They say that only the good die young. In the short time he lived, it was given to Aaron Swartz to define the principal problem facing public life in the United States of America:

If it was conventional wisdom that a bunch of unelected bankers looking out for rich people were the reason everyone was out of work, politicians would be forced to explain to angry voters why we had this crazy system and might actually consider doing something about it. The late Aaron Swartz

This post is entitled, “democracy in an age of ‘unhappy capitalism’”. What do I mean by that, and what, if anything, does “happy capitalism” mean?

To explain how it works, here is a graph straight from the great vampire squid itself:

As you can see in the squid’s graph between 1960 and 1990, wages were up, while at the same time America’s corporations were making good money: I call that “happy capitalism”, because most of the working citizenry were reasonably content and investors were too.

After 1990 (neatly coinciding with the collapse of the USSR?) the relationship wages/profit becomes erratic and in the last two years corporate profits have shot up and wages have fallen dramatically.

What does this mean?

It means that you can make a lot of money without paying even skilled people very much. People are no longer used to make you rich, only to serve you in low paying jobs once you are rich. Most of the jobs being created now are low-paying service jobs.

That could be a problem because in a democracy “unused” and underpaid people can still vote and if they understood the mechanisms impoverishing them, this could cause problems for the “users” because as Aaron Swartz said, “politicians would be forced to explain to angry voters why we had this crazy system and might actually consider doing something about it“.

“Unhappy capitalism” then, is when articulate, educated, middle class people like Aaron Swartz, begin to question the system. In this way the “conventional wisdom” that Swartz talks about is created: in a national “conversation” of a great number of articulate, educated voters. Topic of the day: something has gone wrong, let’s all get together and fix it.

Making that conversation difficult, hopefully impossible, is a major objective of the users facing the formerly used.

Signal and noise

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This is the perfect occasion to resurrect one of my favorite rants, that political paralysis in America is not a byproduct of ideological struggle but the principal objective of the billionaire front, that in the interest of economy I call, the “Tea-Fox-Koch-Murdoch-Beck-Limbaugh-Party”.

Who benefits when we go over the fiscal cliff?

Are they incredibly, devilishly smart to pull this? Not really.

You don’t need to be very smart. You need to have a lot of money. There are people who are getting so much rent off their capital that the mere act of bending over to pick up a hundred dollar bill off the pavement would literally be a waste of their time.

With that kind of wealth comes freedom and the fear of losing it. They pay to create an environment that protects them, people are falling all over themselves to help them do it.

Brains are cheap when you have that kind of money, politicians are cheap, journalists are cheap, think tanks, etc. People are lining up to serve them, the crumbs from their table can buy a home, send kids to college. Things are often much simpler than they appear…. making them seem complicated costs a lot of money.

The good thing about this crisis is that more and more people can see who owns the world they live in.

There are people who can put $100,000 into the offshore account of a politician as easily as you or I can give a beggar 50 cents. They are the the 0.01%.

Since the fall of the USSR, these people have enjoyed a freedom and untrammeled power unknown since the post-Civil War period known as the “Gilded Age.” They are trying to avoid losing any of that freedom and power at any cost to the rest of us.

The method is to create so much ideological “noise” that rational thought and dialog is impossible. That was what the Krupps and the Thyssens did in Germany to stop the communists from taking over in the 1920s. Their boy blamed all the country’s troubles on the Jews and took the heat off the Krupps and the Thyssens, but the thing got out of hand and cost Germany several million dead and left the country in smoking ruins, but, hey, the Krupps and the Thyssens made money hand over fist all the way through the process from beginning to end, and are still today some of the richest families in Germany.

As Fitzgerald said to Hemingway, “the rich are different from us Ernest.”

Action and reaction, just as in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the grotesque abuses of the system brought forth a muscular reform movement to tame the beasts of the Gilded Age, today the feeling is growing all over the world that this new Gilded Age must also be brought under some sort of rational control and regulation. As the center of the world economic system, any general reform and regulation of globalization logically must begin in the United States of America.

That is what the one-percent are afraid of and that is why they fund and promote the paralysis of the American political system:

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Before starting off on the Tea Party’s craziness, I would like you to examine some images from two nearly identical tragedies that occurred over a hundred years and several thousand miles apart. Later in the post I hope to make a connection between these twin horrors and the strange metamorphosis of the American right. Please bear with me.

Compare this Reuters photograph of the Tazreen Fashions Fire, Bangladesh – 2012 with the photograph below of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire:

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, New York – 1911

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, New York – 1911

The great mystery of American politics, a mystery which no one in the world can fathom, not even most Americans, is why so much money, hot air and spittle is being spent on literally paralyzing the American political system and making it impossible, not just to negotiate solutions, but to even have an intelligent conversation about solving the problems facing everyone, everywhere today. For that is what the Tea Party is really about: making first thought, then negotiation, and finally action impossible.

