Anti-immigrant fascism goes malignant, spreads
And so we wade into our dystopia.
According to Representative Sue Myrick (R-NC), Hezbollah agents may be learning Spanish and disguising themselves as illegal immigrants in order to get into the US. TPM reported the following exchange between her and her FOX News interviewer:
“It really bothers me because here we are with a porous border, not really paying attention to who is coming over, what’s happening with Iran and Hugo Chavez and Venezuela. We know that there are people going to Venezuela learning Spanish and then coming up through Mexico with fake documents trying to cross the border. If they’re stopped they say, “Well, I’m Mexican or Spanish.”
…[FOX] host Brian Kilmeade was convinced: “Instead of talking about Mexicans coming here for a better life, we’re talking about Hezbollah coming here to infiltrate our borders and attack the country. That would change the entire dialogue when it comes to illegal immigration.”
(Myrick’s proof that this is taking place, by the way, is that some imprisoned gang members in the Southwest have tattoos in Farsi.)…
Stan:
And here is part of the background… destabilization of categories, which is simultaneously dangerous and an opportunity… a breach in the system. A bifurcation.
Revolution in human relations< <<<<*****>>>>>Reaction.
FULL
15 July 2010, 4:15 pmBG:
The Iranians are going to Venezula to learn Spanish so they can be more convincing when they cross the border?
“Oh no! The US Highway patrol is telling us to pull over! What’ll they do to us if they find the weapons in the back?”
“Don’t worry. I am fluent in Spanish.”
15 July 2010, 5:54 pmKim Sky:
Wonder how they’re feeling about “capitalism” in Costa Rica right now?
US Marines to Costa Rica — Costa Rica has granted the US military a six-month window to bring 7,000 Marines, five planes and 46 warships into its territory to help intercept north-bound narcotics.
Hum. Wonder if they’re headed to Puerto Limon or all parts? The 7,000 marines to be housed on the boats? The rapes etc.
Ugh.
16 July 2010, 12:39 pmVictor:
So we sat on our hands as they flooded the bottom half of the labor market with cheap “illegal” labor. As they created a sub-class of disposable workers without any legal rights, who are essentially impossible to organize (not that we tried), we did nothing for the “illegals” or the workers they displaced. In concert with a corporate union busting campaign (that we also did nothing to stop) the flood of cheap labor had its inevitable effect: unions dissolved, wages went into the toilet, and workplace safety became a cruel joke. In less than a generation the American working class lost everything that had been won in the long and bloody struggles of the old labor movement. It was a devastating defeat. Most members of the left didn’t even notice it. Anyone who did was called a “workerist”, or worse.
Now the anger of the white working class has been carefully manipulated into anti-Latino racial hatred by the far right. This was not inevitable. A real left could have stopped it. Now the sub-class of disposable workers threatens to create a brown majority, so it has to go. So they will become the racial scapegoats for the catastrophic failures of our drug war, immigration policy, labor policy, and war on terror. While Latinos are fighting and dying in disproportionate numbers in our imperial wars, their relatives here at home are being hunted like animals, treated like terrorists, and now conflated with Hezbollah. This is the kind of profound contradiction that a real left could turn to its advantage. Too bad we don’t have one.
While we are busy peeing on the great works of western literature, complaining about the enlightenment, morbidly obsessing about our sexual identities, and manufacturing copious amounts of academic BS, Latinos are being taken away by men in with machine guns, never to be seen again. Do we even care? Really? Why don’t we DO something about it then?
When you compare the interest of the modern left in, say, endangered tree frogs, to its almost complete non-interest in, say, Latino day laborers, you have to wonder, is there some racial hatred of our own going on here? Nothing against the frogs, but what about your fellow, brown skinned, human beings? Would we really tolerate what is done EVERY DAY to Latinos, if it was being done to groups the modern leftist actually likes?
16 July 2010, 7:47 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Yes, I also saw that about Costa Rica and thought of a friend who moved there…
16 July 2010, 8:20 pmxenia:
“destabilization of categories”
experience from war has taught me that this is vitally important for virulent nationalism. in this case, of course, the connection was latent ever since jose padilla (and a few years later, ann coulter’s objections to being checked at the airport by “brown people”).
in spite of all that personal and professional knowledge, i am still stunned. this is an exceptionally dumb and crude equation, but it might work for precisely that reason.
17 July 2010, 4:49 am(Boer) Tom:
@Victor
I think a huge problem on the left the last 40 years has been the trashing of its own principles – it is amazing what happens when one rediscovers one’s principles – about working class whites in RSA and the left’s ignoring them, see “Death and the Mielieboer” – the only study of HIV that included socio-economic data says that poor whites are pushing toward 6% infection (2002 Mandela/HRC).
