7th International

A NOT SHORT ENOUGH HISTORY OF ECONOMICS YOU DON'T NEED A MATHEMATICIAN TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE PISS IS FLOWING You don’t have to live on the streets to know that Economics is the Depressing Science. I studied the subject academically awhile, until resisting the draft interfered. It was more of a curiosity to me as I went thru the “Great” Economists. As a major in Straight Philosophy, perched high on cloud coocoo land, I was more amused at how simple (minded) these “Greats” were. The math never impressed me. It was just another version of Latin for a new priesthood, cackling among themselves. “Hoc est corpus meum: - this is my body, said the priest. “Hocus pocus” translated the cynics. If it works for Latin, math is even better - for those who consider science a religion and economics a science. Recently an Amherst graduate student actually did the math for a couple of “trickle down” Harvard economists and found that they were cooking the books to make their theory work to prove the impossible, that trickle down works for the benefit of all,. The math that works for me starts at 1% and finishes off at 99. How about an example from history. Inheriting a shamanistic tradition, the aristocratic Russian 1% set the standard when – after imbibing a native psychedelic - generously gave the peasants their piss to drink. The original trickle down. In America, the 99% - even those of us in the Marijuana bubble - are finding the trickle down hard to swal-low. RECOVERING THE TRUTH ABOUT DEVELOPMENT So much for academic Economics – which began more truthfully as Political Economy. Adam Smith’s science was effectively a wish list for a new crew of would be aristocrats who needed political clout to destroy the rural craft and agricultural economy that Smith so despised. Welcome to an early example of what we will meet later as the strategy of“ "Development”. but which had for centuries in merry old England been known as Enclosure. . Using state power Enclosure drove peasants off the village commons, replacing them with sheep for the lucrative export of wool. This global economy morphed into the steam driven machine economy. A new breed of would-be aristocrats needed the force of the state to evict what was left of the peasantry and destroy the rural craft economy that Adam Smith had declared worthless. The peasants found out quick that the New Money One Percenters didn’t need all of the 99%. The unused portion of the 99% could languish in London’s urban sewers. The record is graphically illustrated in Hogarth's prints of life of the discarded in the eighteenth century.. . Once all the land had been taken from the Native American inhabitants, enclosure in America was a more accelerated process It didn't take long for the corporate machine economy to turn a land of small proprietors and farmers with very self-sufficient families into isolated employees, utilizing young women and children when pos-sible and ultimately putting the family itself at risk with parents working at several subsistence jobs. My personal economic experience started in the American forties. That was the time when “America” real-ized, all of a sudden, that it was rich and the rest of the world was poor. Development was the name of this new enclosure movement. Strange that the lot of the third world poor never got better, despite the pleasant theories of post war liberal trickle-downers. It didn’t take long for this newly discovered global poor to realize that Russian aristocratic urine was a taste treat compared to the crocodile tears of the global developers. . Worse yet, it was discovered by the liberal trickle-downers that it wasn’t just the rest of the world that was filled with delectably exploitable poor people. Poor Americans were everywhere, particularly in central city urban slums who could be driven – this time literally – out into urban renewal projects or – with good luck – sub-urban resettlements. The great economic discovery that the poor were the greatest financial bonanza since the Indians rested on the same principle – when you drive them off the land, the land value rises exponentially. It was this discovery that ended the usefulness of the slum lord and started people on the street to homelessness. So there it is: in England, sheep replaced the peasants; in America’s inner cities the car was used instead of sheep. In America the eviction process was accelerated. The sub-urban housing boom – good-by redwood forests – provided the ticky-tack housing for the car commuters. Enormous beehive urban projects were touted as “end-ing poverty” for the poorer displaced urbanites, ending instead the culture of neighborhoods.. THE PERSONAL IS THE ECONOMIC TOO My dad – employed in food through the depression and the war – was the second person to get a car on our block after the war, a Henry J. To shorten a longer story, he was able – literally, repeat, literally - able to ride the first wave into suburban Minneapolis, escaping the ethnic backwaters of urban Pitts-burgh. Pittsburgh where I begin my lessons in economics was an industrial giant. That means that the snow turned black from soot the day after it fell. Both my grandfathers worked where the soot came from - the steel mills down by the river, one of them punching his time card well into his seventies. My dad did his own wildcat strike when he walked off his mill job after five days. He went into the produce yards where he parlayed his eighth grade education with nights in the library into a broker’s job – sending the carloads of wholesale fruits and veggies onto the counters of retail grocers. Safe in sub-urban St. Louis Park, my family was atomized now – free of the roots of the broader family. We had cut loose and to prove the immortal words of Frank Lloyd Wright that, “when you tilted the US, everything loose would roll into California”, we rolled into Southern California. Family still had some power, the black sheep kind anyhow, and we headed for one of those packed little courts in L.A., next door to my horse playing uncles and aunt who had escaped Pittsburgh earlier. We were launched into the fabulous Fifties. The Golden Age of America in the Golden State. The Age of More Than Enough for the Nation that ruled the world. The era of I like Ike Eisenhower and nu-clear brinksman Dulles. Oppose us and we flicked you into the garbage heap – Iran, Guatemala, it was all so easy. Take our loans and its easy street. My family was stuffed into a one bedroom apartment where my room was the space behind the couch. The couch was my sister's room. But no matter. The fifties were spectacular and all absorbing. Big fin autos and immense refrigerators. Housewives and (M)Admen. General Electric defined the Good Life. Along came the Men in the Grey Flannel Suits. 