Freaking Out!

Robin Beck of Moveon.org is "freaking out":

I'm freaking out. Despite President Obama and Vice President Biden dominating the past few debates, the race is still incredibly close. ... It's scary. And I'm not sleeping much any more. This whole election is coming down to which side can turn out the most voters. And the only thought that helps me fall asleep—rather than staying up worrying—is that I know I can count on MoveOn members like you, ——, to step up and help us win.

Relax, Robin.

First, it's a close "race" because it's bogus. The "contest" is set up and reported (shaped) to be close so that real differences are not possible.

Second, it's close because the only difference is that one party and its candidate represents Wall Street and the Military with lip service (but not too much!) to so-called liberals and the other party and its candidate represents Wall Street and the Military with lip service to so-called conservatives). To win, each also has to pay lip service to the other group as well. That's what fighting for the center means. And that's why it's necessarily always "close". It is a system designed not to challenge the hegemony of Wall Street and the Military.

And relax, all of you who receive these Moveon.org or similar e-mails. They are fundraising devices, nothing more. Moveon.org is part of the whole machine that requires this "fight" for the center so that they can foment fear among "liberals" just as the tea party foments fear among "conservatives". Meanwhile, Bush expanded Clinton's security state and submission to the banksters, Obama expanded Bush's, and Romney would only expand Obama's.

The threat of fascism is real, but it is already here, it started in a concerted way 30 years ago with the election of Ronald Reagan, and it continued to grow without slowing under every Republican and Democratic administration, Congress, and Supreme Court since.

So relax about the election. It's a charade.

There's plenty of real stuff to freak out about.

anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Plutocrats vs the people

Doug Broome of Vancouver writes:

The British Labour Party had an objective that a quarter of candidates be blue collar workers. And social democratic parties generally have stronger worker representation through legislators who rise from the union movement.

The U.S. is unique among major democracies in its political duopoly which silences social democratic voices. By international stadards the Democrats are moderate conservatives while the Republicans are almost without parallel.

The working class and the poor have few friends in American party establishments. The result is an increasingly impoverished underclass, low unionization and wages, and widespread worker exploitation.

In any other democracy the AFL-CIO would have split from the Democrats long ago to be a foundation of a pro-union, redistributive, socially progressive party of the left which honour taxes as the price of civilization. And long ago the U.S. would have joined all other advanced democracies in achieving universal health insurance.

Unionized teachers are so vilified that education itself suffers. And despite very low taxes and public investment by international standards, a prevalent anti-tax hysteria guarantees that public investment and social programs will be increasingly sub-mediocre compared to other advanced democracies. For instance, neither Obama nor Romney have a word to say about a shameful 22 per cent child poverty rate.

For want of a left-wing party, the U.S. is sacrificing its future to an emergent plutocracy.

A million homes ... sometimes. And minus other users.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has announced the approval of the biggest fucking wind energy facility in the country which will take up 350 square miles of Wyoming. Salazar said it will provide the electricity for 1,000,000 homes.

What he did not make clear is that the output of this 3-gigawatt facility will average the average energy use of 1 million homes. That it will actually provide that much energy only 40% of the time. That those times will not necessarily coincide with actual need. And that residential use represents less than 40% of electricity demand.

But if he said that, it would probably be too obvious how ridiculous it is to spend $4.5 billion, and how criminal to industrialize 350 square miles of open land, for an energy source that doesn't really work.

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism

More Greenwashing

Here are ads from two very non-green companies in the current issue of North American Windpower: war profiteer Lockheed-Martin and polluter Dow Chemical.

   
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Que vivà Chavéz!

Seumas Milne writes at The Guardian:

... Despite claims that Latin America's progressive tide is exhausted, leftwing and centre-left governments continue to be re-elected – from Ecuador to Brazil and Bolivia to Argentina – because they have reduced poverty and inequality and taken control of energy resources to benefit the excluded majority.

That is what Chávez has been able to do on a grander scale, using Venezuela's oil income and publicly owned enterprises to slash poverty by half and extreme poverty by 70%, massively expanding access to health and education, sharply boosting the minimum wage and pension provision, halving unemployment, and giving slum communities direct control over social programmes.

