7th International

Paul Encimer presents

EMPEROR OBAMA IN

THE TRUMAN SHOW

Some people believe that fascism is brand new with DubBush,and that it has met its end with the election of Barack Obama. But Mussolini defined fascism as corporate militarism. Eisenhower in his famous Kiss Off address gave it a uniquely American name: the Military/Industrial Complex.

It was the Korean War that provided our native Fascism’s bipartisan template. The defining difference: the Republicans – then as now –“want war” while the Democrats - whether today or yesteryear - are firmly “opposed to peace.” Barack Obama won't want to change that. (When JFK woke up to the truth of Ike's Complex, his consciousness was unceremoniously terminated.) After almost seventy years in action I think it’s fair to continue to call both parties Fascist

Korea enabled the incipient Julius Caesarism of FDR to evolve into the Augustus Caesarism of the amazing Harry Truman. Truman’s nonproclamation of war against that rocky, freezing Asian peninsula turned Congress into the Emperor’s Rump as surely as Cromwell’s lockout of Parliament did 300 year earlier. Truman managed all this, like DubBush, with a popularity rating in the low twenties.

DubBush allegedly solaces himself by identifying with Churchill, but it should be Truman. Harry, not Winston, was the real hero of 1948/84. It was Harry who first scared the hell out of the American people and made the Cold War a way of life It was Harry who killed the “peace dividend” and enabled the military-industrial complex to mature into the junk bond Warfare State that enriches our elites to this very day. It was Harry‘s National Security State that’s morphed into our Homeland Police State. It was Harry who institutionalized the foreign policy which pits an eternally good us against an eternally evil them. DubBush inherits all this. His regime invented none of it.

We are likely to laugh at the parallel of DubBush with either Winston C.or Harry T. Isn’t it like comparing the first somewhat heroic Napoleon with his frankly farcical nephew, Napoleon III? sure, but the joke is onus. Remember when the Fuehrer restored himself as the Kaiser, it was -mustache for mustache, indeed ridiculous - Charlie Chaplin playing Frederich Nietzsche - but it didn’t turn out to be all that funny.

With the atrocity of the Iraq War, DubBush offers the finishing touches on an extended War he shares with his father and Bill Clinton. Clinton’s million dead is on a par with Dad & Dub’s million plus. These three Presidents, teamed together with the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex, have passed the Korean War’s 2 million dead civilians and, with the help of Speaker Nancy Betrayus and her Democrats, are chasing Vietnam’s 3 million mark. This long Iraq War has become a centerpiece of a Middle East War that rivals the Thirty Years War that devastated Germany in the 17th century. (25 years for this one so far if you include the Eighties war that we egged Iraq into with Iran) And you can bet that Obama will engineer no exit that doesn't take the oil with our Corporations.

Old CIA hands, Frank Stockton and Philip Agee, first made the apt comparison of Korea with the Iraq war. Sec.of State Acheson made it known that Korea was outside our defense perimeter, tempting the North Koreans into an invasion of the South that was loaded with leftists eager to put an end to the American puppet regime of Syngman Rhee.

Out of this, Truman produced a Cold War that lasted a generation - successfully casting the war weary and prostrate Soviet Union for the very Agro Hitlerian role, recently vacated.

Truman’s National Security Council document NSC-68 (the predecessor of P-NAC) laid out the script in advance – with the US projecting onto the Soviet Union our own Imperial Shadow, as we connived for Economic and Military Global Dominance. All that we needed was a pretext to scare the American people into Mobilizing for Permanent War. Korea was the pretext.

In a later repeat, DadBush’s State Department used Kuwait as a lure to initiate the destruction of Iraq, neutralizing the threat to Israel. DadBush’s erstwhile neocon cronies sought to finish the war, laying out their strategy in an updated version of NSC-68 in the P-NAC document. All they needed was a similar pretext – as P-NAC put it, “another Pearl Harbor.” 9ll was it.