So to answer regarding Latin@s, take it to poorer USA whites (especially) and make the arguments to them.
17 July 2010, 2:43 pm(Boer) Tom:
Just in case there’s any misunderstanding, the reason to take it to poor whites is because 1. whites are the majority, or at least a plurality still in the US, 2. not making an effort at organising them, and creating non-racist organisations that sincerely and effectively address them strike me as a kind of racism, and 3. right now they are the most antipathic group toward Latin@s, to my understanding, so working with them is most likely to undermine the kind of tactics that leave Latin@s a vulnerable worker group.
17 July 2010, 2:55 pmStan:
Poor whites are not the majority. For all practical political purposes, in the US, the largest political bloc is the suburban “middle” class. Of voters, it’s over half. Political identities: homeowner (under mortgage), consumer, worker in the technical/service economy, taxpayer, school parent. Mostly, but certainly not exclusively, white. Grid-dependent in the absolute. Will wig out when things don’t work right anymore.
Destabilized, this is our most dangerous political class right now, and they are the core of the tea party lunacy. Failing to contest for their critical attention, as Tom suggests, is a recipe for general failure. If just half of them can be saved from reaction, there’s a chance we can all be saved from it.
17 July 2010, 10:04 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
If I may elaborate on what Stan has begun (without speaking for him), for anyone outside the USA, US Americans are relatively devoid of class consciousness. Even people of the Radical Left who may be able to speak well enough about heterosexism, white supremacy, ableism, etc. will oftentimes have a rather vague notion of “class” which is heavily influenced by thinking that sounds as if it came right off the “boob tube.” Unlike the kind of politically-informed analysis of economic class one would find typical of Marx, et al, amongst people here, “middle class” is thought of in the terms Stan lays out pretty well. There are not nearly as many “middle class” (in the sense of bourgeousie/petit bourgeousie) as there are white collar, working class, with disposable income. They aren’t really even petit bourgeous because they can claim no ownership to means of production or even specialized license (as a physician or attorney could), but because US national power has so effectively concentrated wealth within its borders, there has become this substantial demographic of skilled laborers (assuming that creating an organizational chart in PowerPoint constitutes a skill) who believe wholeheartedly they are “middle class” since, after all, they “own” their own house, they just got a new Prius last year through “‘Cash’ for Clunkers”, and their office has a dress code that doesn’t include a hair net.
Maybe I’ll go stand on the roadside and “fly a sign” that says “will brief program status reports for food”, and see if anyone gets it.
18 July 2010, 7:23 amStan:
Thanks, Marcilla. That needs elaboration. Marxian taxonomies do not work in the US for both objective and subjective reasons. Partly because they are just so old that we have to fit our reality into a Procrustean bed. I’ll re-plug Matthew Lassiter’s very important book The Silent Majority on this topic.
But I think Tom is right – definitions aside. These ‘burb denizens have to be engaged. They are not intrinsically bad; and they think of themselves as “good people.” Their ignorance is cultural. How many can be steered away from signing up with the Strong Father, Duce, whomever? And how many can be employed in the transformation of the suburbs (people act like when the ‘burbs are no longer viable, these folks will have somewhere to move… they won’t).
If and when they can’t cope, they’ll join the first nutball crusade against immigrants, et al; then they’ll use their political clout to strip mine the rest of the commons. If they can’t take care of themselves, they will become like locusts, eating everything, leaving wreckage in their paths.
Very dangerous class.
18 July 2010, 8:02 am(Boer) Tom:
Even though poor whites aren’t a majority in the states, it will be easier for middle-class whites to sympathise with poor and working class whites than with poor and working class non-whites (initially – racism is real, so can we use it, including to defuse it?). One can show/argue that industrialism makes society’s present wealthier by stealing from society’s future, i.e. it impoverishes the future – if a given such individual has a calculus background, state it as a trivial diff. equation,
y”=C y’ (k-y)
where y’ is the size of the economy, y is the integrated economy over time (an economy consumes energy in proportion to its size) and y” is the growth rate of the economy. This is language that the more educated among them can understand, and one can teach those who don’t have the background, if rapport is established.
Because the realities are unpleasant (both generally, and to their self-images/ideal selves), one may have to teach them how to adjust psychologically to unpleasant realities (and possibilities – one must first accept that something is possible before one can accept that it is a reality) – I’ll harp on Ilan Shalif’s method again.
So, what tactics?
