending increases the risk of terrorist attack by engendering hatred and ill will across the world.  Empire spending takes money and expertise away from all other forms of spending, including defence, infrastructure, civilian side economic and technological development, and of course social programs.

Can we get this under control by voting along party lines?  I encourage you to do your own research, but the answer is no.  In fact those peaceniks and advocates of social justice among us should try to reach out and find common ground with the Tea Partyers out there to get real deficit reduction by starving the real beast of America:  The military industrial complex.  A member of President Obama’s Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla) has recommended tha tthe DOD budget be frozen until it can pass comprehensive audits of all programs, agencies, and contractors.  One of most positive contributions to the American political debate has been from Ron Paul, the arch libretarian member of Congress, who actively talks about American empire and the egregious, unaffordable system of bases we have all over the world (somewhere between 750 and a 1000 mini-cities of American military personnel and equipment), which only make us less safe by damaging American credibility and international goodwill.  Raging leftist (and one of my personal heroes) Alan Grayson proposed a bill to force the Pentagon to conducts its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq solely on its existing budget, which is on the order of 500-600 Billion dollars -> roughly what the rest of the world combined spends on defence.

So fuck party politics, and fuck projecting your complex and informed world views onto a one-dimensional basis.  Left and Right, a single line, does not form a complete basis for the discussion of political ideas.  Pick one, or a few, concrete issues which are pressing and important.  Learn as much as you can about those issues, and doggedly pursue repair of those issues.  Be open to new ideas.  Don’t disregard or denegrate the possible contributions of someone who has a different ideology than you do.   Feel free however to ignore all the bloated egoes, dissemblers and opportunists in our political system.   If someone is attacking people instead of discussing issues and solutions, chances are they are wasting your time.  I propose American Imperialism as being one of the most pressing issues facing our nation, as it is either the source of, or a major contributor to, most the issues actively facing America today:  Terrorism, our broken economy,our national debt, out failing educational system…

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The moral shambles that is Israeli apartheid is bad enough, what with illegal settlements adiabatically stealing land from original inhabitants, and relegating the original inhabitants to a second-class or even third-class citizen status, while simultaneously engaging in a process of ghetoization and starvation of the original inhabitants, in a cruel imitation of the European conquest of America, which led to the creation of the United States of America, who finances and provides and muscle for our Israeli friends.

Until I read this article (haaretz.com) it never occurred to me to think of the Israeli settlements as a continuance of European colonialism. The flooring thing, which is entirely new to me, is that Israelis of European descent are racist against Israeli’s of Middle Eastern descent. So take away the religious difference, and we find that the Jewish European invaders (settlers) are racist against Jewish Israeli citizens native to the area. . Apparently the Israeli high court is attempting to desegregate schools in the settlements. If I follow this right, the Israelis of European descent are “Ashkenazi”, while those of middle eastern descent, i.e. the natives, are “Sephardi”. The Ashkenazim parents refuse to let their kids be educated together with the Sephardim. The Israeli police are now seeking arrest for 22 mothers and 2 fathers who failed to show up for two-week jail sentences, for refusing to integrate their children.

According to Yair Sheleg of haaretz.com:

The issue, then, is not Jewish religious law, but rather the racist social norms that characterize the entire ultra-Orthodox worldview. (The Haredim, as we know, also discriminate against the newly religious. )

Heavy stuff (Haredim apparently refers to the ultra-orthodox Ashkenazim).

I find it entertaining to the put the situation into the framework of European Colonialism by way of zombie films. The Ashkenazim have been infected by that European cultural meme of racism and intolerance, which led to our atrocities against the natives, and mexicans, and philipines, and haitians, and central americans (etc etc), the British atrocities against the Indians (and, and, and), the French atrocities against the Indochines (and, and, and), not to mention the Dutch and Spanish, and of course the German atrocities against the Jews. The nazis bit the Jews who are now chomping away at the native populations… the palestinians, and the Sephardim.

Come gentlemen! Ghandi showed us the cure for this meme nearly a hundred years ago. Let’s get busy curing ourselves before we consume ourselves.