Both Truman and the Bushes/Clinton faced the same horror– the possible outbreak of peace. Nothing is more frightening to our elites than the successful termination of the CorporateWarfare State. The specter of peace means the end of the Great Barbeque of endless war. The Warfare State took us out of the depression and kept us out. "Fighting the good fight for the Free Market" is still the myth to be observed, "Hanging on for dear life to Crony Capitalism" is the reality to be served. Larry Summers and the others are rested and ready to continue funding The Right War.

DubBush has successfully replaced Communism with Terrorism, an accomplishment impossible, however, without the crucial work of Carter and Clinton in building up al Quaeda through the Soviet-Afghan and Yugoslavian wars. Otherwise DubBush could never have been able to establish Islamofascism as the suitable candidate for an Endless War on Terror to succeed the Cold War. Obama's Afghanistan Surge Strategy guarentees the success of this substitution of one very profitable Junk Bond warfare for yet another Humanitarian War so beloved by his Clintonite accomplices.

From Korea on, the American Emperor has never been naked. Whether Ike, Jack, Jimmy, right on through to Barack, the Emperor has all the appurtances of Imperial prerogative - the ax, the scepter, the globe, the robe, the crown, the fearsome frown, the boots hobnailed with looted jewels for grinding third world faces forever. Instead, it was the jackals of the Congress and the vultures of the Media who consistently proclaimed the Emperor’s “nakedness” as a ruse to cover their own impotence. Barack will bare all again for a world hoping for a kinder, gentler American Empire.

The difference with DubBush and his anxious Neocons from Obama and his Neolibs is that the Neocoms thought the time was ripe for open fascism. While the earlier Emperors were happy to have the velvet bedroom slippers covering the hobnailed boots, Bush and his cronies wanted us to know that the boot is going to be in our faces. They wanted us to see the mud and shit in the tread before they rubbed it in.
Obama looks cute in those velvet bedroom slippers and his new administration is jack-booted and ready to go. In our duopolistic political world, we are foolish to expect anything different from Obama-fronted Democrats. It is not just a case of submission to Corporate Militarism (fascism) or even enthusiastic cooperation. Now we will see some "brilliant innovations."
With twelve years in the House, Cynthia McKinney made it clear to me when she was touring the Emerald Republic that it is a distraction to distinguish Blue Dog Democrats from Progressives. "They are all Blue Dogs," she told me flatly. That resonates with political reality. The abortive "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act"was supported by every Progressive Congress member except Dennis Kucinich and Pete Stark. Neolib Democrats (both Progs and Dogs) are the fitting successors to Neocons Bush and Cheney, led as usual by House Speaker Nazi Pelosi. Her taste for torture explains why impeachment was and will not be on the Democratic Leadership’s fabled table. The wood is so wet from waterboarding demonstrations for Congressional insiders that it wrecks the flimsy paper that the constitution is written on.
This means that under Obama, we can expect no return to a Republic any time soon. If he plays by the rules he will go down in History alive - to raise millions for His Library. Roosevelt and Truman definitively wrote the Congress out of the document. Obama is in the wrong position (Emperor)to want a script change. The next Constitution is in OUR political future and will perforce have to be rewritten in our own blood on our own bodies before we wake up enough to reassert our inalienable rights.

Labels: Blue Dog Democrats, Constitutional Government, Emperor Bush, Emperor Obama, Truman Show

Mike and his Blue Dog buddies did their best to prop up Bush and the Empire, with two thirds of their 47 voting Bail, baby, Bail. The Progs did even better with over 80% of their 69 caucus members okaying the Bailout. If this Blue Dog and Progressive Pony-up Show had been crewing the Titanic they would have thought “doing something” meant punching more holes in the hull.

To seal their deal, the Democratic Leadership as usual packed in 150 of the 700 Billion as Politically Correct Earmarks and Tax cuts for the wealthy - impotently leading their Party over Viagra Falls in a Pork Barrel. After all, that’s how War Appropriations traditionally get past Congressional consciences: as hopeful bribes to these mostly rich constituents.

