cheese it, the cops!

unstrategic communications

i do not understand what everyone from kerry to the military mouthpieces think they're accomplishing by pretending all day every day that everything is going fine against isis, even as they get their ass kicked again and again. truly, perhaps they are deluding themselves in order to enhance their self-esteem? or perhaps they have taken on board the profound postmodern insight that appearance is everything, that confidence wins the battle, and that the world outside their fluffy little heads is a story that they can win through re-narration. isis prefers munitions. or perhaps they think that acting like they live in a hallucination will win them public support. no, on the contrary, they ought to be painting a dire picture instead of waving off massive defeats as little setbacks. that really might martial some public support if they intend to continue at all. meanwhile, they are degrading and defeating themselves, as well as talking jive all day.

the strategy is entirely incomprehensible: they are sending in iran with air support to re-take ramadi. it's quite as though they are trying to touch off a sunni/shia war to engulf the whole region, which is what is actually happening. i would like to hear what the government of saudi arabia is saying about this, and it would hardly be surprising if the saudis are more or less supporting isis in various ways. they have to read this as part of iranian expansion through the whole region and they have to be working on stopping it. one would think that the saudis are pleased if aqap controls large swathes of yemen, e.g. meanwhile the us is blowing up iran with "war rhetoric" as they also try to negotiate a deal on nukes with them and use their "militias" as the shia ground force to conquer the sunni bits of iraq. there is nothing - really, nothing - in this scenario that could count as a victory. they are fucking themselves from all angles at once (sorry, i've been watching veep), and their strategy is to act like they're enjoying it.

now i realize that it is a difficult situation, presenting no obvious solution. but this is just insane. the goal appears to be total defeat by definition and maximizing total corpses. seriously, what counts as winning? iran de facto taking anbar and killing everyone? their actual strategy is only to yap in a positive mode. but even these people with their pollsters and communications experts are going to be broken, thoroughly and deservedly, by reality.

duran duran duran, &c

martin o'malley, defending his legacy on cnn as he runs for president: "we've got to constantly improve our policing, and our policing of the police." now that is a good basic statement of one extreme dilemma of statism: who will police the police who are policing the police? and who will police the police who are policing the police who are policing the police? if you were sincere about trying to restrain the arbitrary power of the state, you would be instituting an infinite regress of oppression. good luck! you are definitely going to need to annex all resources of the society, and then all those in the universe. for one reason or another (for example, that the state has the power by definition to take stuff, a circumstance under which most people will convince themselves that they have the best reasons to take ever-more), we've been in that spiral for centuries, with no end in sight.

ps, martin o'malley is now a non-starter as a presidential candidate.

oops

in iraq, the us is aligned with iran; it's all about arming up shia militias, which one could be forgiven for thinking was the purpose of the invasion, since that was its tangible and predictable and intentional result. on the other hand, in yemen, we're aligned with the saudis. i daresay the saudi strategy on the ground in yemen is to arm up al qaeda in the arabian peninsula and give them air support. that is, we are supporting both the iranian mullahs and al qaeda here and there while opposing them elsewhere as we mechanically condemn them both. (then there's assad v isis; we support each against the other. israel and egypt both need ever-more extreme weapons. we support and hate every side in libya, etc.) so i'd say this to the state department or the pentagon: if you can't come up with a strategy that isn't just arming your declared enemies ("the terrorists"), you should quit. obviously there's no way to win if you're on all sides at once, or if you strongly support everything you condemn, and so on. we're a very yappy nation, but not the thinkiest. if you described our strategy as trying to make sure that the whole region is consumed by the maximum possible total war as soon as possible, that would at least make our decisions 'rational'.