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Labor’s problem is basically our problem… Blanche Lincoln, a total corporate sell out, won in a tightly contested battle against her challenger in the Democratic primaries. Labor dumped 10 million bucks in a campaign to defeat Lincoln. Hell, I donated ten buck to get the bitch defeated, and I don’t even live in the states.

What’s the issue? Well, Lincoln worked against the public option, and basically Lincoln works consistently against the public in the factor of corporate interests. Now White House staff has apparently been making nasty comments to the effect that Labor just pissed away 10 million bucks.

The problem here is the problem we all face: What can we do about it? Should labor endore the rabidly anti-labor Republicans come November? All they can do is half heartedly support the bastards that are going to screw them the least. Are you pissed off about the fact that the Obama administration has allowed the shallow off-shore drilling moratorium to expire? Well, what are you going to do, vote for the Republicans?

I’m going to the green party website and donating some money right now…

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I’m really sad about what’s happened to, and with, Helen Thomas. Helen has had a long career of poking holes in the white house propaganda (in every administration since Kennedy). But she made the mistake of speaking honestly about Israel:

Any comments on israel?
Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember these people are occupied, and it’s their land. It’s not Germany or Poland.
So where should they go?
They go home.
Where is their home?
Germany. Poland and America…. and everywhere else.

Here’s the full interview:

The rabbi who interviewed here had this to say about her response (from here).

“I was very surprised when Thomas told me that not only was she opposed to the two-state solution, but that she thought that the Jews should leave Israel and return to the final solution, more or less,”

Now Helen’s conclusions regarding Israel are pretty radical, and in my mind unrealistic, but they are a far cry from being hate speech, and it’s really stretching it to characterize her words as meaning jews should “return to the final solution, more or less”. If Helen has said “they should go back to their countries of origin”, which would be equivalent, it would have made for much better press. This just shows us that Helen’s not as quick witted and careful as she used to be, not that she’s a nazi sympathiser.

Making her comment that “they should go home to German, Palestine, the United States…” into a comment supporting ethnic cleansing is dishonest, and stops us from asking important questions. Questions like: Well, what if we, as an international community, decide Israel was a bad idea? It’s true, they are occupying land that belonged to someone else, they have taken land through invasion and are engaging in starvation and ghetoization tactics. What if we dismantled Israel, and made reparations to the Palestinians, restoring their land? Well, the next step would be to return all of the land that the Nazis seized from Jewish citizens. Then we would have to restore the land that allies, like the soviet union, seized from German citizens. This would be applying a certain kind of historic justice, at the cost of screwing over perfectly innocent people living on the occupied land (in Israel and Europe). I think it’s a bad decision as I think the net harm would be greater than the net good.

The Isreali’s, particularly the right wing, claim that they are the original inhabitants of Israel, and are returning to their proper homeland, in a contract in the bible. Joe Biden has echoed these sentiments while condemning Thomas. So both the Israelis and Joe Biden seem to be advocating returning dispossessed people their lands, regardless of how long ago these people were dispossessed. But if we apply this standard honestly, we must return the United States and Canada back to the remaining American Indians. We should certainly make restorations to African Americans, for the hundreds of years we enslaved, killed and beat their ancestors. What’s the statute of limitations on displacement, genocide, and human enslavement?

Stephen Colbert later interviewed the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and asked why Israel wouldn’t allow an international investigation into flotilla event. The Israeli ambassador shrewdly replied that it was for the same reason that the U.S. won’t allow international investigations and international courts to try American war criminals or American human rights violators. Well, that was the most honest statement that came out of the whole drama It’s also a telling revelation of the harm that our own lack of international ethics causes us in international negotiations.

I’m far from an expert on middle east issues, but I’m also far from being an expert on American or S. African Apartheid — I still know they are wrong. Perhaps a two-state solution is the answer, perhaps there exists a better solution, I don’t really have an opinion. Where I do have a an opinion is on very obvious human rights violations and illegal occupations.

