Anglachel's Journal

Rotten to the Core

2012-02-02T20:18:00.000-08:00

Dear Apple defenders,

I don't give a damn about Apple as a corporation. I am only interested in Apple as a cultural phenomenon. However, if you wish to encounter real criticism of Apple's corporate practices, not some fluff by the NYT, please read William Black's two analysis pieces about Apple as a criminal fraud operation:

Anti-employee Control Fraud - In this article, Black discusses the nature of this kind of white-collar crime, how it functions, why it drives ethical corporations out of business, and how international supply chains encourage this behavior.
The New York Times’ Ode to Foxconn and Anti-Employee Control Fraud - In the second article, Black goes through the New York Time's article an it's failure to really interrogate the discrepancies in the accounts given by and about Foxconn.

Black's evaluation of Apple is unyielding: "Apple creates a criminogenic environment in its supplier selection process that leads it to, pervasively, hire criminal suppliers." The explicit and documented treatment of labor in this supply chain is, on the face of it, criminal.

So, go argue with him about the facts of the case. My interest in Apple is as a signifier of a particular mentality among the cultural elite - let's call them Whole Foods Nation - that wants others (like me) to ratify their consumer purchases (phones, canned beans, presidents) as markers of cultural, moral and intellectual superiority.

Use whatever gadget you want, but don't lie to yourself about the very brutal world of global manufacturing where it was produced.

Anglachel

Decisions, Decisions

2012-01-31T20:41:00.000-08:00

Poor Wall Street. They have such a hard choice this election year.

Should they vote for the candidate they own who occasionally makes tsk-tsk noises about them in speeches and only delivers 99% of what they want, but who makes them feel like they've done something morally daring, even hip, by voting for a black dude, or should they put their weight behind the candidate they own who loudly proclaims their greatness in speeches and will be even more obliging in policy, but who may wear goofy underdrawers?

Decisions, decisions, decisions....

Anglachel

Weekly Menu - January 29

2012-01-29T18:34:00.000-08:00

Here's what's on the menu for this week around here.

Last week the menu got messed up because I got sick during the week. The black-eyed peas for Friday didn't get cooked, so they are back for this week.

Sunday	Goan Beef Curry	Cardamom, fennel, cloves, cinnamon, fenugreek, black pepper, cumin, onions, garlic, ginger, tri-tip strips, turmeric, chili powder, coconut milk, potatoes
Monday	Lentils and Sausage	Spices, onions, garlic, ginger, tri-tip, coconut milk, potatoes
Tuesday	Drunken Noodles	Rice noodles, garlic, eggplant, bell pepper, tofu, fish sauce, kecap manis, soy sauce, sambal oelek
Wednesday	Mushroom and Sausage Pasta	Mushrooms, porcinis, red wine, stock, olive oil, shallots, garlic, sausage, sour cream, pasta
Thursday	Reshteh from freezer	Soup and roasted vegetables
Friday	Black-eye Peas and Bulgur	Bulgur, black-eye peas, canned tomatoes, red onion, walnuts, spices, sausage, potato, sambal oelek
Saturday	Five Spice Ginger Beef	Flank steak, orange juice, Hoisin sauce, ginger, 5 spice, chili paste, rice vinegar, soy sauce, rice
Sunday	Cinnamon Pork w/Prunes	Pork chops, spices, shallots, butter, prunes, white wine, chicken stock, couscous

New on the menu are Drunken Noodles, the Black-eyed peas and the Cinnamon Pork w/Prunes. The Reshteh is a Persian mixed lentil and greens soup we made for New Years and then froze about half of it to enjoy later. I'll be roasting some fennel and carrots in pomegranate molasses to go with it.

There's not many meatless meals, though in two I just have sausage as a condiment supporting lentils and mushrooms. Drunken noodles, Reshteh and Black-eyed peas are meatless.

Here's how the costs break down:

Meal	Serves	Cost	Cost/serving
Goan Beef Curry	4	$8.53	$2.13
Lentils and Sausage	4	$2.49	$0.62
Drunken Noodles	2	$3.61	$1.81
Mushroom and Sausage Pasta	6	$7.08	$1.18
Reshteh from freezer	12	$10.65	$0.89
Black-eye Peas and Bulgur	4	$4.01	$1.00
Five Spice Ginger Beef	2	$6.80	$3.40
Cinnamon Pork w/Prunes	4	$4.91	$1.23

Things with meat cost most, especially things with beef. The 5-spice ginger beef is double or triple other meals entirely due to the cost of the flank steak. The pork & prunes don't end up costing so much because the pork chops were super cheap. The mushroom pasta is the surprise higher ticket item because of the mushrooms (over $3.00) and the sour cream. The sausage adds only .86 cents to the entire meal. It does serve a large number. Things with beans are the cheapest (lentils and sausage, reshteh, black-eyed peas. The tofu dish is more costly, despite the lack of meat, because of many fresh vegetables and a lot of condiments that collectively add up.What do we do with the extra servings? Lunches, snacks and freezing.

I'm about to sit down to the Goan Curry, which has been bubbling away in a crock pot since noon. It has certainly made the house smell divine, so I suspect it will taste yummy.

Anglachel

Reality Check on Grocery Costs

2012-01-29T17:14:00.000-08:00

In early January I put up a post Grocery Costs at Casa Anglachel, talking about my shopping habits and spending in 2011. A few days ago, an article was posted in the local paper, the Union-Tribune, about restaurant menu prices going up. The article included a table on wholesale food cost increases, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor.

Looks like I have managed to miss most inflation, probably because of the kinds of food we buy. From the article:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent numbers, wholesale food prices were up 6.1 percent in December compared with a year earlier — the highest increase since 2007. Some of the more notable increases were in beef and veal, which soared 16.1 percent; dairy, which rose 12 percent; and pasta products, 19.3 percent. ...

“The consensus is we’re in an era of high, volatile and rising food costs, and it’s pretty unlikely we’re going to see a big drop-off in any of the major categories that are so critical for operators, like proteins, dairy and grains,” said industry analyst Bob Goldin of Technomic, a research and consulting firm. “Operators are highly reluctant to raise menu prices in this kind of economic climate, but they’re doing so out of economic necessity.”

These price increases are at a wholesale level and the types of food purchased at restaurants are not the same as what gets purchased by grocery stores (you're not going to find "Prime" beef at Ralph's), but there is no reason to believe that food inflation and the categories where prices are rising are not also affecting the grocery stories.

Wholesale food cost changes

Food categories	Change from Dec. 2010
Wholesale foods	6.1
Fruits and melons	-12.9
Vegetables	-2.0
Eggs	7.8
Bakery	5.0
Rice	1.7
Pasta	19.3
Beef and veal	16.1
Pork	7.1
Processed chickens	5.7
Processed turkeys	9.6
Seafood	2.0
Dairy products	12.0
Roasted coffee	13.3
Shortening and oils	16.3

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Pasta costs more because of the wheat shortage of last year driven by the fires and drought in various areas of the world. Meat's going up because the meat industry relies on the oil industry and those prices are going up, from fertilizers for feed to having to drive delivery trucks to deliver perishable goods. I know dairy and meat are up for me for the year. Vegetables remain a decent buy, though quality varies more than price. I can usually count on getting 4 bunches of radishes for a $1 at my produce store, but they can range from fantastic to not worth buying.

If restaurants are convinced that prices are going up and staying up such that they must raise menu prices, then food costs are up for us all. This will hit and hurt more the lower your household income is combined with how many mouths you're feeding.

Ordinary families are seeing their non-discretionary food costs go up at a time when their incomes are stagnant or falling. The people who caused the economic mess are not affected by this. They always have plenty of dollars to spend on the best quality food (cook in, eat out). This is a concrete fact OWS should be using.

Anglachel

Rotten Apples

2012-01-29T15:14:00.000-08:00

There is nothing so annoying as an Apple fanboi/grrl. Especially when they are probably just some shill hired by Apple to search The Interwebz and post pro-Apple comments to blogs that have said something less than complimentary about their gizmos.

No kidding. I've received a few critical comments about the Occupation post which is no more than I expected (and a response is forthcoming) but reactions to the substance of the post are nothing in comparison to the inundation of my inbox by helpful Apple defenders trying to show me the errors of my way.

Jesus, you freaks, give it a fucking break, will ya?

New flash - the article wasn't about you or Steve Jobs or Apple, except as cultural types or patterns of industrial production.

The hinge of the article is Chris Bowers' post from back in 2008 trying to convert a political process - a way of determining the distribution of social and political goods - into a triumph of culture - down with poor working class whites, up with the "creative class" - and the resultant confusion of political success with cultural expression.

To the degree that the self-identified creative class loves owning electronic gadgets produced under inhumane conditions and delivered with an outrageous retail markup and to the degree they can't stop shopping at a grocery store chain they want to think of as in line with their liberal, green, organic life-style, but is owned and operated by a radical right-winger who takes their money and spends it on conservative political causes, that is the degree to which this cultural class works against its political self-interest.

Responses that try to convince me that Apple isn't as bad a corporate citizen as [Microsoft/Oracle/Google/IBM/Exxon/Walmart/you name it] or that if I would only TRY Apple, I, too, would understand its magical appeal [Sorry, the aesthetic is completely Space:1999 and my user experience of these products is meh] or you feel so sorry for me being such a hater, and so forth are wasted on me.

I am not interested in your products as such. If someone else likes them, that's fine by me. I don't care. My focus is on why the left in the US continues to suck so badly in the political arena, and the kinds of cultural biases that Apple products appeal to are part of this analysis.

I'm just thinking differently about this than you are.

Anglachel

What Riverdaughter Says

2012-01-29T14:05:00.000-08:00

The left blogosphere might want to think about that for awhile. If it thinks that nothing it does makes a difference to the powers that be, maybe it should try dissenting and allow the pain of independence work its magic. DON’T say you’re going to vote for the bastards even if they treat you like shit. And then mean it. They’re counting on you to go along with the crowd in order to alleviate that pain and fear. Peer pressure only works if you let it. And those of us who have resisted from the beginning can’t reason with you to make you see our point of view. Resisting peer pressure is something you need to come to grips with on an emotional level your own. It *is* painful but worth it when your thoughts are your own. It’s sometimes physically disorienting and nauseating, I won’t lie to you. People aren’t going to like you. They’re going to call you stupid or mentally ill. They’ll say they were wrong about you and you’re not as sexy and smart as they thought you were. They’ll tell you that you will bring Armageddon down on everyone’s head if you let the Republicans win. They know how the brain game works because they’ve read the studies and it’s always worked this way. If you give in to them, they win and they can do whatever they like because they know you will go along in order to feel good about yourself.

They need you more than you need them. They still need the momentum of the crowd, the frenzy of the mob, the mounting pressure as the election gets nearer. They need your vote. If you refuse it, you monkeywrench their entire peer pressure apparatus and then they have to start paying attention to you and addressing your demands. They’d rather not have to do that. They have other people to win over. It’s easier for them to know that they have checked you off their list so they can move on to tougher nuts. Don’t make it easy for them.

Sunday: Ok, I think we’re on to something here

Amen.

Anglachel

Occupation

2012-01-27T22:46:00.000-08:00

oc·cu·pa·tion

[ok-yuh-pey-shuhn]noun

a person's usual or principal work or business, especially as a means of earning a living; vocation: Her occupation was dentistry.
any activity in which a person is engaged.
possession, settlement, or use of land or property.
the act of occupying.
the state of being occupied.

Revolution was brewing in America’s factories in the 1930s, as autoworkers and other blue-collar workers fought for the right to be represented by unions.

The Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37 was fought and won in Flint. Historian Sidney Fine calls it "the most significant American labor conflict in the 20th century."

The strike hit GM factories nationwide, but attention was focused on the Fisher Body No. 1 factory on S. Saginaw Street and the smaller Fisher Body No. 2 on Chevrolet Avenue, and later at the nearby Chevrolet Plant 4.

"Money wasn’t involved," said Robert Keith, 91, of Grand Blanc Township, who was a sit-down striker at Fisher No. 1 and is one of the charter members of UAW Local 581. "We didn’t talk at all about money."

He said the strike was more about working conditions, lack of job security, treatment and about piecework – paying workers based on the number of parts made – than about wages.

He explained how the company would set a piecework rate. When workers found ways to do the job quicker to earn more, the company would set the pay rate lower.

Keith said employees had no job security before the union. Factory workers of the 1920s and ’30s were like migrant farm laborers, going from place to place to find work, he said. After summer layoffs, management hired back only those whom they wanted.

"If you was 35 years old, you had a hard time getting back in there, unless you had pull with somebody," said Keith, whose wife, Florence, also worked at Fisher No. 1 and was one of the first women there to join the union.

The sit-down in Flint began on Dec. 29, 1936. The UAW had planned to go on strike against General Motors here, but workers at Fisher No. 1 heard that GM was removing dies as a suspected countermove. The union seized the opportunity to call the strike. Earlier that day, Fisher No. 2 went on strike after management transferred three inspectors who refused to quit the union.

Strike changes Flint – and a nation

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors. ...

Executives at other corporations report similar internal pressures. This system may not be pretty, they argue, but a radical overhaul would slow innovation. Customers want amazing new electronics delivered every year.

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.” ...

“The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do things more efficiently or cheaper,” said an executive at one company that helped bring the iPad to market. “And then they’ll come back the next year, and force a 10 percent price cut.”

In January 2010, workers at a Chinese factory owned by Wintek, an Apple manufacturing partner, went on strike over a variety of issues, including widespread rumors that workers were being exposed to toxins. Investigations by news organizations revealed that over a hundred employees had been injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis.

Employees said they had been ordered to use n-hexane to clean iPhone screens because it evaporated almost three times as fast as rubbing alcohol. Faster evaporation meant workers could clean more screens each minute.

Apple commented on the Wintek injuries a year later. In its supplier responsibility report, Apple said it had “required Wintek to stop using n-hexane” and that “Apple has verified that all affected workers have been treated successfully, and we continue to monitor their medical reports until full recuperation.” Apple also said it required Wintek to fix the ventilation system.

That same month, a New York Times reporter interviewed a dozen injured Wintek workers who said they had never been contacted by Apple or its intermediaries, and that Wintek had pressured them to resign and take cash settlements that would absolve the company of liability. After those interviews, Wintek pledged to provide more compensation to the injured workers and Apple sent a representative to speak with some of them.

Six months later, trade publications reported that Apple significantly cut prices paid to Wintek.

“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you don’t give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to cut safety.”

In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad

And so, in many ways, have most of us, and not just by buying what Steve Jobs was selling—the products and the feeling of being a better (smarter, hipper, more creative) person because of them. Through his enchanting theatrics, exquisite marketing, and seductive packaging, Jobs was able to convince millions of people all over the world that the provenance of Apple devices was magical, too. Machina ex deo. How else to explain their popularity despite the fact that they actually come from places that do not make us better people for owning them, the factories in China where more than a dozen young workers have committed suicide, some by jumping; where workers must now sign a pledge stating that they will not try to kill themselves but if they do, their families will not seek damages; where three people died and fifteen were injured when dust exploded; where 137 people exposed to a toxic chemical suffered nerve damage; where Apple offers injured workers no recompense; where workers, some as young as thirteen, according to an article in The New York Times, typically put in seventy-two-hour weeks, sometimes more, with minimal compensation, few breaks, and little food, to satisfy the overwhelming demand generated by the theatrics, the marketing, the packaging, the consummate engineering, and the herd instinct; and where, it goes without saying, the people who make all this cannot afford to buy it?

While it may be convenient to suppose that Apple is no different than any other company doing business in China—which is as fine a textbook example of a logical fallacy as there is—in reality, it is worse. According to a study reported by Bloomberg News last January, Apple ranked at the very bottom of twenty-nine global tech firms “in terms of responsiveness and transparency to health and environmental concerns in China.” Yet walking into the Foxconn factory, where people routinely work six days a week, from early in the morning till late at night standing in enforced silence, Steve Jobs might have entered his biggest reality distortion field of all. “You go into this place and it’s a factory but, my gosh, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools,” he said after being queried by reporters about working conditions there shortly after a spate of suicides. “For a factory, it’s pretty nice.”

Who Was Steve Jobs?

So, unless Obama somewhat surprisingly does not become the next President of the United States, the Democratic Party will experience its first changing of the guard since the late 1980's. What differences will be in store? Here are the three major changes I expect:

Cultural Shift: Out with Bubbas, up with Creatives: There should be a major cultural shift in the party, where the southern Dems and Liebercrat elite will be largely replaced by rising creative class types. Obama has all the markers of a creative class background, from his community organizing, to his Unitarianism, to being an academic, to living in Hyde Park to shopping at Whole Foods and drinking PBR. These will be the type of people running the Democratic Party now, and it will be a big cultural shift from the white working class focus of earlier decades. Given the demographics of the blogosphere, in all likelihood, this is a socioeconomic and cultural demographic into which you fit. Culturally, the Democratic Party will feel pretty normal to netroots types. It will consistently send out cultural signals designed to appeal primarily to the creative class instead of rich donors and the white working class.
Policy Shift: Out with the DLC, up with technocratic wonks. My sense of Obama and his policy team is overwhelmingly one of technocratic, generally less overtly ideological professional policy types. We should see a shift from the more corporate and triangulating policy focus of the Democratic Party in the 1990's, and see it replaced by whatever centrist, technocratic policies are the wonkish flavor of the month. It will all be very oriented toward think-tank and academic types, and be reminiscent of policy making in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's. A sort of "technocratic liberalism" that will be less infuriating than DLC style governance, but still not overtly leftist.
Coalition reorganization: Out with party silos, in with squishy goo-goos. In addition to a shift in culture and policy focus, I also expect a different approach to coalition building. A long-standing Democrats approach of transactional politics with different issue and demographic silos in the party shift toward an emphasis on good government (goo goo) approaches. We will see lots of emphasis on non-partisanship, ethics reform, election reform instead of on, say, placating labor unions, environment groups, and the LGBT community by throwing each of these groups a policy bone or two. Now, the focus will be on broad, squishy fixes that are designed to appeal to several groups at once. George Lakoff wrote about this a couple months ago.

Changing Of the Guard

Many of Obama’s liberal allies have been disillusioned, too. When Steve Jobs last met the President, in February, 2011, he was most annoyed by Obama’s pessimism—he seemed to dismiss every idea Jobs proffered. “The president is very smart,” Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “But he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done. It infuriates me.”

The Obama Memos

As further developed through a labyrinthine analysis that drew on social psychology, brain chemistry, and human transaction theory, Ganz’s model posited that the root of the “values” problem was essentially emotional. “Values are not just concepts, they’re feelings,” Ganz explained knowingly. “That’s what dropped out of Democratic politics sometime in the ‘70s or ‘80s.” Thus, the Obama campaign presented itself as a social movement that was more sentimental than political, pushing gauzy “values,” like “hope” and “change,” while leaving policy concerns to the wonks. Yet the successful movements of the past had more than values; they had specific goals. The civil rights movement’s eyes were on the prizes of desegregation and voting rights. Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, where Ganz learned so much about political organizing, also had its emotive side—summed up in its slogan, “Si, Se Puede,” which the Obama campaign directly appropriated in translation, “Yes, We Can”—but it also had in mind the recognition of organized fieldhands and the negotiation of fair contracts involving wages. The point of the Obama campaign-as-movement was conceived differently: exciting people with the thrill of empowerment, and collective self-empowerment, by electing to the White House a community organizer who believed in “hope” and “change.” Why electing Obama was imperative required no explanation among the faithful; it was enough to get the spirit, share the spirit, and revel in the candidate’s essence, which, by definition, no other candidate possessed. The leader was the program. ...

Ganz’s projection of the Obama presidency gained its prestige from the hallowed memories of the civil rights and farmworker union movements, imbued with high moral as well as political purposes. He posed it against the threadbare, craven horse-trading and maneuvering of parties and all previous presidential politics, which Ganz believes were “practiced to maintain, rather than change, the status quo.” The Obama experiment, a movement that arose from the grassroots apart from the Democratic Party, would usher in a purer moral and more effective leadership to the White House. Obama would not merely alter government policy but also transform the very sum and substance of the political system. ...

According to Ganz’s theory and practice of the Obama movement, policies and politics were slighted in favor of feelings and values. Supposedly, these emotive spurs would bind participants in a new activist community, devoted to the collective good and not personal gratification, and dedicated to advancing the uniquely inspiring political leader who had sprung from the reliable ranks of community organizing, and not from the precincts of compromised “transactional” politics. ...

Obama in office upheld the community organizers’ post-partisan credo, trying to bring together opposing forces and finding common ground, in part under the pressure of the organizer’s own reasonableness. But that was not how it worked in Washington during the past two years; nor had it worked that way for 20 years. A ruthless and right-wing Republican Party spurned talk of common ground as a sign of weakness, and did everything it could to ensure that Obama’s presidency would fail. But oblivious to the long-standing internal dynamics of the Republican Party, Obama continued to vaunt his brand of “post-partisanship.”

Live by the Movement, Die by the Movement

There is a persistent anxiety within the movement of being “co-opted” by potential allies—the word crops up frequently in conversation. The country’s largest labor unions were among the earliest supporters of Occupy Wall Street, donating money and space. The movement’s two most impressive marches by far—in Foley Square on October 5 and November 17—were largely made possible by the teachers, communications workers, and hospital employees who showed up in significant numbers at their unions’ behest.

Yet a wariness of organized labor’s hierarchical structures and establishment contacts has prevented a deeper alliance. Overtures from left-leaning factions of the Democratic Party have been met with similar resistance. The open nature of the general assemblies and working groups, it was feared, made the movement vulnerable to takeover by such groups, though there seemed to be little evidence that any such takeover was in the works. Many demonstrators argued, in effect, that the integrity of the fledgling anarchist experiment must be protected at all costs.

Occupy Wall Street had succeeded, after all, where the “old left”—afraid of damaging Obama, and meekly plodding on—had failed in recent years. Traditional liberals, its members said, didn’t understand the particular generational impulses behind the movement, its new way of protesting and—here was the central point—of making people feel listened to and heard. Still, despite the large number of sympathizers it had gained, the movement, after being expelled from Zuccotti Park, seemed in danger of remaining more or less what it had been in September—a group of freelance activists with no reliable power base or allies. ...

As I spoke, I could sense the impatience of my listeners. I wasn’t getting the point. Any such demand would turn them into supplicants; its very utterance implied a surrender to the state that went against Occupy Wall Street’s principles. Katie maintained that Occupy Wall Street didn’t yet have “a broad enough base” to make such a demand with any reasonable expectation that it could be met. And Amin said, “It doesn’t matter what particular laws you pass. We’re not about laws.” They saw themselves as a counterculture; and to continue to survive as such they had to remain uncontaminated by the culture they opposed. ...

Organizers described Occupy Wall Street as “a way of being,” of “sharing your life together in assembly.” To participate fully in its process of “horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based” democracy, you had to make the movement a central part of your existence. For many, this posed an insurmountable problem. A social worker and single mother with little free time told me that she had given up trying to join Occupy Wall Street because she couldn’t figure out how to do so “without hanging out with them all the time.” The ambitions of the core group of activists were more cultural than political, in the sense that they sought to influence the way people think about their lives. “Ours is a transformational movement,” Amin told me with a solemn air. Transformation had to occur face to face; what it offered, especially to the young, was an antidote to the empty gaze of the screen.

What Future for Occupy Wall Street?

Occupation - The texture of a life. A job. A way to get a paycheck. That which fills your thoughts and guides your actions. Being in a place. Having colonized or taken control of something, be it a place or a mentality. The condition of being colonized.

There are many ways to be occupied, many modes of occupation. The occupations that succeed are those that are material - I've got this space and I am getting these goods in exchange for occupying this space, perhaps as a worker, perhaps as a striker. The Flint Strike at Fisher No. 1 is perhaps the finest example of occupation in US working class history. The occupation of the various electronics manufacturing plants in China by multinational corporations, such as Apple, is a no-less profound moment in workers' history.

That occupation would not be possible without the (pre)occupation of consumers - almost all in the developed world - with having the coolest, swoopiest, hippest gadgets they can get their hands on, exemplified by the obsession (the cultural and psychological occupation) with owning Apple.

The distortion field is not just around Steve Jobs. It can't be. If it was, only Steve would have bought the sales pitch. There is an occupation of the mind, a fantasy of unity, among "creative" types, the ones I labeled Whole Foods Nation back in the 2008 campaign. It is determinedly anti-political, anti-working class, and anti-transactional, preferring morality to effectiveness, righteousness to power. Thus the people who can gaze upon hucksters like Steve Jobs and The Precious and see saviors instead of snake-oil salesmen.

And I watch Occupy Wall Street recapitulate the failures of the movement that put The Precious in office, occupied as they are with transformation rather than achieving immediate, material goals that will persuade the majority of the 99% who only see dirty fucking hippies begging for handouts while they labor on at their thankless jobs.

Anglachel

Minutiae

2012-01-26T21:04:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons data aggregation is both big business and hard to grasp is that is it composed of many, many tiny bits of our lives, very few of which are particularly meaningful in isolation. An IP address in and of itself is not much. That IP address mixed in with your cell phone number, your YouTube viewing history, and a bunch of locally stored tracking cookies can speak volumes about you.

I took some time today to read through the new Privacy Policy that Google will enforce starting March 1, 2012, and what struck me most was the range of information they now state they will collect and integrate about you if they are able to get their hands on it. From the top:

"Information you give us"

Name
Email
Telephone number
Credit card number
Photo

Device-specific information

Hardware model
Operating system
Unique Device Identifiers
Mobile network information including phone number
"Google may associate your device identifiers or phone number with your Google Account"

Server Log Information

"details of how you used our service"
"Telephony log information like you phone number, calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information and types of calls."
IP address
Device event information such as crashes, system activity, hardware settings, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and referral URL
Cookies that may uniquely identify your browser or your Google account

Location Information

GPS signals
various technologies to determine location

Unique Application Numbers (specific to your install of a Google product/service)
Local Storage

We may collect and store information (including personal information) locally on your device using mechanisms such as browser web storage (including HTML 5) and application data caches.

Cookies and anonymous identifiers

They may use this to use your name across all Google services. "In addition, we may replace past names associated with your Google Account so that you are represented consistently across all our services" - so no guarantee that things you deliberately put under another name will remain that way.

Taking this minutiae and recombining it is the stuff of marketeers' wet dreams. All the stuff your phone company can get about your phone combined with all of your on-line search, click and purchasing activities, wrapped up with the bow of electronic "finger-prints" for every device you bring into contact with Google.

Sweet.

This information is for sale. It has value and it will be packaged and sold. How will it be packaged? You don't know. Maybe it's Google using it directly. Maybe it's a third party who bought some stuff from Google, some stuff from Facebook, a bit more from Amazon and stirred in a splash of Yahoo for good measure. And they are far from the only corporation gathering, slicing, dicing and distributing information about you.

Of course, here I am, logged in with a Gmail address to a Blogger blog bitching about Google. They've made me an offer I'm not inclined to refuse, namely a platform from which to shout my opinions of whatever the hell is bugging me today in exchange for gathering as much of the above information as they can. It's "free", after all. And it's more time and cost effective than trying to build my own blogging software and maintaining my own server. I have search prominence. My voice is heard.

Is this bargain (Faustian or otherwise, though I don't think it quite rises to that level of moral compromise) a reasonable one? If at some level I didn't accept it as such, I wouldn't be writing this, would I? I like to think I have prevented release of most of my information. I won't contact Google from a phone, I don't fill out a profile, I don't use the services except Gmail and Blogger and I don't use this browser for anything but blogging, so not a lot of cookie info to be had. I won't let Chrome anywhere near a computer I own.

The deep problem is not, in truth, Google or even data aggregation. The fundamental issue is that I have no right to privacy, no right to manage my own identity and say what information a service provider may use and under what conditions. I can refuse to participate in the Google ecosystem. I can delete some information or decline to provide data points to certain services. Once they have the information, however, the only real limit on what can be done with it is the degree to which the will follow their own deeply mendacious and politically vacuous motto of "Don't be evil." I'm on my own.

The real question is to what degree will I surrender the minutiae of my life to gain access to this quasi-public space?

Anglachel

Homework

2012-01-25T20:44:00.000-08:00

There is a post brewing around here. Probably a couple of posts. Here's a little background reading for what is coming up.

Modes of Reaction and Revolution - Pretty much misunderstood by everyone. If you don't get the difference between treating politics as a response to human nature and treating politics as a world historic unfolding (in short, Kant vs. Hegel), then you won't get almost anything I'll be writing this year.
Where Can I Piss? - My analysis about politics, power, institutions, and why the Stevensonian Left wanted to be conned by Obama.
Live By the Movement, Die By the Movement - Sean Wilentz's article that inspired the above analysis. As relevant today as when it was published.
The Obama Memos - Ryan Lizza's recent "expose" (and gutless waffling) of what kind of political actor Obama really is. I'm less interested in Lizza's confused proclamations than on the specifics of Obama's behavior.
What Future for Occupy Wall Street? - The most recent of Michael Greenberg's series on OWS in New York. He provides a sympathetic but ultimately critical, look at the efforts of OWS.

Anglachel

You're the Merchandise

2012-01-24T17:32:00.000-08:00

With free apps comes loss of anonymity.

There is a trade-off between the user and the provider of apparently free online applications. It's not implicit because it is built into the EULAs. The wording varies but the gist is pretty much the same: When you sign up for and use the service we're providing, you are giving us information about you that we will use as we see fit for our financial advantage. The EULAs are getting more aggressive these days because the providers are using your data more aggressively.

The two biggies in the news that are sliding in somewhat under the radar due to SOPA garnering the lion's share of attention are Apple's preemptive claim on the revenues of your intellectual property and Google declaring that it will take all of the information it can gather about your use of its various services and will data mine it for detailed information about you. Facebook, of course, has always done this kind of thing and continuously expands its data mining operation.

I'm less concerned by Apple's move than Google or Facebook mostly because they are using it to sell you their stuff and profit off your work directly. They are setting up a classic walled garden, and I don't think they are going to be able to sustain it. The other two (and not just them, this would be true of any service that needs to monetize its data) are not so much selling to you as selling you to others.

You ARE the merchandise.

I've talked about this subject before where I distinguished between government data collection and private industry data mining. In the latest news from Google (which I cynically believe simply is the corp 'fessing up to what it already does),

“If you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services,” Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering wrote in a blog post.

“In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience,” she said.

Google can track users when they sign into their accounts. It can also use cookies or find out where people are if they use a Google phone or its maps program. The company will now attempt to mix all of that information together into a single cauldron for each person.

For instance, a user who has watched YouTube videos of the Washington Wizards might suddenly see basketball ticket ads appear in his or her Gmail accounts.

That person may also be reminded of a business trip to Washington on Google Calendar and asked whether he or she wants to notify friends who live in the area, information Google would cull from online contacts or its social network Google+.