10 free TV channels, Roller Derby, Wrestling and late night movies, movies, movies. Breakfast all day. And my family hadn’t really lost any ground mov-ing from sub-urban Minneapolis to L.A. because L. A. had no city, it was all suburbs. But the beatniks on speed relentlessly darted through the underbelly, the highways, the railroad yards, the greyhound buses on the run from the fifties and looking for the sixties. It happened. The US left the fat fifties and plunged into the the schizo sixties. There was even a starting gun when JFK died for our sins. Where then was the economy? The history of economics for most of the 99% could be summed up in 3 letters: Jay Oh Bee. Job. For most of us that’s all she wrote. A few percent got into college prep which meant more zeros for your annual income. .This group at most represented roughly the 5 or 6 % from each high school that the 1% required to handle the so called 99% who were on the High School "get a job" track. (But math aside the number was more like 80% rather than 99.). I think 80% is still a good read, though, for the cereal boxes of the Consumer State. It is a number, democratically speaking, that translates as overwhelming. Competitive at least to the fabulous rush that you get from the solidarity of “99%!” All that of course ignores the uncomfortable detail that the 1% has the allegiance, tepid or otherwise, of about half of the 80%, the good students always desperately seeking the right answers that still only got them a Job - except after one of those periodic crashes. Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift. . BACK TO THE HOUSEHOLD So, to get back to my private history of economics and that of my fellow proles, the need for a job was all the economics I could afford to pay attention to. I wasn’t looking for a business or professional career, far from it. A beneficiary of the GI bill mentality, college was cheap for proles, but in my case spoiled me for serious interest in the standard economics. I recognized the Military-Industrial Complex was all that was out there and I wanted just enough income needed to support a financially unambitious bottom feeder like myself. There is little to be ashamed of here. In every tribal, peasant, village economy - aside from our own West-ern variant - “economics” stays true to the Greek's original meaning. ECO was "household" as in household man-agement. It was the life sustaining day-to-day enterprise carried on by women, servants and slaves while the free men hung out downtown, or went off to sea to trade with or loot others. The University had offered me a private agenda. I started as a liberal arts major which in 1955 had a sort of prestige as monetarily useless. A pioneer drop out, I rejected success in the rat race, as it was affectionately called at the time, in favor of serious study outside the Ivory Tower. Dropping into a beatnik style that fit my lit-erary and philosophical un-ambitions. This kind of private agenda is not that unusual. It was normal for the many to seek alternatives (like intense family life) to monetary success to give a value to their lives that work did not. I eventually got the knack of getting a job. The shreds of family imported to the west coast proved helpful in introducing me to my most productive job in used books. Family is the one important economic factor that is not exclusively available to the higher percentiles. Certainly orphans and foster children, abused children, lacked even that advantage. Many of these were already on the street though Reaganites had not established the word Homeless as the stigma of choice. HOMELESS IS AN ECONOMIC INDICATOR - OR, THE WRITING IS ON THE WALL So it has been trickling down all over the globe for 50 years. And inequality has been what has de-veloped inexorably. A few Billionaires have the control of wealth that equals billions of people. As money is sucked increasingly into the hands of the few, there is nothing left for much of the population, Nothing. In our society for these possessors of zeros who have been hopefully called the homeless. In the logic of money, if you have no money you shouldn't exist. These homeless are internal immigrants, competing with global homeless who are called refugees. The Italians and Europe in gen-eral are trying to solve the problem by sinking boats. In the US we have internment camps, run for profit, which handle immigrants from countries our policies disrupt. Yet people continue stubbornly to exist. In the US, the people reduced to ashes continue to walk about and haunt the societies they are in. Currently in the US the bulk of the 80% desperately gulp down the trickling urine of the rich, offered the false hope that the more rich the more urine. Meanwhile, the homeless stubbornly prove that they can continue to exist though they have been thrown into the alleys where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. What does this prove? That there is no such thing as homeless humans.. Humans are a nesting animal and have to be flushed out by police power and have their habitats destroyed over and over again. But they don’t go extinct. For one, their populations are fed by rivers of the freshly rejected and by those who cannot or will not conform to the naked dollar. Guitars slung over their packs, their pock-ets stuffed with substances that take you out of the ugly world, dependent on each other for intimacy, solidarity and pleasure, a gypsy culture thrives. Their way offers an alternative consciousness not de-pendent on the availability of the success money can buy. It was this sort of inspiration that powered the revolution of the sixties. The inability to dissolve those outside the money culture presents us with a vertical invasion of native and natural people once more. The failure to extirpate our own homeless resonates in the rebel-lion of the rest of the globe by people who will not submit their value systems to corrections by those who serve only the bottom line. This failure calls in question all that the World Bank started in motion in the early forties. The bankers’ failure foretells the impotence of the trade agreements from NAFTA to the TeePees like TPP and TPA that would make the world safe for Billionaires. The strategy of the Developers has been to monetize, monetize, monetize. But the discovery has been spreading, like a hundredth monkey, that money doesn’t solve problems, it creates them. The trick of creating scarcity through predation and then claiming that scarcity is a law of nature has outlived its power to cloud our minds. It isn’t that we will be saved by an insurrection of the homeless. We will be liberated by the realization that poverty is just a concept and that the reality is living life in solidarity and community with the natural world of which we all are part. This is and was the way of life before the West forced upon the globe its perverted money culture, scheming to re-invent colonialism through a con job called development. Challenged by the intrinsic toxicity of our military-industrial-political party system, we are being converted now to this renewal. PAUL ENCIMER

Paul Encimer DISARM THE GOVERNMENT GIVE UP THE GUN Okay. Listen. It’s too late to give up a political strategy of being open, honest and friendly. You know – “nonviolent.”. We have too much PC empathy for The People to nourish a fantasy about killing some of them in order to do them good. Don’t we? But, yet, can there be anything more likely to offend country, town and city people of whatever political persuasion, than threatening gun ownership. People stockpile weapons like they were investing in gold. In fact, self-defense is the gold standard. Who buys a hand-gun without imagining a situation where you need to kill someone in self-defense? The same goes for the threat to disarm a Nation State. The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex has complete bipartisan support. Every week Barbara Lee gets to offer some utopian anti-war legislation totally irrelevant to real policy while the war budget tops 700 billion dollars and the USA leads the world in weapons sales. Don’t ever say Uncle Sam doesn’t know how to run its Own (War) Business!. As the world’s leading arms dealer Uncle Sam’s Death Merchants are doing just fine in Syria, for instance, or Mexico. Libya was plenty good for business. NATO ran out of stuff early and we had plenty to sell. If you are Israelis or Saudis or whoever and into buying guns by mail...just dial Uncle Sam. Money is the ruling sign over the birth of both armed Citizen and Occupation soldier. The Death Merchants behind the NRA profit richly when USA politics get shot from guns. Often those guns turn up in profusion during a police raid, a trophy of the citizen’s fantasy aggression/actual submission. In some cases, those guns are displayed and deployed in secret militias: beer bottle, weed sucking conspiracies rooted in our fabulous resistance to the feds – one of those government incarnations we can all afford to hate. Think how much bigger the money returns when the International Death Merchants close a deal. Why the very day that the nerd from PsyOps was slaughtering people in a Colorado Movie theater Uncle Sam was walking out of a Conventional Arms Control session. Having the biggest table at the World Armaments Flea Market is very lucrative when you spend so many billions “stirring it up.”. The national war addiction leaks over into places like Wisconsin where seven more innocents go down. Is it because American white ethnics are too clueless to tell a Sikh from a Moslem? Or because over-educated nerds find a trigger on a Glock as easy to manipulate as a video game remote? Programmed for violence? Could there be an Illuminati production line for Manchurian Candidates? Well, yeh, you can point to our institutions of learning, praying, playing and competing. The fact is that governments, economies, media, communities are ever down and dirtier. Replacing love and trust with fear and hate is an expensive process. The “technology” is there. Uncle Sam wouldn’t use it? Just watch yourself in the movie theater in the middle of one of those violent Batman scenes - as you flashback to the massacre. Or tune into the relentless drumbeat to the next endless war. Connecting the dots. The political totalitarians are closing in, protecting us globally from the terrorists or the homeless. The quest for absolute security links the armed Citizen to the Occupation soldier. Having the power to do what you shouldn’t is a good description of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex. Or the NRA States of American. It matters little if the guns are used, what’s important is their purchase, Display is often enough. Von Clausewitz laid it down: “it’s not how many enemy you kill, but that you break their will.” Whose will? The targets, the victims if you will, are peers, family, friends, neighbors. Those nigger, bitches, hippies an fags. Or maybe its those birthers, bitchers, birchers and baggers. Ultimately the governments no one can trust. Any ambiguity over our guns is simplified when the gun expands our enemies into infinity. "Infinity" for governments means eventual extinction. Their enemies list dooms them one after another. Gun ownership for the individual certainly does not equal real social power and secret militias are at best Reality TV. All this leaves individuals with such alienated and powerless feelings, that the private arsenal has become the best security. Communities lack the trust necessary to create “well-regulated militia” and at best clusters of friends, families, neighbors may create or fantasize private, but not community, militias. Yet unresisting Communities will steamrollered. Gandhi counseled us “not to cooperate in anything humiliating.” The role of those of us who are willing to give up the gun is not to demand our neighbors or nations turn over theirs, but to initiate noncooperation with an untenable system of lawyers, guns and money. We need to initiate another "move to resist illegitimate authority,' as Chomsky’s gang of academics put it in the Sixties. It is the fatal quirk of armed resistance that it is either premature and frightens people into the arms of Authority. Or it waits too long before it says No. The Gandian strategy is to say NO early and often. When The Chairman said that political power comes out of the barrel of the gun, the Mahatma confidently suggested that ultimately political power comes from standing up to the gun. Paul Encimer.