I visited an old friend last night (who has TV, I don’t…) and I saw the tea-party’s latest – the Pinochet ploy (blacks use welfare to buy plasma TVs – Pinochet made a similar remark during the hyperinflation on bread in 1975 to the effect that workers should ‘sell the TVs that Allende gave them to buy food’ (what TVs?)). On the one hand, anyone making such remarks deserves to be compared to Klaus Barbie and Walter Rauf – if one uses Pinochet’s arguments, one deserves to be compared to his henchmen, but statistical data with a clear presentation to show that the claim is generally fraudulent (lots of work), some footage of the lie (it will take time to prepare such a response) and a bit of history on the liars and their historical actions, without the explicit connection being made to supporters of the tea party, will probably give the supporters the psychological breathing space (after they’ve mouthed off to their harts’ content) to adjust to reality.
18 July 2010, 12:09 pmm.c.:
@Marcilla,
My only quibble is that the top of the pyramid is class-conscious. Upper & Upper-Middle. Yep…
18 July 2010, 4:44 pmStan:
FULL
18 July 2010, 5:01 pmStan:
FULL
18 July 2010, 5:03 pmStan:
FULL
18 July 2010, 5:06 pmLee M:
I urge you to put up an About page.
I would like very much to understand some of your personal history, the experiences and education that inform your view point and the work you do in your blog.
19 July 2010, 1:48 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
I think that with the decline in positive feelings toward Capitalism, and with some rebranding from the thoroughly vilified National Socialist/Nazi thing to something more like “Patriot Mutualism” or “Protective Federalism”, they could have a real movement on their hands. A real *horrible* movement, of course, but that’s more of a personal/subjective thing.
m.c. – I wouldn’t disagree with you. I think you could say that the top of the pyramid is almost class *un*conscious. By that I mean that they lack consciousness in the sense of revolutionary struggle, but not because they are unaware. As I believe you were getting at, they are *very* sensitive to class differences, although my experience has been that they are unconscious in the sense of being *beyond* consciousness – kind of like white people who “don’t see color.”
And (Boer) Tom, you’ve triggered a very nerdy part inside me that can’t resist the mixing of equations with radical politics =-) May I ask about how you operationalize these variables? What is your econometric for y’? y and y’ seem backward to me since y seems as though it would be the value derivative of y’. Are C and k both constants, and what would they represent conceptually? Curious, but I don’t yet understand.
19 July 2010, 7:21 amMichael Anderson:
I’m curious as to how the powers-that-be will attempt to convert middle-class white people trying to climb the rat-race ladder of success into people willing to lay irrigation pipe efficiently for 1/10th of what they make now—a gradual process of mental and physical de-evolution conditioning through media and the presence of the barrel of a gun? Giving us a phantom brown/muslim/heathen (or whatever the current moment of hate demands) menace and the promise of a menial job in the great Am-er-EEK-an dream (whatever that is)? Is this what we’re getting into with our hints of deflation in the economy? Getting costs down to fit the new wages of serfdom?
Dammit, why does labor have to cost anything at all?! (sic)
19 July 2010, 9:34 amStan:
19 July 2010, 12:18 pmm.c.:
I’ve referred here a while ago to an long essay Norman Mailer wrote in the 1970′s “A Harlot, High & Low.” It’s included in a book titled, Pieces, or Pieces and Pontifications. Some libraries might still have a copy. If you read it before watching The Aviator, JFK, Nixon(esp), All the President’s Men, and The Hoax with Richard Gere, you’ll start to get a good picture.
19 July 2010, 2:10 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Marcilla Elizabeth Smith
19 July 2010, 3:38 pmy’ would be the present size of the economy (dollars of some year equivalent). y is the summed total economy that has ever existed, with the intuition that an economy (ignoring growth) consumes available energy (and other resources) at a rate proportional to its size, and therefor the time-integral of the economy would be (within some scaling factor) proportional to the resources consumed. Yes, k and c are constants, and k is representative of the totality of resources at the start (again within a scaling factor). C is merely a scaling factor. Of course, my presentation isn’t necessarily entirely accurate, so one could do two coupled equations, with growth being proportional to remaining resources and present size, and resources being reduced at a rate proportional to total previous economy (therefor integrated over time), but simple substitution and differentiation should produce that equation. One should also force y’ to be monotonically increasing, and the equation ignores nature’s self-repair, but as that is on a time-scale much longer than most lives, it is negligible.
Curt:
Damn Stan, that Washington Post Article was long. I only read through page 6. That was enough for me. I would be willing to bet that the expansion of these programs is really just to soak up the army of unemployed. Such people would be unemployable in any economy that was rational. I know I am one of them. A degree in Political Science with Comparative Religion as my hobby. Who could possibly use such nonsense in a real economy? Once these people go to work for the puzzle palace annexes they then will have their sense of belonging. They will have a good wage that they think that they deserve so they will not be out making revolutions.