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Theft is newspeak for copyright violation, along with the other newspeak vocabulary “intellectual property”. It’s a very deliberate propaganda aimed at framing the discussion of copyright by mapping it onto a vocabulary which unconsciously prejudices our thinking, by bringing our cultural value of private property into play.

This framing, this point of view is completely and demonstrably incorrect. That fact that this propaganda is so successful has devastating effects on our culture, which will take years to properly understand. But the propaganda is highly successful, primarily because the dominant means for cultural dissemination (film, music, television) are controlled by large corporations. This structure is very effective at censoring and biasing the discussion.

That’s why the following video is fantastic. We need popular media which disseminates the truth: copying is not theft.

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I wish Malcolm X had a holiday, or had some streets named after him. Some years ago, a group called the “Guerilla theatre of the absurd” at Reed College printed up stickers, the size and color of street signs, saying “Malcolm X dr.”, and pasted them on all street signs of some particularly wealthy street in Portland. In essence, they did a citizen renaming of a street.

Now, a study of American history shows that the teaching and preservation of American history is grossly, horribly mangled and abused in order to maintain fealty to a kind of unifying fairy tale. As part of this process, I think Malcolm X is being forgotten, and I find that tragic.

So I’d like to propose a new holiday: From now on, let Feb. 21 be Malcolm X day! How do we celebrate Malcolm X day? We print bumper stickers, the same size, shape and color of street signs in our city, and we do a citizen of renaming of a street, or a part of a street, whatever we can pull off. We do this every year, in every city where we can find some brave soul to join the movement. When do we stop? When they rename a street in your town after Brother Malcolm. After that we can celebrate by getting out and having a parade down Malcolm X drive or Blvd.

So what do you think? We have 9 months to prepare. Start your planning. Post pictures of your civic improvements on the web!

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Leaders are overvalued in our culture.  American history tends to paint social change as happening as a result of the actions of a few great leaders, as opposed to occurring  despite the nations leadership, and due to the agitation of large numbers of affected people.  So while I don’t wish to devalue the work that, say, MLK did, I don’t think the civil rights movement of the sixties was thanks to him.  Rather, MLK was successful because he had so many dedicated, hard working followers, most of whom history will forget.

Now look at the following video.  It makes the case clearly, brilliantly and light heartedly.  A small act of sainthood.  Bravo!

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The New York Times has a lengthy article entitled “A Supersized Custody Battle Over Marvel Superheroes”, discussing an ongoing legal battle over copyrights regarding character created by Jack Kirby between 1958 and 1963.  It is useful to analyse such reporting, to see how consent is manufactured for policies which benefit the power-elite (read large corporations), and harm the public, in this case the public domain.

First, a brief history lesson which needs repeating, as the vast majority of America has never even heard of the public domain, and has no understanding of how copyright law differs from property law, which differences defines how copyright violation differs from theft.  Copyright is (intended to be) a short term abridgement of human rights, specifically the right to free speech, in an effort to encourage and reward creative works.  They provide the creator of a work with a temporary monopoly on the spread of his or her ideas.   The main players behind the creation of copyright and patent law in the United States were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who clearly had mixed feelings on the subject.  The fundamental idea was that through creation of this temporary (state enforced) monopoly, congress could “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”.  A useful brief history can be found here.  Once this temporary copyright expired, the intellectual work would return to the public domain.  The original period of copyright length in the U.S. was 14 years, and the author had the right to extend the copyright for an additional 14  (Details of the historical development of copyright law can be found here).  The feeling was that this was an appropriate length of time to allow a creator the opportunity to benefit from his or her creation with an acceptable abridgement of human liberty.  In other words, copyright is a tradeoff between reward for the creator (incentive) and civil liberty, particularly to provide an incentive for publication and distribution.

As costs and times for distribution and publication decrease, the cost function for this tradeoff change, implying that copyright lengths should decrease.  In the last century copyright and publication has become dominated by an oligarchy of powerful corporations, primarily the members of the RIAA and MPAA, with Disney being a major villain.  These corporations have  championed a series of extension to copyright, each time adding a small fixed amount to the existing copyright lengths,  so that copyrights can now be extended to the life of the author + 70 years.  There is no reason to expect that these corporations will allow their increasingly valuable copyright portfolios to expire, so as waves of valuable intellectual property stand to enter the public domain (where they belong), we can expect the armies of lobbyists to swarm Congress’ halls once again.