 

state formation

one account of what's going on with isis puts the blame on 'stateless' or 'ungoverned' areas (another traditional formulation is 'failed state'). that's where the danger is suposed to lie, where terror blooms. but, first, surely the problems of syria and iraq are basically fomented by oppressive/corrupt governements. and second, is provides a pretty good model of how states arise (obviously, it calls itself a state) a more realistic version than the just-so stories of a hobbes or locke. people don't band together for mutual protection; they band together for rapine and sack (or religious fanaticism, or both). then as they roll in, you face a choice: die/lose evertything, or declare your loyalty to the sackers. pretty easy choice. your loyalty will expressed as tribute/protectio/taxes. then you are under the gang's protection, and they will start to consolidate a base by providing social services as well as physical protection from themselves and others. that's how the crips behaved in la, e.g., or hamas in gaza, and i speculate that it is the origin of the political state.

peaches

the idea, currently bruited by palin and hinted at by many others, that obama should be impeached for things like granting waivers to the aca, is just ridiculous. but i say again that nothing in the history of the republic has been as impeachable as nsa. the extreme abuse of power, the global violation of the constitution, the performance of billions of acts that would be criminal if not done by officials: those are the sort of abuses of citizens that impeachment was designed to redress. if not, as jefferson said, insurrection is the only possibility. that's going to be hard when they have all our communications, however. 

eeek!

more and more, i'm grooving on the way governments use the word 'terroriist'. e.g. the government of the ukraine, such as it is, is calling their largely hypothetical actions against russian separatists 'anti-terror operations'. oh, bashar assad is another who calls any disagreement with himself terrorism. i assume vlad putin is calling the gov of ukraine terrorists; he calls everyone a terrorist. i get the propaganda value, i suppose, though surely that is fading fast as the word loses all meaning, in the manner of words in the mouths of government officials from time immemorial. what they are showing, however, is that they regard any disagreement with themselves as terrifying, the little pussies. 

putin on the hits

really, i have not taken sides on ukraine so far, and in the first post where i sort of predicted an invasion (feb 27), i speculated that the us, faced with a similar situation, would consider military intervention too. but now let me point out a few things about putin. he consolidated his power and established his reputation with the chechen genocide. people claimed to be worried about security at the olympics, but there is no one you'd rather be handling your security if you don't care how it's done. he used tried and true techniques: rounding up the young man of, e.g., dagestan, torturing them, and dumping their bodies in shallow graves. he may be the richest man in the world, with all the feeling of impunity such a status bequeaths. he has no significant internal opposition, or threat to his political status; by a hundred techniques he has eliminated or isolated opponents. i don't regard him as a classic semi-cracked conqueror a la hitler or napoleon; but he is cagey and extremely aggressive and brutal when he wants to be. there is liable to be again something well-described as an empire when he is done.

stick it

obama and many other rationalizers of oppression take this approach, among a hundred other distractions, red herrings, etc, to the nsa: hey google and facebook do it, so hahaha! first of all, no they don't, in many dimensions. really do you think facebook is putting backdoor code into google, etc? but here's the thing: i'll be as worried about google or verizon having my info as i am about the us government when google has 'the greatest military the world has ever known', sprawling systems of incarceration, the power of coercive taxation, thousands of heavily armed thugs in suits, predator drones, high-end torturers, and so on. until then, take this argument and stick it.

misunderstood ideologies

speaking of marx, etc. it's true, capitalism has had its bad moments. but you show me where adam smith or milton friedman were all like: people should be brutally exploited! there should be chronic systemic poverty for most people! or anything like that at all. have you even read friedman? capitalism is a beautiful, harmless vision of human freedom, though of course every attempt to realize it in fact has been a horrendous moral disaster. that's just been kind of random, really; sometimes we ideologies just have a run of bad luck out there in the 'real world'. we get misinterpreted by assholes. sometimes it's nothing but assholes and their victims for centuries, really, but you gotta believe! real capitalism has never been tried. that's why i'm calling for immediate deregulation in every respect.

at his discretion

obviously, the administration can keep open whatever bits of the government it pleases. e.g. chuck hagel recalled the defense department. and though they have suspended many programs that help people, they have preserved all oppressive mechanisms: the military, fbi, our amazing structure of universal surveillance. so let me ask you this: does or does not the budget of the us government have to originate in and spending be authorized by the house of representatives? i propose not at all, and if congress went on strike, the whole thing would just keep right on. obama seems to be shutting down bits in the order in which it makes for the best propaganda, but i don't detect the limits: what can he not spend without authorization, etc? anyway, if you think the constitution has any connection to the way this sucker is actually governed, i say you're wrong. it's like, you know, the soviet constitution: a beautiful model of reason and freedom that had nothing to do with anything in the actual world.

everyone's a critic

heterosexual romance is difficult for all of us, even billionaires, repulsive mayors of san diego, and dictators. admittedly therapy, anti-depressants, sad country songs, and changing my identity and moving to the yukon have not worked for me. apparently, kim jong-un just takes the direct approach: having his gf and her whole pop group "machine-gunned". how you like me now, baby?