19 July 2010, 4:05 pmDo not bite the hand that feeds you should be changed to do not feed the hand that bites you. In this case any useful information.
A Tunisian told me a few years ago, there are three types of people in Tunisia.
Those who are in prison. Those who are unemployed and probably will be in prison before very long. Those who work directly or indirectly for the security forces. Well there is one guy who works in a hotel for tourists that is owned by a German or a Saudi.
One thing is really kind of sad though. If anyone of those 850,000 people knows when and where the US is going to attack Iran and tips the Iranians off ahead of time, I do not think that it will really do the Iranian much good. Even if they believe the tip that they are getting.
m.c.:
The Good Shepherd directed by Robert DiNiro is another good period piece of the 1940′s & 50′s. James Jesus Angleton ran his own fiefdom & and the end may have been as crazy as Howard Hughes and James Forrestal. The period say between WWI up through the 30′s, the U.S. had the population and natural resources to become an Empire but it was the industrial and economic output of the second World War, as well as very little physical damage other than Pearl Harbor compared with the other large powers that the psyche of Thomas Paine, Abe Lincoln, maybe characters like Harry Truman(does everyone know he used to sneak out of the WH and go for walks by himself without anyone knowing. He made a name for himself as a Senator by attacking War Profiteers. Not bad for a homespun judge in the pockets of the KC mob. He regretted he couldn’t make Tom Pendergast’s funeral), the small farmer/shopkeeper of the American spirit that became overshadowed by the Empire. The somewhat good news is that The U.S. had pretty adequate public education, quasi-social mobility(at least for non-minorities), and labor unions that at least existed. Even people like Henry Ford who broke unions paid his blue-collar workers relatively well.
21 July 2010, 2:32 pmVictor:
@Stan
“Failing to contest for their critical attention, as Tom suggests, is a recipe for general failure.”
I don’t know what left you people are members of, but all I see when I go to a meeting or a protest march are members of the middle class, almost all white. I don’t know how you define general failure, but I would say that the anti-war movement, something that was 90% white and middle class, was a catastrophic failure, at least for the human beings on the wrong end of the thermobaric bombs. The only people we try to talk to on the left, or “organize” (I use this term very loosely), are members of the middle class or upper classes.
You could certainly argue that the failures of the modern left have as much to do with stupid ideas and bad practices as they do the class origin of those organized, but that class origin has something to do with the culture of leftist failure. The widespread use in the anti-war movement of the support group model, for example, is a piece of idiocy that could only have come from the White American middle class. The unexplainable belief that walking from point A to point B with a protest sign is somehow going to defeat the Hyperpower is a stupidity that could only flourish in a middle class culture. In fact the entire sad protest ghetto to nowhere is as White and Middle class as it is possible to be, as is the deification of political failures and tolerance for utterly incompetent leadership.
21 July 2010, 7:11 pmVictor:
@Michael Anderson
“I’m curious as to how the powers-that-be will attempt to convert middle-class white people trying to climb the rat-race ladder of success into people willing to lay irrigation pipe efficiently for 1/10th of what they make now—a gradual process of mental and physical de-evolution conditioning through media and the presence of the barrel of a gun”
No actually, you simply lose your job, fail to find a new one, and eventually end up in a homeless shelter. At that point you will do anything to get out. I see it every day on the jobsite.
21 July 2010, 7:14 pmCurt:
854,000 people hold a TOP secret security clearance. 849,000 of those people are dead weight on the society not doing anything at all productive. They shuffle paper from one useless parasite to another.
Some of those people could be put to good work managing a world market for airline tickets. I just read that in 2011 world airline passenger traffic is going to reach 2.75 billion. That is one airline trip, long medium or short, for each 2.5 people roughly.
Now airline travel has to be quickly reduced. Here is the Peyton and Eli Manning Plan (PEMP). The United Nations creates a civil aerounautics board. It is charged with giving each person on the planet 10 coupons for 100 airline kilometers per year, more or less depending on scientific environmental outlooks. Now many poor people will not be able to afford an airline ticket in anycase but they will be able to sell their coupons. The trick of course will be to create a system that makes counterfitting difficult and heavily penalizes counterfitters. In this way the poor can improve their economic situation and the rich will be penalized for flying more than their share of airline miles.
or more or less depending on environmental circumstances.
The same system should be applied to the cruise industry, and the auto industry.
Are we really as a species to stupid to come up with a system that would make it difficult to cheat in. It is not fair for me to be expected to come up with such details because I lack the techincal background. Of course each coupon will have to be treated as a a I forget the word but I mean that each one will have to have its own traceable serial number like a car so that the autorities can trace each person who has owned the coupon until it is redeemed and destroyed.
