Chris Hedges yet again criticized liberals and advocated a civilly disobedient politics

Hedges wrote the following in his Monday Truthdig article:

The moral outrage of the liberal class, a specialty of MSNBC, groups such as Progressives for Obama and MoveOn.org, is built around the absurd language of personal narrative — as if Barack Obama ever wanted to or could defy the interests of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase or General Electric. The liberal class refuses to directly confront the dead hand of corporate power that is rapidly transforming America into a brutal feudal state. To name this power, to admit that it has a death grip on our political process, our systems of information, our artistic and religious expression, our education, and has successfully emasculated popular movements, including labor, is to admit that the only weapons we have left are acts of civil disobedience. And civil disobedience is difficult, uncomfortable and lonely. It requires us to step outside the formal systems of power and trust in acts that are marginal, often unrecognized and have no hope of immediate success.

Hedges next focused his attention on "a politics of solidarity":

The organizers of the Left Forum conference scheduled for this March at Pace University in New York City also communicate in the amorphous, high-blown moral rhetoric that is unmoored from the actual and real. The upcoming Left Forum conference, which has the vacuous title "Towards a Politics of Solidarity," promises to "focus on the age-old theme of solidarity: the moral act of imagination underpinning working-class victories everywhere. It will undertake to examine the new forms of far-reaching solidarity that are both necessary and possible in an increasingly global world." The organizers posit that "the potential for transformative struggles in the 21^st century depends on new chains of solidarity—between workers in the rich world and workers in the global south, indigenous peasants and more affluent consumers, students and pensioners, villagers in the Niger Delta and environmental campaigners in the Gulf of Mexico, marchers and rioters in Greece and Spain, and unionists in the United States and China." The conference "will contribute to the intellectual underpinnings of new and tighter forms of world-wide solidarity upon which all successful emancipatory struggles of the future will depend."

Hedges showed his disdain for such talk-fests when he exclaimed:

The last thing the liberal class intends to do is fight back. Left Forum brings in a few titans, including Noam Chomsky, who is always worth hearing, but it contributes as well to the lethargy and turpitude that have made the liberal class impotent.

Only action suffices, according to Hedges

The only gatherings worth attending from now on are acts that organize civil disobedience, which is why I will be at Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., at noon March 19 to protest the eighth anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

To my mind, there are problems with Hedges position, problems which reveal his argument to be sloppy and even demagogic. Briefly put, they are:

First, communication, such as those Hedges criticized, is a species of political action. That is, to write and speak about unemployment and the incoherence of Obamanomics, the state of race relations today and white terror in the United States, America's empire and militarism, its prison population and poverty, personal privacy and public action — that is, to communicate about these issues entails acting politically.

As it turns out, Hedges article denouncing liberal talk-fests counts as a politically communicative act. He thus ensnares himself in a paradox when he makes claims such as these.

Second, the March 19 march Hedges will attend can and ought to be considered an instance of political communication about Iraq and an act of solidarity with the victims of that crime. As a matter of fact and logic, the solidarity revealed on March 19 is itself an instance of political communication. This act of communication manifests itself through the collective action of a group of individuals and though the solidarity expressed for the victims of America's crimes. The relationship between solidarity and communication does not directly depend on the intentions of those acting. It issues instead from the public and political nature of the action.

Third, I see no reason for America's small dissident public to limit its political repertoire to forms of civil disobedience and marches. Any movement that wants to endure and, in the end, to be successful must attract members, organize those it attracts, raise monies that fund actions and solve coordination problems which it must solve in order for these actions to succeed. Organizations are forms of communication and solidarity as well as being instruments which serve the interests of their members. They enable like-minded individuals to act collectively. They also tell the public that they have political projects they intend to achieve along with strategies and tactics they will use to achieve their ends. The tactics employed by these organizations include civilly disobedient actions and marches.

As of this moment, the left in the United States is so weak that limiting itself to civilly disobedient acts is both unproductive and unnecessary. For one thing, security forces can easily police these events, turning them into opportunities to jail march leaders and activists. For another, acts of civil disobedience and political marches also suppose organizational support. Organization- and movement-building work thus leads to and provides a necessary condition for engaging in the actions Hedges affirms.

If my conclusion seems wrong, I only ask my reader to consider the fact that the left is weak today because it has not endured as a politically independent entity, one composed of strong movements and viable organizations. That is, it failed to conserve the political and organizational achievements won with the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, organized movements that left their mark on the federal, state and local governments they touched.

Cross-posted at FireDogLake

Pittsburgh encore

This is a republication of a post that was first published on 9.24.2009. The text had been corrupted, though.

* * * * * * *

As my trip to "dahntahn" Pittsburgh yesterday (9.23) made plain, the G-20 Summit has already worked a kind of bad magic on the everyday political and social life of the city of Pittsburgh.

I say this because it was not at all hard to find evidence supporting my belief that a kind of frenzy drives the local political culture more than a reasoned appreciation for the political, social and cultural predicaments of the moment. Fear — and thus hatred — pervades the city. This is unsurprising since a paranoid ranting has dominated talk radio for weeks along with the local news more recently. The streets were not empty, of course. They were only "not themselves," different in a way that pointed to the G-20 Summit and the political situation surrounding it.

The immediate cause:

"The Anarchists are coming, the Anarchists are coming…."

The anarchists are fearful because they are willing to contend in a direct and forceful way with the militarized and well-armed security forces in the city. Their tactic: Civil disobedience.

In other words, the federal government and its local adjuncts are seeking to suppress much of the politics that will originate from below when that politics fails to affirm in a decisive and direct way the despotic powers of the state and, to be sure, the anti-democratic features specific to the American form of governance. The suppression combines the law (rule by law) with force and violence (rule by law realized by a militarized police). The upshot: Something akin to a local state of siege had appeared as the Summit neared. Pittsburgh epitomizes police state American. Thus:

"The streets of Pittsburgh are secure and will remain so during the Summit. The dignitaries visiting the city for the event will not be molested in any way by the black flag folk especially or by any other movement that chooses to protest the event, the participants and their doings. Nor, for that matter, will they endure a confrontation with the indigent living under the city's many bridges or the famished scrounging for food, for they have been cleansed. Humanity will be disciplined so that unaccountable power might thrive."

As it turned out, the forces of 'order' and fear achieved their goal: Pittsburgh looked as though it were preparing to weather a Category Four political hurricane. Businesses were securing their windows. The police patrolled the streets on foot, singly and in large groups, on motorcycles, bikes and riding in other vehicles. Some of the sidewalks near the Convention Center were enclosed in long but narrow steel cages, creating pedestrian bottlenecks intended, one would guess, to pacify the crowds moving toward the Convention Center and its precious occupants. In short, Pittsburgh looked to be a social and political wasteland in the making, and has remained so today as I write this article.

This debacle — and it was a debacle — received a mixed reception from the locals. I often overhead some of them — "Yinzers" — complaining about the protesters who allegedly were "ruining the Summit for the City," were in need of "a full-time job," a bath, more variety in their diet, better manners, good clothes, etc. It seems the protesters needed, if one were to believe their critics, a whole new identity and way of life, an identity and life that conforms to the expectations the critics have for themselves, their kind and for all 'real' Americans. The protesters ought to become "one of us," so to speak. Apparently, Pittsburgh's anti-protester protesters believed the normalization of the event necessarily meant the complete pacification and integration of the city and, by extension, the people who will host and participate in it. Pacification in this case means the elimination of an opposition politics.