 

 

 

it's morning again in bob filner

here are a couple of fine pieces on nsa from the wall street journal, which - remarkably - has been very aggressive in its coverage and condemnation. i'd say this has been a pretty good moment to see who the decent human beings, clear thinkers, and people who keep faith with american ideals really are, and any time you've got kucinich and noonan together in their outrage, you might want to listen up.

from a roundup by peggy noonan:

If you assume all the information that can and will be gleaned will be confined to NSA and national security purposes, you are not sufficiently imaginative or informed. If you believe the information will never be used wrongly or recklessly, you are touchingly innocent.

If you assume you can trust the administration on this issue you are not following the bouncing ball, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who told Congress under oath the NSA didn't gather "any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans" (he later had to apologize) to President Obama, who told Jay Leno: "We don't have a domestic program." What we do have, the president said, is "some mechanism that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack."

Oh, we have more than that.

 

 bob filner, currently looking for employment, would make an excellent nsa director. 

 

 

 

what is totalitarianism today?

it's true that i've been throwing around 'totalitarianism,' and i do think we're at a pivotal moment, a moment when, thanks largely to snowden, we can see clearly what's happening, a moment we'll look back on from the camps and go, 'well, that was our last shot.' but, stimulated by the author of possible experience, i do want to try to do something a bit more careful and definitional. one thing that we should immediately acknowledge is that whatever form totalitarianism is taking here now, it is not the same as the forms it has taken elsewhere in the past. it won't be shrouded in marxist ideology, of course, or be fascism, exactly, as that emerged historically. well that's good, because those ideologies were grotesquely false and unbelievably annoying. but what might it mean now?

a general definition encompassing the whole miserable history might start with how hierarchical a society is in a variety of dimensions (economics, politics, military, information, rights, aesthetics, status, skills, access to weaponry, etc), how entrenched those structures are, and how much the hierarchies of all these dimensions overlap or coincide. also, i'd look for carceral institutions on a large scale - prisons, internment facilities and so on - and of course the police power to fill them up and keep people inside. also consciousness-forming activities dominated by the central authority or pinnacle of the hierarchy: propaganda, education, media regulation, for example. also sheer centralization of coinciding hierarchies over large territories, reduction of local autonomy or any centers of power outside the center, from individuals to pretty large social systems, all of which are to whatever extent possible incorporated or dominated from the pinnacle.

a particularly central feature of totalitarianism, it seems to me, is a merger of state and economy, or of political/police and economic power. fascism had that (and much else) in common with communism, and with the classic military juntas (egypt right now, for example), and our system has that too, to an ever-more pronounced extent. snowden showed that among many other things: the regime of total surveillance is a 'public/private partnership,' though neither 'public' nor 'private' has any real meaning anyway at this point.

now i do note that i can still say things like this, so the current configuration has not in the classic hitler/stalin/pinochet fashion tried to achieve total control over the content of communications or a total regime of censorship. and at least until recently, i would have said that the current leaders have figured out that previous totalitarian regimes put way too much emphasis on repressing dissent. if you really have very pervasive political and economic and police power, dissent does not threaten it until you reach a point close to popular insurrection (which can be directly put down in a pinch with your overwhelming resources, weaponry, personnel; it's unlikely anyway if it's obviously futile.) see, if you're not driven by ideological or religious fanaticism, then a lot of these procedures just look non-cost-effective. (if you are a fanatic, of course, nothing looks more important than killing disagreement.) but totalitarianism is expensive no matter how you cut it, of course. that's one reason you need the police and economic hierarchies to be the same. 

i do think that's one thing that today's historically-minded totalitarian would shake his head at in the classical varieties: oh my god that's crazy: a soldier in every apartment or an active attempt to have an informant in every conversation or to kill people for subversive graffiti reduces your profit margin or the resources available for other projects and unnecessarily irritates people.

