Sarah Palin does not care about you. She doesn't give one damn whether or not you starve, lose your home or have to trade your self-respect for a little bread.
She has a job to do. She channels your angst and rage into little quantum packets of hatred, and campaign contributions. You provide her party and her faction of the ruling class with a deniable buffer. When one of your group acts up, or does something stupid, they disavow you. They sit behind your rage and your anxiety and mutter, "What can we do?"
Repeat: you provide them with money and cover.
Stop it, already.
PS: Stop congratulating yourselves, sneering liberals. Sarah Palin's followers might have some funny notions about gold, markets and the imaginary national past, but they at least possess enough of an instinct of self-preservation, and self-respect, to know that the guys in the top hats would love to eat our young for dinner. Sure, their rage gets misdirected. Sure, they provide cover for the same top hats. But they know what the enemy looks like, even if they don't know the meaning of the word "socialism."
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
Apr 10, 2010
Apr 9, 2010
Apr 8, 2010
Not Courting At Versaille...
...Kevin Carson answers Sara Robinson with the definitive response:
"...I think the term Robinson’s actually looking for is 'seditious libel': language that tends to defame, discredit, criticize, impugn, embarrass, challenge, or question the government, its policies, or its officials. And that’s clearly the kind of language, coming from the Right, that Robinson treats as seditious in spirit. In this, she puts herself in good company with previous enemies of sedition: blue-nose, powdered-wig conservatives like John Adams, and the know-nothing Legionnaires and Red Squads who rounded up Wobblies and Socialists during the War Hysteria under Woodrow Wilson. In both cases, they were guilty of calling into question the legitimacy of the state, using language that called it into disrepute, undermining the moral authority needed to carry out its policies, and in some cases directly impeding the execution of those policies....
...The problem with Robinson’s standard of seditious libel is, it hits me way too close to where I live on the Left. See, I constantly engage–and the people I admire most on the Left have engaged–in casting doubt on the legitimacy and moral authority of the state.
For example: if you read the books by William Blum and Noam Chomsky on the history of U.S. foreign policy, it becomes pretty clear that the atrocities and crimes against humanity weren’t just 'mistakes' or 'excesses' that sometimes occurred in the execution of a policy whose primary goal was to promote peace and human freedom; the aims of the policies themselves were crimes against humanity. The foreign policies of the U.S. government, throughout the 20th century and right up to today, were the policies of a class state–a state serving as executive committee of the corporate ruling class. The wars of the U.S. government have all been fought in the primary interest of a corporate system of world order. As Howard Zinn put it: 'there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States.'
Now if that doesn’t qualify as undermining the moral authority of the U.S. government, calling its legitimacy into question, I don’t know what does.
When Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC, ret., said he’d been a high-class muscle man, a racketeer, a global enforcer for American corporate interests, either he met Robinson’s standard for the 'moral equivalent of sedition,' or no one does.
And speaking of Zinn, his People’s History of the United States is packed from beginning to end with examples of how the U.S. government has functioned, not as an instrument for 'all of us working together,' not as an instrument of the 'national interest' or 'general welfare,' but as a class state whose main purpose has been to enable the people who own the country to feed off of those who live and work in it.
Glen Greenwald, writing of the recent video on WikiLeaks of American troops gleefully slaughtering civilians in Iraq, pointed out that the slaugher was 'not an aberration': 'it’s par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that’s rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video.'
And as with previous cases, in which 'bad apples' like William Calley or Lynndie England took the fall, the real criminals–the real monsters–are soft-spoken, unassuming men with manicured fingernails, sitting in tastefully appointed offices at the highest levels of power. I don’t see how one can publicly acknowledge this without falling afoul of Robinson’s standard of seditious libel.
Because the fact of the matter is, the U.S. government has pursued evil ends, has served the desire of wicked men for unearned wealth, and left a monstrous trail of blood and devastation in so doing. The U.S. government has lied and manipulated the American people into war after war to meet manufactured foreign 'threats,' when the real 'threat' it had in mind was the threat to global corporate power. It has overthrown democratically elected governments whose main crime was land reform. It has backed military coups and military torturers, including the domino chain of coups Kissinger instigated in South America, and provided fraternal aid to terrorist death squads, with the blood of millions of innocent people on the hands of every American president since at least the mid-20th century.
When the U.S. government acts on the side of wickedness, I cheerfully admit to being on the side of those who obstruct and thwart the execution of its criminal policies. When the Wobblies organized West Coast longshoremen to obstruct the shipping of materiel to Iraq, I cheered them on. And if either Bush or Obama had launched a military attack on Iran or Venezuela, I’d have wished for Sunburn missiles to sink every carrier group involved to the bottom of the ocean.
That’s the problem: I don’t know of any standard of seditious libel, of undermining the legitimacy and moral authority of the United States government, that wouldn’t catch me, Chomsky, Zinn and Greenwald in the net, along with all those right-wingers.
We live under a class state, a system of class rule, and the machinery of the corporate state serves the interests of that class rule. 'Moderates' and 'centrists,' by definition, are those who accept that system as fundamentally legitimate in all its essentials, and just want to tinker around the edges of corporate rule without altering its fundamental nature.
I refuse to accept it as legitimate, or to play nice within the lines of acceptable discourse that Robinson draws.
If this be sedition, then make the most of it."
h/t Corrente for "Versailles"
*
Let's recap:
1. Professional liberals, access journalists and Democratic Party operatives have no problem labeling a wide swath of the population, even members of their own veal pens, "extremist."
2. Prominent moderate, liberal and centrist courtiers have no interest in identifying abuses of power under Obama. As was the case for Republican partisans under Bush, and professional liberals before him under Clinton.
