Is the Blogosphere Really Liberal?

Andrew Breitbart of the Washington Times is frightened:

“…Uninvited Democratic activists are on a mission to demoralize the enemy – us. They want to ensure that President Obama is not subject to the same coordinated, facts-be-damned, multimedia takedown they employed over eight long years to destroy the presidency – and the humanity – of George W. Bush.

Political leftists play for keeps. They are willing to lie, perform deceptive acts in a coordinated fashion and do so in a wicked way – all in the pursuit of victory. Moral relativism is alive and well in the land of Hope and Change and its Web-savvy youth brigade expresses its “idealism” in a most cynical fashion. The ends justify the means for them – now more than ever. Much of Mr. Obama’s vaunted online strategy involved utilizing “Internet trolls” to invade enemy lines under false names and trying to derail discussion. In the real world, that’s called “vandalism.” But in a political movement that embraces “graffiti” as avant-garde art , that’s business as usual. It relishes the ability to destroy other people’s property in pursuit of electoral victory…”

For a wonderful response to Breitbart’s post, here is Clark Stooksbury of the American Conservative.

This is an idea that I’m very interested in myself, so I hope I can actually start a reasonable discussion about it. The question is: is the blogosphere really all that liberal?

It’s an impossible question to answer empirically but it’s still worth asking. Personally I don’t find any more left-leaning blogs out there than I do conservative ones, but then again I’m not actually going out and looking for anything specific.

My feeling is that there probably is a greater percentage of liberal or left-of-center blogs out there, and that it’s not a good or a bad thing either way. For one, most progressively minded individuals tend to get their news and information by reading, either online or through magazines and newspapers. (I have no proof of this, it’s merely an observation, and since me and most of my friends are liberal, I think it’s reasonably believable.)

On the other hand, my impression is that the right tends to get its news and information from television and radio sources. This is why Fox News regularly trumps every other 24-hour news network in the ratings and conservative talk radio hosts are more popular than liberal ones.

Personally I think that this has a great influence on how the respective groups think and feel about the day’s events. I’m not going to say that it’s stupid or ignorant to get your news exclusively through TV and radio, but I will say that I can always tell the difference between a reading conservative and someone who watches the likes of Sean Hannity all day.

Most of my political news comes from reading dozens of different sources, including the New Yorker, The New Republic, the American Conservative, the Economist, the NYT, the National Review, and Mother Jones, to name a few. Occasionally I indulge a guilty pleasure and watch Keith Olbermann but I don’t find myself really learning anything when I watch MSNBC. I find that by reading about politics, I actually have to think and digest things more than by passively consuming ideas barked by TV pundits.

I can’t say that the blogosphere is more liberal with any certainty. But I am certain that if it is true, it bodes very well for progressive politicians and parties, because the internet has already surpassed newspapers and one day will challenge television for becoming the primary source of news for Americans. This means that inevitably, the political discourse in this country will start leaning towards the left.

So, if you’re a conservative who believes that the internet is full of young, naive, useless liberal wusses, why don’t you actually do something about it?

Instead of ranting and raving about how the “liberal mainstream media” doesn’t speak your language and littering the liberal blogosphere with bizarre and hateful comments, why don’t you start your own blog? Share your insights with this wonderful community. Come up with some ideas of your own. Thrill us with your acumen. Please!

Or maybe you’re scared that somebody won’t like what you write?

Stuff White People Fight

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva recently created quite a stir when he claimed that “white people with blue eyes” are responsible for the economic crisis, and that black and indigenous peoples shouldn’t have to pay for white people’s mistakes.

It would be easy, and fun to write Mr. Lula off as a bigot whose best purpose is making Gordon Brown even more uncomfortable on camera than Michael Meyers.

However, the fact is that there is a growing chorus of people who are calling for the disintegration of the established financial order. The Bretton Woods model is under seige by both dissenters within western civilization and emerging economic powers such as China, who are not so enthusiastic about “Anglo-American capitalism” and would like to see a new international economic model take its place.

Although I’m sure the idea is making the editors of the Wall Street Journal’s latte enemas redundant, I think that this is the perfect time to have a debate about the global economy, the IMF, and the financial status-quo.

Historical fact:

Anglo-American free market capitalism is a global phenomenon and widely accepted economic model because of the imperialist policies of Great Britian and the United States. Brazil, India, China, all of these emerging economic powerhouses have all been at one point colonies or for all intents and purposes have been one. Had history been less kind to the great western military powers and more kind to say, the Soviet Union, the global economic landscape would look very, very different. That’s not an endorsement of communism, it’s a simple observation that history is written by the winners.

Although conventional wisdom in western cultures dictates that might makes right, therefore the winners of big wars and the writers of history must be correct, it doesn’t change the fact that free market capitalism does carry some inherent risks. We are now feeling the effects of some of them. Despite what the white skinned, fair-haired, blue-eyed ideologues on CNBC tell you, there are other options. They will fight to the death to preserve this global economic order, but the fact is that there are other paths that we might take.

The original Americans didn’t care much for GDP, derivatives, stockholders, or currency at all, for that matter. And yet their societies thrived for thousands of years and by most accounts there wasn’t a great deal of poverty to go around. Then the white people with blue eyes came and stole their land and nearly wiped them off the face of the earth. Andrew Jackson was probably the first real American neoconservative. What a fine legacy.

Tired from centuries of subjugation, destitution, and starvation, the Russians decided to take matters into their own hands and embraced the ideas of Karl Marx on a mass scale. That didn’t work out very well.

European and Latin-American countries have attempted to strike a balance between financial interests and basic human dignity, with mixed results. Most people call these systems market socialism.

Now the white people with blue eyes have been done in by their own incessant need for more, and they are coming to question the wisdom of their free market fundamentalist overlords.