the new totalitarianism might not have the charismatic-yet-ridiculous systems of all history and reality, the apocalyptic flava, or the tinhorn-messiah-and-his-blank-eyed-acolytes structure of some previous attempts. a more rational calculation of costs and margins would be a feature of 'post-ideological' totalitarianism. that doesn't mean there won't be brutality. it's liable to be somewhat more sustainable, though.

in fact, if you're resting on total surveillance, you should want people to speak as freely as possible; that's the best way to identify and monitor Enemies. also, freedom of expression could be a safety-valve or a replacement in people's minds for action that does actualy threaten the political and economic 'order.'

on the other hand, there are forms of expression (for example, revealing state secrets) that do threaten the regime - which massively depends on self-concealment, a bland pseudo-rational surface and a roiling gigantic repressive machinery accompanied by massive personal corruption - and hence people like snowden and manning and people who represent their material may have to be repressed, interned, assassinated, and so on. 

a regime of total surveillance of the sort revealed by snowden has been a dream of every totalitarian regime, obviously. it's not in itself every aspect of totalitarianism, of course, but it is extremely extremely useful, and it yields a situation in which any member of the population can be blackmailed into silence or picked up on a pretext and silenced and confined. so it is both an extremely effective aid to other totalitarian moves and institutions and itself directly a form of universal oppression of the sort that every totalitarian regime aspires to or identifies as the salvation of mankind or the essence of collective identity. of course there are many other practical measures that might be relevant: oh, stop and frisk, for example.

at any rate, it's a matter that ultimately needs some care. but i do think 'totalitarianism' is a useful term, and that what they're doing now is aptly described by it. also, i think whatever response you think would have been appropriate to the period in which a historic totalitarian regime was being imposed - germany in the 30s, russia in the 20s, all those military regimes here and there - is appropriate here, now. i do want to point out that all of these regimes, once they were ensconsed, engaged in mass murder, the worst our planet has seen by a long way, and you should brace yourself for that if the thing cannot be stopped here. ultimately, when you constitute an irresistable power, you should expect to be its victim in many dimensions. no one responsibly or even sanely exercises power on that scale.

 

 

 

jumping ship

yes, we might all have to abandon the internet because of its colonization by the secret police, as these very reasonable people show. it'll be ok. we'll miss it, but you know, 25 years ago we puttered along without it.

high crimes; forget the misdemeanors

i just want to say clearly that no president has ever been as obviously or urgently impeachable as barack obama. he oversees a massive criminal enterprise and has systematically engaged in an entirely fundamental betrayal of the liberties the american republic was founded to preserve. perhaps he studied and taught constitutional law in order to figure out how best to go about dismantling the already-disintegrating old edifice brick by brick, and then how to hammer each brick to a reddish dust. why aren't congresspersons talking about this? well, just possibly he's got their emails, web activities, text messages, phone calls, etc in a nice chunky hard-drive in the oval office. at any rate, i'd assume that were i congressperson. they'll be engaged in rituals of submission right about now. seems like a nice guy, though. and, as uncle joe says, so clean and articulate!

what is our actual form of government?

an obvious entailment of the nsa situation is that, in fact, we have no idea who is running our government and hence, more or less, our lives. indeed, we have no idea what our actual form of government is or who holds the real power, like egyptians who were under the delusion that they'd elected their president. this should please liberals, for example, who regard the constitution as a ridiculous anachronism that keeps us from helping everyone through universal coercion. well, the constitution and the form of government it prescribes has been a joke for a long time, as anyone can now see thanks to snowden; certainly it has no resemblance whatever to the Thing currently running our lives: they leave some little institutions and phrases in place as a kind of show or historical re-enactment: that capitol, white house, supreme court in dc: it might as well be colonial williamsburg.

anyone who in fact controls a system of universal surveillance - i mean who has day-by-day management of the thing - can control anyone they please and make them do what they like. if keith anderson is in the mood, he's riding obama as in a performance of dressage. he controls who is in or out in the joint chiefs, the state department, justice, congress. he's in control of what limitations other branches of government impose on him. whoever or whatever the fisa rubber-stamp system is, it will end up doing precisely what he tells it to do. i'd recommend violent insurrection if it didn't seem entirely hopeless. so what i'd say is: just go limp, cultivate radical passivity: give up. this america thing was never going to work out anyway. people don't want to be free. and even if they do, they definitely don't want anyone else to be.