3. These folks do have a vested interest in conflating opposition to their power and/or access with "sedition" or "domestic terrorism," especially if petit bourgeois small holders and alienated wage laborers prefer right wing myths of national glory to sedately liberal ones.
4. President Barack Obama has publicly announced that he can kill American citizens on his own say so, so long as the intended victim's name is first entered into a list over which he has final approval (leaving alone, for now, the long standing policy of murdering brown people for even less).
5. Professional liberals of the courtier class are notoriously silent on the subject of Barack's lurch towards the Unified Executive, never mind the merely unitary one. Benighted by our ignorance, they've taken the time to remind us instead that electioneering will get us Mo'betta Democrats, a bright shining recovery and, oh yah, there are really scary ne'er do wells raising a hoot for Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.
6. They are, let us repeat, willing to remain silent about fiat executions but they cannot shut up about Sarah Palin's Alaskan PoMo Roadshow.
7. As has been the case with pollution control, health insurance and care reform, escalation in Afghanistan, the ending of rendition and torture, the closing of Gitmo, Israeli war crimes, continued occupation of Iraq, bailouts of Commons destroying banks - we can count on the The Courtiers to justify what Imperial Barack has done, so long as Barack is the one doing it.
So, do you think they'd come to our defense if we got labeled "domestic extremists"?
"...I think the term Robinson’s actually looking for is 'seditious libel': language that tends to defame, discredit, criticize, impugn, embarrass, challenge, or question the government, its policies, or its officials. And that’s clearly the kind of language, coming from the Right, that Robinson treats as seditious in spirit. In this, she puts herself in good company with previous enemies of sedition: blue-nose, powdered-wig conservatives like John Adams, and the know-nothing Legionnaires and Red Squads who rounded up Wobblies and Socialists during the War Hysteria under Woodrow Wilson. In both cases, they were guilty of calling into question the legitimacy of the state, using language that called it into disrepute, undermining the moral authority needed to carry out its policies, and in some cases directly impeding the execution of those policies....
...The problem with Robinson’s standard of seditious libel is, it hits me way too close to where I live on the Left. See, I constantly engage–and the people I admire most on the Left have engaged–in casting doubt on the legitimacy and moral authority of the state.
For example: if you read the books by William Blum and Noam Chomsky on the history of U.S. foreign policy, it becomes pretty clear that the atrocities and crimes against humanity weren’t just 'mistakes' or 'excesses' that sometimes occurred in the execution of a policy whose primary goal was to promote peace and human freedom; the aims of the policies themselves were crimes against humanity. The foreign policies of the U.S. government, throughout the 20th century and right up to today, were the policies of a class state–a state serving as executive committee of the corporate ruling class. The wars of the U.S. government have all been fought in the primary interest of a corporate system of world order. As Howard Zinn put it: 'there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States.'
Now if that doesn’t qualify as undermining the moral authority of the U.S. government, calling its legitimacy into question, I don’t know what does.
When Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC, ret., said he’d been a high-class muscle man, a racketeer, a global enforcer for American corporate interests, either he met Robinson’s standard for the 'moral equivalent of sedition,' or no one does.
And speaking of Zinn, his People’s History of the United States is packed from beginning to end with examples of how the U.S. government has functioned, not as an instrument for 'all of us working together,' not as an instrument of the 'national interest' or 'general welfare,' but as a class state whose main purpose has been to enable the people who own the country to feed off of those who live and work in it.
Glen Greenwald, writing of the recent video on WikiLeaks of American troops gleefully slaughtering civilians in Iraq, pointed out that the slaugher was 'not an aberration': 'it’s par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that’s rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video.'
And as with previous cases, in which 'bad apples' like William Calley or Lynndie England took the fall, the real criminals–the real monsters–are soft-spoken, unassuming men with manicured fingernails, sitting in tastefully appointed offices at the highest levels of power. I don’t see how one can publicly acknowledge this without falling afoul of Robinson’s standard of seditious libel.
Because the fact of the matter is, the U.S. government has pursued evil ends, has served the desire of wicked men for unearned wealth, and left a monstrous trail of blood and devastation in so doing. The U.S. government has lied and manipulated the American people into war after war to meet manufactured foreign 'threats,' when the real 'threat' it had in mind was the threat to global corporate power. It has overthrown democratically elected governments whose main crime was land reform. It has backed military coups and military torturers, including the domino chain of coups Kissinger instigated in South America, and provided fraternal aid to terrorist death squads, with the blood of millions of innocent people on the hands of every American president since at least the mid-20th century.
When the U.S. government acts on the side of wickedness, I cheerfully admit to being on the side of those who obstruct and thwart the execution of its criminal policies. When the Wobblies organized West Coast longshoremen to obstruct the shipping of materiel to Iraq, I cheered them on. And if either Bush or Obama had launched a military attack on Iran or Venezuela, I’d have wished for Sunburn missiles to sink every carrier group involved to the bottom of the ocean.
That’s the problem: I don’t know of any standard of seditious libel, of undermining the legitimacy and moral authority of the United States government, that wouldn’t catch me, Chomsky, Zinn and Greenwald in the net, along with all those right-wingers.
We live under a class state, a system of class rule, and the machinery of the corporate state serves the interests of that class rule. 'Moderates' and 'centrists,' by definition, are those who accept that system as fundamentally legitimate in all its essentials, and just want to tinker around the edges of corporate rule without altering its fundamental nature.
I refuse to accept it as legitimate, or to play nice within the lines of acceptable discourse that Robinson draws.