Add Hasty Panic to the mix and you have the way Congress deals with Bush regime’s crisis solutions, whether a prepackaged Patriot Act or a handy Declaration of War. The key, as after 911, is to keep Wall St. open for business. Why, this bill allows the Treasury Secretary to buy bad debts from foreign banks too. It’s a global economy after all and the Party elites have many friends in other countries.

Radicals like Naomi Klein and Michael Parenti should be listened to when they tell us that The System isn’t failing. Was the Enron bilking of California at a continuing cost of one billion a year a failure? The Savings & Loan debacle? Is the gentrification of New Orleans a failure? Disaster Capitalism means punishing the losers relentlessly until only super-sharks like the Joe Kennedys and Prescott Bushes are left standing – with their children in place to rule the country and the Globe.

The point of the Bailout, like the 700 billion that goes to the military, is to make sure that tax money only goes up to the wealthiest, to starve the next administration for money to improve our lives, our education, our health, the very public structures that house our civilization. It isn’t Wall St. versus Main St. That’s a continuum. It’s Business as Usual St. against Your St. and My St..

Remember Argentina? Like us, unfortunately, another Global Economy poster-child turned orphan in the storm. The people there started taking to the streets, disrupting business as usual. When one of their corpora do Presidents announced on TV another go-round of Martial Law, the people never let him finish. They rushed from their homes and he ended his speech by leaving the Presidential Palace via helicopter. The great cry went up for new leadership: “Anybody so long as its nobody we know!”

When the elite fat cats also fled the dead economy for homes abroad, the abandoned workers took a look around. There was leather, there were the factories, there was them and then there wee shoes! It turned out it wasn’t capital (or as Mike Thompson and the rest call it: credit) so much as productive people that created the essential products for everyday life.

Perhaps the habit of our Titanic economy of throwing overboard those weakened by losses of jobs, health care, personal safety nets or even homes offers us a remedy on the Argentine model. Maybe this economy isn’t as Titanic as it seems. Maybe it is more like loosely linked lifeboats and a lifeboat short scramble of first class, economy class and steerage passengers on a sinking pleasure ship. Local economies, John Kenneth Galbraith tells us, did not suffer equally from the Great Depression. Those that maintained community solidarity had a major advantage. Local sustainable economic cooperation is already one of those ideas laying around in this crisis that needs to be picked up.

Furthermore, a mortgage crisis may not be about credit lines for millionaires to keep them (and incidentally their wage slaves) viable. It could be about the social requirement, not just to save current homeowners at risk, but to restore homes to all who lost them. Half a century of neighborhood re-development which a la New Orleans erased the places where working people lived in favor of the most profitable real estate ventures for the big money people needs radical reversal.

To go even further than furthermore, if private property – like your house and curtilage – is so crucial, isn’t it obvious that in a free society everyone should have some? Additionally, if work produces a free society then people must own their work, have the right to their jobs, must own their jobs?

The creative Argentines even managed to prototype freedom from centralized taxation when their federal government was forced to release a significant portion of taxation to direct democratic town meeting type allocation. That is participatory democracy with a proper vengeance!

The Peace movement in the U.S. had something like this when we created Sharing Funds. These were a Government directed “rent strike”. The money people “owed” the feds was kept in safe bank accounts. Interest was used for community projects, voted on periodically by contributors. The principle was available either for community use, or held back should the feds move against wages or property. We could break our ties to the totalitarian withholding tax system and redirect some of the two trillion now slated for Wall St. and the Pentagon right back to Your St. and My St. We could stop paying for out-sized government and start operating self-government. Their crisis can be our opportunity.

Paul Encimer

Labels: Bailout, Blue Dogs, class war, Economic package, Mike Thompson, modern revolution

HIPSTER FOR PRESIDENT - OR THE RETURN OF THE WHITE NEGRO

Ah, if Norman Mailer had lived to see himself twice a prophet with the appearance of the Millennial Hipster, Barack Obama. The White Negro was the title of Mailer’s original prophetic contribution to the era of the fifties in which he pontificated on the rise of the Hipster after WW II and so gave the name to a generation of 48 – in an effort to save it from the slur of the come lately “beatnik.”