if you think the item below (skipping one) is fantastical, i want to point out that someone last year was reading the cia director's email, and they used it to end him. now you might just speculate that there might have been a little inter-agency rivalry going on. but the point is: put a bureaucracy in charge of universal secret surveillance and you have constituted a secret power that runs the country.

really, the russian aspect of l'affaire snowden is too damn bad. it somewhat pollutes the whole thing, and one assumes that he is no fan of vlad. but the man had few or no options: i don't think he was ever going to make it to latin america. it's good that he's alive, and i pray he can keep working with greenwald etc.

dangle

if you ever considered yourself a journalist, and your position is that the sheer fact that everyone is under surveillance all the time is a legitimate state secret in the american system of government and that revealing it to the people against whom it is conducted is an act of treason or espionage, you should tie an extension cord to a beam and dangle yourself by the neck. do it right now. any official who believes that that is constitutional or compatible with even a vague commitment to government by the people has no business anywhere in this country and has no place in our tradition. we'll re-admit you to citizenship, though not to office, if you crawl from the capital to the jefferson memorial on your hands and knees and beg forgiveness, stopping at the archives to read the constitution and the declaration and sob uncontrollably.

this has been extremely clarifying as to who's who.

draining

obviously, the u.s. is in hyper disinformation mode. 

Two Western intelligence experts, who worked for major government spy agencies, said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong, and that he said were with him during his stay at a Hong Kong hotel.

now, maybe the chinese got everything he has. maybe the russians too, and i supose this could be one approach: just give it up to everyone. but if you believe that this is true on the basis that 'western intelligence officials' say it is true, you're a chump. obviously, no 'intelligence official' has any credibility on anything like this. their commitment isn't to speaking the truth; it's to obscuring the truth. they have infinitely less credibility than snowden himself.

sometimes damage is morally required, namely when it's richly deserved

snowden has done irreversible damage to the u.s., according to the head of the nsa. but he has also shown that the u.s. government deserves damage, much more than ed can inflict (probably). my view is that everyone who has ever worked in any of these programs and agencies at any level is morally - and, for that matter, constitutionally - obligated to do what ed snowden did. you don't have an authoritarian, anti-democratic state unless people silence their individual consciences and collude in their own and everyone else's oppression. if people were making moral judgments even vaguely independently, you could not accomplish these things. not that no one would ever agree to participate in things like total surveillance regimes, but some people would hop off and make such things impossible. every nightmare of the twentieth century took this form: the individual conscience is irrelevant; all that counts is a simulated collective decision or identity, i.e. some vicious, power-drunk fuck's arbitrary decision, imposed by coercion. no one can be under any all-things-considered obligation to abide by such things. but anyone can be under an all-things-considered moral obligation to commit what such regimes of coercion call a 'felony,' or whatever.

after espionage

they've charged snowden. what i hope is that he has a doomsday device set to go off on his apprehension or unnatural death : every senator's calls to their gay escort services, coke dealers, or whatever it may be in a particular public servant/power-monster's case. or it could be insanely secret operations that would utterly compromise our diplomacy. this whole thing is a decisive demonstration that we do not live in a democracy; you can't have a democracy in which the government spies on everyone all the time, and in which that is itself a secret which it is treason to reveal. i very much think - i mean this completely seriously -  that this would justify a second war of independence; it is a far better justification than the arbitrary oppressions that led to the first. however, one now faces force so overwhelmingly annihilating that that seems futile. any form of resistance we can mount is required, however.

safety second

it's hard to evaluate the claim that the nsa surveillance program has prevented attacks, and it's the sort of case where people have such obvious and powerful motivations to lie, distort, etc. that you'd be silly believe them without evidence. now on the other hand, the complete assurance of greenwald, snowden and others that the program isn't effective against terorism at all is at least equally hard to assess. but here's my view: i think we're at that choice point. i would take somewhat more terrorism in preference to universal oppression of the sort created by the nsa.

