big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
What if the country is no longer a democracy at all?
Professor Wolin declares that managed democracy is a new form of government, a totalitarian government.
Capitalist elite have merged with governmental powers to create totalitarianism.
Instead of an active role, the people are spectators, – a mere matter of political puppets, the audience of American Idol – who vote, but are not part of the process. [review]
Yes, one could blame it all on cluelessness.
[link]
What the modern-day libertarian is, in reality and in practice, is a 24-carat hypocrite. Laissez faire is embraced with uncompromising zeal, while political and cultural freedoms for the rank and file are blithely swept away.
…elites and their hacks…
Supply-side, Trickle Down, Free Market, Reagan, Bush, Limbaugh, Palin, Tea Party: Nuts without facts.
It’s fibs Republicans do.
What third-world style and corruption gives BP our oil?
The Environmental Protection Agency are considering whether to bar BP from receiving government contracts, a move that would ultimately … end its drilling in federally controlled oil fields.
Over the past 10 years, BP has paid tens of millions of dollars in fines [not to mention the dead and scarred] and has been implicated in four separate instances of criminal misconduct that could have prompted this far more serious action.
The company’s executives and their lawyers have fended off such a penalty by promising that BP would change its ways.
Every backroom will always bite. Our current White House reworks it:
Nobody in this government will be satisfied until BP stops the leak, the oil is cleaned up and the affected people along the Gulf are fully compensated.
BP, as a responsible party, is charged with capping their leaking oil well and paying for the response and recovery.
Reform will come and reform will go, but the only secure way to power is by negotiating with the money power.
In the years around a genuine political crisis, and that’s what we’ve been in since 2005, this can be hard to see, hard to fathom. There is great fervor on both sides. The question for money is always, who will set the rules.
Each generational turn of the wheel in American history has been followed by just such a negotiation.
Money lost the struggle only once, as Andrew Jackson closed the Bank of the United States. This was followed by economic collapse driven by the states’ uncontrolled issuance of bonds. Money won’t make that mistake again, especially since Europe is playing the 1837 Game right now.
Republicans put the money power in charge after the Civil War. The progressive era was a continued effort to negotiate with, and struggle against, the money power. The liberal era forced the money power to accept a new normal of regulation in exchange for profit. And the Nixon era overturned the compromise.
During the Bush Excess money set the rules alone. It was the only force at the table. That’s why the ambulance crashed.
Money has no principles, no limits. The ideology of money, put in place by Reagan, was always self-defeating. Money must always compete, it must be challenged and channeled, or its raging water is just a flood, destroying everything before it.
When a crew from CBS News tried to film an oil-covered beach in Louisiana, they were stopped and threatened with arrest by a group of BP contractors and members of the Coast Guard.
Heard from Germaine Greer lately?
The Female Eunuch was part of a process that was already a hundred years old and is now called, for no obvious reason, the second wave of feminism.
And the revolution is really yet to begin.
The hard part is finding people who care.
Dave Pollard thought, “That’s what I should say when people ask me “how to save the world”. For a whole series of reasons:
In our individualistic western society, we try to do far too much alone. We need to organize, to cooperate, to collaborate. But we’re all so busy, so distracted, we don’t (most of us) have time or energy to learn what needs to be done, or to help get that work done. Finding others who can help, and know and care to do so, is even harder.
Enthusiasm drives a huge proportion of human endeavour. If we don’t really care, we will be hesitant to act, and we’ll give up easily in the face of adversity.
In my book Finding the Sweet Spot two of my key points are: (a) never start an enterprise alone; first find partners who share your passion and have complementary skills, and (b) the work you’re meant to do lies at the intersection of what you do uniquely well, what is needed in the world that no one else is precisely meeting, and what you have passion for.
We all need love to keep us going. Finding love is all about finding people who care.
Before we can care about something, we need to know about it. The important issues in the world today are complex, and it takes a lot of work to really know about them. So finding people who know, and who also care, is really hard.
The Bush-Cheney, Texas-Wyoming crowd passionately wanted to ramp up drilling logging and mountain-top mining. It had a zero-tolerance policy toward objections of any kind.
I have a personal take on the MMS. Back in 2006, I wrote a long series of stories about how the agency was losing tens of billions of dollars in royalties on oil and gas being pumped in the Gulf of Mexico. (They still are, by the way.) The MMS’s accounting was disastrously muddled; political hacks under Bush were blocking the agency’s own auditors; and the Interior Department had fouled up leases going back to the Clinton administration.