All of these economic systems have pros and cons, ups and downs, quirks and gaping holes. For my money, I think that the Europeans essentially have the right idea and with a few more decades of tweaking, market socialism will become the dominant economic ideology throughout the world. But, that’s me. I’d like to know what you think. Here is Not so Subtle’s first reader poll:

Whichever ideology wins out will become the new global financial model, and you can congratulate yourselves on revolutionizing society with one simple click of the mouse.

Legalize It

The New York Times is running a pretty solid series on the escalating drug wars in Mexico and the violence spilling over the border.

Earlier this week they reported that Mexican cartels import over 2 million pounds of marijuana into America every year. That makes up the majority of their profits, which are in turn used to purchase high-tech weapons, which are then used to gun down competitors and police chiefs.

One of the few silver linings that the recession has wrought is the fading of the culture war. Issues like stem cell research have taken a back-seat to the economy and so conservative opposition to them has dampened considerably. Now is the perfect time to re-examine our drug policy in this country.

In a recent CBS poll, 58 percent of Americans said they believe that marijuana should be illegal, even if it generated tax revenue.

These people are oxymorons.

Culturally speaking, my bet is that a large majority of that 58 percent are conservative-leaning voters who also decry wasteful government spending. This despite the fact that we spend 44 billion dollars a year on the drug war and miss out on 33 billion in potential tax revenues. I would suggest that they do the math, but my confidence in their computation abilities is limited, so I’ll do it for them. That’s a net total of 77 billion dollars a year that we’re losing, which doesn’t even count the extra money it would take to post national guard troops along the border.

That’s an awfully steep price to pay for these high-minded values. Get with the program, people.

Tuesday in America

11:18 AM: I wake up with a wretched hangover on the West Side of the city. I’m tempted to write off the previous evening’s antics as a networking opportunity, but even then I know better than to play drinking games with people from Wisconsin. My brother-in-law asks me what I have going on today and I reply “nothing,” but could just as easily have said “anything.”

11:51 AM: I walk a couple of miles southeast down Milwaukee avenue, a street that Switters would probably describe as too damned vivid. There’s an electric charge in the air like there always is in the spring and the sky is half dark gray and half bright light.  Same goes for the streets; the tar turned a faint gray along with the sidewalks. Despite my pounding head and tingling arm I feel alive; it feels like anything and anything could happen today.

12:14 PM: Lately I’ve been walking four miles a day, but since yesterday I missed out I promise that I’ll trek at least five today. I’m prepared for the occasion with white gym shoes and loose black jeans. I can always tell the kids who didn’t grow up in the city by what they wear: paper-thin Chucks or Sambas and pants so tight they make grape juice. The ones built like me end up looking like women, the skinnier ones like chickens. You can’t walk around Chicago all day dressed like that and nobody I know who grew up here ever has. These hipsters are all migrants. They come from their pissant towns in Iowa, Indiana, Missouri or Michigan and want to get a taste of real life. They all claim to be artsists but as of yet I haven’t met one who is talented.

12:52 PM: Because maybe I’m a glutton for punishment or maybe I’m just desperate for any sense of familiarity, I stop at the Mexican cafe off Sawyer for breakfast. Cafe con Leche isn’t but two blocks from my ex’s apartment. When I hear that syllable “ex” in my head I remember that I’m alone again, but quickly sweep the thought away. The waiter brings me my steak, eggs and hashbrowns and I smother them in a spicy orange sauce. I don’t have a clue what’s in it but it tastes good enough.

1:03 PM: While  chowing down I get two calls from collection agencies. I know the numbers by heart now so I don’t even bother to answer. Used to be they would have a real person call me to ask why I’m eighteen months past due, but once they figured out that the 700 dollars I owe my allergist isn’t getting paid, they just use machines to leave form letter messages. The voice is some British woman: “this message is for…” we don’t even hire our own people for recordings anymore.

1:38 PM: On the way to the independent bookstore I stop at Mcdonalds to go to the bathroom. Outside a disheveled woman asks me for directions to Cook County Jail and I tell her to go five or six miles south on California, but realize later that I was pointing in the wrong direction. Inside the restaurant every booth is filled up with mostly elderly people sipping coffee and reading the paper. Like them, I also have no place to go, but I’m not going to let that stop me from moving around as I please. The bathroom is clean for a Mcdonalds except for a bloody napkin discarded next to the toilet. Of course the writer inside searches for a story to explain how and why it got there. Menstruation crosses my mind but then I remember I’m in the men’s room. Perhaps some vagrant drunk slipped and cut his hand in the lake of broken glass outside, and I curl up my lip thinking about it but then again I’m only a few steps up the social ladder from him. As I’m leaving a Polish girl who couldn’t possibly be older than 13 but looks 20 asks me in a mousy voice if I can please, please spare any change. Avoiding her eyes, I say I can’t and push past. What is happening to us? For the first time in my life I feel truly transient.

2:11 PM: I can see the recession affecting the landscape in real time. I walk past shuttered windows and closed doors that were open for business and thriving not two months ago. Graffiti is spackled onto most of them; patterns and hieroglyphs that sometimes I wish I could read. Pop culture provides my memory with a fitting quote from Brad Pitt: but what could the damned really have to say to the damned?

3:01 PM:  I believe whole-heartedly in social safety nets and defend them on a daily basis, but that doesn’t stop a sinking, guilty feeling when I go to the ATM to withdraw from the first unemployment check I’ve ever gotten. I should be working. Everyone who wants to should be able to work. I suddenly see how years of this could demolish a person’s self esteem. At the independent bookstore I read part of Richard Price’s Samaritan and part of Noam Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy and wonder how many days I could spend lounging around in bookstores before I lose my mind.