it's often said that the first duty of an american president is to keep americans safe. no, you sweet little kindergartner, that's the first duty of your mommy. the first duty of the american president is to keep americans free.

safety first

well, you sort of figured they were scooping everything. really, obviously, most of us only depend for the non-detection of our crimes on the fact that there's too much information to actually read, though i'm sure the algorithims get better here as in china. but however: understand that anyone is arrestable at any time, in virtue of their tax posture, drug consumption, possessions of one sort or another, associations. that is really the squishy totalitarian sine qua non or some shit. yo y'all want this. you need to be safe! neo-cons and safetynetters agree. you have already been searched.

remember last week, when you were arguing that the government is all of us, working together, our agent of collective identity, our collective justice? funny what it takes to make that shit happen.

one thing you see immediately: the government regulates these communications companies, and these communications companies maintain an oligopoly, and they  and it are all one big sprawling machine when it comes to processing your information. also health-care, benefits, taxes are all worked in; you are never not embroiled. but you just just try to chill and there's no real reason you should particularly come to anyone's attention. can't intern everybody! but we could intern anybody.

where is russ feingold? paging russ feingold!

squishy totalitarianism: the political/economic/aesthetic/psychological system or syndrome shared in common, for instance, by contemporary China, the European Union, Iran, and the United States. It is characterized by a complex so-called 'technocratic' merger of state and capital; large-scale mechanisms of subject-formation such as compulsory state education and regulation/monopoly ownership of the media; welfare-state or 'safety-net' programs that enhance consumption and give large parts of the population a sense of dependency and security; a relative tolerance for some forms of diffuse dissent and scope for individual choice, particularly in consumption, combined with pervasive state and corporate surveillance;  overwhelming police and military force and sprawling systems of incarceration; entrenched extreme hierarchies of wealth and expertise; regulation of the economy by monetary policy and central banks in cooperation with banking concerns; an international regime of national sovereignty combined with international state/corporate mechanisms for the circulation of wealth.  

 

i love the way you love

Ayn Rand and Vlad Lenin, Kim Il Sung and Barry Goldwater, Barack Obama and Rand Paul, Francois Mitterand and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro, Friedich von Hayek and Leo Trotsky, Alain Badiou and Augusto Pinochet, for all I know, disagreed on several matters. But they agreed on this, or said they did, or have been represented as saying they did, even if they acted entriely incompatibly with it: the state was a force that was historically pitted against private capital. To reduce one was to increase the other and to increase one was to reduce the other. They vary inversely and the balance between them that you recommend constitutes the fundamental way of characterizing your political position. From an anti-authoritarian, anti-statist, or anarchist point of view, this spectrum stretches from authoritarianism on the one end to authoritarianism on the other, with authoritarianism in between. It makes anything that is not that incomprehensible. It narrows all alternatives to variations on hierarchy, structures of inequality, or profoundly unjust distributions of power/wealth. And also as a single ideology, it is merely false. Massively, quite obviously false; throughout the last five centuries, economic and political hierarchies have been massively mutually reinforcing. This is not to say that in some local moment the balance could really shift according to some left or right political progam; it is meant to point out that the choice is extremely constructed and incoherent.

 

as anselm argued, that is a vocal performance than which no greater can be conceived in soul music, proof of the existence of god. it's dynamic, baby.

 

that's - yes! - little beaver and willie clarke doing everything from b.b. to shaft.