22 July 2010, 8:34 amIf you ask me that is really a great PEMP. Of course it may take much more coordintion than joining little communes and gardening but the PEMP will actually have a better chance than some wanna be hippies digging up some old communes. Of course the chances that either plan will actually be implemented is tiny.
Stan:
@Victor,
We must have gone to some different meetings, and a few different actions.
We don’t know what effect the antiwar actions had, because we can’t know what would have happened without them. This is not a football game where there is one clear winner and one clear loser at the end.
I saw people converted in that process. I saw a lot of lies get publicly and relentlessly confronted. I saw a Secretary of Defense fired. I had amazing experiences with a lot of people I’d never have met (and that counts, too!). I saw soldiers transformed into peacemakers.
As to the white middle-class folk who participated in the antiwar movement (excluding those who were merely anti-Republican), it’s easy to take a shit on them when they are an undifferentiated abstracted mass; but a lot of them are very decent people who threw everything they knew how at it.
Moreover, when BT or I talk about the WMC clueless that need to be engaged, these are not the same people who were in the antiwar movement. They are frightened, freaked-out people who want some answers about why the world isn’t working they way they were told it would. And they are the latent popular base for reaction. Going after that base with some alternatives early makes strategic sense.
It’s not the healthy person who needs the physician.
22 July 2010, 5:37 pmBG:
@ Stan
“And they are the latent popular base for reaction.”
That could describe the Tea Party movement.
And before someone thinks “Tea Party? Bunch of jerks!” consider that although the health care debate was framed in terms of “access” v. “freedom” (two things that are not in opposition) it could just have easily been expressed as “Health Care costs to much” v. “These reforms will cost too much.”
Both sides were worried about the same thing: high cost… Yet after the dust settled the insurance industry is still around, and what’s more, they’re getting a huge transfer of wealth directly from the people.
25 July 2010, 9:32 amBG:
@ myself
That was supposed to be getting at the importance of getting in there first with your message and having a short, catchy issue frame. As in once someone else gets their message in (“freedom”), it’s a lot harder to argue your way in since you have to convince someone they are wrong about something.
25 July 2010, 9:39 amStan:
Hat tip to Marxmail & LBO for this…
Here is what’s happening to volatilize the biggest political bloc in the country.
26 July 2010, 3:57 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
y”=C y’ (k-y)
I read your explanation, and I think I understand better, but not quite yet. First, from a mathematical perspective (and forgive me that it’s been 20 years since I took calculus), I would expect the equation to look more like this:
y’ = C yn ( k – Σy )
Then it looks as though the rate of growth could never go below zero (reasonably), which makes me think another variable would be needed, maybe? After that, it looks like the equation says the economy grows at a rate proportional to absolute size, but inversely proportional to total resources ever extracted (in terms of energy in particular).
Like the more energy you use, the faster you can grow, but the sooner you reach a point of diminishing returns? Kind of like the Peak Oil curve?
27 July 2010, 11:11 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
The “n” was supposed to be a “sub ‘N’”, but the html didn’t work fro some reason =-(
Also, the sigma should prolly have a “0 -> n” underneath it.
27 July 2010, 11:14 am(Boer) Tom:
Divide and rule as practiced by FOX et al. We should probably keep a list of fora frequented by ‘Tea party’ people for their education’s sake.
27 July 2010, 3:00 pmVictor:
@Stan
I helped organize every major anti-war march in the bay area before the war with Iraq and have gone to most of the major ones on the west coast since. You have to go to a NASCAR event to find crowds so completely white (just to make this clear, I’m white). The failure to engage Latinos and African Americans is unforgivable, the refusal to notice this failure is psychotic.
We failed to stop, slow down, or even provoke a real public debate about the invasion of Iraq. We failed to nominate a antiwar cantidate in both 2004 and 2008. Now that public support has collapsed for both wars (thanks to the insurgents, not us) we still cannot translate that into political action. I guess this is an instrumentalists view of the situation, but there are humans being slaughtered as we speak. If this isn’t failure, the word is meaningless. No, this isn’t a football game. It is much worse. It is a war. 100,000+ dead people.
I’m not trying to shit on white middle class people, but until we admit that our movement is a total failure from the point of view of the only people who matter, the VICTIMS OF THE WAR MACHINE, their blood is on our hands as well. I watched spoiled white middle class children riot in the streets of SF like fucking baboons while the FBI was taking away one of my Iraqi co-workers on the day the war started. I have waited in vain for the kind of self criticism that is long over due in the anti-war movement. We blame the “other” but never ourselves.