If this be sedition, then make the most of it."
h/t Corrente for "Versailles"
*
Let's recap:
1. Professional liberals, access journalists and Democratic Party operatives have no problem labeling a wide swath of the population, even members of their own veal pens, "extremist."
2. Prominent moderate, liberal and centrist courtiers have no interest in identifying abuses of power under Obama. As was the case for Republican partisans under Bush, and professional liberals before him under Clinton.
3. These folks do have a vested interest in conflating opposition to their power and/or access with "sedition" or "domestic terrorism," especially if petit bourgeois small holders and alienated wage laborers prefer right wing myths of national glory to sedately liberal ones.
4. President Barack Obama has publicly announced that he can kill American citizens on his own say so, so long as the intended victim's name is first entered into a list over which he has final approval (leaving alone, for now, the long standing policy of murdering brown people for even less).
5. Professional liberals of the courtier class are notoriously silent on the subject of Barack's lurch towards the Unified Executive, never mind the merely unitary one. Benighted by our ignorance, they've taken the time to remind us instead that electioneering will get us Mo'betta Democrats, a bright shining recovery and, oh yah, there are really scary ne'er do wells raising a hoot for Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.
6. They are, let us repeat, willing to remain silent about fiat executions but they cannot shut up about Sarah Palin's Alaskan PoMo Roadshow.
7. As has been the case with pollution control, health insurance and care reform, escalation in Afghanistan, the ending of rendition and torture, the closing of Gitmo, Israeli war crimes, continued occupation of Iraq, bailouts of Commons destroying banks - we can count on the The Courtiers to justify what Imperial Barack has done, so long as Barack is the one doing it.
So, do you think they'd come to our defense if we got labeled "domestic extremists"?
The Courtiers
Imperial Barack has arrogated the authority to create a kill list, hand it off to his executioners, and have people put to death on his say so, without provision of evidence, without charge, without trial. Anywhere in the world. At any time.
But Digby wants us to worry about the Sarah and Michele Sideshow. The Obamaphile at EL wants us to scoff at the same women, or turn our sneers towards Glenn Beck. In a fit of beggaring the obvious in the service of the Party, OpenLeft gets breathless about the (get ready for it) leftward turn of the other corporate party. BJ's John Cole thinks Erik Erikson is a bad dude. The creepy Shakescult wants us to fret, you guessed it, Glen Beck, Sarah and Michele and the terrible fact that the guy who really, really hates Nancy Pelosi is not being called a terrorist, you know, at the same time that Imperial Barack gets his kill finger flexing. Booman points his finger of doom at CNN, for failing to make ugly noises about Sarah and Michele's wayward base, while Yggie gets jiggy for Matthew Frum. Ezra Klein wonks out some procedural garbage, as TNR's Chait thinks the economy is getting better, and that libertarians should give up trying to get Democratic Party respect.
But none of these courtiers mentioned the fact that their presidential Lion, their eleven dimensional coolness guru has decided to out-Dubya little Poppet Bush.
No Public Witnesses in this list. Not a one.
*
Added in edit (12:40am, Friday):
Not on the front page: "Targeted: Barack Obama Decides To Target American With Fiat Execution"
But Digby wants us to worry about the Sarah and Michele Sideshow. The Obamaphile at EL wants us to scoff at the same women, or turn our sneers towards Glenn Beck. In a fit of beggaring the obvious in the service of the Party, OpenLeft gets breathless about the (get ready for it) leftward turn of the other corporate party. BJ's John Cole thinks Erik Erikson is a bad dude. The creepy Shakescult wants us to fret, you guessed it, Glen Beck, Sarah and Michele and the terrible fact that the guy who really, really hates Nancy Pelosi is not being called a terrorist, you know, at the same time that Imperial Barack gets his kill finger flexing. Booman points his finger of doom at CNN, for failing to make ugly noises about Sarah and Michele's wayward base, while Yggie gets jiggy for Matthew Frum. Ezra Klein wonks out some procedural garbage, as TNR's Chait thinks the economy is getting better, and that libertarians should give up trying to get Democratic Party respect.
But none of these courtiers mentioned the fact that their presidential Lion, their eleven dimensional coolness guru has decided to out-Dubya little Poppet Bush.
No Public Witnesses in this list. Not a one.
*
Added in edit (12:40am, Friday):
Not on the front page: "Targeted: Barack Obama Decides To Target American With Fiat Execution"
Public Witness
When I'd not yet reached the pitfall strewn age of my middle years, responsible for and to children who did not ask my permission to make them and who therefore do not need my permission to live whatever lives suit them best, I'd mumbled up a vague, ill defined concept of "the Public Witness."
A person who actively counters the injustice of the day, and the age, with the unwavering witness of mind, wit and flesh.
Think Maulana Azad and the other satyagrahi facing abuse outside the salt mines, public witnesses to injustice. Think Mary Harris Jones, and Red Emma against Carnegie and Stalin.
Think, also, Chris Floyd:
"Let us hear no more excuses for Barack Obama. Let us hear no more defenses, no more special pleading, no more extenuations. Let us have no more reciting of the 'pressures' he is under, of the 'many obstacles' that balk him in his quest to do us good, of the 'bad advisors' who are swaying him to unworthy acts against his will. Let us be done at last with all these wretched lies, these complicitous self-deceptions that are facilitating atrocity and tyranny on a monstrous scale.
Barack Obama has ordered the murder of an American citizen, without trial, without due process, without the production of any evidence. All it takes to kill any American citizen in this way is Barack Obama's signature on a piece of paper, his arbitrary designation of the target as a 'suspected terrorist.' In precisely the same way -- precisely the same way -- Josef Stalin would place a mark by a name in a list of 'suspected terrorists' or 'counterrevolutionaries,' and the bearer of that name would die. This is the system we have now, the same as the Soviets had then: a leader with the unchallengeable power to kill citizens without due process.