No Barack in Iraq
NObama Afghanistan
Has it sunk in yet? President Obama recently threw a fast one right past the Peace Bloc in Congress. These Democrats of varying stripes, including our own Blue Dog Mike Thompson, have in the past voted a righteous No on special war appropriations from the Bush regime. It is shocking to see all but 20 Democrats stamping their approval on $130 billion dollars worth of Live War money coming from the new regime.
By tucking these war appropriations back in the budget under the guise of “transparency”, the money for Afghanistan and Iraq became nothing more than a pair of bloody earmarks, easily “overlooked” in the larger factional struggle over the Democrats’ plan to save corporate capitalism. The Republicans played their part in the two party charade by sticking to the economic stimulus theme, meanwhile rejecting paying out money for a war Americans are currently
killing and dying in!
Dennis Kucinich wasn’t fooled. As one of only two Progressive Caucus members voting No to this sleight of hand, Kucinich said: “I will not vote for a budget that ties military spending to the operational funding of our government. This year, the budget includes $130 billion for war funding. ”
Wasting no time, Obama has followed up with another 77 billion dollars worth of supplemental war appropriations, 2/3rds to Iran, 1/3rd to Afghanistan. "I can't imagine any way I'd vote for it," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, our Democratic congress member directly to the south and a co chair of the 77-member Progressive Caucus. Woolsey fears the president's plan for Iraq would leave behind a big occupation force. She is also concerned about the planned escalation in Afghanistan. "I don't think we should be going there," she said.
What are we to make of Obama’s bold move, reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson’s dramatic escalation of the Vietnam War after a 1964 Presidential campaign that played up his peaceful contrast to his opponent’s bellicosity?
Obama, who I thought was being so clever, is perhaps showing what a shallow view he has of the Peace movement. It didn’t all begin with Iraq, Barack dear – although your career may have started there. After 9-11, the Peace movement made it clear world-wide that our sorrow was not an excuse for war against Afghanistan.
The Peace movement called for the apprehension of the criminals responsible - not for the random bombing of women and children and men. Particularly when in Afghanistan US Cold Warriors paid for the schooling and the arming of the Taliban kids we proposed now to root out. Particularly when the “hijackers” were overwhelmingly Saudis! Particularly when the criminals who need to be apprehended bear a strong resemblance to the ones who ran the Bush regime! The ones who said we needed a “New Pearl Harbor.”
But Obama’s view of the Peace Movement may be just Empire Realism. Cheney’s contempt for our opinions has perhaps been inherited along with Gates, Bernancke, Summers, Clinton et.al.
When Mike Thompson had his two week Easter recess, activists swarmed his offices in Ft. Bragg and Eureka to make known an agenda for the future - with Peace at the top of the list. The upcoming vote on this war supplemental is scheduled around Memorial Day. It will tell us a lot about what to expect from Mike Thompson and the onetime Peace Bloc in Congress. Our trillion dollar war has 3 trillion more to catch WW II. We must stop this waste of money and life, and end the war economy. Paul Encimer, Box 162, Piercy Ca 95587 923 4488