Mailer was presciently quick to see the emergence of The Negro out of his (sic) invisibility into a vanguard role. Obama, for Mailer as for me, would have inspired him to speculate on the abrupt return of the White Negro himself.

There has been a lot of talk about generational identify which seems to follow a cycle of twenty years – 68,(The Counterculture, Hippie or mass media’s Boomer), 88 (Generation X, the Slackers) and now 08 (dubbed the Millennial Generation by eager pop sociologists. The Hipster arises from the prehistoric slime of 48 after the disappearance of the Jazz Age generation of 28. (08 had seen the generational anti-corporate revolt of the Populists, Socialists, Progressives).

The Hipster had appeared with Auschwitz and Hiroshima freshly minted for a Western Society turned seriously and catastrophically psychotic. A book “Rebel without a Cause” had made the psychopath an emblematic figure. Here was a creature whose infantile demand for instant gratification put him at odds with a supposedly moral society. But what happens when the society itself is insane and without a moral center?

Enter Mailer’s Hipster. Mailer posited the emergence of an ethical psychopath – doing right without social sanction, in fact against the grain of a demonic state. No one had come to this position earlier than The Negro who, as Mailer saw, had the edgy edge of participating in a totalitarian and democratic state – simultaneously. The meeting of The Negro with the Bohemian and the juvenile delinquent produced the Hipster. The wedding ring of this union, said Mailer, was marijuana. The orgasm was jazz but a new avant-garde Cool jazz.

It was a world divided between the creep, the hip and the square. It was a time for making it, man, for getting with it and for putting it down. It was crazy, man, but you had to dig it or flip.

The Hipster, like his prototype The Negro, had his back against an evil past and faced a future that the Negro had always face, as blank and merciless as a police station wall. Like his straight relative the conventional psychopath, the Hipster shares an immoderate, childlike adoration of the present. The affirmation of Hip, says Mailer, the self-described anarchist Marxists, is to remove every social restrain and category, confident he would at his root be more creative than murderous, having thrown off his deadly conditioning.

Obama, literally a White Negro, arrives up out of nowhere to take stage center in our consciousness, eloquently spilling out his politically hip-hop in an unexpected adulation of hope. Hope of course is all future tense but in Obama’s presentation, his hope synchronizes with the Hipster’s adoration of the present because Obama’s hope explicitly rejects and negates the past – “the same old same old.”

Not only is Obama the foremost figure of GenX, a generation famous for rejecting the commercial conditioning provided by the Republic’s Poets of Advertising. but he also is essentially a “second generation” Afro-American. With the Negro revolt of the Civil Rights era, the Negro became the Black, no longer cloaked in the Invisibility of the past. Black people became suddenly Immigrants from a continent no longer dark. The right to a hyphen allowed Obama’s generation to take a visible place with all the other hyphenated Americans.

The past is a hindrance to Immigrants and even more so to their 2^nd Generation children, “born free” to parents issuing from an irrelevant Old Country. Obama inherits thus a heritage that is not settled and privileged but an open opportunity, as it was for my own 2^nd generation parents. Opportunity can be a merciless goad and it can make you heedless. It must be seized or be cattle prodded into unconsciousness like your 2^nd generation parents. Their chances were always slim and shady, in an unequal competition called “free” by those who start off loaded down with privilege and comparatively big bucks. To win you must seek solutions outside the box and without the rules. As a GenX, “2^nd Generation Afro-American”, this is Obama’s promise when he calls on Hope. After all, the future for a good Hipster, isn’t out there, it is right here, a suppressed part of the Present.

But dare we confuse the Present with the Presidency? Yet where can we most use a master Hipster but in the most dangerous position on the globe. In “normal times” when the crackpot realists think they are being reasonable, you can take an ostensibly sane human being and put in the Oval Office and its aura creates a flaming Psychopath. That’s why the ruling crackpot reality of the mass media seizes up Madman McCain as the perfect President, the good ol’ Saxon Mother’s Son with his itchy finger on that warm trigger. He’s all buffed up and chanting Bomb Bomb Iran for his title match against the steroid pumped up Hilary Clinton, ready to obliterate Iran, and who can’t wait to be Queen of the Crackpot Realists.