What the protest critics neglected to mention was the purpose animating these protests: To secure a higher quality of life in the present and the future for those who need it the most. Nor did they consider the issues the G-20 countries would discuss while convening in Pittsburgh or, for that matter, the situation that they and everyone else confronts today. They treated these as irrelevant. They were beside the point, it seems, because their presence could only undermine the spectacle of the event and the security of the city.

In short, the critics of the protesters had erased the political essence of the event which would have scared the Hell out of them had they taken seriously this essence along with the issues history has made relevant today.

But, they could instead obsess about the spectacle at hand: A spectacle composed of despotic and unaccountable power doing as it pleases, of armed forces crossing the streets of their hometown, of political liberties breached and undermined, of a garrison state as it appears to those subject to it.

Enforcing ‘civility’ in Pittsburgh

Nearly all is quiet today in Pittsburgh. Only the groaning over the most recent heartbreaking Steelers' loss breaks the silence.

The G-20 Summit concluded on Friday, so too the street clashes between the police and some of the G-20 protesters. The sirens now sound less frequently, and mirror the rhythms of violence and illness specific to the city, not the workings of the security-surveillance apparatus as it disciplines the burghers. The locals can be thankful Allegheny County's Long Range Acoustical Device can no longer be heard at all.

What remains of the G-20 for the Steel City?

For one thing, Western Pennsylvania's talk radio goons are working hard to keep the recent spectacle alive and present within the collective memory of the region. Their effort in this matter was to be expected. This is what they do, after all. They rouse the rabble by focusing on something disturbing or by creating a creating a disturbance when reality proves stingy in that regard. It is their job! They get a paycheck for it. Thus, it would be silly to expect them to say anything good about the anarchists who behaved so 'badly' last week, that is, who proved themselves willing to contend with the city's well-armed, well-fortified and militarized police forces while relying on the "weapons of the weak" available to them. In this they physically defied America's garrison state in the making. They refused to recognize the authority it claims for itself and implicitly appealed to the rights granted to them and to every American citizen by the Bill of Rights.

For another thing, the talk radio goons also want to defend the political repression that characterized the state's use of its policing powers in Pittsburgh. Why would these 'liberty loving' folk support the political use of the police? They seemingly did so because they despised the anarchists and everything for which the anarchists stand.

I believe this because the deeds, words and intentions of the anarchists made one thing clear to the goons: The anarchists belong to that social category — "the other" — which sits well beyond the fringe that separates the American from the non-American, the the friend from the enemy, the "one-of-us" from "one-of-them." The anarchists are "strangers" living among the 'real' Americans — living vicariously and illicitly among the 'producers. This, in any case, is the political space where the talk show goons and their followers want to place the anarchists and near to the place where, one suspects, the anarchists would place themselves.

While something like political peace has returned to the Steel City, looks can be deceiving.

Peacefulness does not imply civility! I say this because one crucial element of a modern civil society — the rule of law — had a bad time of it during the Summit. Events during the past week revealed once again that, in the United States today, the rule of law has given way, in part, to the rule by law. It has ceded ground to this kind of authoritarianism because the contest between the strong and the weak has become especially lopsided, to paraphrase Stephen Holmes (2003, 23). It is so lopsided that it is not even close to being a fair contest. Not everyone is subject to the law equally nor does every citizen participate equally in the creation and use of public power. This imbalance tends to make the law a technique of elite governance, not an expression of a democratically ordered, legally rational form of self-government. It transforms the law of a democracy into a repressive tool.

Thus, America's recent return to the imperial presidency, which it allegedly tamed when the Congress humiliated Richard Nixon and which surely looked dead after the Clinton impeachment. "Alas, the obituaries were premature," as Arthur Schlesinger observed in the latest edition (2004, ix) of his critical book on the problem.

How could the imperial presidency die when this is the America of, among other things, The Patriot Act, The Protect America Act, The John W. Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2006, The FISA Amendments Act of 2008, but also the America of preventative war, enhanced interrogation techniques or torture, extraordinary renditions, of an extensive prison system along with those laws that have made a prison system of this magnitude inevitable (e.g. The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and The Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994). These legal mechanisms reveal that the United States has traded a generalizable concept of liberty for class-specific and therefore partial forms of security.

Barack Obama is only the latest executive charged with enforcing the prerogatives and operations of the neoliberal system. He has not often or effectively acted to reverse this trend towards governing the country through fear-mongering and its security-surveillance apparatus. Nor, most notably, has he worked to bring to justice America's torturers and those who authorized these illegal practices. The symbolic effect of Obama's act of omission is easy to discern. Despite the bombastic law and order sermons given by so many of America's political candidates since the 1960s, the Obama administration has already proved itself soft on crime when the criminals at issue sport white collars or khaki uniforms. The Obama administration thus prefers stability over rational legality. For some, crime pays.

Obama's discretion in this should surprise no one who has thought much about the matter. A law and order regime in the United States was always meant only for the "many" that lack self-discipline and the power needed to defend themselves; those few who sit atop the heap are mostly and thus effectively exempt from the limits set by the law when it is a matter of their meeting their system-consistent role obligations. Their effective restraints are few. They are deemed too big to fail and too powerful to bring to justice by those who also are too big and too powerful. Any threat to them and their power amounts to a system threat, and will thus not be tolerated by those charged with defending the system.

From the defense of the Bush administration's position on state secrets, habeas corpus, the Obama administration has already compiled a sorry record with respect to its handling of matters of right and justice. Should we be surprised, then, by the near state of siege or martial law that prevailed in Pittsburgh during the G-20 Summit? No. As a matter of fact, the situation on the ground in Pittsburgh during the Summit was not one of which Obama was at all ashamed. He seemed pleased by the fact that the G-20 protesters in Pittsburgh were not overly disruptive when compared to their predecessors. He did not comment on the police harassment of the Climate Convergence Project, the Seeds of Peace Collective and the use of the legal system to deny those who would protest the G-20 their rights to protest. He nevertheless treated Pittsburgh as though the city and its economy reflected the kind of world the G-20 wanted to promote.

Pittsburgh, in Obama's hands, was a Phoenix that rose from the post-industrial wasteland and achieved a regional renewal around the new economy. It counts as a neoliberal success story — a model city, as it were.

Ironically the Pittsburgh of the G-20 Summit was a neoliberal success story insofar as the American state could deploy its despotic powers to suppress a counter-public and its politics and this use of the state's powers is consistent with neoliberal dogma and practice.

The recent militarization of everyday life in Pittsburgh became apparent to me early on since I am a resident of the Western Pennsylvanian region and travel often enough to downtown Pittsburgh. By Wednesday (9.23), the security forces in the city had placed the David L. Lawrence Center within a 'secure' environment. They gave the Summit this kind of environment even though the protesters posed no significant physical threat to the conference participants or, for that matter, to the people of Pittsburgh. (Presumably, the security forces were also defending the Center and the Summit against a terrorist attack meant to eliminate the G-20 leaders, although it is unclear how effective this security would have been if it had to contend with a motivated and well-equipped terrorist group.) In other words, the state of siege seemingly was meant not to provide only for the physical security of the Summit participants but also to present a spectacle that represented to the world the power at their command and their comparative unaccountability to the pöbel. The messages this spectacle conveyed to the protesters in Pittsburgh, to the observers of the Summit and its environment as well as to those individuals who might choose to protest any future official event:

• Do not protest
  
• Do not speak you mind in public
  
• Do not act politically
  
• Do not act autonomously
  
• Do not threaten the system in any way
  

The American legal system actually colluded in the construction of this spectacle by authorizing the militarized police forces to act as they did. The repression observed in Pittsburgh was legal, more or less. The protesters had a legally secure opportunity to protest. Yet, the repression would be characterized best as an instance of rule by law. Had the rule of law prevailed during the Summit and with respect to the protesters, then the protesters would not have had to fight for every bit of public space they had wanted, whether legally or illegally. The protests, rather, would have been a part of the Summit, and would have been included in the Summit even if the Summit organizers had kept the protesters from entering the Convention Center. Their recognition and inclusion would have made present a faction of a global civil society that the Summit did not and even refused to include. Thus, the early appearance of a political wasteland in the city.

