The My Of It

Listening to the harangue over the health care reform squabble, I can't help thinking---even I saw a few episodes of West Wing, I who do not watch television, so of all the Lefties out there who probably hung on every second of that show, why is it so hard to grasp how things don't get accomplished in D.C. ? Yeah, it was fiction, but it was, in my opinion, pretty accurate in terms of the culture. But people complain and wonder why Obama doesn't just "ram his reforms through." Well. The man is a consensus builder. We just got done with a president who wasn't. Obama has not yet been in office a year and already people are ready to jump ship because he's not the second coming of FDR. How thoughtless, ill-informed, and shallow supposedly intelligent people can be. It should not be surprising, yet... First off, instead of presenting his reform package, he handed it to Congress---which is where all the arguing was going to happen anyway. Suppose he had presented a package. What is happening now would have happened anyway, and then he would be directly blamed for having drafted a lame plan. His plan would have been eviscerated and Congress wouold then proceed to draft something possibly worse than what it emerging now since Obama's plan would have been discredited through failure. As it is, the plan being touted is All Congress's. Anything wrong with it, it's on them. Obama has been arguing that regardless what happens, things have to change---which is frightening. With the stimulus package, things were already broken. With health care they are merely on the verge. Secondly, he's got lots of balls in the air just now. A lot. Most of them are disasters he inherited. Now, the metaphor has been used before, but that doesn't make it any less true---this country is a Big Ship and you don't turn it around on a dime. If you do that, you break more than you fix. Maybe that's what needs to happen, and sometimes we've had leaders who did that when there was but one maybe two major things that needed to be tended to. But that's not the case just now. Everything is in a mess. I'm not going to fault the man for failing to meet impossible expectations. Let's assume he did just start "ramming things through" and taking a dump all over Congress in the process, and things would inevitably get worse. For the ideologues who are displeased with what they perceive as half-measures just now, he might be a hero. Maybe, but quite certainly he would be a one-term hero. The Republicans could make good book on a spectacular failure and be right back in power, at least in Congress, and then what? So I think it a stupid thing to start bailing on him this soon into his term when he is possibly the most unifying, certainly the most intelligent and well educated president we've had since...hm. Here's what's going to happen. Congress will put together a lame package. It will pass. Then likely as not it will fail. The system will collapse. On its own. Then the big fix will come in. Congress will be discredited and Obama will be able to present a plan with legs and the public will back it because they will already have seen what happens when the really necessary steps are not taken. Right now, the reality is that health care costs too damn much.

Continue ReadingThe My Of It

More reasons to be pessimistic

I wish I could be more upbeat today, but I feel great danger all around us and what makes this danger real and pressing is our complacency. We Americans could meaningfully address many of our biggest issues, if only we took the time to inform ourselves and then focused our energy. But too many Americans don't take the time to inform themselves and can't bear the thought of prying themselves from their HD TVs. The result is that the social and corporate forces that are smart and organized will continue to quietly slink around picking our pockets on a massive scale; in the process, they will continue to insidiously demoralize us. Consider this: We have never before seen such income inequity in the United States. It is now even greater than it was during the Great Depression. Paul Krugman indicates that as of 2007, the top decile of American earners . . . pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages. He further indicates that "as a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth." These aren't just numbers. This disparity means real-life lost opportunities for real people, and I'm not just referring to the opportunity to buy an even bigger TV set. It means that month by month, this country belongs less and less to you and more and more to someone who doesn't give a rat's ass about you. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but there is no evidence for thinking otherwise. Which leads me to a stunning article written by Chris Hedges: "It's Not Going to Be OK." He starts by characterizing Barack Obama as "a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave." What is the concern?

At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.

How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up out of the slime in moments of crisis to offer fantastic visions? Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won’t have to wait long to find out.

The great danger is our massively widespread passivity at a time when we desperately need informed and focused action. Our passivity and our ubiquitous proud ignorance make us susceptible to the next demagogue to come around. And we'll probably be sitting around watching it happen on TV and convincing ourselves that it's not so bad and that it was all inevitable and who cares about those olden days when the rest of the world actually looked up to the United States? [Thanks to BJ for his link to the Hedges article.]

Continue ReadingMore reasons to be pessimistic

Heck of a job, CIA psychologists!

Who were the psychologists who created and oversaw the U.S. torture of its prisoners? Consistent with much else that occurred during the Bush Administration, it turns out that even though they were psychologists, Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were shockingly unqualified, according to the NYT:

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.
According to the NYT article, Mitchell and Jessen now face a possible criminal inquiry.

Continue ReadingHeck of a job, CIA psychologists!

Knowing someone versus loving someone

When I was a teenager, I sometimes got annoyed hearing people getting all excited when they talked with their children about the Disney characters Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. I thought this was strange, because very few people could tell me anything at all about the personalities of these cartoon characters, other than what they looked like. In fact, I had seen a few old cartoons involving Donald and Mickey, and many of them left me unimpressed, bored or disturbed. Donald often flew off in a fit of anger. Not always, but often enough. Mickey didn't have the anger problem of Donald, but people who "loved" him usually couldn't tell me anything about him other than that he appeared in some cartoons, including "Steamboat Willie." Is he an exemplary character? Very few of the people who love him seem to care. I see the same phenomenon today. Tonight, I ran across this especially disturbing cartoon of Donald Duck, probably not one that you'll see featured at Disneyland. I can hear it now . . . "Hey, kids, look! There's a funny cartoon where Donald Duck commits MURDER!" I'm sure that most people don't care that Donald committed murder. They "love" him no matter what he has done. This cartoon goes to show you that people can think that they love a character without knowing anything at all about that character. We are really good at projecting, filling a knowledge void with good things (or bad things) about a character, a movie star or even a God. Case in point is Jesus, whom many people claim to know or love yet they know so very little about him. Or think of the people who insist that God loves us, yet they aren't interested in knowing about the many genocides committed by the God of the OT. Or consider a more modern example of a person who many people "love" or "admire" without knowing anything about her: Sarah Palin, who I've previously compared to "Helly Kitty." It turns out that many modern corporate characters are intentionally left empty, allowing the public to drum up their personalities in their imagination.

Continue ReadingKnowing someone versus loving someone

Maddow and Olbermann counter-attack the elites opposing health care reform

Who are those "average citizens" disrupting town hall meetings on health care reform? Rachel Maddow exposes them and the people who finance them:

Who are the people and organization who are actively buying our elected representatives on the issue of health care reform? A visibly angrier than usual Keith Olberman calls them out, specifying the names and the obscene payments of cash:

Continue ReadingMaddow and Olbermann counter-attack the elites opposing health care reform