Our White Negro is at least halfway to the job as a Psychopath, albeit an ethical one. Here’s where my infatuation begins - I am turned on by the idea of Obama succeeding to Camelot’s Siege Perilous, the seat at Arthur/JFK’s table, the one with the blood and bullet holes just waiting for a new Galahad.

Of course I’m an anarchist opportunist, not a Crackpot realist, so I will vote for Cynthia McKinney. If this were an actual Democracy and not a Plutocracy where money determines all official outcomes – except for the ones settled outside the Market through murder, assassination, war – Cynthia would be leading the pack. However, such a sudden break with the continuity of Bush/Clinton/Bush (logically it’s Bush/Clinton/Bush/Bush 3 or Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton) would inexorably provoke the Madmen (and women) who think they own America and everybody in it.

Yet Obama, facing almost certain death, has got the psychopath’s cool. He won’t trade his Present for a fearful future. A generation after the Boomers - like Hilary and the High Hippies - got old, and got sold, and now don’t have a ticket to ride, we’re looking at fresh forces – a GenX Icon leading a mass of Millennial. He’s offering his extraordinary talents to – us. Like the late assassinated Paul Wellstone, Obama prefers to view politics from the point of view of a community organizer where he started off – the same spot that Hilary, the darling of the doyen of community organizers, Saul Alinsky, turned her back on for corporate law. Like Wellstone, Obama was so good at organizing that he found himself courted by City Hall, the power establishment, the state house. Ultimately – like Wellstone – he found himself elected to that cemetery for stately bullshit artists and millionaires – the Senate. But give Obama credit, a second term was not his idea of a career. He went for the Presidency itself.

Now Friends don’t elect friends President, right? Not me. I wash my hands of sending anyone to the doom of that social role. If I didn’t have certain losers to vote for I’d have to invent them. This is what – unconsciously or not – happens within the Democratic Party leadership. The template for of all subsequent Presidential losers was set by Adlai Stevenson. The Democrats realized that they weren’t bad enough to supply a President for the modern Empire. They realized the impotence of their position – fearing and rejecting Peace while their opponents lustily advertised their love and need for war.

Democrats just aren’t scary enough to terrorize the world. Even a proto-neoliberal like JFJ with a father every bit as much a Nazi sympathizer as Prescott Bush was too much a liability. It took a revolution to give us a Carter who started off blabbing about zero nuclear weapons and exited with a First Strike policy, who began with Amnesty for draft refusers and ended reinstituting draft registration, whose heart throbbed for Hyman rights and finished himself off giving sanctuary to the Shah, who lured the Soviets into Afghanistan, then threw a hissy fit and canceled our participation in the Moscow Olympics.

As the Democrats prepare to shower Bush with money for the war into 2009 to take it off the election year table, some say that Obama will be the Black Kerry. But perhaps he’s not quite that bad and that he will be another Carter, just waiting to be taught his limitations as the requirements of the Presidency overwhelm him?

Who wants to be a Democratic President really.(The less said about the power and money corrupted Clintons the better. Bill was only allowed to seek the Presidency as a white hope to undermine the Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition. Clinton was underestimated and actually broke the loser mold). Originally, the Presidency was part of the corporate Constitutional coup which purposely wasted the egalitarian potential of the Declaration of Independence and hooked up a federal machine that was part Democracy (the House), part Oligarchy (the Senate) and part monarchy (the President). The last two, along with the Supreme Corps, were indirectly selected. Who needs a Council of Clerics to pick Supreme Cleric, the Supreme Corps can do the job. There is a terror that the Democrats might actually get a shot at the office again.

Not a chance. All around me there is agreement – the white chauvinist self-righteous Anglo males will not allow a black man, let alone an Afro-American – to assume the pinnacle of power. That’s what God gave them guns for. Obama freaked them when he saw them cloaked in their guns and perverted religion – bitter failures who feel their country slip slip slipping away. Obama is suggesting that more people are saying “GODDAMN AMERICA”! along with the old pastor of Obama’s Chicago Church in lieu of a blessing.