3:44 PM: Noam Chomsky is smarter than I am. I need to get back to working on my book.

4:12 PM: The noodle shop across the street calls to me and I answer. I order a full plate of chicken pad sieu but can only finish half of it before my stomach resigns in protest. Drunken sleep is no substitute for real rest. Indigestion creeps up on me the moment the sweet broccoli hit my lips and I rush to the bathroom, which is a striking contrast with the ghetto McDonalds. The walls were clean there but here in yuppieville the stall, the mirrors, even the ceiling are covered in graffiti. No pride in their surroundings, these people. Back at my table while sipping at my Sprite one of the aforementioned hipsters begins beat-boxing at the adjacent table. He stops when I shoot him a murderous glance. I used to think when I was a kid that only a monster could kill somebody, not a real human being. Now I think we all have a little monster in us.

4:44 PM: My friend Elouise calls to confirm that we’re meeting for drinks later on. I’d forgotten all about it and the sound of the word beer does strange and terrible things to my body. I pledge to indulge in nothing more exotic than a club soda and amazingly I follow through.

6:00 PM: I find an open park bench and put headphones into my ears. Bob Dylan sings to me about having to scrounge around for your next meal and I close my eyes and don’t mind it at all when it starts drizzling lightly. The park is empty except for a high-school couple making out on another bench on the other side of the fountain. Again the realization that I’m single and it’s liberating and heart-breaking all at once. I never could stand PDAs, least of all at times like these, so I move along.

7:12 PM: Nobody can see you cry when it rains.

7:19 PM: I pull myself together and head into a bar. The first thing I see when I walk in is a row of boozers all staring up in awe in the same direction. It turns out to be President Obama giving a press conference. When I see this I laugh and shake my head. When he’s out of office all of this good will and social consciousness will fly out the window- that’s what happens when you put your faith in men, let alone politicians.

7:48 PM: The hipster bartender has the gall to charge a dollar fifty for a club soda, so I leave it half empty (or full?) and walk back outside into the rain.

8:15 PM: It’s dark now. Every house that I pass by has the TV on. Every person I see has a laptop in front of them, their faces glowing blue. One such guy I see is watching a Youtube video on his computer and I imagine him as a gerbil trapped in a brick cage, watching a screen within a screen within a screen. How could he possibly know what’s going on in the world? How could he know that it’s raining outside, or that it really smells like spring for the first time this year?

8:21 PM: The bar is empty save for me, my friend, and the plethora of pop-culture paraphenelia on the walls. At least they don’t charge for club sodas here. Elouise arrives and we talk, mostly about how confusing human relationships can be.

8:54 PM: Today it seems that I’m judging civilization by its bathrooms. Here, the toilet is on an elevated platorm in a tiny room that is decked out in pictures of Elvis. One of them is a clipping from an article that says on a particular day in 1954 Elvis Presely walked into a recording studio, and at that moment, American Rock and Roll was born. Maybe the writer had never heard of Muddy Waters, or maybe he was just racist. Only in America.

The Market Doesn’t Love You

Barack Obama shared some thoughts on the financial crisis on 60 Minutes last night. There were several points he made that I think illustrate his understanding of the situation, which make his plans for the new Public-Private Investment Program all the more frustrating.

Obama demonstrated class consciousness when he discussed the public outrage over AIG and their ludicrous, publicly funded bonuses. Certain circles have balked at any efforts to limit executive compensation, seemingly blind to the fact that the vast majority of Americans would be ecstatic at the chance to earn a mere fraction of 250,000 dollars per year.

Now of course, some of these bright young swinging dicks in the financial services industry are going to switch jobs as a result of Congress’ new 90% tax on their bonuses. Let’s take a moment of silence to reflect on their loss. Are we legally obligated to honor the contract and pay these retards these bonuses? Yes. But at one point in our history people were legally bound to return runaway slaves, so I don’t want to hear about it. That’s the great thing about this country: we can CHANGE the law when it becomes an injustice.

President Obama made it clear that there are still some systemic risks out there, such as if Citigroup or AIG were to go completely belly-up. He is well aware that such companies are so large that their failure would lead to a full-blown depression.

But the point that I really wish the President would make is that these financial behemoths should never have been allowed to become too big to fail.

This is not a Christian nation as the televangelists would have you believe. We are a nation of Free Market Fundamentalists, and therefore any mention of government intervention in the market is heresy, punished by burning at the stake. Barack Obama made it very clear during the interview that he “believes in the market,” because calling for nationalization of a company that we already own 80 percent of would still be political suicide in this climate. There is a very sad fact that both America and our President need to realize if we’re going to really come out of this crisis on top:

The Market doesn’t love you.

The free market does one thing and one thing only: it creates wealth for people who are resourceful enough to exploit supply and demand. That’s it.

The free market doesn’t read to your kids at night.

The free market doesn’t make you soup when you have the flu.

The free market doesn’t give a fourth of a flying fig about the United States of America, its economy, or its people.

No matter the situation, the market will choose the path that incurs the highest probability of profit regardless of the humanitarian, environmental, and overall economic effects. For example, President Obama plans to unveil a new 1 trillion dollar spending plan that is intended to get private investors to buy up toxic debt, which in theory will get credit flowing again and revive the economy. It won’t work. And even if it does, we get screwed.

1. No private enterprise is going to buy up these meadow muffins unless there are promises that if the investments go bad, they will be bailed out by the American taxpayer.

2. There is no guarantee that even if these toxic assets are cleared off the books that these institutions will start lending again. If these companies feel it is unprofitable to loosen credit, they simply won’t do it, regardless of any promises they’ve made or public money they’ve taken.