There is, I believe, no reason to expect a return to the rule of law in Pittsburgh or in any other part of the country. Rule by force, through fear and for the sake of elite security remain an implicit feature of the American political system. Political passivity is the goal, especially when that passivity is imposed on the left. But, a pacified society need not be a civil society. It can be a society intimidated by the use of force, rendered dumb by incomprehension and hopelessness and prone to believe that the powerful stand as the real master of its fate.

Taking Obama to task

Eric Stoner adopts this project in his recent article for AlterNet, and he rightly does so. Consider these statements by this supposed radical socialist: When recently asked if a younger Barack Obama would have taken to the streets of Pittsburgh as a protester of the G-20 Summit, he replied: "Probably not." His answer was a characteristic response to a question of this sort, one that a system politician would make in most instances. What was truly astonishing was Obama's defense for his position:

"I was always a big believer in — when I was doing organizing before I went to law school — that focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people's lives is what really makes a difference; and that having protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism or something, generally is not really going to make much of a difference."

Stoner has no trouble demolishing Obama's silliness:

It would not have taken an incredible investigative feat [for Obama] to discover that the protesters descending upon Pittsburgh were doing so for very "concrete" reasons that touch their daily lives in very real ways.

They came to advocate for greater assistance for everyday people during these tough economic times, for more serious government action on global warming ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, and for an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have already taken such a staggering human and financial toll.

In fact, as a general rule of thumb, most people — whether they are diehard activists or not — don't normally travel great distances to face ominous riot police firing rubber bullets, pepper spray and deafening sound cannons, unless they have been deeply, personally affected the issues being protested.

And given the global financial meltdown that has hit working people so hard, can anyone really say that those who critique the entire capitalist system don't have a point?

Stoner could have added the presence in Friday's march of single-payer health advocates and Tibetan exiles who addressed China's imperialistic control of Tibet. Moreover, one can be both pro-capitalist (prefer an economy coordinated by a market system) and pro-single-payer (because of its efficient and fair allocation of goods when compared to its competitors). Likewise, environmentalists need not be anarchists or socialists because of their environmental concerns. It would be a sad ending indeed for humanity if it had to successfully make the transition to socialism before it could tackle climate change and other environmental catastrophes!

Stoner continues:

Obama's dismissal of mass nonviolent action was disingenuous for other reasons as well. Behind his desk in his Senate office, Obama prominently displayed pictures of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

In an interview last year, he explained that the portraits were there "to remind me that real results will not just come from Washington, they will come from the people." And only weeks before the G-20, during his "controversial" address to school children, the president brought up Gandhi, calling him "a real hero of mine."

Could anyone possibly argue with a straight face that King, who was killed while planning the Poor People's Campaign, would not be on the streets with those calling for economic justice? Would Gandhi not oppose the diversion of $700 billion this year from meeting people's basic needs to fund the Pentagon and the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan?

Of course, King would have been in Pittsburgh in spirit if not also in the flesh. Gandhi will celebrate his 150^th birthday tomorrow (10.2); the world, for its part, will celebrate Gandhi by marking his birthday as the International Day of Non-Violence. Obama, on the other hand, will spend the day as the Commander in Chief of the greatest military apparatus the world has ever known.

Democracy Now’s monday after report on the G-20

 

Pittsburgh

A stop on the road to dictatorship in America

While addressing the G-20 Summit along with the protests meant to challenge the Summit and what it represents, Chris Hedges recently characterized the repression implemented by the federal government and the local governments in the Pittsburgh region as follows:

The draconian security measures put in place to silence dissent in Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They are a response not to a real threat, but to the fear gripping the established centers of power.

A quibble: I would say that the threat is real and that the elite rightly believe their position to be insecure. But the actual threat posed by the G-20 demonstrators gathering now in Pittsburgh will not be in any way related to whatever violent acts they might commit during their demonstrations. The actual threat which motivates this kind of fear among the elite is political in nature. It takes the form of a politics meant to represent the interests, identities and lives of those largely excluded or ignored by America's compromised political institutions. This political exclusion supports and reflects the economic dispossession that is now operative in an economy teetering on the brink.

Additionally, the repression is future-directed, as Hedges recognizes:

The power elite grasps, even if we do not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.

How, indeed, will the dispossessed respond to their knowing that their lives were sacrificed so that the finance capital might thrive in the difficult future now coming into being? To whom will they attribute their suffering? Will they have the cultural and social resources they will need if they are to survive the global system coming into being? How will they survive the slums they will inhabit when they know so little of solidarity and political communication?

The American political system, tenuously democratic and corrupted as it has been by the militarism and market fundamentalism of the last decades, can produce only one response to this threat, which is, to be sure, a threat generated by its growing illegitimacy and the inadequacy of contemporary capitalism:

The delegates to the G-20, the gathering of the world's wealthiest nations, will consequently be protected by a National Guard combat battalion, recently returned from Iraq. The battalion will shut down the area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the streets in combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city's police force of 1,000 with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have begun to buzz gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to provide food to protesters have been impounded, activists have been detained, and permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web sites belonging to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and many groups suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their phones and e-mail accounts are being monitored.

In other words, "Force is all the elite have left," as Hedges succinctly states. The elite have no other response to these protests because they lack a reform politics that points to a possible world that exists beyond the crises of the present and which resolves these crises in a manner that can be judged legitimate. Force — the 'reasoning' and 'communicative' technique used by the stupid to address problems they do not understand and cannot resolve.

Hopelessness and Barack Obama

Dissident Voice first published this essay on 9.19.2009. The version given below is identical to the original save for fixes applied to a typo and grammatical mistake I had missed.

* * * * *

Denial is common occurrence among human beings. So also is paranoia. Whether directly or indirectly considered, both make an appearance in America's news reports every single day. For instance, 'authentic' Americans, believe reality is for sissies. Uncle Sam is no sissy, of course. He makes reality. So, why not "Drill baby drill…."

Still, it is also common to consider denial and paranoia irrational responses to the world. They earn this accurate characterization because the world mostly proves to be significantly stronger than the phantasies that would completely or partially replace it and because denial and paranoia reflect psychological positions and cultural objects that are a part of the world but which do not make the world as such. The human imagination is surely creative and often powerful; but it is far from being omnipotent. It can easily imagine beings of all sorts; it just cannot create being as it pleases. Consequently, there will always be a need of and a place for those committed to living in the world as they find it, who willingly reject the naïve metaphysics of the deeply frightened and the power-hungry. Similarly, the reality-challenged will often have the opportunity to learn that they were and are mistaken, that the Earth is neither flat, the center of the universe nor damnable matter, that it can never be made wholly subject to humanity's will and intentions. Whether the reality-challenged want to and can learn from their experience is another matter.