That this power has not been used on the same scale in the American system as in the Stalinist state -- yet -- does not alter the equivalence of this governing principle. In both cases, the leader signs arbitrary death warrants; the security services carry out the task; and the 'great and good' of society accept this draconian power as necessary and right..."
Original source.
A person who actively counters the injustice of the day, and the age, with the unwavering witness of mind, wit and flesh.
Think Maulana Azad and the other satyagrahi facing abuse outside the salt mines, public witnesses to injustice. Think Mary Harris Jones, and Red Emma against Carnegie and Stalin.
Think, also, Chris Floyd:
"Let us hear no more excuses for Barack Obama. Let us hear no more defenses, no more special pleading, no more extenuations. Let us have no more reciting of the 'pressures' he is under, of the 'many obstacles' that balk him in his quest to do us good, of the 'bad advisors' who are swaying him to unworthy acts against his will. Let us be done at last with all these wretched lies, these complicitous self-deceptions that are facilitating atrocity and tyranny on a monstrous scale.
Barack Obama has ordered the murder of an American citizen, without trial, without due process, without the production of any evidence. All it takes to kill any American citizen in this way is Barack Obama's signature on a piece of paper, his arbitrary designation of the target as a 'suspected terrorist.' In precisely the same way -- precisely the same way -- Josef Stalin would place a mark by a name in a list of 'suspected terrorists' or 'counterrevolutionaries,' and the bearer of that name would die. This is the system we have now, the same as the Soviets had then: a leader with the unchallengeable power to kill citizens without due process.
That this power has not been used on the same scale in the American system as in the Stalinist state -- yet -- does not alter the equivalence of this governing principle. In both cases, the leader signs arbitrary death warrants; the security services carry out the task; and the 'great and good' of society accept this draconian power as necessary and right..."
Original source.
Rant
This one took a while to put into words.
I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.
In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:
I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.
So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.
That is all.
I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.
In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:
I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.
So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.
That is all.
Damn
I don't really have much faith in the "support the troops" mantra. I take no stock in the invitation to set aside criticism on account of a magical decree of national affinity.
I've only just recently argued that people who take the dollar to kill other people kind of have to know what they've gotten themselves into: if you decide to serve the House that the Dollar Built, with your body and with your violence, every now and again someone about to get crushed by the ever expanding foundation of that House might lash out at you.
The chap lashing out might read the Qur'an with an eye to a global Caliphate, and have regressive notions about women. Or she might belong to a cadre of Indian Maoists, fighting to survive a Western financed depopulation war.
Still, I'm moved by the palpability, the honesty of this man's desire to just go home:
Perhaps he has had some not so gentle coaching. I wouldn't doubt it. But, in bringing to the fore that we hold his analogs in captivity, he takes on a humanity that the cavalier butchers of the Wikileaks video cannot now or ever redeem.
h/t (sigh) HuffPo
full video @ ABC
I've only just recently argued that people who take the dollar to kill other people kind of have to know what they've gotten themselves into: if you decide to serve the House that the Dollar Built, with your body and with your violence, every now and again someone about to get crushed by the ever expanding foundation of that House might lash out at you.
The chap lashing out might read the Qur'an with an eye to a global Caliphate, and have regressive notions about women. Or she might belong to a cadre of Indian Maoists, fighting to survive a Western financed depopulation war.
Still, I'm moved by the palpability, the honesty of this man's desire to just go home:
Perhaps he has had some not so gentle coaching. I wouldn't doubt it. But, in bringing to the fore that we hold his analogs in captivity, he takes on a humanity that the cavalier butchers of the Wikileaks video cannot now or ever redeem.
h/t (sigh) HuffPo
full video @ ABC
Apr 7, 2010
Imperial Barack and the Monsters Under Sara's Bed
Wherein Skookum lays down some truth about Sara, Hunter of Sedition:
"Still, the fundamental message littered throughout her tiresome rant is that the legitimacy of the US Government and Emperor Obama must not be challenged; the democratic process of bribery, thievery, and money-laundering by Congress and the White House is sacrosanct!"
I wonder if Mrs. Robinson understands the awful joke Lady Irony has played on her. At the very height of her campaign to classify Tea Party attendees as the vanguard of fascism, as seditious threats to state order, Imperial Barack hauls off and decides he's got authority I don't think even Caligula ever had under law.
"Still, the fundamental message littered throughout her tiresome rant is that the legitimacy of the US Government and Emperor Obama must not be challenged; the democratic process of bribery, thievery, and money-laundering by Congress and the White House is sacrosanct!"
I wonder if Mrs. Robinson understands the awful joke Lady Irony has played on her. At the very height of her campaign to classify Tea Party attendees as the vanguard of fascism, as seditious threats to state order, Imperial Barack hauls off and decides he's got authority I don't think even Caligula ever had under law.
The Hopium King Has a Kill List
Hopey Changey wants it all:
"The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen..."
Ugh, the NYT.
I'm sure professional liberals will love it until they hate it, say, when the next assclown from the GOP gets a shot at the Principate.
"The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen..."
Ugh, the NYT.
I'm sure professional liberals will love it until they hate it, say, when the next assclown from the GOP gets a shot at the Principate.
Apr 6, 2010
Ohmyfuckingheadithurts
April 6, 2010
Sedition: Crime of creating a revolt, disturbance, or violence against lawful civil authority with the intent to cause its overthrow or destruction -- Brittanica Concise Dictionary
Well, finally. It's high time somebody had the guts to say the S-word -- sedition -- right out loud..."