So what does all this have to do with manufacturing consent?  In the NYT article, the article never mentions the concept of public domain.  It never discusses the fact that Kirby’s creations, now at 50 years of age, should have entered the public domain 32 years ago (under the original terms of copyright law).  There is consideration of the harm done by such copyright litigation which has no redeeming social value.  Jack Kirby, 16 years dead, is not going to be rewarded by this lawsuit, nor will the current process encourage any kind of creative work, beyond creative legal wrangling.  The underlying message of the article seems to be “look, thanks to the efforts of this lawyer and our wonderful copyright system, this guys heirs are gong to be getting a payday!  Isn’t the American copyright system grand?”  Rather than the message we should all be reading, which is “Look, this legal vampire is trying to make a lot of money of this copyright vampire.  The copyright vampire deserves to suffer, since without it’s machinations these works would be in the public domain and contributing to our culture.  But the legal vampire isn’t contributing anything to our culture either, and giving money to Kirby’s heirs isn’t doing anything for anyone either, other than using the legal system as a kind of lottery”.  The real lesson to be learned here is the following:  We need copyright reform.  We need copyrights to be shorter, and we need them to remain in the hands of the creator, not in the hands of some parasitic corporate behemoth.

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I actually want to write about Obama’s attempt at student load reform, but before I do I want to mention an excellent article at truthout discussing Beck, Coulter, and Limbaugh. The author (one Davidson Loehr) gives a brief review of Julius Streicher, who would seem to be the closest thing to a real life Howard W. Campell Jr. as exists, and compares his crimes (for which he was hung at Nuremburg) to the activities of Coulter, Beck, and Limbaugh. It’s a good read, and mostly on the money. He makes a very strong case against Coulter and Beck, but if the quotes he uses for Limbaugh are the best he could find, his case is pretty weak there. Limbaugh is probably guilty of little more than paving the way for Beck and Coulter and Fox news.

Moving on to Obama’s student loan overhaul: I just read an article at the NYT called Obama’s Student Loan Overhaul Endangered. For those of you who don’t know, the American student loan system works as follows: Most student loans are made by private, for profit companies, with government guarantees. In other words, the private companies take the profit, while the federal government takes the risk. This is essentially the same problem people discuss with the bank bailouts (and the airline bailouts, and the automotive bailouts…) with one important difference: Here the situation is planned in advance. It’s not an attempt at averting an even worse catastrophe, it’s just an example of successful (for the profiteers) lobbying. For federally subsidized loans, the govt makes the interest payments until graduation. Student loans are exempt from bankruptcy, so even if you go bankrupt, you will still owe on the student loans.

Obama’s plan is to loan the money directly, which would save the government billions of dollars, which he would use to expand Pell grant scholarships. This is no-brainer policy reform. The only people who lose out are the lenders, who, let’s face it, are parasitic users who have obtained their risk-free, merit-free profits by gaming the U.S. political system.

But the education bill is strongly opposed by some Senate Democrats, particularly those in states where for-profit student lenders are major employers. In a letter to the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, six Democrats said they disliked the president’s proposal.

“We write to make you aware of our concern with provisions of contemplated student lending reform that could put jobs at risk,” the senators wrote. “Increase our nation’s commitment to higher education funding is a priority, but we must proceed toward this objective in a thoughtful manner that considers potential alternative legislative proposals, while still delivering an equivalent amount of savings over the next ten years.