PRESIDENT BLUE DOG’S BLOODY EARMARKS and Other Atrocities
I thought Obama pulled quite a fast one on us when he took the 130 billion slated for the current wars – the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan where Americans are this minute killing and dying in – and slipped the billons into the 2010 budget. And every Democrat, our Mike Thompson among them, went along. Except, that is, for 20 Democrats, 11 of the Blue Dog variety, joining the unanimous Republicans against the budget. There were also two Progressives, Ed Markley of New York and Dennis Kucinich, who both voted No.
. Kucinich said: “This budget is a statement of principles for the upcoming year, and I cannot accept it in its entirety. I will not vote for a budget that ties military spending to the operational funding of our government. This year, the budget includes $130 billion for war funding. The Washington Post reports today another 10,000 troops may be sent to Afghanistan, bringing our total number of troops there to as much as 78,000 by 2010 – a more than 100% increase from today’s troop levels. This budget is a plan that authorizes the expansion of the war. I simply cannot endorse a budget or a plan that sends more of our brave men and women to Afghanistan, a conflict which has the potential to become this generation’s Vietnam.”
Markley and Kucinich would normally have been followed by at least a hundred or more Peace Democrats, including the other 69 members of the Progressive Caucus, led by Lynn Woolsey. This peace bloc, along with our own Mike Thompson, consistently resisted voting for Afghan-Iraq war appropriations,. In neutralizing them, Obama showed an almost Blue Dogish facility for working both sides of the street. By tucking the war appropriations back in the budget under the clever guise of “transparency”, the money for Afghanistan and Iraq became nothing more than a pair of bloody earmarks, easily “overlooked” in the larger factional struggle over the Democrats’ plan to save corporate capitalism.

Democratic Party orthodoxy required budget support as part of Obama’s sink or swim economic stimulus strategy, and Republicans – faithfully playing their partisan role in this two party charade - voted the negative. No heartrending, hair pulling debate during the Budget’s passage.. Nothing to alert us that Bush’s Wars were now Obama’s wars – with the Republicans voting NOT to provide money for a war in which Americans were on the battlefield!

I was still shaking my head, trying to clear the buzz out of my ears, when Obama came forward with his 87 billion dollar demand for Afghanistan. Lynn Woolsey must have cleared her head ,too, because she started vocally opposing this additional extortion.

Some liberal and leftist talking heads - who have been fearfully positing a coming Republican-Blue Dog majority to thwart Obama’s plans – could see their nightmare come true – except that it’s Obama who’s leading this new Blue/Red majority.

I know!?! What a sight! The 71 Progressives and a couple dozen other pinkos opposing Obama’s war requests while Obama’s True Blue Democrats, including 51 actual Blue Dogs, are creating an overwhelming centerforce with collaborating Republicans who can’t bear the contradiction of voting against a war! Except for Ron Paul of course.

Fortunately Congress is on a recess in April until the 20th. The biggest of the Peace Coalitions - United for Peace and Justice (with associated groups like Code Pink, Vets for Peace and the War Resisters League) - has been encouraging Peace people to take our issue directly to Congress members at home. Many of us in this Congressional District are confronting Mike Thompson by appearances at his Ft. Bragg and Eureka offices. A variety of Imperatives will be presented to a Congressional aide to be delivered later via video.

Obama, who I thought was being so clever, is perhaps showing what a shallow view he has of the Peace movement. Does he think he can get away with flaunting the Peace Movement like he did to the Gay movement with Rick Warren. It didn’t all begin with Iraq, Barack dear – although your career may have started there.

After 9-11. Peace people came out in the streets with the message that our sorrow was not an excuse for war against Afghanistan. Peace people wanted criminals apprehended not women and children and men randomly bombed. Particularly when in Afghanistan the US paid for the schooling and the arming of the Taliban kids we wanted now to root out. Particularly when the “hijackers” were overwhelmingly Saudis! Particularly when the criminals who needed to be apprehended bore a strong similarity to the ones running the Bush regime! The ones who said we needed a “New Pearl Harbor.”

But Obama’s shallow view of the Peace Movement may be just Empire Realism: ignore us, we are powerless to effect outcomes. Cheney’s contempt for our opinions has perhaps been inherited along with Gates, Bernacke, Summers, Clinton et.al.

We can expect Mike Thompson to continue to operate as an Empire Realist. Talk about the “New Pearl Harbor” with him and he stops listening. And now he is chair of an Intelligence subcommittee that oversees the budget and activities of the CIA, the DIA and intelligence elements of the State Department and Homeland Security. How can he be expected to prosecute the war criminals when the crimes are being expanded?