Sara Robinson @ Alternet
Note to Sara Robinson: Conservative know-nothings and corporate stooges may act like assholes, but they haven't set about de-legitimizing government. You can understand the intended outcome of their policies and studied ineptitude just fine if you give it even a half-hearted attempt. Conservatives, generally, want a government that works like a streamlined mafia organization. Small, lean and deadly with a clear boss on top and a clear set of enemies. Those enemies might look like unhappy Arabs, Colombian indigenes living on top of gold or oil - or they might resemble Derrick Jensen and other people who don't like the taste of flesh, or the placement of ski lodges. They might look like any congregation of black men not dutifully employed in the sweeping of floors, or any Mexican grandmother not washing lunch counter trays. But, these enemies of the state serve a simple purpose: they stand-in as symbols of obstruction to power, as signs of those people who get in the way of the making of money and the accumulation of power.
The conservative, as a type, does not want to do away with prisons, or courts of law, Sara. He's not out to cripple Uncle Sam, or roll back police powers. He wants his enemies contained, and he's willing to have the government do it for him.
Liberals, Sara, do not play for a different outcome. They just want to pet the natives on the way to human zoo, and win their comfort, their iPads, their self-congratulatory and well-fed existences, with less troubled consciences. A liberal will use the club of the state to just as nasty an end as any conservative. He'll just lie more about it. He'll pretend he's got the better version of lawn order. He might even like a few black people, as long as they read the right books. He might not even get the icks around Teh Gays. He might like his pot, and turn his nose up at marijuana criminalization, but don't think for a moment that he won't cozy up to the protection racket the moment someone threatens to take away his toys, or just stop buying them.
He's got no problem with the so-called state monopoly on violence, Sara.
He might even, as does the current Dear Leader, send his staffers to defend torture, a global gulag system - or to quash revelations about the military murder of innocents.
You know what de-legitimizes the State, Sara?
The fucking state, itself.
h/t Charles Davis
Update (2:58pm):
Ms. Robinson possesses teh funnehs, in spades. If only the good people with historical historicality on their sides would just pass UHC, then the conservatronics would be "shut out of power for good."
Thanks for making the point, Ms. Robinson. What you want is your faction to control the machinery of state, in perpetuum. No wonder you see "sedition" in the grumblings of the rear guard reactionaries. The competition wants its goodies back...
Perhaps even Ezra Klein can drum up...
...enough animus to oppose this:
Well, so much for net neutrality
h/t and all credit to lambert
*
Excellent piece on the subject, here @ FDL.
*
What was I going on about? Oh, the new fascism...
Well, so much for net neutrality
h/t and all credit to lambert
*
Excellent piece on the subject, here @ FDL.
*
What was I going on about? Oh, the new fascism...
On The Superiority of Cats
My cat has the remarkable capacity to forget when I last fed him. That I enslave myself to a clock, his sideways glance seems to say, has no bearing on his appetite.
Lest We Forget
Lest we forget:
"...The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and usefu[l] instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.
State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management...."
Benito Mussolini, 1935
Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
- attributed to Benito Mussolini
*
I don't think that the American corporate state has a 1:1 correspondence with that outlined by Mussolini. In fact, I think we ought to understand it as a different beast, entire.
For one, ours seems far more beholden to corporations (as to why, below) than Benny would have liked. For Mussolini, the State (Hegel's State, his spirit of history, itself) represented the highest conception of human activity, it embodied the best of Man:
"Fascism sees in the world not only those superficial, material aspects in which man appears as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists."
Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism
Heady stuff, however awful and adolescent.
I cannot really imagine the chief bankster at Goldman Sachs going full hog for it. Nor do I imagine Barack Obama wandering the West Wing, quaffing draughts of golden ale, quoting Benny whilst tapping the ash of his Nat Sherman into the White House china.
Mussolini's fascism, like that of Hitler, and the related falangist and peronist states arising in Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Colombia and Lebanon, represents the emergence of this doctrine and practice within the context of the Westphalian order.
National fascisms, straining against the constrictions of Westphalia, but defined by the borders, trade relations, concepts of nationality and colonial resource extraction of the Westphalian age.
Not so, that which now emerges from the continuing fallout of the Second World War. World War II ended with the unraveling of the Westphalian consensus. The division of the world into Soviet (later, ChiCom), Euro-American and "Third World" blocs, following the American nuclear atrocities in Japan, inaugurated an interregnum.
During this period, ending roughly with the last Bush Presidency, the Westphalian nations (and their heirs, namely the US, India, Japan and China) exceeded their former national limits, creating over the decades (sometimes in fits and starts, and not without repeated conflict) a global monetary and trade superstructure which obligated those same nations to break with the Westphalian tradition of national sovereignty.
Sovereign states have, for the better part of four decades, ceded a number of their functions to supranational trade organs, trade compacts which benefit the "real victors" of the Second World War: corporations, zaibatsus and combines (for example: Krupp, Bayer, Daimler, Fiat, Mitsubishi et al survived the conflagration, despite the near complete destruction of the states which hosted them).
Retaining warmaking capabilities, and domestic police powers, as well as a number of the older mechanisms of population governance, these states nonetheless shifted their enforcement focus from the protection of national interest (however variously defined) to the protection of corporate interest, called otherwise, neoliberalism.