The services that you have opted in to use are now being stitched together as a single service that is anchored by your browsing device(s) - tied to you by that mechanism - and which interrogates the information you freely provide to minutely examine where you go, what you do, who you associate with, and what your next move is likely to be. If this data was severely restricted to use by Google, it would be troubling. Google (or Facebook, or other social networking system) must monetize this data to advertisers and other services providers because that is how they make money while offering it to you for "free". It how they pay their bills, period.

This behavior bothers me far more than SOPA, quite frankly, and SOPA concerns me a lot. While netizens love to scare themselves with paranoid fantasies of being "censored" by the government, they don't seem to take seriously that they are being dissected and tracked by the very companies they rely on to provide them with their soapboxes and organizational tools. These corporations have no interest in censoring you. Quite the opposite. They want you stomping around, ranting and clicking and buying and using and generally leaving huge footprints all over the place.

With this in mind, there is a need for end users to become savvy about how information gets collected and stored and how this aggregated of data is subsequently deployed for fun and profit. If you are online, you are known to some degree. Using services that are designed from the ground up to aggregate and resell your information is something online users must become aware of.

Aggregation of data is both the best and worst aspect of the Interwebz because data is only as significant as the entity that wishes to use it.

Anglachel

Republican Follies

2012-01-22T17:00:00.000-08:00

Obama is extraordinarily lucky in his selection of opponents this time around. Though hard to believe, the Republican Party is more internally divided than the Democrats, though the individual divisions have more ideological and participatory coherence than their counterparts in the Democratic Party.

I'm basically in agreement with Sam Popkin of UCSD (someone the Spousal Unit and I worked with during our grad school days) in this account he provided to the local fish wrap, the Union-Tribune last night, "GOP defies its own reality". Popkin gets down to business in the first paragraph, saying, "I never thought I’d see the day where you got punished in the Republican Party for making a fortune. Stranger than three-wives Newt Gingrich winning the religious vote is a capitalist big winner being punished."

This is a rather amazing turn of events. The business wing of the party can no longer call the shots, at least not in two of the three political environments they've encountered - Midwest, upper New England, deep South. The resentment voters I mentioned in an earlier post appear to be holding sway, with resentment being aimed at two things, economic success and religious minorities. Popkin foregrounds this:

Look, we are not talking a lot about it and we want to pretend it’s not an issue, but Romney’s religion is an issue — there’s no getting around it. In South Carolina, among people who said it was very important the candidate shared their religious beliefs, it was Newt 45 percent to Mitt’s 9 percent.

This is conservative populism, but it’s also anti-Mormon. Both Mitt and Newt did well with Catholics. The big thing is the religious Protestant. This is the election where the conservative religious community is in the position the unions were in in the Democratic Party in the 1980s. This is not a growing power, this is their fighting to hold on a little longer. It’s very clear how much more secular the country is becoming.

The religious angle was probably the deciding factor in Iowa for Mittens, and gave Santorum the Sanctimonious a big boost. It was not so much on display in South Carolina where it worked more as a disqualification factor for Mittens than a preference factor for Man-On-Dog.

What won the day for Newt was resentment. Someone has screwed me over and someone is going to pay. This is why Ron Paul can't really break into the top-tier - he's crazy enough, he's got perfectly crack-pot economic theories, he's got the right teenage boy fantasy of rugged individualism and self-sufficiency (Mom! Bring me a soda!), but he just isn't resentful enough. He wants to tell people what to do, but he doesn't actually take pleasure in doing harm, which is what Newt and Santorum are peddling.

The surprise that Popkin expresses is how the resentment over the excesses of Wall Street are being applied to one of their own insider candidates, someone who has basically been selected by the powers that be as the preferred choice of the current crop. The boogey monster is no longer just the metrosexual multi-colored Other in the urban jungle driving a Cadillac and living off welfare. It's now the top-dog in the economic kingdom, the alleged wealth creators who just need to be freed up from all the regulations and tax burdens to let the honest, hard-working 'Murikan join the gravy train.

I'm getting interested in how this will play out. Something has happened to the Republican Party base, the forces mobilized first by Nixon with the Southern Strategy of racial division and then with Reagan's anti-feminist, anti-abortion engagement with the previously a-political evangelical community. They are having a hard time keeping a pro-business agenda in front of a base that wants the government to punish people for personal success. Where I disagree with Popkin is his claim that this is not a growing power, though it may be divorcing itself from actual religious belief.

The political gambit set in motion by reactionaries to try to reclaim a pre-war social order seems to have taken on a life of its own.

Anglachel

Weekly Menu - January 22

2012-01-22T15:44:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure I'll keep posting this, but I've had a few people ask me the kinds of things I cook and how I decide what to cook.

For me, if I don't put a little thought into what I'm cooking, I'll end making garlic and oil pasta 5 nights of the week. On Saturday night or Sunday morning, I pull together a general menu for the week, naming a recipe and listing out main ingredients. I try to cook something new every week, I try to make half the dishes vegetable based. Having a menu makes me look at what's on my shelf in the pantry and try to use up stuff I already have on hand.

This is what I cam up with this week:

Sunday	Dinner w/friends
Monday	Fennel-Rubbed Pork	Pomegranate molasses, tangerine, shallots, butter, red wine vinegar, pork tenderloin, fennel, garlic, cumin, salt, pepper, couscous
Tuesday	Fish-Fragrant Eggplant & Tofu	Eggplant, chili bean paste, soy sauce, black vinegar, rice wine, sugar, garlic, ginger, cornstarch, Szechuan pepper, tofu, noodles
Wednesday	Pasta in Tomato-Beer Sauce	Capers, sun dried tomatoes, garlic, anchovies, red onions, chile flakes, gherkins, bock beer, canned tomatoes, olive paste, pasta
Thursday	US Senate Bean Soup	Mayacoba beans, ham hock, onions, potatoes, fennel, parsley
Friday	Black-eye Peas and Bulgur	Bulgur, black-eye peas, canned tomatoes, red onion, walnuts, spices, sausage, potato, sambal oelek
Saturday	Braised Black Vinegar Chicken	Chicken thighs, shallots, ginger, dried chilis, scallions, Shiitakes,black vinegar, sweet soy sauce, light soy sauce, sugar, salt, water, rice
Sunday	Goan Beef Curry	Cardamom, fennel, cloves, cinnamon, fenugreek, black pepper, cumin, onions, garlic, ginger, tri-tip strips, turmeric, chili powder, coconut milk, potatoes

As you can see, I'm not yet into a meatless diet. The soup on Thursday got cooked over the last few days and was lunch today. It will taste even better on Thursday and provide plenty to freeze for another meal. The Fish-fragrant eggplant will get served with some kind of noodle. The sauce for the pasta on Wednesday is a new recipe and is simmering in the crock pot right now to allow flavors to develop as well as be heat-and-eat on a weeknight. The Black-eye peas and bulgur and the Goan beef curry are also new recipes. Hmm, so is the fennel rubbed pork. I meant to have that for tonight, but friends asked up over for dinner, so it's bumped to Monday.

So, three recipes with meat, four new recipes, four that have been/will be cooked in a slow cooker (Pasta in Tomato-Beer sauce, bean soup, Braised black vinegar chicken, and Goan beef curry), three with legumes, and all with a lot of flavors.

The cost of each dish as a whole to cook comes out to:

Fennel rubbed pork - $5.75 - serves 4/$1.44
Eggplant & Tofu - $2.60 - serves 2/$1/30
Pasta & beer-tomato sauce - $6.00 - serves 4/$1.50
Bean soup - $7.00 - serves 6/$1.16
Black-eye Peas & bulgur - $4.01 - serves 4/$1.00
Black vinegar chicken - $3.03 - serves 2/$1.52
Goan beef curry - $8.53 - serves 4/$2.13

Why do I list the costs of things? A few reasons. One, I want to emphasize that meals cost money and the lower your income, the more they cost relative to everything else. I also want to show where and why costs are what they are. Beef is expensive, dried beans are not. Home cooked meals are not necessarily cheaper than low-cost fast food meals - none of my dishes come in under $1.00 per serving and I'm not trying to calculate cooking and clean up costs or the cost of shopping.

I also like to emphasize that, except for the Szechuan peppercorns, nothing I buy is "organic" or a specialty food product or otherwise different than what can be obtained from a local grocery store. Some of my Asian condiments come from Ranch 99, an Asian supermarket chain in southern California. The peppercorns come from a gourmet cookware store, were outrageously expensive, and I won't buy them there again. I don't shop Whole Foods ever.

Food is political because it is used to identify insiders and outsiders, who belongs to the tribe and who does not act within the proper social norms. It takes work to make it both delicious and affordable.

We need to think about our food.

Anglachel

Mayacoba Beans

2012-01-22T14:23:00.000-08:00

My new most favorite legume.

I like most beans. Pintos, black beans, chickpeas, lentils, favas, black-eye peas - you name it, I've probably cooked it up in something recently or have some killer recipe for it. Such comfort food. They are filling, taste good, have a marvelous feel in your mouth, mix with other ingredients in interesting ways, good hot or cold, and so forth.

My two exceptions to this are red kidney beans and almost any kind of white bean. I don't like the texture of red kidney beans. Their skin is tough, the bean thick and unyielding, the flavor odd. As for white beans, there's no there there. Bland, dull, mushy, only occasionally providing a decent foil to the other flavors and textures of the the food.

For red kidney bean recipes, I usually substitute in a different red bean, or even black beans, but white bean recipes have left me stymied. Pintos/spotted beans are too assertive, garbanzos have the wrong flavor/texture, and black-eye peas get too mushy. Now I have the best replacement - mayacoba beans.

Also known as maicoba beans, peruano beans, canary beans, and a few other names, these are yellow beans about the size and shape of pinto beans that cook up into a creamy white bean about the size and shape of cannellini beans and with a flavor similar to pintos, but much milder. I just made a big crock pot of "US Senate Bean Soup" which calls for navy beans and substituted mayacoba beans with great results. They became very tender and creamy without becoming mushy and they had a flavor to add to the pot instead of needing tons of ham/bacon/sausage to carry the day.

Mayacoba bean soup - $7.00; Serves six generously - $1.16/serving

1 lb Mayacoba beans - $0.96
2 medium onions, minced - $0.18
4 stalks of celery finely chopped or 1 fennel bulb, finely chopped - $1.00
2-3 russet potatoes, peeled and cubed - $0.74
1 smoked ham hock - $1.32
1 bunch of kale (optional) - $0.99
water or chicken stock - $1.81 (5 cups stock)

Soak beans overnight or quick soak.
Cook beans in water until almost done. This can be on the stove top or, as I did, on High in a slow cooker for a few hours.
Drain beans.
Put finely chopped vegetables in bottom of slow cooker, layer potatoes over them, dump drained beans over them, and bury the ham hock down in the middle of the beans.
Pour in water or stock to just cover the beans.
Cook on low in slow cooker for 10 hours or until everything is tender. Add salt, pepper and Chipotle hot sauce at the table to taste.
If you want to add kale (and you really should, it's so good), stem, wash and chop one bunch of kale and stir it into the soup at about the 8 hour mark and cook until it is tender.
For more flavor, you can saute the onions and celery/fennel before putting them in the slow cooker in your cooking fat of choice - butter, olive oil, bacon grease, ghee, nitr kibe, etc.

Anglachel

Money, Morality and Mittens

2012-01-13T21:05:00.000-08:00

I've been following some of the back and forth in the MSM and the blogosphere about Mitt Romney, what did or did not happen with Bain and what it tells - or fails to tell - us about the Mittster. The crude analysis is that Bain robbed a certain company blind in the 90s and this tells us Romney is a Bad Guy, a vulture capitalist. OMG even Newt tells us it's true!!!!!

To me, it's another round of reducing political judgment to matters of morality.

Since the City of San Diego has done much the same with its own pension fund, the decision to underfund having been made by union heads and politicians of both parties, the assault on worker pensions and retirement funds can't simply be laid at the feet of rapacious Republicans, though they can claim the lion's share of the responsibility. Here are three posts of mine from a few years back discussing how Democrats have worked very hard to assist with dismantling the legacy of FDR, Truman and LBJ. That's not the interesting part of the hand-wringing over Mittens, at least not to me.

What piques my interest is how determinedly the loudest voices on the Left want to make this a moral judgment rather than to address it politically. The focus is on the particulars of the case and what it says about Romney's character. Kevin Drum talks about the contrast between Bain making money and factory workers losing their pensions and whether voters will be more upset by the latter than Romney was, while Paul Krugman directly questions Romney's ethics and capacity for compassion, his moral imagination, if you will. Bob Somerby goes after Rachel Maddow in "The Big Stupid Wins" for not even getting that interested and choosing to make the long-suffering Seamus and his bout of diarrhea the paradigm by which we unwashed masses should comprehend the Mittster.

Substituting morality (He abuses his pet! He laughs at the little people!) for politics (What are his policies on healthcare? How did he handle corporate regulation when governor?) reduces the scope and scale of public scrutiny, asking people to respond viscerally and with antipathy/euphoria towards a particular political actor rather than step back and ask questions about a larger policy and approach to governance. It's a method that can win elections but won't have much power for building and sustaining coalitions. It is also by its very nature more amenable to politics of resentment (You threaten me, you're The Other, you're an enemy, you must be eradicated) which in turn favors the forces of reaction, whether restorative or redemptive.

Let me be clear that I'm not opposed to the use of moral (or ethical) claims in political arguments. I pass plenty of judgements. Good thinkers, such as Krugman and Somerby, use moral arguments to bolster their very fact-based claims, giving their analyses another method by which to persuade their readers. Sadly, the bulk of the commentariat will pull a Maddow and will not be able to rise above the merely moralistic. When dealing with politics-as-cocktail-party writers (Collins, Dowd), we'll be lucky if we can escape the realm of taste (Oh, those awful earth-tone sweaters!) and attain a moral stance, no matter how shallow.

In marked distinction from the moralistic tone of most Bain-focused posts, there is a dispassionate analysis of the matter, both in its particulars and on its wider political meaning in this post on Sic Semper Tyrannis, "Mitt Romney and Bain Capital: Understanding the Reality" by Robert Lifton. Lifton spends the bulk of the article talking about what private equity funds do and why. He neither approves nor disapproves of these organizations, he just explains them. After this, he directs his attention to Romney (my emphasis):

So what does all of that tell us about Mitt Romney. Certainly, his success in founding the Bain equity fund and operating it very successfully for a number of years speaks to his initiative and intelligence, his commitment to hard work, his ability to pull together a team of talented people and work closely with them. It also tells us that he is willing to take risks and to take action required to achieve his goals irrespective of whether that action helps or hurts people affected by it – in this case employees of the acquired companies. It also tells us that he is flexible – he could not accomplish what he did without being adaptable, willing to “go with the flow” and accommodate his views to his business interests and those of his investors and lenders. We have already seen much of that flexibility in his willingness as a candidate to change his political positions to accommodate the demands of the constituency whose support he is seeking. It also tells us that what he says now on the stump is not necessarily what he will do if he is elected president to accomplish his goals.

It also should be evident that “turning around” a business has little relationship with trying to change the direction of a country. The objectives of Bain were clear-cut: increase the profits from the business at whatever cost to employees or suppliers. The objectives of a nation are rarely clear-cut and reflect the balancing of interests of different constituencies with different, often conflicting, desires and aims. The ability to change an acquired company’s direction lay within the power of Bain management. By contrast, the power of a President is diffuse and depends on political circumstances beyond the President’s control, like which party is in power in which branch of government. Leading a nation in a particular direction in those circumstances is very difficult if not impossible, and requires political talents of the highest order to bring the nation with him.

And therein lies the rub. Mitt Romney of Bain Capital was a good businessman. The selection process of choosing the Republican candidate and later the President calls for a different valuation based on other criteria: choosing a political leader whose values conform to those of the voter making the choice. A person whose emotional make-up allows him to handle the crushing burdens of office and gut wrenching decisions such as sending troops off to war. Mitt Romney’s business activities at Bain tell us very little about those important values and what he would seek to do as President. And unfortunately, Mitt Romney’s career as a politician and now as a candidate tell us little more than that he can be all things to all people. We have to look elsewhere than Bain Capital to make a well-reasoned decision about Romney’s qualifications for the job of President.

This bigger picture is the political story that needs to be told and the political question(s) that must be asked. Shouting about the morality of how Bain dealt with the acquired company will not stick, particularly if the words are coming from Newt Gingrich. (Warning to left wing analysts - if you are agreeing with Newt, you'd better wonder what's going wrong in your argument.) Talking about the poor treatment of blue collar workers doesn't work in this country. It hasn't since Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. People don't want to show solidarity with the unemployed lest their employers decide they should join those ranks.They may dislike what Bain as a company does, but they can be persuaded that Romney was simply acting in the interests of his company, that he earned that return from the investment.

What Lifton's argument does is show the qualities that made Romney successful in the business world are not going to serve well in politics, and he never has to make a claim that there is something morally deficient about Mittens. Two different kinds of work, two different kinds of skills. On this you can build a critical analysis. You can give someone their due, not demonize them, and still pull the rug out from under their feet.

Of course, there is the question of The Big Stupid (thank you, Incomparable One, for adding yet another marvelous phrase to my political invectives collection), which says "So what? Moralizing means more viewers, more page views, more entertainment. You want talking heads? Go watch C-Span." Morality sells, as any good televangelist can attest, and, perhaps, in our degraded discourse, only antipathy/euphoria can make a big enough impression to move people to action.

When there's not much euphoria to be had, antipathy rules. Will the voters hate Mittens with his mitts on the workers' money more than the incumbent with his bail out of Wall Street? I'm not holding my breath.

Anglachel

Republican Choices

2012-01-12T20:35:00.000-08:00

It's a good thing I had some parsnips to roast for dinner so I'd have something sweet to go with the bitter reporting by the Incomparable One.

I don't refer to Bob himself, of course, but about the topic of his post today, "Horrible terrible plutocrat watch: How long do we tolerate this?", which is a textbook example of why no politician of any party feels terribly threatened by either the press or the increasingly beggared populace. The social elites, regardless of professed political proclivities, just don't give a shit about the little people. An extended excerpt, but there is more at the post so please be sure to read the whole thing:

Those average people who got their lives looted are just an amusement to Collins. Darlings! You should watch the video! “It’s full of heart-tugging former factory workers who used to have happy homes and wonderful Christmases!”

We have never been able to get a read on this very puzzling person. But she makes it rather plain today:

To Collins, this election is all about the (imagined) mistreatment of Mitt Romney’s poor abused dog. Those average people who got their lives looted?

Darlings! They offer delicious amusement! Just watch as they tug at your hearts!

An early assessment: A very important debate has broken out—a debate which goes right to the heart of this decades-long plutocrat era.

What does Collins say as she starts? Of course:

COLLINS: What will the big issues be in the South Carolina primary?

When five of your six candidates could not be elected president if they were running against Millard Fillmore, I think you can presume there will not be much serious issue discussion.
This person is simply amazing.

As we speak, Gingrich and Perry are hammering away at Romney, going right to the soul of this terrible plutocrat era. But to Collins, there’s nothing to look at! There won’t be any issue discussion here! Darlings! Move right along!

Collins has long been a weirdly horrible person. How long does our pseudo-progressive world plan to tolerate this?

My answer is for as long as the Kewl Kidz and the Purchased Fellows feel themselves safe from downward mobility, they will be more interested in amusing each other than in addressing unpleasant things that might prevent them from being invited to pseudo-insider confabs with the people in power.

What Bob won't address because he will not attack a nominal Democrat in the White House is that there are only Republican choices in the presidential line up this go-around. Obama has demonstrated that he is just as willing as Mittens or Newt to loot the lives of average people. The salvation of Wall Street's living standards was his administration's highest priority. Collins' jibe about the five candidates who couldn't beat Millard Fillmore serves to highlight the difference between 2008 and 2012. In 2008, it would have been nearly impossible for any of the five top-polling Democrats to have lost to the Republican (though The Precious came damn close). This time, the "Democrat" is practically guaranteed of losing to the Republican, no matter how despicable the Mittster may be.

Collins may be the worst excuse for a "progressive" opinionater around (though I think she's got a lot of competition on that count) but that doesn't mean she is wrong. We are guaranteed "there will not be much serious issue discussion," and by serious issue I mean the looting of the nation on behalf of the social elite. The top candidates are all in agreement that it should proceed.

Peter Daou's post today about dissonance and consonance in the context of campaigns holds a warning about how the Republican contest may play out in the general election this fall:

Conversely, the negative frame against Obama in 2008 was that he was “all words and no action.” But that frame was far less potent than it might be in 2012, since all he really had at that point was words, and people wanted to believe – and believe in – what he was saying.

More cynical Peter - Obama was an ineffectual hack in 2008 and anyone with a scrap of honesty knew it. The Hopeium won't work a second time. All Mittens & Co. have to do is play up the discontent about the disparity between the advertisements and the delivered product. Obama's done the hard work for them by selling out his own constituency.

Unlike McCain, who had to pick a running mate who appealed to the party's extreme wing in order to balance defection from the political center, Mittens knows the defections are going to go his direction because A) these isn't that much perceived difference between himself and Precious and B) the discontent with Obama is strongest among people who were uncertain but willing to give him a chance last round. This will allow Romney to pick a more moderate running mate, like a Huntsman, to try to solidify that appeal. Most people won't care about Romney's ever changing political stances when compared to Obama's political failures.

So, the choices are all on the Republican side of the table and the pseudo-progressives can spend the campaign worrying about the Romney family's poor tormented dog. So much more fun than discussing why ordinary Americans are the dog's dinner.

Anglachel

Parsnips, Yum

2012-01-12T19:35:00.000-08:00

I love parsnips. I just had a big serving of them for dinner. I roasted them with a red onion in a balsamic vinegar and brown sugar marinade for about an hour, then served them up with a barley and mushroom baked thing. A little dusting of grated Parmesan was the right touch on each.

It was very good.

Anglachel

Grocery Costs at Casa Anglachel

2012-01-04T21:47:00.000-08:00

My take on the Iowa caucuses - nobody much likes anyone. The election in November will be for who is least detested by the general population. Meh.

I've been keeping my grocery database for just over a year now. I started it with my shopping trip on 10/31/2010 and now I'm starting a new year. I set up some crosstabs and reports last week to see what is going on with food prices and my purchasing habits.

Last time I wrote about the database, I had 262 food items in it. I now have 470. In terms of variety, I have purchased 90 kinds of fresh produce, 73 pantry or staple goods, 63 kinds of herbs and spices, 52 types of meat or fish, 44 condiments or sauces, 31 dairy products, 29 kinds of legumes, 24 types of snack food, 23 types of pasta, rices and grains, 21 types of baked goods, 10 types of cooking alcohol, and 5 each of frozen products or beverages. These selections accounted for 1996 different purchased items - 32 items purchased per week on average over the last 62 weeks. The total bill for food was $6,466, or an average of $2.48 per meal per person (62 weeks * 7 days * 3 meals * 2 people = 2604 meals).

Things are getting more expensive. Dairy products are very price sensitive from store to store and they are more expensive now than a year ago, though butter seems to be an exception. The cheapest time for buying butter is right around Christmas when people do a lot of baking. The cheapest price per pound I got was $2.69 on sale at Ralphs just before Christmas, the most expensive was $3.99/lb at Fresh & Easy in September. Trader Joe's had butter at $3.29/lb November 2010 and I just got it for $2.99/lb on Monday.

Trader Joe's has the cheapest day-to-day dairy prices in my area of San Diego and a decent selection. Costco can always beat it on unit price, but the amounts we'd have to buy are usually too large for a 2 person household. Sliced Provolone at Costco started the year at $6.99/2 lbs, went as high as $8.19 for the same package and is now at $7.99. That adds 3 cents per slice. Put one slice on three lunch sandwiches every working/school day (you and two kids), that's an extra 50 cents a week or $25/year (factoring holidays when you didn't eat sandwiches). Did you get a $25 raise this year? I know I didn't.

Sour cream went from $1.69 to $1.79 a pint at Trader's for the house brand. A gallon of fat free milk was $2.69 in February, rose to a high of $3.19 in August and now seems to have settled in at $2.99 since October. I buy a gallon a week, so an extra 30 to 50 cents depending on the price since the start of the year. The half gallons went from $1.69 to $1.99, which is also 30 cents more a purchase, but half the amount. All in all, it's another $15 this year for milk.

Extra large eggs went from $1.49 a dozen to $1.69 a dozen, then back down to $1.49.

Meat got more expensive, too. Most of what I buy is cheap and stewable, usually purchased in bulk and divided up into smaller serving portions. I don't buy often, so the price fluctuations are bigger compared to weekly purchases like milk. Chuck roast at Ralphs went from $2.53.lb on sale to $2.99/lb on sale. Flank steak at Costco went from $5.99/lb to $6.49/lb. Stew meat went from $3.29/lb to $3.89/lb. In the summer, when it's grilling season, I look out for whole chickens on sale. The sales price varied from a ridiculous manager's special of .48/lb to .99/lb. I don't buy chickens if they're over that per pound. Pork chops at Costco went from $2.29/lb up to $2.69/lb. Overall, meat went up 40 to 50 cents per pound. We might eat a pound of meat in a week, so it's somewhere between $20 and $26 more per year for us. What about a four person household that eats just a 1/4 pound per person per day? Then we're talking an increase of $145/year. For a minimum wage worker, looking at $7.25/hour, that extra $145 is 2.5 working days gross pay.

Fresh produce had the wildest price fluctuations. Chinese eggplant ranged from a low of .68/lb to a high of $2.33/lb, but usually came in at @ .89/lb. At the height of summer, I could get my beloved red bell peppers for as little as .49/lb, but they were usually closer to $1.00/lb at North Park Produce, and I paid as much as $2.83/lb at Trader Joe's.

The store mattered when buying produce. I purchased 459 fresh produce items in 2011 at North Park Produce, and 232 produce items at Trader Joe's. My purchases at North Park came to $491, or an average of $1.06 per purchased item, vs purchases of $550 at Trader Joe's, or an average of $2.37 per purchased item. If I had bought most of my produce at Trader's, my grocery bill would be much higher. This is something that affects food purchase choices for lower income households. If you have a small budget for food and the price of produce is both high and fluctuating, making it difficult to budget, you're less likely to buy it. Especially when the price of meat and dairy is steadily marching upwards.

The powerhouse purchases in my grocery database are the legumes. Whether dried or canned, they're usually under $0.10/ounce or $1.60/lb. Dried beans cost even less per ounce than canned, of course, by the time they hit the dinner plate since that 1 ounce of dry will equal 4 ounces cooked. Much more economical than meat and probably better for everyone involved. Unless you're sitting next to me when I'm farting, but then that's your cross to bear, ain't it? A bag of dried beans, a slow cooker, water and some odds and ends of vegetables has to be the best way to make food dollars go furthest.

Whole grains are fun to toss into that pot along with the beans. My current favorite is freekeh, a green cracked wheat that is roasted and so has a smoky taste. I also love bulgur and wheat berries. Rice is good, especially basmati, though I don't much like brown rice. Quinoa stays the hell out of my kitchen, but I am in love with pearl barley.

In terms of proportion of spending, less than 1% of my grocery budget went to alcohol for cooking, about 7% was baked goods (mostly tortillas and sandwich rolls), the same went to beverages, which means coffee, 3% to condiments and sauces, so necessary to make food interesting, 11% was for dairy, 23% was fresh produce, 19% was general pantry, 3% was legumes, 18% was meat and fish, 2% was pasta, rice and grains, 2.5% was snacks and 3.5% went to spices & herbs. My single biggest purchase this year was for a turkey for Thanksgiving ($28.66 and a terrible buy), nuts are surprisingly expensive, and fresh produce may be expensive per pound, but you don't generally need to buy that much of any one thing. Beans are the best buy on the shopping list.

Anglachel

Modes of Reaction and Revolution

2012-01-02T18:21:00.000-08:00

I am all about distinctions. It matters that we study differences between political actors and correctly identify points of congruence as assiduously as we try to separate the political world into the members of the Beloved Community and those who are beyond the Pale. That's why I was very pleased to read a deceptively simple article in the latest New York Review of Books by Mark Lilla, Republicans for Revolution. It is a review of a Corey Robin's book "The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism form Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin," and it gets to the heart of many of the observations and criticisms I've posted on this blog about misapplication of political labels, though with fewer polemics and greater elegance.

While the review of the book itself is utterly damning (Money quote - "That’s why Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind is a useful book to have—not as an example to follow, but one to avoid."), Lilla uses it as an opportunity to engage in some much needed public thinking about the meaning of "conservative" and "liberal" and their mutual relationship to the concept of "reactionary". In doing so, he demonstrates how and why reactionary politics is empowering for the Right and self-defeating for the Left. He does not explicitly describe the political outcome, leaving it as a thought exercise for the reader. Instead, he explicates the differences between political types in a way that transcends the conventional presumption that Conservative = Right =Reactionary and Liberal = Left = Progressive, the fundamental categorical error both of Robins' book and almost all political pontificating on the Left.

Lilla disposes of Robin in the first few paragraphs of the article and then leaps into what really interests him and me (all emphasis mine):

An opportunity has been missed. Robin is not wrong to think there are two tribes in modern politics, and the terms “right” and “left” are as good as any other to describe them. But within each tribe there are clans that do more than express more radical or moderate versions of the same outlook. Most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will and the ascendancy of new populist reactionaries like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and other Tea Party favorites. To understand why the distinction between them still matters, we need to remind ourselves what the terms “conservative” and “reactionary” originally meant.

Lilla then goes into a three paragraph examination of Edmund Burke, conservatism and liberalism that is breathtaking in its accuracy and economy. He segues into his true interest, analyzing reactionaries by saying, "The quarrel between liberals and conservatives is essentially a quarrel over the nature of human beings and their relation to society. The quarrel between revolutionaries and reactionaries, on the other hand, has little to do with nature. It is a quarrel over history."

Before getting into his brilliant categorization of reactionaries, I want to tease out something he left unsaid when comparing the conservatives and liberals (and these terms, of course, refer to the theoretical categories, not the current US bastardization of their meaning), which is the ground on which they can do political business, the reality that underlies the fantasy of bipartisanship. Conservatives in the Burkean mode defend the accretion of habits, customs and mores that create the society individuals accidentally inhabit. As Lilla writes,

"Conservatives have always seen society as a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for; we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and these obligations take priority over our rights. Conservatives have also been inclined to assume, along with Burke, that this inheritance is best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action. Conservatives loyal to Burke are not hostile to change, only to doctrines and principles that do violence to preexisting opinions and institutions, and open the door to despotism."