In other words, reasonable people reality test their imaginary constructions, and strive to tolerate the results produced by their testing. They take up this often frustrating chore because they wish to be free of illusions and in order to make a success of their projects, which any consistent refusal to recognize the world as a whole or in part would threaten with failure. Although the disconfirmation of dearly held truths can be considered an advance if not a practical advantage, it is, as most human beings know, one often painfully gained. Worse still is the possibility that the pain produced by the process of self-enlightenment might sometimes overwhelm the advantages gained in the end. Human beings tend to be pain-adverse. And they need not value truth for the sake of truth. They certainly may prefer comfort or security to truth. Thus the presence of so many who prefer their illusions to a disconfirming reality. They favor holding fast to their wishes even when they can never be satisfied; they prefer them to the experience of disappointment that often accompanies their partial satisfaction. They want to feel complete, whole, full. Yet, they rarely or even never find themselves satiated. For those who cannot tolerate dissatisfaction of any kind or degree, living in an imaginary world can compensate for the ambiguities and dissatisfactions to be found in the actual world. The imagination can 'prove' the lie contain within the wish by providing a devious kind of satisfaction. Naturally, such a life is often untenable and, paradoxically, painful. Madness is a probable consequence for those individuals who give themselves over to this form of life. An individual must draw from his or her strengths in order to tolerate the limits within the human condition that produce unavoidable dissatisfaction. All in all, therefore, it is unsurprising that the willingness to reality test one's wishes, phantasies, thoughts, etc. is thought to be sufficiently valuable that having it can be considered an essential feature of the "good life." By good life I do not mean a life lived beyond the imagination but, rather, one that draws from both the imagination and the world that surrounds that imagination. Furthermore, the complement to this point is also true: A lack of this willingness to test can be considered a privation for the one afflicted by it, and thus a feature of a "life lived poorly."

This kind of talk should sound familiar to most Americans who are known for the pride they derive from their pragmatic approach to life. Fact-mindedness and goal-directedness, dependence upon common sense and "a willingness to do what it takes to get things done" — these are essential components of the American creed and of pragmatism broadly considered. Verification of this point can be found not only in the writings of America's pragmatic philosophers (C.S. Pierce, W. James and J. Dewey) but also in the honor American culture bestows on its often famous inventor-industrialists (T. Edison, G. Westinghouse, A.G. Bell, etc.). Yet, the pragmatic ethos might receive its greatest and broadest endorsement from that iconic figure in American history, the freeholder farmer, who struggles with nature, society and self in order to live autonomously and productively. If America can be considered a civilization, it should be dubbed the "pragmatic civilization." Thus considered, the term "pragmatism" is merely a high-priced word that refers to what most Americans deem to be "good old common sense."

Given the place and strength of this ethos in American culture, along with the material successes the country has enjoyed throughout its history, it is surely ironic that Americans are now getting a concentrated dose of phantasy-challenging experience by an obstinate world. The irony here issues from the world's refusal to confirm the beliefs Americans commonly have about their country, especially their belief that the United States is unique or an exception to the norm, that it is indispensible, a dependable seer of the future, a just wielder of the sword, the winner of every war it fights and the true leader of humankind, or even that it is the best at those things at which it would want to be the best. Clearly, the pragmatic civilization has its myths. Some of the important ones date back to the first European settlers. As founded by those Puritans who would not have anything directly to do with the religious oppression they encountered in England, the first migrants to America held fast to the messianic conviction that the new world would be "the city upon the hill." They meant their trek to achieve a utopia and thereby to establish a public presence for righteousness. Having burdened themselves with an expectation of this kind, Protestant-Americans could judge their nation a success only if they could believe their way of life embodied God's will on Earth. As practicing Calvinists of one kind or another, Americans were disposed to equate worldly success with Godliness. Their achievements were signs as also were their failures. Their leaders had to be "natural aristocrats" whose wealth, honor and power served as rewards for and symbols of their virtue or, for the theistically inclined, their election. Armed with these beliefs, the settlers and their descendents tended to consider success self-legitimating. To be successful in America nearly entailed the rightful possession of those goods that expressed the presence of this success. America, to be sure, has made a great success of itself, a fact-supported normative judgment that helps to confirm the nation's grandiose identity. More ominously, social Darwinism, the Prosperity Gospel and American exceptionalism lurk within this kind of thinking, American imperialism and the Washington Consensus too. The City of God would often prove brutal in practice.

Currently, however, Americans may learn, if they wish, that their country:

• is a global empire which is now moving towards collapse;
  
• has a security-surveillance apparatus that is costly and oppressive, nearly useless but also a provocation to the rest of the world;
  
• drives its economic system with debt accumulation, mass consumption and weapons production, but also with a near-full employment economy ("the great American jobs machine"), each of which look unlikely to continue as they have in America's near-term future;
  
• is no longer the leader in the development and implementation of productive technology and consumer goods;
  
• will eventually or even soon lose its leadership position as the global lender of last resort and the provider of the world's hard currency;
  
• is shacked to home-grown political institutions that seem as receptive to rational reform as Brezhnev's Soviet Union proved to be in the 1980s.
  

Briefly put, Americans now have the opportunity to learn that their country is dispensable but dangerous, myopic, sterile and a foot-dragger!

They also may soon learn that it is no longer prosperous.

Obviously these points, if true, do not validate America's messianic conceit. Nor do they affirm the secular version of this self-conception, namely, that the United States is the capitalist democracy, the model which its competitors should emulate if they want to make a success of themselves. As a matter of fact, they render both vain and thus preposterous. The American dream is dying.

Although these criticisms are not commonplaces among Americans, they also are not propositions contained within an esoteric form of knowledge. Nor are they available only to an elect, an avant-garde or a privileged class. An exacting ritual does not guard their purity. The acolyte need not learn a special language before enlightenment sets in. Finally, they cannot be debunked by a dubious critique of their class origin or by pointing to the actual or imagined resentment of the critic who airs them in public. If a typical American wishes to learn of these things, he or she needs only to be literate and to pay attention to the world in general. The opportunities to acquire this knowledge are there to be had.

To be sure, attention-paying and reality-testing suppose a prior willingness and capacity to learn from one's experience and from others. It also requires a commitment to participate in reasonable discussion and to use evidence to settle matters that can be settled. Learning requires receptivity to the world, an open-minded attitude towards experience, reflection and change. It also means putting every relevant certainty into abeyance. Consequently, attention-paying and reality-testing entail a willingness to take a risk. With respect to the issues discussed here, this risk-taking gesture quickly leads to the asking of what most Americans would consider unsettling questions. These include: "Can America learn what it needs to learn?" and "If it learns these unavoidable truths, how will this knowledge sit with the average American once the members of this proud nation realize that America is neither innocent, grand nor more powerful than its competitors?" "How," in other words, "will Uncle Sam cope with being fallible, damnable and impermanent, with, that is, being merely human?" "Can he and his brood live without these myths?" "Can he successfully manage his second childhood?"

These are the local problems and questions the United States now confronts. If it and the world only had to confront them…. But it, like the world at large, also faces global problems and crises. The latter, unfortunately, are truly frightening. Managing and resolving them will prove difficult. They include:

• a growing global population, the existence of which will intensify;
  
• ecological crises like global warming;
  
• resource depletion crises (generated by a lack of adequate top soil, water, minerals, etc.) and thus the wars that will be fought over these increasingly scarce resources;
  
• massive food and water shortages.
  