My stories unleashed a slew of investigations, which not only confirmed jaw-dropping incompetence and subservience to industry but also the famous sex-and-drugs scandal in which MMS employees in Denver partied hardy with oil execs. Now, it’s true that the Interior Department and the MMS were in some ways uniquely awful — especially under the Bush administration.
For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name of individual freedom.
Voters pretend to rebel and politicians pretend to listen: this is our political theater.
What’s happening behind the scenes is something quite different. As the libertarian spirit drifted into American life, first from the left, then from the right, many began disinvesting in our political institutions and learning to work around them, as individuals.
The political target of new American populism is ‘government’.
Survey after survey confirms that trust in government is dissolving in all advanced democratic societies, and for the same reason: as voters have become more autonomous, less attracted to parties and familiar ideologies, it has become harder for political institutions to represent them collectively.
This is not a peculiarity of the United States and no one party or scandal is to blame.
Representative democracy is a tricky system; it must first give citizens voice as individuals, and then echo their collective voice back to them in policies they approve of. That is getting harder today because the mediating ideas and institutions we have traditionally relied on to make this work are collapsing.
There are many reasons for this, some of them perverse consequences of reforms meant to make government more open and responsive to the public.
New committees and subcommittees were established to focus on narrower issues, but this had the unintended effect of making them more susceptible to lobbyists and the whims of powerful chairmen.
Coalitions broke apart, large initiatives stalled, special interest legislation and court orders piled up, government grew more complex and less effective.
And Americans noticed.
Not recognizing themselves in the garbled noises coming out of Washington, unsure what the major parties stood for, they drew the conclusion that their voices were being ignored. Which was not exactly true. It’s just that, paradoxically, more voice has meant less echo.
Roundup:
Americans are and have always been credulous skeptics.
They question the authority of priests, then talk to the dead; they second-guess their cardiologists, then seek out quacks in the jungle. Like people in every society, they do this in moments of crisis when things seem hopeless. They also, unlike people in other societies, do it on the general principle that expertise and authority are inherently suspect.
May 8, 2010 [AP]
Radioactive water that leaked from the nation’s oldest nuclear power plant has now reached a major underground aquifer that supplies drinking water to much of southern New Jersey.
My life goes with the atom, first to fry me, then to poison me. And always a great cost. Stewart Brand and fellow techno-opportunists can kiss my ass if they believe nuclear power will solve our social and economic challenges.
I suffer with all of us. And I’m increasingly certain there has never been an era more dangerous. But it’s confusion that makes us mad, I think, not merely aggression, nor greed, nor sloppy mercantile habits. We can’t do politics, we stumble with economics, we broil each other in poor society, yet pundits with a pencil incessantly idolize untested dreams and ignore imminent risk.
The far-right quest for power.
The Republican Party, as presently constituted, cannot be trusted to run our government, or protect our national security, or act as a responsible Minority Party. This is because they undermine government when out of power and mismanage it when in power.
If this trend continues, we will surely decline to a second-rate power.
The far right has taken over the Republican Party and believe they have a god-given right to be in power.
This is a wake-up call to rein in the far right before our country further declines to a second-rate power. They demonize the opposition, are divisive and allow self-interest to dominate public interest.
When they are in power, the government is mismanaged badly. When not in power, they rebel and seek to make our country ungovernable. It’s a vicious cycle and either way, we lose.
The Minerals Management Agency is supposed to oversee drilling:
A Wall Street Journal examination of the MMS’s track record found several instances of the agency identifying potential safety problems and then either not requiring follow-up or relying on the industry to craft a solution.
– – –
Oil rig operators generally are required to submit a detailed “blowout scenario.” But the federal Minerals Management Service issued a notice in 2008 that exempted some drilling projects in the Gulf under certain conditions. BP met those conditions, according to MMS, and as a result, the oil company had no plan written specifically for the Deepwater Horizon project, an Associated Press review of government and industry documents found.
– – –
For more than a decade, the Minerals Management Service, a federal agency within the interior department, has been accused by government watchdogs of failing to inspect offshore oil leases and relying too heavily on industry data in collecting royalties and other fees related to oil and gas. In a low point for the agency, a scathing 2008 report by the inspector-general of the interior described a culture of “substance abuse and promiscuity” within the MMS department charged with collecting royalties on leases and revealed that two MMS employees had, literally, been in bed with industry contacts. (Financial Times.)