In tension with this is the liberal presumption that the individual is prior to the society in which he or she inhabits - society is the accident, not the individual:

Classical liberals like John Stuart Mill, in contrast to conservatives, give individuals priority over society, on anthropological as well as moral grounds. They assume that societies are genuinely constructs of human freedom, that whatever we inherit from them, they can always be unmade or remade through free human action. This assumption, more than any other, shapes the liberal temperament. It is what makes liberals suspicious of appeals to custom or tradition, given that they have so often been used to justify privilege and injustice. Liberals, like conservatives, recognize the need for constraints, but believe they must come from principles that transcend particular societies and customs. Principles are the only legitimate constraints on our freedom.

The common ground is mentioned in the conservative description - institutions. In the institution, the past/inheritance is given form and public stability. Likewise, the institution becomes the collective power of individuals to insist upon and defend their rights against the arbitrary exercise of power by elites. Institutions are necessary for both political perspectives because they are what shape and defend us against human nature - the rapaciousness of elite and mass alike are subject to the disciplinary power of the institution. The battle the conservatives lost - which is the topic of Reflections on the Revolution in France - is how institutions will be legitimized. Age, as represented by custom, is no longer the chief defining characteristic of legitimacy. Instead, property occupies that place, and it is specifically fungible property that is the foundation for the institutions that define modern society. Provision of rights is inextricable from defense of fungible property (property in the abstract, that can be governed by universal, impersonal rules), as rights are cast in the mode of things that cannot be taken away.

If an institution is founded on the basis of defense of (property) rights and then the institution is modified by exercise of its own rules, it can be acknowledged as legitimate by both conservative and liberal political factions. Human nature is defended and constrained in the same moment. There is actually little reference to past or future as the logic of the institution is inward looking, seeking to more faithfully explicate the universal (and thus unchanging) principles that the institution exists to house

It helps that there is almost no true conservatism in the US, as Lilla points out, "Americans’ assumptions about human nature are basically liberal today. We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn’t constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves." Our collective view of human nature is liberal. This is how you can end up with a "conservative" Eisenhower endorsing Social Security because it has now become part of the warp and weft of the (modern, abstract, liberal, rights-based) US society into which particular human beings are accidentally born. Perhaps ironically, the liberalism that venerates and celebrates the centrality of freedom to the human condition is committed to the preservation of formal structures that cannot be changed very easily, lest the space for the enactment of freedom be endangered. The duty of a liberal institution is to conserve.

In distinction to a mode of politics that is mostly inward looking and static (progress is not change but fulfillment of universal principles, after all), there is the view that politics is about change and time - going forward to go back or simply going forward. Reactionaries battle against the creation of stable institutions that do not fulfill their preferred eschatological vision.

Lilla distinguishes between two types of reactionaries - restorative and redemptive. The former "dreams of a return to some real or imaginary state of perfection that existed before a revolution. This can be any sort of revolution—political, religious, economic, or even aesthetic," while the latter "take for granted that the revolution is a fait accompli and that there is no going back. ... They believe that the only sane response to an apocalypse is to provoke another, in hopes of starting over." While the first type wishes to reclaim and and reimpose the past, the redemptive reactionary has nothing conservative in their nature.

They want to blow shit up and watch the world burn. It is political apocalypticism.

Lilla's concern is with the rise of this political mode on the Right, something he thinks intellectuals and political analysts like Robin won't see because they want big sound-bite-ready political targets, because political actors who care nothing about conserving institutions of any kind ("Fascists hated so many aspects of modern society—representative democracy, capitalism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, bourgeois refinement—that we forget they were anything but nostalgic for Church and Crown. They had contempt for weak German aristocrats with their dueling scars and precious manners, and reserved their nostalgia for a new Rome to be brought into being through storms of steel. There was nothing conservative about them.") have nothing to lose by continually upping the apocalyptic ante. We think we're dealing with restorative reactionaries, who are dangerous enough:

On questions of history, however, Americans are all over the map. As we were reminded in the run-up to the last Iraq war, every now and then the prophetic strain in our political rhetoric inspires eschatological fantasies of democratic avant-gardism, with Lady Liberty replacing the French Marianne on top of history’s barricades. Then reality intrudes and Americans revert to the converse fantasy of American exceptionalism, which must be protected from history through isolation and self-purification. We have also had our share of restorative reactionaries, from Southern nostalgics for the ol’ plantation, to agrarian despisers of the great American cities, to racialist despisers of the immigrants they attracted, to no-government oddballs who think they can go it alone, to trust-fund hippies who went back to the land, to lock-and-load eco-terrorists who want to take us off the grid (after they recharge their Macs). What we have not seen much of, except on the fringes of American politics, are redemptive reactionaries who think the only way forward is to destroy what history has given us and wait for a new order to emerge out of the chaos. At least until now. ...

Sometime in the Eighties, though, neoconservative thinking took on a darker hue. The big question was no longer how to adapt liberal aspirations to the limits of politics, but how to undo the cultural revolution of the Sixties that, in their eyes, had destabilized the family, popularized drug use, made pornography widely available, and encouraged public incivility. In other words, how to undo history.

My concern is how the Left has been captured by much the same impulse towards politics as history, wanting to see themselves as revolutionaries who have a world-historic mission to transform society and free it of [insert hated-thing-of-the-month-here]. The thing they hate most, almost a meta-hatred from which all others derive, is institutionalized power. They are, as hinted at throughout Lilla's article, much closer to the Right's reactionaries than they'd like to admit, sharing a resentment against structures that defend political power settlements, but unlike the Right, doing little to mobilize economic and political resentment in the general population to accrue power for apocalyptic political action. Occupy Wall Street protests eschewing actual objectives and one-off hacktivist raids on government and corporate servers are unlikely to translate into votes and it's questionable whether the participants care.

The redemptive reaction on the Left was, I think, Obama's election. We returned to the Kennedy White House, the time when we were all happy with the direction of the nation. The award of the Nobel prize to Obama was done in a political-historical mode, not a reflection of what was but of the fantasy of what the world ought to be in light of the grand historical moment we were witnessing. Reality, sadly, has a distinctly liberal, that is to say, factual bias, and keeps stubbornly persisting in the now instead of breathlessly charging forward into the always already perfect future.

Neither the revolutionaries nor the reactionaries on the Left have a snowball's chance in hell of contesting with their counterparts on the Right in the popular imagination.

In any event, Lilla has provided me with new and interesting ways to look at the current political milieu. The question will be whether the Right's redemptive reactionaries apocalypticism will burn itself out before it burns the place down.

Anglachel

A Long, Nasty Year

2011-12-28T21:06:00.000-08:00

This year started out badly and didn't get a fuck of a lot better. I started with a compressed nerve in my neck, swiftly followed by my mother's death and went on to weeks of persistent illness. I feel like I've been sick the entire year. Now, at the end of December, the compressed nerve is making a comeback. Oh frabjous day...

The company I work for is being dissolved by greedy ideologues who declare - without a scrap of evidence - that outsourcing of course is more economical than having people directly on staff. The multi-million dollar contracts will be signed sometime in April and then all staff are simply waiting to be absorbed by the IT Borg Services company slurping up their section of the operations or else get laid off. I'm going to take advantage of some job placement training that's due in January/February, then I'm going to start looking. I don't fancy waiting around to be fired. My manager, whose pretty cool, knows what I'm doing and said she'll help with my resume, send me job leads and even do practice interviews if I'd like.

I keep up with the news but have resisted the urge to comment. Pretty much everything I said back in 2008 about the wrong track the respectable people on the Left were determined to take has come true, not that they appear to notice. The Boyz of the Blogz continue to be as shallow, narcissistic, clueless, and self-congratulatory as ever, no matter how many times the Incomparable One and the Shrill One smack them upside the head.

My political perspective doesn't align with most other blogospheric positions, left or right. I am unimpressed by the street rebellions (though I agree with Eric Hobsbawm that it is like 1848 all over again), rolling my eyes at the wasted opportunities of the Occupy movement, and deeply cynical about the antics of hacktivists, from Julian Assange to Lulzsec to Anonymous. A customer of the company the Spousal Unit works for got attacked by Anonymous a while back and it was days of effort to keep the little fuckers from bringing down the site. No, not amused by these hooligans whatsoever.

I watch an allegedly liberal intelligentsia unable to escape its collective fantasy that anyone who rejects Obama can only be doing so because they are racist, not because the guy is to the right of Richard Nixon. No, I won't be placated by the knowledge that the Right is worse - shitty governance is shitty governance even if the choice is that or obscenely shitty governance. It's bad and sad when you realize Nixon would be an improvement.

In the absence of material improvements to living conditions brought about by the Long Recession (which, truth be told, really started when Reagan took office), increasing numbers of people will vote their resentments. If it won't get better, you might as well make other people hurt. The high-minded left doesn't want to consider that the dumb-shit cop who pepper sprayed the protesters at UC Davis is a perfect representative of the portion of the 99% who must be wooed away from the reactionary right if any high-mindedness is to have an actual effect in the world. That's the deep failure of the left in this country since LBJ.

So, that's been this year for me - pain physical and emotional, job stress, and political estrangement. Instead of blogging, I've been watching old TV shows on Netflix, reading books, cooking lots of amazing things, tracking local food prices, trying to exercise, visiting with my dad, seeing my friends and generally have this thing called a life.

It's kind of nice.

Anglachel

Panetta

2011-05-01T21:41:00.000-07:00

The news tonight also puts a different light on some of the reshuffling of major posts. The move of Panetta from CIA to Defense makes more sense. If this was an intelligence victory, as seems to be the case, then moving the person in charge of that to head up the remaining operations in the area offers continuity.

Petraeus in at CIA strikes me more as trying to keep him out of the upcoming presidential contest than anything else, though, again, this takes some rethinking. It may be that the general understood he would not be able to contest once OBL had been disposed of as this will be the horse BHO rides to victory next year, and is content to bide his time for 2016.

But the interesting story to tease out of here is what was Panetta's involvement in this operation and why is this leading to him going to replace Gates at Defense rather than have him remain at the CIA?

Anglachel

Bin Laden Dead - Updated

2011-05-01T20:24:00.000-07:00

I've already read cynical responses from the anti-Obama contigent (left & right wings) and I think they are missing the real point.

Osama bin Laden is someone who declared war on the rest of humanity and has engaged in the butchery of thousands of people across four continents (North America, Europe, Africa and Asia) for more than two decades. Any justification for his violence was long ago vitiated by the purposeful targeting of ordinary civilians. It matters not that Bush & Cheney and their neocon crew used him as an excuse to engage in their own butchery. In the attack on the World Trade Center, he was attacking the world, not just the US, and everything that modernity stands for, particularly what is best about it - secularism, equal rights, equality before a rational rule of law, and the undermining of fundamentalist power structures.

Will this event be used in opportunistic ways by every political operator under the sun? Duh, and irrelevant.

This person did not care to share the world with the rest of humanity, wishing to arrogate to himself the power of life and death over all others. It is right and just that the world decline to share the world with him.

Anglachel

UPDATE - Interesting news snippet I have only seen in my local fish-wrap:
"An American official says Osama bin Laden was killed in a mansion close to the Pakistani capital.

A Pakistani intelligence official confirmed that the al-Qaida leader had been killed in Pakistan. "

This news intimates that he has been living in Pakistan under the protection of someone influential for some time. Time to be following some money.

Updated - Create your own TPL for IE9

2011-04-09T16:28:00.000-07:00

Tracking Protection List, that is. For the IE9 users out there who want a little more fine grained control over what gets delivered to your browser and who have access to web server, you can create your own handy-dandy TPL.

First, a quick review of what a TPL does on IE9. A TPL is a plain text file that you can open up and read directly to see what's in it. Nothing compiled or hidden here.

When you add and enable a list in your browser, it checks that list for instructions on how to handle the stuff the web page you want to view is trying to download. Each thing that comes in is evaluated for two things:

Is it coming from the same site where you're browsing? An example of this is news site like LA Times with ads from Double-click. If the content is coming from the LA Times, it is allowed. If it is not, the next thing kicks in.
Is there a rule for it in one of the TPLs loaded in the browser? The rules are relatively simple - yes, let it downlaod or no, block that sucker. If it is blocked, the browser refuses the connection and the junk doesn't download.

OK, now that you know the basics, here's the two caveats:

If you have multiple TPLs, and one says No, don't download X and another says Yes, download X, the Yes rule wins. The exception to this is your built-in personalized list. The rules in that list take precedence over the rules in all other lists. The problem I find with the personalized list is that it will block cookies and tracking stuff, but it doesn't let you specify exactly what things you want to block.
The professionally prepared lists may block advertisement and tracking stuff, but they don't block annoying sites as such. They really don't handle the social media sites very well, letting Facebook in particular run rough-shod across a page.

In general, the TPLs work pretty well as long as you do NOT load the TRUSTe TPL, last link on this page: http://www.iegallery.com/us/trackingprotectionlists/default.aspx. Why not? TRUSTe is the Trojan Horse of the TPL world, and deliberately allows all the tracking shit to access your computer. If you don't install it, it can't override the other lists.

Be sure to install Easy List, which is from the same company that produces the Ad Block plug-in for Firefox. The lists from Abine and Privacy Choice are pretty good, too. Once in place, your browser will automatically go and check them for updates. They work sliently in the background at all times. The updates are delivered transparently and you don't have to restart the browser.

The issue that happened today was a site I use all the time suddenly and obnoxiously displayed the Facebook "Like" button. I started checking other sites I frequent and realized that this miserable bit of crapware was infesting everything. I looked at the various TPLs I have installed, and found that none of them attempted to block any Facebook stuff downloaded as a 3rd party item on a web site. The Like button sits inside an Iframe in the page, which further masks its presence.

After a little searching, I found some great information from the W3C on how to build a TPL. It's located here: http://www.w3.org/Submission/2011/SUBM-web-tracking-protection-20110224/ A little dense to get through, but if you use Easy List's TPL as a model, not hard to figure out. Start at section 4 - List Format, and read down.

Armed with a bit of knowledge, I opened up Notepad and created a TPL that blocked Facebook as a 3rd party download to my system. The file reads:

msFilterList
: Expires = 5
# blocked strings
- like.php
# domain rules
-d facebook.com
-d facebook.net

This says check for a list update every five days, block any URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) that has "like.php" anywhere in the URL, and block anything from either facebook domain, .com or .net. I saved it as "personaltpl.tpl" and uploaded it to my web server. (You can save it with a .txt extension and it will work just as well, by the way.) I also created a simple HTML file that just had a link to the tpl file with a little added javascript to tell the browser to install the file. I took that code from the links on Microsoft's page with the TPLs list I linked above.

After I uploaded the files, I browsed to the HTML page, clicked the link and installed the new TPL. Bye-bye Facebook Like buttons. The extra nice thing is I can add whatever other blocks I want to the file at any time and block the stuff the other lists won't do. When I go to a third party site (making it first party), then the list doesn't block stuff because it is being delivered directly and it's assumed that if you are on the site, you want stuff from that site.

So there's a little tutorial on how to take blocking into your own hands if you're using IE9. You can actually also use this method in IE8, it's just harder to install the lists.

The TPL list method is efficient and effective. You can see the marketing hyenas trying to keep people from using it by turning it off by default in IE9 and not promoting the TPL list links. In truth, it is as or more easy to use than downloading Ad Block for Firefox. After all, Firefox doesn't come with it installed and ready to switch on, does it? You have to know about it and go find it. Here's how to get "Ad Block" for IE9, easy.

Click the Gear icon in the upper right corner of the browser window.
In the menu, select Saftey/Tracking Protection. A new window opens.
In that window, look for the item "Your Personalized List" in the main window. Select it.
Click the "Enable" button.

Congratulations, you now have "Ad Block" for IE9 working. Want to add a few more lists? Go to the Internet Explorer Gallery site (it's a preloaded bookmark in the browser, but if you're incapable of using bookmarks, here's the URL: http://www.iegallery.com/us/). On the home page, there's a BIG button that says "Get Tracking Protection Lists". Click it for the page I linked to above. Install Easy List. That will give you the actual, latest "Ad Block" blocking list.
Now, see, that wasn't so hard, was it? If you want to block even more, build a custom TPL and put it on your own website or ask a friend with a site to post it for you.

For how to get the same protection on XP with IE8, read over my Safe Browsing article, especially Chapter 15, How I Browse. It is a more manual version of what I told you to do with IE9, plus you can't add pre-compiled lists of blocked 3rd party sites, you have to build your own list, but it works and you don't have to worry about ad-ons breaking or being incompatible with the latest update.

It's popular among the technorati to scream and howl about how awful IE is, and never offer a hint to ordinary users on how to turn on built-in features of the product that are as if not more effective than the plug-ins for other browsers. This post is for the majority of web site users who are on IE and who are getting sick and tired of being sneered at instead of helped by your allegedly technically literate friends. The sad truth is they don't know about the real differences between browsers, don't understand security, confuse blocking ads with being secure, and reflexively bash Microsoft instead of critically interrogate all corporate claims. They probably don't know about TPL and its status as a proposed standard for dealing with attempts to track you, or about how your personal list trumps commercially prepared TPLs. Etc.

Safe browsing means not being railroaded by corporation or the conventional wisdom of the hip crowd.

Anglachel

Update - with thanks to commenter John, I have been pointed at a very interesting site by Hal Berenson. Hal has three links of relevance to this particular post:

Help Lambert on a Sudden Shortfall

2011-04-06T17:05:00.000-07:00

Lambert, the indefatigable person who keeps the wheels in motion at Corrente, is asking for some short term financial assistance due to an unexpected interruption of income. What has been happening lately at Corrente? Some good stuff:

1. Corrente was the only political blog to cover the Egyptian revolution live, 24/7, from its beginning to the fall of Mubarak. Correntians LostClown and DanPS attended post-Egyptian events in WI and OH, and tweeted them to the Corrente sidebar.
2. Corrente is the only political blog to integrate the 198 techniques of non-violent protext and persuasion with its postings on political events, whether in Egypt or this country.
3. Correntians produce consistently excellent serial content, like Vast Left's American Extremists, the Plantidotians' Plantidote of the Day, the Corrente Review of Games, Hugh's reports on unemployment statistics, PA_lady's reports on fracking, Annals of Career "Progressive" Idiocy, or It's All About The Rents .
4. Corrente excels at calling bullshit, whether on Obama, our famously free press, the legacy parties, or career "progressives." In fact, Corrente is consistently ahead of the curve in recognizing bullshit as bullshit. We knew Obama was a fraud before it was cool.
5. Corrente has assembled an excellent list of long-form guest posters of whom I would single out Stirling Newberry, danps, letsgetitdone and Tony Wikrent (both now Fellows), as well as David Swanson. And I'm sure I'm missing somebody!
6. Corrente has been consistently ahead of the curve on Depression Era/Peak Oil topics like gardening, growing your own food, and home maintenance, as well as the overall theoretical construct of "rent."
7. At Corrente, two candidates for emergent parties continue to be active commenters and posters -- Julia Williams and Warren Mosler -- putting Corrente firmly in the mainstream of American public opinion, where 58% support a third party (although some would say a second).

To which -- appropriating the Versailles subjunctive -- I would add that the 2012 campaign began today. Independent platforms like Corrente will, I hope, be important for those who wish to avoid drowning in the oncoming tsunami of mis- and dis-information from the legacy parties.

Read the whole post, and then fish around in the sofa cushions for some goodness to throw his way. There are very, very few political thinkers and bloggers in the Left Blogosphere who have contributed as much to keeping critical thinking alive as Lambert has done.

Anglachel

Cannon Fodder

2011-03-31T22:07:00.000-07:00

Just before I mixed up the barley and favas for dinner this morning, I read this article in the LA Times. It struck me as yet another misguided volley in the food morality wars.

At issue is whether BPA levels in human bodies are reduced by not consuming food that has been in contact with packaging containing BPA. From this rather small study, there is evidence that levels are reduced. What does it take to produce that reduction? From the article:

The "Food Packaging and Bisphenol A" study tracked five Bay Area families for eight days in January 2010, collecting urine samples from family members after each individual ate normally. Participating families each had four members: an adult male, an adult female and two children between the ages of 3 and 11. Each family regularly ate meals prepared outside the home, including canned foods, canned sodas and frozen dinners; they also microwaved foods in plastic.

For the study, the families then switched to a modified diet of fresh organic meals and snacks for three days. Prepared and delivered by a caterer that avoided using foods packaged in plastic or cans, the meals were stored in glass and stainless steel containers. Urine samples were collected during the families' diet change and after they went back to eating as normal. Urinary BPA levels decreased by more than 60% on average within three days of switching to a diet with minimal canned foods or plastic food packaging, the study found.

"One of the main sources of BPA is believed to be food packaging, but there weren't any studies that had actually looked at having people eat a normal diet and then stop eating foods that had been wrapped in BPA-containing products," said Janet Gray, Ph.D., director of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Vassar College and science advisor to the Breast Cancer Fund. Gray co-authored "Food Packaging and Bisphenol A," a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

"We wanted to be able to ask the question: Could we have fairly simple changes in people's lives, both adults and children, that would alter their exposure and body burden of BPA?" Gray said.

Switching to fresh foods decreased BPA levels very quickly.

Let's unpack this. Five Bay Area families who eat commercially packaged foods were provided several days' worth of catered meals, prepared from fresh, ostensibly non- or minimally processed foods that represented a dramatic change in their eating habits. BPA levels in their bodies dropped by a measurable amount as a result. "Switching to fresh foods decreased BPA levels very quickly."

Do you see the move here? The final conclusion makes it the individual's (or, let's be more precise, the woman of the house's) decision to pick healthy alternatives and dedicate herself to preparing wholesome meals for the family. It does not address the use of BPA in the first place. It does not try to use packaging that is just as effective in preserving food while also keeping down food costs. There was no mention or calculation of the cost difference between the ordinary diet and the catered meals. The red herring of "organic" tossed in there inserts another panty-sniffing bit of moralism that it isn't enough to get fresh food. Oh, no! It must be "organic" fresh food.

Well, my regular readers know my jaundiced take on "organic" (it isn't actually chemical free and there's no conclusive evidence that it is any better than the dinged up seconds I get at the local ethnic market) but the warning flags for me is the focus on the mere presence of the chemical without the context of why people buy and consume food packaged in this way at all. It's not just convenience, as though the people who pop open the pinto beans and canned tuna are simply too lazy to cook their own beans and catch and home-can their own tuna. (By the way, I have a great recipe for canned pinto bean and canned tuna salad. It's delish!) Commercially packaged food is cheap. Much of it is plenty nutritious, like the canned favas I used in my dinner tonight, or the canned tomatoes I used in the chickpea and potato curry a few posts back. It provides ingredients that are not readily available from local growers. It is not merely lower cost than fresh prodice; it is also consistent quality at a consistent price, which allows for budgeting of both time and money.

The problem is not what the consumers are doing, but what the packagers are doing. This is not a matter of individual inattention. It is a matter of public health. The study's conclusion is not that food packaging should be reformulated to avoid BPA or even that food packages should be labled that they use BPA. The conclusion is that everyone needs to have fresh, organic meals delivered to their doorstep. This is not much help to the people who don't have the income to afford meals made from minimally processed food delivered on demand. We poor schmucks are left with poisonous chemicals in our food supply. This is the privatization of a public health problem, with the less well off left to play roulette with their health, while Whole Foods Nation feels superior about eating minimally processed, lovingly prepared meals.

This is another move towards the deliberate dismantling of the public health system, when Whole Foods do-gooders walk hand-in-claw with the corporate profit takers to shift the burden of social risk onto the backs of those least able to resist.

Anglachel

Barley and Favas

2011-03-31T14:08:00.000-07:00

It's been a nasty few weeks. I came down with some head cold thing the first week in March that is still clinging on. One major customer called a complete halt to all work and another announced an emergency project that should take two weeks and is being compressed into 4 working days. I have the day off today and I'm making a big grain and legume salad for dinner since the temperature in hovering near 80 degrees.

Item	Amount	Unit	Cost
Red Bell Pepper	1.00	Each	$1.16
Fava Beans	1.00	Can (20 oz.)	$0.99
Dried Apricots	3.25	Ounces	$0.62
Chicken Stock	1.50	Cups	$0.54
Barley	5.25	Ounces	$0.32
Shelled Pistachios	0.31	Ounces	$0.19
Olive oil	2.00	Tbsp	$0.16
Scallions	0.50	Bunch	$0.10
Fresh Parsley	0.25	Bunch	$0.05
Ras al Hanout	1.00	Tbsp	$0.03
Lemon zest and juice	1.00	Each	$0.00
Total			$4.16
Serves	4.00		$1.04

The key to this dish is to buy your ingredients at a local specialty market where you can get weird, cheap food. The most expensive item was the red bell pepper that I had to buy at Trader Joe's for over $1/pepper. The barley is something imported from the middle east and is the tiniest, finest barley you can imagine, having nothing in common with the huge grains of US pearled barley. The favas are a non-standard 20 ounce can. Smaller cans cost about 79 cents. My lemon came from my own tree, so was free. I'm really lucky to have a Meyer lemon in my backyard, even if it means washing off the bird poop.

Heat 1 tbsp of olive oil in heavy bottomed sauce pan, and add the barley. Stir until the barley begins to smell good and some of the grains are getting toasted. Pour in the stock and bring to boil, then reduce heat and simmer until the barley is tender, about 30 minutes for fine barley.
While the barley cooks, chop up the bell pepper, the parsley, the apricots and the green onions and stir them up well in a bowl. Add the lemon zest and pistachios. Drain and rinse the favas, then stir them in.
When the barley is done, dump in colander and rinse with cold water to stop the cooking. Drain very well and add to the bowl. Add a tablespoon of olive oil and stir well to distribute ingredients. Pour lemon juice in and stir some more. Sprinkle ras-al-hanout spice mix over the top with salt to taste and mix again.
Let this sit in the fridge for the day to let flavors blend. Pull out an hour before serving and allow to come to room temperature. Add salt, more lemon juice and olive oil to taste at the table.

If you'd prefer to make this with wheat berries, rye berries, spelt, coarse bulgur, or large grained couscous, go right ahead. Heck, brown rice would probably work, too. If you can't find or don't like favas, try substituting chickpeas or even white beans. Try almonds or cashews instead of pistachios. Use cranberries or golden raisins in place of all or some of the apricots. Minced red onion in place of the scallions is fine. Use plain water instead of chicken stock to cook the grains. Use cucumbers and/or tomatoes in place of the red bell pepper. Etc. In short, if you don't have exactly this ingredient list on hand, see if you have something that has a similar texture or flavor and substitute that.

Ras-al-hanout is a spice mix that is slightly different depending on who mixed it up. Search for a recipe - you'll find dozens - and pick the one that has a spice mix that appeals to you. The mix I use is:

1 tsp each ground black pepper and cardomom
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/4 tsp each red pepper (like cayenne), ground ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon

This is a pretty nutritious meal depending on how much extra oil you pour over it. I serve it as a main dish at home, but I also take it as a side dish to potlucks, picnics and parties.

I like using the combination of barley and favas. It has a really good texture and is very cheap.

Anglachel

Chickpea and Potato Curry

2011-03-18T19:40:00.000-07:00

This is what we had for dinner tonight. Details below the fold.

Ingredients by cost:

Item	Amount	Unit	Cost
Roasted Tomatoes	1.00	can	$1.19
Bread	1.00	Round	$0.95
Chickpeas	1.00	can	$0.79
Chicken Stock	2.00	cups	$0.73
Potatoes	4.00	whole	$0.51
Butter	2.00	Tbsp	$0.19
Onion	0.50	whole	$0.06
Fresh Ginger	2.00	tsp	$0.03
Coriander	1.00	tsp	$0.01
Cumin	1.00	tsp	$0.01
Paprika	1.00	tsp	$0.01
Salt	2.00	tsp	$0.01
Turmeric	1.00	tsp	$0.01
Total			$4.50

Serves	4.00		$1.13

The most expensive items were the processed things - a can of Ralphs brand roasted tomatoes with jalaenos, a wheel of flatbread, a can of garbanzos, and some chicken stock. The entire dinner would serve four (we have leftovers) and cost approximately $1.13 per person.

The potatoes were medium sized red potatoes and weighed just under a pound all together. The spices I put at one cent per addition as the amounts I was using were worth perhaps a tenth of that. The penny values them too much, but I don't want fractional cents.

The luxury in this dish was the butter. Half was for the curry and half for the bread. Just that little bit made everything creamy.

Preparation was simple. Chunk the potatoes, chop the ginger and onion very fine, drain and rinse the chickpeas, put all ingredients except the bread into a large heavy pot, simmer vigorously until the potatoes are tender, then keep at a bare simmer until ready to eat. The bread was drizzled with a tablespoon of melted butter, folded onto itself, wrapped in a little foil, and set into a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes.

This is a dish to annoy the anti-carb crowd, but was it ever delicious. A squeeze of lemon would have been good on it, too.

Anglachel

Food Experiment

2011-03-18T18:19:00.000-07:00

Something I've been doing over the last few months is keeping a database of food purchases. I'm doing this for a few reasons.

First and foremost, I want to know how I spend my food dollars. What percentage goes to which kind of food? How much for grains, meat, legumes, fresh produce, etc.?

Next, I wanted to see who was getting my food dollars. I wanted a way to identify where I was shopping.

I also wanted to be able to track food costs over time. Is milk going up? Are vegetables as seasonally priced as we've been led to believe?

Finally, I wanted to be able to cost out my meals to a very fine degree. How much did that 1.5 cups of flour add to the price of the cake? What does my lunch cost? Is this dish more economical when made with tofu or chicken?

I couldn't get enough detail recorded in my regular accounting program, so I fired up Access and slapped a few simple tables together. I have a list of food items I buy, currently sitting at 262 items. I split it up pretty carefully. I have some broad categories like Meat/Fish, Baked Goods, Alcohol (only what I use for cooking), Spices/Herbs, and so forth. There's a store table that lists the places I frequent, and a units table that lets me specify the measurements, from a Bunch to a Gram.

Finally, there is my purchases table where it all pulls together. I have the date, the place, the item purchased, the amount, the unit, the cost and the cost per unit figured two ways.

For example, I can track my beloved red bell peppers. At Trader Joe's, they cost $2.29 per multipack, with two per pack. At Ralphs, the one time I bought them there, were $1 each. At North Park Produce, they are (as of last Sunday) $1.29/pound. Now the 2-packs at Trader's can fluxuate greatly in weight because they are sold by unit, and may end up being anywhere from $1.58/pound to $2.62/pound. The peppers at Ralphs (not that I buy them much there) were about 12 ounces each, so about $1.33/pound. The lowest I've paid is $0.79/pound at North Park Produce.

So, I quickly learned that I can get mauch more for my pepper dollar at North Park as long as I was willing to accept wide price fluxuations and the possibility that there wouldn't be any worth buying. Traders is the back-up location and Ralphs only gets my money if everyone else is out.