What is all this sound and fury covering up?

In my opinion it has much to do with where contemporary globalization is leading, the forces that it is setting in motion, which for historically minded Americans could elicit a bit of dèjá vu.

It seems to me that the globalization of today is in many ways similar on a world scale to the explosion of growth, power and sophistication of the US economy in the period after the Civil War, commonly called “The Gilded Age“. This was the period of the “robber barons” and viewed nostalgically by many of the American right as a paradise of anarcho-capitalism. This was a period of immense growth and innovation, but also one of enormous inequality, suffering and exploitation and financial crisis, all of it interpenetrated by an ubiquitous political corruption as the enormous new wealth so recently created set about purchasing and deforming to its benefit the institutions of American government: federal, state and local.

The excesses of the Gilded Age gave birth to a mass reform movement in the United States called, “Progressivism“. This movement, in a titanic struggle, bridging decades, among other things brought into effect: the regulation of interstate commerce, the breaking up of the monopolies known as “trusts“, laws regulating the purity of food and drugs, the rise of labor unions, laws eliminating child labor and in 1913, even progressive income tax, something which still causes intense indignation on the American ultra-right.
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Readers of mine should not be under the impression that I am a big fan of Obama’s or of the Democrats… I wrote this back in 2008:

I find myself against almost everything that the Republicans stand for, but at least they seem to truly stand for what they say they stand for (although many evangelicals doubt this). I respect that quality, even in a jerk like Bush… He defends his people (the very, very rich) to the bone. But the Democratic Party to use highly technical language, really, really, sucks: with few exceptions, a herd of Judas Goats leading the poor to slaughter, bells a tingling.

Having said that I still say Obama is a better pick than Romney.

Here is what Roger Cohen writes today in the Washington Post:

On the movie screen, Robert F. Kennedy’s appeal is obvious: authenticity. He cared. He showed it. People saw that and cared about him in return. With Obama, the process is reversed. It’s hard to care about someone who seems not to care in return. I will vote for him for his good things, and I will vote for him to keep Republican vandals from sacking the government. But after watching Bobby Kennedy, I will vote for Obama with regret. I wish he was the man I once mistook him for.

I realize that voting for Obama is not an attractive proposition; it’s a little like having your leg cut off to save you from dying of gangrene… but that is the only thing on the menu. The Republican party is now in the hands of rogue billionaires who are stimulating fascism in order to evade taxes and regulation… They want to even go back and repeal the reforms of Teddy Roosevelt. This is really that simple: avoiding a ultra-right coup d´etat.

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

At the center of all the nuttiness of today’s Republicans is their bankrollers’ fear of regulation… The ceaseless culture warfare is merely a tactic to simultaneously attract and confuse a sufficient number of the ignorant to enable the “one-percenters” to paralyze the political process.

Examined under this light their behavior is anything but irrational: they have much to fear, because the globalized world is crying out for regulation.

An illustrative example:

Much of today’s instability, even terrorism and the drug trade, is caused by the growing number of “failed states”, many of them rich in valuable commodities, whose elites, instead of reinvesting their profits in developing their countries, literally loot them, taking the money to opaque, offshore tax havens. What governance remains in these wretched lands consists of totally corrupt political jobbers and armed thugs. These areas often become safe havens for terrorist organizations and state cover for international drug cartels.

This dynamic, so blatantly evident in the third world is also at work in the most developed and sophisticated economies, starving the governments of the money necessary to provide essential goods and services to their populations. This may sound extreme, but if George W. Bush had been a serious man, he could have done a lot more for the wellbeing of the American people, as well as world peace, harmony and the defeat of terrorism, if, in lieu of invading Afghanistan and Iraq, he had invaded Switzerland and the Cayman Islands instead.

Solving all the problems that the future has in store will require money and the money is right there under our noses. In short, bringing the oceans of the world’s black money under state control is an essential first step to achieving the general welfare of humanity.

Although with a less picturesque cast of characters, climate change is also an obvious area where the leading states are going to have to cooperate closely to fashion very strict regulations and enforce them with extreme vigilance and severity.

I am convinced that rather than any sincere questioning of the science involved, it is the simple fear of the mere existence of international and state organizations endowed with the power and technical resources necessary to bring world climate change under some sort of rational control that motivate the massive quantities of money spent on questioning the reality of climate change. It is that “rational control” that the one-percent fear and have reason to fear: that and no other is the coming “revolution”. Theirs is a “counter-revolution” before the fact.