Sarah Palin was on the O’Reilly Factor last night talking about the National Day of Prayer, but she went a bit further than her usual party line of calling America a Christian nation. “I think we should keep this clean, keep it simple, go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant,” she said. “They’re quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 commandments, it’s pretty simple.”
Sufficiently psychopathic to use the pulpit as a way of capturing attention:
A Christian leader and prominent advocate against gays who co-founded the Family Research Council with evangelist James Dobson took a ten-day European vacation with a callboy he met through RentBoy.com and was caught in an airport with the escort by a Miami newspaper.
Obama tax increase misperception grows, by Brendan Nyhan:
Earlier this year, I noted a CBSNews.com post showing that 24% of Americans thought President Obama had raised taxes for most Americans and 53% believed taxes had been kept the same. The numbers, which were drawn from a CBS/New York Times poll conducted February 5-10, were even worse among Tea Party supporters — 44% thought taxes had been increased and 46% thought taxes were the same.
In reality, Obama cut taxes for 95% of working families.
Misperception is too polite a word to hide errors that damage our nation.
“Here’s what populism is not,” Hightower told my colleague Bill Moyers. “It is not just an incoherent outburst of anger. And certainly it is not anger that is funded and organized by corporate front groups, as the initial tea party effort — though there is legitimate anger within it, in terms of the people who are there.
“What populism is at its essence is just a determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming our economy, our environment, energy, the media, government.”
“So you can’t say, ‘Let’s get rid of government.’ You need to be saying, ‘Let’s take over government.'”
In front of us all is the collective responsibility to create hope and opportunity for every child in this country.
We advance industry, science, technology, but we are dumb about ourselves.
One man noticed we have not fixed our social institutions since our last effort in the 1770s thus we argue its accuracy.
Americans in general do not have the habits of deference, so the conservative in America does not have them either.
Ultimately he does not defer even to his country’s institutions.
“This is the last remaining facsimile of the grasslands that once covered all of California. When it’s gone, it’s gone.”
Throw in the antelope, elk, a few roving coyotes and cougars, eagles of the bald and golden variety, some fairy shrimp, songbirds galore, and the occasional California condor, and there’s little wonder why Carrizo Plain has been called “California’s Serengeti.”
Soon after the monument was created in 2001, 13-year BLM veteran Marlene Braun was named manager. She scaled back grazing on sensitive grasslands and began developing the monument’s first management plan, which would phase out long-term livestock permits.
Every agency signed on. But then, in March 2004, the Bush administration… .
Thus in May 2005, Braun arranged her personal affairs and wrote a few important letters about her fears for the Carrizo, took a .38 caliber revolver, killed her two dogs—neatly placing their bodies under a quilt—and turned the gun on herself.
Palin stokes the disaffection of her people, then heals them, for a price.
Being governor was drudgery. “Her life was terrible,” one adviser says.
“She was never home, her office was four hours from her house. You gotta drive an hour from Wasilla to Anchorage. And she was going broke.” Her sky-high approval ratings in Alaska—which had topped 80 percent before John McCain picked her—had withered to the low fifties.
She faced a hostile legislature, a barrage of ethics complaints, and frothing local bloggers who reveled in her misfortune. All this for a salary of only $125,000?
The worst was that she had racked up $500,000 in legal bills to fend off the trooper scandal and other investigations. She needed money and worried about it constantly.
Christopher Hitchens: The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing.
Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray.
He had no friends, only cronies.
His children didn’t like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see.
Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.
Are there mechanisms that we can adopt at the local, regional, or national level that would permit us to arrive at a better understanding of complex issues, a better ability to find common ground with each other, and an ability to arrive at recommendations for public policies that are feasible and fair? [start here]
I was struck today how much the United States is tipping towards a culture of presumed guilt. It is a sign of the times that people are being forced to prove their innocence.
Chris Corrigan steps into The Innocence Project:
Unlike guilty convicts who are able to access a system of resources upon serving their time, exonerees are often assumed to be satisfied with freedom and justice itself. But when you have spent 10, 15 , 20 or more years in prisons like Sing Sing, Utica and Angola, freedom is not an easy transition to make.
What strikes me [among the dozens I have met] is that they are at the same time some of the happiest people I have ever met, and yet there is a deep core of sadness for both what was taken from them as well as what is being taken from others who are behind bars because of mistakes, lies and ignorance. They are imbued with a core purpose that awakens the potential in others, that inspires and invites and draws others to their cause.