I'm still working on the reports to be able to analyze where and how I spend. My expenses breakdown by category as a percentage since late October is:

Alcohol - 1.23%
Baked Goods - 7.30%
Beverages - 6.72%
Condiments/Sauces - 2.43%
Dairy/Egg - 10.92%
Deli Prepared - 0.15%
Fresh Produce - 19.19%
Frozen Prepared - 3.03%
General - 18.31%
Legumes - 2.85%
Meat/Fish - 15.06%
Pasta/Rice/Grains - 4.02%
Snacks - 6.34%
Spices/Herbs - 2.46%

Anyway, that's what I've been working on. It all ties back to my curiosity with the current food moralism vs. health and income. We'll see where this goes.

Anglachel

IE9 Final Release Review

2011-03-16T21:58:00.000-07:00

Between the sorrows of my family and the sorrows of the world, I don't feel like writing very much, but I know that it is a habit like any other and to fail to do some encourages me to refrain from any. Technology blogging is simple-minded enough and gets people all worked up, so is a reasonable facsimile of thought for now.

The final version of IE9 came out on Monday and I've been putting it through its paces the last few days. I've watched the browser develop since the first platform preview last year and have liked what I've seen. I didn't expect the final version to be perceptibly better than the RC (Release Candidate), and have been nicely surprised that it is better - more stable, faster. Overall, if you run Windows 7 as your OS, aren't afflicted with Microsoft hatred, and aren't obsessed with having a bazillion widgets, plug-ins and add-ons, you should use this as your primary browser. The reasons I like it aren't really the BS that the chattering heads in TechnoNewz land like to yammer about.

The thing I like best, which should come as no surprise given that I support government enterprise systems and am part of a security team, is the built in security and privacy tools. It matters that these are baked into the browser itself and not haphazardly plugged in. The programming team at MS has gone head-to-head with the sales & marketing bastards and won some incredibly important rounds.

SmartScreen filter, which looks for bogus and malware infested sites and warns you about them, prompts you upon install to turn it on. A lot of FUD has been spewed that this is "spyware" by MS, mostly by people who don't understand what the thing is doing. It is a dynamically updated list of questionable sites along with hueristics that identify patterns of newly encountered sites to flag them for suspicious content. This was in IE8.
Tracking Protection, which was previously labeled the very unhelpful "InPrivate Filter", a name slected by the goons in marketing to hide the importance of this function. Long story short, it blocks shit people want to stick on your machine, be it ads, scripts, or what have you. It is bascially NoScript and Ad Block for Firefox rolled into one (with one exception) and built into the machine. You do have to turn it on, which is the spanner the ad people have tried to throw into the works. It is faster and easier to use than either FF add-on.
Active X Filtering, otherwise known as Flash killer. Turn it on and it applies to all sites at all times. Use the little blue crossed circle in the address bar to enable it for a site or just turn it on and turn it off once you've viewed a movie. Ad Block does this if you have it loaded in Firefox. I like AB's functionality - it's more fine grained and allows selecting particular elements on a page - but this built in feature on IE9 is much less cumbersome to use.
Trusted/Restricted sites have been there since IE6, but they now interact (along with Protected Mode and the Privacy tab) with the newer security features much more smoothly.
InPrivate browsing is an added level of goodness when I need to use a site which asks for financial and personal data. It was in IE8, too.

What I really love in IE9 is hitting the F12 key and having a complete set of developer tools right there, including the Script Console, which showed me exactly what never made it to my web page.

After working with the One Box (gag, the marketing bozos worked overtime on that name) where addresses and searches get entered together, I'm reluctantly acknowledging that it's an OK thing to use. I still prefer a separate search box and would like an option to enable one. What is important to me about the combined search box is I can control whether my information goes to Bing (or whatever search engine) or whether I just go directly to my web site. The single box on Chrome sends your information to Google first for their database, then delivers you to your site. The refresh and stop buttons are too small for my liking.

Tabs on the same row as the address bar was weird at first but now I like it. I can tear tabs off into their own windows and recombine them, which satisfies my need for tab room. Since browsing with a few dozen open tabs (mostly by people who can't figure out bookmarks) is a fast way to a pwnd browser - not to mention shitty performance - I'm not swayed by howls of indignation that IE won't allow multi-rows of tabs.

The favorites bar (I guess I'm one of the few people in the world who actually likes and uses bookmarks. Go figure.) is awkwardly placed on the right if you just click the Favorites star in the upper right, but it pins to the left where it belongs. The behavior of this bar is disconcerting and needs work as it is still too clunky. I turn off the menu bar anyway, so am unfazed by having to right-click to reveal it again. I NEVER use any fucking add-in search tool bars (Not Google, not I MSN, not Bing, not Yahoo, nada. You really are wasting space and time if you use any of them.) so just enable the Favorites bar (three web page choices, seach, BBC and a personal site) and the Command bar, which I fill up with the buttons I use - home, print, Internet Options, Manage Add-ons, Secuity, InPrivate browsing and the RSS feed button. I also turn on the Status bar (mouse over title area, right-click, click Status Bar) so I have the magnifying button available at all times.

Pinned sites have no interest for me since I use bookmarks and InPrivate. Bleh. Overhyped by the marketing bastards.

Yeah, it's fast and, yeah, it's standards compliant. For example, I went through the CSS in this blog site and stripped out all of the proprietary vendor prefixed styles, plus removed a command that forced rendering under IE to IE7 mode. My blog now looks great under IE9 and blah under the rest. It also allows me to click back into older rendering modes if I encounter a site that won't behave. But, honestly, I'm really not impressed by the speed demon, who can slice the miliseconds thinnest attitude towards browsers. My biggest performance improvement was gained by upgrading my OS to Windows 7 from XP SP3. Everything ran faster once I did that. Since I have a shitty graphics card, I don't see much improvement due to hardware rendering.

Update - Well, my blog would look excellent if Blogger wasn't injecting its own script into the page, overriding the default IE9 mode and deliberately downgrading the document mode to IE8. Bastards. There are no rounded corners now for any browser on first view, but IE9 browser users can click F12 and change the Document Mode to IE9, like it should be.

Speaking as a developer who supports web applications more than web sites, the most interesting part of the IE9 development process wasn't the end result (that was icing on the cake), but was watching the IE development team explain what they were doing and why. They got into standards and test suites and edge cases and and geekery for days. They also had some very serious dicsussions about the business decisions and trade-offs that come with choosing certain development paths and selecting what features would be included, what backwards compatibility was to be dropped, and how to distinguish between a want and a need. None if it satisfied the We Hate M$ assholes (who are swiftly turning into the current day version of the Netscape 4 diehards of 2000) of course, but it resonated well with people who support business applications.

Other browsers do specific things better. I suspect that Opera is actually the fastest performer out there, Firefox will satisfy widget mavens, Chrome has some slick tab options, Safari... well, Safari should never be put on a Windows box. Period. There are claims of better CSS3 support in oterh browsers, but their implementations are specific to them and not consistent. They will need to pass the new test suites the W3C has available - the ones Microsoft handed over to take care of the "standards" nonsense once and for all. No more specially rigged bits of fluff for any vendor (including MS). Transparent, replicable, consistent test suites that everyone has to pass.

I like IE9. It's nicely messed up the triumphalism of the other vendors at the same time as it has set itself up for continuously returning to and improving its own performance. That's what IE6 failed to do and why it became so impossibly lame. I'll be updating my write up on Safe Browsing to add specifics on how to configure IE9 when I get some time.

Anglachel

Revolution 2.Oh Dear

2011-03-02T20:18:00.000-08:00

Well, shit. I spend a month mourning a death in the family and all hell breaks loose around the world. That'll teach me to take a break.

Count me among the jaundiced observers of everything from the protests in Madison to the civil war in Libya.

As someone who makes her living from creating and deploying large scale web-based collaboration sites and always thinking of new ways to incorporate differing communications modes into those sites, I'm distinctly unimpressed by the breathless rah-rah promotion of "social network" tools as some kind of key to a new kind of revolution. If you can Tweet it, they can track it.

Like, duh.

Reliance on systems created for the purpose of tracking you to support clandestine and disruptive activities is going to end up biting the users in their collective ass. Here's a few articles to read and ponder:

WSJ - Web's Hot New Commodity: Privacy - While this article is slanted towards the difficulties ad agencies have getting people to respond, it is a good view of exactly how intent the corporate world is on stripping you of your ability to deny them access.
ZDnet - Dead.ly url's and authoritarian social network tracking - A cheerfully contrarian take on the role of networks and social connectivity in the face of authoritarian regimes.

The deep problem is that the most prolific users of these social systems, teens and young adults, are A) some of the most conformist members of society and B) some of the least critically aware of socio-politico-economic complexity and C) are far too enamored of their own self-image as "rebels" to think two or three hops down the game tree as to what actual outcomes will be. This is not an argument against rebellion (far from it) but is a warning that the tools touted in the NYT today as methods for subverting despotic regimes may become the preferred instruments of those regimes for crushing the next round.

I'm also getting less enamored of Al Jazeera. Posturing is not news reporting, nor is airing every half-assed tweet, call and video. I get better information about Libya from the WSJ or The Economist. Speaking of the Economist, here is a solid, if unsurprising, evaluation of why Gathafi isn't going to be easy to dislodge - The limpet's legions. One of the reasons that the Libyan army was able to fragment so quickly, with many defections to the opposition, is its decentralized organization. This is in stark contrast to Egypt, where it can act in a semi-autonomous manner from state and society and stay organized in the face of pressure from a regime.The Libyan fragmentation is now part of why there is no unified opposition, which both enables Gathafi to try to dispose of his opponents piecemeal and prevents other nations and groups from taking more decisive action. There is no sufficiently representative entity to negotiate with.

The events in Libya are less like the turmoil in Egypt, Tunisia or Bahrain and more like the Balkans. As with the Balkans, we have Russia and China acting as spoilers to prevent UN action in defense of the rebelling population. The Libyans want to get rid of their dictator by their own hook, which is the only way their rebellion can succeed and be viewed as legitimate, but they've got logistical and firepower problems that may be beyond their ability to overcome in a suitably short span of time. The refugee issue is something the UN, EU, US and everybody else can damn well move on with some speed and relieve that burden from the larger situation.

In the end, it turns out that revolutions are done the old fashioned way - by people in the streets, by force of arms, by logistics, ammunition, diplomacy, insider deals, interfering states, and all the traditional methods of political reconstitution. The easy part is the initial revolt. What's uncertain is the state formation and institutionalization that needs to follow. Measured this way, it's not clear to me that Egypt, for example, has had any kind of a revolution (as opposed to a genteel military coup), or that Bahrain is any further along than Iran on the road to popular government. Tunisia has promise, though the influx of refugees may disrupt the cautious agreements arising from those who want a different face to civil and political life and those who like it as it is.

Revolution is not the rebellion. It's the rules that follow.

Anglachel

Slowly Returning

2011-02-20T12:05:00.000-08:00

Life slowly returns to normal.

I've been watching a lot of stuff from Netflix - on demand and DVDs - as I've been wading through my emotional detritus these last two months. I cam across a very interesting British detective series I recommend to anyone. It's called Life on Mars and has two very short (by US standards) seasons of eight episodes each. The basic premise is a contemporary police detective, Sam Tyler, is involved in a car accident. He wakes up in 1973, still a police detective in the same city. Much psychopathy ensues. The first season deals with a specific problem from Sam's past (which is the series' present) while the second season tries to provide a satisfactory explanation of what the hell is happening. It is a brilliant bit of story telling.

I don't have much to say about the events in northern Africa and the Persian Gulf as I think the denizens of those locales have a much better grasp on their life and objectives than I ever could. The best commentary on the effect of the various revolts on US interests in the region (including analysis of what those interests are and why) I have come across is Pat Lang & invited friends on Sic Semper Tyrannis. Something to offend everyone. I think the comparisons between the revolts in these nations with the uproar in Madison are specious and silly, trivializing both by collapsing ginormous historical, cultural, economic and other differences. People doing so sound like Obots from 2008 trying to hook his political campaign to the civil rights movement.

Finally, I'm amused by this article in The Atlantic Monthly calling the "foodie" culture what it is - elitist gluttony tied up with a moralistic bow. The key paragraphs are these:

The moral logic in Pollan’s hugely successful book now informs all food writing: the refined palate rejects the taste of factory-farmed meat, of the corn-syrupy junk food that sickens the poor, of frozen fruits and vegetables transported wastefully across oceans—from which it follows that to serve one’s palate is to do right by small farmers, factory-abused cows, Earth itself. This affectation of piety does not keep foodies from vaunting their penchant for obscenely priced meals, for gorging themselves, even for dining on endangered animals—but only rarely is public attention drawn to the contradiction. This has much to do with the fact that the nation’s media tend to leave the national food discourse to the foodies in their ranks. To people like Pollan himself. And Severson, his very like-minded colleague at The New York Times. Is any other subculture reported on so exclusively by its own members? Or with a frequency and an extensiveness that bear so little relation to its size? (The “slow food” movement that we keep hearing about has fewer than 20,000 members nationwide.)

The same bias is apparent in writing that purports to be academic or at least serious. The book Gluttony (2003), one of a series on the seven deadly sins, was naturally assigned to a foodie writer, namely Francine Prose, who writes for the gourmet magazine Saveur. Not surprisingly, she regards gluttony primarily as a problem of overeating to the point of obesity; it is “the only sin … whose effects are visible, written on the body.” In fact the Catholic Church’s criticism has always been directed against an inordinate preoccupation with food—against foodie-ism, in other words—which we encounter as often among thin people as among fat ones. A disinterested writer would likely have done the subject more justice. Unfortunately, even the new sociological study Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape is the product of two self-proclaimed members of the tribe, Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann, who pull their punches accordingly; the introduction is titled “Entering the Delicious World of Foodies.” In short, the 21st-century gourmet need fear little public contradiction when striking sanctimonious poses.

The same goes for restaurant owners like Alice Waters. A celebrated slow-food advocate and the founder of an exclusive eatery in Berkeley, she is one of the chefs profiled in Spoon Fed. “Her streamlined philosophy,” Severson tells us, is “that the most political act we can commit is to eat delicious food that is produced in a way that is sustainable, that doesn’t exploit workers and is eaten slowly and with reverence.” A vegetarian diet, in other words? Please. The reference is to Chez Panisse’s standard fare—Severson cites “grilled rack and loin of Magruder Ranch veal” as a typical offering—which is environmentally sustainable only because so few people can afford it. Whatever one may think of Anthony Bourdain’s moral sense, his BS detector seems to be working fine. In Medium Raw he congratulates Waters on having “made lust, greed, hunger, self-gratification and fetishism look good.” Not to everyone, perhaps, but okay.

Yeah, this is close to my view on the whole in-crowd foodie fetish. Myers spends more time on the moral contradictions, whereas I would have been putting greater emphasis on the enforcement of class difference, but we come down with the same final perspective, "...the foodie fringe enjoys enough media access to make daily claims for its sophistication and virtue, for the suitability of its lifestyle as a model for the world. We should not let it get away with those claims."

Back to my brooding,

Anglachel

Rest in Peace Linda Ingrid

2011-02-01T13:45:00.000-08:00

My mother died in the early morning of Wednesday, January 26, 2011. It was not a peaceful death, but it came swiftly that morning. She was not religious and rejected most solace as various diseases slowly disintegrated her mortal form starting in her mid-twenties. She had a bleak and unromantic view of life.

Ralph Stanley's a capella version of "O Death" from O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a song she would (grimly) appreciate:

O, Death
O, Death
Won't you spare me over til another year
Well what is this that I can't see
With ice cold hands takin' hold of me
Well I am death, none can excel
I'll open the door to heaven or hell
Whoa, death someone would pray
Could you wait to call me another day
The children prayed, the preacher preached
Time and mercy is out of your reach
I'll fix your feet til you cant walk
I'll lock your jaw til you cant talk
I'll close your eyes so you can't see
This very air, come and go with me
I'm death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To draw up the flesh off of the frame
Dirt and worm both have a claim
O, Death
O, Death
Won't you spare me over til another year
My mother came to my bed
Placed a cold towel upon my head
My head is warm my feet are cold
Death is a-movin upon my soul
Oh, death how you're treatin' me
You've close my eyes so I can't see
Well you're hurtin' my body
You make me cold
You run my life right outta my soul
Oh death please consider my age
Please don't take me at this stage
My wealth is all at your command
If you will move your icy hand
Oh the young, the rich or poor
Hunger like me you know
No wealth, no ruin, no silver no gold
Nothing satisfies me but your soul
O, death
O, death
Wont you spare me over til another year
Wont you spare me over til another year
Wont you spare me over til another year

For the first time in forty-five years, she is not in pain. Death, you are a bastard.

Anglachel

Edit - Thank you to all of the well-wishers. Be assured I am reading every comment.

Leave of Absence

2011-01-22T10:28:00.000-08:00

I'm dealing with a family medical crisis at present. It may end tomorrow, it may be months. It will be a while before I do any serious blogging.

My thanks to those who know what's up and have sent their good wishes.

Anglachel

Judgment

2011-01-17T11:28:00.000-08:00

I'm in absolute, complete, unequivocal agreement with Riverdaughter in her post "failure to discriminate", especially this:

I’ve never seen so much denial in my life. The right was happy as all get out to stomp all over us before this shooting. If it really had nothing to do with it, and I’m not saying it did, why not just admit that it was fun while it lasted? Sarah and Glenn aren’t apologizing. Take credit for the poison. You deserve it!

But if you’re tired of it, like I am, turn off the TV and the radio. Step away from the fight. If you are an FDR type Democrat in Exile like me, this doesn’t have anything to do with you anyway. It’s just two anachronistic, legacy parties going at each other. It has very little to do with how people are living today. It won’t get more people employed, fix our crumbling infrastructure, punish the bankers or end a war. It is a major distraction.

Enough.

It's called judgment. It exists in its exercise. It is what my class has consistently, persistently failed to do since it decided the last Democratic president was too white, too hick, too Southern, and too transactional for them to deign to support. It's what my political opponents, the Movement Conservatives, refuse to do in their single minded pursuit of power, demonizing anyone who fails to fall in behind their hateful, anti-democratic message.

I've been avoiding the news for the most part this last week because of the opportunistic appropriation of the shooting by the usual political suspects. It's why I've avoided most American political news for the last two years. I think I stopped paying attention to most of the Media Kabuki when the loudest voices of Left and Right decided that whatever was wrong with the country, no matter the specific wrong being mentioned, it was the fault of "liberals". Those damn extremists. Those damn partisans. Those damn centrists. Those damn moderates. Those damn transactional, practical folks who give a little here and take a little there, aren't much in the mood for conspiracies, don't agree with any exterminationist sentiments (left or right), don't like culture wars standing in for political contest, and are getting really, really tired of single-issue, faux-victim politics.

Anglachel

Voices in His Head

2011-01-10T21:49:00.000-08:00

A member of my family is paranoid schizophrenic. As I read about Jared Loughner, I think of this relative. There are many points of congruence - the decent but incomplete education, a fascination with intellectual discourse, a seemingly coherent exterior, a deep core of paranoia.

A familiarity with firearms.

There was an incident, when no one he trusted could explain what was going on when strangers showed up on the doorstep and wanted him to leave his home. No one was injured, and no further episodes have had that edge of danger.

It's not clear he thinks he's crazy. Sometimes, he might acknowledge things aren't quite right, but there's nothing to indicate he agrees that he needs treatment, medication or minding. The world he inhabits touches the world the rest of the family lives in, but always at oblique angles, the emphasis falling on a different syllable, the meaning of something blindingly obvious to him and opaque to the rest of us.

He makes sense in most part, but there are moments when you realize this guy is nuts. He watches the news, listens to the radio, reads the papers, wanders down to the coffee shop, absorbs the culture just like everyone else, and then it gets out of whack. 1 + 1 = green. Or 6. Or the guy who chased him through the casbah in Tunisia. How does this background buzz transform into the dream/nightmare our relative inhabits? I don't know.

What I do know is that the kinds of logical leaps and paranoid turns this relative makes negotiating his private world are disturbingly similar to what I read in the public sphere, the world in common that is becoming less common place. While there is no equivalence in the rhetorical output of the right and left, there is a mode of thought on the left that shares the deep paranoia of authority and the comfort in conspiracies that fuels much of right-wing arguments. In the blogosphere it is sophistry, clever pretense at being persecuted by "them" and endless speculation on what nefarious deals are being cut to get "us" for daring to oppose the tyranny de jour, batting the outrage back and forth in the comments to show our disdain for The Man. Perfectly normal behavior by political opponents or state actors become occasions for expressions of outrage and the spinning of bigger and less coherent conspiracy fantasies. It's a bonding exercise more than anything, to find one's tribe and hold a haka.

This mode surfaces in my relative in a darker form, and is on display with Loughner. In these men's minds, they provide all the voices needed for their world and there is no gainsaying them. I'm struck by the isolation and the attempts to force the worlds back into alignment, the world inside the head and the world that keeps refusing to play by the other's rules. Is it easier for their imaginations to conjure up violent methods when the cultural chatter around them reinforces the idea that only violent reaction can counter the irredeemably corrupt body politic? Again, I don't know. My relative does not appear more volatile in the face of hyperventilation of either political extreme. Then again, no one has tried to remove him from his new home, either. I don't think it is politics per se that captures his attention.

I think it is dangerous to draw a direct line between specific political events and the acts of deranged individuals, if only because the mentally ill become demonized and because true political opposition can be trivialized as mere mental imbalance. Conversely, it is irresponsible to say that pervasive rhetoric and appeals for violence have no effect on what does or does not fall within the bounds of acceptable acts. While the focus is and rightfully should be on the eliminationist rhetoric of the right because they are openly advocating the murder of the political opposition, it is time for the Democratic Party and the left blogosphere to confront that tendency on the left, something that has become louder and stronger in stomach turning imitation of the right. This mode is what poisoned the 2008 primaries, with threats of violence against HRC, her constituents and the party convention itself if opposition to Obama continued, and it has its roots in the CDS of the early 90s, absorbing whole-hog the tropes and claims of the Movement Conservatives. It is mixed on the left as it is on the right with an unhealthy dose of petulant faux-victimhood.

My relative has reduced capacity to judge the common world, so immersed in the one inside his head. Some days, he'd possibly be considered sane. Other days, not so much. I hope he will live the remainder of his life quietly and not harm or be harmed by someone else because of his mental illness. I am sorry for Jared Loughner that he did not, and horrified at the murders he committed. I don't want to know the voices in his head.

It is the acts of those who have full capacity that need to be observed, judged and condemned. Time to drown out those voices worming their way inside our heads.

Anglachel

Update: I have received a number of comments and emails from people who mention family members and close friends suffering from mental illness. I will not be posting any of them as I don't feel comfortable making that information public (even if the commenter didn't ask to keep it private), but rest assured I am reading them.

Note: I am not claiming Loughner suffers from the same mental illness as my relative, only that what has been reported of his behavior and actions reminds me of things that have happened to this person whom I know. Only a psychiatrist can provide a diagnosis for Loughner.

Good Thoughts

2011-01-05T19:27:00.000-08:00

Thanks to everyone for all of the warm wishes and helpful advice.

I've been to the doctor and there don't appear to be any complications like a growth or bone damage (I was in a minor car accident not so long ago), so rest and physical therapy will be the course of action.

Anglachel

The New Year

2011-01-01T13:13:00.000-08:00

I've been unable to post recently due a severely pinched nerve in my neck that has rendered any motion in my left arm and hand excruciatingly painful.

In lieu of posts from me, and probably a far better exchange, I recommend reading the articles of the most recent New York Review of Books. The edition is solid from top to bottom. Among my favorites:

Where do we go from here? Paul Krugman and Robin Wells repeat the call for a primary opponent to Obama, providing the political and economic rationale for it to happen. Their theme of delinking is one I have tried to work with recently, but have been held back by the nerve problem.
Why Wikileaks Changes Everything - Christian Caryl delves into many of the same themes I raised early on, particularly the political implications of the indiscriminate release of government data. I particularly like the evaluation of Assange as an incoherent twit, which has been my estimation all along.
The Concealed Battle to Run Russia - Amy Knight makes excellent use of some leaked diplomatic cables in her review of a book on Russian politics. You want a picture of a truly criminal state? Cheney could only dream of this level of power.
The Beleaguered Cambodians - Margo Picken provides a look at another criminal state. This one goes into the ways in which imperial & colonial powers have abetted a local elite to rob the nation blind.
China: From Famine to Oslo - Perry Link discusses two new novels by Chinese writers in the context of the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Liu Xiaobo. As with the articles on Russia and Cambodia, the author goes into life in a repressive, authoritarian state, discussing the reality of life for people who truly are oppressed, spied upon, imprisoned, tortured and murdered by their governments, and how they respond to this condition. These articles individually and together serve as a useful corrective to the denizens of the Left blogosphere wringing their hands and bemoaning the horrible, horrible behavior of the US Gubmint against Our Hero Julian and who might just be coming after poor little ME next! Get a grip, people.
Curveballs - Joseph Lelyveld's review of Bush's account of his administration. Cool, almost cold, it eviscerates W's self-exculpation. The final paragraphs on exchanges between W and Bush 41 are particularly good.
No Thanks for the Memories (access for NYRB subscribers only, but first few paragraphs are available) - Gordon Wood provides a much needed counterpoint to professional liberal pundits' mocking dismissal of the Tea Party by talking about the difference between fact and meaning in cultural memory.

Anyway, I hurt and don't know when that will change. I hope your new year is starting out better than mine.

Anglachel

Snicker

2010-12-14T23:13:00.000-08:00

Sauce, goose, gander. Courtesy of xkcd.

RIP Richard Holbrooke

2010-12-13T17:15:00.000-08:00

This is someone who dedicated himself to the hard work of peace.

Richard C. Holbrooke, U.S. Diplomatic Troubleshooter, Dies at 69

Anglachel

No Such Thing as an Innocent Leak

2010-12-12T18:41:00.000-08:00

One of the problems with the hoo-hah surrounding the release of the State Dept. documents is that there has been little attempt from any quarter to distinguish the different effects resulting from the same acts. As long as everything is connected to everything else and thus is declared good/bad as a piece, we won't understand the real impact of this event.

Let's make one thing really clear - the documents have been released. They are not just on wikileaks. Every government with an internet connection has downloaded the complete set (Just in time for the holidays!), there are mirrors, copies, bit torrents, etc., available for anyone with a modicum of computer savvy, and there are now malware emails out there enticing the unwary into clicking on the link to get the documents and actually getting some lovely bit of malicious software instead. That's how you know you've arrived - you're famous enough to be used as spam-bait. No power can reverse this distribution of information. For good or ill, they are now part of the public discourse. What remains is to analyze what has been set in motion.

My interest remains with who actually did the leaking and why. Amidst the salivating over diplomatic missteps and the outrage over government malfeasance, this large question mark remains. In politics, there is no such thing as an innocent leak. Leaking is a contact sport in D.C., after all, and the most (in)famous leaks rarely have pristine origins. Even the Pentagon Papers and Watergate revelations have roots in intra-organizational turf wars. My current response is still to think "Valerie Plame" if only because of the balance of the memos are too focused on Iran as a threat and do not feel like a complete sample of the cables that would have been released in a given span of time.

There is also this curious bit of information from David Carr on the New York Times, in an article published today where he looks at the changes to wikileaks itself over time:

In July, WikiLeaks began what amounted to a partnership with mainstream media organizations, including The New York Times, by giving them an early look at the so-called Afghan War Diary, a strategy that resulted in extensive reporting on the implications of the secret documents.

Then in October, the heretofore classified mother lode of 250,000 United States diplomatic cables that describe tensions across the globe was shared by WikiLeaks with Le Monde, El Pais, The Guardian and Der Spiegel. (The Guardian shared documents with The New York Times.) The result was huge: many articles have come out since, many of them deep dives into the implications of the trove of documents.

Notice that with each successive release, WikiLeaks has become more strategic and has been rewarded with deeper, more extensive coverage of its revelations. It’s a long walk from WikiLeaks’s origins as a user-edited site held in common to something more akin to a traditional model of publishing, but seems to be in keeping with its manifesto to deliver documents with “maximum possible impact.” ...

Although Mr. Assange is now arguing that the site is engaged in what he called a new kind of “scientific journalism,” his earlier writings suggest he believes the mission of WikiLeaks is to throw sand in the works of what he considers corrupt, secretive and inherently evil states. He initiated a conspiracy in order to take down what he saw as an even greater conspiracy.

“WikiLeaks is not a news organization, it is a cell of activists that is releasing information designed to embarrass people in power,” said George Packer, a writer on international affairs at The New Yorker. “They simply believe that the State Department is an illegitimate organization that needs to be exposed, which is not really journalism.”

By shading his radicalism and collaborating with mainstream outlets, Mr. Assange created a comfort zone for his partners in journalism. They could do their jobs and he could do his.

Whence all of this media savvy? Setting aside Packer's final clause, he is pretty much right that Assange & Co. regard not just the State Department but government as such to be illegitimate, so why the discretion now? There is also the curious fact that their previous information partner, the NYT, was deliberately cut out of the loop this time around. I've had a few quiet side-conversations that Assange himself is a secret Neocon providing a front, which is the real reason the wikileaks organization is fracturing. This strikes me as reaching too hard for a conspiracy to neatly explain the rather messy operation of human affairs. Assange is an authoritarian himself at heart, which anyone reading his writings can discern, as well as more than a bit of a nut and thrives on persecution fantasies - which may unfortunately become prosecution realities, and I'm not talking about the Swedish charges. But that still leaves a rather large question about who or what is driving the new and improved media coziness. That information may come out in the fallout between internal groups at wikileaks.

But back to the real area of interest - who collected, selected and delivered the goods? The materials are broader than what Bradley Manning is alleged to have provided, so who else? I suspect the State Department has limited interest in Assange himself. There's really nothing that can be discussed or worked out, unless he was actively collaborating with an American (individual or organization) to selectively leak some information, in which case we're into major conspiracy land, or was directing an American on what pieces of information to provide, in which case we're talking espionage. If Assange was simply sent the goods, it's not clear what jurisdiction the US could claim. The value that Assange himself carries (and perhaps not him but someone else in the operation has the knowledge) is the name(s) of who supplied the information in the first place.

So much for how the cables came to be released at all. Let's look ahead at the unwinding of events. While the left has been captivated by the human drama of the great man, deprived of flunkies to fuck and threatened by the diabolical Swedish court system, obsessed about how it could be me next!, there's something rather important coming up in January, namely a change of government in the US. While I know that I lose all my Left Blogistan credibility by saying this, there really is a difference between the behavior of the major political parties when in majority power. The Republicans have no interest in compromising on anything and regard all other sources of political power (however ineptly wielded) as not just the opposition, but as an enemy to be terminated.