Scarcity of the greatest sort looks to return to trouble every fraction of the world. War and famine, mass migration and death — these possibilities haunt the near-term future. I believe this because they compose a plausible future the causes and features of which do appear in the world today. We are watching, then, a global emergency while it gestates, the origin of which is due in great part to human practices and their limits. While it remains an open question whether or not this emergency will eventually define humanity's collective fate, its pre-history makes up a significant feature of the contemporary situation humanity must address if it wishes to thrive or even survive as a species. It and its components make evident the need for a political project meant to prevent the disaster.

It is not as though no one ever dares to mention these local and global issues. They have their place in public life, and are discussed by those individuals, movements and organizations most concerned with their consequences. Yet, discussion by the comparatively few individuals concerned with such issues does not seem to be enough to solve problems of this kind and magnitude. Small talk is insufficient because of the immense complexity and scope their solutions would have. Global problems demand what amount to global solutions. Therefore, the greater crisis they pose derives from something which lies beyond the existential threats they express, considerable as these may be. This something which lies beyond: These global crises have failed to provide the kind of motives Americans and humanity as a whole need if they want to address and resolve the threats as such. Stasis should prove to be self-defeating over the long-term.

Although concerned movements and an international public do exist, they mostly lack influence. They suffer this lack because the powerful remain unreceptive to and thus unmoved by the calamity in the making. Denial and paranoia make an appearance here.

Their appearance is unsurprising. Who among the powerful wants to grapple with disastrous possibilities like these? Who would confront the nihilism inherent within them? Or, the sense of powerlessness they evoke? Which member of the elite would choose to radically alter the world they govern in order to save it from the practices, institutions and knowledge from which they draw their power? Very few, it seems. The powerful tend to be masters of survival within the world they know. And it is because there are so few of these men and women that committing the world to creating sensible, peaceful and sustainable forms of life is not a high priority for those who make what amounts to a global agenda.

A prudent person would thus not expect the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh to produce a feasible program meant to avoid these disasters in the making by pursuing highly advantageous goods like sensible, peaceful and sustainable forms of life. Rather, the Summit, if it accomplishes anything, can be expected to work to stabilize the world system already in place, that is, to maintain by adjusting the system now heading towards a disaster. Their refusal to take responsibility for the world they lead, should it come to that, would be significant inasmuch as some of these threats carry speciescide as an effective possibility. The quality of the threat only intensifies the motive it places on the threatened once the threat becomes known as such. Power, of course, implies responsibility, for no one is obligated beyond what he or she can do, according to an ancient legal maxim, and the powerful can do — or prevent — much. Their powers stand as one limit condition that constricts humanity as a whole. Their actions are thus decisive in the short-term.

Over the long-term, on the other hand, the social origin of the solution is unimportant. This is because reform — decisive, systemic and therefore radical reform — ought to define humanity's project if the situation conforms to the gist of the description I offered above. To be radical, reform of this sort must be both feasible (the reformers first identify a problem and then a path meant to resolve the problem identified), adequate (the reforms can solve the problem they were meant to fix) and consistent with a generous concept of human well-being. Additionally, radical reform must intentionally address a global threat that is local in origin and consequence. It must be an inclusive project; it must have beneficial system effects. Yet, it must not end with a totalizing catastrophe founded on an abstract and impossible utopian idea.

It is interesting and somewhat surprising that some observers of the American political scene concluded the United States took a step towards contributing in to a reform project of this sort when it elected Barak Obama as its president last fall.

They may have concluded they could expect reform of this kind from the new president because he had earned his mandate by promising change and offering hope for the future. His political enemies also augmented the euphoria by warning the country about Obama's radical inclinations during the election season. It seems candidate Obama's promises did not sound empty to everyone who heard them. It helped a lot that he appeared able to meet these high expectations. He had credibility in their eyes. Obama is, after all, intelligent and articulate. More importantly, he seemed forthright and decent, at ease with the people he met and the policies he discussed. He was neither a wonk nor a baby-kisser. Although different in many ways from the stereotypical American, Obama had the common touch, for he made his own success as a child of relative poverty, of a mixed marriage and of divorce. Success surely was not given to him, nor the presidency. Candidate Obama became president by running a strong and ultimately successful campaign, one forced by the history of his country to overcome the racist and nativist biases deeply rooted in its culture. Obama is just another Frank Capra story. And, most importantly, he certainly did not strike anyone as being Bush or even Bush-like, which is to say that, he appeared a humane and competent replacement for The Decider puppet and his master.

His mere presence in the campaign thus encapsulated a diffuse hope that had been dormant among common folk. It suggested that progress was possible, that the would-be president could lead the country to better days if he were elected to the office. Obama, his supporters believed, truly could get "it" done, whether "it" referred to health care reform, ending Bush's senseless wars, putting a stop to torture, resolving the financial crisis, etc. He was a "regular fellow" who also radiated gravitas — a mixed-race Jimmy Stewart. Candidate Obama thus exuded the kind of charisma for which lesser politicians would trade their souls. Voting for him was an easy choice that many Americans gladly made. They wanted change — progress, actually.

Obama has held the presidency for less than a year. It is unfortunate that, so far, he and his administration have changed very little about the state and society they govern. Progress has been deferred yet again. In fact, the Obama regime has mostly held the course on policies that were proven failures (Bush's wars) and moral outrages (Bush's torture, detainment and secrecy policies) before he took office. He has stood by Wall Street and finance capital in general even while the bipartisan bailout program he supported encumbered Americans for generations. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the new administration quickly turned "transparency," an electoral buzzword meant to highlight the differences between Obama and Bush, into a cliché, mostly because of the obscurity it created when handling national security and financial matters. Word and deed, image and reality parted company not long after the election.

Obama's tenure has already imposed adverse consequences on the new president: The Obama administration has pursued policies and acted in such a way that it has undermined the basis on which candidate Obama built his case to hold the office of the president. His positive charisma erodes a bit every day. We can learn this just from the fact that Obama's approval rating is falling at a historically fast rate. The new president is thus acquiring the taint of illegitimacy.

In this regard Obama can be compared to some degree to George W. Bush, who, as we may recall, reached his popular peak as president immediately after 9.11 but who collapsed thereafter, should have been impeached and ought to be awaiting trial for the crimes he committed while responding to that catastrophe. It is no exaggeration to judge the second Bush presidency the epitome of an illegitimate American president. The Bush administration had earned this judgment for so many reasons and on so many levels that his recent escape to Texas along with the freedom he enjoys there damns the mainstream media and the Congresses who colluded in his deeds. Bush's very freedom screams the question: "How has he gotten away with so much?" While Obama is no Bush and his defenders may wish to explain his approval ratings by using the crises of the day as a shield for the new president, I believe the Obama administration has, just like its predecessor, advanced the corruption of America's political culture. This corruption is implied by the political and social paralysis it sponsors. This 'achievement' is no small potatoes given the all-encompassing criminality of the Bush regime that preceded it. Yet, the new president could not avoid this result when his administration opted to affirm so much of the status quo ante and accomplished this by following the triangulation playbook written by Bill Clinton and Dick Morris in the 1990s. Obama staked his personal credibility on this strategy. This is astonishing because Candidate Obama ran against the Bush record and against the man whose shadow now follows him as if it were his own. President Obama merely governs as if he were another one of Dubya's crisis managers. And, like his role model, Bill Clinton, Obama looks to be squandering the opportunities for reform history gave him. He wasted them because he was careless in the goals that his administration pursued. The goals, of course, were those taken from his predecessors, goals he would have jettisoned if he were prudent and a reformer.