As formerly sovereign states adopted the neoliberalism (called neoconservatism in the States) of the post-Westphalian interregnum, the various governments of those states began to use their offices and power to undermine the buttresses of the state itself: borders, national identity, language and national capital. Liberating capital from protective and legal frameworks (both at home and abroad), while allowing private banking and corporate firms to manage and circulate it, the neoliberal governments waged a series of offensive wars, embargoes, SAPs and police actions against intransigent former colonies still "mired" in the Westphalian vision of the nation-state (though never part of that consensus) whose leaders (yes, often brutal, thuggish tyrants) resisted the liberation of capital and the weakening of national identity: North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Panama, Serbia; these same post-Wesphalian governments undertook, as well, occupations of so-called "failed states" where sufficient structure for the protection of corporate interest did not obtain, but where resources abounded: Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Bosnia, et cetera.
What has emerged from this process is the second stage, or second form, of fascism proper, the corporation.
Lest we forget, this second stage fascism no longer requires adherence to national myths. Dispensing with the vulgar racial and lingual fealty to a national entity, to a homeland, the new fascist organizations function without the self-imposed limitations of cultural identity, and in fact do better without them.
Topical tolerances of lifestyle and cultural difference (formerly disdained within the national context, one which required a type of homogeneous conformity to the traits of national, religious or moral membership - see the assimilation of the Irish and Italian, but the exclusion of blacks) do not hamper their operation, nor the accumulation of power within their hierarchies
(A person inclined to see the Tea Party revanchists as a rearguard of the old order, of the dying nation, clinging to national myths, clinging to a social-religious framework which included them by excluding others, which in short, defined a White nation, might have an insight or two...)
To this emerging order, we should understand, do people like Barack Obama give their effort and loyalty. Gaining control of the government, they continue to serve the order which produced them, using that government to effect the further dismantling of the nation, and the national myths, in favor of the new fascism of the extra-national corporation.
*
(A hint, perhaps, as to why - despite extraordinary opportunity, public support and a rare lock on government power - they nonetheless did not construct a national health program, but instead crafted a legal edifice which placed more of the former Commons under the control of corporations.)
And a warning to the national fascists of Israel: at some point your affliction, your ironic embrace of Hitlerian national myths, of the primacy of your nation over those of your neighbors, will embarrass the leaders and princes of the European, American, Chinese, Indian and Brazilian corporate fascisms - and they will cut you loose...
*
My first introduction to the unraveling of Westphalia, an indispensable book, timely nearly two decades after publication: Van Creveld's The Transformation of War
The Face of A Fascist
Source: AP
"JERUSALEM — Israel's hard-line foreign minister warned Palestinians on Tuesday against plans to unilaterally declare independence next year, saying such a move could prompt Israel to annex parts of the West Bank and annul past peace agreements.
The remarks by Avigdor Lieberman took aim at a Palestinian policy that has emerged as U.S. attempts to restart peace talks have stalled...
...The international community has welcomed Fayyad's reform efforts, raising fears in Israel that a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood could win international recognition.
Lieberman warned that Israel would not tolerate such a step, and could revoke a series of agreements made under the so-called Oslo interim peace accords of the 1990s or even annex parts of the West Bank.
"Any unilateral decision will release us from all of our commitments and will allow us also to make unilateral decisions," Lieberman was quoted as saying by the Ynet news Web site.
"For example, imposing Israeli sovereignty on certain areas, cutting off all kinds of ties and transfers of money and a string of benefits and agreements put into place since the Oslo accords," he said.
An official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said it is Israel's long-standing policy that unilateral moves by the Palestinians draw similar action from Israel. He spoke on condition of anonymity because there was no official comment on Lieberman's remarks...."
Source.
*
I really enjoy the word magic of treating "the international community" as a self-directing agency with personality traits. It allows the writer of this article to present the complex, varied moves and counter-moves of hundreds of persons, representing an equal number of interests and power blocs, as a single will. A single will dedicated to backing the "reforms" of the current Palestinian puppet head. Reforms which, of course, will sadly fail.
I love the conceit of "US attempts to restart peace talks." Note to writer: you lie. The US - as represented by HRC, Obama, Gates, most national elected officials, the military CoCs, the neo-feudalistic economic power houses and the federal secretariats - has no structural interest in peace. Our government retains its cohesion, to the benefit of the moneyed class, by waging constant low and high grade war. The last three generations of American princes have sent so many billions of dollars (our labor, stolen) to Israel precisely so that Israel can wage war - a long, slow occupation and theft of indigenous Palestinian land. So that Israel can maintain the capacity for a brutal, decisive hot war.
Avigdor Lieberman does not represent an anomaly, or a worst case scenario. He represent the honest face of Israeli policy, as funded by the American government.
It took a nightclub bouncer to strip away the veil and show, for however brief a time, what the scions of the State of Israel have always done: take what does not belong to them, and make it their own, breaking agreements on the flimsiest of pretexts, to justify brutal oppression with false equivalencies.
So that they can continue to take land and destroy lives.
So that they can feed themselves at the expense of others.
A word for this: colonialism.
A term for the method by which they enforce their will, within Israel proper and without it: national fascism.
Apr 5, 2010
Liberation or Power (Part One)
"The armed faction lies.
They recreate the state through their action."
~ Utah Phillips, "I Will Not Obey," Fellow Workers (with Ani DiFranco)
Possessed of a strong social skepsis, but rejecting my own complacency as an organ purges toxins, I often find myself caught in a tension between desire and observation. Specifically, desire for free community, for insurrectionary liberation; and the observation that the spectacle to which I belong has a greater continuity than my own desires, that the accumulation of power constantly threatens my desire with subsumation, sublimating liberation within the need to survive the totality of that control.