They've already made clear that the next two years are not going to be used to advance specific pieces of legislation - indeed, why should they since Obama has kindly moved their agenda for them - but to take down the enemy, and I don't think anyone on the Left really understands just how ruthless they will be. Their control of committee chair positions means that the agenda from January 2011 through December 2012 will be investigate everything that could possibly be turned to their advantage.

It's key that these documents were released under a Democratic administration. The focus will not be on who released the files, but that there were releases at all, just as the focus on Plame was not that someone outed her, but that she was connected to Joe Wilson. The actual crime, which is the act of taking documents and handing them over, will be elided - unless there is someone at the State Department who has shown a bit too much knowledge of and interest in some specific piece of data and who happens to be of liberal political inclinations, and then we're talking a show trial along the lines of the House Un-American Activities Committee. That is why the State Department is saying to its current and would-be staff - do not have contact with that now-tainted information, do not discuss it, do not show special knowledge.

The fact that the cables are now in the open allows the Neocon noise machine to safely reference them to beat the drum for war with Iran, secure in the knowledge that contrary information of comparable validity cannot be provided because of diplomatic concerns. How can contrary information be leaked and to whom without it blowing up in the face of whomever tries to engineer that release? The release of the documents into the wild means there is a "source" for "Oh, look what we just now found!" kinds of revelations. The partial release on the wikileaks site itself always ensures that more can be found when there is a need for a strategic leak. The cables that identify security interests - which are of concern to more than the US - turn into fodder to gin up more domestic fear about terrorism, and to request more money for that purpose.

There is no down-side for the right with the release of these documents.

Now, let's look at some specific details. Robert Gates is going to resign as SecDef and soon, rumor has it by August. Given the new Congress with their agenda and a stack of cables, who do you think is going to replace him? I'm going to hazard a guess it will be a Republican with a much more aggressive view of how the US should act in the Middle East. The Pentagon is a big building with many hallways populated by people eager for power, after all. Remember that the Iraq War was dreamed up in the Office of Special Plans, which leaked like a sieve to get its war on. Not all leaks are in the public interest, which is why you need to know who released what and under what circumstances. Again, I gladly relinquish my Left Blogistan credentials to be able to assert that the current US foreign and military policies are not identical to what Cheney was advancing, that there are substantial differences between them most importantly that the administration can see the stupidity of initiating a war with Iran.

The release of the cables undermines the power of the State Department in relation to the Department of Defense, even as it is highly likely that the leaks were done by actors in the DoD. A loss of power in the diplomatic corps undermines the reassertion of negotiation over invasion, and pushes the State Dept. back into a junior position, especially if the new head of DoD is a hardliner with no interest in sharing authority, which I think is likely. Why anyone on the left should want to see a weakening of the one branch of the state dedicated to trying to find peaceful resolutions to conflict eludes me (again, I don't accept reductionist and thoughtless assertions that "it's the same" - facts do not support that claim), yet that is what will happen given the focus of the leaks and the changing of the governmental guard.

Now, I happen to agree with Riverdaughter that the Republicans' crowning glory of the next Congress will be the impeachment of President Obama, and the release of these cables will become part of that effort. Again, it's not the content that matters, but the release - you were entrusted with the defense of the nation and you failed. Never mind the jaw-dropping hypocrisy, just understand that the argument will be made. What you on the Left see as some great victory for freedom of speech and making governments accountable is seen by most Americans as endangering the nation and weakening government's ability to defend us. You look at Assange and see persecution as the issue; they look at the bombs in Stockholm and see terrorism as the true threat.

I think that you will see the Congress going directly after Sec. Clinton because CDS is always in vogue inside the Beltway. The Right (correctly) calculates that this needs to be done for two reasons - first is that they need to remove as many competent administration officials as possible to undermine what little stability and resilience the administration has left, while the second is to do their best to undermine HRC personally just before a primary season begins. They know who can rally Democrats. If they can badger Obama into asking for HRC's resignation, they score a major win. Given Obama's frantic desire to be seen as reasonable and given that Versailles is already howling for her blood, I believe it is a question of when, not if, she will be asked to resign. And for those of you on the Left who cheer the removal of who you think of as an enemy, I've got five words for you:

Secretary of State Joe Lieberman

Yeaaahhhh, kinda puts it all in perspective, don't it? As I alluded to in an earlier post, Lieberman's office getting in touch with Amazon probably didn't make any difference to the company's decision, but the public optics sure were nice. And then there he is with his face hanging out saying Assange should be charged with treason (which is not a legal possibility) and even threatening the dastardly New York Times. And we all know how loyal Holy Joe has been to the hands that feed him, namely not at all. The only small sop we have is that the governor of Connecticut is Democratic and might appoint a Democrat to fill Joe's seat.

The leaks in and of themselves are mostly embarrassing, though embarrassment has serious cultural and political consequences in countries other than the US. The release of the cables, timed just after the mid-terms, was effective in weakening the current administration in ways that advantage domestic hardliners and become grist for the political mill come January.

Leaks are never innocent. They are always political. Time to consider what the true political fallout will be.

Anglachel

Comments not getting delivered

2010-12-12T16:03:00.000-08:00

Just a note that I've found a bunch of comments in a junk mail folder, some of which are months old. Blogger is also sending almost all comments to the Spam bin when they do arrive. If you haven't seen your comment, it's probably gone into this parallel universe.

Technology, so much fun. Not.

Anglachel

In Search of the Ordinary

2010-12-09T17:37:00.000-08:00

I've been really busy the last few days at work and haven't had any energy to blog. I still don't have much.

My evenings lately have been spent watching re-runs of Dr. Who. It is great fun, what with constantly saving damsels in distress and entire civilizations and foiling the bad guys.

I can see the appeal.

Mostly I've sat in wonder at the explosion of ever expanding hysteria among what were once reasonably intelligent blogs. I can't even begin to address these things because the fundamental assumptions underlying the arguments simply aren't rational. They have bits of fact, threads of insight, and an overwhelming body of self-referential reasoning. It reminds me of Thomas Pynchon's observation in Gravity's Rainbow:

If there is something comforting--religious, if you want--about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

I feel caught between a faith that cannot see its lack of foundation and a determined cynicism that will not allow foundations to be laid. Faith and anti-faith denying a place to reason.

Apocalypse is so much easier to conceive of than the ordinary.

Anglachel

What Did You Think Was Going to Happen?

2010-12-04T12:40:00.000-08:00

Way too many people out in Ye Olde Blogosphere are getting their collective knickers in a twist over the reality that - GASP! - wikileaks is getting shut down by a combination of government and commercial actors.

Grow. The. Fuck. Up.

First., let's dispense with the notion that Julian Assange is doing some service to mankind by vomiting up a set of diplomatic cables provided to him and his operation by parties unknown. This is not some take down of empire, and has more than likely contributed to strengthening exactly the most imperialistic elements in the various governments mentioned in these cables. It has been the occasion for some posturing and high-fives over showing that US a thing or two, and has given the conspiracy theorists toys to play with as they sit at their computers screens performing their intellectual masturbation for all the world to see. If you are convinced, like a good Jacobin, that government as such is always already corrupt and in need of overthrow, then this is "proof" of the "crimes". If you understand that the use and abuse of power is a given in the affairs of states, then you cringe to see the damage done to ordinary diplomatic maneuvers for no purpose save to be obstreperous.

You can't make a government agree stop being one, especially by calling it names. You can sometimes get a government to stop a particular course of action by making that action so problematic between the government and its citizens and/or other governments that there is no advantage to the government in continuing that action. Even then, it's an uphill battle that will probably deflect or delay rather than halt the problematic action.

The problem with wikileaks is that there is no call to action on it. It is a publicity stunt by Assange - see how clever I am! See how I can piss people off! Oh, poor, poor me, persecuted by the big bad US!

Ironically enough, what the wikileaks imbroglio demonstrates is how unlike the current administration is from the conspiracy spinners' fever dreams of Big Brother. Assange's freedom of movement is being constrained by Sweden because of a criminal charge there, one that I find all too believable. The US has known of his document stash for some time and has not seized it because, what do you know, they have no legal standing to do so. It is investigating the US military and other government personnel who may have provided the documents in the first place, which is what anyone would do if they discovered they'd been robbed. They are putting out their own interpretation of the situation, which is pretty much what any person or entity would do when facing bad public news.

There seems to be a lot of outrage that the US is doing anything at all to prevent release of more information or to do anything in the way of damage control. News flash - nations will defend themselves when attacked. This is a feature, not a bug. The argument takes the form of "You're a big meanie and an imperialist power and I hatehatehate you so how dare you do anything to contradict my worst opinions of you!" The infantile ids on display are simply embarrassing to read. There is also a mutually contradictory stance that A) these are so damning it will stop the US in its tracks and expose its criminal core and B) the documents can't possibly do any collateral damage. If A is true, B is a given. The problem is that A can be untrue, yet B can still occur. The less specific and more general the communiques, the less likely A will be and the more likely B.

Much is being made of the incredible shrinking digital island wikileaks sits on. The US must be behind all of the attacks! Yes and no.

Looking at what's happening to Assange and his ego project, you're actually observing an example of how states defend their interests. The US has stated its case and asked for other entities to not distribute the materials. That's really all it has to do. It now is concentrating on damage control with the partners and adversaries who appeared in the cables. To think that it would do anything besides this is a failure of rational analysis.

The denial of service attacks wikileaks is experiencing are probably coming from criminal bot networks at the behest of governments who were embarrassed by the releases, but not the US. Claims that the DNS organization was "told" to drop wikileaks DNS record shows a profound ignorance of how denial of service attacks really do cause exactly the effect the company described. My bets are on China as the instigator because A) they've done this in the past and B) the embarrassment of having their internal actions exposed for international mockery is one of those "collateral damage" things I mentioned above. All of the various efforts on the Korean peninsula to keep North Korea from going off the deep end are now at risk. It may be nothing to you, writing from the safety of your apartment in New York or London, that quiet negotiations have been shaken up like a crate of soda bottles, but it matters a great deal to the millions living in that region near a border with a nuclear-armed batshit crazy dictator of a deeply paranoid nation. Me saying critical things of North Korea is negligible because I am a nobody writing my personal opinion. To see comparable sentiments as part of an official communication between states now makes it, if you will, actionable.

Amazon and PayPal are both dropping business relations with Assange because of legal liability for doing business with someone peddling stolen goods. They don't need a call from a government to calculate their rational business self interest, and I tend to classify Lieberman's aide's call as having more to do with the Senator's self-interest than anything else. Expecting commercial entities to bear the cost (in more ways than one) of political actions by an outside customer is laughable. These companies exist to make money, not support political causes. They have no obligation to assist Assange's promotion of his agenda. This also gets to the situations of Internet service providers. If a domain server (in truth, server bank) is being killed by DDoS, that's a hell of an attack, much greater than just flooding a single under-powered and over-loaded server with a rush of page requests. That DNS vendor had obligations to all of its customers, not just wikileaks, and made a rational decision to drop that record from its domain server.

The point here is that you don't need central coordination from some US-run command and control office for a variety of actors to end up at the same spot. Assange is releasing mountains of stuff in a general broadside against pretty much every moderately powerful nation on the globe and they are acting to defend their own interests. Duh. The seeming banality of the cables is the true motivating factor for the reactions because their exposure destroys the arena for ordinary diplomatic give and take. It raises the costs and risks of interacting with other nations because, frankly, the variance between public face and private actions is where diplomacy has the chance to turn around explosive situations. To attack this mode of interaction as such is why wikileaks is being steadily, methodically shut down.

Had the release been smaller and targeted to a specific set of actions or problems, I strongly suspect it would stand a greater chance of remaining in the public space because of its specificity. Exposure of government behavior needs a case or an argument to say why X behavior is wrong, which also means demonstrating that it is in violation of law or agreement, or that there has been a misrepresentation of such a degree that national interests have been damaged. The Pentagon Papers could stand because it was clear that the misrepresentation was deliberate and aimed at fooling the nation itself. Likewise the photos of Abu Ghraib showed torture being performed. The diplomatic cables for the most part are the antithesis of this - blunt and honest evaluations of other actors that are in the US's interest to know.

So, I have to ask, what did anyone think was going to happen as a result of Assange's dump on the world? That the governments would just stand there, wringing their hands, and vowing to do better?

They are moving to protect their interests, which is the normal and predictable behavior of states.

Anglachel

Hillary is Not Going to Save Us

2010-12-03T21:57:00.000-08:00

I've had private conversations on this point before on whether Hillary would run again for President. I have always said she would not. After the disastrous midterm elections, people who had dismissed her in 2008 began asking if she would, perhaps finally understanding the penalties of having been so wrong before. Today, myiq2xu has a post on The Confluence citing two news articles where HRC says pretty firmly that she's done with public service after the Secretary of State gig. Nope, Hillary is not going to save us, even if we ask nicely.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been reading her statements over the last year. She has said repeatedly that she is "old" (she had a wonderful exchange with Robert Gates in an interview where they ribbed each other about being in the Old Folks Caucus), she was not going serve a second term as Secretary of State, and that she had other things she wanted to do. One of my private observations is that with Chelsea getting married, there's going to be grandkids, and Hillary will not want to miss a second of that. Plus there's other family things like getting to spend more time with her husband and her mother. There's this big foundation attending to human needs around the globe that would greatly benefit from her energy and intelligence. And then there is the incredible freedom of getting to decide what she wants to do unfettered by the caterwauling of the CDS contingent.

I am personally disappointed by the idea that HRC won't take charge if only because it means I don't get to watch Versailles' collective head explode in outrage, but I am very happy for her. It means that I have to let go of a hope that she would somehow be able to reverse the nightmare of the 2008 primaries as I watched fauxgressives let their inner misogynists out to play for the sake of a Reagan adulating opponent. Of course, Hillary herself told us this when she stopped her campaign back in June of 2008 - don't live in the past, don't dwell on what might have been, don't let yourself be consumed by resentment over a loss.

I think that Hillary (and Bill) know it is time to get a newer, younger generation in to pick up the standard of the FDR Democrats. While I try to show my respect for Hillary and Bill by talking about Clinton Democrats, the fact is what they have been bringing forward is the promise of the New Deal into a world transformed since FDR's time; a dynamic, frenetic place, less equal in some ways, more equal in others, bombarding us with technologies, industries, and contradiction, where all that is solid melts into air.

New Deal 2.0, if you will.

It means turning away from the course the Stevensonians have set, drenched in sanctimony and cultural arrogance, and, as we have seen in all its ugly reality since the primaries of 2008, actively and aggressively opposed to the fundamental principle of the New Deal, that there is nobility and honor in all honest labor. Their unrelenting demonization of working class America is perfectly in accord with the philosophy, principles, policies and acts of their beloved, pure, perfect candidate, Obama, who has methodically enacted a domestic policy that by design eviscerates the social and economic safeguards of those who live by their labor, not by their investments, financial deals and trust funds.

Let me say that again. The cultural contempt of Whole Foods Nation for the working class in America is being acted out with perfect fidelity by The Precious. He is delivering exactly what they want.

The Democratic Party has been brought up brutally short by Obama and made to look at the deep division that splits most of its traditional base from the current leadership and a very vocal and dominant, though numerically minor, constituency, a group that mostly identifies as "Independent" (fearful of seeming too loyal to a party - how gauche!) and constantly threatens to bolt and protest vote. Their ideal candidate is someone who lauds Reagan and won't put "Democrat" on his campaign literature. If a primary challenge is made, it needs to be done not merely against Obama, but also against this political faction within the Democratic Party. Modern New Dealers must retake the party and make it, once more, the party of FDR.

What the pair of convention speeches Hillary and Bill gave in 2008 have become is a declaration of what an FDR Democrat stands for: Fairness, Dignity, Respect. An FDR Democrat is someone whose politics rewards those who work hard and play by the rules. An FDR Democrat never stops fighting for the ordinary person, even when the media, political opponents and even your own party mock you because you aren't part of their class. She doesn't look down on you because you earnestly believe in God and can hunt for your own dinner. He isn't going to tolerate racism or misogyny, and will call you on the carpet for either. She encourages the better angels in her opponents and can always answer "And we get...?" with something constructive. He can distinguish between personal insult and political challenge, because it isn't about him and his feelings, it is about his constituents and their needs. We aren't resentful that some people are more economically successful than others - opportunity is a good motivator - but we won't accept that some classes should get all the goods while the majority scrabble for a stable life.

An FDR Democrat begins each day with a single question - What will I do to make the lives of ordinary Americans better? - and ends the day by saying what he or she has accomplished towards that end.

This kind of politics is not against anyone, though it is firmly against certain political actions and goals. It doesn't categorize people into the saved and the damned. It has a daunting work ethic and rewards intelligence without idolizing it. It values the simple and concrete over the grand and abstract. It does not despair or dismiss.

The reason why the Clintons gained and continue to have such a hold on ordinary voters is because they are consistently able to articulate a constructive and inclusive approach to democratic politics that doesn't demean the people that the government is intended to serve. It is the part of the New Deal that the cultural Stevensonians explicitly rejected in 2008 when Donna Brazile told the party faithful to stay home, they weren't wanted anymore. And, in the midterms, we did just that.

Hillary is not going to save us because she cannot. It is not within her power to do so. It never was. No candidate can do this. Her refusal to run turns us back on ourselves, not to wait for a candidate to rescue us from The Precious, but to tell a candidate what he or she is going to do to win our support. It may be that the greatest work Hillary did was to endure the 2008 primary, bringing out into the open the anti-D/democratic impulses of this faction in the party, but refusing to cripple the party by bolting or sabotaging Obama. We have been allowed to see him operate without impediment and understand in unequivocal terms just how ready the Obamacan cadre is to complete the reversal of the New Deal.

Give up fantasies of political perfection and the notion that any one candidate can save us from the bad guys. New Deal 2.0 is going to be a multi-year effort in party capture and rebuilding.

Anglachel

Season's Greetings

2010-12-02T23:46:00.000-08:00

Krugman smacks the Obama apologists:

After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?

On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.

So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of.

Yup, this is what you voted for, Whole Foods Nation. This is the person you were warned about. You voted for a Reagan-adulating, Democrat-hating cipher who has taken the total mess bequeathed to the nation by Bush/Cheney and has made it worse. He is not even pretending to try to defend any interests, not even his own.

Instead, he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,” although he might as well have.

Obama is not a Reaganite, no matter how much he enjoys fellating the corpse of the Gipper. If he really were a Reaganite, he'd know how to preserve and expand power.

I've written before that Obama lacks any sense of or taste for politics, and think I have his political philosophy identified, namely a very patrician Hoover-ish progressivism, but something Krugman wrote today made me have a very bad thought:

One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

I read this a little differently. What it looks like to me is Obama methodically reversing the desires of the people who voted for him, inverting every virtue and intention they projected on to him. If someone was trying to deconstruct the Democratic Party from the inside - betray its hopes, derail its changes, destroy its legacy - you couldn't ask for a better example.

Almost like an act of revenge.

I said in Primary Objective that Obama was not mortally unpopular with the base, but I'm having to rethink that claim much more quickly than I imagined given the way he has increased his pissing on the Democrats since the mid-term losses. If he has no loyalty to any part of the party and is eager to walk around with a big "Kick me" sign taped front and back, then it makes no sense for the party to follow him off the cliff. Krugman closes by saying, "It would be much easier, of course, for Democrats to draw a line if Mr. Obama would do his part. But all indications are that the party will have to look elsewhere for the leadership it needs."

I think the primary season has opened a few months early.

Anglachel

Foreign and Domestic

2010-12-02T22:32:00.000-08:00

As I read various things about the wikileaks document dump, something becomes very clear. Many commenters don't or can't distinguish between domestic law and foreign policy.

First off, the laws that govern US citizens and others within our borders are specific to this geographical location. They may apply to our citizens outside our borders, but that is more complicated and will depend on where that person is - a military base, a consulate, during a diplomatic meeting, on personal vacation, etc. - and what that person is doing. Restrictions and penalties are higher for people serving the nation in an official capacity (military, diplomats, trade representatives, etc.) because they have to varying degrees the authority of the nation behind their actions.

The First Amendment doesn't apply to what Assange is doing. Period. He's not a US citizen, he's not in US territory, and his documents are stolen property. This document release is not the Pentagon Papers or the records from Abu Ghraib, for example, which involved Americans releasing materials directly to American news organizations. To claim that efforts to shut Assange/wikileaks down is somehow violating Assange's First Amendment rights is misunderstanding where and how rights originate and how law is applied. He has no standing.

Likewise, Assange can't be tried for "treason" for the very same reasons that he has no claim on the first amendment. A foreign national's use and abuse of any given nation's government documents, from stuff downloaded from a website to the most highly classified printed memos, cannot qualify as treason. It is doubtful that there is any legal remedy the US can pursue for the material being released by a foreign national using resources not housed in US territory. At most, it can call on the nation(s) where Assange and/or the materials (in this case, database and web servers) are located to prosecute under their laws, or simply to seize the materials. If the other nation(s) concur that there are grounds for action (such as determining that, regardless of content, the documents are stolen property and that Assange/wikileaks do not qualify for protection as journalist/news outlet), then something may occur. I'm assuming here that Assange is merely the recipient of stolen goods and did not steal them himself. If that is the case, then he is at risk of extradition.

Amazon refuses to house the digital documents on it servers. It is not violating Assange's "rights" by doing so because Amazon is not a government entity and because Assange has no rights apart from those held and exercised as a citizen of a particular state. The relationship between Assange and Amazon is purely commercial. There is no obligation on Amazon's part to support Assange's political activities. If the servers in question are physically located in the United States (and most of Amazon's cloud is here) then they may incur legal liability for distributing stolen goods. Given that they are not a news organization, they have no journalistic protections with regards to government documents. There is a question of whether they can hand over to the US government digital assets placed on its servers by someone else. Deleting the virtual machines that Assange spun up to house the files is probably what happened, and has the least liability for the company. I've seen the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) cloud computing centers use and their liability is usually limited to the value of the service provided, i.e., the cost of the disk space and bandwidth.

The same does not hold for the American nationals who provided the material to Assange. As I've argued previously, this is not just one disgruntled soldier copying stuff onto some CDs. (Joseph Cannon offers as reasonable an explanation of the materials as I've yet read, though I think the material is less coherent than he finds it to be.) The people who had access were under a legal obligation to not release this material, even the non-classified stuff, without approval. Thus, a crime is involved. The more secure the document and the greater the amount of information passed, the more egregious the crime. This was the foundation of the outrage over the Valerie Plame case - information was deliberately passed in order to cripple an opposing political view. The information was provided by people who had sworn not to do such things and handed to journalists (I use that term loosely) to disseminate.

Second, the relations between sovereign nations is not one of democracy. They are not subject to each other, nor bound by each others' laws. They have agreements and conventions, protocols and procedures, but none formally has authority over any other. Reality shows us that nations use various kinds of tactics, from quiet diplomatic negotiations to massive invasion and everything in between, to leverage and coerce other nations to perform or refrain from certain acts. It is a constant condition of seeking advantage.

Which leads to another failure on the part of the gleeful wikileaks supporters - the inability to distinguish between circumspection and cover-up. The juvenile squalls that the government is "lying" because it has an official, public position on head of state Z or international situation Y, and behind the scenes is whacking its head on a desk because head of State Z is a sociopath who reneges on his/her agreements or is trying to extort something (or because we're pushing Z to go further towards a desired outcome), or is frantically trying to keep international situation Y from going into total melt-down or dealing with a last minute SNAFU, are stupid beyond belief. Please read my post The Hard Work of Peace from October 2009 for an account of the kind of circumspection needed in foreign policy.

It is the use of discretion and circumspection that allows nations to seek advantage without ending up in annihilation. It also allows skulduggery and deceptions to flourish. They are inextricable elements of diplomacy. They contribute to which nation or bloc of nations will be hegemonic, or if hegemony can be established at all by anyone. The fact is that this is how foreign affairs will be conducted because nations are continually seeking advantage. Nations cannot opt out of the Great Game.

Which gets me back to the wikileaks data dump. Someone is seeking advantage with this carefully selected set of documents, and it is not Julian Assange. I deal with his kind of arrogant techno-dweeb every day. He is a smug narcissist, more like to Obama than anyone else on the public scene - cold, cerebral, self-centered, convinced of his own superiority, and going to forge ahead with his plans for the world, consequences be damned. He wants to be the center of attention and this is how he's figured out to do it, by catering to other moralistic (yet, oddly enough, deeply morally challenged) absolutists who cannot bear to see shades of gray. They refuse to see any other actions save the ones that outrage them so and cannot bear interpretations that vary with their own vision of How Things Need to Be. In that way, they are not the opponents, but rather the mirror image of the neocons who relentlessly pursue empire before all else, both indulging in their fantasies of violent take-downs and emotionally satisfying comeuppance.

It makes for ironic reading.

There are more troubling documents mixed in with the neocon messaging, such as what was the US doing (or failing to do) during the Honduras coup in 2009. Unlike the bulk of the communiques, this one points at US policy that has been rotten for decades. Will the administration report truthfully about Cuba? Doubtful. In the middle east, it looks less like empire and more like a dog fight to try to keep the regional power brokers from guaranteeing failed states and games of nuclear chicken. There is no good end for anyone to achieve in that arena, I fear, only keeping the battles small and and the disasters slow motion.

At the risk of infuriating a wide swath of readers, I'll say for the record that I am not outraged by current US conduct in foreign affairs. I distinguish between being imperial and being hegemonic (me and my damn political science distinctions, I know, I know...) and say that the US is pulling back from the former and must remain the latter. I'm also going to insist that other nations are far more engaged and purposeful actors than the US critics give them credit for being. Read this fascinating account, The Grocer and Alice's Cat, for a lesson in how other nations take action in their own pursuit of self-interest. International relations is the realm of interests, not morals, and always has been. The Left's fantasy of a pure foreign policy is just as deluded and self-destructive as its fantasy of pure domestic politics. At some point, US hegemony will cease. I have my doubts about what will follow.

But that will happen in its own time. For now, I don't think wikileaks should be shut down merely because it holds documents that are embarrassing, but I'm also not terribly upset that Assange will get his ass handed to him by the many nations and governments he has embarrassed. That's how foreign affairs are conducted.

I'm also not among those drooling in anticipation over the bank papers release. If the recent dump is any indication, we'll be seeing files that Citibank handed over about Bank of America, there will be nothing in it that regular readers of Calculated Risk and naked capitalism don't already know, and the ratio of documents that cause moral outrage vs. those that present actionable material will be negligible.

Anglachel

Suspect Intelligence

2010-11-30T07:31:00.000-08:00

Here's a thought. Most of the cables released by wikileaks aren't classified. 54% were unclassified, 40% were confidential and the remaining 6% had a higher designation. Most came from a network called SIPRNet, which is a major conduit for shared information since 9/11.

While the data is tagged as being from that source, it actually is unknown who obtained the data. Bradley Manning is a prime suspect, mostly based on the leak of the helicopter video and the testimony of Adrian Lamo. I think Manning has provided material (classified or otherwise) to Assange, but probably not the bulk of what wikileaks showed the press. He may be being used as a fall guy, and I think even with a fairly low rank, he could have seen a lot of unclassified material, but the breadth of the information along with the knowledge that it is far more than Manning (or Lamo said Manning) claimed to have downloaded makes me doubtful that there is a single source.

While the Intertubz are abuzz with words like "hacking", no special technical knowledge needs to have been employed to get this information. If the reader had legitimate access to the network, and potentially up to 2.5 million people do, then copying information is all that it takes. Manning's own description didn't involve technical know-how, just some thinking about how to copy stuff without being noticed. Can you copy/paste? Can you burn information to a CD? (And, btw, that also makes me go hmm. There's CD burning software conveniently loaded onto classified, secured systems? What Sysadmin did that? On whose orders?) Then you, too, can take classified information.

The question here is not why did so-and-so have access to the data? This was a network of analysts whose job was to read and analyze the information. The question is who copied the data and distributed it? The answer is going to be more than a disgruntled Army Pfc. There's a big question about why the Iraq location seems to have been purposefully configured to allow data to be removed without auditing, which would take deliberate modification of systems, and something Manning doesn't claim to have done.

All in all, the way in which the data was obtained smells to high heaven. It reflects an attitude contemptuous of the actual work of diplomacy, which was clearly the stance of the previous administration. It smells of the actions of the Office of Special Plans.

The claims of immediate danger to operatives and informants is being pooh-poohed by exactly the people who screamed about that same kind of fallout in the Plame case. There are claims that this release of information will prevent crimes and atrocities, but that claim falls flat when the actual content is read. It is the stuff of embarrassment, and that can make a state reverse course on quiet negotiations that get incremental but vital gains. I see long-term fallout from the missives that will not be to the advantage of most people across the globe, such as a reversal of China's quiet disengagement from North Korea or heightening nationalist paranoia in Iran, thereby strengthening the hardliners. These kind of developments don't have the headline appeal of a privileged upper-middle class white male "rogue" informant standing up to "tyranny", but they will surely cause suffering, deprivation and death.

Those celebrating the release of these files are cheering for the deconstruction of diplomacy, and are short-sighted fools. These are not the Pentagon Papers, this is not a "cover up". This is the daily grind of the State Department. As I said before, the people benefiting from this release are those who see no need for diplomacy when you can invade, bomb and occupy.

I guess I am not one of those who thinks it is immoral for the US, or any other nation, to defend its interests and citizens, and fail to see how any of these releases advance any interests other than those of hardliners around the world.

Anglachel

Wikileaks - Cui Bono?

2010-11-28T19:03:00.000-08:00

I'm going to ruffle more than a few feathers with this post, but there are two words that come to mind when I read over the information Wikileaks is releasing.

Valerie Plame.

This smells like a rather large rat-fucking operation with information on so many fronts being made public all at once. What I see is fairly conventional politics of states, but it is sure to enrage the purists on the left and the nationalists on the right in about equal measure. The first group will wring their ineffectual hands over the evil of the government while the latter will rage at their screens over the release of state secrets.

Who is benefiting from this, really? This is designed to embarrass and compromise people, force resignations, undermine conduct of policy.

This much information being released does not happen without some serious coordination and power. This wasn't done by a few outraged whistle-blowers.

Anglachel

Update - To save pointless speculation, no, I don't think this is the White House trying to make HRC look bad. They have their hands full making themselves look like dolts, after all. My guess is the remnants of Cheney's operation at State and in the military (potentially with help from the CIA and key news reporters) providing carefully selected stuff to an operation all too happy to tell the "truth", no matter how distorted, misleading, or lacking in context that alleged "truth" is.

No, I don't have much respect for Wikileaks. It's all too eager to play messenger for unknown interests. If you think this latest round of releases is good for anyone except the hard right, you need to get out more.

PS - Thanks, Falstaff! Good catch.