This behavior isn’t mysterious. It’s simply what private enterprise does. Unfortunately, I think some of the poisonous vapors hovering around UC’s campus must have gotten into the President’s head, because he seems to actually believe that the market will present a solution for the problem. In order to save capitalism and the market itself, we might just have to bite the proverbial bullet and embrace a healthy dose of socialism. Let’s really nationalize these companies so that the taxpayer stops getting fisted and we provide some stability for the system.

Mister President, since nearly half of this country seems to believe that you are harboring a secret socialist agenda, and the other half of the country would really like it if you embraced some of its ideas, why don’t you just get it over with already?

America Wakes Up

So apparently all it takes for Congress to act on the people’s will is massive resentment and the threat of violence against the rich.

Yesterday Congress passed a bill that levies a 90% tax on bonuses paid from companies who have taken 5 billion dollars or more of taxpayer money in order to stay solvent.

This one is such a no-brainer that even Republican members of the House of Representatives rushed to vote for the legislation, which is a revision of previous bailout packages. There is a lesson to be learned here, America.

Why does it have to take such an egregious rape of the public trust to get everybody on the same page and actively pursuing a solution?

Why can’t we badger and frighten our elected officials into action on other issues like warrantless wire-tapping, extraordinary rendition, card check, climate change, and naturalization?

The answer is that there’s no good reason at all.

If we were this passionate about politics on a regular basis, we would be living in a very, very different country right now, my friends. Scenarios like these shouldn’t be the only thing that gets our collective skillet heated up.

A rich man loses money. He asks us to give him some of ours in order to keep his company afloat. He then takes our money and gives million dollar bonuses to the very idiots who got his company into the sad state of affairs that required him to ask for our money in the first place. This is class warfare in its most vile state, but it’s not the only thing that we should be this upset about.

Why aren’t we demanding that the government (OUR government) closes down a few of our military bases all over the world and grant each and every single American citizen health care coverage?

Why aren’t we up in arms about these same corporate masters of the universe sending our jobs overseas so that they can exploit indigenous populations through slave labor?

The time for apathy and indifference has come and gone. If we the people combine our strength and raise our voices in this same way on a regular basis, then we will really see the kind of change that politicians now use as a slogan to gain our trust.

It’s easy to lay blame on politicians and parties. But lest we forget, in a democracy we are the government, so we are responsible for the state of our union.

This week represents a turning point in American political consciousness. We now know that it’s not enough to simply demand that the vermin on Wall Street stop pillaging our labor, our taxes, and our trust. It’s about damned high time that we got our due slice of the pie again.

This is no movie line, this is no joke. This time, we really are mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.

In 1980 an actor stood before us and declared that it was morning again in America. By and large, we believed him. Because of that it is now about five minutes to midnight. What are we going to do about it?

Dick Cheney Still Exists?

Dick Cheney emerged from his (fill in your own blood-soaked lair/cave pun here) this week to complain about President Barack Obama’s handling of the war on terror.

On CNN, the former Vice President warned about the dangers of withdrawing from the war in Iraq, which apparently, we have won all of the sudden:

“There is no prospect” that Iraq will return to producing weapons of mass destruction or supporting terrorists, Cheney asserted, “as long as it’s a democratically governed country, as long as they have got the security forces they do now and a relationship with the United States…”

What’s surprising here is not so much that a former member of the Executive branch is criticizing a sitting administration, or that Dick Cheney actually still believes that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,  it’s that Dick Cheney is apparently still important enough to appear on national television and say such things.

If CNN wants to survive the coming changes in media and technology and remain competitive in the news business, they’re going to have to come up with guests who are more relevant than this comical caricature of iniquity.

Vanilla Ice comes to mind, for one.

Only in America

When someone that you love has a fatal addiction, what do you do?

Do you pretend that it doesn’t exist and hope that things work out for the best? Do you say that each must go his own way and it’s none of my business what they do with their life? Or, do you confront them about their habit and ask them to change their ways because you don’t want to see them hurt?

Hopefully we all would answer with confrontation.

I love this country, despite what some nihilistic neocons will tell you. I love its people. (Most of them.) I love the vast, unspoiled beauty of our land, I love the ideas that it was founded upon. I hope that my country knows this and won’t take it personally when I call us out on our addiction to profligacy: our incessant need for more.

Sometimes reflecting on our culture of more is purely a philosophical or political exercise. At other times, this addiction manifests itself in such a boisterous way that not thinking about it would be the same as not thinking at all.

This weekend I went out with a few friends to an Irish pub by Depaul University. The occasion was two visiting friends or a friend from Germany who are staying here for a week to experience among other things, St. Patrick’s Day. They had never set foot in America until Friday and were excited to see as much as they could during their time here. The pub had a party special that one of us had won a drawing for: the deal went that anyone who said his name at the door got a bracelet that allowed them to get as many domestic beers as they want within 2 hours for free.

While one of our new German friends was sipping a tall glass of Bud Light I asked him what he thought of our beer compared to his own at home. In his charming, broken English he said that German beer was really great, and that this American beer was, kind of great. It was a nice thing to say.

The truth is that Bud Light is shit and you don’t have to be a beer connoisseur to know it. Nevertheless, I drank as much of it as I could during my two-hour time period.

Most American beers are a good example of our addiction. They are light, watery, poorly brewed, and meant to be consumed in large quantities. We value quantity in this country, not quality. Another example that jumped right out at me at the pub was the number of HDTV’s hanging on the walls. Pretty much every square inch of space where the wall met the ceiling was covered by a flat-screen TV.

Our German friend was stunned by this and asked why we needed so many televisions in one space. I didn’t have an answer.

“Only in America” he said.

Where, how, why, and when this addiction started I cannot answer. Some people will say it came after the postwar boom, some during the 80’s and the culture of greed, others, like Alexis Tocqueville have said that it has always been part of our nature. What I am certain of is that this need, this desire, for more is going to destroy us.