I need to feed myself, my children. I need to keep the flat clean, and the car maintained. Or I have to make the bus on time. Everyone within my class, it seems, shares these same needs, these second order obligations. We have shelter, if only tenuously. This week, we owe the gas monopoly. Next, the lights. Then the rent, and all the various fees which in fact act as rent. We have our needs met, barely, bleeding always a sizable portion of our labor outward into the accumulation and power of those who rule. Our effort, their resource. And the fulfillment of those needs comes coupled always with the anxiety that breeds alienation.
Never enough, the satisfaction of those needs, balanced always against retreating desires. Desire repressed, abandoned. And the firm knowledge that next week might tip us off the edge. Casting us out, spinning us away from the forced participation which also provides the ground in which we learn to market our desire, competing against our need, a community of chains. Selling labor, alienating desire - we arrive at a parasitical bondage, leeching off our own repression and angst (and doubly so for those separated further by gender and race) to drive us towards an ever retreating satisfaction.
I have armed my desire, in the past, in small ways and several near to courting danger. So equipped, I overcame an instance or some agent of the machinery of control. The risk tremendous in the face of a pervasive, learned, spectacular culture of obedience. The obedience of invisible chains, bonds fashioned of our continuing defeat, our blind complicity in the alienation of our own desire. We sell our labor, and the exchange binds us to those who live fuller lives at our expense, turning us also against one another, subjects to a distant game of thrones, vying and competing for access to the keys by which we loosen those chains.
Caught up by our own desires, desires now shaped as traps, each fulfillment coupled with some degradation, some extra obedience, some additional hour, or week, or lost night with friends and lovers given over to the production of someone else's fuller life, concentrated in rent, and property, in the bullets and bombs which can any day break us. Spent on the cops, and the cameras, the pundits and the panderers, their labor also accumulated and alienated, to serve our continued and common oppression.
Rebellion liberates, but it provides no guide, of itself. The act of insurrection, petty or great, solitary or in union, breaks obedience, casting the colonial outpost out of the mind, or at the least depriving it of effect (if only for a moment in the history of a life). It does not grant a necessary clue as to what comes next.
Rebellion can free a life. Makhnovists and Catalonian anarchists, the Commune before the fall, Red Emma with a whip, or Thoreau behind bars. A child brimming with joy at the first uttered, "No!" A young lover, her first kiss offered as a forbidden consent.
It can also lead us to forget the origin of our desire, and its aim, to give instead all weight to the taking of it, to the force of arms, to the settling of accounts, to the claiming of the instruments of oppression.
Thinking thus, I've shunned a specific revolutionary impulse, the desire to seize control, to seize "the state." I acknowledge this desire, and the momentary purity of retribution, of justice armed. I will not repress it.
And then I think, I consider. At least, I try.
What must a person become, to operate that machinery of control, to have armed staffers, the power of coercion, and the hierarchy which turns other human lives into buffer zones, armor and expendable flesh?
Not for me. Not for me. Nor ever will I gift my labor to those who want it, even if the avenue to power winds through so-called free elections, through the auctioning of fealty for ballots and favorable legislation.
Seizing power, gaining an office, building a movement to take control of the machinery of state - these do not appear to fundamentally alter how how people apply that power, use that control. Power requires obedience, requires people willing to do as told. Someone must give orders, and others must obey.
Seizing the state, or gaining office, does not alter the contract of obedience. The power, preserved itself by the retention of biddable servants, vests in the doing of it. To achieve an end from a position of power, a person must give orders that others follow.
Call it what you will, just don't call that liberation.
The occupant of an office may represent a snaphot of revolutionary or voter desire, but that desire does not itself erase or eliminate the power that one wields, with the office.
Again, to have power, a person must possess others who obey. Obedience does not liberate. It validates oppression, regardless of the aim. The inducements of power follow on the use of it. Benefits accrue, as do allies and factions. Power opens up the possibilities for the fulfillment of desire, for the discovery of new pleasures and the expansion of old one.
Power rewards he who wields it, and he who seized it to liberate himself must control others to maintain it. His liberation becomes, with the exercise of power, the oppression and destruction of others, their lives consumed that his remains full.
Power requires hierarchy. Someone has to obey. In a private firm, a managerial feudalism, a military chain of command, an ecclesiastical order, a bureaucracy - power adheres to the occupant of an office because he can claim resources and obedience. The exchange of one set of officeholders - even by revolutionary overthrow - does not overturn or transform the culture of obedience. It does not abolish, of its own, the chain of command. The staff remains, and soon enough someone will use them, so long as they obey.
Seizing power does not translate into the elimination of those armed or obedient staffers because the taking of power preserves it.
To take power, you have to preserve it...
They recreate the state through their action."
~ Utah Phillips, "I Will Not Obey," Fellow Workers (with Ani DiFranco)
Possessed of a strong social skepsis, but rejecting my own complacency as an organ purges toxins, I often find myself caught in a tension between desire and observation. Specifically, desire for free community, for insurrectionary liberation; and the observation that the spectacle to which I belong has a greater continuity than my own desires, that the accumulation of power constantly threatens my desire with subsumation, sublimating liberation within the need to survive the totality of that control.
I need to feed myself, my children. I need to keep the flat clean, and the car maintained. Or I have to make the bus on time. Everyone within my class, it seems, shares these same needs, these second order obligations. We have shelter, if only tenuously. This week, we owe the gas monopoly. Next, the lights. Then the rent, and all the various fees which in fact act as rent. We have our needs met, barely, bleeding always a sizable portion of our labor outward into the accumulation and power of those who rule. Our effort, their resource. And the fulfillment of those needs comes coupled always with the anxiety that breeds alienation.