Obama put his finger on a constituency which is bitter at having failed to meet their own and societies expectations. They can only dimly remember the days when their kind rules – before the niggers and the hippies and the bitches and the fags and the tree huggers began those incessant demands that were only too often met by a change of mores and law. These desperate chauvinists see the Country slip slip slipping away. Their religious leadership meanwhile doesn’t merely “Goddamn America!”, it says that God HAS damned America. And none too soon since people mostly won’t listen to spiritual unreason anymore – despite the fatwas of Limberger and O’Rilee, - and aren’t willing to do what their told. The control of the government has become crucial so that lucrative crimes like the Iraq can be cooked and rammed down people’s throats. It is not America, but the fraudulent Constitutional United States which is worthy of a preacher’s damn. The passion of the Preacher’s curse may be pumped up a bit as the result of a lot of forehead slapping whenever Rev. Wright recalls the something like 6 years of service he spent in service to the Empire in the marines. Add irony when you compare his service to everybody else’s Nothing, or Worse than Nothing in the case of Napalm McCain and his PTSD presidential campaign. Bomb bomb bomb Vietnam.

The GOP is supposedly touting Hillary because she can be beaten by the McManiacs but really she is a security blanket back-up. She’s not all that far from their God’s favor having availed herself of the services of Reverend James Dobson. They are old friends from the days when Hillary used his advice to handle childish behavior in her family circle – Bill’s not Chelsea’s. She’s a Global Zionist Lieberman Liberal in good standing. She will obliterate Iran on command and protect Free Trade in Columbia (Plan Columbia was her hubby’s brainstorm!) She will keep piling up the hundreds of millions of dollars in the crooked style she developed in Bill’s first gubernatorial term with Blair and Vince Foster. Gender is no problem here either. The Republican’s know that Hillary has more balls than Bill ever had and maybe more than McCant.

Now I really can’t go along with the Reverend. I’m too busy struggling with my own anger and the built in PTSD that comes with Being A Man in America. I want to bless more and curse less and I’m way behind with a lifelong profession of nonviolence. Nonviolence has to be sought with the passion of an amateur motivated – ama,amas,amat – by loving rather than the psuedocool detachment of a professor. Not profession – emersion.

But I empathize. I see chauvinists constantly coming out the other side of hate, sharing their shame for their practice – the profession of arms. I see now that though their responsibility is clear, it is still not their fault. They, like us, are undermined by National continuity – the same old same old taught from the days of stone age caves. What’s needed is a Sudden Break. That’s where I seize upon Obama as he eloquently raises expectations, something no Democrat has done since the New Deal sputtered out and Lieberman Liberalism became the norm.

We need a sudden break here with out past – a turning away, a Great Conversion turning toward a new lifestyle – sustainable, peaceful and just. Can we expect this from Obama, even should he survive? This is where I see his persona as a Millennial Hipster kicking in. I may deluded. I remember the contempt I felt for a colleague who became besodden with empathy for Mike Thompson while we were holding the Congressman’s feet to the fire. Granted you could go groupie for one of these officials but to them you were just a face in the crowd, one millionth of a fan base. Such infatuation has never happened to me in my adult life. And then along came Obama, eloquent, gracefully self assured and with an entrancing style of active listening. I am suddenly a part of a little clique of radicals and leftists who shamefacedly share our passion.

It is not all a stirring in the bowels. There is a rationale. We are rapidly catching up with our future. A lot of 3 am phone calls with people making animal sounds on the other end. We need an ethical psychopath with no lifelong commitment to a mad society. Awhile back Michele Obama was quoted to the effect that finally in her adult life she could be proud of being an American. As if the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush years could make any sane person proud to be an American, because this is the United States inhabited by our great Manchurian Candidate, John McCondon, or that of our Water boarding connoisseur, Nazi Pelosi, or of those 6 percent Richocrats who make over $100,000. These are the essence of the Court - the United States – about which there is little to be proud. The rest of us are America the country of two continents,without borders, presently melting down. Paul Encimer