It manifests itself in our diets: we have the highest rates of obesity in the world.

It manifests itself in our trade deficit: our consumption has squandered the biggest trade surplus in all of history.

It manifests itself in our politics: I spend a lot of time blaming politicians for America’s problems but the truth is that we are truly responsible. We elect our leaders and they act in ways that reflect our national character.

George W. Bush’s presidency was not an aberration. Despite the debacle in Florida, his election was no accident; we allowed him to take office, and then we legitimized his impulses when he was re-elected. W represents the worst of our collective character: the ultimate incarnation of our desire to have more without thinking about the consequences. The war in Iraq should have forced us to make  changes in our way of life: it should have served as a reminder that wars are deadly, dangerous, and expensive. Instead W decided that no new taxes were needed to pay for the operation, and his Vice President remarked that deficits don’t matter.

Bush was not our first imperial President and he won’t be the last.

This financial crisis has forced us to examine our way of life and to re-evaluate the kinds of purchases that we make. However, as soon as the markets recover the American consumer will go right back to buying gas, groceries, and goodies that we absolutely do not need on credit, and more weight will be piled onto the house of cards that the misanthropes on Wall Street like to call an economy.

One day, maybe soon, it will all come crashing down.

Unless we change our ways and learn to live with less, the next time our German friend comes to visit the country that he remembers may no longer even exist.

165 Million Reasons

Violence is deplorable but today I’m willing to make an exception, because I have 165 million reasons to call for a public hanging for the executive leadership of AIG.

AIG paid out $165,000,000 in bonuses for its top executives this weekend. That money is our money. This company is our company.

Taxpayers now own about 80% of AIG, and as such, we should be treated as any majority stockholder: with deference and respect. Instead, the human tape worms in the company decided to use 165 MILLION of our dollars to grant bonuses to the very same people who are responsible for the worst quarter in the company’s entire history.

As a stockholder of AIG and a concerned citizen, I feel that we need to do something to make an example of these people.

Public hangings are the first thing that come to mind.

Ordinarily reserved for dictators and child molesters, I recommend that this timeless punishment be brought back into the public consciousness in a way that will guarantee no company who took our stimulus money will ever use the funds in such an outrageous way again.

Stockholders of such a company should of course demand that the CEO and board of directors get thrown out on their ass. But AIG deserves special attention, because they’ve done this before. Because tape worms do not have the same emotions and sensibilities that us human beings have, losing their jobs won’t have the same effect. The AIG executives are accustomed to living in your intestines and sustaining themselves on your feces, so it’s unlikely that losing their high-paying jobs or having to give back government money will really upset them.

Only hanging will make a point that they won’t soon forget.

Of course there are technicalities to consider, such as how one can fit a noose around a tape worm’s neck, thin as they are, and lacking in necks. But if we put America’s esteemed biologists to the task, I’m certain that we can come up with an ingenious solution that will satisfy all paries involved, except of course, for the tape worms.

Michael Steele is Done

Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele was already in hot water, and he may have just cooked his own goose. In a revealing interview with GQ magazine, Steele ripped his party’s platform on several key issues, ranging from immigration to abortion and gay rights:

“GQ: Why do you think so few nonwhite Americans support the Republican Party right now?
MS: ’Cause we have offered them nothing! And the impression we’ve created is that we don’t give a damn about them or we just outright don’t like them. And that’s not a healthy thing for a political party…”

Steele went on to claim that he believes that abortion should be a personal choice and that homosexuality is hereditary in nature.

There were already calls from certain elements of the RNC last week to remove Michael Steele as the chair, but now I give him less than a week before he either resigns or is forcibly removed from his post.

But it won’t help the Republican cause one bit.

Now, I actually disagree with some of the things that Michael Steele said. I am generally opposed to abortion, and I have mixed feelings about gay marriage as well. The point is that I, unlike the Republicans, am willing to accept change. I understand that God doesn’t hate fags and women aren’t just aching to go out and get as many tax-payer funded abortions as they possibly can.

Because the Elephant has stamped its foot down and refused to budge on these issues, or even take a more complex, understanding approach, they’re losing out big time. Steele should be commended for his willingness to defy party orthodoxy and attempts to bring in new supporters.

When the GOP forces Steele out, they’ll be shooting themselves in the foot. Voters have rejected the Republican party’s tired attitude for two election cycles, and that will only continue as long as they remain intractable on these divisive social issues.

Whether you believe gays are born that way or choose to do so is pretty much irrelevant to the conversation. Gays aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. If the GOP wants any of their votes, they’re going to have to recognize that fact and soften their opposition to the needs and demands of the gay community.

The anti-amnesty rhetoric within the party is even more damaging to their long-term prospects. Latinos are the single largest growing voting block in the country and they overwhelmingly support open borders and immigration. I support immigration for a few reasons:

1. We always have been a nation of immigrants, since our founding we have been a beacon of hope for people looking to better their lives and to reverse that policy now would be hypocritical to the core.

2. Unscrupulous employers who take advantage of undocumented workers drive down wages for every American citizen.

If the Republican party wants to still be relevant in twenty years, they’re going to have to reach out to segments of the population who aren’t wealthy, white, socially conservative, straight, and male.

Even though his views on these issues are unconventional for a conservative, they need to recognize that Steele is trying to bring the movement into the 21st century. For that, he will be called a charlatan, a RINO, and a dozen other things that aren’t repeatable even in this space by members of his own party.

If they had any brains at all, instead they would be cheering him on for his courageous leadership and vision.

Rahm Emanuel’s Crisitunity

On Fullerton avenue a couple of times a week I walk by the Lakeshore athletic club. Out front they have a sign with changing bulletins, including membership specials, the time, date, weather, and so on.