An example of the tactics that the “counter-revolution” uses to avoid approaching the issue of common sense regulation: regulating the sale of assault rifles, weapons whose only purpose is enabling a lone individual to kill a large number of human beings in a short space of time.

Now, an active and focused one-percenter can take decisions with his money, and the influence that money brings, that can affect the lives of thousands, even millions of his fellow human beings; all his life he lives with the sensation of empowerment just as a fish lives with the sensation of water, he breathes it and swims in it, it is his element, often since birth… just like the fish.

For the average poor slob, probably the only feeling of comparable empowerment available to him in the midst of his general powerlessness is having an AK-47 in his closet with a few banana clips and a couple of thousand rounds of soft-nose bullets… just in case. Threatening that “empowerment” with regulation is a very efficient way of getting him on the same wavelength of the Kochs, Trumps and Romneys of this world.

This is just one example; there are dozens and dozens of others. In the future we might discuss the mental Kama Sutra that allows the supposedly devout Catholic, Paul Ryan, to bed Ayn Rand with Jesus of Nazareth, a blasphemous and perfectly surreal union, which is the proof, if any were needed, of how shameless this counter-revolution is. The “revolution” it counters is, of course, nothing more and nothing less than applied common sense.

Bottom line: America’s ultra-right and the moneyed individuals that empower them are at war with simple common sense… and from their point of view that makes all kinds of sense.

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

Obama must be doing something right

Look, American politics is like Woody Allen’s restaurant, you know the one with, “such bad food and such small portions”. The best you can realistically hope for as President of the United States is a kinder, gentler, mafia don. That is more or less what we have got.

Despite kowtowing to Wall Street, Netanyahu and the NRA and using drones to kill innocent children, Barack Obama makes the Tea Party people and assorted rednecks froth at the mouth; Commentary Magazine loathes him; Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and other assorted rogue billionaires are spending millions upon millions to remove him from power…  somehow all of these folks are lacking gratitude and you might wonder why they attack Barack Obama so savagely… why is this?  This is going to be the dirtiest campaign in history… Obama must be doing something right. Every time I open the Drudge Report my desire to see Obama stay in the White House grows. It’s “tribal” I guess.

He is a war criminal?

Every US president in my lifetime (and I go back all the way to Truman, who dropped the atom bomb on helpless civilians) have been war criminals. So it’s safe to say that nobody that the starry eyed former Obamite would deign to vote for is ever going to inhabit the White House.

However, either Obama or Romney is going to live there in 2013, and frankly, with all his defects I think Obama is a better choice than Mitt. Back in 2008 Obama was an unknown quantity, we only had his own highly embroidered story to go on. But after four years in the White House, I think we know Obama pretty well and he is a vast improvement on his predecessor. Mitt Romney on the other hand has been in public life for a long time, but the more we see of him, the less we seem to know and frankly, I have no desire to know him any better. Compared to Bush junior, at least Obama speaks well and doesn’t look stupid. He has left Iraq and although he hasn’t ended Afghanistan, he as yet has not started any new wars of his own.

I am not trying to sell Obama now as any messiah.  Four years ago I was afraid he was a fraud, which at that time in a sense he was, now he has proven to be a reasonably competent president, during a very, very difficult period… Obama designed himself to harmlessly drain off the progressive energy that Bush created. But… anybody that really believed he would be anything different was naive. I took tremendous shit for pointing this out in 2008. The alternative today is Mitt Romney, who seems to me a caricature of himself.

You wont vote for Obama?

Enjoy Romney. I was not fooled by Obama in 2008 and I’m not fooled now, but John McCain is Abraham Lincoln compared to Mitt Romney, even Sarah Palin has a certain goofy consistency compared to Mitt.

Yeah, character counts, these turkeys have the atom bomb, open carry. I am not an Obama loyalist I wasn’t before and I’m not one now. He is however, no less than the President of the United States and I think with all his defects that he is vastly superior to Romney, who is the only realistic alternative.

You can vote for whomsoever you want to, but it’s either going to be Obama or Romney that fills the next vacancy on the Supreme Court… Chew on that for a while.   Again I repeat: there is going to be an election and either a Democrat or a Republican is going to win it. I think the Democrats would want to change the Supreme Court ruling, because without superpacs they have a distinct demographic advantage that the Republicans don’t have.  I think it is important that nobody influenced by the Tea Party get to choose any new Supremes for at least 16 years. Campaign financing and the “personhood” of corporations are the whole ballgame.