To visit any rally or polling station during the election campaign was to be left in no doubt as to who Chávez represents: the poor, the non-white, the young, the disabled – in other words, the dispossessed majority who have again returned him to power. Euphoria at the result among the poor was palpable: in the foothills of the Andes on Monday groups of red-shirted hillside farmers chanted and waved flags at any passerby.

Of course there is also no shortage of government failures and weaknesses which the opposition was able to target: from runaway violent crime to corruption, lack of delivery and economic diversification, and over-dependence on one man's charismatic leadership. And the US-financed opposition campaign was a much more sophisticated affair than in the past. Capriles presented himself as "centre-left", despite his hard right background, and promised to maintain some Chavista social programmes. ...

Venezuela's revolution doesn't offer a political model that can be directly transplanted elsewhere, not least because oil revenues [which have quadrupled under Chavez] allow it to target resources on the poor without seriously attacking the interests of the wealthy. But its innovative social programmes, experiments in direct democracy and success in bringing resources under public control offer lessons to anyone interested in social justice and new forms of socialist politics in the rest of the world.

For all their problems and weaknesses, Venezuela and its Latin American allies have demonstrated that it's no longer necessary to accept a failed economic model, as many social democrats in Europe still do. They have shown it's possible to be both genuinely progressive and popular. Cynicism and media-fuelled ignorance have prevented many who would naturally identify with Latin America's transformation from recognising its significance. But Chávez's re-election has now ensured that the process will continue – and that the space for 21st-century alternatives will grow.

human rights

Why Obama can't debate

Obama was always a poor debater, so the only surprise in last week's match-up was Romney's gusto.

Obama is a poor debater because he does not stand for anything. He is essentially a servant of Wall Street hiding in cliché liberal rhetoric. He is moderator-in-chief.

He can not respond to critics from the left, because he wants to believe he is on their side but would have to admit they are right, that he is not at all on their side.

And he can not respond to critics from the right, because he would have to show that they are wrong, which he can not do, because he needs his liberal supporters to believe he is on their side.

Poor man: how to reassure the fascists as well as the vestigial liberals.

And any challenger can easily upset his delicate balancing act by upping the ante, forcing him to defend one or the other, to take on the role of conservative or liberal in the charade of U.S. elections. The incumbent wants to remain neither, throwing rhetorical and occasional executive sops to one constituency or another, and the challenger, if victorious, will become neither in the same way (and in turn challenged in the same way). Thus we are asked to choose between Coke and Pepsi, and those that would choose neither (thinking a cup of tea, perhaps, or glass of seltzer would better serve) are ostracized, clearing the field for this mock politics.

Update, Oct. 18:  When Romney tells you that Obama's responses to the Bush recession didn't help middle class families, he should be asked how his family fared. But that would reveal that Obama has done very well by Romney, which neither of them want to publicize.

anarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Billionaires versus society

Michael Hiltzik wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

Walker's own initiative, like others carrying the Peterson imprimatur, properly acknowledges that fiscal responsibility requires tax increases as well as spending cuts, though people can argue in good faith about how to balance the two. But the hallmark of [billionaire Peter] Peterson's worldview is to view social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare strictly as fiscal expense items, ignoring their roots as moral commitments to American citizens that cross generations and unite economic classes.

These programs form the warp and woof of the American fabric. Portraying them, as Peterson does, as "safety net" initiatives that have outlived their relevance for all but the most destitute Americans is an artful way of destroying their universal appeal.

The danger in the economic debate in Washington comes from treating our fiscal problems as if they spring from the structure of our emblematic public social insurance programs, when the truth is that ill-advised tax cuts and unrestrained military spending have played a more important role.

The shame of Washington, on the other hand, comes from the fact that almost every organization promoting the grand fiscal bargain in which those programs will be on the table has accepted, somewhere and somehow, money from Pete Peterson.

That's an important characterization: Social Security and Medicare — and their future expansion — are not “safety nets” but rather the very fabric of a vital society.

human rights, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism