Politics « shoqvalue.com

I have just read for the fourth time, Sara Robinson's important 2012 essay entitled, "Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America"

It's not long, and one of those reads which I think every 10th grader should be forced to consume, and then be quizzed on again and again until the foundational concepts are ingrained and at least partially understood. Until such understandings are embedded in each generation's mindshare, each will too easily fall victim to the same forces of plantation economy, aristocracy, and other rank manifestations of predatory capitalism that have soiled the one before. Free markets have done much for civilization. But only by making them a little less free are we going to be able to constrain their raging excesses and the humanistic failures that have resulted from them.

Below are the last few paragraphs of Sara's post. They make for a tidy list of some of the greater threats posed by this centuries old culture war of inbred and nouveau-greed lording over historically disadvantaged populations of compliant serfs. It's a war threatening not just America, but the entire planetary ecosystem of our delicate species.

It's not an overstatement to say that we're now living in Plantation America. As Lind points out: to the horror of his Yankee father, George W. Bush proceeded to run the country exactly like Woodard's description of a Barbadian slavelord. And Barack Obama has done almost nothing to roll this victory back.

We're now living in an America where rampant inequality is accepted, and even celebrated.

Torture and extrajudicial killing have been reinstated, with no due process required.

The wealthy and powerful are free to abuse employees, break laws, destroy the commons, and crash the economy — without ever being held to account.

The rich flaunt their ostentatious wealth without even the pretense of humility, modesty, generosity, or gratitude.

The military — always a Southern-dominated institution — sucks down 60% of our federal discretionary spending, and is undergoing a rapid evangelical takeover as well.

Our police are being given paramilitary training and powers that are completely out of line with their duty to serve and protect, but much more in keeping with a mission to subdue and suppress. Even liberal cities like Seattle are now home to the kind of local justice that used to be the hallmark of small-town Alabama sheriffs.

Segregation is increasing everywhere. The rights of women and people of color are under assault. Violence against leaders who agitate for progressive change is up. Racist organizations are undergoing a renaissance nationwide.

We are withdrawing government investments in public education, libraries, infrastructure, health care, and technological innovation — in many areas, to the point where we are falling behind the standards that prevail in every other developed country.

Elites who dare to argue for increased investment in the common good, and believe that we should lay the groundwork for a better future, are regarded as not just silly and soft-headed, but also inviting underclass revolt. The Yankees thought that government's job was to better the lot of the lower classes. The Southern aristocrats know that its real purpose is to deprive them of all possible means of rising up against their betters.

The rich are different now because the elites who spent four centuries sucking the South dry and turning it into an economic and political backwater have now vanquished the more forward-thinking, democratic Northern elites. Their attitudes towards freedom, authority, community, government, and the social contract aren't just confined to the country clubs of the Gulf Coast; they can now be found on the ground from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Wall Street. And because of that quiet coup, the entire US is now turning into the global equivalent of a Deep South state.

As long as America runs according to the rules of Southern politics, economics and culture, we're no longer free citizens exercising our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as we've always understood them. Instead, we're being treated like serfs on Massa's plantation — and increasingly, we're being granted our liberties only at Massa's pleasure. Welcome to Plantation America.

How do we even begin to unmask and redress these crises of a modernist empire spiraling out of control? Will it be fixed by carping on the marginal excesses of it, as seen in the issues of drones, national detention controversies and bank bailouts? Or will it be by finding new leadership and policy precepts that replace the ones which are clearly failing to provide for the common good? Ones not motivated by wealth accumulation or careerist ambitions, but rather by a sincere desire to advance our species toward its collective survival and some kind of satisfying intellectual and cultural status quo that endures long enough to reward successive generations without falling victim to them.

I have my ideas for getting there. I am sure you have yours. It's time we started to share them together, and out loud, in hopes of finding a brighter future before we're denied access to one by a dark and aggressively resurgent past.

Due to my recent cancer surgery, I have lost any natural chance of having my own biological children. But I hope I have at least a few good years left where I might be able to do something to help all the other children on this rotating sphere of cosmic debris we're all traveling on. We all get only a very brief span of years to do whatever good it is that we're going to do with them. We should probably get started.

Read the entire post. Then tweet me your thoughts.

Few people under 50 can grasp what the last seven years of the Vietnam war was like. It had cost over 21,000 American lives, far more than that in casualites and permanent disabilities, and generally tore America apart, socially, politcally, and spiritually. It was one of the most traumatic periods in our history, and in many respects, we are still reliving and resolving issues stemming from it. Modern conservatives still hang much of their pro-military rhetoric on the canard that "we didn't fight to win in Vietnam." Well now it seems that the conservative hero of that era, Richard Milhaus Nixon, on his way to the presidency, actually conspired to prolong the war to damage Democrats for their part in waging it, and allowing him to "win it."

Days before the 1968 election, the nation had been greeted with the news that the end of the war might be nearer than anyone thought possible during the so very nasty presidential campaign between Nixon and Hubert Humphrey (President Johnson, so politically damaged by the war, had decided not to run for another term). A deal had been struck between North and South Vietnam, a jubilant American people were told, and that peace was finally imminent.

But just days later, the nation's hopes were crushed as it was told that the deal had collapsed and the war would go on. The campaign momentum that had been shifting back toward Humphrey on the news of a peace deal, swung right back to Nixon. Tricky Dick went on to win the election, and the rest, was to become a very dark and ugly history that we are still paying for today. Rather than end the war, as Nixon promised during the campaign, he went on to expand it into Laos and Cambodia where still thousands more people died, while here at home, he set the tone and substance of the "imperial presidency" that many allege, not wrongly, we still endure today.

Old news for most of us; grim details of nearly a half-century gone by that many of those who prospered in the boom times that followed would probably rather forget. But others are far too damaged to ever forget. Whether you agreed with the war or not, you had to have been affected by it. I was in high school at the time, and it pretty much defined me, my clothing, my friends, teachers, school work, family life, and my later views and philosophies as they evolved. I still so clearly remember my mother's anguish as she anticipated my brother's pending draft number as it was about to be announced in the selective service lottery. My father, a WWII war hero who was awarded the Distiguished Flying Cross, sent his medals to Nixon to protest the war. The Vietnam war was everything and everywhere throughout the American existence. If you didn't live through those times, you can just take the Iraq war fiasco, and multiply it by 100. That was Vietnam.

And it still won't go away. Vietnam is the war that will never die. And now we learn that almost a third of it was prolonged because 1) Richard Nixon was a monumentally traitorous scumbag, and 2) Johnson lacked the courage to admit to the American people that his knowledge of just how big a scumbag Nixon had been was inhibited by the fact that the knowledge came via an illegal wiretap. How ironic that it would be Nixon's own wiretap efforts that would destroy him, but one still has to wonder how different the world might have been if Johnson could have admitted to one wrongdoing in order to reveal an even greater one. A wrongdoing that cost so many people their lives, ruined or reshaped their survivors, and probably permanently altered the trajectory and ultimate governability of the American experiment.

There is no outrage because outrage is now a tactic, not an emotion.

Today is the 10th year anniversary of the Iraq war. Seems like a pretty good time for bloggers and the media to remind us that it wasn't the first unnecessary, or unnecessarily long war, by hammering on this Nixon story hard.. Yet if not for Rachel @maddow (again), and perhaps a few Twitterers like me, the U.S. media would scarcely give this incendiary story more than a passing glance. We've become so accustomed to outrage being a tactic in our politics, or for link-baiting a blog site, or for driving a hashtag campaign, that all the genuine emotion has been sapped from the word, as well as its utility in shaping our national discourse. Who has the time or emotion for one more outrage? Especially one that is now 45 years old.

I do. And I really think that you should too.

Now prepare yourself

Because this story may and should upset you on many levels.

First, the basic outine:

LBJ Tapes Show Richard Nixon May Have Committed Treason By Sabotaging Vietnam Peace Talks

Next, the larger context and relevance…

Once again, courtesy of Rachel @maddow, whose team is just so damn good at that:

Rachel Maddow: History shows war a tool for political opportunists

You have probably heard by now, that the Republicans, under the leadership of the ethically-challenged Reince Priebus, are actively "investigating" a plan to subvert our democracy by rigging the Electoral College in their favor. In a nutshell, the idea is to allocate electoral votes in key battleground states by congressional district. This means that all those little rural red districts, which outnumber the far fewer blue districts (with all the big cities and people in them), would get far more votes.

Thus, had this rigged system been in place in 2012, Mitt Romney would have just been sworn in as our president. And if it's put in place for the 2016 election, there is no almost no way a Democrat could ever garner enough electoral votes to win the White House. It would be game over for Democrats, and likely the same for the progressive agenda that Barack Obamas has finally advanced after decades of inaction.

Unfortunately, Article II of the U.S, Constitution would let the Republicans do this, and get away with it, if they chose to do it. While legal challenges would surely result, the constitutional foundation of the ploy would probably be upheld by the Supreme Court.

We now know that once again, the pure evil @Alec_states is the organization behind the curtain that has been promoting this really bad idea, and have been slowly cultivating it for a long time. I am not exactly surprised.

As I see it, about the only way to stop them is a massive public outcry that rattles House members to their core, and makes them think the perception of election rigging would cost them their seats. Thus, they would pressure key votes in their respective state legislatures to back away from this vulgar manipulation of the process. Hopefully, Democrats will regain the House in the 2014 midterms, and some kind of legistlative action, short of a constitutional amendment, could create future obstacles to this national-level gerrymandering. But I don't have much hope of that. The best course is to make Republicans feel the pain, pre-emptively, and encourage them to seek the White House the old fashioned way: by winning elections fairly.

I won't waste more words trying to summarize this mess any further. It's best to read those bloggers and journalists following the matter day-by-day. Start here, with Maddow's first "wake up call" broadcast. Then read the key details of this plot from @crooksandliars/@Karoli, and a larger analysis by The Nation's John Nichols. Then proceed down the list of of all the other links below to fully understand the danger, and how few options we seem to have to prevent it. I will be updating this post as more information becomes available.

Please pass this post to friends so they'll have an easier time time grasping this pending crisis. If you have new references you think should be included, please use my contact link at the top of this blog.

The most important thing you can do is make noise about it. Let Republicans know there will be hell to pay for attempting this, beyond their first phase in Virginia, which is already poised to go foward (as discussed below). This is not the sort of thing we can easily undo later. We cannot wait until it's a forgone conclusion. We must act—and soon.

Explainers

The Early Wake Up Calls

Overviews

Detailed Analysis

REPUBLICAN ELECTORAL COLLEGE PLAN WOULD UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY (Larry J. Sabato's Crystal Ball New

Obstacles to Their Plan

Other Media About the Issue

Take Action

PETITION Speak out against the latest attempt by the Right to fix elections and drown out the voice of voters. – People For the American Way

Backstory

Same-sex marriage – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Many of us in the liberal/progressive space have spent years decrying the pathetic state of the corporate news empires that govern our daily lives now. We know what they are doing to us, and there's rarely much we can do to stop it.

Perhaps ironically, and due to the very market forces we often renounce as ineffectual, things are happening that promise to restore at least a semblance of intelligent and responsible balance to the media's scales. Probably without initially intending to, @MSNBC, chasing that almighty dollar, has begun a steady transformation of cable news that seems to be on the verge of making real reporting, careful research, thoughtful analysis, and strong voices stylish and marketable enough for prime time.

Whether in the form of Rachel Maddow, Chris L Hayes, Melissa Harris Perry, Krystal Ball, Lawrence O'Donnell, Steve Kornacki, Martin Bashir, or many of the fine contributors, panelists and guests they are bringing forth each day, such as Joy Ann Reid, Joan Walsh, Goldie Taylor, Anthea Butler, and Ari Melber, @MSNBC is steadily elevating the national discourse by producing segments like the one below.

It takes a lot of thought to produce a tribute like this, but you can't do it unless you care. MSNBC has assembled a lot of fine people who care. They may not get us out of this mess, and Comcast may yet put the brakes on their development, but for now, they sure are a step-up from where we've been. I'm thankful for all of them.

The Maddow Show Gives Thanks

Here are three articles I've ready in the past 24 hours that each sum up our "Republican Party Problem" in differents ways. The first and last are brief. The one in the middle is deeper, but a crucial read. All of them taken together provide a damn good panoramic view of the landscape of Republican crazy. And I don't call it that to mock it. I call it that because we need to fear it. I am not one to take comfort in this mess we're in. Desperate animals do desperate things, and the animals who fund these lunatics are very rich, very powerful, and very willing to say and do anything to keep it that way. They have the money to adapt and survive. We cannot let a great Obama win delude us into thinking a war has been won. It was merely a battle.

Leonard Pitts On What They Do That Is So Crazy

The GOP has become it's own worse enemy — So while the grownups in the party may be reading the writing on the demographic wall and believe it calls on them to abandon extremism, there is every reason to believe the rest of the party will think that writing requires them to double down on it instead. Read

Frank Rich On Why What They Do Is So Crazy

Fantasyland — Daniel Patrick Moynihan might be surprised to learn that he is now remembered most for his oft-repeated maxim that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Yet today most Americans do see themselves as entitled to their own facts, with one of our two major political parties setting a powerful example. For all the hand-wringing about Washington’s chronic dysfunction and lack of bipartisanship, it may be the wholesale denial of reality by the opposition and its fellow travelers that is the biggest obstacle to our country moving forward under a much-empowered Barack Obama in his second term. If truth can’t command a mandate, no one can. Read

Dan Hodges On What Keeps All The Crazy Going

Fox News Is Killing The Republican Party — As we saw with Benghazi, rather than try to penetrate mainstream media outlets, there was a clear tendency for Romney advisers to do easy "hand-offs" to Fox on issues they wanted up and running. It reminded me of when we in the Labour Party used to just drop our best material in the laps of the Mirror; they would run it big, and we’d think we were talking to the whole country. In fact, we were talking almost entirely to our own supporters. Read

Introduction

In early June, right wing bloggers were having a field day blathering about what they claimed was an “illegal recording” which I had made of a conversation with a right wing operative named Jason Wade Taylor (JWT) aka Randy Hahn, @farRightOfLeft, et al), now made infamous by Matt Osborne’s several articles about him. The recording in question was passed to JWT by two women who were conned into thinking he was a rich progressive philanthropist from Texas. They were led to think that if they helped him, it would result in funding or other assistance for their advocacy efforts. Neither of them have ever publicly confirmed or denied these charges. But my purpose here is not to speculate about why that is, nor rehash any of the broader details again, but only to set the record straight with these three key points about this purported “illegal phone recording.”

1. Recording this scoundrel was necessary

What I did was a simple “sting,” or “scam baiting,” in law enforcement parlance. I pretended to believe a con man’s lies so I could lure him into exposing those lies to our associates in the the #stopRush effort, the progressive community, and possibly law enforcement. JWT was extracting personal, financial, and strategic information under false pretenses. His targets included me, Matt Osborne (@OsborneInk), Julie Sigwart (@jsigwart), and other #stoprush volunteers. Moreover, by this time JWT had extended his contacts throughout the progressive Twittersphere, turning him into a more general threat. That community lacked any hard information to guard itself against his maneuverings and I needed to gather some.

In the recording, any reasonable listener could hear me trying to get JWT to admit his role in several mysterious fake Twitter accounts, and his many false postures, pretenses, and credentials. That was the sole purpose of recording the call. It was our only way of documenting his lies, because he never put much in writing. Today, most people know JWT was and is a fraud, but back in that day, while we suspected it, we couldn’t prove it. The purpose of the recording was to do that. Period.

2. The recording was completely legal

According to Florida Supreme Court, my recording of the call was entirely legal. JWT was not a Florida resident, and the point of interception was not within the state of Florida (as defined by Florida statute, originally crafted for ordinary wiretaps,and then expanded rather imperfectly, “interception” takes place only where the words are uttered, and not where they are received). Source

Even though I’d quickly learned that the opinions of illegality being offered by several people were flat-out wrong, and my first reading of Florida law had been correct, I decided to not speak about the recording at all and see what came of all the noise and tree shaking. Once JWT and several right wing bloggers had worked themselves into a comical lather over it, new information (and informants) started pouring in from many quarters, and I just decided to let it all pile up until I could decide what outcome I wanted to see come from all of this.

Meanwhile, I quietly consulted with media and communications lawyers who assured me that my actions were perfectly legal, no matter how many ridiculous assertions and opinions were being spewed to the contrary out there on the Internet

3. What may not have been legal was this:

The women and JWT both distributed and/or published recordings they did not own, and had no right to transmit to others in any form. The recording was my property, and in some applicable states, the distribution—and certainly the publication—of confidential communications without the consent of the parties is a crime—even a felony.

The #StopRush effort still goes on, but over 1500 volunteers were harmed by this pointless and unnecessary drama caused by a combination of a con-man’s machinations, false assumptions, rash actions, and self interest. I still receive threats from him like this one (and worse), either directly, or via numerous Skype-calls he's placed to my 85 year old mother.

Whether anything else comes of this sad drama of dishonesty, manipulation, greed, and betrayal, the fact remains that I never made any “illegal recordings.” The larger teaching moment for me, and anyone else involved is simply this: be wary of whom you invest your trust, especially the ones who call you “friend.”

http://www.alternet.org/media/how-fox-news-created-new-culture-idiots

I've said for quite a few years now that Fox News was making the douchebags and assholes among us into a mainstream demographic. And while a brilliant essay on so many levels, I will always cherish it for this brief synopsis of the social psychotic named Roger Ailes, who is single-handedly taking down America for his own amusement and enrichment.. Not for nothing does this scumbag travel in a 9-person security cocoon.

It is not just Fox News commentators but Fox News itself that has the appropriate, in-your-face, I’m-entitled-to-do-this,especially-because-you-dislike-it vibe. Which should not be surprising from a tightly controlled outfit in which everything flows from a single source, chairman Roger Ailes. Ailes has personal flaws that do not necessarily make one an asshole but that clearly shape the coverage, including his paranoia and his extreme politics. We find more telling evidence by considering the man in a happy moment, a victory lap. In an event celebrating Fox News’s success, Ailes said of the competing networks’ talent, as though sharing in the agony of their defeat: “Shows, stars, I mean it’s sad, you know? . . . I called and asked them all to move to the second floor wherever they were working. Because when they jump, I don’t want it to hurt.” By which he meant that he wouldn’t mind at all if his competitors not only lost the contest but felt humiliated enough to kill themselves. He meant of course to gloat but also to show his contempt. He meant to broadcast his contempt and to have a laugh about his being in a position to advertise it.

The comment was at least poor sportsmanship. A longtime practitioner of blood sport media politics, Ailes has emerged as its undisputed heavyweight champion. Politics is indeed a rough sport, but there are still boundaries that while crossed are nevertheless there, or sort of there. It is possible to have a minimal sense of respect among fellow sportsmen, seen as equals off the playing field, and even to display grace in both victory and defeat. Ailes’s comment suggests that he makes little effort at this, even as he does make an effort to draw attention to the fact that he cares not. He keeps it personal, on and off the court.

Ailes is a poor sport but not in a set contest fairly won. His main victory was to redefine the whole sport itself — that is to say, to redefine news. While American TV journalism has always walked a fine line between informing the public and satisfying media capitalism’s demands for viewers, ratings, and ad dollars, the line was more or less there, and it represented respect for what some regard as the fourth branch of government and a democratic society that depends on real news. Ailes obliterates that line with his “orchestra pit theory,” which he puts as follows: “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?” The implication of course being that TV can and should cover the sensation rather than the substance, that it should move still further away from professional journalism and toward infotainment in a pure ratings contest. Fox News has changed the game and won, with an ever-thinner pretext of service. (It has very little actual news gathering and reporting staff; it freely crosses its own purported division between reporting and editorializing; and it now boosts for and even instigates protest movements and financially backs specific political candidates.) For its loyalty and attunement to its fans, it has been richly rewarded with outsized profits and unprecedented political influence.

If we ask why Ailes fought so long and so hard for all this, however, the answer is not simply the ample rewards. His victory lap comment also suggests fundamental contempt. It suggests contempt not just for his competitors but for a society of people who have always counted on news with a lot of information shaped by a good-faith attempt at impartial presentation. Our fundamental need in a democratic society, for each of us to make up our own mind, now goes unmet by the whole media environment. It reflects not the minds of equals deliberating together about what together to do but the tenor and voice of a single asshole’s mind.

Read it all at Alternet

shoqvalue.com

I believe in the semantic web. I just don't know what that means.

Category Archives: Politics

Conservative Southern Values: America’s Ticket Back to the 18th Century and Beyond

Our New Eternal American Question: Where’s The God Damn Outrage?

There is no outrage because outrage is now a tactic, not an emotion.

Now prepare yourself

First, the basic outine:

Next, the larger context and relevance…

Related

The Republican Plot To Win The White House With A Gimmick: A Clear And Present Danger

Explainers

The Early Wake Up Calls

Overviews

Detailed Analysis

Obstacles to Their Plan

Other Media About the Issue

Take Action

See Also

Over $3,000 Raised! Richard C. Myer’s Wife Stays In Her Home. THANK YOU ALL

America Has A Grotesque Monster Under Its Bed

My Cousin Makes A Little History (Again)

Backstory

Related

Rachel @Maddow Is Thankful For Much. I’m Thankful For Her And @MSNBC. Here’s Why

Related

Three Views On The Crazy: Our Republican Party Problem

Leonard Pitts On What They Do That Is So Crazy

Frank Rich On Why What They Do Is So Crazy

Dan Hodges On What Keeps All The Crazy Going

For The Record: Matt Edelstein Never Made Any ‘Illegal Phone Recordings.’

Introduction

1. Recording this scoundrel was necessary

2. The recording was completely legal

3. What may not have been legal was this:

The Asshole Demographic: Why The Buttheads Seem To Rule America