The upcoming vote scheduled around Memorial Day on the Afghan 87 billion will tell us a lot about what to expect from Mike Thompson and the onetime Peace Bloc in Congress. We may be starting from scratch.

TO OUR BLUE DOG REPRESENTATIVE AND NEOLIBERAL PRESIDENT: ENOUGH
Yesh G’vul. Enough is enough. This is the language of Israeli war resisters. I honor their existence. My solidarity with them, I believe, allows me the opportunity to take sides in this conflict of siblings by not supporting Israel’s war.
The invasion of Gaza has shaken me to the core. The conduct of Israel has become my personal responsibility now. Not so for our politicians. Representative Thompson was one of the 390 who voted to support Israel’s aggression. Five reps voted No – Kucinich, Maxine Waters, another Progressive, Moore from Wisconsin, Ron Paul, and a rep named Rahall (must be a Muslim).
Of the 22 who voted a timid “Present,” 12 were Progressives including Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Lee, & Pete Stark, bringing the Prog “opposition” to a stunning 15, a tad over 20% of the Caucus. The Reagan Democrat Blue Dogs were notable by their absence. One voted “Present”, two skipped the vote. Thompson is rumored to have issued a “signing statement” defending his vote but I can’t locate it. Why should he bother? He has a Blue Dog for President now.
In the last few months I have intermittently expressed my distress by hoisting a “Solidarity with Gaza” sign during our weekly antiwar vigil. Most times I wear my Palestinian scarf. Now by making my opposition to Israel’s war and occupation central to my peace witness, I gain transparency. By saying Enough I am finally attacking the root instead of the branches of our midEast policy. The war in Iraq, the threat to Iran, these are not about oil only. They are equally about preventing any serious threat to Israel. Oilsreal! It’s all of a piece.
Now I am mulling over apartheid era strategies, like boycotting the corporations supporting Israel. The list is long. Take a look at just the obvious boycott of Caterpillar and its bulldozers. Open that can of pre-butterflies and you see millions of dollars in straight-on military contracts. Track Caterpillar’s chair, Owens, and you find him sitting cheek to jowl with such as Summers and Geithner, Obama’s financial teammates. Israel is an inseparable part of our Military-Industrial-Political Complex
Certainly an arms embargo is an obvious step. Ending all military aid to Israel is a moral imperative. Our US jets and choppers drop our US bombs, our white phosphorous, and our cluster bombs, on Gaza. But a lot more than Israel is involved here. Face it, in what war don’t our weapons do the killing? Israel is no more than the aggressive tail wagging our very vicious dog whose mouth is full of very sharp teeth. If we are looking to cut off military aid to someone, how about starting with the US government?
Israel may be a prime crime partner but we arm the world for fun and profit. Despite its special relationship, Israel is not in line to become our fifty first state (only 1000 miles further from a US coast than Hawaii). Israel may no longer inspire Western anti-Semitism (the Arabs fill that role now) but historically Western governments have instigated pograms against onetime Jewish “allies” whenever convenient. Israel could easily find itself as passé as the Kurds..
Israel may well serve a useful scapegoat role. The quagmire of Iraq - and more so Afghanistan – is not that different from Palestine. Occupation, puppet governments, war crimes galore. In a moment of absolution, the US could reject its own evil by rejecting Israel.
Israel does have a special problem. Saddam and his “vanguard” B’aathist party never stood for election. Hamas was however democratically elected (ask Jimmy
Carter). A majority of Palestinians had enough of Abbas and his corrupt and greedy American-style politics. Hamas was a Black Panther style Party, with schools and meals for the community, and the stiff arm of resistance for the occupier.