momo

   The main historical point I want to make is this: the rise of capitalism is not explicable without state power, which has increased throughout the capitalist period. The modern state and capitalism have the same origins, or arose together, or really - simplifying slightly - are one thing. In many economic histories, the rise of capitalism is atributed fundamentally to colonialism, and state/corporate hybrids such as East India companies have appeared continuously in myriad variations. They are appearing still. The idea that free markets are historically distinguished from - or even are the very opposite of - large, powerful government is a completely ahistorical ideology, shared by the capitalist right and the communist left. In this regard and in a number of others, we might think of the left-right spectrum as a single ideology rather than as a taxonomy of opposites.  Thus, the left-right or Democrat/Republican splits, which define American politics as a hyper-repetitive, mechanical set of partisan bromides about free markets and positive government programs with egalitarian results, depend on a historical mistake. It is one so obvious that it is actually hard to see how anyone, much less everyone, made it.  Indeed, the entire history of capitalism is utterly bound up with the configuration of the state, and I do not believe that capital accumulations on the vast scales it has achieved are possible in the absence, for example, of pervasive domestic policing and the ability to project military power. The idea that you get to something like the British colonial economy - one capitalist apogee - without a state, is obviously absurd. The American robber-baron period is often held to have been to have led to hyper-concentration of wealth in a few private hands and to have been constrained ultimately by the state. I think that if you looked at the actual procedures employed by a Vanderbilt, a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, you would see that they depended fundamentally on state sponsorship and state violence, which such men were in a position to command in virtue of their wealth. That this underwent various adjustments for various reasons in the so-called Progressive era does not indicate that at that point state and capital went their separate ways, putting it mildly. And if this oscillation toward state over corporate power (sort of perhaps her and there) increased equality, I would like to see the evidence.

    Many leftists hold that we live in an era of 'late' or 'global' capitalism. As they gear up to equip the state with ever more power to regulate economies (their proposed solution), redistribute wealth, and so on, they are simultaneously aware that all of these developments depend fundamentally on state power, sometimes in multi-state configurations: on central banks and currencies, for example; on the projection of military force to secure resources. This is central to the left critique of our situation, but to conclude from it that we need to funnel more resources and powers to the state and create programs that make many more people much more dependent on it is bizarre. If one thought a bit more carefully, for example, about the way that government energy policies and private energy concerns are interlocked, one would get less and less sense of any distinction. American democracy, or American politicians, depend on corporate cash, and any president who really tried to move decisively in other direction would be vitiating the economy and dooming his presidency. Just to say the obvious: regulators and corporate lobbyists and Congressional staffers are all the same people. You could go Soviet, but the most you do is sort of get rid of some of the lobbyists: you just hand your banking system and energy sector to state bureaucrats, who three minutes after that are the wealthiest people in the country, with the power to break you by raising their eyebrow.

dangerous documents

the irs/tea party scandal sure is a beaut. for one thing, the whole thing perfectly justifies the self-presentation of those groups; it is a lovely confirmation of their worldview. the best thing is the notion that the irs targeted groups that "sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Consititution." i do think the irs is just the group which ought to be in the business of repressing that document, which is entirely incompatbile with their conduct of life.

when spike albrechts attack

my other prediction is about afghanistan: this will be recalled as a failure a la vietnam, but smaller. there'll be 'entrepreneurs' and corrupt officials clinging to the underside of the last american cargo planes as we evacuate, giving way to civil war. see here's the slight problem: we imposed on them by force more or less the most corrupt government in the world. this never endears the populace. one of the last chances we had to jump off was the election of 2009; barack and hillary completely screwed that up; they needed to back another horse or demand another election and enforce fairness.

democratize the drone

i don't think the average person needs an assault weapon anymore; basically, it's useless in self-defense. but it's completely obvious that every american citizen needs access to predator drone technology. this is especially true, i feel, in the dc suburbs, where every teenager and every grandma and every small business owner needs whatever would enable her to detect and knock down incoming assassination attempts; monitor the white house, the pentagon, langley and so on; and, if necessary, put missiles through the windows of these facilities. my legal counsel, john yoo, gives me, and all of us, full legal authority under international law to act to preserve the homeland, but only if there are significant barriers to capturing and detaining the people who work at the white house, cia heaquarters, and the pentagon, and only if one determines that those people constitute an imminent threat, which on the prospective targets' own account they certainly do. i like, say, the  chris matthews approach: these insane gun nuts and survivalists think they might be attacked by our own government! have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? well yeah i read it once in a memo somewhere. cheese it, the cops! has sworn a sacred oath to protect the american people.

In which Crusader AXE discusses the relationship of Health Care to Tiberius Caesar and Captain Capitualion

"And if you spend your whole life dragging horses into Troy, You will not go to Heaven, you'll go to Champaign Illinois" -- Rhett Miller

 

 

Actually authorized Dylan re-tool of Desolation Row...