Recently they have been displaying a message that reads “Congratulations to Rahm Emanuel on his Chief of Staff appointment.”

I can only assume that Rahm was a member of the club before jetting to D.C. to become President Obama’s enforcer in the White House. Now, I’ve never met Rahm, but he strikes me as an intelligent guy. I lived next door to his brother Ari, (yes, that Ari, or at least the inspiration for the character) last year and on the rare occasions I got to speak to him he struck me as a fairly smart guy as well.

There are of course the horror stories related by the screenwriters for Entourage and the revelations about Rahm’s time while working for Clinton, but alas, we were not there, we can not know.

We don’t know these men personally so judging their character is a difficult proposition. What is fairly obvious to me is that Rahm Emanuel is pretty damned good at his job. Reportedly, Rahm is the brains behind the White House’s efforts to paint a certain radio host as the heart and soul of the Republican Party. Of course the success of the effort is in no small part due to he that shall not be named’s ego and stupidity, but it’s quite an accomplishment nonetheless.

(At least Senator Gregg had the good sense to know when he was being played.)

Emanuel has gotten some heat over his comments to the World’s Most Important Propaganda Paper: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

The conservative hive-mind will tell you that he was being insensitive to the economic pain being felt by ordinary Americans during this financial crisis. Don’t buy it. Painful as they are, crises are opportunities to learn from. The Great Depression was a crisitunity: we used the disaster to increase regulation and create the middle class. 9/11 was another crisitunity: we could have used it to re-evaluate our relationship with Islam and our role as a global superpower.

The point is, you either grow and learn from a crisitunity, or you don’t and remain stagnant and vulnerable.

Perhaps the most intriguing opportunity that will come out of this recession is a willingness to re-adjust our spending priorities. Robert Kaplan suggests that the financial crisis may lead to cuts in military spending: “maintaining that (hegemonic) position doesn’t just cost money, it costs lots and lots of money—billions, not millions. The fact that the public has docilely accepted this arrangement for so long does not mean that it will continue to do so…”

If it actually comes to pass, the warmongering dweebs running the Department of Defense and their media cheerleaders will scream bloody murder, but I say hallelujah!

Rahm Emanuel and President Obama are intelligent enough to know that our current “defense” budget is unsustainable. Whether that knowledge will take precedence over the campaign contributions the Democrats have gotten from the industrial military complex is anybody’s guess. Yet the simple fact is that throughout history, when Empires have lost their economic power, it has been followed by a quick and ugly loss of military might.

The United States can only maintain its position as the leader on the world’s stage if we make drastic cuts to our defense budget. That might sound like an oxymoron, but only to a moron who doesn’t understand how the world really functions.

Americans are losing our jobs at an alarming rate and one-day rallies in the Dow aren’t going to bring them back anytime soon, despite what the geniuses on CNBC say. Unless we shift our spending priorities to help address this economic crisis we run the risk of becoming a second-rate economic power. The black vortex of death that is our healthcare system must be drastically altered, social safety nets must be funded adequately, and jobs need to be created that will benefit our economy in the long run. (Infrastucture projects are a good example.)

If massive public spending projects aren’t your cup of hallucinogenic tea, them might I suggest another form of fiscal stimulus? Hint: it rhymes with tax cuts!

Tax cuts aren’t the savior that the free market fundamentalists make them out to be, but they’re certainly much more useful, than say, maintaining permanent military installations in Yemen, Bulgaria, Guam, and Kyrgyzstan.

The  greatest lesson that we can learn from this crisis is that empire is very, very expensive. Maybe it’s time we started using some of that 700 billion dollars a year to better our own lot? Hmm?

Watching Watchmen: What If?

I have not read Alan Moore’s original graphic novel, The Watchmen, so I don’t intend to debate its message or merits. In fact, I had not planned to write a post about the political themes in the film at all, until I read Warner Todd Huston’s review in Human Events.

That’s right, red state readers. I don’t just read The New Republic and Mother Jones.  Nobody who just reads things that they already agree with should be able to call themselves serious thinkers with a straight face.

That being said, Huston is pretty far off target for his criticism of the film, as far as I’m concerned. The one point I agree with him on is the gratuitous violence that is used far too often for the director to claim that it’s about reflecting humanity’s darker nature. I’m a writer myself and it’s a mark of an amateur when you can’t portray violence as grotesque and unnecessary without graphic descriptions or depictions of severed limbs.

I would have enjoyed the film much more if I hadn’t been subjected to seeing a buzz-saw cut through a man’s arms and a cleaver smashed into a child molester’s face repeatedly.

But even despite the wantonly gratuitous violence, the movie has many redeeming qualities and philosophical points to make.

The scene that I enjoyed most was the opening sequence in which America’s post-war  history is re-written as if superheroes were around to influence our world. Dylan’s Times are a Changin’ was an exceptional choice to accompany the montage. Historical revisionism has the potential to be far more entertaining than we ever imagined, it turns out.

One of the most interesting questions posed by The Watchmen is, What if?

What if President Richard Nixon had Dr. Manhattan handy to make the Watergate scandal disappear into thin air and guarantee his continual re-election?

What if the United States and Russia had engaged in full-scale thermonuclear warfare?

What if human beings had extraordinary powers? Would they use them to better the good of humanity? Advance America’s political and economic interests? Garner fame, fortune, and an eternal supply of ever-bed-ready groupies for themselves?

After the movie, my sister brought up perhaps the most intriguing question that the film poses:  What would have happened if we had won the Vietnam War?

Let’s consider the question. Our goal in Vietnam was to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. So, what would be different if the South had won and the country became a democratic, capitalist paradise- the likes of which the architects of the second Gulf War imagined Iraq would become after our initial shock and awe campaign?

Probably nothing.