What are some of the more immediate and dangerous consequences that can be attributed to Obama's political failures? Hopelessness is one, cynicism another, passivity a third. Each depends upon Obama's failure to conform to the realistic expectations the electorate had for his administration. Each sends distress signals: Reform has been defeated; the 'good guy' is a fake; we've been fooled again. And each reflects the floundering of a president who has wasted an opportune historical moment that may be collapsing as the days pass.

One can easily identify the Obama administration's most notable and, perhaps, most politically destructive failure so far. It can be found in the president's inability to lead the country in a determined effort to secure an obvious and feasible public good like single-payer health care. The episode is instructive. It forces the observer to look closely at the president and who he represents. It provides the lens through which to examine a flawed reformer.

The administration's performance during the health care debate has been that poor that it has even failed to push the inferior ideas now current in Congress past his political enemies on the right and far right. Obama has instead mostly ceded ground to his blatantly irrational critics on his right flank, much to the material and political detriment of those who voted for him in good faith last November. In this Obama committed one of the cardinal sins of politics: He allowed his political enemies (and what sensible person doubts that they are a disloyal opposition) and the opportunists in Congress (who mostly follow their paymaster's directions) to set the terms of the debate on a key issue. It is they who are defining the Obama presidency. By giving his opponents this kind of power, a gift that depended upon the triangulation gambit, Obama committed a second cardinal sin: He betrayed his supporters by publicly affirming the position of his enemies. Here, then, one can locate the sources of Obama's credibility problem, of his growing legitimation deficit. It can be summarized as: "President Obama has failed to assure America that he will deliver "change they can believe in."

Obama's election happened not too far in the past that it is in any way difficult to recall that it took the votes of the disenchanted to inflict a humiliating defeat on the McCain-Palin ticket and on the Republican Party as a whole. The Republican defeat was rightly construed as an event 'meant' to steer the country in another direction. Indeed, Obama's victory even suggested a repudiation of the Reagan Revolution along with the policies and myths that are essential features of that Revolution. Yet president Obama chose to preserve much of the thinking and practices of the despised Bush administration, the government he ran against, the program which attempted to complete the Reagan Revolution and secure the imperial presidency. It is because Obama made this choice that he placed himself somewhere to the right of the center position in the United States! (Naturally, his move to the right has failed to silence his red-baiting critics!) Why would he do this? Why would he betray his supporters?

One answer: His conservatism in office is attributable to the services he has already provided to the FIRE sector of the economy, which had spent so much to help him gain the presidency, and to the security-surveillance apparatus that sits within and besides the federal government, which no ambitious American politician would dare cross. These commitments are both significant and commonly found among American politicians. They point to the fact that Barack Obama is a system politician. By system politician I wish to refer to the president's commitment to America as he knows it but not to his real or supposed loyalty to the American constitution, the rule of law, democratic governance, economic justice, national and global system rationalization, etc. All things considered, Obama is committed to saving an evolved, mature, ossified but brittle system now in decline. It can be said, I believe, that Obama is at home in Bush's America, which is also the America given to us by Clinton, Reagan and Nixon. This is the America he wants to govern — to save. And, to give credit where credit is due, Obama might be the kind of political operator one would want to have as a president if the times were stable and plush. But, they are neither. It is because times are unstable and insecure that what counts the most is Obama's inability — or unwillingness — to rationally address the problems and crises enumerated above. The global crises especially are too pressing and dangerous to ignore. I say this because global warming is a public bad if anything is! It demands attention — immediate attention. It also demands a solution. It produces these demands because the mechanisms and processes generating the global warming event mostly reflect the workings of Mother Nature and cosmic time. They are not directly fixable. There will not be a magic bullet. They may even conclude with species suicide. Yet, it is shocking that credible efforts meant to address this crisis have yet to appear. It is as though the world wishes to passively await fate to make its presence known and then deliver its final judgment.

For Americans, this lack reflects poorly upon the president, the political entity that represents the sovereignty of the American people, the unity of this nation-state and a longer historical timeline which reaches beyond the founding to the English Revolution, the Magna Carta and the Roman Republic. When considered with respect to this grand horizon, what degree of confidence can one place in a president who cannot achieve a victory for a popular, sensible and much-needed program like single-payer health care? Not much, I would say, especially when one considers the healthcare reform debacle with respect to the significantly greater obstacles Obama would face if he were to take up the path of radical reform and global leadership.

In other words, I would say that Barack Obama's failure to master the healthcare issue emits a potent warning signal which should be heard by everyone who believes this president must deliver a lot more than mere health care reform. It strongly suggests that they should trust only in those powers they can generate on their own. For the reform-minded in the United States and elsewhere, Barack Obama should become the politician they will lead, not the president who leads them and, because he is the president of the United States, the world.

The upshot: America now stands before an impasse of its own making. Americans can neither restore the country to something akin to what it once was (the wealthy, secure superpower), turn it into the country it wishes to be (the authentic and blessed "city upon the hill") nor quickly make it into the country it would choose to be if it practiced a rational politics (a just democratic polity). The local struggle to achieve the third option (a just democratic polity) is the task given to those Americans critical of their country and its pathologies. It is a task of political enlightenment and system rationalization. A rational politics can only be a responsible politics, a politics open to the present and the future, which refuses to shirk lifting the burdens it needs to carry or learning the truths it must have within its grasp. As such and given the situation today, a just democratic polity in the United States would also be a society that would take up the burden of overcoming the problems and crises that now threaten the world. Such is the reality of the present that the United States cannot avoid this task. No one can. Denial and scapegoating are not options. Obama's America, insofar as we already know it, appears unwilling to take this path. It has refused to shoulder this burden, which is to say, it has chosen illusion and paralysis. The Obama way brings only hopelessness.

The Nader moment revisited

I once defined the Nader Moment as:

….something besides the personal electoral prospects of this particular candidate. The term does not refer to Nader's campaign per se. He may or may not win this fall. In fact, he will likely lose the election. Yet the moment reflects his political style in any case. It reflects the need for a reform program that serves just ends.

As I use it, the term has two features: On the one hand, the Nader Moment refers to a specific point in time, namely, to the situation Americans now confront; on the other, it refers to something which is becoming a chronic problem for the country, a problem which marks our present situation while pointing to a disturbing future. The future looks disturbing because it promises to be a time of global war and dictatorship, economic crisis and environmental catastrophe. This problem in general: The United States is pulling the world into this abyss. The problem stated specifically: The political culture which crystallized around the image of Ronald Reagan and the election of 1980 has been exposed as irrelevant, at best, by the crisis the country now faces. 'Crisis' is the relevant word to use here since America now appears to be confronting a historical turning point. It must choose between recycling old thinking and past practices and refusing the past by inventing a politics adequate to the moment. It must reject Reaganism, for the Reagan Revolution generates instability, tyranny and a lesser quality of life for much of the world. It leads to these things because it reflects the thinking and practices of neoliberalism and neoconservatism or, to put the matter less charitably, of 'market fundamentalism' and 'militarism.' Reagan's oft-stated goals were to get government off 'our' backs and to 'stand tall' within the world and against the Communists. A resurgent America would replace the timid colossus left in the wake of the Vietnam War, Watergate and the Stagflation crisis of the 1970s. But the Reagan administration set in motion processes which strongly implicate it in the crisis Americans now confront. The governments of Reagan's America have proven to be more intrusive, less transparent and more destructive than not. America neither stands tall nor resolutely for any principle but imperial self-aggrandizement. It is for this reason that market fundamentalism and militarism have little which is constructive to say about the current situation. Blind to the complexity of the world, deaf to the suffering of nearly every person on the planet, they provide no insight or practical guidance to those Americans who wish to live as good neighbors with the rest of humanity.