And how

2010-11-27T08:49:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of A Softer World.

Anglachel

Commenting Rules on this Blog

2010-11-24T18:27:00.000-08:00

I've posted this before, but it's been over a year and there are some new names showing up in the comments:

Comments on this blog are moderated. If you do not see your comment right away, it is in moderation. Please do not post the same comment more than once.
I have a life. Sometimes I can read comments in moderation very soon after they have been posted. Sometimes they will sit for most of the day or even a few days. Adjust your expectations accordingly.
If you don't see your comment, it means A) I haven't moderated it yet or B) I moderated it and rejected it.
I sometimes get way behind in moderating comments and I reject the entire batch to clear things out. Nothing personal.
If you have put a hyperlink into your comment, I will hold that comment until I can take my time reading what is at the link.
If you state in the comment that it is not for publication, I will not publish it. In those cases, I recommend you use the contact link at the foot of the page instead of leaving a comment.
If you have said something that appears to be humorous, satirical, ironic, etc., and which could easily be misunderstood, I'm probably going to hold the comment until I can add a follow up or else not publish it. I may get the joke but I hate cleaning up after people who didn't.
Anyone who reads my comments can see that I'll approve and release stuff that I strongly disagree with as long as it is civil and thoughtful. Conversely, lack of civility or thoughtfulness, even when the commenter agrees with me, will earn a rejection.
If you are rude, TYPE IN ALL CAPS, look like you're getting into a pointless pissing match with another commenter, spam, or generally annoy me, you will be rejected.
I sometimes release comments that demonstrate the commenter is a moron. If you posted that comment and get ridiculed because you said something moronic, too bad. Think before you post.
Comments of the "I agree!" and "Me too!" variety probably won't be released.
I run this blog for my own purposes. I'm not here to promote your blog, support your cause, or otherwise make you happy. If I don't release your comment or add you to my blogroll or mention you in a post, that's life.
Comments that have nothing to do with the post will probably get deleted.
Sometimes I reply to you with a comment of my own, but I prefer to leave that area for you to voice your thoughts and respond to other commenters. After all, I have the blog itself for my own commentary.

In short, be civil, stay on topic, say something interesting or insightful or provocative without being antagonistic, and I'll release the comment.

Anglachel

Oh, Happy Day!

2010-11-24T18:14:00.000-08:00

The Bug Man has been convicted.

Former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay -- once one of the most powerful and feared Republicans in Congress -- was convicted Wednesday on charges he illegally funneled corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002.

Jurors deliberated for 19 hours before returning guilty verdicts against DeLay on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He faces up to life in prison on the money laundering charge.

Prosecutors said DeLay, who once held the No. 2 job in the House of Representatives and whose heavy-handed style earned him the nickname "the Hammer," used his political action committee to illegally channel $190,000 in corporate donations into 2002 Texas legislative races through a money swap.

Such a nice thing to read in the paper.

Anglachel

To the Right of Lincoln

2010-11-23T20:49:00.000-08:00

Blanche Lincoln, that is.

John Cassidy has an article in the most recent New York Review of Books, The Economy: Why They Failed, on just how badly the Obama administration has failed. None of this will come as any great surprise to regular readers, of course, but there are some interesting tidbits in Cassidy's article that deserve some attention. Part of the appeal of this article is the calm, almost dry, recounting of the actions the Obama administration has taken, granting them every claim they have made about why X was necessary or why Z wouldn't work. Cassidy then throws in the counter factuals, and blows the arguments out of the water.

He starts with an evenhanded recounting of the financial rescue and its results, distinguishing between the formal recovery on a macroeconomic scale and the actual recovery on an individual human scale:

Only on Wall Street was the recovery palpable, however. In September 2010, 9.6 percent of the US workforce was still out of work, and that didn’t include more than eleven million people who had stopped looking for jobs or who had been forced to accept part-time employment. Taking account of these people, the September 2010 rate of “underemployment” was 17.1 percent—about one in six. Even for those fortunate enough to be working, worries remained. Many households were saddled with mortgages bigger than the value of their homes. In Miami, real estate prices were about 50 percent below their 2006 peak; in Las Vegas, they were down 55 percent; nationwide, the decline was about 30 percent. Rather than going out and spending, many households and firms were hoarding cash and rebuilding their savings. In the second quarter of 2010, the annualized growth rate of US GDP fell back to 1.6 percent, raising more fears of a return to recession. ...

If this was a recovery, it was a fragile and embittered one. While the authorities’ response to the crisis had prevented a wholesale economic collapse, it had failed the political test of winning popular support—something Timothy Geithner freely admitted. “My basic view is that we did a pretty successful job of putting out a severe financial crisis and avoiding a Great Depression or Great Deflation type of thing,” the Treasury secretary told me in early 2010. “We saved the economy, but we kind of lost the public doing it.”

Geithner's statement, to me, neatly encapsulates the fundamental problem of the administration - they don't see "saving the economy" as something done for the sake of the public. The playground for the Wall Street kidz was set to rights, the aggregate numbers looked good, therefore the mission was accomplished. This was not an accident or oversight, but a deliberate goal, "The Obama administration didn’t come out and say so, but enabling the banks to make big profits was one of its policy objectives. Rather than seizing control of sickly institutions, such as Citi and Bank of America, it had settled on a policy of allowing them to earn their way back to sound health, while also encouraging them to raise money from private investors." To hear Geithner, you'd think the problem is just that the dim public couldn't follow the intricacies of high finance rather than the truth, which is that the administration selected specific policies to favor banking interests above all others claims on government's power. The policies had the desired results:

When these enormous profits duly materialized and the banks distributed some of them to their employees, the public was outraged. Critics accused the Obama administration of overlooking less offensive options for stabilizing the financial system. One idea, widely canvassed in early 2009, would have been to seize control of troubled firms, move their tarnished assets into a state-run “bad bank,” and eventually refloat them on the stock market as smaller, healthier institutions. Twenty years previously, during the savings and loans crisis, this approach had been adopted successfully. Theoretically, it would have enabled the government to fire reckless bank managers, wipe out bank shareholders, and impose a “haircut,” i.e., a reduction in repayments, on bank creditors, thereby punishing the guilty rather than rewarding them with a bailout. “While the Obama administration had avoided the conservatorship route, what it did was far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses,” the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in his 2010 book, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.

Members of the administration countered that its critics had greatly underestimated the practical difficulty of pursuing the nationalization option. If the government had seized Citigroup, one senior Treasury official told me, it could well have created creditor “runs” at other banks suspected of being on the government target list. The only way to prevent this from happening, the official said, would have been to spend $3 trillion and take over all the big banks. That figure may be an exaggeration, but the fear of sparking another financial crisis was a real one, and so were the political concerns of the White House and the Treasury Department. Neither President Obama nor Geithner had any appetite for a policy that smacked of radicalism and big government.

And so we get to the real culprit - a lack of political will power. The "radicalism" and "big government" move, of course, would have been doing the same things as Reagan and Bush oversaw the S&L crisis. This knowledge, that they could not muster up even the regulatory nerve of a conservative Republican administration puts the lie to Obama's claims of having been so daring that he outdid that financial coward, FDR. Cassidy does an elegant rundown of what FDR-the-slacker actually accomplished - basically, laying the ground work of institutions that saved nation's collective ass over the last two years:

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which President Obama signed in July 2010, while containing many worthwhile individual measures, didn’t really get to grips with this problem. Taken overall, the reform effort amounts to tinkering with the existing system rather than fundamentally reforming it. Any comparison with FDR’s regulatory response to the Great Depression is specious. By the end of Roosevelt’s first term, the financial system had been transformed. The House of Morgan and other big banks had been split up into their investment banking and commercial banking components; through the newly founded SEC, the government was exercising close supervision of Wall Street; through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which had acquired and kept equity stakes in many big financial firms, it was forcing reluctant bankers to extend credit; and through the Justice Department, it was prosecuting a number of prominent financiers. Today the financial system looks overall pretty much the same as it did in 2007, even though at the end of 2010 there are fewer independent Wall Street firms than there were a few years ago, and the survivors have a bit less freedom to maneuver than they used to have.

A transactional politician transforming the fundamental rules of the financial game. Whooda thunk it? Certainly not the crew currently in the White House. What they did do was deliberately undermine the work of the Congress to make the too-modest reforms have some meaningful teeth:

But far from insisting on drastic reductions in leverage and smaller banks, the Obama administration connived against measures designed to bring these changes about. Senator Susan Collins, of Maine, and Senator Blanche Lincoln, of Arkansas, both proposed amendments to the Dodd-Frank bill that would have forced the biggest banks to hold substantially more capital—and real capital, not hybrid securities that are more like debt. After the Senate passed the Collins and Lincoln amendments, the White House and Treasury pushed Congress to drop them from the final legislation. A move to break up the biggest banks, such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America, which was sponsored by Senator Ted Kaufman, of Delaware, and Senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, didn’t even get that far. The Democratic leadership in the Senate joined with Republicans to kill the amendment, which was voted down 61–33. “If we’d been for it, it probably would have passed,” a senior Treasury official told New York magazine. “But we weren’t, so it didn’t.”

When you are working to the right of Blue Dog Blanche, you don't have much to stand on.

In the end, the facts of how the "recovery" was engineered point the political failure of the administration:

Barely a year and a half after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Wall Street was once again doing well for itself—obscenely well, it seemed to many people. “For most Americans, these huge bonuses are a bitter pill and hard to comprehend,” noted Thomas DiNapoli, the comptroller of New York State, whose office tracks Wall Street profits. “Taxpayers bailed them out, and now they’re back making money while many New York families are still struggling to make ends meet.”

No, not really hard to comprehend. Difficult to stomach is more like it. It's Wall Street business as usual. The failure is as simple as not enforcing some measure of fairness, proportion or limit on the money offered to the people who brought on the collapse in the first place, let alone actually implementing structural changes that would prevent it from happening again.

Yes, Timmy. You've lost the public big time. Then again, you never looked for it in the first place.

Anglachel

Imaginary Friends and Political Monsters

2010-11-22T21:10:00.000-08:00

I haven't owned a television since 1989, and encounter it only rarely, such as at a bar or a friend's house. I read about media, entertainment and television on the Internet and in print far more than I watch it. I estimate I watch 8-10 hours of TV a year (broadcasting, not using a TV to view movies or DVDs) and am put off by most of what I see.

Which leads me to the reports of various head-explosions over Dancing with the Stars, where viewer voting is keeping Bristol Palin in the competition. Being without a TV and completely unwilling to even try to locate clips online of any contestant, I can say that I am unbiased about the relative dancing skills of anyone appearing on the show - don't know, don't care

What I do care about is that the show is adding to the media relevancy of the Palin name. McCain's choice should have been a sad selection of VP, on par with Gore's ill-advised selection of Joe Lieberman*, notable only for its bald-faced pandering to a certain obnoxious group internal to the party. But a funny thing happened on the way to the defeat, namely that the Left's reaction to Palin cemented her as a hero on the Right, while their beatification of Obama has led to increasing levels of political demonization of people with reasonable criticisms of his ineffectual center-right politics.

As I asked two years ago, "why did Obama end up running for the presidency not against John McCain but against Sarah Palin?" As the bloom is off the Obama rose, perhaps we can really look at what happened in 2008, when a segment of the left fell in love with an imaginary friend.

The self-proclaimed Progressives in the left media and intelligentsia, wanted a savior, a leader pure and clean and true who would magically get them to their happy place through the sheer force of awesome. Despite the fact that Obama consistently and persistently always made clear that he was a weak centrist at best and a full throated right-wing Progressive by temperament, they projected onto this candidate their idealized fantasy of what they imagined would make the world safe for Whole Foods Nation. He was the black guy who would be proof positive that there was something good about us, the people who voted him in, and that we weren't part of the awful underclass who are southern and dirty and icky to be around. They really, truly, profoundly believed in their deepest heart of hearts that if they nominated The Precious, they could forever drive those undeserving people out of the party, out of politics and back into the shadows, allowing Whole Foods Nation to take its rightful place at the head of the social order.

To do this, they demonized Hillary Clinton, understanding with complete clarity that she was the only thing standing between them and making Obama president. Unfortunately, they had nothing substantive to promote for their own candidate, and had only irrational tribalism to fall back on. They assaulted her personally, called her racist, a monster, and accused her of wanting to murder their beloved object. Above all, they unleashed their deep, passionate misogyny. And, when the dust cleared, they had their pathetic, compromised nomination, overshadowed by the intelligence, partisan loyalty and political acumen of Big Dog and Hillary. But, by God and little fishes, they had the nomination in hand and now nothing could keep them from the White House!

And then McCain chose Palin and all bets were off.

As I said at the time:

Choices like Palin are risky. This may yet all backfire on McCain. What I see, however, is an accidentally savvy ticket selection that is generating buzz and will redound to the Republican's advantage in the fall. It may not win the White House for them, but it revivifies an otherwise tired and disaffected Republican base.

The deliberate actions of the DNC and their selected candidate to antagonize and alienate the Democratic base only compounds the problem.

There are a lot of elements in 2008 that went into the creation of Sarah Palin as a political force, but the chief among them was the insistence of the Obamacan left to focus on her and make her the object of their fury. Her hair, her voice, her knowledge (or lack thereof), her family, her sexiness, her femaleness, her... monstrosity.

You know, kind of like that awful Hillary "monster" they were up against in the primaries?

Again, as I said at the time (All True, but Irrelevant - August 30, 2008):

The real elephant (ahem) in the middle of the room is the unacknowledged fact that the DNC and their selected candidate abused the intelligence and trust of the party base and subjected the base's preferred candidate to outrageous abuse month after month in the primaries. The blogosphere's hysterical overreaction to the Palin selection reveals the fear that their hate-filled, explicitly misogynist tactics will backfire on them and that a significant enough percentage of this disaffected base will do more than sit out the election in November, but will actively cast a protest vote.

Clinton Democrats know exactly how revolting the Republican ticket is. That's why we voted for Hillary. That's why we rejected the Obama message of bipartisanship and content-free hopey-changey. Obamacans were the ones happy to play patty-cake with these bastards and throw our economic and legal concerns into the toilet. Hillary is still out there fighting for UHC, btw, while Obama's good buddy John Kerry declares that a Democratic Congress isn't even going to try to get it in front of a Democratic president.

And with the mid-terms, we see how this continues to play out. Somerby, week after week, has documented the atrocities on the left, the persistent, stupid tribalism that reduces political opposition to racists and refuses to accept that ridicule and demonization have a way of coming back to bite you in the ass.

The fatal mistake, though probably unavoidable, was clinging to their imaginary liberal champion to justify voting for someone disdainful of working class interests and the cultural markers that are assumed to accompany that class. It’s not that they disagreed with the biases and prejudices Obama voiced; to the contrary, he consistently articulated the Stevensonian’s vision of the Democratic Party finally able to lop off the diseased members, the Bunkers and Bubbas, and have a purified community of the well-educated, the urbane, and the properly thankful minorities and women who somehow are always seen in their particularity and never in their universal condition as people who work for a living.

The monster that Obama named in his far-too-revealing remarks was not so much white as working class. The Tribe keeps eroding the distinction between being a racist, being white and being working class, diligently constructing the monster that they want to fight instead of dealing with the utterly pedestrian calamities befalling what used to be the Democratic base – falling real wages, reduced employment, transfer of their wealth upwards, and devaluation of their education and skills. As I said:

The Stevensonian elite predicated its run this year on deliberate abandonment of the poor and working class, who they see as cultural traitors, and playing to the winners of great economic transformation since the 60s. As this is both the media's class and the fantasy it holds of itself, they loved the story - we are the ones we've been waiting for. Unlike the Clintons (“He came in here and he trashed the place, and it’s not his place.”), Obama is seen as a proper member of The Village, unconnected to the (white) trash that both parties have sullied themselves appealing to.

Obama was the perfect temptation for the Tribe.

The right has benefited from the combination of half-hearted measures to do something about the downward drift of the economy (even as they celebrate the bend-over-backwards generosity shown to Wall Street) and the tone-deaf scorn from the talking heads. In particular, the continued demonization of Palin is the gift that keeps on giving. The left blogosphere shrieks in outrage every time Palin gets a slot on TV or is quoted somewhere, yet can't stop making her a feature in their own discourse, such as making her into a monster female destroying the suburbs.

The responses to Obama and Palin are flip-sides of the same political impulse - to replace interests, transactions and compromises with ideals, assertions and absolutes. In both cases, the arguments are about cultural markers more than about actual political positions. The mere fact that Palin exists at all is enough to drive certain members of the left blogosphere into paroxysms of rage, to the point where they will be foaming at the mouth over the minor D-List celebrity status of Sarah Palin's daughter due to a variety show. So what if Bristol wins a dance contest? It's an entertainment program! She wouldn't even have been invited if there wasn't such continued controversy around her mother, and that is fed by the same band having kittens over Bristol.

Let's distinguish carefully here between the desires of the Obamacan left - a weird mix of independents, disaffected Republicans, nominal Democrats, Clinton haters and Obama adulators who are mostly bound together by their identification with a certain kind of urbane lifestyle and imagined intellectual superiority – and the candidate himself. Obama himself, as I will continue to discuss, is also a part of this social class, but whose political beliefs run to the right, though he's happy to let others think he's liberal if it gets him votes. The Tribe projected onto him their fantasies of salvation just as they projected onto HRC and then Palin their fantasies of revenge. It is their obsession with their own political demonology that adds more power to Plain’s rise.

Every tribal reaction to the presence of Sarah Palin and her family in the news strengthens Palin within her own party and in the political realm more generally. In responding to Palin in a personal way, instead of shutting her down early on by focusing solely on her political failings, the Obamacan left has contributed to the creation of a powerful, effective representative for the worst, most revanchist elements on the Right. The personal attacks are exaggerated versions of the same disdain and rejection that the increasingly disaffected Democratic base was subjected to in the 2008 primaries, and which is launched day after day against those who are assumed to support Palin. The arguments used to attack her feel pretty damn personal to the people she is wooing.

The Tribe may have picked the wrong person to demonize. Palin is someone who is unafraid of a political fight and who knows how to capitalize on the mistakes of others. She mostly avoids the main stream media that reviles her and relies on the social media, namely Facebook and Twitter, to get her message out to her tribe. She has not disbanded the online communities that supported her in 2008, probably because their objectives overlap with her own and she feels no need to disavow them in order to appear “serious”. This is someone who can get an interview with Barbara Walters and get votes by proxy on a mass media entertainment show, all the while keeping up a Twitter persona (it is truly irrelevant if those tweets are from Palin or from “Palin”) that delights her base. The difference between the Palin’s political objectives and the desires of her base are not as far as the chasm between Obama's performance and his giddy supporters of 2008.

The ultimate response to Palin and thus to Beck, Gingrich, Boehner, Rove, and the rest of the Right, should have been "It's the economy, stupid," but the Tribe elected their imaginary friend "Obama", not a Democrat.

Sadly for them, their imaginary friend has turned into something of a monster, someone who has governed exactly by the beliefs he espoused from the start of his candidacy.

Anglachel

*For shits and giggles, without looking it up, who was Michael Dukakis' VP choice? And how long did it take you to remember that?

Krugman Agrees

2010-11-21T07:41:00.000-08:00

On all counts - Obama's dangerous Reagan worship, on his misrepresentation of Democratic history, and on the deep self-delusion and denial of the Obamacans when confronted with the baldly stated illiberal beliefs of The Precious:

Some readers may recall that back during the Democratic primary Barack Obama shocked many progressives by praising Ronald Reagan as someone who brought America a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” I was among those who found this deeply troubling — because the idea that Reagan brought a transfomation in American dynamism is a right-wing myth, not borne out by the facts. (There was a surge in productivity and innovation — but it happened in the 90s, under Clinton, not under Reagan).

All the usual suspects pooh-poohed these concerns; it was ridiculous, they said, to think of Obama as a captive of right-wing mythology.

But are you so sure about that now?

And here’s this, from Thomas Ferguson: Obama saying
We didn’t actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.
As Ferguson explains, this is a right-wing smear. What actually happened was that during the interregnum between the 1932 election and the1933 inauguration — which was much longer then, because the inauguration didn’t take place until March — Herbert Hoover tried to rope FDR into maintaining his policies, including rigid adherence to the gold standard and fiscal austerity. FDR declined to be part of this.

But Obama buys the right-wing smear.

More and more, it’s becoming clear that progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion. Once you got past the soaring rhetoric you noticed, if you actually paid attention to what he said, that he largely accepted the conservative storyline, a view of the world, including a mythological history, that bears little resemblance to the facts.

And confronted with a situation utterly at odds with that storyline … he stayed with the myth.

What infuriates me about this situation is that the people who were the most rabid Obama supporters, racing around intimidating anyone who opposed The Precious, spreading lies about HRC, gaming caucuses and rigging votes, justified their actions be claiming that HRC was just a front for right-wing interests and would run an administration identical to the one Obama is running now, whereas he would be the reincarnation of the pantheon of Democratic greats all rolled into one. These are often the same people who failed to vote for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, again claiming that there was "no difference" between them and Bush, that they weren't liberal enough, etc. Gore in particular was singled out for this kind of treatment.

Obama is wholly captured by the conservative myth of the strong entrepreneurial Republicans leading the nation out of the divisive, wasteful wilderness of the weak Democrats. He said so in his campaign, he has said so every day of his administration, and he may very well bring about the end of the Democratic Party given his determination to follow in Saint Ronnie's footsteps.

Anglachel

The San Diego Experiment

2010-11-20T10:08:00.000-08:00

San Diego, California, is a place to keep an eye on as it serves as a laboratory for Movement Conservative experiments in economic malfeasance and runaway plutocracy, helped along by a marvelously kleptocratic and corrupt Democratic contingent. This is the mess Pete Wilson built. The biggest experiment underway right now is how to use Republican controlled major municipalities to eliminate any kind of retirement for workers except 401(k)s. They just might get away with it.

The City of San Diego stopped participating in Social Security system in 1982, when Pete Wilson was mayor, in exchange for a city-funded retirement pension and health care package. City employees do not pay into Social Security or Medicare. The current retirement system is a slightly better than Social Security deal for ordinary long-term employees. Short term employees (less than 10 years of employment) are not vested, so it is a worse deal. For a small number of very long term employees who are at the top of the civil service ladder, especially those in Police, Fire or Life Guard positions, it is a much better deal than Social Security. The people at the top have more opportunities to game the system and maximize their eventual payout. In short, business as usual for the oligarchic kleptocracy.

Until fairly recently, the City has used the pension system exactly as the Federal Government uses Social Security - a piggy bank to raid at will. As a local analyst, Vlad Kogan, describes:

During good economic times, the city relied on strong investment earnings to divert funds from the pension system to pay for projects that San Diego voters supported and to offset other required payments, including the city's annual bill for retiree healthcare.

The City got investigated by the SEC for its shady deals and insider agreements on how it was handling its pension system, and got slapped around sharply for not having a functional financial system which would allow things like, say, auditing. In truth, what it had previously used to keep track of budgets and resources was a set of programs that individually functioned well, but weren't integrated. Those who knew how to manipulate the disparities and gaps did so. It lost its bond rating which prevented borrowing and had to agree to implement a real ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system.

The City powers that be (most centrally this person, Kris Michell, who has been a part of every mayoral administration for over 15 years, but has never been elected to anything) (that's how power elites function, after all), turned their liability into political gold by blaming the greedy, dirty unions for extorting undeserved money from the virtuous taxpayers (never mind that the current mayor, Jerry Sanders, who is leading the charge, is going to get TWO pension payouts from the city - one from his stint as Chief of Police and another from his stint as Mayor), and that we must defend the citizenry from the grasping unions by eliminating their pensions and healthcare entirely.

This despite the fact that the pensions in question are actually on par with Social Security and Medicare.

Vlad Kogan posted a pair of articles that are must reads because while they are specifically addressing San Diego's pension bait-and-switch, they provide insight into how pension systems (from Social Security on down) will be under attack and what moves will be made to try to turn this into an opportunity to transfer yet more wealth upwards.

His first article, What Caused San Diego's Ballooning Pension Payment?, details two actions that put the pension system at risk - deliberate underfunding with diversion of funds to non-pension related expenditures and a significant change to the investment strategy of the SDCERS (San Diego City Employees Retirement System), which went all in to the boom stock market:

Over the past two decades, SDCERS has fundamentally transformed its investment strategy, embracing greater risk.Increasingly, the majority of new money added into the pension system has come from the appreciation of asset prices — instead of member and employer' contributions, and return on fixed-income investments like interest and dividends. While this has reduced the city's pension payment during the boom stock market years, allowing it to spend more money on public services and big-ticket (and voter-approved) projects like Petco Park, it also exposed the pension fund to greater market volatility. As a result of the global financial crisis, which wiped out more than $1 billion in pension fund assets, the city's pension payment must now grow to offset these financial losses. This is one of the primary causes of the growing pension bill.

On top of these changes to the pension system itself (one callously self-serving, the other foolishly optimistic), was a growth in the size of the pension benefit payout. Even that has its roots in the City's deliberate manipulation of the pension system:

In fiscal year 1990-91, the average SDCERS benefit payment totaled $11,403. By fiscal year 2006-2007, it had grown almost three-fold to $33,418. (Note that while $100,000-a-year pension payments are the ones that usually attract the most media attention, the vast majority of employees receive far, far less.)While some of these increases would have occurred as a result of regular cost-of-living adjustments, a significant portion of the growth is due to Managers Proposals 1 and 2, two agreements worked out between the city and the pension system that allowed the city to make less than its required pension payment in exchange for sweetened retirement benefits for its employees. ...

Yet, higher pension benefits can explain only part of the recent rise in the city's required payment. During the same 1990-2006 period, the city's annual pension payment has grown from less than $37 million a year to nearly $180 million, an increase of almost 400 percent. As the chart shows, the city's pension bill has grown significantly faster than then retirement benefit payouts.

In addition to covering the higher benefit payments, the city is now also repaying for its previous practice of diverting money from the pension fund to increase the city budget. Though public employee unions condoned the practice, they certainly were not its primary architects.

Hmm, sounding familiar? It has overtones of the use of Social Security to make the federal budget look better than it is coupled with screams and howls of how underfunded and in peril the SS system is. Of course, had SDCERS not taken the money and gambled it away in the biggest casino in the world, Wall Street, there might be, at worst, a modest shortfall, kind of like Social Security itself:

The shift from fixed-income investments to asset appreciation to produce investment earnings has resulted in increased volatility.That's because, even in the worst years, dividend and interest income generally does not fall below zero. By contrast, assets don't always appreciate — sometimes they depreciate. This is precisely what happened in 2008, when the global financial crisis triggered a market panic that wiped out more than a $1 billion in SDCERS assets.

The effect of asset depreciation needs to be underscored,because this wipes out not only assets but the compounded interest on those assets that had been assumed by actuaries decades into the future just the year before. Overnight, the funded status of the pension system collapses, pushing up employer contributions dramatically.

So, in a nutshell, the City power players took employee contributions and taxpayer matching contributions, tossed it into the stock market, shorted the retirement system, spent the money on pet projects that do not benefit the city in proportion to the money they siphoned away, and now want to renege on all of their fiduciary obligations by blaming it in the unions.

After that article, Kogan published Why a 401(k)-Style Retirement Plan Won't Save the City Money in September this year, going after the idea being pushed by various Movement Conservative interests to simply move the entire city to a 401(k) system and be done with this union-pampering pension nonsense. Here, Kogan actually compares the costs of different systems, and also points out that a move to a 401(k) system tomorrow will do nothing to resolve the city's budget woes, though it will force employees to put all of their retirement savings at risk on the stock market:

First, how much does the city currently contribute to fund the pension benefits of its employees? According to the latest actuarial valuation for the city's retirement system, the current "normal cost" for employees hired prior to July 25, 2009, is 11.4 percent of payroll (see page 9 here). For newer employees, hired under a less generous pension plan negotiated by Mayor Jerry Sanders, the city's contribution rate is 8.6 percent of payroll.

Suppose now that the city of San Diego was indeed a private business and, instead of sponsoring a defined-benefit pension system, paid into Social Security and contributed to a 401(k)-style pension plan. First, the Social Security bill would total 6.2 percent of payroll. Second, if the city made a 401(k) contribution equal to the private-sector average, this would add another 4.1 percent of payroll. The total cost: 10.3 percent of payroll, significantly more than the city's contribution under its existing pension system for new hires.

The problem is that the "normal cost" represents just a fraction of the city's annual pension bill. Most of the current payment (more than 30 percent of payroll) is instead going to pay down the $2 billion unfunded liability in the pension system. As I have written earlier, the vast majority of this liability is due to investment losses in the wake of the global financial crisis. Switching to a 401(k) plan would do little to eliminate the need to pay off this massive liability.

So, the current defined pension is either 11.4% or 8.6% depending on hire date, and a Social Security plus 401(k) system would be 10.3% if the city followed ordinary private sector business practices. Head to head, the "lavish" pension plan provided to city employees is on par with what a comparably sized private sector company would expect to pay. The excess payments are not payroll contributions but back payments for the financial shenanigans and deliberate underfunding done in the 90s.

The point of changing from a defined pension to a 401(k) has nothing to do with saving anyone any money. It is an ideologically driven desire to force all retirement money into private, stock-based accounts where the government cannot guarantee a return and where the funds can be used to transfer the wealth upwards to Wall Street. In short, it is yet another money grab by the have-much-mores. There is no interest in cost savings, because that cuts into the take for the monied class. The purpose is to redistribute tax and payroll dollars.

But wait, there's more. Yesterday, Mayor Sanders announced that he wants to force all new hires into a 401(k) system without the Social Security component. The police and firefighter new hires would remain in the pension system (Jerry rewards his old buddies), but all new hires would be tossed into 401(k) hell (my emphasis):

Sanders acknowledged the Social Security dilemma and said some work groups might be allowed back into the system. He said any proposed city match for a 401(k) plan would likely have to be high to ensure approval from the Internal Revenue Service. A typical 401(k) plan has a 3 percent match.

Some groups might be allowed to contribute to Social Security? OK, so the employee has no secure retirement benefit (no SS, no pension), there is nothing in here about medical benefit (the current pension system replaces Medicare as well as SS), and there is no guarantee what the City will actually contribute.

What San Diego is trying to do is set the precedent for opting out of any employee retirement guarantees at all, and actually goes so far as to force the employees to hand their money over to the private sector to enrich others while losing any hope of security for themselves. When the stock market crashes, you can be at worse than zero appreciation - you will lose your capital. The investment firms probably lose nothing, as they can count on Federal bailouts, as we have seen over the last two years.