27 July 2010, 3:23 pmStan:
FULL
27 July 2010, 7:44 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Marcilla Elizabeth Smith
Replace the summation with an integral, and differentiate the resulting expression, and you get mine. Y is your economy; y’ is mine, although I’m not sure why you have an n after the y.
What it says is that some summed (integrated over time) economy is possible once, after which the economy dies – growth goes negative, strongly at first, then eases off toward zero as the remaining economy goes off the cliff to zero, as the remaining resources are consumed (the economy cannot go negative – a good sanity check!).
Spreadsheet instructions:
Cell A1: Enter “k”. Cell B1: Enter “10″. Cell A2: Enter “C”. Cell B2: Enter “1″. Cell A3: Enter “y(0)”. (I’m using my terminology.) Cell B3: Enter “1″. Cell A4: Enter “y’(0)”. Cell B4: Enter “1″. Cell A5: Enter “dt”. Cell B5: Enter “0.01″.
Cell A7: Enter “t”. Cell B7: Enter “y(t)”. Cell C7: Enter “y’(t)”. Cell D7: Enter “y”(t)”.
Cell A8: Enter “=0″. Cell B8: Enter “=B3″. Cell C8: Enter “=B4″. Cell D8: Enter “=$B$2*C8*($B$1-B8)”.
Cell A9: Enter “=A8+$B$5″. Cell B9: Enter “=B8+C9*$B$5+0.5*$B$5*$B$5*D8″ (2nd order …). Cell C9: Enter “=C8+D8*$B$5″. Cell D9: Copy from cell D8. Select cells A9-D9 and copy. Select cells A10 down (e.g. to A109), and paste. The y(t) column is the summed (integrated) material economy (negative entropy, available energy, not per se valuation), and the y’(t) column is the current size of the economy. (Some rather interesting reinterpretation of the Austrian School is possible, if one junks their ideological assumptions, on this score – inflation is used to thwart market forces into extracting the last remaining vein and soil mineral, especially regarding ancient Rome…)
Actually, the economy does look rather Gaussian – guess I’ll be doing some algebraic investigation tonight…
@Victor
So you feel it as a personal failure. But what is the nature of that failure? What capacity would interested Blacks and Latinos have to change anything? In order to change things on a national (USA) scale, I’d imagine that you’d need at least twenty percent of the populace actively resisting the government (Anglo-Boer war, Iraqi Sunni resistance); have you done the recruiting, training, etc? What I’d suggest (I’m not in USA) is to develop informational tactics – what are the standard lies, misrepresentations, misunderstandings etc., on which the system relies? Standard is different for different groups – for some, it may be racist, for others, it may be the more formal ideologies that we tend to study, etc. Moreover, while the majority of blacks probably distrust the system, that does not mean that they’d actively oppose it.
One such misunderstanding is the Pareto optima (economics) – some fairly dismal situations are Pareto optima, e.g. if 1 kg of nuclear waste is to be swallowed, with monotonically (continually) increasing disutility (i.e. taking more is worse, which isn’t always true, as a prompt death might be more pleasant than an agonisingly slow death, but whatever…), every distribution of who gets to swallow how much is a Pareto optimum…
28 July 2010, 8:32 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Marcilla Elizabeth Smith
30 July 2010, 2:43 pmAnother way to think about it: Let y(t) be the economy, then let the integral with time of y(t) be z(t), and substitute z and its derivatives in your equation – my y’s become z’s, and again we have an identical expression.
m.c.:
“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”
~ Thomas Jefferson (1789)
Hence: The Tribunes of the Plebians/Plebian Council
1 August 2010, 3:10 pm(note: Plebians were those who owned land, somewhat what we might call the middle classes of the Roman Republics. Some of those old timers weren’t that stupid.)
Victor:
I don’t even know what to say to people who think the anti-war movement was something other than a failure. I don’t know that I even have anything to say to them. We are not comrades any more. But Stan’s comments do deserve an examination:
The anti-war movement was a success because: we had fun, met new people, did new things & had therapeutic experiences. In other words the movement was all about US and the unfortunate fate of the people in Iraq and Afghanistan is irrelevant. Our own experiences as members of the movement are more important to us than the LIVES of the people we were supposedly trying to save. That is, more or less, the clinical definition of a sociopath. Other sociopathic traits: ferocious self righteousness, a sense of absolute moral superiority, complete lack of guilt or remorse, no sense of responsibility & a complete inability to engage in self criticism. Sounds like the anti-war left.
Would any of you actually have the gall to stand in front of an Iraqi mother who has lost her children to the car bombers and claim that our movement was a success because: We had fun going to the protest marches?