Briefly put, the Nader Moment points to a deeply rooted crisis — a crisis of America's institutions and political culture — and to the need to resolve the crisis in a way which provides just and long-term benefits to most Americans. It refers to a situation that demands an innovative, democratic and populist politics.

The term thus refers to the kind of politics Nader embodied as well as to the dire situation most Americans confront today. Although 2008 may have been Nader's moment, history recorded an Obama victory last November. To be sure, Barack Obama was the clear choice when compared to the McCain-Palin ticket. But comparing Obama to McCain should be unsatisfying to those individuals and groups who recognize the compelling need for a feasible and radical reformist politics in the United States. I feel comfortable making this claim because candidate Obama ran a campaign that promised hope and change to a massive collection of citizens that pined for both. Nevertheless, President Obama has delivered so far just more of the same malarkey. I suppose some may derive comfort from the fact that President Obama has made good on the common belief that he would be the lesser evil of the two major party candidates! Yet, even they must surely suspect that a world-befouling politics remains the order of the day in Obama's Washington. Chris Hedges addresses this very issue in a recent essay. He wrote:

The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or "extraordinary rendition," restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of pre-emptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding. And if we have not learned by now that the system is broken, that as citizens we do not matter to our political elite, that we live in a corporate state where our welfare and our interests are irrelevant, we are in serious trouble. Our last hope is to step outside of the two-party system and build movements that defy the Democrats and the Republicans. If we fail to do this we will continue to undergo a corporate coup d'etat in slow motion that will end in feudalism.

I cannot disagree with Hedges' judgment of Obama's performance so far. Obama has been a great disappointment even to someone like me who did not believe he would accomplish much as President. I do, however, differ with Hedges on one point: The Democratic Party has provided a slaughter bench for radical reform in America since the election of 1896! Even though this point may seem to be nitpicking on my part and surely when I make it within the current context, it is always useful to recall that the Democratic Party includes politicians above and beyond Franklin Roosevelt! The Party, along with its leaders and cadre, must also manage the constraints placed upon it by its place in the political system. The United States is an empire, the sole military superpower in the world today and a global economic hegemon. These facts are hardly trivial. Consequently, party-politicians are not free to do as they please when they hold office. Moreover, it can also be said that a Democrat need not be a Bourbon, a Dixiecrat, an urban machine politician or, for that matter, a Blue Dog to kill off a reform movement. He or she needs only to harbor great ambitions for him- or her-self and for the Party as a whole. The ambitious sort must also be inclined to take advantage of the opportunities which appear before them. They must pursue success. Yet, this peculiar end — success — imposes on the ambitious person a willingness to serve the goals of the system as they happen to find it. I believe this because conforming to the system as it exists provides the ambitious person with the only path he or she can take that can end with the prize they desire — personal success. The ambitious politician embodies, I would add, not hope, but more of the same. He or she thus stands before the electorate as a betrayal waiting to happen, no more so than the ambitious politician who promise reforms to any degree.

Behold —Barack Obama, President of the United States.

Department of Defense spies on Americans in America

This effort is likely illegal, but not unexpected when considered in the light provided by the history made since 2001.

Democracy Now exposed the incident this morning:

Protests in Iran erupt once again

On Thursday, antigovernment protesters took the June 12^th election and the government suppression of the 1999 student protests as their objects. Reports had protest events occurring in Tehran and other cities in the country.

Sara’s epistle

Sarah Robinson asks:

Dear Conservatives:

Your fellow Americans demand an answer — and we want it now. Just one simple question:

Are you deliberately trying to start a civil war?

Just answer the question. Yes or no. Don't insult us with elisions, evasions, dithering, qualifications, or conditional answers. We need to know what your intentions are — and we need to know NOW. People are being shot dead in the streets of America at the rate of several per month now. You may not want responsibility for this — but the whackadoodles pulling the triggers make no bones about who put them up to this.

You did.

My wild guess: Yes, it is clear that far too many of America's right-wingers want to start a civil war. I would even suspect some of them of wishing to rectify the lost cause of the 1860s and to take the revenge for having endured the Reconstruction and Civil Rights eras. I would imagine their present-day Yankee equivalents would prefer to move to an authoritarian liberal regime, that is, a system which is socially and politically authoritarian but economically liberal.

UPS dumps Bill O’Reilly

UPS has just informed ThinkProgress, leaders of an anti-O'Reilly campaign, that it will no longer buy advertising on The O'Reilly Factor.

Market populism vs. grassroots populism

David Sirota's take on the Santelli meltdown

The rhetoric of American class conflict grows hotter by the day. Sirota's recent article directly addresses this conflict when it gives his take on Rick Santelli's now famous if not infamous CNBC-Chicago Mercantile Exchange piece and on Lansing, MI mayor Virg Bernero's response to — actually, his beat down of — a Fox News talking head.

While Santelli's "let them eat cake" moment may turn out to be another spectacle which merely diverts attention from the real problems now confronting the country, the event may gain greater significance than that. For instance, as Sirota rightly points out, the mass media in America routinely treat market populism as populism per se; it also deems grassroots populism as a kind of political irrationalism which expresses mass resentment, ignorance and fear. This bias becomes a problem when the difference between the market populist ideology and common lived experience of most Americans grows starker and more disturbing every day. Such has been the case since 2007 for many Americans. Many Americans may now reasonably wonder whether good, hard work and honest intentions matter for much. They may doubt that these "goods" count at all since the discrepancy between ideology and reality reflects the dissolution of the "American way of life" that has proceeded apace since 1968. Given the secular decline of the American economic system, I suspect that the Reaganite consensus founded on this social disintegration has now reached its limit point and appears for what it always was: A commitment to extend and secure the national and global powers of American finance capital. Santelli's belligerence, his crude manner and sub-rational thinking, may reflect the sense of entitlement embedded within the market fundamentalist ideology.

If this characterization of the situation is accurate, then the issue of the day becomes: Which one among America's many possible futures will the country select, a future which includes American militarism and Wall Street-led globalization or a future which respects the ecological limits imposed upon humanity as well as the dignity that necessarily inheres within the world's diverse assortment of human ways of life?

Update (2.22.2009)

Glen Greenwald's latest reflects upon the Santelli outburst by comparing it to a noteworthy forerunner, namely, the resentment-laden, tribalist militia movement which opposed Bill Clinton's presidency, "fought" the culture wars and brought about the Contract with America Congressional class of 1994. Greenwald continues by considering the civil war mongering that has begun to take hold of the rightwing dead-enders who seemingly cannot accept that the world will never again mirror their vainglorious imaginings. It is in cases like this where one can see the paranoid political style generate fearsome dangers for everyone involved, especially since this hard core has access to the mass media. Greenwald then rightly asks: "…I wonder what would happen if MSNBC broadcast a similar discussion of leftists plotting and planning the imminent, violent Socialist Revolution against the U.S. Government."

Is a new populist movement emerging?

Frank Rich of the New York Times believes such a movement is now gestating. While mostly addressing Obama's recent Cabinet nominee debacles, Rich had this to say:

The tsunami of populist rage coursing through America is bigger than Daschle's overdue tax bill, bigger than John Thain's trash can, bigger than any bailed-out C.E.O.'s bonus. It's even bigger than the Obama phenomenon itself. It could maim the president's best-laid plans and what remains of our economy if he doesn't get in front of the mounting public anger.