How could the United States really benefit from a capitalist Vietnam? Cheaper rice? A greater confidence in our ability to affect the course of history with our military might? My intention isn’t to demean the sacrifices made by our Vietnam vets, they did their jobs and did them well. But really, how would our lives be any better if Vietnam hadn’t fallen to the Communists?

There still would have been dozens of red revolutions in third world countries- surely we couldn’t stop them all. The Soviet Union would not have had its national security threatened by such a devastated, impoverished nation, now matter how much aid we gave them.

Whatever gains we could have made, they certainly couldn’t possibly be worth the 200,000 casualties it took to get them.

This same hypothetical question is worth asking now more than ever, as applied to Afghanistan. I have selfish reasons for posing this idea, because a close friend of mine is going to basic training this week, and I’ll be worried if he ends up in that God forsaken land.

What if we win the war in Afghanistan and the country becomes a stable, secure, fully-functioning democracy, where terrorists will not find a safe haven to plot attacks against us and our allies?

Answer: they’ll cross the border to Pakistan and do the exact same thing.

What happens if we win the war in Pakistan and the radical, violent Jihadists are scattered?

Answer: they’ll go to Somalia, Indonesia, Iran, Syria, Palestine, or Saudi Arabia or any number of a dozen other places and they’ll find like-minded Muslims who also want to destroy the Godless liberal American empire.

Huston calls The Watchmen anti-American and nihilistic. That’s a simplistic, reactionary response that ignores the nuance that the story provides. What’s so anti-American about not wanting  to send our troops into pointless wars that will only serve to waste our tax dollars and diminish our reputation on the world stage?

What’s so nihilistic about seeing a mad, Orwellian war and calling it exactly that?

One of the few cases of nihilism that I saw in the film was President Pinocchio-Nixon’s response when he learned that Dr. Manhattan had left the Earth: He turns to Kissinger and asks him what’s the soonest time that we can be ready for a preemptive strike? The idea that we can only defeat our enemies only by deploying greater amounts of violence is about as nihilistic as it gets, and it’s an idea that is soundly repudiated by the film.

Aside from Nixon, the arch-villain in the story is a nihilist masquerading as a handsome, intelligent, well-meaning neoliberal. The peace that Ozymandias seeks comes at the cost of millions of innocent lives and the truth. He believes that the lie he tells is justified because human beings are too foolish to not blow themselves up without guidance from an elitist establishment. How appropriate. How Nixonian.

The question I want to pose to Huston and other conservative critics of the film and liberalism in general is this: What if we lived in a country that valued human life more than democracy, more than unrestricted capitalism, and more than an uneasy international peace?

Answer: That would be pretty sweet, and it isn’t the stuff of far-fetched comic books and screenplays, either. If we reject imperalism and embrace the idea that human beings are far from perfect, but hold more value than these games of fortune and conquest, it can be a reality.

Desiring to see that kind of America isn’t anti-American, it’s downright patriotic.

The GOP Must Sacrifice

The Republican Party is bankrupt. I’m not talking about dollars and cents. I’m talking about ideas and common sense.

In just a few short years, the Grand Old Party went from dominating every branch of the federal government to losing all of them (Judicial appointments will come soon) and finding themselves completely and utterly ideologically bankrupt.

The Dow Jones now stands below 7,000, which pretty much erases all the gains over the last decade, including the .com and real estate bubbles. Banks are failing at such a rate that the FDIC may become fiscally insolvent by the end of the year if they don’t increase fees. 600,000 Americans are losing their jobs every single month. States are running out of employment insurance to give to their citizens. You would think that our elected officials would do something to help, even if it means doing things that they personally disagree with.

Not so, if you’re a Republican, especially in the House of Representatives.

Not so if you’re one of the Republican governors who may decide to refuse the money being doled out by the feds in the stimulus packages.

At the onset of this madness, Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson did everything that they could to prevent a full-blown Depression and total collapse of the financial markets. These two men were and are probably among the most market-minded public officials in this nation. But when they were faced with a crisis that defied all of the traditional methods of correcting the problem, they decided to shed their rigid ideologies and became born again nationalizationists.

Bernanke and Paulson did this for the good of the country. What they did, and listen to this very closely, when they saw that the financial system was in great peril, when their country was threatened with catastrophe, they gave up their personal ideas and beliefs in order to promote the greater good.

That’s not called socialism. That’s called sacrifice.

It would do the Republican Party some good to reflect on the sacrifices that have made America what it is today. When our country faced its darkest hour and we were at the brink of being torn apart by the inexcusable sin of slavery, many Americans stood up and sacrificed their lives in order to free the slaves, and to preserve our nation as one whole union.

When our country was blindsided by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, millions of young men and women volunteered to help protect their country and the very fate of the free world. They sacrificed their very lives so that we could live freely today.

When the jobs started disappearing and the DOW started plummeting, Bernanke and Paulson laid down their free market fundamentalism: they SACRIFICED their ideology for the good of the nation. And while they deserve a great deal of criticism for the execution of their plans, they also deserve praise for putting the good of the economy ahead of their principles.

Today many Republicans are actively rooting for our President to fail in his mission to lift us out of this financial crisis.

I invite John Boehner, Bobby Jindal, and the other GOP members who are favoring their own personal agendas and ideas more than the economic well-being of the United States of America to take a good, hard, long look in the mirror.

In March of 2005 the GOP was talking about a permanent majority: look how far they have fallen in just 4 years. Now consider the path that these hard-liners have taken, and think about where they will be in another 4 years if they continue down that same path.

Today in many parts of Europe there is civil unrest and violence because the people there have lost faith in their governments’ ability to effectively deal with this recession. What follows is more turmoil, followed by sweeping social and economic change: in short, things that conservatives very much dislike.

