This sort of headline must be a joke, a fake headline from The Onion, right? Wrong. Here's what the U.K. guardian has to say:
The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.
In the aftermath of the record earthquake and tsunami, I received an email from one of my suppliers in Japan. MrTitanium gets his bulk chains from them because no one else makes them. I place a couple of orders a year, and know several of the staff by name. I am impressed that their communications infrastructure is so hardy. This country had its infrastructure designed for such calamities. The email in slightly fractured English advised me that one of their factories was flood damaged, and both are out of commission pending some repairs, and the grid and roads being rebuilt. Their warehouses are intact, but until the emergency passes they are unable to ship. Power is being rationed and is understandably intermittent, given the worst natural disaster to ever hit nuclear power plants. Lack of food, water, roads, fuel, and such is a hardship for them. But they abashedly apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing me, and beg for our understanding.
In an earlier post on this topic I made the claim that the thing which changed everything in this country was the rise of capitalism as the dominant economic model. It’s time to make good on that claim. Firstly, we need to understand, once and for all, just what Capitalism is and how it is misunderstood in these sorts of discussions. Capitalism is an umbrella term used to describe a variety of practices under one general heading, practices like mercantilism, industrialization, and interest-based lending. But to be precise, all these different practices overlap but are not themselves capitalism. Capitalism is the strategic use of money to determine the value of money and thereby transfer latent wealth from one sector of an economy to another. This simple distinction does much to explain the animosity throughout the 19th Century toward any kind of centralized bank, including the Jacksonian war on the United States Bank, and Jeffersonian suspicion of corporate power. It is nothing less than the ability of a small group to determine the value of local currency and the buying power of a community, all through the manipulation of currency exchange markets (like Wall Street), regardless of intrinsic values of manufactures and production. But we have so conflated this with all other aspects of our much-vaunted “free” enterprise system that to criticize capitalism is seen as an attack on the American Way of Life. It is not. Although many Left attacks on it become hopelessly mired in broad attacks on wealth, it is not so much an attack on wealth per se—that is, wealth based on the prosperity of a community—but wealth derived at the expense of the community. Which is what we are seeing take place today. Which has taken place often in our history. The difficulty is, this has been one of the most successful economic systems ever for creating prosperity, especially for the individual who understands it and works it, and, if properly regulated, has been the foundation of American achievement, at least materially. So any critique can be made to seem like a critique of America itself. This fact has been useful to plutocrats defending their practices against attempts to rein in and control abuses. The coupling of what in extremes are parasitic practices of economic pillage with grass roots patriotism has been the most difficult combination to deal with in our history. In its contemporary guise, it couches itself in an argument that socially responsible community-based efforts to address economic and resource inequality are Socialist and therefore fundamentally un-American. This is historically inaccurate and strategically manipulative, but the bounds between the anti-federalist sentiments that began even before the revolution and became quasi-religious among certain groups in the aftermath of the Civil War are many and strange and need teasing apart to understand. [More . . . ]
This will be a rather lengthy piece. It is my intention here to examine the historical underpinnings of what is happening today in the fight between the Right and everyone else. This will be part one of a two-part essay. Bear with me, it all does lead somewhere. The talking heads have been bloviating for decades now about the function of government vis a vis a so-called Welfare State. The Right claims that having the government “take care of” people is a violation of the American tradition of independence and self-reliance and will sap our resources, both fiscal and moral. The Left has argued that such government programs are there to protect people who have few resources from the depredations of the wealthy and an economy that fluctuates as a normal element of its functioning and that it is the responsibility of the better-off to aid those who are left without recourse in such a system. That’s the basics of the debate. The Right says no, people should look out for themselves. The Left says many people can’t and it isn’t right to let them starve in the streets. The Right says it has no desire to see anyone starve in the streets but rejects the idea that others are responsible for the perhaps bad choices of individuals who have been unable to take advantage of an open system. The Left counters by pointing out the system is not as open as the Right believes and built in to its workings is the inevitability that a certain number of people simply won’t be able to participate. Even if the Right then agrees, they assert that it is not the job of the State, using tax payer money, to off-set this imbalance. The Left says it is if people vote for it and even if they don’t there’s a moral imperative involved. The Right counters that the State is not the instrument for pursuing moral imperatives. Well. Let me be up front here—I think the Right has it wrong. They base their philosophy, if that’s what it is, on an idea of equality that is unsupportable. In the narrowest sense, they argue that our system is open to the extent that everyone has an equal shot at some measure of success and if they fail it is either because they were lazy, foolish, or unlucky. The government can functionally do nothing about any of that. The argument falls apart on its face. Equality in this country is a principle concerning representation before the State. The State in this sense is the community as a whole, both public and private. The ideas that we are not born to a Station in life which determines at the outset how far an individual might go through his or her own efforts. It was never intended as an assessment of talent or a measure of will or a guarantee of achievement. It is only a promise of access. Because people are not equal as individuals. They aren’t and there’s not much point in arguing about it. Intelligence, physical attributes, proclivities, all these things vary widely throughout any population group and to argue that, if somehow we could take away all social obstacles, everyone would be exactly the same is absurd. The Right seems to argue that because this is true, the rest of us have no responsibility for the fundamentally unequal achievements of any one, or group of, individual. They discount social obstacles. Not completely, because when an individual rises above a certain level, reaches the precincts of success, and has done so from straitened beginnings, many on the Right like to point to that individual as an exemplar of succeeding in spite of the circumstances of his or her life. So there is a tacit recognition that social conditions matter, but only as an ennobling aspect to a Horatio Alger story. The question really is why those conditions keep so many others down, but that, as much as the successful individual’s achievement is credited to personal qualities, is a matter of personal failure, not attributable to anyone else. Which seems to make success and failure a matter of choice. Exclusively. Ergo, the tax payer, through the medium of the State, has no responsibility for such failures. This can only be true if the assertion of equality is true as an innate quality. [More . . . ]
I’ll admit up front that I’m shooting from the hip here. There are many aspects to what is happening in Wisconsin right now with parallels to several past instances in the country in the fight over workers’ rights, unions, and moneyed interests, but I frankly don’t have the time to research them all right now and get something up before it all comes to a head. Isn’t it interesting, though, that we are collectively cheering what is happening in the Middle East right now and something similar is happening right here and people don’t seem to be paying attention to what’s at stake? I grant you, it’s a stretch. But on principles, not so much. We’re talking about who has the right to speak to power and over what. The protesters in Madison aren’t having their internet access and phone service pulled and it’s doubtful the military will be called in, but on the other hand the Wisconsin state police are being asked to go get the now-labeled Wisconsin 14 and bring them back to the state capitol to vote on something that is clearly a stripping of the right of petition and assembly. So this can become very quickly a constitutional issue and that’s scary, because right now the Supreme Court has been decidedly against workers’ rights. Governor Scott is at least being clear. I’ll give him credit, he’s not ducking questions about what he’s trying to do. Wisconsin, like many states, has a budget crisis. He’s already gotten concessions from the unions, a lot of money. The unions have not balked at doing their civic duty in terms of agreeing to pay cuts, freezes on raises, and some concessions on benefits to help the state meet its budgetary responsibilities. But he’s going further and asking that all these unions be stripped of their collective bargaining abilities in order to make sure they never again demand something from the state that the legislature or the governor believes they don’t deserve. In other words, Governor Scott doesn’t ever want to have to sit down and ask them for concessions ever again—he wants to be able to just take what he wants. [More . . . ]