Anybody that thinks you can reform the US system from the top down, without several billion dollars to spend is (fill in adjective of choice). The only way it can be done is like MLK did it back then. Thousands upon thousands of totally committed people demonstrating, sitting in, writing talking, going to jail, getting their heads busted… The Civil Rights movement changed America radically: nobody who didn’t know America before it came along could ever know how much it changed America. The way to influence mainstream politics from the grassroots has been developed, no need to reinvent the wheel. That is the model, that’s how it’s done.  Study it and like the fella said, “Go ye and do likewise”.

It is not the same for a Martin Luther King to be pressuring an LBJ than to imagine him pressuring Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush… or president Romney.

It seems to me that the people who were starry eyed about Obama in 2008 and consider him some sort of antichrist today were dumb coming and are now dumb going.

The White House is an ugly place, where ugly things happen, but there still are important differences. The Republican Party is now in the hands of genuine fascists and should be kept out.

Really, there are no “fine points” in this election. The choices are not attractive. You can vote for Obama, who is a jive-ass, bullshit artist, but intelligent, prudent and lucid. Or you can vote for Romney, who is a joke without a punchline. Or you can vote for somebody who isn’t going to win even one state or you can take your ballot and put it on a nail next to the toilet. That is all there is on the menu.

The bottom line is that one of the two men is going to be president and any democrat is going to be more beholding to the unions and to minorities than any Republican… and so it is, hold one’s nose and vote Democrat like my grandparents and my parents did. Tribal.

Cross posted: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

Things are looking pretty dismal at the moment. The economic situation is the worst in my lifetime, and I was born at the end of WWII.  The bad news comes fast and furious.

When I am subjected to an information overload, I occasionally experience some sort of intuitive flash connected to images, a sudden understanding/epiphany/gestalt.

The other day the Tea Party movement revealed itself to me in a poetic metaphor that put them into a different perspective. Something that although just as grotesque, is at the same time touchingly human in its vulnerability. Read the rest of this entry →

I am recently arrived here at FDL and thus in the process of introducing myself, so I thought that some new readers might appreciate a little context to see exactly what I mean when I emphasize the importance of the OWS movement.

I consider this highly original political phenomenon,  in essence, as an awakening or “satori” of the American people. I believe it is an American political, social, ethical, moral and one by one personal, awakening from what seemed to me a sort of drug induced slumber of Jacksonian (Michael not Andrew) proportions. With a view to providing that context I am re-posting something I wrote on October 18th 2010. Re-reading it, I find the lineaments of its sinister implications are even more visible now than when I wrote it.  David Seaton

Herman Cain

“Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself. It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed,” the ex-Godfather’s Pizza CEO declared. New York Daily News

Here is an easy prediction: at the very least, Herman Cain is going to be the coming Republican vice-presidential candidate… at the very least. That is what the polls show and barring any terrible gaff on his part from here to the convention, Herman Cain is bound to be on the ticket… He is as radically conservative as the flakiest Tea Party whacko and at the same time formidably focused, with proven administrative competence… This is not Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman we are talking about; he is as different from them as Godzilla is from your girlfriend’s pet iguana.

Herman Cain obviously presents a formidable problem for the Democrats and for progressives in general. The quote from the New York Daily News, will give you a clear idea of what we are up against. Read the rest of this entry →

Severe Concomitant Esotropia

The most obvious things are often the hardest to see: for example, without a mirror it is impossible to see the nose on your face… unless of course you suffer from severe concomitant esotropia, in which case you hardly see anything else but the nose on your face.  Much of American political discourse is victim to both mirrorlessness and mental esotropia.

Although the Tucson shooter had no known political affiliation, because a congresswoman was attacked, the Tucson massacre is being treated as a political act. In a sense I think it is it is one, but only for what it reveals about the contradictory pull of the American reality on the America’s subconscious.

Some might say that, since the perpetrator of the massacre is insane, his act has no meaning in itself, simply the “tale told by an idiot”. This would be missing the point. Insane people’s acts do have meaning, but the meanings are private, dark, obscure and must be read as metaphors, as in the interpretation of dreams.  They live in their dream world and perhaps their dream world is not so different from ours, differing mostly in that we only visit that world in our sleep or under the influence of drugs and they spend their tortured lives inhabiting it.  Their life is a “daymare”, so to speak. Perhaps we could learn about our own hidden darkness by studying his visible darkness.

Violent fantasies spring from the frustration of powerlessness.

Jared Loughner  dreamed of the power of a gun, he dreamed of killing, the ultimate power:  darkened living rooms and movie theaters all over America are filled with men, women and even children, who dream the same violent dreams, every day, for hours on end… The difference: Jared Loughner’s dream came true.