But, because so many conservatives are clinging to their tax-cuts-only dogma, we may soon see the same thing happening here in America. If the Republican party wants to still be able to recognize this country in twenty years, then they should heed the words of one Mohandas K. Ghandi:

The Roots of Violence:
Wealth without work,
Pleasure without conscience,
Knowledge without character,
Commerce without morality,
Science without humanity,
Worship without sacrifice,
Politics without principles.

Rush is Wrong

Rush Limbaugh.

Mount Rushdie. Rushdie Rush Rush.

I actually listened to Rush Limbaugh’s radio program today for 17 minutes. Two things have happened:

1. I feel dumber

2. I feel like exercising so I don’t end up an obese, slobbering, cheauvanistic imbecile.

But this fat bastard is back in the papers again because the political class is stupid enough to actually acknowledge his existence. First, President Obama stooped lower than any reasonable President should by saying Limbaugh’s name. Then, new RNC chairman Michael Steele went so far as to claim that he is the party’s leader, not Rush.

It’s a sad reflection (ok not so sad for me) on the Republican party that the chair has to defend his legimitimacy as the standard bearer against a disgusting, self-loathing neanderthal radio talk show host.

But politicians aren’t the only people who give Rush far more attention than he deserves. Respected conservative writers are coming to his defense this week, such as Jonah Goldberg.

Last week on the Keith Olbermann, actress and political activist Janeane Garofalo discussed Rush’s personal life, drug addictions, self-image issues, and ideas in one of the longest segments of the show.

I’ve never seen such an inconsequential individual garner so much notoriety and attention without having actually achieved anything in his entire life. Rush Limbaugh’s claim to fame and wealth is that he has a very, very, very large mouth. He’s not intelligent. He’s not attractive. He’s not charming. He has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and yet 20 million people spend choose to spend their days listening to him and his nonsensical ranting.

I have some experience in dealing with hard-lined, ignorant, selfish conservative commentators, and trust me, the best thing that the liberal blogosphere and media outlets can do is to just ignore him.

I for one, promise that forever after this post, I will never mention Rush Limbaugh’s name or fat ass on this blog again.

Just by paying attention to him, he brings us down. Look at this post! It’s terribly written, it’s angry, it’s pointless, and only serves to create more controversy surrounding Rush. That’s what happens when you listen to his radio show. The stupidity is infectious.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go scrub my brain with chlorox.

How to Push Obama Left

On Saturday, February 29th Haymarket Books and In These Times magazine hosted a panel discussion called “Obama and the Left” at the UNITE Hall in Chicago’s historic West Town neighborhood. The panel included James Thwinda of Jobs for Justice, authors Sharon Smith and Paul Street, and Washington correspondent for The Nation, John Nichols. I was lucky enough to attend the event.

After James Thwinda shared some of his post-election ebullience with the crowd, Paul Street dumped a cold bucket of realism on us when he brought up President Obama’s major campaign contributors and his vetting by the powers-that-be long before he announced his candidacy for the highest office in the land. John Nichols followed and gave a rousing speech that denounced the war in Iraq and called for Bush and Cheney to be held accountable for their crimes. Then he reminded the audience that whether Obama is a true progressive or not, he got to where he is today because we put him there. Finally, Sharon Smith brought it back home by sharing a few hopeful news items that have been woefully neglected by the mainstream media, including resistance to illegal foreclosures on Chicago’s north side and the recent successful Republic Windows strike.

There were many conversations that took place that evening, but the central question seemed to be is Barack Obama a socialist, left-wing extremist like the Fox News pundits will have us believe, or is he a liberal in name only?

During the campaign I perpetually blogged about how Barack Obama was one of the more moderate/conservative candidates in the Democratic Party’s field, and threw my support behind John Edwards in the primaries, and finally behind Ralph Nader in the general election. So, you know where I stand on that question. Our distinguished panelists had more diverging views on the subject. When it came time for a question and answer session, James Thwinda remarked that although at the end of the day he still is a politician, Obama represents a great leap forward and an opportunity for the left to make serious progress. The general consensus seemed to be that Barack Obama has the potential to be a great liberal President, but that in order for it to happen, he must be pushed by we the people who got him elected in the first place. Only by a groundswell of popular demand can a really progressive agenda come out of Washington, as it did in the 30’s and 60’s.

When the floor opened up to comments, a number of people stood up to raise awareness about issues close to their hearts, including immigration reform, gay rights and the Employee Free Choice Act, all of which are very important for the left and the nation in general. But when my turn came to speak, I got up and brought up the issue that I feel must come first and foremost for the American left:

Campaign Finance Reform. Campaign Finance Reform. Campaign Finance Reform.

I reminded our audience that a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, card check and gay marriage are all worthy causes but that without serious, comprehensive campaign finance reform, it’s very unlikely that any of them are going to happen.

How can we expect our representatives to change the nature of the game in Washington when we continually elect people who have been bought out by big oil, big pharma, the industrial military complex, and the financial services industry? During the 2008 election campaign, Barack Obama received more than a half a million dollars each from Citigroup, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, and now we’re getting upset that the stimulus packages are benefiting enormous banks more than ordinary Americans? Well, the old adage goes that you get the government that you deserve.

In 2012, if the Republican Party nominates a candidate who runs on a platform of invading China, re-instating Prohibition and campaign finance reform, we should all seriously consider voting for him/her. The damage wrought by their imperialist and regressive impulses would be a necessary evil to get private money out of our electoral process.

Until the American left stands up and shouts in one unified voice that we will not support ANY candidate for ANY public office unless they get on board with seriously changing the way that candidates in America raise funds for their campaigns, we will have to keep asking ourselves whether our President is really a liberal or not.

If we force our government to enact true campaign finance reform, we won’t have to.