100,000 murdered, whole countries laid to waste, Abu Ghraib, the “El-Salvador option”, death squads, ethnic cleansing, sectarian civil war, the car bombing campaign, preparations for partition and genocide, and now a nuclear war with Iran is on the table from the president we helped to elect. Yet I actually have to argue the point that the movement was a failure. What does this say about us, not as leftists, but as human beings? What kind of morality puts your own childish fun as play-pretend radicals above the unspeakable suffering of millions? What do you think Jesus would say about this attitude Stan?
“I never knew you”, I imagine.
While the old left had its share of sociopathic tendencies, when it sold its soul it was for POWER. And even on its worst day, the old left knew when it was beaten. We have sold our soul, for what exactly? Protest marches…street riots…international ANSWER…and Che t-shirts? And we can’t even process our defeat. We have averted our eyes from our responsibilities for the nightmares in Iraq and Afghanistan in exchange for nothing more than the blindness of the act itself. I guess that saves us from having to look in the mirror and see the moral monstrosity that we would see there.
So now it falls to libertarians like Justin Raimondo and Scott Ritter to criticize a movement too retarded to criticize itself. How racist are you that the Buchananites care more about the people in Iraq than you do? Instead we sit around and congratulate ourselves on how noble and smart we are. We talk in an obscure and meaningless academic language that serves mainly to hide the fact that we have nothing to say. We practice the rituals of a political cargo-cult that is mainly the altar of our own vanity. And when someone else steals our fetish, we lose our minds. A bunch of people so stupid that they go to protests with signs like “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” use our tactics to protest a health care “reform” scam (that we also oppose) and the left goes into hysterical fits and starts screaming FASCISM!
1 August 2010, 5:06 pmStan:
Lots of heat, Victor, but no light.
So we can’t be your comrades any more since we’ve disappointed you? Pity. I’m modding in your comment, but you won’t get a second pass. You have managed in one rant to blame the left FOR the war, suggest that the left’s inability to stop it is somehow its failure to do what you think it ought to have done (so why didn’t it?), mangle a medicalized (now popularized) term to suggest than everyone who opposed the war is a sociopath, and reduced an enitre movememnt to trivialities. This straw man you have constructed to tear down is simplified, and that always makes it easy to rant as an demonstration of your own superiority. I mean, we all indulge in these tantrums sometimes; but its not the same as critical analysis is it? You haven’t made one specific observation here about the actual anitwar movement (not the antiBush movement that glommed onto us!). And you haven’t taken into account that there is a huge differential of power between us and the proverbial Them. Instead, you call us racist (wherever that came from).
I just want you to know why another post like this will not be moderated in. This is an adults only blog. And there are too many decent, dedicated people I met during the course of the opposition to the war(s) to accept this grotesque caricature you are trying to pedal here. Many of them were veterans themselves, and many were families of people thrown into the war, and many were people who had lost family in the wars. Many of us, at different times in the course of things, didn’t have a pot to piss in; and plenty poured themselves into the movement with such energy that they sacrificed their mental and physical health along the way.
This will not be a platform for peurile frustration that needs to lash out at everything, and everyone (many who you obviously didn’t know).
The movement against the war was always small. The movement against Bush was big, and it elected Obama. Some of the antiwar movement got caught up in electoral politics (and this is new to you? How old are you?) The movement against the war is still small, and it is still active. The movement for peace is smaller still.
Bring back some substance, and bring down the volume on personal insults, Victor, or you’ll post somewhere else.
2 August 2010, 7:00 amStan:
Here’s the class we need to watch, because they are a ticking time bomb.
FULL
2 August 2010, 11:49 amMichael Anderson:
The FT article is full of people who look very familiar. Coos County, OR, where I live now, has a higher percentage of stressed middle and lower-middle-class people than some other areas in the state. Some of those familiar faces will turn to a populist xenophobic puppet despot for respite—I think we all know some in our own areas. But some are good people who do have some critical thinking skills still intact.
Having said that, I think that any emerging leader (sic) in the short or medium-term who fits the Fascist model a la Adolph or Benito will have a boatload of elite money behind him—and it’ll definitely be a HIM, and a violent one at that. Barring a major societal breakdown, of course. Then all bets are off.