As insane as Jared Loughner is, there are hundreds of people in Tucson even crazier than he is… the thousands of people who went to the “Cross Roads of the West” gun show in Tucson the Saturday after the massacre… business was brisk. That is what is unique… not the killings themselves.

The United States is not alone among developed nations in having an occasional citizen run amok with a gun. Just the other day in the Catalonian town of Olot, here in Spain,  we had such an incident.

An older man was about to lose his job and have the bank foreclose on him, (sound familiar?) So he took his rabbit gun, loaded it with buckshot, went into a cafe and shot his boss and his boss’s adult son dead, then got into his car and drove to the bank, where he shot dead the bank manager and an employee that he found there, and then he calmly went to the police station and turned himself in. He will now be lodged and fed by the Spanish taxpayer. None of his neighbors ever considered the killer crazy, but all were in agreement that he had always been a mean and nasty son of a bitch… America has no monopoly of those.

What makes American gun violence rather unique is the type and free availability of the weapons we employ when we run amok and more unique than that is the wide public demand that military grade weapons be kept available to all, despite frequent massacres.

It is hard to carry out a massacre on the order of Tucson or Virginia Tech with only a double barreled shotgun.  Glock  automatics and assault rifles are not freely available in Spain and  I don’t think very many Spanish people would like them to be. They do not feel that their “freedom” is endangered by not being allowed to own automatic pistols and assault rifles.

More than examining the fevered brain of Jared Loughner, I am interested in examining why so many Americans feel they need to carry such deadly weapons in order to be “free”. Of what? From what? For what? Are they right to feel threatened?  If so, why?

Obviously they do feel their freedom is threatened and depending on how they define the word freedom, they may have reason to feel so.

There are over 300M Americans living in a military juggernaut occupying a huge space that spans a continent: the world’s most populated country after China and India.  This enormous collective is a grab bag of ethnic and religious origins and quite a few of the inhabitants are recent arrivals who have only a tenuous grasp of the official language.

However disagreeable this might seem,  when there are so many different people, impersonal rules and laws have to govern every aspect of the relations and conflicts between total strangers. Nothing can be left to chance. The larger and more heterogeneous the collective, the greater number of rules needed and the greater the severity needed to enforce them. I have talked to Spanish bankers who have been operating banks in the USA and they are amazed at the mind boggling quantities of rules and regulations and the armies of lawyers you need to do even the simplest things. The fear of litigation is always in the room.  Nothing can be taken as “understood”,  everything has to be on paper.

Thinking this over, it occurred to me that the US was an extreme example of an enormous collective of unrelated strangers.  A natural candidate for being a micromanaged dictatorship. What seemed strange, when seen under this prism, was that at the same time this collective  maintains a stubborn fiction of great and untrammeled individualism and personal liberty.

I say “fiction”, because the USA is a country where you can get sixteen years in jail for stealing a candy bar, where the prisons are full of people sent there for possessing small quantities of cannabis, where the death penalty still exists… you name it. Certainly the difference in punishment for those who caused the financial crisis and those who steal candy bars, seems more in keeping with a repressive and punitive kleptocracy then a land where supposedly “all men are created equal”.

Of course if we look at that phrase, we have to remember that is was written by a man who owned African slaves and lived on land stolen from the Native-Americans, therefore it might be worth the trouble to subject it to a severe exegesis, because it is not truly clear what a person in Thomas Jefferson’s position and time actually meant when he used the word, “men” or the word, “all” or the word “equal” or for that matter even what he meant when used the words “created” and “are”.

Sometimes the ringing words of classic texts are less sonorous when rendered into the common speech of today. If for example, you compare a text from the King James Bible with the same text in the New American Standard Bible, you’ll get an idea of what I  am talking about.  But, more than that, under the pressures of its immense size and diversity, American English seems to have deteriorated rapidly since the end of the Second World War, until many examples of contemporary American public speech are so filled with cryptic euphemisms that they seem products of a Google translation from the Japanese. I could write an entire rant about the newly coined euphemism, “inappropriate behavior“, which appears to cover everything from picking your nose to child molesting.

Fortunately some Americans have not lost the ability to write simple, clear, declarative sentences. Here is how Paul Krugman describes the idea some Americans have of freedom:

One side of American politics (…) believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty. Paul Krugman

Using Krugman to help us translate the Declaration of Independence into contemporary right wing American English; the following phrase, written, signed and promulgated by slave holders, which reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, might be freely rendered in Tea Party speak as, “By God, everybody like me has certain privileges which cannot be taken away: you aren’t allowed to kill us, we can do anything we want, and we are here to have a good time.”

I believe their paranoia is justified. Reality is not on their side.

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com