I understand the Israeli frustration. When I was six, I had a best friend – Eddie Casey. I remember him as hot-tempered and we fought too many dreary scuffles. I was stronger but that only made Eddie madder, and sometimes I had to “accidentally” signal to my mother to break it up.
One day, during one of our fights, I found myself sitting astride his back. Knowing that Eddie would never quit, I began slamming his forehead against the pavement. He wouldn’t stop, I thought dully, and I had no choice….
There is the Israeli government dilemma. The guru of war, von Clausewitz, eloquently stated “The object of war is not the numbers of enemy you kill, but that you break their will.” Eddie and I eventually were allowed to play together, but things had changed between us. We never fought again. Unfortunately for Israel, Hamas right now is recruiting freshly enraged Eddie Caseys to take the place of soldiers killed, forced into exile or underground, or who have lost the will to resist.
What we are witnessing is the weirdest form of “nonviolence” on record – what I call after Gandhi: “Polish nonviolence.” Gandhi had marveled at Polish resistance to the Germans – “Polish cavalry charging German tanks,” he enthused, “it was almost nonviolence.”
The Zapatistas used this desperate strategy. The Pine Ridge occupiers of Wounded Knee used it. When Hamas agents drop those homemade missiles that in some cases barely crack the pavements of an overwhelmingly superior enemy, it is sayings in effect: “Come and get us, but if you do it the blood and fire and noise will wake up world opinion and make your life very messy.”
The most important part of such an action of “Polish Nonviolence” is that it underscores and capitalizes and italicizes and emphatically emphasizes the fact that the resisters most definitely do not consent to the status quo.
Perhaps I was successful in my resumed relationship with Eddie because, I firmly believe (perhaps deludedly) that I was innocent of any aggression toward my friend and only fought in self-defense. Israel’s agenda, whatever the truth of mine, is certainly not so innocent.
Here is an except of an article written in the JTA (Jewish and Israeli News) summarizing the Israeli National Security Council’s assessments for 2009. “Whatever happens, the NSC says, Israel must continue to pressure and weaken Hamas. If the current Hamas-Israeli truce in Gaza bre4aks down, the NSC recommends that Israel launch a wide-ranging operation to topple Hamas in Gaza. Whether that would mean reoccupying Gaza, and if so, for how long, the NSC does not say….To keep Abbas in power and the two-state solution alive, the NSC recommends that Israel prevent Palestinian elections.”
The object of greatest concern here is losing the diversion of the “Two state solution” which has the advantage of sounding eminently reasonable but which Israel will assuredly never allow to be attained.
If the two state solution is a delusion not meant to bring peace, it is worth taking a look at a one state solution. A significant number of Palestinians already embrace the idea. A single state could accept in principle the right of return for Palestinians AND the recognition of the West Bank settlements, leaving the details to negotiations rather than violence. A one state solution would also be by its very nature a secular state founded on religious freedom for all, removing the otherwise irresolvable conflict between Zionists and Islamists. Here is nation-building that even a Blue Dog could sink its teeth in.
It appears that military power is inadequate in crushing Hamas. An imprisoned population being battered into submission a la von Clausewitz, doesn’t play. Given world opinion and a decentralized media , time may be running out on Israeli ambitions. In the narrow confines of the midEast, the security blanket of Israel’s nuclear arsenal could leave it only with the useless option of mutually assured destruction.
I have faith that the Israeli people will see the writing on the wall and abandon the religious fantasies of Supreme Power and initiate the process of reconciliation inherent in a one state solution. Until that time, we must keep making it clear that we’ve had enough.
Paul Encimer