The main proponent for this (aside form the shadowy Kris Michell) is the radical Republican City Council member Carl DeMaio, who is single mindedly pursuing two goals - outsourcing and privatizing as many city services as possible (and shutting down those that can't be sold to the best inside bidder) and ending the pension system in its entirety:

Replacing pensions with 401(k)s for new hires already was a part of DeMaio's 80-page financial proposal released two weeks ago. He's holding a rally Monday with the head of the local Republican Party and the fiscal conservative Lincoln Club to promote his reforms, which also seek to cut current employees' pay and benefits, through an initiative.

DeMaio believes there's only room on the next election ballot for one reform initiative: His own.

"It's chump change compared to the reform we need," DeMaio said of a solely 401(k)-based ballot initiative.

No pension system for new employees, but a cheap-ass 401(k) instead, renege on contracts to cut current pensions down to the same level, and destroy union negotiation power.

The Republicans are clever, if horrifyingly brutal towards humanity as such. They know they can't outlaw Social Security head on. Instead, it is a death by a thousand cuts. If San Diego succeeds in replacing both pension and SS with a 401(k), probably by promising an initially high payout to get past IRS watchdogs, then they've also neatly eliminated Medicare, too, and now their target is to reduce the amount of the city's contribution to the privatized 401(k). Or maybe not, since that is money goes directly to their friends. They've shown how other cities can weasel their way out of the system, and set an example for companies to follow, arguing that, hey, why can't we also just pump more into 401(k)s than into SS?

The emphasis on payouts and those damn retiree parasites (it matters that city staff is more female and less white than the surrounding population) bleeding us dry is already a drumbeat against SS, even though the problem for San Diego is deliberate underfunding and SS is facing a time-limited period of potential underfunding decades ahead, plays well in tight financial times as resentment against those who have a little more blinds most people to the way in which their financial future has been exploited by those who have astronomically more. It is all about how to get the public to agree to handing its money over to those who have no interest in your financial well being, only their own.

All of this is perfectly acceptable to the cultural Stevensonians who are also part of the monied elite, or who fancy themselves to be part of it. I mean, we need to be fiscally responsible, and people should be in charge of their economic futures, and just providing handouts doesn't work, and investment is good, and so on and so forth, tapping away on their iPads and Tweeting each other about meeting up for some craft brews, while working class families are being told that they are going to bear the burden for the fiscal irresponsibility of Timmy Geithner's golfing buddies.

The socialization of risk, the privatization of wealth, coming to a paycheck near you all too soon.

Anglachel

Update - See also Mark Thoma's post today on the "payroll tax holiday" proposal from Republicans.

A Hundred Days

2010-11-18T22:18:00.000-08:00

The combination of Hoover, FDR and Obama as a focus of analysis appears to be catching on. I just read Thomas Ferguson's post The Story Behind Obama's Remarks on FDR on New Deal 2.0. He starts with a quote from a transcript of remarks Obama gave to "liberal bloggers":

“We didn’t actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.” - President Obama

There are two things that jump out at me from this quote, regardless of the context.The first is the self-exculpation - we didn't get all we wanted because we took a bolder path than FDR, so don't criticize us! - and the breathtaking erasure of history.

Um, hello? The First Hundred Days of FDR? The stuff of Democratic legend and the bane of Republicans to this day? FDR moved on the FIRST day of his presidency and did not stop for 100 days, passing legislation that would become the most stunning reimagining of American society since Lincoln and possibly since the founding of the nation.
Both of these actions are part and parcel of the movement style campaign politics Obama favors and which is so beloved of the righteous Stevensonians. It is narcissistic and a-historical (We are the one's we have been waiting for), refuses to acknowledge politics as they are, and antithetical to mundane, interest-based transactional governance. It doesn't want responsibility, only obedience and adulation, and so refuses to take it when things go belly up.

I mean, Precious, do you really want to claim that somehow you took on the big fight while FDR was kicking back and drinking martinis, waiting for the bottom to drop out? Really? Well, OK, I'll grant you that FDR probably was downing martinis, a rebellious act in the era of Prohibition, but to claim that the actions of this past president in the first six months of his administration were merely a cynical plot to weaken the country until it could no longer resist the siren call of social engineering boggles the imagination. And smacks a great deal of projection, something the Stevensonian tribe are masters at. It explains nothing and is obviously an attempt to excuse the failings of his own administration to accomplish anything material in more than 20 months.

But even more than being a lame excuse is the misrepresentation of both his own administration's actions and FDR's. The frightening thought to me is that Obama is not being cynical when speaking about his own administrations actions, and that his profoundly incorrect understanding of the Democratic Party's history is ignorance, not deliberate revisionism. I don't get the sense that he is trying to misrepresent history as much as he simply doesn't know any version of it save the conventional wisdom ("which is to say sanctified hearsay and cliche") chattered by the Very Serious People. Lacking political foundations or commitments, Obama has nothing upon which to moor his governance, and this allows him to very sincerely insist that his economic team moved quickly (and they did, for their own interest group) when Roosevelt's did not. It is on par with his incomplete understanding of Reagan, seeing only the Gipper and Saint Ronnie the Beloved while failing to grasp the the ferocity of Regan's fight against FDR's legacy or the ruthless efficacy with which Reagan pushed through extreme, radical policies regardless of his actual support.

Ferguson posits some connections I'm not sure are entirely warranted, but his overall argument is sound. You don't need to put Robert Rubin in bed with Amity Shlaes to see the corruption their respective philosophies have engendered. The central explicit goal of the Movement Conservatives is to roll back the New Deal, and they spend enormous amounts of money to ensure "scholarship" that undermines, distorts and erases the legacy of FDR. This has captured mind share among the Very Serious People and has become part of Conventional Wisdom. That term, by the way (since we're salvaging history) was given its modern definition by John Kenneth Galbraith in The Affluent Society:

It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasizes this predictability. I shall refer to these ideas henceforth as the conventional wisdom.

Ferguson says of Obama regurgitating this myth about FDR's dereliction of presidential duty:

Whether our highly intellectual president picked up the idea by reading it or hearing somebody else say it, it was, and is, in the air. And you can be sure that his words will now be rattling around for years to come and likely cited as proof of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s "irresponsibility."

He goes on to cite historical evidence that the outgoing Hoover administration, completely in thrall to conventional wisdom about financial policy, tried to influence or bully FDR into continuing Hoover's failed policies, such as maintaining the gold standard, demanding economic austerity, and refusing to rethink the foundations of the social contract.

We haven't returned to the gold standard (yet), but the other demands sound all too similar to what the current administration is advocating for all of us little people.

In this way Obama ends up being a recapitulation of Hoover - unimaginative, a willing hostage to hip conventionality, uncomfortable with fundamental changes to the status quo, preferring to let the situation right itself than to chart a new, daring course. I fully agree with him that his administration did not do anything that Franklin Delano Roosevelt did:

Between March 8^th and June 16^th 1933 fifteen legislative proposals were passed into law. Never before had Executive and Legislative branches, co-operated to make such a profound impact on the country in such a short period of time. Private interests were subordinated to public policy, and the federal government took on the mission of doing what no other interest could do on its own. The role of government was transformed.

Anglachel

Richard Sale on the Balanced Budget

2010-11-17T18:15:00.000-08:00

Nothing new from me today kids, but please take the time to read Richard Sale's post The Balanced Budget on Sic Semper Tyrannis. Here is the opening of the article:

The chief result of the struggle between the impulse to reform and classical economic liberalism in the early part of the 20^th century was the welfare state. These partial triumphs of reform occurred because more and more of the population wanted an increase in bargaining power with the great concentrations of wealth, some additional leverage that would provide some reprieve from the harshness of Fate and Misfortune, some badly needed security and protection for the bulk of the people that it had never enjoyed.

Conventional wisdom – which is to say sanctified hearsay and cliche – had argued for years that the American economic system had no flaws -- that capitalism was a process ordained by God to separate the weak from the strong, the energetic and daring from the ordinary and inert.

The dogma that claimed Big Business system was God-ordained and that the millionaire was the finest flower of American civilization was at last toppled from its pedestal because the dogma of conventional wisdom had been rendered obsolete by events. People may find it hard to reason, but most of them are able to see, and when dogma cannot account for the facts of experience, dogma falters.

Read it all. It is short and to the point. The comment thread is (thus far) reasonably intelligent so peruse that as well. (Pat Lang's blog has a varied and interesting group of regular commenters, btw.) Many of the points Sale makes about the conventionality of Hoover in response to the Great Depression are part of my analysis of the current administration.

Anglachel

Prisoner of Conventional Wisdom

2010-11-16T23:07:00.000-08:00

This is one of a set of posts I plan on writing up over the next who knows how long. Like my set of posts identifying the Truman-Stevenson split in the Democratic Party, this will be a partly historical, partly analytical, partly irascible look at the question of how the hell the Democrats in particular and the Left more generally have ended up in such a shitty place, politically speaking. It’s going to be a bit dense.

A word of caution before I get going. I will be using Obama as an example quite a bit because he is an exemplar of a certain political type. Aside from his use as an example, I’m not interested in the person himself because, well, he’s the exemplar of a political type I don’t have much patience with. Claims about his “real” political agenda, or his secret scheme to hand the country over to Wall Street, or his true political alliances, or his cynical selling out of the country, etc., aren’t very interesting to me, though others disagree. I’m writing political theory here, not a political agenda, and my target is not Obama – he’s the person he is and nothing I say is going to change that – but a political culture that doesn’t comprehend its own fault lines and blind spots.

As I alluded to in the post Hostage Situation, I think Krugman has the wrong diagnosis of why Obama is running such a fumbling, impotent administration. He thinks it is timidity. I would say, rather that it is something more fundamental – possessing the wrong kind of political temperament for the time. I'm only a little snarky when I say the biggest reason why Obama is not some crypto-Republican or political conservative is because he can't summon the level of engagement it would take to pursue a vigorous political course in any direction. Rather, I characterize him as a right-wing Progressive, in the same box as Herbert Hoover or Calvin Coolidge. This is different than saying he is a Republican, and while it is a conservative stance, it is not in the mode of current Movement Conservatism. Where a modern political conservative wishes to use the power of government to punish enemies and loot the treasury (it's good to be clear on your goals), this peculiar patrician progressivism is a throwback to the era of Hoover, the landscape into which FDR landed like a cannonball. Obama is practicing the modern version of that ever-so-polite political stance.

He firmly believes in clean government, transparent process, and public rectitude, all those nasty status quo things movement purists deride. It is mixed up with Post-war adoption of a fetishized technocratic stance that overlays the traditional progressive, sharing with it a disdain for and distrust of emotional appeals. What he doesn't believe in is using the power of the government to do good. It's all about clearing away government, reducing government, getting rid of barriers and bureaucracy, and all delivered with a great deal of moralism but very little analysis of why things are the way they are. He has completely internalized the credo that the problem is the government.

I’ll have more to say another time about how an allegedly ultra-liberal makes a very solid right-wing Progressive without any internal contradictions, but for now I want to look at why that political position has rendered the administration unable to act. Remember, Obama is the exemplar, not the isolated case, of this stance.

The prison Obama has gladly entered is the one of conventional wisdom, the enemy of invention and opposition. He was, from the start, the candidate of the Versailles establishment, and remains their pampered favorite son. While the post-midterm news is bad, the media is not, on the whole, hostile and, aside from shrill economists, are very happy to give The Precious a pass. This is not a public figure who ever had an inclination to piss off the Very Serious People. While some deride Obama for the way in which he rose through the social order, there is nothing exceptional about his path – he was smart enough to keep pace and agreeable enough to gain friends. This is the path followed (with less celebrity status and a lot less money, obviously) by literally millions of people in the US. I count myself among that group. Most of the people I work with on a daily basis are in that class of educated, politely raised, moderately affluent professionals. It’s easy to go along in that milieu and never think that it is, well, weird. A lot of people find reassurance in listening to the Very Serious People.

But what you’re taught and who you choose to associate with matter. On the celebrity side, Obama liked to hang out with the faux-radicals of the intellectual hothouse of Hyde Park, Ayers and Wright. (Yeah, remember them?) As I said in “Radical Chic”:

Obama has worked as a community activist, though I have not yet heard what that work specifically accomplished. He served as a legislator in the state senate and is now a US Senator. John Edwards effectively used the courts to right wrongs committed against his clients. He has served as a US senator, and is now dedicated to public service to battle poverty in this country. Hillary organized child care for migrant laborers in Chicago, worked to impeach Nixon in the Watergate hearings, has worked her entire adult life as an advocate for women and children including for the Children's Defense Fund, ran a legal aid clinic for the poor and was appointed by President Carter to the United States Legal Services Corporation, participated in Bill Clinton's various administrations on issues touching on civil rights, trade, health care and other bread and butter issues, traveled the world advocating US interests, gave an historic and very politically daring speech in Beijing on women's rights, and is now in her second term as a US senator. Aside from Hillary's Beijing speech, none of this work by any of the top three candidates … strikes me as particularly radical or extremist. These are all perfectly respectable and commendable public service records, and are well within the bounds of normal political activity. My point is that to call Obama a radical, whether as praise or as criticism, is simply wrong.

It also strikes me that to be talking in these terms about what we should expect from our political candidates is wrong. As criticism, it plays into the hands of the Right who seeks to demonize liberalism by invoking 60s conflict as a whole and subsuming legitimate Democratic political objectives to the reprehensible (and fundamentally anti-political) actions of wack-jobs like Ayers. As praise, it conflates a constructive strand of radical politics, one that pushes the envelope of liberalism but which is intended to expand and strengthen the New Deal, with the violent, shallow, narcissistic and disruptive acts of people like Ayers. It cuts to the core of why Democrats have a difficult time retaining power in the face of the Movement Conservatives, namely the Left's internal class division and the siren call of radical chic.

The Chicago radical stance was a performance specific to that setting and pretty obviously did not make any lasting impression on Obama. More telling is who he had on the philosophical side. Here, he stuck with self-described Libertarian Paternalists and they obviously have had a long lasting effect on his political sensibilities. These are people who compare the Clean Air act to Soviet-style five-year plans, and will not condone the government doing more than “nudging” people towards collective social and economic goals. This crucially matters because it categorically rules out most classically liberal political modes of governance. After reading an analysis of this thought, I commented:

The aspect of Obama's economic approach that had always bothered me was a curious absence of any philosophy of the state as a constructive force, coupled with a stance that focused on "choice" for the isolated and abstract individual of classic economic theory. In short, there is no theory of power. …

[Discussion of 401(k) choice structuring] This "choice" ignores the environment in which retirement savings occur. The concentration on the individual does not offer an opportunity to interrogate the conditions of retirement now, the effect of longer life spans on the need for economic support, the evisceration of traditional pension plans, the assaults on Social Security, the way in which "right to work" laws discourage unionization, living wages, and having enough money *to* save, the gendered face of poverty and how women are disproportionately harmed by poor benefits, lousy pay, and having to work the "second shift" at home, etc. Demanding that people deposit money in a savings account is avoidance of taking on these difficult tangled issues, not a solution to them. …

Choice requires context, and it is the context that is wrong in Obama's economic proposals. As in health care, he appears more concerned with maintaining the illusion of choice than addressing the environment in which acceptable choices about insurance can occur. Cassidy asks a question I have asked myself in several ways: "But for what policy purposes are the masses to be mobilized?" Just what is the vision for the society and the nation that Obama intends to put into practice? There isn't one; it is fractured into small buckets of choices here and there, with neither a philosophy of governance nor a coherent plan for transforming the steaming pile left behind by the Republicans into a strong, liberal government.

Comfort with conventionality and a lack of any constructive view of power in a transactional political system results in a person who is temperamentally unsuited to ordinary politics and catastrophically unsuited in a time of severe crisis.

When looking at Obama’s actions after taking power, the chief aspect that strikes me is that he seems affronted that there is a crisis interfering with what he wanted to do, which was be the Awesomeness in Chief. While I can be outraged at the single-minded looting of the treasury and trashing of the economy by Geithner & Co., I think it is a stretch to view Obama as some kind of evil mastermind or merely as a front for the kleptocracy. Invoking Occam’s Razor, you don’t need to multiply the entities to explain the phenomenon. It is enough to say that Obama trusts other elites like himself to do things in keeping with what the Very Serious People recommend and that he has no philosophical inclination to go beyond what the Very Serious People at University of Chicago told him about proper limits on government action. We screamed, of course, but Versailles cheered and that was enough.

What is missing from the mix, what would doom this administration even if it was not so conventional, is the unwillingness to embrace the crisis as the transformational (dare I say transcendent?) moment that it was and remains. Even W, as vile and loathsome as he is, knew how to make the most of political opportunity. When crisis struck, he quickly turned it to maximum political advantage, spinning momentary and accidental national unity into a “mandate” for him to conduct his imperialist wars, subvert the rule of law in the US, and doing his best to destroy democratic institutions. In contrast, Obama was granted unprecedented powers with true majority support to address the economic crisis and has done worse than nothing in response. At every turn, his administration has sought to tone down and minimize the catastrophic results of Republican rule. His opponent was the previous Democratic president, if you listened to the rhetoric, the one pushing for too much liberalism (If only), not the line of Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II/Cheney, those who led the charge against a fair society.

As I said at the start, this is not some peculiar quirk of Obama’s, though he is such a pure form of this kind of figure in the political elite and intelligentsia of the left that he brings its failings into sharp focus. It is a way of doing politics – with its roots in early Progressivism and then combined with technocratic Stevensonian interests – that has a fundamental disdain for grubby politics performed on behalf of grubby people for dirty, mundane ends. You know, like health insurance. Wilentz’s piece on the movement politics adherents describes a group of people not so much opposed to Obama's way of doing politics as they are the most elemental expression of this approach – we know better so just believe with us and start living your life the right way. No bargains, just do the right thing.

What the crisis invited was someone with a Rooseveltian temperament to step up and wring every political opportunity out of it, inviting hatred and savoring every moment of political contestation. For all that the Stevensonian wing on the left likes to talk about the New Deal and keeping it going, they don’t seem to have a clue as to what combination of talents and temperaments made it possible.

And so we are left watching Obama hold himself and the nation hostage to conventional wisdom about the prudent, expected course of action in the midst of economic disaster, blaming the public for not going along with the vision thing instead of doing something audacious.

Anglachel

Hostage Situation

2010-11-15T20:10:00.000-08:00

I found myself in close to full agreement with The Shrill One's latest column today, The World as He Finds It. I thought Krugman's observation that Obama negotiated everything "with himself" before trying to engage others was of a piece with Sean Wilentz's New Republic article about the failure of the Obama movement to achieve anything of worth. As the Krug notes, echoing Wilentz (my emphasis):

The obvious point is the contrast between the administration’s current whipped-dog demeanor and Mr. Obama’s soaring rhetoric as a candidate. How did we get from “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” to here?

But the bitter irony goes deeper than that: the main reason Mr. Obama finds himself in this situation is that two years ago he was not, in fact, prepared to deal with the world as he was going to find it. And it seems as if he still isn’t.

In retrospect, the roots of current Democratic despond go all the way back to the way Mr. Obama ran for president. Again and again, he defined America’s problem as one of process, not substance — we were in trouble not because we had been governed by people with the wrong ideas, but because partisan divisions and politics as usual had prevented men and women of good will from coming together to solve our problems. And he promised to transcend those partisan divisions. ... He could do uplift — but could he fight?

So far the answer has been no.

I don't find it a mistake that Krugman used the term "transcendence" when pointing out Obama's promises about healing divisions right after Wilentz contrasted transformational and transactional politics in his article. This self-negotiation is like a theater of the absurd version of the famous scene in Blazing Saddles where Cleavon Little takes himself hostage. Where Little used it as a ploy to escape an angry mob, we watch Obama use it as a way to talk himself out of anything that might offend the political opposition by refusing to accept the political world is the way it is - partisan, intractable, unsentimental and a group activity. The personal distancing so crucial to his role as movement leader has become a bubble to fend off the demands of the all-too material world of partisan politics. Whatever world he inhabits, it is not on this earth.

Krugman is right in diagnosing the structural reasons for the failure, an almost pathological avoidance of conflict, ascribing the failure to timidity, that Obama is talking himself out of bolder action by believing in a political world that never existed anywhere outside of his fantasy of himself. As Krugman says after rattling off a list of possible actions, "But none of this will matter unless the president can find it within himself to use his power, to actually take a stand. And the signs aren’t good."

As a result, the American public is now held hostage to Obama's interminable negotiations with himself.

Where Krugman goes wrong is confusing political courage with political temperament, which will be the topic of another post.

Anglachel

Update - I received a lot of comments on this post. I will not be posting any more apart from the two already released. Most are of questionable taste. Some are simply juvenile hateful rants. I'm not going to wade through them to separate wheat from chaff.

One of the things I am trying to do with my blog posts is to avoid joining the general blogospheric rants about how awful Obama the person must be. This includes discussing whether he's a crypto-Republican, a paid lackey of Wall Street, too stupid for words, can't speak without a teleprompter, hates the poor, doesn't floss regularly, secretly votes for Bristol Palin on DWTS, or whatever. I drew my own conclusions about the personal temperament of the guy (the Cossacks obey the Czar, after all) back in March 2007, long before most of the commenters here cared that he existed. He's no more or less venal than the average occupant of the White House and ranting about how unworthy he is makes for really, really boring comment threads.

What I'm trying to do here is discuss political types and their points of failure. Treating Obama as a singular phenomenon (a mode of behavior that perfectly echoes his campaign, ironically enough) is wrong for several reasons. It allows criticisms to be brushed off as mere spite or personal hatred. It gets in the way of extending the critique to other actors or to use it to get at systemic problems. It encourages conflating politics with personages, which leads to politics as personal assault. It allows detractors and adherents alike to look away from institutional faults and remedies. It doesn't help with the next pack of rat bastards crawling their way up the sewer pipes.

I have to disagree with MLK and say that the content of someone's character is irrelevant. Actions are what count. Actions need to be judged on political terms, not personal ones. Railing at Krugman (or me) for not beating the same angry drum as the rest of the blogosphere tells me you aren't getting the point of the posts. Do you really think Paul doesn't know what a political failure this guy is? Krugman is diagnosing the political problem, not the personal one. He's mixing in a pretty hard slap at the self-indulgent "reality based community" (He's looking at you, Brad DeLong) using Obama's failure to cope with the world as it is, not the world as he wants it to be, to point out the same flaw in the coalition that threw their weight behind this cipher two years ago. He's pointing out the political failing of the left to rationally evaluate this person in the first place (the comical campaign sloganeering vs. the hard, cold truth of transactional politics), and is using the image of Obama holding himself hostage to illustrate the way in which technocrats and Democrats have argued themselves into losing positions before going into battle.

If you want to rant about Obama the person, you'll have to do it elsewhere.

Nothing personal.

Where Can I Piss?

2010-11-13T22:34:00.000-08:00

As should be obvious to my regular readers, I'm an institutionalist. This goes directly back to my readings of Hannah Arendt and her analysis of political power. One of her lessons, one generally overlooked or underestimated, was about the purpose of institutions in government. Her discussion of two-sided nature of institutions - to act as a barrier against erosion of rights and protections and to be like a scaffold or a trellis to which power, an ephemeral quality of people acting in concert, could cling and thereby be preserved - tended to be dismissed in seminars as old school and an apologia for government authoritarian tendencies. Didn't she understand that power was in the street, in the movement, in the moment?

Oddly enough, the critics overlooked her agreement with them about sources of power - where else can it come from save "the street" (or in her terms, the public realm) because that is where you encounter unique yet equal others with whom the business of the polity is conducted? - and miss that she is answering the question "What do we do now?" once power has been generated and action is underway. My fellow students were often too caught up in their own struggles against institutions (restrictive family, crappy job, college administration, etc.) to appreciate the function of the structure in the domain of human affairs.

Sean Wilentz's no-nonsense analysis of Obama's political impotence, Live By the Movement, Die By the Movement - Obama’s doomed theory of politics, has led to several evening's worth of discussion between me and the Spousal Unit on the problem of movement style politics, the role of parties, creating and destroying institutions, effecting political change and whose turn it was to empty the dish washer. Both of us agreed that Wilentz had put his finger on the central problem of the Obama movement in this paragraph (my emphasis):

As further developed through a labyrinthine analysis that drew on social psychology, brain chemistry, and human transaction theory, Ganz’s model posited that the root of the “values” problem was essentially emotional. “Values are not just concepts, they’re feelings,” Ganz explained knowingly. “That’s what dropped out of Democratic politics sometime in the ‘70s or ‘80s.” Thus, the Obama campaign presented itself as a social movement that was more sentimental than political, pushing gauzy “values,” like “hope” and “change,” while leaving policy concerns to the wonks. Yet the successful movements of the past had more than values; they had specific goals. The civil rights movement’s eyes were on the prizes of desegregation and voting rights. Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, where Ganz learned so much about political organizing, also had its emotive side—summed up in its slogan, “Si, Se Puede,” which the Obama campaign directly appropriated in translation, “Yes, We Can”—but it also had in mind the recognition of organized fieldhands and the negotiation of fair contracts involving wages. The point of the Obama campaign-as-movement was conceived differently: exciting people with the thrill of empowerment, and collective self-empowerment, by electing to the White House a community organizer who believed in “hope” and “change.” Why electing Obama was imperative required no explanation among the faithful; it was enough to get the spirit, share the spirit, and revel in the candidate’s essence, which, by definition, no other candidate possessed. The leader was the program.

I would add a third movement to this list, one that liberals don't like to discuss but which also proves the point, namely the Movement Conservatives' "Reagan Revolution". That it stands in direct opposition to Civil Rights and unionization does not make it less illustrative. In each case, there is an impassioned following dedicated to achieving the objectives articulated by the leaders of the movement. Action is coordinated, power grows, goals are achieved, and then the goals are institutionalized so that they remain in force.

Spousal Unit commented that the Wilentz article reminded him of something his own professor, John Schaar, said in response to a student's question about why the Civil Rights movement's use of very lofty ideology wasn't a liability. Schaar responded it was because the high-minded rhetoric was always joined to very concrete aims like "where can I piss, you know?" Civil Rights mattered not because of the concept that all men are created equal, but because equality is enacted or denied in the most mundane circumstances, such as being able to relieve yourself in a private and sanitary manner, or order some eggs and toast when you are hungry, or sit on the first available seat on the bus, or have a sip of water from the cooler on this floor, not the one in the basement. The right to vote is, ultimately, the right to piss where everyone else does.

But how do you make bathrooms available to everyone? You have to institutionalize the normalcy of taking a piss. It's not something exceptional, it's not special treatment, it's not a zero sum game where my gain is always and automatically your loss. It's just about ordinary human affairs - you eat, you eliminate. To normalize a particular activity or condition means that it is institutionalized. Institutionalization is the proper goal of a political movement. To be institutionalized, however, is to place something within the bounds of debate about its institutionalization, and this is the point where movement activists start getting their knickers in a twist over politics. As Wilentz says of Ganz, an Obama adviser,

Ganz’s projection of the Obama presidency gained its prestige from the hallowed memories of the civil rights and farmworker union movements, imbued with high moral as well as political purposes. He posed it against the threadbare, craven horse-trading and maneuvering of parties and all previous presidential politics, which Ganz believes were “practiced to maintain, rather than change, the status quo.” The Obama experiment, a movement that arose from the grassroots apart from the Democratic Party, would usher in a purer moral and more effective leadership to the White House. Obama would not merely alter government policy but also transform the very sum and substance of the political system.

Here, oddly enough, is where certain elements of the political right and left have a point of congruence - they both hate the restrictions that institutions place upon them. Jacobins and Authoritarians alike do not want to be held accountable to the dirty, compromised, slow, horse-trading of political interests, though for different reasons. The boundaries set by institutional rules prevent the exercise of arbitrary power, or at least will complicate its efforts, which is anathema to authoritarian regimes. On the left, the resistance is because institutions become rule-bound, and procedures and deals can dilute or prevent pure outcomes. With the fervent support of people like Ganz, Obama became "Obama", an unsustainable fantasy because the dream was crafted in opposition to ordinary, institutional politics, something I described two and half years ago:

[The fantasy leader] knows he wants what is right and true and good, and he will be above all the dirt and filth of the government machine and will pass good laws and The People will hail their modern Solon. It is a compelling fantasy, that of the good philosopher king who will be above “mere politics” and will bring justice and order from the mire merely by pronouncing the law. Every significant election, from local mayor to President, has at least one of these types running, sometimes several. A good liberal democrat knows this is nonsense.

Obama was not running against Washington, which is simply elections as usual. He was running against politics as such. My writings during the campaign are borne out by the Wilentz analysis afterwards:

According to Ganz’s theory and practice of the Obama movement, policies and politics were slighted in favor of feelings and values. Supposedly, these emotive spurs would bind participants in a new activist community, devoted to the collective good and not personal gratification, and dedicated to advancing the uniquely inspiring political leader who had sprung from the reliable ranks of community organizing, and not from the precincts of compromised “transactional” politics.

Rather than go into a critique of the Obama campaign methods, I wish to step back and point to this impulse as something not unique to his campaign, but is an endemic problem with the progressive mind set as such, and something that is implicated in, if not indeed significantly responsible for, the inability of the Left to maintain power. The movement impulse, unattached to immediate material needs, like having to relieve one's bladder while retaining one's dignity, focuses on the the personal made abstract. A leader is pure, not effective, right, not tenacious, absolute, not practical. The leader makes you feel proud, noble, even historic. You don't care about the specifics of the leader's plan because what matters is the righteousness of the overall goal. It ratifies your particular flavor of moralism and brushes away the "But what about..?" details that do not fit with the dream of perfection.

The contempt for "transactional" politics is key to this movement mindset. A transaction is something tainted. It means a compromise has been reached, which means purity is gone. In its obsession with keeping the vision intact and the disgust, sometimes becoming violent rejection, of the offending deal, it resembles nothing so much as an honor killing, where the compromised (female, feminized, weak, inferior) body must be eradicated to repudiate the adulteration. The question that an institutionalist will ask about a political transaction is what is the exchange? To the movement mindset, the question cannot be asked because how can you compromise on truth?

The analogous extreme in an institutionalist would be where everything is fungible, to the point where the act of exchange, in and of itself, is the good in question - let's make a deal at any cost. I would say at this point you are no longer talking about political institutions - which are rule sets backed by law and usually an expensive bit of real estate - but rather about political process - which is a procedure for performing acts in a standard manner. An institution's rules declare what counts as an allowable transaction, such as whether you are allowed to deny me use of the inside ladies room with running water and can send me into the alley to piss in a gutter. A process that won't take anything off the table also undermines institutions because they may allow rule changes that make it OK for you to order me out in the alley to pee, or red line my neighborhood, or refuse me entry to a school, or allow me to be paid less than minimum wage.