So, who should be haranguing for this? They are: Senators Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Bill Nelson of Florida, Mark Warner of Virginia and Jim Webb of Virginia. Now, I’m a huge fan of Webb for his courageous attempt at justice reform. He’s also one of the most reasonable and ethically consistent senators with regard to foreign policy. I might not agree with all his conclusions, but I thnk he’s a pretty good guy who works hard at being ethical. So in the end, the system is to blame, not the individuals. I’m not familiar with the others, but probably the same holds true. It’s not hard to see how this probably played out: Contributions buy you access. Once the lenders have access they make a spiel about how this is going to cost their state X jobs, and probably paints the whole thing as a political liability for the Senator in question. At that point the senator in question either cynically decides in favor of the local over the national interests (this amounts to self interest through the election process), or decides that he (or she) has to pick their battles carefully, and this one isn’t worth fighting.

What really gets me is couching the conflict of interest in terms of national interest vs jobs, where the real issue is national interest v.s. private wealth. Why? Well, the loans are going to made anyway, which means the jobs are needed anyway. The only difference is who’s doing the work, and where. So it’s not a question of jobs, it’s a question of whether or not we want to let some asshole(s) with money and connections profit from the student loan process or not. Who are these assholes? Well, Sallie Mae is at the top of the list.

The whole “jobs vs X” line is overplayed, and pretty transparent. It used to be used to great effect to torpedo environmental protections. Of course, environmental protections typically create jobs. It’s automation and outsourcing that destroys work places. Hopefully the american voter is gradually getting wise to this line of bullshit. So write your senator and tell them you don’t fall for that jobs versus X bullshit anymore, and you expect him (or her) to vote with your interests in mind, not with Fannie Mae’s.

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I recently listened to an old Alex Jones – Noam Chomsky interview.  I absolutely detest Alex Jones, who’s essentially the Rush Limbaugh of the tinfoil hat crowd.  What I find reprehensible in his pseudo-journalism is the net effect of it, which is to discredit and marginalize legitimate points of concern in the political spectrum, for example corporate manipulation (well, ownership) of the media and manufacturing consent being perhaps the most vital.

The problem is AJ has a much bigger audience and visibility than intelligent, reasonable individuals (like Chomsky) who are working hard at exposing this stuff and educating people.   So when you start talking about corporate and elite ownership of the media, the average person will likely have heard these concepts first from a wing-nut source like Alex Jones, and will likely glaze over.  So while A.J. ended his interview with Prof Chomsky by calling Chomsky a corporate-elite schill, the truth is that A.J. does far more to further the corporate-elitist agenda.  I’ll be discussing that at some other point, but I want to talk about a concrete example of this kind of corporate media control that’s taking place right now.

Maybe you’ve heard about the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood?  These guys a a national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups, parents and individuals whoare trying to “reclaim childhood from corporate marketers”.   They managed to push Disney into offering refunds on their “Baby Einstein” videos, because (surprise!) watching a video doesn’t educate your kids, and in fact watching videos is probably harmful for young kids, no matter what’s being watched.  This wouldn’t be a problem if Disney hadn’t claimed that these videos were “education”.

So Disney had to offer refunds, and the companies involved had to drop the word “educational” from their marketing.  Good news all around.   But mega corporations (and Disney’s among the worst) doesn’t like it when people try to execute some kind of democratic control or accountability.  So Disney called up the Judge Baker Children’s Center (a Harvard affiliated children’s mental health center).     Apparently Disney put pressure on Judge Baker, who in turn pressured the heroes in this story not to advocate against corporations, and not talk to the media.  Wow.  Now the JBCC is evicting the C.C.F.C., apparently because “the mission of the C.C.F.C — to protect children from harmful exploitation by corporate marketers — is not in line with the Judge Bake mission”.

Now Karen Schwartzman said Judge Baker received no money, and no promise of money from Disney, so one has to wonder what form of motivator Disney used?  Hints of research grants (this wouldn’t be money to JB after all, but to the childrens center), or pressure through Harvard (does Disney donate or have joint research programs with Harvard)?  Or perhaps it was just the threat of frivolous lawsuits.  Disney is a particularly nasty beast, because, in addition to having the huge financial resources available to all major corporations, they have such an overwhelming hold on the American collective unconcious.  I think it’s hard for the average American to think of Disney as evil, which no doubt has  helped in Disney’s efforts to plunder and deny the public domain.

There’s a fairly good article at the NYT.

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