Never enough, the satisfaction of those needs, balanced always against retreating desires. Desire repressed, abandoned. And the firm knowledge that next week might tip us off the edge. Casting us out, spinning us away from the forced participation which also provides the ground in which we learn to market our desire, competing against our need, a community of chains. Selling labor, alienating desire - we arrive at a parasitical bondage, leeching off our own repression and angst (and doubly so for those separated further by gender and race) to drive us towards an ever retreating satisfaction.
*
I have armed my desire, in the past, in small ways and several near to courting danger. So equipped, I overcame an instance or some agent of the machinery of control. The risk tremendous in the face of a pervasive, learned, spectacular culture of obedience. The obedience of invisible chains, bonds fashioned of our continuing defeat, our blind complicity in the alienation of our own desire. We sell our labor, and the exchange binds us to those who live fuller lives at our expense, turning us also against one another, subjects to a distant game of thrones, vying and competing for access to the keys by which we loosen those chains.
Caught up by our own desires, desires now shaped as traps, each fulfillment coupled with some degradation, some extra obedience, some additional hour, or week, or lost night with friends and lovers given over to the production of someone else's fuller life, concentrated in rent, and property, in the bullets and bombs which can any day break us. Spent on the cops, and the cameras, the pundits and the panderers, their labor also accumulated and alienated, to serve our continued and common oppression.
Rebellion liberates, but it provides no guide, of itself. The act of insurrection, petty or great, solitary or in union, breaks obedience, casting the colonial outpost out of the mind, or at the least depriving it of effect (if only for a moment in the history of a life). It does not grant a necessary clue as to what comes next.
Rebellion can free a life. Makhnovists and Catalonian anarchists, the Commune before the fall, Red Emma with a whip, or Thoreau behind bars. A child brimming with joy at the first uttered, "No!" A young lover, her first kiss offered as a forbidden consent.
It can also lead us to forget the origin of our desire, and its aim, to give instead all weight to the taking of it, to the force of arms, to the settling of accounts, to the claiming of the instruments of oppression.
*
Thinking thus, I've shunned a specific revolutionary impulse, the desire to seize control, to seize "the state." I acknowledge this desire, and the momentary purity of retribution, of justice armed. I will not repress it.
And then I think, I consider. At least, I try.
What must a person become, to operate that machinery of control, to have armed staffers, the power of coercion, and the hierarchy which turns other human lives into buffer zones, armor and expendable flesh?
Not for me. Not for me. Nor ever will I gift my labor to those who want it, even if the avenue to power winds through so-called free elections, through the auctioning of fealty for ballots and favorable legislation.
Seizing power, gaining an office, building a movement to take control of the machinery of state - these do not appear to fundamentally alter how how people apply that power, use that control. Power requires obedience, requires people willing to do as told. Someone must give orders, and others must obey.
Seizing the state, or gaining office, does not alter the contract of obedience. The power, preserved itself by the retention of biddable servants, vests in the doing of it. To achieve an end from a position of power, a person must give orders that others follow.
Call it what you will, just don't call that liberation.
The occupant of an office may represent a snaphot of revolutionary or voter desire, but that desire does not itself erase or eliminate the power that one wields, with the office.
Again, to have power, a person must possess others who obey. Obedience does not liberate. It validates oppression, regardless of the aim. The inducements of power follow on the use of it. Benefits accrue, as do allies and factions. Power opens up the possibilities for the fulfillment of desire, for the discovery of new pleasures and the expansion of old one.
Power rewards he who wields it, and he who seized it to liberate himself must control others to maintain it. His liberation becomes, with the exercise of power, the oppression and destruction of others, their lives consumed that his remains full.
Power requires hierarchy. Someone has to obey. In a private firm, a managerial feudalism, a military chain of command, an ecclesiastical order, a bureaucracy - power adheres to the occupant of an office because he can claim resources and obedience. The exchange of one set of officeholders - even by revolutionary overthrow - does not overturn or transform the culture of obedience. It does not abolish, of its own, the chain of command. The staff remains, and soon enough someone will use them, so long as they obey.
Seizing power does not translate into the elimination of those armed or obedient staffers because the taking of power preserves it.
To take power, you have to preserve it...
Apr 3, 2010
The Other Catholics
I knew mostly Discalced Carmelites, Franciscan and Jesuit radicals long on the Berrigans and short on Rome, liberation theologians and firebrand priests and nuns masquerading as quiet parish votaries, as a child.
I had the good fortune of continued correspondence with Fr. Berrigan, over the course of a number of years, until the retirement home no longer took my calls.
I think I lucked out.
And when it came to sex scandals, Father H fell in love and courted his mistress for the better part of twenty years, til the Vatican rats caught on and kicked him to the curb. Sister C left orders, entire, for the husband she still has.
I think I lucked out.
I had the good fortune of continued correspondence with Fr. Berrigan, over the course of a number of years, until the retirement home no longer took my calls.
I think I lucked out.
And when it came to sex scandals, Father H fell in love and courted his mistress for the better part of twenty years, til the Vatican rats caught on and kicked him to the curb. Sister C left orders, entire, for the husband she still has.
I think I lucked out.
Wherein Ethan reminds me that no one has...
...decided to develop the work of Sheri Tepper into modern film or television:
"But the overall pattern stands: the men are in action! They're doing world-shaping important things! The women are cheating on their husbands or getting married (or is she?) or being pregnant or being brutalized by men."
Read the whole thing.
"But the overall pattern stands: the men are in action! They're doing world-shaping important things! The women are cheating on their husbands or getting married (or is she?) or being pregnant or being brutalized by men."
Read the whole thing.
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