And, having said THAT—referencing something Stan mentioned a year or so ago—about social barriers coming down (in a good way)…I have noticed, since I’ve been back, a more integrated presence here–racism is still strong, but I see lots of black, Asian, and Latino faces, which is quite a change from when I was growing up….then (1960′s), there was ONE black family in town. They owned a shoe shine parlor. It’s good to see more of everybody…
I only hope Dimitri Orlov is right when he says that Americans would make better Communists than Russians…
2 August 2010, 9:43 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
In Florida, I have witnessed a “peace” movement that was too many things to too many different people – a way to punish Obama, a way to jockey for position, a paycheck, and (to some) a means to work toward harmony within the species. I saw too many people who wanted a “shake and bake” movement with big, flashy actions right now that let everyone know how angry they personally felt. I tried pointing out one time that through my work with FNB, I knew mainstream people were having trouble caring about someone right in front of them who was hungry, so how were they going to care about folks halfway around the world who “aren’t even Americans?” No one wanted to answer that question any more than a Democrat wants to say why we should believe voting will ever bring about substantive change.
Peace has to be built from the ground up, from the inside out just like other social change movements. But somebody is always (for now), gonna want to do it some other way either because they don’t know what they’re doing or because they know *exactly* what they’re doing.
3 August 2010, 9:59 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
The growth rate of the economy (y”) is equal (=) to a scaling factor constant (C) multiplied by the present size of the economy in dollars of some year equivalent (y’) multiplied by the difference between the totality of resources at the start (k) and the summed total economy that has ever existed (y)
Don’t you quit me Boer Tom! Just remember that Bush Sr. was in office last time I studied math
3 August 2010, 10:43 amm.c.:
@Michael
Why does it have to be a Him? Sarah Palin with someone like Newt Gingrich as VP or WH Chief of Staff. Maggie Thatcher & Kim Campbell were right wingers/center right wingers. Enen plug Hillary Clinton into the system and very little would change. Maybe more women would register to vote possibly.
3 August 2010, 12:20 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Marcilla Elizabeth Smith
3 August 2010, 2:28 pmNow you should notice that I’m cheating a bit – shouldn’t the economy just die when the resources run out? I’m hedging a bit there – some almost inaudible mumbling about whether the resources are physically consumed, or whether they’ve merely entered the market, prior to consumption… I hope that helped…
m.c.:
Maybe the NeoCons would place Giuliani as AG, Liz Cheney as SecState, and Bill Kristol as Natl.Sec Advisor. It will be like the Fox News All-Star Team.
Sidenote: In the old days a well-thought out & written letter-to-the-editor to your local/hometown newspaper or magazine was a not so modest & good way to influece public opinion & public policy. Nowadays maybe its writing HuffingtonPost or CounterPunch. Even alternative, hs/college newspapers get read by more people that you might think. Going to rallies really should be set up beforehand with coverage by someone(s) from the press or your own created media. Run the Memes….
3 August 2010, 6:11 pmm.c.:
p.s. I started out writing LTE’s.
3 August 2010, 6:12 pmCurt:
I forgot did I comment on Stan’s link already? What really stands out to me is the contention about middle class (median) incomes going up by “ONLY” 10% over a 37 year period, from 1973 to 2010. Is this rise the sign of a problem or the sign that every thing is going really well? Look if this 37 year period were almost any other time in human history a 10% rise in incomes over just one working life time would be wonderful news. Furthermore 1973, at least before the oil embargo was a really good year to measure from. The median US family was doing well then and now someone wants to complain because they are doing 10% better?
3 August 2010, 8:07 pmYet the richest Americans are making 300% more if the link is correct.
Well those managers would I guess try to defend themselves by saying, he look we earned that money. Our management skills have led to a 10% improvement in the median income. I think that is really the best defense that they can mount. Would anyone like to be a devils adovacte a give a better defense for their 300% pay raise? If my defense is as good as it gets I would have to proclaim these managers of guilty of fraud and embezzlement. They have stolen huge amounts of money from society.
I have more to say about this but we will leave it at that for now.
Duh?
m.c.:
Something I’ve missed for a long time. I just rewatched JFK on video. Of the big three forced to resign after the bay of pigs: Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and Charles Cabell; the latter’s brother Earle was the Mayor of Dallas in 1963. Small world indeed.
5 August 2010, 12:23 pmStan:
re-post from Marxmail, on Sweden, where a desperate middle-class is already in political motion.
So I’m not buying into the cheerleading stuff, but it shows how reaction is latent in the “middle class.”
5 August 2010, 7:46 pmm.c.:
I hate to plug hollywood fluff, but Charlie Wilson’s War in on cable again tonight. I’m sure its a whitewash and there were many other even more important players perhaps but its fair at showing how the nuts & bolts of congress work as one not so outstanding member of congress from texas could work the levers of the purse string to pour billions of dollars into a pet project. Maybe the people who run the world aren’t that smart.??
6 August 2010, 1:26 pmStan:
long post from Joaquin at Marxmail… in reply to another thread, but pertinent to our discussion od the right-shift accompanying the middle-declassing of the bubble burst.
7 August 2010, 9:22 am