With respect to the President and his administration, it has surely become evident this past week that Obama's pressing political problems cannot be confined to the "bad apples" which surface from time to time. Rather, each mini-problem — or scandal — also points to a growing and public discourse about the country, one that expresses the belief that "our way of life" might cease to exist sometime soon.

A fear of this sort can be quite potent, as one would expect, especially when it is reinforced by evidence and collective agreement. In this instance it expresses the evidence-supported sense that the existential survival of the American people cannot be taken for granted and the sense that the future is known in some way (Americans expect to be worse off than they were in the recent past) but also uncertain in its particulars (will I and mine survive). When considered as such, this fear can and eventually may produce a significant political problem for any sitting federal government since it can, when prevalent and active, undermine the motivations individuals and groups need to respect and use if they are to participate as committed members of this society. In short, a legitimation crisis awaits America as just one of its possible futures originating in the developmental path now before the country. This kind of crisis reflects the existential threat of the moment.

Although this particular fear may seem fantastic with respect to a wealthy and powerful country like the United States, it has been just this kind of crisis that has recently troubled countries such as Iceland and Latvia, Greece and South Korea, as Naomi Kline points out. The United States need not be immune to an eruption of popular protest. Nor should it be considered safe from a disastrous instance of social disintegration. It has known both traumas before this moment. And together they might generate the kind of system collapse last seen when the Soviet Union imploded.

In any case, I would guess that the presence of popular contention would be the sort of events that could "maim" the Obama administration, as Rich puts it.

Yet, and to conclude, is "maim" the right word to use here? I ask because I wonder whether the Obama administration actually deserves the strong popular support he has had so far given his reluctance to tackle the real problems which vex the country. Given the Obama administration's centrist and co-habitationalist tendencies, we may surely wonder what America's "people" might do once the crisis deepens and both parties appear complicit in origin and course? What the present moment requires is a new social contract, one that includes a more equitable and rational distribution of the country's wealth and risks. This would be change in which many Americans can place their trust. But is this the path that Obama and his administration plan to take?

Protesting market fundamentalism

It has become evident since last summer that the economic crisis of the moment is not just an American disease. It is, rather, systemic in nature and global in scope. There is, therefore, more than enough pain to go around. Naomi Kline's recent article pointed to the many protests that have menaced governments around the world. The object of the protesters' ire: The market fundamentalist policies now in favor among the world's political elite. Unlike the majority of Americans, who refuse to employ most forms of political action, the citizens of other countries are attempting to impose their collective will on their states. They are motivated to do so by the fact that their governments still turn to an economic orthodoxy discredited by the crisis the orthodoxy is meant to resolve. It appears the protesters fail to see a future worth having in this policy choice. Kline concludes by addressing this very point:

The pattern is clear: governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited agenda will not survive to tell the tale. As Italy's students have taken to shouting in the streets: "We won't pay for your crisis!"

A call to action

Honoring Martin Luther King

Kevin Alexander Gray celebrates Martin Luther King Day by calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan as well as a disinvestment campaign targeting Israel.

So, this year we should honor King in an active sense. We should commit ourselves to organize against the American policy of violence and empire. The anti-war movement should apply pressure on Obama to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan. And, just as important, particularly amid the horror that has been visited on the people of Gaza; a broader peace movement must also build real economic and political pressure against Israel's immoral and criminal acts against the Palestinians. This King Day should mark the beginning of an organized push for American divestment from Israel.

A great American leader

This is Martin Luther King Day. Fortunately, we can only wonder about the fate of the Civil Rights movement and the country as a whole had it lacked a leader of this stature.

Culture or Cash?

A roundtable on America's culture war

Yikes!

Via Glen Greenwald:

Some crisis links (10.28.2008)

Mike Whitney reminds his readers that the global economic crisis will cost many their livelihoods and, in the end, their lives, personal goods which are significantly more valuable than their non-existent 401(k) plans, houses, boats, cars, etc. Famine, violent resource conflicts and an ubiquitous morbidity — these social bads promise to be commonplace features of the world now coming into being. The collapse of the world economic system exacerbates these outcomes. This general point is worth keeping in mind as this system reforms around the Chinese Yuan as the new reserve currency. Given this particular change, most Americans will not safely watch the degradation of life across the planet from the sidelines, so to speak. They are likely to be among the leading actors in this tragedy.

Michael Hudson concurs. His current assessment:

U.S. consumer spending and living standards will have to fall — and it seems, to fall sharply — in order to finance the "trickle down" economy at the top. Current Treasury policy is to bail out the creditors, not the debtors. The banks are being saved, but not U.S. industry, and certainly not the U.S. wage earner/consumer. Instead of pursuing a Keynesian type of deficit spending in a manner that will increase employment (government spending on goods and services, infrastructure spending and transfer payments), the Treasury and Federal Reserve are providing money to the banks to buy each other up, consolidating the U.S. financial system into a European-type system with only a few major banks. The financial system is to become monopolized and trustified, reversing two centuries of economic policy aimed at preventing financial dominance of the economy.

None of the money being given to the banks really will trickle down, of course. Instead, the largest upward transfer of property in over seventy years will occur. The policy of giving money to the wealthiest sectors — these days the financial sector — turns the trickle-down economy into a euphemism for the concentration of wealth. The pretense is that America's economy needs the financial and property overhead in order for the "real" economy to "take off" again. But a stronger financial sector selling yet more debt to the economy at large threatens to deter recovery, not to speak of a new takeoff.

In the first and last instances, as Hudson might put it, America's "wealth creators" must produce useful goods to sell to consumers, and the latter must have the wherewithal needed to purchase these goods. Manufacturing matters, and it counts not only to the owners of industrial capital, but also to those who toil or would toil in that sector along with those who depend upon industrial production as the key source of their separate but related economic activity. "This is the 'inner contradiction' of today's financial rescue operation," according to Hudson. "Finance itself cannot survive in the face of a stifled domestic 'real' economy." This point is relevant for every national economy.

Chris Hedges looks again to the right. He writes:

The ideological foundations of free-market economics and a consumer society have collapsed. This collapse is hard for us to fathom. We are still in shock and denial. We cling to old structures of meaning and outdated words to describe them. We have yet to realize that all our political science and economic textbooks have become junk. We have yet to formulate a vocabulary to describe our altered reality. We grasp, on a subliminal level, that laissez-faire capitalism is gone, but we have not viewed the corpse, scheduled the funeral and read the last rites.

"People get very clearly that Washington found hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out rich people in a way the government does not usually intervene," said Anthony Pollina, The Progressive Party candidate for governor in Vermont. "They understand that the government came up with all this money to support the wrong group of people. People get that in their gut. There is anger. It is not rage yet. There is still a little bit of disbelief. I may be running for governor, but all people want to talk about is how did we come up with all this money to give to rich people on Wall Street and why didn't they let them pay their mortgage off."

Millions of people will lose their homes. Jobs and savings will vanish. The government will continue to lurch from crisis to crisis.

Hedges believes two populisms (self-organized movements) will emerge in response to the crisis, a left (radical democrat) and right (reactionary Christian) version. They can be considered populist because both will take root within civil society, will reflect American's capacity for self-organization and will intentionally oppose America's political and economic elite. Although populist in nature and intent, they likely will diverge in attractiveness and ultimate significance: A political victory of one variant could be judged progressive whereas the victory of the other will likely end with a Christian fascist dictatorship, as Hedges often warns.

GOP skullduggery in Virginia: According to a report in The Virginian-Pilot, a flyer now circulating around Virginia informs Democrats that they will vote on November 5^th, not the 4^th!