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

One way to divide American politics says my friend Richard Parker is between "Conspiracy Nuts" and "Conspiracy Denial Nuts." Displaying normal Establishment arrogance, Conspiracy Denial Nuts are in denial about any such category. Conspiracy denial as a form of "you can trust the Establishment," is just common sense realism and the rest of us are merely deviations from the norm.
The most prominent of these Conspiracy Denial Nuts include prestigious leftists - Chomsky certainly heads the list, Michael Albert of Z magazine is a special favorite of mine. Popular radical journalist Alexander Cockburn somewhat epitomizes the breed to the point of of being described as a "Coincidentalist" by Michael Parenti.
The descriptive term I prefer however is Establishment Leftists - what Claudio Katz in a recent Monthly Review may have meant in reference to Latin American politics by "the modern civilized left." Establishment Leftists are rooted, I believe, in the desperate desire not to appear Crazy.
Years ago, Richard Hofstadter, the fifties Dean of popular Political Science, took on what he called "the Paranoid Style" in American Politics. Hofstadter's thesis was that American Populism was the natural home of Paranoid Conspiracy theories, inevitably slanting toward the extreme right.
McCarthyism was the primal horror of the time that gave emotional reality to Hofstadter's thesis, ignoring of course the fact that Democrats like Truman and Humphrey were the first McCarthyites. Being a talented historian, Hofstadter grounded his category of Paranoid style in earlier movements, most importantly post Civil War Populism - exemplified by the career of Tom Watson. A brilliant leader of that movement, Watson began political life standing armed in the doorway defending a threatened ex-slave, yet ended it publicly defending the lynching of Negroes. Hofstadter deemed this an inevitable devolution.
Our Establishment Leftist takes this Hofstadter thesis as Gospel. Any form of Popular skepticism was viewed as dangerously tainted. Left credibility demanded instantly decrying any Populist Paranoids seeking a niche on the left. Thus the 911Truth movement can never be allowed access to leftist outlets unaccompanied by poisonous disclaimers. So Amy Goodman "allows" the author of The New Pearl Harbor airtime but only when dogged by a professional Nazi/Klan hunter. Or at a recent Media Accountability Conference at California's Sonoma State, primo Establishment Leftist Norman Solomon - two weeks before the Conference - demands that the presentation of 911Truth researcher Steven Jones be prefaced by disclaimers to Solomon's specifications.
Establishment Leftists can be selective in their paranoia. Recently David Barsamian whose shows are a much admired staple of my community radio station, KMUD, appeared locally as part of a book tour for his latest book Target Iran. Barsamian made it clear that war with Iran is a real possibility. Why then, he asked, did other Establishment Leftists like Chomsky and Tariq Ali believe an attack to be an impossibility? Because they mistakenly projected their rationality on otherwise thoroughly irrational players of the ilk of Bush and Cheney.
Nonetheless Barsamian discounted 911 scenarios that implicated the very irrational regime about to "target Iran." Instead he fell back on the thin rationale that Seymour Hersch told him "there was nothing to it." As if Hersch was the Platonic receptacle of Truth to whom all leaks flowed. As if the leaks Hersch was getting on Iran for instance weren't motivated by particular political self-interests on the part of the leakers.
Barsamian's service to truth is admittedly substantial - as is the case of otherwise totally admirable Establishment Leftists. My point in criticism such doyens of the Movement is not to deny their immense positive contributions. Establishment Leftists however are unable to encompass an important one of our grassroots political movements due to a fear of the loss of that illusory political commodity called Credibility.
Your average politician (and aren't they all?) needs to pile up credibility as a staging point for their next crucial lie. aradoxically, the Establishment Leftist fears the loss of credibility lest the Establishment reject them as a reserve receptacle for the next needed crucial truth! And, sadly, it may be the case for some that there is the fear that being tarred as a Conspiracy Nut could be that last straw: Down the drain would could an otherwise illustrious career in academia, journalism, political office-holding, executive directorship or some other source of nonprofit profit. Becoming a Conspiracy Denial Nut may be for some a relatively small price to pay for maintaining their minimum status by a minimal show of respect for the status quo.
This is not to assert some kind of moral superiority for us Conspiracy Nuts. In a world of limitless facts, scenarios and perspectives, each of us hobbles together by choice and chance a framework, a set homegrown categories, through which to grasp and order reality.Many Conspiracy Nuts are practically helpless in our ingrained skepticism - while others almost as instinctively cling to their rationality which is a career lifeline to the crackpot realism of the Established Order. Only a divine All encompassing can be expected to have an objective perspective outside our mere categories.
Barsamian meanwhile appeared in our locality under the sponsorship of Greenfuse of whose collective I am a member. He was pretty flawless on the Politically Correct Week in Review show that I co-host, as well as at our bookstore and at the Vet's Hall lecture. The Target Iran aspect of his talk was nicely summarized in the weekly newspaper. I have a host's responsibility therefore not to harshly handle my guest. So let me say that Barsamian proved that his silence on 911 when offered scenarios in the privacy of a bookstore book signing was not deafness. During his talk he admitted, apropos of another question altogether, that "he could be wrong" to have ignored the issue.
In defense of Conspiracy Nuts everywhere I had also unravelled my favorite flanking attack vis a vis 911: 1) given that war in general is a game between consenting parties in which "surprise" is not an absolute, and 2) given that in this game America has preferred her opponents to take the white pieces while reserving the black pieces of "surprise" attack to better involve her citizenry (Tonkin Gulf, the Maine, Pearl Harbor, the Mexican, Gulf, Korean and so on wars), why then 3) would this set of wars be any different?? Barsamian at the time stigmatized this view as crossing the line from skepticism to cynicism. This was not a particularly crushing rejoinder because after the 1st Gulf War I vowed to never say again "They wouldn't do that would they?" But I graciously accepted Barsamian's "apology" when he stated additionally apropos of nothing at his lecture that cynicism was perfectly understandable. Thank you, David.
More important to my education upon the actual appearance in the flesh of an Establishment Leftist even in so mild form was the renewal of my flagging interest in 911Truth and the revitalization of my chess piece thesis of American wars. I went back almost to the beginning of the Imperial Presidency - Truman, that unlikely Augustus Caesar. (FDR of course was The Caesar, a thorough Aristocrat leading the popular party against the failed oligarchy.)
See Part 2, The Gulf War syndrome - the New Korean War

Labels: Alexander Cockburn, Conspiracy Denial Nuts, Michael Albert, Noam Chomsky, Normon Solomon, Paranoid Politics