The great irony of Obama, of course, is that he ran as a movement head and has performed as the ultimate process man, placing the mode of transaction, bipartisanship, as the goal of political exchange. Without having made a promise to anyone to do anything in particular, he has been left with nothing he particularly wants to do. Unfortunately, Washington rewards those who come prepared with to-do lists, as Wilentz notes:

Obama in office upheld the community organizers’ post-partisan credo, trying to bring together opposing forces and finding common ground, in part under the pressure of the organizer’s own reasonableness. But that was not how it worked in Washington during the past two years; nor had it worked that way for 20 years. A ruthless and right-wing Republican Party spurned talk of common ground as a sign of weakness, and did everything it could to ensure that Obama’s presidency would fail. But oblivious to the long-standing internal dynamics of the Republican Party, Obama continued to vaunt his brand of “post-partisanship.”

There ain't no "post" to major league partisan politics. Even the post-war settlement in the 50s and early 60s when everyone pretended to get along was the era of McCarthy, the Red Scare, witch hunts and the rise of Movement Conservatism. Obama, the alpha and omega of his own transitory movement, is getting steamrolled by an actual movement with very specific goals and completely ensconced in the institutions it has been warping to serve its interests since Reagan took office. In this case, it is pretty much irrelevant whether you consider him to be a naif or a knave - the outcome is identical.

Transactional politics, like it or not kids, is how political settlements are done. If you are unwilling to maneuver for position, you are going to get cut out of the deal. As I put it before:

To be a liberal democrat ... is to be someone who deals constructively with ambiguous situations, where the task at hand is not to chose between right and wrong, but to act within the formal institutions, evaluate competing legitimate claims for social goods (rights, entitlements, benefits, protections), and distribute these goods in a defensible, equitable way. When the institutions have either failed or are no longer adequate to evaluate claims, the institutions and laws are restructured. This may happen any where from a local school board to the Constitution.

The vulnerability of a liberal democracy lies in the fact that it must take the claims of all citizens into account. While not everything is allowable (such as chattel slavery), what remains is not always recognizable as liberal, or even very democratic. Even claims that are reasonable are not necessarily harmonious with other legitimate claims, and the resulting contest and compromise are givens. Moreover, what is politically necessary may not be morally perfect. There are limits to the exercise of morality in the public sphere, which is what Machiavelli meant when he said that we must learn how not to be good. It was not a call to lawlessness, but to its opposite, to strict adherence to the needs of the mundane world, embodied in the law of the land, vs. the other-worldly claims of religion.

Transactional politics offends those who only want transformational politics, the political equivalent of the zipless fuck, that we should get what we want simply by the sheer awesomeness of our ideas. "We can have our political triumph by braining really hard and not have to exchange vital essences with the hoi polloi." Again, this is nothing unique to Obama or his campaign, but the man and the movement are almost pure examples of the worst kind of movement politics it is possible to have, especially given an institutionally embedded opposition who has done this move one better. We can really see the failures of this mode taken to its extreme and functioning on its own. In the transformational model, I don't get the right to piss where everyone else does because my need to relieve myself never enters the conversation at all. I just have to hold it until someone finally hands me a paper cup and directs me to the stairwell.

But lets not be romantics. Transactional politics are dangerous precisely because they can betray, dilute or lose sight of the vision that a political movement brings into existence. To be institutionalized is to be made status quo, and things that have been settled don't like to be moved. Things that have been "settled" before include human slavery and incomplete citizenship for women. The movement's fear of betrayal by the status quo institution is not unfounded. However, without the political acts to institutionalize the power created by the movement, its objectives will not outlive the transformational moment. Both are a necessary part of liberal democracy because institutions ossify, become obsolete, or are captured by oppositional forces. The key, again, is that the movement - in its exuberance and irresistible moment of madness - must provide something that can be acted upon and built into an institution to safely house and defend it against dissolution.

Wilentz goes into the true relationship between movement and institution, transformational and transactional politics in some detail. Here is an extended quote, all emphasis mine:

But is the social movement model adequate to democratic governing, especially as the basis of a presidency?

Fundamental to the social movement model is a conception of American political history in which movements, and not presidents, are the true instigators for change. Presidents are merely reactive. They are not the main protagonists. ... Supposedly, all of our progressive presidents have been preternaturally cautious, self-interested men who originated nothing themselves. Only forceful pressure from outside movements led them to undertake the audacious efforts for which history has wrongly given them credit. Hence, Abraham Lincoln would never have become the Great Emancipator had the abolitionists not pushed him to do so. Hence, pressure from the radical left and organized labor forced FDR into launching the New Deal. ...

The movement advocates’ idea of change coming from below, of course, is simplistic. It also blinds its followers to the true problems of democratic politics. No one doubts, for example, that the abolitionists were important and some courageous. But Abraham Lincoln did not have to be awoken to the evils of slavery; he hated slavery all his life. Years before he became president, he declared his expectation and hope that, one day, the nation would be entirely rid of human bondage. And had the consummate party man Lincoln—derided by the more radical abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips as a hack and worse, “the slave hound of Illinois”—not helped to form the first explicitly anti-slavery political party in world history; had his democratic election to the presidency not provoked Southern secession; and had he not managed a careful balancing of military and political exigencies, over the furious objection of the more fractious anti-slavery forces, that led to the Emancipation Proclamation, the abolitionists’ agitation would have remained at the margins of American politics. Indeed, in preparing the way for emancipation, Lincoln manipulated the Left of his day far more than he was manipulated, distancing himself from them publicly, while crushing the slaveholders’ rebellion and, finally, issuing the proclamation that spelled slavery’s doom. So it has gone, from the Civil War era through the end of the twentieth century, as presidents who understood the subtleties and intricacies of constitutional government as well as the art of the possible, achieve what social movements can only demand. ...

Even according to the social movement model, movements push reluctant leaders who are skilled in the intricacies of lawmaking, especially the president. How was this supposed to work when the chief executive was the movement leader, though vastly inexperienced in the ways of the White House, let alone of the hazards of Washington? Where was the crafty president who needed to be pushed, the president who would know how and when to use a movement to his advantage?

After his rocky first two years brought on the Republican tidal wave of 1994, President Clinton, with no illusions about “post-partisanship,” entered a state of day-to-day political trench warfare, co-opting Republican rhetoric about family values to give them Democratic content, winning targeted but crucial legislation on matter such as health care, and risking political capital by endorsing welfare reform that the left wing of his own party lambasted—dogmatically and short-sightedly, it turned out—as the death-knell of liberal reform.

A transactional politician knows how to make shit happen, which battles to fight, and how to set up opponents for defeat three or four jumps down the game tree. Great transactional politicians, those who become historic figures, do so with a visionary political purpose in mind, know exactly how, where, and why I need to piss, and understand in as deep and transformational way as any movement participant why it matters that I don't get sent out into the alley but may, without hesitation or interference, go to the ladies lavatory and urinate in sanitary peace.

And this is the false dichotomy that Ganz and movement adherents try to create - that the understanding, compassion and commitment is only on the side of the movement members and do not make up any part of the crafty politician who turns the movement goals into the law of the land. In fact, the example of Obama is the opposite, that the movement may not have anything worth institutionalizing, and that the fervor of the adherents bears an inverse relationship to the value of the social good being delivered. It makes outrageous claims, like Lincoln being a "slave hound", or FDR being forced to enact financial reform, or that LBJ did not care about ending segregation. These were all men who understood the difficulties of taking a piss. Each of them gave their entire lives over to achieving their political goals. Can anyone honestly say that Obama is in their league, let alone that his "movement" bears the slightest resemblance to the world historic transformations wrought by any one of these presidents?

Wilentz ends with this:

Presidential oratory about beliefs was an important part of the mix—recall Clinton’s effective speech on government and patriotic values following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995—but the grind of political infighting and compromise must always have priority. It could well be that Obama’s survival as an effective political force for the next two years and his prospect for reelection—and any viable future for social movements—will require engaging cleverly and doggedly in what his movement theorists derided as “status quo” politics.

Precisely what the movement adherents most desire, to slip the bonds of status quo politics, is the most certain way to render their movement irrelevant. The battle to properly institutionalize a movement goal, for example having health care for all on the model of Medicare instead of some hodgepodge of tepid ideas and bones thrown to the insurance companies, or declaring that Social Security is not in trouble and will not be on the table instead of allowing it to be nibbled to death by ducks, or that the banks need to be reformed and their criminal management brought to trial instead of handing them bags of cash, or declaring that there will be a stimulus package big enough to jump start the economy instead of preaching fiscal austerity and allowing unemployment to rise, is what a president is supposed to do. That is her job, not to be Organizer in Chief. It is the person who puts the Party in "partisan" and who understand the difference between me wanting to feel righteous and me being denied the right to piss in the same place as other citizens.

In the end, it is the person who can understand the visions, dreams and goals articulated by her constituents and make them concrete in a way that actually satisfies their material needs as citizens.

Anglachel

Investments

2010-11-13T13:07:00.000-08:00

Marshall Auerback on New Deal 2.0, lays into the Catfood Commission's disingenuous calls for sacrifice:

This latter development has now gathered pace and found its fullest expression through the US National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (an Orwellian title if ever there was one) established by President Obama. The Commission has proposed a $3.8 trillion deficit cutting plan that would trim Social Security and Medicare, reduce income-tax rates and eliminate tax breaks, including the mortgage-interest deduction. Yes, there are token cuts in Defense spending in the interests of “fairness”, but the cuts are heavily skewed toward middle class entitlements. (Which is a deceiving word because it implies that we’re just a bunch of weak supplicants, dependent on the graces of the government. Why don’t we call these programs “enablements”?) The priorities laid out by the Commission are truly symptomatic of the degeneracy of our governing class compared to the days of the Great Depression. Grand projects started then are still delivering value to communities and private business interests some 80 years after their completion.

The general criticism of the class bias in how the commission weighted the sacrifices (most for the little people, few for the monied elite) has been done by other commenters, so I'd like to focus on the last, rather amazing sentence in the above quote. The work of the New Deal is delivering value and providing economic security almost a century after it was done. It is an investment that continues to pay out.

Consider that at least 30 of those 80 years have occurred while a political party explicitly opposed to the New Deal has been in power, and that it has been under fire from that same faction since the early 1960s, more than half its life. We're talking some institutional resilience. When a program provides material benefits to large portions of the population with little overhead and minimal intrusiveness, it's going to be a winner. This is deep strength of Social Security and Medicare - they deliver. [There's also the incredible infrastructure investments of the WPA that continue to deliver, but those are less easy to identify as a personal benefit.]

This is why the attacks on them have failed thus far. Main Street can see the benefit these programs deliver. Main Street in this case is not just families, but also small business. Cost efficiencies for business is also a reason why these programs persist. How many small business owners can provide a retiree pension or medical insurance system with the cost efficiency as SS and Medicare, for example? People also see that these New Deal programs are about the only thing still delivering to them in the face of 35 years of continual and deliberate economic degradation:

...American families have spent the past several years facing tough choices in their own lives because the market system failed. This was all due to lax government regulation and dishonest, irresponsible, and indeed fraudulent behavior on the part of the private sector, notably the financial sector, which stands to benefit from any attempt to privatize Social Security.

The deteriorating position of most American families has been exacerbated by the failure of fiscal policy to ensure there was enough spending to support their jobs and, hence, generate increased revenues (which would REDUCE the budget deficit). There are no consequences for the people who helped drive us into the ditch that the President loves to talk about. In fact, to extend the President’s metaphor, the very car that veered off into the ditch has run over the people trying to climb out of it. Those victims, in turn, are being blamed for having dug the ditch in the first place.

The rejection of Obama is not so much a rejection of him personally as it is rejection of the failure of his administration and the Congress sent there to support it to deliver more to Main Street in combination with the eager delivery of moremoremore to Wall Street. He was given the power and the direction to "git 'er done" and bring back some semblance of reasonable economic goods allocation, and there isn't even an effort to hand wave in the direction of Main Street. We just need to sacrifice and expect pain. Those of us who paid attention to his rhetoric all along were not surprised when he turned out to be the incarnation of the worst parts of Big Dog's economic policy missteps (mostly because we assumed he was telling the truth), but I must admit to a certain amazement at just how cavalier the Obamacan regime has been on the messaging. Even Reagan knew how to deliver the message so it sounded like you were being romanced instead of merely fucked over.

For all the bitching Americans do about government power (right back to the original Tea Party), we're a practical lot in the main. We can see when we're getting something good, even if we're not always clear on why the goodness is being delivered. The Right has done excellent messaging on "welfare" and "socialism", but even rank and file who staunchly oppose those two evils are pretty cool with Social Security and Medicare. Those are materially beneficial to themselves and are clearly understood for what they are - payout for having paid in, a return on their investment. They can also see the big picture that they are getting screwed while the people who caused the mess are doing just dandy:

Even on today’s payouts, the vast majority of people will have almost nothing but Social Security with which to support themselves on retirement. The value of their homes has declined, their 401(k)s have been decimated, many have lost their jobs. Yet these are the very people being called upon to make sacrifices to preserve our “national solvency”, even as the people largely responsible for this crisis sustain their jobs and lifestyle on the back of huge government bailouts. It is a mark of the degeneracy of our political and economic system that it looks set to succumb to the maniacal protests of the deficit hawks, who urge yet more destructive public spending reductions ..., which will drive millions more workers out of jobs.

The majority do not want to see the programs that materially benefit them get cut back. Like, duh. By the same coin, the monied elite who have no more need of those programs want to see the resources redistributed for their benefit. Like, duh again.

I don't harbor any illusions about the eventual outcome. Wall Street is going to win this round because the Democrats have set themselves up for failure, starting with the retrograde fiscal legislation pushed through by the Republican Congress in the late 90s and going right through the current administration. They will, with a serious expression and a clean conscience (we're being fiscally responsible!) damage these programs by destroying their return on investment - pay in huge amounts, die before you get anything. The Democrats will suffer more electoral losses and the monied class will hop onto the new Republican steed, riding it until the next "throw the bums out" wave hits DC.

Anglachel

Primary Objective

2010-11-12T23:07:00.000-08:00

I've been reading lots of yak-yak in the blogosphere about how there needs to be a primary challenge to Obama. OK, let's talk about that in some real terms. For shits and giggles, we'll toss in 3rd party/independent challenges, too. This gives us two different modes of challenge, one internal to a party and another intended to cut across institutional coalitions.

There are a few models of what an internal challenge can look like. The classic is a moderately powerful insider taking a run at an incumbent who is clearly failing or is perceived to be weak. In recent times, that gives us Teddy Kennedy's challenge to Carter, Bill Bradley's challenge to Gore, who, as Vice-President, was the default choice for the nomination on the Democratic side, and Ronald Reagan's 1976 challenge to Ford and Pat Buchanan's 1992 challenge to Bush I for the Republicans.

In the Democratic cases, what we have is an older, displaced faction (Northeast Democrat) trying to oust a newer, up-and-coming faction (Southern post-LBJ Democrat). These are dynastic battles, if you will, of the older power center losing ground to the newer. Carter really was weak, mostly due to circumstances out of his control, but also since he had no Congressional coalition partners who could really back him up. Mondale as VP was his biggest asset. Carter also had come to power through an accident of history - Watergate. Without that political catastrophe for the Republicans, it is unlikely the Dems would have won in 1976. The challenge from Kennedy turned Carter into a loser in the eyes of party regulars. Kennedy never had a chance since his only reason for running was his name, but that alone was worth enough to mortally wound Carter.

Gore was not so much weak as targeted by the media and by the same Northeast faction as backed Kennedy, grudgingly supported Fritz Mondale (Kennedy's absence in 1984 is not an accident), had won the nomination with Dukakis, and had backed Tsongas in 1992, only to lose to a different Southerner. Absent a challenge from that faction, he would not have had to run a primary campaign. Bill Bradley, who would go on to be one of the founders of the Unity party movement, had marginal successes in some Northeastern states (New Hampshire, Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont), but never broke 50%. What he did was provide the media opportunities to attack Gore from the start of the election season on and to encourage party disaffection among the Stevensonians. Gore made a probably fatal mistake of selecting Lieberman as VP in an attempt to move to a more "centrist" position. The shifting political stances in combination with unrelenting mockery from the media did weaken Gore in the general. He then had to face a 3rd party challenge.

A slightly different internal challenge is when the challenger is not from an older faction trying to hold on to power, but from a new faction aiming for a takeover. This is the situation of 1976, when Reagan challenged Ford and contributed to Ford losing the general election. I have written about this contest before, and I do think it is closer to where the Democratic Party is now than the previous two examples. The key in this challenge is that Reagan was not running as a personal power trip (or, not merely that). He was the leader of a compact but growing faction that had figured out how to capitalize on cultural resentment for mass appeal plus complete openness to the money elite for cash flow. He was very successful in the primaries, winning an electoral map that looks very much like the recent midterms, and very nearly won the nomination. He may have cost himself the nomination by trying to appeal to moderates with a unsubtle selection of a moderate as a running mate - it didn't convince moderates and pissed off conservatives. Reagan's lesson from that was never moderate one inch further than necessity demanded. His challenge to Ford probably did not directly cost Ford the general election (Ford was running under Nixon's ghost, after all), but he stirred up party dissatisfaction and was set up as the heir apparent for 1980, coming away with influence among the power brokers and a riled up voting base.

Buchanan was not a viable challenger to Bush in 1992, but that was not his purpose. It was to discipline Bush and keep him positioned to the hard right, and to that degree, he succeeded. However, with the 3rd party general election challenge by Perot, the move to the right may have cost Bush centrist Republicans.

The next model of challenge is when a sitting president drops out of the race after a successful challenge. There are two modern examples - Harry Truman challenged by Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and LBJ challenged first by Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and then by Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York.

Truman went into the primary season, which bears very little resemblance to the current primaries, with rock bottom poll numbers and was challenged by the populist Kefauver. Truman had more Democratic support, but Kefauver was favored by independents. Kefauver upset Truman in New Hampshire, and Truman withdrew from the race not long afterwards. There was a pile-on of entrants after Truman withdrew, including people like Hubert Humphrey and Averell Harriman. Truman engaged in a number of back-room deal to try to get other challengers to Kefauver, including, Adlai Stevenson, who said he wasn't interested and wanted to run for Governor of Illinois. At the convention in Chicago, Stevenson gave a well received speech and was convinced to stand for nomination. After three intensely contested rounds, he won the nomination, never having campaigned. This kind of overnight back-room deal is not going to happen again.

In 1968, McCarthy was mostly doing a protest campaign, trying to influence party support of the Vietnam war. He made a crucial decision to pour almost all of his campaign resources into New Hampshire, and came in a close second to Johnson, though not as close as Bradley came to Gore (42%/49% vs. 46%/50%). Kennedy jumped into the race four days later. By the end of the month, Johnson had withdrawn from the contest. Like Truman, LBJ was not content to let the challengers have the field, and privately supported Humphrey, his VP, who went on to win the nomination. The primary system was very different than we have today, closer to the situation in 1952 with Stevenson's first nomination. Humphrey did not campaign, focusing on winning delegates outside of the few primaries, and was handed the nomination at the convention. The primary contest shook loose the old New Deal coalition. The fragmentation of the party after the convention remains evident in the voting habits of the party to this day - a split between the working class and ideologues, or more specifically, between the populists and the progressives. In some ways, it was the opposite of the 1976 Republican convention, where a leader and a direction came out of the convention to dominate in the following electoral cycles, much like FDR in 1932. The Democrats lost the Dixiecrats, who bolted first to Wallace and then to Nixon and Reagan. This may be the only unequivocal good to come out of the 1968 clashes.

Now we get to 3rd party challenges. In recent times, this would include George Wallace, John Anderson, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader.

Ironically, of all these candidates, the most successful was Wallace, the most execrable. He ran a pure race-based campaign and won electoral votes as a result. It is the bogey man of 1968 that haunts Democrats, even though all of his electoral votes would not have made the difference for Humphrey. His campaign marked the modern use of pure resentment as the motivating force for a national campaign, and probably drew more from Nixon than from Humphrey.

With Anderson in 1980, we see the last hurrah of Republican style progressives. He can also be seen as a proto-Unity candidate, having chosen a Democrat as running mate. It is unlikely he drew too many votes from Carter, who was disliked by his own party, and simply attracted a nebbishy middle.

Perot's two runs involve a lot of maybes. The conventional wisdom is that he drew support away from Bush, allowing Clinton to squeak by in 1992, though exit polls show he at most drew form each equally and, given Bush's plummeting poll numbers, probably dug more deeply into Clinton's support. In the 1996 run, exit polls showed that if Perot had not run, his supporters were more likely to support Clinton. Thus, in both situations, Perot inflicted greater losses on the Democratic side than the Republican side. Unlike defections to Anderson or Wallace, these defections materially harmed the Democratic candidate.

1996 was also when Ralph Nader entered the scene. His impact was negligible, and probably attracted voters who might otherwise have left the ballot blank or written in "Mickey Mouse". In 2000, voting for Nader was very much a protest against Gore, fed in no small part by the media. Nader probably siphoned off votes that would have gone to Gore, most crucially in Florida. Nader votes in New Hampshire, Missouri, Ohio, Nevada and Tennessee were also direct losses to Gore. However, had it not been for the intraparty assault on Gore by Bradley in the primaries and the incessant drumbeat of spite and vitriol from the so-called liberal media, it is unlikely that the sliver of votes Nader received - barely 1/3 the amount of John Anderson in 1980 - would have made a difference. Nader was merely an insult added to injury. Thanks, Ralph.

So, what conclusions can we draw from this? A primary challenge is going to be more damaging to a sitting president than a 3rd party challenge because it represents a schism within the base. An internal challenge is an attempt to rearrange the power structure within a party in a big way. In no case of a primary challenge did a challenger manage to go on to win the nomination, though a few were able to win in primaries. A challenger is usually a spoiler, not a contender, and is more beloved of the media and party insiders than of the base. The chief outlier here is Reagan, the only clear example of a rising power who went on to capture his party. The Democratic examples have two insurgents (Kefauver & McCarthy) who upset the dominant faction, but both were suppressed by party insiders at the conventions. With Kennedy and Bradley, it was the party insiders opposing a rival faction and willing to see the party lose to ensure destabilizing the other faction's power base. Party positions are patronage jobs, after all.

A 3rd party candidate decided an event only when the fractions between the major candidates were so close that missing less than a tenth of a percent in an elector rich state like Florida flipped an election. The degree of difference caused by Nader is so extreme, it has to be considered an outlier. More typical would be the other 3rd party runs where percentages were high enough, particularly with Perot's first run, that it could have wreaked havoc in a tight race. In the end, the weight of the electoral system dampens the damage that can be inflicted by a 3rd party candidate.

There's the landscape for a primary challenge. Anyone who would try this had best be ready to give up all hope of a political future, as he or she would be mounting a campaign against the dominant faction. There simply isn't anything in the Democratic party analogous to the Movement Conservatives behind Reagan. Hillary is probably the only Democrat who has that kind of support and loyalty from her coalition, but is the last person in the party to deliberately undermine a sitting president that way. No other candidate has the right combination of name recognition, an established base, and/or a defined cause.

Someone could act as a spoiler, much like Kennedy in 1980 or Bradley in 2000, but those two came in with media support and a dedicated base. Obama is unpopular in the party, but not mortally so (contra Carter), and he is still the beloved of the media for intraparty battles (contra Gore), so is unlikely to be as damaged by a primary challenge as Carter or Gore. If there is another big economic shock and/or if unemployment stays as is or worsens, then the cumulative bad news may embolden challengers from his own faction and make the press distance itself from a loser.

Mostly, the danger to Obama will be in the general, where wider dissatisfaction, resentment voting and a less fawning press will put him in a condition closer to Humphrey's or Gore's in the general. In this case, a 3rd party challenge from the left could siphon away votes in a tough challenge. That person would need to be able to capture the public's imagination the way Perot did in 1992.

The trouble with the Democratic Party, an organization that is the worst in politics except for all the others, is that it has not discovered a way to recombine the populist and progressive modes of its liberalism in a way that matches the force of the New Deal coalition. Until it purged itself of the Dixiecrats, it could not do this. Since doing so, the progressive faction has not cared to do this.

It needs to build an analogue of the Movement Conservatives, and that cannot be done without the majority of the white working class once again agreeing that it's material interests are best served by this party.

Anglachel

Update - I have made small edits throughout the post to fix typos, correct a couple of dates, and clarify some points. Also, in answer to some private notes, I am not saying there shouldn't be a primary challenge. I'm saying that people are not thinking through what a primary challenge might accomplish, based on what we can observe from prior challenges and what we know about intraparty factionalism. This post is to clarify objectives, not advocate a specific action.

Oh No - He's Your Son of a Bitch

2010-11-11T13:32:00.000-08:00

Obama is not a Clinton Democrat. I'm a Clinton Democrat. I voted for Hillary. I picked the candidate who had the best mix of policies for the middle class and who had the best track record of delivering on legislative measures. I picked someone with a decades long record on human rights and promoting heath care reform. Me and the majority of registered Democrats threw our support to Hillary Clinton.

Obama did not come to power because of me. I did not give Obama my primary vote. I constantly pointed out his conservative tendencies in my blog. I did not give him any funds. I did not cast a vote for him in the general - I wrote in Hillary's name. I knew what he was and what he would do since November 2007. I did not fall for his bullshit.

YOU DID.

You, David Sirota. You Josh Marshall. You, Jane Hamsher. You, Arianna Huffington, and Markos, and Armando/BTD, and Big Media Matt, and Ezra Klein, and Kevin Drum, and Steve Benen, and Digby, and Jeralyn, and Chris Bowers, and all the rest of you self-proclaimed liberal/progressive/radical types who decided that you should be the arbiters of progressivism.You proclaimed "Out with Bubbas, up with Creatives" and swore your allegiance to Whole Foods Nation. Your idol was The Precious.

You shilled for someone whose political hero is Ronald Reagan. You gave him your votes, your money, your volunteer time, and your seal of approval. You devoted your time and energy to promoting him and brushing away the very valid questions about what he would actually do if he gained the office. You called those of us who dared to ask these questions bitter, low-information, racists, and said we were voting with our cunts. You said that we didn't support Obama because we supported McCain/Palin. You did everything in your power to bully, threaten, shame and intimidate us into going along with your delusional fantasy.

For crying out loud you fucking threw PAUL KRUGMAN under the bus when he didn't drink your poisoned kool-aid!

Obama is your creation, not mine.

He is your son of a bitch, through and through, and is made in your image. He is what he labeled himself - an Obamacan, neither Democrat nor Republican, dedicated to nothings save his own cult of personality. You chose him and made him the media darling you wanted to associate with. You did so knowing exactly what he was, and the single biggest reason you did this was to piss on Bill and Hillary Clinton. All you wanted him to do was beat "that bitch", and it never once occurred to you what your son of a bitch would do when he got into office. This is why I call him The Precious - a beautiful thing that destroys and corrupts everything and everyone it touches.

Don't you presume to call him a Clinton Democrat.

Anglachel

Media Darlings and Policy Disasters

2010-11-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

A pattern I'm noticing among former Obama cheerleaders is how quick they are to subsume Obama to Clinton. BTD scornfully dismisses him as a Clinton Democrat, for example, and now Sirota (is it funny that my spell check wants to change "Sirota" into "scrotum"?) is rolling him back into the Clinton/DC/Third Way borg. He has disappointed them, he is no longer top-drawer goods, so now they paint him with the worst epithet they can pull out of their kit-bag - Clinton Democrat.

None of these esteemed pundits appears willing to cop to the fact that Obama is being completely consistent with what he campaigned on - a platform of feel-good rah-rah and center-right policies, coupled to a deliberate rejection of identification with the Democratic party. Obama was a transformational figure only in their self-indulgent wet dreams. (BTD in particular has no grounds to complain as he explicitly said the reason to support Obama was his media darling status, not his policies.) They supported Obama in order to defeat HRC, and, rather like Obama himself, failed to consider the all important closing line of The Candidate "What do we do now?"

In the rush to anoint The Precious, the actual work of governance became a pooh-poohed afterthought. Of course Obama will be liberal! We're voting for him, aren't we? They projected on to him their political fantasies and did not believe what the candidate himself was saying.

I knew Obama was not going to be more liberal or progressive than Hillary long before the primaries wrapped up:

No Agenda Except to Win - Thursday, January 17, 2008
Who Pays for a Party's Mistakes? - Monday, January 21, 2008
Fights Worth Having - Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Words Matter When Struggles Matter - Monday, February 18, 2008
It's the Missed Opportunities, Stupid - Friday, February 22, 2008
Policy vs. Personality - Monday, March 03, 2008

And, well, just about everything else I posted since October 2007 that looks at what Obama actually says about his specific political objectives points out that he was the most conservative, least inventive, least progressive candidate running for the nomination. There should be no surprises here for anyone who was paying attention to what the guy said. The Purchased Fellows didn't even have to take my word for it - The Shrill One knew all along and told you so, too, though Krugman (like Somerby) held back on his criticisms when the general election outcome was in doubt.

From the first of the posts linked above, No Agenda Except to Win, I said:

What is it that Barack Obama, self-anointed next-president of the US, what is it precisely that he thinks to do with this position? He has no interest in the detailed wonk stuff, he doesn't think he should get deeply involved in anything, he has yet to articulate a single, true objective or goal or achievement for his tenure in office.

Hillary has two huge objectives - to implement national health insurance and to restore the national economy - and a list as long as her arm of things like raising minimum wage, expanding citizen privacy rights, reversing the unconscionable expansion of executive power, and so forth. Edwards talks about restructuring power relationships. Biden spoke of resolving crisis in the middle-east and restoring American stature in the world. Dodd talked about fighting against the encroachments of state power on privacy. Even Kucinich has a list of to-do items, including promoting peace and turning back global warming.

Golden Boy Barry has nothing but his own awesomeness and a vague platform of feel good about being hopeful for, umm, something. His policy proposals, as Krugman has relentlessly documented, amount to little except watered down and incomplete versions of what he stole from Clinton and Edwards. He makes people feel dreamy, but he has no dream to articulate, except becoming the first black president. He is so determined to become that, he will crawl on his knees and beg Republicans, the party dedicated to disenfranchising minorities, degrading women and exploiting immigrants, to vote for him in order to get the margins in the primaries.

For me, I keep coming back to the demographics of who doesn't vote for him - Democrats. He is not very popular with the party he wants to lead because he is not promoting the interests of people who need the government to be squarely on their side. It is all about him, his desires, and a one-item agenda - vote for me because I say you should. It speaks volumes that his supporters are behind him more because they want someone to beat HRC than because he represents anything they actually support. People who don't actually need Social Security or FHA loans or health insurance have the luxury of voting Obama.

The rest of us are Democrats.

In light of the fact that Obama never stood for anything remotely approaching the political philosophies these newly awakened critics claim to hold, just why do they think their words hold any water with those of us who were well aware of Golden Boy Barry's failings all along?

Clinton Democrats knew all along that he was not on our side.

Anglachel